Symbolism of Western Europe at the end of the 19th century. Art of Western Europe at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries

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CONTENT

Introduction
At the end In the 19th century, Europe achieved unprecedented technological progress, science gave man power over the environment and continued to develop at a gigantic pace. However, it turned out that the scientific picture of the world does not fill the voids that arise in the public consciousness, and reveals its unreliability. The limitedness, superficiality of ideas about the world was confirmed by a number of natural scientific discoveries, mainly in the field of physics and mathematics. The discovery of X-rays, radiation, the invention of wireless communication, and a little later the creation of quantum theory and the theory of relativity shook the materialistic doctrine, shook faith in the absoluteness of the laws of mechanics. The previously identified “unambiguous regularities” were subjected to a significant revision: the world turned out to be not only unknowable, but also unknowable. The awareness of the fallacy and incompleteness of the previous knowledge led to the search for new ways of comprehending reality.
One of these paths - the path of creative revelation - was proposed by the symbolists, according to whom the symbol is unity and, therefore, provides a holistic view of reality. The scientific worldview was based on the sum of errors - creative knowledge can adhere to a pure source of superintelligent insights.
The appearance of symbolism was also a reaction to the crisis of religion. "God is dead," F. Nietzsche proclaimed, thus expressing the common sense of the borderline era of the exhaustion of the traditional dogma. Symbolism is revealed as a new type of God-seeking: religious and philosophical questions, the question of the superman - about a person who has challenged his limited abilities. Based on these experiences, the Symbolist movement attached primary importance to the restoration of ties with the other world, which was expressed in the frequent appeal of the symbolists to the "secrets of the coffin", in the increasing role of the imaginary, the fantastic, in the fascination with mysticism, pagan cults, theosophy, occultism, magic. Symbolist aesthetics was embodied in the most unexpected forms, delving into an imaginary, transcendent world, into areas that had not been explored before - sleep and death, esoteric revelations, the world of eros and magic, altered states of consciousness and vice.
Symbolism was also closely connected with the eschatological forebodings that seized the man of the borderline era. The expectation of the "end of the world", "the decline of Europe", the death of civilization exacerbated metaphysical moods, made spirit triumph over matter.
Among the important ideas of this time are the following:
- Darwinism (a trend named after Charles Darwin, a scientist). According to this idea, a person is determined by his environment and heredity, and he is no longer a "copy of God";
- the pessimism of culture (according to Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher and writer) is based on the notions that there are no more religious ties, there is no overwhelming meaning, there is a reassessment of all values around. Most people are interested in nihilism;
- psychoanalysis (according to Sigmund Freud, psychologist), aimed at discovering the subconscious, interpreting dreams, studying and understanding one's own Self.
The turn of the century was the time of the search for absolute values.
1. Symbolism as an artistic movement

The development of the history of world culture (the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, the 20th century and the turn of the 20th-21st centuries) can be viewed as an endless chain of novels and partings of "high literature" with the theme of capitalist society. Thus, the turn of the 19th-20th centuries was characterized by the emergence of two key trends for all subsequent literature - naturalism and symbolism.
French naturalism, represented by the names of such prominent novelists as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, the Brothers Jules and Edmond Goncourt, perceived the human personality as absolutely dependent on heredity, the environment in which it was formed, and the "moment" - that particular socio-political situation in which it exists and operates at the moment. Thus, naturalist writers were the most meticulous writers of everyday life in capitalist society at the end of the 19th century. On this issue, they were opposed by the French symbolist poets - Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stefan Mallarmé and many others, who categorically refused to recognize the influence of the modern socio-political situation on the human personality and opposed the world of "pure art" and poetic fiction.
SYMBOLISM (from French symbolisme, from Greek symbolon - a sign, an identifying sign) is an aesthetic movement that was formed in France in 1880-1890 and became widespread in literature, painting, music, architecture and theater in many European countries at the turn of the 19-20s centuries Symbolism was of great importance in Russian art of the same period, which acquired the definition of "Silver Age" in art history.
The symbolists believed that it was the symbol, and not the exact sciences, that would allow a person to break through to the ideal essence of the world, to go "from the real to the real." A special role in the comprehension of superreality was assigned to poets as carriers of intuitive revelations and poetry as the fruit of superintelligent intuitions. The emancipation of the language, the destruction of the usual relationship between the sign and the denotate, the multi-layered nature of the symbol, which carries diverse and often opposite meanings, led to the dispersion of meanings and turned the symbolist work into a “multiplicity madness”, in which things, phenomena, impressions and visions. The only thing that gave integrity at every moment to the splitting text was the unique, inimitable vision of the poet.
The removal of the writer from the cultural tradition, the deprivation of the language of its communicative function, the all-consuming subjectivity inevitably led to the hermeticism of symbolist literature and required a special reader. The Symbolists modeled for themselves his image, and this became one of their most original achievements. It was created by J.-C. Huysmans in the novel “On the contrary”: the virtual reader is in the same situation as the poet, he hides from the world and nature and lives in aesthetic solitude, both spatial (in a distant estate) and temporal ( renouncing the artistic experience of the past); through a magical creation, he enters into a spiritual cooperation with its author, into an intellectual union, so that the process of symbolist creativity is not limited to the work of a magical writer, but continues in the deciphering of his text by an ideal reader. There are very few such connoisseurs, congenial to the poet, there are no more than ten of them in the entire universe. But such a limited number does not confuse the Symbolists, for this is the number of the most chosen, and there is not one among them who would have his own kind.
2. The concept of a symbol and its significance for symbolism

Speaking of symbolism, one cannot fail to mention its central concept symbol, because it was from him that the name of this trend in art came from. It must be said that symbolism is a complex phenomenon. Its complexity and inconsistency are due, first of all, to the fact that different poets and writers put different content into the concept of a symbol.
The very name of the symbol comes from the Greek word symbolon, which translates as a sign, an identification sign. In art, a symbol is interpreted as a universal aesthetic category, which is revealed through comparison with adjacent categories of an artistic image, on the one hand, sign and allegory, on the other. In a broad sense, we can say that a symbol is an image taken in the aspect of its symbolism, and that it is a sign, and that it is a sign endowed with all the organicity and inexhaustible ambiguity of the image.
Every symbol is an image; but the category of the symbol points to the image going beyond its own limits, to the presence of a certain meaning, inseparably merged with the image. The objective image and the deep meaning appear in the structure of the symbol as two poles, inconceivable, however, one without the other, but divorced from each other, so that in the tension between them the symbol is revealed. I must say that even the founders of symbolism interpreted the symbol in different ways.
In the Symbolist Manifesto, J. Moreas defined the nature of the symbol, which supplanted the traditional artistic image and became the main material of symbolist poetry. “Symbolist poetry is looking for a way to clothe the idea in a sensual form that would not be self-sufficient, but at the same time, serving the expression of the Idea, would retain its individuality,” Moréas wrote. A similar "sensual form" in which the Idea is clothed is a symbol.
The fundamental difference between a symbol and an artistic image is its ambiguity. The symbol cannot be deciphered by the efforts of the mind: at the last depth it is dark and not accessible to the final interpretation. The symbol is a window to infinity. The movement and play of semantic shades create indecipherability, the mystery of the symbol. If the image expresses a single phenomenon, then the symbol is fraught with a whole range of meanings - sometimes opposite, multidirectional. The duality of the symbol goes back to the romantic notion of two worlds, the interpenetration of two planes of being.
The multi-layered nature of the symbol, its open polysemy was based on mythological, religious, philosophical and aesthetic ideas about super-reality, incomprehensible in its essence.
The theory and practice of symbolism were closely associated with the idealistic philosophy of I. Kant, A. Schopenhauer, F. Schelling, as well as F. Nietzsche's thoughts about the superman, being "beyond good and evil." At its core, symbolism merged with the Platonic and Christian concepts of the world, having adopted romantic traditions and new trends.
Not realizing the continuation of any particular trend in art, symbolism carried the genetic code of romanticism: the roots of symbolism are in romantic commitment to a higher principle, an ideal world. “Pictures of nature, human deeds, all the phenomena of our life are significant for the art of symbols not in themselves, but only as intangible reflections of the original ideas, indicating their secret affinity with them,” wrote J. Moreas. Hence the new tasks of art, previously assigned to science and philosophy - to approach the essence of the "most real" by creating a symbolic picture of the world, to forge the "keys of secrets".
3. Formation symbolism
3.1 Western European symbolism
As an artistic trend, symbolism publicly announced itself in France, when a group of young poets, who in 1886 rallied around S. Mallarme, realized the unity of artistic aspirations. The group included: J. Moreas, R. Gil, Henri de Regno, S. Merrill and others. In the 1990s, P. Valery, A. Gide, P. Claudel joined the poets of the Mallarmé group. P. Verlaine, who published his symbolist poems and a series of essays “Damned Poets”, as well as J.K. Huysmans, who published the novel "On the contrary". In 1886, J. Moreas placed the Manifesto of Symbolism in Figaro, in which he formulated the basic principles of the direction, based on the judgments of C. Baudelaire, S. Mallarmé, P. Verlaine, C. Henri. Two years after the publication of the manifesto by J. Moréas, A. Bergson published his first book “On the Immediate Data of Consciousness”, in which the philosophy of intuitionism was declared, which in its basic principles echoes the symbolist worldview and gives it additional justification.
3.2 Symbolism in France
The formation of symbolism in France - the country in which the symbolist movement originated and flourished - is associated with the names of the largest French poets: C. Baudelaire, S. Mallarmé, P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud. The forerunner of symbolism in France was Charles Baudelaire, who published the book Flowers of Evil in 1857. In search of ways to the "ineffable", many symbolists took up Baudelaire's idea of "correspondences" between colors, smells and sounds. The proximity of various experiences should, according to the symbolists, be expressed in a symbol. Baudelaire's sonnet "Correspondences" became the motto of symbolist quests with the famous phrase: "Sound, smell, form, color echo." The search for correspondences is at the heart of the symbolist principle of synthesis, the unification of arts.
S. Mallarme, “the last romantic and the first decadent”, insisted on the need to “inspire images”, convey not things, but your impressions of them: “To name an object means to destroy three-quarters of the pleasure of a poem, which is created for gradual guessing, to inspire it - that's the dream."
P. Verlaine in the famous poem "Poetic Art" defined the adherence to musicality as the main sign of genuine poetic creativity: "Musicality is first of all." In Verlaine's view, poetry, like music, strives for a mediumistic, non-verbal reproduction of reality. Like a musician, the symbolist poet rushes towards the elemental flow of the beyond, the energy of sounds. If the poetry of C. Baudelaire inspired the symbolists with a deep longing for harmony in a tragically divided world, then the poetry of Verlaine amazed with its musicality, subtle feelings. Following Verlaine, the idea of music was used by many symbolists to denote creative mystery.
In the poetry of the brilliant young man A. Rimbaud, who first used vers libre (free verse), the symbolists adopted the idea of abandoning “eloquence”, finding a crossing point between poetry and prose. Invading any, the most non-poetic spheres of life, Rimbaud achieved the effect of "natural supernaturalness" in the depiction of reality.
Symbolism in France also manifested itself in painting (G. Moreau, O. Rodin, O. Redon, M. Denis, Puvis de Chavannes, L. Levy-Durmer), music (Debussy, Ravel), theater (Poet Theater, Mixed Theater, Petit theater du Marionette), but the main element of symbolist thinking has always been lyricism. It was the French poets who formulated and embodied the main precepts of the new movement: the mastery of the creative secret through music, the deep correspondence of various sensations, the ultimate price of the creative act, the orientation towards a new intuitive-creative way of knowing reality, the transmission of elusive experiences. Among the forerunners of French symbolism, all the major lyricists from Dante and F. Villon to E. Poe and T. Gauthier were recognized.
3.3 Symbolism in Western Europe
Belgian symbolism is represented by the figure of the greatest playwright, poet, essayist M. Maeterlinck, known for his plays The Blue Bird, The Blind, The Miracle of St. Anthony, There, Inside. According to N. Berdyaev, Maeterlinck depicted "the eternal tragic beginning of life, cleansed of all impurities." Maeterlinck's plays were perceived by most contemporaries as puzzles that needed to be solved. M. Maeterlinck defined the principles of his work in the articles collected in the treatise Treasure of the Humble (1896). The treatise is based on the idea that life is a mystery in which a person plays a role that is inaccessible to his mind, but understandable to his inner feeling. Maeterlinck considered the main task of the playwright to be the transfer of not an action, but a state. In The Treasure of the Humble, Maeterlinck put forward the principle of “secondary” dialogues: behind an apparently random dialogue, the meaning of words that initially seem insignificant is revealed. The movement of such hidden meanings made it possible to play with numerous paradoxes (the miraculousness of everyday life, the sight of the blind and the blindness of the sighted, the madness of the normal, etc.), to plunge into the world of subtle moods.
One of the most influential figures of European symbolism was the Norwegian writer and playwright G. Ibsen. His plays Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, The Wild Duck combined the concrete and the abstract. “Symbolism is a form of art that simultaneously satisfies our desire to see embodied reality and rise above it,” Ibsen defined. - Reality has a flip side, facts have a hidden meaning: they are the material embodiment of ideas, an idea is presented through a fact. Reality is a sensual image, a symbol of the invisible world. Ibsen distinguished between his art and the French version of symbolism: his dramas were built on "the idealization of matter, the transformation of the real", and not on the search for the beyond, the otherworldly. Ibsen gave a specific image, a fact a symbolic sound, raised it to the level of a mystical sign.
In English literature, symbolism is represented by the figure of O. Wilde. The desire to shock the bourgeois public, the love of paradox and aphorism, the life-creating concept of art (“art does not reflect life, but creates it”), hedonism, the frequent use of fantastic, fairy-tale plots, and later “neo-Christianity” (perception of Christ as an artist) allow attribute O. Wilde to the writers of the symbolist orientation.
Symbolism gave a powerful branch in Ireland: one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, the Irishman W.B. Yeats considered himself a symbolist. His poetry, full of rare complexity and richness, was fed by Irish legends and myths, theosophy and mysticism. A symbol, Yeats explains, is "the only possible expression of some invisible entity, the frosted glass of a spiritual lamp."
The works of R.M. Rilke, S. George, E. Verharn, G.D. are also associated with symbolism. Annunzio, A. Strinberg and others.
4. Symbolism in Russia

