Text of the book “Free Elements”. Articles about Pushkin's work"

Romantic lyrics

What is romanticism? Views of A.S. Pushkin on romanticism. Romantic lyrics: Romantic poem by A.S. Pushkin's "Prisoner of the Caucasus"

Bibliography

Not all of Pushkin's lyrical poems of 1820-1824 can be called romantic. And at the time of his romanticism, Pushkin wrote a number of poems in the classical spirit and going back to Russian literature of the eighteenth century. In Pushkin's poems of the romantic period we often find a non-romantic appeal to classical mythology. Pushkin’s 1824 poem “Proserpina” is entirely based on it, beginning with the words: The waters of Phlegethon are splashing, The vaults of Tartarus are trembling, The horses of pale Pluto are rushing quickly to the nymphs of Pelion From Hades the god is rushing. These lines are steeped in mythology. And the style of Pushkin’s poems of the romantic period, containing mythological motifs, is far from the “discontinuity” of the romantic style. These are the excellent anthological poems “Muse” and “Nereid”: Among the green waves kissing Taurida, At dawn I saw a Nereid. Hidden between the trees, I barely dared to breathe: Above the clear moisture, the demigoddess lifted her young breast, white as a swan, and squeezed foam from her hair in a stream. They have smooth, seemingly rounded ends. And yet, the brightest and most daring lyrical works of Pushkin from 1820-1824 are romantic poems. They are permeated by the idea of ​​human freedom. Pushkin the romantic was outraged not only by the lack of freedom in an autocratic state, he was repulsed by the spiritual pettiness of the social elite. He noticed this small detail in the column M.S. Vorontsov, under whose command he was forced to serve in Odessa. In a poem about him, Pushkin ironically contrasted Vorontsov’s “good tone” with truly outstanding mental and moral qualities: He did not keep Deep plans and thoughts in his reserve; He did not have a brilliant mind, he was not very courageous in soul; But he was dry, polite and important. (“I don’t know where, but not here”). Pushkin’s romantic lyrics sometimes tell how dispassion arises and how passion disappears. This is discussed in the poem “Black Shawl”. The hero, having survived the betrayal of his beloved, the “young Greek woman” whom he “passionately loved,” and killed her, comes to complete spiritual coldness. He forever forgets about female beauty, just like the old gypsy in Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsies.” There are even coincidences of texts here: Since then I haven’t kissed those lovely eyes, Since then I haven’t known happy nights. I look like crazy at the black shawl, And my cold soul is tormented by sadness. ("Black Shawl")...From now on, all the maidens of the world hate me; Between them my gaze never chose a girlfriend, And I no longer shared lonely leisure with anyone. (The story of an old gypsy). In both cases, the catastrophic disappearance of passion becomes a tragic milestone in a person’s life. (“Since then”, “From now on” is precisely a line in time). But more often than spiritual cold, in the lyrics of the romantic Pushkin we see spiritual burning, powerful fiery passion. It also appears when Pushkin talks about his political passion as a poet. “I became known among people through passion of will and persecution,” writes Pushkin in one of his letters to V.F. Raevsky. And yet, Pushkin the romantic put forward the theme of love with its fundamental psychologism. Therefore, in his love works his philosophy of passions was most brilliantly developed and his conviction that a romantic poet should live in the element of bright, intense passion was most clearly manifested. Pushkin's idea of ​​passion is associated with images of flame. In the poet’s heart lives “fiery passion”, “fiery delight”, the “kisses” of the beloved are “so fiery”, “a new heat excites the blood”, the beloved “pours” “fire” into the soul, “youthful ardor of passions”... The image is contrasted with this flame what remains from love burning is the image of ashes. In “The Burnt Letter” Pushkin writes: It is finished! Dark curled sheets; On the light ashes, their cherished features turn white... My chest felt shy. Dear ashes, Poor consolation in my sad fate, Stay forever with me on my sorrowful chest... The poet calls the ashes “sweet”, “light”. For him, ashes are the only “solace.” This is all that remains of love, of all that was dear to him. Living in the elements of passion, the romantic poet often talks about the uniqueness of his love, which captures his entire being. “Everything is a sacrifice to your memory,” he addresses Vorontsova. He even needs fame only so that it will always remind his beloved of him. In the poem “Desire for Glory,” dedicated to Vorontsova, we read: I wish for glory, so that with my name your ears would be amazed all the time, so that you would be surrounded by me, so that with loud rumors everything, everything around you would sound about me... This “single” feeling makes the poet live with the image of his beloved even when she is not with him. Often in Pushkin’s love lyrics a vision appears - a memory that replaces reality. In the poem “Night”, dedicated to Amalia Riznich, the image of his beloved appears before the poet “in the silence of the dark night” with amazing clarity, possible only with enormous strength of feeling. He even hears the sounds of her voice, her passionate confessions: In the darkness, your eyes shine before me. They smile at me, and I hear the sounds: My friend, my gentle friend... I love... yours... yours The same, only softened vision-memory is in the famous poem “To ***”. The poet also sees the face of his beloved woman and hears her voice: In the languor of hopeless sadness, In the worries of noisy bustle, A gentle voice sounded to me for a long time, And I dreamed of sweet features. And in the poem “The stormy day has gone out...”, dedicated to Vorontsova, the poet has a vision - a memory. But this time it is purely visual. The poet sees his beloved against the backdrop of southern nature - the moving “luxurious veil” of the sea: ... she is now walking along the mountain To the shores, drowned by noisy waves; There, under the treasured rocks, Now she sits, sad and alone... In Pushkin’s love lyrics, the enormous emotional power of the poet’s experiences in most cases breaks the orderliness of artistic forms. The style becomes dynamic, sharply expressive and even “torn”. Such “discontinuity” reflects the poet’s emotional agitation and the contradictory nature of his love experiences, which defy order. Questions and exclamations follow each other in the poem “The Desire for Glory,” where the poet complains about the intrigues that have arisen in connection with this love: So what? Tears, torment, Betrayal, slander, everything suddenly fell on my head... What am I, where am I? I stand like a traveler struck by lightning in the desert, and everything before me was eclipsed! What a storm of feelings we see in these verses! We feel all the experiences of the lyrical hero. The poem “The Rainy Day Has Extinguished” ends with an extremely expressive description of the beloved’s loneliness: Alone... no one cries or yearns for her; No one kisses her knees into oblivion; Alone... she does not betray to anyone’s lips Neither shoulders, nor wet lips, nor snow-white breasts, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No one is worthy of her heavenly love. Isn’t it true: you’re alone... you’re crying... I’m calm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But if. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . All this is unusually strong. The rows of dots graphically express the agitated intermittency and spasmodic nature of the lover's emotions. These points at the same time hint at what is hidden in the depths of the poet’s psychology. And most remarkable of all is the last “But if...”. This suddenly breaks off the poem and even deprives it of its external harmony and consistency of rhyme. This is a brilliant “But if...” The sudden break in the narrator's speech reveals the lover's jealous excitement more clearly than words. The “extension” of the implied thought is depicted by ellipsis, occupying almost an entire line: the poet would feel deeply unhappy if the woman he loved were not alone and fell in love with another person. All this poetry of passions and dispassion had the artistic goal of revealing the psychological. the inner world of the individual and recreate her image. But the romantics also faced another task: abandoning the traditions of “classical” poetry, they sought to paint an individual image of the nation. The romantic Pushkin solved this problem. A true masterpiece of Pushkin’s romantic reproduction of Russian national color was “The Song of the Prophetic Oleg.” Here not only is the chronicle legend used and the era of ancient Greek paganism is brilliantly depicted, but also the clearly romantic plot of a wonderful mysterious prediction is taken. Here Pushkin appears the theme of a poet-prophet, not subject to any earthly authority, endowed with the power of unmistakable foresight, which sets him apart from ordinary people. The “inspired magician” who predicts the death of Oleg opens up a long series of such Pushkin heroes as the prophet from the first “Imitation of the Koran”, Andre Chénier, Mozart and others. This is evidenced by the words of the “Song”: The Magi are not afraid of mighty rulers, And the princely gift is not for them their prophetic language is needed, truthful and free, and friendly with the will of heaven. The coming years lurk in darkness; But I see your lot on your bright brow. In the lyrical poems of the romantic Pushkin, depicting the life of different nations, there are no corresponding landscapes or they have almost nothing nationally characteristic. There are no landscapes in the poems “Faithful Greek!” , “The Greek Woman” (only the rather abstract “sky of sacred Greece” is mentioned), “Black Shawl” (only the “Danube waves” are mentioned, where the killer’s slave threw the dead bodies). And in Pushkin’s “Russian” works there are few national landscape images. Pushkin was able to describe the life of different peoples against the backdrop of the corresponding national landscapes only in his southern poems. But in Pushkin’s romantic lyrics there are magnificent “personal” landscape poems, depicting exotic nature and at the same time imbued with deep and subtle psychologism. These poems are not associated with the image of any national environment, but with the experiences of the poet himself, with his perception of life. The seascapes of Romantic Pushkin are beautiful. Pushkin saw the sea as the embodiment of disobedience and rebellion. It is not for nothing that in his poem “The Prisoner” the eagle, striving for freedom, called the poet to fly “to where the edges of the sea turn blue.” In the poem “The Daylight Has Gone Out,” the excitement of the ocean awakens in the poet memories of his past “wishes and hopes,” about his past “mad love,” which he is unable to forget, and an infinitely strong desire for new impressions. The lines of this poem are written not only about the sea, but also about the excitement of the poet’s soul: Make noise, make noise, obedient sail, Worry beneath me, gloomy ocean I see a distant shore, Magical lands of the midday; I rush there with excitement and longing; Intoxicated with memories... And I feel: tears were born in my eyes again; The soul boils and freezes; A familiar dream flies around me; I remembered the crazy love of previous years, And everything that I suffered, and everything that is dear to my heart, The languid deception of desires and hopes... These lines perfectly combine the agitated sea and the soul in excitement. Such is the romantic poetry of Pushkin. Surprisingly subtle and sublime, it became artistic material for many major Russian composers, who found in it a world of noble emotions. Beautiful romances by A.N. were written based on the texts of these lyrics. Verstovsky, M.I. Glinka, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov and others. The romance by N.A. is especially remarkable. Rimsky-Korsakov, written on the text of Pushkin’s poem “The flying ridge of clouds is thinning...”. When, after listening to this romance, you begin to read Pushkin’s poem, you involuntarily repeat exactly those intonations that are given in Rimsky-Korsakov’s romance. This is how the music organically merges with the text of the romance. But still, the main area of ​​Pushkin’s romantic lyrics is the area of ​​love experiences. Therefore, all of his romantic poems had love plots. They expressed strong, “fiery” passions and polar spiritual coolness even more clearly than in the romantic lyrics. So how did all this manifest itself in his poems?



