In modern literary criticism, it is used to separate the representatives of a new formation - the modernists, who updated Russian poetry based on folk art - from the traditionalists, imitators and epigones of the poetry of Nikitin, Koltsov, Nekrasov, who churn out poetic sketches of rural landscapes in a lubok-patriarchal style.

Poets in this category developed traditions of peasant poetry, and did not become isolated in them. The poeticization of rural life, simple peasant crafts and rural nature were the main themes of their poems.

The main features of the new peasant poetry:

Love for the “small Motherland”;

Following age-old folk customs and moral traditions;

The use of religious symbols Christian motives, pagan beliefs;

Appeal to folklore stories and images, an introduction to poetic use folk songs and ditties;

Rejection of the “vicious” urban culture, resistance to the cult of machines and iron.

At the end of the 19th century, no one emerged from among the peasantry. major poets. However, the authors who then came to literature in many ways paved the way for the creativity of their especially gifted followers. The ideas of the old peasant lyrics were revived on a different, higher artistic level. The theme of love for native nature, attention to folk life and national character determined the style and direction of the poetry of the new time, and reflections on the meaning of human existence through the images of folk life became leading in this lyrics.

Following the folk poetic tradition was inherent in all the new peasant poets. But each of them also had a particularly keen feeling for their small homeland in its poignant, unique concreteness. Awareness of her own role in her fate helped her find her way to reproducing the poetic spirit of the nation.

On the formation of the new peasant poetic school big influence It was the work of the Symbolists, and primarily Blok and Andrei Bely, which contributed to the development in the poetry of Klyuev, Yesenin and Klychkov of romantic motifs and literary devices characteristic of modernist poetry.

The entry of new peasant poets into great literature became a notable event in the pre-revolutionary period. The core of the new trend was made up of the most talented people from rural hinterland- N. Klyuev, S. Yesenin, S. Klychkov, P. Oreshin. Soon they were joined by A. Shiryaevets and A. Ganin.

In the autumn of 1915, largely thanks to the efforts of S. Gorodetsky and the writer A. Remizov, who took care of young poets, the literary group “Krasa” was created; October 25 at concert hall The Tenishevsky School in Petrograd hosted a literary and artistic evening, where, as Gorodetsky later wrote, “Yesenin read his poems, and in addition, he sang ditties to the harmonica and, together with Klyuev, suffering ...”. The organization of the publishing house of the same name was also announced there (it ceased to exist after the release of the first collection).

However, it would be wrong to talk about some kind of collective status of the new peasant poets. And although the listed authors were part of the “Krasa” group, and then the “Strada” literary and artistic society (1915–1917), which became the first association of poets (by Yesenin’s definition) of the “peasant merchant”, and let some of them participate in “ Scythians” (an almanac of the Left SR direction, 1917–1918), but at the same time, for the majority of the “new peasants”, the very word “collective” was only a hated cliché, a verbal cliché. They were more connected by personal communication, correspondence and common poetic actions.

Therefore, about the new peasant poets, as S. Semenova points out in her study, “it would be more correct to speak of a whole poetic galaxy that, taking into account individual worldviews, expressed something different than proletarian poets, a vision of the structure of national existence, its higher values and ideals – a different feeling and understanding of the Russian idea.”

All poetic currents of the early 20th century had one thing in common: their formation and development took place in conditions of struggle and rivalry, as if the presence of an object of controversy was a prerequisite for the existence of the current itself. This cup has not passed and the poets of the “peasant merchant”. Their ideological opponents were the so-called "proletarian poets".

Having become the organizer of the literary process after the revolution, the Bolshevik Party sought to ensure that the work of poets was as close as possible to the masses. by the most important condition the formation of new literary works, which was put forward and supported by the party press, was the principle of "spiritualization" of the revolutionary struggle. “The poets of the revolution are inexorable critics of everything old and call forward, to the struggle for a brighter future They vigilantly notice all the characteristic phenomena of modernity and paint with sweeping, but deeply truthful colors In their creations, much has not yet been polished to the end, ... but a certain bright mood is clearly expressed with deep feeling and peculiar energy”.

sharpness social conflicts, the inevitability of a clash of opposing class forces became the main themes of proletarian poetry, finding expression in the decisive opposition of two hostile camps, two worlds: “the obsolete world of evil and untruth” and “rising young Russia”. Terrible denunciations grew into passionate romantic appeals, exclamatory intonations dominated many verses (“Rage, tyrants! ..”, “Out on the street!”, etc.). A specific feature of proletarian poetry (the core motives of labor, struggle, urbanism, collectivism) was the reflection in the poems of the current struggle, the combat and political tasks of the proletariat.

Proletarian poets, defending the collective, denied everything individually human, everything that makes a person unique, ridiculed such categories as the soul, etc. Peasant poets, in contrast to them, saw main reason evil in isolation from natural roots, from the people's worldview, which is reflected in everyday life, the very way of peasant life, folklore, folk traditions, national culture e.

The acceptance of the revolution by the new peasant poets came emotionally from their folk roots, direct involvement in the people's fate; they felt themselves as spokesmen for the pain and hopes of “the poor, the hungry, the martyrs, the age-old shackles, the gray, wretched cattle” (Klyuev), the grassroots, crushed by the age-old oppression of Russia. And in the revolution, they saw, first of all, the beginning of the realization of the aspirations embodied in the images of “Kitezh-grad”, “peasant's paradise”.

At first, both Pimen Karpov and Nikolai Klyuev, who after October even became a member of the RCP (b), believed in the paradise on earth promised by the revolutionaries.

It is also a fact that in 1918 - the apogee of revolutionary messianic illusions - peasant writers and proletarian writers tried to bring them closer together, when an attempt was made to create a section of peasant writers in Moscow under the Proletkult.

But even in this relatively short historical period of time (1917–1919), when it seemed that one revolutionary whirlwind, one universal aspiration, one “boiling” pathos burst into the work of both proletarian and peasant poets, a significant worldview difference was nevertheless felt. In the verses of the “new peasants” there were quite a few revolutionary messianic furies, motives for the storming of heaven, titanic human activity; but along with rage and hatred for the enemy, the idea of ​​a God-bearing people and a new religious disclosure of its highest goal: “Unseen God / My people will see,” wrote Peter Oreshin in his collection of poems “Red Russia” (1918). Here is a somewhat rhetorical, but accurate in thought expression of what, by and large, bred the proletarian and peasant poets (for all their "hooligan" atheistic breakdowns, as in Yesenin's "Inonia").

The announcement in the post-revolutionary period of proletarian poetry as the most advanced put peasant poetry in a position of secondary importance. And the implementation of the policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class made the peasant poets “superfluous”. Therefore, the group of new peasant poets from the beginning of the 1920s was the object of constant attacks, poisonous “revelations” from critics and ideologists who claimed to be the expression of the “advanced”, proletarian position.

