The theme of the poet and poetry in the works of A. Akhmatova

Akhmatova spoke about how poetry is born in the series "Secrets of the Craft". The combination of these two words is remarkable, the combination of the sacred and the ordinary - one of them is literally inseparable from the other when it comes to creativity. For Akhmatova, it is a phenomenon of the same order as life, and its process occurs according to the will of the forces that dictate the course of life. The verse appears like a “roll of dying thunder,” like a sound that triumphs “in the abyss of whispers and ringings.” And the poet’s task is to catch it, to hear the signal bells breaking through from somewhere “words and light rhymes.”
The creative process, the birth of Akhmatova’s poetry, is equated to the processes that occur in life, in nature. And the poet’s duty, it would seem, is not to invent, but only, having heard, to write down. But it has long been noticed that the artist in his work does not strive to do as in life, but creates as life itself. Akhmatova also enters into competition with life (“I have not settled my scores With fire and wind and water...”). Akhmatova’s poetry allows us to get to the innermost meaning of what is being done and done by life. Anna Akhmatova said this:

« If only you knew what kind of rubbish

Poems grow without shame,

Like a yellow dandelion by the fence,

Like burdocks and quinoa.”

But the earth's trash becomes the soil on which poetry grows, lifting a person with it (“For me, my dreams will suddenly open the gates And lead me to the morning star”). That is why in Akhmatova’s lyrics the poet and the world have an equal relationship - the happiness of being gifted by him is inseparable in poetry from the awareness of the opportunity to give generously, royally:

He probably wants a lot more
To be sung by my voice:

That which is wordless rumbles,
Or in the darkness the underground stone wears away,
Or breaks through the smoke.

For Akhmatova, art is capable of absorbing the world and thereby making it richer, and this determines its effective power, the place and role of the artist in people’s lives. With a feeling of this power bestowed on her, Akhmatova lived her life in poetry. “We are condemned - and we ourselves know this - We are to waste, not to save,” she said at the very beginning of her poetic path, in the fifteenth year. This is what allows the verse to gain immortality, as it is said aphoristically precisely:

Gold rusts and steel decays,
Marble is crumbling. Everything is ready for death.

The most durable thing on earth is sadness
And more durable is the royal word.

When meeting with Akhmatova’s poems, the name of Pushkin is involuntarily recalled: the classical clarity, intonation expressiveness of Akhmatova’s verse, a clearly expressed position of acceptance of the world opposing man - all this allows us to speak about the Pushkin principle, which clearly reveals itself in Akhmatova’s poetry. The name of Pushkin was the most dear to her - the idea of what constitutes the essence of poetry was associated with it. There are almost no direct echoes of Pushkin's poems in Akhmatova's poetry; Pushkin's influence is felt here on a different level - the philosophy of life, the persistent desire to be faithful only to poetry, and not to the power of power or the demands of the crowd. It is with the Pushkin tradition that Akhmatova’s characteristic scale of poetic thought and harmonic precision of verse is associated, the ability to identify the universal significance of a unique emotional movement, to correlate the sense of history with the sense of modernity, and finally, the variety of lyrical themes, held together by the personality of the poet, who is always a contemporary of the reader.
Akhmatova forever linked her fate with the fate of her native land, and when, after the revolution, the time came to choose, she did not hesitate: she remained with her native country, with the people, declaring this decisively, loudly in the poem “I had a voice. He called comfortingly...”
But Akhmatova did not intend to become a singer of the winning class.
She did not deny the revolution the greatness of its goals, but Akhmatova was convinced that their affirmation could not be achieved.

to demonstrate a desecration of humanity, cruelty, which in the post-revolutionary era was presented as the most effective means of establishing goodness and justice. Her poems, generated by a time when in the name of high ideals, many human destinies were senselessly destroyed and lives were trampled, are filled with inescapable bitterness:

You won't be alive

You can't get up from the snow.

Twenty-eight bayonets,

Five gunshots.

Bitter update

I sewed for a friend.

Loves, loves blood

Russian land.

Akhmatova’s poems clearly did not correspond to ideas about the meaning of existence and the purpose of poetry, which were increasingly asserted in the post-revolutionary era: her poetry is declared to be a property of the past, hostile to revolutionary reality. And soon her poems stopped being published altogether, and even her name appeared occasionally, only in a sharply critical context. Time treated Akhmatova extremely cruelly.
The grief she experienced then and remained with her for the rest of her life will be echoed in her poems again and again:

“On the threshold of white paradise, Looking back, he shouted: “I’m waiting!” “I called death on my dear ones, And they died one after another.”
Akhmatova learned about the execution of her husband Gumilyov from newspapers.

To the masterpieces of Akhmatova's lyrics:
Tear-stained autumn, like a widow
Dressed in black, all hearts are clouded...
Going through my husband's words,
She won't stop crying.
And it will be so until the quietest snow
He will not take pity on the mournful and tired...
Oblivion of pain and oblivion of bliss - I would give a lot of life for this.
There are many beautiful descriptions of autumn in Russian poetry. Akhmatova does not describe - she recreates the inner, mental state, which in everyday life is often characterized by the word autumn: here bitterness and melancholy merge together.

Composition

Anna Akhmatova worked in a very difficult time, a time of disasters and social upheavals, revolutions and wars. Poets in Russia in that turbulent era, when people forgot what freedom was, often had to choose between free creativity and life. But despite all these circumstances, poets still continued to work miracles: wonderful lines and stanzas were created. The source of inspiration for Akhmatova was the Motherland, Russia, which was desecrated, but this made it even closer and dearer. Anna Akhmatova could not emigrate, because she knew that only in Russia could she create, that it was in Russia that her poetry was needed.

* I am not with those who abandoned the earth
* To be torn to pieces by enemies.
* I don’t heed their rude flattery,
* I won’t give them my songs.

