Traditions of revolutionary-democratic literature in the late 80s. pessimistic moods, fatigue, disappointment in social ideals noticeably fade away, intensify. Time was not conducive to the development of civil poetry. Representatives of pure art"intensified their creative activity, opposing themselves to civil poets.
This transitional period is characterized by the flourishing of intimate lyrics, personal themes and motifs, and landscape poems.
A. N. Maikov (1821-1897), A. A. Fet (1820-1892), who published the book "Evening Lights", Ya. P. Polonsky (1820-1898) continued their activities. Along with them, younger poets who continued to defend the aesthetic principles of "pure art" actively spoke. An example is the poetry of K. K. Romanov (1858–1915), who published his works under the signature of K. R. In his lyrics, which were of an amateurish and purely personal nature, a melancholy mood prevails, glorifying a quiet, serene feeling, occasionally overshadowed by separation from loved ones or other life circumstances.
K. R. was far from the public mood of his time, but his legacy still contains several poems on a civil theme. One of them is “Died, poor fellow! In a military hospital ... ”(“ Died ”, 1885).
On January 23, 1881, the Pushkin Prize was established at the Academy of Sciences "for research on the history of language and literature, as well as essays on belles-lettres both in prose and in verse." In the 1980s, in addition to Nadson, D. N. Tsertelev and A. A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov also received this prize.
According to his political convictions, Dmitry Nikolaevich Tsertelev (1852-1911) belonged to the "Old Believers", the conservative wing of Russian literature. In his work, he proclaimed a departure not only from acute social topics, but sometimes from modernity into the depths of centuries, into the distant historical past. The attention of the poet is attracted by ancient Persian and ancient Indian legends, in which he seeks consonance with his philosophical views.
In the poetry of Tsertelev (the first collection of his "Poems" was published in 1883), characteristic of all poetry of the 80s was reflected. moods: mournful thoughts, "vague dreams" and doubts. The poet compares his heart with an empty, forgotten temple, in which, “as in a grave,” he buried his “best dreams and dreams.” In this heart "only tears, everything in it is cold, sad, dark."
In the future, we do not shed light:
In a rush of vain dreams
We only try in vain to break
Time unshakable boundaries.
Our life is twilight: both night and day;
And we wait in vain for an answer
What's in front of us? Eternal night shadow
Tsertelev is infected with social skepticism and does not believe in the expediency of struggle: “What is the use of fighting in vain? “Everything in the world is madness and lies!” ("Dream").
The poet does not seek in life neither truth, nor freedom, nor happiness, nor goodness. He lives in a world of dreams, "wonderful dreams", "magical visions", which, according to him, are alien to ordinary people. This emphasized aristocracy is very characteristic of Tsertelev's public sentiments.
Don't speak, summoner of heaven,
About the splendor of eternal beauty;
The people need only bread, -
Of greatest interest are Tsertelev's poems about nature, in which his poetic language acquired clarity and simplicity.
And now I'm tired of the stones
He lay down under the old pines;
Rocks huddled at my feet,
Thundered and splashed the stream,
And black shadows fell
On the moonlit snow
Peaks like a row of ghosts
White through the dusk of the night.
Tsertelev was to a certain extent the forerunner of the Russian Symbolists. It's not just that life for him is "an endless series of ghosts" and "eternally flickering dreams." He searches in the mysterious-mystical "country of the almighty Word for the prototypes of eternal ideas." For him, the world becomes "only a conditional sign", and "it is not given to mortals to penetrate into its meaning."
Arseniy Arkadyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1848–1913) is close to Tsertelev in his public position. In his collection Calm and Storm (1878), along with the hackneyed motifs of boredom, sadness, melancholy and despondency, anxious thoughts and doubts, there are poems in which sympathy for the oppressed peasant masses is noticeable.
From noisy capitals far, far away
I will leave, embraced by a strict thought,
I will look deep into the soul of the motherland there,
I will climb into dugouts and huts.
Poverty and patience mysterious face
I can see with the flickering rays,
In a roadside tavern I will overhear a cry
Hopeless and drunken bastard. -
And when I return, I will sing you a song -
Not the same as I have sung to this day.
No, when I heard this song of mine,
You will worship her like a shrine.
By the mid 70s. the creative community of M. P. Mussorgsky with Golenishchev-Kutuzov belongs. Apparently
during these years the composer had a certain influence on the work of the poet. On the advice of Mussorgsky, he writes a dramatic chronicle called "Trouble" ("Vasily Shuisky") from the history of Russia in the 17th century. In close creative contact with the poet, Mussorgsky's cycles "Without the Sun", "Song and Dances of Death", the ballad "Forgotten" were created, which are among the best vocal works of the composer. Finally, the libretto of the opera "Sorochinsky Fair" was compiled with the close participation of Golenishchev-Kutuzov. But in his biography, friendship with Mussorgsky is just an episode. In the poem "M. P. Mussorgsky” (1884) Golenishchev-Kutuzov wrote:
Dear by chance we met with you
And together we went. I was young then;
You briskly walked forward, already proud and rebellious;
Declaring his admiration for "eternal beauty", "pure art", Golenishchev-Kutuzov at the same time found it possible to address topical issues. Although the author declares that he is “mute and deaf to the thunders of war,” that he “does not sing swear songs,” nevertheless, in his first collection, a whole section is devoted to the Russian-Turkish war, where he sings of the heroism of Russian soldiers. The poet speaks of countless innocent victims, whose cries "torment the ear." He is afraid of the "all-devouring war", and he, forgetting for a while "fun", "noise", "dreams, desires", composes mournful songs.
Sometimes his verse sounds like a peppy call:
Let the storm groan - we'll wait it out!
We will not be overcome by adversity.
Trouble struck - let's take the trouble!
Sons of a great nation
We believe in our star.
And cursed be the one whose spirit is troubled,
Whose face turns pale in fear,
Who faint-heartedly doubts
Golenishchev-Kutuzov tried to write poems, but his attempts in this direction were unsuccessful. He draws the plots for his poems (“Old Speeches”, “Dawn”) from personal memories. They have little original poetic thought.
Aleksey Nikolaevich Apukhtin (1841–1893), who enjoyed great popularity, belongs to the representatives of the poetry of “pure art”. He began to publish in the 50s, but the first collection of his "Poems" appeared only in 1886. The book was opened with the poem "A Year in the Monastery", representing the hero's diary entries, which reflected the characteristic circle of the main themes and motifs of Apukhtin's lyrics .
