Abstract on the topic:
Vladimir Mayakovsky
(1893 - 1930)

The figure is ambiguous in world literature. The poet began his journey with a rebellion against the old world.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born on July 19, 1893 in the Georgian village of Baghdad in the family of a forester. Mother was from Kherson peasants. This gave rise to the poet later to write about his origin:
I
from grandfather-great-grandfather - Cossack,
on the other - sechevik,
and in Georgia
live
started.
(Translation M. Desirable)
From 1902 he studied at the local gymnasium, and then in Moscow, where the family moved after the death of his father. At the age of 15, he left school and began revolutionary activities, for which he ended up behind bars three times. 1911 returned to study - at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. At the same time, he joined the Futurists.
Avant-gardists, including V. Mayakovsky, considered their work as an aesthetic revolution - an analogy to the social revolution. Therefore, the legacy of the poet is marked by active innovation in the field of poetic language, the system of versification, and genres. He often called his poems "steps into the future."
The poet surrendered to the destructive revolutionary elements with delight. During the Civil War (since October 1919) he worked at the Windows of Satire ROSTA (Russian Telegraph Agency), drawing crying at night and writing short poems to them so that in the morning people would read in the windows of shops:
The works of the first years of the revolution (the poem "150,000,000", the play "Mystery - Buff", the poems "Left March", "Ode to the Revolution", "Our March") are imbued with faith in the victory of the ideas of a new society built according to the laws of brotherhood and justice:
Attack with lava!
Fight with the sky for the happiness of the earth!
Who steps right there?
Left!
Left!
Left!
(Translation Yes. Drobyazko)
V. Mayakovsky considered himself "an agitator, a loud leader", who does not oppose the crowd, but is a part of it, a worker, his voice. The crowd, having received the idea of ​​building a new society, became a people.
A new wave of patriotism swept over the poet after traveling to the countries of the West. Beginning in 1922, he crossed the border of the USSR nine times. Germany, France, Mexico, America aroused antagonistic feelings in the poet: he condemned profit, exploitation, racism. Technical equipment, the wonders of America's architecture only emphasized the contradictions of the bourgeois world, which was manifested in the poems "Hlarochos in the cut", "Broadway", "Black and White".
The first work "Night" (1912) was published in the collection "Neglect of Public Tastes" - a poetic manifesto of Russian futurists who proclaimed themselves the creators of the art of the future and denied everything that was created in the past. A new culture behind the manifestos of the "budetlyans" (as they called themselves) arose on the ruins of the old culture, old morality, old society. Rebellion against everything accepted corresponded to the character of the young V. Mayakovsky, a powerful nature was looking for new ideas and unusual artistic forms. This is the first work of V. Mayakovsky, which differs from his further work, especially in versification, and in the ideological plane is a manifestation of the sympathies and antipathies of the poet, his worldview. The author portrayed the city at night as a struggle between darkness and light. People and the poet are involved in this struggle. The poet and the crowd are an old antithesis in the poetic world, but in V. Mayakovsky the poet is the antipode and at the same time the voice and heart of the inhabitants of the streets and squares.
The lyrical hero of the poem is a child of the night city, he follows the changes in colors, which, by the way, are very expressive (red, white, blue, yellow), the movement of people hiding behind the door from the night, and gives them a "smile in the eye." But in response, he hears only the laughter of a booth and remains alone.
Red and white discarded, buzzing
handfuls of ducats were thrown into the green,
and to the black valleys of the assembled windows
handed out burning yellow cards.
Boulevards and squares were not surprising
see blue togas on the buildings.
And those who ran like yellow wounds
they put bracelets on their feet.
(Translated by A. Ngkolenko)
The poem can be considered one extended metaphor of the night city. The windows light up, the poet compares with palms that were given burning yellow cards. "This comparison is built on associations caused by the life of a night city. As a futurist, V. Mayakovsky hated philistinism, satiety, a waste of time.
The meter in which the verse is written is amphibrach, classical meter, later the poet abandoned the classical meter and switched to tonic versification.
The poet took the futuristic philosophy of objections and struggle as a program of his own life and work. Dressed in a yellow sweater or orange-colored jacket, he read his poems.
