Lecturer L.I. Sobolev
Russian poetry of the 19th century experienced at least three genuine upsurges in its development. The first, relatively speaking, dates back to the beginning of the century and is blessed with the name of Pushkin. Another long-recognized poetic rise occurs at the turn of two centuries - the nineteenth and twentieth - and is associated primarily with the work of Alexander Blok. Finally, the third, as a modern researcher puts it, “poetic era” is the mid-19th century, the 60s, although it is in poetry that the so-called “sixties” shift chronologically more noticeably to the early 50s.
Russian poetry after Pushkin carried opposing principles and expressed the increased complexity and contradictory nature of life. Two directions are clearly emerging and polarizing: democratic and the so-called "pure art" When we talk about two poetic camps, we need to keep in mind the great diversity and complexity of relations both within each of the camps and in the relations between them, especially if we take into account the evolution of social and literary life. “Pure” poets wrote civil poetry: from liberal-accusatory (Ya. Polonsky) to reactionary-protective (A.P. Maikov). Democratic poets experienced a certain (and also positive) influence from the poets of “pure art”: Nikitin, for example, in his poetry of nature. The flourishing of satirical poetry is mainly associated with the democratic movement. Nevertheless, “pure art” put forward a number of major satirical talents: P. Shcherbina and especially A.K. Tolstoy, who wrote many satirical works - both independently and as part of the collective authorship that created the famous Kozma Prutkov. And yet, in general, there is a fairly clear divide between poetic movements. The confrontation and confrontation between these two trends often manifested an intensified social struggle. The poles could perhaps be designated by two names: Nekrasov and Fet. “Both poets began to write almost simultaneously,” the critics stated, “both experienced the same phases public life“, both made a name for themselves in Russian literature... both, finally, are distinguished by far from extraordinary talent - and for all that, in the poetic activity of each of them there is almost not a single point in common.”
More often under Nekrasov school- and here we are talking about just such a school - they mean the poets of the 50s - 70s, ideologically and artistically closest to him, who experienced the direct influence of one great poet, even organizationally united in essence due to the fact that the majority Of these, it was grouped around a few democratic publications: Nekrasov’s Sovremennik, Russkoe Slovo, Iskra.
An absolutely exceptional place in the depiction of folk life was occupied by the largest and most talented representative of the Nekrasov school - Ivan Savvich Nikitin (1824 - 1861). His best works represent independent and original creativity in the spirit of the Nekrasov school.
In Russian poetry the second half of the 19th century century, the development of folk, primarily peasant, life took place almost exclusively within the framework of the Nekrasov direction.
In the lyrics of the Nekrasov poets we find a new hero - a man of public service, civic duty.
The poetry of the 50s, especially in its second half, is also interesting as a kind of preparation for the epic. Even in the lyrics of this time, much of what was realized in the epic itself in the 60s was ripening. And not only in poetic, but also in prose epic. We are talking about the interaction and roll calls of lyrics and prose. In general, these interactions themselves become more complex. Poetry of the 40s was closely associated with the small prose genres of the story and especially the essay, for example in the poems of Nekrasov and Turgenev. This phenomenon also occurs in the 50s, both in the work of poets of the Nekrasov school (Nikitin) and in Polonsky Mey. At the same time, processes are observed in the lyrics that are approaching the complexity of psychologism and the organization of lyrical plots to the novel. This was especially clear in love poem cycles.
Revolutionary Populists create their own poetry, organically included in the literary movement of this decade. In the poetry of the 70s years In general, two directions still coexist: Nekrasov’s, civil and Fetov’s, the direction of “pure art,” the struggle between them has intensified significantly. The poetic declarations of each direction are deliberately emphasized and sharpened. At the same time, each of them revealed its own inconsistency. “Pure art” mobilizes its poetic internal capabilities to the maximum and at the same time exhausts them (A.A. Dret, A.N. Maikov, A.K. Tolstoy). Nekrasov's poetry, which affirms the high ideal of serving the people, at the same time experiences its own difficulties in combining civic pathos and psychologism. Among the poets grouped around the Iskra magazine, the humorous tone that prevailed in the 60s was replaced by a satirical beginning.
Possessing a certain specificity, populist poetry also touches on those aspects of the populist movement and consciousness that were almost not touched upon by the prose of the populists. It is characteristic that lyric poetry arises primarily among the Narodnaya Volya. “Going to the people,” as already noted, gave rise to propaganda literature; poetry in it was represented primarily by songs.
The activities of revolutionary populists are inseparable from poetry. Their poetry is, first of all, poetic journalism. They almost consciously contrast themselves with professional poets.
The internal content and main task of democratic poetry of the 70s is “the liberation and education of the people in the spirit of humanism and social justice.” This theme is leading in the works of A. P. Barykova, I. V. Fedorov Omulevsky, A. F. Ivanov-Classic, A. A. Olkhin, A. L. Borovikovsky, A.K. Sheller-Mikhailovsky and others. Democratic poets are characterized by a special attitude to the word. “In their work, the word became a civil act, a direct continuation social activities. Word and concept, word and feeling are fused in the poetry of democrats; there is no confrontation between them, the result of which would be the birth of additional semantic and emotional shades. The dominant tendency here is to expose the fundamental, vital meaning of words.”
The lyrics of the revolutionary populists also have their own lyrical hero. He uniquely combined the consciousness of his tragic fate and the conviction that his suffering would be redeemed. This theme will be strengthened by the poetry of the 80s, primarily in the poems of prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress: V.N. Figner, N. A. Morozova, G. A. Lopatina and others.
Poetry of the 80s and 90s occupies a very modest place in the literary process, although it is marked by some signs of a new upsurge.
The era still bears reflections of the bright poetic phenomena of previous decades. Thus, poetry, which served “pure beauty,” recalls itself in the work of A. Fet, who, after a short break, appears in print and publishes four issues of “Evening Lights” (1883 - 1891).
His lyrics are rich in free and strong feelings, appearing in infinitely varied shades - in this direction Fet deepens the “eternal” themes of art, almost without expanding their range. In his poetry, new content is obtained not so much through the new objectivity of the image, but through the boldly renewed form of the verse. It is Fet’s form, acquiring truly musical mobility and flexibility, that captures such combinations of moods, overflows of thoughts and feelings that were not known to Fet’s poetry.
Fet’s work is associated with a trend that directly leads to the formation of symbolist poetry. Objective-psychological motivations for the poetic image are increasingly being replaced by subjective-psychological and purely aesthetic motivations; Experiments with poetic form acquire independent artistic value. All this will soon be reflected in the poetic practice of K. D. Balmont, B.C. Solovyov, F. Sologub, in the declarations of N. M. Minsky, D. S. Merezhkovsky - the direct founders of Russian symbolism.
But here a qualitatively different stage in the development of poetry begins, which will fully take shape by the 900s. And in the 90s, Fetov’s lyrics, which continued the traditions of classical Russian poetry and brought them to their logical conclusion, with its sensual power and rich poetics, remained an isolated phenomenon.
For many poets of these years, the themes and images of democratic poetry of the 60s and 70s, especially the poetry of Nekrasov, retain their attractiveness. However, their interpretation turns out to be poorer, the artistic means of developing these themes are more meager, and the author’s voice is quieter and more monotonous.
Often in the poems of the 80s and 90s one can find echoes of Lermontov’s motives and moods - interest in his romantic lyrics, as well as in the work of Pushkin and in general in the poets of the first half of the century, increased noticeably at that time. But none of the poets managed to approach the heights of Lermontov’s poetry, combining merciless negation with a powerful love of life, energy and picturesqueness of verse with accuracy and depth of thought.
Feelings of disappointment, hopelessness, “civil grief”, spiritual breakdown do not know the outcome and create in poetry a general atmosphere of tragedy, a gloomy and “sick” time.
In the second half of the 19th century there was a surge in Russian lyric poetry. Just listing the most famous names of poets says a lot - Apollo Nikolaevich Maykov (1821-1897), Apollo Alexandrovich Grigoriev (1882-1864), Yakov Petrovich Polonsky (1819-1898), Ivan Savich Nikitin (1824-1861), Alexey Nikolaevich Apukhtin ( 1840-1893), Konstantin Konstantinovich Sluchevsky (1837-1904), Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson (1862-1887), Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov (1862-1911), Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873), Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875), Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820-1892), Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821-1877/78).
Unfortunately, the triumph of poetry was short-lived. In Russian literature, prose is developing, especially large epic forms. The triumph of prose turned out to be more durable and is associated with the name of I. Turgenev, F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy. And yet the poetry of the second half XIX century has had huge role in the development of Russian literature and culture in general. Poetry was a multifaceted system in which various forms of manifestation of the lyrical “I” were present. To understand this “I”, the reader must have an open heart and soul. N.V. Gogol noted: “Reading a lyrical work properly is not a trifle at all.”
It is important to remember that poetry developed in two directions - Pushkin's and Gogol's. The romantics of the 19th century (especially A.S. Pushkin) proclaimed its independence from the authorities and the people, and considered the poet a creator inspired by God. The programmatic poem for them was A.S. Pushkin "The Poet and the Crowd". Slogan - final words“Not for everyday worries, / Not for self-interest, not for battles, / We were born for inspiration, / For sweet sounds and prayers.” The ideas of the romantics of the beginning of the century were picked up by the romantics of the second half of the 19th century and substantiated the theory of “pure art”. The main provisions of “pure art” can be formulated as follows: art should not depict reality and should not play a social role. The purpose of art is to create beauty, i.e. poetic, world. Art should exist for the elite.
The opposite point of view on civil art was substantiated by N.V. Gogol in the poem " Dead Souls"(beginning of chapter seven). He compared the creator of “art for art’s sake” and the writer-accuser. The principles of the “civil” direction in poetry of the second half of the 19th century are most consistently and vividly implemented in the poetry of N.A. Nekrasova.
