What assessment does the heroine of the requiem give to her era? Analysis of the poem "Requiem"

Composition

The poem “Requiem” (together with “Poem without a Hero”) was the result of Anna Akhmatova’s creative path. In it, the poetess expressed her civic and life position.
Akhmatova's early poems determine the poet's approach to the themes of the Motherland, native land, and father's home. The poem “I had a voice...” (1917) expresses the poet’s creative position in a “time of grief,” and “Lot’s Wife” (1922-1924), with the help of biblical images, talks about the pain of a woman leaving home. The “Requiem” reflects the motives of these poems, only now they sound solemn and sublime, with “high sorrow.” This spirituality allows us to classify "Requiem" as the best poems XX century, along with “The Twelve” by A. Blok, “Cloud in Pants” by V. Mayakovsky, “Vasily Terkin” by A. Tvardovsky.
Akhmatova created the poem over the course of twenty years. "Requiem" was not recorded. L. Chukovskaya, a close friend of the poet in the 1930s and 40s, wrote: “It was a ritual: hands, a match, an ashtray.” Eleven more people knew “Requiem” by heart, but not one betrayed Akhmatova - writing, reading and even listening to a poem about the “terrible years of Yezhovshchina” was a dangerous activity. This is exactly what O. Mandelstam spoke about: “Only in our country poetry is respected - people kill for it.”
The poem "Requiem" consists of separate poems different years. Its sound is mournful, mournful, it justifies the name of the poem. The word "requiem" means a funeral Catholic service, a requiem. In the history of music there is a mystical incident associated with the requiem. It is associated with the name V.A. Mozart. One day a man in black came to him and ordered a requiem. During the creation of the work, Mozart found it difficult to write, he fell ill and died without finishing the funeral service.
It is interesting that Akhmatova’s work was also written “to order.” The reader learns about this from the initial part of the poem “Instead of a Preface.” It is written in prose. This tradition originates from classical poetry, from the poems of Pushkin (“Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet”) and Nekrasov (“Poet and Citizen”), which determine the civic position of these poets and the price of their work. Akhmatova, in a prosaic preface, also defines her civic position “in the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina”: “Requiem” was written at the request of “a woman with blue lips,” exhausted and emaciated, who stood with Akhmatova in the line of the Leningrad Krestov prison in complete stupor. The human personality was destroyed during the years of repression, and the poet conveys the fear and pain that people experienced. The heroes of the poem are all those who stood “under the blinding red wall.” This is how one of the principles of Akhmatova’s narrative is realized - multi-heroic character.
“Dedication” introduces other heroines into the poem - “involuntary friends ... of rabid years.” In this chapter, Akhmatova writes not only about her own grief, but also about the grief of her Motherland, about the grief of all people. Therefore, the poet’s lyrical “I” turns into “we”. And the poem sounds large-scale, all-encompassing:

Mountains bend before this grief,
Doesn't leak great river…

Akhmatova refers to the “memory of the genre” - in the preface there is a quote from Pushkin’s message to the Decembrists in Siberia. The poet mourns everyone who touched this “deadly melancholy.”
The “Introduction” to “Requiem” paints an image of Leningrad at that time. In the tradition of depicting the city, Akhmatova is close to Dostoevsky, who called St. Petersburg “the most deliberate city on earth.” This is a city where only prisons exist. He is depicted bloody and black (“under the bloody boots and under the tires of black marus”). The sounds of the city are locomotive whistles, the people in it are condemned. This is a crazy city with a death star above it.
In the following parts of the poem, the image of the lyrical heroine develops - a mother who lost her son. The three-syllable meter (three-foot anapest) of the first part of the “Requiem” indicates the folklore basis of the poem. The image of dawn, the description of the dark room, the comparison of the arrest with the removal give the poem historical authenticity and take the reader into the depths of history:

I will be like the Streltsy wives,
Howl under the Kremlin towers.

The heroine's grief is interpreted as timeless, familiar to both the 20th century and the era of Peter the Great.

The second part of "Requiem" is written in the lullaby genre ( lexical repetitions: “The quiet Don flows quietly”), rhymes in trochee tetrameter. Outwardly, the heroine is calm and restrained, but behind this calmness lies the beginning of madness from grief, the image of which is revealed later in the poem. The suffering heroine in the third part of the poem tries to look at her grief from the outside. The image of “black cloth” expresses universal sorrow for the dying people. At the rhythmic level, this mood is expressed in free verse (unrhymed verse), the basis of which is the intonational division of lines by the author. Again, a prose passage cuts into the mournful narrative. The mother's despair reaches its climax:

Everything's messed up forever
And I can't make it out
Now, who is the beast, who is the man,
And how long will it be to wait for execution?

