Did Akhmatova, who wrote “Poetry Without a Hero”, know that Thackeray’s famous “Spoil Fair” was subtitled “a novel without a hero”? Well, of course he knew.
But then what other thought suddenly falls on Akhmatov’s poem itself? (Did someone notice this parallel? Or did I just make a little discovery here? Probably noticed.)
Thackeray (who, by the way, died exactly on December 24, 1863: cold, winter, rain, everything is gray, until spring you still crawl and crawl in this damp dampness) wrote something grim but shining.
Is Becky Sharp, one of the main characters of the novel, evil? Of course it’s bad. But if it’s bad, why isn’t the palette on which it’s written not just black paint?
Or does everything shine there, as in Akhmatova’s Heroless Poetry, which deliberately mixes the tracks, setting up mirrors everywhere, thus trembling and confusing perspective?
Thackeray writes in the preface to the novel: “A deep sadness comes over him as the Toy Maker sits on the stage and looks at the Fairground buzzing around. (…) Here they will see the most diverse sights: bloody battles, majestic and magnificent carousels, scenes from the life of high society and very modest people, love episodes for tender hearts and funny ones , in a light style – and that’s all, furnished with appropriate ornaments and at their expense lavishly illuminated with candles by the author himself.
So, how does this differ from Akhmatov’s?
“The action venue is the Çeşme House. Time – early January 1941. There is the ghost of a snow-covered maple in the window. The hellish mottled of the thirteenth year passed, awakening the stillness of the great silent age, and leaving behind the torch smoke, flowers on the ground, sacred memories that are so characteristic of every feast or funeral procession. The wind is howling in the chimney, and in that you can guess the very deep and very artfully concealed parts of the Requiem. It is better not to think about what is seen in mirrors.
The puppeteer-writer pulls his characters as well as us readers by the ropes. He made them (us) puppets and suddenly reared up in one paragraph of the novel and said, “I have nothing to do with what is being promoted.” We read somewhere…
“My editor was unhappy.
He swore to me that he was busy and sick.
locked your phone
And he grumbled: “Three subjects at once!
read the last sentence
You won’t know who’s in love with who
Who met when and why
who died who survived
And who is the author and who is the hero, –
And why do we need them today?
reasoning about the poet
And some swarm of ghosts?
… speaking of ghosts.
Thackeray would probably have mocked the event had she lived to see it, and Akhmatova, had she known, would have certainly included it as a rhyme, a semi-ambiguous stanza in “Poetry Without a Hero.” He loved such “strange”, “mysterious”, incomprehensible events.
At the end of 1880, the unidentified body of a 16-year-old girl was found in the River Seine. Everyone was so shocked by her beauty that she even had a plaster cast on her face. At the casting, the girl could be seen smiling slightly.
He was called “the stranger from the Seine”. Not a very good name in my opinion. And what, still acquaintances from the Seine?
In any case, the image of the face of a drowning young woman became very popular. At first, it was the aforementioned posthumous cast, and then the images transferred as replicas of the death mask were also copied.
For many years, a plaster cast over the face of a drowning woman was a kind of erotic symbol in the narrow circles of the aesthetic bohemian (this aesthetic bohemian and to gather “for potatoes” or asparagus in the French fields), and then – here is the fate of any legend, any cult – In the 1960s and 1990s, the poor drowning woman, or rather her face, became the face of simulator dummies called Annie, which were widely used to teach resuscitation methods, including word of mouth. . (You choked, they made you a cult, put your face in the museum, then poked them with their lips. No rest Ophelia, no one here.)
Albert Camus compared her smile to that of the Mona Lisa, and a poet and critic wrote about her that a whole generation of German fashionistas compared their looks to the face of a poor drowned woman as if it were an ideal.
Even Nabokov did not pass by, strangely “kissing” the unfortunate woman.
“… on endlessly fading strings
I hear the voice of your beauty.
In the pale crowd of drowning young women
All of them are paler and make you more charming.
At least you’re humble with me in sounds,
Fortunately your destiny was stingy,
Reply with a deadly grin
Magical plaster lips.
We humans are of course wild creatures, dark. There is a complex, strange psychological flaw in us (or perhaps this is our strangely complex gift): we seek beauty and meaning where beauty and meaning cannot exist. But if we did not have this feature (suddenly pregnant women’s desire to have an unimaginable combination of products), then perhaps there would be nothing: no music, no pictures, no poetry, no computer games.
And the heroine without poetry, the heroine without novels, like the modern new Mona Lisa, still smiles a little, replicated but unique; dead, nameless and fateless, but temporarily immortal. Gathered around her lips (I mean “near her feet”) she was smiling at the show’s fair.
…So what was there? Why did you swim into the dark waters of the Seine (no bruises found, no signs of struggle, so you were not killed)? And why was your face so calm after you died? And you know what else, Annie? (Annie’s lips were later worn on your model by student rescuers and rescuers.) Oddly enough, no one even missed you. It appeared out of nowhere and turned straight into legend. It’s like back in the water.