At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia lived in anticipation of grandiose changes. This was especially felt in poetry. After the work of Chekhov and Tolstoy, it was difficult to create within the framework of realism, since the pinnacle of skill had already been reached. That is why the rejection of the usual foundations and the stormy search for something new began: new forms, new rhymes, new words. The era of modernism has begun.
In the history of Russian poetry, modernism is represented by three main currents: symbolists, acmeists and futurists.
The Symbolists strove to depict ideals, saturating their lines with symbols and forebodings. The mixture of mysticism and realities is very characteristic; it is no coincidence that the work of M. Yu. Lermontov was taken as the basis. Acmeists continued the traditions of Russian classical 19th poetry century, seeking to display the world in all its diversity. The Futurists, on the contrary, denied everything familiar, conducting bold experiments with the form of poems, with rhymes and stanzas.
After the revolution, proletarian poets came into fashion, whose favorite subjects were the changes that were taking place in society. And the war gave birth to a whole galaxy of talented poets, including such names as A. Tvardovsky or K. Simonov.
The middle of the century was marked by the flourishing of bard culture. The names of B. Okudzhava, V. Vysotsky, Yu. Vizbor are forever inscribed in the history of Russian poetry. At the same time, the traditions of the Silver Age continue to develop. Some poets look up to the modernists - Evg. Yevtushenko, B. Akhmadullina, R. Rozhdestvensky, others inherit traditions landscape lyrics with a deep immersion in philosophy - these are N. Rubtsov, V. Smelyakov.
Poets of the Silver Age of Russian Literature
K. D. Balmont. The work of this talented poet was forgotten for a long time. The country of socialism did not need writers who created outside the framework of socialist realism. At the same time, Balmont left the richest creative legacy which is still awaiting further study. Critics called him a "solar genius", since all his poems are full of life, love of freedom and sincerity.
Selected Poems:
I. A. Bunin — the greatest poet XX century, creating within the framework of realistic art. His work covers the most diverse aspects of Russian life: the poet writes about the Russian village and the grimaces of the bourgeoisie, about the nature of his native land and about love. Once in exile, Bunin is increasingly inclined towards philosophical poetry, putting in his lyrics global issues universe.
Selected Poems:
A.A. Block- the largest poet of the 20th century, a prominent representative of such a trend as symbolism. A desperate reformer, he left a new unit of poetic rhythm, the dolnik, as a legacy to future poets.
Selected Poems:
S.A. Yesenin- one of the brightest and most original poets of the 20th century. The favorite theme of his lyrics was Russian nature, and the poet himself called himself "the last singer of the Russian village." Nature became the measure of everything for the poet: love, life, faith, strength, any events - everything was passed through the prism of nature.
Selected Poems:
V.V. Mayakovsky- a real block of literature, a poet who left a huge creative legacy. Mayakovsky's lyrics had a huge impact on the poets of the next generations. His bold experiments with the size of a poetic line, rhymes, tonality and forms became the standard for representatives of Russian modernism. His poems are recognizable, and the poetic vocabulary is replete with neologisms. He entered the history of Russian poetry as the creator of his own style.
Selected Poems:
V.Ya. Bryusov- another representative of symbolism in Russian poetry. I worked a lot on the word, each of its lines is precisely verified mathematical formula. He sang about the revolution, but most of his poems are urban.
Selected Poems:
N.A. Zabolotsky- a fan of the "cosmists" school, which welcomed nature, transformed by human hands. Hence so much eccentricity, harshness and fantasticness in his lyrics. Evaluation of his work has always been ambiguous. Some noted his fidelity to impressionism, others spoke of the poet's alienation to the era. Be that as it may, the poet's work is still waiting for a detailed study by true lovers of belles-lettres.
Selected Poems:
A.A. Akhmatova- one of the first representatives of truly "female" poetry. Her lyrics can be safely called "a manual for men about women." The only Russian poetess who received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Selected Poems:
M.I. Tsvetaeva- Another adept of the women's lyric school. In many ways, she continued the traditions of A. Akhmatova, but at the same time she always remained original and recognizable. Many of Tsvetaeva's poems have become famous songs.
Selected Poems:
B. L. Pasternak- famous poet and translator, laureate Nobel Prize on literature. In his lyrics he raised hot topics: socialism, war, the position of man in contemporary society. One of the main merits of Pasternak is that he revealed to the world the originality of Georgian poetry. His translations, sincere interest and love for the culture of Georgia are a huge contribution to the treasury of world culture.
Selected Poems:
A.T. Tvardovsky. The ambiguous interpretation of the work of this poet is due to the fact that for a long time Tvardovsky was the "official face" of Soviet poetry. But his work is knocked out of the rigid framework of "socialist realism". The poet also creates a whole cycle of poems about the war. And his satire became the starting point for the development of satirical poetry.
Selected Poems:
Since the beginning of the 90s, Russian poetry is experiencing a new round of development. There is a change of ideals, society again begins to deny everything old. At the level of lyrics, this resulted in the emergence of new literary movements: postmodernism, conceptualism and metarealism.
Report grade 7.
In a difficult time for Russia, in a period of political change, in difficult social and living conditions, Russian poets turn in their works of art to genuine spiritual values, they write about morality, morality, mercy and compassion.
For example, a landscape poem by I.A. Bunin "Evening" belongs to the philosophical lyrics. The lyrical work is written in the form of a sonnet. The lyrical hero reflects on happiness:
We always only remember about happiness, And happiness is everywhere. Maybe it's this autumn garden behind the shed And clean air pouring in through the window.
The final line of the poem, in depth and volume, is related in meaning to biblical wisdom: “The kingdom of God is within you”:
I see, I hear, I am happy. Everything is in me.
A person is only truly happy when he feels his connection, his kinship with all life on earth, with the whole Universe, with all nature.
And in the poem by A.A. Blok "Night, street, lamp, pharmacy" (1912), the lyrical hero has lost the highest spiritual values. The poem is dedicated to the "terrible world." The lyrical hero is a man who has lost his soul, forgotten about love, compassion, mercy. The ring composition of the work reveals its problems: the meaninglessness and dullness of existence, the inability to find a way out of the current situation:
Night, street, lantern, pharmacy, Senseless and dim light. Live at least a quarter of a century - Everything will be so. There is no exit.
Where can a person find spiritual values? According to the same A. Blok, in merger with the Motherland. Homeland for A. Blok is a multifaceted concept. In the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” (1919), the poet writes about the historical past of Russia. Back in 1908, A. Blok wrote to K.S. Stanislavsky: “In this form, my topic stands before me, the topic of Russia ... I consciously and irrevocably dedicate my life to this topic. I realize more and more clearly that this is the first question, the most vital, the most real... Not without reason, perhaps, only outwardly naive, outwardly incoherently, I pronounce the name: Russia. After all, here is life or death, happiness or death. The cycle "On the Kulikovo Field" consists of five poems. In a note to the cycle, Blok wrote: “The Battle of Kulikovo belongs ... to the symbolic events of Russian history. Such events are destined to return. Their solution is yet to come." The lyrical hero of the cycle feels like a contemporary of two eras. The first poem of the cycle plays the role of a prologue and introduces the theme of Russia:
Oh my Russia! My wife! Painfully, a long way is clear to us! ..
In the vast expanses of Russia there is an "eternal battle", "the steppe mare flies, flies." In the third poem, a symbolic image of the Mother of God appears as the embodiment of a bright, pure ideal, which helps to endure in a time of difficult trials:
And when, in the morning, a horde moved like a black cloud,
Was in the shield Your face not made by hands Svetel forever.
The final poem of the cycle finally clarifies its general idea: the poet turns to the past in order to find a match for the present. According to Blok, the time of "return" is coming, decisive events are coming, which, in their intensity and scope, are not inferior to the Battle of Kulikovo. The cycle ends with lines written in the classic iambic tetrameter, which express the aspiration lyrical hero to the future:
The heart cannot live in peace, No wonder the clouds have gathered.
