From the anthology of Evgeny Yevtushenko "Ten centuries of Russian poetry"
Few people remember that one of the most published foreign books in the Stalinist Soviet Union, and even in excellent translations, was Anatole France's The Gods Are Thirsty. On its pages, the self-devouring of Jacobinism was carried out, the brutal roar of the crowd greeted the executions of "enemies of the people", yesterday's accusers became tomorrow's victims, and their accusers - the victims of the day after tomorrow, just like in the years of our native terror.
It is impossible to imagine that any 9-year-old boy would read this book today. But in 1941, at the age of 9, having just finished the first grade, I opened with rapture and horror a carrot-colored volume called “The Gods Are Thirsty”, published by the Aca-demia publishing house, trying to understand where both of my grandfathers had disappeared and why adults avoid talking about it.
But this is not for me alone foreign book explained our own history. In 1931, a year before my birth, the novel by Anatole France, which resonated with the demonic roll call of the French and Russian revolutions, was read by 30-year-old Anna Barkova - Anna Tretya in Russian poetry after Anna Bunina (1774-1829) and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966):
I treat literature dryly,
I am not friends with the faithful VAPP
And support for the woeful spirit
In Anatole France I find.
The gods are thirsty... Let's be patient
Wait until they are fed.
Ruthlessly trampling on an olive branch
Our days are thirsty for blood.
All will pass. broken trough
We will see before us again.
Maybe by chance we will be full,
Maybe you have to go hungry.
They treated us with an empty nut.
We died for obvious nonsense.
So appreciate the wise smile
And nothing blurred vision.
I do not want to swallow indiscriminately
Food approved by the censor.
Only the great France is my support.
He will help you to wait and endure.
In 1918, after the sixth grade of the gymnasium, Anna Barkova went to work at the editorial office of the Ivanovo newspaper Rabochy Krai. She changed into a dress of a female worker - black and long. She chose a metaphor as a pseudonym - Kalika Crossing. And when asked what kind of environment would be useful for her creativity, she prophetically joked: “Katorga!”
The first and only lifetime collection of poems by Anna Barkova "Woman" was published in 1922 with a preface by A.V. Lunacharsky:
“Look: A.A. Barkova has already developed her own peculiar form - she almost never resorts to meter, she loves assonances instead of rhymes, she has completely personal music in verse - tart, deliberately rude, direct to the impression of spontaneity.
Look: it has its own content. And what! From the impulses of purely proletarian cosmism, from revolutionary violence and concentrated tragedy, from sharp, painful insight into the future to the most sincere lyrics of noble and rejected love.
Lunacharsky invited Anna Alexandrovna to work in his secretariat, even gave her a corner in her own apartment in the Kremlin. But one day, from a conversation between Lunacharsky and Bogdanov about Lenin, a phrase reached her that highlighted the inside of the revolution. Barkova preserved this phrase in verse:
Here's to the bloody loss
The goal we have achieved:
Yes, he was a great dictator,
That, perhaps, was Cromwell.
Struck by the cynicism of the corridors of power, she lost confidence in her philanthropist, and in a letter to her friend she sarcastically remarked that sometimes she wants to set fire to his Kremlin apartment. The Gepeushniks intercepted the letter and handed it over to Lunacharsky. He announced to Barkova that she could no longer work for him. But, perhaps, even earlier, she herself decided to leave the Kremlin, when the masterly glance of Stalin, who was taking power into the hands of Stalin, slipped over her and she remembered how Anatole France described Marat: “He looked around with yellow piercing eyes, as if he was the enthusiasm of the crowd of enemies of the people who were to be exposed, traitors who were to be punished.
Gradually, previously open doors began to close before her. Her poems were bitter and bitter.
Soaked in blood and bile
Our life and our affairs.
The insatiable heart of a wolf
Fate gave us fate.
Tearing with teeth, claws,
We kill mother and father
We do not throw a stone at the neighbor -
We pierce the heart with a bullet.
A! Shouldn't you think about it?
