“I am not with those who left the earth ...” - one of the most famous and quoted poems by Akhmatova, relating to civil lyrics.
Brief history of creation
The poem “I am not with those who left the earth ...” is dated July 1922 and is included in the collection “Anno Domini MCMXXI”. It is highly likely that it was created under the impression of the events that took place at that time with the Soviet intelligentsia. In May 1922, Lenin sent a note to Dzerzhinsky, which spoke of preparations for the expulsion of "writers and professors helping the counter-revolution." Already in June, the first two people were sent abroad. On July 16, a letter from Lenin appeared, addressed to the Central Committee, proposing the arrest and then exile of several hundred representatives of the intelligentsia, and without explanation. Subsequently, these plans began to be implemented. If Akhmatova knew about Lenin's intentions, which is quite acceptable, then the poem "I am not with those who abandoned the land ..." is a reaction to the actions of the authorities. If you didn’t know, then the work is most likely dedicated to people who left Russia after the fall of the tsarist regime.
Theme, plot, composition
The poem has no plot. The attention of readers is focused on the thoughts and feelings of the lyrical hero. It is generally accepted that the main theme of the work is the theme of emigration. “I am not with those who left the land…” is often seen as a harsh statement directed against people who left Russia after the Great October Revolution. The share of the exile in the poem is a heavy share. The emigrant's bread smells of wormwood, his path is dark. Those who remained in their homeland also have a hard time - Russia, which is in the "deaf child of the fire", is dangerous. They can only hope that time will put everything in its place, that subsequently "every hour will be justified." Compositionally, the work is built on antithesis- those who left are opposed to those who remain.
There is another interpretation of the poem. For example, the poet Dmitry Bobyshev, who in the early 60s was part of Akhmatova's closest circle of friends, believed that emigration was not the main theme. In his opinion, the people mentioned in the work, who left the land to be torn apart by enemies, are those who signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, which marked the withdrawal of Soviet Russia from the First World War and the defeat in it. With this interpretation, the rough flattery, which the lyrical heroine does not heed, does not come from emigrants, but from representatives of the new government. If we accept this interpretation, then the second stanza begins to sound differently. It turns out that she talks about those whom the Soviet government expelled from the country, and not about those who left, and the heroine really feels sorry for them. In this case, the semantic originality lies in the fact that the poem is about confronting the authorities, about people who were forced to leave their native land, and about those who remained, whose share in the future will also face many trials.
Lyrical hero
The perception of the image of the lyrical hero is almost completely determined by the chosen interpretation of the poem. However, there are some common features. Regardless of the interpretation of the work, it is clear that his lyrical heroine is a strong personality, able to endure hardships, unwilling to compromise her moral principles and ready to fight.
Size, rhymes, trails
The poem is written in iambic. The rhyme is used cross, rhymes are both male and female. Among the means of artistic expression found in the work are epithets (“rough flattery”, “deaf child”), comparison (exiles are compared with prisoners, patients), alliteration with “r” (the first two lines). In addition, an important role is played by the combination of “high” vocabulary (“I will not heed”, “torn apart”) with everyday (“foreign bread”).
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The revolutionary events in Russia alarmed the whole country. The number of emigrants who urgently began to leave Russian lands increased every day. Anna Akhmatova also had the opportunity to travel abroad. She could easily follow her husband Nikolai Gumilyov, who was in France at that time. However, the poetess refused such a chance. She has repeatedly stated that she wants to stay in her native and sweet heart of St. Petersburg.
Of course, Anna Andreevna realized that soon life in Russia would turn into a complete hell. But, this did not stop her and did not push her to make the wrong decision.
And now the borders are closed. Now, persecution and arrests begin inside the country. The poetess also has a hard time, because she does not accept the policy of the ruling party, speaking with opposition slogans and proposals.
At this time, Akhmatova creates her poem "I am not with those who left the earth ...". The reason for the appearance of this work was a terrible event - the arrest and execution of Akhmatova's husband, Nikolai Gumilyov.
Having gathered her spirit, the poetess remains faithful and devoted to her native land. It does not support those people who cowardly left the territory of Russia and hid outside of it. Moreover, she treats them with great sympathy, calling them cowardly. Akhmatova calls the road of such runaway wanderers dark. And he describes bread on the territory of a foreign country with the cloying smell of wormwood.
Of course, Anna Andreevna is aware that emigrants save themselves from the difficulties and problems that have fallen on the shoulders of the Russian people. But, this does not stop and does not upset her. She is a true patriot of her homeland and she is not afraid of repression and persecution. She, like the rest of the faithful inhabitants, will take any blow of fate. Under such heavy blows, people became tough, and even cruel.
