A. Akhmatova’s Poetry in 11th Grade: Experience in Creating Classroom Problem Situations

The purpose of this article is to find approaches to understanding of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry in the eleventh grade classroom. The author presents written and oral assignments that can lead students to an understanding of the lyrics through independent reading comprehension. Each assignment creates a problem situation at the lesson. Acquisition of new material in such an approach is creative, that is, it takes place via looking for new information in a problem situation. The group of students in this case serves as a “collective researcher” (L. S. Aizerman), and the answer is sought throughout the whole lesson. Such assignments create an unexpected situation in which readymade typical answers do not work, the same as searches on the Internet. The assignments were used by the author at literature lessons in non-profile and in social-humanities classrooms. The article analyzes extracts from written works and essays of eleventh grade and the author explains his approach to their evaluation. The logic of classes on the poet’s lyrics (love and civil poetry), which end with a discussion of the poem “Requiem”, is described in detail. While reading of the poem “Clasped hands under a dark veil ...” in class, the teacher dwells on the psychological plot in detail, which allows the students to see not only the complexity of the psychological plot but also some continuity of Ahmatova’s and Tyutchev’s lyrics. The article also describes several tasks on the poem “When in the yearning of suicide ...” related to different editions and cultural-historical context; suggests various suitable ways of comparing the poem “Dante” and “Lot’s Wife” in a secondary school literature classroom, formulates a topic for an option class on Akhmatova’s poetry, and describes fragment of the lesson on the poem “Requiem”.