Thus, illusions collapsed, the faith of peasant poets in the Bolshevik transformations disappeared, accumulated anxious thoughts about the fate of his native village. And then, in their poems, the motives sounded not just of the tragedy of the revolutionary crucifixion of Russia, but also of the guilt of her unlucky, reckless son, who succumbed to the substitutions and temptations of the diabolical machinations of her own people, who trampled on her. There was a hell of a juggling as the bright dreams of the people slipped into a dark, violent alliance with diabolical power.

N. Solntseva in her book "The Peacock of Kitezh" comes to the conclusion that it was the peasant poets in the post-October years that "took the cross of the opposition." However, not everything is so clear.

In a review of the aforementioned book, L. Voronin noted that “the creative and life destinies of N. Klyuev, A. Shiryaevts. A. Ganina, P. Karpova, S. Klychkova, in general, fit into this concept. However, other new peasant poets are nearby: Pyotr Oreshin with his hymns of the new, Soviet Russia, the studies of N. Solntseva who remained “behind the scenes”, completely loyal Pavel Radimov, Semyon Fomin, Pavel Druzhinin. Yes, and with the “seditious” Sergei Yesenin, everything is not so simple. After all, in the same years when he wrote “The Country of Scoundrels”, his poems “Lenin”, “Song of the Great Campaign”, “Ballad of Twenty-Six” appeared.

According to A. Mikhailov, “the social disharmony, to which the revolution led, was a reflection of a whole tangle of contradictions: ideological, social, economic and others. However, the task of the Soviet ideologists was to present a new state structure as the only correct one, so they tried at all costs to recode the mechanism of national memory. In order to consign the past to oblivion, the carriers of tribal memory were destroyed. All the new peasant poets, the keepers of national shrines, perished.” Only A. Shiryaevets, who died early (1924), and S. Yesenin did not live up to the time of mass repressions that swallowed up their like-minded people.

A. Ganin was the first to suffer this fate. In the autumn of 1924, he was arrested among a group of young people on charges of belonging to the “Order of Russian Fascists”. Ganin’s theses “Peace and free labor for the peoples” found during a search are accepted as evidence, containing frank statements against the existing regime. An attempt to pass off the text of the theses as a fragment of a conceived novel (thus writing off the crime at the expense of a negative hero - a “class enemy”) failed. Ganin was shot in the Butyrka prison among the seven people who make up the “order” group, as its head.

In April 1920 N. Klyuev was expelled from the party “for religious views”. And after the publication of the poem "The Village" (1927), he was sharply criticized for longing for a ruined rural "paradise" and was declared a "kulak poet." This was followed by a link to Tomsk, where Klyuev was dying of hunger, selling his things, asking for alms. He wrote to M. Gorky and begged for help with "a piece of bread." In the autumn of 1937 the poet was shot in the Tomsk prison.

In the midst of mass repressions, S. Klychkov died, whose poetry escaped both the intoxication of October and a sharp, frankly disappointed reaction. Nevertheless, since the late 1920s, critics have brought him into the category of "singers of the kulak village", and in 1937 Klychkov was arrested and disappeared without a trace.

Even P. Oreshin, one of the new peasant poets, who, in the words of S. Semenova, “one of all, as if sincerely, forcing his voice from the heart, could not escape the fate of his brothers in the literary workshop, ran after the Komsomol, and after the party, and behind a tractor, quite mechanically joining the poetry of his native nature (which he never refused) and the “new beauty” of the collective farm village, not disdaining production propaganda in the form of tales in verse. His last collection, Under a Happy Sky (1937), consisted of prepared, smoothed poems of his previous books But even such a “happy” coincidence with the requirements of the era did not take away the right hand of terror from the poet, who once acted together in one “peasant merchant's house”. “Under the Happy Sky” of 1937, he was arrested and shot.”

Of the new peasant poets, only P. Karpov survived this meat grinder, who lived until 1963 and died in complete obscurity. True, it can be attributed to this trend only with big share conventions.

New peasant poetry can rightfully be considered an integral part of creative heritage Russian Silver Age. It is significant that the peasant spiritual field turned out to be much more fruitful than the proletarian ideological soil, on bright creative personalities. S. Semenova draws attention to “the striking difference in the creative result: if proletarian poetry did not put forward truly great masters of the word, then peasant (revealed) Klychkov’s first-class talent as a poet and prose writer, the remarkable talent of Oreshin and Shiryaevts, Ganin and Karpov And two poets - Klyuev and Yesenin, being the spiritual and creative leaders of the “peasant merchant” and expressing her aspirations more accurately and more perfectly than their brothers, stood among the classics of Russian literature” (Ibid.).

The concept of "peasant poetry", included in the historical and literary bypass, unites poets conditionally and reflects only some common features inherent in their worldview and poetic manner. They did not form a single creative school with a single ideological and poetic program. How the genre of "peasant poetry" was formed by Surikov. They wrote about the work and life of the peasant, about the dramatic and tragic collisions of his life. Their work reflected both the joy of merging workers with the natural world, and a feeling of dislike for the life of a stuffy, noisy city alien to wildlife. The most famous peasant poets of the Silver Age period were: Spiridon Drozhzhin, Nikolai Klyuev, Pyotr Oreshin, Sergey Klychkov. Sergei Yesenin also joined this trend.

Imagism

Imagism (from lat. imago - image) - literary movement in Russian poetry of the 20th century, whose representatives stated that the purpose of creativity is to create an image. The main expressive means of the Imagists is a metaphor, often metaphorical chains that compare various elements two images - direct and figurative. The creative practice of the Imagists is characterized by outrageous, anarchist motives.

Imagism as a poetic movement arose in 1918, when the "Order of Imagists" was founded in Moscow. The creators of the "Order" were Anatoly Mariengof, who came from Penza, the former futurist Vadim Shershenevich, and Sergei Yesenin, who was previously a member of the group of new peasant poets. Features of a characteristic metaphorical style were also contained in the earlier works of Shershenevich and Yesenin, and Mariengof organized a literary group of Imagists back in hometown. Imagist "Declaration", published on January 30, 1919 in the Voronezh magazine "Siren" (and on February 10 also in the newspaper " Soviet country", whose editorial board included Yesenin), in addition to them, the poet Rurik Ivnev and the artists Boris Erdman and Georgy Yakulov signed. On January 29, 1919, the first literary evening imaginists. Poets Ivan Gruzinov, Matvey Roizman, Alexander Kusikov, Nikolai Erdman, Lev Monoszon also joined Imagism.

