In 1908 Blok wrote to K.S. Stanislavsky: “... my topic is before me, the topic of Russia ... I consciously and irrevocably dedicate my life to this topic. I realize more and more clearly that this is the first question, the most vital, the most real. I’ve been approaching him for a long time, since the beginning of my conscious life ... ”Blok created the image of a many-sided Russia - folk, robbery, meek, free ... In his perception of the homeland there are intonations of A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontova, N.V. Gogol.
In the early lyrics, the theme of the motherland was embodied in Russian landscapes, through folk motifs and images. In the poem "Autumn Will" (1905), the poet continues the traditions of M.Yu. Lermontov (“Motherland”, “I go out alone on the road ...”). Pay attention to the beginning of Blok’s poem: “I go out on the road, open to my eyes, / The wind bends the elastic bushes, / The broken stone lay down on the slopes, / There are meager layers of yellow clay.” In this passage, the intonation of loneliness, the feeling of the vastness of the native land are akin to Lermontov's attitude. There is a relationship in vocabulary and poetic meter.
The poem "Rus" (1906) was inspired by folklore images and folk beliefs: "Where sorcerers with fortune tellers / Enchant cereals on zero, / And witches amuse themselves with devils / In road snow pillars." Behind this fabulous picture, the realities of poor life timidly emerge - “fragile housing”, “a whirlwind whistling in bare rods” ...
In the poem "Russia" (1908), social motives sound stronger:
Russia, impoverished Russia,
I have your gray huts,
Your songs are windy for me -
Like tears of first love!
Pain for Russia, love for her permeate the entire poem. The image of a road passes through the whole work, on which “... painted knitting needles / In loose ruts”. The poem "Russia" was included in the cycle "Motherland". The concept of "Motherland" for Blok is a broad, multifaceted one. Hence the variety of themes (“Visit”, “Smoke from the fire with a gray stream ...”, “Sin shamelessly, ’ unawakened ...”). Blok’s love for his homeland is an intimate, personal feeling: “My Russia, my life, are we toil forever? / Tsar, yes Siberia, yes Yermak, yes prison! (1910).
In 1908, Blok wrote five poems under the general title "On the Kulikovo Field", which he included in the cycle "Motherland". The Battle of Kulikovo is a symbolic event in Russian history. Blok reveals its connection with modernity in the article "The People and the Intelligentsia" (1908): "There is a rumble over the cities ... which was over the Tatar camp on the night before the Battle of Kulikovo, as the legend says." The strength and steadfastness of Russia, according to Blok, is in restlessness: “And eternal battle! We can only dream of peace...” The image of the “steppe mare” enhances the dynamics of the verse, reminiscent of Gogol's bird-troika. The lyrical hero combines both an ancient warrior and a modern poet, and Russia embodies the feminine principle: “O my Russia! My wife!" Poetic mastery is combined in poems about Russia with all the richness of Blok's creative experience and a variety of feelings.
In the spring of 1916, Blok felt creative fatigue: “The other day I thought that I didn’t need to write poetry, because I was too good at it. You still need to change (or - so that everything around you changes) in order to again get the opportunity to overcome the material ”(from the notes of the book on March 25, 1916).
The theme of the motherland in the work of Alexander Blok. “Sooner or later everything will be different, because life is beautiful,” Blok wrote. Russia was the source of this saving faith for him.
Many poets addressed the theme of their native land in one way or another, but each in his own way understood Russia, familiar to all of us. Alexander Blok is no exception. The theme of the motherland is one of the most important in his poetry. Blok did not immediately find this topic for himself. This was preceded by long years of moral development. Before writing about Russia, the poet experienced a lot, “he was fed with pain, compassion and inexhaustible faith in his country.” Appeal to the theme of the motherland was a kind of result of the work of Alexander Blok.
The theme of Russia captured the poet. It can be traced in all his subsequent works, and with it the whole dynamics of Blok's development. In the poem "Rus" we see the image of a fabulous and mysterious country:
Where are the sorcerers with the soothsayers
Enchant cereals in the fields,
And witches amuse themselves with devils
In road snow pillars.
Fairy-tale images are gradually replaced by calm admiration of native nature:
The river spread out.
Flowing, sad lazily
And washes the shore.
Over the meager clay of the yellow cliff
Haystacks are sad in the steppe.
A similar image of Russia can be found in many predecessors of the Bloc. He differed from them in that he approached the image of his native land, his fate not "as a thinker with an abstract idea, but as a poet - with a feeling of burning, intimate love." Alexander Blok is characterized by blood unity with Russia. “There is no gap between the personal and the general in the poetic sense of the world,” he wrote.
The image of the motherland in Russian literature was usually associated with the image of the mother. Blok was an innovator. The poet not only endows Russia with "beautiful features", he loves her, as he used to love the Beautiful Lady. The Motherland appears to Blok as a young beauty, a yearning bride and wife. The homeland of the great symbolist is a woman full of strength and passion, endowed with “robber beauty”.
Free and a little wild
Russia has eternal beauty
Beautiful Lady, poetic and spiritual:
And the impossible is possible.
The road is long and easy
When the road flashes in the distance
Instant glance from under the scarf ...
But in the light of the romantic ideal, the homeland appears not only beautiful and imperishable, but also impoverished, destitute, downtrodden and deceived. We see pious Russia with cautious melancholy and the muffled song of the coachman, gray huts, sloppy roads ...
