About A. Tarkovsky's cycle "In Memory of A. A. Akhmatova"
I give my consent to this celebration. They will erect a monument to me, and if ever in this country..
Anna Akhmatova
When poets mourn a fellow writer, they seek not only to express feelings of loss and grief, but also to recreate a poetic portrait of the deceased, based on his work. So did Arseny Tarkovsky in his cycle of six poems "In memory of A. A. Akhmatova "(1966-1968), written under the direct impression of the death and funeral of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova and completed on the sad anniversary.
The cycle opens with the sonnet "I made a bed of snow", in which the author, saying goodbye to the deceased, bows before her "mountain height" and sees himself standing under the northern sky, in a black shirt, "in your future, as in paradise". The whole farewell scene is drawn in metaphorical and symbolic images: a snow bed, decapitated meadows and groves, laurel and hops as symbols of glory and passion, a monument erected "on the most tearful of lands". Even mentioning the actual date of death looks like stopped time against this background: "But March was not replaced by April," Akhmatova died on March 5, once predicting: "Spring wanders indifferently over my Leningrad grave."
From the very first lines, the sonnet is permeated with Akhmatovian allusions, starting with the rhyme bed-hop and the superlative adjectives "sweetest laurel, bitterest hop", so characteristic of her style: sweetest dream, day, name; bitterest sigh, day; the most lively drama; the most blessed and sacred springs; the rarest and most legitimate name, the most tender conversation, the most faithful friend, the thinnest rain, the lightest dust, the sleepless headboards, the most forbidden window.
Common in Akhmatova's poetry are also threefold enumerations of definitions that usually take up an entire line: "Bold, evil
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and cheerful", "Cold, clean, light flame", "The only one, farewell, unforgettable", "You were slender, calm, foggy ...
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