Mikhail Kuzmin's prose art world. The originality of the artistic manner of Mikhail Kuzmin

"Dear Zina. Yesterday Vladimir Sergeevich Meyer shot himself. This is what I must tell you first of all, so that neither my long silence nor the disorder of this letter may seem strange to you. I belonged to Meyer before we left, and I tormented him; I think I didn't love him, and maybe that's what love is. I do not know anything. I didn't know, and maybe I still don't know myself. Now I know a little better than a year ago. When you get married, you gradually get to know not only the person you married, but also yourself. But, oh, how long it is, and maybe only after five loves or ten do you know yourself enough to risk a long relationship. All this is not what you need to write, what you need to say, what you need to think at the present moment. If I confessed my real thoughts, then I would have to confess that I can’t get out of my ears, like Meyer hit the back of his head on my bedroom door when he fell. The dull thud of an almost inanimate body. He fell on his back and died almost immediately. We didn't have a fight before he died. I thought that it might end like this, but at that moment I did not expect it at all. Meyer was passionately in love with me, but did not understand me at all, or understood me too well. It didn't interest me, just as Meyer didn't interest me at all. Why I did all this, I don't know, or rather, I'm afraid to know. I also don't know what keeps me from following the example of Vladimir Sergeevich: both he and I loved one Tolstoy. And now, when everything turned out as I expected and as I wanted, I feel great fear for that other person, because Meyer was very dear to him. This I know for sure. I believe that you will forgive me, but understand that I do not care. I almost don't even care if Tolstoy forgives me, because I don't forgive myself. If only he, if only he were strong enough. I would agree to be faithful to Vitaly all my life, if only what happened did not happen, and at the same time I do not repent at all. I am so confused that I myself do not know what to do, even if you put a bullet in your forehead, like this unfortunate boy who was ruined by me. From the outside, all this may seem like a very banal and simple story: a bored lady who ran away from her husband with her lover and drove the latter to suicide. What could be simpler and more disgusting than this? But you yourself know that this is far from the case. I don't have any specific future plans. Volodya's funeral will be tomorrow. I have now moved to another hotel and my address is Munich. Hotel Four Seasons, No. 7. I am telling you this, by no means inciting you to write, but in the secret hope that this address will be recognized by someone else. If I stay alive, I'll be here for quite some time. Does it matter where you live, but here, at least, is the grave of Meyer, who was close to Tolstoy and binds the three of us. I kiss you tenderly and remain your Sasha.

P.S. By the way, I am listed here as Meyer's wife, so I should write.

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Antipina Irina Vladislavovna The concept of man in the early prose of Mikhail Kuzmin: Dis. ... cand. philol. Sciences: 10.01.01: Voronezh, 2003 201 p. RSL OD, 61:04-10/519

Introduction

Chapter I The novel "Wings" in the context of aesthetic searches for literature of the era of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries 29

Chapter II. The originality of the stylizations of Mikhail Kuzmin 88

"The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" as "approbation of new aesthetic ideas" 88

"The Exploits of the Great Alexander": the ideological overcoming of symbolism 118

Conclusion 146

Notes 166

References 172

Introduction to work

Mikhail Kuzmin was one of the brightest figures of Russian culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Contemporaries knew him as a poet, prose writer, critic, composer and musician. The artist is so firmly connected with the “Silver Age” that contemporaries in their memoirs cannot imagine this period without him. He himself was the creator of the time: “The eighteenth century from the Somov point of view, the thirties, Russian splitism and everything that occupied literary circles: gazelles, French ballads, acrostics and poems for the occasion. And it is felt that all this is first-hand, that the author did not follow the fashion, but he himself took part in its creation, ”wrote N. Gumilyov.

The arrival of M. Kuzmin in literature was quite unexpected even for the artist himself. After the first publication in 1905 in the almanac "Green Collection of Poems and Prose", which did not receive any significant reviews (1), in 1906, with the appearance of "Alexandrian Songs" in the journal "Scales", Kuzmin was talked about as "one of the finest poets of that time ", and the release of his novel" Wings "brought real popularity to the author.

