Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Sep 2019)
Siberia in the Artistic Vision of Anna Akhmatova (the Context of A Little Geography)
Abstract
This article examines the structure of Siberian text in Anna Akhmatova’s poetry and prose; this type of text took shape in her works in the 1930s–1940s. The purpose of this study is to establish recurrent systematic attributes of the author’s image of Siberian space relying on the methodological principles of scrutiny of “psychophysiological spaces” put forward by V. N. Toporov in some of his research. Akhmatova’s Siberian locus establishes a dialogue and debate with Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, Leo Tolstoy’s prose, and exiled Decembrists’ poetry. It does not have the usual “commonplaces” of Russian literature or landscape details; in their place, there are proper names (toponyms and people’s names). The primary object of this historical and cultural commentary is the poem A Little Geography (Not like a European Capital), written in 1937, at the same time as Requiem. This research demonstrates the poem’s context connections with other poems by Akhmatova (The Russian Trianon, Poem without a Hero, etc.), with Alexander Odoevsky’s poetry, Leo Tolstoy’s novels Resurrection and War and Peace, etc. In Akhmatova’s poetry about Siberia, the author of the article observes the structure of perceptive space which restrains the visual perception and builds on the repetition of olfactory references. The absence of a formal description of the Siberian territory and emphasis on the intertextual character of sensory motifs makes it possible to suggest that in Akhmatova’s artistic vision, Siberia is a vantage point, a source of the poet’s calamitous perception and a reason for prophetic phrasing represented in the incompleteness and fragmentariness of the composition of the poem.
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