Composition

I would like to call everyone by name,
But the list was taken away and there is no way to find out.
I created a wide cover for them
From the poor, they have overheard words.
The main creative and civic achievement of A. A. Akhmatova was her creation of the poem Requiem. The poem consists of several poems related to each other by one theme, the theme of memory of those who found themselves in prison dungeons in the thirties, and of those who courageously endured the arrests of their relatives, the death of loved ones and friends, who tried to help them in difficult times.
In the preface, A. Akhmatova talks about the history of the creation of the poem. An unfamiliar woman, just like Akhmatova, who was standing in prison lines in Leningrad, asked her to describe all the horrors of the Yezhovshchina. And Anna Andreevna responded. And it couldn’t be otherwise, because, as she herself says:
I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.
The repressions of the years fell not only on friends, but also on Akhmatova’s family: her son Lev Gumilev was arrested and exiled, and then her husband N.N. Pu-nin, and earlier, in 1921, Anna Andreevna’s first husband N. Gumilev was shot .
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me...
she writes in the Requiem, and in these lines one can hear the prayer of an unfortunate woman who has lost her loved ones. Mountains bend before this grief, we read in the Dedication to the poem, and we understand that for those who have only heard the hateful grinding of keys and the heavy footsteps of soldiers, there will never again be bright sunshine or fresh wind.
In the Introduction, Akhmatova paints a vivid image of Leningrad, which seemed to her like a dangling pendant near the prisons, the condemned regiments that walked along the streets of the city, the death stars that stood above it. The bloody boots and tires of the black Marus (as the cars that came at night to arrest townspeople were called) crushed innocent Rus'. And she just writhes under them.
Before us passes the fate of a mother and son, whose images are correlated with gospel symbolism. Akhmatova expands the temporal and spatial framework of the plot, showing a universal human tragedy. We either see a simple woman whose husband is arrested at night, or a biblical Mother whose Son was crucified. Here before us is a simple Russian woman, in whose memory the crying of children, the melting candle of the goddess, the mortal sweat on the brow of a loved one who is taken away at dawn will forever remain. She will cry for him just as the Streltsy wives once cried under the walls of the Kremlin. Then suddenly we see the image of a woman so similar to Akhmatova herself, who does not believe that everything is happening to her, a mocker, the favorite of all her friends, the cheerful sinner of Tsarskoye Selo. Could she ever have thought that she would be three hundredth in line at Kresty? And now her whole life is in these queues:

I’ve been screaming for seventeen months,
I'm calling you home
She threw herself at the feet of the executioner,
You are my son and my horror.
It is impossible to tell who is an animal and who is a person, because innocent people are being arrested, and all the mother’s thoughts involuntarily turn to death.
And then the sentence of stone sounds, and you have to kill your memory, petrify your soul and learn to live again. And the mother thinks about death again, only now about her own. It seems to her like salvation, and it doesn’t matter what form it takes: a poisoned shell, a weight, a typhoid child, the main thing is that it will save you from suffering and from spiritual emptiness. These sufferings are comparable only to the suffering of the Mother of Jesus, who also lost her Son.
But Mother understands that this is only madness, because death will not allow you to take away with you
Neither the son's terrible eyes, petrified suffering, nor the day when the thunderstorm came, nor the hour of the prison meeting, nor the sweet coolness of hands, nor the worried shadows of the linden trees, nor the distant light sound of the Words of the last consolations.
So, you have to live. To live in order to name those who died in Stalin’s dungeons, to remember, to remember always and everywhere who stood in the bitter cold and in the July heat under the red, blinding wall.
There is a poem in the poem called The Crucifixion. It describes the last minutes of Jesus' life, his appeal to his mother and father. There is a misunderstanding of what is happening, and the reader comes to the realization that everything that is happening is senseless and unfair, because there is nothing worse than the death of an innocent person and the grief of a mother who has lost her son.
A. Akhmatova fulfilled her duty as a wife, mother, and poet, telling in her poem about the tragic pages of our history. Biblical motives allowed her to show the scale of this tragedy, the impossibility of forgiving those who created this madness, and the impossibility of forgetting what happened, because we were talking about the fate of the people, about millions of lives. Thus, the poem Requiem became a monument to innocent victims and those who suffered with them.
In the poem, A. Akhmatova showed her involvement in the fate of the country. The famous prose writer B. Zaitsev, having read the Requiem, said: Was it possible to imagine... that this fragile and thin woman would utter such a feminine, maternal cry, a cry not only for herself, but also for all suffering wives, mothers, brides, in general all those crucified? And it is impossible for the lyrical heroine to forget the mothers who suddenly turned gray, the howl of an old woman who lost her son, the rumble of black marus. And the poem Requiem sounds like a memorial prayer for all those who died in the terrible time of repression. And as long as people hear her, because the entire hundred million people are screaming with her, the tragedy that A. Akhmatova talks about will not happen again.

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The poem “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova is based on the personal tragedy of the poetess. An analysis of the work shows that it was written under the influence of what she experienced during the period when Akhmatova, standing in prison lines, tried to find out about the fate of her son Lev Gumilyov. And he was arrested three times by the authorities during the terrible years of repression.