Nevertheless, already in the 1920s, during the life of the writer, his oblivion began. An artist "strict and carefree", an artist "with a joyful lightness of brush and cheerful work", he turned out to be inconsistent with the time of social change. The quiet voice of M. Kuzmin, addressed to an individual, was lost among the global events of the 1930s. The originality of the writer's work, the combination of a variety of themes and motives in it, also to some extent contributed to his oblivion: Kuzmin cannot be unambiguously assessed, he is many-sided and cannot be summed up in one line. In his prose there is the East, and Ancient Greece, and Rome, and Alexandria, and France of the 18th century, and the Russian Old Believers, and modernity. B. Eikhenbaum wrote about the work of M. Kuzmin: “He combines French grace with some kind of Byzantine intricacy, “beautiful clarity” with ornate patterns of everyday life and psychology, “not thinking about the goal” art - with unexpected trends "

4 . The complexity of Kuzmin's work also played its role: the signs of world culture with which it is saturated, easily recognizable at the beginning of the century, turned out to be inaccessible to the reader of the 1930s, and the very ideas of his work lost their former relevance. In this regard, in Soviet times, Mikhail Kuzmin was almost forgotten. In the literary criticism of those years, he is mentioned only as a theorist of "beautiful clarity." Only in the 1990s, a century after its appearance in literature, did the name of Mikhail Kuzmin return to the reader. The first collection of his prose works was prepared and published by V. Markov at Berkeley (1984-1990) - the most complete collection of M. Kuzmin's works to date. In Russia, collections of his poems and prose were published as separate books. The first among them are the book “Mikhail Kuzmin. Poems and Prose (1989), which includes several stories, stylizations, a play and seven critical articles by Kuzmin, and the volume of Selected Works (1990), in which prose is also presented only in stylizations. "Bystochnye" works, or works "on modern subjects", including the novel "Wings", appeared only in 1994 in the collection "Underground Streams" (2). It was the most complete of the Russian editions until the appearance of the three-volume Prose and Essays (1999-2000), in which the first volume is devoted to the prose of 1906-1912, the second volume - to the prose of 1912-1915, the third - to the critical works of 1900-1930 years, and most of them are published for the first time. In this edition, the “modern” prose of the writer is most fully represented, and not just stylized. The latest to date are the collections "Floating Travelers" (2000) and "Prose of the Poet" (2001) (3).

Prose belongs to the least studied part of the literary heritage of M. Kuzmin. “She has always been, as it were, a stepdaughter,” remarked V. Markov. Contemporaries valued him primarily as a poet, limiting themselves only to general observations about the artist's prose works. Serious attention was paid to them only by V. Bryusov and N. Gumilyov, who especially singled out The Adventures of Aime Leboeuf, Vyach. Ivanov and E. O. Znosko-Borovsky, for the first time

5 you who presented the writer's work as a whole (4).

After B. Eikhenbaum's article "On M. Kuzmin's prose" (1920), in which an attempt was made to determine the literary origins of his works, the writer's name appears in literary studies only in 1972: G. Shmakov's article " Blok and Kuzmin”, the author of which for the first time reveals the name of Mikhail Kuzmin to the Soviet reader, considers his work in the context of the era, outlining his relationship with various groups (symbolists, acmeists, the “World of Art”), determines the literary and philosophical origins of the writer’s worldview.

Interest in M. Kuzmin has increased in the last decade, against the backdrop of a general interest in the literature of the early 20th century. The result of this is the publication of the writer's works, biographical research, research on the topic "Mikhail Kuzmin and the era", which examines the relationship of the writer with his contemporaries, schools, magazines. An analysis of these works as a whole indicates that M. Kuzmin played a significant role in the era, and demonstrates how wide and diverse the circle of his cultural ties was - from the Symbolists to the Oberiuts. Research by N. A. Bogomolov "Vyacheslav Ivanov and Kuzmin: on the history of relations", "Mikhail Kuzmin in the autumn of 1907", N. A. Bogomolov and J. Malmstad "At the origins of Mikhail Kuzmin's creativity", A. G. Timofeev "Mikhail Kuzmin and the publishing house "Petropolis", "M. Kuzmin's "Italian journey", "Mikhail Kuzmin and his entourage in the 1880s - 1890s", R. D. Timenchik "The Riga episode in Anna Akhmatova's "Poem without a Hero", G. A. Moreva “Once again about Pasternak and Kuzmin”, “On the history of the anniversary of M. A. Kuzmin in 1925”, O. A. Lekmanova “Notes on the topic: “Mandelstam and Kuzmin””, “Once again about Kuzmin and acmeists: Summing up the well-known”, L. Selezneva “Mikhail Kuzmin and Vladimir Mayakovsky”, K. Harer “Kuzmin and Ponter” and a number of others not only determine the place of Kuzmin in the cultural life of the era of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, but also allow filling in the “white spots" of his biography (5).