In verses of the period 1912-1916. ("Nate!", "To you", "Listen!", the poems "A Cloud in Pants", "War and Peace") sounded a challenge to the old world, the poet accused the crowd of lack of spirituality, passivity, indifference, called for a fight. Under the influence of revolutionary ideas, the faceless crowd, as a symbol of the philistine old life, acquired the features of a class enemy - the exploiter of the working masses, and in short - the bourgeois. On the eve of the October events of 1917, Mayakovsky wrote lines that became a folk phrase:
Eat pineapples, chew grouse,
Your last day is coming, bourgeois!
Mayakovsky considered his work as an aesthetic revolution - an analogy to the social revolution.
He often called his poems "steps into the future."
The poet surrendered to the destructive revolutionary elements with delight.
During the Civil War, he worked at the Windows of Satire ROSTA (Russian Telegraph Agency), drawing crying at night and writing short poems to them so that in the morning people would read in the windows of shops:
Culture - Commune! We are builders!
Works of the first years of the rev. (the poem "15,000,000"), the play "Mystery - Buff", the poems "Left March") are imbued with faith in the victory of the ideas of a new society built according to the laws of brotherhood and justice.
Attack with your left! Mayakovsky considered himself an agitator who did not oppose the crowd, but was part of it, a worker, his voice.
A new wave of patriotism swept over the poet after traveling to the countries of the West. Since 1922, he crossed the border 9 times. Germany, France, Mexico, America aroused antagonistic feelings in the poet: he condemned profit, exploitation, racism. Technical equipment, the wonders of America's architecture only emphasized the contradictions of the bourgeois world, which was manifested in the poems "Skyscraper in Section", "Broadway", "Black and White".
V. Mayakovsky gained immense popularity.
Recently it became known that in the last years of his life, V. Mayakovsky began to realize the forced, artificial nature of his works. In the drafts, a bitter confession was found that he "stands on the throat of his own songs." In response to his poem "Good!" I was going to write a new one - "Bad!".
Hyperbolism of the poet's worldview helped him in his work, but interfered with his life. He aspired to great faith, universal recognition, cosmic love. In the story, Lilia Brik is mentioned next to his name. It was her poetic name that V. Mayakovsky rhymed, it was to her that he devoted most of his works, it was her initials, as if on purpose for V. Mayakovsky's subtle poetic ear, that formed the word LOVE. They met in the summer of 1915. At that time, L. Brik was married, which complicated their relationship. V. Mayakovsky and Briki found an unusual way out of the piquant situation: they agreed to a "love triangle" and created a new family. Osip Brik, who loved his wife very much, chose the role of a friend and adviser. By the way, it was he who first began to study the poet's versification, helped him.
Soviet criticism kept silent about the family life of V. Mayakovsky, believing that it compromised the poet. But now this is an attempt to answer the question: "What is more in the family union of V. Mayakovsky and Brikiv - a real feeling or a futuristic declaration?"
Apparently, not without reason, according to L. Brik, Chernyshevsky's book "What to do?"
Many facts testify to the true tenderness and trust in their relationship. Lile Brik, the poet called his only woman; despite the fact that other hobbies appeared in his life - Ellie Jones, Tatyana Yakovleva, Veronika Polyanskaya - Mayakovsky always returned to Lily. In his suicide letter to the government, it was Brikiv that the poet recognized as his family.
According to the official version, which raises many doubts, the poet shot himself on April 14, 1930, when Brikiv was not in Moscow, and having Mayakovsky repeat: "If there was Lilya, this would not have happened ..." The bullet that ended his life - still one riddle. Why did the poet, who condemned the suicide of S. Yesenin (by the way, extremely vaguely), supposedly do the same? There are many versions, but one thing is clear: he gradually lost confidence in his ideals (the work of recent years is predominantly satirical); in addition, suicide was one of the main motives in Mayakovsky's life. According to L. Brik, it was like a chronic illness. He tried several times to die... and one day it ended tragically.
After the death of the name of V. Mayakovsky, it again became the object of a political game. 5 years after the tragic shot, Steel proclaimed V. Mayakovsky "the best poet of the era." The great rebel was dressed in bronze, having leveled sharp corners, and his work was torn into quotations, which, they singled out, made the impression necessary for the authorities.
The works of V. Mayakovsky are timeless. Behind the roar and explosions of rhythms one can see both his era and the soul of the poet.

