Russia has long been the most reading country in the world - if you believe the statistics for 2008, the Russians on this indicator in seventh place, a lot of behind the leaders, people of India. But during the stay of the Soviet Union it is this country still wore the proud (although giving little other than moral satisfaction) title. In many ways, these figures were the result of administrative clerk reading of the classics of Marxism-Leninism, but it's not by chance that in the 1960s there was an explosion of reader interest in Russian literature, especially to the national poetry. And one of the main figures that make this possible, was Bella Akhmadulina.

Russian poet with an Italian name and surname Tatar

I think it looks quite so bizarre and sophisticated paradox that the poet, which was in many ways, according to Brodsky, "the heir of Lermontov-Pasternak line" line subtle, skillfully wielding a classical Russian style and poetic mood was predominantly non-Russian ethnic roots. Parents of Isabella (which very quickly all became known as just Bella) Akhmadullina born in Moscow on April 10, 1937, was a Tatar Ahat Valeevich Akhmadulin, who worked in the Soviet government and attained respectable career peaks as a deputy minister, and Russian with Italian ancestors Hope Makarovna Lazarev, a translator, in the Proceedings of the Committee of State Security.

Bell became interested in literature from an early age, the first poetic experiments have occurred on school years, thanks in no small measure contributed to the classes in the children's literary circle at Zil .  That literature attracted the biggest girl, so natural to her step was the admission after graduation in the Gorky Literary Institute .  By that time, in 1955, she already had to his credit the first publication - her poem "Homeland" was published in the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" .  She continued to write and publish poems in various literary magazines and newspapers Ahmadulina and while studying at the institute, also dabbled as a journalist by providing a certain article for the same "Komsomolskaya Pravda" .  In 1959, Bella Akhmadulina almost went into adulthood with "blacklisted": her active student, journalist and poet, was expelled from the Literary Institute for refusing to join a public condemnation of Boris Pasternak (then just reached its climax campaign against writer in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for published abroad the novel "Doctor Zhivago") .  However, times were not the ones under Stalin, has started "Khrushchev thaw", so that the continuation of repressive measures are not followed - Akhmadulina restored at the institute, which she graduated from in 1960 .

Without Akhmadullina 60 would be different ...

Of course, it is hardly the end of the institute served for Akhmadullina signal the beginning of vigorous activity, but just from the beginning of the 1960s, she gets great fame in the first place in the youth and intellectual circles of the Soviet Union. First of all, it happened because of the famous poetic evening in the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, which with their works were young poets who became the voice of the advancing 60th, the first "sixties", and in the future - the classics of Russian literature of XX century: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina. Soon arrived the first own poetry collection, released in 1962 called "strings". It was only the first of nearly thirty books of poetry Bella Akhmadulina, which went on for forty years, until the beginning of the new twenty-first century.

Largely Bell Ahatovna his poetry has created the very atmosphere of the Soviet 60s, thanks to her verses "sixties" perceive themselves and are perceived until now, not only as rebels raise his voice after the "Stalinist winter", but as a romance, deriving its inspiration from the the tradition of the great Russian culture and hopefully looking to the future .  Lyrical motifs poetry Akhmadullina in conjunction with the vocabulary and turns of classical Russian poetry, converted to his own experiences, often wore an abstract character, subtle nostalgia for the beautiful - all this has become an integral part of the concept of "thaw" .  Since the 1960s and up to the present time Bella Akhmadulina perceived and representatives of his generation and the younger generation as an aesthetic fork national culture .  Because of her care is felt especially sharply: November 29, 2010 Bella Akhmadulina died as a result of a cardiovascular crisis .  The official farewell to the poet is scheduled for December 3 in Moscow's Central House of Writers .

Alexander Babitsky