Poets of pure art
Poets of pure art A picture of Russian literary life in the 3050s. would be incomplete if we did not take into account the existence of poetry, the so-called. pure art. Under this conventional name the work of those poets who defended the ideology of the conservative part of the landowner class can be united. This group was headed by Tyutchev and the young Fet, A. Maikov (the first edition of his poems 1842), N. Shcherbina (Greek poems, Odessa, 1850; Poems, 2 vols., 1857) and others actively participated in it. The undoubted predecessor of this line in Russian poetry there was Zhukovsky, in some motifs Pushkin (the period of departure into the theory of self-sufficient art 1827-1830) and Baratynsky. However, neither Pushkin nor Baratynsky received such comprehensive development of the motives of pure art as in the subsequent era of Russian poetry, which was undoubtedly explained by the worsening decomposition of the class that fed them. It is not difficult to establish the noble origin of this poetry: sympathy for the estate, admiration of its nature, the serene life of its owner run through the entire work of any of these poets. At the same time, all these poets are characterized by complete indifference to the revolutionary and liberal tendencies that dominated the social life of that time. It is deeply logical that in their works we will not find any of the popular ones in the 4050s. However, denouncing the feudal police regime in its various aspects, the fight against serfdom, defending the emancipation of women, the problem of superfluous people, etc. are not of interest to these poets engaged in the so-called. eternal themes of admiring nature, the image of love, imitation of the ancients, etc. But indifferent to the initiatives of liberals and revolutionaries, they willingly left the sphere of their solitude in order to speak out in an invariably conservative and reactionary spirit on important problems of current life that threatened the life of their class (cf. Tyutchev’s condemning message to the Decembrists and incense.
F.I. Tyutchev is a poet of truly “pure”, bright art. His poetic word embodies an inexhaustible wealth of artistic meaning; it is full of deep philosophizing and reflection on the essence of existence. Throughout his entire creative career, the poet did not lose his characteristic world, cosmic, universal spirit.
Although the main fund of the poet's legacy is only a little less than two hundred laconic poems (if you do not take into account youthful poems, translations, poems for the occasion and poems dictated by the poet during a serious dying illness), his lyrics have remained relevant and interesting for more than a century . A century ago, the great Russian poet A. A. Fet rightfully said about the collection of Tyutchev’s poems:
Tyutchev Fedor Ivanovich (1803 - 1873)
Tyutchev Fyodor Ivanovich (1803–1873), Russian poet, diplomat, corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences since 1857. Born on November 23 (December 5), 1803 in the Ovstug estate, Bryansk district, Oryol province. in an old noble family. Tyutchev spent his childhood in the Ovstug estate, in Moscow and the Troitskoye estate near Moscow. The patriarchal landowner life reigned in the family. Fyodor Tyutchev, who showed an early ability to learn, received a good education at home. His teacher was the poet and translator S.E. Raich (1792–1855), who introduced Tyutchev to the works of antiquity and classical Italian literature. At the age of 12, the future poet, under the guidance of his mentor, translated Horace and wrote odes in imitation of him. For the ode “For the New Year 1816” in 1818 he was awarded the title of employee of the “Society of Lovers of Russian Literature”. In the “Proceedings” of the Society in 1819, its first 
This publication is a free adaptation of the “Epistle of Horace to Maecenas.”
In 1819 Fyodor Tyutchev entered the literature department of Moscow University. During his studies he became close to M. Pogodin, S. Shevyrev, V. Odoevsky. At this time, his Slavophile views began to take shape. As a student, Tyutchev also wrote poetry. In 1821 he graduated from the university and received a place in the College of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg, in 1822 he was appointed a supernumerary official of the Russian diplomatic mission in Munich.
In Munich, Tyutchev, as a diplomat, aristocrat and writer, found himself at the center of the cultural life of one of the largest cities in Europe. He studied romantic poetry and German philosophy, became close to F. Schelling, and became friends with G. Heine. Translated into Russian the poems of G. Heine (the first of the Russian poets), F. Schiller, I. Goethe and other German poets. Fyodor Tyutchev published his own poems in the Russian magazine “Galatea” and the almanac “Northern Lyre”.
In the 1820s–1830s, Tyutchev’s masterpieces of philosophical lyrics “Silentium!” (1830), “Not what you think, nature...” (1836), “What are you howling about, night wind?..” (1836), etc. In poems about nature, the main feature of Fyodor Tyutchev’s work was obvious on this topic: the unity of the image of nature and thoughts about it, the philosophical and symbolic meaning of the landscape, the humanization, spirituality of nature.
In 1836, in Pushkin’s journal Sovremennik, on the recommendation of P. Vyazemsky and V. Zhukovsky, it was published under the signature of F.T. a selection of 24 poems by Tyutchev entitled “Poems sent from Germany.” This publication became a milestone in his literary life and brought him fame. Tyutchev responded to the death of Pushkin with prophetic lines: “The heart of Russia will not forget you, like its first love” (January 29, 1837).
In 1826, Tyutchev married E. Peterson, then had an affair with A. Lerchenfeld (several poems are dedicated to her, including the famous romance “I met you - and all the past...” (1870). The affair with E. Dernberg turned out to be so scandalous that Tyutchev was transferred from Munich to Turin. Tyutchev had a hard time with the death of his wife (1838), but soon married again - to Dernberg, without permission leaving for the wedding in Switzerland. For this he was dismissed from the diplomatic service and deprived of the title of chamberlain.
For several years Tyutchev remained in Germany, and in 1844 he returned to Russia. Since 1843, he published articles on the Pan-Slavist movement “Russia and Germany”, “Russia and the Revolution”, “The Papacy and the Roman Question”, and worked on the book “Russia and the West”. He wrote about the need for an Eastern European union led by Russia and that it was the confrontation between Russia and the Revolution that would determine the fate of humanity. He believed that the Russian kingdom should extend “from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China.”
Tyutchev's political views aroused the approval of Emperor Nicholas I. The title of chamberlain was returned to the author, in 1848 he received a position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg, and in 1858 he was appointed chairman of the Committee of Foreign Censorship. In St. Petersburg, Tyutchev immediately became a prominent figure in public life. Contemporaries noted his brilliant mind, humor, and talent as a conversationalist. His epigrams, witticisms and aphorisms were heard by everyone. The rise of Fyodor Tyutchev’s poetic creativity also dates back to this time. In 1850, the Sovremennik magazine reproduced a selection of Tyutchev’s poems, once published by Pushkin, and published an article by N. Nekrasov, in which he ranked these poems among the brilliant phenomena of Russian poetry, putting Tyutchev on a par with Pushkin and Lermontov. In 1854, 92 poems by Tyutchev were published in the appendix to Sovremennik, and then, on the initiative of I. Turgenev, his first collection of poetry was published. Tyutchev’s fame was confirmed by many of his contemporaries - Turgenev, A. Fet, A. Druzhinin, S. Aksakov, A. Grigoriev and others. L. Tolstoy called Tyutchev “one of those unfortunate people who are immeasurably higher than the crowd among whom they live, and therefore always alone."
Tyutchev's poetry was defined by researchers as philosophical lyricism, in which, according to Turgenev, thought “never appears naked and abstract to the reader, but always merges with an image taken from the world of the soul or nature, is imbued with it, and itself penetrates it inseparably and inextricably.” This feature of his lyrics was fully reflected in the poems “Vision” (1829), “How the ocean embraces the globe...” (1830), “Day and Night” (1839), etc.
The Slavophil views of Fyodor Tyutchev continued to strengthen, although after Russia’s defeat in Crimean War he began to see the task of the Slavs not in political, but in spiritual unification. The poet expressed the essence of his understanding of Russia in the poem “Russia cannot be understood with the mind...” (1866). Despite these views, Tyutchev’s lifestyle was exclusively European: he moved in society, reacted vividly to political events, did not like village life, and did not attach much importance to Orthodox rituals.
As throughout his life, in his mature years Tyutchev was full of passions. In 1850, being a married man and the father of a family, he fell in love with 24-year-old E. Denisyeva, almost the same age as his daughters. The open relationship between them, during which Tyutchev did not leave his family, lasted 14 years, they had three children. Society perceived this as a scandal, Denisyeva’s father disowned her, and she was no longer accepted in the world. All this led Denisyeva to a severe nervous breakdown, and in 1864 she died of tuberculosis. The shock of the death of his beloved woman led Tyutchev to the creation of the “Denisyev cycle” - the pinnacle of his love lyrics. It included the poems “Oh, how murderously we love...” (1851), “I knew the eyes - oh, these eyes!..” (1852), “Last love” (1851-1854), “There are in my suffering stagnation...” (1865), “On the eve of the anniversary of August 4, 1865.” (1865), etc. Love, glorified in these poems by Tyutchev as the highest thing that is given to man by God, as “both bliss and hopelessness,” became for the poet a symbol of human life in general - torment and delight, hope and despair, the fragility of that only thing, what is available to man is earthly happiness. In the “Denisyev cycle” love appears as a “fatal fusion and fatal duel” of two hearts.
After Denisyeva’s death, for which he blamed himself, Tyutchev went to his family abroad. He spent a year in Geneva and Nice, and upon returning (1865) to Russia he had to endure the death of two children from Denisyeva, then his mother. These tragedies were followed by the deaths of another son, only brother, and daughter. The horror of approaching death was expressed in the poem “Brother, who has accompanied me for so many years...” (1870). In the lines of this poem, the poet foresaw his “fatal turn.”
Poetry
Tyutchev began writing poetry as a teenager, but he rarely appeared in print and was not noticed by either critics or readers. The poet's real debut took place in 1836: a notebook of Tyutchev's poems, transported from Germany, falls into the hands of A.S. Pushkin, and he, having accepted Tyutchev's poems with amazement and delight, published them in his Sovremennik magazine. However, recognition and fame came to Tyutchev much later, after his return to his homeland, in the 50s, when Nekrasov, Turgenev, Fet, Chernyshevsky spoke admiringly of the poet and when a separate collection of his poems was published (1854). And yet Tyutchev did not become a professional writer, remaining in public service until the end of his life.
A brilliant artist, a deep thinker, a subtle psychologist - this is how Tyutchev appears in his works. The themes of his poems are eternal: the meaning of human existence, nature, the connection of man with it, love. The emotional coloring of most of Tyutchev’s poems is determined by his restless, tragic worldview:
And I sow with noble blood
You quenched the thirst for honor -
And the overshadowed one fell asleep
Banner of the people's sorrow.
Let your enmity
He will judge
Who hears the blood shed...
You are like my first love,
The heart will not forget Russia!.. Or:
There is a high meaning in separation:
No matter how much you love, even one day, even a century,
Love is a dream, and a dream is one moment.
Is it early or late to wake up,
And man must finally wake up...
The poet felt the autocracy of the human “I”, a manifestation of individualism, cold and destructive, as the most severe disaster and grave sin. The illusory, illusory, fragility of human existence constantly worries the poet. In the poem “Look how in the expanse of the river...” he compares people to melting ice floes:
All together - small, large,
Having lost my former image,
Everyone is indifferent, like an element, -
They will merge with the fatal abyss!..
In the last years of his life, the image of an all-consuming abyss appears again in the poet’s poem “From the life that raged here...”
In relation to nature, Tyutchev shows the reader two positions: existential, contemplative, perceiving the world around him with the help of the senses, and spiritual, thinking, striving to guess the great secret of nature behind the visible veil.
Tyutchev the contemplator creates such lyrical masterpieces as “Spring Thunderstorm”, “In the Initial Autumn...”, “The Enchantress of Winter...” and many similar, short but charming figurative landscapes. Tyutchev the thinker sees in nature an inexhaustible source for reflections and generalizations of the cosmic order. This is how the poems “Wave and Thought”, “Fountain”, “Day and Night” were born.
The joy of being, happy harmony with nature, serene rapture with it are characteristic of the poet’s poems about spring:
The earth still looks sad,
And the air already breathes weight,
And the dead stalk in the field sways,
And the oil branches move.
Nature hasn't woken up yet,
But through the thinning sleep
She heard spring
And she involuntarily smiled...
Glorifying spring, Tyutchev invariably rejoices at the rare opportunity to experience the fullness of life. He contrasts heavenly bliss with the beauty of spring nature:
What is the joy of paradise before you,
It's time for love, it's time for spring,
Blooming bliss of May,
Ruddy color, golden dreams?..
Tyutchev’s lyrical landscapes bear a special stamp that reflects the properties of his soul. Therefore, his images are unusual and striking in their novelty. Its branches are boring, the earth is frowning, the stars are talking quietly among themselves, the day is growing thin, the rainbow is exhausted. Nature sometimes delights and sometimes frightens the poet. Sometimes it appears as the tragic inevitability of cataclysms:
When nature's last hour strikes,
The composition of the earth's parts will collapse
Everything visible will be covered by waters again,
God's face will be depicted in them!
But in his doubts and fears and searches, the poet comes to the conclusion that man is not always at odds with nature, he is equal to it:
Bound, connected from time to time
Union of consanguinity
Intelligent human genius
With the creative power of nature...
Say the cherished word -
And a new world of nature
Tyutchev's poetry is the poetry of deep and fearless thought. But Tyutchev’s thought is invariably fused with the image, conveyed in precise and bold, unusually expressive colors.
