Acmeism in the work of Akhmatova. Open Library - open library of educational information

Acmeism (from the Greek Akme - the highest degree of something, flourishing, maturity, peak, tip) is one of the modernist trends in Russian poetry of the 1910s, the basis of which was the rejection of the ambiguity and fluidity of images and the desire for material clarity image and accuracy, chasing of the poetic word /17/.

The "earthly" poetry of the acmeists is prone to intimacy, aestheticism and poeticization of the feelings of the primordial man. Acmeism was characterized by extreme apoliticality, complete indifference to the topical problems of our time.

The beginning of a new trend was laid in the autumn of 1911, when a conflict arose in the poetic salon of Vyacheslav Ivanov. Several talented young poets defiantly left the next meeting of the "Academy of Verse", outraged by the criticism of the "masters" of symbolism.

A year later, in the autumn of 1912, the six poets who formed the Union "Poets' Workshop" decided not only formally, but also ideologically to separate from the Symbolists. They organized a new community, calling themselves "Acmeists". At the same time, the "Shop of Poets" as an organizational structure was preserved - the acmeists remained in it as an internal poetic association / 43 /.

Acmeists did not have a detailed philosophical and aesthetic program. But if in the poetry of symbolism the determining factor was the transience, the momentaryness of being, a kind of mystery covered with a halo of mysticism, then a realistic view of things was put as the cornerstone in the poetry of acmeism. The hazy unsteadiness and fuzziness of symbols were replaced by precise verbal images. The word, according to the acmeists, should have acquired its original meaning.

The highest point in the hierarchy of values for them was culture. A distinctive feature of the acmeist circle of poets was their "organizational cohesion" /57/. In essence, the acmeists were not so much an organized movement with a common theoretical platform, but a group of talented and very different poets who were united by personal friendship. The symbolists had nothing of the kind. Acmeists immediately acted as a single group.

The main principles of acmeism were:

The liberation of poetry from symbolist appeals to the ideal, the return of clarity to it;

Rejection of mystical nebula, acceptance of the earthly world in its diversity, visible concreteness, sonority, colorfulness;

The desire to give the word a specific, precise meaning;

Objectivity and clarity of images, sharpness of details;

Appeal to a person, to the "authenticity" of his feelings;

Poetization of the world of primordial emotions, the primitive biological natural principle;

A call to the past literary epochs, the broadest aesthetic associations, “longing for world culture” /20/.

In February 1914, it split. The "shop of poets" was closed. As a literary trend, acmeism did not last long - about two years, but it had a significant impact on the subsequent work of many poets.

Acmeism has six of the most active participants in the current: N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, S. Gorodetsky, M. Zenkevich, V. Narbut.

The early work of Anna Akhmatova expressed many principles of acmeistic aesthetics, perceived by the poetess in an individual sense. However, the nature of the world outlook distinguished her from other acmeists. Blok called her a "real exception" among acmeists. “Only Akhmatova went as a poet along the paths of the new artistic realism she discovered, closely connected with the traditions of Russian classical poetry ...”, wrote Zhirmunsky / 26 /. The gravitation towards the classical strict and harmoniously adjusted tradition of Russian poetry of the twentieth century was predetermined long before Akhmatova became a poet. An important role in this was played by her classical education, her childhood spent in Tsarskoe Selo, her upbringing in the best traditions of Russian noble culture.

A feature of the early work of Akhmatova's poetry is the interpretation of the poet as the guardian of the flesh of the world, its forms, smells and sounds. Everything in her work is permeated with sensations of the surrounding world /29/.

"The wind blows hot, stuffy,

The sun burned my hands

Above me is an air vault,

Like blue glass

Immortals smell dry

In a scattered braid.

On the trunk of a gnarled spruce

Ant Highway.

The pond is lazy silver,

Life is easy again...

Who will dream of me today

In the light mesh of a hammock?

Within the framework of acmeism, Akhmatova developed an understanding of being as presence, which is an important principle for the philosophy of acmeism - the principle of "domestication", habitation of the surrounding space as a form of creative attitude to life. This homely, intimate sense of connection was reflected in Akhmatova's later work.

A purely value perception of the real world, including the "prose of life" was the ideological basis of a new way of embodying emotions /48/.

But contrary to the acmeistic call to accept reality "in the totality of beauties and ugliness", Akhmatova's lyrics are filled with the deepest drama, a keen sense of fragility, disharmony of being, an approaching catastrophe.

Akhmatova's poetry has a property that distinguishes it from other acmeists: it is intimacy, self-absorption, immersion in the secrets of the soul - feminine, complex and refined / 49 /.

But this intimacy is reinforced by clarity and rigor, which does not allow any "openness".

"Oh, shut up! from exciting passionate speeches

I'm on fire and trembling

And frightened tender eyes,

I'm not taking you.

Oh shut up! in my young heart

You awakened something strange.

Life seems to me a marvelous mysterious dream

Where kiss-flowers

Why are you so leaning towards me

What did you read in my eyes,

Why do I tremble? why am i on fire?

Leave! Oh, why did you come."

The work of Anna Akhmatova in the group of acmeists and in Russian poetry as a whole should be defined as "tragic lyricism". The tragedy, even in her early poems, is the deeper and more distinct, the brighter, sometimes even more joyful, the background against which this tragedy is shown. If her colleagues in acmeism are defined according to the principle of the artistic transformation of external reality in an objective aspect, in the energy of action, in the direct experience of culture as memory and as one of the goals of life, then Akhmatova focuses her artistic attention on the inner, emotional sphere, on the formation of personality, on internal conflicts through which the personality passes /29/. Let's look at the lines:

Three in the dining room struck,

And saying goodbye, holding on to the railing,

She seemed to say with difficulty:

"That's all... Oh, no, I forgot,

I love you, I loved you

Already then!" - "Yes".

This is the lyrical conflict of Akhmatova. Here you can already feel the tragic intensity in which the source of Akhmatova's late work.

The main theme of Akhmatova's lyrics has always been love. She developed a special concept of love, the embodiment of which was a psychological and poetic discovery in Russian lyrics of the 20th century /29/. Akhmatova moved away from the symbolist stereotype of depicting love as a refraction in the human soul of certain world entities (universal harmony, elemental or chaotic beginnings) and focused on "earthly signs", the psychological aspect of love:

It was stuffy from the burning light,

And his eyes are like rays.

I just shuddered: this

Can tame me.

He leaned over - he would say something ...

Blood drained from his face.

Let it lie like a tombstone

For my life love.

The essence of love, according to Akhmatova, is dramatic, and not only love without reciprocity, but also “happy.” The “stopped moment” of happiness dies, because the satisfaction of love is fraught with longing and cooling. The analysis of this state is devoted to the poem "There is a cherished trait in the proximity of people ...".

The interpretation of love affected the development of the image of the lyrical heroine. Under the external simplicity of appearance hides a completely new image of a modern woman - with a paradoxical logic of behavior that eludes static definitions, with a "multi-layered" consciousness in which contradictory principles coexist.

Contrasting facets of consciousness are personified in different types of the lyrical heroine /29/. In some poems, this is a representative of literary and artistic bohemia. For example:

"Yes, I loved them, those gatherings of the night, -

Ice glasses on a small table,

Over black coffee odorous, thin steam,

Fireplace red heavy, winter heat,

The gaiety of a caustic literary joke

And a friend's first glance, helpless and creepy."

Sometimes the lyrical "I" is stylized as a village woman:

"My husband whipped me patterned,

Double folded belt.

For you in the casement window

I sit with the fire all night ... "

The trend of alienation of the lyrical hero from the author's "I" is characteristic of the poetics of acmeism. But if Gumilyov gravitated toward the personalistic form of expressing the lyrical "I", and the hero of the early Mandelstam "dissolved" in the objectivity of the depicted world, then Akhmatova's "objectification" of the lyrical heroine happened differently.

The poetess, as it were, destroyed the artistic convention of poetic outpouring. As a result, the "stylistic masks" of the heroine were perceived by readers as genuine, and the lyrical narrative itself was perceived as a confession of the soul. The effect of "auto-recognition" was achieved by the author by introducing everyday details into the poem, a specific indication of the time or place, and imitation of colloquial speech.

“In this gray, everyday dress,

On worn heels...

But, as before, a burning embrace,

The same fear in the huge eyes.

Prosaicization, domestication of the lyrical situation often led to a literal interpretation of texts and the birth of myths about her personal life.

On the other hand, Akhmatova created an atmosphere of understatement and impenetrable mystery around her poems - the prototypes and addressees of many of her poems are still being debated. The combination of the psychological authenticity of the experience with the desire to "remove" the lyrical "I", to hide it behind a mask-image is one of the new artistic solutions of the early Akhmatova /51/.

She created vibrant, emotional poetry; more than any of the acmeists, she bridged the gap between poetic and colloquial speech. She avoids metaphorization, the complexity of the epithet, everything in her is built on the transfer of experience, the state of the soul, on the search for the most accurate visual image. For example:

“The insomnia-nurse has gone to others,

I do not languish over gray ash,

And the clock tower crooked arrow

It doesn't seem like a deadly arrow to me."