After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905-07. in Russia, decadent moods were especially widespread.
Decadence (French decadence, from late Latin decadentia - decline), the general name for the crisis phenomena of bourgeois culture of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, marked by moods of hopelessness, rejection of life, the individual, etc. ........ .........

1. Romanticism(Romanticism), an ideological and artistic movement that arose in European and American culture of the late 18th century - the first half of the 19th century, as a reaction to the aesthetics of classicism. Initially formed (1790s) in philosophy and poetry in Germany, and later (1820s) spread to England, France and other countries. He predetermined the latest development of art, even those of his directions that opposed him.

Freedom of self-expression, increased attention to the individual, unique features of a person, naturalness, sincerity and looseness, which replaced the imitation of classical examples of the 18th century, became new criteria in art. The Romantics rejected the rationalism and practicality of the Enlightenment as mechanistic, impersonal, and artificial. Instead, they prioritized the emotionality of expression, inspiration. Feeling free from the declining system of aristocratic rule, they sought to express their new views, the truths they had discovered. Their place in society has changed. They found their reader among the growing middle class, ready to emotionally support and even bow before the artist - a genius and a prophet. Restraint and humility were rejected. They were replaced by strong emotions, often reaching extremes.

Some romantics turned to the mysterious, mysterious, even terrible, folk beliefs, fairy tales. Romanticism was partly associated with democratic, national and revolutionary movements, although the "classical" culture of the French Revolution actually slowed down the arrival of Romanticism in France. At this time, several literary movements arise, the most important of which are Sturm und Drang in Germany, primitivism in France, headed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Gothic novel, interest in the sublime, ballads and old romances (from which actually coined the term "Romanticism"). The source of inspiration for German writers, theorists of the Jena school (brothers Schlegel, Novalis and others), who declared themselves romantics, was the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Fichte, which put the creative possibilities of the mind at the forefront. These new ideas, thanks to Coleridge, penetrated into England and France, and also determined the development of American transcendentalism.

Thus, Romanticism began as a literary movement, but had a significant influence on music and less on painting. In the visual arts, Romanticism manifested itself most clearly in painting and graphics, and less so in architecture. In the 18th century, the favorite motifs of artists were mountain landscapes and picturesque ruins. Its main features are the dynamism of the composition, voluminous spatiality, rich color, chiaroscuro (for example, the works of Turner, Géricault and Delacroix). Other romantic artists include Fuseli and Martin. The work of the Pre-Raphaelites and the neo-Gothic style in architecture can also be seen as a manifestation of Romanticism.

Artists of Romanticism: Turner, Delacroix, Martin, Bryullov

2. Realism(realism, from lat. realis - real, material) - a concept that characterizes the cognitive function of art: the truth of life, embodied by the specific means of art, the measure of its penetration into reality, the depth and completeness of its artistic knowledge.

Realism, understood as the main trend in the historical development of art, suggests a variety of styles and has its own specific historical forms: the realism of ancient folklore, the art of antiquity and late Gothic. The prologue of realism as an independent trend was the art of the Renaissance (“Renaissance realism”), from which, through European painting of the 17th century, “enlightenment realism” of the 18th century. threads stretch to the realism of the 19th century, when the concept of realism arose and was formulated in literature and the visual arts.

Realism 19th century was a form of response to romantic and classical idealization, as well as to the denial of generally accepted academic norms. Marked by a sharp social orientation, it was called critical realism, becoming a reflection in art of acute social problems and aspirations to evaluate the phenomena of social life. The leading principles of 19th century realism. became an objective reflection of the essential aspects of life, combined with the height and truth of the author's ideal; reproduction of typical characters and situations with the completeness of their artistic individualization; preference in ways of depicting "forms of life itself" with a predominant interest in the problem of "personality and society".

Realism in the culture of the 20th century. characterized by the search for new connections with reality, original creative solutions and means of artistic expression. It does not always appear in its pure form, often intertwined in a complex knot with opposite currents - symbolism, religious mysticism, modernism.

Realism masters: Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Francois Millet, Ilya Repin, Vasily Perov, Ivan Kramskoy, Vasily Surikov, Rockwell Kent, Diego Rivera, Andre Fougeron, Boris Taslitsky.

3. Symbolism- direction in the literature and fine arts of Europe at the end of the 19th century - the beginning of the 20th century. Symbolism arose as an alternative to the exhausted and artistic practices of realism and naturalism, turning to an anti-materialistic, anti-rationalist way of thinking and approach to art. At the heart of his worldview concept was the idea of the existence behind the world of visible, real things of another, real reality, a vague reflection of which is our world. The symbolists considered everything that happens to us and around us to be the product of a chain of causes hidden from ordinary consciousness, and the only way to achieve truth, a moment of insight, is the creative process. The artist becomes an intermediary between our illusory world and supersensible reality, expressing in visual images "an idea in the form of feelings".

Symbolism in the visual arts - a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, not formed into a single system and not developed its own artistic language. Following the Symbolist poets, artists sought inspiration in the same images and plots: the themes of death, love, vice, sin, illness and suffering, eroticism attracted them. A characteristic feature of the movement was a strong mystical-religious feeling. Symbolist artists often turned to allegory, mythological and biblical subjects.

The features of symbolism are clearly traced in the works of a variety of masters - from Puvis de Chavannes, G. Moreau, O. Redon and the Pre-Raphaelites to the post-impressionists (P. Gauguin, Van Gogh, "Nabids", etc.), who worked in France (the birthplace of symbolism), Belgium, Germany, Norway and Russia. All representatives of this trend are characterized by the search for their own pictorial language: some paid special attention to decorativeness, exotic details, others strove for an almost primitive simplicity of the image, clear contours of figures interspersed with blurry outlines of silhouettes lost in a foggy haze. Such stylistic diversity, together with the liberation of painting “from the shackles of authenticity,” created the preconditions for the formation of many artistic trends of the 20th century.

Masters of symbolism Cast: Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, Felicien Rops, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel, Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Viktor Borisov-Musatov, Mikhail Vrubel.

4. Impressionism- a direction in painting that originated in France in the 1860s. and largely determined the development of art in the 19th century. The central figures of this trend were Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley, and the contribution of each of them to its development is unique. The Impressionists opposed the conventions of classicism, romanticism and academism, asserted the beauty of everyday reality, simple, democratic motives, achieved lively authenticity of the image, tried to capture the "impression" of what the eye sees at a particular moment.

The most typical theme for the Impressionists is the landscape, but they also touched on many other topics in their work. Degas, for example, depicted races, ballerinas and laundresses, and Renoir depicted charming women and children. In impressionistic outdoor landscapes, a simple, everyday motif is often transformed by an all-pervasive, moving light that brings a sense of festivity to the picture. In some methods of impressionist construction of composition and space, the influence of Japanese engraving and partly photography is noticeable. The Impressionists were the first to create a multifaceted picture of the everyday life of a modern city, capturing the originality of its landscape and the appearance of the people inhabiting it, their way of life, work and entertainment.

The name "Impressionism" arose after the 1874 exhibition in Paris, which exhibited Monet's painting "Impression. The Rising Sun" (1872; stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris in 1985 and is today listed by Interpol). More than seven Impressionist exhibitions were held between 1876 and 1886; at the end of the latter, only Monet continued to strictly follow the ideals of Impressionism. "Impressionists" are also called artists outside of France who painted under the influence of French Impressionism (for example, the Englishman F. W. Steer).

Impressionist painters: Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir

5. Naturalism- (fr. naturalisme, from lat. natura - nature) - a trend in literature and art that developed in the last third of the 19th century in Europe and the USA. Under the influence of the ideas of positivism, the main representatives of which were O. Comte and G. Spencer, this movement strove for an objective and dispassionate depiction of reality, likening artistic knowledge to scientific knowledge, proceeded from the idea of the complete predestination of fate, the dependence of the human spiritual world on the social environment, heredity and physiology.

In the field of art naturalism was developed primarily in the work of French writers - the brothers E. and J. Goncourt and Emile Zola, who believed that the artist should reflect the world around him without any embellishment, conventions and taboos, with maximum objectivity, positivist truth. In an effort to tell “everything ins and outs” about a person, naturalists showed a special interest in the biological aspects of life. Naturalism in literature and painting manifests itself in a consciously frank display of the physiological manifestations of a person, his pathologies, depicting scenes of violence and cruelty, cruelty, dispassionately observed and described by the artist. Photographic, de-aestheticization of the art form become the leading features of this trend.

Despite the limitations of the creative method, the rejection of generalizations and analysis of the socio-economic problems of society, naturalism, by introducing new themes into art, interest in depicting the "social bottom", new means of depicting reality, contributed to the development of artistic vision and the formation of critical realism in the 19th century (such like E. Manet, E. Degas., M. Lieberman, C. Meunier, verist artists in Italy, etc.), however, in painting, naturalism did not take shape as a holistic, consistent phenomenon, as in literature.

In Soviet criticism of the 1930s-1970s. naturalism was seen as an artistic method opposite to realism and characterized by an asocial, biological approach to man, copying life without artistic generalization, and increased attention to its dark sides.

Masters of Naturalism Cast: Theophile Steinlen, Constantin Meunier, Max Liebermann, Käthe Kollwitz, Francesco Paolo Michetti, Vincenzo Vela, Lucian Freud, Philippe Perlstein.

In the middle of the 19th century, Europe stood on the threshold of the emergence of new artistic trends and trends. They touched primarily on painting and poetry, but gradually penetrated into prose. Symbolism was the deepest and most authoritative new trend in literature. Its origins were the great poet of France Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who was then paid tribute to Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898).

Baudelaire's main book is "Flowers of Evil" (1857), which went through several editions and was supplemented with new poems. In addition, Baudelaire published a collection of poetry, Fragments, and other works. The book "The Parisian blues" was published posthumously, which contains "Little Poems in Prose".

Baudelaire's influence on the Symbolist poets was very significant. A. Rimbaud wrote: "Baudelaire ... is the king of poets, the real God." The collection "Flowers of Evil" showed the hallmarks of a new word in poetry, introduced into it by Baudelaire. Firstly, it is a heightened susceptibility and maximum fidelity in the reproduction of the dark sides of the soul. Secondly, the duality of the image, which appears both real and imaginary, the blurring of the line between the creative person, the poet and the depicted object, as a result of which the image turns into a symbol. For example, in the poem "Cat" a bizarre vision arises:

Important walks in my brain
Beautiful, meek, strong cat
And, celebrating your arrival,
Purring gently and lingeringly.

