1937 A terrible page in our history. I remember the names: O. Mandelstam, V. Shalamov, A. Solzhenitsyn... Dozens, thousands of names. And behind them are crippled destinies, hopeless grief, fear, despair, oblivion. But human memory is strange. She keeps the most intimate, dear things. And scary...

“White Clothes” by V. Dudintsev, “Children of Arbat” by A. Rybakov, “By Right of Memory” by A. Tvardovsky, “The Problem of Bread” by V. Podmogilny, “The Gulag Archipelago” by A. Solzhenitsyn - these and other works about the tragic 30 -40s The 20th century became the property of our generation; quite recently it turned our consciousness, our understanding of history and modernity upside down.

A. Akhmatova's poem "Requiem" is a special work in this series. The poetess was able to talentedly and vividly reflect the tragedy of the individual, family, and people. She herself went through the horrors of Stalin’s repressions: her son Lev was arrested and spent seventeen months in Stalin’s dungeons, and her husband N. Punin was also arrested; those close and dear to her, O. Mandelstam and B. Pilnyak, died; Since 1925, not a single line from Akhmatova has been published; it was as if the poet had been erased from life. These events formed the basis of the poem "Requiem".

No, and not under an alien sky,
And not under the protection of alien wings
- I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were...
I've been screaming for seventeen months,
I'm calling you home...
You are my son and my horror.
I learned how faces fall,
How fear peeks out from under your eyelids,
Like cuneiform hard pages
Suffering appears on the cheeks...

I am amazed by the depth and brightness of the author’s experiences. I forget what's in front of me work of art. I see a woman, a mother, a wife, broken by grief, who herself does not believe in the possibility of experiencing this: No, it’s not me, it’s someone else who is suffering. I couldn’t do that... But once I was “a mocker and the favorite of all my friends, a cheerful sinner from Tsarskoye Selo...” There was a beloved husband, a son, and the joy of creativity. It was ordinary human life with moments of happiness and sorrow. And now? Can those griefs compare with what is happening now?!

Pictures, one more terrible than the other, appear when reading the poem. Here, “they took you away at dawn, following you, as if on a takeaway...” But “the three hundredth, with a transmission, under the Crosses” stood, burning through the New Year’s ice with a hot tear. So she “threw herself at the feet of the executioner” and awaited execution. And when the “stone word fell,” I learned to kill my memory, my soul, and learned to live again. The motif of death and petrified suffering is heard in the poetess’s poems. But, despite her personal grief, the lyrical heroine managed to rise above the personal and absorb the grief of other mothers, wives, the tragedy of an entire generation, before which “mountains bend.” And again terrible pictures. Leningrad, dangling with an “unnecessary appendage”, “convict regiments”, “song of separation”. A " high stars with the souls of the dear ones" have now become stars of death, looking with a "hot hawk's eye."

The poetess reflects on her beloved homeland, on Russia, which innocently writhed in suffering, on her friends in misfortune, who turned gray and grew old in endless queues. She would like to remember everyone, call them by name. Even in new grief and on the eve of death, she will not forget about them. And she would like to have a monument to herself not by the sea, where she was born, not in the Tsarskoye Selo garden, where she became friends with the muse, but by that terrible wall where she stood for three hundred hours. Through the lips of the lyrical heroine, the poetess appeals to our memory, the memory of her contemporaries and future generations.

Anna Akhmatova's poem "Requiem" is a condemnation of violence against the individual, a verdict on any totalitarian regime that is based on blood, suffering, and humiliation of both an individual and an entire people. Having become a victim of such a regime, the poetess took upon herself the right and responsibility to speak on behalf of the affected multi-million people. Akhmatova’s multifaceted talent as an artist of words, her ability to conduct a dialogue with the reader, to convey to him the most intimate things, helped Akhmatova to convey her pain and thoughts suffered in misfortune. Therefore, the poem "Requiem" excites readers and makes them think about what is happening around them. This is not only a funeral lament, but also a stern warning to humanity.

