The solution of the eternal problems of human existence in the lyrics of A. A

Religious and philosophical foundations of A.A. Akhmatova

2.1 The solution of the eternal problems of human existence in the lyrics of A. A. Akhmatova: the motives of memory, life and death

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is an artist of a truly philosophical disposition, since it is precisely philosophical motives that form the ideological and content core of all her poetry. Whatever topic the poetess touches, whatever form she uses in creating her poetic images, everything bears the imprint of deep authorial reflections.

However, attention is drawn to the fact that the term "philosophical" in relation to Akhmatova's poetry is introduced by literary critics very carefully. So, analyzing the category of memory, E. S. Dobin notes: “Akhmatova’s memory has become, I would say, a philosophical value. If this word had not been devalued by critics, who sometimes see "philosophy" in the most uncomplicated maxim. At the same time, in the scientific world, the idea of the undoubted importance of studying this lyrical layer is persistently supported. A. I. Pavlovsky states on this occasion: “The philosophical side of Akhmatova’s lyrics ... was not seriously written about. Meanwhile, it is of undoubted interest. At the same time, only late Akhmatov's poetry is often declared philosophical, excluding the thought-forming factors of an earlier period. This is the position of V. Ozerov. “But, paying tribute to these really new and penetrating verses,” the critic emphasized, “it is impossible to single out or, even more so, to oppose them to the late philosophical lyrics of A. Akhmatova.”

All of the above indicates that the designated layer of A. Akhmatova's lyrics still remains a "blank spot" in Akhmatova studies, so we consider it necessary to dwell on the analysis of the main philosophical motives of the poetess.

Her view of the world was peculiar and quite consistent. As an acmeist, in her early period she was an opponent of the dissolution of the living, corporeal and material world in those mystical categories that were characteristic of the symbolists. Akhmatova recognized the world as real and objectively existing. It was concrete and multicolored for her, it should be transferred to the lines of poetry, trying to be accurate and truthful at the same time. Therefore, she considered literally everything that makes up everyday life and surrounds a person suitable for artistic depiction: a midnight vault, a tiny blade of grass, chamomile or burdock. It is the same in feeling - any of the human emotions can be artistically explored, enshrined in the word and passed on to future centuries. The power and might of art seemed to her enormous and hardly even observable. Akhmatova loved to convey this surprise to the reader when she had the opportunity to once again be convinced of the fantastic incorruptibility of human culture, especially such a fragile and imperishable material as the word is.

Of course, most of the early love lyrics are deeply intimate. However, already in it tendencies of immersion and deepening into the world of reflection on the foundations of human existence are outlined. For the first time we hear them in the poem "I learned to live simply, wisely ...":

I learned to live simply, wisely,

Look up to the sky and pray to God

And wander long before evening,

To tire out unnecessary anxiety.

The lyrical heroine reflects on the perishability and transience of life. In this poem, Akhmatova uses the technique of describing the inner world of the hero through the surrounding nature. A touchingly purring fluffy cat, a fire that caught fire on the sawmill tower reflect the heroine’s clear and “wise” worldview, and the signs of autumn (a drooping bunch of mountain ash, rustling burdocks) reflect light melancholy and sadness associated with the awareness of the perishability of everything that exists. The whole poem is, as it were, an answer to the question: how should a person live? You can even derive a formula: nature, faith and solitude.

A turning point in the work of A. A. Akhmatova can be called the poem "Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold." It testifies to the final transition of the author from the psychology of a love "novel in verse" to philosophical and civil motives. The personal pain and tragedy of the wounded soul of A. Akhmatova merge with the fate of the entire Russian people. Seeing the bitterness and injustice of the era, the author tries to point out the way out, the path to the revival of spirituality. This is how the motives of faith in immortality and supreme justice appear, the motive of Christian forgiveness, as well as the hope for a bright and wonderful future, for the eternal renewal of life and the victory of spirit and beauty over weakness, death and cruelty.

In a later period of creativity, A. Akhmatova places the idea of the need for harmony between the world and man, society and man, man and time at the center of her artistic worldview. At the same time, the poetess "does not abstract from the objective reality, but goes to a new level of artistic representation, concentrates the action, layers on it dialogues with her opponents, monologues-appeals to the world, time, people" .

More and more often A. Akhmatova thinks about the problems of our time. The tragedy of modernity, according to the poetess, lies in the interrupted connection of times, in the oblivion of the previous era:

When an era is buried

The grave psalm does not sound,

Nettle, thistle

Decorate it...

And the son does not recognize the mother,

And the grandson will turn away in anguish.

Under these conditions, the task of the poet is not only to state the fatal break in times, but also to glue together “the vertebrae of two centuries” with “his blood”.

Akhmatova’s memory becomes the basis for the connection between the past and the present not only as something in a person that makes it possible to correlate him with history, but also as a deeply moral principle, opposed to oblivion, unconsciousness and chaos. So the motive of memory becomes a kind of prism through which the key ideas and images of her poetry are refracted.

No wonder this word appears in the titles of many poems: “The memory of the sun in the heart is weakening ...”; "Voice of Memory"; "You are heavy, love memory..."; “I will take this day out of your memory…”; "In memory of a friend"; “And in memory, as if in patterned styling ...”; "And in the black memory, fumbling, you will find ..."; "Memory cellar".

