The theme of maternal suffering in the poem by A. A

The theme of maternal suffering in Akhmatova's poem Requiem

A. Akhmatova's poem "Requiem" is a special work. This is a reminder of all those who have passed unheard of trials, this is an excited confession of a suffering human soul. "Requiem" is a chronicle of the 30s of the twentieth century. Akhmatova was asked if she could describe it. The stranger asked, standing in line in the prison corridor. And Akhmatova answered in the affirmative. She had been on the subject of perpetuating her terrible time for a long time, ever since her son was first arrested. It was 1935. And then there were more arrests. What came out of her pen during these years was dictated not only by personal maternal grief - this is the grief of millions, which Akhmatova could not pass by indifferently, otherwise she would not be Akhmatova ...

The poetess, standing in the prison queue, writes not only about herself, but about all women mothers, speaks of "the numbness inherent in all of us." The preface to the poem, like the epigraph, is the key to helping you understand that this poem was written, like Mozart's "Requiem" once, "on order." A woman with blue lips asks her about this as her last hope for some kind of triumph of justice and truth. And Akhmatova takes on this "order", this such a heavy duty, without the slightest hesitation - after all, she will write about everyone, including herself.

Akhmatova's son was taken away, but she rose above her own maternal suffering and created a poem about the suffering of the Mother in general: Mary - for Jesus, Russia - for the millions of her dead children. The poem shows the unity of all women - all suffering mothers, from the Mother of God, "streltsy wives", wives of the Decembrists to "Tsarskoye Selo merry sinners." And feeling in her suffering the participation in the suffering of many, the poetess looks at him as if from the side, from somewhere above, perhaps from the sky:

The quiet Don flows quietly,

The yellow moon enters the house.

He enters with a cap on one side.

Sees the yellow moon shadow.

This woman is sick

This woman is alone.

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

Only at the limit, the highest point of suffering, does this cold detachment arise, when one speaks about oneself and one's grief impartially, calmly, as if in the third person ... readiness for death or suicide:

Already madness wing

Soul covered half

And drink fiery wine

And beckons to the black valley.

And I realized that he

I must give up the victory

Listening to your

Already as if someone else's delirium.

And won't let anything

I take it with me

(No matter how you ask him

And no matter how you bother with a prayer) ...

At some point of the highest tension of suffering, one can see not only those who are nearby in time, but also all the mothers who have ever suffered at the same time. Uniting in suffering, different times look at each other through the eyes of their suffering women. This is demonstrated, for example, by the fourth part of the poem. In it, the “merry sinner from Tsarskoye Selo” looks into the eyes of that one, “three hundredth, with a transfer” - this is already a clash of different women. And overcoming the time gap occurs through the feeling of it in oneself, when indeed the “heart in half” and the two halves are both one and the same, and two different women's lives. And so she goes this way - in the circles of hell, lower and lower,

and female figures on the way -

I bow to Morozova,

To dance with Herod's stepdaughter,

Fly away with smoke from the fire of Dido,

To go to the fire with Zhanna again -

as monuments to suffering. And then - a sharp jerk back to the present, to the prison queues in Leningrad. And all are united in the face of the torture of time. No words can convey what happens to a mother whose son is being tortured:

And to where silently Mother stood,

So no one dared to look.

It's as taboo as it is for Lot's wife to look back. But the poetess - looks around, looks, and just as Lot's wife froze with a pillar of salt, so she freezes with this monument - a living monument, mourning all suffering people ... Such is the torment of a mother because of a crucified son - a torment equivalent to the torment of dying, but death does not come, a person lives and understands that he must live on ... The "Stone Word" falls on the "living chest", the soul must turn to stone, and when "it is necessary to kill the memory to the end", then life begins anew. And Akhmatova agrees: all this is “needed” And how calmly, in a businesslike way it sounds: “I will cope with this somehow ...” and “I have a lot to do today!”. This testifies to a kind of transformation into a shadow, a transformation into a monument (“the soul has turned to stone”), and “learning to live again” means learning to live with this ... Akhmatova’s “Requiem” is a truly folk work, not only in the sense that it reflected great national tragedy. Folk primarily because it is "woven" from simple, "overheard" words. "Requiem", full of great poetic expression and civic sound, expressed its time, the suffering soul of the mother, the suffering soul of the people ...