The collection "Flowers of Evil" struck readers with a frank and sincere "confession" in the depiction of the inner world of the poet, who did not hide any vices or mistakes. “In this cruel book,” Baudelaire wrote, “I have put all my mind, all my heart, my faith and hatred.”

The title of the book contains a significant semantic contradiction: “flowers” and “evil” are hardly compatible words and phenomena. But this name accurately conveys Baudelaire's thought - evil is attractive to modern man, it has its own beauty, its own charm, its own greatness. Baudelaire's man and the poet himself feel the attraction of good and evil, spiritual beauty and the beauty of vice. This is one side. The other is that evil is seen as a form of good. The split between good and evil causes melancholy in the split soul of a person and gives rise to a thirst for the infinite, a desire to break out into the unknown. An irreparable split permeates reality and a person who is just as predisposed to good and beautiful as he is susceptible to evil and vicious:

Stupidity, sin, lawless lawful robbery
They corrupt us, sharpen both soul and body.
And like beggars - lice, we've been stupefied all our lives
We feed ourselves remorse.

Only outside of reality and outside of the "I", as critics note, the man in Baudelaire and the poet are freed from longing.

Baudelaire's vacillation between good and evil, material and spiritual, moral and immoral, above and below, in his poetics leads not only to the combination and interpenetration of the sublime and the base, but also to incompatible combinations in the image, to the aestheticization of the ugly. Each feeling and its underside with all its diverse shades can be easily interchanged. At the same time, Baudelaire cannot escape into illusion, extracting a bitter result from attempts to find an "artificial paradise":

So the old pedestrian sleeping in the ditch
Staring at the Dream with all the strength of the pupil.
It is enough for him to see Paradise in reality,
A flickering candle on an attic tower.

The only place where he doesn't feel lonely and lost is the huge city, Paris. A random passer-by will suddenly meet there or a conversation will start. “Baudelaire Paris,” wrote one of the critics, “is a huge receptacle for the motley total unity of life with its cycle of face and underside, the crossroads of centuries and customs, where gray-haired antiquity and tomorrow collided, intertwined, noisy crowds and loneliness in the midst of crowds, luxury and adversity, revelry and asceticism, filth and purity, well-fed complacency and swelling anger. Paris is a "human anthill" and a city of "mysteries", a storehouse of "wonderful". Both outside of himself and inside, Baudelaire sees trembling shimmers, bizarre shadows. Particularly impressive are the transitional states of nature - autumn (from summer to winter), twilight (from day to night or from night to morning), “when withering and birth, peace and bustle, sleep and wakefulness crowd each other, when the glare of the sunset or rising sun wander absently, all outlines are blurred, quiveringly glimpse ... ". Victor Hugo saw a "new thrill" in Baudelaire's poems.

Baudelaire knew that life was gloomy and saw no way out, but he did not fall into despair, but sang a courageous and bitter song, "keeping high calm."

Following him came the poets, in whose work the feeling of an incurable disease that overtook humanity at the end of the 19th century strengthened. They bore the stamp of a curse and were called "damned poets." What distinguishes them from Baudelaire and his "heroism of the times of decline" is their agreement, although not without internal resistance, with their inferiority and the elevation of decadence "into refined valor." It is this disobedience to their own gloomy moods, the desire to rise above them that makes them great poets.

“I am the Roman world of the period of decline,” Paul Verlaine wrote about himself (the main works are “Saturnian Poems”, “Girlfriends”, “Gallant Festivities”, “Song of Pure Love”, “Romances without Words”, “Wisdom”, “ Far Close, Love, Parallel, Dedications, Women, Happiness, Songs for Her, Elegies, Epigrams, Flesh, Invectives, Bibliosonnets, "Poetic Art", critical articles "Cursed Poets", etc.). He was tormented by longing, overcome by pain, and he tried at all costs to escape from the captivity of the blues and pull himself together. But these attempts again and again ended in failures and breakdowns into the abyss of vice. However, the expression in poetry of these sad experiences of the soul turns into a sincere confession, into the disclosure of the most secret movements of the heart and thoughts about oneself and life, brought to full exposure:

There is a drunken rumble in the taverns, dirt on the sidewalks,
In the dank air of bare plane trees,
A creaky omnibus whose heavy wheels
They are at enmity with the body, sitting somehow askew
And two dim lanterns staring into the night,
Workers running in a crowd, smoking
The policeman has a nose warmer under his nose,
Leaky roof drops, slimy benches,
Ditches full of manure over the edge -
This is what it is, my road to paradise!

Verlaine went through a difficult poetic path. His collection Romances Without Words is the pinnacle of impressionistic lyrics. In the poem "And poison in the heart, / And rain in the morning ..." an instantaneous sketch of nature turns into a "landscape of the soul", into a description of the inner state of the lyrical hero. From the impression, the poet proceeds to express the shades of his mood:

Oh dear rain,
Your rustle is an excuse
The soul of mediocre
Cry iodine noise.

Words, losing their substantive and semantic function, serve to create "melody", "musicality". Verlaine seeks to replace meaning with sound, to merge poetry and music, to make lyrics "wordless".

The manifesto of impressionism and symbolism was the poetic declaration "Poetic Art" (an allusion to Boileau's poetic treatise). In the future, the tendencies of symbolism intensified and found their expression in the collection "Wisdom". Here, the deep plane of the image-symbol is occupied not by the human soul, but by God, which gave reason to believe that supersensible relations have been established between the depicted phenomena and the soul and that Verlaine moved from “humanistic symbolism” to “religious”.

MODERN

Modern (French) moderne- the latest, modern) - an artistic style in European art at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. It received different names in different countries: in Russia - "modern", in France, Belgium, England - "art nouveau", in Germany - "art nouveau", in Austria-Hungary - "secession", in Italy - "liberty".
Symbolism became the aesthetic and philosophical basis of modernity.
Despite its sophistication and sophistication, Art Nouveau was focused on the mass consumer, while maintaining the principle of "art for art's sake."
Art Nouveau rethought and stylized the features of the art of different epochs, and developed its own artistic techniques based on the principles of asymmetry, ornamentality and decorativeness.
The predominant motifs of Art Nouveau are poppies, irises, lilies and other plants, snakes, lizards, swans, waves, dance, as well as the image of a woman with flying hair. The colors are dominated by cold tones. The compositional structure is characterized by an abundance of curvilinear outlines and flowing uneven contours.
Art Nouveau embraced all types of plastic arts - painting, graphics, arts and crafts, theatrical and decorative arts, architecture.
The ideas of creating a unified artistically designed subject-domestic environment have become widespread.
Art Nouveau artists strove for universalism, engaging in various types of artistic activities. Members of the World of Art (K. Somov, N. Sapunov, M. Dobuzhinsky, S. Sudeikin, and others) who combined painting, graphics, arts and crafts, and sculpture became prominent representatives of modernity in Russia.

SYMBOLISM. Symbolism in literature is such a trend in which a symbol (see Symbol) is the main method of artistic depiction for an artist who, in the surrounding reality, is looking only for correspondences with the other world.

Beneath the rough crust of matter
I saw the imperishable purple, -

wrote Vladimir Solovyov, teacher of Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok. For representatives of symbolism, "everything is just a symbol." If for a realist a rose is important in itself, with its delicately silky petals, with its aroma, with its scarlet-black or rose-gold color, then for a symbolist who does not accept the world, a rose is only conceivable likeness mystical love. For the Symbolist, reality is only a springboard for jumping into the unknown. In symbolic creativity, two contents organically merge: hidden abstraction, conceivable similarity and explicit specific image.

Alexander Blok in his book "On the Current State of Russian Symbolism" connects symbolism with a certain worldview, he distinguishes between this the visible world, a rough booth, on the stage of which puppets move, and the other world, the distant shore, where the “bottomless blue eyes” of a mysterious stranger bloom, as the embodiment of something obscure, unknowable, Eternally Feminine. The symbolist poet proceeds from the opposition to this world

other worlds, his poet is not a stylist, but a priest, a prophet who is the owner of secret knowledge, with his images-symbols, like signs, he “winks” with the same mystics, who “all imagine the secrets of the coming meeting”, who are carried away by a dream to to other worlds “beyond the limit”. For poets - mystics, symbols, these are “keys mysteries”, this is “windows in eternity”, windows from this world to another. Here is no longer a literary, but a mystical-philosophical interpretation of symbolism. This interpretation is based on a break with reality, the rejection of the real visible world - a booth with its "cardboard bride" - in the words of A. Blok, or with his "disgusting", rude Aldonsa - in the words of F. Sologub. “Realists are caught, like a surf, by concrete life, beyond which they see nothing, - symbolists, detached from reality, see only their dream in it, they look at life from the window” (Mountain peaks, p. 76. K. Balmont ). Thus, symbolism is based on spiritual split, the opposition of two worlds and the desire to escape from this world with its struggle to another, otherworldly, unknowable world. Hiding from worldly storms and battles in a cell, having gone into a tower with colored windows, the mystic poet serenely contemplates the restless life in Buddhist peace - from the window. Where the masses bleed in struggle, there the secluded poet-dreamer creates his legend and transforms the rude Aldonsa and the Beautiful Dulcinea. He hears the noise of the surf in the shell of his symbols, and not in the face of a stormy element.

I created in my dream
World ideal nature.
Oh, how insignificant before her
Rivers and rocks and waters...

(Valery Bryusov).

The poet experiences special happiness “to leave irrevocably with the soul of his soul to that which is fleeting, which shines with joy. other being"

(K. Balmont).

Such an attitude to the surrounding life, to reality, to the visible world is far from accidental. It is significant and

characteristic of the late 19th century. “However, one cannot but admit,” writes K. Balmont, “that the closer we are to the new century, the more insistently the voices of symbolist poets are heard, the more palpable the need for more refined ways of feelings and thoughts becomes, which is a hallmark of symbolic poetry.” (Mountain Peaks, p. 76). The need to escape from reality into a world of obscure symbols, full of mystical experiences and forebodings, arose more than once among those romantics who did not accept the world, who were carried away by a dream to a blue flower, to a beautiful lady, to the eternally feminine.

The medieval romantics were replaced by the German romantics of the early 19th century. The neo-romanticism of the late 19th century, the neo-romanticism of the symbolists: Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Stefan Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, C. Baudelaire, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, F. Sologub, Vladimir Solovyov are connected with the romance of Novalis; the same break with this world, the same protest against harsh reality.

If the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century is the collapse of feudalism, then the end of the 19th century is the collapse of that 3rd estate, which was nothing and became everything, and which waited for its gravedigger. The end of the 19th century is the collapse of bourgeois culture, it is the formidable approach of a new century fraught with revolutions.

The end of the 19th century, associated with the death of some classes and the rise of others, is full of anxious moods and forebodings among the representatives of the ruling classes. Those social strata to whom reality promises death respond with a denial of reality itself, since reality denies them and, in the words of Nietzsche, hasten to "cover their heads in the sand of heavenly things."

Eroded by doubts, the Hamlet of bourgeois society says to his muse: “Ophelia! retire to the monastery from the people.”

On the one hand, the fear of "barbarians", "Scythians", "the coming Huns", "the coming boor", all those who own the future of all those who bring the death of the old culture, old privileges, old

idols, and on the other hand, contempt for that obsolete ruling stratum with which the bourgeois aristocrats of the spirit are intimately connected - all this creates a transitional, unstable, intermediate position. The destruction of the old way of life, the obscurity of the new, the life of the absence of being lead the outgoing life to something illusory, foggy and vague. The poet rejects the despicable world, the accursed world, begins to love the "string clouds", the legend and dreams, the poetry of bleak moods and gloomy forebodings.

If the representative of the organic creative epoch and the victorious class is a realist and creates definite, clear, daytime images, then the representative of the critical epoch, the representative of the dying class, lives in the illusory world of his fantasy and clothes vague, obscure, vague ideas in symbols. On the shaky ground of the illusory and obscure, disturbing and ambiguous, symbolist poetics grows.

Symbolism and its poetics. Symbolists are reproached for the defiant darkness, for the fact that they create ciphered poetry, where words - hieroglyphs need, like rebus figures, to guess that their poetry is for the initiated, for lonely refiners. But the vagueness, vagueness, duality of experiences is also clothed in the corresponding form. If the classically clear Kuzmin speaks of klyarism - clarity in poetry, then the romantically mysterious poet occultist Andrei Bely loved the "current of darkness." The most sincere symbolist poet, Alexander Blok, "has a soul devoted to dark melodies." In A. Blok's little drama "The King in the Square", the architect's daughter addresses the prophetic poet, the poet-prophet with the words:

I sing your soul
And I love dark words.

