Speaking about Russian art of the 19th century, experts often call it literary-centric. Indeed, Russian literature largely determined the themes and problems, the general dynamics of the development of both music and the fine arts of its time. Therefore, many paintings by Russian painters seem to be illustrations for novels and stories, and musical works are built on detailed literary programs.

This also affected the fact that all outstanding literary critics undertook to evaluate both musical and pictorial works, to formulate their requirements for them.

This, of course, primarily applies to prose, but the poetry of the 19th century also had a strong influence on the development of national art. Whether this is good or bad is another question, but for a full-fledged study of Russian poetry and its integration into the general context of Russian art, it is undoubtedly very convenient.

Thus, the main genres of Russian musical art of the 19th century were romance and opera - vocal works based on a poetic text.

Painting, in turn, most often depicted pictures of Russian nature at different times of the year, which directly corresponds to the natural lyrics of Russian poets of different directions. No less popular were everyday scenes "from the life of the people", just as clearly echoing the poetry of the democratic direction. However, this is so obvious that it does not need proof.

Therefore, the simplest move is to illustrate the studied poems by listening to romances on their words and demonstrating reproductions. At the same time, it is best if the poems of one poet accompany the romances of one composer and the paintings of one painter. This will allow, along with the study of the work of each poet, to get an additional idea of ​​​​two more masters of Russian culture, which is impossible to do when using the illustrations of many authors. So, for the poetry of F. Glinka, you can pick up the graphics and paintings of F. Tolstoy and the romances of Verstovsky or Napravnik, in the poetry of Polonsky - choirs to his poems by S. Taneyev and landscape painting by Savrasov, etc.

Those who would like to understand the relationship between poetry and fine arts in more detail should refer to the books of V. Alfonsov "Words and Colors" (M.; L., 1966) and K. Pigarev "Russian Literature and Fine Arts" (M., 1972), articles in the collections Interaction and Synthesis of Arts (L., 1978), Literature and Painting (L., 1982).

It will be very good if the students themselves can be involved in the selection of music and reproductions: this will teach them to navigate the world of art on their own, to be creative in its interpretation. Even in cases where the choice of students does not seem quite successful to the teacher, it is worth bringing it to the judgment of the class team and jointly decide what is not entirely accurate in this choice and why. Thus, lessons and extracurricular activities in literature can become a genuine introduction to the national Russian culture as a whole.

One cannot ignore such an area of ​​direct contact between the arts as the portrayal of poets by contemporary artists. It is the artistic images-versions that make it possible to capture the personality of the writers in their aesthetic, artistic incarnation, which is valuable in itself for real portrait painters. D. Merezhkovsky brilliantly demonstrates how a masterful portrait can become a starting point for understanding creativity in his article about Fofanov. Therefore, we can recommend the teacher to use in his work portraits of Russian poets reproduced in the volumes of the Poet's Library series: A. Koltsov by K. Gorbunov (1838), K. Pavlova and A. Khomyakov by E. Dmitriev-Mamonov, portraits by little-known graphic artists and painters, friendly caricatures of contemporaries.

Photo portraits of poets, illustrations for their works, autographs can become no less interesting and practically useful. These materials are usually reproduced to the extent necessary for the work in publications of the Poet's Library, collected works and editions of selected works of poets, a description of which is given at the end of this publication.

Below is an abbreviated article by V. Gusev on the Russian romance; We also recommend that you refer to the book by V. Vasina-Grossman “Music and the Poetic Word” (M., 1972), the collection of articles “Poetry and Music” (M., 1993) and the recent article by M. Petrovsky “Riding to the Island of Love”, or What is Russian romance” (Questions of Literature. 1984. No. 5), as well as an invaluable practical reference book “Russian Poetry in Russian Music” (M., 1966), which lists almost all vocal works based on verses by Russian poets of the 19th century , grouped by the authors of the texts, indicating the corresponding musical editions.

From the article "Songs and romances of Russian poets"

<…>The first half of the 19th century, in terms of the variety of types of vocal lyrics, the abundance of works and the richness of their ideological and artistic content, can be considered the heyday of Russian everyday romance and song. It was at this time that the main song fund was created, which to a large extent determined the nature of the Russian national musical and poetic culture and left its mark on the musical and poetic life of Russian society.

In the second half of the 19th century, significant changes took place in Russian vocal lyrics - they affect both its ideological content, the correlation of genres, and stylistic visual musical and poetic means.

The process of democratization of Russian culture, the flourishing of realism and the deepening of nationality in various types of art had a beneficial effect on the development of songwriting. The thoughtful study of the folklore tradition by poets and composers and a more independent, free handling of it led to the fact that the so-called "Russian song", which is distinguished by deliberate folklore stylization, ceased to satisfy both the artists themselves and the critics and the public.

Folk poetic traditions, as if newly discovered and organically assimilated by the entire advanced Russian artistic culture, gave it a pronounced national character, no matter what topics it touches, no matter what material it takes, no matter what means of reflecting reality it uses. The need for a special genre of "Russian song" in these conditions has disappeared. Having played its positive role in the formation of national art, it gave way to other types of song lyrics, characterized by no less, if not greater, national originality. Deprived of signs of external, formal folklore, vocal lyrics not only do not lose, but, on the contrary, develop the best traditions of folk songwriting, enriching them with the experience acquired by Russian "book poetry". It is characteristic that even poets, who are closest in their manner to folk poetry, overcome the conventions of the “Russian song” genre and refuse the term itself, preferring the name “song” to it, or even do without the latter. The stylistic features of folk poetry are creatively assimilated, processed, and receive a pronounced individualized refraction in the artistic method of each more or less major poet.

The desire to overcome the conventions of the “Russian song”, to abandon its musical and poetic clichés, gives rise in the aesthetic consciousness of outstanding poets, composers, and especially critics of the second half of the 19th century, a kind of reaction to the genre as a whole, even to the best works of this genre created in the first half of the century. The very nationality of many “Russian songs” is being questioned, and they are not always given a fair assessment. One Koltsov avoids the harsh judgment of new generations, although enthusiastic assessments are being replaced by an objective analysis of both the strengths and weaknesses of his poetry. The revolutionary-democratic criticism of the 1950s and 1960s takes a step forward in this respect in comparison with Belinsky. Already Herzen, highly appreciating Koltsov's poetry, comparing his significance for Russian poetry with Shevchenko's significance for Ukrainian poetry, prefers the latter. Ogarev, as if commenting on his friend's remark, defines the meaning of Koltsov's poetry as a reflection of "the people's strength, which has not yet matured to the point." The limitations of Koltsov's nationality become especially clear to Dobrolyubov: "His (Koltsov. - V. G.) poetry lacks a comprehensive view, the simple class of the people appears in his solitude from common interests." Elsewhere, like Herzen, comparing Koltsov with Shevchenko, Dobrolyubov wrote that the Russian poet "with his mindset and even his aspirations sometimes moves away from the people." The “Russian songs” of Merzlyakov, Delvig, Tsyganov receive an even harsher assessment under the pen of revolutionary-democratic criticism - they are recognized as pseudo-folk. The same thing happens in the field of music criticism. From the point of view of Stasov and his followers, the "Russian song" cultivated by Alyabyev, Varlamov and Gurilev is seen as artificial, imitative, pseudo-folk. In his monograph on Glinka, V.V. Stasov, advocating for a truly national and democratic art, gave a general negative assessment of folklore stylizations and borrowings that were fashionable in various types of Russian art of the first half of the 19th century: “In the 30s, we had, as it is known that there is a lot of talk about nationality in art ... Nationality was then accepted in the most limited sense, and therefore it was then thought that in order to impart a national character to his work, the artist must insert into it, as into a new frame, what already exists among the people, created his immediate creative instinct. They wanted and demanded the impossible: an amalgam of old materials with new art; they forgot that the old materials corresponded to their specific time and that the new art, having already worked out its forms, also needs new materials. This statement by Stasov has a fundamental character. It helps to understand the inconsistency of a fairly common simplistic idea about the requirements for the art of an outstanding democratic critic. When they talk about his propaganda of folklore, about his struggle for national identity and the nationality of art, they usually forget that Stasov always opposed the consumer attitude to folklore, against its passive, mechanical assimilation, against stylization, against external, naturalistic folklore. This statement also explains Stasov's sharply negative attitude towards the "Russian song": even about the "Nightingale" by Delvig and Alyabyev, he spoke ironically, putting it among the "worthless" Russian "musical compositions of our then amateurs." He considered all composers of the pre-Glinka period "amateurs" and believed that their experiences "were completely insignificant, weak, colorless and mediocre." Stasov ignored the song work of these composers, and his follower A.N. Serov contemptuously dubbed the entire style of "Russian song" - "Varlamovism", considering its characteristic features "vulgarity" and "sweetness".

The exaggeration and injustice of such reviews is now obvious, but they should be taken into account in order to understand that the rejection of the “Russian song” genre in the second half of the 19th century was dictated by a progressive desire for the development of realism and for a higher level of nationality. This should explain the fact that Nekrasov, and even Nikitin and Surikov, do not so much follow the tradition of the "Russian song", but combine an interest in folk life and genuine folklore with the study of the experience of Russian classical poetry. It is also no coincidence that now, even more often than in the first half of the 19th century, songs in the exact sense of the word are not those poems that are to some extent still guided by the traditions of the "Russian song", but those that the poets themselves did not prophesy " song future. Even I. N. Rozanov noticed that among Nekrasov’s poems, his propaganda-civil lyrics, plot poems, excerpts from poems, and not actually “songs” gained popularity in everyday life. The same thing happened with Nikitin’s works - it was not his “songs” that firmly entered the oral repertoire (of which only “The Bobylya’s Song” really became a song), but such poems as “A deep hole was dug with a spade ...”, “I rode from fairs ukhar-merchant…”, “Time moves slowly…”. Surikov is no exception - written in the traditional style "Song" ("In the green garden of a nightingale ...") turned out to be much less popular than the poems "In the steppe", "I grew up an orphan ...", "Rowan", "The execution of Stenka Razin" ; in these poems, the connection with folklore is undeniable, but it acquires the character of a free interpretation of a folk poetic plot or image. Indicative in this regard is the poem "In the Steppe", inspired by the well-known drawn-out folk song about the Mozdok steppe. It is curious that this poem, having turned into a song, ousted the traditional song from the folk repertoire. True, the people at the same time abandoned the plot frame of the song, introduced by the poet.

If the observed phenomenon is so characteristic of poets directly connected with the folklore tradition, then it is not surprising that it can also be traced in the work of other poets of the second half of the 19th century. Most of them no longer write poetry in the style of the "Russian song"; in those cases when some poets paid tribute to this genre, as a rule, it is not their “Russian songs” that acquire song life, but other poems - as, for example, by A. Tolstoy or May. The most popular songs of the second half of the 19th century no longer resemble the genre of the “Russian song” in their type.

True, at the end of the 19th century, the genre of “Russian song” seemed to be reborn in the work of Drozhzhin, Ozhegov, Panov, Kondratiev, Ivin and other poets, who were grouped mainly in the “Moscow Comradely Circle of Writers from the People”, “Literary and Musical Circle. Surikov" and in various similar provincial associations. But of the numerous works written in the manner of Koltsovo and Surikov's lyrics and filling the collections and song books published by these circles and especially by the enterprising Ozhegov, only a very few acquired a truly song life, and even fewer entered the oral repertoire of the masses.

The song popularity of the works of Surikov poets is often exaggerated by researchers of their work. Sometimes simply incorrect information is reported, which migrates from authoritative publications to various articles and comments in collections. So, in the academic “History of Russian Literature” we read: “Surikovites are songwriters par excellence. Their best poems, akin to the style of peasant lyrics, sometimes firmly entered into popular use. These are the songs “Do not scold me, dear ...” by A. E. Razorenova, “I lost my ringlet ...” by M. I. Ozhegova and others. But in reality, the popular song “Do not scold me, dear ...” was created by Razorenov long before the Surikov circle arose, and even before Surikov himself began to write poetry, namely, in the 40s or early 50s years; none of the poems of Razorenov-Surikov, written in the second half of the 19th century, became a song. As for the song "I lost my ringlet ...", Ozhegov is not at all its author - he only processed the song known to him. It is characteristic that other songs of Ozhegov himself (excluding "Between the steep banks ...") did not gain such popularity as this adaptation of his old song.