The poem was written at different times, starting in 1935. For a long time this work was kept in A. Akhmatova’s memory; she read it only to friends. And in 1950, the poetess decided to write it down, but it was published only in 1988.

In terms of genre, “Requiem” was conceived as a lyrical cycle, and later was called a poem.

The composition of the work is complex. Consists of the following parts: “Epigraph”, “Instead of a Preface”, “Dedication”, “Introduction”, ten chapters. The individual chapters are titled: “The Sentence” (VII), “To Death” (VIII), “The Crucifixion” (X) and “Epilogue.”

The poem speaks on behalf of the lyrical hero. This is the poetess’s “double”, the author’s method of expressing thoughts and feelings.

The main idea of ​​the work is an expression of the scale of the people's grief. As an epigraph, A. Akhmatova takes a quote from her own poem “It’s not in vain that we were in trouble together”. The words of the epigraph express the nationality of the tragedy, the involvement of each person in it. This theme continues further in the poem, but its scale reaches enormous proportions.

To create a tragic effect, Anna Akhmatova uses almost all poetic meters, different rhythms, and also a different number of feet in the lines. This personal technique of hers helps to acutely perceive the events of the poem.

The author uses various paths that help to understand people's experiences. These are epithets: Rus' "innocent", yearning "deadly", capital "wild", sweat "mortal", suffering "petrified", curls "silver". Lots of metaphors: "faces fall", “the weeks fly by”, “Mountains bend before this grief”,“The locomotive whistles sang a song of separation”. There are also antitheses: "Who is the beast, who is the man", “And a heart of stone fell on my still living chest”. There are comparisons: “And the old woman howled like a wounded animal”.

The poem also contains symbols: the very image of Leningrad is an observer of grief, the image of Jesus and Magdalene is identification with the suffering of all mothers.

In 1987, Soviet readers first became acquainted with A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”.

For many lovers of the poetess’s lyrical poems, this work became a real discovery. In it, a “fragile... and thin woman” - as B. Zaitsev called her in the 60s - let out a “feminine, maternal cry”, which became a verdict on the terrible Stalinist regime. And decades after it was written, one cannot read the poem without a shudder in the soul.

What was the power of the work, which for more than twenty-five years was kept exclusively in the memory of the author and 11 close people whom she trusted? This will help to understand the analysis of the poem “Requiem” by Akhmatova.

History of creation

The basis of the work was the personal tragedy of Anna Andreevna. Her son, Lev Gumilyov, was arrested three times: in 1935, 1938 (given 10 years, then reduced to 5 forced labor) and in 1949 (sentenced to death, then replaced with exile and later rehabilitated).

It was during the period from 1935 to 1940 that the main parts of the future poem were written. Akhmatova first intended to create a lyrical cycle of poems, but later, already in the early 60s, when the first manuscript of the works appeared, the decision was made to combine them into one work. And indeed, throughout the entire text one can trace the immeasurable depth of grief of all Russian mothers, wives, brides who experienced terrible mental anguish not only during the years of the Yezhovshchina, but throughout all times of human existence. This is shown by the chapter-by-chapter analysis of Akhmatova’s “Requiem”.

In a prosaic preface to the poem, A. Akhmatova spoke about how she was “identified” (a sign of the times) in a prison line in front of the Crosses. Then one of the women, waking up from her stupor, asked in her ear - then everyone said so -: “Can you describe this?” The affirmative answer and the created work became the fulfillment of the great mission of a real poet - to always and in everything tell people the truth.

Composition of the poem "Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova

The analysis of a work should begin with an understanding of its construction. An epigraph dated 1961 and “Instead of a Preface” (1957) indicate that thoughts about her experience did not leave the poetess until the end of her life. Her son’s suffering also became her pain, which did not let go for a moment.

This is followed by “Dedication” (1940), “Introduction” and ten chapters of the main part (1935-40), three of which have the title: “Sentence”, “To Death”, “Crucifixion”. The poem ends with a two-part epilogue, which is more epic in nature. The realities of the 30s, the massacre of the Decembrists, the Streltsy executions that went down in history, finally, an appeal to the Bible (chapter “Crucifixion”) and at all times the incomparable suffering of women - this is what Anna Akhmatova writes about

"Requiem" - title analysis

A funeral mass, an appeal to higher powers with a request for grace for the deceased... The great work of V. Mozart is one of the poetess’s favorite musical works... Such associations are evoked in the human mind by the name of the poem “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova. Analysis of the text leads to the conclusion that this is grief, remembrance, sadness for all those “crucified” during the years of repression: the thousands who died, as well as those whose souls “died” from suffering and painful experiences for their loved ones.

"Dedication" and "Introduction"

The beginning of the poem introduces the reader into the atmosphere of the “frenzied years”, when the great grief, before which “the mountains bend, the great river does not flow” (hyperboles emphasize its scale) entered almost every home. The pronoun “we” appears, focusing attention on the universal pain - “involuntary friends” who stood at the “Crosses” awaiting the verdict.

An analysis of Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” draws attention to an unusual approach to depicting her beloved city. In the “Introduction”, bloody and black Petersburg appears to the exhausted woman as just an “unnecessary appendage” to the prisons scattered throughout the country. Scary as it may be, “death stars” and harbingers of trouble “black marusi” driving around the streets have become commonplace.