Akhmatova's poems stand out for their simplicity, sincerity, and naturalness. She apparently does not have to make an effort to follow the principles of the school, because fidelity to objects and perceptions follows directly from her nature. Akhmatova keenly feels things - the physiognomy of things, enveloping their emotional atmosphere. Any detail is inextricably intertwined with her mood, forming one living whole. Early Akhmatova strives for indirect transmission of psychological states through fixation of external manifestations of human behavior, delineation of an event situation, surrounding objects. For instance:

“So helplessly my chest grew cold,

But my steps were light.

I put on my right hand

The glove on the left hand."

Thus, acmeism had a great influence on the work of Akhmatova, but at the same time, her poems differ sharply in their concept from the works of other acmeist poets.

Acmeists refused to embody unknown entities that cannot be verified. Akhmatova's approach to inner experiences, in fact, was the same, but her unmanifested essences move from the ontological plane to the psychological one. The world in Akhmatova's poetry is inseparable from the perceiving consciousness. Therefore, the picture of reality is always doubled: the realities of the external world are valuable in themselves and contain information about the internal state of the heroine.

However, Akhmatova's poetic revolution did not consist in the fact that she began to use words with objective meaning to embody emotions, but in the fact that she united two spheres of being - the external, objective and internal, subjective, and made the first a plane of expression for the latter. And this, in turn, was the result of a new - acmeistic - thinking.

Acmeism and creativity of Anna Akhmatova

The peculiarity of poetry Anna Akhmatova lies in the fact that she especially acutely felt the pain of her era, perceived it as her own, and the tragedy of Russia was reflected in the tragedies of the personal fate of the poetess and in her work. Akhmatova became the voice of the time and the voice of the conscience of her time. She doesn't
She participated in the crimes and meanness of power, did not stigmatize it in her poems, but simply and mournfully shared the fate of the country and reflected the Russian catastrophe in her work.

Akhmatova acutely felt like the brainchild of two eras - the one that has gone forever, and the one that reigns. She had to bury not only her loved ones, but also "bury" her time, her "silver age", leaving him a "not made by hands" monument of poems and poems.

When an era is buried, The grave psalm does not sound, Nettles, thistles Have to decorate it ... -
The poetess will write in August 1940, drawing a line under the bygone era. A new, "iron" (by A. Blok's definition) age was advancing. And in this century there was no worthy place for the creativity of the poetess, Akhmatova's soul remained in that past, so close and at the same time so distant.

But all the same, throughout her life, Akhmatova retained the acmeistic principles of creativity: beingness, Christian enlightenment, careful attitude to the word, creative beginning, connection and fullness of times. She was the first and only woman in world poetry to become a great national and universal poet, extremely deeply and psychologically correctly embodying the inner world of a lyrical heroine in her artistic world and at the same time creating the ideal of a woman - beloved and loving. It was Akhmatova who was the first in Russian poetry to give love the “right of a woman’s voice” (before her, writing about love was considered almost a monopoly right of male poets). “I taught women to speak,” she remarked very accurately in the poem “Could Biche ...” She dreamed in her poetry of an ideal, a male hero ...

Akhmatova's personal has always merged with the national and eternal. Taking on national and world grief in the era of historical catastrophes revealed in Akhmatova's lyrical heroine her "worldwide responsiveness": she saw her "Way of the Cross" in a series of world tragedies; I saw myself as the successor to the tragic fates of women:

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 ...

("The Last Rose").

The way of the cross of merging with the fate of Russia, when in a series of memorable dates “there is not a single damned one,” allowed Akhmatova to feel her continuity with the great Russian poets, whose “lyres ring on the branches of Tsarskoe Selo willows”: “There are so many liras hung on branches ... but there seems to be a place for mine” (“Tsarskoye Selo lines”), Akhmatova humanized her era, revived the connection of times, traditions and the single truth of being: cultural, national, Christian, universal ... She preserved the memory of her era and with full right wrote to her contemporaries:

("Many")

In the 1910s, a crisis began in Russian poetry - a crisis of symbolism as an artistic movement. Among the poets who sought to return poetry to real life from the mystical mists of symbolism, a circle called "The Workshop of Poets" (1911) appeared, headed by N. Gumilyov and S. Gorodetsky. The members of the "Tsekh" were mainly novice poets: A. Akhmatova, G. Ivanov, O. Mandelstam, V. Narbut and others. In 1912, at one of the meetings of the "Tsekha", the issue of acmeism as a new poetic school was resolved. The name of this trend (from the Greek word "akme" - the highest degree of something, color, flowering time, the top of something) emphasized the aspiration of its adherents to new heights of art.

Acmeism united poets, different in their work and literary destinies. But the common thing that united them was the search for a way out of the crisis of symbolism. In an effort to free poetry from the irrational, mystical, the acmeists accepted the whole world - visible, sounding, audible; they cultivated Adamism in poetry - a courageous, firm and clear outlook on life. “Away with symbolism, long live the living rose!” - exclaimed O. Mandelstam.

Acmeists returned in their poetry to the traditions of world culture. “Poets speak the language of all times, all cultures,” Mandelstam emphasized. Therefore, for acmeists, it is characteristic to turn to world mythology (ancient, biblical, eastern, Slavic), to traditions, legends - ancient Greece and Rome in the verses of Mandelstam, biblical motifs of Akhmatov's verses, the universality of Gumilev's "Muses of distant wanderings". Acmeists accepted the reality of earthly existence in its entirety and integrity, did not oppose themselves to the world and did not try to remake it. They involved in their work the most mundane, everyday realities: rubbish, mugs, a dusty road, a well, sand, time and eternity, connecting the “high” with the “earthly”, seeing the high in the dark - and vice versa.

Acmeists developed a “poetics of things” - “poetry of detail”: “they smelled fresh and sharp of the sea on a dish of oysters in ice” (Akhmatova); “in a room as white as a spinning wheel, there is silence” (Mandelstam). “To love the existence of a thing more than the thing itself and one's own being more than oneself - this is the highest commandment of acmeism,” Mandelstam proclaimed.

All these features of acmeism are embodied in the work of Anna Akhmatova. But, being an acmeist in her early work, Akhmatova significantly went beyond the boundaries of one literary movement. Her poetry does not fit into the narrow framework of one concept, it is much broader and deeper in content and more significant in subject matter.

What was "revolutionary" in the appearance Anna Akhmatova? Before her, history knew many women poetesses, but only she managed to become the female voice of her time, a woman poet of eternal, universal significance. Akhmatova for the first time in Russian and world literature presented in her work a comprehensive lyrical heroine - a woman.

Her lyrical heroine is an eternal universal woman, not everyday, momentary, but existential, eternal. She appears in Akhmatova's poems in all reflections and hypostases. This is a young girl in anticipation of love (the collections “Evening”, “I pray to the window beam”, “Two poems”, etc.), this is a mature woman, seduced and seduced, absorbed in complex love (“Walk”, “Confusion ”, etc.), this is also an unfaithful wife, asserting the correctness of her “criminal” love and ready, for any torment and retribution in moments

Passions ("The Gray-eyed King", "My husband whipped me patterned ..,", "I cried and repented ..."). However - and this is the originality of Akhmatova the poet - her lyrical heroine does not coincide with the personality of the author, but is a kind of mask representing one or another facet of the female fate, the female soul. Naturally, Akhmatova did not experience those situations that are presented in her poetry, she embodied them with the power of poetic imagination. She was not a wandering circus performer (“I left me on a new moon”) or a peasant woman (“Song”), a poisoner (“She clenched her hands under a dark veil”) or a “hawker, a harlot” (“I won’t drink wine with you”). It's just that Akhmatova, thanks to her special gift, managed to show in verse all the incarnations of a Russian (and world) woman.

Later, the lyrical heroine of Akhmatova appears in the perspective of a poet and a citizen, unusual for women's poetry. If love has always been considered the basis of women's poetry, then Akhmatova showed the tragic path of a woman poet. This tragedy was declared by her in the poem "Muse" (1911), which speaks of the incompatibility of women's happiness and the fate of the creator. This theme is not only one poem - it is one of the main ones in all of Akhmatova's work. In the artistic world of the poetess, a peaceful resolution of the conflict between love and creativity is impossible in the worldly sense. Creativity requires complete dedication from the poet, because the "Muse-sister" takes away from the lyrical heroine the sign of earthly joys - the "golden ring", a symbol of marriage and ordinary female happiness. But the woman-poet cannot and does not want to give up her love and happiness, this is the tragedy of her position: "Everyone on this earth must experience the pain of love."

ACMEISM. N.GUMILEV, A.AKHMATOVA

LECTURE 8

The discussion about symbolism in 1910 made obvious the emerging crisis of Russian symbolism, which consisted in the fact that its representatives understood the future path of art in different ways. The younger symbolists (A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov) preached "life-creation" and "theurgy". Bryusov insisted on the autonomy of art and poetic clarity. The reaction to the crisis of symbolism was the emergence of acmeism as a post-symbolist movement. Acmeists and Symbolists were brought together by a common goal - the "thirst for culture", but they were separated by the difference in the choice of ways to achieve this goal. N. Gumilyov became the head of the writers who denied any abstractions in art, the symbolist worldview.