The armor is heavy, as before the battle.
Now your time has come. - Pray!
and V.V. Mayakovsky in the poem "A good attitude towards horses" reflects on vices modern society, shortcomings of people. Like many works of the poet, this poem has a plot: people, having seen a fallen horse, continue to go about their business, compassion, a merciful attitude towards a defenseless creature has disappeared. And only the lyrical hero felt "some kind of general animal longing":
"Horse, don't.
Horse, listen
Why do you think that you are worse than them? ...
The famous phrase from a poetic work: "... we are all a little horse" - has become a phraseological unit. In the life of every person there comes a period when he needs sympathy, compassion, support. The poem reveals spiritual values, teaches kindness, mercy, humanity. The atmosphere of tragic loneliness is created by various poetic devices. The most common among them: the reception of sound recording (the description of the subject is transmitted through its sound accompaniment). AT this poem the selected combination of sounds conveys the voices of the street: “huddled together, laughter rang and rattled”, - the sound of horse hooves:
Beaten hooves.
They sang like: Mushroom. Rob. Coffin. Rough
An unconventional combination of words is used by the poet to convey the conflict depicted: “the street overturned”, “Kuznetsky laughed”, “the street slid”. The special rhyming of the poetic poem also contributes to forcing the painful atmosphere of the loneliness of a living creature - a horse in a crowd of onlookers:
Horse on croup
crashed
For the onlooker of the onlooker,
Pants that came to Kuznetsk to flare
huddled together
Laughter rang out and tinkled:
The horse has fallen!
The horse has fallen! -
V.V. Mayakovsky uses various artistic and expressive means in the poem, which create a special atmosphere, make the depicted poetic picture more vivid and expressive.
For example, the metaphor “shod with ice” conveys the perception of a horse: the street is sliding, not the horse. The inversion “trousers that came to Kuznetsk to flare” reveals the place and time of the poem: the shopping malls of the Kuznetsk bridge, it was especially fashionable at that time to wear flared trousers.
The incident described by the writer leaves a painful impression on the reader, but the ending of the poem is optimistic, since the horse found an empathetic person in the image of a lyrical hero:
Maybe old-
and did not need a nanny,
maybe my thought seemed to go to her,
rushed
stood up,
The finale of the poem is symbolic: the horse recalls childhood - the most carefree time of life, when everyone dreams of a happy future, hopes for a better life:
And everything seemed to her - She is a foal, And it was worth living, And it was worth working.
In the poetry of S.A. Yesenin, the lyrical hero acquires "eternal values" also in merging with nature. The theme of nature is associated in Yesenin's poetry with the personification of living beings. For example, in the poem "Song of the Dog" (1915), "seven red puppies" were taken away from the mother dog. Pure naturalism (“the bitch fawned”, “combing her tongue”, “licking the sweat from the sides”) is combined with Yesenin’s deep lyricism (“the snow was flowing down”, “for a long, long time the water of the unfrozen surface trembled”, “looked loudly into the blue heights” , "the moon glided thin", "golden stars in the snow"). The poem has a plot: a man (“gloomy owner”), regardless of the feelings of the dog, drowned her puppies. The poet conveys the true grief of the animal:
And when she trudged a little back, Licking the sweat from her sides, A month appeared to her above the hut One of her puppies.
The last quatrain is an oxymoron, which describes the impossibility of existence in the same world of a cruel person and a mother dog, deliberately deprived of her own children:
And muffled, as from a handout, When they throw a stone at her in laughter, The dog's eyes rolled like golden stars into the snow.
So, the poets of the beginning of the 20th century, like many Russian people, are busy searching for “eternal values” that can be found in merging with the Motherland, nature, independently developing the best spiritual qualities in oneself: mercy, compassion, kindness.
Questions about the report:
1) Which of the Russian poets of the early 20th century refers to "eternal values"?
2) What happens to a person, according to A. Blok, when he loses moral concepts? (See the analysis of A. Blok’s poem “Night, street, lamp, pharmacy ...”)
3) How does V. Mayakovsky reveal the theme of mercy in the poem “Good attitude towards horses”?
4) What is the poem by S.A. Yesenin "Song of the Dog"
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all aspects of Russian life were radically transformed: politics, economics, science, technology, culture, and art. There are various, sometimes directly opposite, assessments of the socio-economic and cultural prospects for the development of the country. The general feeling is the onset new era, bearing a change in the political situation and a reassessment of the old spiritual and aesthetic ideals. Literature could not but respond to the fundamental changes in the life of the country. There is a revision of artistic guidelines, a radical renewal of literary techniques. At this time, Russian poetry is developing especially dynamically. A little later, this period will be called the "poetic renaissance" or the Silver Age of Russian literature.
Realism in the early 20th century
Realism does not disappear, it continues to develop. L.N. is also actively working. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov and V.G. Korolenko, M. Gorky, I.A. Bunin, A.I. Kuprin ... Within the framework of the aesthetics of realism, the creative individualities of the writers of the 19th century, their civic position and moral ideals found a vivid manifestation. Dostoevsky to I.A. Bunin, and those for whom this worldview was alien - from V.G. Belinsky to M. Gorky.
However, at the beginning of the 20th century, many writers were no longer satisfied with the aesthetics of realism - new aesthetic schools began to emerge. Writers unite in various groups, put forward creative principles, participate in polemics - literary movements are affirmed: symbolism, acmeism, futurism, imagism, etc.
Symbolism in the early 20th century
Russian symbolism, the largest of the modernist movements, was born not only as a literary phenomenon, but also as a special worldview that combines artistic, philosophical and religious principles. The date of the emergence of a new aesthetic system is considered to be 1892, when D.S. Merezhkovsky made a report "On the Causes of the Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature". It proclaimed the main principles of the future symbolists: "mystical content, symbols and the expansion of artistic impressionability." The central place in the aesthetics of symbolism was given to a symbol, an image that has a potential inexhaustibility of meaning.
To the rational cognition of the world, the Symbolists opposed the construction of the world in creativity, the cognition of the environment through art, which V. Bryusov defined as "comprehension of the world in other, non-rational ways." In the mythology of different peoples, the symbolists found universal philosophical models, with the help of which it is possible to comprehend the deep foundations human soul and the solution of spiritual problems of our time. Representatives of this trend also paid special attention to the heritage of Russian classical literature - new interpretations of the work of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tyutchev were reflected in the works and articles of the Symbolists. Symbolism gave culture the names of outstanding writers - D. Merezhkovsky, A. Blok, Andrei Bely, V. Bryusov; the aesthetics of symbolism had a huge impact on many representatives of other literary movements.
Acmeism in the early 20th century
Acmeism was born in the bosom of symbolism: a group of young poets first founded the literary association "Poets' Workshop", and then proclaimed themselves representatives of a new literary trend - acmeism (from the Greek akme - highest degree something, flourishing, peak). Its main representatives are N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, S. Gorodetsky, O. Mandelstam. Unlike the symbolists, who strive to know the unknowable, to comprehend the higher essences, the acmeists again turned to the value of human life, the diversity of the bright earthly world. The main requirement for the artistic form of the works was the picturesque clarity of images, verified and precise composition, stylistic balance, and sharpness of details. The acmeists assigned the most important place in the aesthetic system of values to memory - a category associated with the preservation of the best domestic traditions and world cultural heritage.