The hero of the poem, a secular person infected with pessimism, flees from the "world of lies, betrayal and deceit" under the "humble roof" of the monastery. But life in deep silence, "without storms and without passions" soon bored him. In vain he tries to expel from his heart the image of his beloved, who gave him so much bitterness and suffering - more and more "waves of memories and passions rage" in him. Finally, on the eve of the tonsure, the hero says goodbye forever "to a quiet, humble abode", going towards the storms of life. The poem is devoid of a complex dramatic development of the plot, it is a long chain of thoughts of the hero, his conversation with himself.
The theme of the poems of the first collection is in many ways akin to the painful thoughts that underlie the poem "A Year in the Monastery". Melancholy, the torments of unrequited feelings, "mad groaning of love", memories of lost happiness, the tragedy of disappointment, the melancholy of "tedious days", pessimistic moods - such is the content of Apukhtin's poetry.
Previously, the poet gravitated toward elegy and romance lyrics. The widely known romances Crazy Nights, Sleepless Nights, Pair of Bays, Broken Vase, etc. Apukhtin attracted the attention of composers, including P. I. Tchaikovsky, who had been friends with the poet for many years.
In the 80s. Apukhtin begins to gravitate toward narrative poetic genres - a diary, confession, letter, monologue, which made it possible to increase the emotional intensity of the characters' experiences and dramatize their story about themselves. Appeal to the narrative in verse, to a kind of verse novel, gave Apukhtin the opportunity to bring into his poetry a lively intonation. colloquial speech and more freely introduce everyday vocabulary into it.
Apukhtin's lyrics abounded in stereotyped poetic phrases and images. “Foggy distances”, “heavenly smiles”, “golden dreams”, “azure sky”, “bright eyes”, etc., poured into his poems in a wide stream. Turning to the narrative form helped the poet overcome the attraction to someone else's imagery. Apukhtin was not a pioneer in the field of poetic narration, but he introduced new moods into it and a new psychological revelation of the man of his time. The monologues-confessions created by him ("Crazy", "From the papers of the prosecutor", "Before the operation") quickly entered the pop repertoire. In the preface to Apukhtin's "Poems" published in 1961, N. Kovarsky rightly writes that Apukhtin was characterized by the desire to "bring poetry and prose together. Apukhtin's verse under the influence of this kinship undoubtedly wins. The vocabulary becomes simpler, "poeticisms" are less common, the verse becomes freer, it absorbs much more than before, conversational elements both in vocabulary and syntax. In the works of this period, Apukhtin gets rid of the mannerism of romance and elegy.
Almost simultaneously with Apukhtin, Konstantin Konstantinovich Sluchevsky (1837-1904) entered the literature, the most fruitful period of his work falls on the 80s. (in the period 1881-1890 four books of his "Poems" were published).
Poems that deal with social topics(“Strange City”, “On Razdelnaya”, “Tsynga”, “Wiesbaden”, etc.), are not typical for the main circle of Sluchevsky's creative interests. He gravitated more toward "pure lyrics" and philosophical and moral issues; a significant place in his poetry is also occupied by religious and mystical motifs, which intensified in the last period of his life.
And it seems in the moonlight that our world is the afterlife,
That somewhere, before, we once lived,
That we are not we, after other beings, similar
Residents of a hopeless, mysterious prison.
("Lux Aeterna")
According to the poet himself, his work reflects the languor of a “tired mind” and a “broken spirit”. He often touches on the traditional theme of the eternal conflict between mind and feeling, reason and heart.
Oh, do not scold me for the fact that I lived aimlessly,
The mistakes of youth are not all for me,
For the fact that with my heart I loved to interfere with the mind,
And the harsh truth of thought prevented the heart from living.
The desire to reason often suppressed the poetic feeling in Sluchevsky's poems. The reality that did not satisfy the poet caused him to need memories, to immerse himself in the world of dreams.
And I thought: why would -
In us, in people, reason is strong -
Do not look at dreams as the truth,
Don't look at life like a dream!
In Sluchevsky's poetry, a feeling of inferiority, "terrible half-sleep", "gloomy visions of mental disorders" find expression. One of the poet's favorite themes is the theme of the bifurcation of man:
That's why, that there are two of us - it's impossible,
We can't live well
A little one of us will get settled - the other
Glad in what can only annoy!
Sluchevsky tried his hand at various poetic genres. He also tried to perform in the field of satirical poetry ("From the album of a one-sided man").
Sluchevsky's poetry was not popular with his contemporaries, and only at the end creative way poet attracted the attention of the symbolists. Bryusov called him "a poet of contradictions". This inconsistency was reflected both in the problems of Sluchevsky's poems and in his poetic manner.
Sluchevsky's work is devoid of traditional poetic forms. He acted as a seeker of new artistic means in poetry. Claiming high poetry, philosophical lyrics, Sluchevsky at the same time gravitated towards depicting mundane everyday life, “boring” worldly prose. In his poetry, we encounter unexpected rhymes and associations (see, for example, “The Shapes Are Motionless…”, 1889):
Islands float by
Dark algae - ducks,
Seagulls and loons hangout.
Like a series of floating jokes
Like a light feuilleton ...
Sluchevsky's sublime poetic language coexists with deliberate prosaisms borrowed from household, clerical and scientific vocabulary. The disharmony of the poet's inner world was expressed through stylistic disharmony. But it was in this inconsistency that Bryusov saw the originality and originality of Sluchevsky the poet. “In the most fascinating parts of his poems,” wrote Bryusov, “he suddenly strayed into prose, broke all the charm with an inappropriately inserted word, and, perhaps, it was precisely in this way that he achieved a very special, peculiar to him alone, impression.”
Like other poets, Sluchevsky often wrote about poetry itself and its role in life:
You do not chase the wayward rhyme
And behind poetry - the absurdities of one:
I will compare them with Princess Yaroslavna,
With the dawn crying on a stone wall.
After all, the prince died, and the walls do not exist,
And the princess has been gone for a long time;
And everything seems to be, poor, longing,
And not everything is from her, not everything is buried.
Death to the song, death! Let it not exist!
Nonsense rhymes, nonsense poems! It's absurd!..
But Yaroslavna still yearns
At the appointed hour on the stone wall...
(p. 224–225)
The process of the extinction of civil poetry was most clearly manifested in the poetry of Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov (1862–1911), who spoke in the 80s. with two collections of Poems. His work is dominated by a lyrical theme, almost always painted in sad tones. Here, more than in other modern poets, there is a dependence on the Russian elegiac tradition. Fofanov is definitely haunted by the "native shadows" of Pushkin, often by Fet, but most of all by Lermontov. Reading Fofanov's poems, you are once again convinced of how strong Lermontov's power was over the poets of the last third of the 19th century.