The poet answers:

I vague I just love to talk
Soul sayings - unspeakable.

In Paul Verlaine's poetry, unsteady and obscure, like an ambiguous

Gnoconda's smile, the same dark speeches and the same vague...

As if someone's eyes shine
Through the veil..

Symbolist poets avoid bright colors and clear drawings. For them, "the best song in shades always” (Verlaine), for them “the finest colors are not in bright consonances” (K. Balmont). Refined, weary, decrepit in soul, the poets of the departing life catch with their souls "the elusive shadows of the fading day."

Colorful, precisely and clearly minted words do not satisfy symbolist poets. They need "words - chameleons", melodious, melodious words, they need songs without words. Together with Fet, they repeat many times: “oh, if it were possible to express the soul without a word,” together with Paul Verlaine, they consider the musical style to be the basis of their poetry:

Music, music above all

(Verlaine).

Symbolist poets convey their obscure moods of foreboding and vague dreams in musical consonances, “in a barely noticeable trembling strings". They embodied their dreams and insights into musical-sounding images. For Alexander Blok, this most stringed of all poets, all life is “dark music, sounding only about one star. He is always captured by one " musical theme." He says about his writing style:

Always sing, always melodious,
Swirling in mists of verse.

Vague and foggy, unknowable, inexpressible tales of the soul cannot be conveyed in words, they can be inspired by musical consonances that set the reader in tune with the poet-priest, the poet is prophetically obscure, like the ancient Pythia.

Just as in France the marble architectural style of the classics was replaced by the pictorial style of Hugo, Flaubert, Lecomte de Lisle, Gauthier, the Goncourt brothers, who confessed their “musical deafness”, so the musical style of the Symbolists replaced the painting and plasticity of the musically deaf. blind to real life.

These guests of the heavenly side find the charm of their symbolic dreams in the beauty of musicality. In his poem "Chords" K. Balmont writes or sings:

And in silent musicality,
This new specularity
Creates their live round dance
New world unsaid
But connected with the story
In the depths of reflective waters.

When K. Balmont read his poems to Leo Tolstoy, which sang of the "flavor of the sun," Tolstoy did not understand them and said: "what lovely nonsense." The most vigilant of the realists did not understand, did not hear the most musical of the symbolists... He had to say: "what is ringing for me", and he asked himself: "what is drawn in front of me?" The first book of poems by K. Balmont, published in 1890, was simple and understandable in Nadson's way, but not typical for the poet. Only after the translations of the most musical poets Shelley and Edgar Poe, the connoisseur of poetry A. I. Urusov revealed Balmont to K. Balmont, emphasizing to the poet his main thing: “love for the poetry of consonances, admiration for sound musicality.” This love for the poetry of consonances is characteristic of the symbolists Shelley, Edgar Poe, Stef. Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, F. Sologub and V. Bryusov. It is not for nothing that the Symbolists were passionate admirers of Wagner's music. Mallarmé, the master of the French Symbolists, liked to attend Collon's concerts in Paris, and sitting in the front row with a notebook, he gave himself up to the poetry of consonances to the music of Wagner. The young man Konevskoy, one of the first Russian Symbolists, went to Bayreuth to hear Wagner's music in the Wagner Church. Andrei Bely, in his wonderful poem The First Date, sings of the symphony concerts in Moscow, where his poetic heart flourished. When the first collections of Russian symbolists appeared in 1894, they resounded in resounding silence; the very titles spoke first of all about music: Notes, Chords, Scales, Suites, Symphonies.

For the symbolist poet, musicality, the melodiousness of the verse is in the first place, he seeks not to convince, but to tune.

Perhaps everything in the world is just a means
For brightly melodious poetry,
And I from a carefree childhood
seeking combinations words.

says the symbolist poet, striving to convey to the verse a bright melodiousness, melody through a skillfully selected combination of words, letters, through the complex instrumentation of the verse and its euphony. Take the poems of Edgar Poe, translated by Balmont "Bells and Bells", "The Raven", "Annabelli" - you will immediately feel that the Symbolists created a new poetics. Edgar Poe's brilliant treatise "Philosophy of Creativity" introducing you to the workshop of creativity (see vol. II Op. Poe in Balmont's translation). Listen to the booming strikes of a large bell and the chime of small ones, and then read Balmont's poem:

Oh quiet Amsterdam
With a sad chime
old bell towers,
Why am I here, not there...

The whole poem is built on a combination of dental, smooth and palatal. The selection of letters d, t, l, m, n, w allows the poet to build his musical elegy and capture us with the melodiousness of the evening bell ringing in Amsterdam:

Where is the dreamer
Some ghost is sick.
Longing with a long groan
And eternal chime
Sings here and there:
Oh quiet Amsterdam
Oh quiet Amsterdam.

In the poems "Buttercups", "Moisture", "Reeds", "Rain" Balmont achieves extraordinary results with external musical means, sound symbolism. He was right when he exclaimed:

Who is equal to me in my melodious power?

None! None!

Symbolists in the field of musicality of verse, in variability, in the variety of rhythms, in the euphony of verse, opened a new page in the history of poetry, they surpassed even Fet and even Lermontov. Valery Bryusov in 1903 in the World of Art (No. 1-7, p. 35) wrote: “In Russian literature, there was no equal to Balmont in the art of verse. It might seem that in tunes

Feta Russian verse has reached extreme incorporeality, airiness. But where others saw the limit to Balmont, infinity opened up. Such a sample, unattainable in melodiousness, as Lermontov's "On the Air Ocean" completely fades before the best songs of Balmont. Valery Bryusov himself, this eternal experimenter, in his experiments and technical exercises did a lot in the field of the musical style of the Symbolists. He managed to convey the entire orchestra of urban sounds: "hums, voices, rumbles of wheels." Sometimes the purely external emphasized musicality hurts the ear unpleasantly, and the same Balmont has a lot of rude verses that look like a parody, like the famous poem:

Evening, seaside, sighs of the wind,
Majestic cry of the waves...
A storm is close, beats on the shore
Alien to charms black chuln.

All this justifies the parodies of Vl. Solovyov:

Mandrakes immanent
rustled in the reeds,
And rough and decadent
Verses in withering ears!

Unlike externally musical K. Balmont, poet Alexander Blok internally musical. He achieves musical suggestion by the musicality of the theme, composition, without emphasizing his assonances and alliterations (see these words).

The poetics of symbolism, with its allusion and suggestion, with its musical suggestion and tuning, brought poetry closer to music and introduced us to the pleasure of divination. After the Symbolists, crude, documentary, everyday naturalism does not satisfy us. The neo-realists of prose and poetry learned much from the symbolists; they loved the depth and spirituality of the images, they follow in the footsteps of A.P. Chekhov, V.G. Korolenko, Sergeev-Tsensky ...

In the article "Philosophy of Creativity" mentioned above, written about the symbolic poem "The Raven", Edgar Poe explains why his story about the Raven, who got into the room of a lonely man at night, yearning for his dead beloved, went beyond

his explicit phase, beyond real and received hidden symbolic meaning, when we see something emblematic in a crow, an image-symbol of a gloomy, never-ending memory:

Take your hard beak out of your heart
mine, where sorrow is always!
The raven croaked: - Never!

“When developing the plot, however skillful, and at least the event was painted very brightly,” writes Ed. Poe - there is always a certain rigidity, nakedness, repulsive to the artistic eye. Two things are absolutely required: firstly, a certain degree of complexity, more precisely, coordination; secondly, a certain degree of suggestibility - some, at least indefinite undercurrent in the sense. It is this latter that in a special way gives the work of art so much wealth(I take a forced term from everyday life), which we too willingly confuse with the feeling ideal"(Vol. II p. 182. Translated by Balmont). The significance of symbolism lies in the fact that it enriched poetry with new techniques, imparted deepness and suggestibility to the images, imparted melodiousness and musicality to the style. The complicated life, complex experiences of complex, not simple, differentiated personalities found their vivid expression in symbolism. Symbolism has left its mark on Russian literature as well.

SYMBOLISM(from French symbolisme, from Greek symbolon - a sign, an identifying sign) - an aesthetic trend that was formed in France in 1880–1890 and became widespread in literature, painting, music, architecture and theater in many European countries at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries . Symbolism was of great importance in Russian art of the same period, which acquired the definition of "Silver Age" in art history.

Symbol and artistic image. As an artistic trend, symbolism publicly announced itself in France, when a group of young poets, who in 1886 rallied around S. Mallarme, realized the unity of artistic aspirations. The group included: J. Moreas, R. Gil, Henri de Regno, S. Merrill and others. In the 1990s, the poets of the Mallarme group were joined by P.Valeri, A. Zhid, P. Claudel. The design of symbolism in the literary direction was greatly facilitated by P. Verlaine, who published his symbolist poems and a series of essays in the newspapers Paris Modern and La Nouvelle Rive Gauche Damned poets, as well as J.C. Huysmans who came up with a novel Vice versa. In 1886, J. Moreas placed in "Figaro" Symbolism Manifesto, in which he formulated the basic principles of the direction, based on the judgments C. Baudelaire, S. Mallarme, P. Verlaine, Ch.Henri. Two years after the publication of the manifesto by J. Moreas A. Bergson published his first book On the Immediate Data of Consciousness, in which the philosophy of intuitionism was declared, which in its basic principles has something in common with the worldview of the symbolists and gives it additional justification.

AT Symbolist Manifesto J. Moreas determined the nature of the symbol, which replaced the traditional artistic image and became the main material of symbolist poetry. “Symbolist poetry is looking for a way to clothe the idea in a sensual form that would not be self-sufficient, but at the same time, serving the expression of the Idea, would retain its individuality,” Moréas wrote. A similar “sensual form” in which the Idea is clothed is a symbol.

The fundamental difference between a symbol and an artistic image is its ambiguity. The symbol cannot be deciphered by the efforts of the mind: at the last depth it is dark and not accessible to the final interpretation. On Russian soil, this feature of the symbol was successfully defined F. Sologub: "The symbol is a window to infinity." The movement and play of semantic shades create indecipherability, the mystery of the symbol. If the image expresses a single phenomenon, then the symbol conceals a whole range of meanings - sometimes opposite, multidirectional (for example, "miracle and monster" in the image of Peter in the novel Merezhkovsky Peter and Alex). Poet and symbolist theorist Vyach.Ivanov expressed the idea that the symbol marks not one, but different entities, A. Bely defined a symbol as "the connection of the heterogeneous together." The duality of the symbol goes back to the romantic notion of two worlds, the interpenetration of two planes of being.

The multi-layered nature of the symbol, its open polysemy was based on mythological, religious, philosophical and aesthetic ideas about super-reality, incomprehensible in its essence. The theory and practice of symbolism were closely associated with the idealistic philosophy of I. Kant, A. Schopenhauer, F. Schelling, as well as F. Nietzsche's thoughts about the superman, being "beyond good and evil." At its core, symbolism merged with the Platonic and Christian concepts of the world, having adopted romantic traditions and new trends. Not being aware of the continuation of any particular trend in art, symbolism carried the genetic code of romanticism: the roots of symbolism are in a romantic commitment to a higher principle, an ideal world. “Pictures of nature, human deeds, all the phenomena of our life are significant for the art of symbols not in themselves, but only as intangible reflections of the original ideas, indicating their secret affinity with them,” wrote J. Moreas. Hence the new tasks of art, previously assigned to science and philosophy - to approach the essence of the “most real” by creating a symbolic picture of the world, to forge the “keys of secrets”. It is the symbol, and not the exact sciences, that will allow a person to break through to the ideal essence of the world, to pass, according to Vyach. Ivanov's definition, "from the real to the real." A special role in the comprehension of superreality was assigned to poets as carriers of intuitive revelations and poetry as the fruit of superintelligent intuitions.