In 1919-1925. Imagism was the most organized poetic movement in Moscow; they arranged popular creative evenings in artistic cafes, published many author's and collective collections, the magazine "Hotel for Travelers in the Beautiful" (1922-1924, 4 issues were published), for which the publishing houses Imagists, Pleiada, Chihi- Pikha" and "Sandro" (the last two were led by A. Kusikov). In 1919, the Imagists entered the literary section of the Literary Train. A. Lunacharsky, which gave them the opportunity to travel and perform throughout the country and in many ways contributed to the growth of their popularity. In September 1919, Yesenin and Mariengof developed and registered with the Moscow Council the charter of the Association of Freethinkers, the official structure of the Order of the Imagists. The charter was signed by other members of the group and approved by the People's Commissar of Education A. Lunacharsky. On February 20, 1920, Yesenin was elected chairman of the "Association".

In addition to Moscow ("Order of Imagists" and "Association of Freethinkers"), Imagist centers existed in the provinces (for example, in Kazan, Saransk, in the Ukrainian city of Alexandria, where the poet Leonid Chernov created an Imagist group), as well as in Petrograd-Leningrad. The emergence of the Petrograd "Order of Militant Imagists" was announced in 1922 in the "Manifesto of Innovators", signed by Alexei Zolotnitsky, Semyon Polotsky, Grigory Shmerelson and Vlad. Royal. Then, instead of the departed Zolotnitsky and Korolevich, Ivan Afanasiev-Soloviev and Vladimir Richiotti joined the Petrograd imagists, and in 1924 Wolf Erlich.

Some of the poets-Imagists spoke with theoretical treatises ("Keys of Mary" by Yesenin, "Buyan-Island" by Mariengof, "2x2 = 5" by Shershenevich, "Major Imagism" by Gruzinov). The Imagists also gained notoriety for their shocking antics, such as "renaming" Moscow streets, "trials" of literature, painting the walls of the Strastnoy Monastery with anti-religious inscriptions.

Imagism actually collapsed in 1925: in 1922 Alexander Kusikov emigrated, in 1924 Sergey Yesenin and Ivan Gruzinov announced the dissolution of the "Order", other Imagists were forced to move away from poetry, turning to prose, dramaturgy, cinema, largely for the sake of making money. Imagism was criticized in the Soviet press. Yesenin was found dead in the Angleterre Hotel, Nikolai Erdman was repressed.

The activities of the "Order of Militant Imagists" ceased in 1926, and in the summer of 1927 the liquidation of the "Order of Imagists" was announced. The relationship and actions of the Imagists were then described in detail in the memoirs of Mariengof, Shershenevich, Roizman.

New peasant poets the term was introduced by V. Lvov-Rogachevsky in the book “Poetry of New Russia. Poets of fields and city outskirts” (1919). These are N.A. Klyuev (1884-1937), S.A. Klychkov (1889-1937), S.A. Yesenin (1895-1925), A.L. Ganin ( 1893-1925), P.I. Karpov, A.V. Shiryaevets (1887-1924), P.V. Oreshin (1887-1938), as well as P.A. literary process in the 1920-30s P.N. Vasiliev (1910-37). New peasant poets did not organize a literary group, but most of them are characterized by common civil, aesthetic positions, religious and philosophical quests, in which Christian, sometimes Old Believer ideals were synthesized with both pagan motives and sectarian temptations. So, Klyuev's book "Brotherly Songs" (1912) was perceived as Khlyst chants, the theme of Karpov's poetry is the snatching of Russia into the Khlyst circle. Central to the work of the New Peasant poets were the ideas of an earthly paradise and the chosenness of the peasant, which was one of the reasons for their interest in revolutionary movements. Expecting the transformation of peasant life into paradise, the New Peasant poets created and symbolic images messiah, a wonderful guest, a prophet-shepherd .. God's chosen peasant and mystical nature of the peasant world are revealed in Klyuev's poetic cycle "Izbyanye Songs" (1920).

In the February and October revolutions, the New Peasant poets saw the possibility of social revenge for the peasants and religious renewal. In the article "Red Horse" (1919), Klyuev wrote about how all the "Pudozh man's strength" flocks to the "red ringing of the Resurrection" (Klyuev N.). In the religious-revolutionary poems (1916-18) by Yesenin "Comrade", "Singing Call", "Father", "Oktoih", "Coming", "Transfiguration", "Country Book of Hours", "Inonia", "Jordanian dove", "Heavenly Drummer", "Pantocrator" - Russia was shown as a new Nazareth, and the February Revolution was interpreted as a revolution of an Old Believer peasant - a catcher of the universe, similar to a biblical shepherd. Some of the New Peasant poets saw in the revolution the mystery of universal forgiveness and harmony. The maximalist version of this theme was developed in the lyrics of Klyuev and Karpov: even the devil was reborn into a bearer of good, became a participant in the bright transformation of Russia. If the pre-revolutionary work of Karpov, Klyuev, Shiryaevets, Oreshin, Yesenin was mainly aimed at creating a harmonious earthly structure, then an existentialist tendency manifested itself in the work of Klychkov, he is a singer of “unprecedented sadness in the world” (“The carpet fields are golden ...”, 1914). Both in the work of Klychkov and in the work of Ganin, existential moods were intensified by the First World War. Ganin wrote: “The face of man and God has been erased. Chaos again. Nobody and Nothing ”(“ Singing Brother, we are alone on the road ... ”, 1916). Shortly after victory October revolution Shiryaevets and the former World War II and pacifist-minded Klychkov took a position of removal, Ganin found himself in opposition, and by the beginning of the 1920s, the relationship between the New Peasant poets and the authorities had acquired a clear conflict character.

Party criticism the work of the New Peasant poets was defined as not truly peasant and kulak. Ganin, Klychkov, Oreshin, Klyuev and Vasiliev were shot. The New Peasant poets saw the reason for the death of the peasant way of life not only in the policy of the Bolsheviks, but also in the peasant himself. In the works of Ganin, the theme of the inability of the people to recognize evil sounded, someone “wildly mocked” him, in Russia “Fiery eyes sparkle and the scourge of deaf Satan” (“Pursued by an invisible conscience ...”, 1917-18). In Klychkov's neo-mythological novels about the relationship between man and the devil - "Sugar German" (1925), "Chertukhinsky Balakir" (1926), "Prince of Peace" (1927), the theme of the peasant's powerlessness to preserve Divine harmony on earth is revealed. The same theme is heard in Klyuev's poem "Pogorelytsina" (1928), which tells about the death peasant Russia: personifying the destructive power of the city of Herod's daughter, "pine cherubs" carry the Rublev Savior; only a faint hope of overcoming evil and the revival of Christian culture sounded in the poem. One of the priority themes in the work of the New Peasant poets is the self-worth of the individual. The lyrical hero of Klychkov's poetry books "Home Songs" (1923), "The Wonderful Guest" (1923), "Visiting the Cranes" (1930) - a homeless Kalika, a poet not needed by the country: "And the soul to someone else's shelter, Like a laborer lay down" (“There is no hut, no cow…”, 1931). The tribal culture of a person, his uniqueness, family values, love, creativity are the themes of Klychkov’s poem “The Song of the Great Mother” (1929 or 30), the cycle “What Gray Cedars Noise About” (1930-32), etc. In Yesenin’s post-revolutionary poetry, the main became the lyrical content, the feelings of the poet. A man, as the New Peasant poets believed, belongs to God, himself and the world, and not to a class and not to power, therefore the leitmotif of Klyuev’s poetry is the universality of Russia: herds of rhinos roam in the Zaonezhye region described by him, a buffalo heifer is located in the Yaroslavl barn, parrots live in the taiga, in In Olonets poems, images of both Nubian and Slav women appear. The theme of the fate of the poet in an atheistic country also became a priority: Klyuev's poem "Lament for Sergei Yesenin" (1926) tells the story of the ruined poet. At the same time, the desire to understand and accept socialism is expressed in Oreshin's works, his position is conveyed in the title of the book "Under a happy sky" (1937).