Drozhzhin was a very prolific poet, and his literary activity lasted more than half a century, many of his poems were set to music, some were popularized from the stage by the singer N. Plevitskaya. But it is noteworthy that actually 3-4 of his poems, mainly from the early period of his work, became songs. Even more problematic is the song fate of the poems of other Surikov poets and poets close to them. Of the poems of Panov, who wrote a large number of "songs", two or three came into oral use. Several dozens of “Russian songs” were published in Kondratiev’s collection “Under the noise of oak forests”, but none of them was sung (in the urban environment, his other poems gained some fame: one was written in the style of “cruel romance”, the other - “gypsy song”) . No matter how Ozhegov promoted the poems of I. Ivin, A. Egorov, I. Vdovin, S. Lyutov, N. Prokofiev, N. Libina and others in his songbooks, they did not penetrate into the oral repertoire.

The Surikov poets not only did not move forward compared to their teacher, who creatively accepted folklore traditions, but, in fact, took a step back - to the “Russian song” of the first half of the 19th century. They failed to breathe life into this genre, the possibilities of which were already exhausted by their predecessors.

The most characteristic type of vocal lyrics of the second half of the 19th - early 20th century is the freedom-loving revolutionary song in its various genre varieties: propaganda, hymn, satirical, mourning march. Created by poetic representatives of various generations and trends in the liberation struggle of the Russian people—revolutionary democracy, revolutionary populism, and the proletariat—these songs from the underground, from illegal circles and organizations, were distributed through prisons and exiles, penetrated the masses, sounded at demonstrations and rallies, during strikes, strikes and barricade fights.

As a rule, these songs were created by the participants in the revolutionary movement themselves, who were not professional poets, or by people who combined literary activity with participation in the liberation struggle: A. Pleshcheev (“Forward! Without fear and doubt ...”), P. Lavrov (“Let's renounce from the old world…”, M. Mikhailov (“Be brave, friends! Do not lose…”), L. Palmin (“Do not cry over the corpses of the fallen soldiers…”), G. Machtet (“Tormented by severe bondage…”), V. Tan-Bogoraz (“We dug our own grave ...”), L. Radin (“Boldly, comrades, in step ...”), G. Krzhizhanovsky (“Rage, tyrants ...”), N. Rivkin (“The sea groaned in fury ...”), etc. The authors of the melodies of these songs, as a rule, also turned out to be non-professional composers (A. Rashevskaya, N. and P. Peskov), sometimes - the poets themselves (L. Radin, N. Rivkin), very rarely - well-known musical figures (P. Sokalsky), most often the authors of the music remained unknown.

The repertoire of freedom fighters included, acquiring in oral performance the features of revolutionary songwriting, and poems by poets who were far from the liberation struggle, but objectively reflected in some of their works the aspirations of its participants or caught the public mood of their era. Therefore, the poems of A. K. Tolstoy (“Kolodniki”), Y. Polonsky (“What is she to me ...”), I. Nikitin (“Time moves slowly ...), I. Nikitin (“Time moves slowly ...), right up to V. Bryusov’s “The Mason”, and even some works by conservative authors: “There is a cliff on the Volga ...” by A. A. Navrotsky, “It’s my strip, stripes ...” by V. V. Krestovsky, “Open the window, open ...” You. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko.

A remarkable feature that distinguishes the revolutionary songs of the second half of the 19th - early 19th centuries is that they were truly widespread, often sung in versions that differed from the author's edition, they themselves became a model for similar anonymous songs, were included in the process of collective songwriting, - in a word, folklorized. Another characteristic feature of them is choral, most often polyphonic performance without accompaniment (“Russian song”, as a rule, by its very content assumed solo performance; in the first half of the 19th century, only drinking, student and some “free songs” were performed by the choir).

The latter circumstance allows in the vocal lyrics of the second half of the 19th century to draw a clearer line between the song in the proper sense of the word and the romance, oriented towards solo performance and musical accompaniment on some instrument.

But even in the romance art itself, a noticeable evolution has taken place since the middle of the 19th century. As the researcher notes, “the area of ​​the “professional” and “domestic” romance is also sharply demarcated, and their ratio changes significantly.” Indeed, in the 18th century and in the first half of the 19th century, all romance art was, in fact, accessible to any music lover and easily entered home life, especially among the noble intelligentsia. Only some of Glinka's romances can be considered the first examples of a "professional" romance, requiring great technical skill and special training from the singer. The situation is completely different in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Everyday romance is now becoming mainly the lot of minor composers. Among the authors of everyday romance to the words of Russian contemporary poets are N. Ya. Afanasyev, P. P. Bulakhov, K. P. Vilboa, K. Yu. A. Lishina, V. N. Paskhalova, V. T. Sokolova. The historian of Russian music N.V. Findeizen writes: “Some of the works of these romancers ... sometimes enjoyed enviable, albeit cheap popularity ...” Everyday romance in the proper sense of the word is smaller in ideological and psychological content and is often marked by the seal of formal epigonism in relation to the masters of everyday life. romance of the first half of the 19th century. This, of course, does not mean that in the mass of mediocre works of the named genre there were not at all those that, in their artistry, would approach the everyday romance of the first half of the 19th century.

Very popular everyday romances of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries were “A Pair of Bays” by Apukhtin, “Under the fragrant branch of lilacs ...” by V. Krestovsky, “You forgot” by P. Kozlov, “It was a long time ago ... I don’t remember when it was ... ” S. Safonov, “Letter” by A. Mazurkevich, “Under the impression of Chekhov's Seagull” by E. Bulanina, “Nocturne” by Z. Bukharova. They have long entered into oral use.

The best everyday romances of the period under review are some of the most accessible romances by major composers to music lovers. It is noteworthy that with the music of composers of the second half of the 19th century, poems of poets of the first half of the century also enter everyday life. Such, in particular, are many of Balakirev's romances to texts by Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov. It is curious, for example, that the raznochintsy of the 60s fell in love with Balakirev's romance to the words of Lermontov "Selim's Song" - it is no coincidence that "the lady in mourning" from Chernyshevsky's novel "What is to be done?" sings it. Some of Dargomyzhsky's romances to the words of poets of the middle of the 19th century - N. Pavlov (“She of sinless dreams ...”), Yu. Zhadovskaya (“You will soon forget me ...”), F. Miller (“I don’t care ...”) gained song popularity. . Nekrasov-Mussorgsky's "Calistrat" ​​and "I came to you with greetings ..." by Fet-Balakirev became widely known. Particularly famous were many of Tchaikovsky's romances to the words of poets of the second half of the 19th century: “Oh, sing that song, dear ...” (Pleshcheev), “I would like in a single word ...” (Mei), “Crazy nights, sleepless nights ...” (Apukhtin ), “At dawn, don’t wake her up ...” (Fet), “In the midst of a noisy ball ...” (A. K. Tolstoy), “I opened the window ...” (K. R.), “We were sitting with you by the sleeping river ... "(D. Ratgauz).

Many of the poems of the poets of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries became remarkable phenomena of Russian vocal lyrics, where a complete fusion of text and music was achieved. This applies to the work of such poets as A. K. Tolstoy, Pleshcheev, Maikov, Fet, Polonsky, Apukhtin, Mei. The poems of some poets generally still live only as romances (Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Rostopchina, Minsky, Ratgauz, K. R.). Together with the music of the greatest composers, the poems of these poets have firmly entered the consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia, and as the cultural level of the masses rises, they become the property of an ever wider circle of working people. Therefore, when evaluating the contribution of Russian poetry to national culture, it is impossible to limit ourselves to the heritage of the classics, but it is necessary to take into account the best examples of everyday romance - first of all, those works that are included in the repertoire of popular vocalists and are constantly heard from the stage of concert halls and on radio, and also penetrate into modern mass amateur art.

If we turn to the poets whose poems were especially often and willingly used by the greatest Russian composers and whose texts were used to create classical romances, it is easy to see that, with a few exceptions, the choice of names is not accidental. Despite the fact that each composer's personal preferences and tastes could play a big role (for example, Mussorgsky's passion for the poetry of Golenishchev-Kutuzov), nevertheless, the circle of poets, on whose texts a particularly large number of romances were written, is represented by very specific names. In the work of any of these poets, one can find many poems that have been repeatedly set to music by composers who differ in their creative method. And even the fact that excellent music was written to such poems by Glinka or Tchaikovsky, whose romances have already gained fame, did not stop either their contemporaries or composers of the subsequent era, right up to our time. There are poems on which literally dozens of romances have been written. Of the poets of the first half of the 19th century, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lermontov and Koltsov were especially happy in this respect. Romances based on the texts of the first Russian romanticist were created over the course of a whole century - from the first experiments of his friend composer A. A. Pleshcheev to the works of Ippolitov-Ivanov. In the 19th century alone, more than one hundred and seventy Pushkin's romances were set to music. The poem “Do not sing, beauty, with me ...”, despite the fact that it still lives primarily with the music of Glinka, created in 1828, after that many other composers addressed (among them there are such names as Balakirev, Rimsky -Korsakov, Rachmaninov). The poem "The Singer" has been set to music by more than fifteen composers of the 19th century. In the 19th - early 20th centuries, a huge number of romances were created based on more than seventy poems by Lermontov. His “Prayer” (“In a difficult moment of life ...”) was set to music by more than thirty composers. Over twenty romances exist on the words of "Cossack lullaby" and poems: "Do I hear your voice ...", "No, I do not love you so ardently ...". Perhaps the first place among Russian poets in this regard belongs to Koltsov - about seven hundred romances and songs were created on his texts by more than three hundred composers! As you can see, the proportion of poets of the first half of the 19th century in Russian vocal lyrics approximately coincides with their significance in the history of poetry - the romances of the primary poets clearly predominate (the only exception is Baratynsky, whose words are written relatively few romances).

When we turn to the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, here the picture, at first glance, suddenly changes: poets, whose role in the history of poetry seems modest, are often preferred by composers to larger poets, and in the romance repertoire they hardly occupy no greater place than the luminaries of Russian poetry. It is curious that while about sixty texts from the poetic heritage of Nekrasov attracted the attention of composers, more than seventy texts from Maikov and Polonsky were set to music. More than ninety poems by Fet, over fifty poems by Pleshcheev and Ratgauz, over forty poems by Nadson, and the same number by Apukhtin became romances. Perhaps the picture for the poetry of the beginning of the 20th century is especially paradoxical: a kind of “record” belongs to Balmont - more than one hundred and fifty of his poems have been set to music (for some twenty years, almost as many as in a century by Pushkin, and more than by Lermontov , Tyutchev, Nekrasov). Moreover, among the composers who created romances to his words, we meet Rachmaninov, Taneyev, S. Prokofiev, Grechaninov, Gliere, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Stravinsky, Myaskovsky ... Blok is significantly inferior in this respect - about fifty romances were written to his texts. Bryusov could also envy Balmont in this respect. Other poets noticeably "lag behind" both Blok and Bryusov - even A. Akhmatova, V. Ivanov, D. Merezhkovsky, F. Sologub, whose texts were nevertheless repeatedly set to music. However, many famous poets of the early 20th century could be proud that at least one or two of their poems were set to music by the greatest composers of that time.

What attracted musicians to the poetry of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries? Of course, a categorical and monosyllabic answer to this question is hardly possible, equally applicable to the work of all poets. But, taking into account the features and possibilities of vocal music, as well as the creative tasks that the composers set themselves when creating romances, it should be noted that they preferred those verses where the inner psychological state of the lyrical hero is most directly expressed, especially such where the poet's experience turns out to be incomplete, not expressed to the end, which made it possible to reveal it by musical means. The poetry of allusions, omissions, containing deep lyrical overtones, represented the greatest creative scope for the composer's imagination. Not the last role was played by some stylistic features of the creative manner of such poets as Fet, A. Tolstoy, May, Polonsky - the development of the theme and the compositional structure of the poem, reminiscent of the structure of a musical work, the saturation of the text with repetitions, exclamations, semantic pauses, the melodiousness of the language, the smoothness of the rhythm , flexible speech intonation. Some of these poets consciously followed musical laws in their work. So, Fet proceeded from the theoretical principle formulated by him: "Poetry and music are not only related, but inseparable ... All centuries-old poetic works ... in essence ... songs." It is no coincidence that Fet called one of the cycles “Melodies”. The poet admitted: “I was always drawn from a certain area of ​​​​words to an indefinite area of ​​​​music, into which I went, as far as my strength was enough.”