Brief description of individual works. Mayakovsky
"Could you?" (1913)
There are two kinds of vocabulary in this verse:
1) words that depict the world of everyday life, devoid of any purpose (paint, glass, tin fish, everyday life);
2) words that symbolize the existence of another world - beautiful and spiritual (nocturne, flute, ocean, cliques).
Therefore, the main thing in the work is the conflict of two worlds - the unspiritual and the spiritual, which is transferred to the psychological sphere.
The lyrical hero experiences the imperfection of reality as his personal drama and as an impetus to action. He is dissatisfied with the philistine routine, therefore, he seeks to change everything by the power of his will, creativity, and fantasy.
"I instantly crossed out the map of everyday life ..."
The main motive of the poem is the desire to transform the world, the search for a spiritual ideal in life. But it is not enough for the hero that he himself rebels against the obsolete and imperfect, he needs all of humanity to begin a struggle against lack of spirituality, philistinism, and vulgarity.
The question is what his poet puts into the title and finale of the work.
("Could you play a nocturne on a pipe flute?")
does not require an answer - it is rhetorical, but requires action. This question divides people into well-fed, indifferent and those who are able to make everyday life new, bright, unexpected.
The main tropes are metaphors and epithets (he smeared the map of everyday life, cheekbones of the ocean, calls for new lips). The pronouns "I" and "you" are often used, interconnected according to the principle of contrast and symbolize the antithesis "poet - crowd", traditional for the early poetry of V. Mayakovsky.
"Listen!" (1914)
V. Mayakovsky addresses the theme of the purpose of a person, the meaning of his earthly and stellar existence, and argues that a person cannot live without beauty, which is created by eccentric poets.
Listen!
When someone has already lit the stars -
So, is there a great need for this?
So - someone wants the stars to shine?
So - who calls these spits pearls?
The lyrical hero of the poem is just such a poet, for whom there are no temporal and spatial boundaries, he bursts into God, he is involved in the illumination of the stars. At the same time, one feels his loneliness, defenselessness, "starless torment", a misunderstanding, an acute need for dreams, beauty, stars.
V. Mayakovsky's experiments in versification contributed to the creation of an original system inherent only to him. This is a new graphic recording of poems - a "ladder", which created attention on individual words, unusual rhymes.
The poet did not recognize full rhymes when words, parts of speech coincide, did not use traditional rhymes. He rhymed various parts of speech, formed rhymes in the middle of a line, phonetic rhymes (when not all sounds match). In his poems, the beginning and end of lines and even words that belong to different stanzas could be rhymed.
His verse was built not on the constant duty of stressed and unstressed syllables, but on the number of stresses.
Such versification is called tonic and is used in oral folk art, but Mayakovsky improved it. The number of stresses in the lines was not the same. The innovative poet does not have the traditional division of poems into stanzas of 4 or 6 lines, his stanzas have any number of lines.
"Lilichko! Instead of a letter" (1916)
The poem is dedicated to Lily Brik, whom V. Mayakovsky loved very much and to whom he returned at various periods of his life. But the work goes beyond the biography of the poet, acquiring a generalizing meaning, since it violates the eternal theme - love.
The lyrical hero of the poem is a strong personality. The author compares him with a bull, an elephant, but this strong "wild beast" obeys one single glance and touch of the beloved's hand. He bows before her, because besides her love for him "there is no sun" and "there is no sea", and only one sound gives him joy - "the bell of his beloved name."
"I will not fall from the frenzy ..."
Without a loved one, the world turns into hell for him, life loses its meaning. But the feelings of the lyrical hero are marked by special nobility. Realizing the inevitability of "separation, not knowing where she is and with whom," he remains true to his love forever.
"Tomorrow you'll forget how you were crowned..."
The verse is written in the creative manner traditional for the early period of V. Mayakovsky. The tonic system helps to create an excited monologue of the lyrical hero, to show the slightest movements of his soul. The feeling of great happiness of love and the drama of separation are conveyed by numerous epithets, metaphors, and comparisons.
The main leitmotif of the work is the phrase "Except for your love ...", which is repeated several times and emphasizes the strength of the poet's great feeling. There are a lot of appeals in the verse: "Lіlіchko!", "road", "good".
However, the work is an appeal not only to the beloved, but also to oneself. The verse has a subtitle: "Instead of a letter." He understood that he could not return his beloved, but he did not give up his feeling, which was stronger than despair.