Everything is confused in the mother’s mind, madness reaches its climax. Akhmatova's image of a star, taken from the Bible, signifies not the birth, but the death of the main character - her son.
In chapter six, the image of the son is associated with Christ. His life is the way of the cross, and the mother’s way is the cross, the sacrifice. She goes crazy and asks God for death.
The chapter “Towards Death” was an emotional highlight. The heroine is ready to accept death in any form: “poisoned shell”, “typhoid child”, “bandit’s weight”. But death does not come, and the heroine, the mother, becomes petrified from suffering.
The image of the fossil is most developed in the chapter “Crucifixion” - the poetic and philosophical center of the poem “Requiem”. In this chapter, Akhmatova rethinks the biblical situation of the crucifixion. This story is presented to Akhmatova not only as the tragedy of Christ, but also the tragedy of the mother, about which not a word is said in the Bible. The tragedy of the lyrical heroine is depicted realistically - this is the tragedy of Akhmatova herself, and her horror - worse than horror Maria. The mother's tragedy becomes universal, a private story takes on a national resonance. The parallel construction of the poem (comparison of the private and the universal) is due to the theme of the epigraph:

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

The first part of the epilogue again returns the reader to the “red blind wall” of the prison where the story began. But unlike the preface of the poem, the first part of the epilogue is full of figurative and expressive means: epithets (“dry laugh”), metaphorical epithets (“blind wall”), expressive verbal vocabulary (“the smile fades,” “fear trembles”). All these tropes are due to the appearance of the memory motif in the epilogue.
In the second part of the epilogue, the image of the monument becomes central. But this is a monument not only to victims of repression, but also to the poet, Akhmatova herself, standing, according to her will, not near the sea, but next to the Crosses. Therefore, the epilogue sounds solemn and sublime. It has several levels of meaning thanks to biblical motives that sound in it is the motive of burial (“on the eve of my memorial day"), the cover ("for them I wove a wide cover"), the appearance of the image of the beast ("the old woman howled like a wounded beast"). The heroine appeals not only to the Bible, but also to folklore images - she is looking for a folklore basis in her suffering. However, the epilogue does not sound tragic, but, on the contrary, spiritual. The image of a dove appears, symbolizing spiritual freedom. Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine thanks God and life for everything that happened to her: for the prison lines in which she stood for seventeen months, for grief, for “petrified suffering” and crucifixion.
But in the poem, the poet’s personal tragedy is hidden behind the theme of centuries-old suffering and humiliation of the entire Russian people. After all, “Requiem” is not a document about the poet’s life in a time of grief, but a conversation about the past, present and future.

Other works on this work

And innocent Rus' writhed... A. A. Akhmatova. "Requiem" Analysis of A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” Anna Akhmatova. "Requiem" The poet's voice in Akhmatova's poem "Requiem" Female images in A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” How does the tragic theme develop in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”? How does the tragic theme unfold in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”? Literature of the 20th century (based on the works of A. Akhmatova, A. Tvardovsky) Why did A. A. Akhmatova choose this name for her poem “Requiem”? Poem "Requiem" The poem "Requiem" by A. Akhmatova as an expression of people's grief Poem by A. Akhmatova “Requiem” Development of the tragic theme in A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” The plot and compositional originality of one of the works of Russian literature of the 20th century The theme of maternal suffering in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” The tragedy of the individual, family, people in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” The tragedy of the individual, family, people in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” The tragedy of the people is the tragedy of the poet (Anna Akhmatova's poem "Requiem") The tragedy of a generation in A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” and in A. Tvardovsky’s poem “By the right of memory” The tragedy of A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” Artistic means of expression in the poem "Requiem" by A. Akhmatova “I was then with my people...” (based on A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”) My thoughts on Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” The theme of the homeland and civil courage in the poetry of A. Akhmatova The theme of memory in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” ARTISTIC IDEA AND ITS EMBODIMENT IN THE POEM "REQUIEM" Akhmatova’s poetry is a lyrical diary of a contemporary of a complex and majestic era who felt and thought a lot (A.T. Tvardovsky) “It was when only the dead were smiling and happy with the calm” (my impression from reading A Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”) Problems and artistic originality of Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” The tragedy of the people in Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” Creation of a generalized portrait and problems of historical memory in Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” The theme of the requiem in Akhmatova’s work The role of the epigraph and the image of the mother in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is a great Russian poetess, a talented woman who faced difficult trials. She had to go through a lot. The terrible years that changed the entire country could not but affect its fate. The poem "Requiem" was evidence of everything that Akhmatova had to face.