Much for understanding the fate of Russian poetry in music is given by the statements of the composers themselves. Tchaikovsky clearly formulated in one of his letters that "the main thing in vocal music is the truthfulness of the reproduction of feelings and moods ...". The great composer thought a lot about the peculiarities of Russian versification and the intonational structure of Russian poetry, he searched in poetry for a variety of rhythms, stanzas and rhymes that create the most favorable opportunities for the musical expression of the lyrical content of poetry. Tchaikovsky was attracted by the type of melodious intonation-expressive verse, and he himself called Fet's poetry as a model in this regard. The composer wrote about him: “We can rather say that Fet, in his best moments, goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry, and boldly takes a step into our field ... This is not just a poet, but rather a poet-musician, as if avoiding even such topics that easy to put into words." Tchaikovsky also highly appreciated the poetry of A. K. Tolstoy: “Tolstoy is an inexhaustible source for texts to music; this is one of my favorite poets.

It was the manner of expressing feelings, moods and thoughts inherent in the poetry of Fet and A. K. Tolstoy, as well as Pleshcheev, Mey, Polonsky, Apukhtin and poets close to them, and the nature of the intonation of the verse that provided the best opportunities for setting their poems to music. Therefore, not only in Tchaikovsky, but also in the romance work of other major composers of the second half of the 19th century, along with the classical masters of Russian poetry, the poems of these poets occupy a central place.

Let's start with a few quotes.

"In poetry and poetic prose, in music, in painting, in sculpture, in architecture - poetry is all that in them is not art, not effort, that is, thought, feeling, ideal."

“The poet creates with a word, and this creative word, inspired by an idea that powerfully possessed the soul of the poet, rapidly passing into another soul, produces the same inspiration in it and just as powerfully embraces it; this action is neither mental nor moral - it is simply power, which we cannot repel by force of will or by force of reason. Poetry, acting on the soul, does not give it anything definite: it is neither the acquisition of some new, logically processed idea, nor the excitation of moral feeling, nor its affirmation by a positive rule; No! - this is a secret, all-encompassing, deep action of frank beauty, which embraces the whole soul and leaves indelible traces in it, beneficent or destructive, depending on the property of the work of art, or, rather, according to the spirit of the artist himself.

If this is the action of poetry, then the power to produce it, given to the poet, must be nothing but a call from God, it is, so to speak, a call from the Creator to enter into the fellowship of creation with Him. The Creator put his spirit into creation: the poet, his messenger, seeks, finds and reveals to others the ubiquitous presence of the spirit of God. This is the true meaning of his vocation, his great gift, which at the same time is a terrible temptation, for in this strength for a high flight lies the danger of a deep fall.

“In order to write poems, a person talented in literature only needs to accustom himself to being able to use, in place of each, one real, necessary word, depending on the requirement of rhyme or meter, ten more approximately the same meaning words and then accustom every phrase , which, in order to be clear, has only one proper placement of words, to be able to say, with all possible movements of words, so that it looks like some sense; to learn more, guided by words that come across for rhyme, to come up with semblances of thoughts, feelings or pictures for these words, and then such a person can no longer stop making poems, depending on the need, short or long, religious, love or civil.

“Excuse me, isn’t it crazy to rack your brains for days on end in order to squeeze living, natural human speech at all costs into measured, rhymed lines. It’s the same as if someone would suddenly think of walking only along a spread rope, and without fail squatting at every step.

The first two quotations belong to Pushkin's contemporaries and friends, the poets Kuchelbecker and Zhukovsky; the second two - to his far from the worst followers, the prose writers Leo Tolstoy and Shchedrin. As you can see, the attitude towards poetry expressed in these quotations is exactly the opposite: instead of admiration and admiration, there is humiliation and contempt for poets and their “products”.

Why did this monstrous discord in thoughts arise? It would be easiest to answer this question this way: the Pushkin era was a high, golden age of Russian poetry, then it was replaced by the age of prose, and poetry first faded into the background, and then completely ceased to exist. However, Russian critics also wrote about this, starting with Polevoy and Belinsky; Leo Tolstoy also stated the same with his characteristic peremptoryness: “In Russian poetry<…>after Pushkin, Lermontov (Tyutchev is usually forgotten), poetic fame passes first to the very dubious poets Maikov, Polonsky, Fet, then to Nekrasov, completely devoid of poetic gift, then to the artificial and prosaic poet Alexei Tolstoy, then to the monotonous and weak Nadson, then to completely mediocre Apukhtin, and then everything gets in the way, and there are poets, their name is legion, who do not even know what poetry is and what it means what they write and why they write.

Maybe the seasoned human being is right here, and Russian poetry after Pushkin and Lermontov should be forgotten and erased from our memory? It seems, however, that something is not quite right here. At least, if we recall the poems of Tyutchev and Fet, Nekrasov and Maikov, Polonsky and Pleshcheev, familiar to everyone from childhood ...

Indeed, from the late 1830s, magazines began to publish poetry less and less often. They are replaced by young Russian prose and sharp-toothed literary criticism, which undertook to defend its interests from the very first steps. And she, this criticism, was extremely partisan, that is, she openly defended on the pages of the magazine the interests of certain political forces that originated in Russia at that time and entered into a battle that has not stopped to this day. It is clear that poetry addressed to the soul of man, to the eternal, was this criticism - regardless of its political interests - simply to nothing. But with prose, especially also party prose, it’s much simpler: after all, it describes understandable, earthly events and explains in clear text who is to blame, what to do, when the real day comes ... But poetry needs to be dealt with, interpreted, and for this it is better to understand either just not notice it, or ridicule parodist clickers.

Prose writers attacked the poetry of the middle of the century no less furiously than the critics. No, they agreed to consider their close friends real poets, they constantly admired their creations (especially in private correspondence), but put them next to Pushkin ...

Therefore, Pushkin's anniversary turned, first of all, into a celebration, in the words of Vyazemsky, prose writers. Even Shchedrin was perplexed about this: "Apparently, the clever Turgenev and the insane Dostoevsky managed to steal the holiday from Pushkin in their favor." Other prose writers turned him to their own, that is, prosaic benefit: it is enough to open newspapers and magazines of those years or anniversary collections to find that modern poets were simply not allowed to participate in the celebrations.

Of course, in the foreground among politicized Russian prose writers were, as always, party interests. But no less frankly expressed by all of them, in this case, regardless of political preferences, the general idea: Pushkin is a great poet of the past, today there are no poets and cannot be.

Of course, not without the pressure of these ideas, books, for example, Fet did not diverge for many years, as, indeed, in their time, the poems of Alexander Pushkin. But the “folk vitias” preferred not to talk about this out loud ...

Thus, a kind of conspiracy against Russian poetry developed - a conspiracy in which politicians, critics, and prose writers took part. The poets continued to create, not paying attention to the fact that the circle of their readers was getting narrower - despite the unconditional achievements. Poets made their way to the public in a different way - primarily through the increasingly popular romance, through simple poems addressed to children.

Indeed, after Pushkin, Russian poetry becomes much simpler and more accessible, it almost refuses to appeal to ancient and European traditions, consciously focuses on the folk song, speaks of simple things that are necessary for everyone: nature and love, the delights of youth and the experiences of old age. In it, the high civil pathos of the Pushkin era sounds less and less, more and more often - the sincere voice of a loved one. Poetry of the second half of the 19th century is more intimate than its more successful predecessor.

At the same time, it does not at all deviate from the defense of higher human values ​​- on the contrary, it consistently defends them in contrast to the prose addressed to the actual modernity. This is especially evident in cases where the same writer writes both in verse and in prose. For example, Turgenev is the author of Fathers and Sons and Gray Morning. Today, the novel about nihilists needs to be explained in detail, and the classic romance does not need any comments ...

Contemporaries, absorbed in everyday storms, were incomprehensible and wild Fet's words, written about the publication of Tyutchev's collection of poems, almost unnoticed by critics: “All living things consist of opposites; the moment of their harmonious union is elusive, and lyricism, this color and pinnacle of life, in its essence, will forever remain a mystery. Lyrical activity also requires extremely opposite qualities, such as insane, blind courage and the greatest caution (the finest sense of proportion). Who is not able to throw himself from the seventh floor upside down, with an unshakable belief that he will soar through the air, he is not a lyricist.

Alexander
ARKHANGELSKY

Introducing chapters from the new school textbook

Russian lyrics of the second half of the 19th century

Russian poets and the era of "social" prose. Russian poets of the beginning of the 19th century - from Zhukovsky and Batyushkov to Pushkin and Lermontov - created a new poetic language in which it was possible to express the most complex experiences, the deepest thoughts about the universe. They introduced into Russian poetry the image of a lyrical hero who both resembles and does not resemble the poet himself. (Just as Karamzin introduced the image of a narrator into Russian prose, whose voice does not merge with the voices of the characters and the author himself.)

The poets of the first half of the 19th century revised the usual system of genres. They preferred a love elegy, a romantic ballad, to "high", solemn odes; re-instilled in native literature a taste for folk culture, for Russian songs and fairy tales; embodied in their work the contradictory consciousness and the tragic experience of a contemporary person, a Russian European. They mastered the experience of world romanticism - and gradually outgrew it in many ways.

But this often happens in literature: having barely reached the artistic pinnacle, Russian poetry began to decline sharply. It happened shortly after the death of Pushkin, and then Baratynsky and Lermontov. That is, in the early 1840s. The poets of the older generation somehow got tired of the turbulent literary life at the same time, turned off the active process. Zhukovsky began translating voluminous epic works - you know about his translation of Homer's Odyssey. Pyotr Vyazemsky hid for a long time in a deaf literary shadow, moved away from poetic affairs, and only in old age his talent blossomed again, he returned to the limits of his native literature. Vladimir Benediktov experienced instant popularity in the mid-1830s - and just as quickly fell out of fashion.

And many young lyric poets of the 1840s, who remained in the public eye, seem to have forgotten how to write. The highest skill, mastery of verse technique, which in Pushkin's time was considered the norm, something taken for granted, was lost overnight by most poets.

And there is nothing surprising here.

At the very beginning of the 19th century, Russian literature learned to portray the human character in its individuality and originality. In the 1820s and 1830s, Russian writers began to associate the fate of their heroes with a specific historical era, with those everyday, financial circumstances on which human behavior often depends. And now, in the 1840s, they faced new substantive tasks. They began to look at the human personality through the prism of social relations, to explain the actions of the heroes by the influence of the "environment", they took them out of economic and political reasons.

Readers of the 1840s and 1860s were waiting for just such social writings. And for solving such problems, epic, narrative prose, a physiological essay, and a journalistic article were much more suitable. Therefore, the main literary forces of that time concentrated on the prosaic "bridgehead". The lyrics seem to have lost their serious content for a while. And this inner aimlessness, lack of content bled the poetic form. This is how a plant dries out, which has blocked access to life-giving underground juices.

• Why did prose push poetry to the margins of the literary process in the 1840s? What substantive tasks does Russian literature solve in this decade?

Pierre Jean Beranger

How can we talk about painful things, about everyday "insignificant" life by means of lyrics, how to express new social ideas? In the 1840s, European poetry also decided the answers to these questions. After all, the transition from the era of romanticism to the era of naturalism took place everywhere! But there, especially in France, a tradition of social, revolutionary lyrics had already been developed, a special poetic language had developed. This language was "adapted" for emotional - and at the same time sincere - conversation about the troubles and sorrows of modern society, about the tragic fate of the "little" person. That is, the transition of poetry to a new, social quality was prepared in advance, correlated with the cultural tradition.

The most significant of the European "revolutionary" poets, social lyricists, is rightfully considered the Frenchman Pierre Jean Beranger (1780-1857).

Raised by his grandfather as a tailor, he witnessed the upheavals of the French Revolution as a child. The young Beranger believed in her ideals and - which is no less important for literature - he forever remembered the sound of the revolutionary folk songs that the rebellious crowd sang. The most popular of these songs is well known to you too - it's "La Marseillaise"; its somewhat bloodthirsty content - a call to violence - was clothed in a solemn and light musical form. In the songs of the revolutionary era, not only juicy folk expressions and jokes were used, which are unacceptable in "high" lyrics, but the possibilities of epic poetry were also used - a short dynamic plot, a constant refrain (that is, a repetition of the "refrain" or some key lines).

