Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Sep 2019)
New Year Semantics in Anna Akhmatova’s Poetry
Abstract
This article examines New Year semantics in the context of Anna Akhmatova’s lyrical poetry. The author aims to define the meaning of this event in the context of the author’s conceptualisation going beyond Akhmatova’s personal destiny which she regards as affected by the calendar cycle. Akhmatova’s lyrical heroine is sensitive to the calendar shift which resulted in the emergence of a peculiar Russian holiday, the so-called “Old New Year”. It extended the period of Christmas carnival, thus combining two Christmas Eves which had distinguished Christmas from Epiphany. This affected the poet’s lyrical heroine’s perception of all Russian festive life. This psychological plot is accompanied by a tragical emotional background reproducing any holiday events, especially those of the New Year perceived as an omen of “new grief” and new human lives sacrificed to Thanatos in his different guises. Akhmatova’s heroine constantly perceives herself as being in Christmas Eve chronotope scary for her with the New Year in its centre. In the Slavic tradition, there existed a Christmas Eve ritual of “playing dead”. This folklore tradition was reflected in Nikolay Gumilyov’s early poetry, having predetermined the “feast day of the dead” plot in the New Year’s Ballad and the first part of the Poem without a Hero by Akhmatova. New Year semantics is permeated in this artistic system with eschatological sense in understanding dynamics both as personal existence and the entire history of the “split twentieth century”. The article considers a thematic selection of Akhmatova’s texts which have not been studied by researchers in this connection (including texts not to be found in her major collections). This selection accompanied by its interpretation makes it possible to look deeper into the complex symbolic structure of the psychology of a representative of the Silver Age who had to live through a number of global historical cataclysms searching for irrational and mystical explanations if not rational and logical ones. On this level, Akhmatova, who had always been sensitive to dates, painfully tried to solve the tragic riddle of being.
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