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

As the famous literary critic writes Victor Zhirmunsky, the name of Anna Akhmatova (nee Gorenko) already in the first quarter of the 20th century was “strongly connected with the name of Blok as her“ teacher ”. Interestingly, 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 for all the transience of these meetings for the poetess, they have always been something very important, significant. So that all the details, even, at first glance, the most insignificant, were deeply imprinted in the memory.

“In Akhmatova’s workbooks, big number excerpts of a memoir relating to Blok. All of them, like the printed "Memoirs", according to the writer's joking definition, are, in fact, written on the topic: "How I did not have an affair with Blok," writes Zhirmunsky. “All my memories of Blok,” says Akhmatova in her notes, “can fit on one page of the usual format, and among them only his phrase about Leo Tolstoy».

Once, in a conversation with Blok, the poetess conveyed to him the poet's remark Benedikt Livshits, "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 this. Leo Tolstoy prevents me from writing.

Literary critics note that Anna Andreevna dedicated five poems to Alexander Blok. According to some estimates - seven, but two were without explicit dedication. The first of the known ones 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 inscribes them." “On each he simply wrote: “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 a Spanish shawl, in which I am depicted there, but at that time Blok raved about Carmen and Spanishized me too, ”the poetess writes. By the way, she never wore a red rose in her hair. . Here is the "madrigal" we are talking about:

“Beauty is terrible” - they will tell you, - you will lazily put on

Spanish shawl on the shoulders, Red rose - in the hair.

"Beauty is simple" - they will tell you - A motley shawl clumsily

You will cover the child, Red Rose - on the floor.

But, distractedly listening

To all the words that sound around

You will think sadly and repeat to yourself:

"I'm not terrible and I'm not simple; I'm not so terrible that I just

Kill; I am not so simple, so as not to know how terrible life is.

The "answer" to Blok was written in the first days of January. In the poem, against the background of a realistic picture of the Russian winter, there is a “psychological portrait” of the poet, “also realistic, with a deep perspective of an unspoken feeling” (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. Quiet in a spacious room, And frost outside the windows

And crimson sun

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

Clearly looking at me! He has such eyes that everyone should remember;

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

In a gray and high 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 indicated her attitude towards the great poet, calling him "the tragic tenor of the era."

It is noteworthy that with all due respect to her literary teacher, Akhmatova once allowed herself to speak unflatteringly about his "Beautiful Lady". We are talking about the wife of Blok - the daughter of the great chemist Lyubov Mendeleeva. What to hide, many found Luba'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 subsequently spoke about her like this: “She looked like a hippopotamus climbing hind legs. Eyes - slits, nose - shoe, cheeks - 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 notes of the poetess: “I consider Blok not only the greatest poet of the first quarter of the twentieth century, but also a man-epoch, 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

Anna Akhmatova "after the death of A. Blok undoubtedly belongs to the first place among Russian poets." So N. Osinsky (Obolensky), an active participant in the October Revolution, later an academician, wrote in 1922 on the pages of the central Pravda (July 4, No. 145) in his extensive review of contemporary Russian Soviet poetry. And although his assessment of Akhmatova did not meet with support in the then press, it can be said that such 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. and the sincere funeral lament with which Akhmatova escorted Blok to the grave (“And Smolenskaya is now a birthday girl ...”, 1921), gave rise to a legend about 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 first .

Recently, D. E. Maksimov published “Memoirs of Al. Block" by Anna Akhmatova - a typewritten text of her memorial speech on Leningrad television on October 12, 1965, accompanied by a historical and literary commentary and her own recollections 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 the press. In Akhmatova's workbooks, a large number of excerpts of a memoir character relating to Blok have been preserved. 2 All of them, like the printed "Memoirs", according to the writer's joking definition, are, in essence, written on the topic: "On how I did not have an affair with Blok." All my memories of

Blok, - says Akhmatova in her notes, - can fit on one page of the usual format, and among them only his phrase about Leo Tolstoy is interesting.

The draft plans of the article list all the meetings of Akhmatova with the poet, they are even renumbered (nine numbers, but the list is not completed). Such clarifications are very characteristic: “7. At the Tsarskoye Selo railway station. Dined 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 Zhenya (Ivanov, - V. Zh.), Gumilyov and A. Akhmatova”. 3

However, for 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, it would seem, outwardly. insignificant, but for her in a special significant way, the words of her interlocutor. This applies, for example, to Blok's words about Leo Tolstoy mentioned above. In a conversation with Blok, Akhmatova conveyed to him the remark of the then young poet Benedikt Livshits, "that he, Blok, by his very existence prevents him from writing poetry." “Block did not laugh, but answered quite seriously: “I understand this. Leo Tolstoy is preventing me from writing.” Another time, at a literary evening where they spoke together, Akhmatova said: “Alexander Alexandrovich, I can’t read after you.” He - reproachfully - answered: "Anna Andreevna, we are not tenors." This comparison, which was imprinted in my 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 goes on to say: “Blok advised me to read ‘We are all hawkers here. I began to refuse: “When I read “I put on a tight skirt”, they laugh.” He replied: “When I read “And Drunkards with Rabbit Eyes,” they also laugh.” 4

But the most impressive was the unexpected meeting between Akhmatova and Blok on the train at a remote half-station between the geographically close Shakhmatov (the Beketov estate) and Slepnev (the Gumilev estate), rather reminiscent of 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. In early July, I went to my home, to the village of Slepnevo, through Moscow. In Moscow, I take the first mail train that comes across. I smoke in the open area. Somewhere, at some empty platform, the locomotive slows down, they throw a bag of letters. Blok suddenly appears before my astonished 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 going with?”. I manage to answer: “One”. The train is moving."

And this story is confirmed by evidence from Blok's notebooks. 5 Akhmatova continues: “Today, after 51 years, I open Blok’s Notebook and on July 9, 1914 I read: “My mother and I went to inspect the sanatorium for Podsolnechnaya. - The devil teases me. - Anna Akhmatova in the mail 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 everyone still very satisfied." This "gossip", according to the poetess, was most vigorously spread by emigre circles hostile to her, sensational and often false "memories" of her St. Petersburg contemporaries and especially contemporaries, as well as some foreign critics who fell under their influence. “However, now that she threatens to distort my poetry and even my biography, I consider it necessary to dwell on this issue.”

This gossip is of “provincial origin”, it “arose in the 1920s, after the death of Blok”; "already one publication of the archive of A. A. Blok should have stopped these rumors."

We will continue to proceed from these repeatedly repeated confessions of Akhmatova and do not consider it necessary to delve into the artist's intimate biography at all. Much more significant for the modern reader is the perception of Akhmatova's poetic personality of Blok and those creative connections between them, which N. Osinsky 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-epoch, 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-epoch, Blok got into my poem“ Triptych ”(“ The Demon Himself with Tamara’s Smile ... ”), however, this does not mean that he occupied a special place in my life. And that he occupied a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation, there is no need to prove. 7

In figurative form, this idea is embodied in one of the later poems by Akhmatova (1946), dedicated to the historical role of the poet, her contemporary:

Like a monument to the beginning of the century,

There is this man...

From the spring of 1911, Akhmatova began to publish regularly in magazines, and in 1912 her first collection of poems, Evening, was published with a preface by M. A. Kuzmin, immediately

attracted the sympathetic attention of critics and readers. Then she began to meet with Blok from time to time, appearing, accompanied by her husband, in the so-called "Poetic Academy" of Vyacheslav Ivanov ("The Society of Zealots of the Artistic Word", which met in the editorial office of "Apollo"), in the salon of Vyacheslav Ivanov on " tower”, at the Gorodetskys, at public literary meetings and speeches.

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 Blok notes the presence of "youth" - Anna Akhmatova with N. S. Gumilyov, poetess E. Yu. Kuzmina-Karavaeva (who in her last years became famous in Paris as "Mother Mary" active participation in the resistance movement and heroic death in the fascist extermination camp). “A careless and sweet evening,” Blok writes. - It was fun and easy. You get better with the young."

Soon after that, on November 7, they meet again at Vyacheslav Ivanov's, on the "tower": "...A. Akhmatova (she read poetry, already exciting me: the further the poetry, the better). 9 This evidence is very remarkable: it will find confirmation in a number of Blok's subsequent reviews of the novice poetess's poems.

Two years later, according to Akhmatova, she was at Blok's apartment on Officerskaya 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 to inscribe them. On each 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 a Spanish shawl, in which I am depicted there, but at that time Blok raved about Carmen and Spanishized me too. 10 Blok's cycle of poems "Carmen" (March 1914) is dedicated to L. A. D. (Lyubov Alexandrovna Delmas), the famous performer of the role of Carmen, whom Blok was "delirious" at that time. Akhmatova's words emphasize Blok's complete preoccupation with his feelings for Delmas, while the "madrigal" has the connotation of a secular poetic compliment. Akhmatova develops this idea further: “Of course, I never wore a red rose in my hair. It is no coincidence that this poem is written in the Spanish stanza romancero. And at our last meeting backstage at the Bolshoi Drama Theater in the spring of 1921, Blok came up and asked me: “Where is the Spanish shawl?” Those are the last words I heard from him." eleven

Blok was obviously warned about the forthcoming arrival of Akhmatova and her request to inscribe books by the poetess in advance. His "madrigal", as shown by the drafts published by V. N. Orlov, 12 he wrote the day before and did not immediately find its form. The surviving sketches represent experiences 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

You heed...

But I'm not so simple, and I'm not so complicated

To forget that ... is given.

I know a lot of people have to tell you

That you are strangely beautiful and strangely gentle.

………………………………………………..

They say all around: "You are a demon, you are beautiful."

And you, submissive to rumor,

Throw a yellow shawl lazily,

Flower on the head.

The meter of the Spanish romancero in Russian adaptation (four-foot choreas without rhymes with 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 prompted by it.

Akhmatova’s answer, written in the same “romancero meter,” is in essence not a direct answer to the theme set 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 a young poetess in Blok’s poem. At the same time, the contrast of artistic methods is very characteristic: Blok Akhmatova replaced the romantic Spanish exoticism in her own manner with a realistic picture of the Russian winter:

I came to visit the poet.

Exactly noon. Sunday.

Quiet in a spacious room

And outside the windows frost

And crimson sun

Above the shaggy blue smoke...

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

Like a silent master

Clearly looking at me!

He has eyes like

What should everyone 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 Sunday afternoon

In a gray and high house

At the sea gates of the Neva.

Akhmatova’s poem was written, according to her dating, in January 1914, apparently in the first days of 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 Rosary collection (in March 1914), but at first it was published, at the request of Blok, together 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.

Dear Anna Andreevna,

Yesterday I received your book, I just cut it open and took it to my mother. And in her house - the disease, and generally hard; this morning my mother took a book and read without stopping: she says that not only good poetry, but humanly, femininely - truly.