A multifaceted study of the life and work of the writer was carried out by N. A. Bogomolov in the book “Mikhail Kuzmin: Articles and Materials”. It consists of three parts: the first is a monograph on the work of M. Kuzmin, the second is devoted to the study of a number of individual issues related to the biography of the writer, in the third some archival materials with detailed comments are published for the first time. In addition, the book presents an analysis of a number of "dark", "abstruse" poems by M. Kuzmin, which make it possible to see his work in a new way, in a completely different light than it was done before, when it appeared only as an example of "beautiful clarity" .

The book by N. A. Bogomolov and J. E. Malmstad “Mikhail Kuzmin: art, life, era” is a continuation and addition to the one written by N. A. Bogomolov earlier. In addition to recreating (mainly on the basis of archival documents) the chronological outline of the writer's life, it also examines the main stages of his work against a broad background of world culture, with special attention paid to ties with Russian traditions - the Old Believers, the 18th century, the work of A. S. Pushkin, N Leskova, K. Leontiev and others. The role of Kuzmin in the culture of his time, his contacts both with literary movements (symbolism, acmeism, futurism, OBERIU, etc.) and with individual artists (V. Bryusov, A. Blok) are traced in detail. , A. Bely, F. Sologub, N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, D. Kharms, A. Vvedensky, K. Somov, S. Sudeikin, N. Sapunov, V. Meyerhold and others .). Among the most significant works about M. Kuzmin, it is necessary to note the collection "Studies in the Life and Works of Mixail Kuzmin" (1989), the publication of abstracts and materials of the conference dedicated to the work of M. Kuzmin and his place in Russian culture (1990), as well as articles A.G. Timofeeva “Seven sketches for the portrait of M. Kuzmin”, I. Karabutenko “M. Kuzmin. Variation on the theme "Cagliostro"", A. A. Purina "On the beautiful clarity of hermeticism", E. A. Pevak "Prose and essays-

7 ethics M. A. Kuzmin”, M. L. Gasparova “The Artistic World of M. Kuzmin: the formal thesaurus and the functional thesaurus”, N. Alekseeva “Beautiful clarity in different worlds”.

However, despite the recent significant number of works on Kuzmin, researchers focus on the poetic work of the artist, leaving aside his prose. In the study of prose, special merit belongs to G. Shmakov, V. Markov, A. Timofeev, G. Morev. V. Markov was the first of modern literary critics who tried to analyze the prose of M. Kuzmin as a whole. In the article "A Conversation about Kuzmin's Prose", which became the introductory part of the collected works of the writer, he outlines the main problems that arise before the researcher: the nature of Kuzmin's stylization and "Westernism", the parody of his prose, its philosophical origins, genre and style evolution.

If we talk about works devoted to individual works of Kuzmin the prose writer, they are not numerous. The greatest attention is paid to the novel "Wings", without which, according to V. Markov, a conversation about the writer's prose is generally impossible. Attempts to "write" "Wings" into the tradition of Russian literature were made in the articles of A. G. Timofeev ("M. A. Kuz-min in a polemic with F. M. Dostoevsky and A. P. Chekhov"), O. Yu. Skonnaya (“People of the Moonlight in Nabokov's Russian Prose: On the Question of Nabokov's Parody of the Silver Age Motifs”), O. A. Lekmanova (“Fragments of a Commentary on Mikhail Kuzmin's Wings”). Researchers draw a number of interesting parallels between the novel by M. Kuzmin and the works of F. Dostoevsky, N. Leskov, A. Chekhov, V. Nabokov. The hidden polemic of the Wings is revealed, the presence of various traditions in them. A. G. Timofeev and O. A. Lekmanov draw our attention to the images of heroes who “came” into the work from the literature of the 19th century. - Vanya Smurov ("The Brothers Karamazov" by F. Dostoevsky) and Sergei ("Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" by N. Leskov). Their images, on the one hand, include the novel by M. Kuzmin in the tradition of Russian

8 Russian literature, on the other hand, the discrepancy with the interpretation of the XIX century. reveals the features of Kuzmin's worldview. O. Yu. Skonechnaya shows that the work of M. Kuzmin, in particular, the novel "Wings", also became the subject of controversy for writers of the next generation: she reveals reminiscences of the novel "Wings" in V. Nabokov's work "The Spy".