Development of the main theme in the main part

The poem continues the description of the scene of the son's arrest. It is no coincidence that there is a similarity here with popular lament, the form of which Akhmatova uses. “Requiem” - analysis of the poem confirms this - develops the image of a suffering mother. A dark room, a melted candle, “deathly sweat on the brow” and a terrible phrase: “I was following you like I was being taken out.” Left alone, the lyrical heroine is fully aware of the horror of what happened. External calm gives way to delirium (part 2), manifested in confused, unsaid words, memories of the former happy life of a cheerful “mocker”. And then - an endless line under the Crosses and 17 months of painful waiting for the verdict. For all the relatives of those repressed, it became a special facet: before - there is still hope, after - the end of all life...

An analysis of the poem “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova shows how the heroine’s personal experiences are increasingly acquiring the universal scale of human grief and incredible resilience.

The culmination of the work

In the chapters “Sentence”, “To Death”, “Crucifixion” the mother’s emotional state reaches its climax.

What awaits her? Death, when you no longer fear a shell, a typhoid child, or even a “blue top”? For a heroine who has lost the meaning of life, she will become a salvation. Or madness and a petrified soul that allows you to forget about everything? It is impossible to convey in words what a person feels at such a moment: “... it’s someone else who is suffering. I couldn’t do that...”

The central place in the poem is occupied by the chapter “Crucifixion”. This is the biblical story of the crucifixion of Christ, which Akhmatova reinterpreted. “Requiem” is an analysis of the condition of a woman who has lost her child forever. This is the moment when “the heavens melted in fire” - a sign of a catastrophe on a universal scale. The phrase is filled with deep meaning: “And where the Mother stood silently, no one dared to look.” And the words of Christ, trying to console the closest person: “Don’t cry for me, Mother...”. “Crucifixion” sounds like a verdict to any inhuman regime that dooms a mother to unbearable suffering.

"Epilogue"

The analysis of Akhmatova’s work “Requiem” completes the determination of the ideological content of its final part.

The author raises in the “Epilogue” the problem of human memory - this is the only way to avoid the mistakes of the past. And this is also an appeal to God, but the heroine asks not for herself, but for everyone who was next to her at the red wall for 17 long months.

The second part of the “Epilogue” echoes the famous poem by A. Pushkin “I erected a monument to myself...”. The theme in Russian poetry is not new - it is the poet’s determination of his purpose on Earth and a certain summing up of creative results. Anna Andreevna's desire is that the monument erected in her honor should not stand on the seashore where she was born, and not in the garden of Tsarskoye Selo, but near the walls of the Crosses. It was here that she spent the most terrible days of her life. Just like thousands of other people of an entire generation.

The meaning of the poem "Requiem"

“These are 14 prayers,” A. Akhmatova said about her work in 1962. Requiem - the analysis confirms this idea - not only for his son, but for all the innocently destroyed, physically or spiritually, citizens of a large country - this is exactly how the poem is perceived by the reader. This is a monument to the suffering of a mother's heart. And a terrible accusation thrown at the totalitarian system created by “Usach” (the poetess’s definition). It is the duty of future generations to never forget this.

A difficult and difficult period in the history of Russia, when the country experienced the sorrows and fears of the Revolution and World War II, affected all its inhabitants. The fate of a creative woman, Anna Akhmatova, is no exception. She suffered so many adversities and difficulties that it is even difficult to imagine how a fragile and sophisticated woman could survive them.

Anna Andreevna dedicated a poem to all these events, which was written over the course of six years. Its name is "Requiem".

The epigraph of this work suggests that Akhmatova was a true patriot of her homeland. Despite all the difficulties that awaited her along the way, the poetess refused to leave Russia or leave her native land.

The poetic part “Instead of a Preface” tells about those terrible years when Russia simply drowned in the arrests of completely innocent people. The son of the poetess was among them.

Part of the poem called “Dedication” describes the grief and suffering of people who are in prison. They are hopeless, they are confused. Prisoners are waiting for a miracle, waiting for release, which will depend on the sentence.

In the “Introduction”, every reader can experience all the pain, all the sorrow that is in the souls of innocent people. How difficult it is for them! How difficult it is for them!

The image of a lonely, grief-stricken woman immediately appears before the reader. She looks like a ghost. She's completely alone.

The subsequent poems describe the emotions and life events of the poetess herself. In them she talks about her experiences, her innermost feelings.

In the seventh part of the Requiem, the poetess describes human capabilities and the need for perseverance. To live and experience all the events, you need to become stone, kill your memory, destroy bitter memories. But this is very difficult to do. That is why the next part of the poem is called “Towards Death”. The heroine wants to die. She is waiting for this, because she does not see the further meaning of her existence.

The “Crucifixion” part shows the universal tragedy of women who cannot look at the misfortunes of their children who suffer innocently.

In the epilogue, Akhmatova turns to God for help. She asks to ease the grief and suffering of all people.

On her life's journey, Anna Andreevna came face to face with many troubles. However, she always steadfastly met and survived them, showing willpower and inspiration in life.