Thank you.

Yours, Alexander Blok. fourteen

For Blok, the assessment of the mother meant - the highest court. This was also known to Akhmatova: sometimes she later recalled it with some impatient irritation.

The dedicatory 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). It was briefly described by V. N. Orlov in the publication “New about Alexander Blok”. 15 On the title page - 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 is obviously a quotation, but it is difficult to say from where: from a poem unknown to us by Akhmatova herself or from another source, also

as yet undiscovered. The first is more probable, since the verses have the metric form of a dolnik, which is uncommon in classical poetry; quotation marks are found in Akhmatova and in autoquotations. The poem speaks of the older poet as the teacher and inspirer of the younger one.

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

Before some of the poems that completely pleased Blok or struck his attention, a large cross was put in pencil. These include: s. 13 - “We are all thugs here, harlots ...” (a poem that the poet recommended Akhmatova to read at a joint public speech); from. 24 - “We will not drink from one glass ...”; from. 39 - “Voice of memory (O. A. Glebova-Sudeikina)”; from. 46 - “I marked it with charcoal on my left side ...” (Akhmatova later singled out this work from her early experiments); from. 84 - “An excerpt from a poem” (“At that time I was visiting the earth ...”) and a few others.

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

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 (inaccurate rhymes), the fashion for which once went from himself: p. 52 - candles: brocade(in the margins "I do not like"); or with. 60- sins: stole(there is also an exclamation point). 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, among the examples of a specifically “feminine”, domestic style, which Blok later wrote with irritation about Akhmatova’s early poem “By the Sea” (see below, p. 332), should be attributed to p. 33 ("Flowers and inanimate things..."):

And the boy told me being 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 that Blok's perception of love experience, in which, judging by the dedicatory inscription on the Rosary , Akhmatova considered herself to some extent a student of the senior poet. Wed, for example:

S. 67. And she rang and sang poisonously

Your unspeakable joy.

S. 95. - Because I am tart sadness

Got him drunk.

S. 132. And you realized that poisonous

And suffocating melancholy.

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 respects the opposite of the romantic manner of Blok himself - precise, material, about revealing behind an unexpected realistic detail the psychological depth of a simple and genuine human feeling. Wed from a large number of examples:

pp. 58-59. You are my letter, dear, not clumpy,

Until the end, his friend, read.

…………………………….

In this gray and casual dress

On worn heels...

P. 61

P. 79

Slight tobacco smell.

P. 100. Candles burned only in the bedroom

Indifferent yellow fire.

P. 103. And passers-by think vaguely:

That's right, just yesterday she was a widow.

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

P. 51. I see a faded flag over customs

And yellow haze over the city.

P. 96

Fan through.

P. 108 On the trunk of a gnarled spruce

Ant Highway.

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

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

And judgmental eyes

Calm, tanned women.

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

Or in the same rural setting, the motive of social pity, prompted in the "Song" (p. 116) by folk laments about the cruel female lot:

I see the girl is barefoot

Weeping at the wattle fence.

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

There will be a stone instead of bread

I am an evil reward.

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

Dear Anna Andreevna,

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

the poem was terribly praised different people and for various reasons, they praised her so much that I stopped believing in her altogether. Secondly, I saw a lot of collections of poems by authors "known" and "unknown"; almost always - 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 you don’t need to write poetry anymore; the next stage is that I don't like poetry; the next one is that poetry in general is an idle occupation; further - you start talking about it loudly to everyone. I don't know if you have experienced such feelings; if so, then you know how much sick, extra weight 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 much that is gratifying, fresh, like the poem itself. All this - despite the fact that I will never go over your "didn't know at all", "at most seas", "most gentle, most, meek" (in "Rosary"), constant "at all"(this is not yours at all, common to all women, I will not forgive all women for this). The same goes for the “plot”: no need for a dead fiance, no need for puppets, no need for “exoticism”, no need for equations with ten unknowns; need to be even tougher, uglier, more painful. But all this is nonsense, the poem is real, and you are real. Be healthy, you need to be treated.

Yours faithfully Al. Block. 17

Blok’s remarks about the romantic “plot” of Akhmatova’s early poem are clear from the lips of the author, who himself moved from the romantic “exoticism” of his early poems “with ten unknowns” to “Iambs” and “Retribution” with their truthful and harsh social realism. The question of evaluating Akhmatova's poetic vocabulary is more difficult. This "feminine" vocabulary is intentionally intimate, homely, colloquial in nature (cf. also noted above in the Rosary, p. 33: "at all excited and quiet). It is one of the poetic means specific to the young Akhmatova, far 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 the numerous imitators of Akhmatova at that time. It is interesting to note that the title "U most sea”, which unpleasantly hurt Blok, goes back to “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”, which inspired Akhmatova to write her poem:

An old man lived with his old woman

At most blue seas...

Later, perhaps recalling Blok's criticism, Akhmatova limited herself in the collections of her poems to reprinting the first twenty-four lines of the poem - a picture of the southern sea, against which the plot unfolds, and the free life of the "seaside girl". eighteen

IN last time, the only time in print, Blok spoke about Akhmatova's poetry in the well-known polemical article "Without a deity, without inspiration." (Shop 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

Tan in 1925, when both opponents were not alive. At the beginning of his creative way Akhmatova was a member of the Workshop of Poets (1912 - 1915) and a poetic group of acmeists that emerged from it. But in the second workshop, revived by Gumilyov in 1919, she, after a divergence from her husband, no longer participated. In the new workshop, much more than in the old one, the principles of aesthetic formalism, epigone "neoclassical" poetic technique, supported by formalist criticism of one's own skill 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 classicist stylization. Classicism for her, according to the apt expression of the Genevan professor Ocouturier, was as much an ethical category as an aesthetic one, connected with the inner structure of the soul (especially in The White Flock).

Against the aesthetic formalism of the "guild of acmeists" (as Blok expresses it not quite accurately historically), his last article is directed, which is, in a certain sense, a poetic testament. In an angry and ironic form, the poet stands up for the rights of true poetry, which has never been "art for art's sake" in Russia, but was closely connected with the entire "single powerful stream" of Russian national culture, with "philosophy, religion, the public, even politics ". But, rejecting flat formalism in the theory and practice of a poetic trend deeply hostile to it, Blok refuses to include Akhmatova, about whom he speaks with his former 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" in her tired, sickly, feminine and self-absorbed manner was positively impossible to find.

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

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

Won't you tell me again

The word that conquered death

And the clue to my life? eleven

Many years ago, in 1920, when the opposites of a 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 theme - a love meeting in a restaurant - as an example of "two directions of modern lyrics" , polar opposites in their creative method. 22 In Blok's poem "In a restaurant" ("I will never forget (he was, or was not, This evening) ...") a chance meeting with an unfamiliar woman takes on the meaning of romantic extraordinaryness, uniqueness, exclusivity. This impression is also created by the image of the dawn at the beginning and at the end of the poem, which usually accompanies the appearance of the Stranger as a symbolic background, but during this period of his work - always yellow, smoky, sick; and the very image of the Stranger, transformed by romantic metaphorization: “You rushed with the movement of a frightened bird, You passed, like my dream, easy ...”; and, finally, lifted 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 the fluctuation of the poet's consciousness: "... he was or was not, This evening ..."; the indeterminacy of the localization of the experience is also characteristic: “Somewhere bows about love were singing”, “... the strings struck something”. The musical impact is created by repetitions, rhythmic-syntactic parallelism of half-verses and alliteration of initial sounds and syllables:

And the spirits sighed, eyelashes dozed off.

Silk whispered anxiously.

In the closing verses, it is emphasized by a deliberately importunate strumming of internal rhymes:

And the monisto strummed, the gypsy danced

And squealed the dawn of love.

If Blok depicts in his poem an accidental meeting in a restaurant with an unfamiliar woman as an event full of infinite, mysterious meaning for him, then Akhmatova’s poem “The music rang in the garden ...” speaks of a simple, ordinary life meeting, although it is subjective for her. -

body. This is the first date of the heroine with her beloved: she learns that he does not love her and will never love her, he is only a “true friend”. The experience of this meeting is mediated by everyday details, unusual in terms of the theme for traditional "high" poetry, but clearly remembered in all the little things: "The oysters in the ice smelt fresh and pungent of the sea." 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 soul of the heroine: "The music in the garden rang with such inexpressible grief ...". The image of the beloved is devoid of romantic idealization, its metaphorical transformation is completely absent, but on the other hand, significant psychological features for the development of the plot clearly appear in it:

How not like hugs

Only laughter in the eyes of his calm

Under the light gold of the eyelashes.

And yet, despite the fundamental difference in the creative method, these poems are in a 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 separate similar details appear ("voices of violins" ), but also by the hard-to-define general features of the time, which Akhmatova herself later managed to embody as an artist in the images of the poem "The Nine Hundred and Thirteenth Year" that had risen from the past, where Blok was given first place as the most remarkable poetic exponent of her era. It could be said that Blok awakened Akhmatova's muse, as she said about it in the dedicatory inscription to the "Rosary"; but then she went her own ways, 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.

The literature has already noted a roll call with Blok in the poem, where, for all the difference in topic, Blok suggested the general syntactic structure of the stanza (“That city, which I have loved since childhood ...”, 1929).

From Akhmatova:

But with the curiosity of a foreigner,

Captivated by every novelty,

I watched the sleds go by

And I listened to my native language.

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

No, with the constancy of the geometer

I I count every time without words

Bridges, a chapel, the sharpness of the wind,

Desert of low islands.

“The sled is racing” in Akhmatova’s poem may also be connected with 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 sang pipe.

Wed Akhmatova in the poem "Three Autumns" (1943):

AND gold trumpets distant marches

Floating in a fragrant fog...

Against this background, there are other correspondences: dancing autumn (Block) - dance(Akhmatova); rhymes (very formulaic) - birches: tears.

Akhmatova:

And they are the first to dance birch,

Throwing on a through-dress,

Shaking off in a hurry the fleeting tears

To the neighbor through the fence.

Autumn smiles through tears

…………………………………

And behind the thin lace birch.

Along with this, however, Akhmatova has other comparisons that are characteristic of her individual realistic imagery: “... the leaves fly like shreds of notebooks”; "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 successively replacing each other pictures of nature (“Three Autumns”); Blok's "Autumn Dances" ("Excite me again and again ...") has eleven stanzas that form a single stream of growing lyrical experience.

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

Singer Galina Vishnevskaya performs the Brazilian Bakhiana by composer Villa-Lobos:

It seems black, wet, night ...

This bold metaphor culminates in an almost ecstatic vision, in a manner characteristic of some later examples. love lyrics Akhmatova ("Cinque", "Midnight Poems"):

And such a mighty force

As if there is no grave ahead,

And the mysterious stairs take off.

