Meaning of the title Requiem. Analysis of the poem "Requiem

Analysis of the poem "Requiem"

Poem - this is a lyrical diary, and an excited eyewitness account of the era, and a work of great artistic power, deep in content. Over the years, a person becomes wiser, perceives the past more sharply, observes the present with pain. So Akhmatova's poetry became deeper over the years, I would say - sharper, more vulnerable. The poetess thought a lot about the ways of her generation, and the result of her thoughts is the Requiem. In a small poem, one can, and indeed should, peer into every line, experience every poetic image.

First of all, what does the title of the poem mean?

The very word "requiem" (in Akhmatova's notebooks - Latin Requiem) means "departure mass" - a Catholic service for the dead, as well as a mourning piece of music. The Latin name of the poem, as well as the fact that in the 1930s - 1940s. Akhmatova was seriously engaged in the study of the life and work of Mozart, in particular his "Requiem "a", suggests the connection between Akhmatova's work and the musical form of the requiem. By the way, Mozart's "Requiem" e" has 12 parts, and Akhmatova's poem has the same number ( 10 chapters + Dedication and Epilogue).

« Epigraph" And "Instead of a Preface"- original semantic and musical keys of the work. " epigraph" to the poem lines became (from the poem of 1961 “So it was not in vain that we were in trouble together ...”), which, in essence, is a recognition of complicity in all the disasters of our native country. Akhmatova honestly admits that her whole life was closely connected with the fate of her native country, even in the most terrible periods:

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.

These lines were written much later than the poem itself. They are dated 1961. Already retrospectively, recalling the events of past years, Anna Andreevna is re-aware of those phenomena that drew a line in people's lives, separating a normal, happy life and a terrible inhuman reality.

The poem "Requiem" is short enough, but what a strong effect it has on the reader! It is impossible to read this work indifferently, the grief and pain of a person with whom terrible events have occurred make one accurately imagine the whole tragedy of the situation.

"Instead of a Preface"(1957), picking up the theme " my people", takes us to " Then”- the prison line of Leningrad in the 30s. Akhmatov's "Requiem", like Mozart's, was written "on order"; but in the role of "customer" - "a hundred millionth people." Lyrical and epic the poem is merged together: talking about her grief, Akhmatova speaks on behalf of millions of "nameless"; behind her author's "I" is the "we" of all those whose only creativity was life itself.

The poem "Requiem" consists of several parts. Each part carries its own emotional and semantic load.

"Dedication" continues the theme of prose "Instead of a Preface". But the scale of the described events changes:

Mountains bend before this grief,

The great river does not flow

But the prison gates are strong,

And behind them "convict holes"

And deadly sadness.

The first four verses of the poem, as it were, outline the coordinates of time and space. Time is no more, it has stopped (“the great river does not flow”);

“The wind is blowing fresh” and “the sunset is basking” - “for someone”, but no longer for us. The rhyme "mountains - burrows" forms a spatial vertical: "involuntary girlfriends" found themselves between heaven ("mountains") and the underworld ("burrows" where they torture their relatives and friends), in earthly hell.

"Dedication" is a description of the feelings and experiences of people who spend all their time in prison lines. The poetess speaks of "mortal anguish", of hopelessness, of the absence of even the slightest hope of changing the current situation. The whole life of people now depended on the sentence that would be pronounced on a loved one. This sentence forever separates the convict's family from normal people. Akhmatova finds amazing figurative means to convey her state and others:

For someone the fresh wind blows,

For someone, the sunset basks -

We don't know, we're the same everywhere

We hear only hateful rattle of keys

Yes, the steps are heavy soldiers.

There are still echoes of Pushkin-Decembrist motifs, a call in common with a clearly bookish tradition. It's more of a poetic declaration of grief than grief itself. But a few more lines - and we are immersed in the immediate sensation of grief - an elusive, all-encompassing element. This grief, dissolved in everyday life, in everyday life. And from the boring prosaic nature of grief, the consciousness of the ineradicability and incurability of this misfortune, which has covered life with a dense veil, grows:

We got up as if for an early mass,

We walked through the wild capital,

We met there, the dead lifeless,

The sun is lower and the Neva is foggy,

And hope still sings in the distance.

“Fresh wind”, “sunset” - all this is a kind of personification of happiness, freedom, which are no longer available to those languishing in prison lines and those behind bars:

The verdict ... And immediately the tears will gush,

Already separated from everyone

As if life is taken out of the heart with pain,

As if rudely overturned,

But it goes... It staggers... Alone.

Where are the unwitting girlfriends now

My two crazy years?

What does it seem to them in the Siberian blizzard,

What does it seem to them in the lunar circle?

To them I send my farewell greetings.

Only after the heroine gives the "involuntary girlfriends" of her "rabid years" "farewell greetings", begins "Introduction" in a requiem poem. The extreme expressiveness of images, the hopelessness of pain, harsh and gloomy colors amaze with stinginess and restraint. Everything is very specific and at the same time as generalized as possible: it is addressed to everyone and everyone, to the country, its people and to the lonely suffering, to the human individuality. The gloomy, cruel picture that appears before the reader's mind evokes associations with the Apocalypse - both in terms of the scale of universal suffering, and in terms of the feeling of the “last times” that have come, after which either death or the Last Judgment is possible:

It was when I smiled

Only the dead, I am glad for peace.

And dangled with an unnecessary pendant

Near the prisons of their Leningrad.

And when, mad with torment,

There were already condemned regiments,

And a short parting song

The locomotive horns sang.

The death stars were above us.

And innocent Rus' writhed

Under the bloody boots

And under the tires of "black marus".

How sad that a talented person had to face all the hardships of a monstrous totalitarian regime. The great country of Russia allowed such a mockery of itself, why? All lines of Akhmatova's work contain this question. And when reading the poem, it becomes harder and harder to think about the tragic fate of innocent people.

The motif of the "wild capital" and "rabid years" "Dedications" in "Introduction" embodied in an image of great poetic power and precision.

