Bella (Isabella) Akhatovna Akhmadulina
April 10, 1937, Moscow - November 29, 2010, Peredelkino
tat. Bella akhәt kyzy Әkhmәdullina, Bella Əxət qızı Əxmədullina is a Soviet and Russian poetess, writer, translator, one of the largest Russian lyric poets of the second half of the 20th century.
Member of the Union of Russian Writers, Executive Committee of the Russian PEN Center, Society of Friends of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation and the State Prize of the USSR.
She never calls herself a poetess, only a poet. One of the brightest representatives of the "sixties" generation, she gathered huge halls for her performances ... She performed at the Polytechnic, at stadiums, squares. The audience was captivated by her recognizable voice, inimitable manner of reciting poetry and some kind of airy and unearthly appearance. And, of course, the poems themselves are lyrical and psychological.
All this is about the poetess Bella Akhmadulina, who managed to create in her poems a special female inner world, where every little thing is of great importance, and the most ordinary situations become unsteady and unreal.
Bella Akhatovna was born on April 10, 1937 in Moscow, on Varvarka.
Bella's family belonged to the Soviet elite. Her father Akhat Valeevich was a major customs chief, and her mother Nadezhda Makarovna was a KGB major and translator. The girl received an exotic combination of blood: on the mother's side, the family had Italians settled in Russia, and on the paternal side - Tatars.
Parents were busy at work all day long, and the future poetess was brought up mainly by her grandmother. She adored animals, and together with her granddaughter they picked up homeless dogs and cats ... Later, Bella would do this all her life, passing on her love for animals to her two daughters - Anya and Lisa. “I fully agree with Anastasia Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, who said: “I write the word“ dog ”in capital letters,” she once said.
The future poetess did not speak for a long time, and then the tulips bloomed. And the little girl said: “I have never seen such a thing” ... She began writing her first poems at school. Already in 1955, her works were published in the magazine "October". Some critics called her poems "irrelevant", talking about things banal and vulgar. Nevertheless, the young poetess immediately gained great popularity among readers.
In 1960, she graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute, about her stay within the walls of which she spoke as follows: “If the Literary Institute taught me something, it was how not to write and how not to live. My youth just came to the time when Pasternak was persecuted, and I saw what then happened in the souls of those people who took part in it. They slowly self-destructed from within. I realized that life is partly an attempt to defend the sovereignty of the soul:
not succumb to temptations or threats.
This is how hearts are broken
Evening at the Polytechnic
A poetic fragment of the film by Marlen Khutsiev Zastava Ilyich (or I am twenty years old, 1964). Poems are read by Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Grigory Pozhenyan, Boris Slutsky, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava sings.
"Poems are a wonderful theater..."
This position did not pass the young poetess in vain. In 1959, she was expelled from the institute for refusing to participate in the persecution of Pasternak. However, Akhmadulina was reinstated a year later.
Later, she will always go against the flow: write letters to the head of the KGB Andropov with a request to alleviate the fate of Paradzhanov, who was in prison, sign petitions in defense of Sinyavsky and Daniel, who fell into disgrace, go into exile to academician Sakharov ...
“I have never been afraid for myself,” the poetess once said. “But I know fear for my comrades.” And he will poetically express it like this: "There is no love more ferocious than friendship!"
Shortly after graduating from the institute, she released her first collection "String". Then, evaluating her debut, the poet Pavel Antokolsky wrote in a poem dedicated to her: "Hello, Miracle named Bella!".
And then there will be collections of "Snowstorm" and "Music Lessons", "Garden" and "Candle", "Dreams of Georgia" and "Mystery", "The Noise of Silence" and "Rock of Stones", "My Very Poems" and "Sound indicating "," Once Upon a December "and" Contemplation of a glass ball "... you can’t list everything. Akhmadulina also made excellent poetic translations: from Georgian, Armenian, Abkhazian, English, French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian ...
1962
Many remember her role as a journalist in the 1964 film There Lives Such a Guy. Cinema subsequently pops up more than once in her life. In particular, in the form of wonderful songs based on Akhmadulina's poems: "And in the end I will say ..." or "On my street", which sounded in the equally wonderful domestic films "Cruel Romance" and "Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath!".
One of the daughters of the poetess - Elizabeth - continued the work of her mother and writes books. Anna is also a creative person - she is a fashion designer.
Akhmadulina has always been an object of love and admiration. The poetess did not like to talk about her past personal life, “Love is the absence of the past,” she once wrote in one of her poems ...
However, her ex-husbands, who retained admiration for Bella for life, themselves spoke about past relationships in their diaries and memoirs.
