Artist – Petrov -Vodkin
“But in the world there are no more naughty people, more arrogant and simpler than us”-these lines from the Akhmatovsky “not with those who abandoned the Earth” of 1922 could become an epigraph to the image of a poetess created by Petrov-Vodkin. The artist indirectly turns to the standard of a poetic portrait – a portrait of Pushkin’s work of Kiprensky. The muse materialized from the “planetary” blue background behind the left shoulder of Akhmatova is no longer a dark -skinned girl with a pipe in her hand, dictating the lines of her early verses, but a strict virgin with a proudly lowered head. We do not know the circumstances in which the portrait was created, and where the drawing was made with watercolor from nature, which formed it in its basis. (L. B.). Russian portrait. XX century: St. Petersburg, 2001. WITH. 181.
Akhmatova (Gorenko) Anna Andreevna (1889–1966) – poet. Russian portrait. XX century: St. Petersburg, 2001. WITH. 5
The simplicity and nobility of the portrait of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova is akin to her best verses. Strict laconic silhouette of a pranial figure. Matovo pale, as if exuding light, face-face, hopelessly detached gaze of cold gray eyes, a bitter smile, slightly affected by tightly closed lips. External asceticism and marginal internal composure. Behind the poetess, in sadness, the head of the strict maiden – a muse, whose whispering only gifted with a superpowerful hearing, was in sadness. Its silhouette protrudes from the cosmic blue of the background, as if exuding light – the light of the “Akhmatovsky” silver month, which was brightly flowing over the Silver Age and now becoming colder and homeless.
In 1922, when a portrait was created, the name Akhmatova was already famous in the poetic world. And at the same time she went through trials, to resist which only a person of the exceptional fortitude of the spirit could resist. Many left Russia, many were preparing to leave it. A year earlier, on charges of conspiracy against the Soviet regime, her ex -husband, the father of her only son, the famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov was shot.
And here, in the deaf child of the fire
The rest of the youth is destroying,
We are not a single blow
Not rejected from themselves.
These lines of Akhmatova from the 1922 poem “Not with those who abandoned the Earth …” are consonant with the clear expressiveness of the portrait of the brush Petrov-Vodkin.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (in the girlhood of Gorenko, 1889–1966) – Russian poetess, translator and literary critic, one of the most significant figures of Russian literature of the 20th century. The Horde Khan Akhmat considered her ancestor in the maternal line, on behalf of which she later formed her pseudonym.