We emphasize that in Akhmatova's poetry the semantics of "memory" covers a wide semantic space, all manifestations of memory: from memory, as an individual, "psychophysiological" gift, to memory, as a historical and moral category. It is no coincidence that K. Chukovsky, Yu. Levin, V. Toporov considered the motive of memory to be fundamental for the work of Akhmatova.

In early lyrics, memory is realized as a natural, organic property of human consciousness, which allows the poet to artistically capture the world (“I see everything. I remember everything”), to embody the past, as a continuing and emotionally experienced being, in the present. Her "mechanisms" serve as the plot frame of "lyrical short stories".

In the late Akhmatova, the motive of memory becomes the semantic basis that holds together the disparate episodes of one human destiny, and the episodes of the destiny of the people, which reunites the broken connection of times, that is, it serves the purpose of "gathering" the world together.

Let us characterize the main trends in the implementation of the motive of memory in the poems of A. A. Akhmatova.

In the poem “A dark-skinned youth wandered along the alleys”, the poetess speaks about Pushkin and his time, while the motive of memory is the semantic concept. For Akhmatova, memory is what opposes decay, death, oblivion. Memory is synonymous with loyalty.

In the poem "It is getting dark, and in the sky dark blue ..." memory acts as a catalyst for the joys of life.

And if I have a difficult path,

Here's the light load I can handle

Take with you, so that in old age, in illness,

Perhaps in poverty - to remember

Sunset furious, and fullness

Mental strength, and the charm of a sweet life.

The poem is marked 1914-1916. At that time, Akhmatova was not even thirty years old. A light consolation burden was what would be stored in memory. I wanted the memory to turn into only a beneficent side. Only the custodian of the cloudless, gratifying that can be gleaned from being. Memory is a faithful companion, the "guardian angel" of existence.

But memory is not only a keeper. She discovers things in a new way, overestimates. Memory is the wise sister of life, dividing its burden.

Like a white stone in the depths of a well,

There is one memory in me.

I can't and don't want to fight

It is fun and it is suffering.

And the poet cherishes this duality. In the distance of time, sadness is cleared, and I want to keep it: “So that wondrous sorrows live forever, you are turned into my memory.”

Memory becomes the comforter of all those who mourn and a kind of "law of conservation of phenomena", but only the phenomena experienced, passed through the feeling.

It's like everything I have inside of me

Struggled all my life, got life

Separate and embodied in these

Blind walls, into this black garden...

E. S. Dobin called the Akhmatov category of memory “an analogue of the folk-tale “living water”. This is a gift of returning life to phenomena, events, feelings that have gone into the past.

Memory is comprehended by Akhmatova as a certain generalizing figurative category. This is the continuous life of the soul. It can be called the spontaneously creative side of the spirit, every minute reviving the past. But besides this, memory has a second side - a dramatic one. Not so, it turns out, the burden of memory is light. And not only "the fullness of spiritual strength and the charm of a sweet life" he includes. According to Akhmatova, memory is diverse and quite often traces of the past remain, like scars from wounds.

Oh, who would have told me then

That I inherit all of this:

Felitsu, swan, bridges,

And all Chinese inventions

Palace through galleries

And lindens of wondrous beauty.

And even my own shadow

All distorted with fear

And a penitential shirt

And sepulchral lilac.

However, it was even more tragic when "the iron curtain of the change of times fell and blocked the path of the life-giving memory of the past."

And, once waking up, we see that we forgot

We even have a secluded path to that house,

And, choking with shame and anger,

We run there, but (as happens in a dream)

Everything is different there: people, things, walls,

And no one knows us - we are strangers.

We didn't get there...

For Akhmatova, here memory is a mirror of being, it illuminates the tragic side of the irreversible course of life, but at the same time, losses enhance the sense of the values of the experienced, the values of the immortal.

Thus, memory becomes, as it were, a through thread of being. It projects endless connections with time and environment. A continuous line connects the steps of man's ascent and descent. What has been gained and lost, what has been achieved and what has disappeared is recorded. E. S. Dobin notes that “Akhmatov's memory is not a tape of shots that simply capture pieces of the past. This is a synthetic activity of the soul, analyzing, comparing, evaluating, which is equally located in the sphere of feelings and in the sphere of thoughts. Memory is the accumulator of experience and experiences.

It should be noted that the motive of memory, being the leading one in the creative concept of A. A. Akhmatova, is nevertheless close to such eternal categories as life, death, love, me and the world, me and we.

The motive of death, one way or another present in many of her poems, is most clearly revealed in the later work of the poetess: funerals, graves, suicides, the death of the gray-eyed king, the dying of nature, the burial of the entire era.

Death is interpreted by Akhmatova in the Christian and Pushkin traditions. In Christian ones - as a natural act of being, in Pushkin - as the final act of creativity. Creativity for Akhmatova is a feeling of unity with the creators of the past and the present, with Russia, with its history and the fate of the people. Therefore, in the poem "Late Answer", dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, it sounds:

We are with you today, Marina,

We walk through the capital at midnight,

And there are millions behind us

And there is no more silent procession,

And around the funeral bells

Yes Moscow wild moans

Blizzards, our sweeping trail.