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Tomashevsky B.: Pushkin. Book One Chapter III. South. 34. Romanticism of Pushkin

In the very definition of a new work, Pushkin encountered contradictions. On the one hand, he calls “Onegin” “the motley stanzas of a romantic poem,” on the other hand, he reproaches N. Raevsky for expecting romanticism, but finding “satire and cynicism.”

Here two ideas about romanticism collided (both rather shaky). On the one hand, romanticism was understood as freedom of creativity, mainly freedom from classical “rules”, and united in the single concept of “romanticism” everything moving forward towards new forms in poetry. On the other hand, romanticism meant those features that were defined as typical for the young movement, and this direction, like the term itself, was considered not within the national framework of Russian literature, but within the framework of pan-European ones. When Pushkin wrote about the “variegated stanzas of a romantic poem,” he took the word “romantic” in its first meaning. Approximately the same thing is expressed in the last lines of Eugene Onegin, where Pushkin calls his work a “free novel.” The epithet “motley” has the same meaning: Pushkin speaks of the free development of his theme, the freedom of digressions, changing descriptions with stories, etc. The word “romanticism” is used in a completely different sense when applied to the criticism of N. Raevsky. What is meant here is the sublimely dreamy direction that is characteristic of the New Romantics, those qualities that stemmed from the cult of the heroic personality characteristic of the young school.

Pushkin considered himself a romantic in the sense of the word, which included poetic innovation, a bold and free violation of outdated forms and traditions in literature. For him, in this sense, the concept of “romantic” was opposed to the concept of “classic”. But he did not reduce the literary struggle that was waged in the Russian situation to the polemics of classics and romantics in the form in which it was defined in the West. That is why Pushkin reproached Vyazemsky for publishing his “Conversation” during the first edition of “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” “more for Europe.” “Where are the enemies of romantic poetry? where are the classical pillars? (P.A. Vyazemsky, April 1824). Pushkin calls himself the “Romantic Robber” (to his brother, June 13, 1824).

During these years, the word “romanticism” did not leave the pages of Russian magazines. It was found in reviews of Pushkin’s poems, in O. Somov’s discussion “On Romantic Poetry” (1823), and polemically put forward in P. Vyazemsky’s preface to “The Bakhchisarai Fountain.” Everywhere Pushkin was proclaimed the most prominent representative of Russian romanticism, and Pushkin did not protest against this. But as soon as it came to determining what the main features of the new direction were, disagreements began. The presentation of the foundations of romanticism was usually limited to either translations of critical articles from Western European magazines or their compilations. Such a compilation is the argument of O. Somov (mainly based on Stahl’s book “On Germany”). The matter was complicated by the fact that they tried to apply the term “romantics” to young Russian poets of the “new school” and to comprehend, within the framework of the pan-European struggle of the classics and romantics, the already defined struggle of the “new school” with its opponents. The general definitions of romanticism, which suffered from instability in the West, were mechanically transferred to purely Russian literary relations.

Pushkin did not make his own path dependent on the forms into which the romantic movement took shape. This is especially felt in his assessments of Western trends. In the early 20s, Byron was his idol. However, he did not think of subordinating himself to those forms of romanticism that he found in the works of the English poet. Regarding his death, he wrote to Vyazemsky (June 24-25, 1824): “Byron’s genius paled with his youth... He was created completely inside out; there was no gradualism in him, he suddenly matured and matured, sang and fell silent; and his first sounds did not return to him - after the 4th song of Ghild-Harold we did not hear Byron, but some other poet with high human talent wrote.” This review is quite cold and rather indicates that the former charm of the Byron name has disappeared.

Romanticism was most noisily established in French literature, which was closest to the Russian reader. Pushkin had a particularly harsh attitude towards French romanticism. In a draft of a letter to Vyazemsky (July 5, 1824) we read: “The age of romanticism has not yet arrived for France - Lavigne is fighting in the old networks of Aristotle - he is a student of the tragedian Voltaire,294 and not of nature. Tous les recueils de poésies nouvelles dites romantiques sont la honte de la littérature française.”295 And Pushkin came to the sad conclusion: “for now there is less poetry in France than here.”

All this indicates that Pushkin was not at all seduced by Western romanticism. To an even greater extent, he felt free from the romantic forms of Russian literature, since Russian romantics in these years did not go beyond the imitation of Pushkin and Zhukovsky.

Therefore, when Pushkin wrote about N. Raevsky’s judgment regarding “Eugene Onegin,” he could not mean by the name “romanticism” either any version of Western European romanticism, or any Russian romantic work with its features. Of course, N. Raevsky, in Pushkin’s new work, was looking for the same features that he saw in Pushkin’s previous works: in “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “The Robber Brothers” and “The Bakhchisarai Fountain”. It was in these poems that “romanticism” was present, which was no longer present in “Eugene Onegin”.

“Eugene Onegin” marks the overcoming of the poetic system in which southern poems were written. Initially, Pushkin, apparently, did not realize that the new work was taking him away from this “romanticism” altogether, and considered his novel as a work of a special style. It is characteristic that he simultaneously began a new romantic poem, “The Gypsies.” Further work on the novel showed that a return to the romanticism of southern poems is no longer possible. However, Pushkin continued to use the term “romanticism” (sometimes with the epithet “true”) to define his literary direction.

To understand the definition of the style of “Eugene Onegin” given by Pushkin in a letter to his brother, there is no need to turn to the literary polemics of those years and reveal those qualities that were noted by the criticism of that time. It is enough to compare the new work with southern poems.

“Poems and Prose”, sublime inspiration and ironic conversation, luxury of imagination and everyday details of “Onegin” - Pushkin regarded all this in contrast to his new work with the romanticism of southern poems. And for the high dreams of romance, the low prose of Onegin was, of course, “satire and cynicism.” These words must be understood not in their absolute meaning, but only in comparison with what was previously written.

Already the first stanza of the novel ended with the “cynical” reflection of the hero: “Well, will the devil take you soon!”296

And this cynic, the “rake” is portrayed as a hero, as a friend of the author, who enters into a casual conversation with the reader:

Friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan, With the hero of my novel Without preamble, this very hour Born on the banks of the Neva, Where, perhaps, you were born Or shone, my reader; But the north is bad for me.

Thus, the author intruded into the story as a friend of the hero and, along the way, made ironic hints about his own fate, which was quite well known among very wide circles of readers, knowledgeable about the fate of Russian literature and the personal fate of its largest representatives.

“Cynicism and satire” also consisted in the fact that instead of romantic outpourings, the author shared the “cynical” moods of the hero and clearly included himself among his intimate friends and like-minded people. Friendly relations were strongly emphasized:

My friend was burning with impatience... And at the age of sixteen my friend completed his course of science... Having overthrown the decency of the world, How he fell behind the bustle, I liked his features... My friend Onegin, for example, Was a very sweet fanatic.

The ease of the conversation was reminiscent of a similar tone in “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” as the author himself pointed out. This is indirectly contained in the mention of the first poem in the quoted verses of the second stanza; it is even more clearly stated in the preface, written shortly after arriving in Mikhailovskoye and reflecting the same attitude towards the poem that we saw in the letters of the Odessa period: “Several songs are ready. Written, apparently, under the influence of favorable circumstances, they bear the imprint of the gaiety that marked the first works of the author of the Caucasian Prisoner. Among these first works, Pushkin had Ruslan and Lyudmila in mind most of all.

The author’s “gaiety” contained notes of protest: everywhere Pushkin emphasized that persecution did not break him. We see this from the constant hints about the circumstances of his exile life; This is the meaning of the ironic mention of “favorable circumstances”, the notes: “Written in Bessarabia” (the first note to the novel), “Written in Odessa”, a return to the theme of Ovid’s exile, etc.

The style of casual conversation is emphasized by the special intonation of the narrative, colloquial phraseology with characteristic phrases: “What do you want more?..”, “But if I tell you the truth...”, “There’s no time to spread the word...”, “So, let’s put aside care...”, etc.

The tone of the conversation brought the narrator’s own “I” closer to the reader. This “I” in Onegin is complex, and we will have to return to this issue in a general analysis of the novel. Here we note some of the features that determined the artistic system of storytelling. The “author” of the novel is not identical with the author of “Ruslan and Lyudmila”: he acts not only as a narrator, but also as a participant, as an acquaintance of Evgeniy; Already in the first chapter a meeting with Eugene at night on the embankment is described. Consequently, the “author” is a distinctly literary character, a participant in a fictional action, although he bears the traits of Pushkin himself. This combination of fiction and reality allows Pushkin to give the “author” the psychological characteristics that he considers necessary in the interests of the narrative. The fact that self-characterization does not always coincide with reality, Pushkin admits in the last chapters of the novel (chapter VI, stanza XLIV):

Is it really true, and really, Without elegiac undertakings, The spring of my days has flown by And is there really no return for it? Am I really going to be thirty soon?

Here the word “elegiac” is used in the sense of “feigned” (i.e., belonging to the field of poetic invention), as in a letter to my brother on January 24, 1822: “... my friends, as if on purpose, decided to justify my elegiac misanthropy” (i.e. feigned misanthropy, glorified in elegies).

“elegiac” is present in the novel from its first chapters. It is possible that it was precisely this mood, not inherent in Pushkin himself, but penetrating into the digressions, into the lyrical outpourings of the “author,” that Pushkin had in mind when he said in the preface to the first chapter: “... they will condemn... some stanzas written in the tedious kind of young elegies " After all, one of the features of the “young” (in print “newest”) elegies was complaints about the passing of youth (cf. in a note about prose in 1822: “With memories of past youth, our literature will not move far forward”).

On the other hand, the “author” was portrayed as having had years of fascination with “romanticism” in his past:

And to me lovely objects - and my soul preserved their sweet image, And then the muse fell in love. And the maiden of the mountains, my ideal...

These lines already contain the not yet fully defined beginning of those reflections on overcoming “romanticism”, which received complete expression in the famous poems of Onegin’s Travels.