In previous years, there was a fairly widespread idea of ​​the narrowness and intimacy of Akhmatova’s poetry, and it seemed that nothing foreshadowed its evolution in a different direction. Compare, for example, B. Zaitsev’s review of Akhmatova after he read the poem “Requiem” in 1963 abroad: “I saw Akhmatova as a “merry sinner of Tsarskoye Selo” and a “mocker”... Was it possible to assume then, in this Stray Dog, that this fragile and thin woman would utter such a cry - feminine, maternal, a cry not only for herself, but also for all those who suffer - wives, mothers, brides... Where did the male power of the verse come from, its simplicity, the thunder of words as if ordinary, but ringing like a funeral bell, striking the human heart and arousing artistic admiration?”

The basis of the poem was the personal tragedy of A. Akhmatova: her son Lev Gumilyov was arrested three times during the Stalin years. The first time he, a student at the Faculty of History of Leningrad State University, was arrested in 1935, and then he was soon rescued. Akhmatova then wrote a letter to I.V. Stalin. For the second time, Akhmatova’s son was arrested in 1938 and sentenced to 10 years in the camps; later the sentence was reduced to 5 years. Lev was arrested for the third time in 1949 and sentenced to death, which was then replaced by exile. His guilt was not proven, and he was subsequently rehabilitated. Akhmatova herself viewed the arrests of 1935 and 1938 as revenge from the authorities for the fact that Lev was the son of N. Gumilyov. The arrest of 1949, according to Akhmatova, was a consequence of the well-known resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and now the son was in prison because of her.

But "Requiem" is not only a personal tragedy, but a national tragedy.

The composition of the poem has a complex structure: it includes Epigraph, Instead of a preface, Dedication, Introduction, 10 chapters (three of which are titled: VII - Sentence, VIII- To death, X - Crucifixion) and Epilogue(consisting of three parts).

Almost the entire "Requiem" was written in 1935-1940, section Instead of a Preface And Epigraph labeled 1957 and 1961. For a long time, the work existed only in the memory of Akhmatova and her friends; only in the 1950s did she decide to write it down, and the first publication took place in 1988, 22 years after the poet’s death.

At first, "Requiem" was conceived as a lyrical cycle and only later renamed into a poem.

Epigraph And Instead of a Preface- semantic and musical keys of the work. Epigraph(an autoquote from Akhmatova’s 1961 poem “So it was not in vain that we suffered together...”) introduces a lyrical theme into the epic narrative of a people’s tragedy:

I was then with my people, Where my people, unfortunately, were.

Instead of a Preface(1957) - the part that continues the theme of “my people” takes us to “then” - the prison line of Leningrad in the 1930s. Akhmatov's "Requiem", like Mozart's, was written "to order", but the role of "customer" in the poem is played by "a hundred million people". The lyrical and epic are fused together in the poem: talking about her grief (the arrest of her son, L. Gumilyov, and her husband, N. Punin), Akhmatova speaks on behalf of millions of “nameless” “we”: “In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. Once someone “identified" me. Then the woman standing behind me with blue lips, who, of course, had never heard my name in her life, woke up from the stupor that is characteristic of us all and asked me in my ear (there everyone spoke in a whisper): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “I can.” Then something like a smile slid across what had once been her face.”

IN Dedication the theme of prose continues Prefaces. But the scale of the events described changes, reaching a grandiose scale:

Before this grief the mountains bend, The great river does not flow, But the prison gates are strong, And behind them are the convict holes...

Here the time and space in which the heroine and her random friends are located in prison queues are characterized. There is no more time, it has stopped, has become numb, has become silent (“the great river does not flow”). The harsh-sounding rhymes “mountains” and “holes” reinforce the impression of the severity and tragedy of what is happening. The landscape echoes the paintings of Dante's "Hell", with its circles, ledges, evil stone crevices... And prison Leningrad is perceived as one of the circles of Dante's famous "Hell". Next, in Introduction, we encounter an image of great poetic power and precision:

And Leningrad dangled like an unnecessary appendage Near its prisons.

The numerous variations of similar motifs in the poem are reminiscent of musical leitmotifs. IN Dedication And Introduction those main motives and images that will develop further in the work are outlined.

The poem is characterized by a special sound world. In Akhmatova's notebooks there are words that characterize the special music of her work: "... a funeral requiem, the only accompaniment of which can only be Silence and the sharp distant sounds of a funeral bell." But the silence of the poem is filled with disturbing, disharmonious sounds: the hateful grinding of keys, the song of separation of locomotive whistles, the crying of children, a woman’s howl, the rumble of black marus, the squelching of doors and the howl of an old woman. Such an abundance of sounds only enhances the tragic silence, which explodes only once - in the chapter Crucifixion:

The choir of angels praised the great hour, And the heavens melted in fire...

The crucifix is ​​the semantic and emotional center of the work; For the Mother of Jesus, with whom the lyrical heroine Akhmatova identifies herself, as well as for her son, the “great hour” has come:

Magdalena struggled and sobbed, the beloved student turned to stone, and where the Mother stood silently, no one dared to look.