Here is an unexpected echo with Blok, in fact, 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 rumor,

As if you brought down the angels

Seductive with her 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 acute in his lyrics of that time on its socio-political theme:

Again rich angry and happy

Again the poor are humiliated.

The last two stanzas went like this:

It would all be in vain

If there were no king,

To follow 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 handkerchief

Under a holey canopy

Smiling.

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 a manuscript in the third volume of the 1921 edition. However, according to the evidence of the notebooks, Blok read the poem at literary evenings in January 1918, apparently in its entirety, in a form that corresponded to the revolutionary moods of those years. 24

A poem by Akhmatova, similar in theme and originally titled "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 poetic manner of the early Akhmatova is especially characteristic of the second stanza with its concrete and precise poetic imagery and (in the second verse) the psychological perspective of overtaking death:

And, speeding up a smooth run,

As if in anticipation of the chase,

Through softly falling snow

Horses rush under the net.

Blok's poem is a harsh and accusatory political lubok, reminiscent of the satirical magazines of 1905. In Akhmatova's "pastel" manner, there is no element of political satire and denunciation. This “meeting” opens in her work a series of paintings of the pre-revolutionary Tsarskoe Selo created since the mid-20s, more elegiac than in the literal sense of accusatory - images of the old world, which has become a world of ghosts, historically condemned and doomed to death (cf. in particular excerpts from the unfinished "Tsarskoye Selo poem" "Russian Trianon", 1925 - 1940), 25

Apparently, Akhmatova's recollection of the "meeting" was a response to Blok's prophetic vision, but it is impossible to say this with certainty. However, it is not so significant: the features of a 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 do not always lie on the surface. It is characteristic that Blok, analyzing the poem "By the Sea," did not feel its connections with his own work, which the poetess later repeatedly spoke about. At first glance, this poem is in its title, a fabulous background. folk narrative style and poetic form is fully explained by comparison with Pushkin's 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: “But weren’t Blok’s verses in Russian Thought in 1914? 26 Something like:

I went to sea with her.

I forgot with her

(Italian<ьянские>poems)

Oh…sail

Goes ... from the supper

There is no blood in the heart

…glass beads

...and on a shawl

But I heard:

Bays cut up

All the sails ran out to 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 an impetus for her work and set her up to describe the South Sea as a backdrop for the love of a romantic girl.

Wed at Block:

I went to sea with her

I left the coast with her,

I was away with her

I forgot my loved ones with her...

Oh red sail

In the green gave!

black bugle

On a dark shawl!

Comes from a gloomy mass,

There is no blood in the heart...

Christ, tired of carrying the cross...

Adriatic love -

my last -

Sorry Sorry!

On careful reading, one can probably discover a number of similar signs of the unconscious action of creative memory, artistic "infection", which in no way should be considered from the traditional point of view as mechanical "borrowing". At one time, a similar creative exchange between the young Akhmatova and Innokenty Annensky, whom the acmeists revered as their teacher, was repeatedly noted. It is more significant to note the presence in the mature work of Akhmatova of some of the main themes of Blok's poetry, of course - in its ideological and artistic refraction, which is characteristic of her.

Such is the theme of the "lost generation", which occupies an important place in the work of the late Blok, in the verses of his third book - the generation that lived between two wars (meaning the Russo-Japanese and German) and in the "deaf" period of political reaction after the collapse of the revolution of 1905 For example, the poem "Born in Deaf Years ..." was written on September 8, 1914, in the early days of the World War. It reflects the deep crisis of Blok's public self-consciousness, which led him to the camp of the revolution after 1917:

Born in deaf years

The paths do not remember their own.

We are the children of the terrible years of Russia -

Nothing can be forgotten.

Burning years!

Is there madness in you, is there any hope?

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

There is a bloody glow in the faces.

There is dumbness - then the hum of the tocsin

Made me stop my mouth.

In the hearts that were once enthusiastic,

There is a fatal void.

And let over our deathbed

Ravens will rise with a cry, -

Those who are more worthy, God, God,

May your kingdom be seen!

About the fate of her "generation" Akhmatova speaks most fully in the poetic images of the poem "Nine hundred and thirteenth year", 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 echoes the theme of Blok's work. Akhmatova's "two wars", in contrast to Blok, are the first and second world wars.

De profundis... My generation

Little honey tasted. And so

Only the wind hums in the distance,

Only the memory of the dead sings.

Our business was not finished

Our hours were numbered

To the desired watershed,

To the top of the great mountain

Until the wild bloom

It only took a breath...

Two wars, my generation

Illuminated your terrible path.

The feeling of the nearness of the tragic end, threatening the imaginary calm and comfort of philistine existence,

In the pre-revolutionary years Blok was driven by the consciousness of imminent social catastrophe that dominated him. “One way or another, we are going through a terrible crisis,” he wrote in December 1908 in the article “Elements and Culture”. - We still do not know exactly what events to expect, but in our heart has already deviated the arrow of the seismograph. 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 we cry - you and I -

Over your miserable life!

Oh, if you knew, friends,

The cold and darkness of the days to come!

…………………………………….

Be happy with your life

Quieter than water, lower than grass! Oh, if you knew, children, you

The cold and darkness of the days to come!

They thought: we are poor, we have nothing.

And how they began to lose one after another,

So what happened every day

Memorial day -

Started making songs

About the great bounty of God

Yes, about our former wealth.

This poem, as Akhmatova later said, was written in April - May 1915, when she went to visit her husband after he was wounded at the front, in the hospital of art workers. She doubted whether to print it or not, since it was a "fragment" (at that time, short, apparently unfinished poems seemed to Akhmatova unworthy of printing). Later she published it, placing it at the beginning of The White Pack, 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 overlap of the two poets, the similarity of the theme: their feeling of the unsteadiness of the usual way of life in its imaginary well-being and the foreboding of future social and personal troubles - in Akhmatova in a more intimate, simple and personal form, in Blok - with a philosophical and historical perspective. and with a prophetic tone.

Blok's unfinished poem "Retribution" (1910 - 1921) and Akhmatova's "triptych" "A Poem without a Hero", more precisely, its first part "Nine hundred and thirteenth year. Petersburg story "(1940 - 1962).

In Blok's poem, "retribution" comprehends the hero for the sins of his ancestors, passing from generation to generation, and for the fact that he himself inherited these sins in his psychology and in his social existence - deadly 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's form and the romantic idea, we cannot judge with complete certainty either this idea as a whole, or the specific possibilities for its implementation.

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

But how could it happen

Am I the only one alive?

We recall Blok's "Dance of Death", especially the poem "How hard it is for a dead man among people to pretend to be Alive and passionate!", with its ominous ending:

In her ears - unearthly, strange ringing:

The bones clang against the bones.

Wed from Akhmatova:

I see dance courtiers bones...

Thus, a theme sounds that goes through the entire perception of the historical past in the poem: depicting the “Silver Age” in all its artistic brilliance and splendor (Chaliapin and Anna Pavlova, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Wilde and Strauss’ Salome, Dorian Gray and Knut Hamsun), Akhmatova at the same time pronounces judgment and pronounces judgment on herself and her contemporaries. The consciousness of the fatal doom of the world around her does not leave her, the feeling of the proximity of a social catastrophe, a tragic "retribution" ("Retribution is coming anyway") - in the sense of Blok's "retribution":

And always in the frosty stuffiness,

Pre-war, prodigal and formidable,

Lived some future hum,

But then it was heard more muffled,

He almost did not disturb the soul

And drowned in the snowdrifts of the Neva.

"Over the cities stands hum, in 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 October revolution(January 9, 1918) the poet again speaks of "terrible 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 rumble when he wrote The Twelve: “... during and after the end of The Twelve, for several days I physically felt, with my hearing, a big 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 rumble of the revolution. The images of "Retribution" are directly connected with the verses that complete the above passage with a solemn and formidable vision of a new historical era:

And along the embankment of the legendary

Not a calendar one was approaching -

The real Twentieth Century.

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

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 snowy 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 lasts, lasts

Petersburg devil...

You can't see the stars in the black sky

Death is around here, obviously.

But careless, spicy, shameless

Masquerade talk...

In the prose introduction to chapter two, depicting the Heroine's bedroom": “Behind the dormer window, the Arabs are playing snowballs. Blizzard. New Year's Midnight." And then the verses:

You see, there, behind the grainy blizzard

Meyerhold's blacks

Are they making a fuss again?

In chapter three, the curtain finally opens and a picture of a frosty winter night opens up with bonfires, characteristic of pre-revolutionary Petersburg, lit on the squares:

Christmas time was warmed by bonfires,

And carriages fell from 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 Field of Mars ... A high fire is burning. Beats of the bell ringing from the Savior on Blood are heard. On the field behind the snowstorm the ghost of the palace ball "(in an earlier edition: "Zimnedvorsky ball"):

Wind full of Baltic salt

Snowstorm Ball at Mars Polo

And the invisible ringing of hooves...

A suicide scene follows.

The image of a snowstorm was well known to Akhmatova's contemporaries from Blok's lyrics, starting with the poems of the second volume, combined into different time in the collections "Snow Mask" (separate edition - 1907), "Earth in the Snow" (1908), "Snowy Night" (1912). As a symbol of spontaneous passion, a whirlwind of love, frosty and burning, it unfolds in Blok's love lyrics during this period in long rows of metaphorical allegories characteristic of his romantic poetics. In the future, 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 blizzard,

Fatal, native country.

From here they are thrown into "The Twelve", a poem about the revolution as a rebellious element of the people, turning from "land-

shaft of the soul" into the artistic background of the whole 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 "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 (“on Sergievskaya street, 7”). Akhmatova's attitude to this lyrical poem by Blok was apparently ambivalent. According to D. E. Maksimov, she saw in it a lot of “star fittings”, that is, bad taste, which, in her opinion, is characteristic 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 from the "ballet scenario" conceived in 1959-1960). In one case, this is a sketch of a scene that characterizes the artistic tastes of the era: “Olga (that is, the heroine, Glebova-Sudeikina, - V. G.) in the box he is watching a piece of my ballet “The Snow Mask”..” There is also another sketch, which only partially corresponds to the printed beginning of chapter three: “The Arabs are opening the curtain and ... around the old city of St. Petersburg. New Year's, almost Andersen's blizzard. Through it - a vision (possibly from the "Snow Mask"). A string of carriages, sleighs ... ". Another discarded option that deserves attention: “Blizzard. Ghosts in a blizzard (maybe even twelve Blocks, but far away and unclear).