Tyutchev’s poems have a lot of grace and plasticity; they contain, as Dobrolyubov puts it, “sultry passion” and “severe energy.” They are very complete, complete: when reading them, one gets the impression that they were created instantly, in a single impulse. Despite the skeptical notes in Tyutchev’s poetry, who sometimes claims that all human activity is a “useless feat,” most of his works are filled with youth and an ineradicable love of life.
Art as a social phenomenon
Abstract >> Culture and artInvolvement in the system of public relations. “ Art For art", or " clean art”, is an aesthetic concept that asserts... purely utilitarian objects (table, chandelier), a person cares about benefits, convenience, and beauty. Exactly That's why art ...
Art ancient Egypt (8)
Abstract >> Culture and artThey were obliged to follow established canons. That's why V art slave-owning Egypt also retained a number of conventions... . Sometimes the idea of the pharaoh's divinity was conveyed purely by external means: the king was depicted together...
Art, its origin and essence
Abstract >> Culture and artLife's on the way" pure art" devoid of real content, leads... to which it appeals art. Speaking about the literature of the last century, poet
As a manuscript
POETRY OF “PURE ART”:
dissertations for an academic degree
Doctor of Philology
Eagle – 2008
The dissertation was completed at the Department of History of Russian Literature
XI-XIX centuries Oryol State University
Scientific consultant:
Doctor of Philology,
Professor
Official opponents:
Doctor of Philology,
Professor ;
Doctor of Philology,
Professor ;
Doctor of Philology,
Professor
Lead organization:
Moscow State Regional University
The dissertation defense will take place “__”_____________ 2008 at ____ hour. ____ min. at a meeting of the Dissertation Council D.122.183.02 in Orlovsky state university
The dissertation can be found at scientific library Oryol State University.
Scientific Secretary
Dissertation Council,
Candidate of Philology,
assistant professor
general description of work
The poetry of the so-called “pure art” - one of the branches of Russian poetry of the 1920s - is considered in our dissertation in the light of the problems of continuity and innovation, as well as the accompanying artistic method and psychologism. Like any other literary movement, this community of literary artists arose as a definite unity, conditioned by the development of life and literature itself and having its source, first of all, in a well-known commonality in the approach to reality, in its aesthetic perception, in the creative method.
The poets, collectively included in the general category of apologists of “pure art,” were united by a related understanding of the essence and tasks of art, a strict distinction between the “low” and the “poetic” in reality, and the opposition real life the free world of poetic dreams, focusing on depicting the inner world of man. All of them have the idea that the deepest, most hidden thing in human nature and life is eternal, but the outer shell changes. They were not interested in the socio-historical content of personality, but in its transcendental beginning: personality as a bearer of absolute spirituality. The considerable merit and indisputable dignity of the “pure” lyricists lay in the revelation of the high impulses of the human spirit, in the fact that they considered the individual in his universal human content. Romantic exaltations and insights brought them into direct contact with the “universal.”
Art is the only, disinterested form of knowledge, based on the contemplative essence of things, that is, ideas. This is what the most gifted of this group of poets thought. The same idea of art is characteristic of other “pure” lyricists -,. Living contemplation of the beauty of nature, love, art, in their understanding, frees a person from selfish emotions and elevates him above the prose of life. Ideal knowledge (as opposed to everyday knowledge) opened up to each of them the world of eternal ideas, elevated them above the world of passions due to the harmonious fusion of subject and object.
Poets of “pure art”, being in their own way philosophical worldview objective idealists, contrast rational knowledge with direct “comprehension” of reality, based on intuition as a special ability of consciousness, irreducible to sensory experience and discursive, logical thinking. It is intuition, “clairvoyance” that reveals the harmonious essence of the world. The main thing hidden in the work of “pure lyricists” is their high poetic spirituality. The same Fet, in the article “Two Letters on the Significance of Ancient Languages in Our Education,” calls art a spiritual activity that reveals the essence of objects that lies “in immeasurable depth,” only the poet “is given complete mastery of the most intimate essence of objects.”
and, and, like Fet, they were convinced that the living power of poetry is preserved by faith in the ideal and spirituality of the human personality. All of them remained singers of high truths. Maikov and A. Tolstoy assessed the past of the Fatherland from a spiritual perspective. From the same position, Polonsky responded to any phenomenon of a foreign culture (ancient or modern, European or Eastern). Apukhtin's poetry is also inspired by faith in eternal human values.
The creativity of writers adjoining the movement of “pure art” does not fit within these frameworks, and in general it is impossible to equate the aesthetic declarations of poets with their creative practice. , for example, was the author not only of the finest poems about nature or love, but also of the sharpest social satire (“Popov’s Dream”, “History of the Russian State ...”, the works of Kozma Prutkov), the author of brilliant parodies ... of “pure art”.
As for Polonsky, he avoided that inside-out tendentiousness that is characteristic, for example, of Fet, who prejudicially excluded everything social from poetry precisely because it is public. The people as an element in moments of the rise of their usually hidden forces, free human thought - all this excites Polonsky - a man and a poet. Polonsky objectively served in many ways the advanced trends of the time with his “mental” and “civil” anxiety expressed in his lyrics.
In A. Maykov’s poems from Russian history, poetic pictures are inspired by faith in the living significance of Russia, in its people. He resolutely defends the right to dignity and national identity of his people. “What can the Russian people endure in the name of love? - the poet asks in a letter to Dostoevsky and answers: - Yes, that’s it! People's love is our constitution... Russia in its basic principles is necessary for the world, for history, and this is its strength, and this is nothing that even smart people they don’t understand this: history, Providence, God – whatever you want to call it – they won’t be asked whether they understand or not!”
Fet, Polonsky, Maikov, A. Tolstoy, Apukhtin - each of them, in the conditions of the fierce ideological struggle of the 1860s, sought to save poetry from “didactism”, to preserve its right to sing the beauty of love, nature, art, and each was destined to carry on for a long time to oneself, as a stamp of rejection, the label of “pure art”, far from life and its problems. In defiance of democratic literature and in the fight against it, they defended the thesis of the independence of art from life, of its intrinsic value.
The works of numerous scientists have decisively revised the usual cliches in the characterization of these significant poets of that difficult time. The works of outstanding literary scholars have created a textual and source study basis for solving many problems associated with the work of these literary artists, including those problems that are of particular interest to us - continuity and innovation.
The latest research has significantly enriched our understanding of the place of each of the poets in the history of Russian culture and poetry, the uniqueness of their poetic systems, their aesthetic views, etc. Researchers are attracted primarily not by ideology, but by the “secret freedom” that he spoke about A. Blok.
Many correct thoughts and observations, not always, however, indisputable, about the poetry of “pure” lyricists are contained in the publications of G. B. Kurlyandskaya, . Some of the researchers (,) give a general outline of the life and creative path of this or that poet, others (T. A Bakhor,) reveal individual aspects of his talent, and still others (,) clarify the features of the lyrical world. The keen interest of the fourth (,) concentrates on issues of poetics and creative individuality. In all cases, we are dealing not with purely factual, but with theoretically meaningful materials. In the scientific community, there has been a tendency towards an in-depth comprehension of the essence and independence of poetic systems and artistic worlds created by word artists, an understanding of how the same motif in the artistic system of a particular author develops into a special figurative complex, the analysis of which opens the way to identifying the creative manner of the poet (,).
The existence of solid research makes the task of modern reading of the poets that interest us quite difficult. In our work, we tried, avoiding speculation, to focus on issues that are little studied and controversial in the scientific community. We do not set ourselves the task of giving a systematic and consistent analysis of the work of this or that poet; we were interested in individual aspects of their poetics, artistic system, creative process, and method.
The core, key problems of the dissertation are continuity, innovation, involvement of the poets under study in the classical Pushkin (and not only) tradition, psychologism as the most essential feature of their creative manner. These questions are a kind of “brace”, thanks to which our observations regarding the poetics and A. K. Tolstoy, and, develop into a holistic picture, allowing us to clearly see both the common thing that unites them, and the uniquely individual thing that makes up the creative physiognomy of each.
Literary continuity, as we understand it, is a complex process that includes not only the intuitive connections in which poets find themselves, but also the “element” of awareness and intentionality. In addition, continuity presupposes not only attraction, but also repulsion, which, combined with each other, dialectically accompany each other. This is a critical revision, a revaluation by those inherited of the spiritual values and creative experience of their predecessors, which takes very diverse forms, behind which divergences of creative manners and lively polemics can be hidden.
Many of the poets of the school of “pure art” considered themselves heirs of Pushkin, and they objectively, with certain inevitable restrictions, continued the traditions of their great teacher. Most importantly, in relation to poetry, in understanding one’s role ministers, performing duty, - they certainly followed him. Although, of course, their connections with the founder of new Russian poetry had limits. The dissertation also examines reflections in the works of the poets we are interested in. Each of them found the meaningful beginning of their lyrics in a “dialogue” not with socio-political trends, but with the best examples of fine literature. Therefore, a deep and meaningful reading of them is possible only in the context of literary, in particular poetic, tradition.
Each of the poets, in accordance with the characteristics of their talent and temperament, paved the way to liberation modern poetry from that “sad, dissatisfied, sad-lazy element” that gave her “a stamp of monotony.” Their voices returned to poetry the vital authenticity, simplicity, and naturalness it had lost, and opened up new possibilities for artistic comprehension of the world.
The problem of the artistic method of “pure” lyricists presents a certain difficulty due to its insufficient development and debatability. We have studied this issue more or less thoroughly using the example of creativity. It turned out that in a complex system of interdependence, mutual influence of the subject-thematic basis, figurative and ideological content, genre-speech form - all these components of the work - lies the artistic and aesthetic essence of the romantic type of creativity.
In the understanding of adherents of the school of “pure art,” not all of life, but only its individual links and sections serve as an expression of its main, innermost current, which riveted their poetic ear. Its general meaning often seemed to them mysterious, “unreasonable,” and contradictory. They limited themselves to recreating only local spheres of life experiences and were interested in special, aesthetic layers of reality. The basis of the romanticism of lyric poets is a unique aesthetic concept of life; it determines the ideological and aesthetic features of their romanticism, including the method as a consistent unity of re-creating the external empirical shell of phenomena in order to understand their true essence.
In general, the creative method of the poets we are studying is a complex, highly artistic fusion of heterogeneous elements, where the romantic principle is still decisive. The system of their romantic poetry comes into contact with other, non-romantic artistic systems: realism, classicism (A. Maikov), impressionism and symbolism (A. Fet).
Artistic style is associated with the creative method. Each of the poets, in addition to the generic stylistic features characteristic of him as a representative of the school of “pure art,” is also endowed with his own stylistic signature. Fet, for example, turns to a semantically mobile word, to its overtones and whimsical associations. Maikov, precise and clear in the use of words, in the rendering of colors and sounds, imparts a certain beauty to the word, aestheticizes it. Tolstoy's style system is determined by the fact that his lyrics contain immeasurably more heartfelt melancholy than daring revelry. Everyday life - and a metaphorical breakthrough into the sphere of the ideal, leading into the deep perspective of comprehended premises, expanding the space of the poet’s soul - these are the signs of Polonsky’s individual style. The charming charm and undying charm of “banality” can be illuminated from within by Apukhtin’s elegiac verse.
The dissertation also talks about the nature of the psychologism of romantic poets, about the impact of poetry, with its ability to expand and generalize the meanings, concepts, and ideas inherent in it, on prose and about the reverse influence of prose on poetry, on the processes occurring in it.
We associate the nature of the psychologism of the romantic poets not with the “natural school”, as some researchers do, but with the heightened interest in the inner life, individual psychology of a person, characteristic of the mid-19th century, in the spiritual and moral values of the individual. With their ability to capture the subtle and fragile mental life, the poets anticipated Tolstoy’s “dialectics of the soul,” Turgenev’s “secret” psychology, and Dostoevsky’s discovery of psychological analytics in the sphere of mental life. And they themselves took into account the achievements of Russian psychological prose.
In lyrics, psychologism is expressive in nature. In it, as a rule, it is impossible to “look from the outside” at a person’s mental life. The lyrical hero either directly expresses his feelings, thoughts, experiences, or goes deeper into introspection. The subjectivity of the lyrical makes it expressive and deep, but at the same time limits its capabilities in understanding the inner world of a person.
In the process of analyzing lyrical poems, we sought to capture the inexplicable charm of allusion, understatement, which allows one to guess what is the very substance of art, and at the same time is difficult to translate into the language of direct and unique meanings. It is no coincidence that Dostoevsky valued poetry for the fact that it allows one to derive something general and whole from a hint or a detail.
According to the right thought, “the poetry of Russian romantics of the middle and second half of the 19th century century, which in many ways opposed realistic literature, acted at the same time as its unique ideal complement.” And this, undoubtedly, made them closer to each other.
In reflecting on this ideal world, each of the poets paved his own path. Their poetic creativity is distinguished by a rare expressive diversity.
The relevance of our research is determined by the fact that in the perception of our contemporaries, poets of the Nekrasov school and representatives of “pure” poetry no longer oppose each other, but one complements the other. The historical unity of opposites acquires a harmonious character. Using the best examples of the lyrics of Fet and Maykov, Polonsky and A. Tolstoy, our contemporary learns a “sense of poetry,” perception and comprehension of beauty. Their work continues to remain a living, enduring phenomenon in the history of Russian literature and culture.