Gogol proclaimed and embodied the idea that poetry should serve the people. Nekrasov made the peasant the main character of poetry, and the struggle for his happiness - the pathos of his work. The ideas of “pure art” are the basis of A.A.’s worldview and artistic system. Feta. From the point of view of the history of poetry, Pushkin and Gogol’s movements enriched the literature, culture, and poetry of the 19th century and prepared many phenomena in the cultural life of Russia.
The poets of the second half of the 19th century turned out to be receptive to life, to the spiritual atmosphere of Russian society. They continued and developed the traditions of the Russian poetic school of the 18th - early 19th centuries. At the same time, poets were looking for a new poetic language, original forms of expression. They were concerned about issues of national identity; the relationship between good and evil; death and immortality; spiritual generosity of people. A feature of Russian poetry of the 19th century is the magic of sound and words. I. Nikitin conveys the finest shades of color, shape and sound. Landscape lyrics are developing intensively (A. Maikov, “Landscape”; I. Koltsov, “South and North”; K. Sluchevsky, “Oh, don’t scold me for the fact that I lived aimlessly...”, etc.).
Song character, folklore, Russian antiquity, beauty of Russian nature, originality of Russian national character became the source of Russian poetry. Alexander Blok called A. Grigoriev’s poem “The Gypsy Hungarian” “one of a kind pearls of Russian lyricism.” The “guitar” nature of the poem, set to music, made it a popular romance. Romances and folk songs many poems by Y. Polonsky, “Song of the Gypsy” (set to music by P.I. Tchaikovsky) became famous. Famous romances included poems by A. Apukhtin, set to music, “A Pair of Bays,” “Crazy Nights, Sleepless Nights...”; S.Ya. Nadson “In the shadow of a pensive garden...”.
In the second half of the 19th century, Russian poetry gradually moved towards modernism. This was also the movement in world literature, especially in French poetry. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine - French symbolists were contemporaries of N. Nekrasov, the late A.A. Feta, V. Solovyova. The forerunners of modernism in Russia were primarily F.I. Tyutchev, A.A Fet.
As researcher V.S. notes. Babaevsky: “Russian poetry of the 19th century, as a whole with all its structural and chronological diversity, a manifestation of the spirit of the people, does not fit strictly within the boundaries of the century. The last decade, the 1890s, belongs in its essence to modernism. We can say that for Russian poetry the 20th century began in 1892. Poetry K.M. Fofanova and S.Ya. Nadsona connected the two centuries of Russian poetry, “golden” and “silver.”
Lesson #14
Topic: “Review of Russian literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century”
Goals:
Review of an entire literary and historical era;
Show the main directions of development of literature in a given period;
Assess the contribution of literary figures of the era to the development of Russia;
Learn to collect and organize information;
Select material for messages.
Equipment: presentation on the topic, literature exhibition.
During the classes.
Teacher's lecture.
1. Socio-political and cultural-historical situation in Russia in the second half of the 19th century.
Slide1.
Teacher's opening speech. Today we will get acquainted with the features of the history and cultural development of Russia in the 2nd half of the 11th century. I would like to draw your attention to the epigraph (slide 2) - the words of N.G. Chernyshevsky, who said about the role of literature in this historical period as follows:
“Literature in our country still concentrates almost the entire mental life of the people, and therefore it has a duty directly to deal with such interests that in other countries have already passed, so to speak, into the special department of other areas of mental activity...”
Individual task Historical reference. 1850s.
The eastern question occupied a special place in Russian politics during this period.
In 1853, a war began between Russia and Turkey. (slide 3) Feudal-serfdom, technically backward, with an army formed on the basis of conscription from an overwhelmingly illiterate population, Russia was unable to resist its enemies.
The main military operations took place directly on its territory, in Crimea. In October 1854, the Allies besieged Sevastopol.
Accession to the throne of Alexander II. (slide 4)
The new sovereign found himself at the head of a country tired of a bloody war. During the days of his coronation, many were granted freedom, including the Decembrists. There's been an awakening social thought. An intense search for a social ideal began in philosophy and literature, and the problem of uniting the nation and its spiritual unity became acute. These searches were especially active in the most influential ideological trends in Russian social thought - Slavophilism and Westernism.
(loving Slavs and loving Western ideas)
Individual task. Historical events of the 1860-1870s.
1861 – abolition of serfdom. Huge historical meaning. Slavery was abolished, and opportunities arose for the development of market relations in the countryside. Russia has practically taken the capitalist path of development. (slide 5)
The turn of the 1860-1970s is the emergence of revolutionary populism.
(slide 6)
Teacher's word. The social struggle in Russia was reflected on the pages of numerous magazines. The magazine controversy has become a bright page in the historical and literary process in Russia.
The London one was extremely popularnewspaper "Bell"(1857-1867), which Herzen A.I. published together with Ogarev N.P. The newspaper criticized the reactionary aspirations of senior officials, the government and the entire political system Tsarist Russia. “The Bell” helped many to take a critical look at the reforms of Alexander II and the balance of socio-political forces in the country. (Lessons of Russian literature, Author - Bikulova I.A., Bryansk, 2003) (slide 7)
Sovremennik magazine(slide 8)
Talented publicist D.I. Pisarev and the magazine “Russian Word”(slide 9)
Many people debated Sovremennik and the Russian Word. Well-known critics A. Druzhinin, V. Botkin, P. Annenkov believed that the artistic value of works is not related to the requirements of the social situation. Therefore, they were supporters only of “pure art”. Critics argued with Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev and assessed not the ideological orientation, but artistic features works. The main thing for them was the degree of the author’s talent and “eternal values” - God, love, beauty, mercy.
It was not easy for readers to understand the journal polemics and conflicting assessments of the same work.
2.Features of the development of literature and art in the second half of the nineteenth century.
At this time, it was critical realism that produced brilliant creative results. Realistic cultural traditions established the concept of a “golden age” in Russian art and literature. The gallery of artistic images in the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Nekrasov and Turgenev, in the music of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, in the paintings of Repin and Perov, Kramskoy and Surikov, in the Maly Theater of the times of Shchepkin and Ostrovsky was a kind of mirror, reflecting a kind of mirror that reflected Russian reality.
Literature, painting, music, and theater of the “golden age” purposefully affirmed the aesthetics of public life, which gave rise to a world of “humiliated and insulted” and a world of “superfluous people,” “typical images in typical circumstances.” But Russian art not only reflected the world, but it transformed him. Russian art was closely connected with spiritual quests in public life.
(slide 10)
The 19th century is rightly called the golden age of Russian literature. Domestic literature has rapidly traveled a serious path, illuminated by the genius of A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol, I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy and A.P. Chekhov, the brilliance of the talent of the whole constellation of the greatest writers, became one of the greatest literatures of the world and had a significant influence on the artistic culture of all mankind. It became the focus of the spiritual life of society, its conscience, and has always stood out for the intensity of its philosophical quests.
A grandiose panorama of Russian life in the second half of the 19th century was created by outstanding works: “Oblomov” by I.A. Goncharov, “The Thunderstorm” and “Dowry” by A.N. Ostrovsky, the novels by I.S. Turgenev, “What is to be done?” N.G. Chernyshevsky, “The Past and Thoughts”, A.N. Herzen, “The History of a City” by Saltykov-Shchedrin M.E., “Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky, “Who Lives Well in Rus'” N. .A. Nekrasov, “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy, stories by A.P. Chekhov, lyrics by F.I. Tyutchev, A.K. Tolstoy, A.A. Fet.
Realism has become the main direction of Russian literature (slide 11)
The most relevant genre was the novel (slide 12)
Definition of a novel.
Wide varieties of the genre have become widespread: social, political, historical, philosophical, psychological, love, family, adventure, fantasy. The novel widely covered the social conditions of human existence, deeply penetrated inner world character. It was the novels that gained enormous resonance not only in Russia, but also abroad. Works by Tolstoy L.N., Dostoevsky F.M., Turgenev I.S. almost immediately transferred to foreign languages and enjoyed great success.
Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century ascended to the highest ideological and artistic level and reached a position that can be defined as the pinnacle of world art. (slide 13)
Student messages:
“The significance of P.I. Tchaikovsky’s work in Russian culture”
"The Mighty Handful" - a creative community of Russian composers"
“The importance of the Maly Theater in Russia”
“The significance of the “Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions in Russia”
Literature: “Lessons of Russian literature. Second half of the 19th century.”, Bryansk “Kursiv”, 2003
Individual assignment: messages on the biography of A.N. Ostrovsky.
Back in the 40s. XIX century poetry was clearly giving way to prose. Relatively little time passed and the situation changed. Already in the next decade, poetry again occupied its rightful place in the literary movement, in some cases it even preceded and stimulated artistic searches in the field of prose.
In Russian poetry of the mid-19th century. It is generally accepted that there are two directions. On the one hand, these are Nekrasov and the poets of his school. Representatives of this trend addressed pressing socio-political problems. Their focus was modern man with his need and grief, worries and disappointments. Characteristic of them were the speed of response to current phenomena of reality, accusatory tendencies, active participation in the literary struggle of the era, and the widespread use of satirical genres. This especially applies to the poetry of V. S. Kurochkin, D. D. Minaev, V. I. Bogdanov, who collaborated in the satirical magazine “Iskra”, to the poems of Dobrolyubov, which he published in “Whistle” - satirical technical supplement to Sovremennik. I. S. Nikitin, who devoted his work to depicting people’s life, should also be fairly included in the Nekrasov school.
At the same time, there was another direction in poetry, oriented towards the theory of “art for art’s sake” (A. A. Fet, A. N. Maikov, L. A. Mei, A. K. Tolstoy, partly F. I. Tyutchev) . Poets of “pure art” went into the world of philosophical and psychological problems, focusing their attention primarily on personal, intimate experiences. All this caused active rejection in the democratic reader, who, at a sharp turning point in history, wanted to find in literature direct responses to the questions that worried him.