The Petersburg group of acmeists ("acme" - Greek, "acme" - the highest degree, blooming power), sometimes they called themselves "adamists", i.e. in this case, "the first people", drawing a parallel with the first man - Adam. Acmeists did not show an aggressive rejection of all the literature of the past, they denied only their immediate predecessors - the Symbolists. A group of acmeists - N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, G. Ivanov, M. Zenkevich, V. Narbut, M. Kuzmin - were called the "Workshop of Poets". The actual proclamation of the new literary trend took place in February 1912. The name and charter of the "Shop of Poets" was focused on the medieval traditions of craft guilds, they called themselves "syndics" of the Shop, there were still students. Acmeists began to publish their own magazine - "Hyperborea", but only a few issues were published, mostly published in the magazine "Apollo", where N. Gumilyov's program article "The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism" appeared in No. 1 for 1913. The goal of the acmeists was to turn to reality, to return to earthly values, to the clarity or "clarism" of the poetic text. They sought to free poetry from symbolist impulses towards the "ideal", excessive polysemy, complicated imagery and symbolization. Instead of striving for the infinite, the acmeists offered to delve into the cultural world of images and meanings, they adhered to the principle of cultural associations. O. Mandelstam called acmeism "longing for world culture." "Clarism" - the term was created by M. Kuzmin from the Spanish "claro" - clear, the return of the word to its original clarity, he believes that it is necessary to leave the stylistic "fogs" of symbolism and return to normative poetics. 1912-1914 was a period of a surge in acmeism, numerous public performances. But in 1914, in connection with Gumilyov’s departure to the front, the “Shop of Poets” disintegrated, then attempts were made to revive the former commonwealth: in 1917 - Shop II, in 1931 - Shop III, but the later artificial formations did not affect the history of Russian literature. had a significant impact.

A distinctive feature of the acmeists is their asociality- lack of interest in social and civil issues - often demonstrative. Their themes - adventure stories that take the reader to exotic countries, interest in world mythology - are associated with a lack of attention to modern life in Russia. Intoxication with the history of culture, cultural and historical stylizations are a distinctive feature of their poetry. Acmeism was a noticeable course of the Silver Age. In the Russian diaspora, the traditions of acmeism were highly valued. The poets of the "Paris School" continued to develop the principles of acmeism - G. Adamovich, N. Otsup, V. Nabokov, G. Ivanov.

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov (1886-1921)

Gumilyov studied at the gymnasium in Tsarskoye Selo, where the famous poet Innokenty Annensky was the director, after graduating from the gymnasium he leaves for Paris, where he listens to lectures at the Sorbonne, studies painting, and writes poetry. From Paris in 1907 he made his first trip to Africa, then returned to Russia, entered St. Petersburg University. In 1910 he marries A. Gorenko (Akhmatova), again leaves for Africa (in 1909 and 1910).

Three periods can be distinguished in his work: the first (1905-1910) is pre-Acmeistic, the second (1911-1916) is early Acmeistic, (1917-1921) is late Acmeistic. His life ended tragically, he was shot at the age of 35, in 1921.

The first book of poems - "The Way of the Conquistadors" (which he later did not consider his first book), 1908 - "Romantic Flowers", 1910 - "Pearls", dedicated to V.B. - the teacher. Already in the first collections, the theme of the path is indicated, the influence of Nietzsche is felt, the poet sees himself as a magician, dreamer, life-creator, capable of turning a dream into reality. The plots in the poems unfold in exotic situations - in the abyss, in caves, dungeons, on the banks of the Nile and Lake Chad, in Ancient Rome, Baghdad, Cairo, etc.

I am a conquistador in an iron shell,

I'm merrily chasing a star

I walk through the abysses and abysses

And I rest in a joyful garden.

Today, I see, your look is especially sad,

And the arms are especially thin, hugging their knees.

Listen: far, far away on Lake Chad

Exquisite giraffe roams.

The theme of the Devil-Lucifer is often encountered (“The Cave of Sleep”, “Behind the Coffin”, “Smart Devil”, “Ballad”), metamorphoses are frequent - the lyrical hero turns into a jaguar. The theme of passion is embodied in the plot - the taming of a wild beast. The lyrical heroine does not believe in a magical world, the St. Petersburg "fog" becomes only one possible reality for the heroine: "But you inhaled the heavy fog for too long." She doesn't want to believe in anything but rain. Many poems are built on the antinomy of the natural and civilized world: the heroine of the poem “Lake Chad” is a black woman, an African woman, fell in love with a white man, runs with him, he leaves a woman in Marseille, she dances naked in front of drunken sailors. Very often, heroes are outstanding people of past eras - Pompey, Beatrice, Caracalla, Semiramis, Odysseus, Agamemnon, they all defend their right to choose, up to the right - "to choose your own death" ("Choice"). Often the heroes of his poems are leaders, conquerors of space, seekers of new lands, the archetypal motif of the collection is the motif of the path. The path is both overcoming geographical space, and a journey into the depths of history (Odysseus, Captains), overcoming the limitations of human life.

Be the captain! Please! Please!

Instead of an oar, we hand over a pole ...

Only in China will we anchor,

Even if we meet death on the way!

Plots of wandering, images of wanderers, images borrowed from ancient and biblical mythology, even from world literature (Homer, Dante, Rabelais, even Jesus Christ is a wanderer). "Captains" - the central cycle in "Pearls" - is classic neo-romantic lyrics - old forts, taverns, countries where no human foot has set foot, but the Captains have no purpose.

The second period of creativity (1911-1916) is a new stage. The poet changes his attitude towards symbolist art, he began to look for new ways in art. In 1911, the "Workshop of Poets" was created, in the manifestos of which the "intrinsic value" of each thing was declared, not a symbol, but a living reality where everything is "weighty", everything is tight. This attitude to the integrity of the world was reflected in Gumilyov's new books: Alien Sky (1912), Quiver (1916). In 1913, the poet led an expedition to Africa, was in Abessia, where he collected folklore, got acquainted with the life of African tribes. In 1914, Gumilyov volunteered for the front, he was awarded two St. George's crosses, but did not forget about creativity, wrote plays, essays.

In these books, the image of the lyrical heroine changes especially clearly: “She”, “From the lair of the serpent”, “By the fireplace”, “One evening”. There is a hidden confrontation between the characters, and the winner is always a woman, this is not a “fatal duel”, but a duel of wills, characters. "By the fireplace" - the hero talks about his exotic travels, when he felt almost like a god, and an unexpected ending: "And, melting in the eyes of evil triumph / The woman in the corner listened to him." Gumilyov's hero is not weak, but such a denouement is often found in poetry. "Margarita", "Poisoned" - a new type of poem, built on a novelistic-ballad principle. The lyrical hero himself is also changing, if earlier the hero identified his path with the path of supermen of the Nietzsche type, now he is trying to understand modern life, it has become his “one consolation”: “I am polite with modern life.” In the poem “I believed, I thought,” the hero concludes that his former path as a conqueror of “tops, seas” can lead to an abyss, to a fall into the abyss. Gumilyov sees a way out of this situation in an appeal to the eastern worldview, accepts the merger of “everything with everything”: “And so I dreamed that my heart does not hurt, / It is a porcelain bell in yellow China on a motley pagoda ... Hanging and ringing in greeting / In the enamel sky, teasing flocks of cranes. Interest in the East remains for a long time; the poet even creates a book of free translations, an imitation of ancient Chinese poets: "The Porcelain Pavilion". This reflection was interrupted by the war of 1914. The lyrical hero of Gumilyov found himself, his path became destined. This was vividly reflected in the “Iambas Pentameters”: “And in the roar of the human crowd / In the hum of passing guns, In the incessant call of the battle trumpet / I suddenly heard the song of my fate / And I ran where the people were running.”

The collection "Kolchan" reflects the history of Russia, military impressions, the personal fate of the poet:

The country that could be paradise

Became a lair of fire

We are entering the fourth day

We haven't eaten for four days.

But do not need earthly food,

In this terrible and bright hour,

Because the word of the Lord

Better than bread feeds us.

- his credo became the words:

Golden heart of Russia

Beats peacefully in my chest.

The third period is represented by collections: "Bonfire" (1918); "Tent" (1921, the whole book is devoted to Africa); "Pillar of Fire" (1921, the title of the book has a complex connotation, this is the name of one of the symbols of the Buddha).

Modernity, the events of 1917-1920 Gumilyov interprets as a spontaneous explosion, carrying the seeds of chaos and demonism. To explain these destructive processes, he turns to ancient Russian history and mythology: “The Serpent” is the key to the problems of the entire collection; The "winged serpent" - from folklore - hid in the garden at midnight in May, he kidnaps girls at night, but none was in his palace, they die on the way, and "I throw the bodies into the Caspian Sea", Volga appears in the role of a snake fighter (in folklore was Dobrynya), because it was Volga in folklore who guarded Holy Russia from infidel raids. In this poem, the threat to national and state integrity is transferred to the past, and the poem “The Man” describes the terrible mood that is associated with the appearance in Russia of Rasputin - the Antichrist:

In the wild and wretched

Many such men

Heard on your roads

The joyful rumble of their steps.