The period of creation of this poem took six years - from 1935 to 1940. These years were full of difficult and tragic events, which touched the lives of many people, sharing the normal, happy life and terrible reality.

The poem "Requiem" consists of several parts, each of which carries a specific idea.

The epigraph to the poem was the lines in which Akhmatova says that her whole life was closely connected with the fate of her native country, even in the most terrible years; all the hardships of that time also affected her life. She refused to emigrate and remained in Russia:

No, and not under an alien sky,

And not under the protection of alien wings -

I was then with my people,

Where my people, unfortunately, were.

The lines of the epigraph were written later than the poem itself. They are dated 1961.

The part “Instead of a Preface” talks about what preceded the writing of the poem. The wave of arrests of innocent people, repressions and arbitrariness of the authorities that swept across the country became a tragedy for the entire country. Endless prison queues, in which relatives and friends of prisoners stood, became a symbol of that time. This also affected Akhmatova when her son was arrested.

“Dedication” is a description of the experiences of people who spend a lot of time standing in prison lines. Akhmatova speaks of their “deadly melancholy,” hopelessness and enormous grief. The metaphors she uses convey the people's grief and suffering:

Mountains bend before this grief,

The “Introduction” part conveys the pain and grief that one feels when thinking about tragic destinies innocent people.

Death stars stood above us

And innocent Rus' writhed

Under bloody boots

And under the black tires there is marusa.

In the same part, the poetess paints the image of a deeply unhappy, sick, lonely woman. This is not even a woman, but a ghost, grief-stricken to the extreme:

This woman is sick

This woman is alone...

The third, fourth, fifth and sixth poems are personal in nature. Akhmatova talks about her own memories and feelings. There are precise temporal details (“I’ve been screaming for seventeen months”), affectionate addresses to my son (“the white nights looked at you, son, in prison”), and a characterization of the most lyrical heroine of the poem (“the cheerful sinner from Tsarskoe Selo”).

The seventh part of the poem - “The Verdict” - carries the idea of human perseverance. In order to survive, the mother must become stone, learn not to feel pain:

We must completely kill our memory,

It is necessary for the soul to turn to stone,

We must learn to live again.

But it’s difficult to bear all this, so the eighth part is called “To Death.” The heroine is awaiting her death. She asks her to speed up her arrival, because life has lost all meaning for the heroine:

You'll still come. - Why not now?

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

I turned off the light and opened the door

To you, so simple and wonderful.

The tenth part - “The Crucifixion” - shows the tragedy of thousands of mothers whose children innocently bear a heavy cross:

Magdalene fought and cried,

The beloved student turned to stone.

And where the mother stood silently,

So no one dared to look.

The epilogue of the poem consists of two parts. In the first part, Akhmatova again addresses those who stood in the prison line with her. She asks God for help, but not for herself alone, but for all the grief-stricken people “under the red, blind wall.”

The second part develops general poetic themes of the purpose of the poet and poetry. Here Akhmatova raises the topic of her possible Monument, which should stand at that terrible prison wall where “the old woman howled like a wounded beast.” Akhmatova poetess poem requiem

In her life, Anna Akhmatova knew glory and oblivion, love and betrayal, but she always endured all suffering and difficulties, because she was strong man. In our time, the mental fortitude and unyielding will of Anna Akhmatova serve as an example for us and an inexhaustible source inspiration.

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Students, graduate students, young scientists who use the knowledge base in their studies and work will be very grateful to you.

Posted on http://www.allbest.ru/

on the topic of: Comprehensive analysis Akhmatova's poem "Requiem"

The poem “Requiem” (together with “Poem without a Hero”) was the result of Anna Akhmatova’s creative path. In it, the poetess expressed her civic and life position.