Blok, speaking about his love for the Motherland, correctly noted that “the soul wants to love only the beautiful,” so you first need to feel compassion for your native land, and “compassion is already the beginning of love.” His extraordinary feeling for Russia gave the poet confidence that the long-suffering motherland has a future, that it will overcome all the hardships and obstacles in its path. Reflecting on the fate of his country, Alexander Blok compares it with a troika rushing into the distance: “Who will make his way towards the flying troika along secret and wise paths, stop the lathered horses with a meek word, overturn the demonic driver with a bold hand ...”
The more mature works of Blok are characterized by an understanding of the meaning of Russia, an understanding of the originality of its historical path. His poems are endowed with a "distinct historical memory". They are written on behalf of the son of the "terrible years of Russia." They have a heightened foreboding of the future. With all its movement, Blok's poetry is also directed to the future. It remains only to wish all of us to learn patience and love for the Motherland from Blok, as well as to borrow an inexhaustible faith in a bright tomorrow for our country.
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok, in turn, combined the concept of the Motherland in his works, combined several options together. It should be noted that despite such a union, in each new work, the Motherland in the lyrics of Blok is presented in completely different ways, each time her new image is revealed. This does not mean at all that the perception of the native land is dissipated or the attitude of the writer to it changes - no. The thing is that, according to the poet himself, the Motherland is multifaceted, it is great.
The concept of the Motherland for the Block
Discourses about the Motherland and Russia did not immediately appear in Blok's works. This topic came to him a little later, became a kind of summing up stage in a person’s life, but even though it came to him late, it was one of the most important stages in a person’s life and destiny.
The homeland came to the works of Alexander Blok after long wanderings around the country, a lot of suffering, which only further contributed to the writer's immersion in the topic itself, began to push him to write, intrigued more and more. This is precisely the reason why the writer refused to describe the Motherland in the form of some abstract phenomenon. Such a stereotyped approach to the description of his native land did not suit him, which was the “sin” of many famous personalities in their time.
For Blok, Russia has existed and always exists as a constant whose value remains unchanged. It does not exist only now, it has been and will always remain, no matter what. The native land is able to penetrate into things, the fate of a person, dissipate in the air, soak into the ground, in general - it exists everywhere and will undoubtedly remind something of the Motherland. Thus, it becomes quite clear why the Motherland does not have any single person in Blok's work.
As mentioned above, Blok regularly used several different approaches to describe the Motherland. Experts highlight several:
Fairytale. In this case, Blok's Motherland is not a personified magical land, where various mysterious creatures live, there are riddles and secrets.
Romance. One of the most popular tricks among writers is when the native land is described in the image of a beloved, and the main character appears as a young man, unable to resist the tenderness, trepidation of his beloved.
Historicism. In this case, native places are described from a historical point of view. The events that took place at this place in the past have their own history, which is told to the reader.
Poverty and suffering. It should be noted here that the writer does not describe the Motherland, but rather its inhabitants. They do not live in the best of times, they experience difficulties, difficulties that they try to somehow deal with. People accept their native land as it is and live without leaving it, but hope for positive changes in the near future.
Optimism. A kind of analogue of the previous approach. The writer again describes the mood of people who yearn for good changes in the future.
The image of a living being. The approach is also very often used by writers to describe the Motherland. Native land is a kind of living being, similar to man himself, but it does not have any external distinctive features, they can only be felt.
Examples of various images of the Motherland
Russia, as a kind of fairy-tale country, is present in Blok's work "Rus". This is indicated by the landscape described by the poet, which is more like a folklore description of the area. There is also a mention of mythical creatures like: sorcerers, fortune tellers and others. Words such as "wilds", "swamps" are also most often mentioned in mythological tales. The mystery of Russia emphasizes the color contrast. At first, blacks, greys, browns, and muddy greens begin to appear in the reader's imagination. I doze - and behind the slumber is a mystery,
And Russia rests in secret.
She is extraordinary in dreams,
I won't touch her clothes.
Then it becomes clear that in this way the writer emphasizes the originality of Russia, its contrast.
Romanticization is inherent in poems about the "Beautiful Lady". Here, the poet’s Motherland appears in the image of a beautiful, young beauty, in fact, the native land and the predecessors of Blok also represented it. This woman has a very extraordinary character, she is at the same time unbridled, strong and thus, alluring to herself a diva, but she is also gentle, meek and beautiful. Suffering, according to Blok, is also an elevated feeling. In fact, they are very common in human relationships. Every person should feel it and pass through it, but the most important and most important thing at the same time is not to lose oneself. With Russia, everything is the same. To fall in love with this beautiful and so heterogeneous land, you need to feel compassion for it, to comprehend and feel the depth of all its sorrows.
Russia, impoverished Russia,
I have your gray huts,
Your songs are windy for me -
Like the first tears of love!
Historicism is very clearly visible in the cycle of poems "On the Kulikovo Field". Here, as you might guess from the name, historical events are described that happened to the native land of Blok. Here, a panoramic image of the life of the country from the Mongol-Tatar yoke to the present is literally served. Blok also speaks of the bright future of his native land, of hopes, that, striving forward, Russia has overcome a lot, suffered, and deserves prosperity.
Despite the fact that in many ways Russia in Blok's works has a kind of pessimistic image, the theme of the motherland is highlighted in his optimistic way. The author talks about his assumptions, thoughts that in the future everything will certainly change, it will become much better than now. This is explained as simply as it is said about it. A simple law of justice, that is why changes must necessarily occur in the life of the country. Of course, when exactly this will happen - only God knows, but nevertheless, without changes, and positive ones - nowhere. The country has undergone a huge number of wars, revolutions, poverty simply cannot but become a really strong power that will be feared and respected.