Fofanov was a poet of the “sick generation”: “We are late singers,” and “late dreams are paler than the original ones.” The main circle of his moods is characterized by typical poetic formulas of those years: these are “the haze of memories”, “unaccountable impulses”, “gloomy sadness”, “vague longing”, “joyless longing”. Despondency, despair and impotence are reflected in his lyrics. He sincerely sympathizes with the "poor", "suffering, hungry brothers." His thoughts are where “poverty huddles”, “where there is crying”, where there are “cellars of the pale poor”, where “both life and the world are a heavy hell!”. Fofanov sympathizes with those who do not put up with the untruth of life, who fight. One of his best poems, "To the Departed" (1889), the poet dedicated to "heralds of freedom"; he speaks of those who, in the days of reaction and political terror, languish in gloomy prisons (“I have long been imprisoned in unsightly walls ...”, 1882). The poet himself “has subsided in the heart of malice”, “there is no curse in the mouth”, he only “mourns” and “weeps”. However, this is not the end of Fofanov's poetry. In the literature of the end of the century, he occupied a special place. His work has features that make it possible to speak of him as an original, bright figure. Fofanov's poetry has much in common with the emerging decadence; it was not for nothing that the Symbolists attributed him to their predecessors. His poetic world is the world of ghosts and painful phenomena. On this basis, he has a stable theme of "double":
Sad autumn night
The autumn night is dark;
Someone white nods to me
At the open window.
I recognize this ghost
I got it a long time ago:
This is my poor friend.
This is my sad twin.
He's been following me for a long time.
I've been following him for a long time
It makes me feel dim
("Double", 1887)
Fofanov's poetic heritage is unequal. Along with sluggish, gray poems and erased images, there are many poems in his work that should be attributed not only to the personal achievements of the author, but also to the lyrics of the end of the century as a whole. Fofanov clearly gravitated towards the impressionistic style, which was subsequently adopted and developed by Russian symbolists. He is a poet of twilight and halftones, who contributed to the landscape lyrics.
I saw the silver of sparkling lakes
pubescent willow earrings,
And gray villages tear-stained expanse,
And in the pale distance gave a green forest.
The sky shone immensely
And in it, like a flock of light dreams,
Sliding pink spots
Evening clouds.
Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869-1905), whose first collection of "Poems" (1890) was awarded the Pushkin Prize, should be attributed to the notable poetic figures of the end of the century.
Far from social issues, Lokhvitskaya introduced the world of “stormy impulses” into her poetry, and this gave rise to attacks on her.
Lokhvitskaya worked hard, achieving "combinations of unexpected and strange", "chimes of crystal harmonies", and sometimes achieved great precision and melodiousness of her poems.
Where those who did not know sorrows,
In the wild brilliance of bacchanalia
Burning years?
Where are you people? By, by!
Everything is irretrievably gone
Everything vanished without a trace.
And to the delight of the hypocrites
Life crawls in a gray fog,
("Today", 1898)
Don't kill the pigeons!
Their plumage is snow-white;
Their cooing is so gentle
Sounds in the darkness of earthly sorrows,
Where everything is either dull or rebellious.
Don't kill the pigeons!
According to its main tendency, the lyrics of Lokhvitskaya are close, on the one hand, to the poetry of A. N. Maikov, who welcomed her entry into literature, on the other hand, to the “ringing” lyre of K. D. Balmont. V. Ya. Bryusov, not without reason, ranked Lokhvitskaya among the "Balmont school" with her heightened interest in the form of verse, flaunting "rhymes, rhythm, consonances", as well as the pursuit of "original expressions at all costs."
In the last period of creative activity, the impressionism of Lokhvitskaya's poetry increased significantly. Her poetic searches influenced a number of young poets, including Igor Severyanin.
For the emergence of new poetic phenomena at the end of the century - proletarian poetry and symbolism - the ground was prepared, on the one hand, by democratic literature (not only poetry, but also prose) of the 70-80s, and on the other hand, by the work of K. Sluchevsky, K. Fofanov, N. Minsky, D. Merezhkovsky.
Merezhkovsky and Minsky paid some tribute in their youth to the populist ideas, but quickly moved away from them and became the first ideologists of decadent art in Russia.
N. M. Minsky (pseudonym of Nikolai Maksimovich Vilenkin, 1855–1937) first acted as a poet of a civic orientation. His poem The Last Confession (1879) was published illegally. The first collection of his "Poems" (1883) was banned by the Committee of Ministers and then destroyed. The poem "Night of Gethsemane" (1884), which was accusatory in nature, was, in turn, banned by the censors. An oppositional imprint is also characteristic of other early poems of Minsky. But it didn't last long. In the same 1884, he delivered the poem "Nocturne", in which he stated:
Someone I don't love
Everyone is alien to me, I am alien to everyone.
I don't mourn for anyone
At the same time, Minsky published in the Kyiv newspaper "Zarya" an article "An old dispute", aimed at protecting poetry, not related to social struggle. It was the first declaration of a new decadent poetry. Minsky's book In the Light of Conscience, published in 1890, also served to defend "pure art." Like Merezhkovsky, Minsky begins to pay great attention to philosophical and religious issues. The revolution of 1905 resurrected the poet's civic interests ("Hymn of the Workers"), but then he again departs from them.
Minsky is looking for "twilight, deserted people, silence", he is tormented by "doubts-vultures" and "bitter questions", and he calls himself a singer of sadness and sorrow. But soon the author turns his eyes away from the bleak pictures of reality. He has no desire to mourn "for a great mountain, for a homemade torus of boundless land", because "the suffering of the people, like a sea with a ladle, cannot be exhausted with an elegant song." He mourns only for the "sick generation", for those
Who could not find malice in his heart,
Who is full of doubt and full of sorrow
It stands at a crossroads, not knowing the way.
These words perfectly characterize Minsky in the 1980s, his social position in an era of ideological confusion and the search for new paths.
