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Those Forgotten Poets: Anna Akhmatova

2022-12-04T07:14:57.113Z


CHRONICLE - Under Stalin's terror, the "Queen of the Neva" lays simple, pure and translucent words on paper.


"

Anna Akhmatova's face is the only magnificent thing left to us in the world

", notes, just after the death of the poetess, on March 5, 1966, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.

And what a face!

It's all there: each of her features reflects this tragic dignity, this volcanic power that Anna Akhmatova embodied.

During the Great Terror, "

exiled from within

", she despite herself became the voice of the oppressed Russian people.

His weapons?

Simple words and sentences.

Breaking with symbolism, the one who was nicknamed "

the Queen of the Neva

" gave her letters of nobility to everyday things, combining conciseness and sobriety.

In a crystalline and musical poetic language, she builds her rhymes in flexibility.

Everything seems clear, obvious.

The voice of the Russian people

Anna Akhmatova was born in Imperial Russia in 1889 in Odessa, on the shores of the Black Sea.

His family moved the following year to Tsarskoye Selo, not far from Saint Petersburg.

Anna learns French there and devours the works of Pushkin.

His teachers also introduced him to Verlaine, Baudelaire and the great Greek authors.

Very early, she decides that she wants to write poems.

Her father, a naval engineer, does not object, provided that she finds a pseudonym, so as not to "

smear

" her surname, Gorenko.

She thus chose as her pen name that of her Tatar grandmother: Akhmatova.

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In 1910, she married the poet Nikolai Goumiliev, founder of the poetic movement called "acmeism", which advocated Latin clarity in opposition to the vagueness of symbolism.

Her first collections,

Le Soir

(1912) and

Le Rosaire

(1914), where she describes the beginnings of a relationship between a man and a woman, made her famous.

When the night I wait for his arrival, / It seems that life hangs by a thread.

/ What are honors, youth, freedom worth, / In front of the dear visitor with her flute

During the 1917 Revolution, Anna Akhmatova was 29 years old.

She could have left her country, but the poet chose to stay.

A way to seal his fate to that of the Russian people, victim of the madness of a man - whom Anna nicknamed "

The Moustached

".

The young woman was then part of this generation of poets of the "

Silver Age

": Ossip Mandelstam, Sergei Essenin, Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva... So many immense talents who almost all knew dramatic fates.

Anna was one of the few to escape the steamroller of the Soviet era, helpless witnessing the disappearance, one after another, of her loved ones.

In 1921, her husband was shot for “

anti-Bolshevik activities

”.

Her husbands, her lovers, then her son, are in turn shot, imprisoned, deported.

Anna is constantly tracked, monitored and, above all, banned from publication.

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So Akhmatova composes at night.

When at night I wait for his arrival, / It seems like life hangs by a thread.

/ What are honors, youth, freedom worth, / In front of the dear visitor with her flute

”, she writes.

In the morning, she recites her poems to her friend Lydia Chukovskaya, who memorizes each line.

The "

Queen of the Neva

" then makes her writings disappear, which she burns with her cigarettes.

His relatives, like Lydia, thus become living collections of poetry.

When she is not writing, Anna Akhmatova waits in the interminable line of “

Kresty

” (“

The Crosses

”), the Leningrad prison.

Like thousands of Russian mothers whose children are behind this “

blind and reddened

” wall, she brings her son, Lev, clothes and food.

The latter will remain there for twenty years.

Requiem

, which recounts the fate reserved for mothers who await news of the disappeared in the USSR, will not be published until thirty years later.

A text by Anna Akhmatova: “The rosehip blossoms and other poems”

To Alexander Blok

I went to see the poet.


At noon.

Sunday.

No noise in the vast room,


At the windows, the frost.

A crimson sun emerges


Flakes of gray smoke...


On me, my taciturn host Looks


so clearly!

Such eyes, for sure, are engraved


In all memories;


For me, cautious, I prefer


not to dive into mine.

I remember our words,


Noon, the mist, this Sunday,


In the high gray house


At the mouth of the Neva.

(January 1914, translated from Russian by Marion Graf and José-Flore Tappy)

"Requiem, Poem without heroes and other poems"

Some exchange caresses of glances,


Others drink until first light,


But me, all night long, I negotiate


With my indomitable conscience.



I say, "I carry your burden,


And it's heavy, you know how many years. "


But for her time does not exist,

And


for her there is no space in the world.



Here comes back the dark evening of the carnival,


The evil park, the slow race of the horse,


The wind loaded with happiness and gaiety,


Which falls on me from the slopes of the sky.



Above me, a quiet witness


Shows his double horn... Oh, to go,


Through the old alley of the Chinese Pavilion,


There, where one sees swans and

November 1935, translated from Russian by Jean-Louis Backès

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-12-04

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