Russia is crushed, destroyed. The poetess from the bottom of her heart pities her native country, which is completely defenseless, mourns for her. How do you deal with what happened? What words to find? Something terrible can happen in a person's soul, and there is no escape from it.

In Akhmatov's "Requiem" there is a constant shift of plans: from the general - to the particular and concrete, from the horizon of many, all - to the horizon of one. This achieves a striking effect: both the wide and narrow grasp of eerie reality complement each other, interpenetrate, combine. And, as it were, at all levels of reality - one incessant nightmare. So, after the initial part "Intros"(“It was when I smiled…”), majestic, looking at the scene from some superstellar cosmic height (from which Leningrad is visible - a kind of giant swinging pendulum;

moving "shelves of convicts"; all of Rus', writhing under the boots of the executioners), is given, almost a chamber, family scene. But this makes the picture no less heartbreaking - with the utmost concreteness, grounding, fullness of signs of everyday life, psychological details:

They took you away at dawn

Behind you, as if on a takeaway, I walked,

Children were crying in the dark room,

At the goddess, the candle swam.

Icons on your lips are cold,

Death sweat on the brow... Don't forget! -

I will be like archery wives,

Howl under the Kremlin towers.

In these lines fit a huge human grief. Walked "like a takeaway" - this is a reminder of the funeral. The coffin is taken out of the house, followed by close relatives. Crying children, a swollen candle - all these details are a kind of addition to the painted picture.

Intertwining historical associations and their artistic counterparts (“Khovanshchina” by Mussorgsky, Surikov’s painting “Morning of the Streltsy Execution”, A. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter 1”) are quite natural here: from the late 20s to the late 30s, Stalin was flattered by the comparison of his tyrannical rule from the time of Peter the Great, who eradicated barbarism by barbaric means. The cruelest, merciless suppression of the opposition to Peter (the Streltsy rebellion) was transparently associated with the initial stage of Stalinist repressions: in 1935 (this year the "Entry" into the poem dates from) the first, "Kirov" flow into the Gulag began; revelry of the Yezhov meat grinder 1937 - 1938 was yet to come... Akhmatova commented on this part of "Requiem": after the first arrest of her husband and son in 1935, she went to Moscow; through L. Seifullina, she contacted Stalin's secretary Poskrebyshev, who explained that in order for the letter to fall into the hands of Stalin himself, you need to be under the Kutafya tower of the Kremlin for about 10 hours, and then he will hand over the letter himself. Therefore, Akhmatova compared herself with the "shooter's wives."

1938, which, along with new waves of violent fury of the soulless State, brought the repeated, this time irreversible arrest of Akhmatova's husband and son, is experienced by the poet in different colors and emotions. A lullaby sounds, and it is not clear who and to whom can sing it - either a mother to an arrested son, or a descending Angel to a woman distraught with hopeless grief, or a devastated house for a month ... The point of view "from outside" imperceptibly enters the soul of Akhmatov's lyrical heroines; in her lips the lullaby is transformed into a prayer, no - even into a request for someone's prayer. There is a distinct feeling of a split in the consciousness of the heroine, a splitting of the lyrical "I" of Akhmatova: one "I" vigilantly and soberly observes what is happening in the world and in the soul; the other - indulges in madness, despair, hallucinations uncontrolled from the inside. The lullaby itself is like some kind of delirium:

The quiet Don flows quietly,

The yellow moon enters the house,

He enters with a cap on one side.

Sees the yellow moon shadow.

This woman is sick

This woman is alone.

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

And - a sharp break in the rhythm, which becomes nervous, choking in a hysterical patter, interrupted along with a spasm of breathing and clouding of consciousness. The suffering of the poetess reached its climax, as a result, she practically does not notice anything around. All life has become like an endless nightmare. And that is why the lines are born:

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

I couldn't do that, but what happened

Let black cloth cover

And let them carry the lanterns ...

The theme of the duality of the heroine develops, as it were, in several directions. Then she sees herself in a serene past and compares with her present:

I would show you, mocker

And the favorite of all friends,

Tsarskoye Selo merry sinner,

What will happen to your life

Like a three hundredth, with a transmission,

Under the Crosses you will stand

And with my hot tear

New Year's ice to burn.

The transformation of the events of terror and human suffering into an aesthetic phenomenon, into a work of art, produced unexpected and contradictory results. And in this respect, the work of Akhmatova is no exception. In Akhmatov's "Requiem" the usual correlation of things shifts, phantasmagoric combinations of images, bizarre chains of associations, obsessive and frightening ideas, as if getting out of the control of consciousness, are born:

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.

Everything is messed up,

And I can't make out

Now who's the beast, who's the man

And how long to wait for the execution.

And only lush flowers,

And the ringing of the censer, and traces

Somewhere to nowhere

And looks straight into my eyes

And threatened with imminent death

Huge star.

Hope flickers, even though stanza after stanza, that is, year after year, the image of great sacrifice is repeated. The appearance of religious figurativeness is internally prepared not only by the mention of salutary appeals to prayer, but also by the whole atmosphere of the suffering of the mother, who gives her son to inevitable, inevitable death. The suffering of the mother is associated with the state of the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary; the sufferings of the son - with the torments of Christ crucified on the cross:

Light weeks fly by.

What happened, I don't understand

How do you, son, go to jail

White nights looked

How do they look again?

With a hawk's hot eye,

About your high cross

And they talk about death.

Maybe there are two lives: a real one - with queues at the prison window with a transmission, to the reception of officials, with mute sobs in solitude, and a fictional one - where everyone is alive and free in thoughts and memory?

And the stone word fell

On my still living chest.

Nothing, because I was ready

I'll deal with it somehow.

The announced verdict and the gloomy, mournful forebodings associated with it conflict with the natural world, the surrounding life: the “stone word” of the verdict falls on the “still living chest”.

Parting with her son, pain and anxiety for him dry up the mother's heart.