The purpose of our work is to, without straying into repeating known information, focus on problems that have not yet found adequate coverage in the literature of the issue (the concept of personality in the work of “pure” lyricists, the features of their artistic method and style, their recognition of beauty as universal harmony, sacred essence of the world, recognition of aesthetic contemplation as the highest stage of knowledge). To achieve this, the following are set: tasks:
– identify the place of each poet in the history of Russian literature;
– explore individual issues of their artistic method and creative process;
– characterize the originality of their poetic manner;
– consider the creative connections in which the poets were with each other;
– show the organic involvement of poets in the classical Pushkin tradition.
Basic provisions submitted for defense.
1. Russian poetry of the 1920s, traditionally called “pure art”, as a literary movement, represents a certain unity, conditioned by the development of life and literature itself and having its source in a certain commonality in aesthetic perception, philosophical and ethical ideals, and in the creative method.
2. General principles and trends that exist in the work of poets play an important role in the literary process.
3. The work of poets affiliated with the school of “pure art” does not always fit within its framework and goes beyond its boundaries with many features (the desire to find beauty in the earthly and ordinary, to see the ideal and eternal in the everyday and transitory, the love of freedom, attempts to appeal to people's life, a critical attitude towards arbitrariness and violence).
4. The nature of the artistic method of the poets under study: the method is basically romantic, but complicated by elements of realism, and in other cases - classicism (A. Maikov) and impressionism and symbolism (A. Fet).
5. The stylistic features of poets are associated not only with the type of artistic thinking, but also with the entire structure of the aesthetic thoughts and feelings of the artist of the word in their individual refraction.
6. The psychologism of the lyrical creativity of poets who were influenced by Russian psychological prose and, in turn, influenced prose with its growing attention to the “details of feeling” is an important feature of their creative manner.
7. Historical continuity is one of the necessary conditions for the fruitfulness of any literary artistic creation.
Scientific novelty of the research manifests itself in establishing the characteristics by which the artistic individuality of the poet is determined, as well as the specificity of the aesthetic world of poets classified as the school of “pure art”, in identifying the peculiarities of perception and assessment of the world characteristic of a particular poet, as well as a complex of means of expression - the dominant features his poetics.
Theoretical significance of the work is determined by the fact that it contains an understanding of the moral, aesthetic and spiritual quests of poets in the light of the ideas of “pure art” against the broad historical and literary background of the middle and second half of the 19th century. Theoretical observations and conclusions make certain clarifications and additions to the study:
– problems of harmony of universal life in the work of A. Fet with a similar problem in creativity;
– evolution of artistic method;
– Maykov’s romanticism, clothed in strict “classical” forms, but not reduced to passive contemplation and “cold” dispassion;
– connections between poetry and Russian realistic prose;
- the genre of poetic psychological short story.
Subject of research is the lyrical work of poets, in some cases - epic and dramatic works (poems “Dreams”, “Wanderer”, “lyrical drama” “Three Deaths” by Maykov).
Object of study– the problem of successive connections and innovative aspirations in the work of poets of “pure art”.
Methodological basis of the dissertation served as theoretical developments of researchers on ways to study the text of a work of art, on the lyrical system and the lyrical hero, on the problem of the author in lyric poetry, on the foundations of realistic and romantic poetics, on romanticism as a method and as an artistic system.
Research methods. The work uses the principles of a holistic analysis of works of art in close interdependence with historical-literary, comparative-typological and systematic methods.
Scientific and practical significance of the work is that its results can be used in the development of general and special courses on the history of Russian literature of the mid and second half of the 19th century.
Approbation of the obtained work results was conducted in the form of reports at a scientific conference at Oryol State University dedicated to the 180th anniversary of the birth of A. Fet (2000), and pedagogical Readings at the Oryol Institute for Advanced Training of Teachers dedicated to Oryol writers (1998, 2002). The dissertation materials were discussed at meetings of the Department of History of Russian Literature of the 11th-19th centuries at OSU.
The works prepared by the dissertation student based on the research materials were published in the magazines “Russian Literature”, “Literature at School”, “Russian Language at School”, “Russian Literature”, “Russian Speech”, as well as in his books “Star Threads of Poetry. Essays on Russian poetry" (Orel, 1995), "A sonorous spring of inspiration. Above the pages of Russian poetry" (Orel, 2001).
Work structure: consists of an introduction, five chapters, a conclusion and a list of references.
MAIN CONTENT OF THE WORK
In administered the relevance of the topic is substantiated, the state of its scientific development is considered, the purpose and content of the tasks are determined, the research methodology is presented, the scientific novelty and practical significance of the work are revealed.
First chapter(“Poetics. Creative connections with and”) is dedicated to the poetics of the greatest and most original lyricist, who amazes the reader with his entire stylistic system, his special structure of artistic means and techniques.
IN first Section of the chapter contains an analysis of two poetic messages to A. Fet on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his poetic activity. Their authors, A. Maykov and Y. Polonsky, in a brilliant artistic form, managed to capture the very “essence” of the addressee-celebrator, sketching his creative portrait. Maikov in his message found a surprisingly accurate image with which he expressed Fet’s poetic talent. He likened Fet’s “irrepressible verse” to “a stormy horse that broke the bit.” This verse rushes into space in pursuit of a thought in order to grab it “like a trophy”, amuse itself with the “beauty” of this thought “not yet known to people” and marvel at its “audacity”. And the poet himself watches his “brainchild” - a poem - and when it becomes a “winner” for him, he experiences the greatest feeling of joy, “bliss”. Mike's message captures us with the mighty breath of a fresh, sparkling image, thanks to which Fet becomes closer and more accessible to us.
Polonsky “saw” Fet from the other side. The poet appeared in his message as a companion of the gods, a participant in their game, its singer. Singer of the beauty of life! Fet’s songs, alien to “vanities and moments of infatuation,” are “age-old” songs. The “genius of music” finds in them combinations of words “soldered into “something” by spiritual fire.” Fetov's chants are difficult to strictly follow logical analysis. Their meaning is more felt and guessed than clearly perceived by the mind - the “genius of reason” passes by them.
The features of Fet's creative style, noted by his closest friends, Polonsky and Maykov, are revealed in detail by us in the second section “Novelty of Fet’s metaphorical language”.
It has long been noted that Fetov’s “primordial” word is multidimensional; its exact lexical meaning is not always captured. The language and poetic metaphors are tense, allowing different interpretation. The logical connection (“coupling”) of images is weakened, the logic of the development of poetic thought is often bizarre and paradoxical. The poet every time carries us into new, unexpected states of spirit, disturbs our imagination with images that give a fusion of very distant concepts, and puts the word in an unusual position. This is the fundamental property of Fetov’s lyrics. The poet’s bold similes and metaphors were not always revealed to the inner gaze of his contemporaries; they stunned and baffled them. Yakov Polonsky, for example, was more than once annoyed at the ambiguity and even incomprehensibility of certain images of Fet. He often assessed Fet’s poems based not on direct poetic impressions, but from the point of view of formal logic, “common” sense - a criterion, when applied to Fet, is too shaky, not to say incorrect, because it does not take into account the specifics of his creative individuality. The emotional principle of the composition allows Fet to omit associative links. This caused bewilderment among many critics, and aesthetically sensitive ones at that - Fet was ahead of his time with his discoveries.
The “obscurities” in Fet’s poems, which were pointed out by Polonsky, Strakhov, Botkin, Druzhinin and other contemporaries, naturally flowed from the very nature of Fet’s lyrics and were conditioned by it. Fet resolutely defended this kind of “incomprehensibility” in his poems and firmly stood his ground. The victory here was won by the sixth sense of the poet, with which Fet was able, in his words, to see “music” even where the “non-poet” does not suspect its presence.
The “inaccuracies,” “ambiguities,” and “slips of the tongue” in individual poems by Fet that we examined and analyzed deepened our understanding of his poetic individuality, of its quality, which he defined with the words “lyrical audacity.”
Fet amazes the reader not only with the outburst of his emotions, but also with his reliable concreteness and vigilance of observations. In him lived the sophisticated visual power of an impressionist artist and at the same time a powerful melodic element. About it - last two sections of the chapter– “Nature in the poetic world of Fet and Tyutchev” and “Nature and man in the works of Fet and Turgenev: typology of aesthetic situations of the poet and prose writer.” Fet, especially the late one, no less than Tyutchev, is characterized by the perception of nature as a gigantic whole, as an animated, “intelligent” being. Fet's poetry from the period of "Evening Lights", having artistically become related to disharmony (not without the influence of A. Schopenhauer), penetrates deeper and deeper into the world of nature and the human soul. The natural world is depicted through the emotional perception of a person who strives to merge with it, to embrace it with his thoughts and feelings. Like Tyutchev, whose poems can expand to the size of the Universe, Fet infects us with deep cosmic lyricism and universal power. The image he created of the stars of the endless expanses of the Universe illuminated by golden eyelashes with the “sun of the world in the center” is highly consonant with Tyutchev with his close attention to metaphor and comparison of a very special kind: “Like heavy eyelashes / Rising above the earth, / And through the fugitive lightning / Whose “Those menacing eyes / Sometimes they light up.”
Apparently, not without Tyutchev’s influence, Fet resorts to solemn intonations of speech, using, for example, openings with the solemnly affirming adverb “so” (“So, impossible, undoubtedly, / permeated with golden fire”), compound epithets (“languorously- sweet”, “insanely happy”, “gold-leafed”), archaic vocabulary (“co-inherent”, “that seraph”, “boat”, “wind”).
At the same time, Fet and Tyutchev differ from each other in the development of a philosophy of nature, in the principles of awareness and depiction of the life of nature. Fet is not frightened by the night, as it frightens Tyutchev with its ugliness, the chaos stirring under the cover of darkness. The night of Feta is predominantly a bright, moonlit, starry, quiet night, setting one up for enthusiastic contemplation. In Tyutchev, nature and man are separated and alienated. Fet’s poems are not poems that convey the philosophical worldview of a person immersed in the contemplation of world laws, like Tyutchev’s, but a reflection of the psychological state of a person, full of impressions and gradually comprehending them. Fet strives to capture something significant in changing experiences. Tyutchev, on the contrary, is trying to penetrate through the fluid impressions of life to something more intimate and permanent in it.
Interesting material is provided by a comparative analysis of the problem of nature and man in the works of Fet and Turgenev. For both poets and prose writers, the “human” essence of nature was revealed in aesthetic experiences of its beauty. Both artists approached the process of merging man with the endless world of nature from a lyrical-romantic position. Reproducing the ecstatic states of a person immersed in nature helped them understand the essence of life. Turgenev and Fet showed that human communication with nature opens up the opportunity for him to comprehend high ethical values. Poetic sensitivity turned out to be associated with purity of moral feeling. This is the basis of the ideological and philosophical understanding of nature and man, which makes the poet and prose writer similar, despite their individual characteristics in the development of this problem. The essence of these features is as follows. In Fet’s understanding, beauty is a reality of life. In his ideal world there is no place for mystical moods, while Turgenev’s world often comes into contact with the transcendental, mysterious, and unknown. Turgenev's sense of beauty acquired shades of idealistic contemplation. The writer contrasts his idealistic hero with the prose of life. For Fet, there was no conflict between romance and everyday life; his interest was focused on moments of enlightenment and delight, elation. Fet's work directly expresses a sense of ideal - that feeling of life, full, bright and free, which a person is capable of, having shaken off the oppression of everyday worries and burdens.
The dissertation notes that the romantic ideal impulses of Turgenev’s heroes, when each of them has “delight in their eyes, and their cheeks are glowing, and their hearts are beating,” and they speak “about the truth, about the future of humanity, about poetry...”, match those moments contemplative elevation above the world of the “possible”, which Fet so inspiredly poeticized and which were for him, as for Turgenev, moments of moral uplift. Both of them, the poet and the prose writer, through love joined the Whole of universal life, overcoming that force that oppresses a person, which L. Tolstoy called “self-love, or rather the memory of oneself” - a feeling of painful concentration on oneself.
From the analysis of A. Fet’s work it follows:
Firstly, Fet’s romantic aesthetics was based on a sharp distinction between two spheres: the “ideal” and “everyday life.” This conviction had a common root with the very essence of his poetic gift. The sphere of the ideal is formed “spread throughout the entire universe” beauty, "spread throughout nature" Love, secret moments consonance of cosmic and spiritual life, creations of art. Fet “breathed” all this in his lyrics.
Secondly, Fetov’s song was born from the ideal of beauty and was lifted up by the same spirit of resistance to “life’s hardships.” Its naturalness and naturalness are the result of a premonition of ever-renewing changes in Russian life in the middle of the century, a premonition that called out to a new man and a new humanity.
Thirdly, the deep cosmic lyricism and universal power of the poems of the late Fet makes him similar to Tyutchev. And philosophical generality, and a sense of the integrity of world existence, and an emphasized typically romantic feeling of the beyond.
Finally, fourthly, Fet’s romantic aspiration for beauty brings him closer to Turgenev, as we could see by analyzing their aesthetic positions when they studied the problem of the relationship between nature and man. Both of them followed the same path to understanding the essence of life: through the depiction of romantic insights that have a morally elevating meaning for a person. The “human” essence of nature was revealed to both the poet and the prose writer in the aesthetic experiences of its beauty.
in the assessments of critics and the work of writers, the beginning of the poet’s creative path, the features of his artistic method, Tolstoy and the poetic tradition - the subject of research second chapters dissertation (“and his place in the history of Russian poetry”).