In some works of Akhmatova, dedicated to the motive of death, the image of a ladder appears:

As if there is no grave ahead

And the mysterious stairs take off.

So in the works of the poetess, the theme of immortality is outlined. This motif appears in the poems about victory and is further strengthened. It is significant, for example, the poem "And the room in which I am sick", ending with the lines:

My soul will fly to meet the sun

And a mortal will destroy the dream.

In later verses, the motive of immortality is revealed in verses about music:

And the listener then in his immortality

Suddenly begins to believe unconditionally.

But this motive is especially clearly revealed in a poem about his own painful state at the end of life:

The disease torments three months in bed,

And I don't seem to be afraid of death.

An accidental guest in this terrible body

I, as if through a dream, seem to myself.

At the same time, it should be noted that in Akhmatova’s late lyrics, the most stable motive is farewell to all the past, not even to life, but to the past: “I put a black cross on the past ...”. In the poem "At the Smolensk Cemetery" she, as it were, sums up the past era. The main thing here is the feeling of a great watershed that ran between two centuries: the past and the present. Akhmatova sees herself standing on this shore, on the shore of life, not death:

This is where it all ended: dinners at Danon's,

Intrigues and ranks, ballet, current account ...

In these lines we are talking about an imaginary human existence, limited by an empty fleeting minute. In this one phrase, the essence of imaginary, and not genuine, human life is captured. This "life," Akhmatova argues, is equal to death. True life appears in her, as a rule, when a sense of the history of the country, the people enters the verse.

One of the best works of the period of the 1950s and 60s is the poem “Seaside Sonnet”, in which, according to researchers, “the classical transparency of the form, “lightness”, felt almost physically in the verbal texture, testifies to conquered suffering, to the comprehension of higher harmony natural and human existence".

"Primorsky Sonnet" is a work about death in which Akhmatova sums up life. The lyrical heroine perceives death without a tragic anguish: not as a deliverance from unbearable pains of life (cf. "Requiem"), but as "the call of eternity", "an easy road", reminiscent of one of the most dear places to her on earth - "the alley at Tsarskoye Selo pond "and. The proximity of death ("Everything here will outlive me, / Everything, even dilapidated starlings") creates a special existential mood in her, in which the world - in its most everyday manifestations - is perceived as a "God-given palace", and every lived moment is like a gift.

Summing up, we consider it important to note that Akhmatova's lyrics can undoubtedly be considered philosophical. The poetess is characterized not by an enumeration of well-known truths, but by a craving for a deep, effective knowledge of the human essence and the universe. In her work, "scattered grains of the material and spiritual are fused, diverse phenomena are built together, in unity and consonance." The motive of memory, being a cross-cutting, meaning-forming one, as well as the motives of life and death, allow Akhmatova "to go far beyond the immediately visible horizon and cover vast spaces of experiences, looking into the unknown lands of feelings and thoughts" .

2.2 Christian motives of the lyrics of A. A. Akhmatova: motives of repentance and forgiveness

When studying the work of A. A. Akhmatova, in addition to a philosophical view of reality, it is necessary to take into account her religiosity, faith in God, which, as a characteristic feature of her worldview, was noted by many researchers: both the poet's contemporaries and later literary critics. So, V. N. Sokolov in the article “The Word about Akhmatova”, defining the sources of her work, the first of them calls the Holy Scripture, and in the introductory article to the anthology “Anna Akhmatova: Pro et contra” S. A. Kovalenko writes: “Religiously -philosophical motives of Akhmatov's work, as if in a mirror, are reflected in her fate", she "through generations perceived spiritual experience, the idea of sacrifice and redemption". And the critic K. Chukovsky directly calls Akhmatova "the last and only poet of Orthodoxy."

Akhmatova, with all the originality of her personal religious experience, not only recognized the existence of God, but recognized herself as an Orthodox Christian, which was reflected both in the figurative and ideological structure of her poetry and in her life position. The high ideals of Christianity helped her to endure trials as a person, just a living person. It was the period of trials, which actually lasted almost her entire creative life, that revealed the following feature of her poetry - the constant struggle and at the same time the coexistence of the principles of "earthly" and "heavenly", and also formed a special type of heroine - a believing woman who did not abandon the world, but lives all her life. the fullness of earthly life, with all its joys, sorrows and sins.

Thus, the religiosity of A. A. Akhmatova is an indisputable fact, and we consider it necessary to isolate and analyze the main Christian motives of her work.

Religious ontology in early Akhmatov's work is not expressed directly, it is only implied. First of all, it is worth noting that the figurative "background" of many of Akhmatov's poems is saturated with Orthodox Christian symbols and church paraphernalia. Here are images of Orthodox churches (Isakievsky, Jerusalem, Kazan, Sofia, etc.). For example, in the poem “I began to dream less often, thank God” the lines: “here is the strongest from Jonah / the Lavra bell tower in the distance”. We are talking about the Kiev Holy Trinity Monastery near the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. We find mention of another Kyiv shrine in the poem "The gates are wide open ...": "And the dry gilding is dark / The indestructible concave wall" . These lines speak of the famous mosaic gold-colored image of Our Lady Oranta on the altar of St. Sophia Cathedral, which was believed to have miraculous power.