In the cycle of poems "Motherland" she appears in personified form before the reader. With all this, Blok achieved that the homeland is not tied to any particular image, personality. It is a generalized - at the same time a living and ephemeral being, which stands behind the soul of a person, as his main, main wealth, which must always be treasured. At the same time, she often brings suffering to him. The country literally breaks away from the earthly, material, what we are all used to, and appears as the highest matter.
My Russia, my life, shall we toil together?
Blok's innovation in the description of the Motherland
Many predecessors of this poet personified their native land in their works. Most often, the Motherland was described in the image of a woman, but, as a rule, she acted as a mother who gives life to a person. In Blok's work, everything is somewhat different. Yes, of course, he also personified her, but just did not make her a mother. He represented his native land as a girlfriend, bride or wife of a person. The motherland is always next to the lyrical hero, whether it be joy, sadness or something else. She will never leave him and will always become a reliable support, support if it is really needed. With all this, she does not patronize a person, and moreover, she herself needs and asks a person for protection. As a rule, such a theme as the Motherland in the works of Blok is revealed through the development of the image. Literally all the submission options that were mentioned above are built on this reception. Despite the fact that the image of the Motherland is often perceived in an abstract way, the poet tried to make his Motherland alive, to breathe life into it. Alexander Alexandrovich did not want the reader to see only an image or a picture, he tried to touch deep feelings.
The merit of the poet is that he was able to unite the past and the present, and thus made a great contribution to the development of the poetic culture of our country.
The theme of the Motherland acquires a special sound in the work of A. Blok. After all, he worked in that era when the fate of Russia was being decided (the Russo-Japanese War, the Revolution of 1905, the First World War, the February and October Revolutions, the Civil War). Being a great patriot, the poet could not help thinking about his country, could not help but capture its changing face and his thoughts about it.
In early poetry, the theme of Russia does not yet become distinct and large-scale, although the author has repeatedly turned to Russian landscapes, folklore images and creations of his native culture:
All the trees stand as if in radiance.
At night it blows cold from the earth;
In the morning the white church in the distance
And close, and clear outline.
Beginning in 1905, the poet's patriotic feeling intensified in a special way. The theme of the Motherland becomes an independent motive.
In 1906, Blok wrote a poem called by her ancient name - "Rus" . The poet depicts here a fabulous, reserved country with its sorcerers, demons. Blok introduces folk art and peasant beliefs into his poem - the property of the Motherland. The homeland appears in these poems as "dense", "sorcerous", "resting in mystery". This state of hers seems beautiful to the poet:
You are extraordinary even in a dream.
I won't touch your clothes.
I doze - and behind the slumber is a mystery,
And in secret - you will rest, Russia.
Russia is surrounded by rivers
And surrounded by wilds,
With swamps and cranes,
And with the cloudy eyes of a sorcerer...
But behind this fabulous beauty, Blok sees sad pictures: peasant "fragile housing", "a whirlwind in bare rods", the poverty of people's life. While these social motives sound timid. But soon, in 1908, they develop and are embodied in a poem. "Russia" :
Russia, impoverished Russia,
I have your gray huts,
Your songs are windy for me, -
Like the first tears of love!
Blok returns here to the Lermontov tradition. It is not difficult to catch in the opening lines of the work a roll call with Lermontov's "Motherland". Both poets paint pictures that open while driving along a Russian country road. Here the Gogol figurative world begins to come to life; associations arise with the moving troika and the sorcerer-sorcerer who killed the beauty in "Terrible Revenge" (in Blok, the sorcerer is also ready to lure and deceive). Nekrasov’s motifs are also resurrected: Blok connects the image of Russia with a beautiful peasant woman (“When the road flashes in the distance / An instant glance from under a scarf”), and in the final lines one can hear the “muffled song of the coachman”, ringing with “guarded melancholy”. The poet is convinced of a better future for the Motherland and its people, who have preserved their living soul and are able to endure everything, resist, not perish. This assimilation of classical themes and images and their transformation within one poem makes it a real masterpiece of Blok's lyrics.
The described poem was included in the Blok cycle "Motherland" (1907–1916), one of the most important in the third book of his lyrics. The patriotic theme sounded broad and spacious here. The cycle begins with a gospel motif: the poet overshadows his Fatherland with the name of Christ. Poem “In the thick grass you will disappear with your head ...” develops folklore images of previous works and sets the reader up for the perception of "songs of distant villages" and the sounds of the coachman's bell. The image of the beloved becomes fused with the image of the Motherland, and the hero himself is filled with a thirst for achievement.
Blok's love for his homeland is a deeply intimate experience. Therefore, referring to his country, the poet speaks of heartfelt pain at the sight of "low poor villages" and, in violation of the accepted custom to associate the image of the native land with the mother, merges it with the image of the wife:
Oh my poor country
What do you mean to the heart?
Oh my poor wife
What are you crying about?
The theme of the struggle for the future of Russia sounded sharp in verse "On the Kulikovo field" (1908). Turning to the history of the Russian people, Blok put modern meaning into the events of the past. The Battle of Kulikovo seemed to him a symbolic event in Russian history, which is "destined to return":
The heart cannot live in peace,
Suddenly the clouds have gathered.
The armor is heavy, as before the battle.
Now your time has come. – Pray!
The lyrical hero of this cycle is the nameless ancient Russian warrior Dmitry Donskoy. He is a patriot of his native country, a fighter for its freedom, ready to lay down his head "for a holy cause."
