Until now, five poems were known that Akhmatova dedicated to Blok. They belong to different periods of her life and equally testify to the exceptional significance that Blok’s appearance had for her. And there is no need to prove that he occupied a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation.

The first poem - a response to Blok's "madrigal" ("I came to visit the poet...", 1944) - has already been discussed above.

The second is a memorial, written in August 1921. immediately after Blok’s funeral at the Smolensk cemetery on August 10 (July 28, old style). In it, Akhmatova uses the folk form of Russian tonic verse, without rhymes, with dactylytic endings, and it is conceived, in the selection of images and style, as a kind of spiritual verse, expressing the people's grief over the death of the poet:

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 Holy Mother of God

In your arms in a silver coffin

Our sun, extinguished in agony, -

Alexandra, the pure swan.

This is limited to the poems of Akhmatova, contemporary to Blok, which were known until now. The last three poems were written in 1944-1960, many years after death, and contain in poetic form a memory and assessment, distanced in time, claiming historical objectivity, although personal in tone. 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, who sang the beauty of his native land:

And remembers Rogachevskoe highway

The robber whistle of young Blok.

The allusion is understandable only with close acquaintance with Blok’s poetry. His poem “Autumn Will” (“I set out on a path open to the eyes...”), written in July 1905. , marked by the author: Rogachevskoe highway.

The third poem of the cycle, marked in the manuscript on June 7, 1946. (“He’s right - again a lantern, a pharmacy...”), written by Akhmatova in the most difficult years of her life and marked by an allusion to Blok’s poem from the tragic cycle “Dances of Death.”

On February 13, 1921, at a crowded anniversary meeting in the House of Writers with a speech “On the appointment of a poet,” which begins and ends with “the cheerful name of Pushkin.” With this last speech by Blok, dedicated to the Pushkin House (written on February 5, 1921), Akhmatova hints at it in her poems.

Anna Akhmatova “after the death of A. Blok undoubtedly holds first place among Russian poets.” This is what N. Osinsky (Obolensky), an active participant in the October Revolution, and later an academician, wrote in his extensive review of modern Russian Soviet poetry in 1922 on the pages of the central Pravda (July 4, No. 145). And although his assessment of Akhmatova did not meet with support in the press of that time, one can say that this was the opinion of many readers and admirers of these poets in those years.

That is why the name of Akhmatova was already firmly connected with the name of Blok as her “teacher”, and their poetic correspondence, published on the pages of the theater magazine of Dr. Dapertutto (pseudonym of V. E. Meyerhold) “Love for Three Oranges” (1914, No. 1), and the soulful funeral lament with which Akhmatova escorted Blok to the grave (“And now Smolenskaya is the birthday girl...”, 1921), gave rise to the legend of a love affair between the first poet and the greatest poetess of the era, or at least about the hopeless love of this latter for the former .

Recently D. E. Maksimov published “Memoirs of Al. Blok" by Anna Akhmatova - a typewritten text of her memorial speech on Leningrad television on October 12, 1965, accompanied by historical and literary commentary and her own memories of conversations with the author. 1 The speech contains, as it were, a brief account of the poetess about her meetings with Blok, very few, which, as the narrator emphasizes, almost always took place in the presence of strangers.

A short speech dictated for television was hardly intended in this form for publication in print. In Akhmatova’s workbooks, a large number of passages of a memoir nature related to Blok were preserved. 2 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 one page of a regular format, and among them only his phrase about Leo Tolstoy is interesting.”

The draft outlines of the article list all of Akhmatova’s meetings with the poet, they are even renumbered (nine numbers, but the list is not completed). The following clarifications are very typical: “7. At Tsarskoye Selo station. We had lunch in the first days of the war (with Gumil<евым>)". The usual accuracy of Akhmatova’s memory is confirmed by Blok’s notebooks (August 5, 1914): “Meeting at the Tsarskoye Selo station with Zhenya (Ivanov, - V.Zh.), Gumilyov and A. Akhmatova.” 3

However, with all the superficial and fleeting nature of these meetings “in public”, in literary salons and at literary evenings, one cannot help but notice that for Akhmatova herself they were always something very important and that she remembered for the rest of her life, seemingly outwardly insignificant, but for her especially significant words of her interlocutor. 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 then young poet Benedict Livshits, “that he, Blok, by his very existence prevents him from writing 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, was perhaps 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.” 4

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. In Moscow I board the first mail train I come across. I smoke in an open area. Somewhere, near some empty platform, a locomotive 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. 5 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.” 6

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 I’m still very happy with it.” This “gossip,” according to the poetess, was most energetically spread by emigrant circles hostile to her, by the sensational and often false “memoirs” of her St. Petersburg contemporaries and especially by her contemporaries, as well as by some foreign critics who fell under their influence. “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 “arose in the 20s, after the death of Blok”; “The publication of A. A. Blok’s archive alone should have stopped these rumors.”

We will proceed further from these repeatedly repeated confessions of Akhmatova and do not consider it necessary to delve into the intimate biography of the artist at all. Much more significant for the modern reader is Akhmatova’s perception of Blok’s poetic personality and those creative connections between them, which N. Osinsky had already thought about. Akhmatova wrote in her notes: “I consider Blok not only the greatest poet of the first quarter of the twentieth century (originally it was: “one of the greatest,” - V.Zh.), but also a man of the era, that is, the most characteristic representative of his time...” Wed. another similar confession, reproduced from draft manuscripts in an article by D. E. Maksimov: “As a man of the era, Blok ended up in my poem “Triptych” (“The Demon himself with Tamara’s smile...”), but it does not follow from this that he occupied a special place in my life. There is no need to prove that he occupied a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation.” 7

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:

Like a monument to the beginning of the century,

This man is standing there...

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 preface by M. A. Kuzmin, which immediately attracted

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, at the so-called “Poetry Academy” of Vyacheslav Ivanov (“Society of Admirers of the Artistic Word”, meeting in the editorial office of “Apollo”), in the salon of Vyacheslav Ivanov at “ Tower”, at the Gorodetskys, at public literary meetings and performances.

Blok’s first meetings with Akhmatova were reflected in his diary of 1911. They meet at the Gorodetskys’ on October 20 of this year. 8 The block notes the presence of “youth” - Anna Akhmatova with N. S. Gumilyov, poetess E. Yu. Kuzmina-Karavaeva (in her last years, famous in Paris as “Mother Mary” for her active participation in the Resistance movement and heroic death in a fascist extermination camp ). “A careless and sweet evening,” writes Blok. - It was fun and simple. You get better with young people.”