Akhmadulina's first husband was Evgeny Yevtushenko. She met him at the Literary Institute. "We often quarreled, but quickly reconciled. We loved both each other and each other's poems. Hand in hand, we wandered around Moscow for hours, and I ran ahead and looked into her Bakhchisaray eyes, because only one cheek was visible from the side , only one eye, and I didn’t want to lose a piece of my beloved and therefore the most beautiful face in the world. Passers-by looked around, because we looked like what they themselves failed to do ... "- the poet later recalled. This marriage lasted three years...
The second husband of Akhmadulina was the writer Yuri Nagibin. “I was so proud, so admired her when, in a crowded room, she read her poems in a tender, tense, brittle voice and her beloved face burned. I did not dare to sit down, and stood against the wall, almost falling from a strange weakness in my legs, and I was happy that I was nothing for all those gathered, that I was for her alone," wrote Nagibin.
At that time, Akhmadulina, according to the memoirs of the poetess Rimma Kazakova, was especially extravagant: in the obligatory veil, with a fly on her cheek, “She was a beauty, a goddess, an angel,” Kazakova says about Akhmadulina.
Akhmadulina and Nagibin lived together for eight years ... The poetess will mark their parting with the lines: "Farewell! But how many books, trees were entrusted to us with their safety, so that our farewell anger plunged them into death and lifelessness. Farewell! We, therefore, are one of them, who destroys the souls of books and forests. Let us endure the death of the two of us without pity or interest."
With her current husband, the famous artist and sculptor Boris Messerer, they lived together for more than thirty years. We met while walking our dogs and it was love at first sight. Before their marriage, Messerer was not even really familiar with her poetry ...
He was immediately struck by how easily Akhmadulina gave away her works. And he began to collect these scattered poems - sometimes written on napkins, on notebook sheets ... As a result of Messerer's search, a whole four-volume book was published.
He became her kind of guardian angel. Boris took on the task of patronizing and patronizing and has been coping with this task for many years. “I am an absent-minded person,” the poetess said about herself. “Worldly difficulties are completely insurmountable for me.”
And if during the performance she forgot the line, her husband immediately prompted. In one of her poems, she said about him: "Oh, the guide of my timid habits" ... And there is nothing to add to this.
Ekaterina Shcheglova
"My comrades"
- Bye! - Comrades say goodbye to me.
- Bye! - I speak. - Do not forget! —
I say: - Stay here more often! —
while my comrades say goodbye to me.
My comrades are walking up the stairs
and their voices rise back up.
They have to go for a long time - to the Arbat,
to the embankment, where their houses are waiting.
I live here. And remember for a long time
me all the signs of this situation.
My comrades are at the bus stop
and for a long time I look at them out the window.
The summer rain splashes them on their raincoats,
and something else is doing.
Closing the window, I say:
“Oh, woe, come in here, act outrageously and dance!”
My comrades have gone home
they sat there and said
smoke still rises above the table
It was my comrades who smoked.
But here comes another person.
His face is calm and content.
And I look and say: — Enough!
My comrades are so pretty!
He smiles. “I respect them.
But they are unlikely to succeed.
- Oh, they still manage to excel
from all your hateful deeds.
Good luck everyone envy yours -
and this is also an important art,
and yet another is Art,
— my comrades, it is open to them.
And again I say goodbye: - Well, just
good, good luck with everything!
My comrades don't need luck!
My comrades will get their way!
Boris Messer. Monologue... 1. Bella Akhmadulina
Monologue of a free artist. Film 1. Monologue to his wife Bella. A distant memory of a chance meeting in childhood, in the evacuation... Everything happened much later, when both had marriages and victories behind them... Culture, 2013
Bella Akhmadulina. Monologue (2007)
Duet of Bella Akhmadulina and Leonid Kuravlev in the film "Such a Guy Lives". 1964. Directed by Vasily Shukshin.
Bella Akhmadulina and Mikael Tariverdiev -
"On My Street" (1993)
Friends called Bella "Joan of Arc of pure thoughts". Voice, beauty and incorruptibility were an integral part of her work. The famous workshop of stage designer and theater designer Boris Messerer, the poet's husband, "Povarskaya, 20" is an informal academy of arts, a union of literature, painting and It is no coincidence that the literary almanac "Metropol" was created here in the late 70s - one of the first uncensored collections in the USSR, in the release of which Vasily Aksyonov, Andrey Bitov, Fazil Iskander, Bella Akhmadulina,
Vladimir Vysotsky, Viktor Erofeev.
Bella's friends gathered in the workshop will share their memories of her.