The formation of Symbolism in France, the country in which the Symbolist movement originated and flourished, is associated with the names of the largest French poets: C. Baudelaire, S. Mallarmé, P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud. The forerunner of symbolism in France is Ch. Baudelaire, who published a book in 1857 The flowers of Evil. In search of ways to the "ineffable", many symbolists took up Baudelaire's idea of "correspondences" between colors, smells and sounds. The proximity of various experiences should, according to the symbolists, be expressed in a symbol. Baudelaire's sonnet became the motto of symbolist quest Correspondence with the famous phrase: Sound, smell, shape, color echo. Baudelaire's theory was later illustrated by A. Rimbaud's sonnet Vowels:

« BUT» black White« E» , « And» red,« At» green,

« O» blue - the colors of a bizarre mystery ...

The search for correspondences is at the heart of the symbolist principle of synthesis, the unification of arts. The motifs of the interpenetration of love and death, genius and illness, the tragic gap between appearance and essence, contained in Baudelaire's book, became dominant in the poetry of the Symbolists.

S. Mallarme, “the last romantic and the first decadent”, insisted on the need to “inspire images”, convey not things, but your impressions of them: “To name an object means to destroy three-quarters of the pleasure of a poem, which is created for gradual guessing, to inspire it - that's the dream." Mallarme's poem Luck will never abolish chance consisted of a single phrase typed in a different script without punctuation marks. This text, according to the author's intention, made it possible to reproduce the trajectory of thought and accurately recreate the "state of the soul."

P. Verlaine in a famous poem poetic art defined the adherence to musicality as the main sign of genuine poetic creativity: "Musicality is first of all." In Verlaine's view, poetry, like music, strives for a mediumistic, non-verbal reproduction of reality. So in the 1870s, Verlaine created a cycle of poems called Songs without words. Like a musician, the symbolist poet rushes towards the elemental flow of the beyond, the energy of sounds. If the poetry of C. Baudelaire inspired the symbolists with a deep longing for harmony in a tragically divided world, then the poetry of Verlaine amazed with its musicality, elusive experiences. Following Verlaine, the idea of music was used by many symbolists to denote creative mystery.

In the poetry of the brilliant young man A. Rimbaud, who first used vers libre (free verse), the idea of \u200b\u200btaking into service the idea of \u200b\u200brefusing "eloquence", finding a crossing point between poetry and prose, was embodied by the Symbolists. Invading any, the most non-poetic spheres of life, Rimbaud achieved the effect of "natural supernaturalness" in the depiction of reality.

Symbolism in France also manifested itself in painting ( G. Moreau, O.Roden, O. Redon, M. Denis, Puvis de Chavannes, L. Levy-Durmer), music ( Debussy, Ravel), theater (Poet Theater, Mixed Theater, Petit Theater du Marionette), but the main element of symbolist thinking has always been lyricism. It was the French poets who formulated and embodied the main precepts of the new movement: the mastery of the creative secret through music, the deep correspondence of various sensations, the ultimate price of the creative act, the orientation towards a new intuitive-creative way of knowing reality, the transmission of elusive experiences. Among the forerunners of French symbolism, all the major lyrics from Dante and F. Villon, before E.Po and T. Gauthier.

Belgian symbolism is represented by the figure of the greatest playwright, poet, essayist M. Maeterlinck known for the plays Blue bird, Blind,Miracle of Saint Anthony, There inside. Already the first poetry collection of Maeterlinck Greenhouses was full of vague allusions, symbols, the characters existed in the semi-fantastic setting of a glass greenhouse. According to N. Berdyaeva, Maeterlinck depicted "the eternal tragic beginning of life, cleansed of all impurities." Maeterlinck's plays were perceived by most contemporaries as puzzles that needed to be solved. M. Maeterlinck defined the principles of his work in the articles collected in the treatise Treasure of the Humble(1896). The treatise is based on the idea that life is a mystery in which a person plays a role that is inaccessible to his mind, but understandable to his inner feeling. Maeterlinck considered the main task of the playwright to be the transfer of not an action, but a state. AT Treasure of the Humble Maeterlinck put forward the principle of “second plan” dialogues: behind an apparently random dialogue, the meaning of words that initially seem insignificant is revealed. The movement of such hidden meanings made it possible to play with numerous paradoxes (the miraculousness of everyday life, the sight of the blind and the blindness of the sighted, the madness of the normal, etc.), to plunge into the world of subtle moods.

One of the most influential figures in European Symbolism was the Norwegian writer and playwright G.Ibsen. His plays Peer Gynt,Hedda Gabler,Dollhouse,Wild duck combined the concrete and the abstract. “Symbolism is a form of art that simultaneously satisfies our desire to see embodied reality and rise above it,” Ibsen defined. – Reality has a flip side, facts have a hidden meaning: they are the material embodiment of ideas, an idea is presented through a fact. Reality is a sensual image, a symbol of the invisible world. Ibsen distinguished between his art and the French version of symbolism: his dramas were built on "the idealization of matter, the transformation of the real", and not on the search for the beyond, the otherworldly. Ibsen gave a specific image, a fact a symbolic sound, raised it to the level of a mystical sign.

In English literature, symbolism is represented by the figure O. Wilde. The desire to shock the bourgeois public, the love of paradox and aphorism, the life-creating concept of art (“art does not reflect life, but creates it”), hedonism, the frequent use of fantastic, fairy-tale plots, and later “neo-Christianity” (perception of Christ as an artist) allow attribute O. Wilde to the writers of the symbolist orientation.

Symbolism gave a powerful branch in Ireland: one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, the Irishman W. B. Yeats, considered himself a symbolist. His poetry, full of rare complexity and richness, was fed by Irish legends and myths, theosophy and mysticism. A symbol, Yeats explains, is “the only possible expression of some invisible entity, the frosted glass of a spiritual lamp.”

Creativity is also associated with symbolism. R.M. Rilke, S.George, E.Verharna, G.D.Annunzio, A. Strinberg and etc.

FRENCH POETRY OF THE END OF THE 19TH — BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURIES

SYMBOLISM

In France at the turn of the century, the signs of a transitional era were particularly evident. On the one hand, there was a tangible and lively connection with the richest heritage of national art, with an authoritative, world-recognized tradition that was reflected in the work of various writers - even Marcel Proust admitted that he was "obsessed with Balzac." Hugo died in 1885 and on the threshold of a new century was perceived as a kind of deity from literature, as the personification of the spirit of the XVIII-XIX centuries, the era of Reason and Progress.

Along with incomparable artistic experience, by the end of the last century, France had an exceptional socio-political experience: the century of revolutions culminating in the proletarian Commune of 1871 brought all classes to the arena of political struggle, activated and democratized French society, and as a result of social development, “Robespierres turned into shopkeepers”, the social structure that had developed by the end of the century appeared as a depressing “world of the color of mold”.

The nation, Thomas Mann recalled, was born in the fire of the French Revolution, "the greatness of the French political spirit" consists in the "happy unity" of the revolutionary and the universal. In any case, historicism and political maturity became prominent signs of French literature emerging from the 19th century. With extraordinary drama, this literature expressed the foreboding of the historical turning points ripening at the turn of the century, and it is in this literature that the other side of the transitional period is especially obvious: the departure from tradition, the need for renewal, in the development of a “new poetics” corresponding to truly dramatic changes.

"All the gods have died" - this is how these fractures are indicated in the famous aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche. From this statement followed his call to "discover ourselves." But such a discovery of oneself in the world from which the gods had departed was carried out primarily lyrically, in poetry, and above all in romantic poetry - the first stage of the historical shift was the development of French romanticism towards symbolism. Symbolism appeared as the last stage in the transformation of romanticism within the 19th century, organically connected with all previous experience and at the same time striving for a "new poetics" - that is, it appeared as a classic version of the art of the transitional era.

The significance of this shift was not immediately realized, it was realized later, in the 20th century, along with the understanding of this new century itself. Yes, and symbolism itself matured in the work of poets who were not bound by any fundamental documents, by any guidelines. The first manifesto of symbolism was published in 1886 and was written by Jean Moréas, a minor poet; it was then that they began to talk about symbolism, about the school of French symbolism. Rimbaud and Mallarme gained some fame only after the publication of Verlaine's book "The Accursed Poets" and Huysmans's novel "On the contrary" in 1884. By this time, Rimbaud, engaged in trade in Africa, had already forgotten that he had once been a poet - and with surprise learned in his solitude that he was included in a symbolism of which he had no idea. He had no idea, but back in May 1870, announcing his desire to become a "clairvoyant poet", Rimbaud thereby announced the creation of symbolist poetry. It was stated in letters that were published forty years later, and until that time no one knew about the poet's intentions.

Mallarme was a theoretician of symbolism, but his discussions about the "new poetics" also for the time being did not go beyond private correspondence, and poetry in the 60s and 70s did not find a reader. Only Verlaine was known, and he was very influential (“the true father of all young poets”, according to Mallarme), but Verlaine was perceived as an impressionist poet, his role in the preparation of the symbolist “new poetics” could not be realized at that time, if only because that no one knew either Rimbaud or Mallarmé, who were greatly influenced by Verlaine.

By the end of the century, symbolism was identified with a feeling of indefinite but boundless freedom, which for the French was concretized in the liberation from the rigid system of traditional versification, which is extremely important for national poetry, in the creation of a system, if not free, then liberated verse. In the manifesto of Moreas, signs of symbolism, more or less obvious by that time, were recorded. The main task of the symbolist is to reproduce the “original Ideas”, as a result of which everything “natural” appeared only as an “appearance” that had no independent artistic value, all poetic means were aimed at conveying the mysterious “original” essence with the help of a hint, “inspiring” , "suggestive" means. Naturally, such poetics sharply contrasted symbolism as an idealistic trend with the spirit of naturalism, positivism, rationalism that prevailed in the middle of the century - prose in all meanings of the word.

No "school" could unite such different, such significant poets as Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé were. In addition, their unification was difficult because each of them turned out to be the personification of a certain stage of movement - in one direction, however, the direction of "discovering ourselves" in a world abandoned by the gods, that is, in a world from which objective truths leave, and the only source of the "new poetics" is the "I" of the poet.

"I was born a romantic," Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) admitted the obvious and deep connection of his poetry with romanticism (his first poem - "Death", 1858 - he dedicated and sent to Victor Hugo), especially with the late Romantic group of Parnassus (Lecomte de Lisle, Banville, etc.) and the work of Charles Baudelaire. This connection determines both the content and the form of Verlaine's first collection of poems, Saturnalia (1866): the romantic opposition of the Ideal to the vulgar crowd, the past to the present, etc. ”, “Sad landscapes”). This intonation had its source in Baudelaire's "spleen", but was stimulated by the collapse of all the poet's illusions, bitterly admitting that he "does not believe in anything."

The poet, who is losing faith, trusts only his feeling, his impressions - already at the moment of the publication of the Saturnalia, Verlaine begins to move towards what he will call the "new system". The main link of the “system”, according to Verlaine, is “sincerity, and these goals are served by impressions from a given moment, literally traced”, “accurate sensations”. Accordingly, the poet "parts with the historical and heroic plots, with the epic and didactic tone, drawn from Victor Hugo."

The milestones of this movement were the collections Gallant Feasts (1869) and Good Song (1870). The subjective perception of reality triumphs in the first of them, which transforms the world into a puppet theater, which is entrusted with performing a performance "in the spirit" of the 18th century. In these elegant miniatures, laconic scenes, in these landscapes filled with feelings, everything is ghostly, secondary, as if written off from the paintings of Watteau or rewritten from the book “The Art of the 18th Century” by the Goncourt brothers, whom Verlaine admired in the 60s.

"The Good Song" is addressed to the beloved woman and is not free from verbosity, from stencils, pathos generated by a love ritual. But in general, the collection marks the transition from the "epic" to the personal, to the everyday, to impressions "of the moment." The penetrating assimilation of the small details of being, ordinary, everyday things, which Verlaine turns into the details of a truly poetic world, into a special “landscape of the soul,” all this will become a feature of the impressionist’s poetry. As well as the characteristic naturalness of the verse: from the rhythms of romantic poetry, "epic and didactic tone", Verlaine moves to miniature, song forms, written as if in a whisper, in one breath, in an instant.

After 1871 Verlaine's melancholy worsened. The defeat of the Commune played its part. Verlaine did not leave Paris during the days of the uprising, he sympathized with the Communards, the Communards were among his friends. His role was played by an uncomplicated personal life, a break with his wife. Friendship with Rimbaud also played a role (in August 1871, Rimbaud wrote to Verlaine, then came to see him in Paris), whose total nihilism pushed for a more decisive break with tradition, for a seriously understood "disorder of all feelings."