Minsky says about himself that he "was born a singer of love and beauty," but the time for songs is gone and "twilight reigns all around." He complains about fate because he was born "in a sick and gloomy age", that his "demon of gentle words never whispers." In his pessimism, he often runs into contradictions with himself. Either he longs for a storm, a hurricane, a thunderstorm, in order to “breathe deeply at least once,” then he calls for silence, for all-forgiving and all-pacifying love. A vague and ambivalent attitude towards reality led not only to the vagueness and inconsistency of the motives and ideas of his poetry, but also to the vagueness of his speech. This applies primarily to those verses of Minsky in which he strives for a philosophical understanding of the complex phenomena of social reality. He himself felt the shortcomings of his artificially complicated language. Calling Pushkin and Lermontov his mentors, referring to their great shadows, Minsky wrote:
I drink the poison of beauty in your songs,
And I feel sorry for myself with my vague verse,
And I'm sad that there is so little simplicity in it ...
(“My mentors! O majestic Pushkin…”)
In the early work of Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), a protest was also expressed against the world, where “a groan suppressed by inexpressible torment” is heard. In 1883, the popular poem "Corals" appeared, which spoke of the victory of millions of workers who had escaped from the depths of the seas into space, to the sky.
The hour will come - and proudly over the waves,
Shattering their wet emerald,
A new island, created over the centuries,
With triumph, the corals will lift up ...
The poem "Sakya-Muni" (1885), which had an anti-religious connotation, was also very popular. But already in these years, the poet's disbelief in the forces of the people is manifested and the desire to focus not so much on the suffering of the world as on his own "I" is manifested. Poems from the 90s Merezhkovsky affirms the inevitability of human loneliness, the alienation of people from each other.
In my prison - in myself -
You poor man
In love, and in friendship, and in everything
One, one forever!..
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Alexey Apukhtin (Nature, the world, the secret of the universe...)
Mikhail Epshtein
A. Apukhtin completes the development of elegiac motifs in landscape lyrics XIX century. The leading theme is the withering of the garden, the fading of summer, the "magnificent-funeral" sunset of the day and year, the desire to revel in the farewell moments of a dwindling life: "Oh God, how good a cool summer evening is! .."; "Under these rays life is dearer to us at the last hour"; "How joyfully the flowers shine for the last time!"; "Oh, tear them quickly - the last flowers // From my faded garden!". The sadness of parting with the holiday of nature, the fatal line that separates life from death, is poeticized. A favorite image is fading flowers, seized by early frosts, "late guests of a faded summer", "dead autumn flowers belated"; hence the special love for late flowering asters ("Astram", early 60s; "Autumn Leaves", 1868).
Alexey Apukhtin (Three poets)
N. Kolosova
"From adolescence, I began to delve into life ..."
When A. K. Tolstoy and Ya. P. Polonsky were already starting their literary path, in November 1840, in the city of Bolkhov, Oryol province, Alexei Nikolayevich Apukhtin was born into an old noble family. Then Apukhtin's father retired, and the family moved to the Pavlodar estate in the Kaluga province. Apukhtin's poetic talent manifested itself very early: already at the age of twelve he was predicted the glory of Pushkin. Apukhtin's first poetic experiments appeared in print in 1854, when he was still a student at the School of Law. In fact, already in the adolescent poem "First Snow" one cannot help but see his artistic mastery, confident mastery of form, undoubted signs of a poetic vision of the world. Undoubtedly, this poem is largely imitative, it clearly shows Pushkin's influence, Pushkin's epithets and intonations are clear:
"A familiar row of pictures rises in front of me:
I see skies shrouded in mist
And a snowy tablecloth on smoothed fields,
And the roofs are white, and the frost on the wood..."
Here, perhaps, there is no striking originality, but which of the great poets did not start with imitation, and the imitative verses of the young Apukhtin would do honor to a much more mature poet. The motives of Apukhtin's early lyrics are quite traditional, and it would hardly be worth giving a special meaning and foreseeing future "Apukhtin notes" in "the former joys and sorrows of former days", "a dull song", "a sad share", "lonely life", etc. ., - all these are inevitable accessories of romantic poetry, not dependent on age, because Lensky "sang the faded color of life at almost eighteen years old." Another thing is surprising - while still studying at the aristocratic School of Law, Apukhtin, tendentiously and traditionally accused of anti-democratism, writes "Village Essays", in which he paints pictures of village serf life, speaks of "crushing captivity", of "flammable tears" and "bloody streams" with which the fields of their native land are watered. Addressing the people - brothers - he believes:
"The term will end severe,
Fetters will fall from your shoulders,
Rotten on you!"
The eighteen-year-old poet thinks about the fate of his homeland:
"And you... what will you be, my native country?
Will your people understand the burden of the past?
And will I see, at least meeting my own sunset,
Your full of happiness dawn?"
Some researchers condescendingly remark that in pre-reform Russia, namely at this time, "Village Essays" were written, "new trends" touched even the most inveterate conservatives, and that these motives in Apukhtin's work are nothing more than a tribute to the times. This appears to be fundamentally wrong. Indeed, four years before the "Essays" (that was still the era of Nicholas I) in the same "First Snow" Apukhtin, seemingly completely absorbed in his purely personal experiences, does not forget about such a distant detail as the fact that the peasant - "nature sad son" will be able to "Take the fruits of labor along the winter journey // For a meager fee, take them for sale." In addition, it is difficult to find a person so indifferent to what they say about him, what was Apukhtin, he was highly alien to the desire to flirt with public opinion. It is noteworthy that the pupil of the privileged closed educational institution, indulging in his early poetic experiments with a “shimmer of sadness”, he knows how to see evil and injustice that reigns as if outside the circle that his life experience should have been limited to:
"The glorious city, the rich city,
I won't be seduced by you"
the young poet speaks of Petersburg, in which there are so many "invisible sufferings" and "invisible tears", where "criminal" and "indurated" depravity reigns.
At nineteen, Apukhtin graduated from college and entered the service of the Ministry of Justice. Three years later, he leaves for the Kaluga province, then serves in Orel for two years. During these years, Apukhtin's worldview was finally determined. With exhaustive completeness, it is formulated in the poem "To Modern Ornaments". He is in his own way, just like A.K. Tolstoy, "not a fighter of two camps", his position is "Among the oppressive and obedient, / Among the villains and slaves ..." But, unlike Tolstoy with his "hatred of despotism", Apukhtin is too temperamental to actively oppose something, too passive to "love something with all his heart". His state of mind is a kind of paralysis of will, fatigue and hopelessness. He comes to the conclusion early on that life is a stage on which people are actors playing roles. With bitter irony, he speaks in the poem "Actors" about falsehood, which is saturated with the words and feelings of the people around him. If in early youth one can still believe the sincerity of passionate words
"That sacrifice is our motto,
About the fact that all of us, people are brothers,
although they say these words, "looking furtively at the prompter", then over the years "the cold has penetrated our chest" and the roles become ridiculous and the actors are pitiful. For Apukhtin, the period of youthful inspiration associated with hopes for social transformation ended early. The abolition of serfdom, on which so many hopes were pinned, changed little in the life of the people:
"In my homeland, enlightenment does not shine
Rays of peace nowhere,
Generations stagnate, suffer and perish
In senseless hostility
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All my life, only dreams of happiness, of freedom
Among stupid worries...