The years of Stalin's repressions were a terrible period in the life of the Soviet people: millions of the best people were declared “enemies of the people, disappeared without a trace, and went to prison. One could only talk about them in a whisper; they turned away from their relatives, the “enemies of the people.” This bitter cup did not escape the family of Anna Akhmatova. Back in 1920, her first husband G. Gumilyov, a famous Russian poet and former officer in the tsarist army, was shot by the Bolsheviks. 1935 Her son Lev Rumilev and a second person were arrested for “anti-Soviet” activities; M. Punin. After Akhmatova’s letter to Stalin, they were released. However, in 1939, Lev Gulmilyov was arrested a second time. Sentence: ten years in forced labor camps. Akhmatova endured many years of despair and fear. And there were millions of such people. Therefore, the poem about the suffering experienced, which Akhmatova promised to write to one of these tired women “with blue lips,” is the voice of an entire people.

Depicting a national tragedy, Akhmatova personifies the image of the people in the images of a mother and son. A violent break between them leads to a violation of harmony - the basis of the foundations. The pain of the wounded mother cannot be compared with anything, and only through her grief can one imagine the great tragedy of that era.
The verdict... And immediately the tears will flow,
Already separated from everyone,
As if with pain the life was taken out of the heart,
As if rudely knocked over,
But she walks... She staggers... Alone.

The mother’s grief is so boundless that she looks at him as if distantly, she cannot believe that she can withstand everything. And the cry of the mother’s soul rushes over the country shrouded in fear and grief:
I've been screaming for seventeen months,
I'm calling you home
She threw herself at the feet of the executioner,
You are my son and my horror.

Life without a son’s mother loses its meaning; perhaps it would be easier to die, she would have to endure such grief. And she finds the courage to walk this way of the cross, as when the Mother of God accompanied her son in his suffering. Through this, the section of the story of Jesus Christ is organically woven into the poem:

Magdalene fought and cried,
The beloved student turned to stone,
And where Mother stood silently,
So no one dared to look.

When Jesus was crucified, even those who shouted: “Crucify him, crucify him,” did not dare to look at the Mother, because her suffering was a great disaster on earth.
The fear of losing a son makes happy, warm mother's faces frozen, sorrowful. The heroine of the poem saw with her own eyes,

How the glitz falls,
How fear peeks out from under your eyelids,
Hack cuneiform hard pages
Suffering is brought out on the necks,
Like curls of ashen and black
They are made silver...

Remembering all the dead in the epilogue of the poem, the author focuses on the image of the mother as a generalized image of all women. They are different in appearance, in character, in willpower, but they were all united by one grief, suffered the same fate. In each of them, Akhmatova finds something of her own, and for everyone - each of them:

For them I wove a wide cover
From the poor, they have overheard words,
I will remember them always and everywhere,
I won’t forget about them even in a new trouble...

A true work by Anna Akhmatova about the life of the Soviet people in the 30s of the 20th century. could be published in her homeland only in 1988, when many years had passed after the death of the author of the poem.

"Requiem", written in 1935-1940s, lived unusual life- only in the hearts and memories of people to whom the poet secretly, in a whisper, entrusted the “word” of truth about the mortal era and about the living human soul that cannot be killed .choose what you need

The theme of maternal suffering in the poem by A.A. Akhmatova’s “Requiem” occupies the most important place. This is due to the fact that the image of the mother is central in the poem. It is extremely complex. Three hypostases are intertwined in it: the mother is a lyrical heroine (an autobiographical image), the mother is a generalizing image of all mothers, and, finally, the mother is Russia.

In “Dedication” Akhmatova immediately introduces a generalizing image of the Mother. This happens due to the use of the pronoun “we” and verbs in plural. Towards the end of the poem, from the crowd of mothers awaiting the verdict, the image of one Mother stands out, who is destined to become an exponent of maternal suffering in the poem:

...And immediately tears will flow,

Already separated from everyone...

...But she walks...Wobbles...Alone...

In the “Introduction” the image of Rus' appears. Using the technique of personification, the poetess creates a feeling of Rus' as a living person, a woman who is beaten until she bleeds with boots, crushed under the tires of “black Marus”.