The writing

The beginning of life promised Anna Akhmatova a happy fate, a brilliant future. All-Russian fame came to her early, after the publication of her first book, all reading Russia spoke about her. However, life has treated her terribly cruelly. Akhmatova, together with her people, went through difficult times for Russia. And terrible events in the life of the country passed through the fate of the poetess. In the poem "Requiem" there are these lines:
I would show you, mockers And the favorite of all friends, Tsarskoye Selo merry sinner. What will happen in your life...
These words of Akhmatova are addressed to herself. She says that she would never have believed if someone had told her earlier that such a thing was possible in her life. At the end of August 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov was shot on a false charge of belonging to a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. And although their life paths diverged by that time, he was not deleted from the heart of Anna Akhmatova. There were too many things that connected them. First of all - the son, Lev Gumilyov.
A wave of repression swept across the country, and in 1935 Akhmatova's son was arrested. He was soon released, but he was arrested twice more, imprisoned and exiled. It was about this time that Akhmatov's poem "Requiem" was written.
In Requiem, Akhmatova writes about what she herself experienced, about what she witnessed. Anna Andreevna "spent seventeen months in prison camps in Leningrad." Her maternal grief came into contact with the grief of many thousands of mothers.
The task set by Akhmatova in "Requiem" is to create a monument of great maternal sorrow, to all the destitute and tortured:
For them I wove a wide cover
Of the poor, they have overheard words ...
The poem is addressed to those who stood with Akhmatova in the prison queues, to "involuntary girlfriends". However, the poetess does not focus on the grief experienced by individuals, she says that the whole city is one big prison, and all of Russia is crushed by “bloody boots”.
"Requiem" is a poetic poem, but with Akhmatova's inherent creative skill, she prosaically, in detail, step by step, tells about a terrible time for her. The authenticity of what is portrayed is so great that the chilling breath of death is felt in the lines: “They took you away at dawn, / They followed you, as if on a takeaway ...”; “On your lips are cold icons. / Death sweat on the brow... Do not forget!
In "Dedication" she says that the grief of the mother is so great that before him "mountains bend, / The great river does not flow." Women, "lifeless dead", came early in the morning to the walls of the prison in the hope of learning something about their relatives. The portrait of mothers becomes generalized in the poem - grief leveled everyone:
Knowing how faces fall, How fear peeps out from under the eyelids, How hard cuneiform pages Suffering brings out on the cheeks. How curls from ashen and black become Silver suddenly ...
Specific images of mothers pop up in the memory of the poetess, and she would like to call everyone “by name” in her poem, “Yes, they took away the list, and there is nowhere to find out.” She especially remembered the one “who was barely brought to the window”, and the other, who could not bear what happened and “dearest does not trample the earth”. Akhmatova also speaks to that woman who is already so accustomed to coming to the walls of the Crosses that she already goes there "like home." Remember the poetess and the old woman that "howled like a wounded beast."
This grief is so great that it deprives a person of spiritual strength (“Already madness has covered half of the Soul with a wing ...”), and makes one doubt the possibility and necessity of such an existence. Thoughts arise about death as a deliverance from this nightmare:
You will come anyway - why not now? I'm waiting for you - I'm very good.
A cry of pain erupts in the poem, but for the most part Akhmatova speaks quietly, and that is why it is especially scary. Folklore motifs are poured into Akhmatov's speech: some lines are akin to folk lamentations. Many epithets are very close to folk ones: “farewell greetings”, “hawk's eye”.
The suffering of mothers is also expressed through the image of the mother of Christ, enduring her grief in silence.
"Requiem" is the final accusation in the case of the bloody atrocities of a terrible time. But Akhmatova does not make accusations, she turns to history, to human memory. And it is no coincidence that in the final lines of the poem, she says that if they “raise a monument to her,” then it must certainly be installed precisely at the walls of this prison, and let melted snow flow like tears from motionless and bronze eyelids, And the prison dove let it roam in the distance, And the ships go quietly along the Neva.

Other writings on this work

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The quiet Don flows quietly,

The yellow moon enters the house.

He enters with a cap on one side.

Sees the yellow moon shadow.

This woman is sick

This woman is alone.

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

Already madness wing

Soul covered half

And drink fiery wine

And beckons to the black valley.

And I realized that he

I must give up the victory

Listening to your

Already as if someone else's delirium.

And won't let anything

I take it with me

(No matter how you ask him

And no matter how you bother with a prayer) ...

and female figures on the way -

I bow to Morozova,

To dance with Herod's stepdaughter,

Fly away with smoke from the fire of Dido,

To go to the fire with Zhanna again -

And to where silently Mother stood,

So no one dared to look.

New!
Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem, piercing in terms of the degree of tragedy, was written from 1935 to 1940. Until the 1950s, the poet kept her text in memory, not daring to write it down on paper so as not to be repressed. Only after Stalin's death was the poem...

Anna Akhmatova's poem "Requiem" was written in terrible years for our country - from 1935 to 1940. During this period, unheard of things happened in the Soviet Union: there was a great and unjustified genocide of our own people. Millions languished in dungeons, many ...

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was destined to live a long life filled with the same tragedy as her time. She had to go through two world wars, revolutions, Stalinist repressions. About Akhmatova, we can say that she witnessed the greatest folk ...

The fate of Anna Akhmatova is tragic even for our cruel age. In 1921, her husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot, allegedly for complicity in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. What if by this time they were divorced! They were still connected by a son ...

The years of Stalin's repressions were a terrible period in the life of the Soviet people: millions of the best people were declared "enemies of the people, disappeared without a trace, ended up in prisons. It was possible to speak about them only in a whisper, they turned away from their relatives "enemies of the people". This bitter cup did not pass and the family of Anna Akhmatova. Back in 1920, her first husband G. Gumilyov, a famous Russian poet, a former officer in the tsarist army, was shot by the Bolsheviks. 1935 her son Lev Rumilyov and a second person were arrested for "anti-Soviet" activities; M. Punin. After Akhmatova's letter to Stalin, they were released. However, in 1939 Lev Gulmilev was arrested a second time. Sentence - ten years in labor camps. Akhmatova endured long years of despair and fear. And there were millions of such people. Therefore, the poem about the sufferings experienced, which Akhmatova promised to write to one of these tired women “with blue lips”, is the voice of a whole people.