Akhmatova's early poems determine the poet's approach to the themes of the Motherland, native land, and father's home. The poem “I had a voice...” (1917) expresses the poet’s creative position in a “time of grief,” and “Lot’s Wife” (1922-1924), with the help of biblical images, talks about the pain of a woman leaving her home. The “Requiem” reflects the motives of these poems, only now they sound solemn and sublime, with “high sorrow.” This spirituality allows us to rank “Requiem” among the best poems of the 20th century, along with “The Twelve” by A. Blok, “A Cloud in Pants” by V. Mayakovsky, “Vasily Terkin” by A. Tvardovsky.

Akhmatova created the poem over the course of twenty years. "Requiem" was not recorded. L. Chukovskaya, a close friend of the poet in the 1930s and 40s, wrote: “It was a ritual: hands, a match, an ashtray.” Eleven more people knew “Requiem” by heart, but not one betrayed Akhmatova - writing, reading and even listening to a poem about the “terrible years of Yezhovshchina” was a dangerous activity. This is exactly what O. Mandelstam spoke about: “Only in our country is poetry respected—they kill for it.”

The poem "Requiem" consists of individual poems from different years. Its sound is mournful, mournful, it justifies the name of the poem. The word "requiem" means a funeral Catholic service, a requiem. In the history of music there is a mystical incident associated with the requiem. It is associated with the name V.A. Mozart. One day a man in black came to him and ordered a requiem. During the creation of the work, Mozart found it difficult to write, he fell ill and died without finishing the funeral service.

It is interesting that Akhmatova’s work was also written “to order.” The reader learns about this from the initial part of the poem “Instead of a Preface.” It is written in prose. This tradition originates from classical poetry, from the poems of Pushkin (“Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet”) and Nekrasov (“Poet and Citizen”), which determine the civic position of these poets and the price of their work. Akhmatova, in a prosaic preface, also defines her civic position “in the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina”: “Requiem” was written at the request of “a woman with blue lips,” exhausted and emaciated, who stood with Akhmatova in the line of the Leningrad Krestov prison in complete stupor. The human personality was destroyed during the years of repression, and the poet conveys the fear and pain that people experienced. The heroes of the poem are all those who stood “under the blinding red wall.” This is how one of the principles of Akhmatova’s narrative is realized—multi-heroes.

“Dedication” introduces other heroines into the poem - “involuntary friends ... of rabid years.” In this chapter, Akhmatova writes not only about her own grief, but also about the grief of her Motherland, about the grief of all people. Therefore, the poet’s lyrical “I” turns into “we”. And the poem sounds large-scale, all-encompassing:

Mountains bend before this grief,

The great river does not flow...

The “Introduction” to “Requiem” paints an image of Leningrad at that time. In the tradition of depicting the city, Akhmatova is close to Dostoevsky, who called St. Petersburg “the most deliberate city on earth.” This is a city where only prisons exist. He is depicted bloody and black (“under the bloody boots and under the tires of black marus”). The sounds of the city are locomotive whistles, the people in it are condemned. This is a crazy city with a death star above it.

In the following parts of the poem, the image of the lyrical heroine develops - a mother who lost her son. The three-syllable meter (three-foot anapest) of the first part of the “Requiem” indicates the folklore basis of the poem. The image of dawn, the description of the dark room, the comparison of the arrest with the removal give the poem historical authenticity and take the reader into the depths of history:

I will be like the Streltsy wives,

Howl under the Kremlin towers.

The heroine's grief is interpreted as timeless, familiar to both the 20th century and the era of Peter the Great.

The second part of the “Requiem” is written in the genre of a lullaby (lexical repetitions: “The quiet Don flows quietly”), counting in trochee tetrameter. Outwardly, the heroine is calm and restrained, but behind this calmness lies the beginning of madness from grief, the image of which is revealed later in the poem. The suffering heroine in the third part of the poem tries to look at her grief from the outside. The image of “black cloth” expresses universal sorrow for the dying people. At the rhythmic level, this mood is expressed in free verse (unrhymed verse), the basis of which is the intonational division of lines by the author. Again, a prose passage cuts into the mournful narrative. The mother's despair reaches its climax:

Everything's messed up forever

And I can't make it out

And how long will it be to wait for execution?

Everything is confused in the mother’s mind, madness reaches its climax. Akhmatova's image of a star, taken from the Bible, signifies not the birth, but the death of the main character - her son.

