Response to Blok's "madrigal"

Alexander Blok
I came to visit the poet.
Exactly at noon. Sunday.
Quiet in the spacious room,
And it's frosty outside the windows

And crimson sun
Above the shaggy gray smoke...
Like a silent owner
Looks at me clearly!

His eyes are like that
What everyone should remember;
I better be careful
Don't look at them at all.

But the conversation will be remembered,
Smoky afternoon, Sunday
In a gray and tall house
At the sea gate of the Neva.
January 1914

Funeral, written in August 1921 immediately after Blok’s funeral at the Smolensk cemetery on August 10 (July 28, old style)
And Smolenskaya is now the birthday girl,
Blue incense spreads over the grass.
And the singing of a funeral service flows,
Today is not sad, but bright.
And they bring rosy widows
At the Boys and Girls Cemetery
Look at my father's graves,
And the cemetery is a nightingale grove,
It froze from the radiance of the sun.
We brought it to the Smolensk intercessor,
Brought to the Blessed Virgin Mary
In your arms in a silver coffin
Our sun, extinguished in agony, -
Alexandra, the pure swan.
1921

The conversation with Alexander Blok continued.
The last three poems were written in 1944-1960, many years after death, and contain reminiscence and assessment in poetic form. The first and third were written in 1944−1960, the second was added to them in 1960 and later became part of the same cycle “Three Poems” (1944−1960). The first: “It’s time to forget this camel noise…”, originally entitled “Excerpt from a Friendly Message,” represents a farewell to Tashkent and the oriental themes of the evacuation period. The poetess returns to her homeland, and the native Central Russian landscape of Slepnev and Shakhmatov is associated in her imagination with the name of Blok (His poem “Autumn Will” - “I set out on a path open to the eyes...”, written in July 1905, labeled by Blok: Rogachevskoye Highway #207094).

Three poems
1
It's time to forget this camel noise
And a white house on Zhukovskaya Street.
It's time, it's time to go to the birches and mushrooms,
Toward the broad Moscow autumn.
Everything there now shines, everything is in dew,
And the sky climbs high
And remembers Rogachevskoe highway
The robber whistle of young Blok...

2
And rummaging through your black memory, you will find
Gloves up to the elbow
And the night of St. Petersburg. And in the darkness of the lies
That smell is both stuffy and sweet.
And the wind from the bay. And there, between the lines,
Passing the oohs and aahs,
Blok will smile at you contemptuously -
Tragic tenor of the era.

3
He's right - again a lantern, a pharmacy,
Neva, silence, granite...
Like a monument to the beginning of the century,
This man is standing there -
When he goes to the Pushkin House,
Saying goodbye, he waved his hand
And accepted mortal languor
Like undeserved peace.

Akhmatova and Blok - about each of them one can say “a monument to the beginning of the century,” because, despite the fact that Akhmatova lived much longer, many noted her incongruity with the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It was “created” then, in the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry and brought it with itself to completely different times...

It is very difficult to talk about the relationship between these people, because we should talk not only about the contact of the greatest of their kind, unique poets, but also because both of them are, first of all, individuals of enormous scale, and for such people everything simply does not happen.

“Akhmatova - Blok” he wrote to her on the book he gave her. This is not increased modesty, this is a precise awareness of his - and her - meaning: surnames to which there is no need to add anything.

They met once at a poetry evening in 1913. At this time, Blok, as Anna Andreevna wrote much later, “was already the most famous poet in Russia.” And she “has been reading poetry quite often in the Poets Workshop for two years now.” And yet (sorry for the long quote): “I begged: “Alexander Alexandrovich, I cannot read after you.” He responded with reproach: “Anna Andreevna, we are not tenors.”

The most striking thing in this episode is Blok’s intonation, so accurately noted by Akhmatova: “with reproach.” How much was said in this word - both respect for a woman, without which Blok is unthinkable, and real, wise concern for a beginner, but great poet - with his “we” he put them on the same level. And here I hear a delightful self-irony, an understanding of how little both of them, in essence, mean and can do in difficult, nervous pre-war Russia - the “tenor” is more important. But at the same time, Blok himself knows that this is not so, he knows so firmly that he does not want to convince anyone of this. And young Anna Akhmatova, who understood this without words, becomes a person close to him in spirit.

A few months later, Blok wrote Akhmatova’s now famous poem “Beauty is Terrible...” It seems to me that the main idea of ​​this poem is the same: emphasizing the independence of the poetic self-esteem of both of them. At first glance, there is nothing about poetry in the poem: “beauty is terrible”, “beauty is simple”, “I am not terrible and not simple...” And yet - Blok could not think so boringly about Akhmatova, see only her appearance in her - let it be interesting and original. It is poetry itself that shines with a “red rose in its hair” and just as naturally covers the child. It is the poet who “thinks sadly,” “absentmindedly listening to all the words sounding all around,” because poetry is a reflection of life, and “life is terrible”...

Akhmatova responded to Blok almost a month later, describing the meeting “in a gray and high house at the sea gates of the Neva.” This poem is even more mysterious than Blok’s. Behind the description of the external signs of the conversation and the landscape, there seems to be nothing more. But the striking line is about the eyes of the “silent master”: “It’s better for me, being careful, not to look into them at all.” The eyes are described, I think, in a deliberately non-specific manner: “...the kind that everyone should remember...”, just like “a conversation will be remembered...” It’s like an iceberg, of which only a small part is visible on the surface of the water. And the feeling is the same: a huge, indescribable closeness behind the external distance.

In 1919, Akhmatova met “the emaciated Blok with crazy eyes” in the theater canteen. Only about a relative, and not just a close person, can you allow yourself to say this.

On August 7, 1921, Blok passed away. Akhmatova’s poem “And Smolensk is now a birthday girl...” is dedicated to his funeral. It is in the same spirit as “I came to the poet...” - the same detailed description of the Smolensk cemetery, the same encrypted shock line: “... Our sun, extinguished in agony...” I can’t explain why, but this The poem doesn't seem very sincere to me. Perhaps because such a stylization of folk lamentation is not suitable for Blok. But, probably, the point is not that Akhmatova does not mourn his death. It’s just that, perhaps, at that time their spiritual kinship was not felt so keenly by both. In addition, it is known that Blok changed a lot towards the end of his life; his poetic vision of the world left him.

But in 1944 this turned out to be no longer so significant. By that time, Anna Andreevna herself had experienced a lot - both the execution of Nikolai Gumilyov and the arrest of her son, “Requiem” had already been written... Akhmatova’s poetic attitude did not leave her even in such circumstances, but she wrote: “Madness has already covered half of the soul with the wing...” Immediately I remember Blok’s “crazy eyes”. At this time, Akhmatova understood much better what the “lack of air” was, which destroyed Blok. And the lines appeared:

He's right - again a lantern, a pharmacy,

Neva, silence, granite...

Blok did not like Akhmatova. The whole history of their personal relationship - and they knew each other for about ten years and lived in the same city - St. Petersburg - is a story of Blok's avoidance of any shorter acquaintance. When 40 years after /198/ Blok’s death, Akhmatova turned to her memory, it turned out that she had nothing to say about Blok. And this is not accidental, and arose because of Blok himself, and not Akhmatova. Literary historians and literary scholars are trying to obscure this circumstance in the biography of the two poets, and it is completely in vain.

Why does Nadezhda Yakovlevna so insistently make us think about senile sclerosis, considering it necessary to mention from the first phrase of our acquaintance:

You know, of course, that there are two Acmeisms: one by Gumilev and Gorodetsky, the other by Akhmatova and Mandelstam. So we are from this second current.

There is no second current here, but there is a desire to avoid Blok’s mortal blow, for in his dying article “Without God, without Inspiration,” Blok attacked Gumilyov and Gorodetsky, singling out Akhmatova from the “Workshop” as an example of “sad lyricism” that does not correspond to the world of Acmeism.

Modern Acmeism, or rather, that shadow of Acmeism that wanders across Russian soil, across Russian poetry, strives to emphasize this division, isolation, and not community. Instead of emphasizing the breadth of the school from Narbut to Lifshits, any former Acmeist tries to narrow it and, mainly, renounce Gumilyov and Gorodetsky. This is not being done because Akhmatova and Mandelstam value their own, non-Gumilev direction, creative truth, not mined in Gumilev’s mines. The reason for this phenomenon is different. It is necessary to abandon Gumilyov and Gorodetsky because Blok devoted the last year of his life to the defeat of this group. “Without Deity, Without Inspiration” was written in 1921.

In Blok’s diaries and notebooks, among the three hundred women who were close to him, there were both poetesses and non-poetesses, acrobats, mentioned in the notebooks in the same font as literary ladies and actresses. So, finding confirmation of meetings with Blok in your own memory, relying on Blok’s notebooks, is not so difficult, especially since this memoir goes back, forty years after the poet’s death. Blok did not want to meet with Akhmatova. Why? There are reasons for this, but not those that Akhmatov’s memoirs write about. What's the matter here? What is the reason for this eternal hostility and avoidance /199/ of personal meetings, for which Blok was quite generous? It seems to me that the point here is not only Akhmatova’s importunity, which was unpleasant to Blok like the touch of an epigone. The point is also a purely physical incompatibility, a purely physical aversion to Akhmatova’s physical appearance. History teaches that in order to be successful with men, you don’t have to be a stunning beauty. There was something alien to men about Akhmatova’s physical type, and not at all in terms of talent or intelligence. Blok was simply alienated from this physical type. “Correspondence between two poets” was a purely literary enterprise, from which Blok did not draw any conclusions. Blok rejected his mother's good advice.

There is a visit to Blok, where Akhmatova brings Blok three volumes of his works. On the first two he puts the inscription “Akhmatova Blok”, and on the third he writes a madrigal prepared in advance, included in all the collected works of Blok under the title “Beauty is terrible - they will tell you...”.

The draft of this madrigal shows how difficult it was for Blok. Block forcibly<впихнул>in the Romancero, the text of the poem was never given to him in December 1913. Akhmatova did not like the madrigal, it even offended her, because it “Hispanicized” her. Akhmatova, biting her lips, explained that “Hispanization” arose in Blok involuntarily, because at that time he was interested in Delmas, the performer of the role of Carmen. But the fact is that the acquaintance with Delmas dates back to March of the future 1914.

Akhmatova responds to Blok in the same meter: “I came to visit the poet...”, the poem is the most ordinary, landscape, descriptive, recording the visit.