Futurism in the early 20th century
Derogatory reviews of previous and contemporary literature were given by representatives of another modernist trend - futurism (from Latin futurum - future). A necessary condition for the existence of this literary phenomenon, its representatives considered an atmosphere of outrageousness, a challenge to public taste, a literary scandal. The futurists' craving for mass theatrical performances with dressing up, painting faces and hands was caused by the idea that poetry should come out of books into the square, sound in front of spectators-listeners. Futurists (V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, D. Burliuk, A. Kruchenykh, E. Guro, and others) put forward a program for transforming the world with the help of a new art that abandoned the heritage of its predecessors. At the same time, unlike representatives of other literary movements, in substantiating creativity, they relied on fundamental sciences- mathematics, physics, philology. The formal and stylistic features of the poetry of futurism were the renewal of the meaning of many words, word creation, the rejection of punctuation marks, the special graphic design of poetry, the depoetization of the language (the introduction of vulgarisms, technical terms, the destruction of the usual boundaries between "high" and "low").
Conclusion
Thus, in the history of Russian culture, the beginning of the 20th century is marked by the emergence of diverse literary movements, various aesthetic views and schools. However, original writers, true artists of the word, overcame the narrow framework of declarations, created highly artistic works that survived their era and entered the treasury of Russian literature.
The most important feature of the beginning of the 20th century was the general craving for culture. Not to be at the premiere of a performance in the theater, not to attend the evening of an original and already sensational poet, in literary drawing rooms and salons, not to read a book of poetry just published was considered a sign of bad taste, outdated, not fashionable. When culture becomes a fashionable phenomenon, this is a good sign. “Fashion for culture” is not a new phenomenon for Russia. So it was in the days of V.A. Zhukovsky and A.S. Pushkin: let's remember the "Green Lamp" and "Arzamas", "The Society of Lovers of Russian Literature", etc. At the beginning of the new century, exactly one hundred years later, the situation practically repeated itself. The Silver Age came to replace the Golden Age, maintaining and maintaining the connection of times.
In the 20s of the twentieth century, Yesenin experienced an upsurge in creative activity. He turns out to be almost the only poet who continues to create lyrical works. The situation at that time was such that many Soviet writers generally denied the existence of lyrics in the light of revolutionary era. Sergei Yesenin, one might say, in spite of everything, proved that lyric poetry does not contradict the existing situation in the country. Rather, on the contrary, it is time for people to leave their weapons and pay attention to the beautiful, the eternal. The poet's lyrics are distinguished by deep psychologism, maturity, and are also impeccable in terms of artistic design.
The lyrical works of Sergei Yesenin are full of clear images that indicate the feelings and experiences of the author, reveal the beauty of the human soul: “I am wandering through the first snow, in my heart there are lilies of the valley of flashing forces ...”. Yesenin was, to some extent, an innovator in Russian literature. For him, characters are unusual images for that time. Only in this author “evening drew black eyebrows”, “golden foliage swirled in pinkish water on the pond, like a light flock of butterflies with fading flies to the moon.” When creating poems, Yesenin uses various artistic techniques. For example, the poem “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry ...” is characterized by both the originality of the form and the novelty of the content. Rhetorical appeals give the poem amazing emotionality: “Vagabond spirit, you are less and less ...”, “My life? Or did you dream about me? Reading the poem, one can feel the author's sadness, some temporary doom: "Everything will pass like white smoke from apple trees." Yesenin understands that everything ends sooner or later, as his youth is now passing. The past is both beautiful and already inaccessible: "Oh, my lost freshness, riot of eyes and flood of feelings." This poem is also characterized by emotional song negations, personifications and symbols. Quite realistic thoughts are combined here with metaphorical images. The feeling of sadness sounds in many works of Sergei Yesenin. Often his poems reflect personal dramas, experiences, and also reveals the time in which the poet had to live and create.
In the famous poem "The golden grove dissuaded ..." reveals a complex psychological condition author. From the first words, a vague anxiety is felt. The grove not only dissuaded them, but dissuaded them with "birch, cheerful language." Here one can clearly see the grief of the author about something past, about the past days. With each line, sadness becomes deeper: “And, sadly flying, they no longer regret about anyone”, “A fire of red mountain ash burns in the garden, but it cannot warm anyone.” Inevitably, time flies quickly, nothing can stop it, but everything is going as it should be. Yesenin's metaphors immerse the reader in an amazing world of images: "A hemp plant with a wide moon over a blue pond dreams of all the departed." Yesenin said that "the life of the image is huge and spilled." This is what he proved with each of his works. In the cycle of poems "Persian Motifs" he uses elements of melodious verse: frequent sound repeats, the use of interrogative and exclamatory sentences, which in turn creates certain intonations, the ring construction of stanzas, the repetition of a line within one stanza. Often, simple rhymes are combined with complex components that carry the main semantic load: "and a cry in a rake - and meek songs." Of many of Yesenin's poems, his reverent attitude to color is noticeable. You can even highlight the author's favorite colors - blue, gold, blue. In the ancient Russian color tradition, the symbolism of these colors is clearly defined. The poet is a true artist. He sees May as blue, and June as blue. The heart can become a golden block, and wild youth is a golden daredevil.
Many of Yesenin's poems are dedicated to women. Love for the poet is an inexplicable and bright miracle: "The one who invented your flexible figure and shoulders, put his mouth to the bright secret." A wonderful feeling, according to the poet, can heal any, even a disappointed soul. love lyrics Yesenin is filled with a variety of emotions. This is the joy of a new meeting, and the impulse, and sadness, and longing for the beloved and despair. AT last years the theme of love merges in Sergei Yesenin with the theme of the Motherland. and the poet's love is possible only on native land, in the circle of friends and loving people. The image of the mother is like through all the work of Yesenin. A mother is not only a person who gave life, but one who generously endows her children with song talent. For a poet, this is the closest person. The author rewards her with epithets: sweet, kind, old, tender. In the poem "Letter to Mother" Yesenin fully expresses his son's feelings:
You are my only help and joy, You are my only inexpressible light.
The lyrical image of a thing in the poetry of the twentieth century
It is difficult to understand the path of new Russian poetry without tracing and clarifying the fate of the thing in it: from an auxiliary, situational element to a paramount lyrical value - and then, at least in one of the tendencies, to its splitting, dematerialization and disappearance behind the canopy of words and sound.
Of course, the image of a thing can be given in literature and, therefore, in lyrics only in a word, through a word. But this does not mean that every naming of a thing brings its image to the fore. In poetry, much more than in storytelling, the word itself is image-creating. Only when its lexical novelty is not prominent in the word about a thing is its stylistic characteristic extinguished (poetism, prosaism, dialecticism, vulgarism, etc.), when material meanings are not crushed by poetic root words (“Dragling in thistles for stockings ...” - or again in Pasternak: “... a tea and mischievous bud” - the bud is no longer visible) - then only the image of the thing really shines through the word as an independent lyrical component. I will explain simple example- a poem by early Yesenin "In the hut":
It smells of loose drachens,
At the threshold in a bowl of kvass,
Over turned stoves
Cockroaches climb into the groove.
Soot curls over the damper,
In the oven, the threads of popelits.
And on the bench behind the salt shaker -
Husks of raw eggs.
This is a typical still life in lyrics, with a “mood” (nice childhood!), with signs of a new vision (an abundance of near plans, thanks to which objects are not just indicated in detail, but lyrically chosen). But it is easy to see that the thingness of all the things named here is not equally intense. Dialectal and specifically "village" words slightly, as it were, subdivide what they name. "Raw egg husks" are much more material, so to speak, than drachenes, for the preparation of which these eggs were just broken, and "cockroaches" are more material than "popelits". In general, this eggshell is the only genuine new thing in Yesenin's little etude filled with things; going through stylistically neutral word, it surprises precisely as an object that has not yet been present in poetry, not excluding poetry with everyday and folklore coloring.