It is impossible even to imagine the whole tragedy of a person with whom such terrible trials happened. It would seem that everything has a limit. And that is why you need to “kill” your memory so that it does not interfere, does not press on the chest with a heavy stone:

I have a lot to do today:

We must kill the memory to the end,

It is necessary that the soul turned to stone,

We must learn to live again.

But not that ... The hot rustle of summer,

Like a holiday outside my window.

I've been anticipating this for a long time.

Bright day and empty house.

All the actions taken by the heroine are unnatural, sick in nature: killing memory, petrifying the soul, trying to “learn to live again” (as if after death or a serious illness, i.e. after “having once learned to live”).

Everything experienced by Akhmatova takes away from her the most natural human desire - the desire to live. Now the meaning that supports a person in the most difficult periods of life has already been lost. And so the poetess addresses "Towards Death", calls her, hopes not her imminent arrival. Death appears as liberation from suffering.

You'll still come - why not now?

I'm waiting for you - it's very difficult for me.

I turned off the light and opened the door

You, so simple and wonderful.

Take any form for this<…>

I don't care now. The Yenisei swirls

The polar star is shining.

And the blue sparkle of beloved eyes

The last horror covers.

However, death does not come, but madness comes. Man cannot bear what has befallen him. And madness turns out to be salvation, now you can no longer think about the reality, so cruel and inhuman:

Already madness wing

Soul covered half

And drink fiery wine

And beckons to the black valley.

And I realized that he

I must give up the victory

Listening to your

Already as if someone else's delirium.

And won't let anything

I take it with me

(No matter how you ask him

And how not to bother with a prayer ...)

Numerous variations of similar motifs, characteristic of the Requiem, are reminiscent of musical leitmotifs. IN "Dedication" And " Introduction» those main motives and images that will develop further in the poem are outlined.

In Akhmatova's notebooks there are words that characterize the special music of this work: "... a mourning Requiem, the only accompaniment of which can only be Silence and sharp distant strikes of a funeral bell." But the Silence of the poem is filled with sounds: the hateful rattle of the keys, the parting song of locomotive whistles, the crying of children, the female howl, the rumble of black marus ("marusi", "raven", "funnel" - this is what the people called cars for transporting arrested people), the squelching of the door and the howling of the old woman... Through these "hellish" sounds are barely audible, but still audible - the voice of hope, the cooing of a dove, the splashing of water, the ringing of censers, the hot rustle of summer, the words of last consolations. From the underworld (“prison hard labor holes”) - “ not a sound- and how many / Innocent lives end there ... " Such an abundance of sounds only enhances the tragic Silence, which explodes only once - in the chapter "Crucifixion":

The choir of angels glorified the great hour,

And the heavens went up in flames.

He said to his father: “Almost left me!”

And mothers: "Oh, don't cry for me..."

Here we are not talking about the upcoming resurrection from the dead, the ascension to heaven and other miracles of the gospel history. The tragedy is experienced in purely human, earthly categories - suffering, hopelessness, despair. And the words spoken by Christ on the eve of his human death are quite earthly. Those who turn to God - reproach, bitter lamentation about their loneliness, abandonment, helplessness. The words spoken to the mother are simple words of consolation, pity, a call for reassurance, in view of the irreparable, irreversible nature of what happened. God the Son is left alone with his human destiny and death; what he said

Divine parents - God the Father and the Mother of God - are hopeless and doomed. At this moment of his destiny, Jesus is excluded from the context of the Divine historical process: he suffers and perishes before the eyes of his father and mother, and his soul “sorrows to death”.

The second quatrain is dedicated to experiencing the tragedy of the crucifixion from the outside.

Jesus is already dead. At the foot of the Crucifixion are three: Mary Magdalene (beloved woman or loving), beloved disciple - John and the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ. Just as in the first quatrain the focus is on the “triangle” - “Holy Family” (understood unconventionally): God the Father, the Mother of God and the Son of Man, in the second quatrain there is a “triangle”: Beloved, beloved Disciple and loving Mother. In the second "triangle", as in the first, there is no harmony.

"Crucifixion"- the semantic and emotional center of the work; for the Mother of Jesus, with whom the lyrical heroine Akhmatova identifies herself, as well as for her son, the “great hour” has come:

Magdalene fought and sobbed,

The beloved student turned to stone,

And to where silently Mother stood,

So no one dared to look.

The grief of the beloved is expressive, visual - this is the hysteria of the inconsolable grief of a woman. The grief of a male intellectual is static, silent (which is no less understandable and eloquent). As for the grief of the Mother, it is generally impossible to say anything about it. The scale of her suffering is incomparable to either women's or men's: it is boundless and inexpressible grief; her loss is irreparable, because this is her only son and because this son is God, the only Savior for all time.

Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple, as it were, embody those stages of the Cross that the Mother has already passed: Magdalene is a rebellious suffering, when the lyrical heroine “howled under the Kremlin towers” and “threw at the executioner’s feet”, John is the quiet stupor of a person trying to “kill the memory ”, distraught with grief and calling for death.

The terrible ice star that accompanied the heroine disappears in Chapter X - “heaven melted into fire". The silence of the Mother, on whom "so no one dared to look", but also for all, "millions of those killed cheaply, / Who trodden a path in the void." This is her duty now.

"Crucifixion" in "Requiem" - the universal verdict to the inhuman System, dooming the mother to immeasurable and inconsolable suffering, and her only beloved son to non-existence. In the Christian tradition, the crucifixion of Christ is the way of humanity to salvation, to resurrection through death. This is the prospect of overcoming earthly passions for the sake of eternal life. For Akhmatova, the crucifixion for the Son and Mother is hopeless, how endless the Great Terror, how innumerable the line of victims and the prison queue of their wives, sisters, mothers ... "Requiem" does not give an exit, does not offer an answer. Doesn't even open up hope that it will end.