And here the images of Blok were present in the imagination of the poetess as "the atmosphere of the era", but they remained, as it were, behind the scenes. Blok's "star armature" is missing - the unbridled revelry of romantic metaphors. The motifs of a snowstorm behind the thick curtains of the palace hall, which are so important in the ideological and artistic sense, are preserved, but the description is reduced to a minimum of selected, concise and precise details, on which, for all their realism, a fantastic reflection of “Petersburg Hoffmanniana” (“ringing of hooves”) falls The Bronze Horseman on the Field of 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. Biographical prototypes, as you know, were: Colombina - a friend of Akhmatova, actress and dancer O. A. Glebova-Sudeikina (wife of the artist S. Yu. Sudeikin); Pierrot - a young poet, cornet Vsevolod Knyazev, who committed suicide in early 1913, unable to survive the betrayal of his "La Traviata" (as Glebova is called in the first edition of the poem); Blok served as the prototype for the Harlequin. This love triangle

Nickname as a structural basis for masquerade improvisation gained especially great popularity thanks to Blok's lyrical drama "Puppet Show" (1906), staged by V. E. Meyerhold in the theater of V. F. Komissarzhevskaya (1906 - 1907) and again, a few years later, in the Tenishevsky Hall schools on the eve of World War II (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 the images of French painting and theater of the 18th century. (K. S. Somov, A. N. Benois, N. N. Sapunov, S. Yu. Sudeikin and others). Recall that in I. Stravinsky's ballet "Petrushka", which Akhmatova mentions, the same three characters perform: Ballerina - Petrushka - Arap (at the same time, Petrushka is not in the traditional role inherent in him in the folk farce theater, but as a Russian lyrical Pierrot ).

Akhmatova herself calls her heroine "Colombina of the 1910s", 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. The memoirs on this occasion of a contemporary, actor and director A. A. Mgebrov, a student of V. E. Meyerhold, are interesting: “... Glebova-Sudeikina was, by the way, one of the most remarkable Columbine. According to all her data, she really was extremely suitable for this image: graceful, unusually fragile, refined and peculiarly beautiful ”; “All the women of our basement (artistic cabaret “Stray Dog”, - V. Zh.), by a wave of the magic wand of Dr. Dapertutto, they turned into Columbine, the young men whom the Columbine could love - into Harlequins, the enthusiasts and dreamers - into the poor and sad, Pierrot ... In the whirlwind, Columbine and Pierrot then rapturously rushed about everything. 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.

So the life and art of the "nine hundred and thirteenth year" are intricately intertwined in Akhmatova's creative recollection, but life often takes the forms suggested by the poetic tradition.

Such, for example, is the scene on the Champ de Mars, preceding the tragic finale:

He wanders under the windows after midnight,

Relentlessly directs at him

Dim beam corner lamp, -

And he waited. slim mask

On the way back from Damascus

Returned home... not alone!

Wed in a similar situation, under the lantern, the scene of the abduction of Columbine by Harlequin in the "Balaganchik":

I stood between two lamps

How they whispered, covering themselves with cloaks,

Kissed their eyes in the night.

And a silvery blizzard swirled

They have a wedding ring,

And I saw through the night - girlfriend

She smiled at his face.

Oh, then in the cab sleigh

He made my girlfriend sit down! ..

Acting as a Harlequin in a love triangle, Blok is introduced into "Year 913" as a symbolic image of the era, "the Silver Age in all its greatness and weakness" (to use Akhmatova's words), - as a "man-epoch", i.e. as spokesman for his era. The development of this image did not happen immediately in the poem. In the first edition, only key lines are given to the image of a romantic demon, uniting the extremes of good and evil, ideal ups and downs and a terrible fall:

On the wall is his thin profile.

Gabriel or Mephistopheles

Yours, beauty, paladin?

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

With the smile of an evening victim

And paler than Saint Sebastian

All embarrassed, he looks through his tears,

How roses were handed to you

as his rival rouge. 34

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

This is him in a crowded room

Sent that black rose in a glass...

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

as his rival famous.

The passage about Blok in the final version was expanded by the addition of eighteen verses, which were gradually composed:

1956: Demon himself with Tamara's smile,

But such spells lurk

In this terrible smoky face;

Flesh that almost became spirit

And an antique curl above the ear -

Everything is mysterious in the stranger.

1962: This is 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 eye

Did he meet with the Commander,

Into that cursed house that you sneaked into?

1956: And it was told by a word,

How were you in the new space,

How out of time you were, -

And in what polar crystals,

And in what radiance of amber

There, at the mouth of Leta-Neva.

The first stanza, adjoining the previous one, develops the image of a romantic hero - a "demon". The rest consists of four half-stanzas containing successive allusions to four well-known poems by Blok, two of which are from the Terrible World cycle, which, as we have seen, was of particular importance for Akhmatova's work.

The first, the clearest (In a Restaurant, 1910), does not require further explanation. The second is connected with the poem "Commander's Steps" (1910 - 1912). The third one is a paraphrase of the dedication to Andrei Bely (“Dear brother! It’s getting late…”, 1906):

As if we are in a new space,

As if in new times.

The fourth vaguely echoes the poem "The snow-covered columns again ..." (1909), dedicated to V. Shchegoleva and depicting a trip to the islands

There, at the mouth of Leta-Neva.

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

From a blessed, unfamiliar, distant country

Singing is heard rooster.

What are the sounds of bliss to a traitor?

The moments of life are numbered...

scream cockerel we only dream...

“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 feel the approach of impending doom. It is no coincidence that Colombina, as reported 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 was preceded by the entire poem "The Nine Hundred and Thirteenth Year", in which the death of a windy and dissolute lover for the first time, at least by musical means, is 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, frank and half-hidden quotations, allusions of all kinds are woven into the complex fabric of a work that recreates the historical era as the poet's modernity 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 citationally, with his works; he largely determined the atmosphere of the poem with his work, and at the same time, to some extent, 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 a critic of the old times could call "borrowing": Akhmatova's creative image remains completely unlike Blok, even where she treats a topic close to him.

This can be seen in the compositional (genre) structure of the "Poem without a Hero" ("Triptych") as an artistic whole, and its first part - "Nine hundred and thirteenth year." Discussing this "Petersburg story" in "Reshka" (the second part of the poem), Akhmatova ironically pointed to the "centenary enchantress" - "a romantic poem early XIX century" (created in Russia by Pushkin in his southern poems) - as his genre model. This comparison is not immediately clear: it is possible that the poetess had in mind a new form of narration, 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 solved by mechanical imitation of old models: it required modern solutions. In a conversation recorded by D. Khrenkov in November 1965, Akhmatova

spoke about this: “... in the view of many, the poem as a genre is very canonized. And amazing things happen to the poem. Let's remember the first Russian poem "Eugene Onegin". Let us not be embarrassed that the author called it a novel. Pushkin found a special 14-line stanza for it, a special intonation. It would seem that both the stanza and intonation, so happily found, should have taken root in Russian poetry. And “Eugene Onegin” came out and lowered the barrier behind him. Whoever tried to take advantage of Pushkin's "development" failed. Even Lermontov, not to mention. about Baratynsky. Even later Blok - in "Retribution". And only Nekrasov realized that it was necessary to look for new ways. Then "Frost, Red Nose" appeared. Blok also understood this when he heard new rhythms, new words on the streets of Petrograd. We immediately saw this in the poem "The Twelve". The same should be said about Mayakovsky's poems... I am convinced that a good poem cannot be written following the law of the genre. Rather, contrary to him. Wed also in a conversation with D. E. Maksimov in August 1962: “My poem ... is an anti-Onegin thing, and here is its advantage. After all, "Onegin" "spoiled" both Lermontov's poems and Blok's "Retribution". 35

Following Pushkin and Nekrasov, Blok (in The Twelve) and Mayakovsky, Akhmatova created her own special strophic form in A Poem without a Hero, which has already received the name Akhmatova stanza. It is based on dolnik, a new metrical form of Russian poetry since the time of Blok, characteristic of the early lyrics of the poetess: a “syncoped” meter with a variable number of syllables between stresses (1.2) and before the first stress. Dolniki in Akhmatova's early poems have a different, more "conversational" intonation than in Blok's poems. In the poem, in comparison with its lyrics, they reveal a more regular form: with three stresses in a verse, the beginning is always anapestic (two unstressed before the first stress); one of the other two stresses can be preceded by one unstressed syllable (iambic foot), while the other in the same verse is preceded by two unstressed syllables (anapaest); or both feet are anapestic, like the first. Wed:

Boots trample like hooves, (2, 2, 2)

Earrings ring like a bell, (2, 2, 1)

In pale curls, scarlet horns, (2, 2, 2)

Cursed dance drunk ... (2, 1, 2)

In such a verse, which can be called yambic-anapestic, anapaests predominate (2 or 3 in a verse), individual iambic feet against their background are perceived as "constricted". The predominance of anapaests, especially their regular presence in the pre-impact part of the verse ("anacruz"), gives the whole verse a progressive, "winged" rhythmic movement - a swift run - "forward, arms outstretched," according to Pasternak's figurative expression recorded by Akhmatova.

The structure of the stanza is also new. In lyrical dolniks, four verses are combined, as usual, by alternating female and male rhymes. Wed a poem that is especially close to the poem in theme, color and intonation (1913):

We are all thugs here, harlots,

How sad we are together!

Flowers and birds on the walls

They languish on the clouds.

In the poem, Akhmatova creates a more extensive stanza of variable volume by combining two, three, and sometimes four times parallel rows of lines into one female rhyme:

I lit the sacred candles

To make this evening glow

And with you, who did not come to me,

I meet the forty-first year.

The Lord's power is with us!

The flame drowned in the crystal,

And wine, like poison, burns.

The elasticity of this compositional form, which allows variations in the volume of the stanza while maintaining its overall structure, creates a rhythmic background that changes from stanza to stanza of a faster or slower forward movement of the verse and prevents its monotony over a long period of the poem. Strophicity is perceived as a lyrical form that supports the emotional coloring of the story. Intercepts formed by shorter verses with crossed male rhymes resemble the structure of a ballad - that is, the genre of epic in its plot and lyrical-dramatic in form.

The poem "The Nine Hundred and Thirteenth Year" achieves the same genre syncretism by other external and internal poetic means. Colored by the hero's lyrical feeling, it is dramatized at the same time. The author acts in it as a “leader” (entertainer): he “leads” the action, introduces us to his heroes, with whom he speaks like with old friends, on “you”, and shows us a series of episodes played out at the ball of ghosts on New Year's Eve and ending with a tragic scene on the Champ de Mars and the death of a cornet in love before our eyes. Thus, the poet appears before us as the author and as the hero of his poem, as a contemporary and "co-culprit" of the people of his "generation" and at the same time as a judge pronouncing a historical sentence on them ("I will execute not you, but myself").

So far, five poems have been known that Akhmatova dedicated to Blok. They belong to different periods her life and equally testify to the exceptional significance that the phenomenon of Blok had for her. "And that he occupied a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation, there is no need to prove." 36

The first poem - the answer to Blok's "madrigal" ("I came to visit the poet ...", 1914) - 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 dactylic endings, and it is conceived, in the selection of images and style, as a kind of spiritual verse expressing the people's grief about the death of the poet: 37

And Smolenskaya is now a birthday girl,

Blue incense spreads over the grass,

And the dirge song flows,

Not sad now, but bright.

