Spiritual and poetic origins. Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev was born on October 10, 1884 in the village of Koshtug, Koshtug volost, Vytegorsky district, Olonets province (now Vytegorsky district Vologda region). At various times, in autobiographical notes, letters, oral stories, the poet liked to emphasize that in his family there were many remarkable, gifted, artistic people by nature. So, he recalled his grandfather from his father’s side: “My late aunt used to say that his father, and my grandfather, was full of bear dancing. He took the bear to the fairs, played the snot, and the shaggy wise guy walked around in snot chic. In the Kirillov side, up to two hundred rubles were brought to my grandfather a year. So my grandfather Timothy lived ... The ruin and death of grandfather came from the decree. A decree was issued to deliver the bears-dancers to the county administration for execution ... For a long time the breadwinner's skin hung on the wall in the grandfather's hutch, until time wore it to dust. But the bear's snot is alive, it pities in my songs, crumbles into golden grains, echoes in my heart, in my dreams and consonances.

But more often than others, Klyuev recalls his mother Praskovya Dmitrievna. She was originally from Zaonezhye, from a family of Old Believers. Mother knew many folk songs, spiritual verses, possessed an outstanding gift of an improviser-wailer. “I owe literacy, a song warehouse and all verbal wisdom to my late mother, whose memory I revere tearfully, even to death,” the poet admitted. Klyuev carried the veneration of his mother through his whole life. Already on last step his way of the cross, he constantly returns in his memories and reflections to the image of the person dearest to him. So, in August 1936, the exiled poet wrote from Tomsk to V. N. Gorbacheva (the wife of the poet Sergei Klychkov): “A visit to the beautiful hilltop church of the 18th century with rare images for an exile is a monstrous crime. I don’t know whether in a body or without a body, in reality or in a dream, but my late mother appeared several times to me and this church - against the backdrop of northern carvings and paintings -: all, like a swan feather, in bluish rainbows, consoled me and wiped my tears ... "Praskovya Dmitrievna, the poet dedicated one of his best works - the poetic cycle" Hut Songs ". The poem "Zaozerye" is also dedicated to the memory of the mother.

Being already famous poet, Klyuev repeatedly reminded of the antiquity of his Old Believer peasant family, raising his origins, both blood, and spiritual, and literary, to the frantic Archpriest Avvakum:

When I knit my knitting
Pine words, bear thoughts?
"Get ready for the fire early in the morning" -
Thundered my great-grandfather Avvakum!

Of course, one cannot perceive Klyuev's stories about his life, about his relatives as reliable, factual, accurate in detail. They have a lot of poetic-legendary, fictional. The poet creates the artistic image of his ancestors, as well as his own. But this was not just a desire to embellish his biography. No. In this seemingly individual, Klyuev's striving, one of the tendencies characteristic of peasant poetry generally. Before Klyuev, there was already a well-defined, established "peasant" tradition in Russian literature. But the peasant poets of the second half of the XIX century. most often acted as spokesmen for the oppressed state of the most numerous estate in Russia. Sorrow and sadness are the main motives of their work. And Nikolai Klyuev, a native of the northern Olonets region, entered Russian poetry with a different worldview, with a different intonation. However, he entered, and not so boldly as it might seem to a reader who knows mature Klyuev poems and poems. His first publications (the poems “Rainbow Dreams Did Not Come True...”, “Widely Vast Field...” in the almanac “New Poets”, 1904) did not differ in originality, did not stand out among the many neo-populist poetic variations of the pre-revolutionary period. So far, only one thing was clear - the young poet was not going to sing a sad song about a hard lot, which his literary fathers did - peasant poets of the 19th century:

But not with the groan of fathers
My song will sound
And the roll of thunder
It will fly over the earth.

The rebellious appearance of the lyrical hero of these lines coincided at that time with the appearance of the author. The aspiring poet actively cooperates with revolutionary organizations of populist and socialist-revolutionary orientation. As the biographers established, “in 1905, Klyuev was brought by the Moscow gendarme department to an inquiry into the case of the dissemination of revolutionary proclamations among the employees of the Kuskovo station of the Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod railway.

In early 1906, he was arrested for agitation activities in Vytegra and the surrounding villages. He spent about six months in prison, first in Vytegorskaya (Klyuev calls it prison), and then in the province, in Petrozavodsk. “For the first time I was in prison at the age of 18 (Klyuev again creates a legend - in fact he was already over twenty then. - V. Zh.), beardless, thin, voice with a silver crack. The authorities considered me dangerous and secretive. When they were transporting me from prison to the provincial prison, they put me in leg irons. I wept, looking at my chains. Through the years, the memory of them gnaws at my heart. But, speaking of the rebellious moods of the young Klyuev, one must remember the originality of his revolutionary spirit. Remember that she was closely associated with religious ideas, the idea of ​​​​Christian sacrifice, suffering for "brothers" and "sisters":

I will wear a black shirt
And after the muddy lantern
On the stones of the yard I will pass on the chopping block
With a silent, gentle face.

Campaigning activities and imprisonment could not but be reflected in the verses of the artistically impressionable young man. One of these reflections is the poem "Walk" (1907). It resembles folk "prison" songs in terms of plot and emotional mood, and more specifically, Lermontov's "Neighbour" created according to folklore samples and then included in the folk song repertoire. Reminds, but, of course, does not repeat.

In Klyuev's poem, there are characteristic signs of the new time. The girl she accidentally sees in the window lyrical hero, not a free beauty, arousing the dream of freedom, the desire to escape from prison, but a sufferer imprisoned alone. The pale face of the ascetic excites the author's imagination. And if in this poem the poet nevertheless pays tribute to the tradition of “prison” songs: the hero is carried away in dreams to freedom along with the girl, then in the poem “You are more private and stricter ...” (1908), the idea of ​​“Calvary” sacrifice becomes the main . Here the heroine deliberately follows her thorny path, knowing its sad outcome:

And ashen braids are smoother,
The sooner you tighten
A deaf mother sits at the yarn -
On funeral canvases.

Most likely, the image of a revolutionary girl, a "sister" in Klyuev's poetry was not abstractly generalized, but had a specific biographical basis.

One of its prototypes was Elena Dobrolyubova, the sister of Alexander Dobrolyubov, a well-known symbolist poet at the beginning of the century who went “to the people”. Klyuev dedicates several poems to her, written in 1906-1908. E. M. Dobrolyubova probably told Klyuev about her sister Maria, who died shortly after her release from the Tula prison, where she was imprisoned for revolutionary propaganda. It seems that the facts of the fate of the Dobrolyubov sisters found a poetic refraction in the verses:

Bridegroom, shot through the chest,
Sister who died in battle -
All in the evening desert
They will go to your hut.