From the first to the tenth part the actual plot of the poem unfolds. First, the son of the lyrical heroine is taken away, and a period of expectations and ordeals begins. The mother's soul is overcome by paradoxical feelings. Part three is noteworthy in this regard:

No, it's not me, it's someone else who is suffering.

I couldn't do that, but what happened

Let the black cloth cover

And let the lanterns be taken away...

Night is a mother’s state of mind. Unconsciousness suddenly gives way to quiet crying, and then a hysterical lament:

I've been screaming for seventeen months,

I'm calling you home

I threw myself at the feet of the executioner,

You are my son and my horror. (V part)

The lungs fly for weeks.

I don’t understand what happened

How do you like going to jail, son?

The white nights looked

How they look again

With the hot eye of a hawk,

About your high cross

And they talk about death (Part VI).

In the seventh part, “The Verdict,” the mother learns about the fate prepared for her son: “And the stone word fell // On my still living chest.” The madness approaching a grief-stricken woman begins with a request for death to come (“To Death”). The mother is ready to accept death in any form, just not to see her son suffer. The apogee of madness comes in the ninth chapter:

Madness is already on the wing

Half of my soul was covered,

And drinks fiery wine

And beckons to the black valley.

Amazingly, here we no longer see tears and lamentations. Fossilism and fatigue are the feelings that gripped the lyrical heroine in this part. She seems to have gathered herself and shrunk into a ball, but in this collectedness one can see madness, detachment from the world and reality.

The highest point of the poem is the tenth part, “The Crucifixion.” Akhmatova uses here the biblical motif of the crucifixion of Christ, but looks at everything that happens through the eyes of Mary. In this image of the suffering Mary, the mother-lyrical heroine, and all the mothers of victims of terror, and Rus', humiliated, trampled, forced to watch in silence the murder of their sons, are intertwined. Mary becomes inviolable and holy at the moment she endures the same martyrdom that her son endures on the cross:

Magdalene fought and cried,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And where Mother stood silently,

So no one dared to look.

I would like to call everyone by name,

Yes, the list was taken away, and there is no place to find out.

The poet calls for erecting a monument to the great Mother in order to never forget the horror and pain that Russian women had to endure during the terrible years of terror.

Akhmatova dedicates her poem to all women and mothers who, suffering, were on the verge of exhaustion of physical and mental strength and lived only in hope. But thanks to their endless love and the torment they endured, life will continue.

Poem by A.A. Akhmatova is entitled with the name of the funeral service. But this has rather a general cultural meaning; the religious side is perceived as an appeal to the highest justice, as an expansion of the image of the lyrical heroine to the image of the Mother of God, the intercessor of all women on earth. Everyone perceived Akhmatova, according to the precise remark of I. Brodsky, as “the poet of human connections,” so this theme of intercession for millions of mothers sounded from her lips completely justifiably. The lyrical heroine of the poem feels more than just a victim or an ordinary participant Soviet history, she is ready to take on a more global mission - the mission of the Mother of God.

It is important that Akhmatova did not need to transform from a secular person into a pilgrim; this state always lived in the depths of her soul. The feeling of Orthodox conciliarity does not allow the poet to reduce Requiem to a personal drama, despite the indeed very personal nature of the work and the fact that in the poem it is not always possible to separate the heroine - mother and wife - from the author. The poem is large-scale, being an epic work. Personally experienced, autobiographical drowning in nationwide immeasurable suffering:

No, it's not me, it's someone else who is suffering.

I couldn't do that, but what happened

Let the black cloth cover

And let the lanterns be taken away...

Polyphony in the poem is equivalent to nameless all-voice. When the poet was asked: “Can you describe this?” - she agreed, she took upon herself the responsibility of saying a word for all of us, including for the “woman with blue lips” (the speaking detail in the character’s appearance seems to prepare the reader for what he will experience while listening to a description of the life of such, like her). In the “Epilogue” the author seems to give an account to everyone on whose behalf the poem was written:

For them I wove a wide cover

From the poor, they have overheard words.

I remember them always and everywhere,

I won’t forget about them even in a new trouble...