Soon after this, on November 7, they meet again at Vyacheslav Ivanov’s, on the “tower”: “...A. Akhmatova (read poetry, already worrying me: the more poetry goes on, the better).” 9 This evidence is very remarkable: it will find confirmation in a number of subsequent reviews by Blok about the poems of the aspiring poetess.

Two years later, according to Akhmatova’s story, she was at Blok’s apartment on Ofitserskaya Street (now Dekabristov Street) “on one of the last Sundays of the thirteenth year” (December 16) - “the only time”, as reported in “Memoirs”, when she was visiting the poet: “... I brought Blok his books so that he could inscribe them. On each one he wrote simply: “Akhmatova - Blok”... And on the third volume the poet wrote a madrigal dedicated to me: “Beauty is terrible, they will tell you...”. I never had the Spanish shawl in which I am depicted there, but at that time Blok was raving about Carmen and Spanishized me too.” 10 Blok’s cycle of poems “Carmen” (March 1914) is dedicated to L. A. 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 “madrigal” has the connotation of a secular poetic compliment. Akhmatova further develops this idea: “I, of course, never wore a red rose in my hair. It is no coincidence that this poem is written in the Spanish romancero stanza. And at my last meeting backstage at the Bolshoi Drama Theater in the spring of 1921, Blok came up and asked me: “Where is the Spanish shawl?” These are the last words I heard from him." eleven

Blok, obviously, was warned in advance by the poetess about Akhmatova’s upcoming arrival and her request to inscribe books. He wrote his “madrigal,” as the drafts published by V.N. Orlov 12 showed, the day before and did not immediately find its form. The surviving sketches represent experiments varying

in different poetic sizes the main theme is the mysterious and contradictory charm of female beauty:

Listening with greedy indifference

So indifferent and so greedy

Attentively and, together, indifferently

Are you listening...

But I’m not that simple, and I’m not that complicated

To forget that... given.

I know many people must tell you,

That you are strangely beautiful and strangely tender.

………………………………………………..

People say all around: “You are a demon, you are beautiful.”

And you, obedient to rumors,

Lazyly throw on a yellow shawl,

Flower on the head.

The size of the Spanish romancero in the Russian adaptation (tetrameter trochees without rhymes with a strophic alternation of three verses with a feminine and one with a masculine ending) was an unexpected resolution of these searches in the direction of the Spanish “romance” and the poetic image suggested by it.

Akhmatova’s answer, written in the same “romancero size,” is, in essence, not a literal answer to the topic asked by Blok, but in the form of a description of their meeting, a portrait of the owner of the house, a poet, is given, parallel to the portrait of the young poetess in Blok’s poem. At the same time, the contrast of artistic methods is very characteristic: Akhmatova replaced the romantic Spanish exoticism of Blok in her own manner with a realistic picture of the Russian winter:

I came to visit the poet.

It's exactly noon. Sunday.

Quiet in the spacious room,

And it's frosty outside the windows

And crimson sun

Above the shaggy gray smoke...

Against this background appears a psychological portrait, also realistic, with a deep perspective of unspoken feelings:

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.

At the end, the winter landscape returns again, enriched with the psychological content of the previous story:

But the conversation will be remembered,

Smoky afternoon, Sunday,

In a gray and tall house

At the sea gate of the Neva.

Akhmatova’s poem was written, according to its dating, in January 1914, apparently in early January: judging by the notebooks, Blok received it by mail, along with a letter, on January 7 (“Letter and poems from A.A. Akhmatova"). 13 It still managed to get into the collection “The Rosary” (in March 1914), but first it was published, at Blok’s request, along with his Spanish “madrigal”, in No. 1 for 1914 of the magazine “Love for Three Oranges”, where Blok was the editor of the poetry department.

Yesterday I received your book, I just cut it and took it to my mother. And in her house there is illness, and it’s generally difficult; This morning my mother took the book and read without stopping: she says that not only good poetry, but in a human, feminine way - authentically.

Thank you.

Alexander Blok, devoted to you. 14

For Blok, his mother’s assessment meant the highest court. Akhmatova also knew this: sometimes she recalled it later with some impatient irritation.

The donated copy was preserved in Blok’s personal library at the Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad (code 94 5/11). He was briefly described by V.N. Orlov in the publication “New about Alexander Blok.” 15 On the title page there is a dedication framing the printed title:

Alexander Blok

Anna Akhmatova 16

“You gave me anxiety

And the ability to write poetry."

Spring 1914

Petersburg

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.

Blok read Akhmatova’s poems, following his mother, with very great attention. On the pages of his copy there is, in the words of V.N. Orlov, a whole system of “markings”, which cannot in all cases be unambiguously interpreted unless, from this point of view, the numerous symbolic signs on other books in Blok’s library are subjected to comparative consideration: crosses, circles, vertical lines and minuses in the margins; lines underlined by solid or wavy lines. In any case, there are about 100 such icons for a total of 82 poems in the collection.

Some poems that Blok completely liked or that struck his attention are marked with a large cross in pencil. These include: s. 13 - “We are all hawkmoths here, harlots...” (a poem that the poet recommended Akhmatova to read at a joint public performance); With. 24 - “Let’s not drink from the same glass...”; With. 39 - “Voice of Memory (O. A. Glebova-Sudeikina)”; With. 46 - “I marked it with charcoal on the left side...” (Akhmatova later singled out this work from her early experiments); With. 84 - “Excerpt from the poem” (“At that time I was visiting the earth...”) and a few others.

In most cases, individual lines or stanzas are highlighted sympathetically or critically. Thus, Blok impatiently notes the signs of the “modernism” fashionable among his epigones, of which he himself was once guilty. For example, s. 123 (“Bury, bury me, wind...”):

And led the blue fog

Blok writes in the margins: “Extreme modernism, exemplary, one might say, “all of Moscow” wrote like that.” He is also impatient with the so-called rhymes (imprecise rhymes), the fashion for which once came from himself: p. 52 - candles: brocade(in the margin “I don’t like”); or with. 60 - sins: stole(there is also an exclamation mark). Wed. Blok (mainly in the second volume) has truncated rhymes, usually feminine: drives: horses; cold: lace and many others; much less often male (unlike Akhmatova’s examples): mast: trumpeter

Apparently, examples of a specifically “feminine”, domestic style, about which Blok later wrote with irritation regarding Akhmatova’s early poem “By the Sea” (see below, p. 332), should include p. 33 (“Flowers and inanimate things...”):

And the boy told me, afraid,

At all, excited and quiet...