In 1874, the collection Romances without Words appeared, with which, first of all, the idea of the new, impressionistic poetry of Verlaine is associated. In the same year, the famous first exhibition of impressionist artists was organized - impressionism became a fact of the history of French art.

As it should be for an impressionistic work, “Romances without words” consist of poems depicting landscapes. Other plots (historical, heroic, satirical) disappeared without a trace. Despite the apparent geographical dispersion (Paris, Brussels, London), the space of poetry is one-dimensional, like time: the "present moment", that is, the present time, nourishes the "exact impressions" of the poet.

But the landscape here is unusual - it is truly a "landscape of the soul." Nature ceases to be an object in relation to which it defines itself and in which the poet's soul expresses itself. They suddenly merged in one image, in a single being, which, remaining nature, becomes a man. The poet does not compare, does not liken, does not personify, he deploys a metaphor that lives independently as an impressionistic duality of external and internal, with the predominance of internal impressions.

The logically completed phrases that carry the thought and description have been replaced by short phrases that fall on paper, like strokes on the artist's canvas, like a hasty touch of the brush of an impressionist artist. Verlaine confessed to his exceptional ability to "see" an object; like an artist, he “hunted” for shapes, colors, shadows. The phrase in impressionistic poetry loses its independent activity, the action leaves it together with the predicate-verb. Verlaine tried to entrust the verbal conversation, the communication of the soul and nature, to colors and sounds.

Verlaine's words - "music first of all", the first line of the poem "Poetic Art", written in the same 1874, gained loud fame. From the point of view of the French poetic tradition, the poem is heretical, encroaching on the very foundations. Fundamentals of French (syllabic) verse - the number of syllables in a line and rhyme; meter and syntax match, speech obeys meter. Verlaine called all this into question, both rhyme and the primordial regularity of verse, announced the possibilities of "irregularities", nuances, unpaired verses and especially music, "music first of all." Verlaine placed the verse at the borders of its complete liberation. Repetitions, internal rhyming, a system of consonant vowels, alliteration - all this creates an effect of amazing euphony, genuine music of the word, designed to inspire, tune, and not report, not describe. That is, to be "romances" - "without words": Verlaine's impressionism contains the premises of Mallarme's symbolist aesthetics, the aesthetics of silence.

But Verlaine himself was far from such extremes. He held on to real life as a source of "accurate sensations" and did not dare to break with tradition. In the collections that followed Romances Without Words (Wisdom, 1880; Once and Recently, 1885; Love, 1888, etc.), verses written in traditional meters (for example, sonnets) appear. As if recollecting himself, Verlaine recalls that "rhyme is necessary for French art." In the last cycles of poems, the traditional theme of love prevails (albeit in a very frivolous interpretation) and the no less traditional theme of faith in God, to which Verlaine returned as he sank, drank himself, died.

Verlaine's inconsistency is perceived as a sign of the first stage of the movement towards the "new poetics" - just as the sign of the next stage is Rimbaud's sequence, the extraordinary rapidity of its development and the shortness of the path: within three and a half years, Rimbaud was able to follow the path of his predecessors, and stage it was called into question, creating a new poetics of "clairvoyance", and to be disappointed in the results of their reform, to leave poetry.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) began with the same student devotion as Verlaine to the then authorities, Hugo, the poets of Parnassus, Baudelaire - in a word, the French romantics ("a true poet is a true romantic"). It is significant for the beginning of Rimbaud's work, for the first year and a half from January 1870 to May 1871, a large poem "The Blacksmith". Everything in it is reminiscent of Hugo's poetry: both the historical plot (the Great French Revolution), the epic content and epic form, the republican idea and the monumental style.

The originality of Rimbaud developed rapidly, along with the development of his rebellion, as his dissatisfaction with life, his desire for renewal, his irresistible craving for change, found poetic expression. Rimbaud is irritated to the extreme by the vulgar bourgeois world, the world of humanoid "sitting" ("Seated"). The poet is defiantly cynical, in Rimbaud's verses a sarcastic-grotesque intonation spreads, heterogeneous, contrasting phenomena, sublime and base, abstract and concrete, poetic and prosaic, are combined in one image. The poetry of early Rimbaud is distinguished by a rare lexical richness, which in itself creates the impression of the widest and constantly changing amplitude, spasmodic rhythm, and polyphony of the verse. Paradoxical and in contrasting combinations of idea and form: the majestic Alexandrian verse of sonnets, this traditional form of sublime confessions, serves the story of the "lice seekers".

Tradition connected the beautiful with the good - following Baudelaire, who sang the "flowers of evil", Rimbaud in the sonnet "Venus Anadyomene" depicts the goddess of beauty in the guise of an ugly, disgusting creature, "disgustingly beautiful." The romantic, literary idea of beauty was being phased out, along with the ideals that were left in the past.

A pitiful and absurd creature, personifying Woman, Love, Beauty, testifies to the state of total disbelief and rebellion in which Rimbaud was in the spring of 1871. Following Flaubert, Rimbaud could say: "Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue." But the universal "extreme idiocy" in the poet's mind turned even virtue into another "flower of evil", into "disgustingly beautiful". Nothing sacred remained in this world, its emotional rejection reached its boiling point, which found expression in a generalized, collectively symbolic and at the same time extremely earthly, naturalistically frank, shocking image.

For a moment, Rimbaud's rebelliousness was politically concretized, his thoughts were answered by the proletarian Commune. Rimbaud may have been in Paris during the days of the uprising, perhaps fighting on the barricades. It is obvious that the Commune left its mark on the poetry of Rimbaud. The pinnacle of his civic lyrics is "Paris Orgy, or Paris repopulates."

"Parisian Orgy" - in the same row as Hugo's "Retributions" (in May, Rimbaud wrote: "I have "Retributions" at hand"), in the tradition of the romantic epic. Above the apocalyptic picture of the disaster, above the wild orgy, the voice of the poet rises, delivering his accusatory speech. The feeling of genuine pain experienced by the poet, who has taken the revelry of base passions so close to his heart, gives the poem an unusually personal character. But the poet has risen to the platform of History itself; the defeat of the Commune, the "settlement" of Paris - a sign of the victory of the Past over the Future, a terrifying sign of social regression.

Having lost all hope, Rimbaud cuts ties with society. He stops learning despite his exceptional abilities. He lives casually, so as not to die of hunger, earnings - and rushes around Europe, he is in France, Belgium, England, Germany, Italy, etc. form of organized life. He tries to be absolutely free, not even bound by the fact of being present, of being in one place. Without binding himself with any obligations either to people, or to the law, or to God himself.

The “clairvoyance” program is a program of total liberation, because it involves “achieving the unknown by upsetting all the senses”! and such an attempt turns the poet into a "criminal", into a "damned one". In essence, this is a romantic program: both the stake on poetry and the stake on the "I" of the poet in themselves were more likely to be associated with tradition than to oppose the "clairvoyant" to it. However, the Romantics, even assuming that "only the individual is interesting," considered it necessary to give the individual a universal "universal meaning." Such thoughts were alien to Rimbaud, he was truly obsessed with “search for oneself”, removing, “scratching” from the given “I” everything socially characteristic in the name of the uniquely individual (“cultivating one’s soul”). What can be more individual than a soul “disorganized” by all possible means, alcohol, drugs, poverty, forced and deliberate hunger strikes, a strange friendship with Verlaine?!

By those means that clearly confirmed that "discovery of oneself" implies "liberation from morality", liberation from all the authorities that romantics never tired of referring to, from God to Nature. At the starting point of the creative act of the "clairvoyant" there seem to be no objective values, there is only "I" as the crucible in which the poetic image is melted. Since the "I" is created by the "disorder of all the senses," the soul of the "clairvoyant" is a "monster"; an introduction to the last stage of Rimbaud's work can be the poem "The Drunken Ship".

“Drunk”, lost, off course, a sinking ship is a fairly obvious symbol of the poet, his soul, embarking on a risky adventure. The ship is a metaphorical image, the image of a "ship-man", in which the external and the internal merge together, evoking the impression of the emergence of some kind of third force, which is not reducible to either the ship or the poet. This is the main difference between "clairvoyance" and Verlaine's impressionism, and this difference is the essence of symbolism. The emerging "mystery", a kind of beginning not subject to logical definition, entails a special poetic technique, the technique of allusion, "suggestion".

Hence the meaning of the sonnet "Vowels" as a declaration of such poetry. Whatever prompted Rimbaud to create this sonnet, the assimilation of a vowel sound to a color marked the neglect of the word as a semantic unit, as a carrier of a certain meaning, meaningful communication. Sound isolated from the semantic context, being likened to color, becomes the bearer of a different function, the function of "suggestion", "suggestion", with the help of which the "unknown" is revealed.

Such a literary technique was already prepared by the “musical” principle of Verlaine (who undoubtedly directly influenced Rimbaud), but impressionism preserved both the image of a given soul and a specific natural image, while with Rimbaud everything simple and tangible becomes unrecognizable. The aesthetic effect of the last poems, written in 1872, is determined by the shocking fusion of the simplest and the most complex.

It may seem that the last poems of Rimbaud are something like travel sketches made by a very observant poet during his wanderings. Here is Brussels, where Rimbaud so often visited; here is a wanderer, tired, drinking; so he told about his thoughts in the morning, about the "young couple", perhaps, met along the way, as the "blackcurrant river" also met. As if a random, "passing" selection of topics, random, because they are not the point. Absolutely real impressions are thrown into a dense ball, the whole world is drawn to this state of mind, while the state of the soul is reflected in everything, mysterious landscapes are built out of time and space. At the same time (summer 1872), under the influence of the same impressions, Verlaine's "Brussels" and Rimbaud's "Brussels" were written, but Verlaine's poem reads like, one might say, a realistic description of the Brussels landscape next to that strange dream , which splashed out in the creation of Rimbaud. Everything here is symbolic, everything is allegorical, hints at some mysterious procedure, at the “unknown”, at that “wonderful” that settled in the “everyday” thanks to the “insights” that visited the poet.

"Insights" - this is the name of the cycle of "poems in prose" created during the period of "clairvoyance". And in this work, Rimbaud retains his ability to "see"; fragments of "Insights" seem to be visible pictures, they are laconic, compact, composed as if from materials that are at hand, nearby. However, the simplicity of "insights" is apparent, only shading the extraordinary complexity of the fruits of "clairvoyance".

None of the fragments that make up the cycle can find an adequate interpretation, but “Illuminations” as a whole draw an unambiguous image: this is the image of a strong, extraordinary personality, overwhelmed by powerful passions, who created the whole world with her unbridled imagination, readiness to go to the end. One feels that the “I” is at the limit, balancing on a dangerous edge, conscious of the charm of torment, the attractiveness of the abyss. It creates its own Universe, operating with both the firmament, and the waters, and the forms of all things, and their substances. In the cosmic space of "Insights" there is its own time, its own measure of things, non-historical, collecting all human experience at the moment of its intense experience by a given person.

Naturally, the extreme subjectivization of the creative act could not take place within the limits of a strictly regulated traditional form. Simultaneously with Verlaine and using the same methods, Rimbaud freed verse and, finally, gave the first samples of free verse. In the Illuminations there are two poems, "Seascape" and "Movement", written in such a verse, free from rhyme, from certain meters, from any "norms". Such a verse is already close to poetic prose, although the prose of Illuminations is not without its rhythm, which is created by a general emotional intonation, now lengthening, now shortening the phrase, repetitions, inversions, division into stanzas of a special, free type.

Rimbaud's absolute freedom could only be achieved at the limit, by renouncing even "clairvoyance", by renouncing poetry. In the summer of 1873 a "Season in Hell" arose, an act of self-denial, an act of aggressive and ruthless self-criticism. Rimbaud condemned "clairvoyance". He accurately identified the decadent fundamental principle of this literary experiment, appreciated the loss of the ideal, blatant asociality and its result - the destruction of the individual. Rimbaud was aware that decadence in relation to him was not even a decline, but a fall, a fall in the most direct, humiliating sense of the word. And Rimbaud confesses his “swine love”, not embarrassed to show the dirt in which he has been floundering for several years.

A Season in Hell is a wonderful piece of confessional prose. It may seem to be the result of a spontaneous act, a sudden outburst of feelings, but it has its own system and its own completeness. "Season" is rhythmic prose, divided into "chapters", "stanzas" and "lines", with the use of various rhetorical devices and turns. And with its internal dynamics, which is determined simultaneously by a journey through hell and an assessment of this journey, a movement from a confession of guilt (“I insulted beauty”) to testimony, from testimony that compromises the “clairvoyant” to a sentence.