Blok publishes “Correspondence of Two Poets” in the magazine “Love for Three Oranges,” where he heads the literary department. Inspired by this publication, Akhmatova sends Blok her next collection, “The Rosary” (a gift copy was preserved by the Pushkin House). Akhmatova receives a reply letter to this collection quite soon. “Dear Anna Andreevna, yesterday I received your book (“The Rosary”), I just cut it and took it to my mother, but in her house she is sick and generally in trouble. This morning my mother took the book and read without stopping, she says that not only good poetry, but also in a human, truly feminine way. Thank you, devoted Alexander Blok. P.S. Both times you /200/ called, I really wasn’t at home.” Mortally offended, Akhmatova began to wait for an answer, but the answer never came, although Blok himself read the collection very carefully. He liked four poems there and did not like the other sixty. Akhmatova made another attempt to send Blok a reprint of her poem “Apollo”. This time there are no 6lock marks on the print. Blok delayed answering it for many months; only in March 1916 he responded with a letter that left no doubt in Blok’s opinion. Obviously, Blok did not want to answer at all, but he answered under someone’s pressure, perhaps maternal, and not because Blok took into account his mother’s opinion, but because his mother strongly hoped for this marriage with Akhmatova. The mother strongly favored Akhmatova, and this alarmed Blok even more.

Many of Blok's poems were used as a stimulant, a proven injection of testosterone in the artistic life of the Russian intelligentsia. For some reason, behind such magnificent poems as “Humiliation,” they did not look for any Beautiful Ladies or even Strangers; they accepted reality as reality and refused to accept “Humiliation” as a poetic symbol. Why is “Beautiful Lady” a symbol, but “Humiliation” is not a symbol? Both are symbols, both are poems of the highest quality, and this very thing justifies the work of the poet, the eye of the poet, the pen of the poet. It should also be precisely understood that as soon as poems become verses, they cease to be everyday life, remaining a quotation, they lose their reality. Therefore, the search of Chukovsky, who assured that there really was a pharmacy on the corner, was extremely unwise.

Ninety percent of Russian lyric poems are written for the last stanza.

Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva revealed a complete misunderstanding of the nature of artistic creativity. But that was not the main thing. Lyubov Dmitrievna revealed a complete misunderstanding of the physical nature of her husband. During Blok’s infatuation with N.N. Volokhova, /201/ the safest rival of Lyubov Dmitrievna, Mendeleev’s daughter found it necessary to go to Volokhova and “personally” transfer to her the rights to Blok’s “muse”. L.D. I didn’t want to understand the laws of Artistic creativity, to understand such an elementary thing that Volkhova is only a symbol of “Faina”, just as L.D. herself was a symbol of the “Beautiful Lady”. Volokhova was never close to Blok, and yet the poems flowed uncontrollably, confirming only one law: for a poet there is a need to express his own, and it can be either accidental or a modified reflection of thousands of environments - water, air, where the ray of poetry passes. Volokhova protested most energetically against the initiation, but Blok said: “Poetry requires exaggeration - I see you like this, but the fact itself does not matter for poetry.”

The power of Blok returns to my heart, which no acmeistic poisons could poison.

Blok greeted me with a deafening rhythm of immediacy in the “Twelve,” which, in the same Annenkov-esque design, flapped their white wings on the streets among the wrapping paper of posters, newsprint of all kinds of shades, the large white wings of the “Twelve.” The shiny white wings of the Twelve looked out from afar, overtaking many, if not all. “The Twelve” was the first poem by Blok that I heard with my inner ear, although there they were already “breathing spirits and mists,” and the ladder and eternity, and trotters, and the brilliant “Humiliation” I heard completely late. What's here<делo>was? how to say more precisely, more roughly. In “Twelve” time spoke to Blok, and he heard it. In all other respects, Blok spoke to time, and it listened to him, sometimes more attentively, sometimes less. “The Scythians,” a poem not inferior in its merits to “The Twelve,” was the voice of man to time, and not the voice of time to him. It seems to me that the fact that Blok did not write poetry for four whole years, but wrote a number of fundamental articles during this time, suggests that Blok was still waiting for the voice of God, the same one who raised him from his bed in 1918.

An unsolved mystery. Death of Alexander Blok Svechenovskaya Inna Valerievna

Chapter 14 Blok and Akhmatova

Blok and Akhmatova

The summer of 1914 justified all of Blok’s forebodings. The war has begun. This sad event found the poet in his beloved Shakhmatovo, where he was rebuilding his estate. But, oddly enough, the news of Russia’s entry into hostilities against Germany did not plunge Blok into depression, as might have been expected. Rather, for him it was an annoying absurdity. Precisely absurdity, not tragedy. Blok did not believe in real hostility between the two countries. Perhaps because he himself loved Germany very much. Its literature, philosophy, universities, the whole way of life. He sincerely did not understand why two peoples who had so much in common should fight each other to please their rulers.

At the same time, relations with Lyubov Dmitrievna reached a complete dead end. Lyuba experienced his affair with Delmas painfully. So much so that they even separated and now the “Gishpan princess” could easily come to Blok’s home. Lyubov Dmitrievna was tormented. Has she gotten excited? For the first time, such a clear threat hung over her marriage. What will happen now? Is their relationship with Blok really over? What should she do? Maybe because she never found an answer to this question, Lyubov Dmitrievna solved the dilemma that confronted her in her own way. Namely, in the spirit of that time. She signed up as a nurse for the front. However, unlike her husband, her patriotic mood was shared by almost the entire country. Moreover, a certain unity and even inspiration reigned everywhere. Women went to hospitals as nurses, men rushed into the trenches. Blok’s good friend Mikhail Tereshchenko stopped engaging in literary activities altogether, believing that when the guns roar, the muses can remain silent.

Moscow and St. Petersburg change a lot during these war months. There is talk about the mobilization of Blok's peers, patriotic verses are heard everywhere, and Blok is very irritated by this. He feels suffocation filling the air. And although he shouts to Gippius on the phone that “war is, first of all, fun,” Lyuba has already left and is now sending correspondence from there, which is published under the heading “From the Letters of a Sister of Mercy.” And it’s absolutely surprising that Blok sent her the latest fashion magazines to the active army. “Why does she need fashion there?” – Verigina was amazed. To which the poet’s mother replied: “Sasha knows that she loves it, it will entertain her a little...”

Blok writes tender and warm letters to his wife, and also says that now in St. Petersburg the Acmeists with their leader Nikolai Gumilyov are stronger than ever. We have come to, perhaps, one of the most mysterious pages in Blok’s life. Namely, to his relationship with Anna Akhmatova.

Was there love? Maybe it's all made up? Gumilev was sure of the latter. Of course, this could be explained by the illusion of the husband, who did not want to believe in his wife’s feelings for another man. Or stubbornness, so characteristic of Gumilyov, who did not want to acknowledge the inexorable facts. Moreover, Gumilyov’s relationship with Akhmatova itself was very difficult. Indeed, they gave each other the freedom characteristic of that time, and tried to be above fleeting romances on one side and the other. Gumilyov put up with many of Akhmatova’s hobbies, but could not forgive her for her platonic feelings for Blok. Although there was never any talk about physical intimacy. Perhaps it was jealousy that was carefully hidden and driven as deep as possible that gave rise to Gumilyov’s complex attitude towards Blok. He once admitted to Irina Odoevtseva: “Just don’t think that I want to somehow belittle Blok. I understand very well what a huge talent this is. Perhaps the best poet of our century. He, and not, as most people think, Sologub. Since the time of Lermontov, no one has heard the “sounds of heaven” sound so clearly.

The block is a mystery. Nobody understands him. He is judged wrongly. Not only enemies and detractors, he has many of them, but also his most ardent admirers. I think I've figured it out. Blok is not at all a decadent, not a “symbolist cat-catcher,” as he is considered. Blok is a romantic. A romantic of the purest water, and a German romantic at that.

He, too, was a rebel at the age of twenty. In my pride I wanted to be equal to the Creator. He also wanted to bewitch not only the world, but also himself. And I was also always dissatisfied with my work. Painfully dissatisfied - with himself, with everything he does, and with his love. He does not know how to love the woman he loves. After all, he himself realizes that he is destined to love her again in heaven and cheat on her on earth. He doesn't know how to love himself. And this is even more tragic than not being able to love at all.”

And yet, Gumilyov and Blok had much more in common than differences. They were both knights of their era. That’s why Akhmatova ultimately responded to Gumilyov’s love and... carried her feeling for Blok throughout her life.

Much later, she tried to figure out her complex, tangled relationship with Blok herself. Akhmatova did not have to meet young Blok; schoolgirl Anya Gorenko, apparently, was slightly, airily, in love with him, “like a hundred thousand like them in Russia.” As for the relationship with that Blok, who in the fall of 1911 at the founding meeting of the “Workshop of Poets” asked Gumilyov to introduce him to his wife, they are so bizarre that one can only marvel at Akhmatova’s ingenuity. After many attempts to find similar words, she said this: “My relationship with Blok is a book that could be called “How I Didn’t Have an Affair with Blok.”

And yet... There are suspicions that the great poetess was lying a little. If you conduct a little investigation, it is quite possible to prove that the novel, although not entirely ordinary, still happened. In those years, people really “lost their heads” over Blok’s poems; The dizziness was not only massive, but also bisexual. Older contemporaries were shocked by the madness of “bloc service” and “bloc circles.” I. Annensky, whom Akhmatova considered her Teacher, left a derogatory remark in the papers:

Under the white marble guise of an androgyne

He would become a joy, but someone's old dreams.

His poems burn like a dahlia in the sun,

They burn, but with the coldness of unsuffered tears.

In order to play out the mystery of serving the blockade, Akhmatova did not need an ordinary romance with Blok. Vice versa. It is necessary that such a novel should not exist. “There is a cherished line in the closeness of people, / it cannot be crossed by love and passion.” Akhmatova, in relationships with people, should step beyond this “cherished” - forbidden! - the line was drawn...

It was not for nothing that Blok’s mother wrote a letter, which we will present in full. A letter about a lovely girl in love with her son.

“I’m still waiting for Sasha to meet and fall in love with a woman who is anxious and deep, and therefore tender... And there is such a young poetess, Anna Akhmatova, who stretches out her hands to him and would be ready to love him. He turns away from her, although she is beautiful and talented, but sad. And he doesn't like it. I would like to write you one of her poems, but I only remember the first two lines:

Glory to you, hopeless pain, -

He died - the gray-eyed king.

You can judge what kind of soul this young and unfortunate girl has. She already has a child, however. And Sasha fell in love with Carmen again.”

But how could Blok’s mother know about Akhmatova? After all, they didn’t know each other! And here it is very opportune to remember Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova-Williams. This lady not only knew Anna Akhmatova closely, loved this young woman unlike others in her own way, but also often visited Blok. She was engaged in publishing activities, and a completely trusting relationship was established between the poet and Ariadna Vladimirovna. Moreover, she had one undoubted advantage - Mrs. Tyrkova knew how to keep her mouth shut, which unusually captivated Alexander Alexandrovich. Anna Akhmatova was convinced of this from her own experience. The following episode is recorded in autobiographical sketches: “Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova... Blok told her something about me, and when I called him, he said on the phone (literally): “You’re probably calling because you learned from Ariadna Vladimirovna that I told her about you." Burning with curiosity, I went to Ar. Vl. (on one of her days) and asked: “What did Blok say about me?” A.V. answered: “Anichka, I never tell my guests what others said about them.”