And bring ruddy widows

In the cemetery of boys and girls

Look at my father's graves.

And the cemetery is a nightingale grove,

From the radiance of the sun froze.

We brought the Smolensk intercessor,

Brought to the Blessed Virgin Mary

On the hands in a silver coffin

Our sun, extinguished in flour,

Alexander, pure swan.

This is the limit of Akhmatova's poems, modern to Blok, which were known until now. The last three poems were written in 1944 - 1960, many years after his death, and contain in poetic form a reminiscence and an assessment, distant in time, claiming historical objectivity, although personal in tone. The first and third were written in 1944 - 1950, the second was added to them in 1960 and later became part of the Three Poems cycle with them (1944 - 1960).

The first: "It's time to forget this camel's din ...", originally entitled "An excerpt from a friendly message", 38 is a farewell to Takshent and to 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 Rogachev highway

Robbery whistle of young Blok...

The allusion is understandable only with close acquaintance with Blok's poetry. His poem “Autumn Will” (“I go out on a path open to my eyes ...”), written in July 1905, is marked by the author: Rogachev highway. This is one of the first poems suggested to Blok by the trends of the 1905 revolution, in which new image Russia as a motherland, beloved in its violent, "robbery" beauty:

No, I'm going on a path not called by anyone,

And let the earth be easy for me!

Rest under the roof of a tavern.

Will I sing about my luck

How I ruined my youth in hops ...

I will cry over the sadness of your fields,

I will love your space forever ...

Let us also note here a more frequent roll call of motives: Akhmatova’s poem also describes a “wide autumn Moscow".

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

Night, street, lamp, pharmacy,

A meaningless and dim light.

The end, rising above the hopelessness of personal feeling to a high consciousness of the historically enduring significance of poetry, was apparently prompted by Akhmatova's recollection of Blok's speech on February 13, 1921, at a crowded anniversary meeting in the House of Writers with a speech "On the Appointment of a Poet", 39 which begins and ends with "the cheerful name of Pushkin." With this last performance of Blok, which Akhmatova probably attended, his poem dedicated to the Pushkin House (written on February 5, 1921) is also connected - Akhmatova alludes to it in her poems:

Like a monument to the beginning of the century,

This man is standing there

When he Pushkin House,

Saying goodbye, waved his hand

And took the languor of death

Like undeserved rest.

In the second poem, the latest by the time of writing (“And fumbling in the black memory, you will find Gloves to the very elbow ...”, 1960), in the memory of the heroine, associations of the secular and artistic life of St. trips to the islands. On this background

Blok's image appears psychologically lowered - as an image. hero of his time

Blok will smile contemptuously at you -

Tragic tenor of the era.

However, this “decrease”, which may be prompted by Akhmatova’s long-standing conversation with Blok in the artistic room (“Anna Andreevna, we are not tenors”), is present to some extent in his demonic appearance in the poem “Nine hundred and thirteenth year”. "A monument to the beginning of the century" and "the tragic tenor of the era" represent for Akhmatova two dialectically interconnected aspects of the image of Blok as a "man of the era".

I would like to conditionally add two more to this list of reliable dedications, which contemporaries associated with the name of Blok without actual evidence - on the basis of biographical conjectures. In the "Rosary" opi are printed in a row, the first was written in 1912 in Tsarskoye Selo, the second - in Sleppevo in July 1913. Let us quote the initial stanza of the first, where the name of the addressee, perhaps, is suggested by the last line:

Involuntarily, the Eyes ask for mercy.

What should I do with them

When they say to me

A short, sonorous name?

The second contains a memory of the past:

Submissive to me imagination

In the image of gray eyes

In my Tver solitude

I remember you bitterly.

Beautiful hands happy prisoner,

On the left bank of the Neva

My famous contemporary

Happened as you wanted

You, who ordered me: enough,

Go kill your love!

……………………………

And if I die, who will

My poems will write to you

Who will help to become ringing

Words not yet spoken?

The last two verses closely resemble the dedicatory inscription to the Rosary. Contemporaries said that L. A. Delmas, sung by Blok in the form of Carmen, had beautiful hands. It should be noted that in Blok's copy of The Rosary, these poems are not marked with any marks.

However, mentioning the "conversations" among contemporaries, we would in no way want to return to the biographical theme left at the beginning of this article.

Block Akhmatova poet verse

In Akhmatova's workbooks, a large number of excerpts of a memoir character relating to Blok have been preserved. All of them, like the printed "Memoirs", according to the writer's joking definition, are, in essence, written on the topic: "About how I did not have an affair with Blok." All my memories of Blok, - Akhmatova says in her notes, - can fit on a page of the usual format, and among them only his phrase about Leo Tolstoy is interesting.

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

However, with all the superficial and fleeting nature of these meetings "in public", in literary salons and literary evenings, it is impossible not to notice that for Akhmatova they were always something very important that she remembered for the rest of her life, seemingly insignificant, but for her especially significant words of his interlocutor. This applies, for example, to Blok's words about L.N. Tolstoy. In a conversation with Blok, Akhmatova conveyed to him the remark of the young poet Benedikt Livshits, "that he, Blok, interferes with writing poetry by his very existence." “Block did not laugh, but answered quite seriously: “I understand this. Leo Tolstoy prevents me from writing. Another time, at a literary evening where they spoke together, Akhmatova said: "Alexander Alexandrovich, I can't read after you." He reproachfully answered - "Anna Andreevna, we are not a tenor." This comparison, long imprinted in the memory, was, perhaps, picked up many years later in a poem where Blok appears as "the tragic tenor of the era" (1960). Akhmatova goes on to say: “Blok advised me to read “We are all hawkers here.” I began to refuse: “When I read“ I put on a tight skirt ”, they laugh.” He replied: "When I read:" And drunkards with rabbit eyes "- they also laugh." (No. 4, p. 21).

But the most impressive was the unexpected meeting between Akhmatova and Blok on the train at a remote half-station between the geographically close Shakhmatov (the Beketov estate) and Slepnev (the Gumilev estate), rather reminiscent of 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. In early July, I went to my home, to the village of Slepnevo, through Moscow. Somewhere, at some empty platform, the train slows down, they throw a bag of letters. Blok suddenly appears before my astonished 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 going with?" I manage to answer: "One". The train is moving." And this story is confirmed by evidence from Blok's notebooks. Akhmatova continues: Today, after 51 years, I open Blok's Notebook and under (July 9, 1914 I read: "My mother and I went to inspect the sanatorium for Podsolnechnaya. - It teases me. - Anna Akhmatova in the mail train. "(No. 7, p. 325).

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 is still since everyone is very satisfied. (...) However, now that it threatens to distort my poems and even my biography, I consider it necessary to dwell on this issue. (No. 10, p. 325).

This gossip is of “provincial origin”, it “originated in the 20s, after the death of Blok”, “is already one publication of the archive of A.A. Blok should have stopped these rumors.” (No. 10, p. 325).

Much more significant for the modern reader is the perception of Akhmatova's poetic personality of Blok and the creative connections between them, which will be discussed below. Akhmatova wrote in her notes: “I consider Blok not only the greatest poet of the first quarter of the 20th century (originally it was: “one of the greatest”, - V. Zhirmunsky - No. 10, p. 325), but also a man-epoch, i.e. . the most characteristic representative of his time ... ”A few more fragmentary pages containing Anna Akhmatova’s memoirs about Blok join the rich memoir literature about Blok. These memoirs reproduce 3-4 interesting statements by Blok, a number of fleeting impressions from meetings with him and some curious details, but on the whole they are far from striking in the abundance of material. The information contained in them matters not so much in itself, but to those from whom it comes. Anna Akhmatova chose in her short memoirs the rigid, "Pushkin" principle of pure photographic storytelling. Having told about her meetings with Blok, she did not share her thoughts about him, kept silent about her deep attitude towards him and his poetry, and kept her assessments of his works to herself.

In fact, A. Akhmatova and her older contemporary A. Blok knew each other much less than many people think. “Anna Andreevna told me,” writes D. Maksimov, that she rarely met Blok, in her whole life - no more than 10 times and did not talk to him for a long time. These meetings took place in public, sometimes with joint performances. Anna Andreevna Blok never visited. And she went to him only 1 time - at the end of December 1913, when he lived on Officerskaya. And even then she hurried to her place in Tsarskoe Selo and did not stay long, "forty minutes." (No. 11, p. 188). Akhmatova resolutely denied the legend of the affair with Blok, and it was no coincidence that when reading her memoirs to D. Maksimov, she jokingly called them like this: “About how I didn’t have an affair with Blok.” “As a man-epoch, Blok got into my poem“ Triptych ”(The Demon himself with Tamara’s smile ...), however, it does not follow from this that he occupied some special place in my life. And that he occupied a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation, there is no need to prove. (No. 11, p. 189). The original note is in the Manuscript Department of the Leningrad Public Library).

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

However, I would like to look at the facts described above from the other side. V.M. Zhirmunsky writes: “In her memoirs, Akhmatova devoted a lot of space to the refutation of ... the legend. (which has already been mentioned above). Further, Zhirmunsky concludes: “We will continue to proceed from these repeatedly repeated confessions of A.A. Akhmatova and do not consider it necessary to delve into the intimate biography of the artist at all. (No. 10, p. 264).

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

This “pleasure of recognition” hides “an inner gesture of an acceptingly open, trusting and trusting attitude towards the text and through it to the author” (No. 13, p. 89), the conviction that the text begins or continues in the life of the author (or in general as then connected with it), and, therefore, his life can help in a deeper understanding of the text. Interest in the author's biography is akin to an attempt to expand the "external" text of the work and check the correct understanding of the text through an appeal to its creator.

It should be noted that in her statements about Blok (outside of poetic texts) quite numerous (especially if we mean oral ones) Akhmatova was easy, if not to dispel the "legend", then to explain and divert many essential details. In reality, according to the researcher Toporov, in these statements there was a clear tendency to root the idea of ​​a “legend”, of the existence of this “legend.”… rather, on the contrary, it increases the number of mysteries..., forcing the reader to solve more and more complex and abstract tasks, imperceptibly switching the reader from the biographical plane to the poetic" (No. 13, p. 10) that the latter consist mainly of citing Blok's mentions of meetings with Akhmatova (in his Notebooks), firstly, that they omit mentions of a number of other meetings of poets (which can in no way be explained by a loss of memory), secondly secondly, that in the meetings attributed to Akhmatova with Blok, everything that goes beyond the framework of the strongly emphasized factographic nature is omitted, and thirdly. In other words, in the memoirs of Akhmatov's Blok, “there is not a reception surprising in its courage: she forces Blok to talk about these meetings, cedes to him the right and primacy to remember. (. "From you came to me anxiety and the ability to write poetry (from the dedication to Blok not a copy of the Rosary"), the right and primacy to remember ("Recently I read and reread Blok's notebooks. They seemed to return many days and events to me. I feel: I need to write about this. These will be autobiographical notes "(No. 4, p. 242). Compare: "... and again the wooden St. Isaac's Bridge, flaming, floats to the mouth of the Neva, and my companion and I look with horror at this unprecedented spectacle, and this day has a date - July 11, 1916, noted by Blok. "(No. 4, p. 48) with Blok's entry:" July 11. In the evening I'm with my mother ... At night, the palace bridge burns out on the seashore. Everything is very difficult. "( No. 7, p. 314. The next morning, Blok was already going to the Izmailovsky Regiment, preparing to leave for the army.) In this way, a kind of two-pronged text is built, consisting of 2 voices: one of them belongs directly to Blok, the other - also to Blok, but indirectly - Blok's mouth in the mouth of Akhmatova.