References
1. Ukrainian and foreign literature. Reader. - K., 2000.
2. Mikulyak V.I. Vladimir Mayakovsky in the eyes of his contemporaries. - Kharkov, 1993.
3. Literary encyclopedia. - K, 1983.

Takes a place of honor. He is considered not only a predecessor, but also a teacher of Pushkin, whose name is associated with the heyday of Russian literature. Batyushkov's poetry was distinguished by a special plasticity, originality of poetic style and rare musicality. The poet created his numerous works at the turn of two historical eras. Features of that difficult time left an imprint on his lyrics.

Batyushkov's contribution to the history of Russian literature is difficult to overestimate. Critics consider his main merit to be the processing of poetic speech that existed by the beginning of the 19th century. In the lyrical works of this poet, the poetic language acquired harmony and indescribable flexibility. Masterfully mastering the poetic word, Batyushkov successfully achieved purity of language and wealth.

The well-known literary critic V. G. Belinsky more than once turned to Batyushkov's work. He pointed out that it was the works of this poet that prepared that literary breakthrough in Russian, which Pushkin made a little later. The great poet learned from his eminent predecessor to finish his own in such a way that they were impeccable in form and inner content.

Excellence in poetry did not come easy. Batyushkov persistently worked on every line of his works, painfully looking for suitable images and comparisons. His notes have been preserved, where he reproaches himself for his excessive passion for corrections and improvements. Of course, today no one will consider such meticulousness a vice. It was the desire to work out every small detail of the poetic form that allowed Batyushkov to achieve perfection in the sound of poetic speech.

Batyushkov was also distinguished by the desire to avoid everything that seems unnatural and far-fetched. The poet considered sincerity one of the signs of a good work. He tried, in his own words, to compose not with the mind, but with the soul. The poet's contemporaries noted the special power of feeling that they found in him. This power was greater than

Standalone Applications

Pronounced intonation and punctuation members of a sentence acting as an application. In some cases, isolated applications have only an attributive meaning, in others, various circumstantial shades of meaning are attached to it, which is associated with the lexical volume of the isolated construction, the place it occupies in relation to the defining word, and the morphological nature of the latter. Separated:

1) a common application expressed by a common noun with dependent words and related to a common noun;

such applications are usually postpositive, rarely they occur in the prepositive position. Her husband, a Putilov worker, spent two long periods in prison before the war.(A. N. Tolstoy). Centuries past giants, legends of the watchman's glory, Cossack mounds stand(Surkov);

2) an uncommon application related to a common noun, if the latter has explanatory words with it. He stopped his horse, raised his head and saw his correspondent, the deacon(Turgenev). One girl took care of me, Polish(Bitter). Rarely, an uncommon application is isolated with a single definable noun. And the enemies, fools, think that we are afraid of death(Fadeev). Usually, a single application tends not to separate from the noun being defined, but to merge with it: an excellent student, a hero city, a giant factory, patriot fighters, an engineer-economist, a home garden tobacco, pests, etc .;

3) an application expressed by a common noun and related to a proper name, if it is in a postposition; a prepositive application is isolated if it has an additional adverbial value. This afternoon, Kuliga, the timekeeper, was talking about French electrical engineers.(Bitter). A renowned scout, Travkin remained the same quiet and modest young man that he was when they first met.(Kazakevich);

4) an application expressed by the person's own name, if it serves to explain or clarify a common noun (the words “namely” can be put in front of such an application without changing the meaning). Their former roommate, Nikulin, considered it more prudent to separate from us(Korolenko). Vanya Zemnukhov's elder brother, Alexander, was a typographical worker by profession.(Fadeev);

5) an application related to a personal pronoun. For me, a person who began to live in a difficult, dark time, it is a great joy to know that such reasonable, good people are working to replace us, the old people.(Bitter). A cheerful southerner, in the most difficult moment he could make everyone laugh: he told Marseille jokes, jumped, played tricks(Ehrenburg);

6) an application attached to the word being defined by the union as (with a causal meaning), words by name, surname, nickname, family, etc. As a poet of modern times, Batyushkov could not help but pay tribute to romanticism.(Belinsky). A little dark-haired lieutenant, by the name of Zhuk, led the battalion to the backyards of that street, the facades of which represented the front line tonight.(Simonov). In the kitchen, the dear cook Ivan Ivanovich, nicknamed the Little Bear, is in charge(Bitter).