And nowhere is there a thought about myself personally, only in connection with the role voiced in the words: “...my exhausted mouth, with which a hundred million people scream...”. The right to be a representative of a “hundred-million people” can only be earned by having “friends of my two maddened years,” imagining how “the three hundredth, with the transfer, you will stand under the Crosses,” calculating that “I have been screaming for seventeen months, calling you home,” and knowing , “where I stood for three hundred hours.” All these numbers seem to document the tragedy of millions of mothers in the memory of the people.

Proof that Akhmatova turned to the theme of maternal suffering not only in connection with the arrest of her son is the existence of the motif of motherhood in her early lyrics:

The mother's share is pure torture,

I wasn't worthy of her.

The gate has dissolved into a white paradise,

Magdalene took her son.

……………………………………….

I keep wandering through dark rooms,

I'm still looking for his cradle.

In a poem from 1940 we find a direct allusion:

I'll be the city crazy

Wander through the quiet squares.

The motive of madness associated with the loss of a child in Requiem is combined with the motive of memory. The memory seems mortal to the heroine (“Verdict”):

I have a lot to do today:

We must completely kill our memory,

It is necessary for the soul to turn to stone,

We must learn to live again.

But historical memory Mother Russia cannot be destroyed. The image of the lyrical heroine, indeed, grows into the image of Russia itself, Orthodox, pious, suffering for its children. The heroine of “Requiem” is perceived by us as a deeply religious Christian, waking up in the dark to take an early place under the prison wall - “they rose as if to an early mass.” It is natural for her to say goodbye to her arrested husband in the room where “the shrine’s candle has melted,” to feel the “coldness of the icon” on her lips during the farewell kiss. The “ringing of the censer” during the prayer service for health and the memorial service “eternal memory” for those who did not return fit organically into the atmosphere of the poem.

Akhmatova’s conviction that blood cannot be justified in any way rests on the eternal Christian commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” In this context, the appearance of the image of “streltsy wives”, connecting the past with the present, does not seem strange. After all, the heroine of “Requiem” mourns all the lost sons and the grief of all mothers. The poem does not simply sound like the poet’s final indictment of the terrible atrocities of the bloody era. This time itself turns to the memory of generations, erects a monument to all those who died innocently:

And even from the still and bronze ages,

Melted snow flows like tears.

And mothers - sad witnesses of the troubles happening on earth - will forever grieve for their sons, passing the stream of time through their souls:

And let the prison dove drone in the distance,

And the ships sail quietly along the Neva.