Another, equally difficult to trace, but required in the future, is the distinction between the lyrical, on the one hand, and the figurative-situational, on the other, image of the subject. Moments of figurativeness, situationality are inevitable in lyrics - art, albeit “expressive” according to the traditional classification, but connected with the situation, with the specificity of place and time, in contrast to music or non-figurative ornament. “She was sitting on the floor / And sorting through a pile of letters” - this is an episode from Tyutchev's lyrical novel (“Denisiev cycle”), and it requires a subject focus, elements of a stage setting - which are given: in the form of a pile of letters. But for the object to heal proper lyrical life, he must be drawn into a network of subjective mental associations or symbolic correspondences. It should freely enter into the composition of all metaphorical conjugations - both as a reality and as an ideal likeness, explaining it, as something with which the reality is compared; should easily be based on both "halves" of the allegory, the path.
Thus, the "world of things" in principle does not constitute a specific beginning in lyrics, and within the boundaries of entire epochs or styles, it may lie on the periphery of its possibilities. In a certain sense, Derzhavin's powerful situationality, Nekrasov's conscientious realities, or even Fet's flying-stingy outline: "The piano was all open ..." are phenomena of the same order. Things here are predominantly typical, not symbolic; they “work” according to the principle of metonymy (a specific particular testifies to the whole, for example, to a certain way of life with its worldview), and not according to the principle of metaphor (an associative bridge from one sphere of perception to another). Derzhavin's "Sheksnin sterlet" or the "cross and button" in Nekrasov's song about Kalistratushka, as they say, are not equal to themselves: behind them are layers of life, everyday and spiritual, but not taken in a specially lyrical mode.
Moreover, the selection, the selection of things, is very important for classical lyrics. I have in mind not only the generally understandable side of the matter, that things, hierarchically underestimated, from the lower strata of everyday life, hardly penetrated high lyrics, surrounded by a comic halo that excuses them (“variegated rubbish of the Flemish school”) or stylistically marked as impudent prosaisms. . I mean something else: the lyrics of the 19th century were not crowded and cluttered, in relation to the world of things, a kind of Occam's razor operated in it - as much objectivity as needed to vitally root the lyrical impulse and give it acceleration - but no more. Next to Fet's open piano, a table on which a cup of chocolate smokes is unthinkable, or a dressing table in which the singer is reflected - that would be simply blasphemy. The same is obvious if we turn to classical meditative lyrics, where the starting point for reflection is a memorable or instructive object, a thing: “A dried, earless flower, / Forgotten in a book, I see ...” (A. S. Pushkin); “At the silver spurs / I look in thought ...” (M. Yu. Lermontov). This thing turns out to be only a shore from which the boat of poetic imagination pushes off in order to swim away; any concretization and encirclement of other things would be felt here as redundant.
So, until relatively recently, the world of things penetrated the lyrics only through a series of strict filters: stylistic relevance, typicality, involvement in a given situation life, the interpenetration of “I” and “not-I”: “Everything is in me and I am in everything”). And suddenly - in relation to things - everything in poetry changed. The filters suddenly burst, and the materiality of the civilized world flooded into the lyrics. Lyricism faced the problem of mastering the thing not by the periphery of its means, but by its very essence, the core of its impressionability and expressiveness. That this is so, it seems to me, is evidenced by all the trends of the new poetry, beginning even with symbolism. If we ignore for a moment the socio-ideological side of their disputes, manifestos and recommendations, then almost every time the remainder will be the question of the meaning and mode of the presence of a thing in poetry. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, they argued about the objective image (and about the objectivity of the word) as passionately as in the first quarter of the nineteenth - about language and style. Already the motto “from the real to the most real” postulated in the lyrics the world of realities, although it was going to make it a bridge to the world of essences. Post-symbolist currents are struggling with symbolism for the self-sufficiency of realities (acmeism), for expanding their circle, going out into the street (futurism, in fact, already anticipated by the expressionist experiments of Bryusov, Blok, Bely); then come the Imagists with their search for an “organic image”, the constructivists with their “local device”, the “Oberiuts” with their preference for the masculine concreteness of material objects over all sorts of “experiences” - no matter where you throw it, the lyrical word is perceived as objectifying, in its own way colliding and pulling things together.
Of course, first of all, it is not theories and experiments that are indicative, but the full-fledged poetic practice of creative artists. Between them, in the perspective we are interested in, there will be more similarities than differences. According to Pasternak, Mayakovsky once told him: "You love lightning in the sky, and I love an electric iron." But this is only a volatile aphorism that characterizes Mayakovsky's programming, and not Pasternak's inclinations. The latter loved, could love lightning in an electric iron no less than Mayakovsky, although in a different way: not as a technical achievement, but as a sign of housekeeping, captivating female troubles. The point is not in the motive, but in the very lyrical acceptance of the thing. The notorious “iron” could not be low for Pasternak, as well as for Mayakovsky, and most importantly, it could not be dumb subject.
But before turning to the experience of the verses themselves, it will be natural to ask the question, where did this expansion of things into lyrics come from, which began after the first Russian revolution, in the era of "modernity", and by the turn of 1917 had reached a decisive force? The closest (albeit too general, since we are talking about the original ways of art) explanation is found in the material pathos of late capitalist civilization, which began to throw many new “comfortable” things on the market, cultivate needs for them and glorify these needs as symptoms of the growth and expansion of human individuality. . Now, when new things, as if on a smoothly moving conveyor belt, are moving down to our life and from there - without hindrance - into art (so, for example, the touching manipulation of a soda machine, as a metaphysical object in some way, immediately made me feel that in well-known poem by B. Akhmadulina, pose and stretch) - in short, in our habitually overstocked time it is already difficult to imagine all the pretentiousness and all the psychological effect of the onslaught that the refined layers of spiritual culture once experienced from the side of the new world of things. At the turn of the century, the German economist and philosopher W. Sombart, an enthusiast of the offensive capitalist ethos, wrote with an intonation of triumph: or due to lack of funds, a real understanding of material well-being, the decoration of external life. Even Goethe, who belonged to a more secular era, who was no stranger to pleasures and who did not lack a taste for luxury and splendor, even Goethe lived in a house whose decoration seems miserable and beggarly to our present taste ... Even the artists did not know the magical charm furnishings of beautiful things, they knew nothing about the art of living in beauty: they were ascetics or purists. They either dressed as Nazarenes in camel hair and ate locusts and wild honey, or led the life of a gymnasium teacher or official. Now, in the words of Sombart, “the whole understanding of life is undergoing a change. It becomes from a predominantly literary to a predominantly artistic, from an abstract-idealistic to a sensuous one. A taste is awakening for the visible of the local world, the beautiful form of even external objects for the joy of life and its pleasures ... At present, shops selling perfumes and ties, linen shops, ladies' hair salons, haircuts and shaving salons are ahead of everyone in terms of aesthetic furnishings. , photographic workshops, etc. e. Business and commercial life is saturated with beauty. This rather aggressive challenge seeped through all the pores of life and could not but give rise to a lyrical response, one way or another. From the passages of Sombart it is easy to throw a bridge to the world of Severyanin's ego-futuristic poetry, to some early Acmeistic "joys of life". But even in order to be rejected, this new "design of life" had to be taken into the lyrical sensibility and somehow digested by it, whether in the form of flickering glare of "mysterious vulgarity" or as a vision of a "revolt of things" returning to the vegetative - to the animal, the living world, which served as raw material for them, or in some other way.
However, it would be naive to explain the marriage of lyricism with materiality solely by the influence on the life of mass production, its generous temptations and vices. To take into account the inaccuracy of this sociological projection, we must remember that if the multiplication of things in their quantity and variety could cause a certain restructuring of the poetic world, then the impoverishment of things did not delay this restructuring in the least, on the contrary, it exacerbated it. The “sulfur match”, which could warm a poet chilling in the backyard of life, is also a new thing, and moreover, it has already grown into a symbol, poetically much more significant than “diamond cream or a wafer with filling” in the early poems of the same author, Osip Mandelstam . When the things were firmly established in the lyrics in a new way, it became clear that they do not need to be either beautiful, or defiantly vulgar, or technically amazing - they just need to be simple, so to speak, democratic things in order to condense the energy of lyrical feeling. Some “sample pattern” becomes a witness to a lyrical drama, like a “withered flower”, and in Pasternak (the hero of whose poems weeps over this “pattern”) it is precisely “the way of cellars without embellishment and attics without curtains” that is clothed with the highest lyrical dignity.