Some other works are considered in a similar vein - the novel "The Quiet Guard" (O. Burmakina "On the structure of the novel by M. Kuzmin" The Quiet Guard ""), the stories "From the Notes of Tivurty Penzl" (I. Doronchenkov "... Beauty , like Bryullov’s canvas”) and “High Art” (G. Morev “The Polemical Context of the Story of M. A. Kuzmin “High Art””). However, these works do not exhaust all the problems of reminiscence of Kuzmin's prose. Pushkin's presence in the writer's prose deserves more attention; the theme “M. Kuzmin and F. M. Dostoevsky. It can be said that the identification of the literary sources of M. Kuzmin's prose is just beginning.

The philosophical origins of the artist's work are outlined in the already mentioned works by G. Shmakov ("Blok and Kuzmin"), N. A. Bogomolov and J. E. Malmstad ("Mikhail Kuzmin: art, life, era"). G. Shmakov considers "Wings" as a philosophical novel, in which the writer sets out "his aesthetic and, if you like, moral creed." Recognizing this attempt as “not entirely successful”, he highlights the main provisions that are important for understanding the views of M. Kuzmin, reflected in the novel: his concept of love, “religious and reverent attitude towards the world”, “perception of feelings as messengers of divine truth”, the idea of ​​self-improvement and service to beauty. Researchers have discovered the closeness of the writer's views to the ideas of Plotinus, Francis of Assisi, Heinse, Hamann, Gnostics, removing only the obvious layer of these echoes and dependencies. However, the connections and divergences of Mikhail Kuzmin with his contemporaries, the impact on his prose of the ideas of V. Solovyov, the spiritual quest for symbolism, the philosophy of the name, etc., has not yet been sufficiently studied.

A significant layer of research literature is devoted to the study of the degree of autobiographical nature of M. Kuzmin's prose, its correlation with his poetic work. N. A. Bogomolov ("Mikhail Kuzmin and his early prose", etc.), G. A. Morev ("Kuzmin's Oeuvre Posthume: Notes to the text"), A. V. Lavrov, R. D. Timenchik ("" Dear old worlds and the coming century": Strokes to the portrait of M. Kuzmin"), E. A. Pevak ("Prose and essays by M. A. Kuzmin") and others see in M. Kuzmin's prose a reflection of his personal experience. With the help of the writer's diaries, they restore the everyday, cultural and psychological contexts of his works. This approach allows us to explain the emergence of many themes and motifs in Kuzmin's prose, but its significant drawback, in our opinion, is that the concept of the writer is built on the basis of documentary materials - diaries, letters, and works of art are involved only as auxiliary material. Such an attitude seems completely unfounded, since it provides deeper and more significant material than a biographical commentary. Recall that V. Bryusov considered M. Kuzmin "a true storyteller" and put him on a par with C. Dickens, G. Flaubert, F. Dostoevsky and L. Tolstoy. N. Gumilyov, in his review of the book of M. Kuzmin's stories, noted that its author, "in addition to Gogol and Turgenev, in addition to Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky", traces his origin "directly from Pushkin's prose"; in the work of M. Kuzmin, the "cult of the language" reigns, which puts his works in a special place in Russian literature. A. Blok called M. Kuzmin a writer, “one of a kind. Before him, there were no such things in Russia, and I don’t know if there will be ... ".

Despite the recognition of the artistic value and the important role of the prose heritage in understanding the aesthetic concept of the writer, researchers have not yet approached Kuzmin's prose as an integral and independent phenomenon of Russian literature of the 20th century. Questions of periodization, genre features of his prose remain unclear, stories, short stories and stylized works are practically not studied.

10 One of the first questions that arise when studying the prose of M. Kuzmin

The question of its periodization. It was first carried out by V. Markov,
which included the following periods in it: “stylization” (including, however,
not only stylizations), “hacky (first war years), unknown
(pre-revolutionary years) and experimental ". It's deed
nie, according to the researcher himself, is very conditional. Other, also before
laid down by him - on the "early" (until 1913) and "late" M. Kuzmin, however
Markov does not give reasons for it. Nevertheless, V. Markov outlined
general trend of periodization of M. Kuzmin's prose, which is followed by
other researchers. So, in the three-volume book "Prose and Essays" E. Pevak
covers the periods 1906-1912. and 1912-1919; offers a similar periodization
G. Morev, who, following the writer himself, notes “the era of the well-known brilliance
art and life" - 1905-1912/13 - and the "epoch of failures" - since 1914.
Thus, researchers agree on the division of Mikhail Kuzmin's prose
for two main periods, the boundary between which falls on 1913-1914;
it is usually indicated that the first period was the most fruitful.

