The glory of A. A. Fet in Russian literature was his poetry. Moreover, in the reader's mind, he has long been perceived as a central figure in the field of Russian classical lyrics. Central from a chronological point of view: between the elegiac experiences of the romantics of the early 19th century and the Silver Age (in the famous annual reviews of Russian literature, which V. G. Belinsky published in the early 1840s, the name Fet is next to the name of M. Yu. Lermontov; Fet publishes his final collection "Evening Lights" in the era of pre-symbolism). But it is also central in another sense, in the nature of his work: it is in the highest degree consistent with our ideas about the very phenomenon of lyricism. One could call Fet the most "lyrical lyricist" of the 19th century.

One of the first subtle connoisseurs of Fet's poetry, critic V.P. Botkin, called the lyricism of feeling its main advantage. Another of his contemporarys, the famous writer A. V. Druzhinin, also wrote about this: “Fet senses the poetry of life, like a passionate hunter senses with an unknown instinct the place where he should hunt.”

It is not easy to immediately answer the question of how this lyricism of feeling manifests itself, where does this feeling of Fetov's "sense of poetry" come from, what, in fact, is the originality of his lyrics.

In terms of its subject matter, against the backdrop of the poetry of romanticism, Fet's lyrics, the features and themes of which we will analyze in detail, are quite traditional. These are landscape, love lyrics, anthological poems (written in the spirit of antiquity). And Fet himself in his first (published when he was still a student at Moscow University) collection "Lyrical Pantheon" (1840) openly demonstrated his loyalty to tradition, presenting a kind of "collection" of fashionable romantic genres, imitating Schiller, Byron, Zhukovsky, Lermontov. But it was a student experience. Readers heard Fet's own voice a little later - in his journal publications of the 1840s and, most importantly, in his subsequent collections of poems - 1850.1856. The publisher of the first of them, Fet's friend, the poet Apollon Grigoriev, wrote in his review about Fet's originality as a subjective poet, a poet of indefinite, unsaid, vague feelings, as he put it - "semi-feelings".

Of course, Grigoriev had in mind not the vagueness and obscurity of Fetov's emotions, but the poet's desire to express such subtle shades of feeling that cannot be unambiguously named, characterized, described. Yes, Fet does not gravitate towards descriptive characteristics, towards rationalism, on the contrary, he strives in every possible way to get away from them. The mystery of his poems is largely determined precisely by the fact that they are fundamentally not amenable to interpretation and at the same time give the impression of a surprisingly accurately conveyed state of mind, experience.

Such, for example, is one of the most famous, which has become a textbook poem “ I came to you with greetings...". The lyrical hero, captured by the beauty of a summer morning, seeks to tell his beloved about her - the poem is a monologue uttered in one breath, addressed to her. The most frequently repeated word in it is "tell". It occurs four times over the course of four stanzas - as a refrain that determines the persistent desire, the inner state of the hero. However, there is no coherent story in this monologue. There is also no consistently written picture of the morning; there are a number of small episodes, strokes, details of this picture, as if snatched at random by the enthusiastic look of the hero. But the feeling, the integral and deep experience of this morning is supremely there. It is momentary, but this minute itself is infinitely beautiful; the effect of a stopped moment is born.

In an even more pointed form, we see the same effect in another poem by Fet - “ This morning, this joy...". Here they alternate, mix in a whirlwind of sensual delight, not even episodes, details, as it was in the previous poem, but individual words. Moreover, nominative words (naming, denoting) are nouns devoid of definitions:

This morning, this joy

This power of both day and light,

This blue vault

This cry and strings

These flocks, these birds,

This voice of water...

Before us, it seems, is only a simple enumeration, free from verbs, verb forms; experiment poem. The only explanatory word that repeatedly (not four, but twenty-four (!) times) appears in the space of eighteen short lines is “this” (“these”, “this”). Let's agree: an extremely non-pictorial word! It would seem that it is so little suitable for describing such a colorful phenomenon as spring! But when reading Fetov's miniature, a bewitching, magical mood, directly penetrating the soul, arises. And in particular, we note, thanks to the non-pictorial word "this". Repeated many times, it creates the effect of direct vision, our co-presence in the world of spring.

Are the rest of the words only fragmentary, outwardly disordered? They are arranged in logically “wrong” rows, where abstractions (“power”, “joy”) and specific features of the landscape (“blue vault”) coexist, where “flocks” and “birds” are connected by the union “and”, although, obviously, flocks of birds are meant. But even this lack of system is significant: this is how a person, captured by a direct impression and deeply experiencing it, expresses his thoughts.

The keen eye of a researcher-literary critic can reveal deep logic in this seemingly chaotic enumerative series: first, a look directed upwards (sky, birds), then around (willows, birches, mountains, valleys), and finally, turned inward, into one’s feelings (darkness and heat of the bed, night without sleep) (Gasparov). But this is precisely the deep compositional logic, which the reader is not obliged to restore. His job is to survive, to feel the "spring" state of mind.

The feeling of an amazingly beautiful world is inherent in Fet's lyrics, and in many respects it arises due to such an external "accident" in the selection of material. One gets the impression that any traits and details randomly snatched from the surroundings are delightfully beautiful, but then (the reader concludes) the whole world is like that, remaining outside the poet's attention! Fet achieves this impression. His poetic self-recommendation is eloquent: "Nature is an idle spy." In other words, the beauty of the natural world does not require any effort to reveal it, it is infinitely rich and as if it goes towards man on its own.

The figurative world of Fet's lyrics is created in an unconventional way: visual details give the impression of accidentally "catching the eye", which gives reason to call Fet's method impressionistic (B. Ya. Bukhshtab). Wholeness, unity of the Fetov world is given to a greater extent not by visual, but by other types of figurative perception: auditory, olfactory, tactile.

Here is his poem, entitled " bees»:

I will disappear from melancholy and laziness,

Lonely life is not sweet

Heart aching, knees weak,

In every carnation of fragrant lilac,

Singing, a bee crawls in ...

If not for the title, then the beginning of the poem could puzzle with the indistinctness of its subject: what is it about? "Melancholy" and "laziness" in our minds are phenomena quite far from each other; here they are combined into a single complex. “Heart” echoes “longing”, but in contrast to the high elegiac tradition, here the heart “whines” (folklore-song tradition), to which is immediately added the mention of completely sublime, weakening knees ... The “fan” of these motives is focused in end of the stanza, in its 4th and 5th lines. They are prepared compositionally: the enumeration within the first phrase continues, the cross-rhyming sets the reader to expect the fourth line, which rhymes with the 2nd. But the expectation drags on, is delayed by a line that unexpectedly continues the rhyme series with the famous “lilac carnation” - the first visible detail, immediately imprinted in the consciousness of the image. Its appearance is completed in the fifth line by the appearance of the "heroine" of the poem - a bee. But here it is not the outwardly visible, but its sound characteristic that is important: “singing”. This chanting, multiplied by countless bees ("every carnation"!), And creates a single field of the poetic world: a luxurious spring hum-buzz in a riot of flowering lilac bushes. The title is remembered - and the main thing in this poem is determined: a feeling, a state of spring bliss that is difficult to convey in words, “vague spiritual impulses that defy even the shadow of prosaic analysis” (A. V. Druzhinin).

The bird's cry, "tongue", "whistle", "shot" and "trills" created the spring world of the poem "This morning, this joy ...".

And here are examples of olfactory and tactile imagery:

What a night! Transparent air is bound;

Fragrance swirls over the earth.

Oh now I'm happy, I'm excited

Oh, now I'm glad to speak!

"What a night..."

Still alleys are not gloomy shelter,

Between the branches the vault of heaven turns blue,

And I'm going - fragrant cold blows

In the face - I go - and the nightingales sing.

"It's still spring..."

On the hillside it is either damp or hot,

The sighs of the day are in the breath of the night...

"Evening"

Saturated with smells, moisture, warmth, felt in the winds and breaths, the space of Fet's lyrics tangibly materializes - and cements the details of the outside world, turning it into an indivisible whole. Within this unity, nature and the human "I" are merged into one. The feelings of the hero are not so much consonant with the events of the natural world, but are fundamentally inseparable from them. This could be seen in all the texts discussed above; the ultimate (“cosmic”) manifestation of this can be found in the miniature “On a Haystack at Night...”. And here is a poem, also expressive in this regard, which no longer refers to landscape, but to love lyrics:

I'm waiting, anxious

I'm waiting here on the way:

This path through the garden

You promised to come.

A poem about a date, about an upcoming meeting; but the plot about the feelings of the hero unfolds through the demonstration of private details of the natural world: “crying, the mosquito will sing”; “a leaf will fall off smoothly”; "as if a string was broken by a Beetle, flying into a spruce." The hero's hearing is extremely sharpened, the state of intense expectation, peering and listening to the life of nature is experienced by us thanks to the smallest strokes of garden life noticed by him, the hero. They are connected, fused together in the last lines, a kind of "denouement":

Oh, how it smelled like spring!

It's probably you!

For the hero, the breath of spring (spring breeze) is inseparable from the approach of his beloved, and the world is perceived as integral, harmonious and beautiful.

Fet built this image over the long years of his work, consciously and consistently moving away from what he himself called "the hardships of everyday life." In the real biography of Fet, there were more than enough such hardships. In 1889, summing up his creative path in the preface to the collection “Evening Lights” (third edition), he wrote about his constant desire to “turn away” from everyday life, from sorrow that did not contribute to inspiration, “in order to at least for a moment breathe clean and free the air of poetry. And despite the fact that the late Fet has many poems of both a sad-elegiac and philosophical-tragedy character, he entered the literary memory of many generations of readers primarily as the creator of a beautiful world that preserves eternal human values.