The chapter consists of four sections.
Tolstoy's work, as shown here, from the very beginning carries within itself a harmonious artistic concept in which beauty and citizenship, complementing and enriching each other, form a single indissoluble whole. “The singer who held the banner in the name of beauty” held it at the same time in the name of citizenship, in the name of the moral meaning of life. The theory of “art for art’s sake” that he professed did not have a self-sufficient meaning for him; he gave it a very special meaning: it did not mean a rejection of either a certain point of view on things or an assessment of what is depicted. A true work of art, according to Tolstoy, must carry within itself “the best proof of all those truths that can never be proven to those who sit down at their desks with the intention of expounding them in work of art" In recognizing poetry as having only official, “auxiliary” functions, in subordinating it to political tasks, he saw a threat to the very existence of art as a special and free sphere of human spiritual activity.
IN first section The chapter provides numerous assessments of Tolstoy’s work by his contemporaries; for the first time in the literature of the issue, it is shown how individual “peak” lyrical poems of the poet aroused the artistic thought of many writers (Skitalets (S. G. Petrov)), who introduced them into their works - as quotations , not only “revitalized” the narrative, but also helped to penetrate deeper into the innermost meaning of one’s own literary text. Tolstoy's poetic art turned out to be surprisingly receptive to the living movement of history.
Second The section is devoted to the beginning of the poet’s creative path. It is emphasized, in particular, that many of his poems of the 40s were influenced by narrative prose, the artistic principles of the “natural school”, the so-called “sensible poetry”. Plot and descriptive prose techniques invade lyrical poetry, the verse is saturated with specific life observations: it includes philosophical and historical material. History not only forms a special sphere of the epic, but even invades the poet’s lyrics, introducing “ballad” motifs and images into it. Historical associations complicate the lyrical beginning of such poems as “My bells...”, “You know the land where everything breathes abundantly...”, “On an uneven and shaking rowing...”.
The associativity of poetic thinking, multiplied by the “feeling” of history and complicated by conscious correlation with artistic world Pushkin and other poets, predetermined the deep originality of Tolstoy.
The artistic method and creative process of Tolstoy the lyricist - the subject of research third chapter section.
His attraction to the ideal world was combined with a love for the earth, for the familiar joys of human earthly existence. The connection with romanticism did not separate Tolstoy from reality. The poet's ideological and figurative system synthesizes heterogeneous elements. The defining elements in it were certainly romantic, since Tolstoy chose primarily the spiritual sphere of life as the subject of re-creation and reproduction. The romantic image in Tolstoy's lyrics carries an artistic objectification of the spiritual feelings of the individual - love, aesthetic perception of nature, reflection on the phenomena of life around us, etc. However, realistic principles also appeared in Tolstoy's poetic system, which indicates the complexity of his aesthetic attitude to reality. What brings his poetry closer to the realism of the mid-19th century is its focus on reality, the “earthly roots” of life, the plasticity of nature paintings, elements of typification and realistic psychologism in love lyrics, and folk poetic associations. Through an analytical study of the complex world of the human soul, the poet overcame traditional romantic stylistics. Realistic figurative and ideological elements, penetrating the artistic fabric of romantic poems, were subordinated structural system romantic work. This was especially evident in the poet’s love and philosophical lyrics.
As observations of Tolstoy's notebooks and his drafts have shown, the process of realizing the plan ends with the creation of pronounced romantic works. In them, the phenomena of reality, reproduced in artistic images, are not a simple, unambiguous reflection of real objects, but serve as a means of expressing the author’s emotional experiences. In other cases, very few in number, a creative idea is translated into a realistic work of art. For example, as he worked on the poem “When all nature trembles and shines...”, concrete, material reality appeared in Tolstoy’s artistic consciousness in the form of concrete visual images, given, in essence, for the sole purpose of revealing the peculiar charm of Russian autumn.
Talking about complex nature artistic method of Tolstoy the lyricist, about the assimilation of realistic elements into the general romantic character of his works, it should be emphasized that Tolstoy’s creative path is not an evolution from romanticism to realism, as G. Stafeev believes. The formula “from romanticism to realism” simplifies creative development Tolstoy, and most importantly, contradicts the facts. How can we reconcile with such a statement, for example, the fact that the poet writes realistic and romantic poems at the same time? (Compare the poems “Darkness and fog cover my path...” and “The door to the damp porch has opened again...” written in the same year)? Or is it the fact that, following realistic poems (“The bad weather is noisy outside...”, “The Empty House”, “Kolodniki”), he creates typically romantic things (“In the land of rays, invisible to our eyes...”)? In addition, when studying Tolstoy’s creative method, it is important to keep in mind what genres of the poet we are talking about. If, say, these are lyrics and ballads, then we should talk about Tolstoy’s romanticism, enriched with elements of realism. Satirical poems and poems “Popov’s Dream”, “History of the Russian State...”, works published on behalf of Kozma Prutkov, are connected, it seems to us, with the realistic line of his poetry.
The dissertation examines the speech and genre components of Tolstoy's poems. Traditional poetic phrases in his artistic system adapted to new stylistic requirements, transformed, acquiring specific meanings lost in the poetic tradition. In the poems “Oh, if you could just for a single moment...”, “It was getting dark, the hot day was turning pale elusively...”, “Since I’m alone, since you’re far away...” the poet returns poetic concreteness to the abstract formulas of elegiac sadness. , revives the semantic connections of the verse, extracts subtle differentiating shades from words.
The genre of the poem itself does not have a clearly defined internal structure in Tolstoy. The plot of individual lyrical miniatures remains unfinished, their composition is “open”. In terms of their emotional tonality and general coloring, in some cases they gravitate towards romance (“Among the noisy ball, by chance…”), in others – to ode (“Singing louder than a lark…”), in others – to elegy (“Descends on yellow fields silence…"). In this regard, Tolstoy consolidated the break with canonical genre forms carried out in the romantic lyrics of the 20s.
It is also very characteristic of Tolstoy’s aesthetic tendencies that he diversifies the stylistic coloring of his elegiac confessions and expands their emotional range. We can talk about a unique genre of solemn elegy developed by the poet. The poet subordinates the elegiac intonations to the pathos structure of his philosophical reflections (“A tear trembles in your jealous gaze…”).
An essential feature of Tolstoy's artistic thinking is intuitiveness. The unconsciousness of individual images and paintings and the intuitive comprehension of truth are evidenced by Tolstoy’s numerous confessions in his letters. Sometimes the present seemed to him to be a repetition of the long past, and his thoughts were carried away to other times in order to guess the connections between the present, past and future. Life is eternal return - this is, in fact, the philosophy of many of his poems. Life is built on repeating things; repetition helps you mentally travel through time. The poet's memory is able to penetrate into “pre-history”. Tolstoy’s awareness of the present through the prism of the “past” and prophetic predictions of the future are very significant. They characterize the peculiarities of the mindset of those poets who widely used predictions in their work as a unique artistic device. Penetrating into the depths of things through intuition allowed the poet to understand many aspects psychological life person. At the same time, the direct “guessing” of the essence of existence prompted him to somewhat distance himself from reality (“I feel the insufficiency of life... and although I don’t talk about it, this feeling is very sincere in me”) and rush with his soul into another world, where “prime images are boiling” where eternal beauty shines.
The dissertation reveals the principles of Tolstoy’s work on the poetic image on the basis of the poet’s draft autographs and notebooks, which are widely used for literary analysis. These principles - the utmost generalization of the image, the refusal to overload details in the disclosure of the topic, the desire to avoid specification in the development of situations - are important not only for studying the “laboratory” of the poet, they help to understand the general laws of the art of words and to understand the nature of the poetic worldview.
Last, fourth, the section of the chapter “Tolstoy and the Poetic Tradition” reveals the poet’s place in the history of Russian literature and his close connection with his predecessors (Pushkin, Lermontov, Boratynsky) and contemporaries (Tyutchev, Fet). It is emphasized, in particular, that the general nature of Tolstoy’s use of Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s images and motifs is determined by the need for figurative and pictorial embodiment of the theme of Russia, concentrated attention to its historical destinies. Reinterpreting Pushkin's and Lermontov's images, Tolstoy included facts from the history of his own family into the “big” history.
Pushkin's influence is especially noticeable in the poet's landscape and love lyrics. Under the sign of Pushkin, Tolstoy also develops the poet’s theme. The creative use of Pushkin and Lermontov traditions strengthened Tolstoy’s valuable ideological and artistic tendencies: love for a healthy earthly life, Russian nature and homeland, integrity of perception of the world around him, cheerfulness.
To a certain extent, we can talk about Zhukovsky’s influence on Tolstoy’s poetics. From the first Russian romantic he learned to study the subtle, unclear, contradictory phenomena of the emotional world and the harmony of verse.
Appeal to the experience of Boratynsky, like Tyutchev, enriched Tolstoy’s lyrics with philosophical and psychological content. Very close to Tyutchev’s philosophical lyrics are Tolstoy’s poems about love, expressed in a solemn “key” (“Not the wind, blowing from above...”, “In the land of rays, invisible to our eyes...”, “Oh, don’t rush to where life is brighter and cleaner..."). In them, love experiences are realized in the light of philosophical views and moods akin to Tyutchev’s. To this end, both poets use largely the same intonation-syntactic structures, anaphoric and other linguistic means.
Tolstoy called himself a “sincere admirer” of Fet. Naturally, he could not ignore his artistic achievements. Obviously, we may not be talking here about the influence of one poet on another, but rather about a certain commonality of aesthetic positions, about typological convergences and internal connections. The main focus of their poetry is the pathos of romantic experiences, feelings and impressions caused by the life of nature and human, mainly love, relationships. Through the details of the landscape they express their enthusiastic feeling of the beyond. In a mysterious communication with the cosmos, the nature of their own soul, its deepest essence, was revealed to them, and this essence turned out to be close, akin to the world life that breathed around them. In their poetry we find separate echoes, most likely unconscious. There is nothing surprising in this: the poets lived and worked at the same time - this circumstance was reflected in their work by common moods, motives and even verbal images.
Some conclusions from what has been said about.
Among Russian poets of the same generation as himself, Tolstoy stands out for the diversity of his creativity and the significance of his personality. The poet never confined himself to aesthetic contemplation of artistic images. Love for his homeland and people, a critical attitude towards his surroundings helped him see negative sides Russian life The poet did not accept the bureaucratization of the Russian state system, he was depressed by the fragmentation and degeneration of the “monarchical principle”, he was sad about the disappearance of the “knightly principle” in public and private life, he was repulsed by lawlessness and inertia in any of their manifestations.
In intimate psychological, landscape and philosophical poems, he consistently and unswervingly defended the independence of the spirit and freedom of the individual - those moral principles that he valued above all else. His selfless service to the “ideal of beauty”, the beautiful, is a conscious service to humanity: the absolute and the human are deeply connected for Tolstoy. Beauty is inseparable from the moral meaning of life - this is his “creed”, the cornerstone of his work.
Chapter third devoted to poetic quests. It consists of five sections.
“The poetic word of Maykov and Tyutchev” – title first section.
In the ideological and figurative system of Maikov and his older contemporary Tyutchev, despite “different preferences,” there is something in common. They are connected by the problems of the poems: the relationship between man and the Universe, the understanding of nature as the only true reality. However, Tyutchev's consciousness is fundamentally deeply antinomic. Maikov's poetic consciousness does not know the fatal duality. But he also has a “cosmic feeling”, consonant with the sublime order of Tyutchev’s experiences. The commonality of perception of the “eternal questions” of human existence is caused by the coincidence of individual images. These are the images mountain peaks, night star, starry sky. The roll call of motives is associated with the commonality and relatedness of the “philosophical” worldview of the poets.
Internal unity in the poems of one and the other is realized, however, in different ways. In Tyutchev’s natural-philosophical poems, the poetic word is perceived in a double meaning – direct and figurative. This is due to the contextual interconnectedness of both parallel figurative series.
It’s a different matter for Maykov. He does not have the interchange or equivalence of natural and human, which are so noticeable in Tyutchev’s lyrical miniatures. Mike's “parallelism” of natural phenomena and human experiences is characterized by the fact that the objectivity of the depiction of natural phenomena prevails over their emotional coloring.
The difference in the poetic personalities of Tyutchev and Maykov is especially clearly manifested in what gives color to the verbal image - in the epithet. With the help of epithets, Tyutchev expresses his emotional and evaluative attitude towards the depicted. The poet often resorts to paired “oxymorons” (noon hazy, gloomy starlight) and compound epithets ( prophetically farewell, painfully bright, sonorously clear), conveying the dialectic of thought.
Maikov strives to objectify every impression from the outside world. He uses epithets in their usual meaning ( blue dusk, quiet evening, gloomy day), almost does not use the means of double definition. Unlike Tyutchev, Maikov retains the classic epic-narrative epithet.
Next, second, section – “Maykov’s poetic cycle “Excelsior”: ideas, images, poetics.”
The key theme of the cycle is the theme of the poet and the essence of poetry. In its development, Mike largely follows what he uniquely understood and interpreted. In Pushkin’s poems about art – in their “artistic” interpretation – Maikov tried to find support and confirmation for his aesthetic views.