Since then, the genre of the poem-song, stylized as a folk song, has prevailed in the work of Beranger. Either frivolous, or satirical (often directed against the mores of the Catholic priesthood), or political, pathos, these songs were liked by the general reader. From the very beginning, the image of a lyrical hero arose and established in them - a folk poet, a man from the crowd, a hater of wealth. (Of course, in real life, Beranger himself was not so alien to money, as it may seem when reading his poems.)

Russian lyric poets began translating Beranger back in the mid-1830s. But from his vast and varied work, at first, only lyrical "songs" were chosen, which were so similar to the familiar experiences of stylized "folk songs" created by poets of the beginning of the century and the Pushkin generation:

The time will come - your May will turn green;
The time will come - I will leave this world;
Your walnut curl will turn white;
The sparkle of agate eyes will fade.
(“My old lady.” Translated by Viktor Teplyakov, 1836)

It `s naturally; we are always interested in the experience of others only as much as it helps to cope with our own problems. And the tasks facing Russian literature in the mid-1830s differed from those that it solved in the troubled decade of the 1840s. Not without reason, after all, Heinrich Heine, a poet of heightened social feeling, was selectively translated by Russian writers of the Lermontov generation, paying attention primarily to his philosophical lyrics, to his romantic irony. And the poets of the 1840s were already paying attention to the other side of Heine's talent - to his political, civic, satirical poems.

And now, when Russian prose spoke so sharply and so bitterly about the shadow side of life, Russian poetry also had to master the new artistic experience. There was no established tradition of its own, so the lyricists of the 1840s voluntarily went to study with Beranger.

But just as a schoolboy must "ripen up" to serious topics that are studied in high school, so poets spend more than one year to "ripen up" to a successful translation. After all, a poem translated from a foreign language must retain the taste of "foreignness" - and at the same time become "one's own", Russian. Therefore, only by the mid-1850s, Beranger "spoke" in Russian naturally and naturally. And the main merit in this belongs to Vasily Stepanovich Kurochkin (1831-1875), who in 1858 published the collection "Songs of Beranger":

"Live, look!" - old uncle
A whole century is ready to repeat me.
How I laugh, looking at my uncle!
I am a positive person.
I spend everything
I can't -
Since I am nothing
I have not.
................................
After all, in a plate of one deli
The capital of his ancestors is sitting;
I know the maid in the tavern:
Full and drunk constantly on credit.
I spend everything
I can't -
Since I am nothing
I have not.
("The Positive Man", 1858)

Of course, you have noticed that these verses are not just translated into Russian. Here, one of the rules of a "good" translation is deliberately violated: the French spirit has completely disappeared from Berenger, the translator has torn the poem out of a foreign cultural soil, completely transplanted it into his own. These verses sound as if they were not translated from French, but written immediately in Russian - and by a Russian poet. They are Russified, that is, they use expressions that are once and for all assigned to Russian everyday life and are completely inappropriate in the French context. For example: "Repeat ... a whole century", "full and drunk." Another translation of Kurochkin is even more Russified - the poem "Mr. Iskariots" (1861):

Mr. Iskariotov -
Good-natured weirdo:
Patriot of patriots
Good little fellow, merry fellow,
Spreads like a cat
Leaning like a snake...
Why are such people
Are we a little different?
.............................................
Diligent reader of all magazines,
He is capable and ready
The most zealous liberals
Scare with a stream of words.
He will shout loudly: "Glasnost! Glasnost!
Conductor of holy ideas!"
But who knows people
Whispers, sensing danger:
Hush, hush, gentlemen!
Mr. Iskariotov,
Patriot of patriots
Coming here!

The French poem about the scammer "Monsieur Iscariot" (Iscariot was called Judas, who denounced Christ) was not without reason turned into a Russian satire on the informer "Mr. Iscariotov." Vasily Kurochkin deliberately tore Beranger's poetry from its French roots and turned it into a fact of Russian culture. With the help of Beranger, he created the language of Russian social poetry, mastered new artistic possibilities. And he quite succeeded.

But the fact of the matter is that luck on the chosen path had to wait too long; domestic poets of the second half of the 1850s could already do without Beranger, rely on the artistic experience of Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov. (A separate chapter is devoted to Nekrasov's biography and the artistic world in the textbook.) It was Nekrasov who, for the first time, within the framework of the Russian cultural tradition, managed to combine the incompatible - rude "sociality" and deep lyricism, it was he who created a new poetic language, proposed new rhythms to his native poetry that would fit new topics and new ideas. Real fame came to him immediately after the poem “I am driving along a dark street at night ...” was published in the Sovremennik magazine in 1847:

Do you remember the mournful sounds of the trumpets,
Splashes of rain, half light, half darkness?
Your son cried, and cold hands
You warmed him with your breath ...

Everyone read these poignant lines - and understood: here it is, a new word in poetry, finally found the only true form for a story about emotional experiences associated with poverty, disorder, life ...

And no one helped the poets of the 1840s to solve the artistic, meaningful problems that confronted them.

• Why were the translations of the poems of the French poet Beranger Russified by Kurochkin? Read the quote from the poem "Mr. Iscariot" again. Find in it examples of expressions that are so connected with Russian speech everyday life that they tear off Beranger's text from the French tradition.

Lyrics by Alexei Pleshcheev

Nevertheless, even in the 1840s, some Russian poets tried to talk about the same serious social problems that social prose touched on in the familiar Pushkin-Lermontov language. More often than not, this was not very successful. Even the most gifted of them.

So, Alexei Nikolaevich Pleshcheev (1825-1893) often wrote civic, political poems in this decade; here is one of the most famous and most popular:

Forward! without fear and doubt
On a valiant feat, friends!
Dawn of holy redemption
I have already seen in heaven!

... Let's not create an idol for ourselves
Neither on earth nor in heaven;
For all the gifts and blessings of the world
We will not fall in the dust before him! ..

... Listen well, brothers, to the word of a brother,
While we are full of youthful strength:
Forward, forward, and no return
No matter what fate promises us in the distance!
(“Forward! without fear and doubt ...”, 1846)

Pleshcheev did not read his rebellious ideas from books at all. He seriously participated in the revolutionary circle of "Petrashevites" (more about them will be discussed in the chapter of the textbook dedicated to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky). In 1849, the poet was arrested and, along with other active "Petrashevites", was sentenced to death by "shooting". After a terrible wait right on the square where the execution was to take place, he was told that the sentence had been commuted and that the execution had been replaced by military service. Pleshcheev, who survived a terrible shock, was exiled to the Urals, and only in 1859 he was allowed to return to central Russia. (First to Moscow, then to Petersburg.)

So the thoughts expressed in the poem, Pleshcheev suffered, endured and paid with his own life. But a real biography is one thing, and creativity is somewhat different. In his civic poems of the 1840s, Pleshcheev still used the familiar four-foot iambic, erased from frequent use, and general poetic images.

Return to the quote from the poem “Forward! without fear and doubt...”, re-read it.

The poet combines the ideas that came from the Bible ("Let's not make an idol for ourselves... Proclaiming the teachings of love..."), with fashionable ideas about the progress and triumph of science ("... And let under the banner of science // Our Union grow stronger and grow ..."). But he cannot find any other role models, except for Pushkin's ode "Liberty", written almost thirty years earlier. Perhaps the political lyrics of the Decembrists - but after all, it is a completely different time in the yard, life itself speaks a different language!

Pleshcheev literally forces himself to rhyme revolutionary slogans, the artistic material resists this - and in the final stanza Pleshcheev "drives" thought into an unruly form, cripples the sound of the verse. Pay attention to what a crowd of sounds in the last two lines! "Forward, forward, and without return, // Whatever the rock in the distance promises us!" "VPRJ ... VPRJ ... BZVZVRT ... CHTBRKVD ..." A continuous series of sound collisions, completely unjustified by the plan.

And the point here is not the individual talent of Alexei Pleshcheev. He was just a very talented poet, and many of his poems were included in the golden fund of Russian classics. But such - contradictory, uneven - was the literary situation of the 1840s as a whole. The state of affairs, as we have already said, will change only in the 1850s and 1860s, after Nekrasov stands at the very center of the literary process. And then Pleshcheev will gradually move away from deliberate "progressiveness" (although occasionally he will recall his favorite political motives), return to traditional poetic themes: rural life, nature.

It is these unpretentious and very simple Pleshcheev lines that will be included in school textbooks and anthologies and will be familiar to every Russian. It is enough to pronounce the first line - and the rest will come to mind by themselves: "The grass is green, // The sun is shining, // A swallow with spring // Flies to us in the canopy" ("Country Song", 1858, translated from Polish). Or: "A boring picture! // Clouds without end, // The rain keeps pouring, // Puddles at the porch..." (1860).

Such was the literary fate of those Russian poets who then tried to clothe the social experience accumulated by prose in the subtle matter of verse. And the verses of other lyricists, who remained faithful to Pushkin's harmony, the elegance of "finishing", sometimes acquired some kind of museum, memorial character.

• Why did the talented poet Aleksey Pleshcheev rarely succeed in creating "civic" poems in the 1840s?

In 1842, the first collection of poems by the young poet, the son of Academician of Painting Apollon Nikolaevich Maikov (1821-1897), was published. From the very beginning he declared himself as a "traditional", classical poet; as about lyrics, far from everyday life, from the momentary details of a fleeting life. Maykov's favorite genre is anthological lyrics. (Recall again: in Ancient Greece, collections of the best, exemplary poems were called an anthology; the most famous of the ancient anthologies was compiled by the poet Meleager in the 1st century BC.) That is, Maikov created poems that stylized the plastic world of ancient proportionality, plasticity, harmony:

Harmonies of verse divine mysteries
Do not think to unravel from the books of the sages:
By the shore of sleepy waters, wandering alone, by chance,
Listen with your soul to the whispering of the reeds,
I speak oak trees; their sound is extraordinary
Feel and understand... In harmony with poetry
Involuntarily from your lips dimensional octaves
They will pour, sonorous, like the music of oak forests.
("Octaves", 1841)

This poem was written by a young author, but it is immediately felt: he is already a real master. The extended rhythm is clearly sustained, the sound of the verse is subordinated to the musical structure. If in one verse we can easily distinguish the onomatopoeia of the rustle of the reeds ("Listen with your soul to the Whispering of the reeds"), then in the next we will hear the forest murmur ("Oak-trees speak"). And in the finale, soft and hard sounds will reconcile with each other, unite into a smooth harmony: "SIZED OCTAVS // They will pour, sonorous, like the Music of oak trees"...

And yet, if we recall Pushkin's anthological poems - and compare the lines we have just read with them, a certain amorphousness, lethargy of Mike's lyrics will immediately be revealed. Here is how Pushkin described the Tsarskoye Selo statue in 1830:

Having dropped the urn with water, the maiden broke it on the cliff.
The maiden sits sadly, idle holding a shard.
Miracle! water will not dry up, pouring out of a broken urn;
The Virgin, above the eternal stream, sits forever sad.

Here an image of the unstoppable - and at the same time stopped! - movements. Here the sound scale is ideally matched: the sound "u" buzzes mournfully ("Urn with water ... about the cliff ... MIRACLE ... from the Urn ... with a jet ..."), the explosive sound "Ch" is connected with the extended " N" and he himself begins to sound more viscous: "sadly ... eternal ... eternally." And in the first line, a hard collision of consonants conveys the feeling of a blow: "Ob UTeS her Virgo beat her."

But this is not enough for Pushkin. He communicates to the reader a deep sense of hidden sadness; eternity and sadness, the sculptural perfection of forms and the gloomy essence of life are inextricably linked with him. For the sake of this, he seems to make the verse sway, repeat: "... the maiden broke ... the maiden sits ... the maiden ... sits sadly." Repetitions create the effect of a circular, hopeless movement.

And Pushkin only needs one unexpected word among sculpturally smooth expressions to hurt the reader, scratch him, prick him a little. That word is "idle". We meet the expression "an empty shard" - and immediately imagine the confusion, the sadness of the "virgin": just that the urn was intact, it was possible to pour wine, water into it - and in one second it became "idle", unnecessary, and this is already forever and ever...

And with Maikov, with all the perfection of his early poem, everything is so even that the eye has nothing to catch on. The secrets of the verse are “divine” (and what else could they be?), the waters are “sleepy”, the sound of oak forests is “extraordinary” ... And only years later, new images will appear in Mike's lyrics, catching the reader's attention with freshness, unexpectedness:

Spring! the first frame is exposed -
And noise broke into the room,
And the blessing of the nearby temple,
And the talk of the people, and the noise of the wheel ...
("Spring! The first frame is exhibited...", 1854).