However, no one could break their strong spirit, their faith in beautiful Russia and in their native land. The remaining citizens turned into ordinary people who defended their views and judgments to the very end.
I am not with those who threw the earth at the mercy of enemies.
I will not heed their rude flattery, I will not give them my songs.
But the exile is eternally pitiful to me, Like a prisoner, like a patient,
Dark is your road wanderer, Wormwood smells of someone else's bread.
And here, in the deaf haze of the fire, destroying the rest of youth,
We did not deflect a single blow from ourselves.
Akhmatova Anna Andreevna (real name - Gorenko) was born in the family of a marine engineer, captain of the 2nd rank, retired at st. Big Fountain near Odessa. A year after the birth of their daughter, the family moved to Tsarskoye Selo. Here Akhmatova became a student of the Mariinsky Gymnasium, but spent every summer near Sevastopol. “My first impressions are Tsarskoye Selo,” she wrote in a later autobiographical note, “the green, damp splendor of the parks, the pasture where the nanny took me, the hippodrome, where little motley horses galloped, the old station and something else that later became part of the Tsarskoye Selo Ode "". In 1905, after the divorce of her parents, Akhmatova moved with her mother to Evpatoria. In 1906 - 1907. In 1908-1910, she studied in the final class of the Kiev-Fundukley gymnasium, in 1908 - 1910. - at the legal department of the Kyiv Higher Women's Courses.
On April 25, 1910, "beyond the Dnieper in a village church," she married N. S. Gumilyov, whom she met in 1903. In 1907, he published her poem "There are many brilliant rings on his hand ..." in a publication published by him in the Paris magazine "Sirius". The style of Akhmatova's early poetic experiments was significantly influenced by her acquaintance with the prose of K. Hamsun, with the poetry of V. Ya. Bryusov and A. A. Blok.
During the First World War, Akhmatova did not join her voice with the voices of poets who shared the official patriotic pathos, but she responded with pain to wartime tragedies ("July 1914", "Prayer", etc.). The White Pack, published in September 1917, was not as successful as the previous books. But the new intonations of mournful solemnity, prayerfulness, and the supra-personal beginning destroyed the habitual stereotype of Akhmatov's poetry, which had developed among the reader of her early poems. These changes were caught by O. E. Mandelstam, noting: "The voice of renunciation is growing stronger and stronger in Akhmatova's poems, and at present her poetry is approaching becoming one of the symbols of the greatness of Russia."
After the October Revolution, Akhmatova did not leave her homeland, remaining in "her deaf and sinful land." In the poems of these years (collections "Plantain" and "Anno Domini MCMXXI", both - 1921), sorrow for the fate of their native country merges with the theme of detachment from the vanity of the world, the motives of "great earthly love" are colored by the mood of the mystical expectation of the "groom", and understanding creativity as divine grace spiritualizes reflections on the poetic word and the poet's vocation and translates them into an "eternal" plan. In 1922, M. S. Shaginyan wrote, noting the deepest property of the poet’s talent: “Akhmatova, over the years, more and more knows how to be amazingly popular, without any quasi, without falsehood, with severe simplicity and with priceless avarice of speech.”
Since 1924, Akhmatova was no longer published. In 1926, a two-volume collection of her poems was supposed to be published, but the publication did not take place, despite prolonged and persistent efforts. Only in 1940 was the small collection "From Six Books" published, and the next two - in the 1960s ("Poems", 1961; "Running Time", 1965).
Since the mid-1920s, Akhmatova has been much involved in the architecture of old Petersburg, studying the life and work of A. S. Pushkin, which corresponded to her artistic aspirations for classical clarity and harmony of poetic style, and was also associated with understanding the problem of "poet and power". In Akhmatova, despite the cruelty of the time, the spirit of high classics indestructibly lived, determining both her creative manner and style of life behavior.
In the tragic 1930-1940s, Akhmatova shared the fate of many of her compatriots, having survived the arrest of her son, husband, the death of friends, her excommunication from literature by a party decree of 1946. The very time she was given the moral right to say, together with "a hundred million people": "We Not a single blow was deflected." Akhmatova's works of this period - the poem "Requiem" (1935? published in the USSR in 1987), poems written during the Great Patriotic War, testified to the poet's ability not to separate the experience of personal tragedy from the understanding of the catastrophic nature of history itself. B. M. Eikhenbaum considered the most important side of Akhmatova's poetic worldview to be "the feeling of one's personal life as a national, folk life, in which everything is significant and generally significant." “Hence,” the critic remarked, “is the way out into history, into the life of the people, hence comes a special kind of courage associated with a sense of being chosen, a mission, a great, important cause ...” A cruel, disharmonious world breaks into Akhmatova’s poetry and dictates new themes and new poetics: the memory of history and the memory of culture, the fate of a generation, considered in a historical retrospective... Multi-temporal narrative planes intersect, "another's word" goes into the depths of subtext, history is refracted through the "eternal" images of world culture, biblical and gospel motifs. Significant understatement becomes one of the artistic principles of Akhmatova's late work. It was based on the poetics of the final work - "Poems without a Hero" (1940 - 65), with which Akhmatova said goodbye to St. Petersburg in the 1910s and to the era that made her a Poet.