Followed by "Crucifixion" in "Requiem" "Epilogue":

I learned how faces fall,

How fear peeks out from under the eyelids,

Like cuneiform hard pages

Suffering brings out on the cheeks,

Like curls of ashen and black

Suddenly become silver

The smile withers on the lips of the submissive,

And fear trembles in a dry laugh.

The heroine bifurcates between herself, lonely, abandoned, unique, and a representative of the “hundred-million people”:

And I'm not praying for myself alone

And about everyone who stood there with me

And in the bitter cold, and in the July heat

Under the blinding red wall

Closing the poem "Epilogue""switches time" to the present, returning us to the melody and the general meaning "Instead of Foreword" And "Dedications": the image of the prison queue “under the red blinded wall” appears again (in the 1st part).

Again the hour of the funeral approached.

I see, I hear, I feel you.

It is not the description of tormented faces that turns out to be the finale of a funeral mass in memory of the millions of victims of the totalitarian regime. The heroine of Akhmatov's funeral poem sees herself at the end of her poetic narration again in the prison-camp line - stretching across the long-suffering Russia: from Leningrad to the Yenisei, from the Quiet Don to the Kremlin towers. It merges with this queue. Her poetic voice absorbs thoughts and feelings, hopes and curses, it becomes the voice of the people:

I would like to call everyone by name,

Yes, the list was taken away, and there is nowhere to find out

For them I wove a wide cover

Of the poor, they have overheard words.

I remember them always and everywhere,

I will not forget about them even in a new trouble.

And if my exhausted mouth is clamped,

To which a hundred million people shout,

May they also remember me

On the eve of my funeral day.

Finally, the heroine of Akhmatova is at the same time a suffering woman - a wife and mother, and - a poet who is able to convey the tragedy of the people and the country, which have become hostages of perverse democracy, who has risen above personal suffering and fear, his unfortunate, twisted fate. The poet, called upon to express the thoughts and feelings of all the victims of totalitarianism, to speak in their voice, without losing his own - individual, poetic; the poet, who is responsible for making the truth about the great terror known to the whole world, reaching the next generations, turned out to be the property of History (including the history of culture).

But, as if for a moment, forgetting about the faces falling like autumn leaves, about the fright trembling in every look and voice, about the silent universal humility, Akhmatova foresees the monument erected to herself. World and Russian poetry knows many poetic meditations on the theme of "a monument not made by hands." The closest is Akhmatova’s Pushkin, to which “the folk path will not overgrow”, rewarding the poet posthumously for the fact that he “glorified freedom” in his not-so-compared to the twentieth, “cruel age” and “called mercy for the fallen” .. The Akhmatov monument was erected in the middle of the folk path leading to the prison (and from the prison to the wall or to the Gulag):

And if ever in this country

They will erect a monument to me,

I give my consent to this triumph,

But only with the condition - do not put it

Not near the sea where I was born:

The last connection with the sea is broken,

Not in the royal garden at the treasured stump,

Where the inconsolable shadow is looking for me...

"Requiem" became a monument in the word to Akhmatova's contemporaries - both the dead and the living. She mourned all of them with her "weeping lyre." personal, lyrical theme Akhmatova completes epic. She gives consent to the celebration of the erection of a monument to herself in this country only on one condition: that it will be a Monument

To the Poet at the Prison Wall:

... here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where the bolt was not opened for me.

Then, as in blissful death I fear

Forget the rumble of black marus.

Forget how hateful squelched the door

And the old woman howled like a wounded animal.

"Requiem" can be called, without exaggeration, Akhmatova's poetic feat, a high example of genuine civic poetry.

It sounds like the final accusation in a case of terrible atrocities. But it is not the poet who blames, but time. That is why the final lines of the poem sound so majestic - outwardly calm, restrained - where the flow of time brings to the monument all the innocent victims, but also those whose lives were sadly reflected in their death:

And let from motionless and bronze eyelids,

Like tears, melted snow flows,

And let the prison dove roam in the distance,

And the ships are quietly moving along the Neva.

Akhmatova is convinced that “in this country” people will survive who openly condemn the “Yezhovshchina” and glorify those few who resisted terror, who implicitly created an artistic monument to the annihilated people in the form of a requiem, who shared with the people their fate, hunger, deprivation, slander...

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova's poem "Requiem" is based on the personal tragedy of the poetess. The result of the experienced years of Stalinist repressions was a work, the publication of which for a long time was out of the question. We suggest that you familiarize yourself with the analysis of the poem, which will be useful to students in grade 11 in preparing for a lesson in literature and the exam.

Brief analysis

Year of writing- 1938-1940.

History of creation– The history of writing the poem is closely connected with the personal tragedy of the poetess, whose husband was shot during the reaction, and her son was arrested. The work is dedicated to all those who died during the period of repression only because they dared to think differently than the current government demanded.

Subject– In her work, the poetess revealed many topics, and all of them are equivalent. This is the theme of people's memory, grief, maternal suffering, love and homeland.

Composition- The first two chapters of the poem form the prologue, and the last two - the epilogue. The 4 verses following the prologue are a generalization of maternal grief, chapters 5 and 6 are the culmination of the poem, the highest point of the heroine's suffering. The following chapters deal with the theme of memory.

Genre- Poem.

Direction- Acmeism.

History of creation

The first drafts of "Requiem" date back to 1934. Initially, Anna Andreevna planned to write a cycle of poems dedicated to the reactionary period. One of the first victims of totalitarian arbitrariness were the closest and dearest people of the poetess - her husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, and their common son, Lev Gumilyov. The husband was shot as a counter-revolutionary, and the son was arrested only because he bore his father's "shameful" surname.

Realizing that the reigning regime is merciless in its bloodthirstiness, Akhmatova after a while changed her original plan and began writing a full-fledged poem. The most fruitful period of work was 1938-1940. The poem was completed, but for obvious reasons not published. Moreover, Akhmatova immediately burned the manuscripts of the "Requiem" after she read them to the closest people whom she trusted without limit.