Such a division seems to be justified both from a historical and literary point of view. 1914 - the year of the beginning of the First World War

It has become a frontier for all mankind, and it is no coincidence that many Russian artists
it was 1914 that was considered the true beginning of the 20th century and, as a result,
the end of the era of the turn (6). M. Kuzmin in his attitude was a man
and a writer of the era of the turn - this largely explains his huge ass
larnost at the beginning of the 20th century. and his return to Russian literature precisely on
at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. Kuzmin's works turn out to be close in world
acceptance of a boundary person who feels himself between two eras, with
appropriate to both at the same time and none completely. impossibility
fully realize the magnitude of such an event as the change of centuries, forced
people to go into private life, turn to "little things", finding in them a frame
giving and support of the existence of an individual person. M. Kuzmin turned out to be consonant

this mood like no other. His words about European culture of the end of the 18th century. one can define all the milestone epochs: “On the threshold of the 19th century, on the eve of a complete change in life, way of life, feelings and social relations, a feverish, loving and convulsive desire swept through Europe to capture, fix this fleeting life, the little things of life doomed to disappearance, the charm and trifles of a peaceful life, domestic comedies, petty-bourgeois idylls, feelings and thoughts that are almost outdated. As if people were trying to stop the wheel of time. The comedies of Goldo-ni and the theater of Gozzi, the writings of Retief de la Breton and English novels, the paintings of Longhi and the illustrations of Chodovetsky tell us about this. Perhaps these words explain the enthusiastic attitude of contemporaries to the work of M. Kuzmin himself, and the reason for the general theatricalization of life at the beginning of the 20th century. (about which below), when on the threshold of a new time, the era seemed to strive to live once again and rethink the entire previous history of mankind. “They say that during the important hours of life, a person’s whole life flies before the spiritual gaze of a person; now the whole life of mankind flies before us.<...>We really feel something new; but we feel it in the old, ”Andrei Bely writes about his time.

Therefore, the allocation in the prose of M. Kuzmin of two periods, the first of which coincides with the era of the turn, and the second falls on the turn of the time, is natural. Without setting ourselves the task of exploring the features of each of the periods, we will name the main, in our opinion, criterion for their selection - demand time, the reason for which lies in the milestone worldview of M. Kuzmin's work, which was mentioned above. Let us add that Kuzmin's prose is distinguished by intensive ideological and artistic searches, thematic and stylistic diversity, as a result of which it is impossible to single out any internal criterion (as V. Markov's attempt at periodization demonstrates). Therefore, we, remembering the boundary consciousness of Kuzmin, proceed from perception his prose by his contemporaries. This external criterion is presented in this case

12 tea the most objective. Kuzmin's works after 1914 are gradually losing popularity, as time and the needs of society change. The writer's work is also changing, but it turns out to be inconsistent with the time, does not coincide with it.

Our work is devoted to the prose of the “frontier” period, when M. Kuzmin was one of the brightest figures in Russian culture. Before turning directly to his works, it is necessary to at least briefly familiarize yourself with the era, the worldview of which was so fully reflected in them.

The central concept of artistic life at the beginning of the 20th century. there was the concept of the game, which embodied the popular idea of ​​\u200b\u200bever-changing, "before our eyes losing shape of life." Later, N. Berdyaev recalled the era of the turn: “There was nothing more stable. Historical bodies melted. Not only Russia, but the whole world passed into a liquid state. Such a feeling was associated with a fundamentally new picture of the world, which was brought by the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. both scientifically and artistically. Second half of the 19th century - the time of the invention of cinema and radio, major discoveries in physics, medicine, geography, which influenced the entire subsequent development of mankind. The picture of the world changed, the connections between phenomena turned out to be completely different than previously imagined. It was revealed to people that the world is changeable and mobile, and this discovery led to a complete restructuring of the worldview. “Time broke,” writes V. Rozanov. The old criteria no longer worked, the new ones had not yet taken shape, and the uncertainty that arose because of this gave unlimited freedom for spiritual quests. The most incredible ideas became possible. “Instead of the relationship between reality and art as its artistic reflection, characteristic of the realism of the 19th century, a different semantic space is put forward, where art itself becomes the object of its own image” .