He lived with ideas about this world, and therefore strove for the credibility of its appearance. And he succeeded. The special authenticity of Fetov's world - a peculiar effect of presence - arises largely due to the specific nature of the images of nature in his poems. As noted long ago, in Fet, unlike, say, Tyutchev, we almost never find generic words that generalize: “tree”, “flower”. Much more often - "spruce", "birch", "willow"; “Dahlia”, “acacia”, “rose”, etc. In the exact, loving knowledge of nature and the ability to use it in artistic creativity, perhaps only I. S. Turgenev can be placed next to Fet. And this, as we have already noted, is nature, inseparable from the spiritual world of the hero. She discovers her beauty - in his perception, and through the same perception his spiritual world is revealed.

Much of what has been noted allows us to talk about the similarity of Fet's lyrics with music. The poet himself drew attention to this; criticism has repeatedly written about the musicality of his lyrics. Particularly authoritative in this regard is the opinion of P. I. Tchaikovsky, who considered Fet a poet “unconditionally brilliant”, who “in his best moments goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry, and boldly takes a step into our field.”

The concept of musicality, generally speaking, can mean a lot: both the phonetic (sound) design of a poetic text, and the melodiousness of its intonation, and the richness of harmonious sounds, musical motives of the inner poetic world. All these features are inherent in Fet's poetry.

To the greatest extent, we can feel them in poems, where music becomes the subject of the image, a direct “heroine”, defining the whole atmosphere of the poetic world: for example, in one of his most famous poems “ The night shone...». Here the music forms the plot of the poem, but at the same time the poem itself sounds especially harmonious and melodious. This manifests Fet's finest sense of rhythm, verse intonation. Such texts are easy to set to music. And Fet is known as one of the most "romantic" Russian poets.

But we can talk about the musicality of Fet's lyrics in an even deeper, essential aesthetic sense. Music is the most expressive of the arts, directly affecting the sphere of feelings: musical images are formed on the basis of associative thinking. It is to this quality of associativity that Fet appeals.

Meeting repeatedly - now in one, then in another poem - the words most beloved by him "acquire" additional, associative meanings, shades of experiences, thereby enriching themselves semantically, acquiring "expressive halos" (B. Ya. Bukhshtab) - additional meanings.

This is how Fet, for example, the word "garden". Fet's garden is the best, ideal place in the world, where a person meets nature organically. There is harmony there. The garden is a place of thoughts and memories of the hero (here you can see the difference between Fet and A. N. Maikov, who is close to him in spirit, whose garden is the space of human transforming labor); it is in the garden that meetings take place.

The poetic word of the poet we are interested in is predominantly a metaphorical word, and it has many meanings. On the other hand, "roaming" from poem to poem, it links them together, forming a single world of Fet's lyrics. It is no coincidence that the poet gravitated so much towards combining his lyrical works into cycles (“Snow”, “Fortune-telling”, “Melodies”, “Sea”, “Spring” and many others), in which each poem, each image was especially actively enriched thanks to associative links. with neighbors.

These features of Fet's lyrics were noticed, picked up and developed already in the next literary generation - by symbolist poets of the turn of the century.

R.G. Magina

Literary position of A.A. Feta is well known. In modern literary criticism, the position about the romantic nature of his lyrics, about the one-sidedness of the themes of his poetry, about the poet's disposition to perceive only the beautiful is proven.

This last feature determined the aestheticism of Fet, and it determined, in our opinion, the main features of the romantic style of his lyrics.

Like a spring day, your face dreamed again, -

I greet the familiar beauty, And along the waves of the caressing word

I'll carry your lovely image...

A characteristic feature of Fetov's intonation - its simultaneous nakedness and restraint - is due to the invariability of the character of the lyrical hero of his poems, based on a pronounced subjective perception of reality, on the belief in the autonomy of art and the unacceptability of prosaic earthly life for the poet.

Romantic detailing, its fragmentation, some pretentiousness and pretentiousness create a stylistic correspondence between Fet's extreme philosophical subjectivism and the poetic embodiment of this subjectivism. This happens for two reasons: firstly, Fet's romantic detail is never impassive. This almost obligatory rule for all romantics is manifested in Fet's lyrics especially clearly. He plays with words, finding shades, colors, sounds in their unusual perspective, in an unexpected, sometimes paradoxical semantic relationship (singing torment, suffering bliss, insanely happy grief) and does it on purpose.

Secondly, the romantic detail in Fet always carries a subjective-evaluative element, and its varieties should be determined according to the signs: traditional and unconventional, figurative concreteness and abstractness. Of course, the presence of non-traditional abstract and concrete-figurative details in romantic poetry is not yet proof of the originality and uniqueness of poetic creativity. The whole question is in what proportion are the traditional and non-traditional romantic details and how, in what individual manner, non-traditional verbal and pictorial means are used in the context of a poetic work, in what way the word is connected in the context of the poem with the general poetic worldview of the author, with the main poetic intonation works and creativity in general.

It is known that Fet was a subtle observer, able to capture transitional moments in the life of nature, its halftones, complex interweaving of shades, colors, sounds. Researchers have long paid attention to this, sometimes calling Fet in connection with such an individual manner “an impressionist poet, first of all, a poet of subtle hints, barely audible sounds and barely noticeable shades. In this he is the direct forerunner of the decadents, the symbolists. And, as D.D. The good, “almost from the very beginning, from the 40s, Fet’s romanticism is his poetry, capable of capturing ... subtly musical impressions, unsteady spiritual movements in them, as in nature surrounding a person, “trembling”, “trembling ", the lively dynamics of the play of colors and sounds, the "magic changes of a sweet face", "continuous fluctuations", "transitions, shades", the dialectical combination of opposites - was colored with features that much later were called "impressionism".

No, don't expect a passionate song. These sounds are vague nonsense,

The languid ringing of the string; But, full of dreary flour,

These sounds evoke

Sweet dreams. They flew in a ringing swarm, flew in and sang

In the bright sky. Like a child I listen to them

What happened to them, I don't know.

And I don't need...

The whole universe, as if in focus, focused in Fet on the consciousness of his "I" and on the desire to find the necessary verbal embodiment of such a perception of reality.

From the general romantic conception of Fet, another feature of his poetry follows: the sublime romantic detail in the context of one work is adjacent to the prosaic detail and, moreover, to the realistically convincing detail. This feature is a consequence of the fact that Fet does not turn away from the real world, he only selectively extracts from it the impressions he needs:

Sleep - still dawn

Cold and early;

The stars behind the mountain

Shine in the mist;

Roosters recently

Sang for the third time

From the bell tower smoothly

Sounds flew...

Brilliant misty stars and floating gentle sounds of a bell (the details are clearly romantic) stand next to the recently crowed roosters in the context of the poem. True, Fet's roosters "sing", but the realistic coloring of this detail is nevertheless obvious. As a result, a lexical discrepancy is created, which determines the unique style of Fetov's lyrics and at the same time greatly expands the semantic possibilities of Russian romantic lyrics of the 19th century.

Fet's lyrics in style and intonation remained basically within the Russian romanticism of the middle of the 19th century, although there is an essential feature in it of expressing lyrical feelings that brings Fet closer to the poetry of the early 20th century: this is a combination of concepts of a different logical series in a single phrase (for example , in Blok: “... There the face was covered in a multi-colored lie”, “At the pensive door the harlequin laughed”, “The queen has blue riddles”; in Bryusov: “On the swell of the furious instant we are two”, “the silent cry of the desire of the captive .. .").

Fet uses this technique more widely and boldly than the Symbolists, and a classic example of this is the poem "To the Singer":

Carry my heart into the ringing distance

Where, like a month behind a grove, sadness;

In these sounds on your hot tears

The smile of love gently shines...

In this poem, in our opinion, the individual poetic manner of the author, all the most characteristic features inherent in his lyrics were reflected to the greatest extent: the apotheosis of the personality and the subjective author's consciousness, the reflection of the impressions of the objective world in an absolutized idealistic romantic hero; extensive use of evaluative romantic details, strong impressionistic overtones and, finally, the combination of concepts of various logical series in a single phrase (ringing distance, invisible swells, silvery path, voice burning, a rush of pearls, meek sadness). The metrical drawing of the verse, strictly and to the end, sustained, determines from the very beginning the given intonation of the poem written in anapaest. Fet generally widely used the anapaest with its rising intonation (“Everything around and motley is so noisy”, “Shaggy branches of pines were frayed from the storm”, “I won’t tell you anything”, “He wanted my madness”, “Forbade you to go out”, "Evening", "From the lights, from the merciless crowd", etc.).

The poem “Fragrant Night, Gracious Night” is another example typical of Fet’s lyrics, which largely repeats the style of the poem “Singer”: the same strict alternation of four-foot and three-foot anapaest with the same masculine endings, the same classical quatrains and even more noticeable impressionistic overtones:

fragrant night, blessed night,

Irritation of the sick soul!

Everyone would listen to you - and I can not be silent

In the silence that speaks so clearly...

In this poem, against a traditional romantic background (azure heights, unblinking stars, an impenetrable shadow of branches, a sparkling key, a whisper of jets), semantic turns characteristic only for Fet sound: the moon looks straight in the face, and it is burning; the night, filled with beauty, becomes silvery, and everything around burns and rings. Sound and visually tangible details are combined in one general idea, in one almost fantastic picture. It appears in indefinite, vague outlines just at the moment when the concept of “impossible dream” appears in the poem:

As if everything is burning and ringing at the same time,

To dream impossible to help;

As if, trembling slightly, the window will open

Look into the silvery night.

The idea (or dream) of a window opening in a silvery night is associated with dreams of love. So, thanks to the chain of associative details that arise in the human mind, Fet creates the lyrical subtext of the poem, reflecting the complex state of the soul, in which the life of nature and the movement of human thought merge into a single stream of lyrical consciousness.