In the 1960s, during the thaw period, Requiem gradually began to spread among the reading public thanks to samizdat. In 1963, one of the copies of the poem went abroad, where it was first published in Munich.

The full version of "Requiem" was officially allowed to print only in 1987, with the beginning of Perestroika in the country. Subsequently, the work of Akhmatova was included in the compulsory school curriculum.

Meaning of the title of the poem deep enough: a requiem is a religious term that means holding a funeral church service for a deceased person. Akhmatova dedicated her work to all the prisoners - the victims of the regime, who were destined for death by the ruling power. This is the heartbreaking groan of all mothers, wives and daughters, seeing off their loved ones to the chopping block.

Subject

The theme of folk suffering is revealed by the poetess through the prism of her own, personal tragedy. At the same time, she draws parallels with mothers of different historical eras, who sent their innocent sons to death in the same way. Hundreds of thousands of women literally lost their minds in anticipation of a terrible sentence that would forever separate her from her loved one, and this pain is timeless.

In the poem, Akhmatova experiences not only personal grief, she is sick of her soul for her patronymic, forced to become an arena for senselessly cruel executions of her children. She identifies her homeland with a woman who is forced to look helplessly at the torment of her child.

The poem is beautifully revealed boundless love theme, stronger than which there is nothing in the world. Women are not able to help their loved ones who are in trouble, but their love and loyalty can warm you during the most difficult life trials.

The main idea of the work- memory. The author urges never to forget about the people's grief, and to remember those innocent people who became victims of the merciless machine of power. This part of history, and to erase it from the memory of future generations is a crime. To remember and never allow the repetition of a terrible tragedy is what Akhmatova teaches in her poem.

Composition

Carrying out an analysis of the work in the poem "Requiem", one should note the peculiarity of its compositional construction, indicating Akhmatova's initial intention - to create a cycle of completed individual poems. As a result, one gets the impression that the poem was written spontaneously, in fits and starts, in separate parts.

The first two chapters ("Dedication" and "Introduction") are the prologue of the poem. Thanks to them, the reader will know what the place and time of the action of the work are.
The next 4 verses represent historical parallels between the bitter lot of mothers of all times. The lyrical heroine recalls her youth, which did not know any problems, the arrest of her son, the days of unbearable loneliness that followed him.
In chapters 5 and 6, the mother is tormented by the premonition of the death of her son, she is frightened by the unknown. This is the climax of the poem, the apotheosis of the suffering of the heroine.
Chapter 7 - a terrible sentence, a message about the son's exile to Siberia.
Verse 8 - a mother in a fit of despair calls for death, she wants to sacrifice herself, but save her child from the evil fate.
Chapter 9 - a prison date, forever imprinted in the memory of an unfortunate woman.
Chapter 10 - in just a few lines, the poetess draws a deep parallel of the suffering of her son with the torment of the innocent crucified Christ, and compares her maternal pain with the anguish of the Virgin.
In the epilogue, Akhmatova urges people not to forget the suffering that the people endured during those terrible years of repression.

Genre

The literary genre of the work is a poem. However, the "Requiem" also has the characteristic features of the epic: the presence of a prologue, the main part of the epilogue, a description of several historical eras and drawing parallels between them.

It was written from 1935 to 1940. Until the 1950s, the poet kept her text in memory, not daring to write it down on paper so as not to be repressed. Only after Stalin's death was the poem written down, but the truth contained in it was still dangerous, and publication was impossible. But "manuscripts do not burn", eternal art remains alive. Akhmatova's poem "Requiem", containing the pain of the hearts of thousands of Russian women, was published in 1988, when its author had been dead for 22 years.
Anna, together with her people, went through a terrible time of "universal dumbness", when the torment is overwhelmed, becomes unbearable, and it is impossible to scream. Her fate is tragic. Akhmatova's husband, the remarkable Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 on false charges of plotting against the new Bolshevik government. Talent and intelligence were persecuted by Stalin's executioners to the tenth generation. Usually, after the arrested person, his wife, ex-wife, their children and relatives went to the camps. The son of Gumilyov and Akhmatova Lev was arrested in the thirties and again on false charges. Akhmatova's husband, N. N. Punin, was also arrested. Arbitrariness reigned in the country, an atmosphere of unbearable fear was escalating, and everyone was waiting for arrest.
The name "Requiem", which means "a funeral mass", very accurately corresponds to the feelings of the poetess, who recalled: "In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad."

I was then with my people,
Where my people, unfortunately, were.

In the poem, Akhmatova speaks on behalf of millions of people who did not understand what their relatives were accused of, tried to get at least some information about their fate from the authorities. The “stone word” sounded to the mother the death sentence for her son, later replaced by imprisonment in the camps. For twenty years, Akhmatova was waiting for her son. But even this was not enough for the authorities. In 1946, persecution of writers began. Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were sharply criticized, their works were no longer published. A strong-willed poetess withstood all the blows of fate.
The poem "Requiem" expresses the immeasurable grief of the people, the defenselessness of people, the loss of moral guidelines:

Everything is messed up,
And I can't make out
Now who is the beast, who is the man,
And how long to wait for the execution.

Akhmatova, like no one else, was able to express the extreme state of mind of a person in capacious, short lines of her poems. The situation of hopelessness, doom and absurdity of what is happening makes the author doubt his own mental health:

Already madness wing
Soul covered half
And drink fiery wine
And beckons to the black valley.
And I realized that he
I must give up the victory
Listening to your
Already as if someone else's delirium.

There is no hyperbole in Akhmatova's poem. The grief experienced by the "hundred-million people" can no longer be exaggerated. Fearing to go crazy, the heroine inwardly withdraws from the events, looks at herself from the side:

No, it's not me, it's someone else suffering.
I couldn't do that, but what happened
Let the black cloths cover
And let them carry the lanterns ...
Night.