At the same time, the “author” acts as Onegin’s like-minded person in his “cynical” assessments of “lofty” concepts. The “author” renounces “solemn” language:

And my solemn vocabulary is not my law, as it was in the old days...

The “author” willingly exposes “sacred” concepts. He does not spare the high concept of friendship:

Friends and friendship are boring

(option: “I’m tired of holy friendship”).

So people (I’m the first to repent) There’s nothing to do

But the author and his hero especially attack love.

It is not nature that teaches us love, But the first dirty romance... But it is enough to amuse the arrogant. They are not worth neither passions, nor the songs inspired by them. The lips and eyes of these creatures

The heat in both hearts has gone away!

The skepticism of the author and the hero was visible in the poems, which sounded like an evil mockery of what was considered inviolable in the poetry of that time (and especially in elegiac poetry):

The moon, the heavenly lamp... Was it not to her that we dedicated And tears, the joy of secret torments, But now we see only in her A replacement for dim lanterns.

Of course, for the romantic poet all this seemed offensive and cynical. True, this skepticism sometimes received restrictions, and in the author’s reflections we sometimes encounter remarks showing that he does not fully share the hero’s skepticism:

Forgivable at seventeen years old. He who believes in a feeling is a poet, or wants to express art above the gullible crowd. .. My God!..

The poet emphasizes that in Onegin he had no intention of portraying himself: the poet hurries between the hero and the author in order to avoid reproaches:

Flowers! Love! village - idleness! Fields!.. And I am glad to notice this difference Between Onegin and me, So that my discerning reader or some publisher, Bringing our features together here, will not then shamelessly repeat, That I painted my portrait in it, Like Byron, the poet of pride, Paint another subject loving, As soon as about ourselves.

Sometimes in the author’s digressions an elegiac tone is heard, somewhat contradicting the “cynicism” of the rest. These are the arguments in stanzas LVIII, LIX of the first chapter, concerning the main question: what is the reason for the author’s disappointment? Pushkin combined the romantic enthusiasm of his previous poems with the theme of passions, in particular with the theme of suffering love (“hidden love”). Here he returns to this topic again in connection with the question of romantic plots. Directly after those verses in which Pushkin lists the plots of romantic poems (“maiden of the mountains”, “captives of the banks of Salgir”), there are poems on the topic of romantic love:

Now from you, my friends, For whom did my lyre sigh, Which of our maidens Enlivened your melody?

And Pushkin gives an answer to this question not in a “cynical” style at all:

- children!.. no one, by God. Love's crazy anxiety I experienced too much...

Love passed, the muse appeared, and the dark mind became clear. Free, again looking for the union of Magic sounds, feelings and thoughts. - and the heart does not yearn, The pen, having forgotten itself, does not draw Near unfinished poems, Women’s legs, then heads, The extinguished ashes will no longer flare up, And soon, soon the trace of the storm In my soul will completely subside. Then I will begin to write the Poem of Songs at thirty-five.

“and the dark mind became clear.” The time for short “poem-stories” has passed. Now we can begin the big epic plan (“thirty-five songs”), in which, of course, according to classical models, an objective story will prevail, and not lyrical digressions of the romantic style. All this is said simply and without any “frills”.

So, “cynicism and satire” of a new work are not absolute assessments at all. They are noticeable in the novel only to those who are looking for “romanticism,” the enthusiastically sublime outpourings of a poet romantically in love.

“satirical” lingered in Pushkin’s phraseology, and he repeats this word when characterizing his new work. We also find a trace of this phraseology in the preface to the novel, printed under the first chapter: “... may we be allowed to draw the readers’ attention to merits that are rare in a satirical writer: the absence of an offensive personality and the observation of strict decency in a comic description of morals” (in the handwritten version there was also phrase: “We boldly offer them a work where they will find true and entertaining observations under a light blanket of satirical gaiety”).

These words of Pushkin were the source of misunderstandings. Not only N. Raevsky was dissatisfied, not finding “romanticism” in the novel. A. Bestuzhev, who reported his impressions in a letter to Pushkin, had the same attitude towards the first chapter of Onegin. This letter has not survived, but its content can be judged by Pushkin’s response: “Bestuzhev writes to me a lot about Onegin; tell him that he is wrong: does he really want to banish everything light and cheerful from the realm of poetry? where will the satires and comedies go?..” (to Ryleev, January 25, 1825).

Controversy followed in letters from Bestuzhev, Ryleev and Pushkin. It is not known to us in full, but the main subject of the dispute can be established from the letters of Bestuzhev and Ryleev that have reached us. Bestuzhev wrote to Pushkin: “Let's talk about Onegin

. You very skillfully repel objections about the subject, but I am not convinced that there is a great merit in fertilizing the meager field of the subject, although I agree that a lot of art and labor is needed here... The higher the subject, the more strength is needed to embrace it - to comprehend it , to animate him... - this is undoubtedly, but did you give Onegin poetic forms other than poetry? did you put him in contrast with the light so as to show his sharp features in harsh slander? “I see a dandy who is devoted to fashion with soul and body, I see a person whom I meet thousands in reality, because the coldest and misanthropic and strangeness are now among the toiletries” (March 9, 1825).

Ryleev complemented these objections: “I don’t know what Onegin will do next... but now he is lower than the Bakhchisarai fountain and the Caucasian prisoner... Byron’s opinion you cited is unfair. A poet who described a deck of cards better than another tree is not always taller than his opponent... I also do not agree that Onegin is taller than the Bakhchisaray fountain and the Caucasian prisoner” (March 10, 1825).297

"Onegin". For A. Bestuzhev, with his romantic norms, it was not clear how one could portray a typical person, “a person I meet thousands of in reality.” Onegin's assessment was clearly influenced by the impression made on Bestuzhev by Griboedov's comedy. He wants Onegin to be like Chatsky in his attitude towards society: “... did you put him in contrast with the light in order to show his sharp features in harsh slander?” Only the hero, in contrast with his environment, is justified for Bestuzhev as the subject of poetic depiction. This is how Chatsky was, this is how Onegin should be.

On these same days, Pushkin read “Woe from Wit” (in Mikhailovsky, where I. Pushchin brought Griboyedov’s comedy).

In a letter to A. Bestuzhev (January 1825), Pushkin gave an analysis of “Woe from Wit.” From the point of view of artistic depiction, Pushkin condemned Chatsky most severely: “Do you know what Chatsky is? An ardent, noble and kind fellow, who spent some time with a very smart man (namely Griboyedov) and was imbued with his thoughts, witticisms and satirical remarks. Everything he says is very smart. But who is he telling all this to? Famusov! Skalozub! At the ball for Moscow grandmothers! Molchalin! This is unforgivable. The first sign of an intelligent person is to know at first glance who you are dealing with and not throw pearls in front of the Repetilovs and the like.”

So, Pushkin condemned two features in the role of Chatsky: 1) the fact that Griboyedov himself is hiding behind Chatsky, and, therefore, Chatsky is not an objective character, but a mouthpiece for the author’s personal opinions; 2) the fact that in Chatsky’s behavior the typical truth of behavior is not observed: Chatsky speaks in Griboedov’s comedy not to those who are on stage, but directly to the audience, and this violates the truth of the human relationships depicted on stage.

“A dramatic writer must be judged according to the laws he has recognized above himself.” In the dramatic system of "Woe from Wit" there were no contradictions in the fact that the satirical gallery of types was shaded by a positive character, who, precisely as a positive hero, made speeches from the author and in his speeches did not take into account the psychological conditions of the conversation on stage. Chatsky’s speeches are an accusatory commentary on everyday pictures, and Chatsky himself is not an everyday hero, but an ideal hero, opposed to everyday figures and expressing not real reality, but the ideas of the author.

But Pushkin became so established in his new poetic system of depicting modern life that, first of all, he noted as a drawback that in Griboedov’s comedy system diverged from his new poetics. In his romantic poems, the speeches of the heroes were also outpourings, not always justified by the psychology of the relationship with the interlocutor. But after Onegin this seemed impossible to Pushkin, at least within the framework of everyday pictures of modern society.

So, typicality in the depiction of heroes and their actions is the feature of “Onegin” that remained misunderstood by A. Bestuzhev. What Pushkin called “cynicism and satire” was essentially an assessment of the new style from the perspective of romanticism. What might offend the romantic was a consequence of the fundamental quality of the new work. This quality did not have its name during the years of the creation of Eugene Onegin. The term “realism” gained its rights much later. In his characterization of the style of the new work, Pushkin noted not its most significant features, but what distinguished Onegin from romantic poems. The dispute with Ryleev and Bestuzhev clarified the situation, especially since the ambiguity of the term “satire” became clear. Bestuzhev understood this word not as one of the qualities of the new style, but as a direct indication of the genre of the novel, and began to make demands on Onegin that apply only to satires in the proper sense of the word. All this is explained in Pushkin’s response to A. Bestuzhev on March 24, 1825. Pushkin yielded to Ryleev in his objection to Byron’s words: “I don’t write to Ryleev...”. Unfortunately, this “refutation” remains unknown to us. Pushkin strongly objects to Bestuzhev on the issue of satire: “You talk about the satire of the Englishman Byron, and compare it with mine, and demand the same from me! No, my soul, you want a lot. Where is my satire of Eugene Onegin

.
My embankment would crackle if I touched satire. satirical
itself should not be in the preface. Wait for other songs..." Note that the word “satirical” was put by Pushkin himself in the preface when the third chapter of the novel was coming to an end. The rejection of this word, formulated in this letter, is not at all explained by the fact that as the work progressed, Pushkin changed his plan or revised his initial view of the nature of his novel: the whole point is that Pushkin and Bestuzhev put different content into this word, and it was precisely this dispute that showed Pushkin that the word “satire” in the sense in which Pushkin applied it to “Onegin” is the cause of bewilderment and misunderstanding of the true intent of the novel.

This also refutes another widespread opinion that, by its nature, the first chapter supposedly contained elements of satire, and in the following chapters this satire no longer exists.298 Bestuzhev, indeed, knew only one chapter at the time of the dispute; As for Pushkin, he first uttered the word “satire” when he was writing the second chapter, and continued to use it when he was approaching the end of the third. By the way, Pushkin wrote the second chapter without any interruption after the first, and the initial and last stanzas of the first chapter show that the idea of ​​the second chapter was present in Pushkin when he started writing Onegin. In a letter to Bestuzhev, he says: “The first song is just a quick introduction, and I am pleased with it (which very rarely happens to me).” Pushkin could not agree with Bestuzhev: “... but still you are wrong, still you look at Onegin from the wrong point of view, after all, he is my best work.”