The verdict is the condemnation of "clairvoyance", followed by parting with poetry. In the spirit of Rimbaud - categorical and irrevocable. In 1880, Rimbaud left Europe, reached Cyprus, Egypt, and settled in Ethiopia for the rest of his short life. He was engaged in trade, quickly became accustomed to the local population, learned the local customs and customs - and seemed to have forgotten that he had once been a poet. Having exhausted the experiments of "clairvoyance", he considered the possibilities of poetry exhausted.

Mallarme considered these possibilities inexhaustible, since, in his opinion, "the world exists in order for the Book to arise." Nevertheless, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), in turn, began with romanticism, with a passion for Hugo, the poets Parnassus, Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, for the sake of reading which he studied English (later became a teacher of this language). He admired Verlaine, who rebelled against the passionlessness of the Parnassians, and himself was looking for "a special way to capture fleeting impressions." Mallarme's poems in the 1960s are quite traditional, romantic in their acute sense of evil, in whose realm flowers of imperishable beauty grow.

The search for a "special way" turned Mallarme into the most prominent representative of symbolism. His first poems were published in 1862, but two years later he wrote: “Finally, I started my Herodias. With fear, because I am inventing a language that would flow from a completely new poetics... to draw not the thing, but the effect it produces. A poem in this case should not consist of words, but of intentions, and all words are obscured before the impression ... " Such a categorical opposition of "thing" to "effect", the separation of the objective and the subjective, meant a reorientation of art. “My spirit is rooted in Eternity”, “My thought thinks of itself and achieves pure Cognition”, “Poetry is the expression of the mysterious meaning of existence”, such maxims sounded in Mallarme as obsessive ideas that turned the relationship between “thing” and “effect” so much that the poet doubted his own reality (“I am now faceless and am not Stefan known to you, but the ability of the Spirit to self-contemplation and self-development through what was me”).

“In my Mind is the trembling of the Eternal,” wrote Mallarme. Such "trembling" could only be expressed in a "special way". To draw is not a thing, but an "effect" - this is a "special way". It was also formed under the pen of Verlaine, since he demanded “music first of all” and wrote “romances without words”, and under the pen of Rimbaud, as soon as vowels were likened to flowers, this method was called “suggestion”. Mallarme opposed the art of “hint”, “suggestion” to the tradition, in particular, to the Parnassians, “direct depiction of things”, fixing the creative practice of poets of his generation in a rigid formula.

Directing all his efforts towards this goal, Mallarmé moved further and further away from the real source of the impression; endless, subjective analogies are becoming more complicated, crowding out the transparent allegories of the first poems. Permanent abbreviations, ellipses, inversions, deletions of verbs - all give the impression of a mystery; the creative work itself became a sacrament. Each word acquired a special meaning in the cipher of Mallarme's poetry, and the poet gave each word many hours of searching.

Embodying Eternity, Mallarme sought the perfection of absolute Beauty. For this reason, he wrote very little, only about six dozen poems (to which, however, it is necessary to add several dozen "poems for the occasion", "poems for the album"). Each of them is a deliberate and carefully finished composition, where every detail is subordinate to the whole, since Mallarme did not care about the meaning, but about a special “mirage” of verbal structures, mutual “reflections” of words. Mallarme generally followed traditional forms, which in itself betrays the organic connection between the poetry of this Symbolist and his predecessors, the romantics of the 19th century. However, "mirages" also unchained Mallarmé's verse, even with its strict rationality, they advanced towards musical spontaneity.

Mallarme asked to consider his last Poem Luck Never Abolish Chance (1897) as "scores". This unusual text was intended to “sound”, where omissions, “emptinesses” had the same meaning as words, which, in turn, “sounded” differently depending on the difference in font and location on the page: a poem should not only be heard, but also to see, comprehending the secrets of graphic perfection.

So the temple of Poetry was erected, in which Mallarmé acted as the priest of the new cult. This revealed another property of symbolism as an elitist art, intended for a select few. Somewhere in the subsoil go, hiding from the eyes, those social and personal root causes of the poet's alienation, which were obvious in both Verlaine and Rimbaud. According to Mallarme's symbolist poetry, it is impossible to detect his deepest disappointment "in all political illusions", his extreme rejection of the "crowd" with its fuss, the tragic feeling of loneliness and doom, forcing him to live with a constant thought of suicide.

All this has gone from poetry along with the departure of the world of real "things". Mallarme wrote little, wrote less and less, almost fell silent also because the content of his poetry, its main character, the Idea, looked more and more like a void. No weighty philosophical content was noticed in it, which by itself prompted all forces to be spent on diligent polishing of style - poetry became a self-sufficient and self-satisfied occupation, the world existed in order for the Book to arise.

The final, final figure of the 19th century was seen in Mallarm by Paul Claudel (1868-1955), the greatest poet and playwright of the “Catholic Renaissance” in French literature of the 20th century. Claudel knew Mallarmé well, attended his weekly poetry evenings, listened to the lessons of the master. According to Claudel, this poet is the culmination of the "nihilism of the 19th century", the liberation of the spirit from the power of matter, from the oppression of "appearances", the realization that man was "created to rule over the world." However, aiming his gaze behind the visible shell, at the core of phenomena, translating poetry from the realm of sensations into the realm of concepts, Mallarme found himself in the face of "absence", in front of the inevitability of silence. According to Claudel, the way out of this impasse is possible only on the path of returning to religion, to God.

André Gide, who also visited Mallarmé's "Tuesdays" and did not hide his admiration for the skill of the poet, exclaimed in the year of Mallarmé's death: "Following Mallarmé is madness!" Gide urged to turn to life as a source of art. Many of the poetic groupings and literary journals that emerged in Paris by 1900 declared a categorical rejection of symbolism. The "ivory tower", into which the poets climbed, seemed like an anachronism, unable to withstand the onslaught of social problems and questions of human existence.

The new century was advancing on art, exciting with its innovations, with its catchy "modernity". "End of the Age" was tinged with a strong sense of the end; "beginning of the century" - a sense of opening prospects. Decadent pessimism is replaced by optimism, advertised complexity by demonstrative simplicity, hermeticism by openness. Life opens up in the broadest and most indefinite sense of this source of renewal of art, just as the concept of renewal itself was also indefinite.

"The New Spirit and Poets" (1918) is the title of Apollinaire's article, which sounded loudly as a manifesto of a new generation of poets, the generation of the beginning of a new century.

This manifesto completed the short journey of Guillaume Apollinaire (pseudo Kostrovitsky, 1880-1918), the most famous and most significant French poet of the beginning of the century. Everything destined him for such a role, starting with his origin: the illegitimate son of a Polish woman and, possibly, an Italian officer, Apollinaire was inclined to mystify his genealogy, which made it possible to present himself as a kind of “citizen of the world”, open to everything possible; trends. It was a sign of the times: on Mallarme's "Tuesdays" they listened to the master - Apollinaire listened to the "new spirit" of the new era.

Among the various literary predilections of Apollinaire, the most prominent place was occupied by French poets, romantics, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, although he mastered French when he was in monastic schools in southern France (he was born in Rome, his native languages were Polish and Italian). Apollinaire began as a completely traditional poet, his first experiences were traditionally stimulated by love interests: first during a summer stay in Belgium (in 1899), and then and especially during a trip to Germany (1901-1902), where Apollinaire ended up in the role of a French teacher in the count's family and where he was visited by love for an English governess.

Impressions from Germany and experiences of love fed what was called the "Rhine cycle" of poems, in which the connection with the romantic and symbolist tradition is reinforced by a deep emotional perception of German romantic paraphernalia, assimilation of the themes and rhythms of a German folk song. Slavic origins, to which the poet always attached great importance, also entered the work of Apollinaire. But although the past of culture, the classical heritage invariably retained its enduring value for Apollinaire, this source was not enough for the poet of the early 20th century. After the "Rhine cycle" he wrote little, his movement obviously slowed down.

Having no means of subsistence, Apollinaire was forced to earn money in various ways, to do what came up. At the same time, he plunges deeper and deeper into the peculiar Parisian life, draws closer to a motley, multilingual artistic bohemian, with semi-poor artists and writers, among whom the spirit of the new art matured. The Spaniard Pablo Picasso quickly turned into a central figure; meeting with him in 1904 played a significant role in the formation of Apollinaire's new aesthetics. The new painting was unexpected and shocking, it could not help captivating the poet, who relied on renewal.

In 1913, Apollinaire published the book Cubist Artists, in which he announced the emergence of a “completely new art”, based, unlike the traditional one, “not on imitation, but on the concept”, “vision” opposing “understanding”, in as a pictorial "grammar", which therefore uses the language of geometry. Apollinaire confesses his love for the "new art", his direct influence on the poet is obvious, although he clearly kept a certain distance.

Following the poets of the end of the century, Apollinaire believed that the main path of development leads to the creation of "a synthesis of the arts - music, painting and literature." In the essay "The New Spirit and the Poets", he questioned the need to "write in prose or write in verse" while following the rules of grammar or the norms of prosody. Even free verse for Apollinaire is only the first impulse towards the freedom of art, which is achieved only through synthesis, through the creation of "visual lyrics". Apollinaire points to the discoveries of science and technology, to the "new language" of cinema and the phonograph as a means of updating the poetic language.

The search for a new form in Apollinaire's "new aesthetics" was subordinated to the main pathos - the "search for truth", the expression of "rapture with life", the discovery of a "new reality", a "new spirit". There was no clarification of these concepts, and literally “everything” was placed within their boundaries, everything that attracted attention and inspired, that surprised - and even this “surprise” itself, which Apollinaire could consider to be “the most powerful force of the new”.

The “new reality” naturally changed, “everything” changed in its content; “surprise” that arose in a collision with Cubist canvases is one thing, “surprise” from a collision with the reality of a world war is another matter. Apollinaire sometimes "surprised" and literally, one should not lose sight of that predilection for the "game", for shocking the townsfolk, the "bourgeois", which colors the aesthetic experience of the artistic avant-garde.

“Calligrams”, “poetry-drawings”, these rather naive examples of “visual” lyrics in the literal sense of the word, remain examples of pure experiment. However, such "drawings" in their own way expressed Apolliner's need for some kind of "totality", at least in a new, "total" language, a synthesis of verbal and graphic images. The verbal image appears on the "canvas", on this page, in spatial parameters, combining the "drawn" words with omissions, with emptiness, that is, with a certain sound of the text. Apollinaire did not hide the dependence of his experiments on the "new poetics" of Mallarme, on the poem "Luck will never abolish chance."

"Calligrams" is an extreme realization of the tendency towards the liberation of verse, indeed going even beyond the bounds of free verse. However, a daring innovator, Apollinaire never parted with the past, did not forget about the value of the classics. In the collection "Alcohols" (1913), Apollinaire found a place for poems created at different times, including "Rhenish", thereby preserving his path entirely, without giving up anything. Free verses coexist with traditional meters, often included in the "correct" poetic structures, which were freely varied and transformed by the poet. By the time the collection was published, Apollinaire had completely abandoned punctuation as a way of forcibly regulating the rhythm of a verse.

The collection "Alcohols" opens with the poem "Zone", an example of Apollinaire's "new lyricism". The desired freedom is also realized here at the level of the idea - the old world, the idols of the past are challenged, Christ himself is lowered in rank to an aircraft, and at the level of form - the liberated poet expresses himself in absolutely free verse. It seems that the creative act itself has freed itself from the rules that the poet composes on the go, walking, and his creative laboratory on the street, among the first people he meets. Angular, sweeping, defiantly disharmonious, “ugly” (Apollinaire could not stand the very category of “taste”), the poem cannot be attributed to a specific genre. It was written under the impression of another unsuccessful love, painfully experienced by the poet, and in general is a confession, an extremely frank picture of suffering and loneliness - it is a picture, “I” immediately turns into “you”, becomes objectified, the confessing poet seems to be watching himself from the side and already sees the hero of the epic, follows his actions, his movements.

The change of "I" to "you" is the underlying technique of simultanism, borrowed from contemporary painting. In a continuous stream, at the moment, on this page, events occur that took place at different times and in different places. This concentration of time and space is a way of recreating "totality"; the poem is ready to be identified with the universe, there is an impression of “openness”, openness of the text, its immense breadth. Moreover, the “walking” poet picks up “everything” on his way, all the signs of a new reality, cars, planes, advertising and, of course, the Eiffel Tower, this symbol of the 20th century.