But let's remember the beginning of the poetess's path. Her first poems appeared in Russia in 1911 in the magazine “Apollo”, and the following year the poetry collection “Evening” was published. Almost immediately, Akhmatova was ranked by critics among the greatest Russian poets. The whole world of Akhmatova’s early, and in many ways later, poetry was connected with A. Blok. Blok's muse turned out to be married to Akhmatova's muse. The hero of Blok’s poetry was the most significant and characteristic “male” hero of the era, while the heroine of Akhmatova’s poetry was a representative of “female” poetry. It is from the images of Blok that the hero of Akhmatov’s lyrics largely comes. Akhmatova in her poems appears in an endless variety of women's destinies: lovers and wives, widows and mothers, cheating and abandoned. Akhmatova showed in art the complex history of the female character of the advanced era, its origins, and the breaking of a new formation. That is why in 1921, at a dramatic time in her life and in everyone’s life, Akhmatova was able to write the lines that were astounding in her spirit:

* Everything was stolen, betrayed, sold,
* The wing of the Black Death flashed,
* Everything is devoured by hungry melancholy,
* Why did we feel light?

So, in a certain sense, Akhmatova was also a revolutionary poet. But she always remained a traditional poet, who placed herself under the banner of Russian classics, primarily Pushkin. The development of Pushkin's world continued throughout his life.

There is a center that, as it were, brings the rest of the world of poetry to itself; it turns out to be the main nerve, idea and principle. This is Love. The element of the female soul inevitably had to begin with such a declaration of love. In one of her poems, Akhmatova called love “the fifth season of the year.” The feeling, in itself acute and extraordinary, receives additional acuteness, manifesting itself in the extreme crisis expression of a rise or fall, a first meeting or a completed break, mortal danger or mortal melancholy. That is why Akhmatova is so drawn to the lyrical short story with an unexpected, often whimsical and capricious end to the psychological plot and to the unusualness of the lyrical ballad, eerie and mysterious (“The City Has Disappeared,” “New Year’s Ballad”).

Usually her poems are the beginning of a drama, or only its climax, or even more often the finale and ending. And here she relied on the rich experience of Russian not only poetry, but also prose:

* Glory to you, hopeless pain,
* The gray-eyed king died yesterday.
* And outside the window the poplars rustle:
* Your king is not on earth...
* Akhmatova’s poems carry a special element of love-pity:
* Oh no, I didn't love you,
* Burned with sweet fire,
* So explain what power

* In your sad name.

The world of Akhmatova’s poetry is a tragic world. Motifs of misfortune and tragedy are heard in the poems “Slander”, “The Last”, “After 23 Years” and others. In the years of repression, the most difficult trials, when her husband is shot and her son ends up in prison, creativity will become the only salvation, “the last freedom.” The muse did not abandon the poet, and she wrote the great “Requiem”.

Compared to the Symbolists, Akhmatova’s descriptions stand out precisely because of their asceticism. Another difference is the stingy accuracy and conciseness. “The thin April ice crunched slightly,” “And the sharp cry of a crow in the black sky,” “And the rare chords of the harpsichord,” each of these sounds, thanks to an accurate, specific characteristic, becomes definite and clearly recognizable. In the poems of Akhmatova, who “overcame symbolism,” “precise and strict forms of the external world” and “nice boundaries between things” appear. They do not prevent the comparison of sounds of different types, but they prevent their mixing into a single unclear sound stream, which symbolists call music.

In symbolist poetry, music is a key word-symbol, covering many meanings. Music, the sounds generated by the art of musicians, is the top of the hierarchy into which the Symbolists built all the sound manifestations of the external world, which attracted them not in themselves, but as representatives of “world harmony.” Hence the deification of musical art, which led the Symbolists to depersonalize qualitatively different sound phenomena. From this position, any sound was already music. In addition, understanding music as the “essence of the world,” the Symbolists heard it even where nothing sounded at all. That is, musical properties were attributed to phenomena that do not have acoustic expression. Phrases became quite natural where the word “music” appeared not independently, but accompanied by a noun in the genitive case, like “music of the earth” by A. Blok or “music of dreams” by I. Annensky.

While Akhmatova’s music is not “music of something,” it exists in poetry on its own. Akhmatova, without theorizing, nevertheless distinguishes sound as an artistic phenomenon from music, also separating several types of sounds. Music is one of the phenomena of the world, which does not pretend to be its essence; it is a value among other values, high, but not supreme. And yet it retained the ability to make a person experience exceptional moments, unique states of mind:

* Something miraculous burns in her,
* And before our eyes its edges are cut.
* She alone speaks to me,
* When others are afraid to approach.
* When the last friend looked away,
* She was with me in my grave
* And she sang like the first thunderstorm
* It’s as if all the flowers started talking.

In the series of sound phenomena, music occupies approximately the same position. Akhmatova's enumerations and comparisons differ from the Symbolist ones by being particularly careful. They are devoid of direct identification. Compare Akhmatova’s timid “or” with A. Bely’s confident “so” and with Balmont’s even more decisive dash. V.M. Zhirmunsky wrote about Akhmatova’s comparisons that they are devoid of “metaphorical identification characteristic of symbolism... Comparisons are introduced with the words as if, as if, as if, as if, even further expanding the distance between the compared objects... they seem to emphasize that the very act of comparison is the result artistic reflection." Sounds are not arranged according to a hierarchical scheme, where music would be given preference over other sounds, but rather along a horizontal one, where each of them reveals its individuality:

* Like cranes crowing in the sky,
* How the cicadas chatter restlessly,
* How the soldier girl sings about sadness -
* I remembered everything with sensitive hearing.

In the above fragment of the poem “By the Sea,” the cries of birds, the crackling of cicadas and singing seem to be equally important to the author’s ear. So later, in the poem “Dream”, enumerative intonation does not give advantage to Bach’s music over the church bell and both sounds over the silent blooming of roses and autumn nature. When reading some of her later poems, Akhmatova’s idea of music sometimes resembles a symbolist one.

Research on this facet of A. Akhmatova’s creativity can be continued in more than one direction, each of which is no less interesting than the one described above. This could be the next stage of my work on studying the work of Russian poets of the 20th century. In addition, it is possible to study this aspect in the works of other representatives of poetic art.

The question of what a poet should be, what his role in society is, what the tasks of poetry are, have always worried and continue to worry supporters of art for the people. Therefore, the theme of the poet’s purpose is the central theme not only of the poetry of the 19th century, it permeates all the work of modern poets, for whom the fate of the homeland and people is their fate.

Despite the fact that Anna Akhmatova predicted a short life path for herself, she was mistaken: her path was long and extremely creatively rich and complex. At different times, she had different assessments of the role of the poet, as she called herself, and poetry in society. Early lyrics were formed under the influence of the fashion for love poems of that time, although even then Akhmatova stood out very much among her “comrades in the shop” and therefore never called herself a female poet.

