THE RECEPTION OF A.A. AKHMATOVA’S LYRICS IN THE POETRY OF MARIA VEGA

Abstract

This article investigates the reception of Anna Akhmatova’s poetics in the work of Maria Vega, a poet of the “first wave” of emigration. The study of Maria Vega’s poetry from this proposed perspective has not been previously undertaken in either Russian or foreign literary scholarship. Through a sequential analysis of poems by Vega and Akhmatova, the author aims to substantiate the influence of the latter, which is not reducible to mere imitation by Vega but rather constitutes a conscious creative dialogue. Key aspects of this influence, discernible in the examined poems and Vega’s epistolary legacy, include: organoleptic imagery, the nontrivial role and significance of the objective/material world, narrative strategies, and the application of the principle of psychological understatement in the literary work. Particular analytical attention is paid to intertextual connections, which demonstrate the forms and methods of Maria Vega’s creative refraction of Akhmatovan motifs such as love, memory, and connection to the Homeland. The main conclusion of the study is that, having assimilated Akhmatova’s model of depicting a self-sufficient female soul, Maria Vega develops it in the direction of greater subjectivity and even an inversion of traditional gender roles, which speaks to her innovative contribution to the development of the “female line” in Russian poetry.