No need - well, if you please:
Give me universal joy
On a platter like bread and salt.
She laid out the road to hard labor with her own poems. Here is her calendar camp: the first five years (1934-1939) she finishes in Karlag; then - more than eight years serving in Abez, near the Arctic Circle (1948-1956); finally, seven years - in the Siberian and Mordovian camps (1958-1965).
Hard labor requested in a dashing young joke did not work in the singular. There was a lot of hard labor. Here is a description of one of them:
Since 1965, Barkova has been living in Moscow. But she won't be able to print a single line. In the editorial offices, only one thing could be advised to the eternal camper: to give up her own life, her tragic experience. She replied to this in one of her letters:
“Rise above hate? To rise above 30 years of your slavery, exile, persecution, infamy of all kinds? I can not! I am not a holy man. I am just a man. And only for this, the chariot of history for 30 years crushed me under the wheels. But it didn't completely crush. Left severely crippled, but alive.
Before her death, the hospital ward began to seem like a prison to her. One day she came down from the third floor and fell down. When they picked her up, she was eager to catch up with her party, from which she allegedly lagged behind after the bath.
Prison and camp can take away everything from a person except God and poetry - this saving and most enduring art in the world. Poetry is memorable because it thinks through the music of words. Other people's poems can be read without books in hand. You can write poetry without a pencil and paper - only in memory. Poetry is not confiscable because memory cannot be confiscated. Poetry is inseparable from the soul, like conscience. One poetic tanka remembered for a lifetime, which will fit on a child's palm, can weigh more than all the military tanks in the world. Poets can be killed, but poetry cannot be killed. Poets are indestructible, even if they are humiliated. Poets can be banished, as was the case with Dante, but their poetry is not banished. The entire execution and torture system turned out to be helpless in the face of poetry. Nikolai Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and many others, and among them Anna Barkova, are not victims, but winners. Crippled, but alive.
Old woman
A cursed cloud hung,
What will happen - hail or thunder?
And I see a strange old woman,
Ancient antiquity eyes.
And her gait is aimless,
In the hand is a wretched stick.
Sick? Maybe a hangover?
Crazy for sure.
Where are you going, grandma?
A storm will begin - do not endure.
I'm waiting for a memorial service. I quit
Yes, only there is no one to sing.
All my roads are well traveled,
And there was no happiness anywhere.
Burning in the fire, frozen,
Drowned in blood and water.
The dress is all worn out on me,
And I have nothing to wear in the coffin.
I've been wandering dead for a long time
Yes, only there is no one to sing.
Pen for human cattle.
Entered here - do not rush back.
On the bunk tags. On the shoulders - a pea jacket.
And the thieves' spasm of the meeting,
A chance meeting, somewhere out there, in the hallway.
Only an eunuch or a monk will condemn.
On the watch there is a cabin for dates,
With a cynical joke put a bed there
It is allowed to sleep with a legal husband.
The country of holy pathos and construction,
Is it possible to fall more terrible and easier -
Is it possible on this mean bunk
To corrupt forever marital passion!
Under laughter, hooting and whistles,
By permission of the evil scoundrel...
No, better, better candid shot,
So honestly piercing hearts.
Again barracks dress,
Treasury ostentatious comfort,
Again state-owned beds -
Shelter for the dying.
me even after the punishment,
As you can see, punishment awaits.
Will you understand my anguish
At unopened gates?
Flattened and pressed into the dirt
I have a dull wheel...
Would sit in a tavern sad
The alcoholic Picasso...
Oh, if only for my sins
Missing me abyss!
No funeral nonsense
Get into the jaws of the noseless!
How ours perished, like those
Who didn't come back.
Like those who are in the permafrost
They lie incorruptible.
1972
Russian longing
excerpt
No, we are not God's children
And they won't let us into heaven
Ready for the light
We have a big shed.
There are crooked bunks,
Out of tune with the board board,
And there we are waiting for a wide
Russian sadness.
Anna the Third
Who were you - Anna Barkova?
Trans-Siberian, tag, barracks ...