Nikolai Klyuev and Alexander Blok. big event in the life of Nikolai Klyuev was an acquaintance with Alexander Blok. Their correspondence began in 1907. In his first letters addressed to the famous master, the novice poet is student-shy, but, realizing that the poet takes him seriously and respectfully, moreover, that he himself is interested in talking with a person from the depths of Russia, from depths of her people, Klyuev gets rid of shyness and speaks confidently with Blok. Confidently and passionately argues with him, feeling himself "initiated from the people." Klyuev writes to Blok not only about the social protest that is brewing in the Russian countryside, but also about the deep artistic potential of the people, about the fact that the creative abilities of the peasant cannot open up, develop into existing conditions: “Forgive my impudence, but it seems to me that if our brother had time for the birth of images, then they would not be inferior to yours. The chest of building principles contains so much, the great inspiration is felt so clearly. Klyuev considered himself entitled to speak like that with the famous poet, being the successor and continuer of the poetic traditions of North Russian storytellers and screamers. After all, it was in those regions, whose attorney he felt himself to be, Hilferding wrote down a set of Russian epics, the Sokolov brothers compiled a collection of fairy tales, this land was glorified by Kryukov and Krivopolenov, Ryabinina and Fedosov. Klyuev's letters made a strong impression on Blok. “This is a document of great importance (of modern Russia- folk, of course), which still and still affirms me in my cherished thoughts and hopes, ”he wrote about one of Klyuyev’s letters. Blok repeatedly quotes the letters of the Olonets poet in his articles. With his assistance, Klyuev's poems are published in the magazines Golden Fleece, Novaya Zemlya and other publications. Metropolitan poets pay attention to Klyuev's poems. He manages to meet some of them personally, including Valery Bryusov.

literary recognition. With a foreword by Bryusov in 1911 (1912 is indicated in the imprint), Klyuev's first collection of poems, "Pine Chime", was published. The book was met with interest and approval in Russian literary circles. Sergei Gorodetsky, Nikolai Gumilyov, and other famous poets responded to her release. The poems of Klyuev's first poetic book struck readers with their unusualness, the absence of rhythms, images, and tropes that leveled individuality. Valery Bryusov, presenting young poet, wrote that his poems are like a wild forest that has grown at random over glades, along slopes, along ravines. Nothing in it is foreseen, not predetermined in advance, at every step of surprise - either a bizarre stump, or a trunk that has long fallen, overgrown with moss, or a random meadow, but it has strength and charm. free life... Klyuev's poetry is like this wild free forest that knows no "plans", no "rules". Nikolai Gumilyov, in his review of The Pines Chime, with his characteristic perspicacity, noted that Klyuev's book was only the beginning of a new, fresh and strong movement not only in poetry, but in all national culture: “The obsolete culture that has led us to dreary atheism and aimless malice is being replaced by people who can say to themselves: “We are early morning clouds, dawns of dewy springs ...” ”Gumilyov quotes a line from Klyuev’s poem “Voice from the People” (1910 ). This poem can be considered programmatic to a certain extent. Here, for the first time, the rejection of “book”, “paper” literature, and, in general, a culture that has departed from folk origins, has lost its life-giving connection with the existing parallel, almost unwritten, anonymous, but indestructible, traditional peasant culture is declared so clearly and definitely for the first time. In subsequent years, this theme will be one of the main ones in Klyuev's poetry. Perhaps most clearly it was expressed in the poem "You promised us gardens ..." (1911). The polemical pathos of this work is emphasized by the fact that Klyuev prefaces his "poems with the same epigraph as Konstantin Balmont (to the poem "From there") - a line from the Koran "I promise you gardens." Hoping that his poetry can lead a person away from problems, conflicts, upheavals real life into the sublimely beautiful world of marvelous dreams, Balmont promises:

I call you to the country
Where there is no sadness, no sunset,
I will initiate you into silence
From where there is no return to the storms.

Klyuev is convinced that the inhabitants of such gardens are "Plague, Mutilation, Murder, Famine and Debauchery." The real cleansing, in his opinion, is in another, truly "refreshing" force - a force coming from the depths of the peasant world, supported by an inextricable connection with nature and the people's way of life, folk morality and art.

They fed us the gorges of the bowels,
Rained down the sky,
We are boulders, gray cedars,
Forest keys and pines ringing.

Klyuev develops these thoughts in the poems of his subsequent collections "Brotherly Songs" (1912), "Forest were" (1912).

Nikolai Klyuev and Sergei Yesenin. Klyuev had to conduct a debate with the "paper" poets almost alone. And so he enthusiastically received a letter received at the beginning of 1915 from a novice poet from the Ryazan province:

“Dear Nikolai Alekseevich!

I read your poems, talked a lot about you with Gorodetsky, and I cannot but write to you. Especially when we have a lot in common with you. I am also a peasant and I write in the same way as you, but only in my Ryazan language ... I would like to talk with you about many things, but “A voice does not reach through a fast river, through a dark forest.”

So there was an acquaintance, albeit in absentia, of Nikolai Klyuev and Sergei Yesenin, poets, around whom the best writers of a "peasant" orientation soon united. Their poetry really had so much in common that they, living at the same time, in the same country, simply could not help but feel it, not reach out to each other with their souls. One of the initial birthmarks Yesenin's poetry was quiet, sincere, but uplifting idealization of peasant life. His poem “In the hut” (“It smells like loose drachens ...”) turned out to be an artistic discovery for Russian poetry. Klyuev's hut becomes by that time not only a symbol of the reliability and creativity of the peasant life system, but also the center of his poetic world. In 1915, he created one of his best poems, The Christmas Hut, in which the process of building a peasant house is likened to an act of high creation:

The groove is warm, the captors of the kokora,
Krutolob tesovy shell.
Valances will be rippled
And the horse is speckled with ludyanka.
On the wall, like a grain, notches will pass:
Sucrest, paws, netting, rows,
So that the young hut in a red coat
Reality and dream seemed - easy.

The poets were also united by the song, folklore element, which had a decisive influence on the formation of their poetics. It is no coincidence that both Klyuev and Yesenin call many of their poems songs. Both first master the techniques of stylization “like folklore”, and then master the forms of folklore poetic thinking, creating original works that are close to folklore not only in form, but also in the essence of thought, image, idea. They also shared an interest in heroic pages Russian history, the legendary images of heroes and ascetics.

Klyuev and Yesenin were given the poetic gift of creating verbal pictorial pictures of Russian nature. Their song poems organically combined psychological condition human and emotional mood landscape. Everyone who has read Yesenin's poems at least once remembers forever and snow fringe on the branches of a birch, and the soft sadness of a dozing road, and drops of morning dew on the thickets of nettles. Klyuev not only skillfully paints his native northern landscape. He, as a descendant of frantic preachers, indignantly denounces those who are born with a cold, indifferent heart, and therefore hostile to nature:

In coniferous incense he breathed a cigarette
And spitting forget-me-not burned,
Pleso charged with tears,
Moss covered with gray hair ...

