Anna Andreevna Akhmatova

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Akhmatova in 1922, painted by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Title page of the Russian edition of Abend (Вечеръ) , 1912 (full text)
Glance into a study with a desk and a glazed bookcase.  Light green walls with various drawings and family photos on them, a Chinese ceiling lamp.
Room in the Anna Akhmatova Housing Museum in Saint Petersburg

Anna Akhmatova (born Gorenko ; Russian Анна Андреевна Ахматова or Горенко, scientific transliteration. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova / Gorenko * 11 . Jul / 23. June  1889 greg. In Bolshoi Fontan in Odessa , Russian Empire ; †  5. March 1966 in Domodedovo near Moscow , Russian SFSR ) was a Russian poet and writer. She is considered the soul of the Silver Age in Russian literature and an important Russian poet. Her later work was mainly shaped by the horrors of Stalinist rule, during which she was not allowed to write, her son and husband were imprisoned and many of her friends were killed.

Life

Childhood and youth

Anna Gorenko was born on June 23, 1889 in the village of Bolshoi Fontan near Odessa, the third of six children into the family of a marine engineer; The family moved to Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg as early as 1890 , where Anna grew up in socially privileged surroundings until she was 16. She later described her childhood memories of the town's parks, racecourse and old train station. The family mostly spent the summer months near Sevastopol on the Black Sea . She also learned French at school early on . She did not write her first poems under the name Gorenko at the age of eleven, as her father feared for his good reputation - she chose the name of her Bulgarian great-grandfather Chan Akhmat as a pseudonym .

Like Pushkin 90 years before her, Akhmatova received her education in the exclusive Lyceum of Tsarskoye Selo. Her relationship with the most important Russian poet runs like a red thread through her work from the start: In September 1911, for the 100th anniversary of the lyceum, she wrote a short poem entitled The dark-skinned boy sauntered through the avenues in which there are allusions to the young Pushkin. Akhmatova's typical metonymy technique is already clear in this poem : Without mentioning Lyceum and Pushkin by name, typical properties and objects (here: dark-skinned, the Lyceum tricorn, etc.) make it clear who and what is meant.

Modigliani drawing by Anna Achmatowas (1911)

After her parents separated in 1905, she lived with her mother and siblings in Evpatoria in the Crimea for a year . Finally, she spent the final year of school at the Fundukleev High School in Kiev . From 1907 to 1910 Akhmatova studied law in Kiev in "higher women's courses", where she was primarily interested in the basic courses in legal history and Latin and was indifferent to the purely legal specialist topics.

In 1910 she married the poet Nikolai Gumiljow , whom she had known from school and who had courted her for a long and desperate period. This was followed by joint trips to Paris and Italy , where she a. a. met the artist Modigliani - his drawings of Akhmatova later became famous - and witnessed the first triumphant successes of Russian ballet dancers in Western Europe. She was deeply impressed by the painting and architecture of Italy.

Before the revolution

Akhmatova, Gumiljow and Ossip Mandelstam became the central representatives of the literary movement of acmeism (from Greek akme , summit, climax, heyday). The so-called "colliery" around these poets formed a countercurrent to symbolism, whose metaphors of the otherworldly, metaphysical, the acmeists opposed with their own poetry of every "earthly thing" and a decided this-sidedness. Akhmatova's poems are therefore characterized by a simple and concise language. In contrast to the “ esoteric ” -style meetings of the symbolists, the gatherings of the acmeists were more like “workshops” in which u. a. new writing techniques were developed.

In addition to Pushkin, Akhmatova found her poetic roots with Innokenti Annenski (1856–1909), a forerunner of the Akmeisten, as well as with the French symbolist Verlaine and the young Mayakowski .

On her return to Saint Petersburg, Akhmatova studied literary history and wrote the poems that were part of her first volume of poems Abend ( Вечер , 1912). Above all, there were love poems in which she described separation, grief and love affliction, for example in the last stanza of her poem "Song of the last encounter":

“Hear the song of the last meeting.
The house in front of me was completely dark.
Only in the bedroom, yellow, without movement,
indifferently lit candles. "

In her laconic, concise poems she used everyday language in which feelings are indicated by gestures. A left glove that is accidentally slipped onto the right hand becomes an expression of the despair and confusion of those described, who remains calm on the outside:

"How icy my chest, how uncomfortable, but
my steps stopped,
And the glove, removed from the left
, I pulled it onto my hand on the right."

