About A. Tarkovsky's cycle "In Memory of A. A. Akhmatova"

I give my consent to this celebration.
They will erect a monument to me,
and if ever in this country..

Anna Akhmatova

When poets mourn a fellow writer, they seek not only to express feelings of loss and grief, but also to recreate a poetic portrait of the deceased, based on his work. So did Arseny Tarkovsky in his cycle of six poems "In memory of A. A. Akhmatova "(1966-1968), written under the direct impression of the death and funeral of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova and completed on the sad anniversary.

The cycle opens with the sonnet "I made a bed of snow", in which the author, saying goodbye to the deceased, bows before her "mountain height" and sees himself standing under the northern sky, in a black shirt, "in your future, as in paradise". The whole farewell scene is drawn in metaphorical and symbolic images: a snow bed, decapitated meadows and groves, laurel and hops as symbols of glory and passion, a monument erected "on the most tearful of lands". Even mentioning the actual date of death looks like stopped time against this background: "But March was not replaced by April," Akhmatova died on March 5, once predicting: "Spring wanders indifferently over my Leningrad grave."

From the very first lines, the sonnet is permeated with Akhmatovian allusions, starting with the rhyme bed-hop and the superlative adjectives "sweetest laurel, bitterest hop", so characteristic of her style: sweetest dream, day, name; bitterest sigh, day; the most lively drama; the most blessed and sacred springs; the rarest and most legitimate name, the most tender conversation, the most faithful friend, the thinnest rain, the lightest dust, the sleepless headboards, the most forbidden window.

Common in Akhmatova's poetry are also threefold enumerations of definitions that usually take up an entire line: "Bold, evil

page 27

and cheerful", "Cold, clean, light flame", "The only one, farewell, unforgettable", "You were slender, calm, foggy" (about St. Petersburg). Note that the epithets chosen by Tarkovsky to define Akhmatova's" height "("Before the white, pale, defiant") were also used by the poetess to characterize her appearance and her poems: "I am whiter than snow", "pale mouth", "face paler", "white flock of my poems", "my defiant verse."

And the line "I put up a monument to you..." is a response to Akhmatova's request in Requiem not to put up a monument to her either by the sea, in Odessa, where she was born, or in Tsarskoye Selo, where she studied, but to build it near the prison where "three hundred hours" stood. And a younger contemporary puts up a monument to the" Lament Museum "with its" tearful gift " - "on the most tearful of lands". The original interpretation of this poem is found in the introductory article by K. Kovalji to the three-volume book by A. Tarkovsky: "This is a thought not about yourself, but about Russia, to which the poet puts up a monument" (Tarkovsky A. A. Sobr. soch.: In 3 vols. Vol. 1. Moscow, 1991, p. 24).

Imagining the future of the mourners of the days of the lost as paradise, Tarkovsky probably remembered numerous statements about paradise in her lyrics: "The one who sings and cries like this Should be in His paradise", "paradise is not for sinners", "the doors of heavenly paradise", "the gate has opened to white paradise", "white sun of paradise", "star paradise", "on the threshold of white paradise". Or maybe he remembered her attempt to look into the coming century in A Poem Without a Hero:

And then out of the coming age
A stranger
Let the eyes look boldly,
And he will give me, a flying shadow,
an armful of wet lilacs
At an hour like this huge thunderstorm.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the choice of an unconventional sonnet size for Russian poetry - not 5-stop or 6-stop iambic, but 4-stop-and the French type-aBBa aBBa vGG vGv, as in the Primorsky Sonnet ("Here everything will Outlive me") Akhmatova, in whose tercets, however, three rhymes are given-VVg DDg (see KLE. M., 1972. Vol. 7. Stl. 67-68).