Akhmatova wondered about the role of the poet and poetry in society. This was not at all accidental. The roots of this phenomenon lay in the psychology of the poet: Akhmatova always felt like a part of something big - history, country, people. The first poetic experiments took place when Akhmatova was in line with the “Acmeism” movement. But gradually the poetess moved away from the Acmeists and chose another reference point, which she considered the only authentic one: Pushkin. One of the poems in the cycle “In Tsarskoe Selo” is dedicated to him:

"The dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys,

The lake shores were sad,

And we cherish the century

The barely audible rustle of footsteps..."

At the end of the verse there is an expressive detail: “the disheveled volume of Guys.” This is a symbol of the poet’s inner liberation and freedom.

But still, despite the fact that Pushkin was the highest literary authority for Akhmatova, she was also looking for her own image in the world of contemporary poetry. The cycle “Secrets of the Craft” became an attempt to understand the mystery of poetry, and, consequently, its own mystery. The nature of inspiration became the theme of the opening poem of the cycle with the unequivocal title “Creativity”. Akhmatova does not forget her literary roots, inheriting the traditions of Lermontov, Pushkin, and Zhukovsky. The poet’s consciousness searches, carefully selects one in the chaos of sounds, one only true motive:

“It’s so irreparably quiet around him,

You can hear grass growing in the forest."

Having determined the motive, the poet must solve another necessary task - putting it on paper. For Akhmatova, this process is likened to dictation, and the poet is dictated by his internal impulses and sounds. It doesn’t matter whether the dictated definition or image is “low” or “high” - such a division does not exist for Akhmatova (she declares: “I have no need for odic armies”). The poetess speaks of the “ordinary miracle” of poetry. It consists in the birth of a verse from an everyday setting:

"If only you knew what kind of rubbish

Poems grow without shame..."

The growth of these poems is not just mechanical writing, but a real re-creation of reality, giving it the form of a poem that carries positive spiritual energy to people.

For Akhmatova, no less important was the figure of the reader to whom the positive charge of the poem would reach, because poetry is the essence of a dialogue between the artist and the reader. If it were not for the latter, there would be no one to write for, that is, the idea of poetry would lose all meaning. “I don’t exist without a reader,” notes Marina Tsvetaeva. For Akhmatova, the reader becomes an “unknown friend” who is much more than a simple consumer of spiritual values. In the soul, his poems acquire a new sound, as they are refracted through a unique consciousness, different from the consciousness of the poet:

"And every reader is like a secret,

Like a treasure buried in the ground."

The example of this and other poems clearly shows that the cycle, in full accordance with its name, reveals to the reader the secrets of Akhmatova’s poetic craft. But besides the “technical” aspect of poetry, as the above can be called with a certain degree of convention, there is also a relationship between the poet and the external, often completely unpoetic world. The twenties of the last century presented many poets with a choice - to emigrate abroad or stay with their country in troubled times. However, Akhmatova, being, like Nekrasov, first of all, a poet-citizen, makes a difficult decision - to stay in the new Russia: “I am not with those who abandoned the earth.” This statement sounds rather harsh, but the line: “I won’t give them my songs” emphasizes the author’s position even more clearly. Akhmatova’s categorical nature is also expressed in the fact that she is confident “that in the later assessment every hour will be justified.” In this appeal to the future, there is a clear echo with the poem “Duma” by Lermontov - the poet addressed his descendants, just like Akhmatova. However, the topic does not end there: in the poem “When in the anguish of suicide...”, permeated with mystical motives, the poet hears an inner voice - the voice of dark forces that call on him:

"Leave your land, deaf and sinful,

Leave Russia forever."

The heroine acts very simply in the finale, but at the same time, a certain pathosity is felt in this action:

"But indifferently and calmly

I covered my hearing with my hands."

Akhmatova finally makes her choice in favor of testing, but in her homeland. They did not have to wait long - the Great Patriotic War became a true test of survival for Russia. Akhmatova also did not stand aside - at the beginning she was in besieged Leningrad, later in Tashkent. But wherever she was, the poetess felt the need for everyone, especially poets and writers, to somehow participate in the war and share the universal grief. This is how one of her most famous poems, “Courage,” is born. It reminds us of our duty to the Fatherland:

"The hour of courage has struck on our watch,

And our courage will not leave us."

Even more important is the reminder of the most precious thing that the Russian people have - the Russian word, which was praised by many poets and writers long before Akhmatova. Losing your home is not as scary as losing your language - any artist of words can subscribe to this. The poetess also understood that language determines the uniqueness of a nation, what makes it unlike any other people in the world. The ending sounds like a spell, which most accurately reflects the author’s desire to preserve native speech:

"We will give it to our grandchildren, and we will save them from captivity.

The poem “Native Land” serves as the philosophical result of Akhmatova’s work. The movement of the plot of this poem begins from the private, momentary and continues to the eternal, imperishable. The poem is very reminiscent of Lermontov's "Motherland" and a number of Pushkin's later poems. Everyone living in Russia is part of their own country and therefore has the honorable right to call this country their own. But the homeland is so huge and vast that sometimes it is not even noticeable and is not appreciated:

“We don’t carry them on our chests in treasured amulet,

We don’t write sobbing poems about her..."

Only after death is a person inevitably reunited with the earth, although in fact this connection should always be there. For a poet, life with a sense of homeland is doubly important - it gives him the strength to create.

"Requiem" by Anna Andreevna Akhmatova

Anna Andreevna is one of the poets whose beauty and ambiguity of creations can only be revealed by returning to them repeatedly. Its individual lines, stanzas and entire poems are remembered and take an active part in our spiritual life, transforming it.

Between 1935 and 1940, “Requiem” was created, published only half a century later - in 1987 and reflecting the personal tragedy of Anna Akhmatova - the fate of her and her son Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov, illegally repressed and sentenced to death. "Requiem" became a memorial to all victims of Stalin's tyranny. “In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in prison queues” - “I’ve been screaming for seventeen months, calling you home...”

"And the stone word fell

On my still living chest.

It's okay, because I was ready

I'll deal with this somehow.

I have a lot to do today:

We must completely kill our memory,

It is necessary for the soul to turn to stone,

We must learn to live again."