And those dreams are poor, how poor our field is,
How poor our people are."
In the mid-60s, Apukhtin returned from Orel to St. Petersburg, entered the service of the Ministry of the Interior, and since then has been living in St. Petersburg almost without a break. Despite the fact that material resources allowed Apukhtin to travel abroad with all the comfort available at that time, he rarely leaves home, because, firstly, it was difficult for him to travel due to poor health, and secondly, he was distinguished by a very hostile attitude abroad in general. A brilliant interlocutor, Apukhtin was always a welcome guest in secular salons, where many highly appreciated his poetic gift.
Apukhtin's early ideals remained precisely ideals in the true sense of the word - that is, they did not allow for the possibility of at least partial realization. And if so, it's pointless to talk about it in vain. Apukhtin's maximalism is not satisfied with "talks" - the struggle of ideas. Therefore, at first, he seemed to be a promising employee of Nekrasov's Sovremennik (Dobrolyubov calls him "a promising young lawyer"), ceases to be published and for some time falls silent altogether. Those decadent motives that were not necessarily to become defining him further development, although they accompanied his early works, become dominant in his attitude. The reality surrounding the poet appears to him as a truly "terrible world", as Blok would later define it. Apukhtin sees no way out. Incorruptible ideals of beauty and "pure art" live in his soul, but professionally engage in art - literature in the 70-80s of the XIX century, when literary works become a commodity, "the price of which rises and falls in accordance with demand," is humiliating for him. Apukhtin's maximalist attitude to the very concept of literary work is also characteristic. In a letter to P. I. Tchaikovsky, with whom he had been a close friend since the time of his joint stay at the School of Law, he convinces him that "... that" work "is sometimes a bitter necessity and always the greatest punishment sent to the lot of a person, that an occupation chosen according to taste and inclination is not labor ... ".
Nevertheless, the need for self-expression takes its toll, and Apukhtin writes again, however, without publishing his works for quite a long time. All the poems of Apukhtin - the most characteristic exponent of the era of "timelessness" with its general decline in the social movement and the strengthening of the reaction - are permeated with a single note of hopelessness and oppression. The personal, as a rule, love tragedy that the lyrical hero of Apukhtin experiences is exacerbated by the bleak background against which it is played out. Human life in general seems to him a monstrous nonsense:
And, dying, he does not know
Why did he come into being
What did he live for, where did he disappear to?
In addition, people, these miserable creatures, instead of "combining efforts // And together carry a common cross," hate each other, envy, and quarrel:
"Everyone breathes only hostility, and everyone is on guard...
Wherever you look, everywhere is the same
Stubborn, insane war!"
And against the background of this meaningless and cruel life, the lyrical hero of Apukhtin's poem, as if with some kind of rapture, endlessly varies the theme of unhappy love. The hero of his poetry is a suffering face. Love for him is always "poisoned happiness." Apukhtin's lyrics contain the entire arsenal of stable phrases, integral attributes of a "cruel" romance. Here and "a broken life", and "fatal passion", and "moan of crazy love", and "burning tear", and "crazy jealousy". Apukhtin's love is not just unsuccessful, unrequited, but humiliation is inevitably associated with it, to which his heroes agree:
"... torments of jealousy and insane quarrels torments
They seem to me happiness before the horror of parting.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"And, like an obedient slave, again, rattling chains,
Not knowing where, I would have followed you."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"She will give the last penny,
To be your slave, maid,
Or your faithful dog - Dianka,
Which you caress and beat!"
And of course, in a particularly "concentrated" form, all the hopelessly bitter notes inherent in Apukhtin with clinging to past deceit in the romance "Crazy nights, sleepless nights ..." are most clearly expressed.
Along with poems, which are a ready-made basis for a romance, Apukhtin has many works, as it were, created for recitation - these are measured prose narrative narratives with a special rhythmic intonation ("Crazy", "With a courier train", etc.). In them - all the same bleak, soul-tearing "Apukhtinskaya note".
But, being in the grip of hopeless, languishing oppression, calling himself a "living dead", Apukhtin could write rather caustic humorous poems. Borrowing the size and manner of Pushkin's "My genealogy", with the refrain "I am an amateur, I am an amateur", parodying Pushkin's: "I am a tradesman", Apukhtin, in essence, defends his belonging to that literature in which "Goodness, fatherland, pure thoughts / / Served as a writer's talent", defending the sacred name of Pushkin from Pisarev's attacks. In general, as one of the first biographers of Apukhtin, M. I. Tchaikovsky, points out, Apukhtin had four idols in his life: his mother, who dearly loved her first-born, instilled in him a love of poetry in childhood and encouraged him to strive to pour out spiritual impulses in poetry . Then - Russia, the love for which, again, was instilled in him as a child. "Russian nature, Russian people, Russian art and Russian history constituted for him the main, one might say, the exclusive interest of existence," writes M. Tchaikovsky. Pushkin has been a idolized name since childhood. And finally, Apukhtin's idol was Leo Tolstoy, however, until the great writer stopped creating his works of art and started preaching his own doctrine. Deeply distressed, Apukhtin, by the way, like Turgenev, wrote a letter to Tolstoy, in which he begged him to return to artistic creativity.
After L. N. Tolstoy, the closest contemporary writers to Apukhtin were F. I. Tyutchev, A. A. Fet, A. K. Tolstoy, Ya. P. Polonsky, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and A. N. Ostrovsky. Giving exclusive preference to literature, Apukhtin also showed great interest in dramatic art and music. He himself was a very capable reciter, and listeners always enjoyed reading Apukhtin both his own works and the works of his favorite poets, above all, of course, Pushkin. In the last days of his life (he died in August 1893), seriously ill, he, waking up from oblivion, began to recite his beloved Pushkin by heart.
In music, Apukhtin "listened with equal pleasure to the truly beautiful and the stereotypically vulgar," writes M. Tchaikovsky. "Glinka's romances and gypsy songs equally aroused emotion and delight in him." He did not recognize only operettas, this genre offended his taste. He found in the gypsy performance, which lost its originality in the second half of the 19th century, on which "the seal of a dirty civilization lay down on the wrong side", that "restless flame of passion", which was the main advantage of their songs, so valued by Pushkin and A. Grigoriev and many others:
"They have some, albeit childish,
But seductive deception...