There are a large number of facts testifying to the irreconcilable struggle between these two directions. But almost a century and a half has passed; It is now much easier for us to appreciate the essence of those disputes and clashes that were so characteristic of the 60s. XIX century First of all, the idea of the diametrical opposition of two aesthetic positions needs certain adjustments. Is it possible to reduce Nekrasov’s work to only “civic motives” and not notice his works of a national and universal character? We must not forget that it was Ne-krasov who was the first to speak about Tyutchev’s remarkable poetic gift and highly value Fet’s poems. On the other hand, the slogan of “pure art” was not so consistently observed by its supporters.
If, nevertheless, we proceed from the presence of two directions in Russian poetry of the mid-19th century. (and they were clearly identified in the minds of contemporaries), then in no case should one of them be elevated at the expense of the other. Representatives of both directions had their own strengths and undoubted discoveries. It is important not to lose historical perspective and be clearly aware that Russian poetry, of course, needed the pathos of sociality, the desire to give poetry a direct propaganda sound, the affirmation of the high destiny of the poet-prophet, the discovery of people's life as a legitimate subject of ethical creativity. But no less important and significant were the achievements of another school, which was characterized by a deep sense of nature in its correlation and organic connection with the mental life of man, confession, subtle psychologism of lyrics, an appeal to the eternal mysteries of existence, and the search for new means of artistic expression. , musicality, etc.
The difficulty lies in the fact that sometimes it is very difficult for us to combine different criteria when analyzing a particular work: momentary and eternal. It happens that a poet or writer creates a work that, thanks to the speed of response to the most current, most topical events, arouses genuine interest among his contemporaries. But five or ten years pass, public consciousness changes, questions that once worried readers so much cease to be relevant, and new problems appear. But what about the work, around which so recently there were lively debates? Nobody remembers about it anymore, it is forgotten, other books have replaced it, but won’t they be forgotten in the same way?
And at the same time, there is a poet or writer who does not enjoy great success at all: his contemporaries almost do not notice him, they do not argue about him, do not organize poetry evenings, do not devote dissertations to him, he does not become an object of worship and delight. But some time passes, and it turns out that it was he, this poet or writer, who turns out to be important, necessary, relevant for subsequent generations, because he addressed such problems in his works, created such perfect books that have timeless value. His poems acquire a new aesthetic life in new conditions among new generations, for they contribute to the enrichment of the artistic consciousness of mankind, promoting the aesthetic exploration of the world.
So, in one case - the desire to respond to today's interests, in the other - to eternal problems. Someone must help us sort out the confusion of everyday life, give us advice, help, instruct. But equally, someone must keep the sacred fire of poetry and not let it go out, even if it does not yet meet with understanding from those who are concerned with immediate problems.
Fet has a wonderful poem, written, by the way, without a single verb:
Whisper, timid breathing, Trill of a nightingale, Silver and swaying of the Sleepy stream...
Radical youth mocked these lines, many parodies were written on them... But listen to how wisely the great Dostoevsky assessed this situation. Material from the site
Imagine, writes Dostoevsky, that a terrible natural disaster occurred in some city (the writer names Lisbon as an example, where there really was an earthquake in the 18th century). The residents are in despair, they are amazed, mad with horror. The next morning, the next issue of the local newspaper is published in the city. The unfortunate residents of Lisbon hope “that the issue was published on purpose to give some information, to convey some news about the dead, about the missing, etc., etc. And suddenly, in the most prominent place on the sheet, something like the following catches your eye: “Whisper, timid breathing...” What should the people of Lisbon do with the author of this poem? “...It seems to me,” writes Dostoevsky, “they would immediately execute their famous poet publicly, in the square.” Lisbonians can be understood. Dostoevsky does not even think of condemning them for such a cruel attitude towards the servant of art. However, he does not finish his story: “...they would have executed the poet, and in thirty, fifty years they would have erected a monument to him in the square for his amazing poetry...”
Of course, everything written by Dostoevsky is the result of his artistic imagination, but the very opposition of reader expectations caused by today's anxieties and troubles, and the objective meaning of an artistic text, which can only be properly appreciated many years later, was noted by him absolutely right.
Even such poets as Nekrasov and Tyutchev have poems written “on the topic of the day,” dedicated to specific historical or political events, which for subsequent generations have already lost immediate interest.
But they also have poems of a different kind, which continue to excite us today, because they affirm those universal human values, without which it is impossible to live. This circumstance predetermines the greatness and significance of poets, writers, playwrights who worked not only for their time.
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On this page there is material on the following topics:
- features of poetry of the mid-19th century
- lesson notes review of Russian poetry late 19th
- main directions of Russian literature xix century
- Russian poetry of the mid-19th century poetry of pure art
- main directions of Russian poetry
Alexander
ARKHANGELSKY
Introducing chapters from the new school textbook
Russian lyrics of the second half of the 19th century
Russian poets and the era of “social” prose. Russian poets of the early 19th century - from Zhukovsky and Batyushkov to Pushkin and Lermontov - created a new poetic language in which it was possible to express the most complex experiences, the deepest thoughts about the universe. They introduced into Russian poetry the image of a lyrical hero, who is both similar and not similar to the poet himself. (Just as Karamzin introduced into Russian prose the image of a narrator whose voice does not merge with the voices of the heroes and the author himself.)
Poets of the first half of the 19th century revised the usual system of genres. They preferred love elegy and romantic ballad to “high”, solemn odes; re-instilled in our native literature a taste for folk culture, Russian songs, fairy tales; embodied in their work the contradictory consciousness and tragic experience of contemporary people, Russian Europeans. They mastered the experience of world romanticism - and gradually outgrew it in many ways.
But this often happens in literature: having barely reached the artistic peak, Russian poetry sharply declined. This happened shortly after the death of Pushkin, and then Baratynsky and Lermontov. That is, in the early 1840s. The poets of the older generation somehow simultaneously got tired of the turbulent literary life and switched off from the active process. Zhukovsky began to translate voluminous epic works - you know about his translation of Homer's Odyssey. Pyotr Vyazemsky hid for a long time in a deep literary shadow, withdrew from poetic affairs, and only in old age did his talent blossom again and he returned to the confines of his native literature. Vladimir Benediktov experienced instant popularity in the mid-1830s - and just as quickly fell out of fashion.
And many of the young lyricists of the 1840s, who remained in the public eye, seemed to have forgotten how to write. The highest skill, mastery of verse technique, which in Pushkin’s times was considered the norm, something taken for granted, was suddenly lost by most poets.
And there is nothing surprising here.
In the very early XIX centuries, Russian literature has learned to depict human character in its individuality and uniqueness. In the 1820s and 1830s, domestic writers began to connect the fates of their heroes with a specific historical era, with those everyday, financial circumstances on which human behavior often depends. And now, in the 1840s, they were faced with new substantive tasks. They began to look at the human personality through the prism of social relations, explain the actions of heroes by the influence of the “environment”, and derived them from economic and political reasons.
Readers of the 1840s–1860s were waiting for just such social works. And for solving such problems, epic, narrative prose, a physiological essay, and a journalistic article were much more suitable. Therefore, the main literary forces of that time focused on the prosaic “springboard”. The lyrics seemed to have temporarily lost their serious content. And this internal aimlessness, vacuity, bled the poetic form. This is how a plant dries out, its access to life-giving underground juices being blocked.
- Why did prose push poetry to the margins of the literary process in the 1840s? What substantive tasks does Russian literature solve in this decade?
Pierre Jean Beranger
How to use lyricism to talk about painful things, about everyday “insignificant” life, how to express new social ideas? European poetry also answered these questions in the 1840s. After all, the transition from the era of romanticism to the era of naturalism took place everywhere! But there, especially in France, a tradition of social, revolutionary lyrics had already been developed, and a special poetic language had emerged. This language was “adapted” for an emotional - and at the same time sincere - conversation about the troubles and sorrows of modern society, about the tragic fate of a “little” person. That is, the transition of poetry into a new, social quality was prepared in advance and correlated with cultural tradition.
The most significant of the European “revolutionary” poets, social lyricists, is rightfully considered the Frenchman Pierre Jean Beranger (1780-1857).
Raised by his grandfather as a tailor, he witnessed the upheaval of the French Revolution as a child. Young Beranger believed in her ideals and - which is no less important for literature - forever remembered the sound of folk revolutionary songs sung by the insurgent crowd. The most popular of these songs is well known to you - this is “La Marseillaise”; its somewhat bloodthirsty content - a call to violence - was clothed in a solemn and light musical form. The songs of the revolutionary era used not only rich folk expressions and jokes, unacceptable in “high” lyrics, but also used the possibilities of epic poetry - a short dynamic plot, a constant refrain (that is, repetition of the “chorus” or some key lines).
Since then, the genre of poem-song, stylized as folk, has prevailed in Beranger's work. Either frivolous, satirical (often directed against the morals of the Catholic priesthood), or political, pathetic, these songs were liked by a wide readership. From the very beginning, the image of a lyrical hero arose and established itself in them - a folk poet, a man from the crowd, a hater of wealth. (Of course, in real life Bérenger himself was not as alien to money as it might seem when reading his poems.)
Russian lyricists began translating Bérenger back in the mid-1830s. But from his vast and varied creativity, at first only lyrical “songs” were chosen, which were so similar to the familiar experiences of stylized “folk songs” created by poets of the beginning of the century and Pushkin’s generation:
The time will come - your May will turn green;
The time will come - I will leave this world;
Your nut lock will turn white;
The shine of agate eyes will fade.
(“My old lady.” Translated by Viktor Teplyakov, 1836)
It `s naturally; We are always interested in other people's experiences exactly as much as they help us cope with our own tasks. And the tasks facing Russian literature in the mid-1830s differed from those that it solved in the troubled decade of the 1840s. It is not for nothing that Russian writers of Lermontov’s generation translated Heinrich Heine, a poet of heightened social feeling, selectively, paying attention primarily to his philosophical lyrics, to his romantic irony. And the poets of the 1840s were already paying attention to the other side of Heine’s talent - to his political, civic, and satirical poems.