Using the details of the outside world, which at first glance cannot be connected in one logical series, Fet often comes to unexpected associative connections, deliberately emphasizing this in his poems, easily moving from an object to an abstract concept, sometimes not connected in any way. It is important for the poet, first of all, to express his subjective perception, albeit illogical, poorly explained and fragmentarily reproduced:

I stood still for a long time

Looking into the distant stars,

Between those stars and me

Some connection was born.

I thought... I don't remember what I thought;

I listened to the mysterious choir

And the stars trembled softly

And I love the stars since then ...

There are five personal pronouns in the eight lines of this poem; four of them are pronouns of the 1st person im. case - make up a single semantic series with amplifying sound from the first to the last phrase: I stood, I thought, I listened, I love . This gives a special confidence to the intonation and emphasizes the romantic subjectivity of the entire poem.

The subjectivity and illogicality of the narrative determine another feature of Fet's poetry - its fragmentation. The fragmentary nature of the narration, as a rule, was only stated by the researchers and reproached Fet without trying to explain this phenomenon in any way, to find its roots. Moreover, many parodies of the poet's poems focused on this particular feature of his lyrics, using it as a pretext for ridicule and negative critical assessments. Meanwhile, we are convinced that this phenomenon is an intentional position of the author, an attitude to emphasize the subjectivity of the narrative, to a certain universal freedom of lyrical feeling and its reflection in poetry. Fet gives numerous examples of such freedom (from logic, from generally accepted poetic patterns, from stable semantic rows of words), which the Russian Symbolists so stubbornly - mainly in theoretical terms - declared after Fet. They elevated this freedom to an absolute and, in its extreme manifestations, brought it to the point of absurdity. For Fet, the main thing is to create a sincere intonation in a lyrical poem, a poetic mood, an emotional subtext, even if based on illogical, absurd information, using it as an almost neutral background, as a faceless building material; the main thing is to create an impression, this is the essence of expressing feelings in Fet's lyrics.

B. Ya Bukhshtab notes: “Fet released his first collection in the same year as Lermontov, and the last one in the era when the symbolist movement had already begun. The long creative path of Fet, as it were, links the romanticism of Zhukovsky with the romanticism of Blok in the history of Russian poetry. This connection is quite clearly traced in the verse forms of Fet's lyrics.

Fet builds much in the form of verse, relying on authoritative poetic canons and traditions of Russian poetry (for example, the stanza of most of his poems is determined by their romance). Nevertheless, Fet's verse variations are quite diverse and interesting in all respects: both in the field of rhyme, and in the syntactic construction of verse, and in strophic, and in sound writing, and especially in metrics. As a rule, it is the meters that determine Fet's main rhythmic pattern of the verse, its originality. The main difference between the poet's metrics is the lack of rhythmic uniformity within a particular work. Fet very boldly varies the rhythm by combining and alternating in one verse or in one work of various poetic meters. Three-syllables are the main source of rhythmic variations of the verse for the poet. Most of the new forms he developed for the first time are combinations of three-syllables and two-syllables, both in different verses and within a verse, but always within the same work.

Fet wrote a new page in the history of Russian free verse. In essence, he is its discoverer, since isolated cases of free verse before Fet (Sumarokov, Zhukovsky, Glinka) remain just isolated cases, but after Fet, free verse is firmly included in the practice of Russian versification. Fet's free verse has not yet been sufficiently studied, although one of the works devoted to the history of free verse says that "a significant page in the history of free verse in Russia was written by Fet."

With a relatively small number of free verse, Fet developed in them a certain characteristic commonality, reflected, in our opinion, in the later poetic experiments of Russian poets - he determined for many decades to come the distinctive qualities of Russian free verse as a special form of national verse.

What is the reason for the poet's appeal to free forms? After all, he rather strictly follows the traditional syllabo-tonic rhythms; deviation from them is rather an exception to the rule. Ver libres, on the other hand, crossed out in the most decisive way the traditional clear rhythm and metrics, not to mention the musicality of the verse, which was important for Fet.

In our opinion, the most important reason for the appearance of free forms in Fet is the general philosophical nature of his poetry and the consequent desire of the poet to focus on the semantic side of the work (this trend is very noticeable in works written in free verse). In the traditional measured musical verse, he did not always find words that were accurate in terms of meaning - impressionistic uncertainty and understatement interfered. Philosophy (most often emphasized) and the simultaneous conciseness and refinement of poetic thought so successfully "fit" into the new ametric forms that there is no doubt that their non-random appearance in Fet's poetry.

The form of free verse allowed Fet, first of all, to make a start from the old verse tradition, and it was in free verse that the philosophical sound of his poetry came to the fore, philosophy appeared here as if in its pure form, devoid of metrical and musical framing (the poem “I love a lot that is close to my heart”, “At night, somehow I breathe more freely”, “Neptune Leverrier”, etc.).

The poetry of A. Fet completes the development of Russian philosophical and psychological romanticism in the lyrics of the 19th century. The indisputable originality of this poetry, the sincerity and depth of lyrical experience, a special bright look at the world, captured in the music of the verse - this is the main thing that we appreciate in Fet's lyrics.

AFANASIY AFANASIEVICH FET

In the famous pre-revolutionary work on the history of Russian literature

riddle", however, only repeating the definition, already flashed

in criticism. This psychological riddle, however, has

social clue. Here lies the explanation of many mysteries that

rye put and continues to put the poetry of Fet.

Already as if completely buried in the 60s of the past

century, this poetry was revived to a new life in the 80s. Explanation,

that this poetry came to court in the era of reaction, rightly so,

but clearly not enough. Interest in Fet sometimes increased, sometimes

fell, but Fet has entered Russian poetry forever, new and new

resurrections refuting the next funeral.

We must not forget also that, significant in itself, poetry

Feta was part of Russian literature and - more broadly - in Russian art

and indirectly, fertilizing many of its great phenomena: enough

name Alexander Blok here.

Fet has always been regarded as the banner of "pure art" and on

actually was him. Nevertheless, critics who gravitated toward "pure

art” or even directly advocating for it (V. Botkin, A. Druzhinin),

Fet's poetry was by no means always understood and approved, and even

in their praises they were, in any case, more restrained than Leo Tolstoy

and Dostoevsky, who, on the whole, turned out to be “pure art”

And here is another mystery. Much has been said about anti-democracy

Feta. Indeed, the elitism of Fet's poetry seems to be

it is more certain that it was theoretically realized by him

in the spirit of Schopenhauer. Works published in 1863 in two volumes

the poet did not disperse for 30 years. It does not follow from this, however, that

Fet did not find a general public, certainly wider than

any, with the exception of Nekrasov, a democratic poet of his time.

“... Almost all of Russia sings his romances,”2 wrote

in 1863 Shchedrin, who, if one can reproach him for partiality,

then not in favor of Fet.

Fet's father, the rich and well-born Oryol landowner Athanasius

Shenshin, while in Germany, secretly took his wife from there to Russia

Darmstadt official Charlotte. Soon Charlotte gave birth

son - the future poet, who also received the name Athanasius. However

Shenshin's official marriage to Charlotte, who had transferred

to Orthodoxy under the name of Elizabeth, several

later. Years later, church authorities uncovered the “illegality”

the birth of Afanasy Afanasyevich, and, already being fifteen

but living in Russia, the son of a German official Fet. Mal-

chick was shocked. Without saying anything else, he was deprived of all rights and privileges,

associated with nobility and legal inheritance.

Only in 1873 the request to recognize him as Shenshin's son was

satisfied; however, the poet retained his literary name Fet.

All his life lived in one two people - Fet and Shenshin.

The creator of beautiful lyric poetry. And a tough landowner.

This duality, however, also penetrated into literature.

“... Even if the acquaintance is based only on

“Memoirs,” wrote critic D. Tsertelev, “it may seem

that you are dealing with two completely different people, although

both of them speak sometimes on the same page. One captures

eternal world questions so deep and with such breadth that on

human language lacks words that could

express a poetic thought, and only sounds, hints remain

and elusive images - the other seems to be laughing at him and knowing

does not want him, talking about the harvest, about income, about plows, about a stud farm

and magistrates. This duality amazed everyone, close

who knew Afanasy Afanasyevich"3.

Understanding this duality requires broader sociological

explanations than those very often offered

criticism: the defender of reaction and the serf-owner wrote about flowers and

love feelings, leading away from life and social

In the "psychological riddle" "Fet - Shenshin" reveals a lot

German philosopher Schopenhauer (as you know, who fascinated Fet

and translated by him) with his own, ultimately coming from

Kant, by contrasting art as "useless", truly

free activity to work - even more widely - life practice

as subject to the laws of iron necessity or that

Schopenhauer called it the "law of reason". Each of these areas

has its servants: "people of genius" or "people of benefit."

Schopenhauer establishes the real contradiction of the world of private property

relations, it captures the real division into

"people of genius" and "people of usefulness" as the inevitable result of the dominant

in the world of private property relations of separation

labor. But Schopenhauer, of course, does not clarify the latter, and,

trapped in insoluble contradictions, turns the contradiction

into antinomy.

This contradiction was recognized and justified, in any case,

taken for granted and unchanged by Fet. Fet originality,

however, manifested itself not in the fact that he understood and realized this contradiction,

but in the fact that he expressed it with his whole life and personal fate

and embodied. Schopenhauer, as it were, explained to Fet what already determined

his whole spiritual emotional structure, his deeply pessimistic

attitude. "He was an artist in every sense of the word.

words, - wrote Ap. Grigoriev, - was present to a high degree

in him is the ability of creation... of creation, but not of birth... He is not

knew the pangs of the birth of an idea. With the ability of creation in him grew

indifference. Indifference - to everything except the ability to create -

to God's world, as soon as the objects of it ceased to be reflected

in his creativity, to himself, how soon he stopped

be an artist. This is how this man realized and accepted his

purpose in life... This man had to either kill himself,

or become what he has become ... I have not seen a man

who would be so choked by melancholy, for whom I would be more afraid

suicide." 4.