On the other hand, the lines that Blok highlights undoubtedly sympathetically sometimes force us to pay attention to the traditions of his poetic art that are still very alive and active in her early poems, pedaling Blok’s perception of the experience of love, in which, judging by the dedicatory inscription on the “Rosary” , Akhmatova considered herself to some extent a student of the older poet. Wed, for example:

P. 67. And it rang and sang poisonously

Your unspeakable joy.

P. 95. - Because I have tart sadness

Got him drunk.

P. 132. And you realized that you were poisonous

And there is a stifling melancholy within me.

However, it is much more surprising that on a number of other pages of the book Blok carefully noted such lines, which were already remembered by its first readers, which represent a specific feature of the new, “Azmatov” style - a style that is in many ways opposite to the romantic manner of Blok himself - precise, material, about revealing behind unexpected realistic detail the psychological depth of simple and genuine human feeling. Wed. from a large number of examples:

pp. 58-59. You are my letter, dear, without crumpling,

Read to the end his friend.

…………………………….

In this gray and casual dress,

In worn out heels...

P. 61. And for my life with an imperishable ray

P. 79. And hidden in tangled braids

Slightly audible smell of tobacco.

P. 100. Only candles were burning in the bedroom

Indifferent yellow fire.

P. 103. And passersby think vaguely:

That's right, I just became a widow yesterday.

Blok also drew attention to Akhmatova’s landscapes, also created in a realistic manner alien to himself and new to Russian poetry of that time, as an obligatory associative background of mental experience, but without a visible connection with it, which was generated among the Symbolists by removing the line between objective reality and subjective feeling , between nature and the soul of the poet. Wed. from the underlined examples:

P. 51. I see a faded flag over the customs office

And there is a yellow haze over the city.

P. 96. The willow spread out in the empty sky

The fan is through.

P. 108 On the trunk of a gnarled spruce

Ant Highway.

Finally, it is characteristic of Blok’s social sentiments that he noticed those rare social motives in the poetry of the young Akhmatova that were close to himself.

Wed. the motive of social condemnation in the description of Slepnev’s landowner idyll (p. 45):

And judgmental glances

Calm, tanned women.

Akhmatova later wrote in her memoirs about Slepnev: “Women went out into the field in homespun sundresses, and then old women and clumsy girls seemed slimmer than ancient statues” (cf. paintings by Z. E. Serebryakova dating back to the same time).

Or, in the same village setting, the motive of social pity, suggested in “Song” (p. 116) by folk laments about the cruel fate of women:

I see the girl is barefoot

Crying by the fence.

In the later edition of the poem (from 1940), this motive was strengthened and acquired a personal character in the new final stanza:

There will be stone instead of bread

My reward is evil.

Blok returned to criticism of the work of the young Akhmatova once again in a letter containing a review of her poem “Near the Sea” (1914). A separate reprint from the magazine “Apollo” (1915, “Na 3) was received by mail with a dedicatory inscription: “To Alexander Blok - Anna Akhmatova. April 27, 1915. Tsarskoye Selo.” The print was preserved at the Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the Blok library (code 94 5/12 ), unlike the copy of “The Rosary,” it has no markings. Apparently, it was not sent to Akhmatova immediately, because Blok replied on March 14, 1916, judging by the text of the answer - immediately after receiving the gift. The letter was written warmly and with visible sympathy for the young author, but at the same time frankly, strictly and authoritatively, with friendly, extensive critical remarks about what seemed to him worthy of criticism:

Dear Anna Andreevna.

Although I feel very bad, because I am surrounded by illnesses and worries, I am still pleased to answer the message of your poem. Firstly,

the poem was terribly praised by different people and for different reasons, praised so much that I completely stopped believing in it. Secondly, I have seen a lot of collections of poems by “famous” and “unknown” authors; always almost - you look, you see that they must write very well, but I don’t need everything, it’s boring, so you start to think that there’s no need to write any more poetry at all; the next stage is that I don’t like poetry; the next one is that poetry in general is an idle activity; then you start talking loudly to everyone about it. I don’t know if you have experienced such feelings; if yes, then you know how much sick, unnecessary burden there is in all this.

After reading your poem, I again felt that I still love poetry, that they are not a trifle, and there is a lot of this that is gratifying, fresh, like the poem itself. All this - despite the fact that I will never go through your “I didn’t know at all”, “you himself seas", "most gentle, most, meek" (in "Rosary Beads"), constant "at all"(this is not yours at all, it’s common for women, I won’t forgive all women for this). The same goes for the “plot”: no need for a dead groom, no need for dolls, no need for “exotics,” no need for equations with ten unknowns; it needs to be even tougher, more unsightly, more painful. But all this is nonsense, the poem is real, and you are real. Be healthy, you need to get treatment.

Dedicated to you Al. Block. 17

Blok’s comments about the romantic “plot” of Akhmatova’s early poem are understandable from the lips of the author, who himself moved from the romantic “exoticism” of his early poems “with ten unknowns” to “Iambics” and “Retribution” with their truthful and harsh social realism. A more difficult question is the assessment of Akhmatova’s poetic vocabulary. This “female” vocabulary has a deliberately intimate, homely, conversational character (cf. also noted above in “The Rosary,” p. 33: "at all excitedly and quietly"). It is one of the poetic means specific to the young Akhmatova, distant from Blok in all periods of his work, and inevitably had to be perceived by him, especially with frequent repetition, not as simplicity, but as mannerism and naivety. However, this manner apparently became specifically “feminine” after “The Rosary,” among Akhmatova’s numerous imitators at that time. It is interesting to note that the title "U himself sea,” which unpleasantly offended Blok, goes back to “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” which inspired Akhmatova’s poem:

An old man lived with his old woman

U himself blue seas...