And now, when Russian prose spoke so sharply and so bitterly about the shadow side of life, Russian poetry also had to master a new artistic experience. There was no established tradition, so the lyricists of the 1840s voluntarily went to study with Bérenger.
But just as a schoolchild must “ripen” to the serious topics that are studied in high school, so poets spend more than one year trying to “ripen” to a successful translation. After all, a poem translated from a foreign language must retain the flavor of “foreignness” - and at the same time become “our own”, Russian. Therefore, only by the mid-1850s Beranger “speaked” Russian naturally and naturally. And the main merit in this belongs to Vasily Stepanovich Kurochkin (1831-1875), who in 1858 published the collection “Beranger’s Songs”:
"You'll live, look!" - old uncle
I’m ready to repeat it for a whole century.
How I laugh, looking at my uncle!
I'm a positive person.
I spend everything
I won't be able to -
Since I'm nothing
I do not have.
................................
After all, in the plate of one deli
The capital of his ancestors sits;
I know the servants in the tavern:
Full and drunk constantly on credit.
I spend everything
I won't be able to -
Since I'm nothing
I do not have.
("Positive Man", 1858)
You, of course, noticed that these poems were not simply translated into Russian. Here one of the rules of a “good” translation is deliberately violated: the French spirit has completely disappeared from Bérenger, the translator has torn the poem out of someone else’s cultural soil and completely transplanted it into his own. These poems sound as if they were not translated from French, but were written immediately in Russian - and by a Russian poet. They are Russified, that is, they use expressions that are once and for all assigned to Russian everyday life and are completely inappropriate in the French context. For example: “Repeat... for a century,” “fed and drunk.” Another translation by Kurochkin is even more Russified - the poem “Mr. Iscariot” (1861):
Mister Iscariot -
The kindest eccentric:
Patriot of patriots,
Good guy, funny guy,
Spreads out like a cat
Bends like a snake...
Why such people
Are we alienating ourselves a little?..
.............................................
A zealous reader of all magazines,
He is capable and ready
The most zealous liberals
Frighten with a stream of words.
He will cry out loudly: “Glasnost! Glasnost!”
Conductor of holy ideas!"
But who knows people
Whispers, feeling danger:
Hush, hush, gentlemen!
Mister Iscariot,
Patriot of patriots,
Coming here!..
It is not without reason that the French poem about the informer “Monsieur Iscariot” (Iscariot was the name of Judas, who denounced Christ) was turned into a Russian satire on the informer “Mr. Iscariot”. Vasily Kurochkin deliberately tore Beranger's poetry away from its French roots and turned it into a fact of Russian culture. With the help of Beranger, he created the language of Russian social poetry and mastered new artistic possibilities. And he succeeded quite well.
But the fact of the matter is that luck on the chosen path had to wait too long; Russian poets of the second half of the 1850s could have done without Beranger and relied on the artistic experience of Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov. (A separate chapter is devoted to Nekrasov’s biography and the artistic world in the textbook.) It was Nekrasov, for the first time within the Russian cultural tradition, who managed to combine the incompatible - rough “sociality” and deep lyricism; it was he who created a new poetic language, proposed new rhythms for native poetry that would suit new topics and new ideas. Real fame came to him immediately after the poem “Am I Driving Down a Dark Street at Night...” was published in the Sovremennik magazine in 1847:
Do you remember the mournful sounds of trumpets,
Splashes of rain, half light, half darkness?
Your son cried and his hands were cold
You warmed him with your breath...
Everyone read these piercing lines - and understood: here it is, a new word in poetry, the only correct form has finally been found for telling about emotional experiences associated with poverty, disorder, everyday life...
But no one helped the poets of the 1840s solve the artistic, substantive problems they faced.
- Why were translations of the French poet Beranger's poems Russified by Kurochkin? Read the quote from the poem “Mr. Iscariot” again. Find in it examples of expressions that are so connected with Russian speech that they tear Bérenger’s text away from the French tradition.
Lyrics by Alexey Pleshcheev 
Nevertheless, even in the 1840s, some Russian poets tried to talk about the same serious social problems that were touched upon by social prose, in the familiar Pushkin-Lermontov language. More often than not, this did not work out very well. Even the most gifted of them.
Thus, Alexey Nikolaevich Pleshcheev (1825-1893) often wrote civic and political poetry in this decade; Here is one of the most famous and most popular:
Forward! without fear and doubt
A valiant feat, friends!
Dawn of Holy Redemption
I saw it in the sky!...We will not make ourselves an idol
Neither on earth nor in heaven;
For all the gifts and blessings of the world
We will not fall to dust before him!.....Listen, brothers, to the word of your brother,
While we are full of youthful strength:
Forward, forward, and without return,
No matter what fate promises us in the distance!
(“Forward! without fear and doubt...”, 1846)
Pleshcheev did not read his rebellious ideas from books at all. He seriously participated in the revolutionary circle of the “Petrashevites” (more about them will be said in the chapter of the textbook dedicated to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky). In 1849, the poet was arrested and, together with other active “Petrashevites,” was sentenced to death by shooting. After a terrible wait, right on the square where the execution was to take place, he was told that the sentence had been commuted and the execution had been replaced by military service. Pleshcheev, who suffered a terrible shock, was exiled to the Urals, and only in 1859 was he allowed to return to central Russia. (First to Moscow, then to St. Petersburg.)
So Pleshcheev suffered, endured and paid for the thoughts expressed in the poem with his own life. But a real biography is one thing, and creativity is something else. In his civic poems of the 1840s, Pleshcheev still used the usual iambic tetrameter, erased from frequent use, and erased general poetic images.
Return to the quote from the poem “Forward! without fear and doubt...", re-read it.
The poet combines ideas that came from the Bible (“Let us not make ourselves an idol... To proclaim the teachings of love...”) with fashionable ideas about the progress and triumph of science (“...And let, under the banner of science // Our Union grow stronger and grow ..."). But he cannot find any other role models except Pushkin’s ode “Liberty,” written almost thirty years earlier. Perhaps the political lyrics of the Decembrists - but this is a completely different time, life itself speaks a different language!
Pleshcheev literally forces himself to rhyme revolutionary slogans, the artistic material resists this - and in the final stanza, Pleshcheev “drives” the thought into an unruly form, crippling the sound of the verse. Notice what a crowd of sounds there is in the last two lines! “Forward, forward, and without return, // No matter what fate in the distance promises us!” "VPRD... VPRD...BZVZVRT...CHTBRKVD..." A continuous series of sound collisions, completely unjustified by the design.
And the point here is not in the individual talent of Alexei Pleshcheev. He was just a very talented poet, and many of his poems were included in the golden fund of Russian classics. But such - contradictory, uneven - was the literary situation of the 1840s as a whole. The state of affairs, as we have already said, will change only in the 1850s and 1860s, after Nekrasov stood at the very center of the literary process. And then Pleshcheev will gradually move away from deliberate “progressiveness” (although he will occasionally recall his favorite political motives) and return to traditional poetic themes: rural life, nature.
It is these unpretentious and very simple lines from Pleshcheev that will be included in school textbooks and anthologies and will be familiar to every Russian. It is enough to say the first line - and the rest will automatically emerge in your memory: “The grass is turning green, // The sun is shining, // The swallow is flying with spring // In the canopy is flying towards us” (“Rural Song”, 1858, translation from Polish). Or: “A boring picture! // Clouds without end, // The rain keeps pouring down, // Puddles by the porch...” (1860).
Such was the literary fate of those Russian poets who then tried to clothe the social experience accumulated in prose in the subtle matter of verse. And the poems of other lyricists, who remained faithful to Pushkin’s harmony, the grace of “finishing,” sometimes acquired a kind of museum, memorial character.
- Why did the talented poet Aleksey Pleshcheev, creating “civil” poems in the 1840s, rarely achieve success?
In 1842, the first collection of poems by the young poet, the son of academician of painting Apollo Nikolaevich Maykov (1821-1897), was published. From the very beginning he declared himself as a “traditional”, classical poet; as about lyricism, far from everyday life, from the momentary details of fast-flowing life. Maykov's favorite genre is anthological lyrics. (Let us remember once again: an anthology in Ancient Greece was a name for collections of the best, exemplary poems; the most famous of the ancient anthologies was compiled by the poet Meleager in the 1st century BC.) That is, Maykov created poems that stylized the plastic world of ancient proportionality, plasticity, harmony:
Verse harmonies divine secrets
Don't think about figuring it out from the books of the sages:
At the shore of sleepy waters, wandering alone, by chance,
Listen with your soul to the whispering of the reeds,
I speak oak forests; their sound is extraordinary
Feel and understand... In the consonance of poetry
Involuntarily from your lips dimensional octaves
The oak groves flow, sonorous as music.
("Octaves", 1841)
This poem was written by a young author, but you can immediately feel: he is already a real master. The extended rhythm is clearly maintained, the sound of the verse is subordinated to the musical structure. If in one verse we can easily discern the onomatopoeia of the rustling of reeds (“Listen with your soul to the Whispering of the Reeds”), then in the next we will hear the forest murmur (“The oak tree speaks”). And in the finale, soft and hard sounds will make peace with each other, unite into a smooth harmony: “SIZED OCTAVES // Flow, sonorous, like the Music of the Oak Trees”...
And yet, if you remember the anthological poems of Pushkin - and compare the lines you just read with them, you will immediately discover a certain amorphousness, lethargy of Maykov’s lyrics. This is how Pushkin described the Tsarskoye Selo statue in 1830:
Having dropped the urn with water, the maiden broke it on the cliff.
The virgin sits sadly, idle holding a shard.
Miracle! the water will not dry up, pouring out from the broken urn;
The Virgin, above the eternal stream, sits forever sad.
Here an image has been created of something unstoppable - and at the same time stopped! - movements. The sound scale is ideally chosen here: the sound "u" hums mournfully ("An Urn with water... about a Cliff... A MIRACLE... from an Urn... in a stream..."), the explosive sound "Ch" is combined with an extended " N" and itself begins to sound more viscous: "sad... eternal... eternal." And in the first line, the harsh clash of consonants conveys the feeling of a blow: “The Virgin broke her.”