The attitude to relativity that prevailed in the era gave rise to a sense of the conditionality of what was happening, blurred the boundaries between real life and

13 thought, between reality and dream, life and play. “...Who will tell us where is the difference between sleep and wakefulness? And how much does life with open eyes differ from life with closed eyes? - reflects in one of the stories A. Kuprin (7). The motive "life-sleep" is often found in the literature of the beginning of the century (K. Balmont, Z. Gippius, D. Merezhkovsky, N. Minsky, F. Sologub, V. Bryusov, M. Voloshin, A. Kuprin, etc.). The game was perceived as "one of the forms of dreaming", "dreaming with open eyes" and was elevated to a life principle, when the real was consciously replaced by the fictitious, things - by their signs. At the same time, the game was understood as a means of creating a reality different from real life, that is, art.

Reality in the minds of modernists turned out to be multilevel. The first level was life itself, which often seemed chaotic, hostile, and ugly. The only salvation from it was to escape into the world of illusion, fantasy, carried out with the help of art. In contrast to deceptive reality, art was presented as the only reliable reality in which the chaos of life is overcome. Art as a substitute for reality was regarded as a way of being, and not just as a result of creative imagination. The artist is the one who preserves among the realities of daily everyday life the inexhaustible ability to transform them in the mysteries of the game. This is how the second level of reality arose - the reality of art, which for many modernists became life itself, they "tried to turn art into reality, and reality into art." Thus, the game from a purely aesthetic phenomenon in the era of the turn turned into a means of creating a new reality, which often turned out to be more real for artists than life. But since play is possible with objectively existing reality, it is also possible with created reality - a third level of reality arises, which is born from play with art. Symbolist life-creation at this level is ironically rethought and turns out to be no longer the creation of a new

14 world, but by playing with created worlds.

The worldview of time was most accurately expressed in the theater, because the theater is the playing on the stage of works already existing in art (written dramas). Theatricality was one of the defining characteristics of the era at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. It was the aesthetics of the theater that often motivated the behavior of many cultural figures of this period. The theater was understood as "a secret call to the creativity of life." Vyacheslav Ivanov assigned the theater the role of a "prototype" and creator of the future, Alexander Blok saw in the theater a point of contact and "meeting" of art and life (8). However, the idea of ​​synthesis of art and life was embodied not only in the theater. The artists of the "World of Art", perceiving the Western tradition of Art Nouveau, tried to "bring" art to life, creating furniture and interiors for entire rooms: utilitarian objects (furniture) were at the same time beautiful works of art. “You need beauty to accompany you everywhere, to hug you when you get up, lie down, work, dress, love, dream or dine. It is necessary to make life, which is first of all ugly, first of all beautiful, ”Z. Gippius believed. The gaming principle invaded not only art, but became the fundamental principle of building life. This principle was already laid down in the very concept of symbolism with its idea of ​​life-creation, that is, the creation of one's life by the poet according to his ideas about it. “The Symbolists did not want to separate the writer from the person, the literary biography from the personal.<...>Life events, in connection with the vagueness, the precariousness of the lines by which reality was outlined for these people, were never experienced as just life events: they immediately became part of the inner world and part of creativity. Vice versa: what was written by anyone became a real, life event for everyone, ”V. Khodasevich wrote later. Life is given to the artist only in order to be transformed into art, and vice versa, art is needed in order to become life. At the same time, only

15 life of creators inhabiting their own artistic world. It is significant that in the 1910s. many artists supported the idea of ​​"theatricalization of life", which N. Evreinov came up with (9). That is, at the beginning of the 20th century. reality is perceived through the prism of the theater, and this makes it conditional. Therefore, artists often do not know "where life ends, where art begins."