Akhmatova's creativity as the largest cultural phenomenon of the 20th century. received worldwide recognition. In 1964 she became the laureate of the Etna-Taormina International Prize, in 1965 she received an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from the University of Oxford.
On March 5, 1966, Akhmatova died in the village of Domodedovo, on March 10, after the funeral service at the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral, her ashes were buried in a cemetery in the village of Komarov near Leningrad.
Already after her death, in 1987, during Perestroika, the tragic and religious cycle "Requiem" was published, written in 1935 - 1943 (supplemented 1957 - 1961).
Anna Akhmatova's poem "I am not with those who left the earth" refers to civil lyrics. In it, the poetess departs from her usual intimate experiences and demonstrates her participation and involvement in the events taking place in society and the country.
Akhmatova wrote it in 1922, shortly after the arrest and execution of Gumilyov, her former husband. Having the opportunity to leave post-revolutionary Russia, like many of her acquaintances, she did not do this, not thinking of her life without Russia and without St. Petersburg. Her love for the Motherland was so great that even the persecution that began against those representatives of culture who remained did not shake the poetess.
main topic
In the lines of the work, the poetess divides into two camps those who left their homeland and those who remained, despite the upcoming difficulties. In the first lines, she also demonstrates her demon-tempter, which, due to her character and beliefs, she did not succumb to: "I will not give them my songs."
She does not despise emigrants, she feels sorry for them. The poetess tears off the veil of that romanticism that other representatives of the literary world attributed to them. She sincerely sympathizes with the emigrants, realizing that it will not be easy for them to assimilate in a new environment - "someone else's bread smells like wormwood."
In the work, she clearly demonstrates that those who remain are having a hard time. They had to stand under a hail of blows of fate.
Akhmatova realizes that such a situation in society is the tragedy of an entire generation with a series of broken destinies and broken lives.
Structural analysis
The poem consists of four iambic stanzas. The rhyme in them is cross.
When constructing the composition of the work, the poetess uses the antithesis. It sharply marks the boundaries of those who stayed and those who went abroad. She describes the subsequent fate of each group, expressing her attitude towards them. The artistic expressiveness of the work is relatively modest. Akhmatova uses metaphors, oxymoron, and neologism. Also in one poem, she successfully combines high-level vocabulary and everyday expressions.
Akhmatova also uses epithets, but they are modest and reserved. Nerve and strain in the work create means of alliteration. The selection of words with growling and buzzing sounds at the beginning of the verse creates a feeling of noise, din and general anxiety, which are supported by buzzing sounds in subsequent stanzas. At the end of the work, a clear ringing and a calling alarm, formed by the sound “z”, are heard.
Conclusion
“Not with those I who abandoned the earth” is a work in which Akhmatova exposes the feelings of her heroine and experiences associated not so much with personal dramas as with the fate of her country and people. The work is valuable in that it clearly shows the tragedy of the era and genuine love for the Motherland. This topic is relevant to this day.
I am not with those who left the earth
At the mercy of enemies.
I will not heed their rude flattery,
I won't give them my songs.
But the exile is eternally pitiful to me,
Like a prisoner, like a patient.
Dark is your road, wanderer,
Wormwood smells of someone else's bread.
And here, in the deaf haze of fire
Losing the rest of my youth
We are not a single blow
They didn't turn themselves away.
And we know that in the assessment of late
Every hour will be justified...
But there are no more tearless people in the world,
Haughtier and simpler than us.
1. Theme - the appointment of a person in the war.
2. The idea - the memory of the people who fought for the Motherland will live forever.
3. Rhyme - cross (1 rhymes with 3, 2 with 4).
4. Size - two-syllable, iambic (stress on 2 syllables).
5. Visual means:
metaphor: "who left the earth", "I will not give them my songs", "ruining the rest of my youth", "every hour will be justified"
epithets: "rough flattery", "your road is dark", "in the deaf haze of fire", "there are no people in the world more tearless, arrogant and simpler than us"
comparison: "an exile, like a prisoner, like a sick person."
Updated: 2013-07-19
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