The matter, apparently, was still in the general reorientation of attention from the eternal to the current, which culture is experiencing on the eve of the First World War. At some point in cultural history, the eternal themes of lyrics - nature, love, death, the soul, God - got hooked on the world of things created by man and, as it were, could not find expression for themselves bypassing this world. So, in Annensky, death was paired with phenol, which protects a dead body from decay. This is modern death, modern horror of death, an eternal theme, skipped through today: "... with left hand and phenol / Indifferently breathing Lady." (The resolution of the lyrics in such things was, of course, spurred on by the novel; everyone remembers the horror of the final scene of The Idiot, where Rogozhin explains to Myshkin how he bought bottles of disinfectant liquid so that Nastasya Filippovna's body would last longer.)
Here it is also necessary to add a shift of thought, "philosophy" from natural philosophy to cultural philosophy. I will allow myself a pun: from creature to utensils. Poetry is not directly dependent on the philosophical interests of its time, but is nevertheless correlated with them. The "lyric of nature" was supplanted by the "lyric of culture" that unexpectedly won a lot of space for itself, and, most importantly, both worlds became mutually permeable and equal. Not only could Nature be compared with Rome and explain its essence with its historical contours (early Mandelstam), but a colonnade began to seem in the forest, and not back (early Pasternak). But even in the “lyric of culture” itself, the philosophically influential distinction between culture and civilization, a culture that organically accompanies nature, and a civilization that is opposite to it, was extinguished. In the young Mandelstam's poem "Tennis", an athlete plays a game with a female partner, "like an Attic fighter, in love with his enemy." The tennis ball flew, as we see, high, very high.
The striking difference between the cosmological, natural-philosophical and, on the other hand, cultural-material, cultural-material approach to the same source of impressions can be illustrated by the following two excerpts. This, however, is not poetry, but prose written in the late 20s and early 30s, but the prose of two great poets, retaining all the signs of their original, original poetic imagery. In short, I am quoting two travels in Armenia - Bely and Mandelstam.
Andrey Bely: “The legend of the life of extinct volcanoes changes the terrain into the clutches of gray-haired brontosaurs<…>into the backs of dragons, barely shimmering with pink peach, into golden brown wool, into the pomegranates of the vertebral ridge, into the heads that rose from the amethyst shadow ... Behind Karaklis, the earth disappeared into the landscape, becoming light and air<…>there the shades are fluid, like statues in the course of the invariable outline of the mountains, their through modulations that make up the light painting of the Pambak ridges…”.
O. Mandelstam: “I was able to observe the service of the clouds to Ararat. There was a downward and upward movement of cream, when they pour into a glass of ruddy tea and disperse in it in cumulus tubers ... The village of Ashtarak hung on the murmur of water, as if on a wire frame. The stone baskets of his gardens are an excellent benefit gift for a coloratura soprano.”
Both of these episodes were written at a time when the dispute between symbolism and acmeism had long since passed away, but, as was said, they are a relapse of the youth of each of the poets. We, looking from our time, are equally removed, it seems, from both ways of perception. It already seems to us completely unreliable - both as a physics and as a "metaphysics" - the golden, brocade, amethyst cosmos of Andrei Bely, entwined with the mythical bodies of air dragons, showered with precious stones, dotted with seals of Gnostic emblems. But the emancipatory freshness of Mandelstam's (as one of his program articles put it) "consciously surrounding man with utensils" has also evaporated. The deliberate handiness of what will never become and should never become “utensils”: the transformation of clouds into cream, villages into a basket from a flower shop (or from the same place: dugouts of hermits - country cellars; “tombs scattered in the manner of a flower garden”; Sevan climate - "golden currency for cognac in a secret cupboard of the mountain sun") - does not already liberate, but vaguely disturbs: too convenient and profane, this world forces us to remember not about the ancient lares and penates that Mandelstam dreamed of, but - to use the expression of Andrei Bitov - about " beach civilization.
A look at nature and in general Big world like, roughly speaking, a warehouse - a salon or a barn, anyway - everyday things are not only Mandelstam's acmeist mark. We find the same material-everyday familiarization of nature in the works of various poets in the post-symbolist 1910s. For Pasternak at that time, “A wet stone bagel / Venice floated in the water,” and if we turn to the celestial-natural economy of the early Yesenin, then we will find pretty utensils there, which more smoothly interface with dawns and waters because it is not urban . To mix the natural with the world of artificial things, to liken one to the other, to equate both in dignity, to attribute to nature not just creation, but some hand creativity (when even God himself creates not with the creative word “Let it be”, but fumbles at the machine: “To whom nothing is small, / Who is immersed in decoration / maple leaf/ And from the days of Ecclesiastes / Did not leave the post / Behind the alabaster's tees") - such was the poetic philosophy of the time. Very interesting to follow the motive window in the poetry of Annensky, Mandelstam, Pasternak. It is, as it were, the line between the outer space of heaven and trees and the interior of the room, but the line is not dividing, but related. A drawing of branches in the sky, as on enamel or a sheet of paper inserted into a frame (by Annensky and Mandelstam), or, conversely, a garden running into a window or dressing table to settle among the crowd of things in the room and bring them out (Pasternak) - here composition of such still lifes with landscape elements. It was possible to go the opposite way - as was usual with the Futurists: not the familiarization of nature, but the romanticization of a thing, its promotion in rank. The young Mayakovsky takes the world of signboards and shop windows behind him into the cosmic distance: “I immediately smeared the map of everyday life, / Splashing paint from a glass, / I guessed on a platter of jelly / Oblique cheekbones of the ocean, / On the scales of a tin fish / I read the calls of new lips ... " It would seem that this is the perfect contrast to when the poet identifies himself with a branch after the rain and, holding the branch in the air, is convinced: “The drops have the heaviness of cufflinks” (B. Pasternak). Nevertheless, the trend is the same: nature, as a generator of lyrical themes, is losing its inviolability and purity. Is it possible to see here a reflection of the tool and consumer attitude to nature, characteristic of the same strip of civilization? Such a conclusion, ideologically not devoid of meaning, would sin aesthetically, crossing out the enduring in the conquests of the new poetry. Therefore, I prefer to put an ellipsis here ...
At the first stage, the discovery of things in new lyrics is not much different from that in prose: this is an extensive mastering of previously unfamiliar or unusual realities in the lyrical sphere. Being drawn into the personal world of the poet, such things, of course, are transformed, receive illumination and a mysterious addition to their direct meaning: but so far they still bring their own circumstantial microenvironment into the lyrical poem, in isolation from which they can neither be named nor used. Blok was not afraid of new things. A new amazing thing could become his theme of a poem. He was one of the first - perhaps the first - to write a poem about an airplane (even two, but here we mean an earlier one): “O steel impassive bird, / How can you glorify the Creator?” The plane in this poem is a symbol of an unacceptable technical civilization, its demonic fall from a height - certainly not a pictorial, but a lyrical unit. But the plane can exist here only as part of a certain thematic picture, between it and the inner world of the lyrics there is an uncrossable strip of alienation. Changes in the lyrical fate of the "airplane" can be illustrated by the late Pasternak's poem "Night". “He drowned in the fog, / Disappeared in its jet, / Becoming a cross on the fabric / And a mark on the linen”; he, this small stitch of a sewing needle, is equated with a star, and the artist is likened to a sleepless pilot, who, of course, is one with the plane, his soul. Pasternak's plane has been in all walks of life - from home economics to stardom and creativity, it has involuntarily increased a lot of meanings, including those that have little in common with its direct flying function. It can be argued that he is lyrically settled.