In chapter six, the image of the son is associated with Christ. His life is the way of the cross, and the mother’s way is the cross, the sacrifice. She goes crazy and asks God for death.

The chapter “Towards Death” was an emotional highlight. The heroine is ready to accept death in any form: “poisoned shell”, “typhoid child”, “bandit’s weight”. But death does not come, and the heroine, the mother, becomes petrified from suffering.

The image of the fossil is most developed in the chapter “Crucifixion” - the poetic and philosophical center of the poem “Requiem”. In this chapter, Akhmatova rethinks the biblical situation of the crucifixion. This story is presented to Akhmatova not only as the tragedy of Christ, but also the tragedy of the mother, about which not a word is said in the Bible. The tragedy of the lyrical heroine is depicted realistically - it is the tragedy of Akhmatova herself, and her horror is worse than the horror of Maria. The mother's tragedy becomes universal, a private story takes on a national resonance. The parallel construction of the poem (comparison of the private and the universal) is due to the theme of the epigraph:

I was then with my people,

Where my people, unfortunately, were...

In the second part of the epilogue, the image of the monument becomes central. But this is a monument not only to victims of repression, but also to the poet, Akhmatova herself, standing, according to her will, not near the sea, but next to the Crosses. Therefore, the epilogue sounds solemn and sublime. It has several levels of meaning thanks to the biblical motifs that sound in it - this is the motif of burial (“on the eve of my funeral day”), the veil (“for them I wove a wide veil”), the appearance of the image of the beast (“the old woman howled like wounded beast"). The heroine appeals not only to the Bible, but also to folklore images - she is looking for a folklore basis in her suffering. However, the epilogue does not sound tragic, but, on the contrary, spiritual. The image of a dove appears, symbolizing spiritual freedom. Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine thanks God and life for everything that happened to her: for the prison lines in which she stood for seventeen months, for grief, for “petrified suffering” and crucifixion.

But in the poem, the poet’s personal tragedy is hidden behind the theme of centuries-old suffering and humiliation of the entire Russian people. After all, “Requiem” is not a document about the life of a poet in a time of grief, but a conversation about the past, present and future.

Essay “The meaning of the title of the poem by A.A. Akhmatova’s “Requiem”, reflected in it personal tragedy and people's grief"

Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem,” poignant in its degree of tragedy, was written from 1935 to 1940. Until the 1950s, the poet kept her text in her memory, not daring to write it down on paper, so as not to be subject to reprisals. Only after Stalin's death was the poem written down, but the truth expressed in it was still dangerous, and publication was impossible. But “manuscripts don’t burn,” eternal art remains alive. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem,” which contained the pain of the hearts of thousands of Russian women, was published in 1988, when its author had been dead for 22 years.

Anna Akhmatova, together with her people, went through a terrible time of “universal muteness,” when the torment overwhelms, becomes unbearable, and it is impossible to scream. Her fate is tragic. Akhmatova’s husband, the remarkable Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 on false charges of conspiracy against the new Bolshevik government. Talent and intelligence were persecuted by Stalin's executioners until the tenth generation. Usually, after the arrested person, his wife and his wife went to the camps. ex-wife, their children and relatives. The son of Gumilyov and Akhmatova, Lev, was arrested in the thirties and again on false charges. Akhmatova’s husband, N.N. Punin, was also arrested. Arbitrariness reigned in the country, an atmosphere of unbearable fear was intensified, and everyone expected arrest.

The title “Requiem,” which means “funeral mass,” very accurately corresponds to the feelings of the poetess, who recalled: “During the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad.” Akhmatova's requiem Yezhovshchina

I was then with my people,

Where my people, unfortunately, were.

In the poem, Akhmatova speaks on behalf of millions of people who did not understand what their relatives were accused of and tried to get at least some information from the authorities about their fate. The “word of stone” was the mother’s death sentence for her son, which was later replaced by imprisonment in the camps. Akhmatova waited for her son for twenty years. But even this was not enough for the authorities. In 1946, the persecution of writers began. Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were sharply criticized, and their works were no longer published. Strong in spirit the poetess withstood all the blows of fate.

The poem “Requiem” expresses the immense grief of the people, the defenselessness of people, and the loss of moral guidelines:

Everything's messed up forever

And I can't make it out

Now, who is the beast, who is the man,

And how long will it be to wait for execution?