But gossip is one thing, and an intimate conversation in a family circle is quite another... Ariadna Vladimirovna, one of Anya Gorenko’s many likes, knew the future poetess from childhood, admired both Anya’s appearance and her poems. Therefore, this lady was annoyed that Blok did not pay due attention to this girl. I think I will not be far from the truth if I assume that Mrs. Tyrkova had intimate conversations with Blok’s mother and told her about Anna Akhmatova, and perhaps even gave her the unusual poems that this girl, unlike others, wrote to read. In any case, her story about Blok’s attitude towards Akhmatova coincides almost word for word with the version of A. A. Kublitskaya-Piottukh: “Of the poetesses who read their poems in the Tower, Anna Akhmatova was most vividly remembered. Thin, tall, slender, with a proud turn of her small head, wrapped in a flowery shawl, Akhmatova looked like a giant... dark hair... picked up at the back of her head by a high Spanish comb... It was impossible to pass by her without admiring her. At literary evenings, young people went wild when Akhmatova appeared on the stage. She did it well, skillfully, with the consciousness of her feminine charm, with the majestic confidence of an artist who knows her worth. And Anna Akhmatova was timid in front of Blok. Not as a poet, but as a woman. In the Tower they drank her poems like strong wine. But her... eyes searched for Blok. And he stayed away. He didn’t approach her, didn’t look at her, hardly even listened. I was sitting in the next, dimly lit room.”

In fact, the relationship of both Blok to Akhmatova, and Akhmatova to Blok, does not fit into any scheme at all. And even more so in such a simple and banal one.

In addition, there are inaccuracies in the statements of the respected lady. Blok listened quite attentively to Akhmatova’s speeches. And he even wrote about this in his diary: “Anna Akhmatova read poetry, already exciting me; the more poetry goes on, the better.”

The first time Akhmatova saw Blok was in the spring of 1911, in the editorial office of Apollo, but she refused the offer of the magazine staff to introduce her to the poet. And this can be understood: Lermontov also did not want to meet Pushkin, although he easily visited his relatives’ house. The second meeting between Blok and Akhmatova took place in the fall. But this time Akhmatova did not show any ardent desire to attract the attention of her famous contemporary. Yes, I was shy, but not only in front of him. K. Chukovsky, who saw her that autumn, remembered the poetess as a timid girl who followed Gumilev with her tail and tried not to contradict him in anything. Then Blok, accustomed to the fact that young poetesses, and there were countless numbers of them in the 10s, did nothing but try to get to know him, he himself approached Gumilyov and asked to introduce him to Anna Andreevna...

Gumilyov's wife quickly settled into life in brilliant St. Petersburg and quite soon, and most importantly very successfully, learned to hide both her shyness and her “provincial lack of education.” Akhmatova developed several rules that helped her after some time become that famous Akhmatova, whom many later imitated. She learned to “remain silent in an important dispute,” covering herself, like a fan, with an almost “Gioconda” smile, about which she would later say: “I have only one smile: / So, the movement of the lips is barely visible” - it led her contemporaries to indescribable embarrassment . At the same time, she chose a couple of spectacular static poses (“in a pose she had chosen a long time ago”). In one of the fixed poses, Akhmatova was immortalized, independently of each other, but by an interesting coincidence, almost simultaneously - Mandelstam: “Half-turned - oh sadness!..” (January 6, 1914) - obviously openly, in “Stray Dog” , and “hidden camera” Blok: “You stood half-turned towards me” (January 2, 1914). Akhmatova will paste the same poetic photograph, as the most successful portrait of herself in 1913, into “Poem without a Hero”: “And as if remembering something, / Turning half turn,/ I say in a quiet voice..."

However... It must be admitted that the purely external attributes of a socialite - poses, smiles, shawls, Spanish combs and African bracelets - looked good from afar, conventionally, from the stage. But when communicating face to face, they seemed a little funny, and worse, provincial. M. N. Ostroumova recalls, not without surprise, her first meeting with Gumilyov’s wife: “Five minutes after we met, she told me: “Look how flexible I am.” I was amazed when instantly her legs touched her head. Immediately after this she read her poem “The Snake”. A.A. performed similar tricks both in “Stray Dog” and in the Tower, delighting fans and irritating her ill-wishers.” L. S. Ilyashenko-Pankratova, who performed the role of the Stranger in V. Meyerhold’s Blok play, recalls: “I met Akhmatova only in “Stray Dog”... Having parted ways, Akhmatova showed her extraordinary circus act. She sat on a chair and, without touching the floor with her hands or feet, crawled under the chair and sat down again. She was very flexible." It is possible that in “Dog” “immediately after this” the same “Snake” was read:

A beautiful woman lives in my room

Slow black snake;

Just like me, just as lazy,

And cold like me.

Blok did not like to visit “Stray Dog,” because he considered it something like “a gambling house in Paris a hundred years ago.” But Lyubov Dmitrievna visited, so the poet knew very well what was happening in the basement from his wife’s words and formed his own opinion. And even more so about the snake tricks of the prima donna of the “dog” cabaret.

The opening of the “Stray Dog” was timed to coincide with the New Year holidays of 1912. On January 13, Akhmatova read poetry there. In February, Blok completed what he started in the fall of 1911, “Oh, no! I don’t want...”, apparently addressed to N.N. Skvortsova. In a letter to his mother (March 1911), informing him that Skvortsova had come to him from Moscow, Blok describes the twenty-year-old contender for his heart as follows: “In everything down to the smallest detail, even in a suit, she is completely similar to Tilda and says everything as she should.” say Tilda” (Tilda is the main female character in Ibsen’s play “The Builder Solnes”). So, in this poem there is a phrase that is not connected either with the plot movement or with the image of the heroine: “But your snake paradise is a hell of bottomless boredom.” Naturally, I do not claim that the disgusting maxim is directly related to Akhmatova’s snake exercises. Blok, like her, was a master of taking several photographs on one plate. I don’t think that she was so naive as to read such messages as being addressed to her personally. But the fact that Alexander Alexandrovich treated her poems and her personally with hidden and intense irritation, she very much felt, and not with her mind, but practically with her skin, with a female instinct, that’s why, apparently, she was suppressed in his presence.

However, for some embarrassment in the presence of Blok in the fall of 1911, Anna Akhmatova had her own purely feminine reasons. In 1927, especially for Luknitsky, in order to clarify the rumors that had reached him, Akhmatova unexpectedly opened up. And...she listed the names of the men with whom she was close. Neither Modigliani nor Blok are on this “Don Juan list”. But the poetess unexpectedly mentioned Georgy Chuikov. Agree, not the most successful figure. It’s one thing to have a young, reckless, bohemian-style Parisian romance with an almost penniless artist, and quite another thing to have a relationship with a venerable writer living next door in Tsarskoe Selo. An affair with a man who had a strong reputation as a “red tape”, who was known throughout St. Petersburg for his Don Juan adventures. Well, the most unpleasant thing is that Chulkov was not only Blok’s constant companion in his “carefree, street and drunken life,” but also Lyubov Dmitrievna’s longtime lover. By the way, Chulkov even boasted that Blok valued him because he was the only one who could speak to him “not like an intellectual,” that is, rudely like a man, “over a red glass in a tavern.” In addition, Chulkov was the first who drew attention to Anna Gumilyova not as a promising poetess, but as an interesting stranger. This happened, judging by climatic details, in the early autumn of 1910, shortly after Gumilyov’s departure to Africa. “Once at the opening day of the World of Art exhibition,” Chulkov recalled with pleasure, “I noticed a tall, slender, gray-eyed woman, surrounded by Apollo employees, standing in front of Sudeikin’s paintings. They introduced me... A few days later there was an evening with Fyodor Sologub. At about eleven o'clock I left the Tenishevsky Hall. It was drizzling... At the entrance I again met a gray-eyed young lady. In the St. Petersburg evening fog, she looked like a big bird that was used to flying high, and now drags its wounded wing along the ground... I offered this young lady to take her to the station: we were on our way... We were late and sat down at a table at the station, waiting for the next one trains... Soon I had to leave for Paris for several months. There, in Paris, I met Akhmatova again. It was 1911."

Therefore, many biographers of Akhmatova suggest that the poem “I have fun with you drunk…”, which was previously considered dedicated to Modigliani, was written in connection with a Paris meeting with Georgy Ivanovich over a glass of red wine in a tavern. By the way, Akhmatova resolutely rejected Modigliani’s candidacy, claiming: a) that she had never seen him drunk and had never been in a cafe or restaurant with him; b) that she didn’t write poetry for him (what’s the point of writing Russian poetry to a foreigner who doesn’t understand Russian); c) that the relationship was ceremonial and addressing “you” was exclusive; d) that although the poems about amorous conversations “across the table” with a certain dissolute gentleman were written in Paris, in the early summer, for some reason she imagined Tsarskoe Selo autumn elms. Let’s add: “stinging torment instead of serene happiness” is a motif from the repertoire of Blok and Chulkov. Yes, in Paris Chulkov was not alone, but with his wife, but Nadezhda Grigorievna looked at her husband’s permanent love affairs with calm condescension: they say, nothing can be done - it’s a family thing for the Chulkovs.

On top of that, Chulkov was famous for enthusiastically promoting new talents to print. All this together clearly did not decorate the biography of the aspiring poetess... And yet Akhmatova did not hide this connection. She did not tolerate it at all when they tried to make a living icon out of her:

Leave me and I was like everyone else

And the worst was

I bathed in someone else's dew,

And hid in someone else's oats,

I slept in someone else's grass.

It can be assumed that Akhmatova knew that Blok was well aware of her affair with Chuikov. And it seems the poetess was right. Once, in a moment of revelation, she told Luknitsky that at that time there was a fashion for a dress with a slit on the side, below the knee. Her dress was split higher up the seam. She didn't notice. But Blok noticed this. It is unlikely that Blok would have allowed himself to notice the inadmissibly bold cut if he had not heard a lot about the Parisian adventures of Madame Gumilyova, who was “cutting off” a timid girl. It is possible that the same male curiosity explains his proposal for Akhmatova to read at the evening at the Bestuzhev Courses the rather risky (for the first performance in a large female audience) “We are all hawkmoths here, harlots...” In her autobiographical sketches, Akhmatova made a note to this poem: they say , these are the poems of a capricious and bored girl, and not at all a “harlot” who has matured in carousing. Did Alexander Alexandrovich guess about this? Most likely, he didn’t think about it at all. Akhmatova “began to excite” Blok, but not at all in the same way as the femme fatales or beautiful ladies of his dreams worried, but in the same way that an artist is worried about a model that defies him - a material whose resistance he is unable to overcome. Moreover, by the fall of 1913, and perhaps at that very evening at the Bestuzhev courses, Blok sensed with the instinct of a hunter: something new had appeared in the pretty provincial girl - the “enthusiasm of freedom and separation” that was previously unusual for her.