The new peasant direction of Russian literature was doomed to extinction. His younger generation is represented by the work of a native of the Semirechye Cossacks, Vasiliev, who made himself known in the poetry collections In Golden Intelligence (1930), People in the Taiga (1931). Sufficiently perceiving from poetic skill Klychkov and Klyuev, he went through an independent creative path, his talent was expressed in his own themes, not typical for the work of his predecessors. Expressive poetics corresponded to the author's maximalism, the heroes of his works are strong people. Vasiliev created the image of Siberia, where "heroes of construction and labor" are creating a new life ("Province - Periphery", 1931). At the same time, in the "Songs about the death of the Cossack army" (1928-32) and in other works, the themes of the tragedy of civil confrontation, violence against a person are developed. The new peasant poets of the 1910s and 1930s did not represent a single stream. Their work is a special branch of Russian modernism, it expressed the tendencies of both symbolism and post-symbolist poetry; their search in poetics contributed to the resuscitation art systems medieval literature and painting. The poetics of Klychkov, Klyuev, Yesenin are characterized by metaphor, symbolism, neo-mythological searches are clearly manifested in their work. In the 1920s, in opposition to the New Peasant poets, a mass literary movement of poets and prose writers from the peasants was initiated, who supported the policy of the party in the countryside with their work, the All-Russian Society of Peasant Writers was formed (

A deep interest in myth and national folklore is becoming one of the most characteristic features Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. On the "paths of myth" in the first decade of the century, the creative searches of such dissimilar artists of the word as A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, K. Balmont,

S. Gorodetsky. The symbolist A. Dobrolyubov writes down folk songs and tales of the Olonets region, A. Remizov in the collection "Salting" (1907) masterfully reproduces the folk-epic folk epic form of narration, leading his story "salting": spring, summer, autumn, winter. In October 1906, Blok wrote for the first volume (“Folk Literature”) of the “History of Russian Literature” edited by Anichkov and Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, a large article “The Poetry of Folk Charms and Spells”, providing it with an extensive bibliography, which includes scientific works A.N. Afanasiev, I.P. Sakharov, A.N. Veselovsky, E.V. Anichkov, A.A. Potebni and others.

Orientation to the folk - poetic forms of artistic thinking, the desire to know the present through the prism of the nationally colored "old times" is of fundamental importance for Russian symbolism. The immediate keen interest of the younger symbolists in folklore was noted by Anichkov, who pointed out in one of his works that "the development of the lower arts is the very basis of new trends." Blok emphasized the same thing in his article: “The whole area of ​​folk rituals and rituals turned out to be the ore where the gold of genuine poetry shines; the gold that provides book "paper" poetry - right up to our days. The fact that interest in myths and folklore was a common and pronounced trend in Russian art and literature at the beginning of the century is evidenced by the fact that S.A. "Artistic Folklorism and Proximity to the Soil", dedicated to the work of Klyuev, Remizov, Gorodetsky and others. And although the plan did not materialize, it itself is very indicative.

During the First World War, the interest of the literary and artistic intelligentsia in ancient Russian art, literature, the poetic world of ancient folk legends, and Slavic mythology became even more acute. Under these conditions, the work of the new peasants attracted the attention of Sergei Gorodetsky, by that time the author of the books "Yar" (1906), "Perun" (1907), "Wild Will" (1908), "Rus" (1910), "Willow" (1913 ). In "Yari" Gorodetsky tried to revive the world of ancient Slavic mythology, building his own mythopoetic picture of the world. He supplements a number of well-known Slavic pagan deities and characters of folk demonology (Yarila, Kupalo, Baryba, Udras, etc.) with new ones, invented by himself, filling the mythological images with a tangibly carnal, concrete-sensual content. Gorodetsky dedicated the poem “Glorify Yarila” to N. Roerich, whose artistic searches were consonant with the ancient Russian coloring of “Yari”.

On the other hand, the poetry of Gorodetsky himself, Vyach. Ivanov, the prose of A. Remizov, the philosophy and painting of N. Roerich could not fail to attract the attention of the new peasants with their appeal to ancient Russian antiquity, knowledge of Slavic pagan mythology, a sense of the folk Russian language, heightened patriotism. "That place is holy - holy and strong Russia" - the refrain of Remizov's book "Fortified" (1916). “Between Klyuev, on the one hand,” noted professor of literature P. Sakulin in a review with the remarkable title “People's Golden Flower”, - Blok, Balmont, Gorodetsky, Bryusov, on the other hand, turned out to be an interesting contact. Beauty is many-sided, but one.

In October-November 1915, a literary and artistic group "Krasa" was created, headed by Gorodetsky and which included peasant poets. The members of the group were united by their love for Russian antiquity, oral poetry, folk song and epic images. However, "Beauty" did not last long: peasant poets and, above all, the most experienced and wise of them - Klyuev, even then saw the inequality of their relationship with salon aesthetes. The poetic cafe of the acmeists "The Stray Dog", which Klyuev visited several times back in 1912-1913, from the first visit will forever become for him a symbol of everything hostile to the peasant poet.

The group of new peasant poets that developed during the years of distinct differentiation in literature did not represent a clearly defined literary trend with a strict ideological and theoretical program, which were numerous literary groups - their predecessors and contemporaries: peasant poets did not issue poetic declarations and did not theoretically substantiate their literary and artistic principles. However, there is no doubt that their group is distinguished by a bright literary originality and social and ideological unity, which makes it possible to distinguish it from the general stream of neo-populist literature of the 20th century. The peasant environment itself shaped the features of the artistic thinking of the new peasants, organically close to the folk one. Never before has the world of peasant life, depicted taking into account local features of life, dialect, folklore traditions (Nikolai Klyuev recreates the ethnographic and linguistic flavor of Zaonezhie, Sergei Yesenin - Ryazan region, Sergey Klychkov - Tver province, Alexander Shiryaevets models the Volga region), did not find such an adequate expression in Russian literature: in the work of the new peasants, with scrupulous, carefully verified ethnographic accuracy, all the signs of this peasant world are recreated.