But this is not enough for Pushkin. He communicates to the reader a deep sense of hidden sadness; eternity and sadness, sculptural perfection of forms and the gloomy essence of life are inextricably linked in him. For the sake of this, he seems to make the verse sway and repeat: “... the maiden broke... the maiden sits... the maiden... sits sadly.” Repetitions create the effect of circular, hopeless movement.
And for Pushkin, one unexpected word among sculpturally smooth expressions is enough to touch the reader, scratch him, slightly prick him. This word is "idle". We come across the expression “idle shard” - and immediately imagine the confusion, sadness of the “maiden”: one moment the urn was whole, you could pour wine and water into it - and then in one second it became “idle”, unnecessary, and that’s already forever...
But with Maykov, for all the perfection of his early poem, everything is so smooth that there is nothing for the eye to catch on. The secrets of the verse are “divine” (what else could they be?), the waters are “sleepy”, the sound of the oak forests is “extraordinary”... And only years later new images will appear in Maykov’s lyrics, catching the reader’s attention with freshness and surprise:
Spring! the first frame is exposed -
And noise burst into the room,
And the good news of the nearby temple,
And the talk of the people, and the noise of the wheel...
(“Spring! The first frame is being exhibited...”, 1854).
The landscape poems of the late Maykov, devoid of social overtones, pose a unique challenge to the general tone of the era and the dominant poetic tastes:
My garden is withering every day;
It is dented, broken and empty,
Although it is still blooming magnificently
The nasturtium in it is a fire bush...I'm upset! Annoys me
And the autumn sunshine,
And the leaf that falls from the birch tree,
And the crackling of late grasshoppers...
("Swallows", 1856)
The overall tone of the poem is muted, the colors are devoid of “screaming”, harsh tones; but in the very depths of the poem very bold images ripen. The metaphor of the magnificent withering of autumn nature goes back to Pushkin’s “Autumn”, but how unexpected is the image of a burning scarlet nasturtium bush, how contradictory are the feelings of the lyrical hero, who is not at all delighted with this splendor, but is irritated by the “trifles” of autumn everyday life...
- A task of increased difficulty. Read the poems of Yakov Polonsky, another Russian lyricist who began his journey in literature in the 1840s, but revealed his talent only in the next decade. Prepare a report about his artistic world, using the teacher's advice and additional literature.
Kozma Prutkov
When “original” poetry is in a state of crisis, painfully searching for new ideas and new forms of self-expression, the genre of parody usually flourishes. That is, a comic reproduction of the peculiarities of the manner of a particular writer or poet.
In the late 1840s, Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875) and his cousins Alexei Mikhailovich (1821-1908) and Vladimir Mikhailovich (1830-1884) Zhemchuzhnikovs came up with... a poet. (Sometimes a third brother, Alexander Mikhailovich, joined the joint parody work.) They began to write poems on behalf of the never-existent graphomaniac Kozma Prutkov, and in these poems they parodied officialdom in all its manifestations. Be it overly refined, pinky-out-of-the-way, anthological poetry or overly pretentious civic lyrics.
Therefore, they came up with a “official” biography for Prutkov, turning him into an official, director of the Assay Tent. The fourth of the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, Lev Mikhailovich, painted a portrait of Prutkov, combining in it the martinet features of a bureaucrat and the mask of a romantic poet. This is the literary appearance of Kozma Prutkov, falsely romantic and bureaucratic at the same time:
When you meet a person in the crowd,
Which is naked;
[Option: Which tailcoat is he wearing? - Note. K. Prutkova]
Whose forehead is darker than the foggy Kazbek,
The step is uneven;
Whose hair is raised in disorder;
Who, crying out,
Always trembling in a nervous fit, -
Know: it's me!
("My portrait")
In the appearance of Kozma Prutkov, the incompatible was combined - the late romantic image of a “strange”, wild poet, “who is naked,” and an official, “who wears a tailcoat.” In the same way, he doesn’t care what and in what manner he writes poetry - either to repeat the bravura intonations of Vladimir Benediktov, or to compose in the ancient spirit, like Maikov or other “anthological” poets of the 1840s:
I love you, maiden, when it's golden
And drenched in the sun you hold a lemon,
And I see the young man’s fluffy chin
Between acanthus leaves and white columns...
(“Ancient plastic Greek”)
Prutkov also grasps on the fly the style of numerous imitators of Heine, the creators of “social” poetry:
On the seaside, right next to the outpost,
I saw a large vegetable garden.
Tall asparagus grows there;
Cabbage grows modestly there.There's always a gardener there in the morning
Lazily walks between the ridges;
He is wearing an unkempt apron;
His gloomy look is gloomy.
............................................
The other day he drives up to him
The official in the troika is dashing.
He is wearing warm, high galoshes,
There is a gold lorgnette on the neck."Where is your daughter?" - asks
The official, squinting through his lorgnette,
But, looking wildly, the gardener
He only waved his hand in response.And the troika galloped back,
Sweeping dew from cabbage...
The gardener stands sullenly
And he digs his finger into his nose.
("At the Seaside")
But if the “creativity” of Kozma Prutkov was only a parody and nothing more, it would have died along with its era. But it has remained in reader use; Prutkov’s works have been republished for a century and a half. This means that they have outgrown the boundaries of genres! It is not for nothing that the creators of this collective image put into the mouth of their character a rebuke to the feuilletonist of the newspaper “St. Petersburg News”: “Feuilletonist, I skimmed through your article... You mention me in it; that’s nothing. But in it you groundlessly blaspheme me! For this I won't praise...
Are you saying that I write parodies? Not at all!.. I don’t write parodies at all! I've never written a parody! Where did you get the idea that I write parodies?! I simply analyzed in my mind most of the poets who were successful; this analysis led me to a synthesis; for the talents, scattered separately among other poets, turned out to be all combined in me as one!..”
In Prutkov’s “creativity,” the fashionable motifs of Russian poetry of the 1840s and 1850s are truly summed up and melted down, creating a funny and in its own way integral image of an official romantic, an inspired graphomaniac, a pompous preacher of banality, the author of the project “On the introduction of unanimity in Russia.” But at the same time, Prutkov sometimes seems to accidentally blurt out the truth; Some of his aphorisms have entered our everyday life, having lost their mocking meaning: “If you want to be happy, be happy,” “A specialist is like gumboil: his completeness is one-sided.” There is something very living in Prutkov’s literary personality. And therefore, it was not Prutkov’s parodies of individual (mostly justly forgotten) poets, but precisely his image itself that forever entered the history of Russian literature.
- What is a parody? Can we consider that the poems written on behalf of Kozma Prutkov are just parodies? Why does parodic creativity flourish in those moments when literature is experiencing a crisis?
Of course, in the 1850-1860s, which were more favorable for poetry, literary destinies developed differently; many Russian poets, whose fame we are proud of today, have never found reader recognition. Thus, two poems by the outstanding literary and theater critic Apollo Aleksandrovich Grigoriev (1822-1864) - “Oh, at least talk to me...” and “The Gypsy Hungarian” - attracted general attention only because they acquired a second - musical - life have become popular romances. Both of them are dedicated to the guitar, gypsy passion, fatal breakdown, love obsession:
Oh, at least talk to me,
Seven-string friend!
The soul is full of such longing,
And the night is so moonlit!..
(“Oh, speak...”, 1857)Two guitars, ringing,
They whined pitifully...
A memorable chant from childhood,
My old friend - is that you?
.........................................
It's you, the dashing spree,
You, evil fusion of sadness
With the voluptuousness of a bayadere -
You, Hungarian motive!
Chibiryak, chibiryak, chibiryashka,
You have blue eyes, my darling!
.........
Let it hurt more and more
The sounds howl
To speed up your heart
Burst with flour!
(“Gypsy Hungarian”, 1857)
Apollo Grigoriev knew firsthand what a “dashing spree” was; he grew up in the patriarchal Zamoskvorechye, in a family of nobles who came from the serf class (Grigoriev’s grandfather was a peasant), and had a Russian, unrestrained attitude towards everything - both work and fun. He gave up a career that was starting to be profitable, was in need all the time, drank a lot, was in debt twice - and actually died while imprisoned in debt...
Being a European-educated person, Grigoriev defended the ideas of national identity in critical articles. He called the principles of his criticism organic, that is, co-natural with art, in contrast to the “historical” criticism of Belinsky or the “real” criticism of Dobrolyubov. Contemporaries read and actively discussed Grigoriev's articles; however, during the poet’s lifetime his wonderful poems were published as a separate edition only once - and in a tiny edition, only fifty copies...
- Read "The Gypsy Hungarian" by Apollon Grigoriev. Identify the features of a romance in the construction of the poem, show how its very structure contains a “musical” beginning.
Alexey Tolstoy
But the literary biography of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875), one of the main “creators” of Kozma Prutkov, was much more successful. (You have already read in elementary school his wonderful poem “My little bells, steppe flowers...”, which, like many of Tolstoy’s poems, became a popular romance.)
Coming from an old family, who spent his childhood on his mother’s Little Russian estate in the Chernigov region, Alexey Konstantinovich, ten years old, was introduced to the great Goethe. And this was not the first “literary acquaintance” of young Alexei. His uncle, Alexey Perovsky (pseudonym - Antony Pogorelsky), was a wonderful romantic writer, the author of the fairy tale “The Black Hen,” which many of you have read. He collected in his St. Petersburg house the whole flower of Russian literature - Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Krylov, Gogol; the nephew was admitted to this meeting of “immortals” - and for the rest of his life he remembered their conversations, remarks, remarks.
It is not surprising that at the age of six he already began composing; his first poems were approved by Zhukovsky himself. And later Tolstoy wrote prose; in his historical novel “Prince Silver” (finished in 1861) noble people will act and genuine passions will reign; Moreover, Alexey Konstantinovich was not at all embarrassed by the fact that the romantic principles of Walter Scott, which he invariably followed, were considered by many to be outdated. Truth cannot become outdated, and taking into account literary fashion was beneath his dignity.