The beginning of life promised Anna Akhmatova good fortune, brilliant future. All-Russian fame came early to her; after the release of her first book, the entire reading population of Russia started talking about her. However, life treated her monstrously cruelly. Akhmatova and her people lived through difficult times for Russia. And terrible events in the life of the country passed through the fate of the poetess. The poem “Requiem” contains the following lines:
I wish I could show you, mocker and favorite of all friends, Tsarskoye Selo to the cheerful sinner. What will happen in your life...
These words of Akhmatova are addressed to herself. She says that she would never have believed it if someone had told her before that this was possible in her life. At the end of August 1921, Nikolai Gumilev was shot on false charges of belonging to a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. And although they life paths separated by that time, he was not erased from the heart of Anna Akhmatova. There were too many things that connected them. First of all, his son, Lev Gumilyov.
A wave of repression swept across the country, and in 1935, Akhmatova’s son was arrested. He was soon released, but was arrested twice more, imprisoned and exiled. It was about this time that Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” was written.
In “Requiem” Akhmatova writes about what she herself experienced, about what she witnessed. Anna Andreevna “spent seventeen months in prison camps in Leningrad.” Her maternal grief came into contact with the grief of many thousands of mothers.
The task set by Akhmatova in “Requiem” is to create a monument to the great maternal sorrow, to all the disadvantaged and tortured:
For them I wove a wide cover
From the poor, they have overheard words...
The poem is addressed to those who stood with Akhmatova in prison lines, to “unwitting friends.” However, the poetess does not limit herself to the grief experienced by individual people; she says that the whole city is one big prison, and all of Russia is crushed by “bloody boots.”
“Requiem” is a poetic poem, but with Akhmatova’s inherent creative skill, it prosaically, in detail, step by step, tells about the terrible time for her. The authenticity of what is depicted is so great that the chilling breath of death is felt in the lines: “They took you away at dawn, She followed you, as if on a takeaway...”; “There are cold icons on your lips. Death sweat on the brow... Don’t forget!”
In “Dedication” she says that the mother’s grief is so great that before him “the mountains bend, the great river does not flow.” Women, “more lifeless than dead,” came to the walls of the prison early in the morning in the hope of finding out something about their relatives. The portrait of mothers becomes generalized in the poem - grief leveled everyone:
Having learned how faces fall, How fear peeks out from under the eyelids, How hard cuneiform pages of Suffering appear on the cheeks. How locks of ash and black suddenly become silver...
Specific images of mothers emerge in the poetess’s memory, and she would like to name everyone “by name” in her poem, “Yes, the list was taken away, and there is no place to find out.” She especially remembered the one “who was barely brought to the window,” and the other who could not stand what happened and “does not trample the ground for her dear one.” Akhmatova also speaks to that woman who is already so accustomed to coming to the walls of the Crosses that she already goes there “like home.” We remember the poetess and the old woman who “howled like a wounded animal.”
This grief is so great that it deprives a person of spiritual strength (“Madness has already covered half of the Soul with the wing of the Soul...”), and makes one doubt the possibility and necessity of such an existence. Thoughts arise about death as a way to get rid of this nightmare:
You will come anyway - why not now? I'm waiting for you - I'm very sad.
A cry of pain breaks through the poem, but mostly Akhmatova speaks quietly, and therefore especially scary. Folklore motifs are infused into Akhmatova’s speech: some lines are akin to folk lamentations. Many epithets are very close to folk ones: “hello farewell”, “hawk’s eye”.
The suffering of mothers is also expressed through the image of the mother of Christ, who endures her grief in silence.
“Requiem” is the final indictment in the case of the bloody atrocities of a terrible time. But Akhmatova does not make accusations, she turns to history, to human memory. And it is no coincidence that in the final lines of the poem she says that if they “plan to erect a monument” to her, then it must certainly be erected precisely at the walls of this prison and let the melted snow and the prison dove flow from the still and bronze eyelids like tears. let it hum in the distance, And let the ships sail quietly along the Neva.

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1. The name of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is known today as the name of the great Russian poetess, whose creative legacy is included in the world poetic fund with fourteen collections of poems. In 1962 she was nominated for Nobel Prize according to literature. In St. Petersburg there is a monument to the poetess, unveiled in Read More......
2. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” is a special work. This is a reminder of all those who have gone through unheard of trials, this is an excited confession of the tormented human soul. “Requiem” is a chronicle of the 30s of the twentieth century. Akhmatova was asked if she could describe it. The stranger asked, standing in Read More......
3. Anna Akhmatova in her poem “Requiem” set herself the task of creating a monument to the great national grief - both to those who stood with her in prison lines, and to the entire country - destitute and tortured by Stalinist repressions: For them I wove a wide Read More ... ...
4. A. A. Akhmatova began writing her poem “Requiem” in 1935, when her only son Lev Gumilev was arrested. He was soon released, but was arrested, imprisoned and exiled twice more. These were the years of Stalinist repressions. Like others Read More......
5. Each poet has his own tragedy. This is precisely what is interesting to contemporaries. The tragedy of Anna Akhmatova is that an entire generation did not know their poet. For many, Akhmatova remained the author of love poems, magical, deep, but far from anxiety and horror. modern life. Read More......
6. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is a Poet, and a Poet with capital letters. Any woman who can write poetry with enough talent can be called a poetess, but the title of Poet requires something more than just a talent for versification. A poet is someone who, through the prism of Read More......
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8. The poem “Requiem” has a real basis: for two years Akhmatova stood in prison lines. In 1935, her son Lev was arrested; in 1939, the second arrest of her son and husband took place. The poem is a tribute to those terrible years and all that have passed since Read More ......

The theme of maternal suffering in A. A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”