That's why at the secular party
We will not change the gypsies."
Apukhtin not only did not seek to publish his works, but also did not always write them down, relying on his phenomenal memory. His poems (and, of course, not all of them) have been preserved only thanks to the perseverance of his close friends, who obtained the poet's permission to record his works. This was explained by Apukhtin's extreme strictness in finishing his works, his "Flaubertian pedantry".
He considered and called himself (in a poem dedicated to P. Tchaikovsky) "an unrecognized poet", but fame and recognition came to him despite his strict prohibitions on printing his works. Before Apukhtin's collection of poems appeared in 1886, many of them had already been set to music, many were recited by poetry lovers. Apukhtin's popularity was an occasion for reflection by critics and literary scholars in his era and later. It is difficult to imagine a poet whose work would cause such polar assessments. Some accused him of poverty of subject matter and banality, found signs of decadence in his poems, others called him "a poet by the grace of God."
Apukhtin is a phenomenon of extremely early formation of a poetic personality. His adolescent works, written at the age of 13-15 and seemed to be the key to future poetic masterpieces, were almost not surpassed stylistically in his later work. He quickly gained his creative height and then did not rise any higher, continuing to move in a vicious circle. However, this height at which he was destined to be held, although not dizzying, turned out to be sufficient for thought and feeling to be able to soar.
Apukhtin's poetry is surprisingly smooth - he has almost no unsuccessful poems, that is, sharply inferior to the rest of his works. Yes, there are clichés, stable and hackneyed phrases in it, which give critics and literary critics, in turn, to attach the stamped label "poetics of banalities" to the Apukhta muse. All these filling poems by Apukhtin are "fatal": abyss, night, thought, struggle, passion; "crazy": kisses, tears, ardor, jealousy, longing; the inevitable broken, joyless and hateful life, as if they were not supposed to satisfy the exacting taste. Nevertheless, romances based on Apukhtin's verses were written by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Arensky and Prokofiev, and many, many other composers. And musicians, and performers, and listeners, apparently, were not repulsed by the "poetics of banalities", but what attracted them?
After sentimentalism in art, and in particular in literature, was replaced by other trends, was outdated, the concept of sentimental (too sensitive) was compromised. Over sentimental began to be ironic. However, human feelings, as it turned out, are more stable and unchanging than all kinds of trends in art. And in the life, probably, of every person there are periods when he discovers that his heart is sensitive, and sometimes too sensitive, that is, sentimental. Most often this coincides with periods of low spirits. And in such moments, full of high tragedy, brilliant creations turn out to be too inaccessible - in order to appreciate and enjoy them, you need a calm mood. And a sentimental romance (or no less compromised melodrama) comes in handy here.
But we are talking, of course, about works of art, where thought, feeling and verbal embodiment are marked, if not by the highest, but by a high standard. In Apukhta's poems there are clichés that are only bad because they have long been found and used too often. But in his poems there are no vulgarisms, no sweetness, no vulgarity, no bad taste. There is thought, there is feeling, there is impeccability of rhyme, there is rhythm and melody, there is perfection of form. The high culture of Apukhtin, combined with his natural poetic talent, ensured success among his contemporaries for his works and serves as a guarantee of their long life. And the thematic limitation, for which Apukhtin got criticized, allowed him to develop and improve that single note, which forever entered Russian poetry as "Apukhtin's".
As a poet Apukhtin declared himself back in the 1850s-1860s. Initially, he was even close to the liberal-democratic camp of "Sovremennik" (cycle "Village Essays", 1859). But very soon he parted ways with the “negative” direction in art, declaring his commitment to the “Pushkin” direction (“Modern Vitiy”, 1862). This was followed by a long silence that lasted twenty years and the “second birth” of Apukhtin in the 1880s already as a poet of “timelessness”.
Become a true expression of the soul modern man, the poet finally found his theme and his style. In the poetic novel From the Prosecutor's Papers (1888), defining his time as "an era of general despondency", its hero, a young man who is about to commit suicide, deliberately refuses to motivate his reason in any definite way. According to the author, who responded to critics' reproaches, this was done on purpose to emphasize the "epidemic nature of the disease."
Recognition is very important. It helps to understand why Apukhtin's poetry, unlike, for example, Nadson's, is not only frankly apolitical (asocial), but also lacks unambiguous, simplified psychological and everyday motivations for the inner world of a man of "timelessness". This person, according to the critic’s exact definition, “appears in Apukhtin’s poems not as a member of society, not as a representative of humanity, but exclusively as a separate unit, called to life by elemental force, perplexed and trembling in the midst of a mass of surging unrest, almost always suffering and dying in the same way. causelessly and aimlessly, as it appeared.
In different aspects, Apukhtin varies the leitmotif of his poetry - tragic powerlessness, hopelessness, randomness, fragmentation of the consciousness of modern man: "And there is no warm place in you for faith, / And there is no strength for unbelief in you." From this point of view, suffering the art world the poet is often regarded as a manifestation of living life. It is suffering, being a consequence of the senseless existence of a person in the 1880s, at the same time, that appears to be the only panacea that can save him from the final mortification of the soul, tear it out of the atmosphere of chilling stupor, which Apukhtin felt as the very “epidemic disease” of the time. The “colorless, stupid repetition” of the existence of the “living dead” (in such expressive images Apukhtin paints a picture of modern life in the poems “For the New Year 1881” and “For the New Year 1882”) is contrasted with new dreams, burning tears, memories, fatal, powerful passion , love dreams, insane fervor, insane jealousy.
It would seem that the character lyrical hero Apukhtina generally reproduces the moods that will later be characteristic of the lyrics of M. Lokhvitskaya. The similarity can also be traced in the dominant theme of the work of both poets - the torment and suffering of love, which, despite all the troubles and humiliations associated with them, always remain a sign of a living soul that resists despondency and the vulgar dullness of "timelessness". It is these torments that in the end induce the humiliated and offended by love man to rise to the true anthem of his beloved:
Will my days be clear, dull,
Will I soon perish, ruining my life, -
I know one thing: as far as the grave,
Thoughts, feelings, and songs, and forces -
Everything for you!