Akhmatova had indeed become emancipated by this time. There was no trace left of the secret but debilitating fear that the success of “Evening” was accidental. And the main thing is that there will not be a second book. And also... Marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, a small child will change the very composition of her being, and the poems will disappear, suddenly and incomprehensibly. More precisely, just as they came from nowhere, they will go to nowhere. The fear was in vain. In less than a year, she put together a new book. Akhmatova celebrated her first married New Year alone. However, she remembered this with pleasure. It was precisely to the loneliness in those days that she owed “Evening,” on which at the beginning of the “fruitful autumn” she made the following inscription: “It is not mournful, it is not gloomy, / It is almost like a through smoke, / A half-abandoned newlywed / A black and white light wreath. / And underneath that hunchbacked profile / And satin Parisian bangs, / And a green oblong / Very keenly seeing eye.”

For “Evening,” which more than compensated for all her female losses, she eventually forgave her husband. Moreover, in relationships with men she valued high friendship more than physical fidelity. However, it was soon their friendship that Gumilyov betrayed. Without hope of reciprocity, he fell in love with his terminally ill cousin, showered her with romantic flowers, and even... being a married man, proposed to her, assuring her that one word from her, and his marriage would be dissolved. Gumilev was madly in love with Mashenka Kuzmina-Karavaeva. And for a long time he could not come to his senses after her death from transient consumption... Therefore, in order to somehow drown out the pain from which the poet did not know a second of peace, he again left for Africa. Taking advantage of his absence, Gumilyov’s mother, Anna Ivanovna, took up general cleaning, and asked her daughter-in-law (Akhmatova) to sort out her husband’s papers. Akhmatova fulfilled her mother-in-law’s request and, putting things in order on his desk, fished out a hefty bunch of women’s love letters from a heap of manuscripts...

Either these almost demonstratively abandoned letters, or the birth of Gumilyov’s illegitimate son that same fall, or maybe everything taken together gave Akhmatova a huge creative impulse. And together with him, she was internally freed from the feeling of guilt before Kolya that was confusing her soul. And for the fact that she walked down the aisle without passionate love, and that she did not preserve innocence for him, the only one... And from marriage bonds, and from recklessly given vows. Then it will all come back, but then... after everything... In the meantime, she again, as in her wild childhood, “was impudent, angry and cheerful.”

In a word, Akhmatova had a good time in the fall of 1913, because the worse she was, the better her poems became. But Blok felt bad, and the worse he felt, the worse, deader and drier his songs became. He even stopped writing them. And by the fall of 1913, he had already decided: if he signed, he would write only about the Spanish-Gypsy. “Art,” letter dated March 6, 1914, “radium (very small quantities). It is capable of radioactivating everything – the heaviest, the roughest, the most natural: thoughts, tendencies, “experiences”, feelings, everyday life. It is amenable to radioactivation alive, therefore - rude, you can't enlighten the dead».

And then something happened between them. Something that neither of them really liked or wanted to talk about. And even more so write. Judge for yourself... Akhmatova willingly talked about how Blok saw her off after the evening at the Bestuzhev courses. But she was silent about what happened after. But... Based on Blok’s character, it is quite possible to assume that he did not let the young woman go at night in bad weather, but invited her to his place.

This assumption is supported by the fact that just three days after their late farewell, under the piercing November sleet, he wrote “Gray Morning.” When this poem was first published, there was one quatrain that remained from the original, specifically gypsy version: “I loved you, master... We are gypsies - a working people!..” But then Blok erased it - it really didn’t fit with the character and even the type of woman depicted here, completely secular and only playing like a gypsy:

Like a boy, she shuffled; bow

He weighs out... “Goodbye...”

And the token jingled on the bracelet

(Some kind of memory)...

Oh those bracelets! They were truly unique! All of St. Petersburg knew them. The famous bracelets that Gumilev gave to Akhmatova. They were entirely connected with “memories”. After all, every time she had a disagreement with Gumilyov, she returned them to him, and he was frightened: “Don’t give me the bracelets...” Therefore, it is not difficult to guess who came to Blok that stormy evening.

Indeed, it was then that Anna Andreevna was invited “to visit the poet.” Blok, as a rule, pedantically noted who, when and for what purpose appeared in his extremely secluded house. In the case of Akhmatova, her biographers were very unlucky: the poet destroyed all diary entries relating to the autumn and early winter of 1913. Akhmatova herself, when asked about the details, said (and then wrote) that she remembered only one interesting statement for a “late assessment”: “I mentioned among other things that the poet Benedict Lifshitz complains that he, Blok... prevents him from writing poetry. Blok did not laugh, but answered quite seriously: “I understand that. Leo Tolstoy is stopping me from writing."

This phrase turned out to be key to understanding the essence of the relationship between the Poet and the Poetess. Having placed himself on a par with Tolstoy, and not jokingly, but quite seriously, Blok immediately established a distance between himself and Akhmatova. And thereby completely excluded the possibility of not only dialogue on equal terms, but also friendly communication in general: Akhmatova thought that she was invited to visit a contemporary, albeit famous, but she was greeted almost by a “monument.”

Then Akhmatova said that when she left, she left his collections for Blok so that he would inscribe them. On each one the poet simply wrote: “Akhmatova – Blok.” But in his third volume of lyrics he wrote a madrigal composed immediately after her departure: ““Beauty is terrible,” they will tell you...”

L.K. Chukovskaya once admitted to Akhmatova that she had not understood before, before her stories about her affair with Blok, the poem “Beauty is Terrible...” A.A. consoled her: “And I still don’t understand. And no one understands. One thing is clear, that it is written like this,” she made a moving movement with her palms, ““don’t touch me.”

Indeed, Alexander Alexandrovich at that time perceived Akhmatova as a beautiful woman who, at the same time, did not attract. But he stubbornly did not see a poet in her. Akhmatova was absolutely not happy with this. She already knew then that after death they stand almost next to each other. This amazing woman knew everything about herself in advance, but Blok did not even allow such thoughts. For him, Anna Andreevna was one of many. So-so... It will do for the stage and even be a success - given the current yellow, vulgar fashion for scented gloves and hats with feathers. He was never able, as it seemed to Akhmatova at the time, to discern something more in her. Of course, she could try to “hook” him as a woman, but...

At this time, wooing and seducing Alexander Alexandrovich was already becoming quite vulgar. There were too many strangers and hobbies for an hour for Akhmatova to decide to join their ranks. It’s another thing to be among the chosen few who were allowed to communicate! Of course, with such plans (to communicate, to be almost on equal terms), the unexpected appearance of Count Tolstoy’s shadow became not only discouraging for Akhmatova, but also came like a bolt from the blue. However, Blok did not recognize such a popularized image in the lady who came to him. A truly capricious, not without vulgarity, snake, working under the guitar, remained somewhere down there, on the corner of Moika and Pryazhka. And in front of him stood a completely different woman. It is not for nothing that the lines later appeared: “beauty is simple - they will tell you.” And if there was something not St. Petersburg, southern, that could be seen in her, then again, it was too different. Like distant echoes of straight, tall, long-nosed Greek women from the Black Sea. But Blok did not understand such women in principle and in essence. They didn't make his heart beat faster. But why is he so worried about this lady's visit? Why does he feel so tense and constrained at the same time? And most importantly, he’s afraid to look her straight in the eyes, as if he might see something that is under no circumstances worth seeing?

In general, there was not mutual attraction between them, but, on the contrary, mutual confusion. And then Blok decided to use a long-established script for beginning poets. It consisted in the fact that Alexander Alexandrovich, who did not know how and did not like to express himself in conversation, first offered the visitors something to read, then followed by an offer to tell about himself.

With Akhmatova, he also decided to lose this proven option. “Tell me about yourself...” It’s interesting that Akhmatova could tell about herself that Blok didn’t know? She began to think, the silence was no longer just painful, but simply indecent. Then an idea came to her mind... There was one topic that both he and she could discuss for a long time. Blok, like Akhmatova, passionately loved the sea as a child. But... Loving the sea in general, Blok had never seen the Black Sea. And Akhmatova... The sea is her theme. This is where she could turn around and lay it all out. And about her wild, pagan Chersonese childhood, and about her seaside youth, and about the stone a mile from the shore, to which she swam as an eight-year-old kid, and probably she didn’t forget to include about the six Vereshchagin destroyers - after all, this episode rhymed so amazingly beautifully with his, Blok, memories of French destroyers. One destroyer and four torpedo boats in a sleepy resort bay on the Breton coast.

Pretending to be a soldier, grief howled,

Like a horse, the dreadnought reared up,

And ice foam columns

The enraged sea threw out

To the imperishable stars from your breast,

And they didn’t count the dead people...

In short, despite the shadow of the great old man, the conversation took place. And Akhmatova returned home clearly in an inspired mood. She even firmly decided to try writing a poem.

A few days later, Akhmatova received a priceless New Year’s gift. Blok, not through a messenger, but himself personally brought her the signed books, but, realizing that it was late, he handed the package to the janitor and at the same time gave the apartment number incorrectly. But this was not an unexpected joy, but the fact that Alexander Alexandrovich asked for permission: “Let me ask you to allow (precisely: “Let me allow!” to be published in the first issue of this magazine (we are talking about Meyerhold’s magazine “The Love for Three Oranges”) - Your poem, dedicated to me, and mine, dedicated to you.”

And in June, Akhmatova went to Kyiv, where, by agreement, Nikolai Nedobrovo was also supposed to come. In all likelihood, it was he who brought Anna Andreevna the spring issues of “Russian Thought” with Blok’s sea poems.

Nedobrovo, of course, did not notice anything, but Akhmatova could not help but hear a direct echo of Blok’s seemingly completely forgotten conversation about the sea and ships, about their shared, childish passion for all this: “Do you remember? In our sleepy bay / The green water was sleeping, / When the warships entered in a wake column.” And further, the most important thing, a redemptive and crazy portrait in the “don’t touch me” style, and everything else in the same spirit: “How little we need in this life / We, children, both you and me!”

Akhmatova enjoyed her holiday in Kyiv, and she did not have any bad premonitions. Vice versa! There was a feeling of fullness of spiritual strength, trust in life and faith that life itself would choose the path and give a sign. And so it happened. “In the summer of 1914,” Akhmatova recalled shortly before her death, “I was with my mother in Darnitsa, in a pine forest, scorching heat... and that in a few weeks horse artillery would march past the house in Darnitsa at night with torches, no one had yet I thought... At the beginning of July I went to my home, in Slepnevo. The path through Moscow... I smoke in an open area. Somewhere, near some empty platform, a locomotive slows down - a bag of letters is thrown. Blok appears before my amazed gaze. I scream out of surprise: “Alexander Alexandrovich!” He looks around and, since he was generally a master of tactful questions, asks: “Who are you traveling with?” I manage to answer: “Alone.” And I move on... Today, 51 years later, I open Blok’s “Notebook”, which V. M. Zhirmunsky gave me, and on July 9, 1914 I read: “My mother and I went to inspect the sanatorium on Podsolnechnaya. - The demon is teasing me. “Anna Akhmatova on the postal train.” (The station was called Podsolnechnaya).”