The poem "I and you" is a prophecy, a foresight, of which there are many in Gumilyov's work:

And I won't die in bed

With a notary and a doctor,

And in some wild crack,

Drowned in thick ivy.

In "Ezbekiya" - a large Cairo garden is described, and the hero was tormented by a woman, he wanted to die, but this beauty, this garden allowed him to inhale the taste of life, he exclaims: "Above grief and deeper than death is life." In Pillar of Fire (the collection came out in August 1921, when Gumilyov had already been arrested), a new understanding of personality appears. In the poem “Memory”, the author retells his life, his experiences, he wanted to become a god and a king, “But Saint George touched twice / Bullet’s untouched chest”, now he does not know how his life will end: “I will shout ... but will who will help so that my soul does not die? The author in the last book is constantly occupied with the question of his significance as a poet, of his end, of his relationship with readers: "My readers." The power of his prophetic visions is especially evident in the poem "The Lost Tram", which is interpreted in different ways. The tram appears suddenly, it flies over "three bridges", takes the poet "across the Neva, across the Nile and the Seine", they "rounded the wall" and "slipped through a grove of palms." The displacement of time and space, the connection of all memories - a consequence of the fact that the tram "lost in the abyss of time." The displacement of landmarks causes the appearance of images of the dead:

And, flashing by the window frame,

Gave us an inquisitive look

The beggar old man - of course, the same one,

That he died in Beirut a year ago.

Literary heroes appear as real characters whose death causes acute pain. Breaking the connections causes the action to be transferred to the 18th century:

How you moaned in your room,

Me with powdered braid

Went to introduce himself to the Empress,

And I didn't see you again.

Masha is the name of the heroine, it is not clear what kind of image, it seems to be from Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter, but again everything is not so simple. In this work, everything is unreal, and the question "Where am I?" remains unanswered: “Do you see the station where you can buy a ticket / To the India of the Spirit?”. There are absolutely terrible and prophetic images here:

Instead of cabbage and instead of swede

Dead heads are for sale.

and the auror's head "lay with the others / Here in a slippery box, at the very bottom." The poet sees both the past and the present: the bizarre landscape of St. Petersburg with the Bronze Horseman, reminiscences, memories, images from Russian and world literature, the philosophical beginning in poetry.

Gumilyov considered The Lost Tram to be mystical poetry; his insights are connected with his reflections on the spiritual fate of Russia. The poem ends with the motive of the church funeral of himself as dead and the confession: "It is difficult to breathe and it hurts to live."

Both in prose and in Gumilyov's poetry, the past, present and future are presented in the form of a "stream of consciousness", by crossing and intertwining mental states. The poet called it “hallucinating realism; alloy in a single picture of the state of consciousness and the state of the world.

In Gumilyov's latest works, the cultural and temporal space is expanding. To explain the destructive processes of 1914-1920, he turns to ancient Russian history and mythology. He comprehends the causes of the Russian - "male" revolution in the spirit of the grotesque, phantasmagoria, and the poet connects the revolutionary rebellion with the revival of the pre-Christian, pagan beginning (see the verse "Man"). In search of forces capable of pacifying the "spontaneous freemen", Gumilyov turns to the historical past of Russia, in it he finds similar situations of the "troubled" time, confusion - the execution of Grishka Otrepyev, the appearance of "twins". Trying to comprehend the turning point in his own destiny, which, as it turned out, is connected with the universal destiny, Gumilyov turns to the "ancestral source", looking for the ancestral, collective memory - "Great Memory". The motif of "great memory" is projected simultaneously onto several philosophical and mythological theories, but the main thing is the search for one's spiritual homeland and one's true "I":

And I realized that I was lost forever

In the blind passages of space and time,

And somewhere native rivers flow,

To which my path is forever forbidden.

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

Anna Andreevna Gorenko (Akhmatova is a pseudonym) was born near Odessa, in the family of an officer, her parents separated, lived with her mother, in Tsarskoye Selo, near St. 1913 dispersed. The divorce was finalized in 1918. She lived mainly in Leningrad, died in Moscow. The main principle of acmeism - to be the highest degree of something - was embodied in her work, it lasted half a century and became a measure of poetic skill. Akhmatova is a major poet of the 20th century; the word “poetess” cannot be applied to her. Personal experiences, the fate of the country and people are reflected in her poetry.

Her first books - "Evening" (1912), "Rosary" (1914) - the initial period of creativity (1907-1914). With her very first books, she showed that love lyrics can be “female”, not inferior in their perfection and tragedy to “male” lyrics, but even in the first books, the theme of her poems is many-sided - these are poems about her beloved city (“Poems about St. Petersburg”), this is a topic about the role and purpose of the poet, the features of the poetic gift. Akhmatova's lyrics are confessional and often autobiographical in nature, but the heroine in poetry has a different look, different guises - a naive girl, a sophisticated beauty, an abandoned lover, an old woman, a simple Russian woman. From the very beginning, critics noted such a feature of her poetry as "novelistic", psychological prose. Her poems were called short stories, short stories, but this should not be taken literally, in most of the poems it is not a presentation of events, but an “imposition” of one perception on another, these are stories about a “moment”, but usually they have two aspects, they are present simultaneously:

She clasped her hands under a dark veil...

"Why are you pale today?"

- Because I am tart sadness

Drunk him drunk -

The very first phrase is dramatic and meaningful, but the information is clear, the reader immediately understands that a drama has occurred - no matter who asks the question, then the author introduces the climactic episode that has already remained in the past.

How can I forget? He walked out, staggering

Mouth twisted painfully...

I ran away without touching the railing

I followed him to the gate.

Breathless, I shouted: "Joke

All that has gone before. If you leave, I'll die."

Smiled calmly and creepily

And he said to me: "Don't stand in the wind."

This answer is even more impressive than the hands clasped under the veil. The tragedy of situations is present in many of Akhmatova's poems, but they often have bright notes as well. The inner world of Akhmatova’s heroes is conveyed through a description of the characters’ appearance, their portrait features (“your profile is thin and cruel”), hairstyles (“And lurks in tangled braids / A barely audible smell of tobacco”), figures (“I put on a tight skirt, To seem even slimmer”), through reflection in the mirror or in the perception of strangers (“And condemning looks / Calm tanned women”). The appearance of the characters changes very quickly: facial expressions(“Dry lips are tightly closed”), gestures("The soaring hands break the sick"), sight(“How do I know those stubborn / Unsatisfied views of yours”), gait("He came out staggering") character the speech itself, often interrupted ("That's it... Oh, no, I forgot / I love you").

To convey the inner state of her characters, Akhmatova uses “realistic” images (“Forgotten on the table / Whip and glove”), interior details (“Worn rug under the icon”), clothing features (“In a gray everyday dress, / On worn-out heels”) , jewelry (“What a beautifully smooth ring”), etc. Akhmatova actively uses color symbolism, the symbolism of flowers (“I carry a bouquet of white levkoy”, “And only a red tulip, the Tulip is in your buttonhole”), trees, birds (stork, peacock), minerals (“A diamond rejoices there and opal dreams” ).

The time of day, the season, even the weather are psychologically colored in Akhmatova’s lyrics - this technique goes back to the traditions of folklore, to psychological parallelism (“The Gray-eyed King”, where evening, autumn, sunset predict fading, the proximity of death, when the heroine learned about the death of her former beloved). One of the most famous early poems - “The Song of the Last Meeting” - conveys physical sensations: a gait, an act (“I put a glove on my right hand from my left hand”), subjective sensations. The heroine turned around and saw that she had left dark home, disinterested yellow candle fire.

The second period (1915-1923) coincided, according to Akhmatova, with the fact that the real twentieth century had come, she had been counting it since 1914. During these years, books were published: "The White Flock" (1917), "Plantain" (1921), Anno Domini (1922, "In the Year of the Lord" - lat.). the thematic range of her poetry is expanding; the love theme does not recede into the background, but the heroine herself changes. If in the early lyrics the situations of the triumph of a man over the heroine prevailed, now the woman is most often strong, she not only prays, but also demands, resists someone else's will, she is able to answer the man: “You obedient? You've gone mad / I'm obedient to the Lord's will alone.

In Akhmatova's poetry, a theme appears that will eventually become the main one in her work - she realizes that she can be the voice of the people. Akhmatova often used the pronoun “we” in her early lyrics, but this meant uniting with her lover (“We wanted stinging flour / Instead of serene happiness”), now this “we” more often means unity with the people (“We thought we were poor. ..")

In general, the topic of exile and emigration is one of the most painful for the poet during this period. She also had a personal meaning for Akhmatova, since her friend Boris Anrep decided to leave the country and called Anna with him (he lived in England, a mosaicist, they met in old age, the black ring she gave before parting had great symbolic meaning for her, and The man didn't remember it. The decision to stay at home and share their fate with their people is fundamental for Akhmatova, this is a moral choice. An analysis of the poem “When Suicide is Anguished” can serve as an example of a “political” approach to artistic creativity: the last four lines were not printed in emigration, it turned out that the angel was calling the poetess to leave her homeland. The first eight lines were not printed in Soviet publications, and it turned out that this was the devil-tempter calling to leave the Motherland. The meaning and salt of this poem is just in the neighborhood of the initial and final lines. The "Prinevsky capital" is desecrated, but the mission of the lyrical heroine is to try to save this city.