He consistently contrasts the poet with the crowd. “In the crowd of self-satisfied light,” the poet does not encounter sympathy and understanding; on the contrary, he encounters her “reproach.”
Inspiration is “God’s power”, thanks to which an artist can “extract a thought from the primeval fog” and clothe it in an image. Maikov contrasts creative insight, poetic burning with “market bustle.”
Translating a secret thought into an image is not an act of simple improvisation, it is a huge amount of work. To rescue a thought from the “darkness,” the poet must literally suffer through the image: “Creative power forges its crown only from mental anguish!”
An important question that arises in the process of analyzing the poetic section of “Excelsior” is the so-called “objective” manner of Maykov’s writing. We believe that the poet’s desire to objectify his feelings primarily characterizes his anthological work. The desire to go beyond the subjective-emotional perception of the world in lyricism did not, however, lead to the complete elimination and removal of the lyrical subject from the picture depicted. The paintings he depicts are somehow “illuminated” with lyrical overtones.
Maikov persistently pursues the idea that one of the most important conditions for truly high art is the reflection of the poet’s personality in his work. It is important that “the entire image shines with the fire of the poet’s soul” and is “filled with joy, or anger, or sadness.”
Until the end of his life, Maikov remained a singer of high truths, an exponent of the spiritual principle in poetry.
IN third Section of the chapter - “Dream and reality in Maykov’s lyrics” examines the following questions: how the poet interprets the “ideal”, how he “remakes” reality into ideal images, what is the degree of opposition between “higher,” poetic reality and real reality, what is the aesthetic ideal of the poet.
Maykov’s poetic and romantic dream did not want to put up with the soulless prose of life. The world transformed by the poet makes a person forget the “eternal everyday anxieties”, “the ashes of everyday vanity”.
Maykov's romantic moods resulted in the forms of ancient mythology, in conventional but picturesque pictures of Roman life.
The motifs of melancholy and longing, eternal dissatisfaction and the eternal desire for the unattainable determine the figurative structure of many “personal” poems.
The penetration of reality into a dream is reflected in the poet’s style, which is characterized by a mixture of everyday life with mythological images, a conventional literary stream with everyday vocabulary, vernacular, and “prosaisms.”
The stylistic duality in Maykov’s language did not at all lead to stylistic inconsistency, but it gave the impression of dissonance in the relations between the real world and ideal ideas about it. “Everyday” vocabulary, which invaded the “high” poetic vocabulary, served as a kind of “signal” that reminded us of everyday reality and did not allow us to completely break living ties with it. At the same time, everyday life testified to the maturation of realistic tendencies in Maykov’s lyrics.
The originality of Maykov the stylist lies in many of his figurative constructions and word combinations, which stand out against the background of contemporary poetry with the power of verbal reproduction and freshness of perception: dark-fawn classic face, bashful green, daylight bloody core, Aurora purple is yours scattered flowingly, sentimental romanticism.
Maikov's “dream” was expressed rather in “classicistic” rather than romantic artistic forms. His style is orderly, he does not know the “discontinuity” and “discontinuity” of the forms of romantic poetics. In the poem “Meeting,” the poet writes about his desire to embody the ideal in “sharp,” honed and perfect forms; he strives to “capture the sharp features of beauty and perfection.”
Just as persistently, the poet emphasizes another artistic feature of his lyrics - the musically melodious melody of the verse.
The rich capabilities of Maykov the poet are evidenced by his epic works (the lyrical drama “Three Deaths”, the poems “The Wanderer” and “Dreams”), which we consider in fourth section of the chapter. The poet’s lyricism in epic works at the same time seemed to be denser, saturated with multifaceted reality, the concreteness of human relationships. In the epic, Maikov revealed new facets of his talent as a poet of powerful epic scope and breath, and a passionate civic temperament. The artistic principles of drama and poem, merging into Maykov’s poetic system, enriched it, forming various stylistic layers, expanding the range of stylistic and linguistic means.
In the poems “The Wanderer” and “Dreams”, in the drama “Three Deaths”, Maikov managed, rushing into the world of moral and philosophical problems, to overcome thematic and genre-stylistic limitations.
The poem “The Wanderer” demonstrates the skill of its author to recreate in a “new form of poetry” images and paintings drawn from the centuries-old culture of the past, in particular from handwritten schismatic literature. The poem “Dreams” is interesting in that it makes it possible to clarify both the aesthetic position of Maykov, who reverently bowed to the art of the Word, illuminated by the light of the Gospel ideal, and the ideological position, which is close to the views of the advanced part of Russian society. The lyrical drama “Three Deaths” reflected the originality of the historical concept of the poet - the “painter”, who resurrected the “spirit” and the character of the era that worried him: the collapse of the slave society and the emergence of a world of new spiritual principles. From his point of view, it is not a scientist, not a “restorer” who can resurrect the past ancient world", but a poet who approaches "every phenomenon from the inside." Those critics who consider Maykov primarily a poet of external form and deny him psychologism are not entirely right. The lyrical element in the drama “Three Deaths” is “hidden” behind a picturesque verse. The lyrical element is formed by such features of Maykov’s poetic speech as its emotional excitement, intense drama of intonation, symbolism of images, “objectivity” of comparisons, “solemnity” of vocabulary, frequent anaphors.
IN last The section of the chapter (“Maikov and the poetic tradition”) examines Maikov’s poetic creativity in the context of Russian poetry, tracing his creative connections with his predecessors and contemporaries. A prominent place is given to his organic assimilation of the traditions of Pushkin and Batyushkov.
The Pushkin poetic tradition makes itself felt both in direct and open appeals to the work of the great Russian poet, attested in the form of ordinary reminiscences, quotes, allusions, and in the general structure of the “harmonic” lyre of the successor, in the high culture of his verse. Maikov objectively continued the Pushkin tradition.
True, Maykov limits the significance of Pushkin as a poet to the artistic merit of his work alone, although, however, the integrity of Maykov’s assessment of Pushkin was violated by the recognition of the “mental”, ideological element of his poetry. (See the poem “The Sculptor (What the Pushkin Monument Should Express).”
Maikov often and willingly turned to those ideas and images of Pushkin that are contained in the famous cycle of poems about the position of the poet in society, about the path of the artist, about the social content and meaning of poetry. And although he one-sidedly accepted the complex concept of his great teacher, nevertheless, his consciousness was deeply captured by Pushkin’s images of the poet and the crowd, tearing the crown from the singer’s head with a “sacrilegious hand,” the motive of inspiration, “creative trembling,” etc. Following Pushkin, Maikov proclaims the poet’s independence from serving the secular “crowd” and “rabble.” Only free and independent art occupies its own special sphere in the spiritual life of society, inaccessible to ideological and political speculation.
Maykov inherited Batyushkov’s style, a characteristic feature of which is the combination of elegant, plastic images with the harmonious sound of verse. He builds many of his images according to Batyushkov’s principle. Moreover, some of Batyushkov’s images and expressions go to him: golden cup, chatter of waters, penates, songs of the Nereids, seagulls, amber honey. Batyushkov’s poems seem to shine through the entire anthological lyrics of Maykov.
Like Batyushkov, Maikov opened access to everyday vocabulary, “prosaisms.” But in comparison with him, he expanded the ties between the Russian literary language and the element of living everyday speech.
In Maykov's poetry we find images inspired by the works of Zhukovsky, Lermontov, Boratynsky, Tyutchev.
Deep literary quality constitutes the “subsoil” of Maykov’s poetry, its inalienable quality. The poetic memories that permeate the poet are a sign of his rich spiritual culture, undeniable philological erudition, which allowed him to be “on par with the century” and give birth to poems in “dialogue” with the best examples of verbal art.
Fourth The chapter (“In the poetic world”) consists of three sections. IN first section (“Caucasian” cycle of poems by Polonsky: ideas, motives, images) reveals the features of the poet’s artistic, stylistic and linguistic system, which determine the nature of his imagery.
Polonsky's Caucasian poems are marked by a romantic flavor, a keen interest in the history, culture and ethnography of Georgia, in its wild and picturesque nature. Harmony and clarity, precision of words, conciseness of syntax, breadth and humanity of the world view, the desire to comprehend the spirit of another people - in all this one can see the classical Pushkin tradition, one can see, in Turgenev’s words, “a reflection of Pushkin’s grace.”
The beauty of artistic images and paintings is striking, due to the high poetic and humane mood. In Caucasian poems there is a reckless rapture of life, complete fusion with nature, glorification of love and love passion. The verse is energetic, never drawn out, it is melodious and sincere, often full of everyday, everyday vocabulary.
Using Caucasian material, Polonsky continues to develop the traditional genres of romance (“Recluse”), ballad (“Agbar”), poem (“Caravan”), creates folklore and historical works inspired by ancient legends and traditions of Georgia (“Tatar Song”, “Georgian Song ", "In Imereti (Tsar Vakhtang's dilapidated pages..."), "Tamara and her singer Shota Rustavel"), writes the great historical tragedy "Darejana, Queen of Imereti." In the “Caucasian” cycle, Polonsky develops new stylistic techniques that make his poems similar to the “natural school.” He assimilates such achievements of realistic prose as its saturation with democratic ideas of time, interest in the “little man” - the hero of the “raznochinsky” layer, in the attributes of real life. Characteristic in this regard are “plot” poems, poetic works of an essay or novelistic nature, some of which resemble poetic “physiological essays.”
The simplicity and pictorial visibility of the descriptions (“Tiflis is a godsend for a painter,” as Polonsky noted) is combined with a psychological element introduced into the artistic fabric of poetic short stories and essays and simply lyrical miniatures, as, for example, in the poem “Night,” the symbolic landscape of which expresses contradictory state of the human soul, admiring the beauty of the night and at the same time... suffering.
Individual poems of the “Caucasian” cycle are united by the image of the poet. This image is in many ways traditionally romantic: he is a prophet, a chosen one (“Old Sazandar”, “Satar”, “Sayat-Nova”).
Sounded in poems by Polonsky and philosophical idea Paths of the Artist (“Mountain Road in Georgia”).
The poem “Rocking in a Storm” anticipated future poetic discoveries of the 20th century. It is no coincidence that A. Blok read him a lot in his youth. It occupies almost a central place in the cycle, rising above this lyrically united series and to a certain extent influencing its content and itself experiencing the opposite influence.
The poems of the “Caucasian” cycle are connected by a single image of Polonsky’s poetry and everything that relates to it: experience, poetic ideas-mythologems, symbols, themes, leitmotifs. That is why, when reading them, one cannot leave the feeling of semantic cohesion and integrity.
Second section (“The formation of Polonsky’s poetic system. Peculiarities of the poet’s worldview”) deepens our understanding of the uniqueness of Polonsky’s poetry of citizenship, which he himself successfully defined as the poetry of “mental” and “civil” anxiety. In his best civic, journalistic and philosophical poems, he expressed himself as a “son of the times,” who sympathized with what coincided in the progressive movement of the era with the ideals of his youth. The poet felt public troubles as personal, sympathizing with those suffering, but without, however, rising to indignation and indignation. Due to the nature of his spiritual organization, extremely soft, good-natured, noble, he was not capable of “cursing” and hating: “God did not give me the scourge of satire... / There are no curses in my soul” (“For the Few”).
Polonsky does not impose anything on the reader, using hints or understatement, he knows how to highlight an everyday life situation, extend it into an endless distance, and then a mysterious meaning is revealed in the very incompleteness. This amazing quality of the poet manifested itself already in his early experiments, in the “plot” poems “Meeting”, “Winter Journey”, “Already above the spruce forest from behind the prickly tops...”, “In the living room”, “Last Conversation”. Some of them - these are small stories from the life of the poor intelligentsia - are in the spirit of Turgenev's stories. They are characterized by the presence of everyday and portrait details that convey psychological condition lyrical hero. Here the “distinctive feature” that was noted in typical poems was clearly reflected - the naturalness of the line between the “everyday” and the “poetic”: “... transition from the ordinary material and everyday environment into the realm of poetic truth - remains palpable».
“The sublime” and the “everyday” are inseparable from each other, they seem to transform into each other - we are witnesses of this transition. Before our eyes, the poetic soul breaks away from the ground and soars above it. If we use V. Solovyov’s metaphor, we feel the flapping of wings, lifting the soul above the ground.
“Everyday” in Polonsky’s poems takes on the reflection of the “ideal”; the latter, in turn, casts a backward light on the “material”, being reflected in it. The everyday scene that forms the basis of this or that poem, such as, for example, the unremarkable meeting in the poem “In the Wilderness,” appears in Polonsky as full of mystery and beauty, because it reveals a distant perspective.
The same is true in the poem “I hear my neighbor...”. A simple story about a neighbor is combined with a mysterious and metaphorical breakthrough into the sphere of the “ideal”: “Behind the wall is a singing voice - / An invisible, but alive spirit, / Because even without a door / Penetrates my corner, / Because even without a word / Can I in the silence of the night / To sound a response to the call, / To be a soul for the soul.” The last couplet is, perhaps, the semantic center of the entire lyrical scene, concentrating the poet’s deep theme: responsiveness. The poet heeds the call addressed to the human soul. With this gift alone of heeding the call of life and revealing its romantic distances to the reader, Polonsky attracts our attention.