The epithets in the poem increase the aversion to terror against one's own people, evoke a feeling of horror, describe desolation in the country: "mortal anguish", "innocent" Rus', "heavy" steps of soldiers, "petrified" suffering. The author creates an image of a “red blind” wall of power, against which the people are beating in the hope of justice:

And I'm not praying for myself alone
And about everyone who stood there with me
And in severe hunger, and in the July heat
Under the blinding red wall.

In the poem, Akhmatova uses religious symbols, for example, the image of the mother of Christ, the Mother of God, who also suffered for her son.
Having survived such grief, Akhmatova cannot be silent, she testifies. The poem creates the effect of polyphony, as if different people are speaking, and the replicas are hanging in the air:

This woman is sick
This woman is alone
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me.

There are many metaphors in the poem that amaze with skill and strength of feelings and will never be forgotten: “mountains bend before this grief”, “death stars stood above us”, “... and burn the New Year's ice with their hot tear”. The poem also contains such artistic means as allegories, symbols, personifications. All of them create a tragic requiem for all the innocently killed, slandered, lost forever in the "black convict holes".
The poem "Requiem" ends with a solemn poem in which one feels the joy of victory over the horror and stupor of many years, the preservation of memory and common sense. The creation of such a poem is a real civic feat by Akhmatova.

Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem, piercing in terms of the degree of tragedy, was written from 1935 to 1940. Until the 1950s, the poet kept her text in memory, not daring to write it down on paper so as not to be repressed. Only after Stalin's death was the poem written down, but the truth contained in it was still dangerous, and publication was impossible. But "manuscripts do not burn", eternal art remains alive. Akhmatova's poem "Requiem", containing the pain of the hearts of thousands of Russian women, was published in 1988, when its author had been dead for 22 years.

Anna Akhmatova, together with her people, went through a terrible time of "universal dumbness", when torment is overwhelmed, becomes unbearable, and it is impossible to scream. Her fate is tragic. Akhmatova's husband, the remarkable Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 on false charges of plotting against the new Bolshevik government. Talent and intelligence were persecuted by Stalin's executioners to the tenth generation. Usually, after the arrested person, his wife, ex-wife, their children and relatives went to the camps. The son of Gumilyov and Akhmatova Lev was arrested in the thirties and again on false charges. Akhmatova's husband, N. N. Punin, was also arrested. Arbitrariness reigned in the country, an atmosphere of unbearable fear was escalating, and everyone was waiting for arrest.

The name "Requiem", which means "a funeral mass", very accurately corresponds to the feelings of the poetess, who recalled: "In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad."

I was then with my people, Where my people, unfortunately, was.

The poem "Requiem" expresses the immeasurable grief of the people, the defenselessness of people, the loss of moral guidelines:

Everything is messed up forever, And I can't make out Now, who is the beast, who is the man, And how long to wait for the execution.

Madness has already covered half of the Soul with its wing, And gives fire wine to drink, And beckons to the black valley. And I realized that I must concede the victory to him, Listening to my own, Already, as it were, someone else's delirium.

No, it's not me, it's someone else suffering. I wouldn't have been able to, but what happened, Let black cloth cover And let the lanterns take away... Night.

And I pray not for myself alone, but for all those who stood there with me And in the fierce hunger, and in the July heat Under the blinded red wall.

In the poem, Akhmatova uses religious symbols, for example, the image of the mother of Christ, the Mother of God, who also suffered for her son.

Having survived such grief, Akhmatova cannot be silent, she testifies. The poem creates the effect of polyphony, as if different people are speaking, and the replicas are hanging in the air: material from the site

This woman is sick, This woman is alone, Husband in the grave, son in prison, Pray for me.

The poem "Requiem" ends with a solemn poem in which one feels the joy of victory over the horror and stupor of many years, the preservation of memory and common sense. The creation of such a poem is a real civic feat by Akhmatova.

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On this page, material on the topics:

the meaning of the title of the poem by A.A. Akhmatova "Requiem".
personal and national grief in Akhmatova's poem in the requiem
why is Anna Akhmatova's poem called a requiem
the answer is the meaning of the title of the poem Requiem?
what is the meaning of the title of the poem requiem

Federal Agency for Education

State educational institution

higher professional education

"Chelyabinsk State University"

Miass branch

Department of Russian Language and Literature

Poem "Requiem" by A.A. Akhmatova

Completed by: Mironova M.A.

Group: MR-202

Checked by: Ph.D., Associate Professor

Shakirov S.M.

Introduction

Chapter 1. Requiem as a Genre

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Conclusion

Literature

Introduction

I know a woman: silence,

Fatigue bitter from words

Lives in a mysterious shimmer

Her dilated pupils.

Her soul is open greedily

Only the measured music of the verse,

Before a distant and gratifying life

Arrogant and deaf.

Inaudible and unhurried,

Her step is so strangely smooth

You can't call her beautiful.

But in it all my happiness. …

I.S. Gumilyov "She"

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is one of the best poets of the Silver Age. But her talent was not fully revealed at the time. The best (as I believe) her work - "Requiem" - was not brought to the reader, like many works of "poets of truth", describing injustices on the part of the authorities and therefore forbidden by it. “The Requiem is one of them, as it describes the repressions of the 1930s. You can study history from the chronicles, but in order to feel it, to understand the feelings, consciousness of the people of that time, you need to study it with the help of fiction. Maybe not all the facts in it are reliable, but then its lines are not dry, like paper, but filled with feelings, experiences that the author shared with them. And, reading Akhmatova's Requiem, one can feel that time, go through her grief together with the heroine and understand the grief of the people.

It is not for nothing that scientists, studying any historical period, turn not only to documents and archaeological excavations, but also to literature that characterizes this period in their understanding.

Therefore, in order to better understand the era in which the Requiem was written, and to better understand the work itself, it is necessary to study not only its content, but also the structure and genre, and the idea and other elements that make up the image.

To study the material, I used articles and books by such authors as Boguslavsky M.B., Vilenkin V.Kh., Erokhina I., Kormilov S. and others. Also, for easier understanding of the information, the abstract is divided into four chapters, introductions, conclusions .