Fet became what he became, so as not to "kill himself"?

he recognized in himself a "man of genius" and a "man of usefulness", "Fet" and

"Shenshina", divorced them and put them in polar relations. And how would

in a demonstration of the paradox of the situation, the hated name

"Fet" turned out to be associated with your favorite art, and the desired and, finally,

by hook or by crook the achieved nobility

"Shenshin" - with that life and everyday practice, from which

he himself suffered so cruelly and in which he himself was so cruel and inhuman.

I am between the crying Shenshin,

And Fet I am only among those who sing, -

confessed the poet in one verse message.

Fet's art was not a justification for Shenshin's practice, but rather

opposing it, he was born of endless dissatisfaction

everything that the "man of benefit" Shenshin lived. Fet and Shenshin

organically merged. But this connection "Fet - Shenshin" is

unity of opposites. The art of Fet is not only closely related

with the whole existence of Shenshin, but also opposes him,

hostile and irreconcilable.

Fet's poetry organically entered its era, was born by it

and was connected by many threads with the art of that time.

Nekrasov, although not equal, but comparing Fet with Pushkin,

wrote: “We can safely say that a person who understands poetry

and willingly opening his soul to its sensations, not in a single Russian

pleasure, how much Mr. Fet will give him”5. Tchaikovsky not only

spoke of the undoubted genius of Fet for him: the music of Tchaikovsky

strongly associated with the muse of Fet. And it's not at all that

Fet turned out to be a convenient "text writer" for Tchaikovsky. Themselves by

Fet's talent turns out to be neither socially nor generally explainable.

Only Goncharov could write "Oblomov" - Dobrolyubov is

perfectly understood. One of the main advantages of the novel about the "new

man" Bazarov Pisarev saw in the fact that it was written by "an old

man" Turgenev. What Fet discovered could not be opened

Nekrasov and no one else but Fet himself. Fet really

got away from a lot, but, as another old critic remarked, he

did not return empty-handed.

Fet went into nature and love, but in order for him to "find"

there must have been some objective historical

and social backgrounds. Fet was looking for beauty and found it. Fet

searched for freedom, wholeness, harmony and found them. Another thing -

within what limits.

Fet is a poet of nature in a very broad sense. In a wider

than just a lyric landscape painter. Nature itself in Fet's lyrics socially

conditioned. And not only because Fet fenced himself off, leaving

into nature, from life in all its fullness, although for this reason too. Fet expressed

in Russian lyrics, more than anyone else, a free attitude

to nature.

Marx wrote about the importance of understanding exactly how human

became natural, and natural became human. This one is already

a new, human naturalness in literature was revealed in the lyrics

nature and in the lyrics of love, the most natural and most human

But art develops in a privately owned world

in serious contradictions. And human, free, social

naturalness, in order to express oneself in art, to express

the joy of free human existence required special conditions.

Only under these conditions could a person feel like a Fetov

lyrics "the first inhabitant of paradise" ("And I, as the first inhabitant of paradise, One

I saw the night in my face”), to feel my “divine”, that is, truly

human essence (there is no talk of religiosity here, and indeed

Fet was an atheist), resolutely defended before the doubter

Leo Tolstoy the right to compare:

And I know, looking at the stars sometimes,

That we looked at them like gods with you.

To do this, Fet needed isolation from the actual social

life of society, from the painful social struggle. Fet unlike,

let's say, from Nekrasov he was quite ready for this. But the victims were

are great: a free relationship to nature at the expense of a non-free relationship

towards society, a departure from humanity in the name of the expression of humanity,

achieving wholeness and harmony through the rejection of wholeness

and harmony, etc., etc. This internal inconsistency is not immediately,

Freshness itself (the definition most often applied to Fet,

especially revolutionary-democratic criticism), naturalness,

the wealth of human sensuality in Fet's lyrics gave birth to

Russian situation in the middle of the century. The country not only concentrated

all the vileness and severity of social contradictions, but was also preparing

to their permission. Premonition of all renewing changes

appealed to a new man and a new humanity. Searches and finds

in literature were here broader than just the image

a new person - a commoner. They were realized in Turgenev's

women, and in the "dialectics of the soul" of Tolstoy's heroes, and in Russian

7 Order 539 193

lyric poetry, in particular in the lyrics of Fet. nature, naturalness

The main conquest of Fet's lyrics, which determined the main

features of his artistic system. That is why, let's say

he already has not just a metaphorization:

Night flowers sleep all day long

But only the sun will set behind the grove,

Sheets open softly

And I hear the heart bloom.

The originality of Fet lies in the fact that the humanization of nature *

meets with his naturalness to man. In the given example

the first line reveals the true meaning only after the fourth,

and the fourth only in relation to the first. nature in its

humanization (flowers sleep) merges with the natural life of the human

hearts (heart blossoms).

Fet discovers and reveals the richness of human sensuality,

not only the richness of human feelings (which, of course, opened

lyrics before Fet, and here he is rather limited than wide), namely

sensuality, that which exists apart from the mind and is not controlled by the mind.

Sensitive critics, although differing in definitions, point out

on the subconscious as a special area of ​​application of the Fetov

lyrics. Ap. Grigoriev wrote that Fet's feeling does not mature until

clarity, and the poet does not want to reduce him to it, that he has rather half-satisfaction,

half-feelings. It doesn't mean that Fet is half

feels, on the contrary, he surrenders himself to the feeling like no one else, but the feeling itself

then it is irrational, unconscious. “The strength of Fet is,” wrote

Druzhinin - that our poet ... knows how to climb into the innermost

secrets of the human soul...”6. “The area is open to him, he knows the area,

on which we walk with a beating heart and half-closed

eyes..."7. Fet also has a clearly conscious creative principle:

"against the mind."

By the strength of immediacy and integrity of the manifestation of feelings

Fet is close to Pushkin. But Pushkin's integrity and immediacy

were infinitely wider, Pushkin's "childhood" did not exclude

adulthood of the mind. "Long live the Muses, long live the mind"

exclaimed the poet, and the very glorification of reason organically entered into his

into the "Bacchic Song" - Fet's thing is impossible. V. Botkin

said in connection with the work of Fet that in a "complete" poet,

mind, and soul, and education. Pushkin was such a "complete" poet.

“Pushkin’s nature, for example,” writes the same Botkin, “was in the highest

degree multilateral, deeply developed moral

questions of life ... In this respect, Mr. Fet seems to him

naive child." And the “incomplete” poet Fet addressed, in fact, to

"incomplete" person. That is why it was necessary for perception

Fet what Botkin called "sympathetic mood."

The sphere of the subconscious perception of the world required for its

expressions of a special method that has become an essential element

in the development of Russian literature. No wonder back in 1889

Chairman of the Psychological Society N. Grot at the celebration of Fet

read on behalf of the members of the society an address that said: "... without

doubts, over time, when the methods of psychological research

expand, your writings must give the psychologist abundant

and interesting material to illuminate many dark and complex

facts in the realm of human feelings and agitations.

It was no coincidence that Fet began his memoirs with a story about the impression

which the photograph had produced upon him, her own, only her

available means of reflecting life: “Are we not entitled to say that

details that easily slip away in a living kaleidoscope

life, are more striking, passing into the past in the form of an unchanging

snapshot from reality.

Fet values ​​the moment very much. He has long been called the poet of the moment.

“... He catches only one moment of feeling or passion, he

all in the present ... Each Fet song refers to one point

being...”9 - noted Nikolai Strakhov. Fet himself wrote:

Only you, poet, have a winged word sound

Grabs on the fly and fixes suddenly

And the dark delirium of the soul and herbs an indistinct smell;

So, for the boundless, leaving the meager valley,

An eagle flies beyond the clouds of Jupiter,

A sheaf of lightning carrying instantaneous in faithful paws.

This fixation of “suddenly” is important for a poet who appreciates and expresses

fullness of organic being, its involuntary

states. Fet is a poet of concentrated, concentrated states:

I'm waiting, embraced by anxiety, As if I broke a string

I'm waiting here on the very path: Beetle, having flown into a spruce;

This path through the garden hoarsely called his girlfriend

You promised to come. Right there at the feet of a corncrake.

Crying, the mosquito will sing, Quietly under the canopy of the forest

A leaf will fall off smoothly... Young bushes are sleeping...

The rumor, opening up, grows, Oh, how it smelled of spring!..

Like a midnight flower It's probably you!

The poem, as often with Fet, is extremely tense, excited

immediately, not only because it is said about anxiety: this anxiety

and from the tension-inducing repetition at the very beginning ("Waiting...

I'm waiting ... "), and from a strange, seemingly meaningless definition -

"on the way." The simple path "through the garden" became the "very path"

with an already infinite ambiguity of meanings: fatal, first,

the last, by burning bridges, etc. In this, the maximum

in a tense state, a person sharply perceives nature

and he himself, surrendering to her, begins to live like nature. "Hearing, opening up,

grows like a midnight flower" - in this comparison with a flower

is not only a bold and surprisingly visual objectification

human hearing, materialization, revealing its natural

ness. Here the process of this very habitation in the world is transmitted

nature ("Hearing, opening up, grows..."). That's why the verses "Hoarsely

called a girlfriend Right there at the feet of a corncrake "already cease to be

a simple parallel from the life of nature. This "hoarse" does not refer to

only to the bird, but also to the person standing here, on the “very path”,

already, perhaps, with an intercepted, parched throat. And also organic.

it turns out to be included in the natural world:

Quiet under the shadow of the forest

Sleeping young bushes...

Oh, how it smelled like spring!

It's probably you!

This is not an allegory, not a comparison with spring *. She is the spring itself

nature itself, also organically living in this world. "Oh, how

it smelled like spring! .. ”- this middle line applies as much to her as

young, how much to young bushes, but the same line unites

her and nature, so that she appears as the whole natural world, and the whole

natural world like her.