The second poem of the cycle "When at Nikola Morskogo" is dedicated to the funeral service of Akhmatova in the St. Nicholas Church, and with its conception and amphibious rhythm, it resembles such poems as "When a person dies..." and "When they bury an epoch..." (1940), and again Akhmatova's rhyme is harsh - word. I must say that the poetess often put "word" and "words" in a rhyming position: the word is ready, again, shelter, Christ, blue, such, seventh; the words are grass, head, blue, celebrations, words are sins. But what Tarkovsky hears is not a" divine "or" royal "word, but a"humble, alien" one -

page 28

"on the wax of the sovereign mouth "(in Akhmatova - "my tortured mouth"), incomprehensible and indistinct, "like a story".

To embody the image of the poetess, the author uses her self-characteristics: "Poverty lay in flowers", "homeless pride". All her life, she considered herself a beggar, emphasized her poverty, homelessness and pride: "I wander as a black beggar" (1917), "bequeathed me benevolence and poverty" (1921), "I entered it as a beggar and leave it as a beggar" (1952), "there are many of us who are homeless" (1915), "no one in the world is homeless and homeless, probably not" (early 60s)," But the end of my pride is coming "(1942)," So save me from the mountains of melon " (1958).

And the shadow of homeless pride
On the black Nevsky ice,
Through the snowy Baltic desert,
And the blue Adriatic
Flying in plain sight.

Depicting the flight of a shadow over his native places, often sung by Akhmatova, the poet again resorts to her favorite concepts and expressions. So, she liked to imagine the shadows of the living and the dead and her own-from the past and the future, up to the" procession "and" round dance "of shadows: " your suffering shadow", "our shadows pass by", "as a shadow passed and left no shadow", "my shadow remains and yearns","my shadow is coming to meet me", "my shadow is still between you", " O shadow! I'm sorry."

Akhmatovs 'poems include" shining ice from wide rivers", a gray seaside, a furious sea, a wind full of Baltic salt, the Neva River's icy water, snow-covered Leningrad, the quiet Karelian land, bleak swamps, and the same color scheme - black, white (snowy), and blue: black - wind, shore, garden, cross, dream, shame, star, road, wine, separation, Christmas trees, songs, news; snow-branches, stars, treasures, night, dust, dust; blue-varnish of the sky, tablecloth of water, cigar smoke, fire and shine of eyes, " eyes bluer than ice."

If the second poem traces the path of the funeral procession to the cemetery, then the third describes the funeral, the surrounding landscape and the night wake. The three-time repetition of "Home, home, home" in the beginning sounds sad and ironic: "under the pines in Komarov" is no longer a dacha-booth in which the poetess lived in the summer, but a grave. How many times did the bespastushnaya (Akhmatovskaya self-determination) homeless woman repeat the cherished word "home", rhyming it with many words (thunder, sleep, table, bottom, corner, circle, fire, pond, window, path, go), including "my", as in this poem: "Well, Let's go home! But where is my home and where is my sanity?" As she will say in "A Poem without a hero": "And the cheerful word-at home-is now unknown to anyone...".

page 29

The universe and nature say goodbye to their singer. Winter is the last ray of light shining from under the Karelian pine needles, "like the first flutter of a wing"; night has lit up the stars above the snowy blue.

Tarkovsky's address " Oh, my mortal angel!" with mystical "wings at the ready" they are combined with everyday details-wreaths in the headboard and a lace kerchief. By the way, Akhmatova herself liked to refer to angels and addressed both heavenly and earthly angels, dead and alive: the angel of God betrothes lovers, then points out the light invisible to us; angels in white wings bring radiance, "the angel of midnight to dawn talks with me", " You will be my angel"Remember me, my angel."

The pathos of farewell is somewhat reduced in the last stanza due to the appearance of new characters, instead of the former "all" - "we", "us":

And we'll keep you up all night
Immortality was promised,
They asked us for help
Leave the house of sorrow...