In 1914, Akhmatova, of course, could not even imagine that Alexander Alexandrovich, seeing her in the vestibule of the mail train, would suspect a conspiracy of “evil spirits,” but she herself perceived the meeting at Podsolnechnaya station as some kind of prophetic sign.

Summer grace. Golden Kyiv. Sofia and Moscow bells. Days full of harmony. And this wonderful meeting. No, Blok did not understand at all the words that she, not daring to say out loud, wrote on the “rosary” given to him: “From you came to me anxiety and the ability to write poetry”... While she was driving, by themselves, as if someone really was theirs dictated, poems were formed, no, not poetry, but prayer. Prayer - as before God!

And in the Kiev Temple of the Wisdom of God,

Falling down to the salt, I swore to you,

That your path will be mine.

Wherever she goes.

The golden angels heard that

And in a white coffin Yaroslav.

Simple words hover like doves

And now at the solar heads.

And if I get weak, I dream of an icon

And there are nine steps on it.

On July 10, Akhmatova was already in Slepnev. Now she will definitely write about her Chersonese, about a wild girl who knows everything about the sea, and she will write the way she wants... Tomorrow! But tomorrow there was WAR.

We have aged a hundred years, and this

Then it happened at one o'clock:

The short summer has already ended,

The body of the plowed plains was smoking.

Suddenly the quiet road became colorful,

The cry flew, ringing silver...

Covering my face, I begged God

Before the first battle, kill me.

From memory, like an unnecessary burden from now on,

The shadows of songs and passions have disappeared.

The Almighty ordered her - empty

Become a terrible book of thunderous news.

Like an extra burden, the idea of ​​a sea poem has now been pushed aside. Gumilev, having shown miracles of ingenuity (in the first days of the war, those released by the medical commission were still rejected), volunteered and exactly where he wanted: as a private in the Life Guards Uhlan Regiment. And in August 1914, Akhmatova and Gumilev had lunch at the Tsarskoye Selo station. And suddenly, just as unexpectedly as a month ago on the Podsolnechnaya platform, Blok loomed over their table. And although this time there was nothing supernatural in his appearance in an unexpected place: Alexander Alexandrovich, together with his friend Yevgeny Ivanov, visited the families of those mobilized to help them, Akhmatova was shocked. Having had a quick snack, Blok said goodbye. Following his direct gaze, a lonely and isolated figure in any crowd, Gumilyov said: “Will they really send him to the front? After all, this is the same as roasting nightingales.”

Having equipped her husband for a campaign, not yet to the front line, but to Novgorod, where the lancers were stationed, Anna Andreevna returned to the village and almost completely, in one breath, wrote the first one hundred and fifty lines of “By the Sea itself.” She was in a hurry, sensing that she would return not only to the capital of another state, but also to another century.

The poem was a desperate attempt to stop the “moment.” Akhmatova believed that she was saying goodbye only to her Chersonesos youth! In fact, she saw off the whole world with a full parade of feelings...

On April 27, 1915, a reprint of the poem “By the Sea” was sent to Blok... Well, then what happened happened. Having received a semi-positive review of the poem “Near the Sea” in the spring of 1916 in the form of a letter to the promising author, Akhmatova decided that Blok had forgotten everything. Tightly. “Today I don’t remember what happened yesterday, / In the mornings I forget my evenings”... But to her, planned for so long(“Who would have thought that I was meant to last so long?”), God gave me a long memory. Long memory and late wisdom: the power is not in what has passed, but what has passed has happened. That's how it was? “With her I went to sea, with her I left the shore”?

Or was it all a dream? Or was it not? The answer to this question may lie in Blok's notebooks. At one time they amazed many fans. I will refer to the essay by B. Alpers (first published in “The Search for a New Stage” - M. Art, 1985): “People who had long-standing relationships with Blok in life were probably wounded by what they read about themselves in his intimate notes. There is nothing offensive in these posts. But they emanate such deep indifference, such icy coldness, as if a poet were writing about insects.” In comparison with many humiliated and insulted, Akhmatova could feel both chosen and noted. But she, as is clear from Chukovskaya’s notes, was nevertheless wounded, although everything that was revealed to Alpers only after reading the diaries was known to her before. “He has such eyes / That everyone should remember; / It’s better for me, being careful, / Not to look at them at all...” Not to look... so as not to see what? However, she was not careful, she looked in: “You are the first to stand at the source / With a dead and dry smile, / How we were tormented by an empty gaze, / Your gaze is heavy - the midnight office.” Frightened, perhaps, by what she accidentally saw, Akhmatova hid the terrible poems from herself - she did not publish Blok during her lifetime.

But Blok must have still suspected something was wrong. Two days after Akhmatova’s visit, more than strange poems were written:

That’s why the invisible gaze is scary,

That he cannot be caught;

You feel it, but you can’t understand it

Whose eyes are watching you?

Not self-interest - not love, not revenge;

So - a game, like a game for children:

And in every meeting of people

These secret detectives exist.

Sometimes you yourself won’t understand,

Why does this happen sometimes?

That you will come to people with yourself,

And when you leave people, you won’t be yourself.

Perhaps only after a while he noticed and realized that every time he encountered this woman, he behaved like... a teenager. He asks tactless questions, and generally loses his vaunted composure and indifference. But in fact... He didn’t feel anything close to falling in love with her, he didn’t like her poems, although he noted that the further they went, the better. But... What then flashed between them that haunted neither him nor her? It’s not for nothing that Akhmatova writes in “Poem Without a Hero”:

His solid profile is on the wall.

Gabriel or Mephistopheles

Yours, beauty, paladin?

The demon himself with Tamara's smile,

But such charms lurk

In this terrible smoky face:

Flesh that has almost become spirit

And an antique curl above the ear -

Everything is mysterious about the alien.

That's him in a crowded room

Sent that black rose in a glass,

Or was it all a dream?

With a dead heart and a dead look...

In her Notebooks there is not a hint, but a direct indication. In a passage that was quoted more than once or five times, but without one phrase. This phrase is the key to the meaning of the cipher, and it was precisely this phrase that was removed by the publishers. Not out of negligence, but because, apparently, the message contained in it could not be commented on. Here is this fragment and this phrase: “I am like Ptishoz with his convent, which his paradise, his paper factory has turned into. Chersonesus, where I have been returning all my life, is a forbidden zone" This is the Chersonesus they talked about all night long...

And here is an excerpt from Blok’s notes, almost immediately after meeting Akhmatova: “There are connections between people that are completely unspoken, at least for the time being that do not find external forms. This is how I considered our connection with you... according to all the “signs” under which we met... If this is really so... then what do letters like your last one mean?.. You become not yourself, one of many, go somewhere- then into the crowd, become like every atom of it... The demon of pride and idleness tempts you to incarnate into a random star of the 10th magnitude with an uncertain orbit... In our century, the possibility of such incarnations is especially tempting and easy, because there is a certain “astral fashion” for trains, to gloves that smell of perfume, to empty charm... You want to meet me the way “strangers” meet “poets.” You are not a “stranger,” that is, I demand from you that you be more than a “stranger,” just as I demand from myself that I be not only a “poet.” Dear child, why are you calling me into the astral wilds, into the “starry abysses” - to kiss your scented gloves ... "

This, perhaps, is the answer to the question of what happened between Blok and Akhmatova. And there was an inexplicable attraction between the two great poets. An attraction that could possibly lead to a strong, deep feeling, so different from what they had before and after that they both chose not to cross the line... And one more thing... Contrary to popular belief, Blok's last entry says that that he actually saw remarkable talent in Akhmatova and placed correspondingly much higher demands on her.

From the book The Private Life of Sergei Yesenin author Tkachenko Konstantin Vladimirovich

ANNA AKHMATOVA One day Yesenin, in the company of Leningrad Imagists, unexpectedly wandered into the Fountain House to visit Anna Akhmatova. They had never been particularly close. There was no personal contact between them. Yesenin remembered well his first visit to Tsarskoe Selo,

From the book Beautiful Features author Pugacheva Klavdiya Vasilievna

Akhmatova Coming to Akhmatova’s grave in Komarov, I remembered my meetings with this unique person. The last time I called her was on phone D30743 in Moscow, when I arrived from England and brought souvenirs from the chairman of the Pushkin Committee. Souvenirs have been sent

From the book Abolition of Slavery: Anti-Akhmatova-2 author Kataeva Tamara

Akhmatova and power Viktor Toporov writes in an article from 2003: Stalin wrote poetry.<…>But he also loved other people's poems. And as for prose... And as for drama... Stalin knew Russian, Soviet literature, which he created in a flask, with the accuracy and meticulousness of an academician of Russian literature.

From the book by Faina Ranevskaya. The love of a lonely mocker author Shlyakhov Andrey Levonovich

Chapter eight. Tashkent. Akhmatova Almost from the Zaleteyan shadow At the hour when the worlds collapse, Accept this gift of spring In response to the best gifts, So that, above the seasons, Indestructible and faithful, The high freedom of the soul, Which is called friendship, - Smiles at me as meekly As

From the book Boris Pasternak author Bykov Dmitry Lvovich

Chapter XIX In the Mirrors: Blok We wandered around Warsaw at night with Spectorsky. A. Blok. Notebooks; December 1, 1909 1 There was almost no personal communication between them, except for a single brief meeting at the Polytechnic Museum on May 5, 1921. Pasternak wanted to meet again at

From the book The Shining of Everlasting Stars author Razzakov Fedor

Chapter XLVI In the mirrors: Akhmatova 1 We decided to consider Pasternak’s relationship with Akhmatova right now, when we started talking about Pasternak’s last years. It was here that differences emerged that were still obscured in the thirties and even forties; this is where everything was laid bare

From the book Voices of the Silver Age. Poet about poets author Mochalova Olga Alekseevna

AKHMATOVA Anna AKHMATOVA Anna (poet; died on March 5, 1966 at the age of 77). Akhmatova had a heart condition and suffered four heart attacks in the last years of her life. The last one was in January 1966, after which she ended up in the Botkin hospital in Moscow. Having stayed there

From the book I Am a Miscarriage by Stanislavsky author Ranevskaya Faina Georgievna

17. Anna Akhmatova I talked to Akhmatova on the phone. Minimum required words. Very cold.N. V., having arrived in Leningrad, went to Akhmatova to convey greetings from Moscow and a letter. She was received in such a way that, awkward and embarrassed, she hurried away. Raisa Ginzburg gave

From the book Unforgettable Encounters author Voronel Nina Abramovna

Chapter Eight TASHKENT. AKHMATOVA Almost from the Zaleteyan shadow At the hour when the worlds collapse, Accept this spring gift In response to the best gifts, So that, above the seasons, Indestructible and faithful, The high freedom of the soul, Which is called friendship, - Smiles at me as meekly As thirty

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The influence of Alexander Blok on the poetry of Anna Akhmatova

Introduction

Well,” said Anna Andreevna, “I don’t see anything here.”