Rural Russia is the main source of the poetic worldview of peasant poets. Yesenin emphasized his initial connection with her - the very biographical circumstances of his birth among nature, in a field or in a forest (“Mother went to the bathhouse through the forest ...”), this theme is continued by Klychkov in a poem with a folklore-song beginning “I was over the river valley ... ", in which the animated forces of nature act as successors and first nannies of a newborn baby:

There was a valley above the river In the dense forest near the village, -

In the evening, picking raspberries,

On it my mother gave birth to me ...

With the circumstances of birth (however, quite ordinary for peasant children), poets also associated the features of their character. Hence, the motive of "returning to their homeland" has become stronger in the work of the new peasants. “I’ve been longing in the city, for three whole years now, along the hare paths, along the doves, willows, and my mother’s miraculous spinning wheel,” Klyuev admits. In the work of Klychkov, this motive is one of the central ones:

In a foreign land, far from my homeland, I remember my garden and home.

Currants are blooming there now And under the windows - bird sodom.

This time of spring, early Lonely I meet in the distance.

Oh, to snuggle up, listen to the breath, Look into the glowing glow of the dear mother - the native land!

(Klychkov, In a foreign land far from home ...)

The poetic practice of the new peasants already at an early stage made it possible to highlight such common moments in their work as the poeticization of peasant labor (“Bow to you, work and sweat!”) And village life, zoo- and anthropomorphism (anthropomorphization of natural phenomena is one of characteristic features thinking in folklore categories), a keen sense of one’s inseparable connection with the living world:

The cry of a child across the field and the river,

Cock crow, like pain, miles away,

And the spider's tread, like melancholy,

I hear through the growths of the scab.

(Klyuev, The cry of a child through the field and the river...)

The question of the moral and religious quests of the new peasants is a very complex and by now far from being studied. "The fire of religious consciousness", which feeds Klyuev's work, was noted by Bryusov in the preface to the first collection of the poet "Pine Chimes". A huge impact Klyuev's creativity was influenced by Khlystism, in whose religious rites there is a complex alloy of elements of the Christian religion, elements of pre-Christian Russian paganism and the Dionysian beginning of ancient paganism with elements of secret, unexplored beliefs.

As for Yesenin’s attitude to religion, although he recalls in his autobiography (1923): “I believed little in God, I didn’t like to go to church” and admits in another version of it (October, 1025): “From many of my religious poems and poems, I would gladly refuse ... ”, - undoubtedly, the traditions of Orthodox Christian culture had a certain influence on the formation of his youthful worldview.

As the poet's comrade V. Chernyavsky testifies, the Bible was Yesenin's desk book, carefully read over and over again by him, spotted with pencil marks, shabby from constant contact with her - she was remembered and described in her memoirs by many of those who met closely with the poet . Among the many highlighted places in Yesenin's copy of the Bible was the first paragraph of the fifth chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, crossed out with a vertical pencil line: because God is in heaven and you are on earth; therefore let your words be few. For as dreams come with many worries, so the voice of a fool is known with many words.

During the years of the revolution and the first post-revolutionary years, revising his attitude to religion (“I shout to you: “To hell with the old!”, / Recalcitrant, robber son” - “Pantocrator”), Yesenin deduced the features of the function that religious symbols performed in his creativity, not so much from the Christian, so much from the ancient Slavic pagan religion.

Yesenin - especially at the time of his belonging to the “Order of the Imaginists” - will exclaim more than once in the heat of controversy: “Better is a foxtrot with a healthy and clean body than the eternal song of dirty sick and crippled people about Lazarus that tears the soul in Russian fields. Get the hell out of here with your God and your churches. Build toilets better of them ... ". However, a piercing longing for the lost (“Something is lost forever by everyone ...”) will more and more often break through from him:

I'm ashamed that I believed in God

I'm sorry that I don't believe it now.

(I have one fun left...)

Recreating in his works the color of everyday and ritual symbols peasant Russia, Yesenin, on the one hand, as a Christian -

I believed from birth In the protection of the Mother of God (I feel the Rainbow of God...)

Light from a pink icon on my golden eyelashes (Silver-zoon bell...) experiences yearning for the highest meaning of being, for “beautiful, but unearthly / unsolved land"("The winds did not blow in vain ..."), his eyes are "in love with another land" ("He spread patterned again ..."), and "the soul is sad about heaven, / She is a tenant of otherworldly fields" (poem of the same name). On the other hand, pagan motives clearly appeared in the work of Yesenin and other new peasants, which can be explained by the fact that the ethical, aesthetic, religious and folklore-mythological ideas of the Russian peasant, enclosed in a single coherent system, had two different sources: in addition to the Christian religion, and ancient Slavic paganism, numbering several millennia.

Indomitable pagan love of life is a hallmark lyrical hero Shiryaevets:

The choir praises the Almighty Lord,

Akathists, canons, troparia,

But I hear Kupala night sun cliques,

And in the altar - the dance of the playful dawn!

(The choir praises the Almighty Lord...)

Abundantly using in their works religious symbols, archaic tales, the new peasant poets, on the way of their ideological and aesthetic searches, approached certain artistic searches in Russian art. late XIX- the beginning of the XX century. First of all, this is the work of V.M. Vasnetsov, who for the first time in Russian art made an attempt to find pictorial equivalents to the traditional folk-poetic images of the epic tale. These are the canvases of V.I. Surikov, resurrecting the legendary heroic pages national history, especially his work of the last period, when it merges with that line in Russian art dating back to the canvases of Vasnetsov, when plots and images are drawn not directly from real history, but from history already reworked, poetically decorated with folk fantasy. This is a "Nesterov" theme, not concretized in historical time - monastic Russia, which seemed to the artist as a timeless ideal of the original fusion of human existence with the life of nature - primordial virgin nature, not suffocating under the yoke of civilization, removed from the destructive breath of the modern "iron" city.

New peasant poets were the first in Russian literature to elevate rural life to a previously unattainable level of philosophical understanding of the national foundations of being, and a simple village hut to the highest degree of beauty and harmony:

Conversation hut - a semblance of the universe:

In it, sholom - heaven, half - the Milky Way,

Where the helmsman's mind, the mournful soul Under the spindle clergy can rest sweetly.

(Where it smells of kumach - there are women's gatherings ...) poetized her living soul:

Hut-hero,

carved kokoshnik,

Window like an eye socket

Summed up with antimony.

(Klyuev, Izba-bogatyrsa...)