Later, perhaps remembering Blok’s criticism, Akhmatova limited her collections of poems to reprinting the first twenty-four lines of the poem - the picture of the southern sea, against which the plot unfolds, and the free life of the “seaside girl.” 18

For the last time, the only time in print, Blok spoke about Akhmatova’s poetry in the famous polemical article ““Without deity, without inspiration.” (Workshop of Acmeists)”, directed against N. S. Gumilyov and his school. 19 The article was written in April 1921, shortly before Blok’s death, and was first published

Tana in 1925, when both opponents were not alive. At the beginning of her creative career, Akhmatova was a member of the Workshop of Poets (1912 - 1915) and the poetic group of Acmeists that emerged from it. But in the second workshop, revived by Gumilyov in 1919, after a separation from her husband, she no longer participated. In the new workshop, much more than in the old one, the principles of aesthetic formalism and the Epigonian “neoclassical” poetic technique, supported by formalist criticism of one’s own craftsmanship at workshop meetings and in reviews, dominated. New poets appeared in the workshop, most of them students and echoes of their teacher. Akhmatova's poetry, classical in nature and in its traditions, was alien to external classicistic stylization. Classicism was for her, as the Geneva professor Aucouturier aptly put it, as much an ethical category as an aesthetic one, associated with the internal structure of the soul (especially in “The White Flock”).

His last article, which in a certain sense is a poetic testament, is directed against the aesthetic formalism of the “guild of Acmeists” (as Blok does not quite accurately express it historically). In an angry and ironic form, the poet stands up for the rights of true poetry, which in Russia was never “art for art’s sake,” but was closely connected with the entire “single powerful stream” of Russian national culture, with “philosophy, religion, public life, even politics.” " But, rejecting flat formalism in the theory and practice of a poetic movement deeply hostile to him, Blok refuses to include Akhmatova in it, whom he speaks of with the same warm sympathy. “The real exception among them,” he writes, “was Anna Akhmatova; I don’t know if she considered herself an “Acmeist”; in any case, the “flourishing of physical and spiritual strength” could not be positively found in her tired, sick, feminine and self-absorbed manner.”

The last idea was put forward by Blok for polemical purposes: the literary leaders of Acmeism advocated in their theoretical speeches for a “masculine, firm and clear view of life,” which they called “Adamism.” Akhmatova would probably recognize the definition of her poetry as “tired,” “painful,” and “feminine” as at least one-sided, especially given the entire direction of her development since the late 30s. Of the early reviews of her poems, she especially appreciated the article by N.V. Nedobrovo, who called her “strong” and in her poems guessed “a lyrical soul that is rather hard than too soft, rather cruel than tearful, and clearly dominant, and not oppressed." 20

In “Poem Without a Hero,” in the Tsarskoe Selo idyll dedicated to the memory of N.V. Nedobrovo, this idea is captured in the following words:

Won't you tell me again

Death-conquering word

And the answer to my life? eleven

Many years ago, in 1920, when the opposites of the living literary process were more noticeable to a contemporary than the similarities, I had to compare two poems by Blok and Akhmatova, written on a similar topic - a love meeting in a restaurant - as an example of “two directions of modern lyrics” , polar opposite in their creative method. 22 In Blok’s poem “In the Restaurant” (“I will never forget (he was, or wasn’t, this evening) ...”) a chance meeting with an unfamiliar woman takes on the meaning of romantic unusualness, uniqueness, exclusivity. This impression is created by the image of dawn at the beginning and end of the poem, which usually accompanies the appearance of the Stranger as a symbolic background, but during this period of his work it is always yellow, smoky, sick; and the very image of the Stranger, transformed by romantic metaphor: “You rushed with the movement of a frightened bird, You passed, like my dream, lightly...”; and, finally, raised by a solemn address to her:

I sent you a black rose in a glass

Golden as the sky, ah.

The idealistic perception of the world is characterized by fluctuations in the poet’s consciousness: “...he was or was not, This evening...”; The uncertainty of the localization of the experience is also characteristic: “Somewhere bows were singing about love”, “... strings struck something.” The musical impact is created by repetitions, rhythmic-syntactic parallelism of hemistiches and alliteration of initial sounds and syllables:

And the spirits sighed, the eyelashes fell asleep.

The silks whispered anxiously.

In the final verses it is emphasized by the deliberately annoying strumming of internal rhymes:

And the monist strummed, the gypsy danced

And she screamed at the dawn about love.

If Blok depicts in his poem a chance meeting in a restaurant with an unfamiliar woman as an event full of endless, mysterious meaning for him, then Akhmatova’s poem “Music rang in the garden...” speaks of a simple, ordinary life meeting, although subjectively significant for her. -

telny. This is the heroine's first date with her beloved: she learns that he does not love her and will never love her, he is only a “faithful friend.” The experience of this meeting is mediated by everyday details, unusual in theme for traditional “high” poetry, but clearly remembered in all the details: “The sea smelt fresh and sharp on a platter of oysters on ice.” The background of the action is precisely localized: distant violins sing not “somewhere”, but “behind the creeping smoke.” The exact localization of sounds corresponds to the exact designation of their emotional content, associatively associated with the state of the heroine’s soul: “The music rang in the garden with such unspeakable grief...”. The image of the beloved is devoid of romantic idealization, its metaphorical transformation is completely absent, but on the other hand, psychological features that are significant for the development of the plot clearly appear in it:

How different from a hug

Only laughter in his calm eyes

Under the light gold of eyelashes.

And yet, despite the fundamental difference in the creative method, these poems are in some sense connected with each other - not only by the “modern” theme of a love meeting in a restaurant, a kind of “urban” background against which individual similar details appear (“voices of violins” ), but also by the difficult-to-define general features of the time, which Akhmatova herself later managed to embody as an artist in the images of the poem “Nine Hundred and Thirteen”, resurrected from the past, where Blok was given first place as the most remarkable poetic exponent of his era. One could say that Blok awakened Akhmatova’s muse, as she said in the dedicatory inscription to the “Rosary”; but then she went her own way, overcoming the legacy of Blok’s symbolism.

The existence for Akhmatova from a young age of the “atmosphere” and tradition of Blok’s poetry is confirmed by the presence in her poems of quite numerous reminiscences from Blok, most of them probably unconscious.

In the literature, a similarity with Blok has already been noted in the poem, where, despite all the differences in theme, Blok suggested the general syntactic structure of the stanza (“That city that I have loved since childhood...”, 1929).

From Akhmatova:

But with the curiosity of a foreigner,

Captivated by every novelty,

I watched the sled rushing,

And listened to my native language.

Wed. from Blok (“Newly snow-covered columns...”, 1909):

No, with the constancy of geometer

I I count every time without words

Bridges, chapel, harshness of the wind,

Desertion of low islands.

“The sleigh is racing” in Akhmatova’s poem may also be related to the theme of Blok’s poem - a sleigh ride with his beloved on a winter night to the islands of the Neva Delta.

In contrast to this formal roll call, we also find cases of material borrowing of the image.