Landscape poems of the late Maykov, devoid of social overtones, will throw a kind of challenge to the general tone of the era, the dominant poetic tastes:

My garden withers every day;
It is crumpled, broken and empty,
Even if it blooms luxuriantly
Nasturtium in it is a fiery bush ...

I'm sad! Annoys me
And the autumn sun shine
And the leaf that falls from the birch
And late grasshoppers crack...
("Swallows", 1856)

The general tone of the poem is muted, the colors are devoid of "screaming", sharp tones; but in the very depths of the poem, very bold images ripen. The metaphor of the magnificent withering of autumn nature goes back to Pushkin's "Autumn", but how unexpected is the image of a flaming scarlet nasturtium bush, how contradictory are the feelings of the lyrical hero, who is not at all delighted with this splendor, but annoyed by the "little things" of autumn everyday life ...

• The task of increased complexity. Read the poems of Yakov Polonsky, another Russian lyricist who began his career in literature in the 1840s, but revealed his talent only in the next decade. Prepare a report on his artistic world, using the teacher's advice and additional literature.

Kozma Prutkov

When "original" poetry is in a state of crisis, painfully looking for new ideas and new forms of self-expression, the genre of parody usually flourishes. That is, a comic reproduction of the peculiarities of the manner of a particular writer, poet.

In the late 1840s, Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875) and his cousins ​​Alexei Mikhailovich (1821-1908) and Vladimir Mikhailovich (1830-1884) Zhemchuzhnikovs invented... a poet. (Sometimes the third brother, Alexander Mikhailovich, joined the joint parody work.) They began to write poetry on behalf of the never-existing graphomaniac Kozma Prutkov, and in these poems they parodied bureaucracy in all its manifestations. Whether it's too refined, with a set little finger, anthological poetry or too pretentious civic lyrics.

Because Prutkov came up with a "state" biography, turned him into an official, director of the Assay Chamber. The fourth of the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, Lev Mikhailovich, painted a portrait of Prutkov, combining in it the martinet features of a bureaucrat and the mask of a romantic poet. Such is the literary guise of Kozma Prutkov, false romantic and bureaucratic at the same time:

When you meet someone in the crowd
Who is naked;
[Option: On which dress coat. - Note. K. Prutkova]
Whose forehead is darker than misty Kazbek,
Uneven step;
Whose hair is raised in disarray;
Who, yell,
Always trembling in a nervous fit, -
Know: it's me!
("My portrait")

In the guise of Kozma Prutkov, the incompatible was united - the late romantic image of a "strange", wild poet, "who is naked," and an official, "whose tailcoat is on." In the same way, he does not care about what and in what manner to write poetry - whether to repeat the bravura intonations of Vladimir Benediktov, or to compose in an antique spirit, like Maikov or other "anthological" poets of the 1840s:

Love you maiden when golden
And sun-drenched you hold a lemon,
And young men see a fluffy chin
Between acanthus leaves and white columns...
("Ancient Plastic Greek")

Prutkov grasps on the fly the style of numerous imitators of Heine, the creators of "social" poetry:

On the seaside, at the very outpost,
I saw a big garden.
There grows tall asparagus;
Cabbage grows modestly there.

There's always a gardener there in the morning
Lazily passes between the ridges;
He wears an untidy apron;
Gloomy his cloudy look.
............................................
The other day he drives up to him
The official on the troika is dashing.
He is in warm, high galoshes,
On the neck is a gold lorgnette.

"Where is your daughter?" - asks
An official, squinting into a lorgnette,
But, looking wildly, the gardener
He waved his hand in response.

And the trio jumped back,
Sweeping dew from cabbage...
The gardener stands gloomily
And digs in his nose with his finger.
("On the seaside")

But if the "creativity" of Kozma Prutkov was only a parody and nothing more, it would have died along with its era. But it remained in the reader's everyday life, Prutkov's works have been reprinted for a century and a half. So they have outgrown the boundaries of the genre! No wonder the creators of this collective image put into the mouth of their character a rebuke to the feuilletonist of the Saint Petersburg News newspaper: “Feuilletonist, I ran through your article ... You mention me in it; that’s nothing. I don't praise...

Are you saying that I write parodies? Not at all!.. I don't write parodies at all! I never wrote parodies! Where did you get the idea that I write parodies?! I just analyzed in my mind most of the successful poets; this analysis led me to a synthesis; for the talents, scattered among other poets separately, turned out to be combined all in me as one! .. "

In Prutkov's "creativity" the fashionable motifs of Russian poetry of the 1840s and 1850s are indeed summed up, melted down, a funny and in its own way integral image of a bureaucratic romantic, an inspired graphomaniac, a pompous preacher of banality, the author of the project "On the introduction of unanimity in Russia" is created. But at the same time, Prutkov sometimes, as if by chance, talks to the truth; some of his aphorisms have entered our everyday speech, having lost their mocking meaning: "If you want to be happy, be happy," "A specialist is like a flux: his fullness is one-sided." There is something very alive in Prutkov's literary personality. And therefore, not "Prutkov's" parodies of individual (for the most part - rightly forgotten) poets, but precisely his image itself forever entered the history of Russian literature.

• What is a parody? Is it possible to consider that the poems written on behalf of Kozma Prutkov are only parodies? Why does parodic creativity flourish at those moments when literature is in crisis?

Of course, in the 1850s and 1860s, more favorable for poetry, literary destinies developed differently; many Russian poets, whose fame we are proud of to this day, have not found reader recognition. So, two poems by the outstanding literary and theater critic Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev (1822-1864) - “Oh, talk to me at least ...” and “Gypsy Hungarian” - attracted general attention only because they acquired a second - musical - life, became popular romances. Both of them are dedicated to the guitar, gypsy passion, fatal breakdown, love obsession:

Oh, talk to me at least
Seven-string friend!
My heart is full of such sadness
And the night is so moonlit!
("Oh, speak...", 1857)

Two guitars ringing
Mournfully whined...
From childhood, a memorable tune,
My old friend, are you?
.........................................
It's you, dashing spree,
You, evil merge of sadness
With the voluptuousness of a bayadère -
You, the motive of the Hungarian!

Chibiryak, chibiryak, chibiryashechka,
With blue eyes you, my darling!
.........
Let it hurt more and more
howling sounds,
To make the heart faster
Bursting with pain!
("Gypsy Hungarian", 1857)

Apollon Grigoriev knew firsthand what a "dashing spree" meant; he grew up in the patriarchal Zamoskvorechie, in a family of nobles who came out of the serf class (Grigoriev's grandfather was a peasant), and in Russian, without restraint, he treated everything - both work and fun. He abandoned a profitable career, was in need all the time, drank a lot, twice sat in a debt hole - and actually died during debt imprisonment ...

Being a European-educated person, Grigoriev defended the ideas of national identity in critical articles. He called the principles of his criticism organic, that is, co-natural with art, in contrast to Belinsky's "historical" criticism or Dobrolyubov's "real" criticism. Contemporaries read and actively discussed Grigoriev's articles; however, during the life of the poet, his wonderful poems were published as a separate edition only once - and in a tiny edition, only fifty copies ...

• Read "Gypsy Hungarian" by Apollon Grigoriev. Reveal the features of the romance in the construction of the poem, show how the “musical” beginning is contained in its very structure.

Alexey Tolstoy

Instead, the literary biography of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875), one of the main "creators" of Kozma Prutkov, developed much more successfully. (You have already read in the elementary grades his wonderful poem "My Bells, Flowers of the Steppe ...", which, like many of Tolstoy's poems, has become a popular romance.)

Coming from an old family, having spent his childhood in the Little Russian estate of his mother in the Chernihiv region, Alexei Konstantinovich, ten years old, was introduced to the great Goethe. And this was not the first "literary acquaintance" of young Alexei. His uncle, Alexey Perovsky (pseudonym - Anthony Pogorelsky), was a wonderful romantic writer, the author of the fairy tale "The Black Hen", which many of you have read. He collected in his St. Petersburg house the whole color of Russian literature - Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Krylov, Gogol; the nephew was admitted to this meeting of "immortals" - and for the rest of his life he remembered their conversations, remarks, remarks.

It is not surprising that at the age of six he had already begun to compose; Zhukovsky himself approved his first poems. And later Tolstoy also wrote prose; in his historical novel The Silver Prince (completed in 1861), noble people will act and genuine passions will reign; Moreover, Alexei Konstantinovich was not at all embarrassed by the fact that the romantic principles of Walter Scott, which he followed invariably, were considered by many to be outdated. Truth cannot become outdated, and it was below his dignity to reckon with literary fashion.

In 1834, Alexei Konstantinovich entered the sovereign's service in the Moscow archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, studied ancient Russian manuscripts; then he served in the Russian mission in Frankfurt am Main; finally, he was enrolled in His Majesty's own office - and became a real courtier. It was at court that he met his future wife, Sofya Andreevna Miller (nee Bakhmetyeva), - they met at a ball in the winter of 1850/51.

Tolstoy's bureaucratic career developed successfully; he knew how to maintain inner independence, to follow his own principles. It was Tolstoy who helped free Taras Shevchenko, the great Ukrainian poet, the author of the brilliant poem “The Wide Dnieper Roars and Groans” from exile in Central Asia and from military service; did everything so that Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was released from exile in Spasskoe-Lutovinovo for an obituary in memory of Gogol; when Alexander II once asked Alexei Konstantinovich: "What is being done in Russian literature?", he replied: "Russian literature has put on mourning over the unjust condemnation of Chernyshevsky."

Nevertheless, in the mid-1850s, having managed to take part in the Crimean War, which was extremely unsuccessful for Russia, Tolstoy decided to retire, to free himself from the service that had long weighed on him. But only in 1861, Alexander II granted his resignation - and Alexei Konstantinovich was able to fully concentrate on literary work.

By this time, his artistic world had already fully developed. As Tolstoy himself was distinguished by inner integrity, rare mental health, so his lyrical hero is alien to insoluble doubts, melancholy; the Russian ideal of openness, the purity of feeling is extremely close to him:

If you love, so without reason,
If you threaten, it's not a joke,
If you scold, so rashly,
If you chop, it's so sloppy!

If you argue, it's so bold
Kohl to punish, so for the cause,
If you forgive, so with all your heart,
If there is a feast, then a feast is a mountain!

In this eight-line, written in 1850 or 1851, there is not a single epithet: the lyrical hero does not need shades, he strives for certainty, the brightness of the main tones. For the same reason, Tolstoy avoids variety in the very structure of the poem; the principle of unanimity (anaphora) is used consistently, passes from line to line: "Kol ... so." As if the poet energetically taps his hand on the table, beating a clear rhythm...

Tolstoy never joined any of the warring camps - Westerners and Slavophiles; he was a man of world culture - and at the same time the bearer of a deeply Russian tradition. His political ideal was the Novgorod Republic, with its democratic structure; he believed that the domestic authorities once followed moral principles, but in the modern world they have lost them, exchanged them for political interests, and reduced different groups to a petty struggle. This means that the poet cannot adjoin any ideological "platform". So is his lyrical hero - "Two camps are not a fighter, but only an accidental guest"; he is free from any kind of "party" obligations.

It is not for nothing that many of Tolstoy's poems - like those poems by Grigoriev we spoke about - were set to music, became "real" romances and are still sung to this day:

In the midst of a noisy ball, by chance,
In the turmoil of the world,
I saw you, but the mystery
Your veiled features;

Only sad eyes looked
And the voice sounded so wonderful,
Like the sound of a distant flute,
Like the waves of the sea.
...............................................
And sadly I fall asleep so
And in the dreams of the unknown I sleep ...
Do I love you - I don't know
But I think I love it!
(“In the midst of a noisy ball, by chance ...”, 1851)

Preserving the traditional romantic motifs, Tolstoy imperceptibly "straightened" them, deliberately simplified them. But not because he was afraid to approach the abyss, to face insoluble problems, but because his healthy nature was disgusted by any ambiguity, uncertainty. For the same reason, his lyrics lack romantic irony, with its inner tragedy, anguish; its place is taken by humor - the free laughter of a cheerful person over the imperfection of life, over the impracticability of a dream.