In 1834, Alexey Konstantinovich entered the sovereign service in the Moscow archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, studied ancient Russian manuscripts; then he served in the Russian mission in Frankfurt am Main; finally, he was enrolled in His Majesty’s own office - and became a real courtier. It was at court that he met his future wife, Sofya Andreevna Miller (nee Bakhmetyeva) - they met at a ball in the winter of 1850/51.
Tolstoy's official career was successful; he knew how to maintain internal independence and follow his own principles. It was Tolstoy who helped free Taras Shevchenko, the great Ukrainian poet, author of the brilliant poem “The Wide Dnieper Roars and Moans” from exile to Central Asia and from military service; did everything to ensure that Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was released from exile in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo for his obituary in memory of Gogol; when Alexander II once asked Alexei Konstantinovich: “What is happening in Russian literature?”, he replied: “Russian literature has put on mourning over the unjust condemnation of Chernyshevsky.”
Nevertheless, in the mid-1850s, having managed to take part in the Crimean War, which was extremely unsuccessful for Russia, Tolstoy decided to retire, to be freed from the service that had long burdened him. But only in 1861 did Alexander II grant his resignation - and Alexei Konstantinovich was able to fully concentrate on literary work.
By this time, his artistic world had already fully developed. Just as Tolstoy himself was distinguished by internal integrity and rare mental health, so his lyrical hero is alien to insoluble doubts and melancholy; the Russian ideal of openness, unalloyed feeling is extremely close to him:
If you love, so without reason,
If you threaten, it’s not a joke,
If you scold, so rashly,
If you chop, it’s too bad!If you argue, it’s too bold,
If you punish, that's the point,
If you forgive, then with all your heart,
If there is a feast, then there is a feast!
In this eight-line poem, written in 1850 or 1851, there is not a single epithet: the lyrical hero does not need shades, he strives for definiteness, brightness of the main tones. For the same reason, Tolstoy avoids variety in the very construction of the poem; the principle of unity of command (anaphora) is used consistently, moving from line to line: “If ... so.” It’s as if the poet is vigorously tapping his hand on the table, beating out a clear rhythm...
Tolstoy never joined any of the warring camps - Westerners and Slavophiles; he was a man of world culture - and at the same time a bearer of deeply Russian tradition. The Novgorod Republic, with its democratic structure, served him as a political ideal; he believed that the domestic government once followed moral principles, but in the modern world has lost them, exchanged them for political interests, and reduced them to petty struggles between different groups. This means that the poet cannot adhere to any ideological “platform”. So is his lyrical hero - “Two stans is not a fighter, but only a random guest”; he is free from any “party” obligations.
It is not without reason that many of Tolstoy’s poems - like those poems by Grigoriev that we talked about - were set to music, became “real” romances and are still sung:
In the middle of a noisy ball, by chance,
In the anxiety of worldly vanity,
I saw you, but it's a mystery
Your features are covered;Only the eyes looked sadly,
And the voice sounded so wonderful,
Like the sound of a distant pipe,
Like a playing shaft of the sea.
...............................................
And sadly I fall asleep like that,
And I sleep in unknown dreams...
Do I love you - I don't know
But it seems to me that I love it!
(“Among a noisy ball, by chance...”, 1851)
While preserving traditional romantic motifs, Tolstoy imperceptibly “straightened” them and deliberately simplified them. But not because he was afraid to approach the abyss, to face insoluble problems, but because his healthy nature was abhorrent to any ambiguity or uncertainty. For the same reason, his lyrics lack romantic irony, with its internal tragedy and anguish; Its place is taken by humor - the free laughter of a cheerful person at the imperfections of life, at the impossibility of dreams.
Tolstoy's most famous humorous poem, “The History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev,” has a genre designation: “satire.” But let's read these verses, which mockingly set out the main events of Russian history:
Listen guys
What will grandfather tell you?
Our land is rich
There is just no order in it.
.......................................
And everyone became under the banner
And they say: “What should we do?
Let's send to the Varangians:
Let them come to reign."
What's the main thing in these funny lines? A satirical, angry, caustic denunciation of traditional Russian shortcomings or the grin of a deeply Russian person at himself, at his beloved history, at the immutability of Russian vices? Of course, the second; No wonder the author puts on the mask of an old joker and likens his readers to little kids! In fact, Alexei Tolstoy does not create a murderous satire, but a sad and cheerful parody. He parodies the form of the chronicle, the image of the chronicler (“Compiled from blades of grass // This unwise story // This thin, humble monk // God’s Servant Alexey”). But the main subject of his parody is different, and we’ll say which one later.
The poem has 83 stanzas, and in such a short volume Tolstoy manages to fit a parody story about all the main, symbolic events of Russian history, from the calling of the Varangians and the baptism of Rus' until 1868, when the poems were written:
When did Vladimir join
To your father's throne,
......................................
He sent for priests
To Athens and Constantinople,
The priests came in droves
They cross themselves and burn incense,Sing to yourself touchingly
And they fill their pouch;
The earth, as it is, is abundant,
There is just no order.
Of course, after this comes a series of princely discords - “The Tatars found out. // Well, they think, don’t be a coward! // They put on trousers, // We arrived in Rus'... // They shout: “Let’s pay tribute!” // (At least Bring the saints out.) // There is a lot of all sorts of rubbish here // It has arrived in Rus'." But still there is no order. Neither Western strangers, nor Byzantine "priests", nor the Tatar-Mongols - no one brought it with them, no one coped with the constant Russian disorder. And here, from the depths of Russian history, comes our own “organizer”:
Ivan Vasilich the Terrible
He had a name
For being serious
Solid man.The receptions are not sweet,
But the mind is not lame;
This one put things in order,
Why roll the ball!
Thus, through the parody, Tolstoy’s own - and very serious - view of the essence of Russian history emerges. Her shortcomings are a continuation of her advantages; this “disorder” destroys it - and, alas, it allows Rus' to preserve its originality. There is nothing good in that, but what to do... Only two rulers managed to impose “order” on it: Ivan the Terrible and Peter I. But at what cost!
Tsar Peter loved order
Almost like Tsar Ivan,
And it was also not sweet,
Sometimes he was drunk.He said: “I feel sorry for you,
You will perish completely;
But I have a stick
And I am the father of you all!"
Tolstoy does not condemn Peter (“...I don’t blame Peter: // Give to a sick stomach // Good for rhubarb”), but does not accept his excessive harshness. The light shell of the parody is immersed in ever deeper content, and sadness emerges through the humor. Yes, Russia is sick, but the treatment may turn out to be even worse, and the result of the “healing” is still short-lived: “... Although it is very strong // There was, perhaps, a reception, // But still quite strong // Order has become // But sleep overtook the grave // Peter in the prime of his life, // Look, the land is abundant, // There is no order again.”
The genre of satire gave way to the genre of parody, and the parody imperceptibly turned into a philosophical poem, albeit written in a humorous form. But if a parody can do without positive content, without an ideal, then a philosophical poem can never do so. This means that Tolstoy’s own answer to the question must be hidden somewhere: what can still heal Russian history from a centuries-old illness? Not the Varangians, not Byzantium, not the “stick” - but what then? Perhaps the hidden answer to the obvious question is contained in these stanzas:
What's the reason for this?
And where is the root of evil,
Catherine herself
I couldn’t comprehend it."Madame, it's amazing in your presence
Order will blossom, -
They wrote to her politely
Voltaire and Dideroth, -Just what the people need
Whose mother you are
Rather give freedom
Give us freedom soon."
But Catherine is afraid of freedom, which could allow the people to heal themselves: “...And immediately attached // the Ukrainians to the earth.”
The poem ends with stanzas about Tolstoy’s contemporary, Minister of Internal Affairs Timashev, a strict supporter of “order.” Order in Rus' is still established - with a stick; It’s not hard to guess what awaits her ahead.
- What is the difference between satire and humor? Why was the genre of parody so close to Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy? Why do you think he chooses a parody form for a philosophical poem about the fate of Russian history?
Poets of the 1870-1880s
You already know that the entire second half of the 19th century, from the mid-1850s until the early 1880s, passed under the sign of Nekrasov, that the era spoke in Nekrasov’s voice. In the next chapter of the textbook, you will get acquainted in detail with the artistic world of Nekrasov, learn to analyze his poems and poems. A little further away, in his public shadow, were two other great lyricists, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. Separate chapters are also devoted to them in the textbook. In the meantime, let's move from the 1850s directly to the 1870-1880s, let's see what happened to Russian poetry after Nekrasov.
And almost the same thing happened to her as after Pushkin, after Lermontov, after the departure of any truly large-scale writer. Russian poetry was again at a loss; it did not know which path to follow. Some lyricists developed social, civic motives. For example, Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson (1862-1887). Just as Vladimir Benediktov took the artistic principles of romantic lyricism to the extreme, so Nadson condensed to the extreme the pathos and style of civil lyricism of the Nekrasov model:
My friend, my brother, tired, suffering brother,
Whoever you are, don't lose heart.
Let untruth and evil reign supreme
Over the earth washed with tears,
Let the holy ideal be broken and desecrated
And innocent blood flows, -
Believe: the time will come - and Baal will perish,
And love will return to earth!..
Nadson's poems enjoyed incredible popularity in the 1880s - almost like Benediktov's poems in the 1830s. Pleshcheev took care of him; Nadson's collection of poems, first published in 1885, went through five lifetime editions; the Academy of Sciences awarded him its Pushkin Prize. He was called the poet of suffering and civic melancholy. And when, having lived only twenty-five years, Nadson died due to consumption, a crowd of students accompanied his coffin all the way to the cemetery...
But several years passed - and Nadson’s glory began to fade. Suddenly it suddenly became clear that he was too moralizing, too straightforward, his images lacked volume and depth, and many of his poems were simply imitative.