Yesenin proclaimed himself the poet of the “golden log hut” (“The feather grass is sleeping. The plain is dear ...”). Klychkov poetizes the peasant hut in his "Home Songs". Klyuev in the cycle "To the Poet Sergei Yesenin" persistently reminds " younger brother"its origins:" The hut - the feeder of words - / It did not raise you in vain ... ".

For the peasant farmer and the peasant poet, such concepts as the mother of the land, the hut, the economy are the concepts of one ethical and aesthetic series, one moral root, and the highest moral value of life is physical labor, the unhurried, natural course of a simple village life. In the poem "Grandfather's Plowing", Klychkov, in accordance with the norms of folk morality, claims that many diseases also stem from idleness, laziness, that healthy lifestyle life is closely related to physical labor. Klychkovsky grandfather after forced winter idleness -

I prayed, shone my clothes,

Unwound onuchi from his feet.

He was embittered, lying down the winter,

Loin sick.

The original folk ideas about physical labor as the basis of the foundations of peasant life are affirmed in famous poem Yesenin "I'm going through the valley...":

To hell, I'm taking off my English suit.

Well, give me a scythe, I'll show you -

Am I not your own, am I not close to you,

Do I not value the memory of the village?

For Klyuev:

The joy of seeing the first stack,

The first sheaf from the native strip,

There is a pudding cake On the border, in the shade of a birch ...

(Klyuev, The joy of seeing the first haystack...)

For Klychkov and his characters, who feel like a particle of a single Mother Nature, who are in a harmonious relationship with her, death is something completely not terrible and natural, like a change, for example, of the seasons or the melting of “hoarfrost in the spring”, as Klyuev defined death. To die, according to Klychkov, means “to go into the undead, like roots into the ground,” and death in his work is not presented in the literary and traditional image of a disgusting old woman with a stick, but an attractive peasant worker:

Tired of the daily chores

How good is a hollow shirt to brush off the hardworking sweat

Move closer to the cup

Chew with seriousness a piece,

Pull the prison with a big spoon,

Calmly listening to the bass of the storm Gathering for the night ...

How good it is when in the family,

Where is the son of the groom, and the daughter of the bride,

Already there is not enough place on the bench Under the old goddess of place ...

Then, having overcome fate, like everyone else,

It is not surprising to meet death in the evening,

Like a reaper in young oats With a sickle thrown over her shoulders.

(Klychkov, Tired of the daily chores...)

The typological commonality of the philosophical and aesthetic concept of the world of the new peasant poets is manifested in their solution of the theme of nature. One of the most important features of their work is that the theme of nature in their works carries the most important not only semantic, but conceptual load, revealing itself through the universal multifaceted antithesis "nature-civilization" with its numerous specific oppositions: "people - intelligentsia", "village - city", " natural man- city dweller", "patriarchal past - modernity", "earth - iron", "feeling - reason", etc.

It is noteworthy that in Esenin's work there are no urban landscapes. Their fragments - "skeletons of houses", "a chilled lantern", "curved Moscow streets" - are single, random and do not add up to a whole picture. “The Moscow mischievous reveler”, running up and down “the entire Tver district”, Yesenin does not even find words to describe the month in the city sky: “And when the moon shines at night, / When it shines ... the devil knows how!” ("Yes! Now it's decided. No return...").

Shiryaevets acts as a consistent anti-urbanist in his work:

I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!

I listen to epic streams!

Let the cities have the best confectioners

Easter cakes are poured into me in sugar -

I will not stay in a stone lair!

I'm cold in the heat of his palaces!

To the fields! to Bryn! to the cursed tracts!

To the legends of grandfathers - wise simpletons!

(Shiryaevets, I - in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!..)

In his multi-page treatise "The Stone-Iron Monster" (i.e. City), completed by 1920 and still unpublished, Shiryaevets most fully and comprehensively expressed the goal setting of the new peasant poetry: to return literature "to the miraculous keys of Mother Earth ". The treatise begins with an apocryphal legend about the demonic origin of the City, then replaced by a fairy tale-allegory about the young Town (then - the City), the son of the Silly Villager and the ventilated Man, who, in order to please the devil, strictly fulfills the parent’s dying order “multiply!”, so that the devil “dances and grunts in joy, mocking the defiled earth.

The demonic origin of the City is emphasized by Klyuev:

Frightening us with a stone throat ...

(From cellars, from dark corners...), and Klychkov in the novel "Sugar German", continuing the same idea, affirms the dead end, the futility of the path that the City is following - there is no place for the Dream in it:

"City, city!

Under you, the earth does not even look like earth ... Satan killed, rammed it with an iron hoof, rolled it with an iron back, rolling on it, like a horse riding in a meadow in a wash ...

That is why stone ships grew on it ... that is why stone ships laid down their iron sails, red, green, silver-white roofs, and now, when the transparent autumn is pouring frost and azure on them, they look from afar like an endless sea hanging in the air folded wings, as migratory birds fold them to descend to the ground ...

Do not flap these wings from the ground!...

Do not rise from the ground to these birds! .. "

Distinct anti-urban motives - and in Klyuev's ideal of Beauty, originating in folk art, put forward by the poet as a link between the Past and the Future. In the present, in the realities of the Iron Age, Beauty is trampled down and desecrated (“A deadly theft has been accomplished, / Mother Beauty has been debunked!”), and therefore the links of the Past and the Future have been unraveled. But after a period, Klyuev prophetically points out, Russia will be reborn: it will not only regain its lost people's memory, but the eyes of the West will turn to it with hope:

In the ninety-ninth summer, the cursed castle will creak,

And the gems of dazzling prophetic lines will bubble up like a river.

The melodious foam will overwhelm Kholmogorye and Celebey,

A sieve will catch the Vein of the Silvery words-crucians.

(I know songs will be born...)

It was the new peasant poets at the beginning of the 20th century who loudly proclaimed: nature in itself is the greatest aesthetic value. And if in the poems of Klyuev's collection "Lion's Bread" the attack of "iron" on wildlife is a premonition, a premonition that has not yet become a terrible reality ("I would shy away from hearsay / About the iron restlessness!"), Then in the images of "Village", "Pogorelytsina ”, “Songs about the Great Mother” - a reality that is already tragic for peasant poets. However, in the approach to this topic, the differentiation of their work is clearly visible. Yesenin and Oreshin, although not easy, painful, through pain and blood, are ready to see the future of Russia, in Yesenin's words, "through stone and steel." For Klyuev, Klychkov, Shiryaevets, who were in the grip of the ideas of a "peasant's paradise", his idea was fully realized by the patriarchal past, the Russian gray-haired antiquity with its fairy tales, legends, beliefs. “I don’t like the accursed modernity, destroying the fairy tale,” Shiryaevets admitted in a letter to Khodasevich (1917), “and without a fairy tale, what is life in the world?” For Klyuev, the destruction of a fairy tale, a legend, the destruction of a host of mythological characters is an irreparable loss:

Where the forest darkness

From the headboards the unta fairy tale is inaudible.