Blok boldly compares the past, present and future of his native land. The basis of the power of Russia, according to the poet, is movement, restlessness, impulse (“and the eternal battle! We only dream of peace ...”).
Let the night Let's go home. Illuminate the steppe distance with bonfires
And eternal battle! Rest only in our dreams. Through blood and dust...
But I recognize you, the beginning of High and rebellious days!
That is why a bright, dynamic image of a “steppe mare” appears in the verses, again reminding of the Gogol poem, completed by the picture of a flying bird - a troika.
The poems of the Motherland cycle, reflecting the events of the outbreak of the World War, are also full of high meaning. In them one can hear the harbinger of the coming tragic fate of Russia ( "The Petrograd sky was cloudy with rain..." ). The poet calls himself and his contemporaries "children of the strange years of Russia", who will convey to their descendants their nightmarish experience of "withering" years. The poet clearly sees the poverty and poverty of the villages, engulfed in the fire of rebellions and wars, a complex, sometimes paradoxical combination of European beginnings and Asiaticism, the "tearful" beauty of their native land.
Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians!
This Asian beginning in a collision with European culture was to give rise to the revolution that the poet foresaw. And his tender confession to the Motherland sounds more and more clearly:
Yes, and such, my Russia,
You are dearer to me than all the edges.
For Blok, Russia has always remained multifaceted and mysterious. "Russia - Sphinx".
When, at one of the poetry evenings, a listener asked Blok, who had finished his speech, to read poems about Russia, he replied: "It's all about Russia."
Rus! Rus! What an incomprehensible secret power
attracts to you and why is heard and distributed
constantly in the ears of your dreary, carrying
throughout your length and breadth, from the sea to
sea, song What's in it, in this song? What is calling
and sobs, and grabs by the heart? - Rus! What
do you want from me? What an incredible connection
hiding between us? .
N. V. Gogol.
Introduction
Epochs differ from each other in time, like countries in space, and when we talk about our silver age, we imagine some kind of bright, dynamic, relatively prosperous time with its own special face, sharply different from what was before, and what came after. The era of the Silver Age, at least a quarter of a century long, stretches between the time of Alexander III and the seventeenth year.
Late XIX - early XX century. in Russia - this is a time of change, uncertainty and gloomy omens, this is a time of disappointment and a sense of the approaching death of the existing socio-political system. All this could not but affect Russian poetry.
The work of Alexander Blok is one of the remarkable phenomena of our national artistic culture. His poems and poems are one of the pinnacles of Russian poetry. The theme of Russia is the most important in Blok's poetry. This can be explained by what he did at a turning point in history. Blok survived two revolutions, witnessed their preconditions and consequences. During such periods of life, the question of the further development of the country, of its future, is especially acute.
Main part
At the end of 1908, the poet sent an unusually important letter to K. S. Stanislavsky, who at that time became interested in the drama Song of Fate; In his letter, Blok says in connection with the "theme of Russia" that has arisen before him:
“I consciously and irrevocably dedicate my life to this topic. I realize more and more clearly that this is the first question, the most vital, the most real. I have been approaching it for a long time, since the beginning of my conscious life, and I know that my path in its main aspiration is like an arrow - straight, like an arrow - effective. Maybe it's just that my arrow isn't sharpened. In spite of all my deviations, falls, doubts, repentance, I go. And now (not yet thirty years old) the outlines of the whole dawned on me, albeit vaguely. Not without reason, perhaps, only outwardly awkward, outwardly incoherent, I pronounce the name: Russia. After all, here is life or death, happiness or death ... "
Only in the solution of this topic does the poet see the possibility of renewing life, and, he claims, if we open her heart, she will “fill him with delight, new hopes, new dreams, again teach him to overthrow his damned “Tatar” yoke of doubts, contradictions, despair, suicidal melancholy, “decadent irony”, etc., etc., all the yoke that we, “the present”, fully bear. If we don’t open our hearts, we will perish (I know it like twice two makes four)” (same letter).
Invariably linking this rich theme with the question of the position and fate of the people, Blok inspired and tirelessly developed it both in lyrics (“On the Kulikovo Field” and many other poems, up to “Scythians”), and in epic (“Retribution”, “Twelve ”), and in drama (“Song of Destiny”), and in journalism.
The poet, imbued with a sharp, genuine and all-consuming sense of the motherland, lived one life with her, suffered from her pains, rejoiced in her joys. His fate is in the fate of the motherland, inseparable from it, inextricably linked with it, and "his hand is in the hand of the people ...". The soul of a Russian person - his contemporary, his national type, his special structure, he explained by Russian historical reality, the events of Russian life in the early twentieth century:
We are the children of the terrible years of Russia -
You can't forget anything!
Burning years!
Is there madness in you, is there any hope?
From the days of war, from the days of freedom -
There is a bloody glow in the faces.
There is dumbness - then the rumble of the alarm
Made me stop my mouth.
In the hearts that were once enthusiastic,
There is a fatal void...
What was revealed to the poet in the thunderstorms of the revolution “turned” his soul, and now he saw his homeland in a new light - in all its glory and strength, in its harsh and immortal beauty, which completely and forever captured his heart.
Everything is intertwined in the theme of the motherland - the poet's personal passion, and a sense of duty, and hatred of the "false life", and the feeling of an impending social storm, and faith in the "new age". That is why the theme of the motherland acquired such a lyrical character in Blok's work:
So - I learned in my slumber
Country native poverty
And in the patches of her rags
Souls hide nakedness.