So, in place of the sublime romantic poem in Pushkin’s work, a work of “low”, ironic tone appears. This tone is a direct consequence of the “low” subject: ordinary life and a typical hero. Essentially, there is a change in the system of artistic generalization. Both classicism and romanticism resorted to the same method of abstraction in their generalizations. The classics freed the character of the hero from everything random and individual, preserving only the scheme of general psychological traits, common “passions.” The hero was taken out of the ordinary environment, placed in the position of a being who depended only on the play of passions, not on everyday circumstances, and was extremely free. Such are the heroes and kings of classical tragedies. In their tragic fate, they become victims of a psychological conflict; the whole action lies in the need to overcome not material obstacles arising from the circumstances of the reality around them, but ideal obstacles. The tragic catastrophe gives us a picture of passions in their extreme expression. Passions reach extreme, exaggerated, extraordinary development.

a “picturesque” environment that was in harmony not with the everyday environment of the prototypes, but with the psychological picture of the intense play of passions. Pictures of exotic nature and natural phenomena seemed to continue the spiritual storms outward.

The typical generalization used by Pushkin in “Eugene Onegin” was that the hero, who was a generalization of the artist’s observations, remained an individual and was not impoverished by the elimination of the random, as with the classics and romantics. The hero was depicted with all his human habits in his usual everyday setting. Such images have been encountered before, but mainly in satirical literature and comedy. This is partly why Pushkin talks about satire. Outside of satire, only the prose novel came close to this depiction of modern man in a modern setting. And Pushkin calls the new poem a novel. But prose has always been opposed to poetry. Pushkin transfers into poetry the artistic tendencies characteristic of prose, which he notes by calling his work “a novel in verse.

“, although he initially intended to call “Onegin” simply a poem (in the draft manuscript, the third stanza of the first chapter is written: “Eugene Onegin’s poem in”; a new definition is found in a letter to Vyazemsky on November 4, 1823: “I am now writing not a novel, but a novel there is a devilish difference in the verses”).

Having chosen a typical subject as the plot of Onegin, Pushkin turns his thoughts to St. Petersburg. Memories of St. Petersburg life formed the content of the introductory first chapter. In the preface to this chapter, he clarifies the era of action: “The first song of Eugene Onegin represents something whole. It contains a satirical description of the St. Petersburg life of a young Russian nobleman at the end of 1819” (draft text).

The new poetic system probably seemed to Pushkin as a feature of only this work, due to the choice of a modern “secular” plot. It is unlikely that he imagined that the beginning of work on “Eugene Onegin” would mark a complete and decisive turn in his entire work and would determine a new direction (and not only in his personal work). Works in the same romantic spirit continue to appear from Pushkin’s pen even after work on “Eugene Onegin” began. Only by the time the first chapter is published is a rebirth of previous themes and a transition to new, non-romantic paths already outlined. But this happens later, already in Mikhailovsky.

Notes

294 Pushkin is referring to the dramatic works of Casimir Delavigne, in particular his tragedies “The Sicilian Supper” (1819) and “Pariah” (1821).

295 “All collections of new poems called romantic are a disgrace to French literature.”

296

297 Ryleev disputes Byron’s opinion cited by Pushkin in a letter that has not reached us. In a polemical article directed against Bowles as the publisher of Pope's works (letter to J. Murray on February 7, 1821), Byron wrote: “... to the question, “Which is more poetic, given the equality of artists in performance, the description of a deck of cards or a forest path,” - you can answer that the objects are obviously not equal; but the one who poetically recreated the deck of cards is much larger than the other.” And in another place: “... a great poet will give a deck of cards more poetry than we find in the American forests” (referring to the card game episodes in Pope’s “The Stolen Lock”).

298 In the academic edition of “History of Russian Literature” (vol. VI, 1953, p. 242) we read: “At first the novel was conceived as a satire, even a bilious satire, but then Pushkin moved on to an epic development of the theme.”

Report on the romanticism of Pushkin’s work

Report

Teacher: Pushkareva L G. “Romanticism in the works of Pushkin”