A few years later, Akhmatova writes an equally famous poem, in which she again tells the world the cruel truth about the trials that befell those who remained in Russia, but it is also about faith in that new, incomprehensible thing that was born in Russian life.

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

The wing of the black death flickered,

Everything is devoured by hungry longing,

Why did it become light?

She made a sensible decision to stay in her homeland, she believed that in the future it would be difficult for emigrants who had lost their homeland. she believes that: "in the evaluation of the late / Every hour will be justified."

I am not with those who left the earth

To be torn apart by enemies

I will not heed their rude flattery,

I won't give them my songs.

But the exile is eternally pitiful to me.

Like a prisoner, like a patient.

Dark is your road, wanderer,

Wormwood smells of someone else's bread.

In Akhmatova's poetry there are a lot of thoughts about creativity, about the "holy craft", as she called it - these are separate poems and whole cycles. She erects her Muse on a high pedestal, does not hesitate to correlate her Muse with the one that served Dante himself.

And so she entered. Pulling back the cover

She looked at me carefully.

I tell her: “Did you dictate to Dante

Pages of Hell? Answers: "I am".

She considers herself the heiress of the great masters, she often has Tsarskoye Selo motifs, for example, poems from the cycle “In Tsarskoye Selo” (1911).

A dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys,

At the lake shores sad,

And centuries we cherish

Barely audible rustle of steps.

Pine needles thick and prickly

Cover low stumps...

Here lay his cocked hat

And the disheveled Tom Guys.

Of course, Akhmatova could speak about poetic creativity directly, without all sorts of grandiloquent hints, allusions to the classics of previous centuries;

When would you know from what rubbish

Poems grow without shame.

Like a yellow dandelion by the fence

Like burdock and quinoa.

Since the second half of the 1920s, researchers have been counting the third period of Akhmatova's work (1924-1966). But I must say that in the 1920s and 1930s she was practically not published, compared to previous years she wrote little, often “on the table”. During these years, Akhmatova studied the work of Pushkin, her Pushkin studies can make up a separate volume. Akhmatova and Gumlev had one son, the famous historian of Eurasianism Lev Gumilyov. During this period, the son was arrested three times in 1935, 1938 and 1949. The terrible personal experience of standing in prison lines for many months became one of the reasons that prompted Akhmatova to write the poem "Requiem" (1935-1940), the leitmotif of the poem - "I was then with my people / Where my people, unfortunately, were .. .". Maternal grief allowed her not only to feel her involvement in the tragedy of the people, but also to become their voice:

They took you away at dawn

Behind you, as if on a takeaway, I walked,

Children were crying in the dark room,

At the goddess, the candle swam.

Icons on your lips are cold.

Don't forget the sweat of death on your forehead.

I will be like archery wives,

Howl under the Kremlin towers.

The personal tragedy and the tragedy of the people is comprehended through the gospel parallels and the image of the Mother of God standing at the crucifixion of the Son-Savior.

Magdalene fought and sobbed,

The beloved student turned to stone,

But where the mother stood silently,

So no one dared to look.

Separate parts of the "Requiem" were created at different times, but the poem has unity, unity of problems, structure, lyrical plot (Arrest - Waiting - Sentence to death - Crucifixion), there is a dedication, an introduction and an epilogue. Many passages are close to folk lamentation, funeral lamentations: "The husband is in the grave, the son is in prison / Pray for me." She also created the image of a person leaving life: "And the blue sparkle of beloved eyes / the last horror covers." The grieving heroine in the poem becomes the spokeswoman for the nation's grief: both as a "prisoner" she expresses all the pain of women's suffering, and as a poet, she says with a high calm that "hundred-million people" are shouting with her "tormented mouth". The image of the monument at the end of the poem suggests another cross-cutting motif - the motif of petrification from grief: "And the stone word fell / On my still living chest", "It is necessary that the soul be petrified", "Son's terrible eyes - petrified suffering." The poem has several levels of generalization - the fate of the author, the fate of the Soviet people in the 30s of the twentieth century, the fate of the Russian people in different periods of the tragic Russian history (the Streltsy revolt at the end of the 17th century, the fate of the Don Cossacks in Soviet times, etc.), and, finally, the fate of mankind in the Sacred History (“Crucifixion”), and the author’s main idea is to affirm the equal magnitude of the destinies of individuals and the people as a whole.

During the Great Patriotic War, Akhmatova became a folk, national poet, her lyrics acquire civil pathos: “Leningrad in March 1941”, “And you, my friends of the last draft!” In the poem "Courage" (1942), the idea of the importance of preserving the Russian language, without which there is no Russian nation and Russian history, sounds:

We know what's on the scales now

And what is happening now.

The hour of courage has struck on our clocks,

And courage will not leave us.

It's not scary to lie dead under the bullets,

It's not bitter to be homeless -

But we will keep you, Russian speech,

Great Russian word.

Her neighbor in a communal apartment, the boy Valya Smirnov, died under the bombing, his image acquires a symbolic generalized meaning, this is an epitaph to all the dead children:

Knock with your fist - I will open.

I have always opened up to you.

I am now behind a high mountain,

Beyond the desert, beyond the wind, beyond the heat,

But I will never betray you.

Akhmatova writes her final work “A Poem Without a Hero” for a long time, from 1940 to 1962. This work reflected the era of the Silver Age, the revolution, even the impulse to freedom during the Second World War. The plot was based on a long story - the suicide of a young boy, the poet Vsevolod Knyazev in 1913, he was unrequitedly in love with the beautiful Olga Glebova-Sudeikina, Akhmatova's girlfriend. Against this background, the atmosphere of life and life of pre-war St. Petersburg is recreated, this is the youth of the poetess and her entourage, as well as the dramatic events of subsequent years, when “not a calendar - the real twentieth century” came. In the depicted kaleidoscope of faces, numerous images and motifs flash - Faust, Don Giovanni, Salome. In this excited atmosphere of general disintegration, mystical motifs also sound - for example, the figure of Mephistopheles, the lord of darkness, appears. One of the central images is Petersburg, which the poetess perceived as her hometown, over which a curse hangs. Among the recognizable "heroes" of the poem are Blok (Demon), Mayakovsky (Milestone), Isaiah Berlin (Guest from the Future), O. Mandelstam, O. Glebova-Sudeikina. M. Kuzmin and others. The author does not mention Gumilyov's name, although she points out that censorship was looking for him in vain, but much in the poem is based on his absence. Due to the saturation of the poem with personal memories and experiences, it has a special cryptography, which makes the poem seem obscure to many: “The box has a triple bottom / But I confess that I used / Sympathetic ink.” The image of a mirror appears all the time, it becomes a through leitmotif: "I write with a mirror letter." There are many reminiscences and allusions in the poem, and they refer not to specific texts, but to various works of the authors of the Silver Age and their predecessors. Accurate fixation of the atmosphere of the Silver Age with its creative and anarchic spirit is projected onto the further fate of Russia, its martyrdom and heroism during the Second World War. The poem ends with the image of a split homeland, Russia split in two. Behind the interweaving of the author's associations and allusions, a clear thought arises: by abandoning the tragic or heroic pose, the author takes on the sins and delusions of an entire generation, sharing with him the responsibility for the fate of his people.

In 1946, Akhmatova, along with M. Zoshchenko, became the subject of sharp criticism, in the spirit of the party campaign to tighten policy in the field of culture. They stopped printing it again - until 1950. Akhmatova during these years was engaged in literary translation, wrote literary articles. The last lifetime collection of poems - "The Run of Time" (1965). In the last years of her life, she was held in high esteem, she traveled abroad - to France, to Italy, where she received a literary prize, to England, where she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

May 07 2010

Crisis of symbolism caused the emergence of two new poetic branches of modernist art - acmeism and futurism. Unlike V. Bryusov, the master of the Symbolist school, who during poetic discussions argued that it should be autonomous, the young "reformers", the creators of new trends, declared: the art of the word needs a super task. A difference immediately emerged: the acmeists considered modernity in the light of previous cultural and historical experience, placing the present in the past, while the futurists swiftly, sometimes contrary to logic, moved the present into the future. The emergence of acmeism is closely connected with the name N.. Initially, he, like a number of other talented young poets, identified himself with the "third generation" of symbolists who grouped around the Apollo magazine. However, his creative search gradually came into conflict with the principles of the symbolic school. Gravitating towards the classical clarity of verse, towards the simplicity of expressing thoughts, depicting the real world of things, gradually from a poet who does not accept the “nebulousness” of symbolism, he turns into its denier and creator of the theory of a new poetic trend.

For Gumilyov followed by other young talents who were once fond of the ideas of symbolism: O., A., S. Gorodetsky. Together with them, in 1911, he created the literary association "Workshop of Poets", which, in fact, became the center of acmeism. Soon, the "Workshop of Poets" was replenished with such original writers as M. Kuzmin, M. Zenkevich, V. Narbut. The manifesto of the new trend was Gumilyov's article "The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism", which began with the statement: "... symbolism has completed its circle of development and is now falling ... Symbolism is being replaced by a new direction, no matter how it is called, whether acmeism ... or adamism ..."