The most famous humorous poem by Tolstoy - "The History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev" has a genre designation: "satire". But let's read these verses, which mockingly set out the main events of Russian history:

Listen guys
What will your grandfather tell you?
Our land is rich
There is just no order in it.
.......................................
And they all became under the banner
And they say: "How can we be?
Let's send to the Varangians:
Let them come to rule."

What is the main thing in these funny lines? A satirical, angry, caustic denunciation of traditional Russian shortcomings, or a deep Russian person's sneer at himself, at his beloved history, at the immutability of domestic vices? Of course, the second; No wonder the author puts on the mask of an old joker, and likens readers to little guys! In fact, Alexei Tolstoy does not create a murderous satire, but a sad and funny parody. He parodies the form of the chronicle, the image of the chronicler ("Compiled from blades of grass // This unwise story // Thin humble monk // Servant of God Alexei"). But the main subject of his parody is different, and which one - we will say later.

There are 83 stanzas in the poem, and in such a short volume Tolstoy manages to fit a parody story about all the main, symbolic events of Russian history, from the calling of the Varangians and the baptism of Russia until 1868, when the poems were written:

When did Vladimir enter
To your father's throne
......................................
He sent for priests
To Athens and Tsargrad,
The priests came in droves
Baptized and censored

Sing sweetly to themselves
And fill their pouch;
The earth, as it is, is plentiful,
There is just no order.

Of course, this is followed by a series of princely strife - "The Tatars found out. // Well, they think, do not be afraid! // Put on bloomers, // We arrived in Russia ... // They shout: "Let's pay tribute!" // (Though bring the saints out.) // There is a lot of rubbish here // It has come to Russia". But still there is no order. Neither Western newcomers, nor Byzantine "priests", nor the Tatar-Mongols - no one brought it with them, no one coped with the invariable Russian disorder. And here, from the depths of national history, comes its own "orderer":

Ivan Vasilievich the Terrible
He had a name
For being serious
Solid person.

Receptions are not sweet,
But the mind is not lame;
Such brought order
What roll a ball!

Thus, Tolstoy's own - and very serious - view of the essence of Russian history emerges through the parody. Her faults are the continuation of her virtues; this "disorder" destroys it - and it, alas, allows Russia to preserve its originality. There is nothing good in that, but what can be done ... Only two rulers managed to impose "order" on her: Ivan the Terrible and Peter I. But at what cost!

Tsar Peter loved order,
Almost like Tsar Ivan
And it wasn't sweet either.
Sometimes he was drunk.

He said: "I feel sorry for you,
You will perish completely;
But I have a stick
And I'm your father!"

Tolstoy does not condemn Peter ("... I do not blame Peter: // Give the sick stomach // Good for rhubarb"), but does not accept his excessive rigidity. More and more profound content is immersed in the light shell of parody, sadness emerges through humor. Yes, Russia is sick, but the treatment may turn out to be even worse, and the result of the "healing" is still short-lived: "... Although he is very strong // There was, perhaps, a reception, // But still quite strong // The order has become // But sleep seized the grave // ​​Peter in the prime of life, // You look, the land is plentiful, // There is no order again.

The genre of satire gave way to the genre of parody, and the parody imperceptibly turned into a philosophical poem, albeit written in a playful way. But if a parody can do without a positive content, without an ideal, then a philosophical poem can never. This means that somewhere there must be hidden Tolstoy's own answer to the question: what, after all, can heal Russian history from a centuries-old disease? Not the Varangians, not Byzantium, not a "stick" - what then? Perhaps the hidden answer to the obvious question is contained in these stanzas:

What is the reason for this
And where is the root of evil,
Catherine herself
Couldn't get it.

"Madame, with you it's amazing
Order will bloom
Wrote to her politely
Voltaire and Diderot

Only the people need
to whom you are the mother,
Rather give freedom
Let's give you freedom."

But Catherine is afraid of freedom, which could allow the people to heal themselves: "... And immediately attached // Ukrainians to the ground."

The poem ends with stanzas about Tolstoy's contemporary, Minister of the Interior Timashev, a strict supporter of "order". Order in Russia is established as before - with a stick; It is not difficult to guess what lies ahead for her.

• What is the difference between satire and humor? Why was the genre of parody so close to Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy? Why do you think he chooses a parodic form for a philosophical poem about the fate of Russian history?

Poets of the 1870s and 1880s

You already know that the entire second half of the 19th century, from the mid-1850s to the early 1880s, passed under the sign of Nekrasov, that the era spoke in a Nekrasov voice. In the next chapter of the textbook, you will get acquainted in detail with the artistic world of Nekrasov, learn to analyze his poems and poems. A little further away, in his public shadow, were two other great lyricists, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. They also have separate chapters in the textbook. In the meantime, let's go straight from the 1850s to the 1870s-1880s, let's see what happened to Russian poetry after Nekrasov.

And almost the same thing happened to her as after Pushkin, after Lermontov, after the departure of any truly large-scale writer. Russian poetry was again confused, did not know which path to follow. Some lyricists developed social, civic motives. For example, Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson (1862-1887). Just as Vladimir Benediktov took the artistic principles of romantic lyrics to the extreme, so Nadson condensed to the limit the pathos and style of civic lyrics of the Nekrasov model:

My friend, my brother, tired, suffering brother,
Whoever you are, don't give up.
Let untruth and evil reign supreme
Above the earth washed with tears
Let the holy ideal be broken and desecrated
And innocent blood flows,
Believe: the time will come - and Baal will perish,
And love will return to earth! ..

Nadson's poems enjoyed incredible popularity in the 1880s - almost like Benediktov's poems in the 1830s. Pleshcheev took care of him; Nadson's poetry collection, first published in 1885, went through five editions in his lifetime, the Academy of Sciences awarded him its Pushkin Prize. He was called the poet of suffering, civic anguish. And when, having lived only twenty-five years, Nadson died due to consumption, a crowd of students accompanied his coffin to the very cemetery ...

But several years passed - and the glory of Nadson began to fade. Suddenly, it somehow turned out by itself that he was too moralizing, too straightforward, his images lack volume and depth, and many of his poems are simply imitative.

Why was this not noticed during the lifetime of the poet?

This sometimes happens in literature: the writer seems to fall into the painful point of his era, he speaks about exactly what his contemporaries are thinking about right now. And they wholeheartedly respond to his poetic, literary word. There is a resonance effect, the sound of the work is amplified many times over. And the question of how artistic this word is, how original it is, fades into the background. And when some time passes and other problems arise before society, then all the hidden artistic shortcomings, creative "imperfections" are revealed.

In part, this also applies to another popular poet of the 1870-1880s - Alexei Nikolayevich Apukhtin (1840-1893). Unlike Nadson, he did not come from a bureaucratic and raznochinny, but from a well-born noble family. His childhood passed serenely, in the parental estate; he studied at the elite School of Law in St. Petersburg. And he continued not the social, civic tradition of Nekrasov, but the line of development of Russian poetry that Maykov outlined in his time.

Apukhtin treated poetry as pure art, devoid of tendentiousness, free from public service, as if distilled. He behaved accordingly - defiantly evaded participation in the "professional" literary process, could disappear from the field of view of magazines for a decade, then begin to print again. Readers, and especially female readers, still appreciated Apukhtin; his gentle, broken intonation, the inner relationship of his poetics with the genre laws of the romance - all this resonated in the reader's hearts:

Crazy nights, sleepless nights
Speech incoherent, tired eyes ...
Nights lit by the last fire,
Autumn dead flowers belated!
Even if time is a merciless hand
It showed me what was false in you,
Nevertheless, I fly to you with a greedy memory,
Looking for the impossible in the past...

And then, after some time, and Apukhta's lyrics began to sound more and more muffled, muffled; her excessive sentimentality, her lack of real depth, began to reveal itself. The place of Nadson and Apukhtin was taken by new "fashionable" poets belonging to the next literary generation - Konstantin Fofanov, Mirra Lokhvitskaya. They occupied - in order then, in turn, to give it to other "performers" of the finished literary role.

Lyrics by Konstantin Sluchevsky

But in the 1880s and 1890s, there were truly great talents in Russian poetry, who not only resonated with the era, but overtook it, worked for the future. One of them is the refined lyric poet Konstantin Konstantinovich Sluchevsky (1837-1904).

He was born in the year of Pushkin's death in the family of a major official (his father, a senator, died in the cholera epidemic of 1848, and his mother became the head of the Warsaw Alexander-Mariinsky Girls' Institute). Sluchevsky studied at the First Cadet Corps and was even listed in the Golden Book of Graduates; then he served brilliantly...

Those around him always considered Sluchevsky to be a whole person; his aristocratic restraint, strict upbringing misled those around him. Because in his poems a completely different, broken-dramatic inner world was revealed, associated with a romantic feeling of life as a realm of duality:

I never go anywhere alone
The two of us live between people:
The first is me, what I have become in appearance,
And the other - then I'm my dream ...

But for the time being, almost none of Sluchevsky's entourage read these poems, they were published in third-rate publications. But in 1860 Sovremennik opened the year with a selection of Sluchevsky's lyrical poems, and then his poetic cycle appeared in Otechestvennye Zapiski. The enthusiastic critic and poet Apollon Grigoriev declared the new poet a genius, Ivan Turgenev (who would later quarrel with Sluchevsky and parody him in the novel “Smoke” under the name of Voroshilov) agreed: “Yes, father, this is a future great writer.”

The recognition was inspiring, but Sluchevsky became a hostage to the fierce literary struggle of those years. Accepted in one "camp", he was immediately rejected in another. The radically diverse wing of the editors of Sovremennik decided to excommunicate the poet from the magazine, despite the sympathy that Nekrasov himself felt for the young lyricist. From the pages of other revolutionary-democratic publications, a hail of ridicule fell upon Sluchevsky, he was portrayed as a retrograde, a man without ideas.

The result exceeded expectations: thinking in "outdated" categories of noble honor and dignity, Sluchevsky considered that an officer and an aristocrat should not be the hero of feuilletons. And - he retired to leave Russia. He spent several years at the University of Paris - at the Sorbonne, at Berlin, at the University of Leipzig, studied the natural sciences, mathematics. And in Heidelberg he became a doctor of philosophy.

In the end, in 1866, he returned to Russia and began to make a career anew - already on a civilian path. He fell into the number of close associates of the royal family, became a chamberlain. But from the shock inflicted on him at the very beginning of his literary path, he never recovered. And therefore he built his poetic biography as emphatically non-literary, amateurish, not involved in the professional environment. (In this he was close to Apukhtin.)

Among the poems written by Sluchevsky in the 1860s and 1870s and not published, we will hardly find "programmatic", preaching poems. Their artistic structure is emphatically uneven, and their style is obviously heterogeneous. Sluchevsky was one of the first in Russian poetry who began to use not just everyday, everyday speech, but even clerical work: "According to the totality of radiant phenomena ...", "The dawn has blazed up in a proper way ...". He developed a special poetics of inexact consonances, unpaired rhymes:

I saw my burial.
Tall candles burned
The sleepless deacon censed,
And hoarse choristers sang.
................................................
Sad sisters and brothers
(How nature is incomprehensible to us!)
Sobbed at a joyful meeting
With a quarter of the income.
................................................
Lackeys were praying outside the door,
Saying goodbye to a lost place
And in the kitchen, the overeaten cook
fiddling with the risen dough...

In these early poems, the influence of the bitterly social lyrics of Heinrich Heine is clearly felt; Like most Russian lyricists of the second half of the 19th century, Sluchevsky fell into the powerful energy field of this "last romantic". But something else is already noticeable here: Sluchevsky has his own cross-cutting idea, the embodiment of which requires not a harmonious, perfect poetic form, but a rough, "unfinished" verse, unpaired, some kind of "stumbling" rhyme.

This is the idea of ​​fragmentation, of the tragic disunity of human life, in the space of which souls, thoughts, hearts echo as weakly and deafly as unpaired rhymes in verse.

Perhaps the most characteristic - and at the same time the most expressive - is Sluchevsky's poem "Lightning fell into the stream ...". It just speaks of the impossibility of meeting, of the inevitability of suffering, of the impossibility of love: "Lightning fell into the stream. // The water did not become hot. // And that the stream was pierced to the bottom, // He does not hear through the rustle of the jets ...<...>There was no other way: / And I will forgive, and you forgive. "It is not without reason that a cemetery motif constantly appears in Sluchevsky's poems, dreary as the night wind; it is not without reason that a second, hidden plan appears through his social sketches. The plan is mystical.