Was unusual - not a novelty, but a lack of familiarity with the old lyrics - and the objective world of Blok's "The Stranger". I. Annensky, in an unusually insightful article “On Modern Lyricism,” immediately noted the special glow of this ordinary, worn-out world: ladies - impudently ugly. And meanwhile, this is exactly what is needed for you to feel the approach of the deity. But again, all these things are, albeit lyrically mysterious, but a single environment, soldered in itself and opposing the dream. The situational and the internal are still separated, located on this and that side of the life of the soul, and motivation by intoxication is needed for the barrier to fall and the “ostrich feathers” to sway “in the brain”. N. Gumilyov, reviewing new poetic books, wrote in 1912 about Blok’s path to objectivity: “In the second book, Blok seemed to look back at the world of things around him for the first time and, looking back, was unspeakably delighted ...” And further: “... the world ennobled by music , became humanly beautiful and pure - everything from Dante's grave to the faded curtain over diseased geraniums. Gumilev, at the time of his first acmeist enthusiasm, was pleased to notice these "faded curtains." But he hastened to see in them one of the things of the world in the sense that could be close to his own aspirations. These curtains live in their own style - songlike (so that they are not "ennobled" by music, but are downright dictated by it) - and in their everyday context: as an accessory of "petty-bourgeois life" for Blok's role-playing lyrics; they are not at all what he has - a portrait “in its simple frame”, a truly lyrical subject that does not need side motivations in order to become sincere, but on the other hand an object that is fully legitimized by classical poetry. In other words, Blok's lyrics do not yet enter into those intimate relationships with a thing, especially with a new thing, that will soon become an ineradicable feature of poetry, right up to today. The word "still" does not in the least indicate any creative limitations of Blok. On the contrary, this "not yet" is perhaps one of his virtues as, in many respects, the last classical poet.
The true father of Russian lyrical “thingism” is, of course, Innokenty Annensky. The world of “not-I”, into which the human “I” always peers so greedily and perplexedly, trying to somehow unravel it, tame it, humanize it, draw it into its spiritual history, this world of “not-I” is represented by Annensky precisely as the world of things. If Tyutchev’s “Night is gloomy, like a stout-eyed beast, / Looks from every bush,” then Annensky’s this night of being looks from every shelf and whatnot, from under the closet and from under the sofa. Of course, Annensky has the finest lyrical landscapes, both urban and in the open, but it is obvious that the nerve of his poetry does not run here. The eyes of the “not-I” (“But in the very “I” from the eyes of the “not-I” / You cannot go anywhere) - these are the eyes of nearby objects, and not of cosmic elements.
In the titled article “The World of Things”, L. Ya. Ginzburg speaks of the presence of “prosaisms” in Annensky’s poems (for example, “shaft”, “thorns” - in the device of a hurdy-gurdy). But the point, perhaps, is that these words in Annensky are already on the other side of the division into prosaisms and poeticisms and, thanks to their stylistic transparency, unmarkedness, they quietly let the things they indicate into the verse, with which you immediately get used to it. "Screw" and "taxi" are remembered when reading Blok as rare, unusual words. Annensky, giving a sense of the familiarity of the subject, names it casually, without any pressure.
Annensky was the first to learn how to saturate ordinary "urban" objects, so to speak, the rubbish of civilization, with radiation inner life- his own, human in general. At first, he did this almost naively - in the form of an elementary allegory. “Around the whitening Psyche / The same ficuses stick out, / The same sad lackeys, / The same din and the same fumes ... Dregs of wine, naked bones, / Ashes of freezing cigars ... " This is not a colorful situation bottom, where "at the appointed hour" the poet wanders to meet the Stranger there. it the very move existence, allegorically represented by the poet in the "tavern of life", written after Pushkin's, much appreciated by Annensky, "The Cart of Life". “But it’s not hot in the hallway: / There, raising his collar, / By the floating cinder, / The undertaker settles scores,” we read at the end, and after such a finale we re-read the poem in order to better catch the allegorical lining of this imaginary everyday composition . Here a double life is imposed on things almost by force, but soon Annensky will be able to revive and animate them with this second plan.
Annensky has a special circle of poems, similar to Lermontov's so-called "allegorical landscapes" (a parallel that is also interesting in that it additionally illustrates the leap from nature to a fabricated product, which poetry dared to turn to new subjects). There are not so many of these plays by Lermontov (“Stream”, “Sail”, “Clouds”, “A golden cloud spent the night ...”), but they are condensed Lermontov: small personal myths, where the lyrical feeling is expressed in an indirect, chaste way, on an ancient basis psychological parallelism. A number of plays, saturated with the same beauty and sadness of existence, can be called by analogy "allegorical still lifes" by Annensky. As in the case of Lermontov, this is only a facet of Annensky's work, but one that cuts into consciousness as a specific "Annensky element", similar to Lermontov's element. “Old hurdy-gurdy”, “Alarm clock”, “Steel cicada” - here objects have an inner being, outlive their destiny, their destiny, and although, apparently original, their life is breathed into them by human experience, comes from it and leads to it back, but the world of "not-I" still receives its own convincing share of vitality and cordiality. When in the fairly popular poem “It was on Vallen-Koski ...” the poet says: “There is such a sky, / Such a play of rays, / That the resentment of a doll / Resentment is pitiful to the heart,” it is clear that he is complaining about my resentment that his heart is lonely, "like an old doll in the waves." But the doll, this piece of wood thrown into a waterfall, is also seriously pitiful, and once endowed with a reflected life, it forever remains for us really alive and really unhappy. Only Lermontov knew how to feel sorry for the inhuman, who, according to V.V. Rozanov, felt how grief hurts when a shovel crashes into her stone chest. In "Bow and Strings" by Annensky, one also believes that "the heart of the violin was in pain" and that the poet was given the opportunity to feel it.
Creative tasks related to the world of things, Annensky set himself consciously, in the course of deep reflection on contemporary poetry. He believed that the world of nature has an eternal and unchanging aesthetic value as a world of essential elements, captured in archetypal myths, to which modern man, living in history and everyday life, has nothing to add. If such a modern person wants to find a poetic image of his changeable, fleeting, historically determined life, he is best to turn to the urban setting, where nothing has yet received mythologically stable meaning consecrated by tradition and therefore can symbolize momentary spiritual situations. “Where in the open, eternally and calmly alternating in full breadth, then the day darkens, then the night melts, where the groves are full of dryads and satyrs, and the streams of nymphs, where Life and Death, Lightning and Hurricane have long been overgrown with metaphors of joy and anger, horror and struggle - there is nothing to do there for the eternally created symbols ... It will certainly seem to you that the poetry of the open spaces, reflecting this once forever completed world, cannot, and should not add anything new to it. Therefore, for Annensky, “symbolism in poetry is a child of the city. It is cultivated and grows as life itself becomes more artificial and even fictitious. Symbols will be born where there are still no myths, but where there is no longer faith ... They soon become familiar not only with the anxiety of the stock exchange and green cloth, but also with the terrible bureaucracy of some Parisian morgue and even among the waxes of the museum, disgusting in their superliveness.
Annensky himself, in general, remained alien to the effects of the mortuary, green cloth and panopticon. The miracle of his selective attention is that he opened up for lyricism in subjects that form the ordinary background of human life, mental resonators. This discovery does not seem so stunning when compared with the development of psychological prose: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (for example, Anna's eyes clinging to unnecessary objects and details before suicide), of course, Chekhov; later, in the West, Proust, Virginia Woolf. But some restrictions and prohibitions had to fall precisely on the paths of poetry, so that such a generally understandable linkage of feeling with a thing: the longing of the patient, staring at the pattern on the wallpaper, and the pattern itself, as if absorbing this longing, entered into poetry, moreover, expanded possibilities of lyricism to world sorrow.