Magdalene and her beloved disciple seem to embody those stages of the way of the cross that have already been passed by the Mother: Magdalene is rebellious suffering, when the lyrical heroine “howled under the Kremlin towers” ​​and “threw herself at the feet of the executioner,” John is the quiet numbness of a man trying to “kill memory ", mad with grief and calling for death. The silence of the Mother, whom “no one dared to look at,” is resolved by a cry-requiem. Not only for his son, but for all those who were destroyed.

Closing the poem Epilogue"switches time" to the present, returning us to the melody and overall meaning Prefaces And Dedications: The image of the prison queue appears again "under the blinding red wall". The voice of the lyrical heroine grows stronger, part two Epilogue sounds like a solemn chorale, accompanied by the sounds of a funeral bell:

Once again the funeral hour approached. I see, I hear, I feel you.

"Requiem" became a monument in words to Akhmatova's contemporaries: both dead and living. She mourned them all, ending the personal, lyrical theme of the poem in an epic way. She gives consent to the celebration of erecting a monument to herself in this country only on one condition: that it will be a Monument to the Poet at the Prison Wall. This is a monument not so much to the poet as to the people's grief:

Because even in blessed death I am afraid to forget the thunder of the black marus. To forget how hateful the door slammed and the old woman howled like a wounded animal.

The poems that made up Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” which we will analyze, were created from 1936 to 1940 and for many years were kept only in the memory of the author and people close to her. In new historical conditions, A. Akhmatova completed the lyrical cycle “Requiem”, creating an artistically integral work close to the genre characteristics of the poem.

In 1962, Akhmatova submitted the text she had prepared to the New World magazine, but it was not published. A year later, “Requiem” was published abroad (Munich, 1963) with a note that it was published “without the knowledge or consent of the author.” An attempt to publish the poem in the book “The Running of Time” (1965) also did not take place, and for a quarter of a century it existed in our country only in the form of “samizdat” lists and copies, and was published in 1987 - in two magazines at once (“October ", No. 3, "Neva", No. 6).

The very title of the work already contains a ritual-genre designation. A requiem is a funeral service according to the Catholic rite, a memorial prayer, or, if we transfer this to Russian soil, a cry, lamentation for the deceased, going back to the folklore tradition. For Akhmatova, this form was highly characteristic - just remember Tsvetaeva’s 1916 poem dedicated to her, beginning with the line “O Muse of Lamentation, most beautiful of muses!”

At the same time, the genre of Akhmatova’s “Requiem” is in no way reduced only to the funeral ritual - funeral prayer and lamentation. In addition to the specific mourning coloring, it represents a complexly organized artistic whole, incorporating a variety of genre modifications of the poems included in it. The very most general concept of a “cycle poem,” on which a number of researchers agree, means the internal integrity of the work, which is a kind of lyric epic, or, in the words of S.A. Kovalenko, “a lyrical epic of people’s life.” It conveys the destinies of people and people through personal perception and experience, and ultimately recreates a portrait and monument of the era.

Compositionally, Akhmatova's Requiem consists of three parts. In the first, following two epigraphs introduced by the author into the manuscript in the early 1960s, three important elements appear preceding the main part: the prosaic “Instead of a Preface,” dated 1957, “Dedication” (1940) and “Introduction.” Then there are nine numbered chapters of the central part, and everything ends with a monumental two-part “Epilogue”, which reveals the theme of the monument to the people's suffering, the poet and the era.

In the cycle poem, everything is subordinated to the principle formulated by Akhmatova herself: “to accept events and feelings from different time layers.” Hence the artistic structure, the plot and compositional structure of the “Requiem”, based on the movement of the author’s thought and experience, absorbing and realizing the “running of time” - from the chronicle of events of personal and general destinies in the 30s to the facts of domestic and world history, biblical myths, plots and images. At the same time, the movement of time is noticeable not only in the text, but is also reflected in the dating of the poems, epigraph, dedication, epilogue, etc.

Two correlating epigraphs provide the key to the content of the poem; they allow you to see and feel personal pain as part of general misfortune and suffering. The first of them, addressed to his son, is taken from the novel “Ulysses” by J. Joyce (“You cannot leave your mother an orphan”), and the second represents the capacious final stanza from his own poem “It was not in vain that we suffered together...” dated 1961.

Akhmatova’s “Requiem” is marked by a special density of artistic fabric, concentrating space and time, and the capacity of characteristics of episodic figures that form an idea of ​​the people. Nature itself freezes before human suffering: “The sun is lower, and the Neva is foggy...” But in its eternal existence there is healing power. And at the same time, this natural, cosmic background highlights human tragedy in all the horror of its everyday reality, shadowed in the “Introduction” by even more cruel and terrible generalized images of trampled, trampled, desecrated Russia.
Feeling like a small part of her homeland and people, the mother mourns not only her son, but also all those convicted innocently, and those who waited with her for many months for the verdict in the fatal line. The central part of the Requiem" - ten poems, very different in genre and rhythmic-intonation shades and subtly interacting within the framework of a single lyrical whole. These are appeals to his son (“They took you away at dawn...”, etc.), to oneself (“I wish I could show you, mocker...”), and finally, to Death (“You will still accept...”).