Depicting a national tragedy, Akhmatova personifies the image of the people in the images of mother and son. A violent gap between them leads to a violation of harmony - the foundation of the foundations. The pain of a wounded mother cannot be compared with anything, and only through her grief can one imagine the great tragedy of that era.
The verdict ... And immediately the tears will gush,
Already separated from everyone
As if life is taken out of the heart with pain,
As if rudely overturned,
But it goes... It staggers... Alone.

The grief of the mother is so boundless that she looks at him as if from a distance, she does not believe that she can withstand everything. And the cry of the mother's soul rushes over the country shrouded in fear of grief:
I've been screaming for seventeen months
I'm calling you home
Threw herself at the feet of the executioner,
You are my dream and my horror.

Life without the mother of a son loses its meaning, perhaps it would be easier to die, she endure such grief. And she finds in herself the courage to go this way of the cross, as when the Mother of God accompanied her son in his sufferings. Through this, the section on the rendering of Jesus Christ is organically woven into the poem:

Magdalene fought and sobbed,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And to where silently Mother stood,
So no one dared to look.

When Jesus was crucified, even those who shouted: “Crucify him, crucify him” did not dare to look at the Mother, because her suffering is a great disaster on earth.
The fear of losing a son makes happy, warm motherly faces frozen, mournful. The heroine of the poem saw with her own eyes,

How the clay falls
As fear peeps from under the eyelids,
Hack cuneiform hard pages
Suffering is brought out on sheks,
Like curls of ashen and black
Silver is made vdrut ...

Remembering all the dead in the epilogue of the poem, the author focuses on the image of the mother as a generalized image of all women. They are different in appearance, in character, in willpower, but all of them were united by one grief, suffered one fate. In each of them, Akhmatova finds something of her own, and in general - each of them:

For them I wove a wide cover
Of the poor, they have overheard words,
I will remember them always and everywhere,
I will not forget about them even in a new trouble ...

True work of Anna Akhmatova about the life of the Soviet people in the 30s of the XX century. was able to come out in her homeland only in 1988, when many years had passed after the death of the author of the poem.

The "Requiem", written in the 1935-1940s, lived an unusual life - only in the hearts and in the memory of people to whom the poet secretly, in a whisper, entrusted the "word" of the truth about the mortal era and about the living human soul that cannot be killed .choose what you need

The stranger asked, standing in line in the prison corridor. And Akhmatova answered in the affirmative. She had been on the subject of perpetuating her terrible time for a long time, ever since her son was first arrested. It was 1935. And then there were more arrests. What came out of her pen during these years was dictated not only by personal maternal grief - this is the grief of millions, which Akhmatova could not pass by indifferently, otherwise she would not be Akhmatova ...

Husband in the grave, son in prison, pray for me. Only at the limit, the highest point of suffering, does this cold detachment arise, when one speaks about oneself and one's grief impartially, calmly, as if in the third person ... readiness for death or suicide: Already madness has covered half of the Soul with its wing, And gives fire wine to drink, And beckons to the black valley. And I realized that I must concede victory to him, Listening to my Already, as it were, someone else's delirium. And it will not allow me to carry anything with me (No matter how you beg him And no matter how you bother with a prayer) ...

And so she goes this way - through the circles of hell, lower and lower, And the female figures on the way - Bow to me with Morozova, Dance with Herod's stepdaughter, Fly away with smoke from Dido's fire, To go to the fire with Zhanna again - Like monuments to suffering. And then - a sharp jerk back to the present, to the prison queues in Leningrad. And all are united in the face of the torture of time.

No words can convey what happens to a mother whose son is being tortured: And where Mother stood silently, So no one dared to look. It's as taboo as it is for Lot's wife to look back. But the poetess - looks around, looks, and just as Lot's wife froze with a column of salt, so she freezes with this monument - a living monument, mourning all suffering people ...

Such is the torment of a mother because of a crucified son - a torment equivalent to the torment of dying, but death does not come, a person lives and understands that he must live on ... The "stone word" falls on the "living chest", the soul must turn to stone, and when "remembrance is needed to the end to kill”, then life begins anew. And Akhmatova agrees: all this is “necessary.” And how calmly, businesslike it sounds: “I’ll deal with this somehow ...

and “I have a lot to do today!”. This testifies to a kind of transformation into a shadow, a transformation into a monument (“the soul has turned to stone”), and “learning to live again” means learning to live with this ... Akhmatova’s “Requiem” is a truly folk work, not only in the sense that it reflected great national tragedy. Folk primarily because it is "woven" from simple, "overheard" words.

"Requiem", full of great poetic expression and civic sound, expressed its time, the suffering soul of the mother, the suffering soul of the people ...