On pale pink ovals,
Mornings are shrouded in mist,
Were entwined with an unprecedented bouquet
Steel color flowers.
………………………….
In their monotony languid,
You will understand their sweet hashish.
You will understand, on the gloss of centifolia
Counting the strokes slowly...
And building rhombuses involuntarily
Between the stages of Tosca.
(About the same thing - “The longing of the pendulum”: “And I’m lying, bewitched. / Is it really my fault, / That on a white dial / A lush rose is painted.”) In Annensky’s work, lyrical objectivity is flourishing, a moment of balance: the thing is fully introduced the right of allegorical life, but still does not lose its integrity, self-identity, is not split into bundles of sensations and is not replaced by a word about a thing.
Mandelstam, having passed this point of balance in his own way, began to move from the object to the properties detached from it or to its verbal shadow. (Let me remind you of the famous words of the poet: “Do not demand from poetry purely materiality, concreteness, materiality ... Why is it necessary to touch with your fingers? And most importantly, why identify the word with the thing, with the object that it denotes? Is the thing the master of the word? The word is Psyche. living word does not designate an object, but freely chooses, as if for habitation, one or another objective significance, materiality, a lovely body. And around the thing the word wanders freely, like the soul around an abandoned but unforgotten body” (From the article “Word and Culture”, 1921). Comparison with contemporaries allows us to catch the features of Mandelstam's approach to things.
At about the same time, Pasternak, Yesenin and Mandelstam were carried away by the "distillation" of their neighbors, most often ordinary, objects into a metaphorical series. It is interesting to compare thematically similar. Mandelstam: “... the city moon comes out on the haystacks ... a pale reaper descending into the lifeless world ... throwing yellow straw on the wooden floor.” Pasternak: "Unless the birds chirp, / In the blue sky they chirp, / The ice lemon is at dinner / Through the straw of the beam." Yesenin: “Stacks of the sun in the waters of the womb…”; "The moon has dropped the yellow reins." This is enough to understand that such image creation was a universal stage of post-symbolist lyrics and did not constitute, say, the monopoly of Imagism. But just from this point - metaphorical objectivity - the paths of the thing in the three named poets diverge. Yesenin develops his material metaphors according to the archaic and ethnographic logic of myth. How this happened can be read in his "Keys of Mary" and in A. Marchenko's book about him, where the visual-objective side of Yesenin's work is highlighted with special attention. In Pasternak's metaphorical doubling of the world, textured, sensual similarities play a huge role. At its core, the material metaphor of the early Pasternak is exceptionally simple, and only in the course of the lyrical plot does it sinuously move as part of detailed personifications, clouded by sound writing. “Like a brazier with bronze ash, a sleepy garden sprinkles with beetles”; “... the fallen sky is not picked up from the roads” (after the rain - patches of the reflected sky in wet puddles, like fallen leaves) - these are, first of all, joyful visual discoveries. Of course, sendings of a “supersensible” nature also helped to make them: faith in the high value of objects of a small world and also in the vitality and whirlwind mobility of all material things (“But things tear their masks off, / Lose power, drop honor, / When they have a reason to sing, / When there is a reason for a downpour”). However, the object image always owes its grain to elementary poetic sensationalism. Even when Pasternak turns to the general and the abstract, the method of sensory similarities remains in force. “It is a sin to think that you are not from the Vestals. / Came in with a chair. / As from a shelf, my life got / And blew the dust. Or - about poetry; about the “Greek sponge in suckers”: “I would put you on a wet board / Green garden bench. / Grow yourselves luxuriant briskets and figs, / Take in the clouds and ravines, / And at night, poetry, I will squeeze you out / For the health of the greedy paper. Here, at first, according to the simple logic of colloquial metaphors, the non-material materializes: life, vegetating in a lonely corner, like a book put on a shelf; the ability of poetry to absorb impressions. And then this conditional objectivity finds the brightest and most tangible attributes in the material-metaphorical series. No matter how complex and fluid these similitudes may be, they are based on the simplicity of visual similarity, from which a step was possible to the “unheard of simplicity” of the late Pasternak.
Not so with Mandelstam. He seemed to be in his own way dear to the self-identity of things, their simple presence in the world, so to speak, the objective granularity of the world. He, as we remember, is afraid of the incorporeal "singing of Aonides" and the gaping of emptiness. And not in the 10s, but already in the 20s, he repeats everything: “But the taste of whipped cream is eternal / And the smell of orange peel.” However, things fall into his metaphorical series on much more complex grounds than in Pasternak's, and there they undergo a much more radical reworking. At least in these memorable lines from Tristios:
Well, in the room as white as a spinning wheel, there is silence,
It smells of vinegar and paint and fresh wine from the cellar.
The spinning wheel stands in this room as the only reliable object in the midst of the shadows - the smells of the substance. But there is just no spinning wheel, there is silence, which is nothing like a spinning wheel and is likened to it not by similarity, but because it is present in the lyrical plot of the poem - no, semi present - unnamed Penelope. True, she didn’t spin - she wove, and at Mandelstam’s she even “embroidered” (“... in a Greek house, everyone’s beloved wife, / Not Elena is different, - how long did she embroider?”), but a spinning wheel (by the way, an object traditionally accompanying it was Penelope's "substitute" in this poem - the beautiful Elena) clearly migrated to the Crimean from that Greek house. Moreover, this is not a rationalistic “local device”, subsequently cultivated by the constructivists (consisting in the fact that the material for metaphors and comparisons was drawn from the same environment as the direct theme of the poem). After all, the “spinning wheel” is connected with “silence” not only through an indistinct thread leading to the Greek epic; the very sound of the spinning wheel - as you can imagine - gives peace and tranquility (compare with Pushkin: "Or you doze under the buzz of your spindle"). This is not a resemblance, but the subtlest, most distant echo of sensation (“the poetics of associations” - this is how L. Ya. Ginzburg defines the figurative structure of Mandelstam). The room in the above lines of Mandelstam seems to be filled with objects, utensils, but in fact smells and shadows hover in it. And about the “spinning wheel” that has arisen here, you don’t know what to say: is it a thing, even if it is an ideal metaphorical one, or just a word about a thing, an exciter of an associative field of significances. Here the thing and the disembodied word about it are indistinguishably identical, as in Mandelstam's Hades, in the realm of the dead, where his Psyche descends: “A crowd of shadows hurries towards the refugee ... Some hold a mirror, some a jar of perfume. The soul is a woman. She likes knick-knacks." But, of course, these are only shadows of "trinkets", words about them, "a leafless forest of transparent voices."
Both Pasternak and Mandelstam, with previously unfamiliar persistence, introduced into poetry the lower realms of sensuality - taste, smell (previously reserved only for the poetically traditional area of aromas) and touch, "the convex joy of recognition" (in the words of Mandelstam the lyricist, who disputes the words from his own article : “Why is it necessary to touch with fingers?”). These feelings are more detached from the whole image of a thing than sight, and more subjective than hearing. They play an important role in the splitting of a thing into its radiations, when the thing itself - the "not-I" - as it were ceases to exist in its own right, leaving its mark and stroke in perception. But if Pasternak usually does not strive to go beyond the limits of sensory certainty, then in Mandelstam the sensible qualities of things turn into polysemantic and even mythologized significance separate from these things. It is no coincidence that in the associative symbolism of Mandelstam, the attention of researchers is attracted not by stone or wood, straw or salt, but by stoneness, woodenness, dryness, salinity, etc.
Mandelstam creates a magical amalgam of verbal meanings, in which the concreteness and specificity of an object melts without a trace, although a kind of objective density is forced up:
I only remember chestnut strands of misfires,
Smoked with bitterness, no - with formic sourness.