Already in the first chapter, the appeal to the son bears very specific signs of the night arrests of the 30s and at the same time - the motive of death, death, funeral, mourning - while in the finale the historical scale of what is happening unusually expands - to the Streltsy tortures and executions of the Peter the Great era.

Likening herself to the “streltsy wives,” Akhmatova at the same time feels and conveys the pain and grief of her mother with tenfold force, using a variety of poetic genres and ritual forms for this. So, in the second chapter there is a unification, a merging of the melody and intonation of a lullaby (“The quiet Don flows quietly, / The yellow moon enters the house”) and crying, a funeral lament (“Husband in the grave, son in prison, / Pray for me” ).

The author’s amazing ability to absorb feelings and events from different time layers is manifested in Chapter IV in the form of an appeal to himself, to two eras of his own life, connecting the brilliant beginning of the century and the ominous middle and second half of the 30s.

And after this, in Chapter VI, there is again a soothing motif of a lullaby addressed to his son, but its imaginary enchanting lightness and apparent enlightenment only set off, by contrast, the cruel reality of imprisonment and martyrdom, sacrificial death. Finally, Chapter X - “The Crucifixion” - with an epigraph from the “Holy Scripture”: “Do not weep for Me, Mother, see in the grave” - switches the earthly tragedy of mother and son into a universal, biblical plan and scale, elevating them to the level of the eternal.
In the “Epilogue,” the important themes and motifs of “Requiem” are heard with renewed vigor, receiving an in-depth, this time largely historical and cultural interpretation. At the same time, this is a kind of “memorial prayer” about the unheard-of victims of the terrible and tragic years in the life of Russia, refracted through the deeply personal experience of the author.

The lines of the “Epilogue” directly lead to the theme of “monument”, traditional for world poetry, which receives a deeply tragic coloring from Akhmatova. Remembering those with whom she “spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad,” Akhmatova feels like their voice and memory.

The very words “memory”, “remember”, “commemoration”, “memorial”, speaking about the impossibility of oblivion, inevitably lead to reflection on the monument, in which the poet sees captured the “petrified suffering” shared by him with millions of his fellow citizens.

Anna Akhmatova sees her possible monument - and this is the main and only condition - here, near the St. Petersburg Kresta prison, where, waiting in vain for a meeting with her arrested son, as she now sadly recalls, “I stood for three hundred hours.” The monument created by the poet’s imagination is humanly simple and deeply psychological.

In this melting snow flowing from the “Bronze Ages” like tears, and the quiet cooing of a prison pigeon and ships sailing along the Neva, one can hear, despite everything experienced and suffered, the motive of a triumphant, ongoing life.

All times have their chroniclers. It’s good if there are a lot of them, then readers of their works have the opportunity to look at events from different angles. And it’s even better when these chroniclers (even if they don’t even bear this name, but are considered poets, prose writers or playwrights) have great talent, are able to convey not only factual information, but the internal layers of what is happening: philosophical, ethical, psychological, emotional and etc. Anna Akhmatova was just such a poet-chronicler. Her life was not easy. The fate of the “muse of lamentation” befell the revolution and civil war, the repressions of Stalin’s times and the loss of her husband (who was shot), hunger, silence, and attempts to discredit her as a poet. But she did not give up, did not run away, did not emigrate, but continued to remain with her people.

At the very beginning of her work, there was nothing to indicate that Anna Akhmatova would ever be able to write the poem “Requiem”. Nothing but great talent. It is no coincidence that she (like M. Gumilev) was recognized as one of the leaders of Acmeism, one of the modernist movements of the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry, one of the principles of which was (according to Ogorodny) to take into art those moments that can be eternal. The perfect poetic technique that was cultivated among the Acmeists, and their typical tendency to broad generalization, complemented everything in Akhmatova, who at first was limited to the traditional theme of love and subtle psychology for poets.

But life made its own adjustments to the topic and did not allow it to be limited to personal problems, especially since the causes of Anna Akhmatova’s tragedies were also the causes of the tragedies of the entire people. And the personal intertwined with the general, and poetic talent allowed one to transform suffering into incomparable lines of poetry.

I was then with my people,

Where my people were in trouble, -

writes Akhmatova.

So, she was always where thousands of ordinary Soviet women were, and differed from them only in that she had the opportunity to poetically sketch what she saw.

The poem “Requiem” is one of the central works of Anna Akhmatova’s entire work. It was written after the poetess “spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad.” The poem seems to consist of separate poems and does not have an outwardly constructed plot, but in fact its composition is quite clear, and the transition from one episode-instant even creates a certain end-to-end action. Prose

The original passage “Instead of a Preface” explains where the idea came from, “Dedication” declares the author’s attitude to the topic and, in fact, what will be discussed in the main part, but already in “Dedication” instead of the pronoun “I” there is “we”:

We don't know, we're the same everywhere

We only hear the hateful grinding of keys

Yes, the soldiers' steps are heavy.

So, Anna Akhmatova talks not only about herself, her lyrical heroine is, besides her, also all the “unwitting friends” who went through the circles of hell from the arrest of loved ones to waiting for a verdict. “No, it’s not me, it’s someone else who is suffering,” - not only distances oneself from one’s own state of mind, but again a hint of generalization.

Is it possible to determine who exactly is being referred to in the lines:

This woman is sick

This woman is alone.