This direction clarified, requires "a greater balance of power and a more accurate knowledge of the relationship between subject and object than was the case in symbolism." Thus, Gumilyov emphasized that acmeists would strive for a realistic depiction of world phenomena, for reliability in the transfer of elements of the living (material, carnal), for accuracy (external and psychological), for the hardness of the drawing, for the rejection of allegory and mysticism. The name of the new trend - acmeism - the theorist derived from the Greek word "acte", which denoted the peak of something, perfection, color, blooming time. The choice of the name corresponded to the goals of the new art, the aesthetic program created by Gumilyov. One of the postulates of acmeism was associated with the establishment of the cult of the primary biological principle in man, opposed to the sociality of the modern world. Hence a different version of the name of the current - Adamism (on behalf of the biblical Adam). This variant was promoted by S. Gorodetsky (the article "Some Currents and Modern Russian Poetry"). Acmeists attached great importance to the form of verse. Gumilyov considered the lyrics of the French romantic Theophile Gauthier to be a model of poetic form. In the article “Letters on Russian Poetry”, he calls to imitate the French poet and cites lines from his poem in this regard:

But the form, I said, is like a holiday before my eyes:
Whether it is poured with Falernian wine or water -
Not all the same! The jug captivates with its beauty!
The aroma will disappear, but the vessel is forever with us.

Focusing on the masterpieces of Western European art, acmeists singled out the works of four great artists of the word - Shakespeare, Rabelais, Viyov and Theophile Gautier. They considered them to be their forerunners. “The selection of these names is not arbitrary,” Gumilev wrote. “Each of them is the cornerstone for the building of acmeism, the high tension of one or another of its elements. Shakespeare showed us the inner world of man. Rabelais - the body and its joys, wise physiology. Villon told us about a life that does not doubt itself in the least, although it knows everything - God, and vice, and death, and immortality. Théophile Gautier for this life found in art worthy clothes of impeccable forms. To combine these four moments in oneself is the dream that now unites people who so boldly looked forward to being acmeists.

It should be noted that the Acmeist manifesto was met with hostility by the theorists of symbolism. So. V. Bryusov wrote: "... Trust in the words of the "new Adams" is undermined by the list of poets they report, whom they recognize as their teachers." The master of symbolism, tendentiously identifying the poetry of the acmeists with primitivism, ironically calling them the leaders of the "forest animals", exclaimed that neither Shakespeare, nor Rabelais, nor Villon, and even more so Theophile Gautier would never agree to act as their spiritual leaders. “We are sure,” Bryusov concluded, “or at least we hope that N. Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky, and A. Akhmatova will remain good poets in the future and will write good poetry. But we would like them, all three, to quickly give up the fruitless pretension to form some kind of school of acmeism. Their inconsistent theories can hardly be useful for their work, and for the development of other young poets, the preaching of acmeism can be directly harmful.

Although V. Bryusov and other opponents of acmeism predicted its short existence and imminent collapse, nevertheless, this modernist literary trend turned out to be quite viable. The journal Hyperborea, created by the Acmeists, became known in Russia, and the collections of poems and poetry cycles published by the Acmeist poets were very popular. Describing them, the critic and literary critic V. M. Zhirmunsky wrote in the article “Overcoming Symbolism”: “With some caution, we could speak of the ideal of the “Hyperboreans” as neorealism, understanding by artistic realism an accurate transmission, slightly distorted by subjective spiritual and aesthetic experience separate and distinct impressions of primarily external life, as well as the life of the soul, perceived from the outside, the most separate and distinct side. The conclusion made by the literary critic is interesting: “Is the future of our poetry in acmeism? Undoubtedly, in recent years, both in symbolism itself and outside it, there has been a turn towards new realism ... But if the literary future that we are waiting for is not in the poets of Hyperborea, they nevertheless clearly expressed the needs of the time, the search for new artistic forms and interesting achievements.

Leading, Acmeism asserted throughout its existence the autonomy of art and the elitist, spiritual independence of the artist from modernity.

I am polite with modern life,
But there's a barrier between us
Everything that makes her laugh, arrogant,
My only consolation.
Victory, glory, pale
Words now lost
Thundering in the soul, like copper thunders,
Like the voice of the Lord and the wilderness.
Always unnecessary and unsolicited
Peace entered my house;
I swore to be an arrow thrown
By the hand of Nimrod Lhill.
But no, I'm not a tragic hero,
I'm ironic and drier, I'm angry like a metal idol
Among porcelain toys.
He remembers curly heads
Bowed to its foot, the priests' majestic prayers,
A thunderstorm in the forests trembling.
And he sees, sadly laughing,
Always motionless swing, Where is the lady with the outstanding breast
The shepherd plays the flute.
N. Gumilyov. I am polite with modern life ...

One of Futurism, which appeared almost simultaneously with it, becomes fierce opponents of acmeism, from the very beginning aimed at modernity and an active, even aggressive, reflection of the real world.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save - » Acmeism in Literature. N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, A. Akhmatova, S. Gorodetsky. Literary writings!

The originality of Anna Akhmatova's poetry lies in the fact that she especially acutely felt the pain of her era, perceived it as her own, and the tragedy of Russia was reflected in the tragedies of the personal fate of the poetess and in her work. Akhmatova became the voice of the time and the voice of the conscience of her time.

When an era is buried, The grave psalm does not sound, Nettles, thistles Have to decorate it ... -

The poetess will write in August 1940, drawing a line under the bygone era. A new, "iron" (by A. Blok's definition) age was advancing. And in this century there was no worthy place for the creativity of the poetess, Akhmatova's soul remained in that past, so close and at the same time so distant.

All these features of acmeism are embodied in the work of Anna Akhmatova. But, being an acmeist in her early work, Akhmatova significantly went beyond the boundaries of one literary movement. Her poetry does not fit into the narrow framework of one concept, it is much broader and deeper in content and more significant in subject matter.

Cycle Northern elegies, developed over several decades, form seven poems, dated 1921. 1940, 1942, 1945, 1955, 1958-1964. The consequence of this was the ultimate concentration of meaning, expressed in such a generalized way that a consistent analytical approach will inevitably lead to a violation of its ideological integrity1. In addition, the order of the poem is not fixed unambiguously, despite the conventionally biographical sequence of the lyrical plot that unites them. Thus, we are given a certain freedom, correlated with the saying "The Spirit breathes where it wants."

The St. Petersburg Myth of Russian literature is certainly original" (E. Sherman, p.169). The uniqueness of St. Petersburg is by no means an accidental phenomenon. Although its founder dreamed of either "Russian Amsterdam" or "Russian Venice", he consciously or unconsciously created the city, not like no other. Petersburg is a "metaphorical" composition, and "metaphor" is in Greek "cart", a cart carrying from the observed to the comprehended. Petersburg appears as an epic work unfolding in time and space. The symbolic city begins with the symbolic name, or rather, from a pseudonym. St. Petersburg ... Leningrad ... Peter is a spiritual name, the second name (as we have already said) is Simon from Vimfsaida. Lenin is a party name, one of the leader's pseudonyms.

The second component of the myth is the mythological image. The image of the city is inextricably linked with the image of its founder. The symbol of Peter's work was the new capital. Its emergence as a result of many years of struggle with the Swedes was bought at a high price. Its creation on the "Chukhon land", in a swamp, which cost the lives of numerous workers who "filled up the swamp with their bones, increased the people's dislike for "Peter", but in those who sympathized with the reform, the new city gave rise to an awareness of the mighty, miraculous power of the "founder". The fabulously rapid growth of St. Petersburg - the city of titanic struggle - testified to the triumph of the cause of Peter" (N.P. Antsiferov, 1924, p.55). The image of the tsar-reformer, intensified by religious consciousness, was combined with the ancient, like the cultural world, images of the cosmic struggle of the creative beginning of the world with the faceless, ugly elements inherent in all ages and peoples. From this contact of historical events with myth-creating consciousness, the myth of the demiurge was born. This myth has its roots in the myth of the Bronze Horseman, framed in the famous poem by A.S. Pushkin, which became one of the main components of the Petersburg text, although the mythologization of this figure of the royal Horseman began much earlier. In the myth of the demiurge, the creator "acts, on the one hand, as a Genius loci, and on the other, as a figure that has not exhausted its vital energy, appearing at the marked moments of the city to its people (the motif of the "animated statue") and acting as the voice of fate, as a symbol of a unique city in the history" (V.N. Toporov, pp. 284-285). Petersburg legend endowed Peter with the features of the founder of the city in the ancient aspect. The very moment of foundation is marked by the appearance of the royal eagle. This was the necessary sign for performing a sacred action. "The founder's first concern is the choice of a place for a new city. This choice is a very important matter; they believed that the fate of the people depended on it. The descending eagle foreshadowed the greatness of the future" (N.P.Antsiferov, 1924, p.55).