Why was this not noticed during the poet’s lifetime?
This sometimes happens in literature: the writer seems to hit the painful point of his era, talking about exactly what his contemporaries are thinking about right now. And they respond with all their hearts to his poetic, literary word. A resonance effect occurs, the sound of the work is intensified many times over. And the question of how artistic this word is, how original it is, fades into the background. And when some time passes and other problems arise before society, then all the hidden artistic shortcomings, creative “shortcomings” are revealed.
This partly applies to another popular poet of the 1870-1880s - Alexei Nikolaevich Apukhtin (1840-1893). Unlike Nadson, he did not come from a bureaucratic, but from a well-born noble family. His childhood passed serenely on his parents' estate; he studied at the elite School of Law in St. Petersburg. And he continued not the social, civic tradition of Nekrasov, but the line of development of Russian poetry that Maikov outlined in his time.
Apukhtin treated poetry as pure art, devoid of tendentiousness, free from public service, as if distilled. He behaved accordingly - he pointedly avoided participating in the “professional” literary process, he could disappear from the field of view of magazines for a decade, then begin to publish again. Readers, and especially female readers, still appreciated Apukhtin; his gentle, broken intonation, the internal kinship of his poetics with the genre laws of romance - all this found a response in the reader’s hearts:
Crazy nights, sleepless nights,
Speeches are incoherent, eyes are tired...
Nights illuminated by the last fire,
Dead autumn flowers are belated!
Even if time is a merciless hand
It showed me what was false in you,
Still, I fly to you with a greedy memory,
In the past I am looking for the impossible answer...
And then, after some time, Apukhtin’s lyrics began to sound duller and duller; Her excessive sentimentality and lack of real depth began to reveal itself. The place of Nadson and Apukhtin was taken by new “fashionable” poets who belonged to the next literary generation - Konstantin Fofanov, Mirra Lokhvitskaya. They took it - then, in turn, to give it up to other “performers” of the ready-made literary role.
Lyrics by Konstantin Sluchevsky
But even in the 1880-1890s, there were truly great talents in Russian poetry who not only resonated with the era, but overtook it and worked for the future. One of them is the sophisticated lyricist Konstantin Konstantinovich Sluchevsky (1837-1904).
He was born in the year of Pushkin's death in the family of a major official (his father, a senator, died during the cholera epidemic of 1848, and his mother became the head of the Warsaw Alexander-Mariinsky Girls' Institute). Sluchevsky studied at the First Cadet Corps and was even listed in the Golden Book of Alumni; then he served brilliantly...
Those around him always considered Sluchevsky to be a solid person; his aristocratic restraint and strict upbringing misled those around him. Because his poems revealed a completely different, fractured and dramatic inner world, associated with a romantic sense of life as a kingdom of duality:
I never go anywhere alone
Two of us live between people:
The first is me, what I look like,
And the other one is me of my dreams...
But for the time being, almost no one from Sluchevsky’s entourage read these poems; they were published in third-rate publications. But in 1860, Sovremennik opened the year with a selection of Sluchevsky’s lyric poems, and then his poetic cycle appeared in Otechestvennye zapiski. The enthusiastic critic and poet Apollo Grigoriev declared the new poet a genius, Ivan Turgenev (who would later quarrel with Sluchevsky and parody him in the novel “Smoke” under the name of Voroshilov) agreed: “Yes, father, this is a future great writer.”
The recognition was inspiring, but Sluchevsky found himself hostage to the brutal literary struggle of those years. Accepted in one “camp,” he was immediately rejected in another. The radical raznochinny wing of the Sovremennik editorial board decided to excommunicate the poet from the magazine, despite the sympathy that Nekrasov himself felt for the young lyricist. From the pages of other revolutionary-democratic publications, a hail of ridicule fell on Sluchevsky; he was portrayed as a retrograde, a man without ideas.
The result exceeded expectations: thinking in “unmodern” categories of noble honor and dignity, Sluchevsky considered that it was not appropriate for an officer and an aristocrat to be the hero of feuilletons. And - he resigned to leave Russia. He spent several years at the University of Paris - at the Sorbonne, at the University of Berlin, at the University of Leipzig, studying natural sciences and mathematics. And in Heidelberg he became a doctor of philosophy.
Ultimately, in 1866, he returned to Russia and began to make a career anew - already on a civilian path. He became one of the close associates of the royal family and became a chamberlain. But he never recovered from the shock inflicted on him at the very beginning of his literary career. And therefore he built his poetic biography as emphatically non-literary, amateur, and not involved in the professional environment. (In this he was close to Apukhtin.)
Among the poems written by Sluchevsky in the 1860-1870s and not published, we will find almost no “programmatic” preaching poems. Their artistic structure is distinctly uneven, and their style is obviously heterogeneous. Sluchevsky was one of the first in Russian poetry to use not just everyday, everyday speech, but even clerical phrases: “According to the totality of luminous phenomena...”, “The dawn has warmed up perfectly...”. He developed a special poetics of imprecise consonances and unpaired rhymes:
I saw my burial.
The tall candles were burning
The sleepy deacon censed,
And the hoarse singers sang.
................................................
Sad sisters and brothers
(How nature is incomprehensible to us!)
Wept at the joyful meeting
With a quarter of the income.
................................................
The lackeys were praying outside the door,
Saying goodbye to a lost place
And in the kitchen there is an overeating cook
I was fiddling with the risen dough...
These early poems clearly bear the influence of Heinrich Heine's bitter social lyrics; like most Russian lyricists of the second half of the 19th century, Sluchevsky fell into the powerful energy field of this “last romantic.” But something else is already noticeable here: Sluchevsky has his own through-and-through idea, the embodiment of which requires not a harmonious, perfect poetic form, but rough, “unfinished” verse, unpaired, some kind of “stumbling” rhyme.
This is the thought of disunity, of tragic disunity human life, in the space of which souls, thoughts, hearts echo as weakly and dully as unpaired rhymes in verse.
Perhaps the most characteristic - and at the same time the most expressive - poem by Sluchevsky “Lightning fell into a stream...”. It speaks precisely about the impossibility of meeting, about the inevitability of suffering, about the impossibility of love: “Lightning fell into the stream. // The water did not become hot. // And that the stream was pierced to the bottom, // Through the rustle of the streams, it does not hear...<...>There was no other way: // And I will forgive, and you forgive." It is not for nothing that a cemetery motif constantly appears in Sluchevsky’s poems, melancholy as the night wind; it is not without reason that a second, hidden plan emerges through his social sketches. The plan is mystical.
Sluchevsky constantly writes about Mephistopheles, who penetrated into the world, about the demon of evil, whose double, vague image flashes here constantly. Such a worldview was not characteristic of Sluchevsky alone at that time; It is not for nothing that his lyrical hero resembles Dostoevsky’s “underground” heroes. It’s just that Sluchevsky was one of the first to grasp and capture in his poems that attitude that would determine a lot in Russian lyrics - and in Russian culture in general - at the end of the 19th century. This attitude would later be called decadence, from the French word meaning decline, a painful crisis of consciousness. The poet wants to be healed from this disappointment - and cannot find healing in anything: neither in social life, nor in thinking about eternal life.
- A task of increased difficulty. Read Sluchevsky’s poem: “I’m tired in the fields, I’ll fall asleep soundly, // Once in the village for grub. // I can see through the open window // And our garden, and a piece of brocade // Have a wonderful night... The air is bright... // How quiet is the silence! I’ll fall asleep, loving // God’s whole world... But the nooses screamed! // Or have I denied myself?” Explain why the poet, in a row, separated by commas, uses common folk expressions (“I’ll sleep soundly,” “to the village for some grub”) and general poetic, sublime vocabulary (“...a piece of brocade // Have a wonderful night...”)? Do you know where this image came from in Sluchevsky’s poem: “the looper shouted! // Or did I deny myself?”? If not, try to read the last chapters of all four Gospels, which tell about the Apostle Peter’s denial of Christ. Now formulate how you understand the poet’s thought expressed in the final lines.
Russian poetry of the end of the century and French lyrics of the 1860-1880s
Charles Baudelaire. Paul Verlaine. Arthur Rimbaud
As we have already said, Russian literature of the first third of the 19th century was a diligent student of Western literature. She quickly caught up with her “mentor”, studied with German and English romantics, then with French naturalists. And in the end, she “caught up” with the general course of world culture and became an equal participant in the cultural process.
This does not mean that Russian writers have completely stopped adopting the experience of others (only a fool refuses useful lessons); but this means that they gained internal independence, learned to move in parallel, in unison with their European brothers. Therefore, much that happened in Russian poetry in the second half of the 19th century seemed to rhyme with what was happening at the same time in European poetry, especially French. Here we are talking not so much about influence as about non-coincidental similarity. Or, as historians and literary scholars say, about typology.
You know that the best Russian lyricists after Nekrasov returned to the romantic motifs of duality, languor of spirit, that notes of despair sounded in their work, a mood of decline appeared. The same motifs can easily be found in French poetry of the 1860-1880s.
The outstanding lyricist Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), a leftist, a rebel who directly participated in the revolutionary events of 1848, published a collection of poems, “Flowers of Evil,” in 1857. (The collection, being updated, was republished several times.) The poems collected in this book did not just challenge petty-bourgeois (aka universal) morality; Baudelaire's lyrical hero experienced extreme, almost mystical disappointment in the foundations of Christian civilization and clothed his extremely disharmonious feelings in a perfect, classical form.
Tell me where do you come from, Beauty?
Is your gaze the azure of heaven or the product of hell?
You, like wine, intoxicate clinging lips,
You are equally happy to sow joy and intrigue.
Dawn and fading sunset in your eyes,
You emanate fragrance as if it were a stormy evening;
The youth became a hero, the great one fell to dust,
Drunk on your lips with the enchanting urn.