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

Akhmatova creates a generalized portrait of all women who shared the same fate with her.

And I’m not praying for myself alone,

And about everyone who stood there with me -

she writes already in the epilogue, where a kind of conclusion of the topic is summed up. The epilogue of the poem is partly also a dedication, it expresses the desire to name all the sufferers by name, but since this is impossible, Anna Akhmatova calls for honoring them (and not only them) in another way - to remember in terrible times when

... Guilty Rus' writhed

Under bloody boots

And under the tires of black Marusya cars. - just as she swore to remember. She even asked to erect a monument to herself where “where I stood for three hundred hours,” so as not to forget about everything even after death.

Only a memory of this magnitude, only the poet’s pain, which readers can feel as if they were their own, can act as a fuse to prevent such tragedies in the future. We must not forget the terrible pages of history - they can unfold again. But in order not to forget, you need to know about their existence. And it’s good that among the hundreds of official poets who glorified the Soviet system, there was one “mouth with which a hundred million people shouted.” This desperate cry is the strongest, since whoever heard it is unlikely to forget if he has a heart. This is precisely why poetry is sometimes more important than history: learning about a fact is not the same as feeling it with your soul. And that is why any power based on violence tries to destroy poets, but even by killing them physically, it still turns out to be unable to force them into silence forever.

Poem by A.A. Akhmatova "Requiem"

History of creation

The 1930s became a time of terrible trials for Akhmatova. And before that, in the eyes of the authorities, she was an extremely unreliable person: in 1921, her first husband N. Gumilev was shot for “counter-revolutionary activities.” In the 30s, the repressions that affected friends and like-minded people also destroyed her family home: first, her son was arrested and exiled, and then her husband, N.N. Punin. The poetess herself lived all these years in constant anticipation of arrest. She spent many hours in long prison lines to hand over the parcel to her son and learn about his fate.

The poem "Requiem" is considered Akhmatova's greatest creative achievement. The poetess described the history of its creation in the first part, which is called “Instead of a Preface”:

“During the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad. One day someone “identified” me. Then the woman standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard my name, woke up from the stupor that is characteristic of us all and asked me in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper):

Can you describe this?

And I said:

Then something like a smile crossed what had once been her face.”

The poem was created over quite a long time: its main part was written in 1935-1943, “Instead of a Preface” - in 1957, the epigraph - in 1961.

Genre and composition

The question of the genre nature of "Requiem" is ambiguous. Many literary critics have wondered: what is this - a poetic cycle or a poem? “Requiem” is written in the first person, on behalf of “I” - the poet and the lyrical hero at the same time. Autobiographical and artistic principles are intricately intertwined in it. The basis of the work is the lyrical beginning, which connects individual fragments into a single whole. All this allows us to classify “Requiem” as a poem.

“Requiem” consists of an epigraph (the lines for it are taken from Akhmatova’s poem “So it was not in vain that we suffered together ...”), a prose preface, called by Akhmatova “Instead of a Preface”, “Dedication”, “Introduction”, ten poems and an “Epilogue” "consisting of two parts.

Topics and problems

“Requiem” is dedicated to the years of the “Great Terror”: the personal tragedy of Anna Akhmatova and her son, who was illegally repressed and sentenced to death, and the tragedies of all victims of Stalin’s repressions.

In the short “Instead of a Preface,” a terrible era looms visibly and clearly: the lyrical heroine was not recognized, but “identified,” everything was said in a whisper and in the ear. “Dedication” multiplies the terrible signs of that time: “prison gates”, “convict holes”, “deadly melancholy”. With restraint, without shouting or strain, in an epically dispassionate manner, it is said about the grief experienced: “Mountains bend before this grief.” Already here the lyrical heroine speaks not only on her own behalf, but on behalf of many:

For someone the wind is blowing fresh,

For someone the sunset is basking -

We don't know, we're the same everywhere

We only hear the hateful grinding of keys

Yes, the soldiers' steps are heavy.

In the first lines of the “Introduction” an image of a “terrible world” and Rus' writhing under “bloody” boots appears:

It was when I smiled

Only dead, glad for the peace.

And swayed with an unnecessary pendant

Leningrad is near its prisons.

The first poem develops the main theme - crying for a son. In the scenes of farewell and arrest of her son, we are talking not only about the personal grief of the lyrical heroine, but about the drama of the entire “innocent” Rus':

I will be like the Streltsy wives,

Howl under the Kremlin towers.

The comparison with the Streltsy wives endlessly expands the artistic time and space of the poem. By connecting past and present, Akhmatova depicts the bloody history of her country.

In the second poem, a melody appears unexpectedly and sadly, vaguely reminiscent of a lullaby. The lullaby motif is combined with the semi-delusional image of the quiet Don. So another motive appears, even more terrible, the motive of madness, delirium and, ultimately, complete readiness for death or suicide (“To Death”):

You will come anyway - why not now?

I'm waiting for you - it's very difficult for me.

I turned off the light and opened the door

To you, so simple and wonderful.

In the tenth poem (“Crucifixion”), gospel motifs appear - a mother and an executed son. The image of the mother is emphasized: her grief is so great that even “heaven... on fire” is not so terrible:

Magdalene fought and cried,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And where Mother stood silently,

So no one dared to look.