One skinhead said:
“Baba in the camp is not new.
We decided - only sucks:
“This one is possible and necessary. Werniak".
But this boisterous cow -
the one that brought a freight train to the camp,
so butted her foot in two words,
that one thug bent,
like a question mark.
She was not like us all.
She did not tolerate animals in uniform.
Frans read Anatole to us,
She called herself a Francis-Birge.
The mind is noble, and the daughter of a porter.
Didn't play the commissioner
at least she was with Lunacharsky on “you”.
And we were so shocked by reading,
that the prisoners gave her flowers.
She was fair, but harsh.
And she wrote verses luckily.
Penetrated the whole soul, ready
Even the Caucasian cook in the dining room
did something to her like pilaf,
called her "baba-kunak".
- 335 -Anna Aleksandrovna Barkova (16.V11.1901 - 29.1.1976) was born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in the family of a watchman of the gymnasium, in which she later studied.
Since 1918, she began to publish in the regional newspaper "Working Land", and soon in the capital's magazines.
In 1922, the first and only book of poems by Barkova "Woman" was published with a foreword by Lunacharsky.
Seven poems by Barkova were included in the collection of Yezhov and Shamurin “Russian Poetry of the 20th Century. Anthology of Russian lyrics. M., 1925
- 336 -Barkova was published in the magazines Krasnaya Nov, New world”, “Krasnaya Niva”, “Press and Revolution” ... From 1924 to 1929 she worked in Pravda.
Hard times began, and Barkova had a rebellious character: she did not know how to be silent or say “yes” where her soul screamed “no”.
In December 1934, Barkova was sentenced to 5 years in the camps. In 1939 she was released and sent into exile.
During the war years, fate brought her to Kaluga. How and for what she din lived - is unknown.
In 1947, Barkova was again arrested and sentenced to 10 years in labor camp. She served this term until January 1956 in the Komi ASSR, first in Inta, and then in Abez. Here we met and were together for a long time.
There were many outstanding people in this camp, but Anna Aleksandrovna, even against such a background, stood out for her originality and sharpness of judgment.
Small in stature, ugly, with a cunning squint, with an eternal cigarette in her mouth, in shoe covers and a large pea jacket that was not large in size ... Having no relatives “outside”, she did not receive any help from outside. But she never complained, she was courageous and did not lose her sense of humor.
Released in 1956, Barkova came to Moscow, but the capital greeted her unfriendly: despite all the efforts, she did not receive a residence permit or a roof over her head, and at the invitation of her friend, with whom she was serving time, she moved to Shterovka, Luhansk region. By this time, Anna Alexandrovna was rehabilitated.
A friend of Barkova, a dressmaker, sewed at home. One of the customers, having run into debt for the work and not wanting to pay, denounced Barkova and her friend. There were other "witnesses" who claimed at the trial that both of them "vulgarized the Soviet press and radio." So in the fifty-seventh year, for 120 rubles, Barkova and her friend received a new term - 10 years in prison each.
In 1965, Anna Aleksandrovna was rehabilitated in this case as well, sent to the Potma of the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in an invalid home.
In 1967, with the assistance of Tvardovsky and Fedin, Anna Alexandrovna returned to Moscow,
- 337 -received a room in a communal apartment on Suvorovsky Boulevard, was admitted to the Literary Fund, she was assigned a pension of 75 rubles. Life seems to be getting better
Every morning (“like going to work,” she said) she went to the House of Books on Kalininsky Prospekt and spent her entire pension on books. They filled the whole room. An old refrigerator donated by someone never turned on: it also served as a bookcase.
Anna Alexandrovna several times offered her poems to various Moscow magazines, but they were not accepted anywhere: “There is no optimism, there is no life-affirming beginning.”
Despite the fact that Anna Alexandrovna's character was not easy, prickly, she did not remain lonely: people were drawn to her - including young people.
Anna Alexandrovna's poems are very difficult to collect, and many have disappeared altogether. How many verses, written on scraps of paper in her sharp, angular hand, were twirled, scattered, carried away by the “Russian wind”!