Akhmatova's only son Lev was born in October 1912 . Her second book, Rosenkranz ( Четки ), appeared as early as 1914 , which, like the first volume, was a great success, despite the events of the beginning World War. This collection also contained the poem For Alexander Blok ( Александру Блоку ) written in January 1914 , an indication of her close relationship with the poet of Symbolism , which she repeatedly referred to as platonic, "exclusively poetic". There are also a number of poems by Alexander Blok that are dedicated to Akhmatova (e.g. An Anna Akhmatova , Анне Ахматовой ). They first met in 1913. While the symbolist pondered on femininity and beauty in his poems, Akhmatova chose her usual frugal, sober style: “I visited the poet. Just noon. Sunday. The room spacious. Frost in front of the windows. ” However, the poem printed immediately before this in the rosary ( The Guest , Гость , January 1914) depicts a tender encounter with a man whose account Blok applied. These matches occasionally led to the suggestion that the relationship between the two poets was more intimate than officially known.

The next volume of poetry, The White Crowd ( Белая стая ), also fell in a historically troubled time when it was published in 1917. The chaotic conditions at the beginning of the revolution reduced the book's sales success.

Repression in the Young Soviet Union

After the October Revolution, Akhmatova worked as a librarian in the Agricultural Institute. From 1922 to 1940, her poems were no longer printed because they were too little socially relevant and too private for the communist rulers. In the Soviet encyclopedia it was said that her poems were overloaded with religious, mystical and erotic motifs, with which she poisoned the youth. Her older works were only disseminated clandestinely in samizdat . Lev Kopelew wrote about them: Their verses stuck in the memory, were brought out again depending on the mood ... At that time it was still ready to admit that class enemies and irreconcilable ideological opponents could be selfless, noble and brave. Such a “liberal objectivism” was not yet a mortal sin, nor a crime.

Her husband Gumilev, from whom she divorced in 1918, was shot in 1921 for alleged counterrevolutionary activities.

"No, you won't wake up
there in the snow, never again
twenty bayonets,
five times the rifle."

She did not want to follow the mosaicist Boris Anrep , to whom she was very close, to the West because she could not imagine leaving her homeland and her people. Her next love, the literary critic Nedobrowo , died of consumption in 1919 . After a second, but short and unhappy marriage to the Assyriologist and translator Vladimir Schileiko , who is said to have burned some of her poems, she lived with the art historian Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Punin (1888-1953) from 1926 to 1938 , with the couple partly lived in an apartment with Punin's wife and daughter in a tense situation. Akhmatova often lived literally on bread and tea during this time, never giving up her self-confidence and her own style.

1930 until the outbreak of war

Both her son Lev and her husband Nikolai Punin were arrested multiple times in the 1930s. After the initial death sentence, her son was sent into exile and was not finally released home until April 1956, three years after Stalin's death. Overall, he spent a decade and a half in camp detention. Her husband Nikolai Punin died in the Vorkuta labor camp in 1953 .

During the time of her son's detention, Akhmatova spent a lot of time in the lines for relatives in front of the prison. In Requiem , which she began to write at this time and which is a single lament against the Stalin terror, she wrote the following short prose text instead of a foreword:

“During the terrible years of judicial terror under Yeshov , I spent seventeen months standing in line in Leningrad prisons. Somebody "recognized" me in some way. Then the blue-lipped woman standing behind me, who of course had never heard my name, woke up from the numbness we all had, and whispered the question in my ear (everyone spoke in a whisper):
"And you can describe this ? "
And I said,
" Yes, "
Something like a smile slipped over what had once been her face."

For Akhmatova these years were a never-ending nightmare. She always expected that her son's death sentence would be carried out. Besides Akhmatova, another important Russian poet of the 20th century, Marina Tsvetaeva , who honored Akhmatova with the quote "Anna of all Russia", hanged herself in 1941, completely impoverished. Friends disappeared, including her long-time companion Ossip Mandelstam , who even wrote down his poems about Stalin for his torturers during his interrogations in the Lubyanka in 1934. Nevertheless, he was not sent to the gulag , as was customary at the time , but by Stalin, to whom the poet would have been more dangerous than alive at the time, tried to isolate him but keep him alive . The Mandelstams were then exiled to Voronezh , 400 km south of Moscow, and were allowed to return to the Moscow area in 1937 - even if not to the capital itself. In the autumn of the same year the Mandelstams visited Akhmatova in the fountain house in Leningrad, where they had to sleep on the sofa in their room because they did not have their own accommodation. During their last visit, Akhmatova wrote a poem for Ossip Mandelstam, whom she looked upon as a twin brother. The poem was about the city - Leningrad - which they both loved.