In this new, heightened perception of nature, Fet was not alone,

and this also confirms the correctness of his discoveries. When Tolstoy

Levin will hear how "the grass grows", then this will be an exact match

discoveries, and perhaps a consequence of the discoveries of Fet

in the field of the so-called lyrics of nature. And a poem by Nekrasov

1846 "Before the Rain" will be close to Fet and the general

composition of a landscape miniature and, most importantly, momentary

experience, which carries a special acuteness of perception:

On the stream, pockmarked and motley,

A leaf flies after a leaf,

And a stream dry and sharp

The cold is coming.

But Fet and Nekrasov generalize in different ways. It's especially clear

seen where they are concluded in the same way. Here is Fetovsky, too

40s, landscape:

A wonderful picture, the Light of the high heavens,

How you are dear to me: And shiny snow,

White plain, And distant sleigh

Full moon, lonely run.

These running sleighs, like someone galloping in the poem "A Cloud

wavy..." and there is Fet's main generalization. For real

the picture begins to live only after the final lines

poems. Nekrasov does the same:

Above the roadway

The top is lowered, the front is closed;

And went!" - standing up with a whip,

The gendarme shouts to the driver...

But he is not concerned about the picturesque perspective, but the social one. Fet

the main thing (we are not talking about other values) is that

the landscape evoked a feeling of, if not infinity, then immensity

world, hence the extraordinary depth of its perspective, which is created by

distant sleigh ("A wonderful picture ... *), a distant rider ("A cloud

wavy...>). No wonder "A wavy cloud ..." originally

was called "Dal" - distance, depth of perspective for him

main. It is she who gives birth to the actual lyrical motive:

“My friend, distant friend, Remember me”, unexpected and outwardly

in no way connected with the landscape, but inevitably born precisely

space, a sense of distance.

Fetov's poetry of momentary, instantaneous, involuntary states

lived at the expense of direct pictures of being, real,

surrounding. That is why he is a very Russian poet, very

organically absorbing and expressing Russian nature.

You are not surprised when you see how social, peasant,

such a Russian Nekrasov declares that “in Italy - he wrote about Russian

exiles." But indifferent to Italy and Fet, the poet of "pure art

"with his cult of beauty, he almost repeats Nekrasov in verse

“Italy, you lied to your heart!”, And in “Memoirs” he writes that

intends to pass over in silence the details of his stay

“on classical, Italian soil”10. For Fet, obviously unacceptable

itself, so to speak, the premeditation of classical beauties

Italy, their consecration by tradition. He searched and found beauty

but not where it turned out to be already set by the mind. Fet air-

Russian poetry creates a Russian atmosphere. At the same time she is clean

devoid of any conscious motives: social,

like Nekrasov with his people's Russia, or philosophical and religious,

like Tyutchev with his Russian messianism.

Fet's lyrics played a well-known role in the democratization of Russian

poetry. What is its democracy? If, for example, democracy

Nekrasov and the poets of his school is directly related to the presence of characters,

then Fet's democracy - with their absence. Fet has character

decomposed, or rather, psychological, even

psychophysical states, moods, feelings that carry it

poetry. They are subtle, subtle, but simple, even elementary.

“World, European, folk poet,” Druzhinin noted, “

Fet will never be; as an engine and enlightener, he is not

will complete the path traversed by the great Pushkin. It does not have

drama and breadth of outlook, his world outlook is a world outlook

the most mere mortal...”11 (italics mine. - N. S.). it

written in 1856. We will say more about the drama of the late Fet.

Here we note the exact indication that the poetic worldview

Fet has the worldview of the most mere mortal.

“Before any demands of modernity, there is a personal self,

there is this heart, this person ... "12 - wrote Botkin, clearly narrowing

the very concept of modernity, since "the personal self ... is the heart,

this man "was already a requirement of modern times and Fet also answered

Of course, in order to split the core of human character

to elementary particles, a complex apparatus was needed,

what became the poetry of Fet. “I see the simplicity fanned by the muse, And

not a simple delight pours sweetly into my chest, ”Fet wrote. However

what Fet reveals is characteristic of everyone, everyone, although it is perceived

not always and not by everyone. Perception requires "sympathetic

mood”, poetic preparation is needed.

“To understand Fet, they finally began to assimilate some

criticism, one must have a certain poetic development. Very few

Fet like immediately. It usually seems empty at first

Fet was involved in that revision of the human personality, which

Russian literature began to produce, primarily in the person of L. Tolstoy,

even preceded this process. He is especially close

Tolstoy. And this is determined by the fact that the subject of Fet's attention is

normal, healthy person. His feelings are sophisticated, but not perverted.

“... We will not find in Fet,” wrote N. Strakhov, “not a shadow of soreness,

no perversion of the soul, no ulcers... reading Fet

strengthens and refreshes the soul." Fet's healthy lyrics are not accidental

an indispensable participant in school anthologies, literature for children

reading. You can blame him for being limited, but you don't need to.

forget that it is only in this limitation that he is free.

Fet wrote most “freely” in the 1940s and 1950s. Just at this

time, the greatest number of works are created, to which

definitions of "fresh", "clear", "whole

”,“ unbroken, ”she was so generous with them then for

Feta Russian criticism of all camps. It is in this, and even exclusively

at this time, the village enters Fet's poems: both pastures and fields,

and sketches of village life, and signs of peasant labor

(“Rainy summer”, “Rye ripens over a hot field ...”, “You see,

behind the mowers..."). All this will completely go away from Fet late.

Curious and the desire to create some kind of unity, something like

poems: "Spring", "Summer", "Autumn", "Snow". Most of those who entered

in these cycles of works created in the 40-60s. Of course, Fet

and there is no hint of social definitions, but he does not have a village

only external decoration. The fresh immediacy of Fet's lyrics

then it did not shy away from the village, the village also fed it. In "Divinations"

Feta, which can be compared both in plot and in how

they are alien to social coloring, with Zhukovsky's "Svetlana", we

we find no longer a conditionally folk, as in Zhukovsky, but a living one,

folk, directly Nekrasov speech:

Full of laugh! What is it with you?

Just a market!

How buzzed! like bees

Full anbar.

There is a boldness and scope of a folk, or rather, Koltsovo song

in the 1847 poem "What an evening...":

So everything is alive in the spring! Everything trembles and sings

In the grove, in the field Involuntarily.

We will shut up that in the bushes

These choirs - And not children, so they will pass

They will come with a song on their lips With a song, grandchildren:

Our children; They will descend to them in the spring

The same sounds.

That is why Fet's special predilection for Koltsov is not surprising,

one of his favorite poets. Already in old age, Fet wrote,

that he was under the "powerful" influence of Koltsov: "I always

bribed the poetic rampage, in which Koltsov lacks

no ... there is so much specially Russian enthusiasm and enthusiasm in it

Fet remained a lyricist, although of a special warehouse. In Fet's lyrics

(in any case, in a significant part of it) there is a kind of

primitiveness, about which V. Botkin said well: “Such a naive

attentiveness of feeling and eyes can only be found among primitive

poets. He does not think about life, but unconsciously rejoices

her. It's some kind of innocence of feeling, some kind of primal

festive look at the phenomena of life, characteristic of the original

era of human consciousness. That is why he is so dear to us,

like our irretrievable youth. That's why they're so attractive

whole and complete, anthological or

comprehensive value, and it was given in 1856, that is

refers to the first period of Fet's work, but it is precisely by the feeling

life, about which Botkin, Fet speaks and is close to Tolstoy's epic

and Nekrasov in his poems of the early 60s. However, in order to

create an epic work (which is always folk) in new

conditions, on a new basis, it was necessary to solve the problem of popular

character. Unlike Tolstoy and Nekrasov, Fet cannot do this.

could. But Fet, expressing the feeling of life fresh, unbroken,

Fet, returning to the basic, initial elements of being,

elucidating in his lyrics the primary, the infinitesimal, to this

One should not think, however, that Fet only fixes immanent

and disparate psychological moods and subconscious states.

In this capacity, Fet's poetry would never have acquired

the impact it had on Russian culture.

Fet seeks to build a bridge from this state to the whole world,

connect this moment with life, in the end, in its

cosmic meaning. Feeling of depth, space, distance,

already characteristic of the early Fet, more and more turns into a sensation

infinity and if it is not filled with the proper philosophical

meaning, it will lead to it. This is the art of "everything-

sympathy," to use Thomas Mann's term, and communicates

the main interest of his poetry, becomes the main "typifying

» beginning in it. His feelings, mood are able to close

on everything in the world (we have already said that the world of social life, let's say,

element of the mind, even the mere existence of other people is excluded

etsya, but this is what ensures the special self-forgetfulness of his lyrics),

merge with nature. It was this quality that admired Tyutchev,

who wrote to Fet:

Beloved by a great mother,

A hundred times more enviable is your destiny;

More than once under the visible shell

You got to see her...

Here lies the explanation of Fet's love lyrics, which is not

just love lyrics. Fet's love is natural. But this love

natural, not only because, first of all, it is sensual, although *

she was even accused of eroticism. However, in this case, misunderstanding

Feta arises not only as a result of aesthetic deafness

or bias, but also reflects the features of the system of the poet himself.

People at Fet, we said, live like nature, and nature like

people. And this is no longer the usual humanization in literature, animation,

personification, etc. In Fet, nature is not only spiritualized,

she lives not as a person in general, but as a person precisely in this

intimate moment, this momentary state and tension,

sometimes directly replacing it. The humanization of Tyutchev's "Fountain

» with all the specificity of the description, it is based on a general comparison

with a "mortal thought" water cannon, Fet's water cannon lives in unison

with a man, his impulse of this moment:

Here the month has surfaced in its wondrous radiance

To the heights

And a water cannon in a continuous kiss, -

Oh where are you?