The third component of the myth is the mythological narrative. The history of St. Petersburg is thought to be closed; it is nothing more than a temporary break in the chaos. The myth first tells how the cosmos was formed from chaos, from the underworld - a "paradise" in the form of Peter's Petersburg" (V.N. Toporov, p. 295), and ends with an eschatological narrative.

Realizing the eternal latent attraction of the Russian consciousness to a miracle, Peter carefully selected the attributes for his beloved offspring. "Suddenly, among the forests and swamps, a whole city grew up, and in the direction of a distant and little-known, as befits a magical city. Everything in this city is not the same as in other cities, from the streets to the inhabitants. And the city itself is not simple, and not it is a city, but a symbol, a symbol of a new, European Russia, which has not yet been, but which will certainly be" (E. Sherman, p. 169). So the myth of St. Petersburg began its narrative with the myth of the miraculous appearance of the city.

The myth of the end of the city determines not only the main theme of St. Petersburg mythology, but also its secret nerve. The idea of the end became the essence of the city, entered its consciousness, and this consciousness of a catastrophe, its expectation for a person is more terrible than, perhaps, even the catastrophe itself.

In the history of St. Petersburg, one phenomenon acquired a special significance, which gave the St. Petersburg myth an exceptional interest: almost annually recurring floods (“over the 290 years of its existence, the city experienced more than 270 floods, when the water rose one and a half meters above the ordinary and more and began to flood the city both from the outside and from the inside - through city rivers and water manholes" (V.N. Toporov, p.296).

In the Petersburg text, Petersburg appears as a special and self-sufficient object of artistic comprehension, as a kind of integral unity.

Like the city itself, the Petersburg text is characterized by the same antinomy. On one pole - the recognition of St. Petersburg as the only real (civilized, cultural, European, exemplary, even ideal) city in Russia, on the other - evidence that nowhere is it so hard for a person as in St. Petersburg, a call for flight and renunciation of St. Petersburg .

3. In Russian literature, Petersburg has a special "Petersburg" text. It can be determined empirically by indicating the range of basic texts of Russian literature associated with it, and, accordingly, its chronological framework.

The beginning of the Petersburg text was laid at the turn of the 1920s-30s of the 19th century by A.S. years). This initiative was already picked up in the 1930s by N.V. Gogol's St. Petersburg novels (1835-1842) and his St. Petersburg feuilletons, published in Sovremennik, and Lermontov's passage "Count V. Had a Musical Evening" (1839). 40-50s - the design of the St. Petersburg theme in its "low" version - poverty, suffering, grief - and in a "humanistic" perspective, the first visions of the otherness of the city, its mystical layer - almost the entire early F.M. Dostoevsky, including "Petersburg Chronicle" (but also A.A. Grigoriev, whose role in the understanding of St. Petersburg is very significant - both "Cities", "Farewell to Petersburg" (1846), prose - "vital" cycle, etc.; N.A Nekrasov, K.P. Pobedonostsev, I.A. Goncharov, V.F. Odoevsky, V.A. Sollogub, I.I. Panaev, A.V. Druzhinin, M. Dostoevsky and others). Further, V. G. Belinsky, A. I. Herzen - "journalistic", partly "pre-historiosophical" image of St. Petersburg. 60-80s - Petersburg novels by F.M. Dostoevsky, as well as D.V. Grigorovich, V.V. Krestovsky, Ya.P. Polonsky, A.F. Pisemsky, I.S. Turgenev, M.E. .Saltykov-Shchedrin, N.S. Leskov, K.K. Sluchevsky and others; from poets - F.I. Tyutchev, S.Ya. Nadson, A.N. Apukhtin, K. K. K. Luchevsky, etc. At the beginning of the 20th century - the central figures of the Petersburg text - A.A. Blok and A. Bely ("Petersburg"); I.F. Anensky and A.M. Remizov ("Cross Sisters"); D.S.Merezhkovsky, F.K.Sologub, Z.Gippius, Vyach.I.Ivanov, M.A.Kuzmin, A.P.Ivanov. From the 10s - A.A. Akhmatova, O.E. Mandelstam, a little earlier - N.S. Gumilyov. In the 20s and until the turn of the 30s - E.I. Zamyatin ("Cave", "Moscow - Petersburg", etc.), S. Semyonov ("Hunger"), B.A. Pilnyak, M.M. .Zoshchenko, V.A. Kaverin, I. Lukash and others. And like some kind of miracle - a gigantic trail that spilled out in the 20s and beyond: "Petersburg" poetry and prose by O.E. . Of course, this brief review does not mention all the authors who created the Petersburg text of Russian literature; It should be noted that it continues to be created in our days.

When reviewing the authors, whose contribution to the creation of the St. Petersburg text is most significant, two features are striking: the exceptional role of writers - natives of Moscow (A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov, F.M. Dostoevsky, A.A. Grigoriev, A.M. Remizov, A. Bely and others) and - more broadly - non-Petersburgers by birth (N.V. Gogol, I.A. Goncharov, V.V. Krestovsky, O.E. Mandelstam, A.A. Akhmatova), firstly, and the absence of writers from St. Petersburg in the first row until the final stage, and secondly. Thus, the Petersburg text was least of all the voice of Petersburg writers about their city. Russia and, above all, Moscow spoke through the Petersburg text.

As for the very image of St. Petersburg, a noticeable evolution took place in it. It changed, following the changes in time of the view of the city. If at the beginning of the 19th century a poet, surveying the urban landscape, strove for a wide, or even complete coverage of it (K.N. Batyushkov, A.S. Pushkin), then by the end of the century, the focus of vision rarely went beyond the boundaries of the urban interior.

The image of the city more and more disintegrated into small components, but they, like molecules that retain the properties of their substance, did not lose their belonging to the urban environment. For example, for V.V. Nabokov, the response is not so much the city sign itself, but the inscription of individual letters on it: "Oh, how many charms of the native / In rounded signs, in the letter" yat ", / Similar to an old church." - "Petersburg", 1921.

The "view from the outside" was increasingly transformed into a "view from the inside". Thus, the artistic biography of the city can be viewed as the history of the relationship between points of view - external and internal.

In the work of A.A. Akhmatova, the reader passes through the profiles of many cities: Moscow, Pavlovsk, Bakhchisaray, Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, Novgorod, Kyiv, Slepnevo, Tashkent, etc. But the first place undoubtedly belongs to St. Petersburg.

In the memoirs of contemporaries, the image of Akhmatova is captured almost inseparably from the city: from her appearance and demeanor to poems of their subject matter and structure.

“From childhood, more precisely, from the age of six, when I first saw Akhmatova, her image was firmly connected in my mind with Leningrad.<…>The mere appearance of Akhmatova in my boyish life was extraordinarily significant and impressive. Perhaps partly the reason for this was the behavior of the elders, and the constant mention of her name in conversations about Leningrad.<…>She not only came from Leningrad, but she herself, according to my understanding, was from Leningrad. Her hairstyle with long, neat bangs, some especially spacious long dresses that make it easy to sit on the sofa, a huge scarf, slow movements, quiet voice - everything was completely Leningrad "(A. Batalov, p. 556).

"... In her eyes, and in her posture, and in her treatment of people" there was one "the main feature of her personality: majesty", she is so similar to one of the most important features of the city (K.I. Chukovsky, p.48). This feature of "stateliness" is noted by many contemporaries and concerns not only the appearance of the poetess, but also her work: melodiousness, rhythm of verse, language ...

"... Akhmatova is forever poisoned by the classical rhythms of this city - "The Bronze Horseman", "White Nights" and "The Stranger". She reminds me of the silent teacher of the once glorious, but abandoned by all the skete, who remained in it, no matter what "(N .M.Basalaev, S.172).

Anna Akhmatova already with her first books won the fame of a poet, par excellence of St. Petersburg. "She always remained the singer of our city, no matter how this city was called - St. Petersburg, Petrograd. Leningrad. "And I know the only city in the world / And I will find it in a dream by feeling ..." - with these words, Akhmatova conveyed her attitude to the city for all time "(M. Karlin, p. 559). At the same time, Akhmatova was never a poet of "local, Leningrad significance", although the city on the Neva always remained the main character of her poetry.

Akhmatov's poetry, strict and classically commensurate, in many ways deeply related to the very appearance of the city - the solemn turns of its streets and squares, the smooth symmetry of the famous embankments, bordered by golden calligraphy lanterns, marble and granite palaces, its countless lions, winged griffins, Egyptian sphinxes, ancient Atlantes , colonnades, cathedrals, maritime rostra and glittering spiers. "The Petersburg architectural style, clearly reflected in the appearance of all Russian art, not only in architecture, but also in literature, was visually revealed in Akhmatova's poetry: it, one might say, predetermined her spiritual and poetic world, that is, imagery, metrics, melody, acoustics and much, much more.

The kinship, spiritual and consanguineous, between Akhmatov's verse and the city was aggravated by the combination of tenderness and hardness, water-air shimmer and stone-cast iron materiality, characteristic only of Leningrad" (A.I. Pavlovsky, p. 9-10).