“Golden Trumpets of Autumn” is an individual metaphor characteristic of the poetic style of Blok’s second book (“Autumn Dances”, 1905):

And behind the lace of thin birch

Golden started singing pipe.

Wed. in Akhmatova’s poem “Three Autumns” (1943):

AND gold pipes distant marches

They float in the fragrant fog...

Against this background, other correspondences appear: dancing autumn (Block) - dance(Akhmatova); rhymes (very formulaic) - birch trees: tears.

Akhmatova:

And they are the first to join the dance birch,

Throwing on a see-through garment,

Hastily shaking off the fleeting tears

At the neighbor through the fence.

Autumn smiles through tears

…………………………………

And behind the thin lace birch trees

Next to this, however, Akhmatova has other comparisons that are characteristic of her individual realistic imagery: “...leaves fly like shreds of notebooks”; "As dark as an air raid." The composition of the poems is also completely different: Akhmatova’s six stanzas (an unusually large number for her!) contain three successive pictures of nature (“Three Autumns”); Blok’s “Autumn Dances” (“To excite me again and again...”) has eleven stanzas, forming a single stream of growing lyrical experience.

Another poem of late times, “Listening to Singing...” (1961) 23 unexpectedly returns the pass in conveying musical experiences to the powerful, irrational impulse of Blok’s lyrics.

Singer Galina Vishnevskaya performs “Brazilian Bahiana” by composer Villa-Lobos:

It seems black, damp, night...

This bold metaphor ends with an almost ecstatic vision, in a manner characteristic of some of Akhmatova’s later examples of love lyrics (“Cinque”, “Midnight Poems”):

And such a mighty force

As if there is no grave ahead,

And the mysterious staircase takes off.

Here is an unexpected echo with Blok, essentially with one of his most memorable poems, ecstatic and frenzied, opening the third volume of his lyrics (“To the Muse”, 1912):

AND such a compelling force

What am I ready to repeat after rumors,

As if you brought down angels,

Seducing with its beauty...

Blok’s poem from the cycle “Dances of Death” (1912 - 1914), written on the eve of the First World War (February 7, 1914), turned out to be prophetic - one of the most poignant in his lyrics of that time on its socio-political theme:

The rich man is angry and happy again,

The poor man is humiliated again.

The last two stanzas sounded like this:

It would all be in vain

If there were no king,

To uphold the laws.

Just don't look for a palace,

good-natured face,

Golden crown.

He is from distant wastelands

In the light of rare lanterns

Appears.

Neck twisted with a scarf

Under the leaky visor

Smiles.

The poem was first published in Russian Thought, 1915, No. 12 (original draft - October 1913), without

the last two stanzas omitted due to censorship conditions. These stanzas were restored by the poet from the manuscript in the third volume of the 1921 edition. However, according to the notebooks, Blok read the poem at literary evenings in January 1918, obviously in its entirety, in a form that corresponded to the revolutionary sentiments of those years. 24

Akhmatova's poem, similar in theme and originally entitled "Meeting", then "Ghost", was written in the winter of 1919 and first published in the collection Anno Doniinh (1921). And here the image of the king appears in the light of “lanterns lit early,” and the strange look of “empty bright eyes” means death. The second stanza with its specific and precise poetic imagery and (in the second verse) the psychological perspective of overtaking death is especially characteristic of the poetic manner of early Akhmatova:

And, accelerating evenly,

As if in anticipation of a chase,

Through the softly falling snow

Horses are racing under a gray net.

Blok's poem represents a harsh and accusatory political popular print, reminiscent of the satirical magazines of 1905. In Akhmatova's “pastel” style, the element of political satire and exposure is absent. This “meeting” opens in her work a series of paintings of pre-revolutionary Tsarskoye Selo created from the mid-20s, more elegiac than literally accusatory - images of the old world, which has become a world of ghosts, historically condemned and doomed to death (cf. especially the passages from the unfinished “Tsarskoye Selo poem” “Russian Trianon”, 1925 - 1940), 25

Apparently, Akhmatova’s memory of the “meeting” was a response to Blok’s prophetic vision, but it is impossible to say with certainty. However, it is not so significant: the features of general internal similarity with deep individual differences could be a product of the general historical and artistic atmosphere of the era.

But real genetic connections are not always on the surface. It is characteristic that Blok, when analyzing the poem “By the Sea itself,” did not feel its connections with his own work, which the poetess later repeatedly spoke about. At first glance, this poem, by its title, has a fairy-tale background. the folk narrative style and poetic form is fully explained by comparison with Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.” However, Akhmatova, in her memoirs, pointed to Blok’s “Italian Poems” (“Venice”, 1) as a direct creative source of her poetic inspiration: “Weren’t there 1914 poems by Blok in “Russian Thought”? 26 Something like:

I went to sea with her.

I forgot to take care of the shore with her

(Italian<ьянские>poetry)

Oh... sail

Coming... from supper

There is no blood in the heart

... bugles

...and on a shawl

But I heard:

The bays were cut up

All the sails fled to the sea

It was in Slepnev in 1914 in my room...”

This example is of exceptional interest for the psychology of creativity. For all her excellent memory, Akhmatova, when she wrote her memoirs almost 50 years after the events, could only remember the main musical and poetic motifs that served as the impetus for her work and set her up to describe the South Sea as the backdrop to the love of a romantic girl.

Wed. from Blok:

I went to sea with her,

I left the shore with her,

I was far away from her

I forgot my loved ones with her...

Oh red sail

In the green distance!

Black bugles

On a dark shawl!

Coming from the gloomy mass,

There is no blood in the heart...

Christ, tired of carrying the cross...

Adriatic love -

My last one -

Sorry Sorry!

Upon careful reading, one can probably discover a number of the same signs of the unconscious action of creative memory, artistic “infection,” which should not be considered from a traditional point of view as a mechanical “borrowing.” At one time, they repeatedly noted a similar creative overlap between the young Akhmatova and Innokenty Annensky, whom the Acmeists revered as their teacher. It is more significant to note the presence in Akhmatova’s mature work of some of the main themes of Blok’s poetry, of course - in its characteristic ideological and artistic refraction.

This is the theme of the “lost generation”, which occupies an important place in the works of the late Blok, in the poems of his third book - the generation that lived between two wars (meaning the Russian-Japanese and German) and in the “deaf” period of political reaction after the collapse of the revolution of 1905 d. So, for example, the poem “Born in the Years of the Deaf...” was written on September 8, 1914, in the first days of the World War. It reflects the deep crisis of Blok’s social self-awareness, which brought him to the revolutionary camp in 1917:

Those born in the year are deaf

They don’t remember their own paths.