PLAN I Introduction 1. What is romanticism? 2.Views of A.S. Pushkin on romanticism. II Main part 1. Romantic lyrics: a) Appeal by A.S. Pushkin to classical mythology. b) “Human freedom” and “pettiness of the social elite.” c) “Dispassion” and “fiery passion”. d) “Image of a nation” in Pushkin’s lyrics. d) “Seascapes”. f) Pushkin’s romantic lyrics are the inspiration of composers. 2. Romantic poem by A.S. Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” a) Prisoner is a psychological portrait of Pushkin’s contemporary. b) The theme of freedom. c) The hero’s mental coolness. d) The theme of “fire” and “cold”. e) Jealousy and spiritual heroism of the Circassian woman. f) The general meaning of the poem. III Conclusion. Contribution of A.S. Pushkin's romance in Russian literature. a) A meaningful romantic world of passions. b) “The sun of our poetry has set!” What is romanticism? “Everyone defines and sees it in their own way!” — poet N.M. wrote about romanticism in 1826. Languages[1]. And in 1958, 132 years later, the modern researcher P. S. Meilakh noted the same thing: “... In no other field of literary criticism are there so many contradictions, such disagreement, as in the field of understanding romanticism”[2]. Everyone defines what romanticism is in their own way. In his textbook for universities A.N. Sokolov focuses on the socio-historical characteristics of romanticism: “Russian romanticism, generated by the impending turning point in the development of Russia, became mainly an expression of new anti-feudal liberation tendencies in social life and worldview”[3]. But the romantics describe not only the era, but also the person himself. The positive hero of romantic literature is “a man of violent passions, intellectually and psychologically towering above the crowd, dreamily looking to the future”[4]. What is romanticism for you? Whatever the answer, I think everyone, when hearing the word romance, will remember the unforgettable lines from Pushkin’s poem: “I remember a wonderful moment.” And it’s not surprising, because Pushkin’s poetry is the highest expression of universal human values: love, friendship, honor, conscience, justice, mercy, rejection of all arbitrariness, humiliation of the individual. All of Pushkin's poetry is his lyrical diary. Poetry is not only his “monument”, but also his “soul in the cherished world.” Pushkin's muse is a sublime muse. Who before him could so sublimely sing all the subtlest shades of love? It’s all here—easy confidence, deep passion, jealousy, anticipation of something new, and good-natured mockery of girlish coquetry. Here a girl passes by, and such wonderful poems are born: When a young, pure, heavenly creature accidentally passes in front of me, Passes by and disappears?.. Is it really not possible for me, Admiring the girl in sad voluptuousness, to follow her with my eyes and in silence Bless her on joy and happiness, And with her heart she wishes all the blessings of this life, Cheerful peace of soul, carefree leisure, Everything, even the happiness of the one who is chosen by her, Who will give the name of his wife to the sweet maiden. Mayakovsky admired one Pushkin verse as the highest manifestation of love. He is extremely laconic: I know that my path has already been measured, But in order for my life to last, I must be sure in the morning, That I will see you in the afternoon. Maybe with Pushkin we only learned to understand what Love is? Exaltation is a dream about the ideal of a woman - “the purest charm, the purest example”, “the genius of pure beauty”, which Pushkin planted in the heart of the Russian, and with which he has been hopelessly ill since then. Of course, Pushkin is the most brilliant example of a romantic writer. Many people have tried to analyze his romanticism. But how does Pushkin himself understand romanticism? Pushkin's views on romanticism. Pushkin's views on romanticism were quite consistent with the spirit of his romantic work. Most of Pushkin’s comments and statements about romanticism date back to 1824-1825, when the southern poems were completed or were being completed (in 1824, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” and “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” were written, “Gypsies” were completed in October of the same year). Pushkin often emphasized his disagreement with the most common definitions of romanticism. He wrote to friends: “No matter how much I read about romanticism, it’s all wrong.” [5] In the sixth chapter of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin, quoting Lensky’s dying poems, remarked: So he wrote darkly and sluggishly (What we call romanticism, Although romanticism I don’t see anything here; what’s in it for us?) This ironic remark about the poems was similar to the categorical statement made by Pushkin later, in the 30s: “all works that bear the stamp of despondency or daydreaming cannot be classified as romantic literature "[6]. Pushkin's views on romanticism were primarily anti-classical. Pushkin ridiculed and condemned those who write “according to all the rules of Parnassian Orthodoxy”[7]. He argued that the romantic school “is the absence of all rules, but not of all art”[8]. Pushkin viewed romanticism as a genuine revolution in the field of form. In one of the letters to P.A. He spoke to Katenin about the “revolution” in literature that the romantics should bring about[9]. Pushkin's theoretical positions also determined his views on the specific history of romanticism. Pushkin classified the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Lope de Vega and many other writers as romantic literature. This is quite unexpected, but from the point of view of the theories of Pushkin, who considered the most attractive feature of a romantic poet to be the artistic courage of breaking with generally accepted norms, it was quite logical. Thus, Pushkin theoretically defined romanticism as a rejection of old classical literary forms. In his correspondence, Pushkin made a number of statements about romantic heroes in life. These statements shed bright light on what he saw as the content of romanticism. Pushkin did not believe that romantic heroes in contemporary Russian life could be found only among disillusioned young people. reading Byron. He associated with the concept of romanticism people who were completely alien to feelings of despondency and disappointment. These are people distinguished by violent passions, who are the heroes of the most extraordinary adventures that lift a person above the ordinary. Thus, Pushkin included in the intellectual and psychological sphere of romanticism the extraordinary, which raises a person above everyday life. As an artist, he embodied this in his works. Pushkin wanted to draw a modern hero in his romantic works. In “indifference to life, to its pleasures”, in “premature old age of the soul”, i.e. in the spiritual coolness of the romantic hero, he saw the “distinctive features” of the “youth of the 19th century”[10]. For the first time in Russian romantic literature, Pushkin creates the image of a modern hero. living with the interests and excitement of his age. This explains the success of Pushkin’s “southern poems.” In the contradictory inner world of their main characters and in their extraordinary fate, contemporaries recognized themselves. Pushkin the romantic depicts exceptional, most often contrasting, psychological states, unlike the vulgar poise of the average person. Pushkin’s romantic lyrics depict either a “mighty passion” that subjugates all a person’s experiences and actions, or spiritual coldness. We find the same thing in Pushkin’s southern poems. In "Caucasian Prisoner" Cherkeshenka is a "passionate maiden" full of "delights of the heart." She is contrasted with the Captive, who destroyed his heart with “passions” and became a “victim of passions.” His soul had almost completely cooled. In “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” Zarema is possessed by “outbursts of fiery desires”, she is “born for passion” and speaks “in the language of tormenting passions”. But then the image of a disappointed hero, the Tatar Khan Girey, is drawn. Even at the beginning of the poem, he is “bored by the abusive glory,” and after Mary’s death he comes to complete despondency. In “Gypsies,” the pinnacle of Pushkin’s romanticism, “fatal passions are everywhere.” The poet emphasizes that Aleko’s “obedient soul” was “played by passions.” They play Zemfira, her lover - a young gypsy, and her mother Mariula. But in the poem there is also a cooled hero - an old gypsy, who, after a love catastrophe, was “sick of ... all the virgins of the world.” Let us now try to understand this better, using the specific artistic material of Pushkin’s romantic works. Romantic lyrics Not all of Pushkin’s lyric poems of 1820-1824 can be called romantic. And at the time of his romanticism, Pushkin wrote a number of poems in the classical spirit and going back to Russian literature of the eighteenth century. In Pushkin's poems of the romantic period we often find a non-romantic appeal to classical mythology. Pushkin’s 1824 poem “Proserpina” is entirely based on it, beginning with the words: The waters of Phlegethon are splashing, The vaults of Tartarus are trembling, The horses of pale Pluto are rushing quickly to the nymphs of Pelion From Hades. These lines are steeped in mythology. And the style of Pushkin’s poems of the romantic period, containing mythological motifs, is far from the “discontinuity” of the romantic style. These are the excellent anthological poems “Muse” and “Nereid”: Among the green waves kissing Taurida, At dawn I saw a Nereid. Hidden between the trees, I barely dared to breathe: Above the clear moisture, the demigoddess lifted her young breast, white as a swan, and squeezed foam from her hair in a stream. They have smooth, seemingly rounded ends. And yet, the brightest and most daring lyrical works of Pushkin from 1820-1824 are romantic poems. They are permeated by the idea of ​​human freedom. Pushkin the romantic was outraged not only by the lack of freedom in the autocratic state, he was repulsed by the spiritual pettiness of the social elite. He noticed this small detail in the column M.S. Vorontsov, under whose command he was forced to serve in Odessa. In a poem about him, Pushkin ironically contrasted Vorontsov’s “good tone” with truly outstanding mental and moral qualities: He did not keep Deep plans and thoughts in his reserve; He did not have a brilliant mind, he was not very courageous in soul; But he was dry, polite and important. (“I don’t know where, but not here”). Pushkin’s romantic lyrics sometimes tell how dispassion arises and how passion disappears. This is discussed in the poem “Black Shawl”. The hero, having survived the betrayal of his beloved, the “young Greek woman” whom he “passionately loved,” and killed her, comes to complete spiritual coolness. He forever forgets about female beauty, just like the old gypsy in Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsies.” There are even coincidences of texts here: Since then I haven’t kissed those lovely eyes, Since then I haven’t known happy nights. I look like crazy at the black shawl, And my cold soul is tormented by sadness. ("Black Shawl")...From now on, all the maidens of the world hate me; Between them my gaze never chose a girlfriend, And I no longer shared lonely leisure with anyone. (The story of an old gypsy). In both cases, the catastrophic disappearance of passion becomes a tragic milestone in a person’s life. (“Since then”, “From now on” is precisely a line in time). But more often than spiritual cold, in the lyrics of the romantic Pushkin we see spiritual burning, powerful fiery passion. It also appears when Pushkin talks about his political passion as a poet. “I became known among people through passion of will and persecution,” writes Pushkin in one of his letters to V.F. Raevsky. And yet, the theme of love with its fundamental psychologism came to the fore in Pushkin the romantic. Therefore, in his love works his philosophy of passions was most brilliantly developed and his conviction that a romantic poet should live in the element of bright, intense passion was most clearly manifested. Pushkin’s idea of ​​passion is associated with images of flame. In the poet’s heart lives “fiery passion”, “fiery delight”, the “kisses” of the beloved are “so fiery”, “a new heat excites the blood”, the beloved “pours” “fire” into the soul, “youthful ardor of passions”... The image is contrasted with this flame what remains from love burning is the image of ashes. In “The Burnt Letter” Pushkin writes: It is finished! Dark curled sheets; On the light ashes, their cherished features turn white... My chest felt tight. Dear ashes, Poor consolation in my sad fate, Stay forever with me on my sorrowful chest... The poet calls the ashes “sweet”, “light”. For him, ashes are the only “solace.” This is all that remains of love, of all that was dear to him. Living in the element of passion, the romantic poet often speaks of the uniqueness of his love, which captures his entire being. “Everything is a sacrifice to your memory,” he turns to Vorontsova. He even needs fame only so that it will always remind his beloved of him. In the poem “Desire for Glory,” dedicated to Vorontsova, we read: I wish for glory, so that with my name your ears would be amazed all the time, so that you would be surrounded by me, so that everything, everything around you would sound loudly about me... This “only” feeling makes the poet live with the image of his beloved even when she is not with him. Often in Pushkin’s love lyrics a vision appears - a memory that replaces reality. In the poem “Night”, dedicated to Amalia Riznich, the image of his beloved appears before the poet “in the silence of the dark night” with amazing clarity, possible only with enormous strength of feeling. He even hears the sounds of her voice, her passionate confessions: In the darkness, your eyes shine before me. They smile at me, and I hear the sounds: My friend, my gentle friend... I love... yours... yours The same, only softened vision-memory is in the famous poem “To ***”. The poet also sees the face of his beloved woman and hears her voice: In the languor of hopeless sadness, In the worries of noisy bustle, A gentle voice sounded to me for a long time, And I dreamed of sweet features. And in the poem “A stormy day has gone out...”, dedicated to Vorontsova, before the poet (the vision is a memory. But this time it is exclusively of a visual nature. The poet sees his beloved against the backdrop of southern nature (the moving “luxurious veil” of the sea: ... she is now walking along the mountain To the shores, drowned by roaring waves; There, under the treasured rocks, Now she sits, sad and alone... In Pushkin’s love lyrics, the enormous emotional power of the poet’s experiences in most cases breaks the orderliness of artistic forms. The style becomes dynamic, sharply expressive and even “torn.” Such “discontinuity” reflects the poet’s emotional agitation and the contradictory nature of his love experiences, which defy order.Questions and exclamations follow each other in the poem “The Desire for Glory,” where the poet laments the intrigues that have arisen in connection with this love: So what? Tears, torment, betrayal, slander, everything suddenly fell on my head... What am I, where am I? I stand like a traveler caught by lightning in the desert, And everything was eclipsed before me! What a storm of feelings we see in these verses! We feel all the experiences of the lyrical hero. The poem “The Rainy Day Has Extinguished” ends with an extremely expressive description of the beloved’s loneliness: Alone... no one cries or yearns for her; No one kisses her knees into oblivion; Alone... she does not betray to anyone’s lips Neither shoulders, nor wet lips, nor snow-white breasts, ……………………………………………………….. ……………………………………………………….. …………………………………….. No one is worthy of her heavenly love. Isn’t it true: you’re alone… you’re crying… I’m calm…………………………………….. But if……………………………. All this is unusually strong. The rows of dots graphically express the agitated intermittency and spasmodic nature of the lover's emotions. These points at the same time hint at what is hidden in the depths of the poet’s psychology. And most remarkable of all is the last “But if...”. This suddenly breaks off the poem and even deprives it of its external harmony and consistency of rhyme. This is a brilliant “But if...” The sudden break in the narrator’s speech reveals the lover’s jealous excitement more clearly than words. The “extension” of the implied thought is depicted by ellipsis, occupying almost an entire line: the poet would feel deeply unhappy if the woman he loved were not alone and fell in love with another person. All this poetry of passions and dispassion had the artistic goal of revealing the psychological. the inner world of the individual and recreate her image. But the romantics also faced another task: abandoning the traditions of “classical” poetry, they sought to paint an individual image of the nation. The romantic Pushkin solved this problem. A true masterpiece of Pushkin’s romantic reproduction of Russian national color was “The Song of the Prophetic Oleg.” Here not only is the chronicle legend used and the era of ancient Greek paganism is brilliantly depicted, but also the clearly romantic plot of a wonderful mysterious prediction is taken. Here in Pushkin the theme of a poet-prophet appears, not subject to any earthly authority, endowed with the power of unerring foresight, which sets him apart from ordinary people. The “inspired magician” who predicts the death of Oleg opens up a long series of such Pushkin heroes as the prophet from the first “Imitation of the Koran”, Andre Chénier, Mozart and others. This is evidenced by the words of the “Song”: The Magi are not afraid of powerful rulers, And the princely gift is not for them their prophetic language is needed, truthful and free, and friendly with the will of heaven. The coming years lurk in darkness; But I see your lot on your bright brow. In the lyrical poems of Pushkin, a romantic depicting the life of different nations, there are no corresponding landscapes or they have almost nothing national. There are no landscapes in the poems “Greek is true!”, “Greek” (only the abstract “Heaven of Greece of the Holy” is mentioned), “Black shawl” (only “Danube waves” are mentioned, where the slave of the killer threw dead bodies). And in the "Russian" works of Pushkin there are few national landscape images. Pushkin managed to describe the life of different peoples against the background of the corresponding national landscapes only in the southern poems. But in the Pushkin romantic lyrics there are magnificent “personal” landscape poems that draw exotic nature and at the same time penetrated by deep and subtle psychologism. These poems are not related to the image of any national environment, but with the experiences of the poet himself, with his perception of life. Beautiful sea landscapes of Pushkin-romantic. Pushkin saw in the sea the embodiment of rebellion and rebellion. No wonder in his poem the “Prisoner” of the eagle, striving for the will, called the poet to fly away “to where the sea edges turn blue”. In the poem “The Day Light,” the excitement of the ocean runs in the poet memories of his past “desires and hopes”, about the past “crazy love”, which he is not able to forget, and an infinitely strong desire for new impressions. Not only about the sea, but also about the excitement of the poet’s soul, the lines of this poem are written: noise, noise, obedient windmill, worry under me, the gloomy ocean I see a distant coast, the lands of the midday magic lands; With excitement and longing I strive there; Removenly Relieved ... and I feel: tears again were born in the eyes; The soul boils and freezes; A friend that is familiar around me flies; I remembered my former years crazy love, and everything that I suffered, and everything that is sweet to my heart, desires and hopes, a languid deception ... The exciting sea and the soul in excitement are perfectly combined in these lines. Such is the romantic lyrics of Pushkin. Surprisingly thin and exalted, it has become an artistic material for many large Russian composers who have in it the world of noble emotions. The texts of this lyrics were written by the beautiful romances of A.N. Vernovsky, M.I. Glinka, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov and others. The romance of N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, written on the text of Pushkin’s poem “The clouds of the clouds of a flying ridge ...”. When, after the hearing of this romance, you begin to read the Pushkin poem, you involuntarily repeat exactly those intonations that are given in the Rimsky-Korsakov romance. So organically merges music with the text of the romance. But still, the main area of ​​Pushkin’s romantic lyrics is the area of ​​love experiences. Therefore, all his romantic poems had love plots. They have even brighter than in a romantic lyrics, strong, “fiery” passions and polar mental cooling have expressed. So how did all this manifest in his poems? "Prisoner of the Caucasus". Pushkin’s first romantic poem (Caucasian captive (completed in February 1821, brought him success, the greatest in his literary activity. Success was caused by the fact that the readers found the image of a modern romantic hero in it, which was absent in Podopushkin’s literature. It is easy to make sure that he was convinced of The fact that the main psychological features of the capital hero of the poem were extremely modern. Bright and bold freedom lives in the captive. He falls into the Caucasus precisely because he is looking for freedom, which is not in the “light” unsatisfying it in a civilized society: the Light Extension, Light, A friend of nature, he left his native limit and in the edge of the distant flew with a cheerful ghost of freedom. Freedom! He was still looking for you in the deserted world. The plot of the poem itself organizes the topic of freedom: a hero, devoid of spiritual freedom and striving to gain it, having been captured, loses, loses Physical freedom. Thus, it is again powerless to find happiness. The poem says about the captive in chain: nature eclipsed before him. Sorry, sacred freedom! He is a slave. Another important feature of the prisoner (mental cooques. The prisoner cannot respond to the feeling of Circassian people in love with him because he lost his ability to feel. His words addressed to the Cherkeshens are talking about this: do not waste the other young man with me. His love is. It will replace my soul with a sad clearance ... ....................................... ... how hard the dead lips of living kisses are answered and the eyes full of tears, with a smile to meet with a cold! True, even this mental stupidity does not force the hero to reject the ideal of freedom. Pushkin speaks of the captive of the captive and freedom: he listened to dreams and the world with the wave of the song, he listened to, animated by you; and with faith, with a fiery moloba, your proud idol hugged. Drawing the soulfulness of the captive, Pushkin sought to capture the characteristic side of the psychology not only of Russian, but also of Western European youth. But together. But together With that, Pushkin drew this “premature old age” on the basis of life and literary material available to him. The fact that the prisoner led to the spiritual coolness of passion is described in detail in the place of the poem, where the chained prisoner recalls the motherland: where he knew the first joy, Where he loved a lot of sweetheart, where he destroyed hope, joy and desire and best days to make a memory in a wilted heart. This is a purely romantic background to the captive. The image of “mental wilting” is especially important here. Features of the psychology of the “wilted” prisoner were revealed by Pushkin according to the laws of a romantic poem, in which the reception of contrast was often found, which allows the psychological features of the heroes. Pushkin’s spiritual cold and wilting - the romantic contrasted the ardent flourishing passion. The Pushkin plot situation “Cherkeshenka prisoner” pushes people who have nothing in common in their psychological warehouse. Cherkeshenka is primarily a passionate virgin. The second part of the poem begins with a description of the “fiery” emotional experiences of the heroine: ... the captive is dear, they cheated on their gaze dull, bow the head to my chest, freedom, forget your homeland. I am glad to hide in the desert with you, the king of my soul! Love me ... But the “cold” was contrasted in the poem and sometimes “fossil”. The prisoner in response to the recognition of the Cherkeshenka complained about his complete disappointment and regretted that he could no longer share an ardent feeling: I died for happiness, the hoping ghost flew away; Your friend was weaned from voluptuousness, petrified for tender feelings ... Here, in connection with the spiritual drama of the captive, another topic sounded in the poem. The hero talked about some of his past love, which did not bring him happiness. We learn that it was an unrequited love, that the hero "did not know the love of mutual: he loved alone, suffered alone." This topic entailed another topic (the jealousy of the heroine. The Cherkeshenka wanted to know who her rival was: but who is she, your beautiful friend? Do you love, Russian? But the Cherkeshenka overcomes jealousy (this is her spiritual heroism Fearing the prisoner, the Cherkeshensk performs the feat of great nobility. It is not without reason, when she goes to free the prisoner, Pushkin says: it seemed that the maiden went to a secret fight, on the feat of the military. In this scene of the poem, the Cherkeshenka is really heroic: sawing the shackles of the captive, she wishes him happiness of happiness and even the compounds with the “other”, although her own love is broken. This place of the poem is marked with subtle psychologism. Although the Cherkeshenka overcame jealousy in her words, the echoes of this feeling are still sounding. She does not want to run with the captive precisely because of his love for the “other” , blessing him at the same time on a new life full of love: sorry, love of blessings with you will be every hour. Forgive me - forget my torment, give me a hand ... for the last time. These experiences of the Cherkens, who ends with the same river , which the captive is crossed to reach the homeland, are not like the “evil” jealousy of Zarema and Aleo, who under her influence commit murder. According to Pushkin, abuse of passions leads to cooling, satiety and spiritual old age. This is the fate of the prisoner. But the normal, natural passion exalts a person and gives him the opportunity to accomplish a feat. This is the fate of Cherkeshenka. At the same time, Pushkin believes that normal natural passions do not live in a civilized society, to which the prisoner belongs, but in a wild, close to nature, where the Cherkeshenka was brought up. The first Russian romantic poem, published by Pushkin, fully met his belief that romanticism is an unusual area. The heroes of the poem are marked by romantic exclusivity, and their backstory is distinguished by an ambiguous poet. The general significance of the "Caucasian captive" was very great. Pushkin not only gave the first example of a large romantic work, but also reflected the characteristic features of a whole generation of Russian and European youth. Pushkin made a huge contribution to Russian literature. His romanticism can be studied endlessly. Pushkin Romantic wrote many beautiful works that amaze the soul with their sensuality. His poems are full of love and tragedy. The Pushkin romantic depicted strong passions, the vivid outstanding phenomena of the "inner world of the soul of man." Pushkin created the most meaningful and original romantic world of passions in Russian literature. His death shocked everyone. V.F. Odoevsky published on January 30, 1837, in the “Literary Additions” and the journal “Russian disabled” the following lines: “The Sun of our poetry has rolled! Pushkin died, died in the color of years, in the middle of his great field! .. Pushkin! our poet! our joy, our national glory!.. Is it really true that we no longer have Pushkin! You cannot get used to this thought! " Zhukovsky, sorting through the papers of the just deceased poet, discovered amazing poems: no, I won’t die - my soul in the treasured lyre will survive and run away to run away ... And he whispered all as a spell, like a prayer, like comfort. Like a requiem ... a bibliographic list