The tops of the limes breathe

Sweet bliss,

And the corners of the pillow

Cool moisture.

The natural world lives an intimate life, and an intimate life gets

the sanction of all-natural existence.

I'm waiting... Here's a breeze from the south;

It is warm for me to stand and go;

A star rolled to the west...

I'm sorry, golden, I'm sorry!

This is the finale of the poem "I'm waiting for ...", the third stanza in it with already

three times the repetition of "I'm waiting" and with resolving tense

waiting for a falling star. Again nature and human life

intertwined with bonds of infinitely many-valued meanings: say, farewell

with a star (the epithet "golden" makes one perceive precisely

so) is also felt as parting with her (the epithet can be attributed

and to her), not coming, not coming ... She is not just likened

star, they can no longer be separated from each other.

Polysemy, which is relatively easily accepted by modern

reader, brought up on the poetry of the 20th century, with great difficulty

the house was perceived by Fet's contemporaries. Parsing the poem

“Swinging, the stars flashed their rays ...”, Polonsky wrote indignantly

the sky, the depth of the sea - and the depth of your soul - I believe that you

here you are talking about the depths of your soul. "Content ambiguity

it is brought to the last extreme ... - quoting the beautiful

the poem "Wait for a clear day tomorrow ...", B. Almazov was indignant.-

What is it, finally, is it? But what Druzhinin wrote

in his "Letters from a non-resident subscriber" about the poem "In the long

night ":" ... The poem of Mr. Fet with its desperate confusion

and darkness exceeds almost everything ever written in such

genus in the Russian dialect!”18.

The poet, who so boldly “concluded” from the particular to the general, although

separated the spheres of the poetic, but in these spheres themselves he had to

take the path of shifting the usual ideas about the poetic:

Dense nettle Funny boats

Noisy under the window, In the distance blue;

Green Willow Iron Lattice

Hung like a tent; Squeals under the saw.

The poem is characterized by its extraordinary decisiveness.

transition from the lowest, closest (nettle under the window)

to the farthest and highest (distance, sea, freedom) and back.

It all rests on the combination of these two plans. There is no middle.

In general, Fet usually drops out the middle link. The same is happening

and in the lyrics of Fet's love, where we never see her, character, person,

nothing of what character presupposes and that communication with a person,

carries with character. She is very specific in Fet (with the smell

hair, with the rustle of a dress, running parting to the left), extremely

specific experiences associated with her, but she and these experiences

only an excuse, a pretext to break through to the universal, world, natural

apart from its human certainty.

In the poems "Pseudo-poet", obviously addressed to Nekrasov,

Fet reproached him for "non-freedom":

Dragging at the whim of the people Did not ascend pilgrimage

In the dirt, a low-worshiping verse, You are in that fresh darkness,

You are the words of proud freedom Where selflessly only freely

Never got it with my heart. Free song and eagle.

Let's not indulge in moral maxims about cringing

Fet himself before the powers that be. "That's in life

Shenshin, ”Fet would object to this, although Fet is nasty and flattering

wrote a lot of poems by the same strong people.

But in the verses of the “Pseudopoet” Fet himself has too much bitterness

for a free relationship with the world. And bitterness is not

by chance. In it, not only the rejection of a person of a different party, a different

social camp. These poems were written in 1866, and the 60s, especially

their second half, a time of crisis in the development of Fet. One

was one of the first to point out the danger posed by the position

"songbird", Nekrasov, who in his time fully saw the power precisely

such a position of Fet. A. Ya. Panaeva recalls: “Fet conceived

publish a complete collection of his poems and gave Turgenev and Nekrasov

carte blanche to throw away those poems from the old edition, which

they find bad. Nekrasov and Turgenev on this occasion

there were frequent disputes. Nekrasov found it unnecessary to throw away

some poems, but Turgenev insisted. Highly

I remember well how Turgenev passionately argued to Nekrasov that in

one stanza of the poem: “... I don’t know myself what I will sing, -

but only the song is ripening! Fet exposed<^ои телячьи мозги»19.

In 1866, Nekrasov spoke in print on the same subject.

already ironically: “We, as you know, have poets of three kinds:

those who "do not know themselves what they will sing," as the apt expression

their ancestor, Mr. Feta. They are songbirds, so to speak.

The sixties brought a new, complex feeling of life,

and a new method was needed to express her joys and her sorrows,

first of all epic. Nekrasov the lyricist could successfully create in the 60s

precisely because he became one of the creators of the Russian epic of this

pores, namely the epic, and not just the poems that he wrote earlier. Life

entered literature in a volume in which it had never entered it

earlier, yes, perhaps later too. Suffice it to say that this

the time of the creation of "War and Peace". It was in the 60s that Nekrasov

will write "Green Noise", in harmony, proximity to nature,

perhaps most akin to Fet and yet for Fet himself

impossible work.

The position of the "one", the view for Fet is natural and inevitable,

to peace above people and beyond them, a true "complete" harmony

ruled out, although Fet himself was sensitively and inevitably drawn to her. it

especially clearly seen when compared with the "full" completely harmonious

creatures that were at different stages of human

history and art history: Venus de Milo, Sistine Madonna,

Christ. The examples are not taken by us arbitrarily, they are pointed

works of Fet himself. When Fet wrote the poem "Venus

Milosskaya", then they turned out to be only a glorification of female beauty

as such. And maybe good on their own, being relegated

to the Venus de Milo, seemed to Gleb Uspensky almost blasphemous.

“Little by little, I finally convinced myself that Mr. Fet

without any reason, but only under the influence of the word

"Venus", obliging to sing of female charm, sang that

which is not even a small edge in the Venus de Milo

in the general immensity of the impression it makes... And how

no matter how carefully you analyze this great creature from the point of

vision of "feminine charm", you will be convinced at every step

that the creator of this work of art had some

another higher goal. However, Gleb Uspensky was sure that

the Wanderer Yaroshenko, Venus de Milo, would not have been understood either.

When Fet tried to write about the Sistine Madonna, then, in essence,

proved powerless to do so. In the verses "To the Sistine Madonna

"he said about Saint Barbara, and about Sixtus, and about the clouds in the picture,

but, confining himself to circumambulation, did not dare to "describe"

her, as happened with the Venus de Milo, and thereby showed at least

least artistic tact.

From the crisis of the 60-70s, Fet was largely taken out by Schopenhauer,

albeit in a paradoxical way: helping to understand and express this crisis

in truly tragic poetry. In the 70s and 80s, Fet remained

beauty attendant. But this very service was realized more and more

like a heavy debt. Fet once again proved how not free from

life position of a "free" artist. He was still a priest

"pure art", but not only served him, but also

who made heavy sacrifices

Who will tell us that we did not know how to live,

Soulless and idle minds,

That goodness and tenderness did not burn in us

And we didn't sacrifice beauty?

This burden of service is clearly realized and expressed in the "Obrochnik"

(1889) and in other verses of this time ("Curse us ..."). into place

the legitimate autonomy of art comes, as Vl. Solovyov

about the supporters of "pure art", "aesthetic separatism".

There is a narrowness and obsession with sectarianism. In verse,

written as if on a private occasion, expressed a whole

program:

It's not the time to think, apparently

As in the ears and in the heart noisy;

To argue today is a shame,

And to be mad is reasonable.

What a paradox: it is reasonable to be mad. But this means that

madness ceases to be madness, becomes premeditation.

A warning was issued to Turgenev, who wrote

Fet back in 1865, that in "constant fear of prudence

much more than just this prudence, before which you

you tremble more than any other feeling.

Beauty is no longer as immediate and fresh as in

40-50s. It has to be obtained in suffering, from suffering

defend, and, finally, even in suffering, seek and find "joy

flour." Suffering, pain, torment increasingly burst into poetry

Feta. Beauty, joy for Fet are still the main thing,

but no longer on their own, but as a “healing from torment”, as opposing

suffering, which also begins to live in the poem itself:

Pure and free soul

Clear and fresh as the night

Laugh at the sick song

Drive her away, away!

As if for a little attention

In a free heart until now

Following living compassion

The same pain did not creep in!

And in a sick, tired chest

It blows with moisture at night ...

Suffering, grief, pain are torn into verses. And if one poet (Nekrasov)

as duty realized the need to write about them, then another.

(Fet), who previously simply turned away from them, now realizes

like a heavy duty not to write about them:

You want to curse, weeping and groaning,

To look for scourges to the law.

Poet, stop! don't call me,

Call from the abyss Tiziphone.

When, offended by outrages again,

In the chest you will hear the call to sob, -

For the sake of your torment I will not change

Freedom to an eternal calling.

And here, in service, in struggle, albeit of a special kind, Fet

revealed a new powerful vitality. The more tragic

than the more powerful, death-defying ("Death") god

(“Not by that, Lord ...”) and unable to withstand the severity of the struggle, for

there were no values ​​other than beauty. But without values, outside

lying beauty, beauty itself was weakened, giving birth to new waves

pessimism and suffering. To the fiftieth anniversary of the creative

activity Fet wrote poems beginning with the words

“We are being buried...” and struck friends with their gloominess.

In beauty itself, the poet begins to strive for the highest. Higher

he is also looking for the ideal in a woman. Sympathy in painting is characteristic

in late Fet: Raphael, Perugino accurately determine the direction

search for the ideal.

I say that I love meeting you

For the shine of your curls falling over your shoulders,

For the light that burns in the depths of your eyes.

Oh, it's all - flowers, insects and stones,

Which child is happy to score from all sides

Beloved mother in those sweet moments,

When you look into her eyes, he is so happy.

That on which the poet's gaze so willingly rested and on which

was satisfied (“shine of curls”, “color of cheeks”, “running to the left

parting", etc.), - all these are "flowers, insects and stones." Need

different, better and higher. And it will not be given:

In a diligent search, everything seems: just about

Mystery takes on a familiar face, -

But the heart of the poor runs out of flight

One powerless languor.