So far, five poems have been known that Akhmatova dedicated to Blok. They belong to different periods of her life and equally testify to the exceptional significance that the phenomenon of Blok had for her. And that he occupied a special place in the life of the entire pre-revolutionary generation, there is no need to prove.

The first poem - the answer 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 about the death of the poet:

And Smolenskaya is now a birthday girl,

Blue incense spreads over the grass,

And the dirge song flows,

Not sad now, but bright.

And bring ruddy widows

In the cemetery of boys and girls

Look at my father's graves.

And the cemetery is a nightingale grove,

From the radiance of the sun froze.

We brought the Smolensk intercessor,

Brought to the Holy Mother of God

On the hands in a silver coffin

Our sun, extinguished in flour,

Alexander, pure swan.

This is the limit of Akhmatova's poems, modern to Blok, which were known until now. The last three poems were written in 1944-1960, many years after his death, and contain in poetic form a reminiscence and an assessment, distant in time, claiming historical objectivity, although personal in tone. the first and third were also written in 1944-1960, the second was added to them in 1960 and later became part of the Three Poems cycle with them (1944-1960).

The first: "It's time to forget this camel's noise...", originally titled "An excerpt from a friendly message", is a farewell to Tashkent and to 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 glorified the beauty of his native land:

And remembers Rogachev highway

Robbery whistle of young Blok.

The allusion is understandable only with close acquaintance with Blok's poetry. His poem "Autumn Will" ("I go out on a path open to my eyes ..."), written in July 1905. , tagged by the author: Rogachevskoe shosse.

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".

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, in which it is dedicated to the Pushkin House (written on February 5, 1921), Akhmatova alludes to it in her poems.

Unsolved mystery. Death of Alexander Blok Svechenovskaya Inna Valerievna

Chapter 14 Blok and Akhmatova

Blok and Akhmatova

The summer of 1914 justified all Blok's misgivings. The war has begun. This sad event found the poet in his beloved Shakhmatovo, where he was engaged in the restructuring of the estate. But, oddly enough, the news of Russia's entry into hostilities against Germany did not plunge Blok into depression, as one might expect. Rather, it was an unfortunate absurdity for him. Precisely absurdity, not tragedy. Blok did not believe in real enmity between the two countries. Perhaps because he himself loved Germany very much. Her literature, philosophy, universities, her whole way of life. He sincerely did not understand why two peoples who have 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. His affair with Delmas Lyuba experienced painfully. So much so that they even parted and now the "Gishpan princess" could easily come to Blok's house. Lyubov Dmitrievna was tormented. Hasn't she got excited? It was the first time that such a clear threat hung over her marriage. What will happen now? Has their relationship with Blok ended? 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 at the front. However, her patriotic mood, unlike her husband, was shared by almost the entire country. Moreover, a certain unity and even inspiration reigned everywhere. Women went as nurses to hospitals, men rushed into the trenches. Blok's good friend, Mikhail Tereshchenko, completely ceased to engage in literary activity, believing that when the guns rumble, the muses can be 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 annoyed by this. He feels a suffocation in the air. And although he shouts on the phone to Gippius that “war is first of all fun,” Lyuba has already left and now sends correspondence from there, which are printed under the heading “From letters of a sister of mercy.” And it is absolutely surprising that Blok sent fresh fashion magazines to her in the army. “Why does she need fashion there?” Verigina was surprised. To which the poet’s mother replied: “Sasha knows that she loves it, she will be entertained 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? Gumilyov was sure of the latter. Of course, this could be explained by the illusion of a 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 admit inexorable facts. Moreover, the relations between Gumilyov and Akhmatova were very difficult. Indeed, they gave each other the freedom characteristic of that time, and tried to be above fleeting romances on the one hand and on 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 of physical intimacy. Perhaps it was jealousy, carefully concealed and driven as deep as possible, that gave rise to Gumilyov's complex attitude towards Blok. Once he confessed to Irina Odoevtseva: “Just don’t think that I want to somehow belittle Blok. I fully understand what a great talent this is. Possibly the best poet of our century. He, and not, as most people think, Sologub. No one since the time of Lermontov "sounds of heaven" did not sound so clearly.

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

He, too, was a rebel at twenty. I wanted to equal the Creator in my pride. He also wanted to bewitch not only the world, but also himself. And he, too, was always dissatisfied with his 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 betray her on earth. He does not know how to love himself. And this is even more tragic than not knowing how to love at all.

And yet, Gumilyov and Blok had much more in common than different. They were both knights of their era. Therefore, Akhmatova eventually responded to Gumilyov's love and ... carried a feeling for Blok through her whole life.

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

And yet ... There are suspicions that the great poetess was a little cunning. If you conduct a little investigation, then it is quite possible to prove that the novel, albeit not quite ordinary, still existed. In those years, Blok's poems really "lost their heads"; dizziness was not only massive, but also bisexual. The madness of "block service" and "bloc circle" shocked the older contemporaries. 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 - in the sun of a dahlia,

They burn, but with the cold of unsuffered tears.

In order to act out the mystery of serving as a Block, Akhmatova did not need an ordinary romance with Blok. Vice versa. It is necessary that such a novel just does not exist. “There is a cherished trait in the proximity of people, / it cannot be crossed by love and passion.” Akhmatov in relations with people to step beyond this "cherished" - forbidden! - the devil was drawn ...

After all, it was not for nothing that Blok's mother wrote a letter, which we will quote 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 an anxious and deep, and therefore tender woman ... 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 one of her poems to you, but I remember only the first two lines:

Glory to you, hopeless pain, -

He died - the gray-eyed king.

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

But how could Blok's mother find out about Akhmatova? After all, they didn't know each other! And here it is very opportune to recall Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova-Williams. This lady not only knew Anna Akhmatova closely, in her own way she loved this young woman, unlike any other, but also often visited Blok. She was engaged in publishing activities, and quite trusting relations were established between the poet and Ariadna Vladimirovna. Moreover, she possessed one undoubted advantage - Mrs. Tyrkova knew how to keep her mouth shut, which unusually bribed Alexander Alexandrovich. Anna Akhmatova was convinced of this on own experience. The following episode was recorded in autobiographical sketches: “Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova ... Blok told her something about me, and when I called him, he said on the phone (verbatim): “You are 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 have said about them.”

But gossip is one thing, and a heartfelt conversation in the family circle is quite another ... Ariadna Vladimirovna, one of the many sympathies of Anya Gorenko, 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 heart-to-heart conversations with Blok's mother and told her about Anna Akhmatova, and perhaps even gave her unusual poems that this unlike other girl wrote. In any case, her story about Blok's attitude to Akhmatova almost verbatim coincides with the version of A. A. Kublitskaya-Piottukh: “Of the poetesses who read their poems in the Tower, Anna Akhmatova is most vividly remembered. Thin, tall, slender, with a proud turn of her small head, wrapped in a flowery shawl, Akhmatova looked like a gitan ... dark hair ... at the back of her head caught by a high Spanish comb ... It was impossible to pass by her without admiring her. At literary evenings, young people raged when Akhmatova appeared on the stage. She did it well, skillfully, with an awareness of her feminine charm, with the majestic confidence of an artist who knows her own worth. And before Blok, Anna Akhmatova was shy. Not as a poet, as a woman. In the Tower, her poems were drunk like strong wine. But her… eyes were looking for Blok. And he stayed away. He did not approach her, did not look at her, hardly even listened. I sat in the next, semi-dark room.

In fact, both Blok's relations with Akhmatova and Akhmatova's relations with Blok do not fit into any scheme at all. And even more so in such a simple and banal.

In addition, there are inaccuracies in the statements of the respected lady. Blok listened rather attentively to Akhmatova's speeches. And he even wrote about it in his diary: “Anna Akhmatova read poetry, already exciting me; poems the further the better.

The first time Akhmatova saw Blok in the spring of 1911, in the editorial office of Apollo, however, she refused the proposal of the magazine staff to introduce her to the poet. And this can be understood: Lermontov also did not want to get acquainted with Pushkin, although he easily visited the house of his relatives. The second meeting between Blok and Akhmatova took place in the fall. But this time, too, Akhmatova did not show an ardent desire to attract the attention of a famous contemporary. Yes, she 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 Gumilyov with her tail and tried not to contradict him in anything. Then Blok, accustomed to the fact that young poetesses, and there were a myriad of them in the 10s, did nothing but try to get to know him, he himself approached Gumilyov and asked him to introduce him to Anna Andreevna ...

Gumilyov's wife quickly got used to the brilliant St. Petersburg and pretty soon, and most importantly very successfully, learned to hide both shyness and "provincial ignorance." Akhmatova developed several rules that helped her, after some time, become that famous Akhmatova, whom many later imitated. She learned to “keep silent in an important dispute”, hiding behind, like a fan, a smile, almost “La Gioconda”, about which she would later say: “I have only one smile: / So, the movement is barely visible lips” - it led contemporaries into indescribable embarrassment . At the same time, she also chose a couple of spectacular static poses (“in a pose she had chosen a long time ago”). In one of the hardened poses, Akhmatova was immortalized, independently of each other, but by an amusing 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). The same poetic photo, as her most successful portrait of the thirteenth year, Akhmatova will paste into “A Poem without a Hero”: “And as if remembering something, / Turning half turn/ In a quiet voice I say ... "

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, conditionally, from the stage. But when communicating face to face, they seemed slightly funny, worse than that - provincial. M. N. Ostroumova, not without surprise, recalls the 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 feet touched her head. Immediately afterwards, she read her poem "The Snake". A. A. did similar tricks in Stray Dog and The Tower, delighting fans and annoying detractors. L. S. Ilyashenko-Pankratova, the performer of the role of the Stranger in V. Meyerhold’s Blok performance, recalls: “I met Akhmatova only in The Stray Dog ... Dispersing, Akhmatova showed her unusual circus act. She sat down 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 the "Dog" "immediately after that" the same "Snake" was read:

A beautiful woman lives in my room

Slow black snake;

Like me, just as lazy

And cold like me.