... The bird cherry twisted her hands,
An ermine confuses a trace to a mink ...
Son of iron and stone boredom
Trampling birch bark paradise.

But already in the early poems of Yesenin, there is a clear difference from Klyuev's poetry. Yesenin's verse is lighter, more mobile, receptive to the intonations of a rapidly changing time, more open to contact with others. poetic worlds and systems. This, of course, Klyuev felt and tried to take the talented Ryazan under his wing, to warn against the influence of "urban" writers. Already in one of his first letters to Yesenin, the “Olonets sorcerer” warned his young brother: “I am especially afraid for you: you are like a bush of forest thorn, which the more it makes noise, the more it crumbles. All the poets have gorged themselves on your loose drachens, but it should be clear to you that this is after pineapples in champagne. My words are justified by experience. The caresses of poets are not animal bread, but "candied rat", and this dish will not come to the liking of Ryazan and Olonchan, and it is a sin and godlessness for us to savor it.

After reading such warnings, the modern reader may get the impression that Klyuev was an opponent of civilization, of "urban" culture in general. Of course, this is not true. Klyuev was a well-educated man. He perfectly knew not only ancient Russian literature, folk art, but also European literature, painting, and music.

In the original language, he read Heine and Verlaine, as contemporaries testify, he played Grieg well on the piano. Warning Yesenin, he was afraid of losing a talented poet who continued the tradition of peasant culture, oral folk poetry. He was afraid that the influence of "urban" poetry would neutralize his "peasant" identity.

The range of Yesenin's talent turned out to be wider than the limits in which Klyuev tried to keep him. Both poets began to understand this. By the middle of 1917, a period of cooling began in their friendly relations. And in the fall of 1917, Klyuev published the poem "Elushka-sister ...", which contains the lines:

White color Seryozha,
Similar to Kitovras
Loved my story.

But it was in the seventeenth, and in 1915-1916. was the peak of their creative friendship. Klyuev and Yesenin constantly appeared together at literary evenings, performed reading works. They attract other talented poets to promote their literary direction. “Nevertheless, Klyuev remained the first in the group peasant poets, - Sergei Gorodetsky testifies in his memoirs, - this group grew and grew stronger. In addition to Klyuev and Yesenin, it included ... Sergey Klychkov and Alexander Shiryaevets. Everyone was talented, everyone was united by a system of song and epic images. This group has become a notable phenomenon in cultural life Russia. Representatives of the creative intelligentsia, fascinated by the study of Russian antiquity, the poetics of ancient Russian literature and traditional folklore, and magical power, treated her with sympathy and interest. folk image(writers Alexei Remizov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, artist Nicholas Roerich). For some time, they even united into the Krasa group. In the diary of A. Blok we read the entry: “October 25, 1915. Evening "Beauty" (Klyuev, Yesenin, Gorodetsky, Remizov) - in Tenishevsky School". It was practically the only (although it received a great response) public speaking"Beauties". The group broke up as soon as it appeared. Probably, among the reasons for this was Klyuev's Avvakumov intransigence. Gorodetsky recalled: “In general, “Krasa” did not last long. Klyuev pulled Yesenin away from me more and more.

In disputes with proletarian poetry. The October Revolution found Klyuev in his native place, in Vytegra. He perceives the revolution with enthusiasm (like the February one), but, like Yesenin, in a peculiar way, “with a peasant bias”, with a dream of a “peasant's paradise”. At the beginning of 1918 the poet joined the Bolshevik Party. Leads lecture work, performs in Vytegra with the reading of revolutionary poetry. Active propaganda of revolutionary ideas deeply a religious person made a strong impression on the listeners. So, one of them, A. K. Romansky, recalled: “All the summer of 1919 I lived in the city of Vytegra ... Around June I had to directly hear Klyuev’s performance ... performance. I came to the theater when all the seats in the hall were occupied, and found myself in a crowd standing at the side exit, close to the stage. There was no one on it except Klyuev, no one announced the topic of the speech. The hall is silent. It’s hard for me now to remember what exactly he was talking about then, but I remember that he figuratively compared the revolution with a woman striding across Russia. Comparisons and juxtapositions of the poet were unexpected and peculiar. He also knew how to pose, to attract attention. As I remember now: Klyuev is standing, one hand is pressed to his heart, the other is thrown up, his inflamed eyes are shining. I have never heard before that they can speak so passionately and convincingly. But many of his words made me think that Klyuev was undoubtedly a religious person. It seemed strange that he could combine, on the one hand, large, wide, modern ideas and, on the other hand, faith in God. Well, for many of the poet's contemporaries, then, faith in God and "big, broad ... ideas" seemed incompatible. The fighters against the "opium of the people" quickly saw that Klyuev was promoting some kind of "wrong" revolution. In the spring of 1920 he was expelled from the party. They almost stop printing. Klyuev not only became objectionable with his religiosity, but also began to irritate the new literary authorities with irreconcilable disagreement with the most revolutionary, most proletarian poets. Klyuev rebels against the substitution of true poetry with high meaning, beautiful fiction, a semi-precious word, slogans on the topic of the day, momentary propaganda crafts such as the noisily popular, but then reliably forgotten play "Marat is a friend of the people." Referring to the famous proletarian poet Vladimir Kirillov, he patiently convinces:

Poetry, friend, is not a cigarette butt,
Not Marat, played out by hearsay.
Caravan of Ossetian cloaks
The muses will not warm in your book.

Run away, Kirillov, to Kirillov,
To Cyril - the alphabetical saint,
Listen to the robins overflow,
Fall to the unmourned, native.

The Olonets poet is even sharper in his dispute with Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose urban, urban poetry was alien to Klyuev. Klyuev was annoyed by overly bold experiments in the field of word formation and rhythm, breaking the song mode of the Russian language.

But most of all, Klyuev was frightened that many poets tried to replace the poetry of the soul, feelings, heart with verbal industrial-ideological paraphernalia:

Does the songwriter care about cranes,
Feeding the crows - moaning hammer?
Only in soulful thoughts, in heart blast furnaces
Crimson gold will be melted into life.

Klyuev joined unequal fight. Defenders of proletarian poetry attacked his collection The Copper Whale, published at the end of 1918 (in imprint - 1919). They caustically suggested that "this book was published Petrograd Soviet, probably with scientific purpose so that they know how modernity has been refracted in the head of a person who is exactly 30 centuries behind life. V. Knyazev hastened to announce the literary death of Klyuev. Created by the poet in the 20s. the poems "Mother-Saturday", "Zaozerye", "Village", with an abundance of folklore motifs and ethnographic details, which he lovingly writes out, choosing the most expensive, most cherished words, caused conflicting responses from critics. Kind words Vs. Rozhdestvensky and Vyach. Polonsky, some other writers. But words of approval were few, very few. The poet's accusations of adherence to the patriarchal, old, outgoing sounded a lot and loudly. In Klyuev's picturesque and vivid pictures of rural life, they saw the propaganda of kulak ideas about a peasant prosperous life.