Brownies, undead, mavki -

Only rubbish, hardened dust...

(Village)

Shiryaevets’s rejection of contemporary reality was manifested with particular force in two poems of 1920: “Steel birds do not fly over me ...” and “Volga”. In the first, Shiryaevets again and again emphasizes his commitment to patriarchal antiquity:

Steel birds do not fly over me,

Titmouse from Izborsk is a mile flight for me! ..

I'm awake, yes, I'm not dreaming! -

I swim in the silks of scarlet ships.

There are no railway stations!.. Iron, hoarse roars!

No black locomotives! - I'm not yours!

There is a spring noise in the shining oak trees,

Singing Sadko, ringing heroic bowls!

in the second, he contrasts the past with modernity in its most environmentally unattractive manifestations.

About the fact that the predatory destruction of nature leads to the spiritual impoverishment of a person, rubbed "by him irreplaceable moral values, 1fedu1feeds in his books Klychkov: “It’s not for the bitterness of pori, when a person in the forest strangles all the animals, starves out the fish from the river, catches the birds in the air and makes all the trees kiss his feet - he cuts them with a saw. Then God will turn away from the desolate earth and from the desolate human soul, and the iron devil, who only waits for this and cannot wait at all, will screw to the person in place of the soul some gear or nut from the machine, because the devil is in spiritual matters. a decent locksmith... With this nut instead of a soul, a person, without noticing it and not bothering in the least, will live and live until the end of time...” (“Chertukhinsky Balakir”).

New peasant poets defended their spiritual values, the ideal of primordial harmony with the natural world in polemics with proletarian theories of technization and mechanization of the world. At a time when representatives of the Iron Age in literature rejected everything “old” (“We are peddlers new faith, / To the beauty that sets the iron tone. / So that the frail natures do not defile the squares, / In the sky we caricature reinforced concrete"), the new peasants, who saw the main cause of evil in isolation from natural roots, from the people's worldview, which is reflected in everyday life, the very way of peasant life, folklore ", folk traditions, national cultures" ("siryutins" in Klyuev's poem "In memory of the Olonets women ..." poets who "forgotten their father's house" are called ingenuously and compassionately), - stood up for this "old".

If the proletarian poets declared in the poem “We”: “We will take everything, we will know everything, / We will plunge deep to the bottom ...”, the peasant poets asserted the opposite: “To know everything, take nothing / A poet came into this world” (Yesenin , "Mare Ships"). If the “peddlers of the new faith”, while defending the collective, denied the individual human, everything that makes a person unique, ridiculed such categories as

"soul", "heart", - all that without which it is impossible to imagine the work of the new peasants - the latter were firmly convinced that the future was in their poetry. In modern times, the conflict between "nature" and "iron" ended in the victory of "iron": in the final poem "A Field Sown with Bones ..." in the collection "Lion's Bread" Klyuev gives a terrible, truly apocalyptic panorama of the "Iron Age", repeatedly defining it through the epithet "faceless". The “blue fields” of Russia, glorified by peasant poets, are now dotted with “... bones, / Skulls with a toothless yawn”, and above them, “... rattling flywheels, / Nameless and faceless someone”: Above the dead steppe, a faceless something It gave birth to madness, darkness, emptiness...

Dreaming of a time when "there will be no songs about the hammer, about the invisible flywheel" and it will become "the horn of an extinct hell - a worldly oran field", Klyuev expressed his secret, prophetic:

The hour will strike, and proletarian children will fall to the peasant lyre.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Russia approached the country of peasant agriculture, based on more than a thousand years of traditional culture, polished in its spiritual and moral content to perfection. In the 1920s, the way of Russian peasant life, infinitely dear to peasant poets, began to collapse before their eyes. Pain for the waning origins of life oozes written in the 20-30s. Klychkov's novels, Klyuev's works, Yesenin's letters, careful reading which are yet to be explored.

The revolution promised to fulfill the age-old dream of the peasants: to give them land. The peasant community, in which the poets saw the basis of the foundations of harmonious being, on a short time was reanimated, peasant gatherings rustled through the villages:

Here I see: Sunday villagers At the volost, as in a church, gathered. With clumsy, unwashed speeches, they discuss their "zhis".

(Yesenin, Soviet Russia.)

However, already in the summer of 1918, a systematic offensive began to destroy the foundations peasant community, food detachments were sent to the village, and from the beginning of 1919, a food requisition system was introduced. Millions and millions of peasants perish as a result of hostilities, famine and epidemics. Direct terror against the peasantry begins - a policy of depeasantization, which eventually brought terrible results: the age-old foundations of Russian peasant management were destroyed. The peasants violently rebelled against the exorbitant exactions - the Veshensky uprising on the Don, the uprising of the Tambov and Voronezh peasants, hundreds of peasant uprisings similar to them, but on a smaller scale. The country was going through another tragic phase of its history, and Yesenin's letters of this time are permeated with painful, intense searches for the meaning of the present, which is happening before our eyes. If earlier, in 1918, the poet wrote: “We believe that miraculous healing will now give birth to an even more enlightened feeling of new life in the village, ”then in a letter to E. Livshits dated June 8, 1920 - the exact opposite impression of what is happening in the“ new ”village: “I am at home, despite the fact that I have not been there for three year, I didn’t like it very much, there are a lot of reasons, but it’s inconvenient to talk about them in letters. “Because it’s not like that now. Horror, how unlike, - he conveys to G. Benislavskaya in a letter dated July 15, 1924, the impression of visiting his native village. A small foal running a race with a train, seen in August 1920 from the window of the Kislovodsk-Baku train and then sung in Sorokoust, for Yesenin becomes "an expensive endangered image of the village."

M. Babenchikov, who met with Yelenin in the early 1920s, notes his “hidden anxiety”: “Some kind of relentless thought drilled Yesenin’s brain .., forcing him to constantly return to the same topic: “- Village, village. .. The village is life, but the city...”. And, suddenly breaking off his thought: “This conversation is hard for me. He crushes me." The same memoirist cites a significant episode in the winter of 1922 in the mansion of A. Duncan on Prechistenka, when “Elenin, squatting, absentmindedly moved the burning firebrands with difficulty, and then, sullenly resting his unseeing eyes on one point, quietly began:“ Was in the village. Everything is collapsing... You have to be there yourself to understand... The end of everything.”