Ivanovo-Voznesensk
Department of Public Education
To the editor of the local newspaper
Tov. A. A. Barnova
Even at the risk of hurting you with praise, since I know that praise is often fatal for young writers, I must say that I remain at my established opinion of you:
- 339 -You have rich emotional experiences and great artistic talent. You need to protect and develop all this. I fully admit the idea that you will become the best Russian poetess in all the time that has passed by Russian literature, but, of course, this is subject to an extraordinary attitude towards your own talent.
CUTE ENEMY
Enemies on the other side
My old friend.
O death come to me
From lovely hands.
I sit sad on the hill
And they have lights.
Yearning in darkness
My friend, remember!
Aren't the grasses rustling,
Are not his steps?
No he won't come back
He and I are enemies.
I won't sleep tonight...
Tomorrow, my friend
I will look at you tenderly
And I'll cock the trigger.
It's time for you to rest
Oh, how tired you are!
Kiss the bullet in the chest
And I - in the mouth.
Soaked in blood and bile
Our life and our affairs.
The insatiable heart of a wolf
Fate gave us fate.
Tearing with teeth, claws,
Negation. Statement.
Statement. Negation.
Arguing between truth and error
The stars twinkle mockingly.
Yesterday's lies become the truth
Yesterday's truth will become a lie.
Everything is crossed out, everything is written down,
And ridiculed and embellished.
In a severe fit of disgust
Finally you want silence
You want times of cessation
And your end will come.
In a dead body, ossification
It is decent and proper for the dead,
In a dead look, the same doubt
And a violent calm.
CONCLUSIVELY
Laconically, please - succinctly.
The reader has no time.
Sun, stars, trees are great
Everyone knows from a long time ago.
We all know it's very hard
Living with friends and living apart.
Everything is written on paper
Everything is felt through
Everyone knows that youth is good,
But old age is sometimes useful,
Why is the stingy moisture
Suddenly dripped caustic from the eyes?
BLACK BLUE
Twilight is cold. Yearning.
I am bitter from a sip of tea.
Thoughts of one and one,
And blue is something outside the window.
- 352 -Silence is alive and not empty.
Closed mouths of books breathe,
Only breathe. Frozen words,
Outside the window darkens blue.
The lamp is very bright strong,
Blue creeps in from the window.
Thoughts about one and one.
The blue is darkening outside the window.
I love thick gold
In the sun and in a dream I catch it,
Only the light is thick and golden
It will be filled with a dead blue.
I can't bring back the past
I can't really live.
My head is turning white
Outside the window is blue.
HEROES OF OUR TIME
Heroes of our time
Not twenty, not thirty years.
That we can't bear our burden
We are heroes, age peers,
Our steps are the same.
We are the victims and the heralds
Both allies and enemies.
We conjured together with Blok,
They did high work.
Golden kept curl
And they went to a brothel.
Breaking ties with the people
And the people went into debt.
Wearing Tolstoy blouses
Following Gorky, they wandered into tramps.
We tried whips
Old Believer Cossack regiments
And the prison gnawed rations
The prudent Bolsheviks.
- 353 -Trembling, seeing rhombuses
And crimson buttonholes,
Bombs were hidden from the German,
During interrogation they said "no".
We saw everything, so we survived,
Bits, shot, hardened,
Our homeland, evil and humiliated,
Evil daughters and sons.
RENUNCIATION
From faith or from disbelief
Renounce, right, all the same.
We will breathe with quiet hypocrisy
What to do? Apparently it's destined.
Everything for posterity
Flowed into the future river,
With the same meek treachery
With a corrupt, beggarly hand.
We are the bloodied god
Let's glorify with a slave tongue,
We will shut up our miserable mouth
Lord's thrown piece.
And we must renounce, we must
In the name of extra days, minutes.
In the name of the herds we enter the herd,
We kiss the whip on our knees.
Such malice towards the talking pack,
Contempt for yourself, for your fate.
Such tenderness and such bitterness
Thrown into the world - thrown into the abyss,
And this is called eternal sleep.