We are children of the terrible years of Russia -

I can't forget anything.

Sizzling years!

Is there madness in you, is there hope?

From the days of war, from the days of freedom -

There is a bloody glow in the faces.

There is muteness - then the sound of the alarm

He forced me to stop my mouth.

In hearts that were once delighted,

There is a fatal emptiness.

And let over our deathbed

The crow will fly up with a cry, -

Those who are more worthy, God, God,

Let them see your kingdom!

Akhmatova speaks most fully about the fate of her “generation” in the poetic images of the poem “Nine Hundred and Thirteen,” which will be discussed below. More personally, in a concentrated lyrically generalized form, the tragic theme of the “lost generation” sounds in her poem “De profundis...”. It was written simultaneously with the first edition of the poem (March 23, 1944, Tashkent) and has similar themes to Blok’s work. Akhmatova’s “two wars,” unlike Blok’s, are the first and second world wars.

De profundis... My generation

Tasted little honey. And so

Only the wind hums in the distance,

Only the memory of the dead sings.

Our work was not over,

Our hours were numbered

Until the desired watershed,

To the top of the great mountain,

Until the frantic bloom

All that was left was to take one breath...

Two wars, my generation,

Illuminated your terrible path.

The feeling of the proximity of a tragic end, threatening the imaginary peace and comfort of philistine existence, accompanies

In the pre-revolutionary years, Blok was driven by the consciousness of an imminent social catastrophe that possessed him. “One way or another, we are experiencing a terrible crisis,” he wrote in December 1908 in the article “Elements and Culture.” “We don’t yet know exactly what events we can expect, but in our heart the seismograph needle has already deviated.” 27 This prophetic fear of the future found its most vivid expression in the famous poem “Voice from the Choir” (June 6, 1910 - February 27, 1914):

How often do we cry - you and I -

Over your miserable life!

Oh, if only you knew, friends,

The cold and darkness of the days to come!

…………………………………….

Be happy with your life,

Quieter than water, below the grass! Oh, if only you children knew

The cold and darkness of the days to come!

We thought: we are beggars, we have nothing.

And how they began to lose one after another,

So that became every day

On a memorial day, -

We started composing songs

About the great generosity of God

Yes about our former wealth.

This poem, as Akhmatova later said, was created in April - May 1915, when she went to visit her husband after he was wounded at the front, in the hospital for artists. She doubted whether to publish it or not, since it represented an “excerpt” (at that time short, apparently unfinished poems seemed unworthy of publication to Akhmatova). She later published it, placing it at the beginning of The White Flock, and even called it the best of her early poems.

In this case, we will not attach decisive importance to the question of the date of Akhmatova’s acquaintance with Blok’s poem. More important is the very fact of the creative roll call of the two poets, the similarity of the theme: their related feeling of the instability of the usual way of life in its imaginary well-being and the premonition of future social and personal troubles - in Akhmatova in a more intimate, simple and personal form, in Blok - with a philosophical-historical perspective and with prophetic intonation.

The same theme of the tragic fate of the “generation” and the trial of it from the point of view of history is united by Blok’s unfinished poem “Retribution” (1910 - 1921) and Akhmatova’s “triptych” “Poem without a Hero”, more precisely, its first part “Nine hundred and thirteen. Petersburg Tale" (1940 - 1962).

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 in his social existence, inherited these sins - deadening egoism (almost “Byronic” in the image of his father), anti-humanism , separation from “neighbors” and, above all, from one’s own people. But, since the poet left his work unfinished, unable to overcome the contradictions between the classical, Pushkin form and the romantic plan, we cannot judge with complete certainty either this plan as a whole, or the specific possibilities of its implementation.

In Akhmatova’s poem, before the inner gaze of the poetess, immersed in a dream that caught her in front of the mirror while doing New Year’s fortune-telling, images of the past, the shadows of her friends who are no longer alive, pass through (“I’m sleeping - I’m dreaming of our youth”). They rush in fancy dress to the New Year's ball. In essence, this is a kind of dance of death:

Just how could it happen

That I'm the only one alive?

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

There is an unearthly, strange ringing in her ears:

Then bones clang on bones.

Wed. from Akhmatova:

I see dance courtiers 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 the world around her, the feeling of the proximity of a social catastrophe, a tragic “reckoning” (“Reckoning is coming anyway”) - in the sense of Blok’s “retribution”:

And always in the frosty stuffiness,

Pre-war, prodigal and menacing,

There lived some future hum,

But then he was heard more faintly,

He hardly bothered souls

And he drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva.

"Over the cities stands hum, which even an experienced ear cannot understand,” Blok wrote back in 1908 in his famous report “The People and the Intelligentsia,” “such hum, which stood over the Tatar camp on the night before the Battle of Kulikovo, as the legend says.” 28 After the October Revolution (January 9, 1918), the poet again speaks of the “formidable and deafening gule, which emits a stream... With all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness - listen to the Revolution.” 29 He listened to this hum when he wrote “The Twelve”: “... during and after the end of “The Twelve”, for several days I felt physically, by ear, a great noise around - a continuous noise (probably the noise from the collapse of the old world)” ( April 1, 1920). thirty

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 was not the calendar one that was approaching -

The Real Twentieth Century.

Wed. Blok, at the beginning of his poem, imbued with the deep hopelessness characteristic of him in the years of timelessness, has a philosophical and socio-historical picture of the change of the same two centuries:

Nineteenth century, iron,

Twentieth century... Still 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 snow-covered Petersburg, a snowy blizzard behind the heavy curtains of the Sheremetev 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 prose introduction to chapter two, depicting the Heroine’s bedroom: “Outside 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

For an unknown purpose

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 the ghost of a palace ball"(in an earlier version: "Zimnedvorsky Ball"):

A wind full of Baltic salt

Blizzard Ball at Mars Polo

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 burning, it unfolds in Blok’s love lyrics during this period into long series of metaphorical allegories characteristic of his romantic poetics. Subsequently, the same symbols, more compressed and concentrated, are transferred by the poet to the perception of Russia - the Motherland as a beloved, its rebellious, violent beauty and from historical fate:

You are standing under a wild snowstorm,

Fatal, native country.

From here they spread into “The Twelve,” a poem about the revolution as a rebellious national element, turning from “land-

the shaft of the soul" into the artistic background of the entire action, realistic and at the same time symbolically significant.

