The goddess of Russian poetry

From: Gladiola Jorbus

Anna Akhmatova (Anna Akhmatova) is valued today as one of the most prominent voices of Russian poetry.

He was born in the twilight of the 19th century, in Odesa, and completed his studies in Saint Petersburg. Akhmatova showed an obvious weakness for the classics, such as Pushkin, Dante, Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

Ahmatova used in her creations strict metric and exact rhyme, endowing the poem with a perfect musicality, while in syntax more priority was given to simple sentences than to subordinate ones. It was not for nothing that her friend and critic Josif Brodsky emphasized the musical character of Ana Akhmatova's poetry. He even described it like this: "Her gaze was breathtaking. Tall, dark-haired, brunette, slender and lithe, with the green eyes of a polar tiger, for half a century she has been drawn, painted, sculpted in plaster and marble, photographed by countless people, starting with Modigliani . The verses dedicated to her would form more volumes than her entire work".

It was the muse of the greatest painters of the time. Her portraits are countless. Her unique appearance made all the painters want to portray her: thin neck, half-closed eyes, ridged nose and of course, the bangs. Impressive, majestic, with a rare finesse, Akhmatova turned into a true cult figure.

Nathan Altman, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Zinaida Serebryakova, Jurij Annenkov, etc., made portraits of her that belong to the history of painting. That they are all influenced by suffering. Ana herself had built, through her poetry, the image of a fragile and sad woman.

In the verses of Ana Ahmatova, we distinguish premonition, love, prophecy of death and tragedy. The poetic alterego appears through the personal pronoun "she" and we can easily find the presence of expensive elements, such as "the house", a living space clothed in intimate silence, where the self and the other poetic character meet again and again.

Although her creativity was censored by the Stalinist authorities, she chose not to emigrate. Stayed in the Soviet Union, becoming a witness to the events of that period: "No foreign sky protected me, / no foreign arm stood a shield over my face. / I stand as a witness of the common fate, / a survivor of that time, / of that place".

Her themes, among others, include meditations on the difficulties of living and writing under the shadow of Stalinism.

She also conveyed the memory of the women lined up at the doors of the secret police, through the verses: "This woman is sick / This woman is alone / The man in the grave, / The boy in prison / Pray for me"

Akhmatova's husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was one of the leading figures of the Silver Age of Russian poetry. In 1921 he was arrested on the claim that he had been a participant in an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy and was convicted.

Also, the tone of her poetry expresses a halved duality between the religious concept of sin and the secular aspect. After the war, the party called Akhmatova its representative "an empty poem, without principles, foreign to the people".

Ana Ahmatova embodied the perseverance of Russian poetry, which had withstood terrible trials. Her tragic fate – the death of her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov; refusal to emigrate; the ordeal of her son – created a completely unique portrait of the Acmeite poetess.

Communists did not like the "decadent" spirit and excessive aesthetics. Andrei Zhdanov, a cultural ideologue of the time who was concerned with respecting the directives of the Soviet Communist Party in the literary field, called her poetry distant from people and "her trivial experiences characterized by mystical-religious eroticism".

But unconquered, the poet together with Osip Mandelstam led Acmeism, an artistic movement of the early 20th century, which, contrary to symbolism, advocated the use of poetic language that contained precise meanings.

Her first lyric poems reflect intimate details, while her later works convey patriotic themes. The most famous poem "Requiem" it did not see the light of publication in the Soviet Union until 1987, as its subject, an elegy for Stalin's prisoners, aroused much controversy and discussion at the time.

Ahmatova remains a powerful poetic personality, even though she was clouded in the midst of the literary storm that the 1965th century brought. There are no cryptic secrets in her poetry, which remains dramatic, maintains originality, clarity and discipline, bursts with truth and is alive. It cannot be disguised with puns or sounds. The strength of that poem lies in the fact that it is as rough as a polished diamond. Poet Akhmatova was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in XNUMX.

A year before his death, at the age of 75, he was invited to the United Kingdom and awarded an honorary degree from Oxford University. In the solemn speech it was said: "This magnificent woman is rightly called by some the second Sappho". /Telegraph/