The "Introduction" shows the purpose of the abstract, its tasks and the relevance of the topic of the abstract. The first chapter tells about the history of the requiem as a genre, the second chapter tells about the difficult history of the consciousness of the work itself, and in chapter 3 its inner world and the significance of the external construction are considered. The fourth chapter reveals the issue of the Requiem genre. In the "Conclusion" the main conclusions of the abstract and the general conclusion are formulated.

Requiem as a genre

Before considering and understanding "Requiem" by A.A. Akhmatova, it is necessary to understand the title of the work, namely, to find out what the requiem genre is. Without understanding the essence of this genre, it is impossible to understand the relationship between the title and the work itself. The genre of the requiem is by its nature a musical genre, therefore, for its definition and characteristics, we turn to the musical encyclopedia.

Requiem (from the first word of the Latin text “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine” - “Give them eternal rest, Lord”) is a funeral mass dedicated to the memory of the dead. It differs from the solemn Catholic Mass in the absence of some parts (“Gloria” - “Glory”, “Credo” - “I believe”), instead of which others are introduced (first “Requiem”, then “Dies irae” - “Day of Wrath”, “Tuba mirum "- "Wonderful Trumpet", "Lacremosa" - "Tearful", "Offertorio" - "Offering Gifts", "Lux aeterna" - "Eternal Light", etc.). The very purpose and content of the requiem determines its mournful and tragic character.

Like the mass, the original requiem consisted of melodies of Gregorian chant, sung in unison; however, there were various local traditions in the choice of melody. Already in the 15th century. many-voiced arrangements of these melodies began to appear. The first such requiem, created by the composer of that time of the first Franco-Flemish school G. Dufan (first half of the 15th century), has not been preserved. The requiem of this type that has come down to us belongs to the composer of the second Franco-Flemish school, I. Okegem (second half of the 15th century). written for choir a capella in the tradition of a strict polyphonic style, it also contains "Credo" - a part that fell out in the requiem of subsequent eras. Many composers of the 16th century, led by O. Lasso and Palestrina, worked in the requiem genre. In 1570, the composition of the requiem was strictly regulated by the Roman church. In the 17th and 18th centuries, in the era of the birth and development of opera and the establishment of a homophonic-harmonious style, the requiem turned into a major cyclical work for choir, soloists and orchestra. The canonized melodies of the Gregorian chant ceased to be its intonational basis, and all its music began to be composed by the composer. Under the dominance of a homophonic-harmonious warehouse, polyphony retained its significance, but in a new quality, entering into a harmonious relationship.

Being textually associated with the Catholic church funeral service, the requiem in its most outstanding examples has acquired a non-cult significance and, as a rule, sounds not in churches, but in concert halls. In the 18th century, the most significant works of this genre were written by the Italians A. Lotti, F. Durante, N. Iommelli, A. Hasse (German by birth), and the Pole M. Zwieschowski. The greatest is Mozart's Requiem (1791) - the last work of the composer, completed by his student F. Süssmeier. Mozart's requiem expresses the deep world of human experiences with a predominance of mournful lyrics.

Many composers of the 19th century turned to the requiem genre. The most outstanding and widespread requiems of this time belong to G. Berlioz (1837) and G. Verdi (1873).

Thus, the meaning of the title of Akhmatova's poem becomes clearer. In the Orthodox tradition, the analogue of the Catholic ritual is lamentation. Akhmatova played the role of a weeper in Russian poetry. Appearing as a kind of "Yaroslavna of the 20th century", she mourned in verse her generation - scattered all over the world, crushed and shot. She mourned the tragic fate of her contemporaries - the death of N.S. Gumilyov, death of A.A. Blok, M.A. Bulgakov, M.M. Zoshchenko, B.L. Pasternak. For half a century, Akhmatova responded to the troubles common to the country, with the voice of a mourner she poured out nationwide suffering. In a series of lamentations, the "Requiem", the funeral of the martyrs of Stalin's prisons and camps, occupies a central place.

But one considered question gives rise to others. For example, why did Akhmatova name the poem "Requiem", because this is a genre of the Catholic religion; what did the author want to convey to us through the feelings of the heroine, through the poem, and in general, is this a poem?

But let's consider everything in order. To understand the soul of a people, you need to know its history. It is the same with a work: in order to fully understand its meaning, idea, you need to learn about its history of creation.

History of "Requiem"

I am happy that I lived in these years and saw events that had no equal ... "

A.A. Akhmatova

“”Requiem” is a poem by A.A. Akhmatova. A work dedicated to the victims of the Stalinist terror "- this is how the Encyclopedia of World Literature immediately indicates the reason that the poem was published in the Soviet Union only in 1987. But this was not the first publication of the poem. In 1963, "Requiem" was published in Munich as a separate book with a note that it was being published without the knowledge and consent of the author.

Although Anna Akhmatova was elevated to the rank of a classic of Russian literature after her death, “her collections and collections of poems came out for a long time without a Requiem” . To explain the reason for such secrecy, let us again turn to the Encyclopedia of World Literature, where it is said that "a poetic story about the suffering of a mother who lost her son seemed dangerous to society."

But let's start the story of the poem from its very birth.

From Akhmatova’s diary: “In early January, almost unexpectedly for myself, I wrote Tails, and in Tashkent (in two steps) I wrote Epilogue, which became the third part of the poem and made several significant inserts into both first parts. ... April 8, 1943. Tashkent".

But, having been born suddenly and easily, the poem will go a long and difficult way before the reader can get acquainted with it. “In the 30s and 40s. Akhmatova could not even write down these verses on paper (for which one could pay with her life) and trusted their memory only to her closest people. But A. Shilov recalls that back in 1940, in the collection “From Six Books” and in the magazine “Star” (No. 3-4), the poem “Sentence” was published about the inescapable grief of a mother who learned about the ruthless massacre of her only son:

And the stone word fell

On my still living chest.

