The English trace in the heading-final complex of Anna Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero”

Abstract

The specificity of the heading-final complex of Anna Akhmatovas Poem without a Hero (Poema bez geroya) is based on the fact that the semantics of the components included in it refers to several sources at once, and allusions to the works of English romantics, authors of poems, play the most important role among the components included in the poem's frame, and above all to J.G. Byron. The relevance of the undertaken research is due to the application of an integrated approach to the analysis of the elements of the frame text Poem without a Hero: not only primary, but also secondary and tertiary allusions, playing with the readers perception and his knowledge of predecessor texts are considered. The purpose of the study is to identify the English trace in Poem without a Hero and the ways of its manifestation through the heading-final complex. The authors trace the genealogy of Poem without a Hero from Byron to Pushkin and to the nominally absent, but implicitly animated, hero of Akhmatovas poem. Research objectives are defined as the study of the framework text as an essential element of the poem, identification of the features of the frame text and its intertextual links, comparison of epigraphs in the poem with notes, comments and critical articles of the author. The authors show that the poet often hides Byronic allusions in the reception from Pushkins poems (mainly Eugene Onegin), placing them in the heading-final complex. The article proves that this technique is used by Akhmatova to build the genre genealogy of her own poem, which goes back to the tradition of English romantic poems, mediated by the tradition of A. Pushkin. The reason for turning to this tradition, according to the authors, lies in the tragic personal and epoch-making collisions, the genre interpretation of which could become the transformed Akhmatova canon of the romantic poem, the founder of which was Lord Byron.