Lines of such tragic intensity, exposing and denouncing the despotism of Stalinism, were dangerous and simply impossible to write down at the time when they were written. Both the author himself and several close friends memorized the text, testing the strength of their memory from time to time. So human memory lasts for a long time

turned into “paper” on which “Requiem” was imprinted. Without Requiem it is impossible to understand either the life, work, or personality of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova. Moreover, without Requiem it is impossible to understand the literature of the modern world and the processes that have taken place and are taking place in society. Speaking about Akhmatova’s “Requiem”, A. Urban expresses the opinion that “he lived before” - in those fragments that were published as separate poems in the 30s. He lived in pieces of paper copied by hand or typed on a typewriter! The critic believes that “the publication of “Requiem” forever put an end to the legend of Akhmatova “as an exclusively chamber poet.”

“A representative of the “Silver Age” of Russian culture, she bravely made her way through the twentieth century to us, witnesses of its last decades. The path is difficult, tragic, on the verge of despair. “But the author of the article draws attention to the fact that even in “her bitterest work, “Requiem,” Anna Akhmatova (this is also a property of great Russian literature) retains faith in historical justice.”

“In essence, no one knows what era he lives in. Our people did not know at the beginning of the 1990s that they were living on the eve of the first European war and the October Revolution,” Akhmatova wrote. This profound remark revealed the author as an artist and a historian at the same time. In her life and work we feel the indomitable “running of time”; we find not the external historical processes of the era we are living through, but living feelings, the foresight of an insightful artist.

Nowadays, the literary and artistic magazine “October” published “Requiem” in its entirety on its pages in 1987. Thus, Akhmatova’s outstanding work became “public”. This is an amazing document of the era, based on the facts of one’s own biography, evidence of the trials our compatriots went through.

“...The funeral hour has approached again.

I see, I hear, I feel you...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I would like to call everyone by name,

Yes, the list was taken away, and there is no place to find out...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I remember them always and everywhere,

I won’t forget about them even in a new trouble...”

Anna Andreevna deservedly enjoys the grateful recognition of readers, and the high importance of her poetry is well known. In strict proportion to the depth and breadth of her ideas, her “voice” never drops to a whisper and does not rise to a scream - neither in hours of national grief, nor in hours of national triumph.

With restraint, without shouting or strain, in an epically dispassionate manner, it is said about the grief experienced: “Mountains bend before this grief.” Anna Akhmatova defines the biographical meaning of this grief as follows: “My husband is in the grave, my son is in prison, pray for me.” This is expressed with directness and simplicity, found only in high folklore. But it’s not just about personal suffering, although that alone is enough for tragedy. It, suffering, is expanded within the framework: “No, it’s not me, it’s someone else who is suffering,” “And I pray not for myself alone, but for everyone who stood there with me. » With the publication of “Requiem” and the poems adjacent to it, Anna Akhmatova’s work takes on a new historical, literary and social meaning.

It is in “Requiem” that the poet’s laconicism is especially noticeable. Apart from the prosaic "Instead of a Preface", there are only about two hundred lines. And Requiem sounds like an epic.

The 30s were sometimes the most difficult trials in her life for Akhmatova. She witnessed not only the Second World War unleashed by fascism, which soon spread to the soil of her Motherland, but also another, no less terrible war waged by Stalin and his minions with their own people. The monstrous repressions of the 30s, which fell on her friends and like-minded people, also destroyed her family home: first, her son, a university student, and then her husband, N.N. Punin, was arrested and exiled. Akhmatova herself lived all these years in constant anticipation of arrest. She spent many months in long and sad prison queues to hand over the package to her son and learn about his fate. In the eyes of the authorities, she was an extremely unreliable person: her first husband, N. Gumilev, was shot in 1921 for “counter-revolutionary” activities. She was well aware that her life was in the balance and listened with alarm to any knock on the door. It would seem that in such conditions it was unthinkable to write, and she really did not write, that is, she did not write down her poems, abandoning pen and paper. L.K. Chukovskaya writes in her memoirs about how carefully the poetess read her poems in a whisper, since the dungeon was very close. However, deprived of the opportunity to write, Anna Akhmatova at the same time experienced her greatest creative rise during these years. Great sorrow, but at the same time great courage and pride for one’s people form the basis of Akhmatova’s poems of this period.

Akhmatova’s main creative and civic achievement in the 30s was the “Requiem” she created, dedicated to the years of the “Great Terror” - the suffering of the repressed people.

“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. »

"Requiem" consists of ten poems. A prose preface, called by Akhmatova “Instead of the Preface”, “Dedication”, “Introduction” and a two-part “Epilogue”. The Crucifixion included in Requiem also consists of two parts. The poem “It was not in vain that we suffered together...”, written later, is also related to “Requiem”. From it Anna Andreevna took the words: “No, and not under an alien firmament...” as an epigraph to “Requiem”, since, according to the poetess, they set the tone for the entire poem, being its musical and semantic key. “Well-wishers” advised to abandon these words, intending in this way to pass the work through censorship.

“Requiem” has a vital basis, which is very clearly stated in a small prose part - “Instead of a Preface”. Already here the internal goal of the entire work is clearly felt - to show the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina. And this story is like this. Together with other sufferers, Akhmatova stood in the prison line. “One day someone “identified” me. Then a woman standing behind me with blue lips, who, of course, had never heard my name in her life, woke up from the stupor that is characteristic of all of us and asked me in my ear (everyone there spoke in a whisper):

Can you describe this?

And I said:

Then something like a smile slid across what once was

her face."

In this small passage, an era visibly emerges - terrible, hopeless. The idea of the work is consistent with the vocabulary: Akhmatova was not recognized, but, as they often said then, she was “identified”; the woman’s lips were “blue” from hunger and nervous exhaustion; everyone speaks only in a whisper and only “in the ear.”

This is necessary - otherwise they will find out, “identify”, “consider him unreliable” - an enemy. Akhmatova, choosing the appropriate vocabulary, writes not only about herself, but about everyone at once, speaks of the “numbness” that is “characteristic” of everyone. The preface to the poem is the second key of the work. He helps us understand that the poem was written “to order.” The woman “with blue lips” asks her for this, as the last hope for some kind of triumph of justice and truth. And Akhmatova takes upon herself this order, this heavy duty, without hesitation at all. And this is understandable: after all, she will write about everyone and about herself, hoping for a time when the Russian people will “endure everything.” And wide, clear...