Sluchevsky constantly writes about Mephistopheles, who penetrated into the world, about the demon of evil, whose doubling, vague image flashes here all the time. Such a worldview was characteristic then not only of Sluchevsky; its lyrical hero not without reason resembles the "underground" heroes of Dostoevsky. It's just that Sluchevsky was one of the first to catch and capture in his poems that attitude that would determine a lot in Russian lyrics - and in general in Russian culture - of the late 19th century. This attitude will later be called decadence, from the French word meaning decline, a painful crisis of consciousness. The poet wants to be healed of this disappointment - and cannot find healing in anything: neither in social life, nor in reflections on eternal life.

• The task of increased complexity. Read Sluchevsky's poem: "I'm tired in the fields, I'll fall asleep solidly, // Once in the village for grub. // Through the open window I can see // And our garden, and a piece of brocade // Wonderful night... The air is bright... // How still and quiet! I'll fall asleep, loving // The whole of God's world... But the noose shouted! // Or have I renounced myself?" Explain why the poet in a row, separated by commas, uses common expressions ("I'll fall asleep solidly", "to the village for grub") - and general poetic, sublime vocabulary ("... a piece of brocade // Have a wonderful night ...")? Do you know where this image came from in Sluchevsky's poem: "the loop shouted! // Or did I renounce myself?"? If not, try to read the last chapters of all four Gospels, which tell about the denial of Christ by the Apostle Peter. Now formulate how you understand the poet's thought expressed in the final lines.

Russian Poetry of the End of the Century and French Lyricists of the 1860s-1880s

Charles Baudelaire. Paul Verlaine. Arthur Rimbaud

As we have already said, Russian literature of the first third of the 19th century was a diligent student of Western literature. She quickly caught up with her "mentor", studied with German and English romantics, then with French naturalists. And in the end "caught up" with the general course of world culture, became an equal participant in the cultural process.

This does not mean that Russian writers have completely ceased to adopt other people's experience (only a fool refuses useful lessons); but this means that they have gained internal independence, have learned to move in parallel, in unison with their European counterparts. Therefore, much that happened in Russian poetry of the second half of the 19th century seems to rhyme with what was happening at the same time in European poetry, especially French. Here we are talking not so much about influence as about non-random similarity. Or, as historians and literary critics say, about typology.

You know that after Nekrasov the best Russian lyric poets returned to the romantic motifs of doubleness, languor of the spirit, that notes of despair sounded in their work, a mood of decline appeared. The same motifs are easily found in French poetry of the 1860s-1880s.

The outstanding lyricist Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), a leftist, a rebel who directly participated in the revolutionary events of 1848, published in 1857 a collection of poems "Flowers of Evil". (The collection, being updated, was reprinted several times.) The poems collected in this book did not just challenge petty-bourgeois (it is universal) morality; the lyrical hero of Baudelaire experienced an extreme, almost mystical disappointment in the foundations of Christian civilization and clothed his extremely disharmonious feelings in a perfect, classical form.

Tell me where you come from, Beauty?
Is your gaze the azure of heaven or the product of hell?
You, like wine, intoxicate clinging lips,
Equally, you are glad to sow joys and intrigues.
Dawn and fading sunset in your eyes,
You stream the aroma, as if the evening is stormy;
The lad became a hero, the great fell to dust,
Having drunk your lips with an enchanting urn.

Like his romantic predecessors, Baudelaire breaks aesthetics and morality, and defiantly, defiantly; he exclaims, turning to Beauty: "You walk over the corpses with a proud smile, / Diamonds of horror stream their cruel brilliance ..." This does not frighten him; it is not self-sufficing Beauty that is terrible, but the world into which it comes. And therefore he accepts its catastrophism as a terrible way out of earthly hopelessness:

Are you God or Satan? Are you an angel or a siren?
Is it not all the same: only you, Queen Beauty,
You free the world from a painful captivity,
You send incense and sounds and colors!
("Hymn to Beauty." Per. Ellis)

Amoralism became an artistic principle for Baudelaire. But if you carefully read his poems - bright, dangerous, really similar to swamp flowers, it will become clear: they contain not only poison, but also an antidote; that horror, of which Baudelaire became the singer, is lived out by the poet's suffering, redeemed by the pain of the world, which he takes into himself. Nevertheless, "Flowers of Evil" became the subject of consideration in a Parisian court; the poet was accused of insulting public morality and sentenced to "withdrawal" of some poems from the book "Flowers of Evil". The judges were not obliged to listen to the hidden sound of the lines, they made their decision based on the immediate, everyday, and not the poetic meaning of the words.

Baudelaire began to be translated in Russia in the 1870s. And the pioneers were populist poets like Vasily Kurochkin and Dmitry Minaev. Their own style, a little rustic, was extremely far from Baudelaire's poetics, its complex metaphorical game and pathos, glowing with prominences. Like the Parisian judges, they paid attention to the external, to the rebellious themes of Baudelaire - only with a positive sign. And only the Russian lyricists of the next generations were able to unravel the Baudelaire mystery, felt in his poems a harbinger of large-scale and tragic images of the 20th century: “Like a black banner, Tosca the queen // Will victoriously develop over her bowing brow” (“Spleen”. Per. Vyach.I. Ivanova).

"On time" began to translate another French lyric poet, who belonged to the generation following Baudelaire - Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). Something familiar seemed to be in his sad poems, the thought of the inevitable splitting of the human soul, of the melancholy of disappointment that permeates the world, the decline of heart strength - all this we met with you and Nadson, and Apukhtin, and Sluchevsky:

Autumn groan -
long ringing,
Funeral ringing -
Sick at heart
Sounds like a string
Restless...
(“Autumn Song”. Per. N. Minsky)

But all these motifs in Verlaine's poetry have a shimmering, symbolic undertone. He does not just share with the reader his "spleen", blues; he feels that the whole universe is "moping", that the creative forces of the universe are drying up, that a time of painful, nervous uncertainty is coming, that humanity is on the threshold of a new era, behind which is complete uncertainty. And this subtext will also be unraveled only by translators of the early 20th century.

But at the end of the 19th century, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), the author of the brilliant tragic, catastrophic and majestic poem The Drunken Ship (1871), was the least "lucky" with Russian translations. It was in this poem that all the main "lines of force" of the poetry of the 20th century were first identified, the traditional motifs and conflicts of romantic lyrics were transferred to a fundamentally different register, associated with global historical forebodings, with future universal upheavals:

Those who controlled me got into a mess:
Their Indian marksmanship targeted
That sometimes, like me, without the need for sails,
He left, obeying the river current.

After the silence made me understand
That the crew no longer existed,
I, a Dutchman, under the load of silks and grains
Was thrown into the ocean by gusts of a squall.

With the speed of a planet that has barely arisen,
Now diving to the bottom, then rising above the abyss,
I flew overtaking the peninsulas
In spirals of changing hurricanes.
............................................................
If I still enter the waters of Europe,
After all, they seem to me a simple puddle, -
I am a paper boat - I'm out of tune
A boy full of sadness, squatting.

Intercede, O waves! To me, in so many seas
Visited - me, flying in the clouds -
Is it fitting to sail through the flags of amateur yachts
Or under the terrible gaze of floating prisons?
(Translated by D. Brodsky)

However, Arthur Rimbaud began to be translated in Russia much later; who became a poet in France at the end of the 19th century, in Russia he turned out to be a poet of the 20th century. But this does not mean that Russian lyric poets of the 1880s and 1890s did not think about the same problems, did not move in the direction set by history.

• Remember the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov "The lonely sail turns white". Compare the images of this poem with the images of "The Drunken Ship" by A. Rimbaud. What is the similarity, what is the fundamental difference?

The poetry of Vladimir Solovyov and the beginning of a new era in Russian lyrics

And Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev (1853-1900) became such a poet, who largely predicted the artistic discoveries and philosophical ideas of the 20th century. Having become a graduate of the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Moscow University and a volunteer at the Moscow Theological Academy, Solovyov delved into the study of ancient mystical treatises about Sophia. That is, about the Soul of the World, about the Wisdom of God, about the personification of the Eternal Femininity. Like many romantics, Solovyov believed that this mystical power directly affects his life, and therefore sought a mysterious meeting with Sophia.

In 1875 Vladimir Sergeevich went to London; the formal reason was work in the library of the British Museum, the real reason was the search for a meeting with Sophia. Solovyov fills notebooks with strange writings, where among the signs that cannot be deciphered, a familiar name is often found: Sophie, Sophia. And - suddenly leaves London through Paris to Egypt. He had a certain "voice" that called him to Cairo. As he later writes in the poem "Three dates": ""Be in Egypt!" - a voice was heard inside, / To Paris - and the steam carries me south. This purely Solovievian construction of the poetic phrase is characteristic: not a word is said about the intermediate state, about doubts. The decision is made instantly. Such was the nature of Solovyov.

For the same reason, he was so inclined to use symbols (by the way, remember the definition of this literary concept, look in the dictionary). After all, a symbol does not depend on a changeable reality, on a change in the angle of view. It is always cryptic in meaning, but always defined in form. So, in Solovyov's poem of 1875 "At my queen ...", which was just connected with a trip to Egypt, the colors of eternity, eternal colors prevail: "My queen has a high palace, / About seven golden pillars, // My queen has a seven-sided crown, // In it there are countless precious stones. // And in the green garden of my queen // Beauty bloomed of roses and lilies, // And in a transparent wave a silvery stream // Catches a reflection of curls and forehead. ..".

The garden of the "queen" is always green, at any time of the year, it does not fade; roses are invariably scarlet, lilies are white, the stream is silvery. And the more unchanged, the more "reliable" these symbolic colors, the more dramatic the main theme of the poem sounds. And this theme is the changeability of the poet's heart, the changeability of the face of his Heavenly Beloved.

In Egypt, Solovyov was in for a shock. He spent an icy night in the desert, waiting for the appearance of Sophia, as he was told by an inner voice, but no mysterious rendezvous happened, the young mystic was almost beaten by local nomads. Another poet would have taken the incident tragically, while in Solovyov, on the contrary, all this caused an attack of laughter. (Not without reason, in one of his lectures, he defined man as a "laughing animal".) In general, he, like his favorite lyricist Alexei Tolstoy, often wrote humorous poems.

Laughter was for Solovyov a kind of antidote to excessive mysticism; he deliberately played with the image of his lyrical hero, the image of the Pilgrim, the mystic, placed him in comic situations. Up to the auto-epitaph: "Vladimir Solovyov // Lying in this place. // At first he was a philosopher, // And now he has become a skeleton ..." (1892).

But with the same inexplicable ease, Solovyov returned from ridicule, from disappointment - to solemn intonation, to charm in a mystical way. In the best, perhaps, of Solovyov's poems - "Ex oriente lux" (1890), Russia is harshly invited to make a choice between the militancy of the ancient Persian king Xerxes and the sacrifice of Christ:

Oh Rus! in anticipation high
You are busy with a proud thought;
What do you want to be the East:
Orient of Xerxes or Christ?

In the 1890s, the azure eyes of the invisible Sophia again clearly shone on Solovyov. This time the light came not from the East, not from the West, but from the North. In the winter of 1894, having left to work in Finland, Solovyov unexpectedly felt the secret presence of Sophia in everything - in the Finnish rocks, in the pines, in the lake ... But it was then that he made a conclusion for himself about the terrible proximity of a global catastrophe, about the appearance of the Antichrist. A bunch of his sad historical observations was the poem "Pan-Mongolism":

Pan-Mongolism! Though the word is wild
But it caresses my ears,
As if a harbinger of a great
The destiny of God is full.

...The instruments of God's punishment
The stock has not been depleted yet.
Preparing new beats
A swarm of awakened tribes.

Pan-Mongolism - in the understanding of Solovyov - is the unification of Asian peoples for the sake of enmity with the European "race"; Vladimir Sergeevich was convinced that in the 20th century the united militant representatives of the "yellow race" would become the main historical force: "From Malay waters to Altai // Leaders from the eastern islands // At the walls of drooping China // They gathered the darkness of their regiments."

These motifs will be developed in their work by the closest literary heirs of Solovyov, poets of the next generation who will call themselves Russian Symbolists - you will also get to know their work in the next, 11th grade.