The poet tried to rebel against the primitive, vulgar class assessment of his works. He did not lose hope of explaining the meaning of his work to the critics crushing him. In a letter sent to the All-Russian Union of Writers, Klyuev defended the legitimacy of his chosen path in literature: “Enlightened and well-educated people have long been familiar with my appearance as an artist of his colors and, in some way, native painting. This is not the brave “so exactly” of the royal fellows, not their barracks uniforms, but the images that live in me, the precepts of Alexandria, Korsun, Kyiv, Novgorod from the grandchildren of the Velesovs to Andrei Rublev, from Daniil Zatochnik to Pososhkov, Fet, Surikov, Nesterov, Borodin , Yesenina. If Mediterranean harps live for centuries, if the songs of snow-covered Norway on the wings of polar gulls are carried all over the world, then why should the Russian birch bark Sirin be plucked and executed for his many-colored witch's pipes - just because they are gray, with an uneducated ear for music people will say something, hurriedly and recklessly asserting that Comrade Mauser is sweeter than a round dance of muses? .. "

But the main form of preaching views on the meaning of creativity, the importance of art in the life of a person and the whole country remained for Klyuev poetry itself. At the end of the 1920s, when the tragic future of the Russian peasantry, its ethical and artistic values, was more and more clearly foreseen, the poet creates one of his top works - the poem "Pogorelshchina".

For many years there lived a legend about the death of the poet at the Taiga station from a heart attack and the loss of his suitcase with manuscripts. In reality, Klyuev was shot in Tomsk on October 23-25, 1937.

His poetry returned to readers a few decades later.

Biography

Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev (1884−1937) was born in the Olonets province in a village on the Vytegra River; his mother taught him "literacy, song structure and all verbal wisdom." He studied in Vytegra at the parochial school, then at the city school, he did not finish the medical assistant's school due to illness.

He began to publish in 1904, and in 1905 his poems appeared in the Moscow collective collections Surf and Wave. At the beginning of 1906, he was arrested for "inciting" the peasants and "agitating illegal ideas." I spent six months in Vytegorsk and then in Petrozavodsk prisons. Klyuev's rebellious ideas were based on a religious (close to sectarianism) basis: the revolution seemed to him the onset of the Kingdom of God, and this topic is his leitmotif. early creativity.

After his release he continued illegal activity, became close to the revolutionary populist intelligentsia (including the sister of the poet A. Dobrolyubov - Maria Dobrolyubova, the "Madonna of the Socialist-Revolutionaries", and the poet L. D. Semenov). New acquaintances led him to the pages of the capital's journal "Working Way", which was soon banned for its anti-government orientation.

In the autumn of 1907, Klyuev was called up for military service, but, following his religious convictions, he refused to take up arms; under arrest, he is brought to St. Petersburg and placed in a hospital, where doctors find him unfit for military service, and he leaves for the village. At this time, he started a correspondence with A. Blok (the problem of relations between the intelligentsia and the people - from different poles - occupied both, and this communication was mutually important and significant).

Block contributed to the appearance of Klyuev's poems in the Golden Fleece magazine, later Klyuev began to collaborate with other publications - Sovremennik, Niva, Zavetami, etc. Especially often in 1910−12. Klyuev is published in the Novaya Zemlya magazine, where they are trying to impose on him the role of the spokesman for the “new people's consciousness”, a preacher and prophet, almost a messiah.

In the autumn of 1911, Klyuev's first collection of poems, The Pines Chime, was published in Moscow, to which almost all influential critics responded, unanimously regarding the book as an event in literary life. At this time, Klyuev becomes known in literary (and even bohemian) circles, participates in meetings of the "Workshop of Poets" and in publications of acmeists, visits the literary and artistic cafe "Stray Dog"; around his name there is an atmosphere of increased curiosity, rush interest, and a variety of people are looking for acquaintance with him.

After the release of two collections - “Brotherly Songs”, 1912 (religious poems inspired by genuine “fraternal songs” of Khlysty), and “Forest were” (stylizations of folk songs), Klyuev returned to the Olonets province. His poems continue to appear in the capital's magazines and newspapers, he visits the capital from time to time.

In 1915, Klyuev met Yesenin, and a close relationship arose between them: for a year and a half they appeared together both in the press and at readings, Klyuev became the spiritual mentor of the young poet, patronizing him in every possible way. A circle of “new peasant” writers gathers around them, but attempts to institutionalize the commonwealth do not lead to the creation of a durable and lasting association (the Krasa and Strada societies lasted only a few months).

In 1916, Klyuev's collection Worldly Thoughts was published, on the subject of which military events left their mark. Klyuev greeted the revolution enthusiastically (this was reflected in numerous poems of 1917-1918), regarding everything that was happening primarily as a religious and mystical event that should lead to the spiritual renewal of Russia.

In 1919, the books "The Copper Whale", the two-volume "Songs" (selected from previous years and new poems) were published, and in 1922 his best lifetime compilation- Lion's Bread.

The lyrics of those years reflect the complex experiences of the poet - the painful belief that all suffering will be redeemed by the onset of "brotherhood", "muzhik's paradise", longing for dying Russia, crying for the disappearing, murdered village.

In 1928 comes out latest collection Klyuev's "Hut in the Field", compiled from already published poems, everything that was written by him in the 30s did not get into print.

In 1934 Klyuev was arrested in Moscow and deported to Tomsk; in June 1937 he was arrested a second time, imprisoned in Tomsk and shot.

Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev (1884−1937) was born in the Olonets province, in a village that stood on the Vytegra River. The poet studied at the parochial school, then entered the city school, then the medical assistant's school, whose diploma he never received due to illness. The literary path begins in 1904, and since 1905 the Moscow collections "Wave" and "Surf" have been publishing poems. For anti-political views and "incitement" of the peasants, he was arrested and spent six months in the prisons of Vytegorsk, and then in Petrozavodsk.

Klyuev's early work is permeated with a religious idea, a revolution in his understanding is the coming to earth of the Kingdom of God, without which the life of citizens will not be full and correct.

In 1907, Nikolai Alekseevich was called up for military service, but being a deeply religious person, he categorically refused to take up arms. Again the arrest, and this time the St. Petersburg hospital, where he was declared unfit for service and sent home to the village. Klyuev is in active correspondence with Alexander Blok, who will subsequently contribute to the appearance of Klyuev's works in Sovremennik, Niva, Testaments, etc.

After the release of the first collection of poems "Pine Chime", it immediately follows the reaction of authoritative critics who consider this important event in the development of literature, at the same time, not only domestic, but also world. This was the real peak of the popularity of the poet Klyuev, many wanted to personally get to know him and chat.