"Requiem" was created over different years. For example, "Dedication" is marked March 1940. It reveals specific "addresses". We are talking about women separated from those arrested. It speaks directly to those they mourn. These are their loved ones who are going to hard labor or execution. This is how Akhmatova describes the depth of this grief: “Before this grief, mountains bend, the great river does not flow. “The loved ones feel everything: “strong prison gates”, “convict holes” and the mortal melancholy of the convicts.

“We only hear the hateful grinding of keys...

Yes, the soldiers’ steps are heavy...”

And again the common misfortune, common grief is emphasized:

“We walked through the wild capital...

And innocent Rus' writhed"

The words “Rus was writhing” and “wild capital” convey with utmost accuracy the suffering of the people and carry a great ideological load. The introduction also contains specific images. Here is one of the doomed, whom the “black marusi” take away at night. She also means her son.

“There are cold icons on your lips

Death sweat on the brow."

He was taken away at dawn, but dawn is the beginning of the Day, and here dawn is the beginning of uncertainty and deep suffering. The suffering not only of the person leaving, but also of those who followed him “like a takeaway.” And even the folkloric beginning does not smooth out, but emphasizes the acuteness of the experiences of the innocently doomed:

“The Quiet Don flows quietly

The yellow moon is entering the house."

The month is not clear, as is customary to talk and write about it, but yellow, “the yellow month sees its shadow!” This scene is a cry for a son, but it gives this scene a broader meaning.

There is another specific image. Image of the city. And even a specific place: “He will stand under the Crosses” (the name of the prison). But in the image of the city on the Neva there is not only “Pushkin’s splendor” and beauty with its beautiful architecture, it is even darker than St. Petersburg, known to everyone from the works of N.A. Nekrasov and F.M. Dostoevsky. This is a city - an appendage to a gigantic prison, spreading its ferocious buildings over the dead and motionless Neva.

“And dangled like an unnecessary pendant

Near its prisons Leningrad"

Both sympathy and pity are felt in these words, where the city appears as a living face.

The reader is shocked by the individual scenes described by the author in the poem. The author gives them a broad general meaning in order to emphasize the main idea of the work - to show not an isolated case, but a nationwide grief. Here is the arrest scene, where we are talking about many sons, fathers and brothers. Akhmatova also writes about children in a dark room, although her son had no children. Consequently, when saying goodbye to her son, she simultaneously means not only herself, but also those with whom her prison line will soon bring her together.

In “Requiem,” speaking of the “streltsy’s wives” howling under the Kremlin towers, she shows a bloody road stretching from the darkness of times to modernity. Unfortunately, this bloody road was never interrupted, and during the years of repression under Stalin, who trampled on “People's Rights,” it became even wider, forming entire seas of innocent blood. According to Akhmatova, no goals ever justify blood, including during 1937. Her conviction rests on the Christian commandment “thou shalt not kill.” In “Requiem,” a melody appears unexpectedly and sadly, vaguely reminiscent of a lullaby:

“The Quiet Don flows quietly,

The yellow moon enters the house,

He walks in with his hat 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."

The motive of the lullaby with the unexpected and semi-delirious image of the quiet Don prepares another motive, even more terrible, the motive of madness, delirium and complete readiness for death or suicide:

“Already madness is on the wing

Half of my soul was covered,

And he drinks fiery wine,

And beckons you into the black valley."

The antithesis that arises gigantically and tragically in the “Requiem” (Mother and executed son) inevitably correlated in Akhmatova’s mind with the gospel plot, and since this antithesis was not just a sign of her personal life and concerned millions of mothers and sons, Akhmatova considered herself to have the right to artistically to rely on it, which expanded the scope of “Requiem” to a huge, all-human scale. From this point of view, these lines can be considered the poetic and philosophical center of the entire work, although they are placed immediately before the “Epilogue”.

The “Epilogue”, consisting of 2 parts, first returns the reader to the melody and general meaning of the “Preface” and “Dedication”; here we again see the image of a prison queue, but this time it’s kind of generalized, symbolic, not as specific as at the beginning poems.

“I learned how faces fall,

How fear peeks out from under your eyelids.

Like cuneiform hard pages

Suffering appears on the cheeks..."

“I would like to name everyone,

Yes, the list was taken away, and there is no place to find out,

For them I wove a wide cover

From the poor, they have overheard words"

Such lofty, such bitter and solemnly proud words - they stand dense and heavy, as if cast from metal in reproach to violence and in memory of future people.

The second part of the epilogue develops the theme of the Monument, well known in Russian literature according to Derzhavin and Pushkin, but under Akhmatova’s pen it acquires a completely unusual - deeply tragic appearance and meaning. It can be said that never, neither in Russian nor in world literature, has such an unusual Monument to the Poet appeared, standing, according to his will and testament, at the Prison Wall. This is truly a monument to all victims of repression, tortured in the 30s and other terrible years.

At first glance, a strange desire sounds sublime and tragic

poetesses:

"And if ever in this country

They are planning to erect a monument to me,

I give my consent to this triumph,

But only with a condition - do not put it

Not near the sea, where I was born...

Not in the royal garden near the treasured stump.

And here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they didn’t open the bolt for me.”

And then the typical A.A. Akhmatova's sensitivity and vitality.

“And let the prison dove drone in the distance,

And the ships sail quietly along the Neva.”

Akhmatova’s “Requiem” is a truly folk work, not only in the sense that it reflected and expressed a great folk tragedy, but also in its poetic form, close to a folk parable. “Woven from simple, “overheard” words, as Akhmatova writes,” he expressed his time and the suffering soul of the people with great poetic and civic power. “Requiem” was not known either in the 30s or in subsequent years, but it forever captured its time and showed that poetry continued to exist even when, according to Akhmatova, “the poet lived with his mouth clenched.”

The strangled cry of a hundred million people was heard - this is Akhmatova’s great merit.

One of the features of Akhmatova’s work is that she wrote as if without any concern for the outside reader - either for herself, or for a close person who knew her well. And this kind of reticence expands the address. Her “Requiem” is completely torn apart. It is written as if on different pieces of paper, and all the poems of this mournful memorial poem are fragments. But they give the impression of large and heavy blocks that move and form a huge stone sculpture of grief. "Requiem" is a petrified grief, ingeniously created from the simplest words.