They leave an amber dryness on the lips.
Save my speech forever for the taste of misfortune and smoke,
For the resin of circular patience, for the conscientious tar of labor...
This non-objectivity, saturated to the limit with the energy of the wasted substance, is “suggestive” and captivating in the subtlest way. But one more step - and a cliff will be revealed; the objectivity of the world will finally become a decaying nuclear fuel for creating poetic ciphers. This danger is present in modern lyrics, along with the achievements of great poetry that it inherited in the first three decades of the 20th century. If we turn to the younger poetic generation, then very often in the verses of talented people (after all, it is the talents who suffer from the crisis infirmities of art, mediocrity are more immune) that strikes with unlimited arbitrariness associative series, crushing an object into edges and fragments, shaking these fragments in some kind of intellectual kaleidoscope. Here are two stanzas from a long poem belonging to a contemporary poet - not without meaning and not without interest:
How to measure the height of those going to war,
How the T-series goes back and forth in parallel,
So this long look attached to the window
Supports the world on the principle of a bracket.
…………………………………………………….
Supports the world. So that the plane of cities
It stood on weight, like a rigid system.
Empty cinema and the bottom of the deli
And branches of a metronome, forgotten between the walls.
The author is both observant to textured likenesses and keeps in mind some kind of cherished thought. But it seems that everything here can be everything (a branch - a metronome, a glance - a T-square and a bracket) - not on the basis of universal kinship and properties, but then that everything can be decomposed into semantic cubes of qualities.
Well, and since with the “loss of the middle”, an extreme that has declared itself immediately gives rise to another (sometimes they converge within the same manner), it is not surprising that the opposite trend has also been outlined in the lyrics of the newcomers. This is the handling of a thing “according to the laws of prose”, when it, the thing, is taken in a bare-objective meaning or as an “impressionistic” detail: outside of inspiring symbolism and without regard to its sounding name, designed to build the sound unity of the line.
Analyzing such a “poetry” of the Leningraders A. Purin, N. Kononov and some of their peers, I tried elsewhere to draw attention to their captivity to the environment. subject environment and not too successful attempts to “transcend”, elevate it: “And let these poets think in theory that the rejection of the old evaluative coordinates, the comparison of the real with the ideal is the novelty, the freshness of their sense of life. In practice, they make a lot of efforts to elevate, or rather, enlarge the incomprehensible life around them, to raise it in rank through extraneous additions. It seems to me that here it is necessary to look for the main explanation of why there is so much cultural, art history, I would say, entourage in these verses. Cultural treasures have now become substitutes for absolute values; culture becomes a deity, and people think that to equate some everyday object with a museum product means to endow this object with a meaning incomparably higher than its immediate purpose and function. This is a modern form of consecration to replace the former. But the giving of meaning and sanctification here, of course, are imaginary.
It is enough to leaf through the book of Aleksey Purin alone to stumble upon the “Cretan bronze” of sunbathing bodies, at the “painting by Van Dyck in Dresden” in connection with army duty, Chekhonin’s graphics - at the sight of trees in hoarfrost, Sparta - in the vicinity of the sports town, The Pergamon altar is in the bath, where the bodies huddled together form a semblance of a frieze. The need for sublimation, the “sublimation” of impressions is satisfied from a random storeroom ... "
It seems to me that the time has arrived for a double return movement. From the “exploded” objective world (“the image enters the image” and “the object cuts the object”) towards Innokenty Annensky; again to a thing that presents a poetic look and feeling, warmed and lived by a person, but also concealing the mystery of its own, indecomposable to the end of being. Yes, and movement towards Blok - so that behind the frank prosaic nature of some recognizable still life to the point of filthiness, the tangibility of the second, higher plane of existence is not lost.
Pushkin's tradition in Russian poetry of the second half of the 19th century 1. Pushkin as a hero of Russian literature. Poems about Pushkin by his contemporaries: Delvig, Kuchelbecker, Yazykov, Glinka. Pushkin is the “ideal” Russian poet in the view of poets-followers: Maykov, Pleshcheev,
From the book Theory of Literature author Khalizev Valentin EvgenievichAbout the wondrous things of the century Thomas Disch. Nice little toaster. Almanac "SOS" Once upon a time, the Strugatsky brothers published a curious science fiction story "Prosperous Planet" (later it became integral part not the most successful novel by the Strugatskys
From the book History of Russian Literature of the 19th Century. Part 1. 1795-1830 author Skibin Sergei Mikhailovich2 Artistic image. Image and sign Referring to the ways (means) by which literature and other forms of art, which have figurativeness, carry out their mission, philosophers and scientists have long used the term "image" (other - Greek eidos - appearance, appearance). AT
From the book Life will go out, but I will stay: Collected works author Glinka Gleb Alexandrovich From the book Creator, Subject, Woman [Strategies for Women's Writing in Russian Symbolism] author Ekonen Kirsty From the book Alien Spring author Bulich Vera SergeevnaLyrical subject in space (garden, sky, house, forest) The holistic, feminine, decadent-modernist and solipsistic lyrical subject of Vilkina's sonnets is localized in spaces that have additional aesthetic and philosophical connotations. Constantly recurring
From the book At the turn of two centuries [Collection in honor of the 60th anniversary of A. V. Lavrov] author Bagno Vsevolod EvgenievichLyrical subject in time In this section, I consider the construction of female creative subjectivity in the sonnets "My Garden" by L. Vilkina as one of the links in the temporal chain of the history of women's writing. Vilkina creates a genealogy of female writing with allusions to
From the book "Valhalla white wine ..." [German theme in the poetry of O. Mandelstam] author Kirshbaum HeinrichThings Rough, tough and obstinate - And not one of those things at home will become Manual, eternal enmity! The whole day passes in a fussy rush, Already a ray of sunset basks on the towers, Here a star sways between the roofs - The resistance of things is not broken. Still they furtively build
From the book Synthesis of the whole [Towards a new poetics] author Fateeva Natalya Alexandrovna"Dumas" as a super-verse unity in Russian poetry of the 19th - early 20th centuries late XIX- the beginning of the XX century. The aim of our article is to try
From the book Both time and place [Historical and philological collection for the sixtieth birthday of Alexander Lvovich Ospovat] author Team of authors2.2.5. Reassessment of the image of Luther in the concept of secularization of poetry ("Notes on Poetry" / "Vulgate") Mandelstam's reflections on the fate of Russian literature continue in "Notes on Poetry", the main characters of which are Pasternak and Khlebnikov: "When I read" My Sister - Life "
From the book Roll Call Kamen [Philological Studies] author Ranchin Andrei Mikhailovich3.6. The word "pleasure" and the pleasure of the word (Based on the poetry of the 20th century) Oddly enough, the word "pleasure" in its literal meaning is "a feeling of joy from pleasant sensations, experiences, thoughts" [ Dictionary 2007: 1020] in Russian poetry there are enough
From the book Arabic Poets and Folk Poetry author Frolova Olga Borisovna3.8. Linguist's commentary on the articles of the Dictionary of the Language of Russian Poetry of the 20th Century Dedicated to my teacher V.P. Grigoriev When working with the Dictionary of the Language of Russian Poetry of the 20th Century, the idea of which belongs to V.P. Grigoriev, for the researcher and for the compiler of the articles
From the author's book From the author's book"In the region of hell": an expression from a poem by I.A. Brodsky "On the death of Zhukov" in the context of Russian poetry of the 18th - the first third of the 19th century In 1974, I.A. Brodsky wrote a poem "On the death of Zhukov" - a kind of imitation of "Snigir" - Derzhavin's epitaph of A.V.
From the author's bookThe lyrical hero and his attributes in sorrow and joy The names of the lyrical hero can be divided into a number of subgroups: 1) most of the names of the lyrical hero are formed from verbs with the meaning "to love" or contain the additional meaning "suffering, torment,