1. Letters from N.M. Yazykova to his family. S.P.b, 1913 2. Collection of answers to questions on literary criticism (IV International Congress of Slavists. Soviet Committee of Slavists). M., 1958 3. Sokolov A.N. History of Russian literature of the 19th century (1st half). 3rd ed. M., 1970 4. Rebyakin A.I. History of Russian literature of the 19th century. First half. M., 1977 5. Pushkin A.S. Full composition of writings. M.-L., 1937, vol. XIII, p. 245. 6. Pushkin A.S. Full composition of writings. M.-L., 1937, vol. XII, p. 179. 7. Pushkin A.S. Full composition of writings. M.-L., 1937, vol. XIII, p. 57. 8. Pushkin A.S. Full composition of writings. M.-L., 1937, vol. XIII, p. 102. 9. Pushkin A.S. Full composition of writings. M.-L., 1937, vol. XIII, p. 225. 10. Pushkin A.S. Full composition of writings. M.-L., 1937, vol. III, p. 52. 11. Used literature 1. Volkov Heinrich. Pushkin's world. M. “Young Guard”, 1989 2. Fridman N.V. Romanticism in the works of Pushkin. M. "Enlightenment", 1980. 3. A.S. Pushkin. Works in three volumes. M. "Fiction", 1985.

S. M. BONDI. POEMS OF PUSHKIN

S. M. BONDI. POEMS OF PUSHKIN

In Pushkin's work, poems occupy the largest place along with lyrics. Pushkin wrote twelve poems (one of them, “Tazit,” remained unfinished), and more than twelve more were preserved in sketches, plans, and initial lines.

At the Lyceum, Pushkin began, but did not finish, a very weak, still quite childish, humorous poem “The Monk” (1813) and a humorous fairy-tale poem “Bova” (1814). In the first, a Christian church legend is parodied in the spirit of Voltairean freethinking, in the second, a popular folk tale.

In these works, young Pushkin is not yet an independent poet, but only an unusually talented student of his predecessors, Russian and French poets (Voltaire, Karamzin, Radishchev). The history of Pushkin’s poem does not begin with these youthful experiences; Yes, they were not published during the author’s lifetime.

In 1817, Pushkin began his greatest poem, “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” and wrote it for three whole years.

These were the years of rising revolutionary sentiment among the noble youth, when secret circles and societies were created that prepared the December uprising of 1825.

Pushkin, although not a member of the Secret Society, was one of the largest figures in this movement. He was the only one in these years (before exile to the south) who wrote revolutionary poems, which were immediately distributed in handwritten copies throughout the country.