"Not like a European city
with the first prize for beauty
But how's oppressive exile on Yenisei,
like a transfer to Tschaita,
to Ishim, the trock'ne Irgiz River,
ins famous Atbasar, '
For outpost Swobodn
For stench of corpses rotting bunk
So I came this City
In that midnight, light blue -
This city, celebrated by the first poet,
By us sinners and by you "

However, Mandelstam was arrested again six months later and sentenced to five years of forced labor in Kolyma, East Siberia. On the drive to Kolyma , as described in the poem, he passed the Yenisei and the cities of Chita and Svobodny and was finally imprisoned in a camp near Vladivostok on the Sea of ​​Japan, where he died of a heart attack on December 26, 1938. When her son is moved to a further north camp and she begs a hat, scarf and boots for him from acquaintances in order to enable him to survive there, she wishes herself death in a poem:

“You will come one day - come to me now.
I can no longer bear my fate.
I turned off the light. I will open the door for you. "

In Russia, Anna Akhmatova is also venerated because she found a language that put the terror of those years into words. In the epilogue to Requiem she wrote:

“I knew many women who were withered early, burned out with
horror, fear and horror.
I saw the cuneiform script of my suffering carved into the
forehead and cheeks, which had hardly blossomed. "

And a few verses later she asks that if a memorial is ever built for her, it should not be done in a park, but in that prison yard where she waited hundreds of hours to find out news about her son's fate. Her memorial should also see the black prison truck that transports the inmates and witness the suffering of the relatives.

War and post-war period

Although her books have not appeared for years, Akhmatova was still so popular among the Russian population that the volume of poems "From six books" (Из шести книг), which was allowed to appear in 1940, could get into a fight in the shops. The unexpected printing of her works happened on personal orders from Stalin, after apparently well-known artist colleagues - allegedly Svetlana Allilujewa had also intervened with her father - had campaigned for her. The volume contained works from 1924 to 1940 as well as the new cycle Die Weide (Ива) .

When the Great Patriotic War broke out , the poet was still living in Leningrad (as Saint Petersburg was now called), but after the start of the German blockade in 1941 she was flown with other writers via Moscow to Tashkent , where she read poems to war wounded in hospitals. A few poems were still officially accepted as "patriotic contributions to the patriotic war"; In 1942 her patriotic poem Bravery (published in the Soviet press in February 1942) even appeared in Pravda :

“We know what weighs the heaviest
today , what is happening today. The hour of
bravery has struck us - who bends,
who breaks us in league with it?
Despite dead bullets, we live on
with death under the roof. '
You stay with us, you Russian word,
you great Russian language.
From doom and imprisonment,
let us keep your purity and strength
forever. "

Lev Kopelev describes the impression that Akhmatova's poem left on him as follows: The simple, clear poem sounded more audible than all the warlike, drumming, trumpeting, thundering verses ... At that time Akhmatova's poem seemed to me above all as an expression of the great unifying power of our war . She, too, the fine, beautiful lady, was with us, just like the old cavaliers of the Order of St. George ... who had called for help to the Red Army.

In June 1944 she was able to return to her beloved, but in the meantime completely changed Leningrad. The war and the repressive policies of the communist governor Andrei Zhdanov had left their mark on the city. Akhmatova's depression and dejection found their way into her prose sketches from this time, Three Lilac Trees (Три сирени) and Guest at Death (В гостях у смерти), which were created during this time.

Soon, however, she too felt the effects of the cultural and political smear campaigns in Zhdanovshchina - in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet writers' association as a representative of the “unimaginative reactionary swamp” and two of her new volumes of poetry were destroyed. The culture secretary of the Central Committee (ZK), Andrei Schdanow, publicly branded her in a speech as "half nun, half prostitute or better a prostitute-nun whose sin is saturated with prayers". From Anna Akhmatova's point of view, this verdict was due to her short relationship with Isaiah Berlin , whom she met in Moscow in 1945/46 when the English philosopher and historian worked for the British embassy in Moscow. For her, the younger man became a “guest from the future” and she dedicated the love poems to him that she had written over the past twenty years. After the brief encounter in 1946, she only met him again in 1965, when she was awarded an honorary doctorate in Oxford.

