The life of Anna Akhmatova in 7 portraits of famous artists

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

"Strongest in the world, Beams of calm eyes" - this beautiful quote belongs to the pen of Anna Akhmatova, the famous poetess, whom Russian artists loved to portray in their canvases. They all wanted to capture a living symbol of that special era. It is extremely interesting to consider the nature of this significant figure of Russian literature of the 20th century through the prism of paintings by painters. Consider the most famous works.

About the poetess

The real name of the poetess is Anna Andreevna Gorenko. She was born in 1889 and belonged to a family of upper-class landowners. She grew up in Tsarskoe Selo, a respectable area on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Akhmatova's father insisted that the girl write under a pseudonym (it was very dangerous to write under her own surname, and his father did not need such dubious fame for him). It was in St. Petersburg, in a large department store, that Akhmatova met her future husband Nikolai Gumilyov. He stalked her for years, even trying to commit suicide in the name of unrequited love. Soon, long courtship led to marriage and the subsequent birth of a son. The boy was named Leo. For her creative activity, Anna chose the name Akhmatova in honor of a distant relative of Tatar origin.

Interesting facts about Akhmatova: ⦁ Her style, characterized by emotional restraint, was strikingly original and characteristic of contemporaries of the Silver Age.

⦁ Her strong and pure female voice gave birth to a new chord in Russian poetry. The writer Korney Chukovsky said: "Young people of two or three generations fell in love, so to speak, to the accompaniment of Akhmatova's poems, finding in them the embodiment of their own feelings."

⦁ Her work was condemned and censored by the Stalinist authorities. But she was brave enough to continue to write secretly and remain in Russia, witnessing the events around her.

⦁ Her themes are extensive: the transience of time, memory, the difficulties of life, love, etc. Love was the dominant theme in Akhmatova's poetry, and her voice literally intoxicated readers from the very beginning.

⦁ Her poetry inspired and helped a large circle of young Soviet writers and poets grow professionally (Iosif Brodsky practically grew up under her wise mentorship).

⦁ Thousands of people accompanied her momentous ceremony. She died in 1966 at the age of 76. Two ceremonies were organized in Moscow and Leningrad.

What are the most famous portraits of the poetess?

1. Sixteen Portraits of Modigliani (1911)

A century ago, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova bewitched Paris and … Amedeo Modigliani. Anna Akhmatova, 21, with raven eyes and delightfully beautiful hair, arrived in Paris in 1910 with her husband. The couple had their honeymoon. Famous poets in their native Russia, they headed straight for Montparnasse, the favorite spot of the Parisian avant-garde. Here they met painters, sculptors, poets and composers who had moved to the area from Montmartre in search of cheap rentals, cheap cafes and ruined buildings that could serve as studios. One of them was 25-year-old Amedeo Modigliani, an artist with an aristocratic Roman nose, strong jaw, and black hair. He charmed Anna. It was a meeting of hearts and minds. Throughout his stay in Paris, Modigliani repeatedly took her to the Egyptian gallery of the Louvre to contemplate the poet among the statues and friezes. The elongated body of Akhmatova and the nose with a graceful hump personified the Egyptian goddesses and queens who admired Modigliani. The artist painted 16 portraits of Akhmatova.

2. The most famous portrait: Nathan Altman (1914)

This portrait is one of the best works of the Russian artist Nathan Altman and the most famous embodiment of the image of the poetess. Natan Isaevich Altman (1889 - 1970) was a Russian and Soviet avant-garde artist, cubist artist, set designer and illustrator. He was born into a family of Jewish merchants. The famous portrait was inspired by poetry and personal acquaintance with Anna Akhmatova in Paris in 1911 and in St. Petersburg. The portrait was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and won second place. The painting depicts the poetess exactly as many contemporaries remember her - tall, slender, with angular shapes and a sharp face profile. And, of course, a sad look. The poetess is depicted against a background of sparkling crystals, symbolizing the world of sublime and abstract dreams.

3. Portraits full of losses: Yuri Annenkov (1921)

In 1921 in Petrograd, in a cozy house on Kirochnaya Street, Yuri Annenkov painted two portraits of Akhmatova at once: one was made with a pen, the other - with gouache. The difference is that the second portrait depicts the writer to the waist, where she froze in a semi-profile, gracefully putting her hand on her chest. But about the first drawing, Evgeny Zamyatin wrote: “A portrait of Akhmatova - or, more precisely: a portrait of Akhmatova's eyebrows. From them - like clouds - light, heavy shadows across the face, and there are so many losses in them. They are like a key in a piece of music: this key is put on - and you hear what the eyes say, the mourning of the hair, the black rosary on the comb. The heroine's large and expressive eyes are like a mirror of the soul - they tell us what sadness this great woman felt at that difficult time when the portrait was prepared. By the way, the second color portrait of the poetess was sold in 2013 at Sotheby's for $ 1.38 million.