Like his Romantic predecessors, Baudelaire breaks aesthetics and morality, and demonstratively, defiantly; he exclaims, turning to Beauty: “You walk over the corpses with a proud smile, // Diamonds of horror stream their cruel brilliance...” This does not frighten him; It is not self-sufficient Beauty that is scary, but the world into which it comes. And therefore he accepts her catastrophism as a terrible way out of earthly hopelessness:
Are you God or Satan? Are you an Angel or Siren?
Does it really matter: only you, Queen Beauty,
You free the world from painful captivity,
Sending incense and sounds and colors!
(“Hymn to Beauty.” Trans. Ellis)
Immoralism became an artistic principle for Baudelaire. But if you carefully read his poems - bright, dangerous, really similar to swamp flowers, then it will become clear: they contain not only poison, but also an antidote; that horror, of which Baudelaire became the singer, is overcome by the poet’s suffering, redeemed by the pain of the world, which he takes into himself. Nevertheless, "Flowers of Evil" became the subject of trial in a Paris court; the poet was accused of insulting public morality and sentenced to “withdraw” some poems from the book “Flowers of Evil.” The judges were not obliged to listen to the hidden sound of the lines; they made their decision based on the immediate, everyday, and not the poetic meaning of the words.
Baudelaire began to be translated in Russia in the 1870s. Moreover, the pioneers were populist poets like Vasily Kurochkin and Dmitry Minaev. Their own style, a little rustic, was extremely far from Baudelaire’s poetics, its complex metaphorical play and pathos, blazing with protuberances. Like the Parisian judges, they paid attention to the external, to Baudelaire's rebellious themes - only with a positive sign. And only the Russian lyricists of the next generations were able to unravel Baudelaire’s mystery, felt in his poems the harbinger of large-scale and tragic images of the 20th century: “Like the black banner of Tosca the Queen // Will flutter victoriously over her dejected brow” (“Spleen.” Trans. Vyach.I. Ivanov).
“On Time” began to translate another French lyricist, who belonged to the generation following Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). In his sad poems we felt something familiar, the idea of the inevitable duality of the human soul, the melancholy of disappointment that permeates the world, the decline of the heart’s strength - we have encountered all this in Nadson, Apukhtin, and Sluchevsky:
Autumn moan -
lingering ringing
Death knell -
Sick at heart
Sounds like a string
Restless...
(“Autumn Song”. Translation by N. Minsky)
But all these motifs in Verlaine's poetry have a shimmering, symbolic subtext. He doesn’t just share his “spleen” and blues with the reader; he feels that the entire universe is “moping”, that creative forces The universe is running out, that the time of painful, nervous uncertainty is coming, that humanity is on the threshold of a new era, beyond which there is complete uncertainty. And this subtext will also be unraveled only by translators of the early 20th century.
But the least “lucky” of all at the end of the 19th century with Russian translations was Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), the author of the brilliant tragic, catastrophic and majestic poem “The Drunken Ship” (1871). It was in this poem that for the first time all the main “lines of force” of poetry of the 20th century were identified, the traditional motives and conflicts of romantic lyrics were translated into a fundamentally different register, connected with global historical forebodings, with future universal upheavals:
Those who controlled me were in trouble:
Their Indian marksmanship chose them as targets,
Sometimes, like me, without the need for sails,
He left, obeying the river flow.Following what the silence made me understand,
That the crew no longer existed,
I, a Dutchman, under a load of silks and grain
Was thrown into the ocean by gusts of a squall.With the speed of a planet that barely arose,
Now diving to the bottom, now rising above the abyss,
I was flying, overtaking the peninsulas
Along the spirals of changing hurricanes.
............................................................
If I still enter the waters of Europe,
After all, they will seem to me like a simple puddle, -
I'm a paper boat, you don't get along with me
A boy full of sadness, standing on his haunches.Intercede, O waves! To me, in so many seas
To the one who visited - to me, flying in the clouds -
Is it appropriate to sail through the flags of amateur yachts?
Or under the terrible gaze of floating prisons?
(Translated by D. Brodsky)
However, Arthur Rimbaud began to be translated in Russia much later; Having become a poet of the late 19th century in France, he turned out to be a poet of the 20th century in Russia. But this does not mean that Russian lyricists of the 1880-1890s did not think about the same problems and did not move in the direction given by history.
- Remember the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov “The Lonely Sail Whitens.” Compare the images of this poem with the images of “The Drunken Ship” by A. Rimbaud. What are the similarities, what are the fundamental differences?
The poetry of Vladimir Solovyov and the beginning of a new era in Russian poetry
And precisely such a poet, who largely predicted the artistic discoveries and philosophical ideas of the 20th century, was Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900). Having become a graduate of the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Moscow University and a volunteer student of the Moscow Theological Academy, Solovyov delved into the study of ancient mystical treatises about Sophia. That is, about the Soul of the World, about the Wisdom of God, about the personification of Eternal Femininity. Like many romantics, Solovyov believed that this mystical force directly affected his life, and therefore sought a mysterious meeting with Sophia.
In 1875, Vladimir Sergeevich went to London; the formal reason was work in the library of the British Museum, the real reason was the search for a meeting with Sophia. Solovyov fills notebooks with strange writings, where among the undecipherable signs a familiar name is often found: Sophie, Sophia. And - suddenly leaves London via Paris to Egypt. He had a certain “voice” that called him to Cairo. As he later writes in the poem “Three Dates”: “Be in Egypt!” - a voice rang out inside, // To Paris - and the steam carries me to the south." This purely Solovyov-like construction of the poetic phrase is characteristic: not a word is said about the intermediate state, about doubts. The decision is made instantly. Such was Solovyov’s nature.
For the same reason, he was so inclined to use symbols (by the way, remember the definition of this literary concept, look in the dictionary). After all, the symbol does not depend on changing reality, on changing the angle of view. It is always mysterious in meaning, but always defined in form. Thus, in Solovyov’s 1875 poem “My Queen...”, which was precisely connected with a trip to Egypt, the colors of eternity, eternal colors predominate: “My Queen has a high palace, // About seven pillars of gold, // My queen has a seven-sided crown, // It contains countless precious stones. // And in my queen’s green garden // The beauty of roses and lilies bloomed, // And in a transparent wave a silvery stream // Catches the reflection of curls and brow. ..".
The “queen’s” garden is always green, at any time of the year, it does not fade; roses are invariably scarlet, lilies are white, the stream is silver. And the more constant, the more “reliable” these symbolic colors are, the more dramatic it sounds. main topic poems. And this theme is the changeability of the poet’s heart, the changeability of the face of his Heavenly Beloved.
In Egypt, Solovyov was in for a shock. He spent an icy night in the desert, waiting for Sophia to appear, as he was told by an inner voice, but no mysterious meeting took place; the young mystic was almost beaten by local nomads. Another poet would have perceived what happened tragically, but for Solovyov, on the contrary, all this caused a fit of laughter. (It is not for nothing that in one of his lectures he defined man as a “laughing animal.”) In general, he, like his favorite lyricist Alexei Tolstoy, often wrote humorous poems.
Laughter was for Solovyov a kind of antidote to excessive mysticism; he deliberately played up the image of his lyrical hero, the image of the Pilgrim, the mystic, and placed him in comic situations. Right down to the autoepitaph: “Vladimir Solovyov // Lies in this place. // First there was a philosopher, // And now he has become a skeleton...” (1892).
But with the same inexplicable ease, Solovyov returned from ridicule, from disappointment - to solemn intonation, to enchantment with a mystical image. In perhaps the best of Solovyov’s poems, “Ex oriente lux” (1890), Russia is harshly asked to make a choice between the belligerence of the ancient Persian king Xerxes and the sacrifice of Christ:
O Rus'! in high anticipation
You are busy with a proud thought;
What kind of East do you want to be?
The East of Xerxes or Christ?
In the 1890s, the azure eyes of the invisible Sophia again clearly shone to Solovyov. This time the light came not from the East, not from the West, but from the North. In the winter of 1894, having gone to work in Finland, Solovyov unexpectedly felt the secret presence of Sophia in everything - in the Finnish rocks, in the pine trees, in the lake... But it was then that he made a conclusion for himself about the terrible proximity of a global catastrophe, about the possible appearance of the Antichrist. The poem “Pan-Mongolism” became a cluster of his sad historical observations:
Pan-Mongolism! Even though the word is wild,
But it pleases my ears,
As if a harbinger of great
God's destiny is full....Weapons of God's punishment
The stock has not yet been depleted.
Preparing new strikes
A swarm of awakened tribes.
Pan-Mongolism - in Solovyov’s understanding - is the unification of Asian peoples for the sake of enmity with the European “race”; Vladimir Sergeevich was convinced that in the 20th century the main historical force would be the united warlike representatives of the “yellow race”: “From the Malayan waters to Altai // Leaders from the eastern islands // At the walls of fallen China // Gathered tens of their regiments.”
These motifs will be developed in their work by Solovyov’s closest literary heirs, the poets of the next generation who will call themselves Russian symbolists - you will also get to know their work in the next, 11th grade.
- What mindsets are characteristic of Russian poets of the late 19th century? What are their similarities with the romantics of the turn of the century?
- Blok A.A. The fate of Apollon Grigoriev // Aka. Collection cit.: In 8 vols. M.-L., 1962.
- Gippius V.V. From Pushkin to Blok. M., 1966.
- Grigoriev A.A. Memories. M., 1980.
- Egorov B.F. Apollo Grigoriev. M., 2000 (Series “Life of Remarkable People”).
- Korovin V.I. Noble heart and pure voice of the poet // Pleshcheev A.N. Poems. Prose. M., 1988.
- Nolman M.L. Charles Baudelaire. Fate. Aesthetics. Style. M., 1979.
- Novikov Vl. The artistic world of Prutkov // Works of Kozma Prutkov. M., 1986.
- Fedorov A.V. Poetic creativity of K.K. Sluchevsky // Sluchevsky K.K. Poems and poems. M.-L., 1962.
- Yampolsky I.G. Mid-century: Essays on Russian poetry 1840-1870. L., 1974.