Nothing, because I was ready

I'll deal with it somehow.

I have a lot to do today:

We must kill the memory to the end,

It is necessary that the soul turned to stone,

We must learn to live again.

But not that ... The hot rustle of summer,

Like a holiday outside my window.

I've been anticipating this for a long time.

Bright day and empty house.

In order to disguise the true meaning of these poignant lines about her mother's grief and about the nation's misfortune, Akhmatova removed the title of the poem in the book version, and in a magazine publication put a deliberately incorrect date of its creation (1934). And the poem, which was, “as we found out much later,” writes Shilov, the culmination of the Requiem prison cycle, was perceived by censorship, criticism, and almost all readers as a story about some kind of love drama (the real date - 1937 - was restored by Akhmatova only in later poetry collections).

Like other authors, Shilov says that “only a few of Akhmatova’s most faithful, most devoted friends understood the true meaning of this poem, knew her other “seditious” lines, for any of which in those years one could pay with freedom, or even life” .

“The time was apocalyptic,” Akhmatova later wrote about this, saying that, even giving books to friends, she did not sign some, since at any moment such a signature could become evidence, and in “Requiem about those terrible years it was said:

The death stars shone above us

And innocent Rus' writhed

Under the bloody boots

And under the tires of the black "Marus".

There was only one way to preserve such poems in a house where search after search was going on, in a city where one apartment after another was empty: not to trust them on paper, but to keep them only in memory. Akhmatova did just that. Until 1962, she did not write down a single such line on paper for more than a few minutes: sometimes she wrote down one or another fragment on a piece of paper in order to introduce one of her closest and most reliable friends to it. Akhmatova did not dare to pronounce such lines aloud: she felt that "the walls had ears." After the silent interlocutor memorized them, the manuscript was put on fire. In one of the poems, we can read how she herself tells about this mournful rite:

... I am not a mother to poetry -

She was a stepmother.

Oh, white paper

The lines are even!

How many times have I looked

How they burn.

Gossip mutilated,

Bats with a flail,

labeled, labeled

Hard labor brand.

But the difficulties and dangers associated with the poem for Akhmatova were not reasons not to bring the work to life. Like her own child, she bore the poem under her heart, putting feelings, pain, experiences, losses into it ... I. Erokhina, in her article on the Requiem, recalls the fact that “almost 20 years later, by the cycle of 1935-1940, Akhmatova writes prose "Instead of a preface." It is dated April 1, 1957, but most likely written later: in Akhmatova’s notebooks of 1959-1960 we can twice find the outline of the Requiem cycle, but neither of them has a preface.” And at the same time, the author of the article notes that Requiem was then still conceived precisely as a cycle of 14 poems; "Epilogue" was only the name of one of them, and not the structural and semantic part of the whole: in one of the plans of the cycle, this poem goes at number 12, followed by "Crucifixion" and "Sentence". Yermolova wonders why April 1, 1957, and immediately ventured to suggest that this emphasized the retrospective look - the poet was able to fulfill the "order" after everything: on May 15, 1956, Lev Gumilyov returned from prison (perhaps this is also some kind of funeral date, "again the hour of the memorial approached").

So, for almost two decades, lyrical fragments arose that seemed to have little connection with each other. Until March 1960, the plot interconnection of these "excerpts" was not realized. And only when Akhmatova wrote the Prologue ("Initiation" and "Introduction") and the two-part Epilogue, "Requiem" was formally completed. The main body of texts of the Requiem (prologue; 10 separate fragments, partially titled, and an epilogue) was created from the autumn of 1935 to the spring of 1940. Even later, during the period of the “thaw”, when, apparently, the hope for the publication of the work flickered (in reality it did not take place), important additions were written to the main text: “Instead of a preface” (April 1, 1957) and 4 lines of the epigraph (1961 .) .

External structure and inner world of "Requiem"

There are times in history when only poetry is able to cope with reality, incomprehensible to the simple human mind, to fit it into a finite framework.

I. Brodsky

The history of the creation of the work is undoubtedly important for the study of the poem itself, since it is closely connected with the life of Akhmatova. "Requiem" repeats a certain fragment of life in miniature, meaning the main events. This can be seen by comparing the biography of the poet and the work. Here is how I. Erokhina does it in her article:

“October 22, 1935 - the first arrest of L. Gumilyov and M. Punin (“They took you away at dawn”, November 1935, Moscow);

Under the protection of other people's wings - I was then with my people, Where my people, unfortunately, were. The reader's empathy, anger and melancholy, which cover when reading a poem, are achieved by the effect of a combination of many artistic means. "We hear different voices all the time," says Brodsky about the "Requiem," either just a woman, or suddenly a poetess, or Maria in front of us. Here is a "woman's" voice that came from the sorrowful ...

Literally, it creates an image. The reverse of hyperbole is an understatement (litote). An example of hyperbole: A guy can barely fit in a chair. One fist four kilos. Mayakovsky. The main idea of the poem "Requiem" is an expression of people's grief, boundless grief. The suffering of the people and the lyrical heroine merge. The reader's empathy, anger and melancholy, which cover when reading a poem, are achieved by the effect of a combination ...

Silently Mother stood, So no one dared to look. Three ancient traditions - folk-song, poetic (it is not for nothing that Pushkin's words are quoted: "convict holes") and Christian help the lyrical heroine of the "Requiem" to withstand an unheard-of test. "Requiem" ends with the overcoming of dumbness and madness - a solemn and heroic poem. The poem echoes the famous "

... "Poems", and the whole process turns out to be perpetuum mobile. The approach to the "Poem" began with the fact that, with a lot of questions, bewilderments and uncertainties, it immediately became clear: "A Poem without a Hero" is a radical experience in transforming the genre of the poem, with which it is perhaps difficult to compare anything in Russian poetry over the past century. It was obvious that for such a fundamentally new text it was necessary to develop and ...

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