And Pushkin always did this. Always.

He took from everyone everything he liked.

And he made it his forever.

The famous literary critic V. M. Zhirmunsky conducted a major study on the topic of “Blok’s text” in the works of Anna Akhmatova. Many researchers address this problem in their works: Chukovskaya L.K., Timenchik R.D., Tsivyan T.V., as well as Toporov V.N., who devoted many articles to this issue.

But it is still difficult and too early to sum up the poetic roll call between the two poets. There are a lot of conflicting facts and opinions related to this topic.

The concept of a legend is ambiguous. The term “legend” in relation to the history of her relationship with Blok was used by Akhmatova herself. “The second legend,” which I ask my readers to say goodbye to forever, she wrote in her later autobiographical notes, refers to my so-called “romance” with Blok...”, “What the legend of the novel was concocted from, I just can’t imagine , but that they liked her and wanted her, that’s beyond doubt.” The concept of “legend” is used here by Akhmatova in a very narrow, purely biographical and sharply negative sense, as a synonym for “gossip”, “ridiculous fiction”. In the later years of her life, Akhmatova, in the opinion of many researchers, considered it necessary to fight this “legend”; her “Memoirs of Alexander Blok” are largely devoted to the refutation of this “legend.”

In a different, much broader sense, in relation to Blok’s work and his appearance in the minds of his contemporaries, Yu. M. Tynyanov used the concept of “legend”. In the article “Blok,” written shortly after the poet’s death, Tynyanov wrote: “Blok is Blok’s greatest lyrical theme. (...) They are talking about this lyrical hero now. He was necessary, a legend surrounds him, and not only now - it surrounded him from the very beginning, it even seemed that it preceded Blok’s poetry itself...”

Memories of Blok

A large number of passages of a memoir nature that relate to Blok have been preserved in Akhmatova’s workbooks. All of them, like the printed “Memoirs,” according to the writer’s own humorous definition, were essentially written on the topic: “About how I didn’t have an affair with Blok.” “All my memories of Blok,” Akhmatova reports in her notes, “can fit on a page of regular format, and among them only his phrase about Leo Tolstoy is interesting.”

The draft plans for the article list all of Akhmatova’s meetings with the poet, they are even numbered (nine numbers, but the list is not completed).

However, with all the superficial and fleeting nature of these meetings “in public,” in literary salons and literary evenings, one cannot help but notice that for Akhmatova they were always something very important, that she remembered for the rest of her life, seemingly insignificant, but For her, the words of her interlocutor are especially significant. This applies, for example, to Blok’s words about L.N. Tolstoy mentioned above. In a conversation with Blok, Akhmatova conveyed to him the remark of the young poet Benedict Livshits, “that he, Blok, by his very existence prevents the writing of poetry.” “Blok did not laugh, but answered quite seriously: “I understand that. Leo Tolstoy is stopping me from writing.” Another time, at a literary evening where they performed together, Akhmatova said: “Alexander Alexandrovich, I can’t read after you.” He responded with reproach: “Anna Andreevna, we are not tenors.” This comparison, imprinted in memory for a long time, could be picked up many years later in a poem where Blok appears as the “tragic tenor of the era” (1960). Akhmatova says further: “Blok advised me to read “We are all hawk moths here.” I began to refuse: “When I read “I put on a tight skirt,” they laugh.” He replied: “When I read “And the Drunkards with the Eyes of Rabbits,” they laugh too.”

But the most impressive was Akhmatova’s unexpected meeting with Blok on the train at a remote stop between the geographically close Shakhmatov (Beketov estate) and Slepnev (Gumilyov estate), which rather resembled not everyday reality, but an episode from an implausible love story: “In the summer of 1914, I was with my mother in Darnitsa, near Kiev. At the beginning of July, I went to my home, in the village of Slepnevo, through Moscow. Somewhere, near some empty platform, the train slows down, and a bag of letters is thrown. Blok suddenly appears before my amazed gaze. I scream: “Alexander Alexandrovich!” He looks around and, since he was not only a great poet, but also a master of tactful questions, asks: “Who are you traveling with?” I manage to answer: “Alone.” The train is moving.” And this story is confirmed by the evidence of Blok’s notebooks. Akhmatova continues: “Today, 51 years later, I open Blok’s Notebook and on July 9, 1914 I read: “My mother and I went to inspect the sanatorium behind Podsolnechnaya. - The demon is teasing me. - Anna Akhmatova on the postal train.”

In her memoirs, Akhmatova devoted a lot of space to refuting the “legend” about her “so-called affair with Blok,” or, as she writes elsewhere, “monstrous rumors about her “hopeless passion” for A. Blok, which for some reason before So far everyone is quite happy with it. (...) However, now that it threatens to distort my poems and even my biography, I consider it necessary to dwell on this issue.”

This gossip is “of provincial origin,” it “emerged in the 20s, after Blok’s death,” “the very publication of A. A. Blok’s archive should have stopped these rumors.”

Much more significant for the modern reader is Akhmatova’s perception of Blok’s poetic personality and the creative connections between them, which will be discussed below. Akhmatova wrote in her notes: “I consider Blok not only the greatest poet of the first quarter of the 20th century (originally it was “one of the greatest,” - V. Zhirmunsky), but also a man of the era, that is, the most characteristic representative of his time. ..” The rich memoir literature about Blok is joined by several more fragmentary pages containing memories of Anna Akhmatova’s Blok. These memoirs reproduce 3-4 interesting statements by Blok, a number of quick impressions from meetings with him and some interesting details, but in general they are far from striking in the abundance of material. The information contained in them matters not so much in itself, but to those from whom it comes. Anna Akhmatova chose in her short memoirs the rigid, “Pushkin” principle of pure photographic narration. Having talked about her meetings with Blok, she did not share her thoughts about him, remained silent about her deep attitude towards him and his poetry, and kept her assessments of his works to herself.

In fact, A. Akhmatova and her older contemporary A. Blok knew each other much less than many people imagine. “Anna Andreevna told me,” writes D. Maksimov, “that she met Blok rarely, no more than 10 times in her entire life, and did not talk to him for a long time. These meetings took place in public, sometimes during joint performances. Anna Andreevna Blok never visited. And she visited him only once - at the end of December 1913, when he lived on Ofitserskaya. And even then she hurried to her place in Tsarskoe Selo and did not sit there for long, “about forty minutes.” Akhmatova resolutely denied the legend of an affair with Blok, and it is no coincidence that, when reading her memoirs to D. Maksimov, she jokingly called them: “About how I did not have an affair with Blok.” “As a man of the era, Blok ended up in my poem “Triptych” (“The Demon Himself with Tamara’s Smile…”), but this does not mean that he occupied any special place in my life. And there is no need to prove that he occupied a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation” (The original note is in the Manuscript Department of the Leningrad Public Library).

This idea is embodied in figurative form in one of Akhmatova’s later poems (1946), dedicated to the historical role of the poet, her contemporary: As a monument to the beginning of the century, \\ There this man stands...

However, I would like to look at the facts described above from the other side. V. M. Zhirmunsky writes: “In her memoirs, Akhmatova devoted a lot of space to refuting ... the legend.” Further, Zhirmunsky concludes: “In the future, we will proceed from these repeatedly repeated confessions of A. A. Akhmatova and do not consider it necessary to delve into the intimate biography of the artist at all.”

However, it does not follow from this that interest in the poet’s biography (in particular, and sometimes especially, intimate) is illegal or, at least, has little relation to the study of creativity. On the contrary, “... a lover of Literature, I will say more, an observer-philosopher, would be pleased to know some details of the private life of a great man, to get to know him, to know his passions, habits, oddities, weaknesses and very vices, inseparable companions of man” (“On character of Lomonosov”, - in the book “Experiments in Poems and Prose” by Konstantin Batyushkov. Part 1. Prose. 1817, p. 40).

This “pleasure of recognition” hides “an internal gesture of an acceptingly open, trusting and trusting attitude towards the text and through it to the author,” the conviction that the text begins or continues in the author’s life (or is generally somehow connected with it), and, therefore, his life can help in developing a deeper understanding of the text. Interest in the biography of the author is akin to an attempt to expand the “external” text of the work and check the correct understanding of the text by contacting its creator.

It should be noted that in her statements about Blok (outside of poetic texts), which were quite numerous (especially if we take into account oral ones), it was easy for Akhmatova, if not to dispel the “legend,” then to clarify and divert many essential details. In reality, according to researcher Toporov, in these statements there was a clear tendency to root the idea of ​​a “legend”, of the existence of this “legend”. “...Following the rule of Secrets formulated by herself not to give away her own, Akhmatova, without removing uncertainty with her statements, rather, on the contrary, increases the number of secrets..., forcing the reader to solve increasingly complex and abstract problems, imperceptibly switching the reader from the biographical plan into poetic." Considering the above memoirs of Akhmatova about Blok, it cannot be considered an accident that the latter consist mainly of quoting Blok’s references to meetings with Akhmatova (in his “Notebooks”), firstly, that they omit references to a number of other meetings of poets ( which cannot in any way be explained by a loss of memory), secondly, that in the meetings attributed to Akhmatova with Blok, everything that goes beyond the framework of the strongly emphasized factuality is omitted, thirdly. In other words, in her memoirs about Blok, Akhmatova attends a reception that is amazing in its courage: she forces Blok to talk about these meetings, cedes to him the right and primacy to remember. (“I recently read and re-read Blok’s notebooks. They seemed to bring back many days and events to me. I feel: I need to write about this, these will be autobiographical notes.” Compare: “...And again the wooden St. Isaac’s Bridge, blazing, floats to the mouth Neva, and my companion and I look in horror at this unprecedented spectacle, and this day has a date - July 11, 1916, noted by Blok,” with Blok’s entry: “July 11. In the evening I’m at my mother’s... At night it burns out on seaside palace bridge. Everything is very difficult." The next morning, Blok was already going to the scum of the Izmailovsky regiment, preparing to leave for the army.) In this way, a kind of two-part text is constructed, consisting of 2 voices: one of them belongs to Blok directly, the other - also to Blok, but indirectly - Blok’s lips in the mouth of Akhmatova.

Creation

Collection “Evening”

In the spring of 1911, Akhmatova began to publish regularly in magazines, and in 1912, her first collection of poetry, “Evening,” was published with a foreword by M. A. Kuzmin, which immediately attracted the sympathetic attention of critics and readers. At the same time, she began to meet with Blok from time to time, appearing, accompanied by her husband, in the so-called “Poetry Academy” of Vyacheslav Ivanov (“Society of Admirers of the Artistic Word”, which met in the editorial office of “Apollo”), in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s salon on the “tower” ”, at the Gorodetskys, at public literary meetings and performances.