The personality and creativity of M. Kuzmin are extremely closely connected even for the era of the turn. We can talk about the existence of the theater of Mikhail Kuzmin, in which the artist himself played the main role. “There was also something of a mask in him, but it was impossible to make out where the mask ended and where the true face began,” recalls M. Hoffman. Memoirists left us many descriptions of the appearance of M. Kuzmin, which reflected the diversity of the writer: “From the window of my grandmother’s dacha, I saw my uncles leaving (K. A. Somova - note I. A.) guests. The unusualness of one of them struck me: a gypsy type, he was dressed in a bright red silk kosovorotka, he wore black velvet trousers that were loose and Russian patent leather high boots. A black cloth Cossack was thrown over his arm, and a cloth cap was on his head. He walked with a light, elastic gait. I looked at him and kept hoping that he would dance. He did not justify my hopes and left without dancing”; “... an amazing, surreal creature sketched like a capricious pencil of a visionary artist. This is a man of small stature, thin, fragile, in a modern jacket, but with the face of either a faun or a young satyr, as depicted in Pompeian frescoes ”; “... he wore a blue undershirt and with his swarthyness, black beard and too big eyes, trimmed “in a bracket”, looked like a gypsy. Then he changed this appearance (and not for the better) - he shaved and began to wear smart waistcoats and ties. His past was surrounded by a strange mystery - they said that he either lived at one time in some kind of skete, or that he was an inmate in a schismatic shop, but that he was a half-French by birth and traveled a lot in Italy "

; “... Kuzmin - what an intricate life, what a strange fate!<...>Silk vests and coachman's undershirts, Old Believers and Jewish blood, Italy and the Volga - all these are pieces of a motley mosaic that makes up the biography of Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin.

And the appearance is almost ugly and charming. Small stature, dark skin, flattened with curls on the forehead and bald head, fixed strands of sparse hair - and huge amazing "Byzantine" eyes "; “An exquisite dandy, a beige suit, a red tie, beautiful languid eyes, oriental bliss in those eyes (from where, if not from a French great-grandmother?). The swarthy complexion also resembled something oriental. It was a trendsetter of tastes and fashion (according to legend - the owner of 365 vests). And not a single memoirist can do without mentioning the amazing eyes of M. Kuzmin and the “inimitable originality” of his voiceless singing (10).

Those who tried to peer into the spiritual image of the artist spoke of him as a person from some other spheres, who only by a whim of fate turned out to be their contemporary. “I do not believe (sincerely and stubbornly)<...>that he grew up in Saratov and St. Petersburg, - wrote E. F. Gollerbach. - He only dreamed about it in his "here" life. He was born in Egypt, between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mereotis, in the homeland of Euclid, Origen and Philo, in sunny Alexandria, during the time of the Ptolemies. He was born the son of a Greek and an Egyptian, and only in the XVIII century. French blood flowed into his veins, and in 1875 - Russian. All this was forgotten in the chain of transformations, but the prophetic memory of subconscious life remained. M. Voloshin also speaks of the same: “When you see Kuzmin for the first time, you want to ask him: “Tell me frankly, how old are you?” there is something so ancient in his appearance that the thought is whether he is one of the Egyptian mummies, to which life and memory have been restored by some kind of witchcraft, ”and K. Balmont in a message to M. Kuzmin about a decade of his literary activity wrote:

Hellas refracted in Egypt,

Gardens of otherworldly rose and jasmine,

Persian nightingale, gardens delight,

Sunk deep into an attentive look -

So in Russian days the poet Kuzmin arose.

The basis of such a different perception of the writer was not only his work, which very accurately coincided with the aesthetic ideas and searches of his time and therefore popular, but also his life, extremely theatrical. “Kuzmin’s life seemed to me some theatrical, recalls Rurik Iv-nev. - We sat at his house, met at the "Stray Dog" and at literary evenings in Tenishevsky and in other places, walked in the Summer Garden and in Pavlovsk ... He was simple and ordinary. And yet, sometimes I imagined or had a presentiment that we were in the stalls, and Kuzmin brilliantly played the role of ... Kuzmin on stage. What was behind the scenes, I did not know. Obviously, M. Kuzmin's worldview was based on that third level of reality, when the game was no longer played with real life, but with the created one. Exactly game of life it is possible to explain the changes in the appearance of the writer and his inner diversity. Therefore, a contemporary has a feeling of the “theatrical life” of M. Kuzmin. Researchers are still unable to fully restore the true biography of the writer. His riddles begin from the date of birth. For a long time it was not exactly known, since M. Kuzmin himself named different years in various documents (1872, 1875 and 1877). Only in 1975, K. N. Suvorova, after conducting archival research in the writer's homeland, came to the conclusion that M. Kuzmin was born in 1872. Such an attitude to the date of his birth testifies to the readiness of M. Kuzmin to play both with his own biography and with his future biographers (11).