Blok's poems are a passionate outpouring of love for Russia, a thirst to see her free and happy:
Russia, impoverished Russia,
I have your gray huts,
Your songs are windy for me, -
Like the first tears of love!
Let her be poor, let her love for her, humiliated, fettered, be bitter and joyless, the poet sees in her such power that her enemies cannot resist.
Blok perceives the homeland as a living being that "lives and breathes" next to a person. “The more you feel the connection with your homeland, the more real and willing you imagine it as a living organism”: “... for every blow or injection, it raises its angry head, under every caress it becomes tender and passionate.”
The very image of Russia takes on in Blok's poems a deeply original, new lyrical incarnation for Russian poetry. Blok’s Russia is most often not even a mother, as she is depicted by Russian poets of the 19th century (this aspect of the image is also found in Blok), but a yearning wife, bride or lover, and the poet’s relationship with her resembles a real love story. “Oh, my Russia, my wife!..”, “Oh, my poor wife”, “... the bride, Russia”, “And let the other caress you ...”, “Remember at the early dinner, dear friend, bright wife ...” - so Blok addresses his homeland. She appears to the poet either as a “stately princess”, who “hugs her arm” and braids her with a scythe, or as a beautiful girl of “robber beauty”, in a patterned scarf pulled down to her eyebrows, or as a fabulous beauty, captivated by a sorcerer. This lyrical and poetic image of Russia-beauty, Russia-beloved, Russia-wife is endowed in Blok's poems with living human, even a kind of "portrait" features:
No, not an old face and not lean
Under the Moscow colored scarf!
Through earthly bows and candles,
litanies, litanies, litanies -
Whispering, quiet speeches,
Your flushed cheeks...
In this living image of Russia, the typical features of the female character are shaded and emphasized. These traits are eternal "burning", high tension of the will, indomitable passion, mental anxiety. In particular, Faina is generously endowed with all this - the heroine of Blok's drama "Song of Fate", the personified image of "young" people's Russia, in whose voice - "free Russian song", "calling distance", "blue fogs, red dawns, endless steppes" .
The historicity of Blok's artistic thinking.
The nature and ideological meaning of the national problem in Blok's work was determined by the historicity of his artistic thinking. This feature sharply distinguished the poet from the vast majority of Russian symbolists. The work of the mature Blok is historical, first of all, because it serves as an artistic reflection of the historical process, and secondly, because the poet himself felt himself a participant in this continuous process, originating in the past and turned to the future, linking his personal fate with the fate of his country, their people, their culture. Blok was characterized by an unusually lively, organic feeling of the "connection of times" - past, present and future.
The feeling of personal participation in the historical process acquired in Blok's poetry the character of a distinct and extremely concrete sense of the past in its inseparable connection with the present ("No! Everything that is, that was, is alive! .."). The images of history have never been for Blok either a dead retrospection, or a conditionally “historical” decoration, or an object of aesthetic stylization. The Old Russian warrior from the militia of Dmitry Donskoy (in the poetic cycle “On the Kulikovo Field”) is a lyrical hero, this is the poet himself, who felt himself a participant in the Battle of Kulikovo. The poet, reincarnated as a Russian warrior, does not recall one of the heroic events of the past, much less describes it, but recreates it in a lyrical experience, in a sense of his own patriotic action:
Let the night Let's go home. Let's light up the bonfires
Steppe distance.
The holy banner will flash in the steppe smoke
And the steel of the Khan's saber ...
A vivid sense of the past, conveyed with the finest poetic skill in the poems “On the Kulikovo Field”, grows out of many specific, historically local signs of the national poetic element that make up the “landscape” of this wonderful cycle: yellow clay of a cliff, sad haystacks, steppe expanse, mare feather grass, cliques of swans, the dark and ominous Don, a combustible white stone, a mother beating against the stirrup of a warrior, an eagle scream, wide and quiet fires, dusty and hot chain mail on the shoulders of a warrior ...
Such a feeling of the past is also conveyed to the dramatic poem “Song of Destiny”, simultaneous to the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field”, in the monologue of its main character, Herman: “Everything that was, everything that will be, surrounded me: as if these days I live the life of all times, I live in the pain of my homeland. I remember the terrible day of the Battle of Kulikovo ... ". The whole figurative fabric of this monologue, taken from a folk tale, is the same as in the verses “On the Kulikovo Field”: “I know, like every warrior in that ambush army, how the heart asks for work and how early it is, early! .. But here it is - morning! Again the solemn music of the sun, like war trumpets, like a distant battle... and here I am, like a warrior in ambush, I don't dare to fight, I don't know what to do, I shouldn't, my us hasn't come! That's why I don't sleep at night: I wait with all my heart for someone who will come and say: “Your hour has struck! It's time!" ("Song of Destiny", picture V).
Here Herman - a modern hero, lost at the crossroads of futile intellectual searches and trying to find direct paths to Russia, to the people - echoes the ancient Russian warrior from the cycle "On the Kulikovo Field":
But I recognize you
High and rebellious days!
Over the enemy camp, as it used to be,
And splashing and trumpets of swans.
The heart cannot live in peace,
Suddenly the clouds have gathered.
The armor is heavy, as before the battle,
Now your time has come. – Pray!
This shift is not accidental. Both in the poems “On the Kulikovo Field” and in the drama Song of Fate, the images of the distant past were drawn by the poet to solve an urgent modern problem, which especially worried him deeply, namely the problem of the relationship between the people and the intelligentsia.
Cycle "On the field of Kulikovo".