The passage of time in many poems is calculated by Orthodox dates. Most often these are great holidays - Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Annunciation, Ascension. For example: “Everything promised it to me: / The edge of the sky, dull and red, / And a sweet dream at Christmas ...”; “I wondered about him on the eve of Epiphany ...”; “... Easter will come in a week”, “Your palms are burning, / Easter ringing in your ears ...”; “I myself chose a share / To a friend of my heart: / I let go free / In his Annunciation ...”; “Your month is May, your holiday is Ascension”, etc.

Also, Akhmatova often refers to the names of saints, miracle workers, mostly Orthodox: to the Monk Evdokia: “Dry lips are tightly closed. / The flame of three thousand candles is hot. / So lay Princess Evdokia / On a fragrant sapphire brocade ... "; to St. Egoriy (George the Victorious): “... May Saint Egori / Your father keep”; to the Holy Great Martyr Sophia; to the Monk Seraphim of Sarov and to the Monk Anna of Kashinsky.

K. I. Chukovsky noted that “church names and objects never serve as her main themes; she only mentions them in passing, but they have so saturated her spiritual life that, through them, she lyrically expresses the most diverse feelings.

In addition, Orthodox-Christian motifs in Akhmatova's work often represent elements of a different system, "embedded" by the author in her texts and participating in the creation of a new lyrical situation. These may be fragments of a religious dogma, ritual, myth, rooted in the people's (folklore, everyday) consciousness, or there may be allusions to a particular church text. Let us give several examples of quotations from the Holy Scriptures that exist in the texts of Akhmatova.

The lines of the poem “Song”: “There will be a stone instead of bread / An evil reward for me” - a poetic rethinking of the following words of Christ: “Which of you father, when his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” . The motif of "stone instead of bread" is traditional in Russian literature (M. Yu. Lermontov's poem "The Beggar").

In the “Song of the Song”, the gospel quote sounds in the general context of reflections on the path and destiny of the poet, here he is not only the chosen one, but also God’s servant, who in the simplicity of his heart fulfills “everything commanded” and does not require any special gratitude or bribe for his work. Lines of the poem: “I only sow. Collect / Others will come. What! / And the jubilant army of reapers / Bless, O God! In the Gospel we read: “He who reaps receives a reward and receives fruit unto eternal life, so that both he who sows and he who reaps will rejoice together.” And in this case, the saying is true: "one sows, and the other reaps."

Let us characterize one more component of Akhmatova's religious outlook. The researchers emphasize that "the transcendent principles of being in Akhmatova's poems fit into the folk-Orthodox world model" . From here appear the motifs of heaven and hell, the grace of God and the temptations of Satan. Compare: “On the threshold of a white paradise / Gasping for breath, I shouted:“ I’m waiting ... ”; "In the city of the heavenly locker ..."; "... Let at least naked red devils, / Let at least a vat of foul-smelling resin ..."; “And the one that is dancing now / Will certainly be in hell.” At the same time, "the binary opposition of "heaven" and "hell" as ontological categories turns into a moral and ethical confrontation between the proper and the improper, the divine and the demonic, the holy and the sinful" .

Also, one of the leading motives in the lyrics of A. Akhmatova can be considered the motive of repentance and forgiveness. It is important to note that "repentance" and "forgiveness" are religious concepts, they are inextricably linked and are a condition for each other. Just as it is impossible to repent before God without forgiving your neighbor, so it is impossible to forgive your neighbor without repentance.

The motive of repentance and forgiveness permeates the entire ideological and thematic fabric of Akhmatova's works, but it is revealed most clearly in love lyrics. If we consider Akhmatova's love lyrics through the prism of repentance and forgiveness, you can see that earthly love appears as passion, temptation, and in some ways even sin: “Love conquers deceitfully / In a simple, unskillful melody”; “Will I deceive him, will I deceive him? - I do not know!" / I live on earth only by lies. The peculiarity of such love relationships is the desire to conquer, "tame", "torture", enslave. Here are the lines characterizing the lyrical heroine: “Forgive me, cheerful boy / My tortured owlet”; “I am free. Everything is fun for me, ”but most often this is a constant trait of a lover:“ You ordered me: enough, / Go, kill your love! / And now I'm melting, I'm weak-willed"; "Tame and wingless / I live in your house". He encroaches on the freedom of the lyrical heroine, on her creativity, and even forbids praying, in connection with which the image of a dungeon, a prison arises in Akhmatova’s poetry: “You forbid singing and smiling, / But you forbade praying a long time ago,” and the heroine appears as a “sad prisoner” .

The lyrical heroine, acutely feels this discrepancy, but still sometimes succumbs to passion, love-temptation, and immediately resists it with all her being. She feels that God is leaving this relationship, the beloved seeks to outshine God and tries to take His place. So, in the poem “By the very sea”, for the mere news of her beloved, she gives a baptismal cross. This is where the source of the tragedy of love originates, and the feeling that is considered the most beautiful on earth turns into poison, sin, endless torment, “damned hops” ...