What if we return again? Useless:
You will be born in another time.
- 354 -And I won't meet you, no, I won't meet you
I will go into terrible wanderings alone.
And if this return is an eternity
I do not need her.
He lived in a closet, in a hut, without a stove,
in Judea and Ancient Greece.
“I would like a little sheep’s warmth,
I can warm myself with a sulfur match.”
He looked up at the stars,
He glorified his life in poverty.
Who ruined the life-loving Osya,
And left me on the ground?
I curse this life
But I also hate death
I don't know what I'm looking for
I don't know why I'm fighting.
And, probably, in the last court
Laugh to myself venomously
What are the seraphim nonsense
And that their harps are broken.
And what could the Lord before the Process
Weigh all denunciations and squabbles.
What do I see? Chief Imp
At the prosecutor's office.
Have mercy, God, night souls.
I don't remember whose
Forgive my night soul
And be sorry.
Around everything is quieter, and everything is deafer,
And it's getting darker.
- 355 -I will go to the land of suffocation,
In the mist of November.
Forgive my night soul
My love.
Sleep. I want to listen to your dream
Full of anxiety.
Forgive my night soul
Anna Alexandrovna Barkova (July 16, 1901, Ivanovo-Voznesensk - April 29, 1976, Moscow) - Russian poetess; She also wrote prose and journalism.
She studied at the gymnasium in Ivanovo-Voznesensk (where her father worked as a doorman); since 1918, she collaborated in the Ivanovo newspaper "Working Land" under the leadership of A.K. Voronsky. She appeared in the press with poems that were noticed and highly appreciated primarily by "left" criticism. In 1922 he moved to Moscow at the invitation of A. V. Lunacharsky, whose secretary he worked for a short time; later, due to the conflict, he leaves his secretariat and tries to get a job in various newspapers and publishing houses in Moscow.
In 1922, her only lifetime book of poems “Woman” was published (with an enthusiastic foreword by Lunacharsky), the following year, the play “Nastasya Koster” was published in a separate edition.
Early 1920s - the pinnacle of the official recognition of Barkova; her poems become widely known, they begin to talk about her as a “proletarian Akhmatova”, an expresser of “ female face» Russian revolution. Her lyrics of these years are really deeply original, she effectively expresses the rebellious (revolutionary and theomachic) aspirations of the “fighting woman”, masterfully using a rich arsenal of poetic techniques (in particular, dolnik and accent verse, firmly established by that time in Russian poetry).
However, Barkova's rebellious nature quickly brings her into deep conflict with Soviet reality. It cannot find a place for itself in official literary and near-literary structures.
At the end of 1934, she was arrested for the first time and imprisoned for five years in Karlag (1935-1939), in 1940-1947. she lives under administrative supervision in Kaluga, where in 1947 she was arrested again and this time imprisoned in a camp in Inta, where she was until 1956. During this period, the poetess wrote about herself like this
In 1956-1957 she lived in Ukraine in the village of Shterovka near the city of Lugansk.
On November 13, 1957, despite the "thaw", she was arrested for the third time (as before, on charges of anti-Soviet agitation) and imprisoned in a camp in Mordovia (1958-1965).
Since 1965 he lives in Moscow, in a communal apartment, receiving a small pension.
All these years, Anna Barkova continues to write poetry, many of which reach great artistic power and are among the most important documents of "camp literature" Soviet period
Anna Aleksandrovna Barkova died on April 29, 1976. The urn with her ashes was buried at the Moscow Nikolo-Arkhangelsk cemetery (section 1-9, columbarium 3, section 3-b).
The publication of her works began only in the 1990s; several collections of poems were published in Ivanovo and Krasnoyarsk. One of the most complete publications is the book “... Forever not the same” (M .: Sergei Dubov Fund, 2002). Barkova's diaries and prose ("Eight chapters of madness": Prose. Diaries. M .: Sergei Dubov Foundation, 2009) have also been published.