In the list of lost works, preserved in Akhmatova’s bibliographic records, under No. 1, “the libretto of the ballet “Snow Mask” by Blok, 1921” is mentioned. The libretto was written for the ballet by A. S. Lurie, a friend of A. A. Akhmatova, then a young modernist composer who later emigrated abroad. In her notes, Akhmatova mentions that she read her script to the poet V. Khodasevich, who later also emigrated from the Soviet Union (“at 7 Sergievskaya Street”). 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, characteristic, in her opinion, of modernist art of the early 20th century. 31

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 characterizing the artistic tastes of the era: “Olga (i.e., the heroine, Glebova-Sudeikina, - V.Zh.) in the box he watches a piece of my ballet “Snow Mask”...” There is also another sketch, which only partially corresponds to the printed beginning of chapter three: “Arapchatki part the curtain and... around the old city of St. Petersburg. New Year's, almost Andersen's 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).”

And here Blok’s images were present in the poetess’s imagination as the “atmosphere of the era,” but they remained, as it were, behind the scenes. Blok’s “star reinforcement” is missing - the unbridled revelry of romantic metaphors. The motifs of the snow blizzard behind the thick curtains of the palace hall, so important in ideological and artistic significance, are preserved, but the description is reduced to a minimum of selected, concise and precise details, which, for all their realism, have a fantastic reflection of the “St. Petersburg Hoffmanniana” (“the ringing of hooves” The Bronze Horseman on the Champ de Mars and the ghost of the “Winter Court” ball).

The main love plot of Akhmatova’s poem, embodied in the traditional masquerade triangle: Columbine - Pierrot - Harlequin, is also connected with Blok. As is known, the biographical prototypes 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

nickname as the structural basis of 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 the Tenishevsky Hall schools on the eve of the World War (April 1914). However, by that time, the stereotypical figures of the theater of masks in its French version had already become the subject of artistic fashion in the art of Russian modernists, along with images of French painting and theater of the 18th century. (K. S. Somov, A. N. Benois, N. N. Sapunov, S. Yu. Sudeikin, etc.). Let us recall that in I. Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrushka”, which Akhmatova mentions, the same three characters perform: Ballerina - Petrushka - Arab (at the same time, Petrushka is not in the traditional role inherent in him in the folk farce theater, but as the Russian lyrical Pierrot ).

Akhmatova herself calls her heroine “Columbine of the tenths,” explaining in her notes that she conceived her not as an individual portrait, but as a collective image of a woman of that time and that circle. Interesting are the memories on this occasion of a contemporary, actor and director A. A. Mgebrov, a student of V. E. Meyerhold: “... Glebova-Sudeikina was, by the way, one of the most remarkable Columbines. According to all her characteristics, she was truly extremely suitable for this image: graceful, unusually fragile, sophisticated and uniquely beautiful”; “All the women of our basement (the artistic cabaret “Stray Dog”,” V.Zh.), at the wave of Doctor Dapertutto’s magic wand, they turned into Columbine, the young men whom Columbine could love became Harlequins, and enthusiasts and dreamers became poor and sad, Pierrot... In a whirlwind, Columbine and Pierrot then all ran around rapturously.” 32

In his rather mediocre poems, published after his death, 33 Knyazev repeatedly calls the object of his love (Glebova) Colombina, and himself her Pierrot.

Thus, the life and art of “nine hundred and thirteen” are intertwined in a complex way in Akhmatova’s creative memories, but life often takes forms suggested by the poetic tradition.

This is, for example, the scene on the Champ de Mars, preceding the tragic ending:

After midnight he wanders under the windows,

Points at him mercilessly

Dim beam corner lamp, -

And he waited. Slim mask

On the way back from Damascus

I returned home... not alone!

Wed. in a similar situation under a lantern, the scene of the abduction of Columbine by Harlequin in “The Showcase”:

I stood between two lanterns

How they whispered, covered with cloaks,

I kissed their eyes at night.

And a silver blizzard swirled

They have a wedding ring ring,

And I saw through the night - girlfriend

She smiled in his face.

Ah, then in the cabman's sleigh

He made my friend sit down!..

Acting as Harlequin in a love triangle, Blok is introduced into “Nineteen 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. The first edition contains only the key lines to the image of a romantic demon, uniting the extremes of good and evil, ideal ups and terrible falls:

His thin profile is on the wall.

Gabriel or Mephistopheles

Yours, beauty, paladin?

In the original version, it is not even clear whether he is the happy rival of the dragoon - Pierrot. The scene of their meeting before 1959 read like this:

With the smile of the evening victim

And paler than Saint Sebastian,

All embarrassed, he looks through his tears,

How they handed you roses,

Like his rival blush. 34

"Rosy" rival is an epithet hardly suitable for Blok, especially in his role as a demonic lover. However, only in 1962 did identification lines appear:

That's him in a crowded room

Sent that black rose in a glass...

And then the epithet “blush” was replaced by a neutral one:

Like his rival famous

The passage about Blok in the final edition was expanded by the addition of eighteen verses, which were added up gradually:

1956: 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.

1962: That's him in a crowded hall

Sweet that black rose in a glass,

Or was it all a dream?

With a dead heart and a dead look

Did he meet with the Commander,

Sneaking into that damned house?

1956: And it is told in words,

How were you in the new space,

How out of time you were, -

And in what polar crystals,

And in what amber radiances

There, at the mouth of the Leta-Neva.

The first stanza, adjacent to the previous one, develops the image of a romantic hero - a “demon”. The rest consists of four half-stanzas containing successive allusions to four famous poems by Blok, two of which are from the “Terrible World” cycle, which, as we have seen, was of especially great importance for Akhmatova’s work.

The first, the most clear (“In a Restaurant”, 1910), does not require further explanation. The second is associated with the poem “Steps of the Commander” (1910 - 1912). The third is a paraphrase of the dedication to Andrei Bely (“Dear brother! Evening has fallen...”, 1906):

As if we are in a new space,

As if in new times.

The fourth vaguely echoes the poem “Newly Snowed Columns...” (1909), dedicated to V. Shchegoleva and depicting a trip to the islands

There, at the mouth of the Leta-Neva.

For the general concept of Blok’s image and the entire era as a whole, the inclusion of the poem “Commander’s Steps” in this chain of allusions is especially significant. In the poem depicting Don Juan, condemned to death, a “traitor” to the romantic ideal of one and only eternal love, the same motive of impending “retribution” sounds:

From a blessed, unfamiliar, distant land

You can hear singing rooster.