The immortality promised by relatives, friends, and admirers is accompanied by requests for help in order to leave the sad land with dignity. After all, Akhmatova also put sadness and poetry side by side: "Sorrow is the strongest thing on earth, and the royal word is the most enduring." The initial repetition of "home" is answered in the final by a four-fold injection of the word "night" ("All night, all night, all night. And again the night at the beginning."), interrupting (undermining) with a gloomy chord faith in the future and in immortality. And the poetess herself expressed hopes for posthumous life and glory only in her early lyrics ("Dying, I yearn for immortality"), later considered only geniuses immortal (Sophocles, Mandelstam), and three years before her death she wrote about her poems: "You will enter oblivion as people enter the temple", apparently, meaning that they, having lost the author's name, will become anonymous and revered, like temples - "Blasphemed, praised" (1963).

For the poem "Home, home, home", a 3-stop iambic was chosen, which has various semantic colors in Russian poetry, but "the overall color is invariably dark", transmitting, for the most part, the motives of doom and death (Gasparov M. L. Semantic halo of the meter. To the semantics of the Russian 3-stop Iambic alphabet / / Linguistics and Poetics, Moscow, 1979, pp. 282-308). In Akhmatov's poetry, this size is rare, but he wrote such a poem as "Now goodbye, capital" (1917): "I will leave. Land of the Lord, take me in!"

And in the next poem of the cycle "On ice, on snow, on jasmine" is used popular in the poetry of the XX century and in Akhmatovskaya too-trekhdolnik: "We do not know how to say goodbye...", " Weak-willed mercy about-

page 30

The combination of ice and snow with jasmine seems strange if you do not know about the Komarovsky jasmine, the unusual flowering of which in August was noted by Akhmatova in 1962 in the poem "More about this summer": "And in August, the jasmine bloomed."

The antonymic beginning becomes the key to thinking about summing up life's results, about what the poetess took to "her home" - "half of her soul, half of her best song" ; and during her lifetime she was "half-recognized, like a heresy", did not trust praise and completed the "earthly semicircle". This emphasized "halfness" has its source not only in relation to the poetess of the official authorities ("half - nun, half-whore"), but also in her attitude - "half-witted", "half-abandoned", "half of misfortunes", "Already madness has covered half of the soul with a wing", "And it seems that the souls have lost half".

Asking the question: "What do the invisible eyes of Incredulous bright eyes see?", Tarkovsky does not give an unambiguous answer, but offers an alternative-an antithesis: a frosty canopy or swirls of light, miles and winter, or "a bonfire that embraces us?". (In Akhmatova - " Oh, there is a bonfire that does not exist dares to touch neither oblivion nor fear..."). How did the poetess imagine "afterlife"? - "And the lightning is a flying fire, And the voice of mighty joy, Like angels, will come down to me "(1913); "And this is how I imagined the Posthumous wandering of the soul" (1916); "My soul will fly up to meet the sun..." (1944).

The fifth poem " White pines..."in its orientation and individual expressions, in its style and rhythm, it approaches prayer, the "funeral psalm".

White pines
sing: - Amen!
My dove is your hand.
My bread is bitter,
my voice is wormwood,
my road is bitter.

The psalms usually begin with a song of praise in honor of the Lord: "Let all the earth worship You, let it sing to Your name" - praise and glory, " My days are in Your hand." Then follow complaints about fate, misfortune, and infirmity: "My heart is bruised and withered like grass," "I eat ashes like bread, and dissolve my drink with tears" (Ps. 101); " Mortal diseases have seized me, the torments of hell have overtaken me, I have met with distress and tribulation "(Ps. .114). But Tarkovsky's prayer is addressed to the buried, hence "Amen" and not " Hallelujah." And again Akhmatova's rhyme amen-wormwood and her favorite epithet "bitter" (dream, air, pain, glory, death, delight, name, fun, dissimilarity, years, meetings,

page 31

delirium), and the image of a dove in my hand ("And the dove eats wheat out of my hands"). Did not the poet remember Akhmatovs plea to the wind (from the early "Bury me, bury me, wind"): "And tell the blue mist to read psalms over me"?

In my throat there is
a heavenly blue -
your icy eyes ...