Akhmatova, like no one else, was able to express the extreme mental state of a person in succinct, short lines of her poems. The situation of hopelessness, doom and absurdity of what is happening makes the author doubt his own mental health: Madness is already on the wing

Half of my soul was covered,

And he drinks fiery wine,

And beckons to the black valley.

And I realized that he

I must concede victory

Listening to your own

Already like someone else's delirium.

There is no hyperbole in Akhmatova's poem. The grief experienced by the “people of a hundred million” can no longer be exaggerated. Afraid of going crazy, the heroine internally distances herself from events and looks at herself from the outside:

No, it's not me, it's someone else who is suffering.

I couldn't do that, but what happened

Let the black cloth cover

And let the lanterns be taken away...

The epithets in the poem intensify the disgust of terror against one’s own people, evoke a feeling of horror, and describe the desolation in the country: “deadly melancholy,” “guiltless” Rus', “heavy” steps of soldiers, “petrified” suffering. The author creates the image of a “blind red” wall of power, against which the people fight in the hope of justice:

And I’m not praying for myself alone,

And about everyone who stood there with me

And in severe hunger, and in the July heat

Under the blinding red wall.

In the poem, Akhmatova uses religious symbolism, for example, the image of the mother of Christ, the Virgin Mary, who also suffered for her son.

Having experienced such grief, Akhmatova cannot remain silent, she testifies. The poem creates the effect of polyphony, as if they are speaking different people, and the replicas hang in the air:

This woman is sick

This woman is alone

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

The poem contains many metaphors that amaze with the skill and strength of feelings and will never be forgotten: “mountains bend before this grief,” “the death stars stood above us,” “...and burn through the New Year’s ice with your hot tears.” The poem also contains such artistic means as allegories, symbols, and personifications. All of them create a tragic requiem for all those innocently killed, slandered, and disappeared forever in the “black convict holes.”

The poem "Requiem" ends with a solemn poem in which one feels the joy of victory over horror and numbness for long years, memory preservation and common sense. The creation of such a poem is a real civic feat of Akhmatova.

Similar essays.

Essay “Reflection of the tragedy of the individual, family and people in A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem””

“And here, in the deep smoke of the fire

Losing the rest of my youth,

We don't strike a single blow

We didn’t turn away from ourselves...”

A. Akhmatova

Every poet has his own tragedy. This is precisely what is interesting to contemporaries. The tragedy of Anna Akhmatova is that when her poems began to sound truly civic motives, she was forced to remain silent. The generation did not know its poet. For many, Akhmatova remained the author of love poems, charming, deep, but far from anxiety and horror. modern life. Very few knew about what enormous work was going on in the poet’s soul, what angry and bitter lines were stored and hidden in memory.

Akhmatova's generation was broken October Revolution, unsettled, deprived of support - primarily spiritual, moral. Heinrich Heine said that all the cracks in the world pass through the heart of a poet. Akhmatova felt and predicted the tragedy of her contemporaries back in the 20s:

“Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,

The wing of the black death flashed,

Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy,

Why did we feel light?”

The last line still retains some hope for change in life - a hope that, unfortunately, was never realized. Unlike Marina Tsvetaeva, who was always “for all, against all” (and the pronoun “we” is unrepresentable in her poems), Akhmatova always felt like a part of a generation, an era, so she could rightfully say:

I am the reflection of your face..."

It was the suffering voice of many thousands of people that was heard in the “Requiem”, written in the 30s. At that time, Akhmatova’s son, Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov, a young talented scientist, was arrested several times. And together with other women, the poet Anna Akhmatova stood in long prison lines, peering with horror and hope into the window where the indifferent guard, in a boring official voice, told her meager information about her son.

At first glance, Requiem seems to consist of disparate poems. This fragmentation seems to have absorbed the ritual of initiation into the poem. L.K. Chukovskaya, who lost her husband at this time, recalled how Akhmatova silently wrote lines of poetry on scraps of paper, gave them to read, and then just as silently burned the piece of paper. She, like everyone else, was afraid of surveillance and denunciations. Her forced muteness was generated not only by non-recognition, but also by fear, which related Akhmatova, an intelligent woman, a poet, to any illiterate dispossessed peasant woman. And only a few initiates kept her “Requiem”, her pain and anger in their memory for many decades.