"The end of everything" - that is, all hopes for the renewal of life, dreams of a happy future for the Russian peasant. Is it not about this gullibility of the Russian peasant with bitterness and pain that G.I. Uspensky, highly valued by Yesenin, wrote, warning about the inevitable tragic and terrible disappointment in the next “fairy tale”? “With a broken trough,” the writer reminded, “... from time immemorial, every Russian fairy tale begins and ends; starting in anguish and suffering, continuing with dreams of a bright free life, after a whole series of countless torments endured by the seeker of freedom, it leads him again to grief and suffering, and in front of him ... "again a broken trough."

As a result social experiments before the eyes of peasant poets involved in a tragic conflict with the era, an unprecedented collapse of the most dear to them - traditional peasant culture began, folk foundations life and national consciousness.

Peasant poets receive the label "kulak", while one of the main slogans of the life of the country is the slogan "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." Slandered and slandered, resistance poets continue to work, and it is no coincidence that one of Klyuev's central poems of 1932, with its transparent metaphorical symbolism, addressed to leaders literary life countries, is called "Slanderers of Art":

I am angry with you and scold you bitterly,

What is ten years old for a melodious horse,

A diamond bridle, made of gold,

The blanket is embroidered with consonances,

You didn't give even a handful of oats And didn't let you into the meadow, where the drunken dew Freshened the broken wings of a swan...

New peasant literature is the only trend in the domestic literature of the 20th century, all of whose representatives, without exception, in their works fearlessly entered into a mortal struggle with " iron age and were destroyed in this unequal struggle. In the period from 1924 to 1938, all of them - directly or indirectly - become victims of the System: in 1924 - Alexander Shiryaevets, in 1925 - Sergei Yesenin and Alexei Ganin, in 1937 - Nikolai Klyuev and young poets Ivan Pribludny and Pavel Vasilyev, in 1938 - Sergey Klychkov and Petr Oreshin.

At the end of the 20th century, it is destined to read in a new way into the works of new peasant writers - continuing the traditions of Russian literature of the Silver Age, they oppose the Iron Age: they contain true spiritual values ​​​​and truly high morality, they carry the spirit of high freedom - from power, from dogma, they affirm a careful attitude to the human person, defend the connection with national origins, folk art as the only fruitful path of the artist's creative evolution.

ANNOTATED REFERENCES

Ponomareva T. A. New peasant prose of the 1920s: At 2 o'clock. Cherepovets, 2005. Part 1. Philosophical and artistic research by N. Klyuev, A. Ganin, P. Karpov. Part 2. "Round World" by Sergei Klychkov.

The monograph is devoted to the prose of N. Klyuev, S. Klychkov, P. Karpov, A. Ganin of the 1920s, but broadly presents the origins of the work of peasant writers in the literature of the Silver Age. New peasant literature is comprehended in historical, national and religious-philosophical aspects. The work of new peasant writers is considered in relation to mythopoetics, folklore, ancient Russian literature and literature of the first third of the 20th century.

Savchenko I K. Yesenin and Russian literature of the XX century. Influences. Mutual influences. Literary and creative connections. M.: Russki m1r, 2014.

The book is devoted to the problem of "Yesenin and Russian literature of the XX century" and is the first monographic study of this kind; some archival documents and materials are introduced into literary circulation for the first time. In particular, Yesenin’s literary and creative ties with peasant writers are studied in detail: in the chapters ““ No one attracted Yesenin spiritually so much ”: Sergey Yesenin and Alexander Shiryaevets ”and“ This one is wildly gifted! ”: Sergey Yesenin and Maxim Gorky. The topic "Gorky and the New Peasant Writers in their attitude to the 'hack Russia'" is studied in detail.

Solntseva N. M. Kitezh Peacock: Philological Prose. Documentation. Facts. Versions. M. : Scythians, 1992.

The book contains essays on philological prose dedicated to the work of peasant writers. The work of S. Klychkov, N. Klyuev, P. Karpov, P. Vasilyev is analyzed in particular detail. The wide use of documentary materials gives the study a deeply scientific character, and the genre of philological prose, in the tradition of which the book is written, gives the character of fascinating reading. The author offers the reader not only literary facts, but also his own versions and hypotheses related to the work of new peasant writers.

• Obviously, the internal controversy with the Acmeist "Workshop of Poets" dictated and exaggerated the stylized form - in the form of a humble petition - donating Klyuev's inscription to N. Gumilyov on the collection "Forests were": "To Nicholas the light of Stepanovich Gumilyov from the great Novogorod Obonezhsky patch of the graveyard of Friday Paraskovia near the garden of Solovyovgora, the songwriter Nikolashka on the liqueur, Klyuev sings glory, bowing respectfully, pays the Lenten day to the memory of the holy prophet Joel, one thousand nine hundred and thirteen years from the birth of the Bogoslov.
• In terms of the atom, the character of the literary pseudonym chosen by one of the proletarian poets, Bezymensky, is also not accidental.

New peasant poetry (Klyuev, Yesenin, Klychkov, Shiryaevtsev)

New peasant poetry is a trend of poets who came out of the people's milieu. They relied on the folklore tradition and the literary tradition of the 19th century (Nekrasov, Koltsov, Nikitin, Surikov). The main motives village life, nature, relationship of village life with the life of nature. Main problems - city/village opposition and tragic contradictions within the village itself.

First wavepeasant poetry - 1903-1905. (Drozhzhin, Leonov, Shkulev) They united within the Surikov literary and musical circle, published collections, collaborated with proletarian poets.

Second wave– 1910s (Klyuev, Yesenin, Klychkov, Shiryaevtsev, Oreshin). In 1916 Yesenin's collection "Radunitsa" was published. They were greeted as messengers of the new Russian village. The group was heterogeneous: different fates, different ideologies, different approaches to mastering the poetic tradition. Therefore, this name, although traditional, is rather conditional.

New peasant poets experienced influence of symbolism and acmeism. Symbolists were interested in them because of the tendencies inherent in them in the years preceding the First World War: nationalist sentiments, reflections on the "people's element", the fate of Russia, and interest in Slavic mythology. The same tendencies were observed in the religious and philosophical searches of the Russian intelligentsia.

Another representative of the new peasant poetry - Sergei Klychkov. main topic his collections (" Songs», « hidden garden”) - rural nature. The influence of Blok, Gorodetsky and Klychkov is obvious. Thus, we can talk about the synthesis of symbolism, acmeism and folk tradition.

His landscapes are conditional, decorative, in the images of Slavic mythology. He ignores reality as such. Most of his poems are adaptations Slavic myths: about the goddess of spring and fertility Lada, about her sister Kupava, about Grandfather, who rules the natural world.

Unlike Klychkov, whose leitmotif was "sadness-sorrow", creativity Alexander Shiryaevts was imbued with life-affirming pathos. The sincerity and immediacy of the poetic feeling makes him related to Yesenin, and Slavic mythology and folklore themes (Vanka the key) with Klychkov. But in his poetry more feelings than Klychkov (love for the Motherland, for the will, for life).