Monday, September 5, 2016

Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966) ... Russian Modernist Poet: Meditations on Time and Memory

**************************

Journal Éveillé is an informal exploration of awakened mind in the art of poetry....

Click Here To View The Main Index

**************************

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko[Notes 1] (23 June [O.S. 11 June] 1889 – 5 March 1966), better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova (/ɑːkˈmɑːtɔːvə/; RussianАнна АхматоваIPA: [ɐxˈmatəvə]), was a Russian modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.[2]
Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935–40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work (1912–25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output.Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate, and remaining in Russia, acting as witness to the events around her. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow ofStalinism.

**************************

Akhmatova joined the Acmeist group of poets in 1910 with poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky, working in response to the Symbolist school, concurrent with the growth of Imagism in Europe and America. It promoted the use of craft and rigorous poetic form over mysticism or spiritual in-roads to composition, favouring the concrete over the ephemeral. Akhmatova modeled its principles of writing with clarity, simplicity, and disciplined form. Her first collections Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914) received wide critical acclaim and made her famous from the start of her career. They contained brief, psychologically taut pieces, acclaimed for their classical diction, telling details, and the skilful use of colour. Evening and her next four books were mostly lyric miniatures on the theme of love, shot through with sadness.

**************************

Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov...... April 15 NS 1886 – August 25, 1921) was an influential Russian poet, literary critic, traveler, and military officer. He was the cofounder of the Acmeist movement. Nikolay Gumilev was arrested and executed by the Cheka, the secret Soviet police force in 1921...Gumilev married Anna Akhmatova in April 25, 1910. He dedicated some of his poems to her. On September 18, 1912, their child Lev was born. He would eventually become an influential and controversial historian.........In the early 1900s, Europe was discussing ancient petroglyphs – writings found by famous Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyov on the rocks of Karelia. As many representatives of Russian intelligentsia, Gumilyov was interested in history and geography and enjoyed traveling. In 1904 he explored Kuzovsky archipelago on the White Sea. He heard about Stone Book that allegedly contained information about ancient times and clues to the location of the mysterious Mu country where the ancestors of the Northern and, probably, Slavic tribes came from. The first mentioning of Mu goes back to the 4th century BC. The texts said it was located to the West of Egyptian Kingdom and could be reached by water. The place was sad to have a sanctuary of Ra, god of the sun. Captions to pictures mentioned a huge lake where a sea path led.....Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova and their son Lev Gumilev, 1913...Lev Gumilev belonged to the old Russian intelligentsia. His father, Nikolai Gumilev, was a prominent poet of the Silver Age and a victim of Bolshevik terror. His mother, Anna Akhmatova, was one of the greatest Russian women poets. Lev Gumilev's ties with the old intelligentsia led to frequent imprisonments from the 1920s to the 1950s in Josef Stalin's Gulag (prison camp system).

**************************

According to the principles of acmeism, every person, irrespective of his talent, may learn to produce high-quality poems if only he follows the guild's masters, i.e., Gumilyov and Gorodetsky. Their own model was Théophile Gautier, and they borrowed much of their basic tenets from the French Parnasse.

**************************

Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Op 27
By Composer Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
Anna Gorenko (1889-1966)
"At the end of 1916, after completing the orchestral score of The Gambler, Prokofiev told friends he wanted to relax by composing a few shorter, more intimate pieces. He wrote the Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Op 27, in one short breath over a period of just four days (13 to 16 November). In the earlier sets of songs, Prokofiev had set classic Russian poets of the so-called Golden Age (such as Pushkin and Lermontov), Romantics such as Apukhtin (a close friend of Tchaikovsky’s), and only one contemporary poet, Bal´mont, who was a one-time leading light of the, by 1917, moribund Symbolist movement. In choosing to set words by Anna Akhmatova, who was at the time only a promising young hope of Russian poetry, Prokofiev allied himself to bright, modern lyrical forms with little extraneous verbiage, spare description and clear forms. Akhmatova employed deliberately straightforward and concrete imagery to convey the sometimes morbid sensations of a society woman.
The Five Poems were first performed at a Concert of Modern Music in Moscow on 18 February 1917; the performers were the soprano Zinaida Artyomova and the composer. The effect of this performance on Prokofiev’s reputation was overwhelming. Even Prokofiev himself admitted that ‘after these songs, many people believed for the first time that I write lyrical music’. Critics underlined his own assessment: Vyacheslav Karatïgin, writing for the journal Iskusstvo, suggested that ‘it is in the further development of the innate poetry of his art, in the enrichment and deepening of his tonal lyricism that I hope to see the further evolution of Prokofiev’s brilliant talent’. Yuly Engel went even further in his description of Prokofiev’s stylistic breakthrough: ‘one hardly expects to find tenderness, warmth, emotion or, in short, lyrical charm in Prokofiev’s music."

Notes by Jonathan Powell © 2004.....http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/tw.asp?w=W4558

Click Here To View Prokofiev - 5 Poems by Akhmatova

**************************

Email....wijijiarts@gmail.com

Northern New Mexico

September 2016

**************************

No comments:

Post a Comment