• What mindsets are inherent in Russian poets of the late 19th century? What is their similarity with the Romantics of the beginning of the century?

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2. Gippius V.V. From Pushkin to Blok. M., 1966.
3. Grigoriev A.A. Memories. M., 1980.
4. Egorov B.F. Apollo Grigoriev. M., 2000 (Series "Life of Remarkable People").
5. Korovin V.I. Noble heart and pure voice of the poet // Pleshcheev A.N. Poems. Prose. M., 1988.
6. Nolman M.L. Charles Baudelaire. Fate. Aesthetics. Style. M., 1979.
7. Novikov Vl. Artistic world of Prutkov // Works of Kozma Prutkov. M., 1986.
8. Fedorov A.V. Poetic creativity of K.K. Sluchevsky // Sluchevsky K.K. Poems and poems. M.-L., 1962.
9. Yampolsky I.G. Middle of the century: Essays on Russian poetry 1840-1870. L., 1974.

Many of the talented Russian lyricists (F.I. Tyutchev, A.A. Fet, N.A. Nekrasov, A.K. Tolstoy, A.N. Maikov) began their journey in the late 1830s - early 1840s . It was a time very unfavorable for lyricists and for poetry. After the death of Pushkin and Lermontov, A.I. Herzen, "Russian poetry has become numb". The muteness of Russian poetry was due to various reasons. The main one was the one about which V.G. Belinsky in the article "A Look at Russian Literature of 1843": "After Pushkin and Lermontov, it is difficult to be not only remarkable, but also some kind of poet." An important role was played by another circumstance: prose takes possession of the minds of readers. Readers were waiting for short stories and novels, and the editors of magazines, responding to the "spirit" of the era, willingly provided pages of prose, publishing almost no lyric poems.

In the 1850s poets, it would seem, overcame the indifference of readers. It was in this decade that the first collection of F.I. Tyutchev, who attracted everyone's attention: readers finally recognized the brilliant poet, who began his career in the 1820s. Two years later, in 1856, a collection of Nekrasov's poems was published, almost instantly sold out. But interest in the poetic word soon fades away, and new books by A.K. Tolstoy, A.N. Maykova, Ya.P. Polonsky, F.I. Tyutcheva, A.A. Fet attract the attention of critics and a few lovers of poetry.

Meanwhile, Russian poetry of the second half of the 19th century lived a very intense life. The originality of aesthetic positions, a special understanding of the purpose of the poet and poetry breed Russian lyricists into different "camps" (according to A.K. Tolstoy). This is “civil poetry”, the purpose of which is “to remind the crowd that the people are in poverty” (N.A. Nekrasov), and “pure poetry”, designed to sing the “ideal side” of life. F. Tyutchev, A. Fet, Ap. Maykova, A.K. Tolstoy, Ya. Polonsky, Ap. Grigoriev. Civic poetry was represented by Nekrasov. Endless discussions between supporters of the two "camps", mutual accusations of pseudo-poetry or indifference to the life of society explain a lot in the atmosphere of the era. But, defending the correctness of only their aesthetic ideas, poets from different “camps” often turned out to be close in their poetic vision of the world, close to the values ​​that they sang. The work of each talented poet served one lofty goal - the affirmation of the ideal of beauty, goodness and truth. All of them, to use Nekrasov's expression, "preached love", understanding it in different ways, but equally seeing in it the highest purpose of man. In addition, the work of every true poet, of course, could not fit into the Procrustean bed of straightforward schemes. So, A.K. Tolstoy, who declared his belonging to the poets of "pure" art, in epics, epigrams and satirical poems, managed to speak very sharply about the problems of contemporary life. ON THE. Nekrasov - deeply and subtly reflected the "internal, mysterious movements of the soul", which the supporters of "pure" art considered one of the main subjects of poetry.

Although the poets of the second half of the 19th century could not overcome the indifference of readers to the lyrics and make them wait anxiously for their poetry collections (as, for example, the new novels of I. Turgenev, I. Goncharov, F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy were expected), however, they made them sing their poems. Already in the 1860s. M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin said that Fet's romances "are sung by almost all of Russia." But Russia sang not only Feta. The amazing musicality of the works of Russian lyricists attracted the attention of outstanding composers: P.I. Tchaikovsky, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, M.P. Mussorgsky, S.I. Taneeva, S.V. Rachmaninov, who created musical masterpieces that the Russian people remembered and loved. Among the most famous, popular ones are “Song of a Gypsy” (“My fire in the fog shines”), “The Recluse”, “Challenge” by Ya.P. Polonsky, “Oh, at least you speak with me”, “Two guitars, ringing ...” A. Grigoriev, “Among the noisy ball”, “That was in early spring ...” A.K. Tolstoy, "Pedlars" N.A. Nekrasov and many, many other poems by Russian poets of the second half of the 19th century.

Time, erasing the acuteness of disputes about the appointment of the poet and poetry, found that for the next generations both "pure" lyricists and "civilian" poets turn out to be equally significant. Reading their works now, we understand: those images that seemed to contemporaries "lyrical audacity" are a gradual but clear emergence of poetic ideas that are preparing the flowering of Russian lyrics of the Silver Age. One of these ideas is the dream of “ascending” love, love that transforms both man and the world. But the Nekrasov tradition became no less significant for the poets of the Silver Age - his “cry”, according to K. Balmont, the cry that “there are prisons and hospitals, attics and basements”, that “at this very minute, when we are with you breathe, there are people who are suffocating.” Acute awareness of the imperfection of the world, Nekrasov's "hostile word of denial" organically combined in the lyrics of V. Bryusov and F. Sologub, A. Blok and A. Bely with longing for the Unspeakable, for the ideal, giving rise not to the desire to get away from the imperfect world, but to transform it according to Ideal.

Literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century played an important role in the social life of the country. Most modern critics and readers are convinced of this. At that time, reading was not entertainment, but ways of knowing the surrounding reality. For the writer, creativity itself became an important act of civic service to society, since he had a sincere belief in the power of the creative word, in the likelihood that a book could influence the mind and soul of a person so that he would change for the better.

Opposition in literature

As modern researchers note, it was precisely because of this belief in the literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century that the civic pathos of the struggle for some idea was born, which could play an important role in transforming the country, sending the whole country along one path or another. The 19th century was the century of maximum development of domestic critical thought. Therefore, the speeches in the press of critics of that time entered the annals of Russian culture.

A well-known confrontation that emerged in the history of literature in the middle of the 19th century emerged between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. These social movements arose in Russia as early as the 40s of the 19th century. Westerners advocated that the true development of Russia began with the reforms of Peter I, and in the future it is necessary to follow this historical path. At the same time, they treated the entire pre-Petrine Russia with disdain, noting the absence of a culture and history worthy of respect. Slavophiles advocated the independent development of Russia, regardless of the West.

Just at that time, a very radical movement became popular among Westerners, which was based on the teachings of utopians with a socialist bias, in particular, Fourier and Saint-Simon. The most radical wing of this movement saw revolution as the only way to change something in the state.

The Slavophiles, in turn, insisted that the history of Russia is no less rich than that of the West. In their opinion, Western civilization suffered from individualism and unbelief, having become disillusioned with spiritual values.

The confrontation between Westernizers and Slavophiles was also observed in Russian literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century, and especially in criticism of Gogol. Westerners considered this writer the founder of the socio-critical trend in Russian literature, while the Slavophiles insisted on the epic fullness of the poem "Dead Souls" and its prophetic pathos. Remember that critical articles played a big role in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century.

"Naturalists"

In the 1840s, a whole galaxy of writers appeared who rallied around the literary critic Belinsky. This group of writers began to be called representatives of the "natural school".

In the literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century, they were very popular. Their protagonist is a representative of the underprivileged class. These are artisans, janitors, beggars, peasants. The writers sought to give them the opportunity to speak out, to show their customs and way of life, reflecting through them all of Russia from a special angle.

The most popular among them is the genre. It describes different strata of society with scientific rigor. Outstanding representatives of the "natural school" are Nekrasov, Grigorovich, Turgenev, Reshetnikov, Uspensky.

Revolutionary Democrats

By the 1860s, the confrontation between the Westerners and the Slavophils was coming to naught. But disputes between representatives of the intelligentsia continue. Cities, industry are rapidly developing around, history is changing. At this moment, people from various social strata come to the literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century. If earlier writing was the lot of the nobility, now merchants, priests, philistines, officials and even peasants take up the pen.

In literature and criticism, the ideas laid down by Belinsky are developed, the authors pose sharp social questions for readers.

Chernyshevsky lays the philosophical foundations in his master's thesis.

"Aesthetic Criticism"

In the 2nd half of the 19th century, the direction of "aesthetic criticism" received special development in literature. Botkin, Druzhinin, Annenkov do not accept didacticism, proclaiming the inherent value of creativity, as well as its detachment from social problems.

"Pure art" should solve exclusively aesthetic problems, representatives of "organic criticism" came to such conclusions. In its principles, developed by Strakhov and Grigoriev, true art became the fruit of not only the mind, but also the soul of the artist.

soilmen

Soil cultivators gained great popularity during this period. Dostoevsky, Grigoriev, Danilevsky, Strakhov included themselves among them. They developed the ideas in a Slavophilic way, warning at the same time to be too carried away by social ideas, to break away from tradition, reality, history and the people.

They tried to penetrate into the lives of ordinary people, deriving general principles for the maximum organic development of the state. In the magazines Epoch and Vremya, they criticized the rationalism of their opponents, who, in their opinion, were too revolutionary.

Nihilism

One of the features of the literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century was nihilism. In it, the soil scientists saw one of the main threats to real reality. Nihilism was very popular among different sections of Russian society. It was expressed in the denial of accepted norms of behavior, cultural values ​​and recognized leaders. At the same time, moral principles were replaced by the concepts of one's own pleasure and benefit.

The most striking work of this trend is Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons", written in 1861. Its protagonist Bazarov denies love, art and compassion. They were admired by Pisarev, who was one of the main ideologists of nihilism.

Genre of the novel

The novel plays an important role in Russian literature of this period. It was in the second half of the 19th century that Leo Tolstoy's epic "War and Peace", Chernyshevsky's political novel "What Is to Be Done?", Dostoevsky's psychological novel "Crime and Punishment", and Saltykov-Shchedrin's social novel "Lord Golovlev" came out.

The most significant was the work of Dostoevsky, reflecting the era.

Poetry

In the 1850s, poetry flourished after a brief oblivion that followed the golden age of Pushkin and Lermontov. Polonsky, Fet, Maikov come to the fore.

In poetry, poets pay increased attention to folk art, history, and everyday life. It becomes important to comprehend Russian history in the works of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Maikov, May. It is epics, folk legends and old songs that determine the style of the authors.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the work of civil poets became popular. The poems of Minaev, Mikhailov, Kurochkin are associated with revolutionary democratic ideas. The main authority for the poets of this direction is Nikolai Nekrasov.

By the end of the 19th century, peasant poets became popular. Among them are Trefolev, Surikov, Drozhzhin. She continues the traditions of Nekrasov and Koltsov in her work.

Dramaturgy

The second half of the 19th century is the time of the development of national and original dramaturgy. The authors of the plays actively use folklore, pay attention to peasant and merchant life, national history, and the language spoken by the people. You can often find works devoted to social and moral issues, in which romanticism is combined with realism. These playwrights include Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Sukhovo-Kobylin.

The diversity of styles and artistic forms in dramaturgy led to the emergence at the very end of the century of vivid dramatic works by Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy.

Influence of foreign literature

Foreign literature of the 2nd half of the 19th century has a noticeable influence on Russian writers and poets.

At this time, realistic novels reigned in foreign literature. First of all, these are the works of Balzac ("Shagreen Skin", "Parma Convent", "Eugenia Grande"), Charlotte Bronte ("Jane Eyre"), Thackeray ("Newcomes", "Vanity Fair", "History of Henry Esmond"), Flaubert ("Madame Bovary", "Education of the Senses", "Salambo", "Simple Soul").

In England at that time, Charles Dickens was considered the main writer, his works Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, The Life and Adventures of Niklas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son are also read in Russia.

In European poetry, the collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire "Flowers of Evil" becomes a real revelation. These are the works of the famous European symbolist, which caused a whole storm of discontent and indignation in Europe due to the large number of obscene lines, the poet was even fined for violating the norms of morality and morality, making the collection of poems one of the most popular in the decade.