Sharp jumps, interruptions, juxtaposition of usually incomparable phenomena - all this “surprises”, illuminates the world with unexpected light, creates an effect close to that for which the surrealists will soon become famous. The sublime and the mundane, the poetic and the prosaic are side by side, on the same plane; the poet, suffering from unhappy love, finds himself in a “herd of roaring buses”. Mysterious “cubist” entities, bizarre abstract landscapes appear in some poems (for example, the poet’s favorite “Windows”, dedicated to Picasso “Betrothal”), while in others everything that “is” is recorded, the flowing flow of life prose is recorded.

There are a lot of such works, prosaic "poems-walks", "poems-conversations", which sometimes look more like a warehouse of building materials than an erected building, in the collection "Calligrams" (1918). And here it is especially obvious that, unlike Verlaine or Rimbaud, Apollinaire did not experience the death of the gods as a tragedy. Having lost the Creator, Apollinaire was content with Creation, existence, the feeling of belonging to him. And the awareness inherited from Mallarme of the special function of the Artist, who occupies the vacant place of the Creator.

Apollinaire went to the front as a volunteer, fought as a private in the artillery, then as a lieutenant in the infantry. At first, he tried to combine the theme of war with the usual motives of love, so that the front turned out to be an integral part of the peaceful landscape of another heartfelt duel (the cycle "Poems to Lou", numerous messages to Madeleine), - everything glorified her beloved and everything, accordingly, seemed beautiful, all the "miracles of war "("how beautiful the rockets are!"). The lover's naive belief that "for the sake of our happiness the armies clashed", and therefore "grenades are like shooting stars", despite the steady Apollinarian frivolity (farce "Breasts of Tiresias", 1917, written with the quite serious intention of encouraging the French to take care of childbearing ), is nevertheless supplanted by an understanding of the tragedy, one's involvement in it, one's responsibility. “Everything” by the end of the war is a common historical fate, concentrated in “my heart”. The process of acquiring a philosophy of life, which Apollinaire lacked, began - this process was interrupted by the sudden death of the poet, who never recovered from a serious wound.

Emile Verhaarn (1855-1916), Belgian poet. However, Belgium and France are neighbors, many French and Belgian writers acted together, realizing the closeness of their tasks. The French language in which de Coster, Verhaarn, and Maeterlinck wrote (there was also literature in Flemish and Walloon dialects of French) introduced French literature to the general European audience. Verhaarn saw the origins of modern poetry in romanticism, and Hugo seemed to him a giant, the embodiment of an entire era and enduring spiritual values. Verhaern highly valued his contemporaries, Rimbaud, Mallarme, especially Verlaine.

As a Belgian poet, Verhaarn began his work with nationally specific themes (the collections Flemish Women, 1883, The Monks, 1886), with an appeal to the past of his homeland, its art, its landscapes and unique characters - to the characters of the "Flemish", this personification national type, fixed by the tradition of the great Flemish painting, revered by Verhaarn. In the poem "Flemish Art", glorifying the old masters, Verharn wrote that their "brush neglected the rouge", and the female images they created; "exuded health." Verharn's verse, in turn, is alien to "decoration", the poet conveys a sense of healthy strength, natural beauty of his heroes, identified with nature itself. The sketches of peasant life are excessively, however, picturesque, the early Verhaern did not escape stylization, and the idealized types of Flemish women and monks play the role of a romantic counterbalance to the present time, when there is already “nothing”, “no heroes”.

The loss of faith in God gave romantic disappointment the meaning of total disbelief. In the collections Evenings (1887), Crashes (1888), Black Torches (1890), pictures of dull evenings, dull twilight multiply, decadent motifs of withering and death are repeated. The layer of decadent culture in Belgium in those years was significant.

Death reigned in the lyrics of Emile Verhaarn. The Flemish plain with its mills, bell towers, farms is filled with "circles of ether and gold", some "fatal structures", rosy-cheeked Flemish women are replaced by mysterious "ladies in black" and "black gods". Nightmarish "somnambulistic dawns" flare up in the sky and "black torches" of madness are lit. The poet, his body, his brain seem to be inhabited by monsters who started a squabble that gives off with monstrous pain. The lyrical hero concentrates in himself all the torments of the world, “empty infinity” flows through him.

Lyricism changes the poetic system of Verhaarn. Emphasized objectivity, material weightiness, literalness of the images of the first collections are pushed aside, complex metaphorical imagery develops. Verhaarn's poetry becomes more spiritual and ambiguous, especially since, according to him, he "never stopped observing real life." The tragic cycles are a transition to the subsequent social trilogy. The poet reveals himself, his "I" - and at the same time, through the "silent monuments" of the symbolist landscape, signs of the real, not the picturesque Flanders are visible.

Verhaarn did not admire the "flowers of evil", did not flirt with death. The loss of the ideal was for him a true, personal tragedy, and the darkest poems reveal not immersion in the elements of decadence, but a growing desire to overcome evil, to cope with madness. For Verhaarn, the short-lived phase of symbolism is delimited into special cycles, and therefore limited in its scope. Completeness, harmony of the composition of the cycles, its logic and dynamism are an important element of the poet's concept, localizing the area of doubts and disappointments, leaving reason, will, purposefulness outside this area, beyond doubt.

As a result of all this, the further movement of the poet was swift and differed sharply from the path of contemporary French poets of the end of the century. Initially characteristic of Verhaarne as a Belgian poet, the scale and epicness (it was no coincidence that Hugo and Balzac were the highest literary authorities for him) were fully realized immediately after overcoming the crisis of the late 80s. A significant role in this turning point was played by the theme of happy love that entered Verhaarn's poetry (the cycles of The Hours). Love for Verharn is the acquisition of kindness and simplicity, the healing purification of the soul, and poetry reflects the process of self-purification, is perceived in an active moral function.

Next to the intimate lyrics are the mighty rhythms of the social trilogy. Their proximity not only testified to the universality of the poet, these vessels were communicating: there was a separation of good and evil, a moral assessment of all life processes, including social processes. The Symbolists moved towards the absolutization of evil, the Unknown became the source of their total pessimism, while Verharn quickly moved along the path of concretization of this source, towards a socially concrete assessment of evil.

"Social Trilogy" is a code name for the works of the 90s, centered around the themes of the village (the collection "Fields in Delirium", 1893, etc.), the city (the collection "Octopus Cities", 1895), the future (the drama "Dawns" , 1898). Once again, the image of Belgium is the main image, but only in the "trilogy" was the social completeness and historical accuracy of this image achieved. The cycles are built in accordance with Verkharn's mastery of the generalized-collective characterization of large, capacious phenomena. Each cycle appears as a complete whole epic canvas, full of inner drama and dynamics. "Plains", "fields" - a visual symbolic image, correlated with the image of the city, opposed to it.

The tragic perception of life is replaced by the image of life tragedies. The monotony of the impoverished plains is set off by the diversity of the octopus city “devouring” the plains, the power of the “soul of the city”, that grandiose structure that Verharn managed to create using the means of a poetic cycle. It was this canvas that glorified Verhaarn as a great urban poet and had a great influence on the poets of the 20th century. from Rilke to Bryusov.

Behind the buildings of metal and stone, the poet saw a whole world of human passions, struggles and impulses. The “soul of the city” is a historical concept: the “centuries and centuries” of the past cause an incredible concentration of energy that breaks down all barriers, sweeps away all borders.

Including the boundaries established by traditional versification. Declaring his "rebellion against any regulated form", Verhaern, who began with traditional forms, with the "correct" verse, finally approved the free verse in the social trilogy. The basis of the poetic reform carried out by Verhaern was accurately identified by Valery Bryusov, who wrote that the Belgian poet "pushed the limits of poetry so widely that he could fit the whole world into it" and that "Verhaarn has as many rhythms as thoughts in his power." Verhaarn's poetry really strikes with its richness, the exceptional depth of its content, but only in a rich, free, constantly changing rhythm could such content be embodied. Verhaarn used all the possibilities of free verse, lined up lines in a bizarre "ladder", broke the traditional stanza; by the agreement of rhythm, assonances, alliterations, sound combinations, he created a “powerful and captivating image” and at the same time did not forget about rhyme, he wrote “correct” poems. Verhaarn did not replace one prosody with another, but achieved an exact expression of thought, without looking back at any rules.

In an effort to "contain the whole world" in poetry, Verhaarn, in the very essence of his art, combined the lyrical and epic principles. Poetry was for him a revelation, a confession - turned, however, to everyone, to everything, turned to others, a conversation that presupposed an interlocutor. Verhaarn's poems are dramatic and even dramatic, in many of them there is a plot, there are characters, there is a conflict. Verhaarn wrote four dramas, the most famous of which crowns the social trilogy.

Dawns is a play about the revolution, about the future. An optimistic perspective is already established in the finale of "Octopus Cities", making up a striking contrast to the finale of the first part of the trilogy, completed with the image of a grave spade. In the city, the poet finds a readiness for "search and rebellion", which the village is deprived of. He sings the glory of labor, creation, scientific research, foreshadowing the future of Ideas. In the conditions of the 1990s, Verhaarn's impulse became politicized, he was fascinated by the socialist, revolutionary idea.

Verhaarn leaves the familiar chamber stages. The action of "Dawn" is taken out on the fields and streets of the city, mass scenes prevail, the greatest historical events take place, which determine the intensity of passions, the acute conflict of the plot, the pathos and declarative style. Along with the theme of the future, romanticism invaded Verhaarn's art; and style, and problems, and the characters of "Dawn" return to the romantic dramaturgy of Victor Hugo. With an inhuman effort of will, the revolutionary Erenyon rose to such a height that he could see the dawn of the future. But in this way he turned into a giant, into a new deity, into a savior.

Being sure that "the gods are outdated", Verharn outlines the border of a new era with just such a hero, who assumes the role of the Almighty. At the beginning of the century, Verhaarn's poetry entered the arena of Being, existence in a universal, generalized, vital sense. Peering into the “faces of life” (collection “Faces of Life”, 1899), Verharn saw “violent forces” (collection “Violent Forces”, 1902), “multi-colored radiance” (collection “Multi-colored radiance”, 1906), heard “sovereign rhythms "(collection" Sovereign rhythms", 1910).

Everything powerful delights the poet, all the "Lords" - the Monarch, the Commander, the Tribune, the Banker, the Tyrant, all the "violent forces" that control the boundless spaces of amazing cosmic landscapes. But the protagonist of the new time is “a thinker, a scientist, an apostle”, foreshadowing the future, personifying a steady forward movement: “We live in the days of renewal”, “Everything has shifted - the horizons are on the way.” A lively, poetic sense of the historical flow saturates Verhaarn's poetry.

Little by little, the "huge intense life" rises by the poet above the real world, expresses the gigantic rhythm of the ideal existence of the chosen ones of fate, and truly prophetic visions become utopian dreams. The resulting abstractness and declarativeness were restrained by lyricism, the confession of poetry, which embodied not a composed, but a real image of a man of infinite courage, inexhaustible spiritual energy and enormous creative powers - the image of a lyrical hero, the image of the poet himself. Utopian constructions seemed to be commented on by the poetry of everyday, “ordinary” existence in this Flemish land: in parallel, the cycle “All Flanders” was created, poeticizing the element of folk life and traditional folk consciousness.

Verhaarn's optimism was suddenly dealt a crushing blow - a world war broke out. The poet managed to respond to this tragedy (the collection Scarlet Wings of War, 1916), but both Verharn and Apollinaire could not yet realize the global nature of the catastrophe that had begun, they belonged to the beginning of the century - Apollinaire did not even include war among the factors that form the "new spirit"!

Literature

Poetry of French Symbolism. M., 1993.

Verlaine P. Lyrics. M., 1969.

Rimbaud. Works. M, 1988.

Apollinaire. Selected lyrics. M., 1985.

Verharn E. Selected Poems. M., 1984.

Poetry of France. Century XIX. M., 1985.

Andreev L. G., Impressionism, M., 1980.

Balashova T.V., French poetry of the XX century. M., 1982.

Oblomievsky D. French symbolism. M., 1973.

Andreev L. G. One Hundred Years of Belgian Literature. M., 1967.

Fried J. Emil Verhaern. The creative path of the poet. M., 1985.

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