My mother, Elena Pavlovna Barkova, worked all her life at the Nauka publishing house.
My father, Yakovenko Leonid Aronovich, architect, author of the project of the Paleontological Museum in Moscow, laureate of the State Prize in 1993 (his website).
Selected facts of the biography: she graduated from school No. 625 and art school No. 3, entered the philological faculty of Moscow State University, which she graduated with honors. She studied with Nikita Ilyich Tolstoy, one of our leading Slavists and the great-grandson of Lev Nikolaevich.
The diploma work was devoted to mythological clichés in Russian epics and was defended in the department of general and comparative historical linguistics, because the department of Russian folklore was not able to accept comparative studies.
In 1990-1993 she taught at the School of the Young Philologist, taught the course “Nicholas Roerich. Spiritual search” – in fact, a course of world mythology and Buddhism, thematically organized around the name of Roerich. Then, on the basis of this course, a course was created in UNIQ.
After graduating from the philological faculty, she was twice not admitted to graduate school, and the second time - even before submitting documents (!), Despite the fact that there was a positive resolution from the Vice-Rector of Moscow State University. I am proud of such a fierce rejection.
From September 1993 to this day I have been teaching at the Institute of the History of Cultures (UNIK), I consider it one of the best universities in Moscow, not only in terms of the level of professors, but also in terms of the level of students. The main subject is world mythology.
In 1995, she actively worked in the State Duma in connection with the project on the ecological and economic region of Altai; I have government gratitude. Article 50 of the Constitution of the Altai Republic was written on the basis of my developments.
Since about 1996, she studied with S.Yu. Neklyudov, under whose guidance she defended her Ph.D. thesis in 2003.
In 1997, she painted a thangka of Shambhala, a Buddhist icon, a recreated banner of the Roerichs' Central Asian Expedition. The painting is in the possession of the Museum. N.K. Roerich (Moscow), where I worked in 1998-2009. in the scientific and educational department (while he was there).
In December 2000, daughter Lyubov was born.
In 2002, my translation of Yu.N. Roerich "Tibetan Painting", to which I wrote the appendix "Buddhist Painting ...", was awarded a diploma from ASKI " Best Books of the year".
Since 2008, I have been collecting Japanese kimonos, as well as prints, sumiyo-e painting, and applied arts. The first exhibition of the "Thousand and One Kimonos" collection was held in September 2008 at the Tretyakov Gallery (as part of the "Ways of Perfection" festival), since December 2008 I have been collaborating with the "Samurai. Art of War" project. In November 2012, we opened the first joint exhibition "Kimono. Three centuries of Japanese fashion" in Kiev. In just 4 years of exhibiting the collection, about 20 exhibitions (both as part of festivals and individual ones) took place at the sites of Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Orenburg, Omsk, Ryazan, Pyatigorsk, Sochi, Gelendzhik.
In 2011, she began developing a course on the history of Russian literature for the Institute of Contemporary Journalism. The course received an almost official title "Russian Literature from Old Nestor to Oldie" and consists of three parts: "Junk" (Old Russian and XVIII century), "Teacher" (classical Russian literature) and "Creatiff" ( silver Age, Soviet and modern). Thanks to the blatant anti-academic nature, it brings students deep knowledge.
In the spring of 2012, she received the position of professor and head of the department of cultural studies at the UNIQ Institute.
Main scientific publications:
books and brochures
articles
translations
Main institute courses:
About the portal. Mif.Ru was opened on March 2, 2005. Initially, it was created as a home page, a collection of my scientific (and creative) works, but then it grew due to scientific library and galleries. The name is spelled with one mistake (mith, not myth), since the correct address has long been occupied by someone, although it is not used.
All the advantages of the portal are due to the fact that its owner (she is also a webmaster) is a humanitarian; all technical flaws are the same :-)
To date, the subject of Mif.Ru, in addition to the actual mythology and epic, is the history of culture, separately Buddhology, as well as literature and fantasy art. Such a strange and uneven principle is explained by the fact that Mif.Ru still remains a “home page” (only a very large one), reflecting my purely subjective interests. Since autumn 2006 special place here occupy materials dedicated to.