Akhmatova's favorite saying about herself was: "I am like a St. Petersburg cabinet." “Only now,” writes Z.B. Tomashevskaya, “I understand the whole powerful meaning of this formula. They, these St. this is called a "cultural layer". But rarely has anyone managed to take out such a pedestal from St. Petersburg land "(Z.B. Tomashevskaya, p. 417).

Just as Akhmatova herself and her poetry became an integral part of Petersburg, its "cultural layer", part of the Petersburg text of Russian literature, so Petersburg, in turn, became one of the cultural

layers of her work, one of the components of Akhmatova's poetic text.

If we take the point of view of V. Koch as the definition of the text: the text is "any sequence of sentences organized in time or space in such a way that it implies a whole" (K. E. Stein, p. 42), then we can talk about the poetic work of Akhmatova like a well-organized text. This is indicated by the strict organization of her books, which have titles, epigraphs, and a certain sequence of poems within the books, and the cycles of poems, and the changes that the poet made over time for different editions of collections (for example, changing the names of poems or rearranging poems, not always chronological sequence, more often thematic), as well as the fact that in these collections there is a variant setting of the same poems.

As part of our topic, we can talk about the original Petersburg text of Akhmatova.

Petersburg occupies a certain semantic space or topical content in Akhmatova's poetic text, which, in turn, is part of the general topical content of her poetry. Petersburg topical content arises as a result of the presence in the text of certain semantic homogeneities (isotopies), which together give us a holistic view of the city of Akhmatova, which she often called "hers": "my city".

Initially, the cycle was called "Leningrad Elegies", then the name was changed. The cycle remained unfinished - the seventh elegy. Researchers of the "Northern Elegies" refer them to the "most openly biographical" works, which have taken a special place in the work of the poetess.

Petersburg is included in the "Northern Elegies" as a full-fledged hero and witness to the life of the poetess. In the "Fifth" elegy, the city acquires the meaning of the only city in the world:

How many friends do I have

I've never met mine in my life

And how many city skylines

Tears could come from my eyes

And I know the only city in the world

And I will find it in my dream by feeling it.

The most interesting for us (in the context of the topic) is the first of the "Northern

elegies" - "Prehistory".

background

I don't live there anymore...

Russia of Dostoevsky. moon

Five-story growing bulks

Everywhere dance classes, signboards changed,

And next: "Henriette", "Basile", "Andre"

And magnificent coffins: "Shumilov Sr.".

However, the city has changed little.

I'm not alone, but others too

It was noticed that he sometimes knows how

Seem like an old lithograph,

Not first class, but decent enough

Seventies, I think.

Especially in winter, before dawn,

Or at dusk - then outside the gates

Darkens hard and direct Foundry,

Not yet disgraced by modernity,

And my counterparts live - Nekrasov

And Saltykov ... Both on the board

Memorial. Oh how scary it would be

Im seeing those boards! I'm passing.

And in Staraya Russa there are lush ditches,

And in the gardens rotten gazebos,

And the glass of the windows is as black as an ice-hole,

And I think it happened there,

It's better not to look, let's go.

You can't talk to every place

To reveal its secret

(And I won’t be in Optina anymore…).

The rustling of skirts, plaid blankets,

Walnut frames by the mirrors

Astonished by Karenin's beauty,

And in the narrow corridors those wallpapers

Which we admired in childhood,

Under a yellow kerosene lamp

And the same plush on the chairs ...

Everything is different, hastily, somehow ...

Fathers and grandfathers are incomprehensible. Earth

Laid down. And in Baden - roulette.

And a woman with transparent eyes

(Such a deep blue that the sea

It is impossible not to remember, looking at them),

With a rare name and a white pen,

And kindness, which is inherited

It's like I got it from her

An unnecessary gift of my cruel life...

The country is shivering, and the Omsk convict

I understood everything and put an end to everything.

And now it will mix everything

And myself above the primordial mess,

Like a spirit, ascend. Midnight strikes.

The pen will fasten, and many pages

Semyonovsky is smeared with a parade ground.

So that's when we decided to be born

And, accurately measuring the time,

So as not to miss anything from the shows

Unseen, said goodbye to non-existence.

In the poem, we observe a mixture of real and unreal plans. The poem is like a memoir while walking around the city.

Written "Prehistory" blank verse. White verse allows you to widely use everyday colloquial speech, freely and flexibly build a phrase. Akhmatova uses the usual classical size of white verse - iambic pentameter, heavily pyrrhic:

Russia of Dostoevsky. moon

Almost a quarter is hidden by the bell tower.

Taverns are selling, cabbies are flying,

Five-story growing bulks

In Gorokhovaya, at the Sign, near Smolny.

Graphically, the poem is divided into four unequal parts. The first three are sketches, sketches of memories, the fourth is a generalization, a conclusion that reveals the meaning of the first three parts.

Externally, "Prehistory" is an intricate, enough - 125 -

a smooth and calm narrative that reveals itself at the internal level through intertextual data based on intense emotional experience. We are again dealing with a one-time contrast characteristic of Akhmatova.

The last part of the poem, revealing the meaning of the poem as a whole, indicates the time frame of the sketches - the era in which Akhmatova was born and lived. This era is called in the verses "Karenin", which, in turn, was considered the era of timelessness. At the verbal level, this is characterized, to a greater extent, by the nominal nature of the poem's vocabulary.

Petersburg is an integral, integral part of the era - Petersburg of the 90s.

The isotopy "city" is displayed in this poem through scenes and paintings activated by means of artifacts. Artifacts are antinomic in nature: on the one hand, this is a city seen through the eyes of F.M. Dostoevsky, painted in ordinary and gloomy tones; on the other hand, solemn Petersburg of lithographs of the World of Art.

Through this artefactual antinomy, the impression of the city is experienced. Artifacts and reflection of the hero reflect the constantly intersecting time layers of the past ("Dostoevsky's Russia") and the present. The present tense is represented especially vividly by a system of predicates: “I’m passing”, “it’s better not to look in, we’ll leave”, “not to be”, reminiscent of remarks in a dramatic work. That is, the real Petersburg is represented by the present tense, the surreal Petersburg (memories) is represented by the past.

Thus, the depiction of the isotopy "city" in "Poems about St. Petersburg" and "Northern Elegies" fits into the general scheme of depicting St. Petersburg in Akhmatova's St. Petersburg text (see Chapter 2, §2).

Practical No. 9

The pathos of Mandelstam's poems of the early period is the renunciation of life with its conflicts, the poeticization of chamber solitude, joyless and painful, the feeling of the illusory nature of what is happening, the desire to escape into the sphere of the original ideas about the world ("Only read children's books ...", "Silentium", etc. ). Mandelstam's approach to acmeism is due to the demand for "beautiful clarity" and "eternity" of images. In the works of the 1910s, collected in the book "Stone" (1913), the poet creates the image of "stone", from which he "builds" buildings, "architecture", the form of his poems. For Mandelstam, examples of poetic art are "architecturally justified ascension, corresponding to the tiers of a Gothic cathedral."

Mandelstam not only sincerely considered himself an acmeist, but was also engaged in the theoretical substantiation of acmeism as a literary movement. A preacher of the ideas of acmeism, perhaps more than Gumilyov, who deserves the title of the theorist of this literary movement, Mandelstam never allowed his poetry to go into the “bottleneck” of acmeism: he did not tolerate one-sided objectivity, concreteness, “pure thingness” and attacked its manifestation in poetry , regardless of the faces: Acmeist friends have already got it here.

The name of Mandelstam is inseparable from another name - acmeism. Acmeism in its understanding is not a school and not a worldview. This is existence, expressed in the word, understood as a substance - with its special internal dynamism and organization.

Mandelstam's view of culture has two aspects. On the one hand, it is due to a certain amount of ideas inherent in science, philosophy, historical and cultural essays, in general, the intellectual consciousness of the beginning of the 20th century. It is no coincidence that one of his first works is the article "Pyotr Chaadaev", the essence of which is clarified by reference to the authority of Chaadaev and his definition of history in general, Russian history in particular. On the other hand, Mandelstam, in search of the patterns of modern life and the behavior of modern man, puts forward his understanding of history and culture, the internal pathos and defining law of which is "architecture". "Architecture" and "architecture" - acquired from him the meaning of fundamental cultural and philosophical concepts. "To build means to struggle with emptiness, to hypnotize space." Hence the image of "chaos", "emptiness", overcome by the creative effort of history.

Collection "Stone"

the first published collection of the poet - "Stone" (1913). This included 23 poems from 1908-1913. (later the collection was supplemented with texts from 1914–1915 and republished at the end of 1915 (the title says 1916)). Early poems included in the collection of 1908-1910. are a combination, unique for all world poetry, of the immature psychology of a young man, almost a teenager, with the perfect maturity of intellectual observation and poetic description of this particular psychology:

From the pool of evil and viscous

I grew up with a rustling reed, -

And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately

Breathing forbidden life...

I am happy with a cruel insult,

And in a life like a dream

I secretly envy everyone

And secretly in love with everyone.

The verses included in Mandelstam's first collection "Stone" are the verses of a student of the Symbolists, but at the same time they are devoid of "otherworldliness", all the positive ideology and philosophy of symbolism. These are poems about a foggy and unreal world.

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