Blok did not like to visit The Stray Dog, because he considered it to be something like "a gambling house in Paris a hundred years ago." But Lyubov Dmitrievna used to drop by, so that the poet knew perfectly well what was happening in the basement from the words of his wife and formed his own opinion. And about the snake tricks of the prima donna of the "dog" cabaret, and even more so.

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 had begun in the fall of 1911, “Oh, no! I don’t want…”, addressed, apparently, to N. N. Skvortsova. In a letter to his mother (March 1911), saying that Skvortsova had come to him from Moscow, Blok describes the twenty-year-old pretender to his heart as follows: “In every detail, even in a suit, she looks exactly like Tilda and says everything as she should speak 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 squeamish maxim is directly connected with Akhmatova's serpentine exercises. Blok, like her, was a master at taking multiple shots on one plate. I do not think that she was so naive as to read such messages as specifically addressed to her, personally, addressed. 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 feminine instinct, which is why, apparently, she was hushed up in his presence.

However, for some embarrassment in the presence of Blok in the autumn 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 suddenly opened up. And ... 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 is one thing to have a young, reckless, bohemian-style Parisian romance with an almost impoverished artist, and quite another to have a connection with a venerable writer living next door in Tsarskoye Selo. An affair with a man who had a stable 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 “a carefree, street and drunken life”, but also Lyubov Dmitrievna’s old lover. By the way, Chulkov even boasted that Blok appreciated him for being the only one who could talk to him “not in an intellectual way,” that is, in a rudely manly way, “over a red glass in a tavern.” In addition, Chulkov was the first to draw attention to Anna Gumilev not as a promising poetess, but as an interesting stranger. This happened, judging by the climatic details, in the early autumn of 1910, shortly after Gumilyov's departure to Africa. “One day at the opening of the World of Art exhibition,” Chulkov recalled with pleasure, “I noticed a tall, slender gray-eyed woman, surrounded by Apollo employees, who was standing in front of Sudeikin’s paintings. I was introduced… A few days later there was an evening of 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 Petersburg evening fog, she looked like a big bird that was used to flying high, and now drags a wounded wing along the ground ... I suggested that this young lady take her to the station: we were on the way ... We were late and sat down at the station at a table, waiting for the next 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'm having 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, arguing: a) that she had never seen him drunk, had never been to a cafe or restaurant with him; b) that she did not write poetry to him (what is the point of writing Russian poetry to a foreigner who does not understand Russian); c) that the relationship was ceremonial and addressing "you" exclusive; d) that although poems about amorous conversations “across the table” with a certain dissolute gentleman were recorded in Paris, in the early summer, for some reason she imagined Tsarskoye Selo autumn elms. Let's add: "stinging flour instead of serene happiness" - a motif from the repertoire of Blok - Chulkov. Yes, Chulkov was not alone in Paris, but with his wife, but Nadezhda Grigorievna looked at her husband's permanent love affairs with calm indulgence: they say, there's nothing to be done - this is the Chulkov family.

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

Leave, and I was like everyone else

And the worst was

I bathed in someone else's dew,

And hid in someone else's oats,

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 that 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 torn at the seam. She didn't notice it. But Blok noticed it. It is unlikely that Blok would have allowed himself to notice an impermissibly bold cut if he had not heard about the Parisian adventures of Madame Gumilyova, who “mowed” like a timid girl. It is possible that the same male curiosity explains his proposal by Akhmatova to read the rather risky (for the first performance in a large female audience) at the evening at the Bestuzhev courses “We are all thugs here, harlots ...” In her autobiographical sketches, Akhmatova made a note to this poem: they say , these are the verses of a capricious and bored girl, and not at all a “harlot” who has matured in the brothel. Did Alexander Alexandrovich guess about this? He probably didn't think about it at all. Akhmatova "began to excite" Blok, but not at all in the way that femme fatale or lovely ladies his dreams, but in the way that an artist is excited by a model that does not yield to him - a material whose resistance he is not able to overcome. In addition, by the autumn of 1913, and, perhaps, on that same evening at the Bestuzhev Courses, Blok sensed with the instinct of a hunter: something new appeared in the pretty provincial girl - the "ardor of freedom and separation" that was unusual for her before.

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

For the "Evening", which more than paid off all her female losses, she eventually forgave her husband. Moreover, in relations with men, she valued high friendship more than physical fidelity. However, soon it was their friendship that Gumilyov betrayed. Without hope of reciprocity, he fell in love with a terminally ill cousin, showered her with romantic flowers, and even ... being a married man, proposed to her, assuring her that her one word, and his marriage would be terminated. Gumilyov was madly in love with Mashenka Kuzmina-Karavaeva. And for a long time he could not recover 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 the 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 weighty bunch of women's love letters from a pile of manuscripts ...

Either these almost defiantly abandoned letters, or the birth of Gumilyov's illegitimate son that autumn, or maybe all taken together gave Akhmatova a huge creative impulse. And together with him, they internally freed her from the feeling of guilt before Kolya that embarrassed her soul. And for the fact that without passionate love she went down the aisle, and that innocence for him, the only one, did not keep ... And from marriage ties, and from recklessly given oaths. Then all this will return, but then ... after all ... In the meantime, she again, as in her wild childhood, "was impudent, angry and cheerful."

In a word, Akhmatova felt good in the autumn of 1913, because the worse she was, the better her poetry became. But Blok felt bad, and the worse it was for him, the worse, deader and drier, his songs became. He even stopped writing them. And by the autumn of 1913, he had already decided: if he signs, he will 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. Suitable for radioactivation living, hence the rough the dead cannot be enlightened».

And then something happened between them. What both did not really like and wanted to talk about. And even more so to write. Judge for yourself ... Akhmatova willingly told how Blok saw her off after the evening at the Bestuzhev courses. But about what happened after - was silent. But ... Based on the character of Blok, 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". At the first publication in this poem there was one quatrain left from the original, specifically gypsy version: “I loved you, master, I love you ... We are gypsies - working people! ..” the type of woman depicted here, quite secular and only playing like a gypsy:

Like a boy, she shuffled; bow

Weighs ... "Goodbye ..."

And the token clinked on the bracelet

(Something reminiscent)...

Oh those bracelets! They were truly unique! All Petersburg knew them. The famous bracelets that Gumilyov gave Akhmatova. They were all connected with "memories". After all, at every quarrel with Gumilyov, she returned them to him, and he was frightened: “Don’t give me the bracelets ...” Therefore, it’s easy to guess who came to Blok that rainy evening.

Indeed, it was then that Anna Andreevna was invited "to visit the poet." Blok, as a rule, meticulously noted who, when and for what purpose appeared in his extremely closed 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 questioned about the details, said (and later wrote) that she remembered only one statement that was curious 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 preventing me from writing."

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

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

L. K. Chukovskaya once admitted to Akhmatova that she had not understood before, before her stories about not having an affair with Blok, the poem “Beauty is terrible ...” A. A. consoled her: “But I still don’t understand. And nobody understands. One thing is clear, that it is written like this, - she made a pushing motion with her palms, - "do not touch me."

Indeed, Alexander Alexandrovich at that time perceived Akhmatova as beautiful woman, which at the same time attracting did not attract. But he stubbornly did not see a poet in her. Akhmatov was decidedly not happy with this. She knew then that after death, they stand almost next to each other. About herself, this amazing woman knew everything in advance, but Blok did not allow such a thought. For him, Anna Andreevna was one of many. So-so ... It will do for the stage and even be a success - with the current yellow, vulgar fashion for perfumed gloves and hats with feathers. He could not, as it seemed to Akhmatova then, to see something more in her. Of course, she could try to "hook" him like a woman, but ...

At this time, to achieve and seduce Alexander Alexandrovich was already becoming quite vulgar. There were too many strangers, hobbies for an hour, so that Akhmatova decided to join their ranks. Another thing is to be among the few chosen ones who were allowed to communicate! Of course, with such plans (to communicate, to be almost equal), the unexpected appearance of the shadow of Count Tolstoy became not only discouraging for Akhmatova, but also appeared like a bolt from the blue. However, Blok did not recognize such a replicated image in the lady who appeared to him. A really capricious, not without vulgarity snake, which worked to the guitan, remained somewhere down there, at the corner of Moyka and Pryazhka. And in front of him stood a completely different woman. It was not for nothing that the lines later appeared: “beauty is simple - they will tell you.” And if there was something not Petersburg, something southern, then again, too much in a different version. Like distant echoes of straight, tall, long-nosed Black Sea Greek women. And Blok did not understand such women in principle and in essence. They didn't make his heart race. But why does he care so much about this lady's visit? Why does he feel so tense and at the same time constrained? And most importantly, is he afraid to look her straight in the eyes, as if he can see something that is by no means 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 scenario for novice poets. It consisted in the fact that Alexander Alexandrovich, who did not know how and did not like to express himself in a conversation, first offered the visitors something to read, then an offer to tell about himself followed.

With Akhmatova, he also decided to lose this tried-and-true variation. “Tell me about yourself…” It is interesting that Akhmatova could tell something about herself that Blok would not know? She thought, the silence was no longer just painful, but simply indecent. Then one 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 like a child. But… Loving the sea in general, Blok never saw the Black Sea. And Akhmatova… The sea is her theme. That's where she could turn around and lay everything out. And about my wild, pagan Chersonesos childhood, and about seaside youth, and about a stone a verst from the shore, to which I swam as an eight-year-old tomboy, and I probably didn’t forget to turn in about six Vereshchagin destroyers - after all, this episode rhymed so amazingly beautifully with his, Blok, memories of French destroyers. One destroyer and four destroyers 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 furious threw the sea

To the imperishable stars from my chest,

And they did not count the dead people ...

In a word, despite the shadow of the great elder, the conversation took place. And Akhmatova returned home clearly in an enthusiastic mood. She even firmly decided to try to write a poem.

A few days later, Akhmatova received an invaluable New Year's gift. Blok, not through a messenger, but personally brought her the signed books, but, realizing that the time was late, handed over the package to the janitor and at the same time incorrectly gave the apartment number. But this was not an unexpected joy, but the fact that Alexander Alexandrovich asked for permission: “Let me ask you to allow (exactly like this:“ Allow me! ”To be placed in the first issue of this magazine (we are talking about Meyerhold's magazine“ 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 supposed to come. In all likelihood, it was he who brought Anna Andreevna the spring issues of Russian Thought with Blok's sea verses.

Nedobrovo, of course, did not notice anything, but Akhmatova could not but hear a direct echo of the conversation, seemingly completely forgotten by Blok, about the sea and ships, about their, one for two, childish passion for all this: “Do you remember? In our sleepy bay / The green water fell, / When the warships entered in a wake column. And then, most importantly, a redeeming and insane portrait in the style of “don’t touch me”, and everything else in the same vein: “How little we need in this life / We, the children, both you and me!”

