The Role of Purism in Anna Akhmatova’s Self-Portraits

Abstract

The aim of this article is the study of linguistic purism that is clearly displayed in ten self-portraits in the first collection of verses The Evening (1912) by Anna Akhmatova. She focuses on the development of pure language in her proposed aesthetics and politics, a process known as akmeism. The purists’ arguments of Akhmatova demonstrate not only the distinguishable traits of her voice, breath, and diction but also establishes new limits in the development and expression of Russian poetry in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The philological selection joined with future linguistic, cross-cultural, and etymological analyses, demonstrates Akhmatova’s choice of using ambiguous ordinary words of Russian origin and tones that were often used in the spoken Russian language and in the Guild of Poets in Saint Petersburg. For the first time, her aesthetic purification and choice of words and their spoken tones applied to the standard norms of modern Russian. The linguistic problematic, along with the results of this study, can be used in dictionaries of twentieth-century Russian poetry and in other philological studies focused on authors’ choices in poetry. The puristic views on the language of The Evening significantly expand the methodology for describing Akhmatova’s poetry.