In 2009, the portal was one of the 300 most visited Runet sites in the "Culture" category. Then the hostess went into real life, and the "Myth" slowly overgrown with moss;)
Anna Aleksandrovna Barkova- Russian poetess, prose writer, playwright.
She was the fifth (and only surviving) child in the family of a caretaker/porter at the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Gymnasium. Mother worked in a textile factory and died early. Anna studied well at the gymnasium where her father worked, from the age of five she read a lot and began to write early, from the age of 13 she earned money with lessons.
She published poems from the age of 16, in 1918-1921 she worked as a "chronicler" in the Ivanovo newspaper "Working Territory" under the direction of A.K. Voronsky. She appeared in the press with poems that were noticed and highly appreciated primarily by “leftist” criticism; sympathetic attention was paid to her poems by such aesthete intellectuals as A. Blok, V. Bryusov. Lunacharsky wrote to her: “I fully admit the idea that you will become the best Russian poetess in all the elapsed time of Russian literature”. In 1922 he moved to Moscow, entered the school led by V.Ya. Bryusov Literary and Art Institute, but soon leaves it. At the invitation of A.V. Lunacharsky, worked for him for two years as an assistant secretary, but due to a conflict (caused by her caustic comments on the secrets of the Kremlin court) she left his secretariat. In 1924, with the help of M.I. Ulyanova gets a job at Pravda, where her notes and poems sometimes appear. Then, until 1929, he worked at Selkolkhozgiz.
In 1922, her only lifetime book of poems “Woman” was published (with an enthusiastic foreword by Lunacharsky), critics write about her as the antipode of Akhmatova: “Russia split into Akhmatovs and Barkovs”. The following year, the play "Nastasya Koster" is published in a separate edition, which also receives the full approval of the Soviet authorities. The beginning of the 1920s is the pinnacle of official recognition of Barkova: her poems become widely known, they begin to talk about her as the “proletarian Akhmatova”, the exponent of the “female face” of the Russian revolution. Her lyrics of these years are really deeply original, she effectively expresses the rebellious (revolutionary and theomachic) aspirations of the “fighting woman”, masterfully using a rich arsenal of poetic techniques (in particular, dolnik and accent verse, firmly established by that time in Russian poetry).
But then everything was no longer so: naturally, they did not publish works that criticized the authorities ... Barkova's rebellious nature quickly leads her into a deep conflict with Soviet reality. It cannot find a place for itself in official literary and near-literary structures, because possesses "excessive intemperance". Long before the appearance of the “Kremlin highlander”, she wrote, for example, the following: “Sad”, “ideal”, “bedrooms”, / Everyone procrastinated to nausea. / Now we will use the sonorous rhyme "Stalin" / We will clamp our critical mouths ". Barkova was arrested on December 25, 1934 - at the beginning of the mass repressions associated with the "Kirov case" because of an accidentally thrown phrase: they killed, they say, the wrong person, and she spends four years in Karlag (1935-1939). Then she lived under supervision in different cities of Russia, survived the Great Patriotic War in Kaluga, worked as a watchman.
But in 1947 she was arrested again, she was again charged under Article 58-10. On February 16, 1948, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases announced the verdict: 10 years in prison with serving in a correctional labor camp, loss of rights for five years after serving the sentence. And this time they are imprisoned in a camp in Inta, where she remains until January 1956, when Anna Aleksandrovna was released under an amnesty decree.
After her release, she wrote a lot, but in 1957, despite the "thaw", she was arrested for the third time. On November 13, 1957, the KGB again opened a criminal case against her “on the grounds of Article 54-10” (reason: a denunciation and a satirical story about Molotov intercepted in the mail). Anna Alexandrovna was charged with the fact that she, twice brought to criminal responsibility, did not renounce her anti-Soviet convictions. For "slanderous fabrications" in his work, Barkova no longer receives Stalin's, but Khrushchev's ten and ends up in Mordovian camps. Another eight years passed in Ozerlag.