The antipode of earthly sinful love is evangelical love, love for God. This love never leaves the heart of the lyrical heroine, she is pure and beautiful. Conscience and the memory of God lead the heroine to repentance, she brings repentance - like a cry from the depths of her soul: “God! God! God! / How grievously I have sinned before you! » ; “We have penitential shirts. / Us with a candle to go and howl "; “I press a smooth cross to my heart: / God, return peace to my soul!” . Akhmatova's lyrics are filled with such impulses, and this is precisely repentance - with its hope in the mercy of God, in forgiveness.

This feeling of repentance is consonant with the same feeling of forgiveness:

I forgive everyone

And in the resurrection of Christ

Kissing me on the forehead,

And not betraying - in the mouth.

With such an attitude to life, the fear of earthly hardships leaves the heart. In losses, Akhmatova feels God, and is ready to be obedient to His will, and here the insight begins: “To be submissive to you, / Yes, you have gone crazy! / I am submissive to the Lord’s will alone!” . In addition, she perfectly understands the futility of these experiences:

What do you yearn for, as if yesterday ...

We don't have tomorrow or today.

An invisible mountain collapsed

The commandment of the Lord has been fulfilled.

But, what is most surprising, in separations, hardships, troubles, hardships, Akhmatov, seeing the will of the Lord, fully accepts and thanks God for these losses:

We thought: we are poor, we have nothing,

And how they began to lose one after another,

So what happened every day

Memorial day -

Started making songs

About the great bounty of God

Yes, about our former wealth.

Through loss and deprivation, she gains freedom and joy. Thus, the motive of repentance and forgiveness permeate the entire lyrics of Akhmatova and form the basis of the poet's worldview.

The sacrament of confession is closely connected with these concepts - the lyrical heroine receives absolution, which is the most important emotional event for her. The blurring of the line between the rite of communion and poetry, as well as a special, sacred register of the word, led to the appearance in poetics of confessional tonality, genre-stylistic formulas of prayerful repentance, vows. O. E. Fomenko emphasizes that “the stylistic essence of“ prayer ”verses is in a direct appeal to God as the transcendent principle of being, which paradoxically merges with the religious and ethical absolute that resides in the soul of the heroine. Therefore, addressing to the Lord turns out to be introspective appeals to oneself, full of introspection and criticism in one's address.

Akhmatova's heroine often utters the words of a prayer to God. V. V. Vinogradov, in particular, noted that “the words “pray” and “prayer” become the favorite words of the lyrical heroine, and therefore the poetess herself.” In early work, prayer is a request for love and inspiration, that is, everyday. So far, its goal is not aspiration to heaven, but the improvement of earthly life. The heroine asks to save her from difficult, difficult life circumstances; asks for the improvement of the poetic gift ("Song of the Song", "I so prayed:" Satisfy ""), for connection with the beloved for earthly happiness, "earthly kingdom" ("By the sea", "God, we will reign wisely" ).

We also see the image of a prayer appeal to God in order to restore inner peace, the repose of the soul of the deceased, etc.: in such poems as “Silently walked around the house”, “Fear, sorting through things in the darkness”, in “Poem without a hero” : "May God forgive you!"

In later works, Akhmatova puts and develops the motive of prayer for Russia. One of the forms of prayer in such conditions is prayer-crying. Let's remember the poem "Lamentation". This is the mournful cry of the Russian people, called "God-bearer", at the sight of the desecration of shrines.

External defeat, poverty, exile - this, in fact, is the lot of a Christian on earth. But courage and calmness in enduring sorrows is a feature of holiness, that is, the spiritual victory of good over evil, promised by Christ.

The innermost essence of prayer for Russia lies in the readiness for any trials and sacrifices, in accepting the cross and crucifixion along with the native country: “So that the cloud over dark Russia / Becomes a cloud in the glory of the rays.”

If you look through Akhmatova's poems written in the 30s-50s in a row, then the first thing that catches your eye is their tragic, moreover, mourning tone. The atmosphere of the collapse of personal and common life in the era of terror, tragic situations that mark the undermining of the most important ethical values, the very foundations of life, as well as the way of personal response to them, are embodied in a system of motives that do not seem to directly express the religious beliefs of the author, but in fact its fit into the Christian world model. The theme of the “end times”, the approach of the Antichrist, the end of the world and the Last Judgment, which in essence go back to apocalyptic motifs, clearly declares itself.

The world of the female soul is most fully revealed in the love lyrics of A. Akhmatova and occupies a central place in her poetry. The genuine sincerity of Akhmatova's love lyrics, combined with strict harmony, allowed her contemporaries to call her Russian Sappho immediately after the release of the first collections of poetry.

The early love lyrics of Anna Akhmatova were perceived as a kind of lyrical diary. However, the depiction of romantically exaggerated feelings is not characteristic of her poetry. Akhmatova talks about simple human happiness and earthly, ordinary sorrows: about separation, betrayal, loneliness, despair - about everything that is close to many, that everyone is able to experience and understand.

Love in the lyrics of A. Akhmatova appears as a “fateful duel”, it is almost never portrayed serenely, idyllically, but, on the contrary, in an extremely crisis expression: at the moment of breakup, separation, loss of feeling or the first stormy blindness with passion.

Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama or its climax. “The torment of a living soul” is paid by her lyrical heroine for love. The combination of lyricism and epicness brings A. Akhmatova's poems closer to the genres of the novel, short story, drama, and lyrical diary.

One of the secrets of her poetic gift lies in the ability to fully express the most intimate in herself and the world around her. In her poems, the string tension of experiences and the unmistakable accuracy of their sharp expression are striking. This is the strength of Akhmatova.

The theme of love and the theme of creativity are closely intertwined in Anna Akhmatova's poems. In the spiritual appearance of the heroine of her love lyrics, the “wingedness” of a creative personality is guessed. The tragic rivalry between Love and the Muse has been reflected in many works since early 1911. However, Akhmatova foresees that poetic glory cannot replace earthly love and happiness.

The intimate lyrics of A. Akhmatova are not limited to the depiction of loving relationships. It always contains the poet's inexhaustible interest in the inner world of man. The originality of Akhmatov's poems about love, the originality of the poetic voice, conveying the most intimate thoughts and feelings of the lyrical heroine, the fullness of the verses with the deepest psychologism cannot but arouse admiration.

Like no one else, Akhmatova is able to reveal the most hidden depths of a person’s inner world, his experiences, states, moods. Striking psychological persuasiveness is achieved by using a very capacious and laconic technique of an eloquent detail (a glove, a ring, a tulip in a buttonhole ...).

“Earthly love” by A. Akhmatova also implies love for the “earthly world” surrounding a person. The image of human relations is inseparable from love for the native land, for the people, for the fate of the country. The idea of a spiritual connection with the Motherland that permeates the poetry of A. Akhmatova is expressed in the readiness to sacrifice even happiness and intimacy with the dearest people (“Prayer”) for her sake, which later so tragically came true in her life.

She rises to biblical heights in the description of maternal love. The suffering of a mother, doomed to see her son's agony on the cross, is simply amazing in Requiem:

The choir of angels glorified the great hour,

And the heavens went up in flames.

He said to his father: “Almost left me!”

And Mother: “Oh, don’t cry for Me…”

Magdalene fought and sobbed,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And to where silently Mother stood,

So no one dared to look.

Thus, the poetry of A. Akhmatova is not only the confession of a woman in love, it is the confession of a man who lives with all the troubles, pains and passions of his time and his land.

Anna Akhmatova, as it were, combined "female" poetry with the poetry of the main stream. But this association is only apparent - Akhmatova is very smart: having retained the themes and many techniques of women's poetry, she radically reworked both in the spirit of not women's, but universal poetics.

The world of deep and dramatic experiences, the charm, richness and originality of the personality are imprinted in the love lyrics of Anna Akhmatova.

She rises to biblical heights in the description of maternal love. The suffering of a mother, doomed to see her son's agony on the cross, is simply amazing in Requiem:

The choir of angels glorified the great hour,

And the heavens went up in flames.

He said to his father: “Almost left me!”

And Mother: “Oh, don’t cry for Me…”

Magdalene fought and sobbed,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And to where silently Mother stood,

So no one dared to look.

Thus, the poetry of A. Akhmatova is not only the confession of a woman in love, it is the confession of a man who lives with all the troubles, pains and passions of his time and his land.

The world of deep and dramatic experiences, the charm, richness and originality of the personality are imprinted in the love lyrics of Anna Akhmatova.

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Akhmatova's poems reveal the world of the female soul, passionate, tender and proud. The framework of this world was outlined by love - a feeling that constitutes the content of human life in Akhmatova's poems. There seems to be no such shade of this feeling, which would not have been mentioned here: from inadvertent slips of the tongue, betraying something deeply hidden (“And as if by mistake I said: “You ...” to “white-hot passion”.

The state of mind in Akhmatova's poems is not told - it is reproduced as being experienced now, even if it is experienced by memory. It is reproduced accurately, subtly, and here every - even the most insignificant - detail is important, allowing, having caught, to convey the overflows of spiritual movement, which could not be directly spoken about. These details, the details are sometimes defiantly visible in the verses, talking about what is happening in the heart of their heroine more than lengthy descriptions could say. An example of such a striking psychological richness of a verse, the capacity of a verse word can be the lines of the "Song of the Last Meeting":

So helplessly my chest went cold,
But my steps were light.
I put on my right hand
Left hand glove.

Akhmatova's poetry is like a novel, saturated with the subtlest psychologism. There is a “plot” here, which is not difficult to restore by following how it arises, develops, is resolved by a fit of passion and leaves, a feeling becomes the property of memory, which in Akhmatova’s early poems determines the main thing in a person’s life. Here is just a premonition of love, still unclear languor that makes the heart tremble: “Eyes are asking for mercy involuntarily. What should I do with them When they say a short, sonorous name in front of me? It is replaced by another feeling, which sharply quickens the heartbeat, already ready to flare up with passion: “It was stuffy from the burning light, And his views were like rays. I just shuddered: this one can tame me. This state is conveyed with physical tangibility, the burning light here has a strange - and frighteningly - attractive power, and the last word in the verses betrays a measure of helplessness in front of her. The angle of vision in these verses is perhaps not wide, but the vision itself is concentrated. And this is because here we are talking about what constitutes the value of human existence, in a love duel the dignity of a person is tested. Humility will also come to the heroine of the poems, but first she will burst out proudly: “You humble? You are crazy! I am obedient to the will of the Lord alone. I do not want any trembling or pain, My husband is an executioner, and his house is a prison. But the main words here are those that appear after the ones just given: “Ho, you see! After all, I came on my own ... ”Submission - and in love too - is possible in Akhmatova's lyrics only of her own free will.