Dictionary-reference book of linguistic terms. Ed. 2nd. - M.: Enlightenment. Rosenthal D. E., Telenkova M. A.. 1976 .

See what "standalone applications" are in other dictionaries:

Standalone Applications

Standalone Applications- 1. A common application is isolated, expressed by a common noun with dependent words and related to a common noun (usually such an application comes after the word being defined, less often in front of it) ... A guide to spelling and style

standalone applications

standalone applications- Isolated in the composition of the sentence in the semantic and rhythmic intonation aspects of the application, which is a productive technique for complication of a simple sentence. In accordance with the general conditions, the following are distinguished: 1) common post-positive ... ...

See standalone applications... Dictionary of linguistic terms

Separate definitions A guide to spelling and style

Separate definitions- 1. As a rule, common definitions are separated (separated by a comma, and in the middle of the sentence are separated by commas on both sides) expressed by a participle or an adjective with words dependent on them and standing after the defined ... ... A guide to spelling and style

separate members Dictionary of linguistic terms T.V. Foal

separate members- Words or groups of words isolated as part of a sentence in a rhythmic intonational or semantic aspect, having a weakened syntactic connection with other members, expressing an additional message about one of the words or the entire sentence. ... ... Syntax: Dictionary

TABLE OF CONTENTS- SPELLING I. Spelling of vowels in the root § 1. Checked unstressed vowels § 2. Unchecked unstressed vowels § 3. Alternating vowels § 4. Vowels after hissing § 5. Vowels after q § 6. Letters e e § 7. Letter y II. Spelling consonants ... ... A guide to spelling and style

On September 14, 1321, Dante Alighieri died in Ravenna - according to F. Engels "... the last poet of the Middle Ages and at the same time the first poet of modern times." Shortly before his death, he completed the main work - the poem "Comedy", which forty years later another great Italian - Giovanni Boccaccio called "Divine". For six and a half centuries, the Divine Comedy has been exciting readers, and each new generation discovers something of its own in it - close and dear.

The poem has come down to us in a large number of lists - during the life of Dante, Europe did not yet know printing. The Divine Comedy was first printed by Gutenberg's student Johann Numeister in 1472 in the small Italian town of Foligno. Numeister was a strange, restless man. He did not stay long in any city, in any country. Starting his printing career in Italy, he soon moved to Mainz, where in 1479 he printed Meditations by Cardinal Turrekremat, already familiar to us. A year later we meet him in the French town of Albi, then in Lyon...

Thus, book printing spread through the labors of itinerant printers.

A new edition of The Divine Comedy is coming out soon. They are printed by Federico do Comitibus in the Italian city of Jesi and Georg and Paul Teutons - in Mantua. Wendelin from Speyer publishes in 1477 in Venice the famous poem by Dante with detailed and commentary by Jacopo della Lana from Bologna. Another famous commentator on The Divine Comedy was Christopher Laudino. His interpretation first saw the light on the pages of the Divine Comedy, published in Florence on August 30, 1481.

A well-preserved copy of the book is in the Lenin State Library of the USSR. We are interested in getting to know him. This is the first illustrated edition of the great poem. On the initial strip, after the preface, we see a large initial, the vertical stems of which serve as a frame for a miniature depicting Dante. Both the initial and the portrait are painted by hand in a place specially left in the printed text. But the rectangular, horizontally elongated illustration that occupies the bottom margin of the page is printed. But not at all like it was done earlier in the incunabula.

Surprisingly thin and clear stroke, delicate halftones, subdued light indicate that we are not in front of a woodcut, but an engraving on copper.

15th century printers preferred woodcuts for the reason that it can be printed along with the text on a conventional machine. Metal engraving requires a special machine. The Englishman William Caxton, who published The History of Troy in 1475 in the Dutch city of Bruges, engraved the title page on metal and pasted it on the first page of the book. A year later, in the same Bruges, a book was published with 10 illustrations engraved on copper and then glued onto the pages.

Theodosius Isograph later did the same.

In 1477, the Florentine printer Niccolò di Lorenzo published Bishop Antonio Bettini's Holy Mountain, illustrated with three full-page engravings. And in 1481 he also published Dante's Divine Comedy. On the pages of this book, for the first time, we meet the text printed from a typesetting form and illustrations engraved on copper. Di Lorenzo printed text on a conventional printing press. And then he transferred the same sheet to another machine and printed an illustration.