After meeting Yesenin in 1915, Klyuev became the mentor of the inexperienced poet. One and half year joint work at readings, speeches to the press served as a good impetus for the author. Yesenin becomes a protege of Nikolai Alekseevich, and Klyuev helps him in all his creative impulses. Societies such as "Krasa" and "Strada" were created, but they were not destined to exist for more than a couple of months.

Due to his religious views, Klyuev perceives the revolution of 1917 with joy, as a mystical event that was supposed to spiritually change Russia.

In 1922, his best brainchild, the collection "Lion's Bread", will be released. In the works of that time, one can read the longing for the dying village, the perishing Russia.

1934 Klyuev was arrested in Moscow, sent to Tomsk. After constant torture and imprisonment in June 1937, Nikolai Alekseevich was shot.

Klyuev Nikolai Alekseevich
Born: October 10 (22), 1884
Died: October 23-25, 1937

Biography

Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev (October 10 (22), 1884, Koshtugi village, Olonets province - between October 23 and 25, 1937, Tomsk, shot) - Russian poet, representative of the so-called new peasant trend in Russian poetry of the 20th century.

Childhood and youth

Father - police officer, inmate in a wine shop. Mother was a storyteller and a weeper. He studied at the city schools of Vytegra and Petrozavodsk. Among Klyuev's ancestors were Old Believers, although his parents and himself (contrary to many of his stories) did not profess the Old Believers.

He participated in the revolutionary events of 1905-1907, was repeatedly arrested for agitating peasants and for refusing the army oath out of conviction. He served his sentence first in Vytegorsk, then in Petrozavodsk prison.

Klyuev's autobiographical notes "Loon's Fate" mention that in his youth he traveled a lot in Russia. Specific stories cannot be confirmed by sources, and such numerous autobiographical myths are part of his literary image.

Klyuev also tells how he was a novice in the monasteries on Solovki; and how he was "King David ... white doves - Christs" (one of the Russian sects), but when they wanted to castrate him, he fled; and how in the Caucasus I met the handsome Ali, who, according to Klyuev, “fell in love with me the way Kadra-night teaches, which costs more than a thousand months. This is a secret Eastern teaching about marriage with an angel, which in Russian white Christianity is indicated by the words: finding Adam ... ”, then Ali committed suicide from hopeless love for him; and how he talked with Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana; and how he met with Rasputin; and how he was in prison three times; and how he became a famous poet and " literary collections, evenings, artistic feasts, the chambers of the Moscow nobility for two winters in a row grinded me with colorful millstones of fashion, curiosity and full boredom.

Literary fame

Nikolai Klyuev in his youth
For the first time, Klyuev's poems appeared in print in 1904. At the turn of the 1900s and 1910s, Klyuev appeared in literature, and did not continue the standard for “poets from the people” tradition of descriptive minor poetry in the spirit of I. Z. Surikov, but boldly uses the techniques of symbolism, saturates poetry with religious imagery and dialect vocabulary . The first collection - "Pine Chime" - was published in 1911. Klyuev's work was perceived with great interest by Russian modernists, about him as a "forerunner folk culture» spoke out Alexander Blok(in correspondence with him in 1907; had a great personal and creative influence on Klyuev), Valery Bryusov and Nikolai Gumilyov.

Nikolay Klyuev had complex relations (sometimes friendly, sometimes tense) with Sergei Yesenin who considered him his teacher. In 1915-1916, Klyuev and Yesenin often performed together with poetry in public, in the future their paths (personal and poetic) converged and diverged several times

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Religiosity Klyuev

As A. I. Mikhailov points out, Alexander Blok repeatedly mentions Klyuev in his poems, notebooks and letters and perceives it as a symbol of the mysterious folk faith. In one of the letters, Blok even stated: “Christ is among us,” and S. M. Gorodetsky attributed these words to Nikolai Klyuev.

In his 1922 entry, Klyuev says:
... for me, Christ is an eternal, inexhaustible milking force, a member that cuts through the worlds in the vagina, and in our world is cut through by a trap - a material sun, continuously impregnating a cow and a woman, a fir and a bee with a golden seed, the world of air and the underworld - fiery.

The seed of Christ is the food of the faithful. It is said about this: "Take, eat ..." and "Whoever eats my flesh will not die"

It has not been revealed to our theologians that by the flesh Christ meant not the body, but the seed, which even among the people is called flesh.

This is what should cut through in the human mind, especially in our times, in the age of the shocked heart, and become a new law of morality...

Klyuev after the revolution

Klyuev’s poems at the turn of the 1910s and 1920s reflect the “peasant” and “religious” acceptance of revolutionary events, he sent his poems to Lenin (although a few years earlier, together with Yesenin, he spoke to the empress), became close to the Left SR literary group “Scythians ". In the Berlin publishing house "Scythians" in 1920-1922, three collections of Klyuev's poems were published.

After several years of hungry wandering around 1922, Klyuev reappeared in Petrograd and Moscow, his new books were sharply criticized and withdrawn from circulation.

Since 1923, Klyuev lived in Leningrad (in the early 1930s he moved to Moscow). The catastrophic situation of Klyuev, including the material one, did not improve after the publication of his collection of poems about Lenin (1924).

Soon, Nikolai Klyuev, like many new peasant poets, distanced himself from Soviet reality, which was destroying the traditional peasant world; in turn, Soviet criticism smashed him as an "ideologist of the kulaks." After the death of Yesenin, he wrote "Lament for Yesenin" (1926), which was soon withdrawn [by whom?] from free sale. In 1928, the last collection "The Hut and the Field" was published.

In 1929, Klyuev met the young artist Anatoly Kravchenko, to whom his love poems and letters of this time

In a letter to Anatoly dated May 23, 1933, Klyuev talks about their close relationship as follows:
On this top human feeling, like clouds touching the dual Ararat, the heavenly swirls over the valley, the earthly. And this law is inevitable. Only now, on my days of the cross, is it, more than ever, becoming clearly perceptible to me. That is why it is harmful and erroneous to tell you that you live in me only as sex, and that love goes away with sex and friendship is destroyed. Irresistible proof that the angelic side of your being has always eclipsed the floor - are my poems - shed at your feet. Look at them - is there a lot of floor there? Are all the feelings of these extraordinary and never repeatable runes connected with you as with a snowdrop, a seagull or a ray that has become a young man?

Arrests, exile and execution

Klyuev himself, in letters to the poet Sergei Klychkov and V. Ya. negative attitude to the policy of the Communist Party and Soviet power. Similar accusations (of “anti-Soviet agitation” and “compiling and disseminating counter-revolutionary literary works”) were presented to Klyuev in connection with his other works - “The Song of Gamayun” and “If the demons of the plague, leprosy and cholera ...”, which are part of the unfinished cycle “Devastation”. AT last poem, for example, the White Sea-Baltic Canal is mentioned, built with the participation of a large number of dispossessed and prisoners:
That is the White Sea Death Canal,
Akimushka dug it,
From Vetluga Prov and aunt Fyokla.
Great Russia got wet
Under the red downpour to the bone
And hid tears from people
From the eyes of strangers into the deaf swamps ...

Poems from the cycle "Devastation" are stored in a criminal case N. Klyueva as an appendix to the protocol of interrogation.

According to the memoirs of I. M. Gronsky (editor of Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine), Klyuev increasingly switched to “anti-Soviet positions” (despite the allotted him state allowance). When Klyuev sent a "love hymn" to the newspaper, the subject of which was "not a 'girl', but a 'boy'", Gronsky expressed his indignation in a personal conversation with the poet, but he refused to write "normal" poetry. After that, Gronsky called Yagoda and asked to send Klyuev from Moscow (this order was sanctioned by Stalin). The opinion that the reason for Klyuev's arrest was precisely his homosexuality was also expressed later in private conversations by M. M. Bakhtin.

On February 2, 1934, Klyuev was arrested on charges of “compiling and distributing counter-revolutionary literary works” (Article 58 10 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR). The investigation into the case was led by N. Kh. Shivarov. On March 5, after the trial of the Special Conference, he was exiled to the Narym Territory, to Kolpashevo. In the autumn of the same year, at the request of the artist N. A. Obukhova, S. A. Klychkov, and possibly Gorky, he was transferred to Tomsk.

On June 5, 1937, in Tomsk, Klyuev was arrested again and on October 13 of the same year, at a meeting of the troika of the NKVD of the Novosibirsk Region, he was sentenced to death in the case of the never-existing "cadet-monarchist rebel organization" Union for the Salvation of Russia "". At the end of October he was shot. As stated in the certificate of posthumous rehabilitation of Klyuev, he was shot in Tomsk on October 23-25, 1937. The vague date of the execution may be due to the fact that from one o'clock in the morning on October 23 to eight in the morning on October 25 there was no electricity in Tomsk due to repairs local CHP. AT similar cases NKVD officers who carried out sentences over two nights (October 23 and 24) using a lantern " bat”, could draw up documents retroactively for the entire party only after the electric light appeared in the city (October 25). The likely place of execution and the mass grave where the poet rested was one of the wastelands adjacent to the Tomsk prison (now SIZO-1 on Pushkin St., 48). (Afanasiev A.L. 2002. P. 188.)

The investigator in the Tomsk case of Klyuev was the detective of the 3rd Department of the Tomsk GO NKVD ml. State Security Lieutenant Georgy Ivanovich Gorbenko.

Posthumous rehabilitation

Nikolai Klyuev was rehabilitated in 1957, but the first posthumous book in the USSR was published only in 1977. (The Poet's Library series, Soviet Writer, Leningrad branch, 1977, ISBN K-70403-316 (361-75), edition 10,000 copies)

Addresses in Tomsk

Two houses have been preserved in Tomsk - per. Krasnogo Pozharnik, 12 and Mariinsky lane, 38 (now 40), in which the poet lived at different times.

The last refuge of the poet - house 13 on the street. Achinskaya. The poet himself described his dwelling (after his release from arrest on July 5, 1936) as follows: “They brought it and carried it in their arms from the cart to my kennel. I'm lying... I'm lying. […] Behind the slanting window of my room is a gray Siberian downpour with a whistling wind. It’s already autumn here, it’s cold, the dirt is up to the collar, the guys are roaring behind the board fence, the red-haired woman curses them, from the terrible common tub under the washstand it carries a nauseating stench […]”

The house was demolished. The memorial plaque installed on the house in 1999 was transferred to the literary museum of the Shishkov House (10 Shishkov St.), copies of documents on the Klyuev case, lifetime publications, articles from periodicals about his life and work are also stored there

Bibliography

Brotherly songs. (Songs of Calvary Christians). M.: To the new earth, 1912. 16 p.
Brotherly songs. (Book Two) / Intro. Art. V. Sventsitsky. M.: Novaya Zemlya, 1912. XIV, 61 p.
Forest were. M.: 1912.
Forest were. (Poems. Book 3rd). M.: 1913. 76 p.
Pine chime. / Foreword. V. Bryusov. M.: 1912. 79 p. 2nd ed. M.: ed. Nekrasova, 1913. 72 p.
worldly thoughts. Pg.: ed. Averyanova, 1916. 71 p.
Songbook. Book. 1-2. Pg.: 1919.
Copper whale. (Poems). Pg.: ed. Petrosovet, 1919. 116 p.
Reprint edition: M.: Stolitsa, 1990.
Unfading color: Songbook. Vytegra: 1920. 63 sheets.
Whacky songs. Berlin: Scythians, 1920. 30 p.
Song of the Sun. Earth and iron. Berlin: Scythians, 1920. 20 p.
Lion bread. M.: 1922. 102 p.
Mother Saturday. (Poem). Pb: Polar Star, 1922. 36 p.
Fourth Rome. Pb.: Epoch, 1922. 23 p.
Lenin. Poems. M.-Pg.: 1924. 49 p. (3 editions)
Klyuev N. A., Medvedev P. N. Sergey Yesenin. (Poems about him and an essay on his work). L.: Surf, 1927. 85 p. 4000 copies (included Klyuev's poem "Lament for Sergei Yesenin").
Hut and field. Selected Poems. Leningrad: Surf, 1928. 107 p. 3000 copies

Major posthumous editions

Klyuev N. A. Poems and poems. / Comp., text preparation and notes by L. K. Shvetsova. Intro. Art. V. G. Bazanova. (Series "Poet's Library". Small series. 3rd ed.) L .: Soviet writer, 1977. 560 p. 15,000 copies 2nd ed. L.: Soviet writer, 1982.
Klyuev N. Heart of the Unicorn: Poems and Poems. / Foreword. N. N. Skatova, entry. Art. A. I. Mikhailova; comp., preparation of the text and notes by V. P. Garnin. St. Petersburg: RKHGI Publishing House, 1999. 1072 p. ISBN 5-88812-079-0 (in notes: Klyuev 1999)
Klyuev N. A. Word tree. Prose. / Entry. Art. A. I. Mikhailova; comp., preparation of the text and notes by V. P. Garnin. St. Petersburg: Rostock, 2003. 688 p. ISBN 5-94668-012-9 (in notes: Klyuev 2003)
Nikolay Klyuev. Letters to Alexander Blok: 1907-1915. Publication, introductory article and comments - K. M. Azadovsky. M.: Progress-Pleyada, 2003. 368 p.

(October 10, 1884 - between October 23 and 25, 1937)

Poet and prose writer, one of the largest representatives of Russian culture in the first third of the 20th century.

The fate of Klyuev - both biographically and literary - was not easy. He was born in one of the villages of the Koshtug volost, which, according to the then territorial-administrative division, was part of the Olonets province. In which particular village is unknown, since in the parish book of the Sretenskaya Church with. Koshtugi, where future poet was baptized, only the volost is indicated as the place of birth. Klyuev's father, Alexei Timofeevich (1842 - 1918), a native of peasants, was a native of the Kirillovsky district of the Novgorod province; returning after fifteen years military service, he became a constable (lower rank of the county police), and then - a prisoner in the state-owned wine shop in the village of Zhelvachevo, Makachevsky volost, Vytegorsk district. The poet's mother, Praskovya Dmitrievna (c. 1851 - 1913), was brought up in an Old Believer family. Thanks to her, already a seven-year-old boy, Klyuev mastered the reading and writing of the Book of Hours, "like a palace decorated", joined the folk poetic work and the spiritual heritage of Ancient Russia. Early printed and handwritten books, as well as icons of pre-Nikon writing, were part of the parental home.

In 1893 - 1895. Klyuev studied at the Vytegorsk parochial school, then graduated from a two-year city school, entered the Petrozavodsk paramedic school, but left it a year later for health reasons.

There is almost no documentary evidence of his biography at the turn of the century. The poet's own memoirs about this period of life (autobiographical notes, the story "Loon's fate") are clothed in art form and cannot be regarded as completely reliable. According to these memoirs, young Klyuev underwent a severe training with the Solovetsky elders, belonged to the sect of "white doves-Christs", wandered around Russia from the Norwegian coast to the mountains of the Caucasus. During these wanderings, he happened to see Leo Tolstoy and perform religious chants of his own composition in front of him.

Revolutionary ferment in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. captured Klyuev. For inciting the peasants of the Makachevo volost to take anti-government actions, he was captured in January 1906 by the police and spent six months in the prisons of Vytegra, St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk. political activity Klyuev continued to study after his release. He maintained ties with the All-Russian Peasant Union, with the Social Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. In 1907, Klyuev had to put on soldier's overcoat. For refusing to take up arms on religious grounds, he was subjected to another arrest. The doctors of the Nikolaev military hospital in St. Petersburg declared him unfit for military service. After that, he settled in the village of Zhelvachevo and took up literary creativity. Klyuev lived in this village from 1895 to 1915. From time to time he had to visit St. Petersburg on publishing business.

Klyuev first published his poems in the St. Petersburg almanac "New Poets" in 1904. The turning point in his biography was the correspondence with A. A. Blok, which began in 1907. Blok saw in Klyuev a representative of healthy popular forces and helped him enter the world of literature. The poet's works began to appear in well-known periodicals - both reputable, with an established reputation, and newfangled (in the journals Sovremennik, Russian Thought, Testaments, Northern Notes, Golden Fleece, Hyperborea, in supplements to the Niva magazine, in the Birzhevye Vedomosti newspaper, etc.). In 1912, Klyuev's first poetic book "Pine Chime" was published. It was followed by others: "Brotherly Songs" (1912), "Forest Songs" (1913), "Worldly Thoughts" (1916). The works written by Klyuev attracted the attention of critics. They were reviewed by well-known writers: V. Ya. Bryusov, S. M. Gorodetsky, N. S. Gumilyov, Ivanov-Razumnik (R. V. Ivanov), V. L. Lvov-Rogachevsky, P. N. Sakulin, D. V. Philosophers. Klyuev was invited to read poetry by the owners of fashionable salons and organizers of concerts and poetry evenings.

Sophisticated public of the early XX century. he appeared as a poet from the depths of the people and struck her with unusual images, rich language, deep knowledge of the hidden aspects of the spiritual life of the northern peasantry. The world that opened up in Klyuev's poetry was admired by Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and Sergei Yesenin. These verses made a deep impression on Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.

In terms of subject matter, Klyuev’s work adjoined “peasant poetry”, represented by the names of A. V. Koltsov, I. S. Nikitin, I. Z. Surikov, S. D. Drozhzhin. Klyuev himself did not refuse such a literary relationship. But almost from the very beginning it was clear that the scale of his talent was not limited to a masterful description of village life and sympathy for the bitter fate of the peasant. The constant desire to discover their deep essence behind the appearance of phenomena, to feel the “presence of the Creator in creation” gave reason to consider him the heir of the symbolists. For some time, the young poet was counted in their ranks by acmeists.

For some time, the closest to him was the literary group "Scythians", formed in 1916. In the program settings of this group, Klyuev was attracted by the rejection of bourgeois civilization, spiritually relaxing a person, relying on the creative power of the national element, the aspiration of revolutionary changes, faith in the saving role for Russia peasant socialism. It was also important for him, apparently, that the group included people who were creatively close to him: S. A. Yesenin, A. M. Remizov, P. V. Oreshin, A. P. Chapygin. However, the "Scythians" did not become a reliable ideological and aesthetic stronghold for Klyuev. He never connected his creative fate with any of the literary trends and none of the groupings of the early 20th century. and remained, in essence, a lone poet, without permanent companions.

Klyuev enthusiastically accepted not only the February, but also October revolution 1917 and, like many contemporary writers, he tried to present it in his works as a long-awaited transformation of all life, as a grandiose spiritual upheaval, equal in significance to the creation of the world. But the events taking place in the country quickly dispelled poetic illusions. In the first post-revolutionary years, despite everyday troubles and difficulties, he still felt himself an active participant in cultural life. Mass public events in Vytegra would not take place without him. He collaborated in the local periodical press, gave readings of his works in Petrograd. Books of his poems and poems were published in separate editions (“Red Song” - 1917, “Copper Whale” - 1919, “Songbook” - 1919, “Pussy Songs” and “Fadeless Color” - 1920, “Lion's Bread”, “Mother Saturday ”and“ The Fourth Rome ”- 1922,“ Lenin ”- 1924, etc.). Then the situation began to change noticeably.

For the adherents of the Soviet ideology, Klyuev was a stranger even in the first post-revolutionary years, when at least relative free-thinking was allowed. In 1920, he was expelled from the Russian Communist Party "for his religious beliefs." He did not want to give up these beliefs and could not. The poet's attempts to feel the spirit of "socialist construction", sing in his own way the leader of the proletariat and come to terms with the dominance of Bolshevism in the country were unsuccessful. He continued to remain faithful to the peasant way of life and considered the hut "the sanctuary of the earth", and the village the custodian of the main human values. Industrialization was perceived by him as evil, as a threat to culture (“The invisible Tsargrad is not subject to the turbine”, “The chisel does not yearn for Tyutchev”).

Everything big and big role in the work of Klyuev, utopian images begin to play invisible hail Kitezh and White India. Both of them go back to ancient Russian literature and folklore. The first of them is connected with the belief in the indestructibility of the beautiful spiritual essence of Russia and in the miracle of the coming revival of this essence. And the second became for Klyuev the focus of the most expensive ideas and motives. In the image of White India, the poet expressed his conviction that historically and spiritually Russia is closer to the East than to the West. This image clearly embodied his idea of ​​an earthly paradise, where tirelessly fertile land provides fabulous abundance, where people live in harmony with the outside world and do not know enmity towards their neighbor, where peoples merge into a single family, and the human spirit, sensitive to awe "Seraphim resurrections", reaches an unprecedented flowering.