The deep idea of “Requiem” is revealed thanks to the peculiarity of the author’s talent with the help of the sounding voices of a specific time: intonation, gestures, syntax, vocabulary. Everything tells us about certain people of a certain day. This artistic precision in conveying the very air of time amazes everyone who reads the work.

There were changes in the work of the poet A. Akhmatova in the 30s. There was a kind of take-off, the scope of the verse expanded immeasurably, incorporating both great tragedies - the impending Second World War and the war that began and was waged by the criminal authorities against their own people. And the mother’s grief (“her son’s terrible eyes are a petrified creature”), and the tragedy of the Motherland, and the inexorably approaching war suffering - everything entered her verse, charred and hardened it. She did not keep a diary at this time. Instead of a diary, which was impossible to keep, she wrote down her poems on separate pieces of paper. But taken together they created a picture of a torn up and ruined home, the broken destinies of people.

This is how the image of the doomed man is created from individual parts of the Requiem:

"Sentence. And immediately the tears will flow.

Already separated from everyone.”

("Dedication")

And a summary:

“And when, mad with torment,

The already condemned regiments were coming."

("Introduction")

"Like cuneiform hard pages

Suffering appears on the cheeks,

Like curls of ashen and black

They suddenly become silver.”

("Epilogue")

Here are the words chosen with extraordinary precision: “mad with torment,” “suffering appears on the cheeks,” “already separated from everyone.”

The personal and personal is intensified. The scope of what is depicted is expanding:

“Where are the involuntary friends now?

My two crazy years?

What do they see in the Siberian blizzard?

What do they see in the lunar circle?

To them I send my farewell greetings.”

In the flow of today's memoir literature, "Requiem" occupies a special place. It is also difficult to write about him because, according to A. Akhmatova’s young friend, poet L. Brodsky, life in those years “crowned her muse with a wreath of sorrow.”

V. Vilenkin writes in his publications: “Her “Requiem” least of all needs scientific commentary. Its folk origins and folk poetic scale are clear in themselves. Personally experienced, autobiographical things drown in them, preserving only the immensity of suffering. “Already in the first poem of the poem, called “Dedication,” the great river of human grief, overflowing with its pain, destroys the boundaries between “I” and “we.” This is our grief, this is “we are the same everywhere,” it is we who hear the “heavy steps of soldiers,” this is us walking through the “wild capital.” “The hero of this poetry is the people... Every single one of them participates on one side or the other in what is happening. This poem speaks on behalf of the people."

“Requiem” (lat. Requiem) - funeral mass. Many composers V.A. wrote music to the traditional Latin text of the Requiem. Mozart, T. Berlioz, G. Verdi. Akhmatova’s “Requiem” retains the Latin spelling, nodding to the basis, the original source, and tradition. It is not for nothing that the finale of the work, its “Epilogue,” takes the tragic melody of eternal memory for the deceased beyond the boundaries of earthly reality:

“And even from the still and bronze ages,

Melted snow flows like tears,

“Requiem” required her to think musically, musically arrange individual disparate parts - lyric poems - into one coherent whole. It is noteworthy that both the epigraph and “Instead of a Preface,” written much later than the main text of the poetic cycle, are attached to it organically—namely through the means of music. In the form of an “overture” - an orchestral introduction in which two main themes of the composition are played: the inseparability of the fate of the lyrical heroine from the fate of her people, the personal from the general, “I” from “we”.

In its structure, Akhmatova’s work resembles a sonata. It begins after short musical bars with the powerful sound of a choir:

“Mountains bend before this grief,

The great river does not flow

But the prison gates are strong.

And behind them are “convict bunks”

And mortal melancholy..."

The presence here of Pushkin’s line from the poem “In the depths of the Siberian ores” expands the space and gives access to history. Nameless victims cease to be nameless. They are protected by the great traditions of freedom-loving Russian literature. “And hope still sings in the distance.” The voice of hope does not leave the author. The poetess created not a chronicle of her life, but a work of art that contains generalization, symbolism, and music.

“And when, mad with torment,

The already condemned regiments were marching,

And a short song of parting

The locomotive whistles sang.

The death stars stood above us..."

Individual words in such contexts acquire a terrifying value. For example, stars glorified in fiction as magical, captivating, mysterious in their beauty, here are death stars. “Yellow Moon,” although it does not carry such a negative assessment, is a witness to someone else’s grief.

Many literary scholars have wondered: “Requiem” - what is it: a poetic cycle or a poem. It is written in the 1st person, on behalf of “I” - the poet and the lyrical hero at the same time. And also the complex interweaving of autobiographical and documentary allows us to answer this question in the affirmative and classify this work as a “small poem” among the poems of the 20th century, although from the point of view of genres, “Requiem” is not a simple “nut to crack”. Akhmatova had a high gift for a lyric poet; the basis of her work, consisting of individual poems, is also lyrical. This gave the strength to the lyrical fragments created in 1935 - 40 and not published in these years, to withstand, not to crumble from the hardest blows of time and to return to us, half a century later, as an integral work of art. At first glance, there is a simple answer. In 1987, the topic of Stalin’s personality cult and its tragic consequences for the people became open from “closed” topics. And Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” which tells about the tragedy personally experienced by the poet in those years, received the status of the most topical document, standing on par with such modern works as Tvardovsky’s poem “By the Right of Memory,” V. Dudintsev’s novels “White Clothes,” V. Grossman “Life and Fate”, poetry and prose by V. Shalamov. But this explanation lies on the surface and cannot fully satisfy the reader. After all, in order for a work to coincide with modernity, to return half a century later to new generations of readers, preserving its artistic value, it means it needs to have it, this artistic value. It is conveyed in the poem by the finest capillaries of verse: its rhythms, meters, artistic means of language. And even her “Instead of a Preface” is not entirely pure prose. This is a prose poem. The dissolution of the heroine in a common tragedy, where everyone has the same role, gave the right to the poem:

“No, it’s not me, it’s someone else who is suffering.

I couldn't do that."

Everything in “Requiem” is enlarged, expanded within boundaries (Neva, Don, Yenisei) and comes down to a general presentation - everywhere.