In the spring of 1911, the thirty-year-old Blok, who was at the zenith of his poetic fame, and the aspiring poet Anna Akhmatova, who was 22 years old, met for the first time. By this time, she had written about 180 poems, but only a few of them were published. What impression did Blok make on Akhmatova at their first meeting? Unknown. Researcher E. S. Dobin only dares to note that in the appearance of the hero of the poem “Fisherman” Blok’s features are vaguely discernible. This observation could hardly be insisted on if the poem were not dated April 23, 1911 - the day after their first meeting in the Apollo editorial office. Perhaps the formation of the “Blok Legend” in Akhmatova’s work began with this poem. His second line is noteworthy: “And his eyes are bluer than ice...”. L.D. Blok recalled that Blok perfectly embodied the image of a light-haired, blue-eyed, slender, heroic Aryan. Andrei Bely also wrote about Blok’s “beautiful blue eyes.”

In the future, as we will see, the theme of eyes will become the leitmotif in the poetic roll call between Blok and Akhmatova.

In 1911, there was a noticeable “redistribution of forces on the literary scene. Relations between N.S. Gumilyov and V.I. Ivanov are becoming increasingly strained. In contrast to the Ivanovo “Tower”, the “Workshop of Poets” arises. Soon Blok and Akhmatova meet again in the “Tower”. On November 7, he writes in his diary: “In the first hour, Lyuba and I came to Vyacheslav. (...) A. Akhmatova (read poetry, already worrying me; the further the poems, the better)...”.

It is very tempting to include in the list of poems Akhmatova read that evening from 1911 - “To the Muse”. The date indicated in the collection compiled by V.M. Zhirmunsky - October 10, 1911, it would seem, allows this to be done. However, this date appears to be erroneous. Akhmatova dated it on November 10, 1911, three days after Blok’s diary entry.

This clarification of the dating does not, however, prevent the comparison of Akhmatova’s “Muse,” published in the collection “Evening,” published in March 1912, with Blok’s textbook-famous poem “To the Muse,” dating from the end of 1912. Blok’s rhymes are heard in the poem - these are obviously. The very first stanza:

Muse - sister looked into the face,

Her gaze is clear and bright.

And she took away the golden ring,

First spring gift...

makes me remember Blok's poems:

I threw the treasured ring into the night,

You gave your destiny to someone else

And I forgot the beautiful face...

Open up, answer my question:

Was your day bright?

I brought the royal shroud

As a gift for you!

The first stanza of Blok's poem:

Is in your innermost melodies

The fatal news of death,

There is a curse of sacred covenants,

There is a desecration of happiness...

in turn, makes me remember Akhmatov’s:

Muse! you see how happy everyone is

Girls, women, widows...

I'd rather die on the wheel

Not these shackles...

At the same time, Blok’s:

So why did you give me

A ray with flowers and a firmament with stars,

All the curse of your beauty?

clearly contrasts with the final words of Akhmatova’s poem “...she took away God’s gift.”

If it were not for the dating of both poems, one could recognize the examples given as yet another convincing evidence of the influence of the venerable Blok on the aspiring Akhmatova. But the dates indicate otherwise. The initiator of the poetic dialogue here is Akhmatova, not Blok. Looking ahead, I will say that in the famous “madrigal” of 1913, Blok again returns to the theme of the “curse of beauty,” directly addressing Akhmatova: “...Beauty is terrible, they will tell you...”.

Of course, the considered example of a “poetic impulse” directed from Akhmatova to Blok is almost an isolated one. There are much more numerous examples of the opposite influence.

One of the later examples of Akhmatova’s love lyrics (“Cinique”, “Midnight Poems”) has an unexpected overlap with the same memorable Blok poem “To the Muse”.

From Akhmatova:

And such a mighty force

As if there wasn't a grave ahead,

And the mysterious staircase takes off.

And from Blok:

And such a compelling force

What am I ready to repeat after rumors,

It's like you brought down angels,

Seducing with its beauty...

A prominent place in the collection “Evening” is occupied by the cycle “Deception”, consisting of 4 poems. It should be noted that the “Deception” cycle is dedicated to M.A. Zmunchilla (Gorenko’s husband), who idolized Blok and said that “she has the other half of his soul.”

It may be noted that the title of the cycle repeats the title of Blok’s poem “Deception” (1904) (“In an empty alley there are spring waters...”). It would seem that there is nothing in common between the works of the same name by Blok and Akhmatova, except for the same names. Their content and poetic form are completely different. However, the overlap between them is revealed at an unexpected level. An amazing feature of Akhmatova’s cycle “Deception” is that none of the 4 poems that make it up say anything about any deception! But deception is repeatedly mentioned in neighboring verses from the same collection “Evening”:

Both of us are in a deceitful country

We wandered and bitterly repent...

Love conquers deceitfully...

I'm deceived, you hear, sad,

Changeable evil fate...

They deceived him, deceived him? - Don't know.

I live on earth only by lies...

But Blok’s poem “Deception” does not directly talk about deception, but deception is mentioned in neighboring verses from the same cycle “City”:

My friend - in love with the moon - lives by deceiving her...

The couplet inserted in quotation marks obviously represents a quotation, but it is difficult to say where it comes from: from a poem unknown to us by Akhmatova herself or from another source, also not yet found. The first is more likely, since the poems have a metrical dolnik form, which is not common in classical poetry; quotation marks are found in Akhmatova and in autoquotations. The poem speaks of the older poet as a teacher and inspirer of the younger one.

Collection “Rosary Beads”

Akhmatova’s second collection of “Rosary Beads” opens with the cycle “Confusion”, consisting of 3

This air is so loud

Deception is so tempting.

Take me away, lane,

In the smoky gray fog...

Here one of the complex knots of Akhmatov-Blok allusions is tied. It can be said that in creating the “Deception” cycle, Akhmatova borrows from Blok, along with the name of the cycle, not a theme, not images, not any elements of poetic form, but an unusual technique of secret writing that cannot be rationally explained, but at the same time “the ability to write poetry” , about which Akhmatova will say in the dedicatory inscription to Blok on a copy of the first edition of “The Rosary” (1914):

“You gave me anxiety

And the ability to write poetry.”

The title of the cycle (as well as the cycle “Deception” in the collection “Evening”) repeats the title of Blok’s poem “Confusion” (“Are we dancing shadows...?” 1907). In terms of content, the poems of the same name by Akhmatova and Blok again have little in common with each other. Unlike the cycle “Deception”, the title of the cycle “Confusion” is quite objective to the content of the poems included in it, which are closely related to each other. They are truly permeated with confusion, which shook the lyrical heroine of the cycle to the depths of her soul.

To whom could these poems, opening Akhmatova’s new poetry collection, be addressed?

To V.V. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, the subject of Anya Gorenko’s first love, with whom Akhmatova broke up in 1905 and could meet again, returning to St. Petersburg in 1910?

To N.V. Nedobrovo, whom she met at the beginning of 1913?

Or maybe, after all, to A. Blok?

A number of considerations can be made in favor of the latter assumption.

1. Some lines of the cycle sound like replicas in the dialogue between Blok and Akhmatova that began two years earlier. The second line of the second poem: “Oh, how beautiful you are, damned!” refers to a line from Blok’s poem “To the Muse”: “All the curses of one’s beauty” and will soon be picked up again by Blok in a poem directly addressed to Anna Akhmatova: “Beauty is terrible, they will tell you...”. In the same way, the lines: “And only a red tulip \\ Tulip in your buttonhole...” refer to Blok’s: “The color of a faded rose in the buttonhole of a tailcoat...” (1909) - and, in turn, evoke Blok’s response in the same poems addressed to Akhmatova: “A red rose in my hair...” (1913).

2. To whom can the lines from the first poem of the cycle apply simultaneously: “I just shuddered: this \\ Can tame me...” - and from the last: “Ten years of freezing and screaming...”? In the first poem there is an immediate impression of the appearance of a person, met for the first time or seen with new eyes after a long separation; in the latter there is a sad ending to many years of persistent thoughts about this man. The first can be attributed to N.V. Nedobrovo, the latter - to V.V. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, but both together, apparently, only to Blok or, more precisely, to his image, already mythologized in Akhmatova’s work.

3. The theme of eyes and glances: “And his glances are like rays...”, “My eyes are covered in fog...”, “And mysterious, ancient faces \\ eyes looked at me” finds a direct continuation in Akhmatova’s poem dedicated to Blok : “He has such eyes, \\ That everyone should remember, \\ It’s easier for me, being careful, \\ Not to look into them at all...”

It should be noted that the theme of eyes runs through literally all the poems placed after the cycle “Confusion” in the first section of the collection “Rosary Beads”.

I looked into his eyes...

Only laughter in his calm eyes,

Under the light gold of eyelashes...

On the eyes of a cautious cat

Your eyes are similar.

Ah, it’s not difficult for me to guess the thief,

I recognized him by his eyes.

And he gave me three carnations,

Without looking up...

The Eyes weakly beg for mercy.

What should I do with them...

My imagination obeys me

In the image of gray eyes...

As if touched by black, thick mascara

Your heavy eyelids...

How do I know these stubborn ones,

Your insatiable glances...

But I understand the fear of the gray eyes...

And with me is the gray-eyed groom...

It’s almost a unique case when eyes are talked about in more than a dozen poems in a row! Apparently, these verses were not collected together by chance. In subsequent sections of the collection “The Rosary” and in other books of Akhmatova’s poems, such a concentration of poems with a single cross-cutting theme is not observed. The motifs of raised and lowered eyes are also repeated in the poems of Akhmatova and Blok at the end of 1913 - beginning of 1914.

Using the example of Blok’s madrigal “Beauty is terrible, they will tell you...” you can see how the dialogue is synthesized.

In “Memories of Alexander Blok” (October 1965) Akhmatova writes: “And on the 3rd volume the poet wrote a madrigal dedicated to me: “Beauty is terrible, they will tell you...” I did not have the Spanish shawl in which I am depicted, but at that time Blok was raving about Carmen and Spanishized me too. Of course, I never wore roses in my hair. (Compare in “Carmen”: “Roses - the color of these roses is terrible to me.”) It is no coincidence that this poem is written in the Spanish stanza of a romancero. And on our last meeting... in the spring of 1921, Blok came up and asked me: “Anna, where is the Spanish shawl?” These are the last words I heard from him.” To these words, V. M. Zhirmunsky makes the following note: “Blok’s cycle of poems “Carmen” (March 1914) is dedicated to L. O. D. (Lyubov Aleksandrovna Delmas), the famous performer of the role of Carmen, whom Blok “raved” about at that time. Akhmatova’s words emphasize this complete absorption of Blok with his feelings for Delmas, while the “madrigal” has a connotation of the meaning of a secular poetic compliment. This explanation is problematic in two respects. Firstly, chronologically. The madrigal was written and presented to Akhmatova on December 16, 1913, when Delmas-Carmen Blok, apparently, was still unable to “rave.” (The history of the emergence of Blok’s feelings for L.A. Delmas is recorded with exceptional accuracy and synchronicity in Blok’s “Notebooks.” Although Blok first saw Delmas in the role of Carmen back in October 1913, and the second time in January 1914 (entry dated 12 January: In the evening, Lyuba and I are in “Carmen” (Akreeva - Delmas), - “Notebooks” p. 200), - certain self-recognitions begin only in mid-February, i.e. 2 months after the presentation of the madrigal.) Akhmatova, diligent and an astute reader of Blok’s notebooks, diaries and letters, exceptionally attentive to the chronology of events, could hardly have been unaware of this.