(“Does the day reign, is the silence of the night ...”, 1880)
This apotheosis of the inherent value of love-passion, love-suffering, characteristic of both authors, however, Apukhtin has his own poetic voice, his own unique intonation. First, in terms of philosophical and ethical, this pathos tends not to glorify a heroic, extraordinary personality endowed with "super feelings" and "super desires", but, on the contrary, to an apology for a weak, weak-willed hero who, like Chekhov's Ranevskaya, is always "below love and who is defenseless against his feelings. The poetic concept of love in Apukhtin's lyrics, rather, inherits not the "Nietzschean", but the "Tyutchev" line: a view of love as a "fatal duel" of two hardened hearts, one of which completely subjugates the weaker to its will.
Secondly (and most importantly), Apukhtin's love theme finds a completely original genre solution. It is embodied in two genre-thematic groups of poems: 1) intimate narrative lyrics (“With a courier train”, early 1870s; “Letter”, 1882 and “Answer to a letter”, 1885; “Before the operation”, 1886; “Crazy”, 1890, etc.) and 2) romance lyrics (“A bleak dream exhausted me of life ...”, 1872; “Crazy nights, sleepless nights ...”, 1876; “In the cold of life, trembling and languishing ... ", 1877; "A couple of bays", 1870s; "Does the day reign, is the silence of the night ...", 1880, etc.).
The first genre group gravitates toward a poetic monologue and, in terms of plot, is a short story, usually built on a sharp dramatic, and more often melodramatic collision. The style of such monologues combines general poetic clichés with precise psychological detail. The dramatic nature of the collision causes the “nervousness” of the monologue, sharp drops psychological states. It is as if a “one-actor theater” unfolds before the reader: the monologues are filled with purely stage effects, full of declamatory gestures - it is not for nothing that they were intended to be read from the stage.
The second genre group is more significant for the history of Russian poetry. No wonder the romance is recognized as the "calling card" of Apukhta poetry. P.I. Tchaikovsky (Apukhtin had a long-term friendship with him), Ts.A. Cui, P.M. Gliere, A.C. Arensky, S.V. Rachmaninov and other composers wrote romances to the words of the poet. The basis of the figurative and stylistic system of a romance, as a rule, is the romantic type of attitude, presented in its most general, schematic form, not complicated psychologically and plotly. Romance is an intonational sign, a poetic emblem of romantic lyrics as a whole, reproducing its most general, “knurled” images, motifs, stylistic formulas taken from various genres - elegies, messages, songs, sonnets, etc. Therefore, romance is a materialized form " Memory of the Genre”, focused, however, not on any particular lyrical form, but resurrecting the artistic outline of many forms at once - a kind of “potpourri” on the themes of romantic lyrics:
Crazy nights, sleepless nights
Speech incoherent, tired eyes ...
Nights lit by the last fire,
Autumn dead flowers belated! ...
This famous romance by Apukhtin is quotable through and through. It also recognizes the images of the "gypsy" lyrics of Ap. Grigoriev (“There are moments of torment and anger // Nights of such crazy groans ...”), and in subsequent stanzas - the image of Tyutchev’s “unbearable” dazzling day, and “fatal” images in the spirit of Benediktov (“merciless hand” of time, “answer impossible" of the past). The use of traditional poeticisms is associated with the installation of the romance on generality, general significance, recognizability of feelings. The critic M. Protopopov, a contemporary of Apukhtin, saw the weakness of this poem in the fact that each reader could put into romance clichés "a meaning appropriate to the circumstances."
But the fact of the matter is that any romance is designed for the co-creation of the reader and the listener, for the "omnivorous" meaning of the lyrical situation that underlies it. That is why romance does not like sharp individualization of style. Among other things, it would divert the reader's attention from the emotional melodiousness of the text (which is the main thing in a romance) towards the updated meaning of poeticisms. If the individual author's image is nevertheless introduced into the text, then it reveals its new quality, as a rule, precisely in the environment of generally valid formulas. This is exactly what happens in the quoted passage: “the flowers of the dead are late in the autumn” - this purely Apukhtinian symbol of the inner world of a person of “timelessness” (no wonder Chekhov put these words in the title of his famous story) fully clarifies its meaning only against the background of the “banal” poetisms that preceded it .
There is a reason that lies in the general patterns of the stylistic development of poetry in the 1880s and 1890s, which explains the extraordinary demand for romance in this transitional era. Such a reason is the demonstrative literary nature of the artistic system of this poetry, the projection of its images and poetic vocabulary into the past - into the golden age of Russian literature. Many poems of the poets of "timelessness" are full of frank paraphrases and reminiscences from Pushkin and Lermontov, Nekrasov and Tyutchev, Zhukovsky and Fet.
The feeling is that modern life penetrated the poems of Andreevsky, Fofanov, Sluchevsky, Apukhtin, Golenishchev-Kutuzov, as if previously passed through the prism of poetic reflections. The abundance of figurative, syntactical, metrostrophic constructions that referred the reader not to the style of a particular author and not even to a particular poetic school, but to the entire tradition of classical poetry at once - all this allows us to speak of a purely "iconic" function of the poetic word, which is often (especially in Fofanov ) does not actually carry a real content, but serves only as a "conventional sign of poetry".
One could talk about the epigonism of this poetry, if not for "the very sharpness and consciousness in the use of traditional poetic means in an era when they were already fully felt as archaisms."
Thus, in the work of the authors of the 1880s-1890s, there is an interesting process of canonization of the poetic system of the 19th century, as a classical, artistically complete system, which cannot be improved on its former basis. Traditional poeticisms are for the authors of the eighties what ancient images are for the writers of classicism. The very accuracy with which the figurative system of the previous nineteenth-century lyrics was reproduced in the 1880s and 1890s, as it were, emphasized the enduring significance of its artistic values, asserted them as an indisputable standard, an “eternal model” for imitation. In the poetry of the end of the century, very rare forms of strophic organization are becoming widespread, which in European practice have a reputation for being classical, strict, not subject to change and reassessment. Among them are a sonnet (P.D. Buturlin, K.P. [Konstantin Romanov], Lokhvitskaya, Minsky), triolet (Fofanov, Lokhvitskaya), seven-line poems (see, for example, “Vera” Fofanov, “Serenade” K.P., “Spring Dream” Lokhvitskaya and etc.).
The final design of the "classical" romance in Apukhtin's poetry should also be attributed to the same series. But the paradox was that the "textbook gloss" of generally recognizable formulas and syntactic figures was superimposed in Apukhtin's romances on a worldview far from harmony, a worldview of a weak-willed and internally confused person. Apukhtin seems to seek to take beauty and harmony from the poetic formulas of the past, as if wishing to find poetic energy in them for a fading feeling. But this support turns out to be too unreliable. That is why the style of Apukhtin's romances no-no and even strays into prose:
What did I do to you? Such insane pain
Don't wish on your enemy...