In the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field”, a passionately intense feeling is combined with such a breadth of thoughts that the poet’s voice seems to dissolve in the voice of the very history of the country, which has such a great past and a great future that it takes your breath away.
Its expanse is monotonous, there are no bright and iridescent colors here, there is nothing to catch the eye; everything is so even, calm, boundless, that it seems - so it has been and will be forever and ever:
The river spread out. Flowing, sad lazily
And washes the shore.
Over the meager clay of the yellow cliff
Haystacks are sad in the steppe ...
Reflections on the fate of the native country are floating in a wide stream, where sorrow, pride, and a premonition of some great changes and joyful events awaiting the homeland have merged together:
Oh, my Russia! My wife! To pain
We have a long way to go!
Our path is an arrow of the Tatar ancient will
Pierced our chest...
Here, the very peace of the boundless expanses turns out to be imaginary: behind it is the gurgling of a storm, opposing passions. meaning "eternal battle" with the forces of predation and enslavement - and in the guise of a warrior Dmitry Donskoy, who inflicted a decisive defeat on the Tatars who seized the Russian land, the poet sees the embodiment of the immortal spirit and adamant courage of the Russian people, stubborn in work and formidable in anger - if the enemy desecrated their shrines and encroached on their inalienable property.
The cycle of poems "On the Kulikovo Field" is a reminder of the feat, once embodied in the battle of light with darkness, in overcoming dark chaos - for the sake of freedom and happiness of one's homeland. There is an “eternal battle” - for Russia, for a dear friend, for a bright wife, for everything that is dear and holy, and there is no rest in this difficult and intense struggle:
Through blood and dust...
The heroes of the Kulikovo field rush in the dust to battle with the enemy, and the very sunset in front of them, as if washed in blood, breaks through the heaps of heavy and frightened clouds, through severe clouds, shining with crimson and clouding the sky - from edge to edge ...
In the first collection of his poems, Blok accompanied the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” with the following note: “The Battle of Kulikovo belongs, according to the author, to the symbolic events of Russian history. Such events are destined to return. Their solution is yet to come."
How to understand these words about the symbolic meaning of the liberation battle? Blok's article "The People and the Intelligentsia" (1908) reveals the symbolism of his lyrical cycle: the military camp of Dmitry Donskoy is a poetic image of the Russian people, which is in a state of revolutionary ferment and ready for the upcoming battle, and Mamai's "enemy camp" is an analogue of a detached from the people and the intelligentsia plunged into a dead "Apollinian" dream.
Thus, Blok, as it were, reverses the traditional ideas familiar to the liberal intellectual, who has been told from time immemorial that the people are “asleep”, and the intelligentsia “goes forward” and is called upon to “wake up the people”. For the poet, however, everything takes on a different meaning: although the "horde" of the intelligentsia is making noise, it is a stagnant and already deadening force, and the people - the Russian army - are preparing for a great decisive battle.
The poems of the cycle "On the Kulikovo Field" exist, of course, even outside such an understanding as the brilliant poetry of the motherland, the Russian national element, not reducible to the private issue of the people and the intelligentsia. But they have a second (journalistic) plan, and Blok was far from being indifferent to it.
Drama "Song of Destiny".
Much more sharply straightforward journalistic meaning, which Blok invested in the theme of Russia, is expressed in the drama "Song of Fate". The very idea of drama is very significant. Its hero, the poet Herman (it is easy to guess Blok himself in him), left his “white house”, full of “hopeless happiness”. for the temptations of the big world. In the whistle of the wind, he heard the "song of fate", which imperiously draws him to freedom. But in the wild, he met only vulgarity, venality, lies, violence, a soulless machine civilization that only oppresses and destroys a person. Herman is honest and conscientious, he curses this corrupted world:
I can't and don't want to!
So this is the great feast of Culture!
People are dying there - they are playing death here!
Here they buy gold with a song
Dignity and reason, honor and duty...
So this is where the centuries have taken us
Sublime, sublime dreams?
But he is a man entangled in doubts and contradictions. His soul is “like a noisy waterfall”, but he does not know “where to direct the force”: “I don’t know! I know how much I have to do, and I don’t know how to start ... ”He fell in love with Faina (Russia), but he still cannot afford to go with her. "Do you love me?" Faina Germana asks. “I love you,” he replies. "You know me?" - "I do not know". "Will you find me?" - "I'll find it." The real meeting between Herman and Faina is yet to come. Faina leaves Herman. He has only one thing left - "a clear conscience." “And there is no road. What am I, a beggar, to do? Where to go?"
There is no way back to the quiet "white house" for Herman. The drama ends with the homeless and lost Herman being led out of the blizzard by a Nekrasov peddler (a song to Nekrasov’s words: “Oh, the box is full, full ...”, etc., passes as an accompaniment through the entire last scene of “Songs of Destiny”).
Blok had high hopes for The Song of Destiny: “But the stone that I may not have been able to polish in The Song of Destiny is precious” (letter to Stanislavsky dated December 9, 1908).
"New America".
The next stage in understanding the theme of the motherland marks the poem "New America", which is a new step in the cycle dedicated to the motherland; it testifies that the poet more and more deeply comprehended the fate of his native country and found more and more correct answers to the question about its future, about its happiness.
The poem opens with an immensely broad and solemn picture:
Joyful holiday, great holiday,
Yes, the star is not visible because of the clouds ...
You are standing under a wild blizzard,
Fatal, native country ...
In the poem "New America", Blok argued how misleading ideas about Russia are at times - if we confine ourselves to what catches the eye, and lose sight of something much more important and significant, even though inconspicuous at first glance:
There you pretend to be devout,
There you pretend to be an old woman,
The voice of prayer, the ringing of bells ...