The whole poem is permeated with the painful logic of expectation - waiting for arrest, waiting for a sentence, waiting for a son to be released from prison. And the feeling of death - when, it seems, you can no longer endure this torment. What is he doing a common person when life is unbearable, but death is also impossible? He tries to forget himself - in prayer, in work, in small everyday worries. What does a poet do? He tries to put his suffering into poetry. And not only yours. Akhmatova writes in the preface about a woman who accidentally “identified” her in a prison line. She “awake from the stupor that is characteristic of us all and asked me in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper): - Can you describe this?

And I said:

Like Mozart's "Requiem", written to order, Akhmatova also received an order - to describe all those who have already died in prisons and camps, and those who still have to die. Therefore, grieving over the fate of her child, she remembers the Mother of God and her son, crucified for all people. After all, the plot of the poem is, in fact, the path of the Mother together with the Son (Akhmatova would have liked it - instead of a son!) according to him way of the cross. Akhmatova writes about the immensity of maternal suffering:

“Magdalene fought and wept,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And where Mother stood silently,

So no one dared to look.”

The poet ascends from a private fate to the fate of the whole country, the whole world, and at the same time, Akhmatova very specifically describes her time and her city:

"It was when I smiled

Only dead, glad for peace.

And dangled like an unnecessary pendant

Near its prisons Leningrad...

The death stars stood above us

And innocent Rus' writhed

Under bloody boots

And under the black tires there is marusa.”

Becoming a part of the dispossessed people, Akhmatova expresses her and his grief in the same way as nameless authors of folk songs did:

“They took you away at dawn,

I followed you, as if on a takeaway,

Children were crying in the dark room,

The candle at the hospital has melted."

And the monotony of despair sounds like the motive of a lullaby:

“The quiet Don flows quietly,

The yellow moon enters the house.

He walks in with his hat on one side,

Sees the yellow moon's shadow."

A suffering woman probably wants to forget about her pain. But the great poet, the involuntary chronicler of the era, understands that it is impossible to forget. To forget is to betray. For hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed will live only in the memory of their wives and mothers.

The theme of oblivion and memory echoes in the “Epilogue” of the poem with the theme of the monument to the poet himself (Derzhavin and Pushkin once wrote about this).

Giving consent to the monument in “this country,” Akhmatova asks not to erect it either near the sea, where she spent her childhood, or in Tsarskoe Selo, the city of muses and poetry. No, the monument should be located near the prison wall:

“...here where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they didn’t open the bolt for me.

Then, even in the blessed death I am afraid

Forget the thunder of the black marusas,

Forget how hateful the door squelched

And the old woman howled like a wounded animal.”

This should be a monument not only to the Poet, but also to the Mother, mourning her own and other people’s children:

"And even from the still and bronze ages,

Melted snow flows like tears,

And let the prison dove drone in the distance,

And the ships sail quietly along the Neva.”

Here the dove is a symbol of posthumous existence, tranquility. And the majestic picture of the Neva reminds us of the most beautiful city in the world, built on human bones. And this city is eternal, just as the tears of mothers losing their children are eternal. This means that a requiem for them will always sound - “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova, as a protest of all mothers against world injustice.

Posted on Allbest.ru

Poem by A.A. Akhmatova "Requiem"

History of creation

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

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

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

Can you describe this?

And I said:

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

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

Genre and composition

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

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

Topics and problems

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

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

For someone the wind is blowing fresh,

For someone the sunset is basking -

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

We only hear the hateful grinding of keys

Yes, the soldiers' steps are heavy.

In the first lines of the “Introduction” the image appears “ scary world”and Rus', writhing under “bloody” boots:

It was when I smiled

Only dead, glad for the peace.

And swayed with an unnecessary pendant

Leningrad is near its prisons.

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

I will be like the Streltsy wives,

Howl under the Kremlin towers.

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

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

You will come anyway - why not now?

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

I turned off the light and opened the door

To you, so simple and wonderful.

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

Magdalene fought and cried,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And where Mother stood silently,

So no one dared to look.

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

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

I learned how faces fall,

How fear peeks out from under your eyelids.

Like cuneiform hard pages

Suffering appears on the cheeks...

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

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

No, and not under an alien sky,

And not under the protection of alien wings, -

I was then with my people,

Where my people, unfortunately, were.

What assessment does the heroine of the requiem give to her era? Analysis of the poem "Requiem"

Other works on this work

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Similar documents

Poem by A.A. Akhmatova "Requiem"

History of creation

Genre and composition

Topics and problems