Much has been written about Akhmatova's love, and, probably, no one in Russian poetry has recreated this sublime and beautiful feeling so completely, so deeply.

In the early poems of the poetess, the power of passion turned out to be irresistible, fatal, as they liked to say then. Hence the piercing sharpness of the words that escape from a heart scorched by love: “Don’t you love, don’t you want to watch? Oh, how beautiful you are, damned! And further here: "My eyes are obscured by fog." And there are many of them, lines that capture the almost sorrowful helplessness that comes to replace defiant rebelliousness, comes in spite of the obvious. As it is seen - ruthlessly, precisely: “Half-affectionately, half-lazily I touched the hand with a kiss ...”, “How unlike the hugs The touches of these hands are.”

And this is also about love, which Akhmatova's lyrics speak of with that boundless frankness that allows the reader to treat the poems as lines addressed to him personally.

Love in Akhmatova bestows both joy and grief, but it is always happiness, because it allows you to overcome everything that separates people (“You breathe the sun, I breathe the moon, but we are alive with love alone”), allows their breath to merge, echoing in the verses born of this :

Only your voice sings in my poems,
In your poems my breath blows.
And there is a fire that dare not
Touch neither oblivion nor fear.
And if you knew how I love you now
Your dry, rosy lips.

In Akhmatova's poems, life unfolds, the essence of which in her first books is love. And when she leaves a person, leaves, even just reproaches of conscience cannot stop her: “My flesh languishes in a sorrowful illness, And a free spirit will already rest peacefully.” Only this seeming serenity is devastating, giving rise to a sad realization that in the house abandoned by love "not quite well."

Akhmatova does not seek to arouse sympathy in the reader, and even more so pity: the heroine of her poems does not need this. "Abandoned! Made up word - Am I a flower or a letter? And the point here is not at all the notorious strength of character - in Akhmatova's poems every time a moment is captured: not stopped, but slipping away. A feeling, a state, only when it is outlined, changes. And perhaps it is precisely in this change of states - their fragility, instability - that the charm, charm of the character embodied in Akhmatova's early lyrics: “It will be joyful and clear Tomorrow will be morning. This life is beautiful, Heart, be wise.” Even the appearance of the heroine of the poems is outlined with a light stroke, we can hardly catch it: “I have only one smile. So, the movement is slightly visible lips. But this fluctuation, uncertainty is balanced by an abundance of details, details that belong to life itself. The world in Akhmatova's poems is not conditionally poetic - it is real, written out with tangible authenticity: “A worn rug under the icon, It's dark in a cool room ...”, “You smoke a black pipe, How strange the smoke above it. I put on a tight skirt, To appear even slimmer. And the heroine of the poems appears here "in this gray everyday dress, on worn-out heels ...". However, the feeling of being grounded does not arise - here it is different: "... There is no earthly from the earth And there was no liberation."

Immersing the reader in life, Akhmatova allows you to feel the flow of time, which powerfully determines the fate of a person. However, at first this found expression in the attachment of what was happening to an exactly - by the clock - designated moment, so often found in Akhmatova: "I went crazy, oh strange boy, Veredu at three o'clock." Later, the feeling of moving time will truly materialize:

What is war, what is plague? The end is in sight for them;
Their verdict is nearly pronounced.
How are we to deal with the horror that
Was once called the run of time.

About how poems are born, Akhmatova told in the cycle “Secrets of the Craft”. The connection of these two words, the combination of the innermost and the ordinary is noteworthy - one of them is literally inseparable from the other when it comes to creativity. For Akhmatova, it is a phenomenon of the same series as life, and its process proceeds according to the will of the forces that dictate the course of life. The verse arises as a "peal of subsiding thunder", as a sound that wins "in the abyss of whispers and ringing". And the task of the poet is to catch it, to hear the “signal bells” breaking through from somewhere.

The process of creativity, the birth of poetry in Akhmatova is equated with the processes that occur in life, in nature. And the duty of the poet, it would seem, is not to invent, but only, having heard it, write it down. But it has long been noted that the artist in his work strives not to do as in life, but creates as life itself. Akhmatova also enters into a rivalry with life: “I have not cleared up my scores With fire and wind and water ...” However, here, perhaps, it is more accurate to talk not about rivalry, but about co-creation: poetry allows you to get to the innermost meaning of what is done and done by life. It was said to Akhmatova: “If only you knew from what rubbish Poems grow, knowing no shame, Like a yellow dandelion near a fence, Like burdocks and quinoa.” Ho earthly rubbish becomes the soil on which poetry grows, raising a person with it: "... My drowsiness Suddenly such gates will open wide And lead behind the morning star." That is why in Akhmatova's lyrics the poet and the world have an equal relationship - the happiness of being gifted by him is inseparable in poetry from the realization of the opportunity to bestow generously, royally:

Much more probably wants
To be sung by my voice:
That which is wordless rumbles
Or in the darkness the underground stone sharpens,
Or breaks through the smoke.