Behind the crosses - crosses, yes crosses ...
It is as if nothing has changed in this Russia, and it is the same as it was centuries ago, but if you take a closer look, it will truly turn out that Russia is no longer what it is seen at first sight; she can “pretend” to be humble, submissive, devout, but this is already only an appearance, for it is not prayerful humility, but something completely different that distinguishes the poet’s inquisitive gaze through the old, familiar features, and completely different ringing and voices are heard by his alert, sensitive ear "Under a wild blizzard", sweeping across the expanses of his native country.
The poet speaks of the Russia of the future as a "new America", but he introduces a special meaning into these words: here the "new America" is not the USA, not a country of businessmen, stockbrokers (of which there is not a single word in the poem); here, the “new America” means a land of enormous opportunities and a talented, young-spirited people who will be able to implement - and are implementing - these opportunities in a living, fruitful business.
The most important thing that should be emphasized in the poem "New America" is that, glorifying the new Russia and its new look, its young enthusiasm, its creative forces, Blok does not even mention entrepreneurs, owners of factories and factories. He knows that they do not create wealth and, therefore, they do not own the honor and glory of conquering and developing the bowels of their native country, its innumerable treasures that bring people a happy future.
If we compare the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” with “New America”, then one cannot fail to notice a new degree of maturity of the poet, because in “New America” what modernity brought with it is revealed more concretely, and the pictures of topical reality go into a broad, striving into the future perspective; here the poet's faith in his people and his future has gained more solid support, for the artist is already aware of where the wealth and power of his native country are laid, from whom it can be expected to be renewed, who is the bearer of the future, on whom the victory in struggle for its welfare and prosperity; all this finds its passionate and solemn expression in the "New America" - the anthem of the new Russia, one premonition of which transformed an ordinary and everyday day into a joyful and great holiday.
Russia is a country of imminent revolution.
The theme of the struggle for the future of Russia comes to the fore in Blok's civic-patriotic poetry. From the understanding of the fact that Russia is a country of an imminent revolution, the poet's confidence grew that his homeland would play a great, world-historical role in the life of mankind. Even referring to the national past, the poet, as we have seen, dwelled on such historical events that allowed him to connect them with the theme of the struggle for the future of Russia (“On the Kulikovo Field”).
“We are bequeathed in fragments of Russian literature from Pushkin and Gogol to Tolstoy, in the bright and incorruptible, only temporarily clouded eyes of Russian peasants - a huge (but not yet grasped by the iron ring of thought) concept of a living, powerful and young Russia,” Blok wrote in a letter, entering into an argument with Rozanov. - ... If there is something to live, then only this. And if such a Russia is “growing up” somewhere, then, of course, only in the heart of the Russian revolution in the broadest sense, including here Russian literature, science and philosophy, a young peasant obsessively pondering the thought “all about one”, and a young revolutionary with a beaming a truthful face, and everything generally clumsy, obsessed, thunderous, oversaturated with electricity. Not a single lightning rod can cope with this thunderstorm.
Such words, imbued with incorruptible love for the people and faith in the revolution, in its historical justice, were not uttered during the years of reaction by any of the Symbolists and, in general, by none of the representatives of the then literature.
Although the poet's idea of the impending revolution was vague, he was not mistaken in the most important thing: in the will of the people to win for freedom, in their moral rightness and inexhaustible creative power, in the fact that the truth is on their side and the future is theirs:
The people are the crown of earthly color,
Beauty and joy to all colors:
Do not pass the Lord's summer
Favorable - and to us.
This faith in Russia gave life to Blok. Even having captured with truly realistic ruthlessness the disgusting image of a hypocrite and money-grubber (in the poem “To sin shamelessly, soundly ...”), the poet, against all odds, courageously asserts:
Yes. And such, my Russia,
You are dearer to me than all the edges ...
Blok here loves nothing and admires nothing; on the contrary, he hates everything with “sacred hatred”. But even with such a Russia, he cannot “separate himself”, even such a Russia is “more dear to him than all lands” - and not only at the behest of patriotic duty, but also because behind all sorts of vulgarity and dirt he sees through the “other world”, the future Russia.
This is Russia in Dreams. “She looks at us from the blue abyss of the future and calls there. What it will grow into - we do not know; we don't know what we'll call it." But dreams of this future Russia helped Blok endure the "impenetrable horror" and vulgarity of the "false life" that surrounded him, saved him from despair. Blok's Russia is a "light image of paradise", a consolation and hope for a tired, destitute person. Remembering "everything that once tormented, sometimes amused" - flattery, deceit, fame, gold, "human stupidity", everything that makes up the "loathsome circle of being", the poet asks: "Well, the end?" And answers:
No ... still forests, glades,
And country roads, and highways,
Our Russian road
Our Russian fogs
Our rustles in oats ...
Blok's images of the motherland.
It is important to note that the image of the motherland in Blok's patriotic poetry did not remain unchanged. As time went on, it became more and more filled with real socio-historical content. At first, the poet enthusiastically sang of the romantically “extraordinary”, “resting in secret” Russia - “poor”, witchcraft, “dense”, with sorcerers and soothsayers, with the cherished “traditions of antiquity”:
You are extraordinary in a dream,
I won't touch your clothes.
I doze - and behind the slumber is a mystery,
And in secret - you will rest Russia.