Secondly, it is difficult to imagine that Blok could have decided to consciously “Hispanize” Akhmatova for precisely the reasons that she wrote about. Such a transfer of poetic images (“masks”) from one addressee to another does not find any support in Blok’s work. From this, Toporov concludes that in her explanation, Akhmatova develops, as it were, two opposite versions: a “positive” factual one (with barely noticeable chronological shifts), in which she “adjusts” to Blok’s version of the description of his relationship with Delmas, and a “negative” one, meaning which - in indicating the inconsistency (at least partial) of the first version and, therefore, that behind the strongly emphasized “Hispanization” lies nothing more than what is traditionally associated exclusively with Carmen (and, even more so, with Carmen- Delmas).

“Poem without a hero”

The box has a triple bottom...

The creative synthesis of Akhmatova’s poetic development is “Poem without a Hero,” on which she worked for more than twenty years (1940 – 1962). The personal fate of the poet and the fate of her “generation” received artistic coverage and assessment here in the light of the historical fate of not only her contemporaries, but also her homeland.

That “A Poem without a Hero” could suffer the fate of an incomprehensible or, at least, not entirely understandable work, that its poetic code could ultimately remain undecipherable - this thought was in the author’s mind even at the time when the second, middle part of the poem was written, “ Tails.” It says this in no uncertain terms:

I accept failure

And I don’t hide my embarrassment...

The box has a triple bottom.

But I confess that I used it

Cute ink...

I write in a mirror letter,

And there is no other way -

Miraculously, I came across this...

And I’m in no hurry to part with her.

The confession, in its directness, seems unprecedented in Russian poetry. But, admitting to using a code (“sympathetic ink”, “mirror writing”, “triple bottom”), Akhmatova still believed that this “mystery without a cryptogram” would be solved by the reader, and from the very beginning she was afraid of only one thing - “perverse and absurd interpretations of “Poem without a Hero.” This is stated in her first attempt to write something “instead of a preface” in 1943 - 1944, when the text of the poem seemed “final” and she did not think that she would have to return to it so many times.

Already in the first edition, “Poem without a Hero” consisted of 3 parts, according to which it had the subtitle “Triptych” “Nine hundred and thirteenth year. Petersburg Tale” (subtitle of “The Bronze Horseman”), “Tails” and “Epilogue”. The plot core, the “poem” itself, is the first part. The past appears in the poet’s memory in the light of the present:

From the year forty

I look at everything as if from a tower...

“Tails” and “Epilogue” coincide in time with the present, as do the three dedications to the poem, written at different times.

“Retribution”, “Twelve”, “Snow Mask” by A. Blok and “Poem without a Hero”

In Blok’s poem, “retribution” befalls the hero for the sins of his ancestors, passed on from generation to generation, and for the fact that he himself, in his psychology and his social existence, inherited these sins.

In Akhmatova’s poem, before the inner gaze of the poetess, immersed in a dream that overtook her during New Year’s fortune-telling, images of the past, shadows of her friends who are no longer alive (“I’m sleeping - I’m dreaming of our youth”) pass before them; they are rushing in fancy dress to the New Year’s ball . In essence, this is a kind of dance of death: “But how could it happen that I am the only one of them alive?”

We recall Blok’s “Dances of Death,” especially the poem “How hard it is for a dead man among people to pretend to be alive and passionate!”, with its ominous ending:

There is an unearthly, strange ringing in her ears:

Then bones clang on bones.

Compare with Akhmatova:

I see the dance of the court bones...

Thus, there is a theme that runs through the entire perception of the historical past in the poem: depicting the “Silver Age” in all its artistic splendor and splendor (Chaliapin and Anna Pavlova, “Petrushka” by Stravinsky, “Salome” by Wilde and Strauss, “Dorian Gray” and Knut Hamsun), Akhmatova at the same time carries out a trial and pronounces a verdict on herself and her contemporaries. She is haunted by the consciousness of the fatal doom of her world, the feeling of the proximity of a social catastrophe, a tragic “reckoning” - in the sense of Blok’s “retribution”:

And always in the frosty stuffiness,

Pre-war, prodigal, menacing,

There lived some kind of future hum,

But then he was heard more faintly,

He hardly disturbed souls

And he drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva.

“There is a roar over the cities that even an experienced ear cannot understand,” Blok wrote back in 1918 in his famous report “The people and intelligentsia are such a roar that stood over the Tatar camp on the night before the Battle of Kulikovo, as the legend says.” After the October Revolution (January 9, 1918), the poet again speaks of “the menacing and deafening roar that the stream makes... Listen to the Revolution with all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness.” He listened to this hum when he wrote “The Twelve”: “during and after the end of “The Twelve”, for several days I felt physically, auditorily, a great noise around, a continuous noise (probably the noise from the collapse of the old world)” (April 1, 1920. ).

Akhmatova lived under the impression of the same acoustic image, suggested by Blok’s words about the underground roar of the revolution. The verses that conclude the above passage with a solemn and menacing vision of a new historical era are directly related to the images of “Retribution”:

And along the legendary embankment

It wasn't the calendar day that was approaching

The Real Twentieth Century.

Compare Blok’s philosophical and socio-historical picture of the change of the same two centuries at the beginning of his poem, imbued with deep hopelessness, characteristic of him in the years of timelessness: The nineteenth century, the iron one, Truly a cruel century!

The twentieth century...

Even more homeless

Even worse than the storm is the darkness.

(Even blacker and bigger

Shadow of Lucifer's Wing).

The landscape background of Akhmatova’s poem, the figurative meaning of which is quite obvious, is winter snowy St. Petersburg, a snowy blizzard behind the heavy curtains of the Sheremetyev Palace (Fountain House), where the New Year’s masquerade takes place. This topic is barely outlined in the first chapter:

Outside the window the Neva is smoking,

The night is bottomless - and it lasts, it lasts

Petersburg devil...

You can't see a star in the black sky,

Death is somewhere around here, obviously.

But carefree, spicy, shameless

Masquerade chatter...

In the prosaic introduction to chapter two, depicting the “Heroine’s bedroom”: “Beyond the attic window, little black boys are playing snowballs. Blizzard. New Year's midnight." And then the verses:

You see, there, behind the grainy blizzard

Meyerhold's arapchat

Are they starting a fuss again?

In chapter three, the curtain finally opens and a picture of a frosty winter night with bonfires lit in squares, characteristic of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, is revealed:

Christmastide was warmed by fires,

And the carriages fell off the bridges,

And the whole mourning city floated

Along an unknown tide

Along the Neva or against the current...

In Chapter Four, a cornet in love, full of despair, runs out into the street. “The corner of the Champ de Mars... A high fire is burning. You can hear the bell ringing from the Savior on Spilled Blood. On the field behind the blizzard is the ghost of a palace ball” (in an earlier edition: “Winter Palace Ball”):

A wind full of Baltic salt

Blizzard Ball on the Champ de Mars

And the invisible sound of hooves...

A suicide scene follows.

The image of a snow blizzard was well known to Akhmatova’s contemporaries from Blok’s lyrics, starting with the poems of the second volume, combined at different times into the collections “Snow Mask” (separate publication - 1907), “Earth in the Snow (1908), “Snowy Night” (1912) . As a symbol of elemental passion, a Whirlwind of love, frosty and scorching, it unfolds in Blok’s love lyrics during this period into long rows of metaphorical ones, more compressed and concentrated, which are then transferred to the perception of Russia - the Motherland, as a beloved, its rebellious, violent beauty and its historical destiny : You are standing under a wild snowstorm \\ Fatal, native country.

From here they spill over into “The Twelve,” a poem about the revolution as a rebellious folk element, transforming from the “landscape of the soul” into the artistic background of the entire action, realistic and at the same time symbolically significant.

The list of lost works preserved in Akhmatova’s bibliographic records under No. 1 mentions “the libretto of the ballet “Snow Mask,” after Blok, 1921.” The libretto was written for the ballet by A. S. Lurie, a friend of A. Akhmatova, then a young modernist composer, who later emigrated abroad.

Akhmatova’s attitude towards this lyrical poem by Blok was apparently ambivalent. According to D. E. Maksimov, she saw in it a lot of “star reinforcement,” that is, bad taste, which in her opinion was characteristic of modernist art of the early twentieth century.

On the other hand, Blok’s work is mentioned twice by Akhmatova in the remaining unused prose materials for the poem (excerpts of the “ballet script” conceived in 1959 - 1960). In one case, this is a sketch of a scene that characterizes the artistic tastes of the era: “Olga is in the box watching a piece of my ballet “Snow Mask” ....” There is also another sketch, which only partially corresponds to the printed beginning of the third chapter: “Arapchatki part the curtain and... around the old city of St. Petersburg, a New Year's, almost Andersen-like blizzard. Through it - a vision (can be from “Snow Mask”). A string of carriages, sleighs...” Another discarded option that deserves attention: “Blizzard, ghosts in the blizzard (maybe even Twelve Blocks, but in the distance and unclear).”

The main love plot of Akhmatova’s poem, embodied in the traditional masquerade triangle: Columbine - Pierrot - Harlequin, is also connected with Blok. Bibliographic prototypes, as we know, were: Columbins - Akhmatova’s friend, actress and dancer O. A. Glebova-Sudeikina (wife of the artist S. Yu. Sudeikin); Pierrot is a young poet, cornet Vsevolod Knyazev, who committed suicide in early 1913, unable to survive the betrayal of his “La Traviata” (as Glebova is named in the first edition of the poem); Blok served as the prototype for Harlequin. This love triangle as a structural basis for masquerade improvisation gained especially great popularity thanks to Blok’s lyrical drama “Balaganchik” (1906), staged by V. E. Meyerhold at the theater of V. F. Komissarzhevskaya (1906 - 1907) and again, a few years later, in hall of the Tenishevsky School on the eve of the World War (April 1914).

Acting as Harlequin in a love triangle, Blok is introduced into “Nine Hundred and Thirteen” as a symbolic image of the era, “the Silver Age in all its greatness and weakness” (in the words of Akhmatova) - as a “man-era”, i.e. as exponent of his era. The development of this image did not occur immediately in the poem. In the first edition, only key lines are given to the image of a romantic demon, uniting the extremes of good and evil, ideal ups and terrible falls: On the wall is his thin profile \\ Gabriel or Mephistopheles \\ Yours, beauty, paladin?