Since then, Anna Akhmatova has mainly worked on literary translations and transcriptions; the poets she translated included Victor Hugo , Rabindranath Tagore, and Giacomo Leopardi . The writing ban existed until 1950, when a series of poems on the subject of Glory to Peace (Слава миру) first appeared in the magazine Ogonjok ; these poems - including two poems in praise of Stalin - are considered extorted and rather embarrassing work. Only at the beginning of the thaw period did more meaningful poems appear again.

rehabilitation

After Stalin's death, the poet was gradually rehabilitated; she was allowed to work again and in 1958 was again accepted into the Writers' Union. When the American poet Robert Frost came to Russia for the first time in September 1962 as President Kennedy's envoy , he wanted to be introduced to Anna Akhmatova. This wish is granted to him. Anna Akhmatova experienced this encounter from an ironic distance:

“I wasn't allowed to see him at home. The Potemkin village was built in the dacha of the academician Alexeyev. I don't remember where this fine tablecloth, the crystal, was got from. I got a festive haircut, elegantly dressed ... And then an old man appears. An American grandpa, but one of those, you know, who is slowly becoming a grandma: reddish cheeks, white hair, very cheerful. We sit next to each other in wicker armchairs, we are served all kinds of delicacies, we pour different wines. We talk calmly. But I keep thinking: You, my dear, are a national poet, every year, every year your books are published, and of course you don't have any poems that were just written “for the drawer”. All the newspapers and magazines praise you, the students hear about you in schools, the President welcomes you as a guest of honor. You have received all conceivable honors, wealth and fame. And me? What dogs were not set on me! What dirt haven't I been kicked in ?!
There was everything - poverty, miserable lines in front of the prisons, fear, poems that you only knew by heart, only remembered, and poems that were burned. Humiliations and sorrow, sorrow again and again ... You know none of this and would not understand if I told you about it ... But now we are sitting next to each other, two old people in wicker chairs. As if there was no difference. And the end will be the same for both of us. But maybe the difference isn't that big either? "

Her verse epic " Poem without a hero " (Поэмa без героя), on which she had worked for 22 years and which is considered her most important work, appeared in a New York literary almanac in 1960/61, in 1963 in Russia. It can be seen in the literary tradition of Russian verses, which Pushkin founded with Eugene Onegin in 1833 and which Alexander Blok also took up.

Even more than usual, she worked here with complex structural and temporal encodings, which on the one hand made up her personal style, on the other hand, in a time of censorship and oppression, simply served for self-protection. And so the volume of poetry was published, but the editor responsible openly admitted difficulties in understanding the text.

In 1964 Anna Akhmatova was allowed to accept the Etna-Taormina Prize in Taormina , Sicily . On this trip she met Ingeborg Bachmann in Rome , who then dedicated the poem Verily to her.

In 1965 she received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University and in the same year she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature . Two years before her death, she became chairman of the writers' association from which she had been expelled in 1946. Her cycle of poems Requiem , which accuses the terror under Stalin's rule, could not appear in the Soviet Union until 1987. The publication was hailed as a result of perestroika . Since the 1930s she had quoted poems from people whom she trusted. Her fellow writer Lev Kopelew describes how she recited poems from Requiem in May 1962 after asking him not to write down her poems :

“I looked at her, steadfastly, all self-consciousness was gone… My eyes were wet. She must have noticed that too. In a tight voice I asked: "Please speak that again". In those minutes I just thought: Hold on, remember as much as possible. She spoke the epilogue again. The music of the verses emerged in her breast, in the depths of her throat ... I saw and heard an empress of poetry - a legitimate monarch - she was so unsophisticated precisely because she did not need self-affirmation. Your rule was undeniable. "

Akhmatova's tomb ( Komarovo )

On March 5, 1966, the 13th anniversary of Stalin's death, Anna Akhmatova died in a rest home in Domodedovo near Moscow. The Moscow newspapers called her a great writer and poet in their obituaries. Her poetic influence on younger colleagues was particularly evident in Joseph Brodsky .

Anna Akhmatova's grave is in the Komarowo settlement on the Baltic Sea, not far from her chosen hometown, which is now called Saint Petersburg again.

"I go where we expect nothing more,
Where that was dear to us only blows as a shadow,
Where quiet in the breeze lies a silent garden
And where the foot is on a cold step."

The astronomers Lyudmila Georgijewna Karachkina and Lyudmila Schuravljowa gave her the name Akhmatova in 1982 in honor of the minor planet 3067 .