But even in legal, printed literature, Pushkin had to fight reactionary ideas. In 1817, Zhukovsky published the fantastic poem “Vadim” - the second part of the large poem “The Twelve Sleeping Virgins” (its first part, “Thunderbreaker,” was published back in 1811). Taking a conservative position, Zhukovsky wanted with this work to lead young people away from political actions into the realm of romantic, religiously colored dreams. His hero (to whom the poet not by chance gave the name Vadim, the legendary hero of the Novgorod uprising against Prince Rurik) is an ideal young man striving for exploits and at the same time feeling in his soul a mysterious call to something unknown, otherworldly. He eventually overcomes all earthly temptations and, following steadily this call, finds happiness in a mystical union with one of the twelve virgins, whom he awakens from their wonderful sleep. The action of the poem takes place either in Kyiv or Novgorod. Vadim defeats the giant and saves the Kyiv princess, whom her father intends for him to be his wife. This reactionary poem was written with great poetic power, beautiful verses, and Pushkin had every reason to fear its strong influence on the development of young Russian literature. Moreover, “Vadim” was at that time the only major work created by a representative of the new literary school, which had just finally won the fight against classicism.

Pushkin responded to “Vadim” with “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” also a fairy-tale poem from the same era, with a number of similar episodes. But all its ideological content is sharply polemical in relation to the ideas of Zhukovsky. Instead of mysterious and mystical feelings and almost ethereal images, Pushkin’s everything is earthly, material; the entire poem is filled with playful, mischievous eroticism (description of Ruslan’s wedding night, Ratmir’s adventures with twelve maidens, Chernomor’s attempts to take possession of the sleeping Lyudmila, etc., as well as a number of author’s digressions).

The polemical meaning of the poem is fully revealed at the beginning of the fourth canto, where the poet directly points to the object of this polemic - Zhukovsky's poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" - and mockingly parodies it, turning its heroines, mystically minded pure maidens, "nuns of saints", into frivolous inhabitants of a roadside “hotels” that lure travelers to their place.

Pushkin's witty, brilliant, sparkling poem immediately dispelled the mystical fog that surrounded folk fairy-tale motifs and images in Zhukovsky's poem. After “Ruslan and Lyudmila” it became no longer possible to use them to implement reactionary religious ideas.

The good-natured Zhukovsky himself admitted defeat in this literary struggle, giving Pushkin his portrait with the inscription: “To the victorious student from the defeated teacher, on that highly solemn day when he finished his poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila.”

This poem put Pushkin in first place among Russian poets. They began to write about him in Western European magazines.

However, being the largest phenomenon in Russian literature and social life, Pushkin’s humorous fairy-tale poem did not yet put Russian literature on a par with the literature of the West, where Goethe in Germany, Byron and Shelley in England, Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant in France, acted in those years, each in their own way resolved the most important issues of our time in their work.

Since 1820, Pushkin has been included in this series, creating one after another his romantic poems, serious and deep in content, modern in subject matter and highly poetic in form. With these poems (“Caucasian Prisoner”, “Robber Brothers”, “Bakhchisarai Fountain”) a new direction enters Russian literature: advanced, revolutionary romanticism - a poetic expression of the feelings and views of the most advanced social stratum, the revolutionary-minded noble youth, the most active of which the Decembrists were part. Sharp dissatisfaction with everything around, with the entire social structure, in which life seems to be a prison, and a person is a prisoner; fiery desire for freedom; freedom as an object of almost religious cult {1} is one side of the worldview of the revolutionary romantics of the 20s. At the same time, their social loneliness, the lack of a living connection with the people, whose suffering they deeply sympathized with, but whose life they knew poorly and understood little - all this gave a tragic and extremely subjective, individualistic character to their worldview. The feelings and tragic experiences of a lonely, proud person standing high above the crowd became the main content of Pushkin’s romantic work. Protest against any oppression weighing on a person in a “civilized” society - political, social, moral, religious oppression - forced him, like all revolutionary romantics of that time, to sympathetically portray his hero as a criminal. a violator of all accepted religious norms in society. legal, moral. The favorite image of the romantics is “a criminal and a hero” who “was worthy of both the horror of people and glory.” Finally, characteristic of the romantics was the desire to take poetry away from the reproduction of everyday reality, which they hated, into the world of the unusual, exotic, geographical or historical. There they found the images of nature they needed - powerful and rebellious (“deserts, edges of pearly waves, and the noise of the sea, and piles of rocks”), and images of people, proud, brave, free, not yet touched by European civilization.

Byron's work, which in many ways was close to the worldview of Russian advanced romantics, played a major role in the poetic embodiment of these feelings and experiences. Pushkin, and after him other poets, used, first of all, the form of the “Byronic poem” successfully found by the English poet, in which the poet’s purely lyrical experiences are clothed in a narrative form with a fictional hero and events that are far from the real events of the poet’s life, but perfectly express his inner life, his soul. “...He comprehended, created and described a single character (namely his own),” Pushkin wrote in a note about Byron’s dramas. “He created himself a second time, now under the turban of a renegade, now in the cloak of a corsair, now as a giaur dying under the schema...” (see vol. 6). So Pushkin, in his romantic poems, tried to “create himself a second time,” either as a prisoner in the Caucasus, or as Aleko, who escaped from the “captivity of the stuffy cities.” Pushkin himself more than once pointed out the lyrical, almost autobiographical nature of his romantic heroes.

The external features of Pushkin’s southern poems are also associated with the Byronian tradition: a simple, undeveloped plot, a small number of characters (two, three), fragmentary and sometimes deliberately unclear presentation. A constant characteristic of Pushkin’s poetic talent is the ability to vigilantly observe reality and the desire to speak about it in precise words. In the poems, this was reflected in the fact that, when creating romantic images of nature and people, Pushkin did not invent them, did not write (like, for example, Byron about Russia or, later, Ryleev about Siberia) about what he himself did not see, but was always based on living personal impressions - the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabian steppes. Pushkin's poems created and for a long time predetermined the type of romantic poem in Russian literature. They caused numerous imitations by minor poets, and also had a strong influence on the work of such poets as Ryleev, Kozlov, Baratynsky and, finally, Lermontov.

In addition to “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” “The Robber Brothers,” and “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,” written before 1824 and soon published, Pushkin also conceived other romantic poems. “There are still poems wandering around in my head,” he wrote to Delvig in March 1821. In his manuscripts there were sketches of several poems, where Pushkin, in different ways, with different plots and in different national environments, thought to develop the same “heroic” or a “criminal” romantic image and show his inevitably tragic fate (see excerpts and outlines of the poems). Pushkin published an excerpt from one of these poems, where the ataman of the Volga robbers was to become the hero, under the title “The Robber Brothers.” The beginning of the great romantic poem “Vadim” has also been preserved. During these same years, perhaps under the influence of the enormous success of “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” Pushkin also thought about poems of a completely different type - magical fairy tales, with an adventurous plot and historical or mythological characters: about Bova the Prince, about the son of Vladimir Saint Mstislav and his the fight against the Circassians, about Actaeon and Diana. But these plans, which distracted the poet from his main task - the development and deepening of romantic themes - were never implemented by him.

However, in the spring of 1821, Pushkin wrote a short poem “Gabriiliad”, a witty, brilliant anti-religious satire - a response to the intensified political reaction, colored in these years by mysticism and religious hypocrisy.

In 1823, Pushkin experienced a severe crisis in his romantic worldview. Disappointed in the hope of the imminent realization of the victory of the revolution, first in the West, and then in Russia - and Pushkin, full of “careless faith”, was completely convinced of this victory - he soon became disillusioned with all his romantic ideals - freedom, an exalted hero , high purpose poetry, romantic eternal love. At this time he writes a number of gloomy, bitter poems, pouring out his “bile” and “cynicism” (in his words) - “The Sower”, “Demon”, “Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet” (and a little later - “Scene from Faust") and others that remained unfinished in the manuscript. In these verses, he bitterly ridicules all the basic tenets of his romantic worldview.

Among such works is the poem “The Gypsies,” written in 1824. Its content is a critical exposure of the romantic ideal of freedom and the romantic hero. The romantic hero Aleko, who finds himself in a desired environment of complete freedom, the opportunity to do whatever he wants without hindrance, reveals his true essence: he turns out to be an egoist and a rapist. In "Gypsies" the very romantic ideal of unlimited freedom is debunked. Pushkin convincingly shows that complete freedom of action, the absence of restrictions and obligations in public life would be feasible only for people who are primitive, idle, lazy, “timid and kind at heart,” but in personal life, in love, it turns out to be a purely animal passion, not bound by with no moral feelings. The inability to go beyond the purely romantic, subjective view of life inevitably leads the poet to the deeply gloomy conclusion that happiness on earth is impossible “and there is no protection from fate.” "The Gypsies" - a poem of a turning point, transitional period - is ideologically and artistically a huge step forward compared to previous poems. Despite the completely romantic nature of its style, exotic setting, and heroes, Pushkin here for the first time uses the method of a purely realistic test of the fidelity of his romantic ideals. He does not suggest the speeches and actions of his characters, but simply places them in a given setting and observes how they behave in the circumstances they encounter. In fact, Aleko, a typical romantic hero, well known to us from Pushkin’s poems and lyrics of the early 20s, could not have acted differently in the situation in which he found himself. The double murder he commits out of jealousy is fully consistent with his character and worldview, revealed both in the poem itself and in other romantic works of that era. On the other hand, Zemfira, such as she is shown by Pushkin, also could not do otherwise, could not remain faithful to Aleko forever - after all, she is a gypsy, the daughter of Mariula, and her story only repeats - with the exception of the tragic ending - the story of her mother. This “objective” position of the author of “Gypsy” in relation to the actions and feelings of his characters was reflected in the form itself: most of the episodes of the poem are given in the form of dialogues, in a dramatic form, where the author’s voice is absent, and the characters themselves speak and act.

“Gypsies” is a work that most deeply reflected the crisis of Pushkin’s worldview as a romantic; at the same time, in terms of the method of developing the theme, it opened up new paths in Pushkin’s work - the path to realism. In the summer of 1824, Pushkin was expelled from Odessa to Mikhailovskoye, without the right to leave there. Constant and close communication with the peasants and the people, apparently more than anything else, helped to overcome the grave crisis in the poet’s worldview. He became convinced of the injustice of his bitter reproaches to the people for their reluctance to fight for their freedom {2}; he realized that “freedom” is not some abstract moral and philosophical concept, but a concrete historical one, always connected with social life, and for such Freedom - political, economic - the people have always fought tirelessly (constant peasant revolts against the landowners, not to mention the uprisings of Pugachev, Razin or the era of the “Time of Troubles”). He had to see that all his disappointments in previous romantic ideals were the result of insufficient knowledge of reality itself, its objective laws and little poetic interest in it itself. In 1825, a sharp turn occurred in Pushkin’s work. Having finally broken with romanticism, Pushkin emerges from his crisis. His poetry takes on a clear and generally bright, optimistic character. The former task of his poetry - the expression of his own feelings and suffering, a poetic response to the imperfections of life, contrary to the subjective, albeit noble demands of the romantic, the embodiment of romantic ideals in the images of the unusual - exotic, idealized nature and extraordinary heroes - is replaced by a new one. Pushkin consciously makes his poetry a means of understanding the ordinary reality that he previously rejected, strives to penetrate into it through an act of poetic creativity, to understand its typical phenomena, objective laws. The desire to correctly explain human psychology inevitably leads him to the study and artistic embodiment of social life, to the depiction of social conflicts in certain plot forms, the reflection of which is human psychology.