So for the first time in the cycle (in the text, and not in the title), the heroine's name appears - and then in the form of the initials A. A. A. (there are seven "a" s in the first name, patronymic, and surname) with the epithet "ice", which Akhmatova gave to various nouns: roses and speeches, pillars and glasses, night and water, foam and surf. Tarkovsky, without mentioning the name "Anna" (in Hebrew - grace, mercy), deciphers it, resorting to an anagram and combining the sound and meaning: "Your name is Angel and Canaan", i.e. in you the messenger of God and the promised land, promised to Abraham, merged. But "you are separated, you are alienated", and the open "A" is replaced by the deaf "P" - the doubled "desert of deserts" and "feast remembered in lent", as a hyperbole of loneliness and alienation, as the eternal confrontation of the Poet with the surrounding world.

Mysterious and mysterious is the ending of the poem: "For seven centuries / reached the eyes / phosphorus of the last stars". Why exactly does the light of distant stars reach the earth for seven centuries? The answer, it seems, lies in the following Akhmatov lines written in Tashkent during the war: "I haven't been here in seven hundred years, but nothing has changed (...) All the same choirs of stars and waters, All the same arches of the sky are black (...) It is strong, my Asian home... " - and alluding to the author's Asian ancestors, who came to Russia in the XIII century and settled there, becoming Rusichs, and now she has visited her ancestral homeland. That is why, after seven centuries, the "phosphorus of the last stars" has come down to us.

The biblical mood of "White Pines" echoes Akhmatovsky memorial prayers (for example, "And Smolenskaya is now a birthday girl") and frequent references to the Bible ("Bible verses", "I read the messengers of the apostles, I read the Words of the Psalmist", "I have the sadness that King David gave to millennia in a royal way").

The cycle also ends with the sonnet "And this shadow I spent on the road", this time traditional, 5-stop lambic, but with a variation of rhyming. Created on the anniversary of Akhmatova's death, it combines the motifs and images of previous poems: a winter landscape, a forest and Karelian pines, a shadow with two wings on its back, similar to two rays; the word and immortality. Once again, the agonizing questions to which there are no answers:

page 32

What if the memory is outside of earth conditions
Powerless to restore day to night?
What if the shadow, having left the earth, in the word
Doesn't drink immortality?

The author of "A Poem without a Hero" asked a long-gone shadow something similar: "Won't you tell me again the word That Overcame death And the answer to my life?". Tarkovsky asks the heart to be silent and not lie - " Bless the dawn rays." Many of Akhmatovs poems end with such a soothing note.: "Bless the heavens...", " Bless, O God...", "To prolong the blessed life"," For the joy of you and me"," And do not ask God for anything"," Consolation and good news for me","Words of last consolation".

The cycle "In Memory of A. A. Akhmatova" impresses not only with its metrical diversity (iambic, amphibrachian, dactyl), but also with its stanzas: I and VI - sonnets with different rhyme sequences, II and IV-5-verses AbAAb, III-6-verses AbAbAb, V-quatrains with "idle" lines abab abhv ahgh. This diversity to some extent reflects the peculiarities of the verse system of late Akhmatova, which used the following methods: 5 - 6-7 - 8- poems of various rhyme configurations, including those with unrhymed and broken lines. Did Tarkovsky want to refute her grieving complaint: "Akhmatovskaya will not be called Either the street or the stanza"?

Tarkovsky personally met Anna Andreevna in 1946, and she listened favorably to his poems, later claiming that with her own hands she "dragged Arseny from Mandela to the Adam bonfire" (i.e., from under the influence of Mandelstam), and he dedicated to her one of his best program poems - the sonnet "Manuscript" (1960). And in Notes on the 50th Anniversary of the Rosary of Anna Akhmatova, he reflected on her amazing and rare "gift of harmony", on the ability to create perfect and complete works, on the "psychologism of poetic language", on the simplicity of rhymes and unobtrusive metaphors. These reflections Tarkovsky translated into verse form in the cycle "In Memory of A. A. Akhmatova", creating an image of the poet (Tarkovsky called Akhmatova a poet, not a poetess, and she also disliked this name) and a poetic monument to his famous contemporary, whom he revered and worshipped.

Israel, Safed.

Permanent link to this publication: