One of the bright and priceless pearls in the work of the brilliant Russian poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is the poem "Anchar", which he created in 1828. In 1832 it was published in the literary almanac "Northern Flowers". At the time of writing this work, the poet has been living in Moscow for several years after a long four-year exile in Chisinau and is under the covert supervision of tsarist censorship. Pushkin, taught by bitter experience, is careful not to openly oppose the tsarist autocracy, and uses in this work a thinly veiled allegory, making the central character of his pseudo-medieval ballad with an oriental parable a bias, the poisonous upas-anchar tree growing on the island of Java, located in the distant Indian Ocean.

The main theme of the poem

The plot for the poem was the notes of a doctor from Holland of a West Indian trading company read by Pushkin in the Russian periodicals of that time about the amazing ominous upas-anchar tree, which emits poisonous juice, extracted by local residents at great risk to their own lives and used by them as an impregnation for arrows and other projectile weapons. Also, some researchers of Pushkin’s work put forward the idea that this work was created by Pushkin as a contrast to the poem of the famous poet of that time Pavel Katenin “Regret” (it contained the image of a certain “tree of life”, symbolizing royal mercy).

Compositionally, the poem "Anchar" consists of two opposed structural parts based on the principles of antithesis. In the first five stanzas, which represent the beginning of the work and relate to the first part, the author gives us a description of the legendary anchar tree, which grows in a barren desert and has poisonous resin. The brilliant poet creates the image of a tree, the embodiment of absolute evil, which is distinguished by its brightness and expressiveness: “a bird does not fly to it, and a tiger does not go to it”, and everything that approaches it is saturated with the stench of death and decay. The next three stanzas, which are the main development of the plot and related to the second part, show us the image of an inexorable and cruel ruler who sends a slave "with just one imperious look" for poisonous resin, knowing full well that he is doomed to a painful death. The last stanza tells why the lord needs poison in order to saturate his arrows with it and bring death and destruction to neighboring states.

The main theme of this work is the image of the image of world evil, considered both from a philosophical and social position. The image of universal evil, which is embodied in the poisonous anchar tree, according to Pushkin, is, along with the issue of life and death, one of the main problems of mankind throughout its existence. Also in the poem "Anchar" such important topics for the poet are touched upon as freedom and tyranny throughout his entire career as a poet and citizen of his homeland. Only in this case, these themes are disclosed in a general philosophical sense, characteristic of the late stage of his work.

Structural analysis of the poem

In terms of genre orientation, this work is a lyric-epic plot poem, written by the poet's favorite poetic meter in iambic tetrameter with the use of a special omission of stress on a particularly rhythmically strong place (the so-called pyrrhic, a special technique of versification) in order to enhance the drama of the events taking place.

For the figurative disclosure of the ideological content in the work, the author used vivid epithets (stunted and stingy desert, combustible sand, black whirlwind), metaphors (nature has drunk, a whirlwind will come), antithesis (slave - lord). The use of ancient Slavic archaisms by the author (tree, cold brow, whirlwind, obedient) gives special solemnity and majesty to the work. A large number in the first part of such consonants as “p” and “h” at the sound level creates a gloomy and depressing impression, with which the author wanted to emphasize the dull and sad atmosphere that reigns in the “stunted and mean desert”.

In the poem “Anchar”, for the judgment of readers, Pushkin presents a system in which absolute power belongs to one person (lord or prince, as in earlier versions) and he can do whatever he pleases with his subordinates, being, like God, the arbiter of their fate, master of life or death. Such power is the real source of evil, destroying everything around like a poisonous anchar tree.

"Anchar" is one of Pushkin's most famous poems. This is an allegorical work in which the poet embodied his own bitter thoughts about the structure of his contemporary society - a brief analysis of "Anchar" according to the plan shows this very clearly. It can be used in the literature class in grade 9 to explain the topic.

Brief analysis

The history of the creation of the poem- it was written in 1828, when two years had passed since Pushkin was allowed to return from exile. It became clear to the poet that his ideas about creativity without restrictions were not destined to come true, and he poured out his sadness in the text of this work.

Theme of the poem- the death of power, which has no limits. Pushkin learned the power of this phenomenon on himself, which made the poem unusually convincing and emotionally deep.

Composition- the work consists of two parts: the first speaks of a tree exuding poison, the second - of a man who, obeying the order of his master, brought " deadly pitch and died, himself poisoned by it.

Genre- a lyrical poem with elements of a ballad.

Poetic size- tetrameter iambic.

Metaphors – “the nature of the thirsty steppes gave birth to him on the day of wrath“, “whirlwind black nand the tree of death will run“, “obediently flowed on the way“.

epithets– “in the desert stunted and stingy“, “dead greens", "G set with transparent resin“.

Comparisons– “anchar, like a formidable sentry“.

Inversions– “dead greens", "G set with transparent resin“, “whirlwind black”.

History of creation

The idea for writing "Anchar", apparently, was born because of the case brought against the poet for the creation of "Gavriliad" and "André Chenier". His sad reflections on the nature of power were allegorically expressed in this work, written in 1828.

As for the plot basis, its creation story is interesting because two sources inspired the poet at once: one of the old legends about a poisonous plant and the notes of a certain Dr. Fouche, who talked about a tree supposedly growing in Java, to which criminals were sent, the punishment for which was death, so that they bring poison to the leader of the tribe. Pushkin was inspired by this plot, but remade it in accordance with his artistic design.

Topic

The main theme of the poem is the perniciousness of the unlimited power of one person. To reinforce this idea, Pushkin uses the opposition of natural behavior, when all living things in nature avoid touching the deadly tree, and the behavior of the ruler, who violates this law.

Thus, the idea is that the “invincible lord” who sent his slave to the anchar knowing that he would die, and then used the poison he brought to bring death further, is an evil even more than a poisonous tree. This is the main idea of ​​the work.

Composition

This work is divided into two almost equal parts: the first contains five stanzas, the second - four. First, Pushkin is a poisonous tree, which in this case symbolizes evil. Even the movement, which usually symbolizes life, becomes deadly - the wind flies away from it as a deadly one, rainwater, flowing down from the branches, drips poison into the sand.

In the second part of the verse, the poet describes an all-powerful lord who, without hesitation, sends his slave to die in order to obtain the poison necessary for further conquests, and the slave obeys him implicitly.

The poetic size used for writing - iambic tetrameter - allows you to equally well convey both the sensations of death in nature, as well as the manifestations of evil in human relations. The poet used cross rhyme.

Genre

Usually the genre of this work is defined as a lyric poem, but it can be partially considered a ballad due to the event plot.

means of expression

The poet used all the richness of the Russian language to convey both the psychological and ideological message of the poem. So, when creating it, the following artistic means were used:

• metaphors- “the nature of the thirsty steppes gave birth to him on the day of anger”, “black whirlwind will run into the tree of death”, “obediently flowed on the way”;
• epithets- “in the desert stunted and stingy”, “dead greenery”, “thick transparent resin”;
• comparisons– “anchar, like a formidable sentry”;
• inversions- “dead greenery”, “thick transparent resin”, “black whirlwind”.

It is also easy to trace the antithesis “king-slave” in it. To create it, the author uses not only epithets (“poor slave” - “invincible lord”), but also verbal opposition: if the king sent a slave, then he flowed, and in the second case the verb is reinforced by the word “obediently”.

At the same time, the king and anchar, on the contrary, are described as equally deadly phenomena.

With the help of bright expressive means, Pushkin created a gloomy, emotionally rich work with a clearly expressed thought.

The genre is traditionally defined as a lyrical poem, but the eventful plot allows us to call it a ballad.

Pushkin based the plot of this work on semi-legendary information about the existence of a poisonous anchar tree on the island of Java. Travelers said that this tree poisons the surrounding air, and its juice is deadly. The leaders of the local tribes sent those sentenced to death to collect poisonous anchar resin, which was used to poison arrows.

In his poem, Pushkin creates a very vivid and expressive image of a deadly poisonous tree, symbolizing absolute evil:

Not even a bird flies to him,

And the tiger does not go: only a black whirlwind

Will run into the tree of death -

And rushes away, already pernicious.

To this tree the king, who needed poison for his arrows, sent his servant. He fulfilled the order, paying for it with his life.

In "Anchar" the theme of the fatality of unlimited power is raised. Pushkin compares the evil of nature and the evil of the ruler, who sends a person to a tree that brings death. All living things avoid touching the anchar, he is "one in the whole universe." The king breaks the law of nature.

Composition. The poem is divided into two parts. The first gives a description of the poisonous tree. The second tells of an all-powerful lord who sent his slave to death. When depicting anchar, Pushkin uses epithets aimed at revealing his main quality - destructiveness to all living things. The images of the king and the servant are contrasting: in the first, the poet emphasizes his omnipotence, ruthlessness, in the second - humility. At the same time, the images of the anchar and the king, on the contrary, are compared: both of them bring death.

The ideological meaning of this poem is the destructiveness of unlimited power for society.

ANCHAR

D. Good

The poem "Anchar" is clearly divided into two parts: the description of the "tree of poison" (the first five stanzas) and the story of the death of the "poor slave" sent to him for poison.<...>

In a halo of gloomy and formidable grandeur, the "tree of poison" appears to us from the very first lines of the poem. The most sinister and terrible of all the inhabitants of the desert - this world of waterless steppes, hot sands, black whirlwinds - Anchar, as it were reigns above everything around: It stands alone in the whole universe.<...>"The tree of poison" - the phrase originally given in the very title of the poem - it is also the "tree of death" - a synonymous phrase repeated in the fourth stanza - through and through, from top to bottom, saturated with the poison with which it was drunk foliage, its trunk, its roots. Accordingly, the words poison, death and derivatives from them are persistently forced by the poet, repeated over and over again, from stanza to stanza-fu: “And greenery dead branches; // And roots poison got drunk" (2nd stanza); "Poison dripping through its bark” (3rd stanza); "On the tree of death will come running” (4th stanza); "From its branches poisonous"(5th stanza). Full of poison and death itself, Anchar (remember dead the green of its branches - an epithet highly expressive in its paradoxicality) poisons and kills everything that comes close to it: "Even a bird does not fly to him, / And a tiger does not."<...>Even rain - in the sultry desert is the only source of life, life-giving force - touching Anchar-ra, it becomes poisoned, poisonous.<...>

Pushkin, as we have already seen, was a remarkable master of sound recording. This is manifested with full force in "Anchar". The original title of the poem, as we know, was: "Anchar, the tree of poison." In addition to the semantic side, these words are a combination of vowels (a, e, i) and consonants (nchr, drv, d) created some sounds. At the same time, the repetition of these sound combinations by association caused in consciousness the emergence of images-thoughts associated with them. If we analyze the sound composition of the stanzas dedicated to the description of Anchar, the "tree of poison", we will be convinced that the indicated sounds are persistently repeated in them. You can especially clearly see this in the word Anchar. The very sounds of this mysterious, unusual-sounding word for the Russian ear ... evoke the idea of ​​​​something sinister, frightening: by sound association ( cha, nchr) with the words "enchantment", "black", "gloomier". This representation is reinforced and reinforced by the accompanying words. Anchar and words that reveal its meaning tree poison, not tree, tree... And here is the sound image associated with the word "Anchar", persistently repeated by the poet over and over again. The sound belongs to the number of sounds that are relatively infrequently used in the Russian language (especially in combination cha and nchr). Meanwhile, the entire first stanza of "Anchar" is "instrumented" to a large extent precisely on this sound and on these combinations: Anchar, like a formidable sentry...” The non-randomness of this becomes obvious if we turn to the drafts. Yes, an epithet. stunted did not appear immediately. At first, Pushkin did not find a corresponding epithet at all. The line at first formed: "In the desert ... and deaf." Then it went in sequence: “In the desert dead","In desert sultry","In desert skinny", and finally, the word needed in all respects, including sound, was found: “In the desert stunted." Sound elements, so to speak, sound signs of the word Anchar (h, full impact a, combination chr, nchr) as the poem progresses, the following is continually repeated: "in the evening", "transparent pitch "(3rd stanza); "whirlwind black","rushes away" (4th stanza); “The cloud waters”, “dense leaf”, “combustible sand” (5th stanza). As a result, a special musical atmosphere arises associated with the word and sound image. Anchar, A special, so to speak "ancharny" - a gloomy, black color, created by the combination of the sounds themselves, their condensations, repetitions, as the condensation of certain colors creates color in the picture. Other artistic means of the poem also contribute to the creation of the necessary color. It is written in the most canonical meter for Pushkin - iambic tetrameter, to which, however, the somewhat archaic vocabulary in line with the "high style" gives special solemnity and epic majesty.

But, no matter how artistically impressive Pushkin's image of the “tree of poison”, the “tree of death”, there is nothing in it that would take it beyond the highly poetic, but at the same time completely corresponding to the source - quite reliable, as at first they thought , Fursh's story about one of such extraordinary, amazing and frightening natural phenomena (the extreme exaggeration of the details of this story, largely based on the legendary stories of local residents, was established later).

At the same time, the lengthy, occupying more than half of the poem (as many as five stanzas) description of the "poison tree" is in the ideological and artistic whole of the work of everything, only a kind of prologue, an introduction necessary in order to, having created the image of Anchar that fills with horror, most sharply expand the main, not descriptive, but plot part - the story of the tragic, disastrous relationship between the invincible lord and the poor slave - containing in an extremely compressed form even for Pushkin's famous laconism - in just sixteen lines of poetry - a huge generalization of a social and political nature.

The transition from description to narration is given by the poet through the opposing union “but”, which contrasts everything that has been said before with what will follow. Neither the beast, moreover, the most powerful and predatory - the tiger, nor the bird dare to approach the terrible "tree of death", but a person goes to it. This plot move is also suggested by the message of Fourche, who tells that the "sovereign" of these places sends criminals condemned to death for a poison that is very expensive and therefore very profitable for trade, and they agree to this, since they have nothing to lose, in the case good luck, they are not only granted life, but also assigned lifelong “maintenance”. However, taking advantage of the fact reported by Fursh that people go for the poison of anchar, Pushkin gives this fact a completely different motivation (not a criminal, but just a slave), which allows him to put with amazing force the most burning and tragic social theme, prompted not only by modern tsarist Russia, but also to every social system based on oppression and exploitation.<...>“But a man // He sent a man with an authoritative look to Anchar, // And he obediently flowed into the path ...”

The line: “But a man is a man” - with the utmost avarice of the verbal material and the elementary nature of its grammatical construction (a conjunction and only one noun, only repeated twice in different cases and thus in two different grammatical categories - subject and object) is saturated great meaning, is the true key to the entire ideological content of the poem, as if a kind of second, inner title. In its epic conciseness and exceptional simplicity, this line, more than the loudest and most pathetic exclamations, reveals all the deepest inhumanity, the immorality of those relations - relations of unlimited power and absolute enslavement - that exist between the slave and the master. After all, no matter what social distance separates the slave from the king, from the master, both of them by their nature, by their nature, are one and the same, both are people; and at the same time, in those unnatural social relations in which they are in relation to each other, both of them cease to be human. It is characteristic that in what follows the designation human the poet is no longer attached to either one or the other - it goes on only about either a slave or a master. In fact, the relations of domination and slavery have been erased, etched out in each of them everything human. The man - the king - completely coolly sends another person - a slave - in the name, as is clear from the end of the poem, his purely aggressive goals to certain and painful death. On the other hand, the behavior of a slave clearly proves how slave oppression kills a person, suppresses all his human essence in him.<...>The terrible habit of absolute obedience affects him more strongly than the instinct of self-preservation inherent in every living being. Not even a word, but one “imperious look” of the master is enough for the slave to “obediently flow on the way” - flow like a river flows along its intended channel - go to a terrible poisoned tree. It seems that the roll call of the definition is not accidental here. obediently and epithet "obedient arrows" at the very end of the poem. I can’t help but pay attention to the exceptional artistic expressiveness of this line: “Sent to Anchar with an imperious look” - with three successively repeated, like blows with a stick or whip, percussion a and percussion I... and repeated combinations la, blah, look, accompanying and thus reinforcing the irresistible power of the master over the slave, expressed in appropriate words, and hence the almost magical power of his silent command. No less expressive in terms of sound is the line: “And he obediently in path drip "- with the injection of all the same sound P... p... p.., creating the impression of a long and difficult journey through the desert (remember the beginning of the poem: “In the desert, stunted and miserly ...” - and the word “sweat” in the next stanza: “And sweat on a pale brow”).

In the draft manuscript of Anchar, a drawing of Pushkin is sketched out: the figure of a thin, emaciated man with a low, obediently bowed head, who, seeing nothing in front of him, doomedly steps forward. The slave knows that he is sent to inevitable death, and does not dare not only to protest or refuse to carry out the terrible order at all, but also to try to hide, to run away during the journey that he makes all alone, moreover, under the cover of night darkness (“And to morning returned with poison). Of the whole world of feelings and actions, only meek, slavish obedience lives in him. This obedience not only stifles the instinct of self-preservation, natural for every living being, but also forces him to strain his last strength so as not to die (although death in his position was only a relief) before the order was carried out, and only after that, he seems to allow himself to die, to die in no other place and position, namely “at the feet” of his “master”; to die as humiliated and powerless as he lived.

It is characteristic that at first, in the drafts, the slave's death was portrayed somewhat differently: "He brought it - and he was exhausted // And he lay down, uttering screams." Then even sharper: "And lay down ... screams." But “shouts”, “screams”, even if from unbearable pain, from excruciating suffering, in the presence of the “lord” would still be a kind of way out, even if only in moments of death agony, from habitual complete, uncomplaining obedience. And Pushkin eliminates even this purely physiological "revolt" of the flesh. But it is precisely these quiet lines in their epic restraint and majestic simplicity that make a particularly strong impression.

The majestic epic here is created by the exceptional clarity of the verbal and sound pattern, the strict balance and harmonic correspondence of each word: “And sweat on pale chelu // flowed cold streams ... "Here are the words pale and cold not only mutually balanced, compositionally symmetrical, but also exactly correspond to each other in their figurative content (“paleness” and “coldness”) and even in their sound composition: "pale" - "cold". The same sound correspondence in equally symmetrical epithets: "And the poor slave died at the feet // of the Invincible lord." The aesthetic task that Pushkin invariably set for himself, creating the greatest examples of poetry as the art of the word, he himself defined as follows: "Looking for union of magical sounds, feelings and thoughts. The poem "Anchar" is one of the brightest examples of what amazing success the poet achieved on the path of his creative quest.

L. Timofeev

To understand the ideological orientation of the poem, one should keep in mind the noted by V.V. Vinogradov correspondence between "Anchar" and P. Katenin's poem "Old true story". In this poem, Katenin, in a somewhat veiled form, condemned Pushkin's famous Stanzas (“In the hope of glory and goodness ...”), seeing in them praise of the “autocratic tsar”. Pushkin's "Anchar" was a poetic response to Katenin's reproaches, testifying to Pushkin's loyalty to the freedom-loving ideas of Decembrism. It is no coincidence that General Benckendorff immediately asked Pushkin why he printed his poem "without prior request for printing ... the highest permission."

Thus, the historically conditioned ideological and aesthetic content underlying "Anchar" is obvious. In order to receive artistic expression, it had to take on the form of a concrete human experience that conveys the contradiction between the despotic social order and the aesthetic ideal of freedom and humanism that opposes it.<...>First of all, Pushkin strives to give the sharpest and most dramatic depiction of the Anchar.<...>

Pushkin finds, discards, searches for ever sharper and more intense details, painting a terrible picture of death and doom that surrounds a poisonous tree: “On dead, red-hot soil”, “mighty poison”, “poisoned dust swirls”, “desert of death” , "an ardent tiger beats." But this picture is important to him not in itself. Its meaning is that a person is walking towards a terrible tree. The first sketch appears:

But man

to the tree of poison

But man

approaches the terrible Anchar

and immediately the following entry appears, the one that contains the entire ideological meaning of the poem:

But man man

Sends to the desert.

But why could a man send a man to anchar? The search for the next line begins: “Sent to the Anchar with an imperious word”, “Sent to the Anchar autocratically”, “Sent to the Anchar indifferently”. And already at the end, the most accurate words are found: “Sent to the desert with an imperious look,” and the line takes on its final form: “Sent to the Anchar with an authoritative look.” The ideological meaning of the poem is expressed with the utmost precision. In the characterization of a slave, Pushkin had various shades. The path to Anchar is a feat. In the drafts we find the epithet "brave", the line "And he madly flowed on the way." The definition of "faithful slave" appears. But all this is discarded - the point is not in the courage and fidelity of the slave, but in his obedience, i.e. in the ultimate submission to his alien will, "powerful look" (not even "powerful word"). The poem is built on contrasts, primarily in compositional terms. The tree of death - and the man walking towards it; slave and master. In the eighth stanza, the contrast is expressed with the greatest force:

And the poor slave died at the feet

Invincible lord.

It would seem that the poem is completed, the contradiction is revealed. But Pushkin finds a new and even more tragic turn of the theme: for what did the poor slave die, for what did he even perform his forced feat? And the last stanza further expands the ideological meaning of the poem. The Lord needs arrows obedient like a slave, so that he with them

...doom sent out

To neighbors in alien confines.

If the anchar is destructive for those who go to him, then the lord sends out this death. The humanistic pathos of the poem here reaches a special force. Thus, the composition of the poem is based on sharp, irreconcilable contrasts and contradictions. On the one hand, they convey the intensity of the social struggle, which has just found its expression in the Decembrist uprising of 1825, and at the same time, in these contrasts, the character of the lyrical hero is expressed, boldly and irreconcilably revealing all the sharpness despotic contradictions. This contrast, the search for extremely sharp and dramatic expressive means also determine the vocabulary of the poem.<...>

Anchar "stands - alone in the whole universe." Epithets and definitions are subject to the same goal of conveying the drama and tension of both the situation itself and the speech of the lyrical hero speaking about it: “terrible sentinel”, “thirsty for the steppe”, “day of anger”, “black whirlwind”, “leaf dense". The very organization of the narrative is contrasting. This contrast is expressed in the fact that the narrator, on the one hand, speaks of an extremely tragic situation: the lord sends a slave to death in order to bring death to other people at the cost of his death, and at the same time, the narrator himself does not give an assessment to this, he only tells stories. talks about the tragedy that happened near Anchar. His attitude towards her breaks through only in the mention of the poor slave, in the indignant juxtaposition: “a man is a man”, and even, perhaps, in an emphatically simple and at the same time mournful story about how the poor slave died.<...>Thus, both the composition of the poem, and its vocabulary, and the narrative elements included in it (anchar, lord, slave) are all a single and integral form of revealing the state of the character of the lyrical hero, concretizing him, turning him into an individual experience, into a concrete a picture of the spiritual human life, created by means of speech. An important role in this concretization is played by the rhythmic and sound organization of the verse.<...>

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, its rhythmic originality is connected primarily with the way the stresses are located in the line. Let's consider their distribution in "An-char".

Compositionally, the poem can be divided into four parts. The first five stanzas describe the anchar. The first half of the second stanza, i.e. the first and second lines, introduces a new one during the poem - the order of the lord, then the second half of the sixth stanza and the seventh and eighth stanzas give a description of the fate of the slave, the last-ninth stanza speaks of the king. The first part is almost completely sustained on homogeneous rhythmic lines: there is, as it were, an enumeration of the properties of anchar-ra, the stanzas are homogeneous in terms of intonation and therefore do not require any significant deviations in the movement of rhythm:

In the desert stunted and stingy,

On the ground, the heat of the red-hot,

Anchar, like a formidable sentry,

Worth - alone in the entire universe.

The nature of the thirsty steppes

She gave birth to him on the day of wrath

And green dead branches,

And watered the roots with poison.

As you can see, here all lines (with one exception) give a similar arrangement of stresses: there are three stresses in each line; the stress on the 6th syllable is omitted. This creates a homogeneity of the rhythmic movement, corresponding to the intonational homogeneity of the text: enumeration, so to speak, of the qualities of anchar. The next three stanzas are built in the same way. In total, there are only three four-strike lines and one two-strike line for 20 lines.

One four-strike line ends the first stanza (“It stands alone in the whole universe”, maintaining the final intonation), the other - in the fourth stanza (it is connected with the transfer: “And the tiger does not come - only a black whirlwind”) and the third ends the entire description of the anchar (“ Rain flows into combustible sand.

All of them, therefore, are intonationally motivated, give the lines with which they are associated an individual originality, but at the same time, since all the surrounding lines do not have three stresses, they do not appear with special emphasis, which is not required by the course of the narrative, since it is all built in one plan - the description of the anchar. As for one two-strike line within the third stanza (“And freezes in the evening”), it is not connected with the essential semantic and intonation shades of the phrase and therefore does not fall, so to speak, into the rhythmic field of vision.

The sound of the verse changes dramatically in the transition to the second compositional part. Here Pushkin proceeds from the description of the Anchar to the main contradiction, to the main conflict. There is a sharp intonation here. The word “man” is repeated twice, but with a completely different meaning put into it. Here is the center of the tragedy that shook the lyrical hero. How does his voice sound? Pushkin collected here all the means of sound expression. The repetition of words, of course, is also a repetition of sounds, it is supported in the next line by the repetition in all words of the sound “a” (“Sent to the anchor with an imperious look”), there is no such emphasized sound repetition in any other line of the poem. Finally, this semantic, intonational, sound prominence of the first two lines of the sixth stanza is also supported rhythmically.

The fifth stanza, as we remember, ends with the final four-strike line. And the sixth stanza begins with a two-strike line, after which a four-shock line follows again, with all the stresses falling on the sound “a”. All this gives them a particularly original, individual character, thanks to which these most important lines in a semantic and emotional sense sound exceptionally expressive, based on both rhythm and sound. All this gives the intonation of these lines the most dramatic character, corresponding to the essence of the experience itself, clothed in them, or rather, existing only in them.<...>

The third part is the story of a slave, and it has its own intonational and rhythmic ending. The story about him again goes on three-stress lines (the seventh and eighth stanzas and the first half-line of the eighth stanza), then there is an intonation rise, and a four-strike line (“And the poor slave died at his feet”), followed by a two-strike (“invincible vladyki"), the final stanza.<...>

The unity of all elements determines the artistic power and persuasiveness of the speech of the lyrical hero - the bearer of the experience that is the direct content of the poem "Anchar". All of them constitute a measure of the certainty of this immediate content, up to the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables, which give originality to its rhythm.

The idea of ​​the poem "Anchar" was suggested to Pushkin by Samuel Coleridge in his tragedy "Repentance". Pushkin named the inspirer of this work by writing out a few lines in English on his autograph. This phrase is translated as follows:

There is a tree of poison that permeates everything hidden with poison,

It cries only poisonous tears.

Coleridge

These lines were supposed to serve as an epigraph to the poem.

In the original Pushkin version, the poem was called "Anchar, the tree of poison."

Written in November 1928, Pushkin could not publish for a long time, due to the severity of censorship. On this occasion, he wrote several letters to Benckendorff. From a letter written in the winter of 1832 in St. Petersburg, we learn that in 1827 the sovereign emperor was pleased to announce to the poet that he, apart from his majesty, would have no censor.

Turning to Benckendorff, Pushkin wrote: “... Being subjected to one special censorship that is solely dependent on you - I, contrary to the right given by the sovereign, of all writers, will be subject to the most shy censorship, because in a very simple way - this censorship will look at me with prejudice and find secret applications, allusions (hints) and difficulties everywhere - and accusations of applications and implications have neither boundaries nor justifications, if under the word wood will understand the constitution, and by the word arrow autocracy".

The poem was published in 1832 in Northern Flowers in its original form. In subsequent editions, it received a shortened name "Anchar", and in the last lines instead of the word " tsar" the word "prince" appeared.

And the King fed that poison
Your obedient arrows
And with them death sent
To neighbors in alien confines.

In the same truncated form, this poem was printed after the defeat of the Tsarist autocracy, during socialism. It turns out that the social leaders were also afraid of the influence of this poem on human minds.

The main theme in this poem is not the demand for the overthrow of the autocracy. Thirty-year-old Pushkin, who studied a lot of historical materials in the archives, unlike Pushkin, an ardent and passionate youth of eighteen or twenty, understood perfectly well that anarchy is more terrible than autocracy. He no longer set as his goal either the overthrow, let alone terror in relation to the king.

The main theme of this poem is the responsibility of those in power to their slaves who trust their ruler. And the higher the rank of the ruler, the higher this responsibility.

By changing the word tsar to the word prince, the servants of the rulers, thereby removed the responsibility from the Tsars. It turned out that the Tsar, or the General Secretary (who also, in fact, reigned in the country), could do anything. In this poem, Pushkin put the idea of ​​the perniciousness of unlimited power.

But man is weak and sinful. Having received unlimited power, (it is tempting to write - having seized upon power), he is in no hurry to part with it. And he justifies his actions with the phrase "for the good of the state."

"For the good of the state" a slave was sent, trusting his master, to certain death to the anchar. For the benefit of the state, poisonous arrows were sent "to neighbors in alien lands."

How often the rulers of the good of the state covered their own ambitions, greed. Using such a symbolic image, Pushkin reminded the tsar of his responsibility to the people and the state. But, as the French writer Prosper Mérimée noted, "This poem had the misfortune of being taken by the censors for a revolutionary praise."