He was powerless to express it in all the complexity of feelings,

in character, in spirituality, in ideality. Fet rushed to

Nekrasov's path, on the path of Tyutchev, looking for her, creating his own "lyrical

novel," and yet the unity of the cycle will remain only the unity

moods.

The poem "Never" is perhaps the most accurate expression

late Fet crisis. This is a poetic fantasy on the theme

resurrection on an already frozen and deserted land:

No winter birds, no midges in the snow.

I understood everything: the earth has long cooled down

And she died. Who cares

Breathing in your chest? Who is the grave for?

Did you get me back? And my conscience

What is it connected with? And what is his calling?

Where to go, where there is no one to hug,

Where is time lost in space?

Come back, death, hurry up to accept

The last life is a fatal burden.

And you, frozen corpse of the earth, fly,

Carrying my corpse along the eternal path!

Such a resurrection in the future expresses in Fet nothing more than

dying in the present. Here are the questions: to whom? for whom? where? And the answer

- "someone to hug." L. Tolstoy accurately understood the essence of this poem

and wrote to Fet: “... the question of the spiritual is beautifully posed. And I

I answer it differently than you. - I would not want to go back to the grave.

For me and with the destruction of all life but me still not

over. For me, my relationship with God still remains... God forbid

you health, peace of mind and that you recognize

the need for a relationship with God, the lack of which you so vividly

deny in this verse.

For Fet there was no "God" and, more broadly, there were no "gods", there were no

social, moral, religious values. Was alone

God is Art, which, as Valery Bryusov noted, is not

withstood the load of the fullness of being. The circle is closed and exhausted.

And already for the closest heir to Fet - Alexander

Blok will need an antagonist Fet - Nekrasov with his search

public, worldly values ​​in real life in all its

complexity and breadth.

In Russian poetry it is difficult to find a poet more "major" than Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820-1892). This is the poetry of life-affirming power, which is filled with every sound, primordial freshness and fragrance. Fet's poetry is limited to a narrow range of topics. It lacks civic motives and social issues. The essence of his views on the purpose of poetry in the exit from the world of suffering and sadness of the surrounding life is immersion in the world of beauty. It is beauty that is the main motive and idea of ​​​​the work of the great Russian lyricist. The beauty revealed in Fet's poetry is the core of being and the world. The secrets of beauty, the language of its consonances, its many-sided image and the poet seeks to embody in his creations. Poetry is the temple of art, and the poet is the priest of that temple.

Features of the subject matter of A. Fet's poetry

The main themes of Fet's poetry are nature and love, as if merged into one. It is in nature and love, as in a single melody, that all the beauty of the world, all the joy and charm of being are united. In 1843, Fet's poem appeared, which can rightfully be called his poetic manifesto:

I came to you with greetings

Say that the sun has risen

What is hot light

The sheets fluttered;

Three poetic subjects - nature, love and song - are closely interconnected, penetrate each other, forming Fetov's universe of beauty. Using the technique of personification, Fet animates nature, she lives with him: "the forest woke up", "the sun rose ... trembled." And the poet is full of thirst for love and creativity.

Impressionism in the lyrics of A. Fet

The poet's impressions of the world around him are conveyed by living images. Fet consciously depicts not the object itself, but the impression that this object makes. He is not interested in details and details, he is not attracted by motionless, finished forms, he seeks to convey the variability of nature, the movement of the human soul. This creative task is helped to solve a kind of visual means: not a clear line, but blurry contours, not color contrast, but shades, halftones, imperceptibly passing one into another. The poet reproduces in the word not an object, but an impression. We first encounter such a phenomenon in literature precisely in the poetry of Fet. (In painting, this direction is called impressionism.) Habitual images of the surrounding world acquire completely unexpected properties.

Fet not only likens nature to a person, but fills it with human emotions, since the subject of his poetry is most often feelings, and not the phenomena that cause them. Art is often compared to a mirror that reflects reality. Fet, in his poems, depicts not an object, but its reflection; landscapes, “overturned” into the unsteady waters of a stream, a bay, seem to double; motionless objects oscillate, sway, tremble, tremble.

In the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...”, a quick change of static pictures gives the verse an amazing dynamism, airiness, gives the poet the opportunity to depict the subtlest transitions from one state to another:

Whisper, timid breath,

trill nightingale,

Silver and flutter

sleepy stream,

Night light, night shadows,

Shadows without end

A series of magical changes

sweet face,

In smoky dots the purple of a rose,

reflection of amber,

And kisses, and tears,

And dawn, dawn!..

Without a single verb, only with short nominal sentences, like an artist with bold strokes, Fet conveys a tense lyrical experience. The poet does not depict in detail the development of relationships in poems about love, but reproduces only the most significant minutes of this great feeling.

Musicality of A. Fet's poetry

The poem "The night shone. The garden was full of moonlight. They lay ... "reminiscent of Pushkin's" I remember a wonderful moment ... ":

The night shone. The garden was full of moonlight. lay

Beams at our feet in a living room with no lights.

The piano was all open, and the strings in it were trembling,

Like our hearts for your song.

This poem was inspired by the singing of T. A. Kuzminskaya (sister of Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya), who described this episode in her memoirs.

Fet's poems are unusually musical. Composers, the poet's contemporaries, also felt this. P. I. Tchaikovsky said about him: “This is not just a poet, but rather a poet-musician ...” Fet considered music the highest form of art and brought his poems to a musical sound. Written in a romance-song vein, they are very melodic, not without reason that Fet called a whole cycle of poems in the collection “Evening Lights” “Melodies”. Singing beauty, Fet seeks to "intensify the fight of fearless hearts." In the poem "With one push to drive away the living boat ..." the poet says this about the calling of the "chosen one":

With one push to drive the rook alive

From the smoothed ebb of the sands,

One wave to rise into another life,

Feel the wind from the flowering shores ...

Creative Path Features

The birth of the poet was strongly reflected in his creative path. Fet's father, the rich and well-born Orlovsky landowner Afanasy Shenshin, while in Germany, secretly took the wife of a German official (Fet) Charlotte from there to Russia. Soon, Charlotte gave birth to the son of the future poet, who received the name Athanasius. Charlotte converted to Orthodoxy under the name Elizabeth, and they got married in the church. Many years later, the church authorities revealed all this, and at the age of 15 he began to be considered not the Russian nobleman Shenshin, but the son of the German official Fet living in Russia. He lost all the rights associated with the nobility. This shocked him greatly. Only in 1873. the request to recognize him as Shenshin's son was granted, but the poet decided to keep his name Fet as a literary one. All this greatly influenced his creative path. In order not to “kill himself”, he was aware of himself as a “man of genius” (according to Schopenhauer, a philosopher) and a “man of usefulness”, “Fet” and “Shenshin”. The hated name "Fet" turned out to be connected with his beloved art, and the desired and, by hook or by crook, achieved "Shenshin" - with that life and everyday practice, from which he himself suffered so cruelly:

I am between the crying Shenshin,

And Fet I am only among those who sing...

Fet's "pure art" gave rise to endless dissatisfaction with everything that Shenshin's "man of use" lived. "Fet-Shenshin" - the unity of opposites were inextricably and organically connected and intertwined in it. Tchaikovsky's music was closely associated with Fet's muse. Tchaikovsky, speaking about the undoubted genius of Fet, spoke of his talent as an inexplicable phenomenon, neither socially nor in any way at all.

Lyrics

In the personality of Afanasy Fet, two completely different people surprisingly converged: a grated, beaten by life practitioner and inspired, tireless, literally to the last breath (and he died at the age of 72), a singer of beauty and love.

The illegitimate son of a petty German official, he lost the status of a noble son. He tried to "serve out" the nobility, but 13 years of the army and guards did not give anything. Then he married an old and wealthy landowner, and became a cruel and tight-fisted farmer-exploiter. Fet never sympathized with revolutionaries and even liberals, and in order to achieve the desired nobility, he demonstrated his loyal feelings for a long time and loudly. And only when Fet was already 53 years old, Alexander II set out a favorable resolution on his petition. It got ridiculous: if the thirty-year-old Pushkin considered it an insult to grant him the title of chamber junker (this is a court rank usually given to young people under 20 years old), then this Russian lyric poet specially procured himself a chamber junker at the age of 70? And at the same time, Fet wrote divine verses. Here is a poem from 1888: “Half-destroyed, half-resident of the grave, About the sacraments of love, why do you sing to us? Why, where forces can't rush you, Like a daring young man, you alone call us? I languish and sing. You are listening and crying. In the melodies of the senile, your young spirit lives. The old gypsy woman still sings alone.

That is, literally two people lived in a shell that was not the most pleasant to look at. But what a strength of feeling, the power of poetry, what a passionate, youthful attitude towards beauty, towards love! Fet's poetry did not have long success with his contemporaries in the 40s, and in the 70s and 80s it was a very chamber success, by no means massive. But Fet was familiar to the masses, although they did not always know that the popular romances that they sing (including gypsy ones) were to Fet's words. “Oh, for a long time I will be in the silence of a secret night”, “What happiness! And the night and we are alone”, “The night was shining. The garden was full of moon”, “For a long time there has been little joy in love”, “In the invisible haze” and, of course , “I won’t tell you anything” and “Don’t wake her up at dawn” are just a few of Fet’s poems set to music by different composers. Fet's lyrics are thematically extremely poor: the beauty of nature and female love - that's the whole theme. But what great power Fet achieves within these narrow limits. Here is a poem from 1883:

"Only in the world is there that shady
Dormant maple tent.
Only in the world and there is that radiant
A childish thoughtful look.
Only in the world is there that fragrant
Cute headdress.
Only in the world is this pure,
Left running parting "

This is a kind of ontology (philosophical doctrine of being) by Fet, although it is difficult to call his lyrics philosophical. The world of the poet is very narrow, but what a beautiful, full of grace. The filth of life, prose and the evil of life never penetrated his poetry. Is he right about this? Apparently, yes, if you see art par excellence in poetry. Beauty should be the main thing in it. Fet's ingenious lyrics of nature: "I came to you with greetings", "Whisper. Timid breathing", "What sadness! The end of the alley", "This morning, this joy", "I'm waiting, I'm filled with anxiety" and many other lyrical miniatures. They are diverse, dissimilar, each is a unique masterpiece. But there is something in common: in all of them, Fet affirms the unity, the identity of the life of nature and the life of the human soul.