At the end of his "last term" Barkova in 1965 was sent to the village. Potma of the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to an invalid home, from where she only in 1967 received (with the assistance of A. Tvardovsky and K. Fedin) the opportunity to return to Moscow, received a room in a communal apartment on Suvorovsky Boulevard, was admitted to the Literary Fund, she was assigned a pension of 75 rubles . Every morning (“like going to work,” she said) she went to the House of Books on Kalininsky Prospekt and spent her entire pension on books. They filled the whole room. An old refrigerator donated by someone never turned on: it also served as a bookcase.
All these years, Anna Barkova continues to write poetry, many of which reach great artistic power and are among the most important documents of the “camp literature” of the Soviet period. Several times she tries to offer them for publication, each time receiving an invariable refusal with the wording: "No optimism, no life-affirming start".
An excerpt from a letter from 70-year-old Barkova: “... I indulge in the devil of irony, the demon of contradiction, the spirit of unbelief. But do not think that the sky is completely alien to me. Forgive me for the quote, but I can repeat after Heine: "I don't know where irony ends and heaven begins." And this dubious, insidiously mocking side of any phenomenon, any faith, any belief and principle is the first thing that I see and feel and against which I am wary. Rise above hate? To rise above 30 years of your slavery, exile, persecution, infamy of all kinds? I can not! I am not a holy man. I am just a man. And only for this, the chariot of history for 30 years crushed me under the wheels. But it didn't completely crush. Left severely crippled, but alive ".
Therefore, Anna Barkova could rightfully write about her generation and herself with such amazing shrillness:
“Heroes of our time / Not twenty, not thirty years old.
Those cannot bear our burden, / No!
We are heroes, the same age, / Our steps coincide.
We are both victims and heralds, / Both allies and enemies.
Blok and I conjured, / We were engaged in high labor.
They kept a golden curl / And went to a brothel.
They broke ties with the people / And went to the people as debtors.
They put on Tolstoy blouses, / Following Gorky, they wandered into tramps.
We tried whips / Old Believer Cossack regiments
And the prison nibbled on rations / From prudent Bolsheviks.
They trembled, seeing rhombuses / And crimson buttonholes,
Bombs were hidden from the Germans, / During interrogations they said "no".
We saw everything, so we survived, / Bits, shot, hardened,
Our Motherland, evil and humiliated, / Evil daughters and sons.
Anna Alexandrovna died of throat cancer on April 29, 1976 - shortly before her death, she slipped out of the hospital ward, went down from the third floor, hobbled to the exit and lost consciousness. Recovering herself, she explained to the sisters who ran up that she had lagged behind the column: she was trying to catch up. This woman, who denied God all her life, asked to be buried according to the Orthodox rite. She was buried in the church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Khamovniki, the urn with her ashes was buried at the Nikolo-Arkhangelsk cemetery. And only fourteen years after her death, her books began to appear: several collections of poems were published in Ivanovo and Krasnoyarsk. One of the most complete publications is the book “... Forever not the same” (M .: Sergei Dubov Fund, 2002). “The linguistic clarity of her poems reflects the dignity with which this woman went through a thorny path prepared for hundreds of thousands of people”. (V. Kazak).
Barkova was prone to fantastic themes all her life. Starting from the fantasy story "The Man of Steel" (1926), to the dystopia "The Liberation of Gynguania" (1957) and the story "Eight Chapters of Madness" (1957), in which the modern Mephistopheles in the guise of a retired Soviet employee fishing in a local pond, tells how he talked with the Minister of State Security of Stalin and Adolf Hitler himself, invites the author to travel through time and space, and the interlocutors went to the future, to its alternative options - the liberal-democratic and militaristic-communist worlds.
Literature:
A.I.Mikhailov // in the dictionary of Russian literature of the twentieth century. M.: OLMA-PRESS Invest, 2005 - pp. 170-173
V.D.Panov. Review of archival investigative files by A.A. Barkova // Selected. From the Gulag archive. pp.271-280.
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