What are the sounds of bliss to a traitor?

The moments of life are numbered...

Scream rooster we are only dreaming...

“The block was waiting for the Commander,” Akhmatova wrote in her materials for the poem: this expectation is also a sign of the people of her “generation,” doomed to perish along with the old world and feeling the approach of impending death. It is no coincidence that Columbine, as stated in the prose introduction to Chapter Two, seems to some to be “Donna Anna (from “The Commander’s Steps”).” This roll call clearly begins already in the epigraph from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, which prefaces the entire poem “Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen,” in which the death of a flighty and dissolute lover is for the first time, at least by musical means, depicted as a romantic tragedy:

Di rider finirai

Pria dell aurora.

<Ты перестанешь смеяться раньше, чем взойдет заря (Italian)> It is not possible for us to dwell here on the peculiar structure of the “Poem without a Hero” as an artistic whole, in which numerous epigraphs from modern and classical poets, overt and half-hidden quotations, allusions of all kinds are woven into the complex fabric of the work, recreating a historical era as the poet’s contemporaneity in the past and as a memory in the present. In this regard, Blok’s place in the poem is special, he is its hero, as the highest embodiment of his era (“generation”), and in this sense he is present in it quotationally, with his works; He largely determined the atmosphere of the poem with his work and, at the same time, in some ways, Akhmatova’s own work. This atmosphere is associated with numerous, closer or more distant echoes of his poetry (“allusions”). But nowhere do we find what an old-time critic could call “borrowing”: Akhmatova’s creative image remains completely different from Blok, even where she treats a topic close to him.

This is visible in the compositional (genre) structure of the “Poem without a Hero” (“Triptych”) as an artistic whole, and its first part - “Nine hundred and thirteen”. Discussing this “St. Petersburg story” in “Tails” (the second part of the poem), Akhmatova ironically pointed to the “hundred-year-old enchantress” - “a romantic poem of the early 19th century” (in Russia created by Pushkin in his southern poems) - as her genre sample. This comparison is not immediately clear: it is possible that the poetess had in mind a new form of storytelling, colored by the individual lyrical feeling of the poet and largely dramatized. However, the question of the modern type of “romantic poem” could not be resolved by mechanical imitation of art.

An attentive reader will definitely see that same connecting thread in the poems of two great contemporaries - poets of the Silver Age Alexandra Blok And Anna Akhmatova.

As a famous literary critic writes: Victor Zhirmunsky, the name of Anna Akhmatova (née Gorenko) already in the first quarter of the 20th century “was firmly connected with the name of Blok as her “teacher.” It is interesting that Blok and Akhmatova were credited with something more than just a creative roll call. They were credited with a love affair.

However, according to Akhmatova herself, her meetings with Blok were few and always took place in the presence of strangers. But despite the fleeting nature of these meetings, for the poetess they were always something very important and significant. So that all the details, even the most insignificant ones at first glance, were deeply imprinted in my memory.

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

Once, in a conversation with Blok, the poetess conveyed to him the poet’s remark Benedikt Livshitz, “that he, Blok, by his very existence prevents him from writing poetry.” Akhmatova recalls that “Blok did not laugh, but answered quite seriously: “I understand that. Leo Tolstoy is stopping me from writing.”

Literary scholars note that Anna Andreevna dedicated five poems to Alexander Blok. According to some estimates, seven, but two were without explicit dedication. The first known one is Blok’s answer to his “madrigal” - “I came to visit the poet...”.

Akhmatova visited the poet only once - “on one of the last Sundays of the thirteenth year.” She brought Blok his books - “so that he could inscribe them.” “On each one he wrote simply: “Akhmatova - Blok”... And on the third volume the poet wrote a madrigal dedicated to me: “Beauty is terrible, they will tell you...”. I never had the Spanish shawl in which I am depicted there, but at that time Blok was raving about Carmen and Spanishized me too,” the poetess writes. By the way, she never wore a red rose in her hair. . This is the kind of “madrigal” we are talking about:

“Beauty is terrible” - they will tell you, - You will throw it lazily

A Spanish shawl on the shoulders, a red rose in the hair.

“Beauty is simple” - they will tell you, - A colorful shawl is clumsily

You will cover the child, the red rose is on the floor.

But, absentmindedly listening

To all the words that sound all around,

You will think sadly and repeat to yourself:

“I’m not scary and not simple; I’m not so scary that I’m just

Kill; I’m not so simple that I don’t know how scary life is.”

The “answer” to Blok was written in early January. In the poem, against the background of a realistic picture of the Russian winter, there appears a “psychological portrait” of the poet, “also realistic, with a deep perspective of unspoken feelings” (Zhirmunsky V.M. “Theory of Literature. Poetics. Stylistics”). Spacious room, smoky afternoon, frost outside the windows... And His eyes:

I came to visit the poet. Exactly at noon. Sunday. It’s quiet in the spacious room, and there’s frost outside the windows.

And crimson sun

Above the shaggy gray smoke... Like a silent master

Looks at me clearly! He has such eyes that everyone should remember;

It’s better for me, being careful, not to look at them at all. But the conversation will be remembered, Smoky afternoon, Sunday

In a gray and tall house

At the sea gates of the Neva

The second poem was written after Blok’s death, in August 1921. More precisely, after his funeral at the Smolensk cemetery. The last three poems were written in 1944-1960.

In one of these last poems, dated 1960, Akhmatova clearly outlined her attitude towards the great poet, calling him “the tragic tenor of the era.”

It is noteworthy that with all the respect Akhmatova had for her literary teacher, she once allowed herself to speak unflatteringly about his “Beautiful Lady.” We are talking about Blok's wife - the daughter of the great chemist Lyubov Mendeleeva. To be honest, many found Lyuba’s appearance ordinary, but for Blok this did not matter. In it he saw a sublime ideal, “a holy place in the soul.” But Akhmatova later spoke about her like this: “She looked like a hippopotamus rising on its hind legs. The eyes are slits, the nose is a shoe, the cheeks are pillows”...

One can talk about Akhmatova’s feelings for Blok for a very long time. However, in conclusion, I would like to quote a fragment from the poetess’s notes: “I consider Blok not only the greatest poet of the first quarter of the twentieth century, but also a man of the era, that is, the most characteristic representative of his time...”

Akhmatova admits that the brilliant poet of the Silver Age occupied “a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation.”

http://regnum.ru/news/cultura/2021928.html

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 evaluation 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.

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 worry” 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. Gumilyov 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 pillars

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.

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