For Akhmatova, art is able to absorb the world and thereby make it richer, and this determines its effective power, the place and role of the artist in people's lives.

With the feeling of this - bestowed upon her - power, Akhmatova lived her life in poetry. “Condemned - and we know it ourselves - We squander, not save,” she said at the very beginning of her poetic path, in the fifteenth year. This is what allows the verse to gain immortality, as it is said aphoristically exactly:

Gold rusts and steel rots,
The marble crumbles. Everything is ready for death.
The strongest thing on earth is sadness
And more durable - the royal word.

When meeting with Akhmatova's poems, the name of Pushkin is involuntarily recalled: classical clarity, intonational expressiveness of Akhmatova's verse, a clearly expressed position of accepting the world that opposes man - all this allows us to talk about Pushkin's beginning, which clearly reveals itself in Akhmatova's poetry. The name of Pushkin was the most precious for her - the idea of what constitutes the essence of poetry was associated with him. There are almost no direct echoes with Pushkin's poems in Akhmatova's poetry, Pushkin's influence affects here on a different level - the philosophy of life, the persistent desire to be faithful to only one poetry, and not to the power of power or the demands of the crowd.

It is with the Pushkin tradition that Akhmatova’s characteristic scale of poetic thought and the harmonic accuracy of verse are associated, the ability to reveal the universal significance of a unique spiritual movement, to correlate a sense of history with a sense of modernity, and finally, the variety of lyrical themes held together by the personality of the poet, who is always a contemporary of the reader.

At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps the most significant “female” poetry in the entire world literature of the new time, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, arose and developed in Russia. Akhmatova's lyrics immediately occupied a special place with their balanced tone and clarity of thought expression. It was felt that the young poet had his own voice, his own intonation inherent in this voice.
Akhmatova's poems from the period of her first books ("Evening", "Rosary", "White Flock") are almost exclusively the lyrics of love. Her innovation as an artist initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeatedly and, it would seem, played out theme to the end.
Quite often, Akhmatova's miniatures were, in accordance with her favorite manner, fundamentally unfinished and looked not so much like a small novel in its, so to speak, traditional form, but like a randomly torn page from a novel, or even part of a page that had neither beginning nor end. and forcing the reader to think out what happened between the characters before.
Almost immediately after the appearance of the first book, and after the "Rosary" and "The White Pack" in particular, they began to talk about the "mystery of Akhmatova." In the complex music of Akhmatova's lyrics, in her subconscious, a special, frightening disharmony constantly lived and made itself felt, embarrassing Akhmatova herself. She later wrote in “A Poem without a Hero” that she constantly heard an incomprehensible rumble, as if some kind of underground gurgling, shifts and friction of those original solid rocks on which life was eternally and reliably based, but which began to lose stability and balance.
Akhmatova, indeed, is the most characteristic heroine of her time, manifested in the endless variety of women's destinies: mistresses and wives, widows and mothers who cheated and left. "Great earthly love" - this is the driving principle of all Akhmatova's lyrics. It was she who made me see the world in a different way - no longer symbolist and not acmeist, but rather realistic - to see the world.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the tonality of that love novel, which before the revolution at times covered almost the entire content of Akhmatova’s lyrics and which many wrote about as the main discovery of the achievement of the poetess, noticeably changes in the 20-30s compared to early books. The love story, without ceasing to be dominant, nevertheless now occupied only one of the poetic territories in it. But in the lyrics, the ultimate concentration of the content of the episode itself, which underlies the poem, is also preserved. Akhmatova never had languid, amorphous or descriptive love poems. They are always dramatic and extremely tense, confused. The love lyrics of Akhmatova in the 1920s and 1930s, to an incomparably greater degree than before, are directed to the inner, hidden spiritual life.
The theme of the Motherland is also very significant for Akhmatova's lyrics. She always connected her fate with the fate of her native land. After the revolution, she refused to emigrate, remaining with her country, stating this in the poem “I had a voice. He called consolingly ... ". But she did not accept the revolution and did not share the ideas of the victorious class. She recognized the greatness of the revolution, but believed that the assertion of its great goals could not go through cruelty, desecration of humanity. Her poems of this time are filled with bitterness and pain from the fact that many human lives were senselessly destroyed in the name of high ideals. But the world war, national disasters exacerbate Akhmatova's sense of belonging to the fate of the country, people, history. The thematic range of her lyrics is expanding, the motives of the tragic foreboding of the bitter fate of a whole generation of Russian people are intensified in it.
Due to the poet's rejection of the new government, her poetry is declared the property of the past, it is no longer printed. Over the years, Akhmatova's sense of the transience of life intensifies, this caused not only sadness, but a feeling of joyful amazement at her ageless beauty. This is expressed with great force in her poem "Seaside Sonnet".
The thought of the inevitability of parting with everything that is so dear to the heart causes bright grief, and this feeling is generated not only by faith, but also by the feeling of one’s blood involvement in eternally living life.