So, in response to the events of the 30s, A.A. Akhmatova responded with the tragedy "Requiem". Russian poetry knew many examples when this genre of musical work became a form of poetic thought. For Akhmatova, it was an ideal form of mastering the tragic plot of Russian history, in which the author’s fate rose to universal generalizations: the poetic “I” often speaks on behalf of “we.” The author’s lens breaks in everywhere: where grief and death have settled, noticing “the one that was barely brought to the window,” “and the one that does not trample on the native land.” “And the one who, shaking her beautiful head, said: “I come here like coming home.” The author does not lose sight of the one who is “already separated from everyone,” and the “unwitting friends” walking through the maddened city, and the “crowd of the condemned.”

With the help of artistic visual and expressive means of A.A. Akhmatova reveals the main idea of her work - to show the breadth and depth of people's grief, the tragedy of life in the 30s.

Thus, the creative success of the poetess in the 30s was enormous. In addition to poems, she created two significant poems - “Requiem” and “Poem without a Hero.” The fact that neither “Requiem” nor other works of Akhmatova of the 30s were known to the reader does not in the least diminish their significance in the history of Russian poetry, since they indicate that in these difficult years literature, crushed by misfortune and doomed in silence, continued to exist - in defiance of terror and death.

Akhmatova's poetry is an integral part of modern Russian and world culture.

In the early 50s, a writers' congress was held in Moscow. A. Fadeev presided, and the most famous writers sat around him. And suddenly the hall began to thin out. Everyone stood along the walls of the spacious foyer, and Anna Andreevna Akhmatova slowly walked in the center of the foyer. Slender, with a shawl thrown over her shoulders, not looking at anyone, alone.

So her life went on - both in the spotlight and alone with herself, and her poetry was the whole world and the whole life.

Poetry is the poet himself and his time, his spirit and struggle with injustice for the sake of nobility and beauty.

A. Akhmatova’s poems capture the features of time with all its monstrous cruelty. No one has ever told the truth about him with such bitter mercilessness:

“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's messed up forever

And I can't make it out

Now, who is the beast, who is the man,

And how long will it be to wait for execution?”

Defenseless and direct, in inhuman conditions in front of legalized crimes, she not only mourned these dark days, but also prevailed over them: “Don’t forget” (“Requiem”)

Akhmatova's time passed through sharp changes, and it was a path of great loss and loss. Only a poet of great strength, deep essence and will could withstand this and resist everything with the power of his truthful art. A. Akhmatova, who in her youth delighted the world with lines of genuine, tender and subtle lyrics, was both firm and adamant, direct and majestic in this formidable turning point.

Time is the fairest judge. It's just a pity that retribution

sometimes it's late.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, we can draw conclusions.

Akhmatova created a lyrical system, one of the most remarkable in the history of poetry, but she never thought of lyricism as a spontaneous outpouring of the soul. She needed poetic discipline, self-constraint, self-restraint of the creative. Discipline and work. Pushkin liked to call the work of a poet - the work of a poet. And for Akhmatova, this is one of her Pushkin traditions. For her it was even physical labor in its own way. Lyrics for Akhmatova are not spiritual raw materials, but the deepest transformation of inner experience. Translating it into another key, into the realm of another word, where there is no shame and secrets belong to everyone. In a lyric poem, the reader wants to recognize not so much the poet as himself. Hence the paradox of lyricism: the most subjective kind of literature, it, like no other, gravitates towards the universal.

It is in this sense that Anna Andreevna said: “Poems should be shameless.” This meant: according to the laws of poetic transformation, the poet dares to talk about the most personal - from personal it has already become general. Akhmatova was characterized by an unusually intense experience of culture. Lyrics and culture are an important topic. This is not the place to go into it; I will only say that culture gives lyrics the breadth and richness of associations it so needs.

Culture was always present in Akhmatova’s work, but in different ways. In her later poems, culture comes out. In the early ones it is hidden, but makes itself felt by the literary tradition, subtle, hidden reminders of the work of their predecessors.

Remembering Akhmatova, you certainly come across the theme of culture, tradition, heritage. Her work is perceived in the same categories. Much has already been said and written about the impact of Russian classics on Akhmatova’s poetry. In this series are Pushkin and the poets of Pushkin’s time, the Russian psychological novel, Nekrasov. The meaning of Nekrasov's love lyrics for Akhmatova remains to be explored. This lyricism is close to her - nervous, with its urban conflicts, with the colloquial speech of intellectuals. But all these relationships are not at all straightforward. Criticism sometimes understands the “classicity” of some poets of the 20th century, right up to the poets of our days, as repetition, a cast. But Russian poetry, which emerged after the Symbolists, in the struggle with the Symbolists, could not yet forget what they discovered - the intense associativity of the poetic word, its new polysemy, multi-layeredness. Akhmatova is a poet of the 20th century. She studied with the classics, and in her poems you can find the same words, but the relationship between the words is different. Akhmatova’s poetry is a combination of the objectivity of the word with a dramatically transformative poetic context, with the dynamics of the unnamed and the intensity of semantic clashes. This is great poetry, modern and reworked the experience of two centuries of Russian verse.

At the turn of the last and present centuries, although not literally chronologically, on the eve of the revolution, in an era shaken by two world wars, perhaps the most significant “female” poetry in all world literature of modern times arose in Russia - the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. The closest analogy, which arose among her first critics, was the ancient Greek love singer Sappho: the Russian Sappho was often called the young Akhmatova. Akhmatova’s poems from the period of her first books (“Evening”, “Rosary”, “White Flock”) are almost exclusively love lyrics. Her innovation as an artist initially manifested itself precisely in this traditionally eternal, repeatedly and seemingly played out to the end theme.

The novelty of Akhmatova’s love lyrics caught the eye of her contemporaries almost from her first poems, published in Apollo, but, unfortunately, the heavy banner of Acmeism, under which the young poetess stood, seemed to have draped her true, original image for a long time in the eyes of many. appearance and forced her to constantly correlate her poems either with Acmeism, or with symbolism, or with one or another linguistic or literary theory that for some reason came to the fore. Akhmatova is, indeed, the most characteristic heroine of her time, revealed in the endless variety of women's destinies: lover and wife, widow and mother, cheating and abandoned. According to A. Kollontai, Akhmatova gave “a whole book of the female soul.” Akhmatova “poured into art” the complex history of the female character of a turning point era, its origins, breakdown, and new formation. The hero of Akhmatov's lyrics (not the heroine) is complex and multifaceted. In fact, it is even difficult to define him in the same sense as, say, the hero of Lermontov’s lyrics is defined. This is him - a lover, a brother, a friend, presented in an endless variety of situations: insidious and generous, killing and resurrecting, the first and the last.