Oh, be happy - I'm superfluous between you,
Oh, be happy together.
The very interruption of romance intonation by prosaisms once again sets off the “Apukhta grumbling” (A. Bely), makes even more noticeable the inner emptiness of a person of “timelessness”.
Analysis of the work of one of the poets (optional).
Poetry 1880-1890s
Poetic twenty years of the 80-90s. most often called poetic "timelessness". In the 80s. no major poetic names appeared. The most prominent representatives of this period - S.Ya. Nadson, K.K. Sluchevsky, K.M. Fofanov, A.N. Apukhtin, A.A. the title of "Russian minor poets". But “minor” does not mean “second-rate”. The poetry of this period paved the way for the poetic renaissance of the early 20th century. The poets of the eighties reflected the drama of the change of poetic epochs, the "break" of artistic consciousness (from classics to modernism, from the "golden" age of Russian poetry to " Silver Age"(N.A. Otsup, N. Gumilyov's like-minded person in the "Workshop of Poets".)
Poetic symbols that reflected the spiritual atmosphere of “timelessness”: in Fofanov’s work, this is the image of “withered leaves”, which suddenly come to life, like the resurrected dead, saturated with the borrowed delight of a spring alien to them (“Dried Leaves”, 1896); in Apukhtin's lyrics, these are asters, "late guests of the faded summer"; flowers blooming on the eve of autumn nature, touched by the first glassy cold (“Astram”, 1860s). This is an expressive image of the "winter flower" in the poetry of K.K. Sluchevsky, ("The flower created by Mephistopheles").
The "great dispute" between the two currents, "civil" and "pure" poetry, for these poets was no longer relevant. They did not unite in schools, they did not issue manifestos. The unfinished, open nature of the artistic searches of the “children of the night” (D.S. Merezhkovsky) does not give grounds to deny this period a certain integrity.
In historical and literary science, there were attempts to give it clear terminological characteristics - "decadence", "pre-symbolism", "neo-romanticism".
The authors of the textbook “History of Russian. lit. 19th century" (Part 3) ed. V.I. Korovina (eg, S.V. Sapozhkov) believe that the attempt of Z.G. Mints to describe the literary process of the late 19th century with the term “neo-romanticism” deserves the greatest confidence. (Mints Z.G. “New Romantics” (to the problem of Russian pre-symbolism) .// Tynyanovsky collection of RIGA, 1988.)
Typological features of this phenomenon:
1) Refusal of full everyday plausibility, strengthening the artistic convention of the text, interest in folklore and literary legend;
2) The search for a universal picture of being based on global antinomies (the purpose and aimlessness of existence), life and death, me and the world, etc.
3) the attraction of style, on the one hand, to increased emotionality, expressiveness, and, on the other hand, the desire for "prosaic", naturalistic "pettiness" of the description. Very often, both tendencies coexisted in the style of one poet, creating an effect of dissonance.
Poetry of the 80s and 90s conditionally can be divided into 3 groups:
1.S.Ya.Nadson and "mournful poets"
2. Poets of "aesthetic" orientation (Andreevsky, A. Apukhtin, Fofanov, M. Lokhvitskaya, Sluchevsky and others.
3. Poets of pre-modernist orientation (Vl. Solovyov, D. Merezhkovsky, N. Minsky).
Born into an old noble family in the city of Bolkhov, Oryol province. In 1859 he graduated from the St. Petersburg School of Law. Served in the Ministry of Justice. From childhood, he showed brilliant abilities, he first appeared in print at the age of 14.
Aleksey Nikolaevich Apukhtin began to publish in the 1950s, but the first collection of his "Poems" appeared only in 1886. The book was opened with the poem "A Year in the Monastery", representing the hero's diary entries, which reflected the characteristic circle of the main themes and motives of Apukhtin's lyrics.
The hero of the poem, a secular person infected with pessimism, flees from the "world of lies, betrayal and deceit" under the "humble roof" of the monastery. But life in deep silence, "without storms and without passions" soon bored him. In vain he tries to expel from his heart the image of his beloved, who gave him so much bitterness and suffering - more and more "waves of memories and passions rage" in him. Finally, on the eve of the tonsure, the hero says goodbye forever "to a quiet, humble abode", going towards the storms of life. The poem is devoid of a complex dramatic development of the plot, it is a long chain of thoughts of the hero, his conversation with himself.
The theme of the poems of the first collection is in many ways akin to the painful thoughts that underlie the poem "A Year in the Monastery". Melancholy, the torments of unrequited feelings, "mad groaning of love", memories of lost happiness, the tragedy of disappointment, the melancholy of "tedious days", pessimistic moods - such is the content of Apukhtin's poetry.
Previously, the poet gravitated toward elegy and romance lyrics. The well-known romances Crazy Nights, Sleepless Nights, Pair of Bays, Broken Vase, etc. by Apukhtin attracted the attention of composers, including P.I. Tchaikovsky, who had been friends with the poet for many years.
In the 80s, Apukhtin began to gravitate towards narrative poetic genres - a diary, confession, letter, monologue, which made it possible to increase the emotional intensity of the characters' experiences and dramatize their story about themselves. Appeal to the narrative in verse, to a kind of verse short story, gave Apukhtin the opportunity to introduce into his poetry the intonation of live colloquial speech and more freely introduce into it the intonation of live colloquial speech and more freely introduce everyday vocabulary into it.
Lyrics A. abounded with stereotyped poetic phrases and images. “Misty distances”, “heavenly smiles”, “golden dreams”, “azure sky”, “bright eyes”, etc. poured into his poems in a wide stream. The appeal to the narrative form helped the poet overcome the attraction to someone else's imagery. Apukhtin was not a pioneer in the field of poetic narration, but he introduced new moods into it and a new psychological revelation of the man of his time. The monologues-confessions created by him ("Crazy", "From the papers of the prosecutor", "Before the operation") quickly entered the pop repertoire. In the preface to A.'s Poems, published in 1961, N. Kovarsky rightly writes that A. was characterized by the desire to “bring poetry and prose together. Verse A. under the influence of this relationship undoubtedly wins. The vocabulary becomes simpler, "poeticisms" are less common, the verse becomes freer, absorbs much more colloquial elements than before, both in the dictionary and in the syntax.
(Choose your own quotes.)