In his lyrics of nature, Fet acts as an anti-nihilist: if for Turgenev's Bazarov "nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man is a worker in it," then for Fet nature is the only temple, temple and background, above all love, a luxurious decoration for the subtlest plot twists of love feelings, and secondly, a temple for inspiration, tenderness and prayer to beauty. If love for Pushkin was a manifestation of the highest fullness of life, then for Fet love is the only content of human existence, the only faith. He affirms this idea in his verses with such force that it makes one doubt whether he is a pagan. With him, nature itself loves - not together, but instead of a person (“In the Invisible Haze”). At the same time, quite in the Christian spirit, Fet considers the human soul a particle of heavenly fire, a divine spark (“Not by that, Lord, mighty, incomprehensible”), sent down to man for revelations, daring, inspiration (“Swallows”, “Learn from them - from oak, birch").

The later poems of Fet, 80-90s, are amazing. A decrepit old man in life, in poetry, he turns into a hot young man, all whose thoughts are about one thing - about love, about the riot of life, about the thrill of youth ("No, I did not change", "He wanted my madness", "Love me! How only yours humble", "I still love, I still languish").

Let's analyze the poem "I won't tell you anything", dated September 2, 1885. It expresses the idea, often found among romantics, that the life of the soul, the subtlety of feeling, cannot be conveyed by the language of words. Therefore, a love date, as always, surrounded by luxurious nature (opens with silence: "I won't tell you anything ..."). Romantics did not trust the language of words as a means of expressing the soul of a person, especially a poet. However, it is difficult to call Fet a romantic: he is very “earthly.” Nevertheless, the lot of the hero of the poem remains to “silently repeat” the words of a love confession. And this oxymoron (a combination of contrasting words) becomes the main verbal and artistic image of the poem. But still, why is he silent? What is the motivation for this? The second line elaborates: "I won't disturb you in the slightest." Yes, as other poems testify, his love can also alarm, excite the virgin soul of his chosen one with its "languishing" and even "shudders".

There is another explanation, it is in the last line of the second stanza: his "heart blooms", like the flowers of the night, which are reported at the beginning of the stanza. Here is the identity of the human soul and nature, expressed, as in many other works by Fet, with the help of a special artistic technique called psychological parallelism. In addition, the chest, that is, the receptacle of the emotional and spiritual beginning, the hero is "sick, tired" (the first line of the third, last stanza). "I'm trembling" - whether from the chill of the night or from some internal spiritual causes. And so the end of the poem mirrors the beginning: "I won't disturb you at all, / I won't tell you anything." The three-foot anapaest of the poem sounds melodious: "I won't tell you anything," has repeatedly inspired many composers. The poem attracts with the subtlety and elegance of the feelings expressed in it and the naturalness, the quiet simplicity of their verbal expression.

The inconsistency of Fet's life and personality, the time in which he happened to live, was practically not reflected in his lyrics, harmonious, mostly bright, life-affirming. The poet consciously sought to oppose his own failures and trials, the prose of life, which oppresses the human spirit, "the pure and free air of poetry."
Addressing his fellow writers in the poem “To Poets” (1890), Fet wrote:
From the markets of life, colorless and stuffy,
It is so joyful to see subtle colors,
In your rainbows, transparent and airy,
The sky of my native seems to me caresses.
He formulated the original view of poetry as follows: "A poet is a crazy and good-for-nothing person, babbling divine nonsense." This statement expresses the idea of ​​the irrationality of poetry. “What you can’t express in words, with sound on your soul,” is the task of the poet. Creativity Fet in accordance with this installation is extremely musical. He, as a rule, does not seek to create paintings, but speaks of his impression of what he saw, heard, and comprehended. It is no coincidence that Fet is called the forerunner of impressionism (from the French Impression - impression), a trend that was established in the art of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.
The poem "May Night" (1870) is indicative of the understanding of Fet's creative methodology. It is an original fusion of romanticism and realism. The poet, it seems, speaks of the impossibility of happiness “on a vain earth ... in a wretched environment”, “it is like smoke”, but Fet’s ideal is nevertheless realized in a purely earthly, although sublime and beautiful love, in equally full lives, colors, smells pictures of nature. The poet consistently opposes the social, everyday life to other manifestations of earthly existence, full of aesthetic content.
Nature is not just one of the themes of Fet's lyrics, but the most important source of poetic imagery in most of his poems.
In the poem "Evening" (1855), the very process of the transition of nature from day to night is conveyed with amazing subtlety. The entire first stanza is made up of impersonal sentences designed to express the fluidity, transitivity of the moment, the movement in which the world is:
Sounded over a clear river,
Rang out in the faded meadow,
It swept over the mute grove,
It lit up on the other side.
Then the syntax becomes more complete, as if giving the impression that the contours of objects have become clearer in the evening light.
The transitional, borderline states of nature especially attract the poet. They are imprinted as a mold of the secret desires of the human soul, striving for the sublime and loving the earthly. In the poem "Dawn says goodbye to the earth ..." (1858), this human aspect of perception of what is happening in the world is clearly expressed. The position of the lyrical hero is already indicated in the first stanza:
I look at the forest, covered with mist,
And on the fires of its peaks.
It is to him that the admiring exclamations of the next two quatrains belong, he reflects that the trees, striving into the sky after the departing sun's rays:
As if sensing a double life
And she is doubly fanned, -
And they feel their native land,
And they are asking for the sky.
... As the soul of a person - the spiritualized picture of the evening forest created by the poet convinces of this.
Fet does not emphasize the connection of man with nature, it manifests itself as a natural quality of the depicted life, heroes. This, in addition to those analyzed above, is also convinced by the poem “Still fragrant bliss of spring” (1854). Snow-filled ravines, a cart rattling across the frosty morning earth, birds flying by as heralds of spring, “a beauty of the steppe with a blush on her cheeks” are depicted as natural parts of the general picture of life, waiting for the next and forever new arrival of spring.
Syntactic "extreme" also characterizes the structure of the poems "This morning, this joy ..." (1881), "Whisper, timid breathing ..." (1850). Here the poet completely refuses verbs. At the same time, the poems are filled with events, life, movement. In the landscape poem “This morning, this joy...”, the enumeration, the injection of signs of spring may seem “naked”, non-judgmental: “These mountains, these valleys, these midges, these bees, this tongue and whistle.” But everything enumerated is painted in quite definite tones by the first line, as by the first ray of the morning spring sun. And the pronoun repeated 23 times in different versions - “this”, “this”, “this”, “these” - as if connects the disparate pieces of being into a single living and moving picture. Each repetition is like inhaling and exhaling delight before the opening beauty of the transformed spring nature.
In the poem "Whisper, timid breathing ...", in the absence of predicates, the poet creates a consistent story about a love date, an evening meeting (first stanza), a wonderful night spent alone by the lovers (second stanza), parting at dawn (third stanza). Nature gives the poet colors to create a picture of complete bliss and at the same time chaste love. The reception of psychological parallelism is used here by the poet with the highest skill. Love in the image of Fet is precious in every moment, even the tears of parting are one of the manifestations of happiness that overwhelms those who love and splashes out in the final line:
And dawn, dawn!
The poems “Don’t wake her up at dawn”, “I came to you with greetings ...” are also classic examples of Fet’s love lyrics. However, as always with Fet, one can only talk about the dominant theme in the work, but its development includes other themes, motives in the orbit of the artistic image, the figurative world expands, trying to embrace being as a whole.
In "I came to you with greetings ..." (1843), the lyrical hero seeks to attach his beloved to the world that he loves, to which he organically belongs. In the first two stanzas, he appears to her as a messenger of the eternally joyful, beautiful, renewing world of wildlife with every new day. And as an organic part of it, a natural continuation, love, the song, which is discussed further, should be perceived.
A characteristic feature of Fet's paintings is generalization, the frequent absence of specifics, the individual face of what is being discussed. His favorite images - the sun, moon, light, forest, air, day, evening, morning, night - are the same for everyone. And in this poem we are talking about the forest, leaves, branches, birds in general. Each reader has the opportunity to fill the images embodied by the poet in an individually unique poetic form with his own visual, sound, sensual content, to concretize them in his imagination at the expense of paintings and details familiar, dear and close only to him.
The same can be said about the beloved, to whom the lyrical hero addresses. Obviously, he does not need to draw her individualized portrait, talk about some personal psychological qualities, because he knows her, and besides, he loves, and this love makes everything around beautiful. The reader, through his own life experience, can touch the fragile and beautiful feeling that is accessible to everyone, which so emotionally resulted in the exclamations of the lyrical hero of the poem. Fet combines extreme generalization with an amazing intimacy of experience.
Just as naturally as the sun shines, unintentionally, as love comes, poetry is born, the song that is discussed in the final stanza of the poem. And it doesn't matter what it's about. Joy, happiness, "fun", accessible to everyone, will appear in it - this is more important. The beauty of nature, love, poetry, life is embodied in this poem by Fet in an inseparable and natural unity.
The lyrics of A.A. Fet are rightfully considered one of the most striking and original phenomena of Russian poetry. It seriously influenced the development of poets of subsequent decades, and most importantly, it allows new generations of readers to join the world of the enduring beauty of human feelings, nature, the secret power of the mysterious and beautiful musical word.