The poet loved to depict pictures in an opening distant perspective, which is why images of the road, distance, steppe, and space are so frequent in his poems (“Road”, “In the Wilderness”, “On Lake Geneva”, “Gypsies”, “In Memory”). He seems to be pushing the boundaries of the poetic situation, hinting at what is hidden in the depths of his psychology. Circle of reflections on meaning human life, dreams of impossible happiness, fear for the future, sad memories of what was and died - all this seems at first glance quite traditional, but the image of the lyrical hero acquires psychologically reliable features, he turns out to be an exponent of the unique spiritual experience of the poet himself with his real experiences .
A romantic by the nature of his work, Polonsky remains a lyricist who knows how to combine reality with fantasy, with a fairy-tale element. A subjective view of life, art, and its tasks determines the romantic principle of artistic recreation of reality in his work. At the same time, he early reveals a search for a different, more sober, realistic attitude towards life. This was reflected in his assimilation of the achievements and discoveries of realistic prose, in his interest in the modest, unnoticed fate of the “little man”, in the attributes of real life that surround people, in the democracy and humanism of his poetry.
IN third section (“Spiritual and moral quests of the late Polonsky”) examines the main ideas, motives, images of the poet’s late lyrics, emphasizing that the main advantage of such masterpieces as “The Swan”, “The Prisoner”, “The Old Nanny”, “At the Door” - in the harmonious combination of civic thoughts and feelings with the beauty of artistic form. True, in later works there are forgotten “accessories” of high poetry: sacrificial flame, heavy cross of the poet, incense, wreaths, thorns. But these traditional attributes eternal peace arts were called upon to protect poetry in difficult times for it, in conditions of a sharp demarcation between two poetic movements. However, they cannot obscure the main thing from us: the solid vital basis of Polonsky’s “quiet” lyrics, its deep connections with its era. Polonsky, like his like-minded people in their views on art, Fet and Maikov, expressed in his own way the spirit of the era and the mood of his contemporary. He is close to the “...rootless, / Noble in slavery itself” old nanny; he speaks with sympathy about the people, “...who suffered from chains / and suffer without chains”; he is admired by the feat of the sister of mercy who saved the life of a mutilated soldier; he wants “everyone in his family to have holiday candles burning!” A heightened sensitivity to the suffering of others is captured in the heartfelt lines of “The Prisoner.”
The poet himself had every reason to say about himself: “Harmony taught me / To suffer like a human being...”.
Spiritual responsiveness to human troubles was generated by a feeling of loneliness and depression in a world of triumphant vulgarity and rigidity of “dissipation.” “And I, with the ears of corn, like an ear of corn, / Nailed to the damp earth,” the poet complained in the poem “Loving the soft rustle of ears of grain...”. “Between me and the whole universe / Night is like a dark sea all around,” he was annoyed in another poem (“Night Thought”). In the poem “Cold Love,” Polonsky bitterly concludes: “My love has long been alien to a cheerful dream.” “To me, chilled by life and light, / Let me at least greet you with warm greetings!..” - he addresses the sea wave (“At Sunset”).
The plot-forming elements that determine the structure of a lyric poem are such key color images as masses floating in the fog polar ice, a fading sunset, autumn darkness, “dull and unresponsive” darkness of the night, “there are weeds on the way” - images that have not only psychological, but also pronounced social connotations.
Of course, it is impossible to discern certain allegorical meanings behind each of these images in a straightforward, literal way, but, moving from poem to poem, varying and repeating, “mating” with each other, they together form a sensual image and the “spirit” of the era, and in addition, they express the mental, moral and psychological state of the lyrical hero, very close to the poet himself.
In an effort to save poetry from “didactism,” Polonsky, with his constant skepticism towards himself and life, was alien to the positivist speculations of his opponents and resolutely defended the poet’s right to sing the beauty of art, love, and nature. With the poet’s “sixth sense” he heard “God’s music”, which “suddenly rang out” from eternity and “poured” into infinity, capturing “chaos” on its way (“Hypothesis”).
He not only listened to this music, he tried to express it using all the artistic means available to him. The poetic depth of his inspired creations is determined by the power of depicting human experiences and moods, which is on the verge of the “supersensible”, “irrational”. Poetic “obscurity” was inherent, as it were, in the very nature of Polonsky’s artistic worldview, who, following the example of his closest friend and patron, opposed systems and all kinds of “last words,” preferring unambiguous estimates and halftone judgments.
It is difficult, almost impossible, to analyze many of Polonsky's poems. But it’s easy to get into their moods and inner expression. A subtle stylist and lyricist, Polonsky achieves artistic effect by boldly combining traditional romantic images with specific everyday details. He deliberately avoids vivid images and rich epithets. The verse, freed from unnecessary embellishments, is endowed with natural conversational intonations. It is as close as possible to prosaic speech, to its strictest norms, while retaining, however, all the qualities of poetic speech.
The lyrical works of the late Polonsky were written by the hand of an experienced master who had not lost his youthful liveliness of perception of the world, social sensitivity, and ardent faith in the ideal of freedom and beauty. Until the end of his days he remained a knight of poetry.
Chapter fifth(“-one of the last romantics of the 80s”) contains three sections. In the first– “the features of the content of Apukhtin’s poetry and the principles of awareness and depiction of life” are revealed (section title).
In Apukhtin's small poetic heritage, intimate narrative lyrics and the romance genre clearly stand out. The intimate narrative line is represented by diary poems (“A Year in the Monastery”), monologue poems (“From the Prosecutor’s Papers,” “Madman,” “Before the Operation”), poetic messages (“To the Brothers,” “. Regarding historical concerts", "To the Slavophiles"). All of them can conditionally be classified as a genre of original confession, marked by genuine sincerity, sincerity, and subtle psychologism. The same qualities are also distinguished by romances (“I defeated her, fatal love ...”, “Flies”, “Whether the day reigns, or the silence of the night ...”, “No response, not a word, not a greeting ...”, “A pair of bays”).
The theme of tragic powerlessness, futility, chaos, fragmentation varies in different aspects. And although the problems of many works are not directly related to the socio-political and moral atmosphere of the eighties, nevertheless, they reflected with rare psychological and emotional expressiveness, with deep inner drama, the ideas and anxieties of the generation that survived the crisis of populism. The poet depicts ordinary everyday dramas and captures the pain of a “weary soul.”
In the poem “Muse” (1883), hopelessness takes on a downright declarative character: “My voice will sound lonely in the desert, / The cry of a weary soul will not find sympathy...”. People have poisoned life with treason and slander, death itself is more merciful than them, it is “warmer than these brother people.”
The restless consciousness of the hero, hunted by life, is reproduced with great artistic force in the poem “A Year in the Monastery.” The hero flees “from the world of lies, betrayal and deceit” to the monastery, but even there he does not find “peace” and, at the first call of a woman, returns to the company of “vulgar, evil persons” that he hates, bitterly realizing that he is a “pathetic corpse.” soul” and that he “has no place in the world”...
Traditional images and symbols for poetry of that time often become plot-forming elements of a lyrical play. Thus, the lyrical plot of the poem “A joyless dream has exhausted me from life...” forms a metaphorical image of a prison:
I am imprisoned in my past, like in a prison
Under the supervision of an evil jailer.
Do I want to leave, do I want to step -
The fatal wall doesn't let me in,
Only the shackles sound, and the chest contracts,
Yes, a sleepless conscience torments me.
The theme of prisonerhood for Apukhtin is not a random image, but a real problem of existence modern man. Just like other images: dreams, “longing”, “burning tears”, “fatal memories”, “mighty passion”, spiritual “silence”, love dreams, “rebellious soul”, “insane ardor”, “insane jealousy” “- all these are integral attributes of Apukhtin’s lyrics, flesh of its flesh.
The structure of the poem “To Poetry” (“In those days when the broad waves ...”) is determined by the expressive images and colors of “the spirit of inexorable hostility”, “the icy crust” that fettered life, “the underground, the mysterious forces” shaking the earth. These and similar conventional images, localizing the lyrical situation in time and space, create an impressive image of the “transitional” era. For the poet, a passionate denunciation of social evil merges with universal, cosmic evil, with the “untruths of the earth.”
Apukhtin's poetics is a curious interweaving of conventional general poetic images, tradition-fixed poetic formulas, stable models, linguistic cliches with sharp features of the particular, with breakthroughs into the vernacular, into the “conversational” element.
Emphasized inclusion of everyday speech and purely prosaic comparisons in a sublime poetic text ( black thoughts like flies) gives it a peculiar expressive shade, enriching the narrative precisely due to the tangible difference in the verbal series correlated in the work. All kinds of everyday words, “mundane” words, in the vicinity of “high” lexemes, lose their everydayness.
Let’s read the poem “Oh, be happy! Without complaints, without reproach...”, which, by the way, has a real basis related to the relationship between the poet and his beloved singer. Fate decreed that they were not destined to be together - the singer married a friend of the poet - whom he himself introduced to her, he himself contributed to their marriage and, by his own admission, never repented of what happened.
The first stanza of the poem is a set of traditional phraseology and vocabulary, beautiful in its proven effectiveness: complaints, reproach, empty cry of jealousy, insane melancholy, fervent prayers, an extinguished altar.
But already the second stanza is a metaphorical breakthrough into spiritual depth, a breakthrough into the private, constructive, concrete. Happily found image funeral train And on wedding guests traveling, fulfilling an important associative-psychological role in the verse, rearranges the entire text, giving it a piercingly intimate intonation. This image falls on the soul and is easily remembered because it appears unexpectedly against the background of ordinary images.
The internal connection, which always shines through in Apukhtin, between the external environment and secret spiritual life, is reminiscent of Russian realistic psychological prose. Apukhtinsky, on the verge of prose, “sad verse,” weighed and verified on the scales of impeccable taste, full of internal tension and psychological authenticity, becomes a living pain.
Apukhtin created his works with the expectation that they would be read by reciters or performed by singers, that is, for auditory perception. From here great importance in poetry, intonation acquires: rising and falling of tone, speech pauses, questions and exclamations, syntactic and phrasal stress, emphasis on the sound structure of speech. With the help of various syntactic structures of phrases, word order, and punctuation marks, Apukhtin conveys the main features of intonation, achieving the uniqueness of his “voice.”
The poet deliberately avoids the coincidence of the constant rhythmic pause that ends the line with the semantic pause, and often breaks the verse into short phrases. To increase the emotional intensity of his speech, he alternates - within the same poem - iambic tetrameter, pentameter and hexameter (“Night in Monplaisir”), sometimes for the same purpose he uses a tapering stanza (“The path of life is paved by the barren steppes…”).
The increased emotional coloring of Apukhtin’s poetic speech is given by frequent roll calls of the first and final stanzas of the poems (“Soldier’s song about Sevastopol”, “Oh, God, how good the cool summer evening is...”, “Road Thought”, “Crazy nights, sleepless nights...”), as well as other types of repetition: doubling, anaphora, gradation, junction, refrain. In “A Pair of Bays,” the poet very successfully used the repetition of words in different meanings: « Melted in the arms of a happy lover, / Melted sometimes other people have capital...”
It is just as easy to find in Apukhtin’s poems examples of other techniques of stylistic figures, for example, syntactic parallelism (“Flies”, “Broken Vase”), the intersection of various syntactic constructions (“Will I find you? Who knows! Years will pass...” - “To the Lost letters”), polyunion (“I love you so much because…”), etc.
Apukhtin’s poetic speech presents everyday, everyday expressions, colloquial words and phrases, “prosaisms”. Let us give examples of everyday, conversational expressiveness: “No one would tell her about love stuttered, / But here the king, unfortunately, turned up" - "Venice"; " I really didn't dare" - "The Sadness of a Girl" (from the series "Village Sketches"); “And the gray one is attached with his fat friend/ Along the sultry path walking along…” – “Neighbor” (from the series “Village Sketches”); “And so we won, so sour face/ And with broken set sail nose" - "Soldier's song about Sevastopol"; " Maybe, your conversation kill the clock will help” – “Fortune telling”, etc.
Apukhtin gave Russian verse the freedom, looseness, and ease necessary to talk about ordinary, everyday things, for a sincere outpouring of the soul. His poems speak in the language of subtle and complex associations about the depth of personal experiences, often filled with dramatic contradictions; in them, as a rule, the subtext turns out to be much more important and deeper than the words themselves, in which emotional movements are expressed.
The romantic Apukhtin is by no means devoid of social pathos. Behind his poetic confessions and revelations ultimately lie the completely earthly concerns and conflicts of contemporary man and modern society. He felt a strong urge to realistically recreate life. Apukhtin adopted certain features of the realistic style in Nekrasov’s poetry, which were especially pronounced in his narrative poems and in his verse stories. This is revealed both in the interpretation of the topic, and in the very nature of the imagery, and in the vocabulary - everywhere the constant trend of “decrease” makes itself felt.
Apukhtin chose for himself the genre of romance as the most emotionally intense means of expressing conventional poetic reality, which smoothes out the expressiveness of poetic thought and at the same time gives the same expressiveness to “everyday” emotions.
Often romantic, conventional vocabulary is intertwined with an almost prosaic analysis of a complex psychological situation, as, for example, in the poem “We sat alone. The pale day was coming…”, in the romance shell of which such “prosaisms” as “sarcasm” and “irony” are barely contained. The song-romance “element” dissolves mental pain: “And your voice sounded triumphant / And tormented you with poisonous mockery / Over my dead face / And over my broken life...”.