APPLICATION

Bibliography

1. A. Naiman “Stories about Anna Akhmatova”

2. M., “Fiction” 1989

3. Anna Akhmatova. Poems and poems.

4. V., “Central Chernozem” book publishing house, 1990.

5. Anna Akhmatova. Poetry and prose. Leningrad publishing house, 1976

6. Anna Akhmatova. Collected works in 6 volumes (Volume I – poems) M., 1998.

8. Akhmatova A.A. Favorites, - M.: Olma-press, 2006. – 376 p.

9. Akhmatova A.A. Favorites/Comp., author. note I.K. Sushilina. - M.: Education, 1993. - 320 p.

10. Akhmatova A.A. Essays. In 2 volumes. T1. Poems and poems/Introductory article by M. Dudin - M.: Fiction, 1986. - 511 p.

11. Akhmatova A.A. Poems. Poems. – M.: Bustard, 2003. – 368 p.

"The dark-skinned youth wandered through the alleys,

The lake shores were sad,

And we cherish the century

The barely audible rustle of footsteps..."

At the end of the verse there is an expressive detail: “the disheveled volume of Guys.” This is a symbol of the poet’s inner liberation and freedom.

“It’s so irreparably quiet around him,

You can hear grass growing in the forest."

"If only you knew what kind of rubbish

Poems grow without shame..."

The growth of these poems is not just mechanical writing, but a real re-creation of reality, giving it the form of a poem that carries positive spiritual energy to people.

"And every reader is like a secret,

Like a treasure buried in the ground."

"Leave your land, deaf and sinful,

Leave Russia forever."

The heroine acts very simply in the finale, but at the same time, a certain pathosity is felt in this action:

"But indifferently and calmly

I covered my hearing with my hands."

"The hour of courage has struck on our watch,

And our courage will not leave us."

"We will give it to our grandchildren, and we will save them from captivity.

Forever!"

“We don’t carry them on our chests in treasured amulet,

We don’t write sobbing poems about her..."

Composition

In Russian classical literature, the theme of the poet and poetry is one of the leading ones. Poems of this kind always represent a kind of creative self-report, an intense author’s confession, which is why they attract the reader’s attention. A poet in the 19th century is a prophet, his word is a weapon in the fight against social ills. In the crisis of the 20th century, the understanding of poetry and its significance became immeasurably more complicated, although in the main it remained unshakable. How does this theme sound in the works of A. Akhmatova?
As you know, Akhmatova’s youthful poems are closely related to Acmeism. If the symbolists considered the poet a prophet, speaking about the mysteries of existence, leading “from the real to the most real,” then the Acmeist idea of the poet is much more down-to-earth. Poetry is a craft, a poet is a master who knows the laws of this craft. He does not rush to the sky-high heights, but lives, like other people, on earth, just like them, loves, suffers, waits. That is why the image of the poet in Akhmatov’s lyrics is so concrete and tangible, recreated in everyday, prosaic details:

And the face seems paler
From the sweet silk,
Almost reaches the eyebrows
My uncurled bangs.

In this gray, casual dress
In worn out heels...

The poet is an ordinary person among people, but his view of the world is unusual. For Akhmatova, a poetic view of the world is a view that connects things that are not connected in everyday consciousness:

My chest was so helplessly cold,
But my steps were light,
I put it on my right hand
Glove from the left hand.

The willow tree spread out like a bush in the sky
The fan is through.
Maybe it's better that I didn't
Your wife.

Examples of such “conjugation of distant concepts” (A.S. Pushkin) can be multiplied indefinitely. The main thing here is the creation of a new world, filled with living, intense, bizarre connections that do not exist anywhere except in the poetic word.
Thus, Akhmatova’s poetic word becomes a separate reality with its own laws. Perhaps this is why Akhmatova, like no other poet of the Silver Age, has an extensive and deep relationship with the Muse:

And the Muse in a holey scarf
Sings sadly and sadly.
In cruel and youthful melancholy
Her miraculous power;

The sister muse looked into the face,
Her gaze is clear and bright.

And the page I left unfinished,
Divinely calm and light,
The Muse will be finished by a dark hand.

“Muse-sister” is close, humane, compassionate. Her compassion is manifested primarily in the fact that she frees you from the torments of love:

Thus, unrequited love becomes a source of poetic creativity. Akhmatova’s poetic creativity is, first of all, the embodiment of memory: love, historical, cultural.
After all, only poetry turns out to be a refuge for Akhmatova of love, which has no place in real life:

That is why the memory of love is a fire in which the poet is doomed to “sing and burn,” while experiencing the agony of death and coming to life again, “so that later, like a Phoenix from the ashes, to rise blue in the ether.”
Dying and resurrecting, the poet remains firmly rooted in culture and history. He constantly feels like a container of the past, in which this past begins its new life. It is very characteristic that Akhmatova’s Muse, with all her originality, which was mentioned above, turns out to be the one that “dictated the pages of Hell to Dante,” that is, not only her own, but also someone else’s. Akhmatova spoke about this paradox of poetic creativity in the following quatrain:
Don't repeat - your soul is rich -
What was once said.
But maybe poetry itself -
One great quote.

Indeed, in Akhmatova’s works there are many quotes from the works of other poets (Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, etc.) But still, poetry for Akhmatova is not a combination of quotes, not a “game of glass beads.” After all, behind any quote there is an experience, often painful, poetry for Akhmatova is the return of the past in its most painful moments. The fate of the poet is the fate of Lot's wife in the poem of the same name. Returning the past, trying to “look at the red towers of his native Sodom,” which at this moment are already destroyed by God’s wrath, the poet sacrifices his life. He turns into a pillar of salt and suffers the agony of this transformation. It was precisely this sense of poetry that made the appearance of such a work as “Requiem” necessary.
So, Akhmatova’s poetic self-determination is closely connected with moral self-determination. The moral foundations of Akhmatova's poetry are empathy for other people's pain, a sense of belonging to the world and responsibility for all its troubles.