Annenkov is a hero artist. He managed to survive the Stalinist repressions, the murder of Trotsky, the overthrow of the personality cult of Stalin. He saw the success of advanced Soviet science in space and at the same time intense political persecution in the USSR. And at the end of his creative period, the former revolutionary artist Annenkov became an illustrator of the forbidden books of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

4. Portrait during the period of tragedies: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1922)

The ideal epigraph to the portrait of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin would be the words of the poetess: “And we know that in the late evaluation / Every hour will be justified; / But there are no people in the world who are more tearless, / More arrogant and simpler than us. (1922). The portrait was painted in a very difficult year for the poetess and filled with tragedies. During this period of time, Akhmatova's first husband, Gumilyov, was shot.

Akhmatova survived the brutality of the revolution when her husband, among dozens of other intellectuals, was shot dead in 1921 for conspiring to overthrow the government. In addition, her favorite teacher and mentor, Alexander Blok, died. The son of Gumilyov and Akhmatova, Lev, a well-known historian, was also arrested during the Stalinist purges, convicted of "counter-revolutionary agitation" and sent to the GULAG. Akhmatova constantly campaigned for his release, putting her own life in significant danger. “The husband is in the grave, the son is in prison, / Please pray for me,” Akhmatova writes in one of her most famous poems, Requiem. The divorce from her second husband was another turning point for her. Oddly enough, the events experienced were not personified in the portrait. On the contrary, she is depicted with her head held high. Although the poetess herself spoke of the portrait as follows: "It does not look like it - it is timid."

5. Black Angel and the Perfect Profile: Nikolay Tyrsa (1928)

The year is 1928. By this time, Akhmatova had stopped publishing altogether: “After my evenings in Moscow (spring 1924), a resolution was passed to terminate my literary activity. They stopped publishing me in magazines and almanacs, and they stopped inviting me to literary evenings. I met M. Shaginyan on Nevsky. She said: "What an important person you are: there was a decree of the Central Committee about you - not to arrest, but also not to publish." After the war, the Communist Party decided that Akhmatova was the representative of "empty poetry, devoid of ideology, alien to our people." The communists did not like what they considered the decadent spirit and excessive aestheticism of her poetry. Party leader Zhdanov described her poetry as being far from the people for his "trifling trials and religious and mystical eroticism." And the silence was the most destructive for her. For a woman who lived to write poetry, Stalin's suppression of all aspects of cultural life that were out of step with the regime (he ultimately banned her work entirely) was excruciating. At this time, the artist Nikolai Tyrsa creates a number of portraits of Akhmatova, using unusual materials - a mixture of watercolors with soot from a kerosene lamp. Osip Mandelstam was impressed by the artist's works:

As a result, Akhmatova's poems were not published anywhere, but were distributed among the intelligentsia in the form of samizdat. People memorized them, wrote them down, passed them on to friends and … burned them. Keeping "harmful" poetry was a dangerous game.

6. Pre-war portrait: Benjamin Belkin (1941)

The first known evidence of Belkin's work on Akhmatova's portrait dates back to May 1922. Veniamin Pavlovich writes to Berlin: "I am diligently engaged in painting, I paint a portrait of Akhmatova and sketches." The Anna Akhmatova Museum (Fountain House) contains a copy of the White Flock, which she presented to the artist, with the following inscription: “To dear Veniamin Pavlovich Belkin on the first day of our portrait painting in the spring of 1922. Petersburg ". Later, for some unknown reason, the artist rewrites this portrait and shows it again at the exhibition "Artists of the RSFSR in 15 Years" in 1932. The complete portrait was completed in 1941.

7. Exhausted, but just as strong: Moses Langleben (1964)

The 1964 portrait of the artist Langleben depicts a woman exhausted by illness and hardship, but not broken, who survived the death of her husband, the arrest and imprisonment of her son, literary persecution, the departure of relatives and oblivion. A year before her death, at the age of 75, when her poems were not published in her homeland for 18 long years, Akhmatova was invited to England and received her doctorate from the University of Oxford.

In the solemn speech it was said that “I rightfully call this majestic woman the second Sappho (ancient Greek poet and musician). In November 1965, shortly after she was allowed to travel to England to earn an honorary doctorate, she suffered a heart attack and died. Subsequently, the talent and property of Anna Akhmatova will be recognized all over the world.

The interest of historians and literary critics is also the tragic fate of the son of Anna Akhmatova, and that Lev Gumilyov could not forgive his mother.