The stubborn unwillingness of the “singer of the Olonets hut” to submit to the “demands of the era” led to the fact that spokesmen for the interests of the proletariat hastened to bury him as a poet and declare him creatively untenable. Throughout the 1920s. there was a gradual displacement of Klyuev from literature.

In the summer of 1923 he was arrested and brought to Petrograd. He was released very soon, but decided not to return to Vytegra, hoping to find more favorable conditions for creative life on the banks of the Neva. Hopes, however, did not materialize. It was more and more difficult to find the way to the reader of his works. Klyuev was ranked among the "kulak poets", and the word "Klyuevshchina" was used to stigmatize "muzhik" writers who did not find the strength to renounce the centuries-old culture of the Russian peasantry. The poem "The Village", published in the January issue of the Leningrad magazine "Zvezda" for 1927, was sharply criticized. argument against it. A year earlier, the 15th Congress of the VKP(b) (All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks) had proclaimed a policy of collectivization of agriculture, and any expression of attachment to old village perceived as the machinations of the class enemy.

In 1932, the instinct of self-preservation prompted Klyuev to move to Moscow. But the poet was destined for the same fate as many of his contemporaries. In February 1934 he was arrested and exiled. The last years of his life were spent in Tomsk. These years were filled with deprivation and suffering, both spiritual and physical. In June 1937, the poet was again arrested on false charges of creating a monarchist and church organization, and a few months later he was shot. The execution took place on 23, 24 or 25 October. It is impossible to establish the exact date of the end of Klyuev's earthly journey.

For almost half a century, Klyuev's literary heritage was withdrawn from cultural circulation. For several generations of readers, such a poet simply did not exist. Re-printing of his works, and then in small print runs for those times, began only in the 1970s. And the real scale of the poet's legacy was revealed to the reading public at the very end of the 20th century, when works that had not been published before became available.

Unfortunately, not all of Klyuev's works "survived the ashes" of the creator and "fled away decay." The text of the play "Red Easter", apparently, has been irretrievably lost, little remains of the poem "Cain". But, fortunately, the manuscripts of the unfinished poems "Pogorelshchina" (1928), "Solovki" (1928), "The Song of the Great Mother" (1931), the poetic cycle "What gray cedars rustle" (1933) have been preserved. Several works written in exile have come down to us. They testify that Klyuev's talent, in extremely unfavorable conditions for creativity, not only did not die out, but also reached new heights. Klyuev's last poems are large-scale works dedicated to the fate of the people in turning points his history. Despite the dominant tragic flavor, the main thing in them is the belief in transfiguration. long-suffering Russia, in the indestructible ability of the people's soul to rebirth.

Petersburg composer V.I. Panchenko wrote a cycle of songs and romances based on Klyuev's poems. In Vytegra, where the poet lived in the late 1910s and early 1920s, there is his museum. Since 1985, annual Klyuev readings have been held in this city. Department of Russian Language Vologda Pedagogical University released a series of compilations scientific works, dedicated to creativity poet.

S. Yu. Baranov, Ph.D., Professor

plus

Born on October 10 in one of the remote villages of the Russian North (Olonets province) in a peasant family, closely associated with the Old Believer traditions, which had a great influence on the character and work of the future poet. From his mother, Praskovya Dmitrievna, he inherited a love for folk art - for songs, spiritual poems, tales, legends. She also taught him to read. In 1893-95 he studied at a parochial school, then at a two-year city school, after which he studied for a year at Petrozavodsk paramedic school. Left due to illness. Klyuev's wanderings began in Old Believer sketes and monasteries.

In the early 1900s, he began to write poetry: in 1904, his poems appeared in the St. Petersburg almanac “New Poets” (“Rainbow dreams did not come true ...”, “Widely vast field ...”, etc.); in 1905 - in the collections “Waves” and “Surf”.

In 1905 - 07 he took an active part in the revolutionary movement of the peasants and in 1906 was in prison for six months for this, after which he was placed under covert police supervision.

By 1907, the beginning of Klyuev's correspondence with A. Blok, which had great importance for both (37 letters from Klyuev to Blok have been preserved). used these letters in his articles, considering them "a document of great importance - about modern Russia - folk, of course" ("The words of his letter seem to me golden words"). With the assistance of A. Blok, N. Klyuev’s poems are published in the journals Golden Fleece, Novaya Zemlya, and others. In 1912, two poetic books by Klyuev were published - Pine Chimes (with a preface by V. Bryusov) and Brotherly Songs. Before the revolution, two more collections were published - “Forest were” (1913) and “Mirskie d:'my” (1916). Not only the bloc and Bryusov noticed this original, great poet, but also Akhmatova, Gorodetsky, Mandelstam and others. In 1915, Klyuev met S. Yesenin, and poets of the new peasant direction (S. Klychkov, P. Oreshin, A. Shiryaevets and others).

Klyuev warmly welcomed the October Revolution, perceiving it as the fulfillment of the age-old aspirations of the peasantry. During these years he worked hard and with inspiration. In 1919, the collection “The Copper Whale” was published, which included such revolutionary poems as “Red Song” (1917), “From cellars, from dark corners ...” deep in the people.

The decisive role in the fate of Klyuev played critical article L. Trotsky about him (1922), which appeared in the central press. The stigma of "a kulak poet" accompanies him for a whole decade. The poet is in dire need, he appeals to the Union of Poets with requests for help, writes to M. Gorky: "... Poverty, wandering around other people's dinners destroys me as an artist." He continues to work, creates several very significant works: “Lament for Sergei Yesenin” and the poem “Pogorelshchina”.

Since 1931, Klyuev has been living in Moscow, but the path to literature is closed to him: everything he writes is rejected by the editors.

In 1934 he was arrested and exiled from Moscow for a period of five years to the city of Kolpashevo, Narym Territory.” I was exiled for the poem “Pogorelshchina”, there is nothing else for me,” he wrote from exile.

By the middle of 1934 Klyuev was transferred to Tomsk. Painfully experiencing his forced separation from literature, he wrote: “I don’t feel sorry for myself as a public figure, but I feel sorry for my bee songs, sweet, sunny and golden. They sting my heart hard."

On June 5, 1937, Klyuev was arrested in Tomsk “for counter-revolutionary insurgent activity” (the Siberian NKVD fabricated a case about the “Union for the Salvation of Russia”, which was allegedly preparing an uprising against the Soviet regime, in which the role of one of the leaders was attributed to Klyuev). In October 1937, N. Klyuev was shot in Tomsk. Posthumously rehabilitated.

Brief biography from the book: Russian writers and poets. Brief biographical dictionary. Moscow, 2000.