The illustrations were made by the famous Italian painter and graphic artist Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445-1510). Vaccio Valdinn (c. 1436 after 1480) roared them into the language of engraving. But he managed to make only 19 boards.

A complete set of drawings by Botticelli is kept in Berlin and in the Vatican Library. In 1960, the Berlin publishing house "Rütten und Löning" published the "Divine Comedy" with these wonderful illustrations.

Niccolo di Lorenzo intended to give an engraving to each of the songs of Dante's immortal work. Printing difficulties forced him to abandon this intention. In most of the surviving copies, only 2-3 engravings are reproduced. The copy with the largest number of impressions (23 some engravings are repeated) is in the Riccardi Library in Florence. There are 3 engravings in the Moscow copy. The pearl of the copy is hand-drawn initials. One of them - with a portrait of Dante - was discussed above. The initial opening of "Purgatory" depicts Dante and Virgil crossing the river of the underworld on the boat of the Styx. The third initial contains a portrait of Beatrice, Dante's beloved who died early.

The first illustrated edition of The Divine Comedy makes bibliophiles' hearts beat faster. In 1927 a copy with 3 engravings was sold at auction for 6,000 marks, and with 19 engravings for £3,950.

The difficulties of reproduction and printing forced Niccolo di Lorenzo, and other printers, to abandon attempts to illustrate books with copper engravings. And the 15th century. 5 more illustrated editions of the Divine Comedy were published - four of them in Venice. The drawings are reproduced in woodcut technique.

The copper engraving remains temporarily in shadow. It took the work of several generations of wonderful graphs to hone and reveal the possibilities inherent in this method. Only one century will pass, and in-depth engraving will replace woodcuts from the book. However, the latter, in a slightly modified guise, will take revenge in the 19th century. One of her triumphs will again be associated with the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. We are talking about the wonderful illustrations of the French artist Gustave Dore, which, of course, need to be told separately and in detail.

Following the simplified Platonic tradition of German models, the French romantics presented the poet as a misunderstood seer, as a priest in the sanctuary of art. The poets formed a party against the bourgeois public and then broke up into groups that were at enmity with each other. Madame de Stael's formula of 1801, according to which literature is a reflection of society, has lost its meaning. Literature repeated the protest of the revolution against the ruling society, became oppositional literature, the literature of the "future" and, in the end, the literature of singles, increasingly proud of their isolation. Rousseau's scheme of exclusivity based on abnormality naturally became the scheme of this generation - and the next.

Undoubtedly, the poet's self-giving, a genuine or simulated experience of suffering, anguish, contempt for the world, released the energy that stirred up the lyrics. After a brilliant era three centuries ago, French lyricism once again flourished in romanticism. Much is high in it, even if not of European rank. She was favored by the popular, widespread in France, the idea that poetry is the proto-language of mankind, the total language of the total subject, for which there are no boundaries between topics, but also there are no boundaries between religious and poetic enthusiasm. The romantic poetry of France was distinguished by the breadth and nuance of inner experience, creative sensitivity to oriental exotic colors and atmospheres, it brought amazing landscape and love poems and virtuoso versification. Fiery, raging, rich in dramatic gestures in Victor Hugo, who equally succeeded in insinuatingly intimate confessions and prophetic incantations; sad, painful to the point of cynicism in Musset; tender, striking purity of tone in Lamartine - soft, like velvet, in his own words.

Here began a very fruitful search for the new poetry of the inner impulse hidden in the word. Victor Hugo, using the experience of many predecessors, consciously and successfully led such a search. In the famous passage "Contemplations" one can read the following: the word is a living being, more powerful than the one who uses it; unexpectedly flashing in the darkness, it creates a meaning pleasing to itself; it is much more mysterious and deeper than thought, sight, feeling expect; the word is color, night, joy, sleep, suffering, ocean, infinity; the word is the divine logos. It is necessary to recall this passage, as well as Diderot's tentative statements and Novalis' decisive thoughts, if one wishes to understand Mallarmé's ideas about the initiatory energy of language: of course, the rigor of these ideas is far from Victor Hugo's enthusiastic intoxication.