Works

  • Evening (Вечер). 1912.
  • The rosary (Четки). 1914.
  • The white crowd (Белая стая). 1917.
  • Plantain (Подорожник). 1921.
  • Anno Domini MCMXXI. 1922.
  • From six books (Из шести книг). 1940.
  • Poems 1909 to 1945. Moscow / Leningrad 1946 (after the Zhdanov speech this edition of the poems was destroyed).
  • Poem without a hero (Поэмa без героя). 1963.
  • Requiem. Munich 1963 (Russian), first published in 1987 in the USSR .
  • The passage of time. 1909-1965. Moscow / Leningrad 1965.
  • Collected works in 2 volumes. Inter-Language Literary Associates, New York 1965/1967, Munich 1967/68.
  • Selection. Edited by N. Bannikow. Moscow 1974.
  • Poems and poems. Edited by Viktor Shirmunski. Leningrad / Moscow 1976.
  • Poems and prose. Edited by B. Drujan. Leningrad 1976. (The edition was actually compiled by Lydia Chukovskaya , but in 1976 her name was no longer allowed to appear publicly in the USSR.)
  • Poems. Edited by N. Bannikow. Moscow 1977.
  • About Pushkin. Articles and Notes. Edited by Emma Gerstein. Leningrad 1977.

Translations

reception

Anna Amatowa met Ingeborg Bachmann at the end of 1964 when she was in Sicily to receive the Premio Etna-Taormina . Bachmann, whom she greatly admired, dedicated the poem Verily to her and performed it at the award ceremony on December 12, 1964 in the ancient theater in Taormina, to the enthusiasm of the poet and the Russian delegation accompanying her. Achmatova's importance for Bachmann is also clear elsewhere: Bachmann's decision to part with Piper Verlag in 1967 was a protest against the fact that the publishing house had Achmatowa's poems translated by former Hitler Youth leader Hans Baumann .

A. Akhmatova and their contribution to culture in women's educational canon and Meier mountain. a. 2018 mentioned as an example.

literature

Web links

Commons : Anna Akhmatova  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Transfer: Johannes von Guenther ; quoted from: Anna Akhmatova: In the mirror country - selected poems. Munich 1982, ISBN 3-492-02593-5 , p. 8.
  2. 1st stanza from Song of the Last Meeting ; Transfer: Peter Engel ; quoted from: Anna Akhmatova: Im Spiegelland - Selected Poems, p. 9.
  3. Transfer: Kay Borowsky ; quoted from: Anna Akhmatova: Im Spiegelland - Selected Poems, p. 59.
  4. a b c Afterword by Elisabeth Cheauré. In: Anna Akhmatova: love poems. Edited by Ulla Hahn. Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-010845-1 .
  5. Transfer: Ludolf Müller ; quoted from: Anna Akhmatova: Im Spiegelland - Selected Poems, p. 168.
  6. A Little Geography, OM (1937). In: Akhmatova: Sobranije sotschineni , vol.
  7. ^ Translation: Ludolf Müller; quoted from: Notes on Anna Akhmatova, p. 232.
  8. ^ Translation: Ludolf Müller; quoted from: Russian poetry - poems from three centuries. Selected and introduced by Efim Etkind . R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-492-02573-0 , p. 392.
  9. Transfer: Alfred-Edgar Thoss; quoted from: Anna Akhmatova: Im Spiegelland - Selected Poems, p. 92.
  10. a b Transfer: Eva Rönnau and Marianne Wiebe in collaboration with Lew Kopelew; quoted from: Raissa Orlowa, Lew Kopelew: Contemporaries, Masters, Friends. Knaus, Munich, Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-8135-0739-4 .
  11. Transfer: Ludolf Müller; quoted from: Anna Akhmatova: Im Spiegelland - Selected Poems, p. 148.
  12. Verena Auffermann , Gunhild Kübler , Ursula March , Elke Schmitter : Passions: 99 authors of world literature. C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-570-01048-8 , p. 11.
  13. lyrik-kabinett.de . See also the reference in Art. Kay Borowsky .
  14. See the edition by Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1982 2 , p. 147 annotation ** (see literature).
  15. Andrea Stoll: Ingeborg Bachmann: The dark shine of freedom. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 2013, ISBN 3-570-10123-1 , p. 281.
  16. Andrea Stoll: Ingeborg Bachmann: The dark shine of freedom. 2013, p. 295.
  17. Felix Philipp Ingold : Friendship in Times of Terror. Book review in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . January 3, 2012, ISSN  0376-6829 , accessed January 3, 2012.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on July 31, 2005 in this version .