Russia is surrounded by rivers
And surrounded by wilds,
With swamps and cranes,
And with the cloudy gaze of a sorcerer,
Where are the diverse peoples
From edge to edge, from valley to valley
Conduct night dances
Under the glow of burning villages,
Where are the sorcerers with the soothsayers
Enchant cereals in the fields
And witches amuse themselves with devils
In the road snow pillars ...
Where are all the ways and all the crossroads
Living stick exhausted
And a whirlwind whistling in the bare bars,
Sings the legends of old...
Blok defined Russia ambivalently - either as “poor” and “beautiful” Russia, then as “New America”: “He could not and did not want to combine these two principles, he palpably opposed them to each other as hostile, affirming romance in this opposition. of his work” (N. Aseev).
The main and fundamental thing in Blok's patriotic lyrics is not the touching admiration of the "humble nakedness" of Russia, but the idea of it as a country of enormous, not yet fully revealed power and energy, as a country irresistibly rushing towards a new life. She is all directed forward - into the boundless "distance of centuries." with her
And the impossible is possible
The road is long and easy...
The motif of the road - the “long road” that lies in front of the homeland, runs like a red thread through the entire patriotic lyrics of Blok: “I go out on a path open to the eyes ...”, “And I will go the way, dear ...”, “And again the bell rings behind the grass ... " , “O my Russia! My wife! The long way is painfully clear to us…”, “The steppe path is without end, without outcome…”, “But the highway is running…”, “Our Russian road…”, “You passed by night ways…”
“Russia is a storm,” Blok said, and he brilliantly conveyed this feeling of the homeland as a powerful and free element in his lyrics, in its very figurative fabric, in the images of unrestrained whirlwind aspiration, flight, which are uniform in their inner meaning, passing through all his poems, perpetual motion: wind, blizzard, snowstorm, fire fanned by the wind, clouds running across the sky ...
This chain of images stretches from the early poems to The Twelve, and outside of this symbolism Blok does not have a sense of Russia, because he always feels it - only in motion, only in flight, only in striving forward, into the future. and Blok expressed this feeling of “storm and anxiety” raging everywhere with specific means of verse - a lyrically colored landscape, the very rhythm and tempo of poetic speech:
And eternal battle! Rest only in our dreams
Through blood and dust...
Flying, flying steppe mare
And crushes the feather grass ...
And there is no end! Miles are flashing, steep ...
Stop!
Frightened clouds are coming,
Sunset in blood!
Sunset in blood! Blood flows from the heart!
Cry, heart, cry...
There is no rest! steppe mare
Rushing jump!
The image of the motherland, which is in perpetual motion, in flight, on the way, is successively connected in Blok's poetry with Gogol's lyrical pathos, with his irrepressible troika bird. This is clearly seen, for example, from the program of one of Blok's creative ideas: “And now the quiet plan of our doubts, contradictions, falls and madness rises: do you hear the gasping rut of the troika? Do you see her diving through the snowdrifts of the dead and desolate plain? This is Russia flying to no one knows where - into the blue-blue abyss of time - on its dismantled and decorated troika. Do you see her starry eyes - with a prayer addressed to us ... ". It is significant that the continuation of one of Blok's most lyrically intimate poems (“I am nailed to the tavern counter ...”) is planned here - another example of the fusion of “personal and general” that dominates in his poetry.
Conclusion
Blok's work still captivates us, it is a call to fight for the reorganization of life, for that Russia that must arise before us in all its unclouded beauty. The poet went to this Russia, he saw it in his creative dream, he embodied it in the creations of his work.
Blok's poems about Russia are beautiful, imbued with tenderness and devoted love for the motherland, for its glorious past, for the beauty and charm of its nature, for its distances and endless roads, gray huts and wind songs ...
Bibliography:
Vl. Orlov "Alexander BLOCK"
Boris Solovyov "The Poet and His Feat"
Journal "Literary Review" (10, 1980)
Alexander Blok "Poems and poems" (introductory article by Nikolai Kryschuk)
Magazine "Young Guard" (11, 1990)
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Greedily looks into the eyes of the other ... "Sizzling years! Is there madness in you, is there any hope? From the days of war, from the days of freedom - There is a bloody reflection in the faces. The theme of the motherland, Russia captures Blok entirely. The feeling of the motherland as a living being merges with a super feeling of burning love. The personal tragedy of loneliness rises to the level of the tragedy of the people. “In the poetic sense of the world...
Consciousness of Blok in the 1910s Permeated with a rush of destruction of "everything", with the breath of icy winds burning the "old world", this poem is revolutionary both in spirit and in its artistic structure. Why did the poet Alexander Blok fall silent? But the future for Blok is not a rejection of the past, but the result of the "embodiment" of all the lofty things that have been achieved by the spiritual experience of man, the experience of history. He was convinced that Russia ("Fatal, ...
The whole earth, and then not just one earth, but an infinite universe, only a few wings of linen and steel once the wings of the Spirit will carry us into the arms of eternity. The theme of the motherland, Russia captures Blok entirely. The feeling of the motherland as a living being merges with a super feeling of burning love. The personal tragedy of loneliness rises to the level of the tragedy of the people. “In the poetic sense of the world there is no...
In the last quatrain: If the holy army shouts: "Throw Russia, live in paradise!" I will say: "There is no need for paradise, Give me my Motherland." In addition to the theme of the Motherland, in the work of Sergei Yesenin there is another theme closely related to it. Revolution theme. The poet was not a supporter of the revolution. he was afraid of her as A.S. was afraid. Pushkin of the Russian rebellion "... senseless and merciless ...". However, Yesenin was interested in ...
