‘Rozanov's layer' in Anna Akhmatova's oeuvre

The article establishes that Anna Akhmatova was well acquainted with texts by the philosopher Vasily Rozanov (Solitaria, Fallen Leaves, his literary criticism) and the circumstances of his life, knew his daughter N. V. Vereshchagina-Rozanova. This conclusion is based on the vast material of texts by Akhmatova (poetry, prose, notebooks), as well as on Lydia Chukovskaya's memoirs about her. Texts by Akhmatova are shown to contain ‘Rozanov's layer' (implications, references to Rozanov's works), which reflects the poet's direct and implicit dialogue with the iconic figure of Russian modernism - both religious-philosophical (‘new religious consciousness') and literary (the genre of ‘fallen leaves'). In the literary sense, what was of great significance for Akhmatova, as well as for O. Mandelstam, is Rozanov's ‘non-literary', ‘pre-Gutenberg' attitude to the word (intonation and intertextuality). Rozanov's discourse (Among Artists, 1909) is dialogically refracted in Akhmatova's poem Venice (1912). Rozanov's perception of biblical poetics is reflected in the biblical cycle of Akhmatova (Rachel, 1921; Lot's Wife, 1924; Michal, 1959-1961). The paper provides a detailed analysis of the image of Rozanov as a participant in the ‘masquerade' of the early 20th century epoch as presented by Akhmatova in the diary entry concerning Poem without a Hero (1962), in which the poet mythologizes Rozanov as a gender philosopher (metaphysics of gender) in the demonic context of Grigori Rasputin. The paper analyzes the multilayer allusion in Poem without a Hero (1940-1965), where one can discern Akhmatova's dialogue with Rozanov about ‘spirit' and ‘flesh' in the context of Blok. It comes to light that Rozanov and Akhmatova concur in the demonic and mortal perception of Alexander Blok and in the modernist perception of Mikhail Lermontov as the ‘progenitor' of Russian literature (as well as they concur in the intonation perception of Lermontov's poetry). The modernist form of the ‘stream of consciousness' (‘fallen leaves'), discovered by Rozanov, was of great importance for Akhmatova's memoir prose, directly and indirectly (through Mandelstam and Pasternak).