The same desire to understand reality and modernity pushes him to study the past, to reproduce important moments in history. In connection with these new creative tasks, both the nature of the objects depicted in Pushkin and the very style of depiction change: instead of the exotic, unusual - everyday life, nature, people; instead of a poetically sublime, abstract, metaphorical style - a simple, close to colloquial, but nevertheless highly poetic style.

Pushkin creates a new direction in literature - realism, which later (from the 40s) became the leading direction of Russian literature.

Pushkin gives the main, primary embodiment of this new, realistic direction, these new tasks of correct knowledge of reality and its laws not so much in poems as in other genres: in drama (“Boris Godunov”, “little tragedies”), in prose stories (“Belkin’s Tales”, “The Captain’s Daughter”, etc.), in a poetic novel - “Eugene Onegin”. In these genres, it was easier for Pushkin to implement new principles and develop new methods of realistic creativity. A kind of manifesto of this new direction in Russian literature were the historical folk tragedy “Boris Godunov” (1825) and {3} (1825-1826).

At the same time (in December 1825) Pushkin wrote his first realistic poem - the playful, cloudlessly cheerful “Count Nulin”. In it, on a simple, almost anecdotal plot, many beautiful paintings, landscapes, conversations of the most ordinary, “prosaic”, everyday content, turned into genuine poetry, are strung together. Here you can find almost all the images with which Pushkin, in a half-serious and half-joking stanza from “Onegin’s Travels,” characterizes his new realistic style, as opposed to the romantic “piles of rocks,” “the sound of the sea,” “deserts,” and the image of a “proud maiden” {4} : here is a slope, and a fence, and gray clouds in the sky, and rainy season, and a backyard, and ducks, and even a “hostess” (albeit a bad one) as the heroine of the poem...

The defeat of the December uprising of 1825 and the subsequent political and social reaction, a temporary stop in the development of the Russian revolutionary movement, changed the nature of Russian literature: the theme of the struggle for freedom disappeared from it for several years. Pushkin, returned from exile by Nicholas I, given the opportunity to communicate with friends, enjoying enormous popularity among the public, nevertheless did not feel happy.

The stuffy social atmosphere after the defeat of the Decembrists, the reactionary, cowardly, philistine moods, supported by the new reactionary journalism, which reigned in society and infected many of his friends - all this at times caused Pushkin to have attacks of complete despair, expressed in such poems as “A gift in vain, a random gift, life, why were you given to me?” or “In the worldly steppe, sad and boundless...” (“The last key is the cold key of oblivion, it will quench the heat of the heart sweetest of all”).

The idea that death is preferable to life, Pushkin thought to form the basis of a gloomy poem he began in 1826 about the hero of the gospel legend - Ahasfer ("The Eternal Jew"), punished for his crime before God with immortality. However, these dark themes remained a temporary episode in Pushkin’s work. He managed to overcome his difficult mood, and the poem about Agasphere was left at the very beginning.

During these years of social decline, Pushkin’s creative work did not stop, but at this time he was developing themes that were not directly related to the theme of the liberation movement. The subject of the poet’s close attention is the human psyche, characters, “passions”, their influence on the human soul (“little tragedies”, sketches of prose stories).

Among Pushkin's works of 1826-1830, inspired by a “psychological” theme, we do not find a single poem. (True, in the poems “Poltava” and “Tazit” the development of the psychology of the heroes occupies a large place, but it is not the main task of these purely political works.) A more suitable form for the artistic analysis of human psychology was a novel in verse, a dramatic sketch, a prose story or story. During these same years, Pushkin also wrote a number of major works of political content, but of a different nature. In his work of this time, the theme of the Russian state, the fate of Russia in the struggle with the West for its independence is embodied - an echo of Pushkin’s youthful memories of the events of 1812-1815. In parallel with this, he poetically develops the most important theme of the multinationality of the Russian state, writes about the historical pattern of the unification of many different peoples into one state whole. In the poem “Poltava” these themes are developed on the historical material of the struggle of Russia at the beginning of the 18th century. with the then strongest military state - Sweden. Here Pushkin poetically reveals his assessment of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. In another, unfinished, poem “Tazit”, based on Pushkin’s impressions from his second Caucasian journey (1829) and reflections on the complexity and difficulty of the issue of ending the enmity of the peoples of the Caucasus with the Russians, the same national-political theme is developed. In the 30s Pushkin's work is again almost entirely devoted to the development of social issues. The people, the serf peasantry, their life, their poetry, their struggle for their liberation - becomes one of the main themes of Pushkin the artist and historian, as he became in these years. The life of a fortress village is shown in the unfinished “History of the Village of Goryukhin”, in “Dubrovsky”; In fairy tales and the drama "Rusalka" the motifs of folk poetry are reproduced and artistically processed. Pushkin first shows the struggle of the peasants against the landowners in the form of “robbery” (in “Dubrovsky”), and these are no longer romantic “robber brothers”, but living, real types of peasants and servants. Pushkin devotes two large works to the real peasant war, “Pugachevism” - the story “The Captain's Daughter” and the historical study “The History of Pugachev”. The popular uprising against the feudal knights and the participation in it of representatives of the bourgeois class constitute the volume of the unfinished drama “Scenes from the Times of Knights.”

During these years, Pushkin introduced a new hero into literature - a suffering, oppressed “little man”, a victim of an unfair social structure - in the story “The Station Warden”, in the novel “Yezersky”, in the poem “The Bronze Horseman”.

Pushkin reacts sharply to the changes taking place before his eyes in the class composition of the intelligentsia, in particular the literary community. If previously “only the nobles were engaged in literature in our country,” as Pushkin repeated more than once, seeing this as the reason for the writer’s independent behavior in relation to the authorities, to the government, now representatives of the common, bourgeois intelligentsia are beginning to play an increasingly larger role in literature. In those years, this new democracy was not yet a “revolutionary democracy”; on the contrary, most of its leaders, fighting with representatives of the ruling noble, landowner class for their place in life, did not reveal any oppositional sentiments towards the government or the tsar. Pushkin considered the only force capable of opposing its independence to government arbitrariness to be a “powerful defender” of the people, the nobility from which the Decembrists emerged, an impoverished nobility, but “with education”, “with hatred against the aristocracy” {5}. “There is no such terrible element of rebellion in Europe either,” Pushkin wrote in his diary. — Who was on the square on December 14? Only nobles. How many of them will there be at the first new disturbance? I don’t know, but it seems like a lot” (see vol. 7).

Pushkin embodied these thoughts about the role of the ancient nobility in the liberation movement (in the past and in the future), the condemnation of its representatives who do not understand their historical mission and grovel before the authorities, before the “new nobility”, the tsar’s servants, not only in his journalistic notes, but and in works of art, in particular, they constitute the main, main content of the first stanzas of “Yezersky” written by Pushkin.

In the 30s Pushkin had to wage a fierce literary struggle. His opponents were reactionary, cowardly, unscrupulous journalists and critics who had captured almost the entire mass of readers, pandering to the philistine tastes of readers from small landowners and officials, who did not disdain political denunciations against their literary enemies. They persecuted Pushkin for everything new that he introduced into literature - a realistic direction, simplicity of expression, reluctance to moralize... Pushkin included polemics with modern journalism about the tasks of literature in the initial stanzas of “Yezersky”; this same polemic constitutes the main content of the entire poem - “ House in Kolomna.

Pushkin completed a long series of poems written from 1820 to 1833 with “The Bronze Horseman” - a poem about the conflict between the happiness of an individual and the good of the state - his best work, remarkable both for the extraordinary depth and courage of thought, the severity of the historical and social problem posed by the poet , and in the perfection of artistic expression. This work still causes controversy and different interpretations.

Pushkin used many genres in his work, but the poem always remained his favorite form for expressing his “mind of cold observations and heart of sorrowful observations.” Pushkin celebrated almost every stage of his development with a poem; almost every life problem that arose before him found expression in a poem. The enormous distance between the light, brilliant poem of the twenty-year-old Pushkin - “Ruslan and Lyudmila” - and the deeply philosophical poem “The Bronze Horseman”, written by the thirty-four-year-old sage poet - clearly shows the swiftness of Pushkin’s path, the steepness of the peak to which Pushkin, and with him, climbed and all Russian literature.

{1} Freedom! He was still looking for you alone in the desert world... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And with faith, fiery prayer, Your proud idol embraced. ("Prisoner of the Caucasus".)

{2} Graze, peaceful nations! A cry of honor will not awaken you. Why do the herds need the gifts of freedom? They should be cut or trimmed. Their inheritance from generation to generation is a yoke with rattles and a whip. (“Desert sower of freedom…”, 1823)

{3} The original plan (1823) and the first chapters of the novel date back to the period of the Pushkin crisis. Realistic images in them are presented polemically, with the aim of mocking everyday reduction of traditional romantic images and situations. “...I am writing a new poem, “Eugene Onegin,” in which I am choking on bile” (letter to A.I. Turgenev dated December 1, 1823); “...don’t trust N. Raevsky, who scolds him (“Eugene Onegin.” - S.B.) - he expected romanticism from me, found satire and cynicism and did not lose heart” (letter to his brother dated January-February 1824 ).

{4} I need other pictures: I love a sandy hillside, two rowan trees in front of a hut, a gate, a broken fence, gray clouds in the sky, piles of straw in front of a threshing floor, a pond under the canopy of thick willows, the expanse of young ducks. My ideal now is a housewife... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sometimes on a rainy day I turned into a barnyard... (Excerpts from Onegin’s Travels, 1829)

{5} That is, the ruling elite.

Source - Collected Works in ten volumes. Volume three. State Publishing House of Fiction. Moscow, 1959