Other poems are also constructed as a kind of psychological research - “A Memorable Night”, “Late at night, on a snowy plain...”, “Crazy nights, sleepless nights...”.
Apukhtin is a “transitional” poet, open equally to the past and future of poetry. His poetics bears the reflection of a bygone great poetic era, which both nourishes his work and weighs him down with a heavy burden. This burden of heritage is acutely felt not only by Apukhtin, but also by other poets of the end of the century - K. Sluchevsky, K. Fofanov, S. Andreevsky, A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov. In comparison with them, Apukhtin's poetry most fully expressed the main features of the life and literary atmosphere of the eighties.
And one more important, in our opinion, circumstance. Some critics focus on the hopelessly dull Apukhtin autumn and talk about the monotonous gray twilight of Apukhtin. This is hardly fair. The sincerity of sadness and the authenticity of suffering resist the general feeling of “despondency.” No wonder Sluchevsky wrote about his “songs”:
There is something infinitely good about you...
The happiness that has flown away sings within you...
As if spring is approaching under the powder,
There is languor in the heart, ice drifting in the soul.
In second section “The genre of psychological short stories in the works of Apukhtin and Polonsky. Connections with Russian realistic prose" provides an analysis of a new genre for lyricism - the psychological short story in verse, which is connected with prose in many ways, but at the same time - which is characteristic of poetry - presents the problem in an extremely compressed, “compressed” form. Works of this genre, unlike purely lyrical poems, as a rule, have a detailed plot, containing some kind of life drama.
The basis for the psychological novel, as one might think, was Russian psychological prose with its art of penetrating into the depths of the human soul. At the same time, some poetic short stories themselves gave birth to a literary tradition, anticipating the discoveries of prose writers. Reproducible in them life situations and the collisions so took possession of the prose writer’s consciousness that he involuntarily “thought” about the poems that worried him, often introducing them into his literary text and, starting from them, enriching and deepening their plot “moves”, creating his own spiritual universe.
Not only Apukhtin and Polonsky, but also other poets of the “golden age” of Russian poetry - K. Sluchevsky, In. Annensky. Its best examples, presented by them, received wide recognition and retained their significance as a characteristic literary phenomenon of the period of quest and impulse, which was the middle and especially the second half of the 19th century in the history of Russian literature.
When reading Apukhtin's psychological short stories, associations arise with Dostoevsky. One of these short stories, “From the Prosecutor’s Papers,” outlines a situation of real choice, including the ultimate option of leaving into oblivion—the choice of a suicide—a topic that worried the author of the novel “Demons.”
Apukhtin’s most famous poem “The Madman” also interacts with the tradition of Dostoevsky.
Organic for Apukhtin is the short story “With the Express Train,” which reflects Tolstoy’s “dialectics of the soul”: the internal monologues of the characters, into which the author’s story “flows,” reveal their moral and psychological states through everyday details. This novella to some extent anticipates individual stories.
Small tragedies in Polonsky’s poems, such as “The Bell,” “Miasm,” “The Blind Tapper,” “At the Door,” and “The Swan,” found a sympathetic response from our wonderful prose masters. They “thought” with Polonsky’s poems and created their works, respectively, “In a Familiar Street” and “Humiliated and Insulted.” The heroes of these works perceived Polonsky’s poems as something of their own, deeply felt, “native,” painfully familiar.
The contours of an entire novel, or at least a short story or story in the style of Chekhov, are outlined in the poems “The Blind Tapper” and “At the Door.” Behind the plot lines of the short story “Miasm” one can guess a collision, which can also unfold into a voluminous novel narrative.
Turning to the verse novella gave Apukhtin and Polonsky the opportunity to introduce into their poetry the intonation of lively colloquial speech and new moods. Key Features The genre of the poetic short story included the following: high tension of the figurative structure, fed by collisions and characters drawn from the life of predominantly democratic strata of the population, plot drama, psychological motivation of love and other life vicissitudes of human destinies, “openness” of the composition. It should also be noted the significant role of colloquial vocabulary in the general flavor of the narrative poems of Polonsky and Apukhtin.
Third The section “Apukhtin and the poetic tradition” is devoted to the consideration of the poet’s work in the context of literary, in particular poetic, continuity. From the very beginning of his creative career, Apukhtin was formed under the direct influence of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, and he retained connections with these and his other predecessors and contemporaries until the end of his life. The section examines echoes, reminiscences, paraphrases from Pushkin, and explores Lermontov’s reflections: the motives of unrequited “fatal love,” the betrayal of a woman, the callousness and hypocrisy of people in the “secular” circle. Apukhtin’s poems “A Year in the Monastery” and “From the Prosecutor’s Papers” are marked by a significant influence of the author of “Duma” and “Hero of Our Time”: they depict the same “ inner man”, which became the object of Lermontov’s close artistic attention.
Philosophical lyrics had a certain impact on Apukhtin (motives of the ephemerality of human life, powerlessness, weakness of man before the omnipotence of the Creator and the nature he created, painful reflections on the mystery of existence, the soullessness and lack of spirituality of the age). In the poetics of both poets, a huge place belongs to the night, dreams, everything that lies on the border between being and non-being.
Nekrasov's traditions are clearly visible in Apukhtin's work. True, verbal coincidences with Nekrasov, for a rare exception, we don’t find it in him, but nevertheless the Nekrasov “element” is expressed quite strongly. In a poetic vein close to Nekrasov’s style, “Village Sketches”, excerpts from the poem “The Village of Kolotovka”, the poems “In wretched rags, motionless and dead...”, “Fortune telling”, “Old Gypsy”, “About the Gypsies”, “A Year in monastery”, “Before the operation”... They use Nekrasov’s dramatic-narrative tonality and plot principles for the development of the theme.
The creative development of Nekrasov's traditions did not exclude, however, polemics with him. Apukhtin declared his hostility towards Nekrasov. And yet, he adopted certain features of the realistic style in his poetry.
Deep humanity, sincerity of feeling, subtle, elegant psychologism make Apukhtin's lyrics also similar to the prose of his great contemporaries. In our opinion, in particular, the poem “The music thundered, the candles burned brightly...” concisely reproduces the history of the intimate and personal relationships of the heroes of the story “Asya”, published, by the way, in the same year as Apukhtin’s poem (1858). In the short spatial period of the poem, a whole story of the dramatic relationships of the heroes is squeezed, starting from the emergence of the first feelings and ending with their rupture - a situation quite close to the one that we learn about from Turgenev’s story. The poem outlines the main phases of the lyrical hero’s mental states ( I didn’t believe it, I languished, I cried), those stages through which the feeling of Turgenev's hero passed. The poet's psychologism is akin to Turgenev's psychologism: Apukhtin is focused only on the external manifestations of feelings and mental movements of the heroes ( trembling chest, burning shoulders, gentle voice, gentle speech, sad and pale etc.), giving the reader the opportunity to guess for himself what is happening in their souls.
Possessing undoubtedly a high artistic gift, Apukhtin was not afraid to introduce images and motifs of his contemporaries and predecessors into his poems - he was not in danger of being a simple imitator in poetry. His poetry is not secondary, it is fresh and original: it was nourished not by other people’s images, but by life itself. He was not afraid to turn to topics long sung by “others”; he was able to find and convey the unique in the familiar and banal. It is no coincidence that A. Blok mentioned the “Apukhtin touch” in Russian poetry.
Only by being independent, free from any goals external to it, can art awaken the best feelings in a person. This ultimately Kantian idea of “purposeless” art, of poetry embodying the “ideal,” naturally follows from the analysis of the poetic creativity of “pure” lyricists. The principle of a sublime ideal, which constitutes one of the basic principles of their aesthetic views, predetermined the absence in their work of a direct, untransformed image of certain aspects of reality.
The long-term wariness towards “pure” lyricists is not explained by the content of their work as such. A fatal role in their fate was played by the fact that they tried to resurrect the freedom of poetry, its independence from practical needs and the “spite of the day” in a dramatic situation - a situation that Dostoevsky quite seriously likened to the Lisbon earthquake. The world was split into two camps - and both camps sought to put poetry at the service of their needs and demands.
But, as always, the fate of art is decided by the almighty time. “Lyrical audacity” by A. Fet, a bright, simple-hearted, courageous talent filled with a high ideal, a unique talent of Ya. Polonsky, in which the real, the ordinary and the fantastic are intricately combined, the spiritual grace of A. Maykov’s lyrics, with its harmonious cheerfulness, plastic completeness, the melodious, attractive melancholy of A. Apukhtin - all this is our spiritual heritage, which gives us and will give our descendants genuine aesthetic pleasure.
IN « Z "adventure" The work summarizes the results of the research, updated in the provisions submitted for defense.
List of works on the topic of the dissertation,certain vacancies of the Russian Federation
1. Letter to // Russian literature. – 1988. – No. 4. – P. 180-181.
2. “Organic word combinations will interweave a clear meaning...”. Notes on lyrics // Russian speech. – 1992. – No. 4. – P. 13-17.
3. Is it possible to “play naughty with an oath”? About poetic speech // Russian speech. – 1994. – No. 6. – P. 3-7.
4. “My soul is full of anxiety and sadness...” Notes on poetry // Russian speech. – 1996. – No. 6. – P. 7-12.
5. “And there is no prophecy on earth...” Poetics of the late E. Boratynsky // Russian language at school. – 1997. – No. 3. – P. 74-78.
7. Poetics of two poetic messages by A. Fet // Russian language at school. – 1998. – No. 2. – P. 64-68.
8. “Harmony taught me to suffer as a human being.” Notes on poetry // Russian language at school. – 1998. – No. 4. – P. 70-74.
9. Poems of Nikolai Strakhov, critic and philosopher // Russian speech. – 1998. – No. 5. – P. 35-47.
10. Stylistic energy of epigrams // Russian speech. – 1999. – No. 2. – P. 3-9.
11. Reflecting on the poem... (Ya. Polonsky, “The Seagull”) // Russian language at school. – 1999. – No. 6. – P. 57-59.
12. About the language of the poem “The Wanderer” // Russian speech. – 2000. – No. 6. – P. 11-17.
14. Fragrant freshness (A. Fet, “Whisper, timid breathing...”) // Russian language at school. – 2002. – No. 6. – P. 67-68.
15. Poetic word u and // Russian speech. – 2003. – No. 5. – P. 10-14.
16. “The ability to scribble mercilessly.” Draft versions of poems // Russian speech. – 2004. – No. 4. – P. 30-34.
17. Images of A. Tolstoy, A. Maykov, Y. Polonsky, In. Annensky and the poetry of K. Sluchevsky // Russian speech. – 2005. – No. 1. – P. 23-31.
18. “My heart is a spring, my song is a wave.” About poetics // Russian speech. – 2005. – No. 2. – P. 12-22.
19. Poem by I. A Bunin “Loneliness” // Russian language at school and at home. – 2005. – No. 4. – P. 8-10.
20. “All this already happened once...” // (About one poem) // Russian language at school and at home. – 2005. – No. 5. – P. 14-17.
21. About the poem “Evening sky, azure waters...” // Russian speech. – 2006. – No. 4. – P. 10-14.
22. The genre of psychological short story in Russian poetry // Russian literature. – 2006. – No. 8. – P. 8-14.
23. “You are a victim of life’s anxieties...” (Page of love) // Russian speech. – 2007. – No. 2. – P. 17-20.
24. Reflecting on the poem // Russian language at school and at home. – 2007. – No. 3. – P. 15-17.
25. In the depths of psychological subtext (In. Annensky. “The Old Organ Organ”) // Russian language at school and at home. – 2007. – No. 8. – P. 9-11.
OTHER PRINTED WORKS OF THE APPLICANT
26. “What’s wrong with her, what’s wrong with my soul?” We read poems about nature by Russian poets with sixth-graders // Literature at school. – 1995. – No. 1. – P. 65-68.
27. Star threads of poetry. Essays on Russian poetry. – Orel, 1995. – 208 p.
28. // Literature at school. – 1996. – No. 1. – P. 86-89.
29. “The abyss of poetry...” Works of Russian writers about native nature in the 5th grade // Literature at school. – 1996. – No. 3. – P. 111-115.
30. “Nature... slender is true to simplicity.” Interdisciplinary connections in the study of poetry // Literature at school. – 1997. – No. 3. – P. 124-127.
31. and poetic tradition // Literature at school. – 1999. – No. 5. – P. 25-33.
32. About poetics // Literature at school. – 2000. – No. 8. – P. 2-5.
33. A resounding spring of inspiration. (Above the pages of Russian poetry). – Orel, 2001. – 244 p.
34. Poetic individuality: from “First Snow” to “Winter Caricatures” // Literature at school. – 2002. – No. 1. – P. 21-25.
35. In the name of sacrificial self-denial. . “The sun is shining, the waters are sparkling...” // Literature at school. – 2003. – No. 1. – P. 14-15.
36. Poetry is an expression of universal human sadness. K. Sluchevsky. “It burns, it burns without soot and smoke...” // Literature at school. – 2003. – No. 4. – P. 13-14.
37. Notes on poetics // Mundo Eslavo. Revista de Cultura y Estudios Eslavos. – Universidad de Granada. – 2004. – No. 3. – P. 91-96.