The theory of the grotesque and the fragment

The theory of the grotesque proved to be very influential. Diderot sketched it in Rameau's Nephew, Victor Hugo developed it in the preface to Cromwell (1827) as part of a general theory of drama. This is the most interesting thing that was developed by the French in the general romantic ideology. The roots of this theory can probably be recognized in the considerations of Friedrich Schlegel regarding irony and witz, where the following concepts occur: chaos, eternal mobility, fragmentation, transcendental buffoonery. However, many details of a purely original nature can only be explained by the intuition of the twenty-five-year-old Hugo, who can hardly be suspected of preliminary and detailed consideration of the problem. These details emerged as symptoms of a new aesthetic.

The word "grotesque" once meant an ornament in painting, designed in the spirit of an allegory or a fairy tale. In the 17th century, understanding expanded, and anything strange, burlesque, distorted, extremely specific began to be called “grotesque”. Approximately so, and similar to Schlegel, Victor Hugo understands the grotesque. However, in his theory of the grotesque, an energetic attempt was made to aesthetically balance the beautiful and the ugly. This latter, disqualified, permissible only in the lower literary genres, permitted only on the periphery of the visual arts, has risen to metaphysical expressiveness. For Hugo, the world is fundamentally split into opposites, and only because of such splitting is it able to exist as a higher unity. This has often been said before, it is an ancient thought. But Hugo emphasizes the role of the ugly in a new way. From now on, it is not the opposite of beauty, but an independent value. In a work of art, the ugly appears as a grotesque, as a sketch of the imperfect and deranged. But imperfection is "a legitimate means of achieving harmony." It can be seen how in such a "harmony" disharmony appears, namely the disharmony of the fragment. The grotesque must rid us of beauty and with its "hoarse voice" eliminate its monotony. It reflects the dissonance between the animal and higher levels of man. Since any manifestation breaks up into fragments, we come to the conclusion that the “great whole” is generally given to us as a part or a fragment – ​​the “whole” does not agree with a person and is incompatible with him. What is the whole? Significantly, there is no answer, utterly confusing at best. Presumably, Hugo thinks in a Christian direction: then this whole is a sterile transcendence. Only its fragments, grotesquely distorted, feel Hugo, but this grotesque does not cause laughter. The laughter of such a grotesque softens a spasm or a nervous tremor, turns into a grimace, provokes excitement and anxiety, which the modern soul seeks more than appeasement.

Similar romantic views were later developed by Theophile Gautier. These are the stigmata Baudelaire spoke of. They point the way to the verlaine "poems of the harlequin", to the convulsive poetry of Rimbaud and Tristan Corbière, to the "black humor" of Lautréamont and his followers - the surrealists, and, finally, to the absurdity of today's writers. All this has the dark purpose of hinting in dissonances and passages at transcendence, since no one else can perceive its harmony and unity.

Poet of the New Age

With Baudelaire, French lyrics became a European event. This is evident from its influence on Germany, England, Italy, Spain. In France itself, quite quickly, a different kind of inspiration was felt emanating from Baudelaire than from the romantics. It affected Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé. The latter admitted that he started where Baudelaire ended. At the end of his life, Paul Valéry spoke of a direct connecting line leading from Baudelaire to himself. The Englishman T. S. Eliot called Baudelaire "the great example of new poetry in any language." In 1945, Jean Cocteau wrote: “Through his grimaces, slowly, like the light of a star, his gaze reaches us.”

Many such statements refer to the poet of the “modern times” (Modernität). This is quite logical, since Baudelaire himself initiated such an expression. He spoke on this topic in 1859, justifying his own novelty by a necessary feature of the modern artist - the ability to see in the desert of a big city not only the fall of a person, but also a mysterious beauty still undiscovered. This is the fundamental problem of Baudelaire: how can poetry exist in a civilization of technology and commerce? His lyrics point the way, prose thinks it through theoretically. The path goes as far as possible from the banality of the real to the zone of the mysterious, but in such a way that the dramatic material of civilization is included in this zone, acquiring poetic energy. Such is the caustic and magical substance of the new lyrics.

The main advantages of Baudelaire are the remarkable spiritual potential and clarity of artistic consciousness, the combination of poetic genius with critical intellect. His views on the poetic process are not only not inferior in quality to his poetry, but often surpass it in breadth, as in the case of Novalis. These views turned out to be even more effective for future generations than his poetic achievements. They are reflected in the collections of articles "Curiosités esthétiques" and "L'Art romantique". Both books contain sketches and programs, developed not only from observations of the literary, but also artistic and musical process.