Gospel images expanded the scope of the “Requiem” to a huge, pan-human scale. From this point of view, these lines can be considered the poetic and philosophical center of the entire work.

The two-part “Epilogue” closes the poem. First, he returns to the melody and general meaning of the “Preface” and “Dedication”: here we again see the image of a prison queue, but this time it’s kind of generalized, symbolic, not as specific as at the beginning of the poem:

I learned how faces fall,

How fear peeks out from under your eyelids.

Like cuneiform hard pages

Suffering appears on the cheeks...

The second part of the epilogue develops the theme of the monument, well known in Russian literature from the poems of Derzhavin and Pushkin, but under Akhmatova’s pen it acquires a completely unusual - deeply tragic - appearance and meaning. The lyrical heroine wants the monument to be erected “under the blinding red wall,” where she stood for “three hundred hours.”

In this context, the lines of the epigraph are especially striking, in which the poetess admits that she is inextricably and bloodily connected with her native land and people even in the most terrible periods of its history:

No, and not under an alien sky,

And not under the protection of alien wings, -

I was then with my people,

Where my people, unfortunately, were.

All times have their chroniclers. It’s good if there are a lot of them, then readers of their works have the opportunity to look at events from different angles. And it’s even better when these chroniclers (even if they don’t even bear this name, but are considered poets, prose writers or playwrights) have great talent, are able to convey not only factual information, but the internal layers of what is happening: philosophical, ethical, psychological, emotional and etc. Anna Akhmatova was just such a poet-chronicler. Her life was not easy. The fate of the “muse of lamentation” befell the revolution and civil war, the repressions of Stalin’s times and the loss of her husband (who was shot), hunger, silence, and attempts to discredit her as a poet. But she did not give up, did not run away, did not emigrate, but continued to remain with her people. At the very beginning of her work, there was nothing to indicate that Anna Akhmatova would ever be able to write the poem “Requiem”. Nothing but great talent. It is no coincidence that she (like M. Gumilev) was recognized as one of the leaders of Acmeism, one of the modernist movements of the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry, one of the principles of which was (according to Ogorodny) to take into art those moments that can be eternal. The perfect poetic technique that was cultivated among the Acmeists, and their typical tendency to broad generalization, complemented everything in Akhmatova, who at first was limited to the traditional theme of love and subtle psychology for poets. But life made its own adjustments to the topic and did not allow it to be limited to personal problems, especially since the causes of Anna Akhmatova’s tragedies were also the causes of the tragedies of the entire people. And the personal intertwined with the general, and poetic talent allowed one to transform suffering into incomparable lines of poetry. “I was then with my people, Where my people were in trouble,” writes Akhmatova. So, she was always where thousands of ordinary Soviet women were, and differed from them only in that she had the opportunity to poetically sketch what she saw. The poem “Requiem” is one of the central works of Anna Akhmatova’s entire work. It was written after the poetess “spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad.” The poem seems to consist of separate poems and does not have an outwardly constructed plot, but in fact its composition is quite clear, and the transition from one episode-instant even creates a certain end-to-end action. The prosaic passage “Instead of a Preface” explains where the idea came from, “Dedication” declares the author’s attitude to the topic and, in fact, what will be discussed in the main part, but already in “Dedication” instead of the pronoun “I” there is “we”: We We don’t know, we are the same everywhere, We only hear the hateful grinding of keys and the heavy footsteps of soldiers. So, Anna Akhmatova talks not only about herself, her lyrical heroine is, besides her, also all the “unwitting friends” who went through the circles of hell from the arrest of loved ones to waiting for a verdict. “No, it’s not me, it’s someone else who is suffering,” - not only distances oneself from one’s own state of mind, but again a hint of generalization. Is it possible to determine who exactly is being referred to in the lines: This woman is sick, This woman is alone. Husband in the grave, son in prison, Pray for me. Akhmatova creates a generalized portrait of all women who shared the same fate with her. And I pray not for myself alone, but for everyone who stood there with me,” she writes in the epilogue, which sums up the topic in a way. The epilogue of the poem is partly also a dedication, it expresses the desire to name all the sufferers by name, but since this is impossible, Anna Akhmatova calls for honoring them (and not only them) in another way - to remember in terrible times when... Guilty Rus' writhed under the bloody boots And under the black Marusya tires. - just as she swore to remember. She even asked to erect a monument to herself where “where I stood for three hundred hours,” so as not to forget about everything even after death. Only a memory of this magnitude, only the poet’s pain, which readers can feel as if they were their own, can act as a fuse to prevent such tragedies in the future. We must not forget the terrible pages of history - they can unfold again. But in order not to forget, you need to know about their existence. And it’s good that among the hundreds of official poets who glorified the Soviet system, there was one “mouth with which a hundred million people shouted.” This desperate cry is the strongest, since whoever heard it is unlikely to forget if he has a heart. This is precisely why poetry is sometimes more important than history: learning about a fact is not the same as feeling it with your soul. And that is why any power based on violence tries to destroy poets, but even by killing them physically, it still turns out to be unable to force them into silence forever.