38. About “The Poet and the Citizen” // Literature at school. – 2007. – No. 6. – P. 47.
39. A. K. Tolstoy and the poetic tradition // Literature at school. – 2006. – No. 8. – P. 13-18.
See about this: Kurlyandskaya Galina. Thoughts: I. Turgenev, A. Fet, N. Leskov, I. Bunin, L. Andreev. – Orel, 2005. – P. 107 et seq.
Fet.: In 2 volumes - M., 1982. - T. 2. - P. 166.
Dostoevsky and materials / Ed. . – P.-L., 1925. – P. 348.
Druzhinin. op. – St. Petersburg, 1866. – T. VII.-S. 132.
“Lyrics have their own paradox. The most subjective kind of literature, it, like no other, is directed towards the general, towards the depiction of mental life as universal” (On Lyrics. - 2nd ed. - M., 1974. - P. 8).
Corman lyrics of the era of realism // Problems of studying cultural heritage. – M., 1985. – P. 263.
This issue is developed in detail in the works. See, for example, her study “Turgenev and Fet // Kurlyandskaya Galina: Reflections: I. Turgenev, A. Fet, N. Leskov, I. Bunin, L. Andreev. – Orel, 2005. – 70-87 p.
Turgenev. collection op. and letters: in 28 volumes - M.-L, . – Works, vol. VI. – P. 299.
Tolstoy. collection op. (Anniversary edition). – T.V. – P. 196.
Tolstoy. cit.: In 4 volumes - M., 1963 - 1964. - T. IV. – P. 343.
"My heart is full of inspiration." Life and art. – Prioksk. book ed., Tula, 1973. – P. 304.
Tolstoy. collection op. – T. IV. – St. Petersburg, 1908. – P. 56.
Soloviev Vl. C. Literary criticism. – M., 1990. – P. 158.
Block A. Collection cit.: In 6 volumes - L., 1980. - T. II. – P. 367.
Poets of “pure art”
Fet Afanasy Afanasyevich (1820 -1892)
“Almost all of Russia sings his (Fet’s) romances,” composer Shchedrin wrote in 1863. Tchaikovsky called him not just a poet, but a poet-musician. And, indeed, the indisputable advantage of most of A. Fet’s poems is their melodiousness and musicality.
Fet's father, the rich and well-born Oryol landowner Afanasy Shenshin, returning from Germany, secretly took the wife of a Darmstadt official, Charlotte Fet, from there to Russia. Soon Charlotte gave birth to a son, a future poet, who also received the name Athanasius. However, the official marriage of Shenshin to Charlotte, who converted to Orthodoxy under the name Elizabeth, took place after the birth of her son. Many years later, church authorities revealed the “illegality” of the birth of Afanasy Afanasyevich, and, already as a 15-year-old boy, he began to be considered not the son of Shenshin, but the son of the Darmstadt official Fet living in Russia. The boy was shocked. Not to mention, he was deprived of all rights and privileges associated with nobility and legal inheritance. The young man decided to achieve at all costs everything that fate had so cruelly taken from him. And in 1873, the request to recognize him as Shenshin’s son was granted, but the price he paid for achieving his goal, for correcting the “misfortune of his birth,” was too great:
Long-term (from 1845 to 1858) military service in a remote province;
Refusal of the love of a beautiful but poor girl.
He acquired everything he wanted. But this did not soften the blows of fate, as a result of which the “ideal world,” as Fet wrote, “was destroyed long ago.”
The poet published his first poems in 1842 under the name Fet (without dots above the e), which became his permanent literary pseudonym. In 1850, he became close to Nekrasov’s Sovremennik, and in 1850 and 1856 the first collections, “Poems by A. Fet,” were published. In the 1860s - 1870s, Fet left poetry, devoting himself to economic affairs in the Stepanovka estate in the Oryol province, next to the Shenshins' estates, and for eleven years he served as a justice of the peace. In the 1880s, the poet returned to literary creativity and published the collections “Evening Lights” (1883, 1885, 1888, 1891).
Fet is the most significant representative of the galaxy of poets " pure art", in whose work there is no place for citizenship.
Fet constantly emphasized that art should not be connected with life, that the poet should not interfere in the affairs of the “poor world.”
Turning away from the tragic sides of reality, from those questions that painfully worried his contemporaries, Fet limited his poetry to three themes: love, nature, art.
Fet's poetry is the poetry of hints, guesses, omissions; his poems for the most part do not have a plot - they are lyrical miniatures, the purpose of which is to convey not so much thoughts and feelings as the “volatile” mood of the poet.
IN landscape lyrics Feta has perfected his insight into the slightest changes in the state of nature. Thus, the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” consists exclusively of nominal sentences. Due to the fact that there is not a single verb in the sentence, the effect of a precisely captured momentary impression is created.
Poem
The night was shining. The garden was full of moonlight. were lying
Rays at our feet in a living room with no lights
can be compared with Pushkin’s “I Remember a Wonderful Moment.” Just like Pushkin, Fetov’s poem has two main parts: it talks about the first meeting with the heroine and the second. The years that passed after the first meeting were days of loneliness and melancholy:
And many tedious and boring years have passed...
The finale expresses the power of true love, which lifts the poet above time and death:
But there is no end to life, and there is no other goal,
As soon as you believe in the sobbing sounds,
Love you, hug you and cry over you!
Poem " Drive away a living boat with one push" - about poetry. For Fet, art is one of the forms of expression of beauty. It is the poet, believes A.A. Fet is able to express something “that makes the tongue go numb.”
Tyutchev Fedor Ivanovich (1803 - 1873)
Tyutchev - "one of the greatest lyricists who existed on earth."
Born F.I. Tyutchev on December 5, 1803 in the city of Ovstug, Bryansk district, Oryol region. The future poet received an excellent literary education. At the age of 13, he became a free student at Moscow University. At the age of 18 he graduated from the literature department of Moscow University. In 1822 he entered the service of the State College of Foreign Affairs and went to Munich for diplomatic service. Only 20 years later he returned to Russia.
For the first time, Tyutchev’s poems were published in Pushkin’s Sovremennik in 1836, the poems were a tremendous success, but after Pushkin’s death, Tyutchev did not publish his works, and his name was gradually forgotten. An unprecedented interest in the poet’s work flared up again in 1854, when Nekrasov published a whole selection of his poems in his Sovremennik.
Among the main themes of F.I.’s lyrics. Tyutchev can be distinguished as philosophical, landscape, love.
The poet thinks a lot about life, death, the purpose of man, the relationship between man and nature.
Poems about nature trace the idea of animating nature, belief in its mysterious life:
Not what you think, nature:
Not a cast, not a soulless face -
She has a soul, she has freedom,
It has love, it has language.
Nature appears in Tyutchev's lyrics in the struggle of opposing forces, in the continuous change of day and night.
No wonder winter is angry -
Its time has passed.
Spring is knocking on the window
And he drives him out of the yard.
Tyutchev was especially attracted to transitional, intermediate moments in the life of nature. The poem “Autumn Evening” shows a picture of autumn twilight; in the poem “I Love a Thunderstorm in Early May” we enjoy, together with the poet, the first thunder of spring.
Reflecting on the fate of his Motherland, Tyutchev writes one of his most famous poems:
You can't understand Russia with your mind,
The general arshin cannot be measured:
She will become special -
You can only believe in Russia.
Among the best creations of Tyutchev are love lyrics, imbued with the deepest psychologism, genuine humanity, and nobility.
In his declining years, Tyutchev experienced the greatest feeling in his life - love for Elena Alexandrovna Denisyeva. The poems that he dedicated to her were included in the so-called “Denisevsky cycle” (“Oh, how murderously we love”, “More than once have you heard a confession”, “Last love”, etc.). On July 15, 1873, Tyutchev died.
The school of “pure art” emerged in the 50s and 60s. XIX century Poets of this movement concentrated their attention on the category of beauty and philosophy in life and tried do not touch in his works "hot" topics politics, social conflicts, etc. The largest representatives of “pure art” were F.I. Tyutchev and A.A. Fet.
Tyutchev’s aesthetic views were formed under the influence of Pushkin, whose memory the poet treated very reverently: “ Russia's heart will not forget you, like its first love.». Distinctive feature poetry Tyutchev - in her philosophy. The themes of Tyutchev's poems are varied, but the dominant motif is author's philosophical reflection– be it intimate lyrics or lyrics about nature, etc.
Nature appears to the poet as a perfect, ideal category, hence the anger towards indifferent people who are unable to see the naturalness of nature and understand its language: “ Not what you think, nature: // Not a cast, not a soulless face - // It has a soul, it has freedom, // It has love, it has language" Subtle observation, warmth, lyricism and even confessionalism are manifested in the poems “There is in the original autumn”, “Quietly flowing in the lake”, etc.
Nature is closely connected – through invisible connections – with man, the “thinking reed”. Man is considered by the poet as a part of nature, while nature itself is seen by him as the harmonious infinity of the Universe. The human soul is seen as a secret that needs to be preserved: “ Just know how to live within yourself, // There is a whole world in your soul"("Silentium!").
For Tyutchev, love is a “fatal duel,” but at the same time, it is also the greatest happiness. Drama, disastrous passion, a storm of feelings are presented in Tyutchev’s love lyrics: “ Oh, how murderously we love, // As in the violent blindness of passions // We most certainly destroy, // What is dear to our hearts!».
A deep love for E. Denisyeva, a passionate woman similar to Dostoevsky’s women, and her early death were the impetus for the creation of the “Denisyevsky” cycle of poems, the main features of which are confession, sympathy for a woman, and the desire to understand her soul. 
Tyutchev's love for the Motherland is akin to Loremont's love - a strange, contradictory feeling. For the poet, Russia is deep and unknowable, and its soul is original and irrational: “ You can’t understand Russia with your mind, // You can’t measure it with a common arshin: // It has become special – // You can only believe in Russia».
The theme of the poet and poetry is revealed by Tyutchev specifically: the poet, according to the author, must always be at the center of events and only by this “involvement” in the great can he immortalize himself: “ Happy is he who visited this world // In his fatal moments! // He was called by the all-good // As an interlocutor at a feast"(Cicero).
The idea of the transience of time, discussions about life and death, about human happiness are the dominant motives of Tyutchev’s poems, emphasizing the depth and versatility of his poetry: “ It is not given to us to predict // How our word will respond, // And we are given sympathy, // How grace is given to us».
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In the middle of the 19th century, disputes between supporters of the so-called “pure” and “utilitarian” art intensified. The first believed that art has meaning in itself, as the reproduction and creation of something beautiful that always excites the soul of a person, the second put art at the service of social tasks. Representatives of “pure” art were Tyutchev, Fet, Maikov, Polonsky, Grigoriev and some other poets, representatives of “utilitarian” art were Nekrasov, Pleshcheev, Nadson. A.K. occupied a difficult position in this struggle. Tolstoy. Each side was obviously right in its own way; supporters of “pure” art turned to eternal universal humanistic values, representatives of “utilitarian” art rightly pointed out the need to fight for the democratization of society through the means of art.
Among the poets of “pure” art, Pushkin’s motifs of poetry as a divine gift, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, were widely developed. So, turning to his Muse, Fet writes: “Caring carefully for your freedom, / I did not invite the uninitiated to you / And to please their slavish rampage / I did not desecrate your speeches.” The muse appears to the poet as “an imperishable goddess with a thoughtful smile on her brow,” “a cherished shrine.” Tyutchev developed this motif even further: in the poems “Silentium”, “Be silent, please, don’t you dare wake me up...”, “We are not given the opportunity to predict...” the poet talks about the fatal misunderstanding of people with each other, which even the poet is unable to overcome. Tyutchev also hears Pushkin’s motif of contrasting the poet with the crowd; So, about his soul, he writes: “My soul, Elysium of shadows, / What do life and you have in common! / Between you, the ghosts of past, better days, / And this insensitive crowd?..” The Pushkin and Lermontov tradition of understanding poetry as a divine gift, and the poet as a prophet, is also developed by Grigoriev: “The poet is a prophet, it is given to him / To see in the future stranger. / He is familiar with everything that is dark for others, / Fate’s chosen one. / The unknown distance / Of the days to come is naked...” We find an interesting interpretation of poetry in Polonsky: he was perhaps the first to bring art and science closer together. “The world, like a new sun, shines / The light of science, and only with him / The Muse adorns the brow / With a fresh wreath "
A.K. took an interesting position on the question of the purpose of poetry. Tolstoy. Not alien to the themes and problems of “pure” art in his lyrics, he nevertheless admitted in one of his poems: “Art for art’s sake / I match with a bird’s whistle.” He also owns a wonderful miniature about the citizenship of art, about the connection of the poet with the fate of his homeland and people:
A writer, if only he is a Wave, and the ocean is Russia,
Can't help but be outraged
When the elements are outraged.
A writer, if only he is the nerve of a great people.
Can't help but be amazed
When freedom is defeated.
Writers opposite direction They defended citizenship in art and the need to serve high social ideals. Art, in their opinion, should lead to struggle, even if the poet himself will not be awarded a laurel wreath for his work. Here, Gogol’s traditions of contrasting the easy road of sublime creativity and the thorny path of a citizen poet were very strongly felt, as for example in this poem by Pleshcheev: “Even though the smooth path is tempting, / But you are your high goal, / Poet, both in songs and in deeds / Unshakably faithful be... Walk through the thorns / Without encouragement and crown. / And be a fearless fighter, / A fighter for human rights.”
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