Akhmatova enjoyed her vacation in Kyiv, and she did not have any bad feelings. Vice versa! There was a feeling of fullness of spiritual strength, trust in life and faith that life itself would choose a 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, hot heat ... and about the fact that in a few weeks horse artillery will go past the house in Darnitsa at night with torches, no one has yet I thought… In early July I went to my home, to Slepnevo. The way through Moscow… I smoke in an open area. Somewhere at some empty platform, the locomotive slows down - they throw a bag with letters. Blok appears before my astonished 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 going with?” I manage to answer: “One”. And I’m moving on… Today, 51 years later, I open Blok’s “Notebook”, which was presented to me by V. M. Zhirmunsky, and on July 9, 1914, I read: “My mother and I went to inspect the sanatorium on Podsolnechnaya. - The devil teases me. Anna Akhmatova on the mail train. (The station was called Podsolnechnaya).

In 1914, Akhmatova, of course, could not even imagine that Alexander Alexandrovich, seeing her in the vestibule of a mail train, would suspect a conspiracy " evil spirits”, However, she herself perceived the meeting at the Podsolnechnaya station as a 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 utter aloud, wrote on the "Rosary" presented to him: "You gave me anxiety and the ability to write poetry" ... While I was driving, by themselves, as if someone really dictated, verses were formed, no, not verses, but a prayer. Prayer is like before God!

And in the Kiev temple of the Wisdom of God,

Crouching to the salt, I swore to you

What will be mine your way.

Wherever she wandered.

That the golden angels heard

And in a white coffin Yaroslav.

Like doves, simple words curl

And now at the solar heads.

And if I weaken, I dream of an icon

And 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 as she wants ... Tomorrow! But tomorrow there was WAR.

We are a hundred years old, and this

Then it happened at one o'clock:

The short summer is ending

The body of the plowed plains smoked.

Suddenly a quiet road

Crying flew, ringing silver ...

Covering my face, I begged God

Before the first battle, kill me.

From memory, as a load from now on, superfluous,

The shadows of songs and passions have disappeared.

She - deserted - ordered the Almighty

Become a terrible book of storm news.

As a load from now on, the superfluous moved away and the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe sea poem. Gumilyov, having shown miracles of ingenuity (in the early days of the war, those released by the medical board were still rejected), he volunteered and exactly where he wanted: as a private in the Life Guards Lancers Regiment. And in August 1914, Akhmatova and Gumilyov dined at the Tsarskoselsky railway 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, went around the families of those mobilized to help them, Akhmatova was shocked. After a quick snack, Blok said goodbye. Following his straight look, in any crowd a lonely and separate figure, Gumilyov said: “Is he really going to be sent to the front? After all, this is the same as roasting nightingales.

Having equipped her husband on a campaign, not yet to the front line, but to Novgorod, where the uhlans 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." She was in a hurry, anticipating 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 "instant". 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 print of the poem "By the Sea" was sent to Blok ... Well, then what happened happened. Having received a semi-positive review of the poem "By the Sea" in the spring of 1916 in the form of a letter to a 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, conceived for so long(“Who would have thought that I was conceived for so long?”), God gave a long memory. A long memory and late wisdom: the power is not in what has passed, but in what has passed, yes it was. So it was? “I went to sea with her, I left the shore with her”?

Or was it all a dream? Or was it not? The answer to this question may lie in Block's notebooks. At one time, they amazed many fans. I will refer to the essay by B. Alpers (first published in “Searching for a New Scene” - M. Art, 1985): “People who have long-term relationships with Blok were probably hurt by what they read about themselves in his intimate notes. There is nothing offensive in these records. But they exude such deep indifference, such icy cold, as if a poet writes about insects. In comparison with many humiliated and offended, Akhmatova could feel both chosen and marked. But she, as it is clear from Chukovskaya's notes, still got hurt, 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, careful, / I don’t even look at them ... ”Don’t look ... so as not to see what? However, she was not careful, she looked in: “You are the first who stood at the source / With a dead and dry smile, / How we were tormented by an empty gaze, / Your gaze is heavy - a midnight clerk.” Frightened, perhaps, by what she accidentally saw, Akhmatova herself hid the terrible verses from herself - she did not publish during the life of Blok.

But Blok, too, must have suspected something was wrong. Two days after Akhmatova's visit, more than strange verses were written:

That's why the invisible look is terrible,

That he can't be caught;

You hear, but you can't understand

Whose eyes follow you.

Not self-interest - not love, not revenge;

So - a game, like a game for children:

And in the assembly of every people

These secret detectives exist.

You yourself sometimes do not understand

Why does it happen sometimes

That you yourself will come to people,

And you will leave people - not yourself.

Perhaps only after a while did he notice and realize that every time he encounters this woman, he behaves like ... a teenager. He asks tactless questions, and in general loses his vaunted self-control and indifference. But in fact, 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 farther they go, the better. But ... What then flashed between them that haunted neither him nor her? It’s not for nothing that Akhmatova writes in “A Poem Without a Hero”:

On the wall is his solid profile.

Gabriel or Mephistopheles

Yours, beauty, paladin?

The demon himself with Tamara's smile,

But such spells lurk

In this terrible smoky face:

Flesh that almost became spirit

And an antique curl above the ear -

Everything is mysterious in the alien.

This is him in a crowded room

I sent that black rose in a glass,

Or was it all a dream?

With a dead heart and dead eyes...

In her Notebooks there is not a hint, but a direct indication. In a passage that was quoted more than once or five, but without one phrase. This phrase, the key to the meaning of the cipher, was just stopped by the publishers. Not out of negligence, but apparently because the message contained in it was not amenable to commenting. Here is this fragment and this phrase: “I am like Ptishoz with his nunnery, into which his paradise, his paper factory has turned. Khersones, where I have been returning all my life, is a forbidden zone". This is the Chersonese 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 inexpressible, at least, until the time they 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 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 indefinite orbit... In our century, the possibility of such incarnations is especially tempting and easy, because there is a certain "astral fashion" for trains, on gloves smelling of perfume, on empty charms... You want to meet me the way "strangers" meet "poets". You are not a "stranger", that is, I demand of you that you be more of a "stranger", just as I demand of myself that I be not only a "poet". Dear child, why are you calling me to the astral jungle, to the "starry abyss" - to kiss your scented gloves ... "

Here, 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, perhaps, could lead to a strong deep feeling, so unlike what they had before and after, that they both preferred not to cross the line ... And yet ... Contrary to popular belief, Block's last entry says that that he just saw a remarkable talent in Akhmatova and made correspondingly higher demands on her.

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

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

From the book Beautiful Features author Pugacheva Claudia Vasilievna

Akhmatova Arriving at the grave of Akhmatova in Komarov, I recalled my meetings with this unique person. The last time I called her was at D30743 in Moscow, when I arrived from England and brought souvenirs from the chairman of the Pushkin Committee. Souvenirs have been sent

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

Akhmatova and the government Viktor Toporov writes in a 2003 article: Stalin wrote poetry.<…>But he also loved other people's poetry. And as for prose... And as for dramaturgy... Stalin knew Russian, Soviet literature, created by him in a flask, with the precision and meticulousness of an academician of Russian literature.

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

Chapter eight. Tashkent. Akhmatova Almost from the Zaleteiskaya shadow At the hour when the worlds are collapsing, Accept this gift of spring In response to the best gifts, So that, over the seasons, Indestructible and true, Soul high freedom, Which is called friendship, - I smiled as meekly, As

From the book Boris Pasternak author Bykov Dmitry Lvovich

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

From the book The Shining of Unfading Stars the author Razzakov Fedor

CHAPTER XLVI In the Mirrors: Akhmatova 1 We decided to consider Pasternak's relationship with Akhmatova right now, when the conversation turned to Pasternak's last years. It was here that differences emerged that were still obscured in the thirties and even forties; this is where it all came out

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

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

From the book I am a miscarriage of Stanislavsky author Ranevskaya Faina Georgievna

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

From the book Unforgettable Encounters author Voronel Nina Abramovna

Chapter Eight TASHKENT. AKHMATOVA Almost from the Zaleteiskaya shadow At the hour when the worlds are collapsing, Accept this gift of spring In response to the best gifts, So that, over the seasons, Indestructible and true, The soul's high freedom, Which is called friendship, - I smiled as meekly, As thirty

From the book Boris Pasternak. Lifetimes author Ivanova Natalya Borisovna

ANNA AKHMATOVA I didn't know Akhmatova very well. I saw her once, but she fully and artistically revealed herself even in this single meeting. I don’t remember who brought me to her or put in a word, but I was allowed to cross the threshold of the gloomy Petersburg

From the book, Pushkin aimed at the Tsar. Tsar, poet and Natalie author Petrakov Nikolai Yakovlevich

Akhmatova. Reflection “... She was rather closed off and was not so ... wide open, as Pasternak was. It was the complete opposite." I recalled - and compared - a person who was well (and separately) familiar with them, Lev Gornung, who is also the author of wonderful

From the book As I know, as I remember, as I can author Lugovskaya Tatyana Alexandrovna

Chapter 14 Anna Akhmatova, Tatyana Larina and Melnik's Daughter When thinking about any poet, one imagines more or less the personality of oneself... Only Pushkin does not have it. What can you grasp from his writings about himself? Go catch his character as a person! N. V. Gogol Many biographers

From the book 50 Greatest Women [Collector's Edition] author Vulf Vitaly Yakovlevich

AKHMATOVA Akhmatova fell ill with scarlet fever, and the train of ladies near her house disappeared. I had scarlet fever as a child. I was not afraid of scarlet fever, and because of this scarlet fever I stopped being afraid of Akhmatova. Every evening at the appointed hour, when it was getting dark, Nadya Mandelstam would shout from above:

From the book Faina Ranevskaya. Women are smarter author Shlyakhov Andrey Levonovich

Anna Akhmatova NORTHERN STAR ... She was called the "Northern Star", although she was born on the Black Sea. She lived a long and very eventful life, in which there were wars, revolutions, losses and very little simple happiness. All of Russia knew her, but there were times when even her name was

From the book of Scheherazade. A thousand and one memories author Kozlovskaya Galina Longinovna

Chapter Eight Tashkent. Akhmatova Almost from the Zaleteiskaya shadow At the hour when the worlds are collapsing, Accept this gift of spring In response to the best gifts, So that, over the seasons, Indestructible and true, Soul high freedom, Which is called friendship, - I smiled as meekly, As

From the author's book

Anna Akhmatova It was raining, the sky was covered with clouds, when Zhenya came and said: “Akhmatova has arrived in Tashkent, and now we will go to her.” Zhenya - Evgenia Vladimirovna Pasternak, an artist, the first wife of Boris Leonidovich, was my friend of youth. I loved her

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