The forms of manifestation of the game principle in the “Silver Age” were diverse: “the use of “game” (in particular, theatrical and masquerade) images and plots as a subject of the image; attraction of the "mask" of a theatrical hero (for example, Don Juan or Carmen)

as a certain form capable of being filled with diverse, "flickering" meanings; play on contrasts and ambiguities; styling, etc.” . For our purposes, it is especially important that the "theatricalization of life" at the beginning of the 20th century. It was often expressed by bright stylization of their own appearance by artists, when they quite consciously “played out” well-known historical or cultural situations (12). N. Evreinov called the beginning of the 20th century "the century of stylization". A modern researcher writes: “The phenomenon of “stylization”, subjected to both severe criticism, branding it as a “gross fake” or “decadent”, and enthusiastic praise, accepting it as the most “theatrical” language of stage art, becomes one of the most striking features of the theater art of the beginning of the century. We add that not only theatrical art. Stylistic trends have captured literature, painting, music, architecture, that is, all areas of art, and life itself. There were several reasons for this. A. Zhien connects the emergence of stylization with the "anti-realist trend of modernism in general". In her opinion, symbolism arose as a reaction and protest against the civil poetry that dominated Russian verse in the 1870s and 1880s. Therefore, the Symbolists rejected any attempt to reproduce reality in art. They saw art as a welcome replacement for reality, and reality began to distort. But there was also a philosophical aspect to this phenomenon. Modernity turned to bygone eras in order to rethink them on the threshold of a new time, but due to the general theatricalization, rethinking became possible only in the game. The stylization corresponded to this mood in the best possible way, since the stylization method always implies not only the reproduction of someone else's style, but also a game with it.

According to M. Bakhtin, stylization “suggests that the totality of stylistic devices that it reproduces once had a direct and immediate meaning.<.. .="">Someone else's object design (artistic-objective), - writes M. Bakhtin, - stylization makes it serve its own

19 their goals, that is, their new ideas. The stylist uses someone else's word as someone else's and thereby casts a light objective shadow on this word. At the same time, since the stylist “works from someone else’s point of view,” “the object shadow falls precisely on the very point of view,” and not on someone else’s word, as a result of which a conditional meaning arises. “Only that which was once unconditional, serious can become conditional. This original direct and unconditional meaning now serves new purposes, which take possession of it from within and make it conditional. “Conventionality” in this case directly points to a special playful character inherent in stylization: the artistic meaning of stylization arises on the basis of the playful distance between the position of the stylizer and the reproduced style.

E. G. Mushchenko notes that in transitional periods, stylization in literature, in addition to its main functions (“educational”, “self-affirming” and “protective”), additional ones appear. First of all, it is the function of maintaining tradition, ensuring the continuity of culture, which is so important at the turn of the century. "Stylization, bringing back<...>to the tradition of different eras,<...>on the one hand, it tested them for "strength" at a given stage of national existence. On the other hand, it led away from the close tradition of critical realism, creating the illusion of empty space for playing the situation of the "beginning" of art, the "zero tradition". This created a special environment of omnipotence for the narrator: he acted as the organizer of the dialogue with the reader, and the legislator of the artistic action embodied in the text, and the performer of all stylistic roles.

The appeal to stylization was also connected with the desire to pave the way for the emergence of new works compared to the previous tradition, written according to the principles of the “new art”, which symbolism felt like. That is, “stylization on the verge of centuries was one of the ways to test new aesthetic ideas. Preparing a springboard for a new art,

she simultaneously rechecked the "old storerooms", selecting what could go into the asset of this new one. In addition, according to V. Yu. Troitsky, interest in stylization in the era of the turn of the century was associated with a special attitude to the language, characteristic of the beginning of the century, to the style of speech, "because life itself was reflected in it in a peculiar way" .

In the definition of stylization, two approaches can be distinguished, which developed as early as the beginning of the 20th century. The first is characterized by the understanding of stylization as an accurate recreation of the stylized era "on a reliable scientific basis". This approach was followed, for example, by the Ancient Theater in St. Petersburg. The second approach involves the identification of characteristic features, the essence of the object of stylization, using "instead of a large number of details - one or two large strokes" . This is a stylization of "stage positions". “By stylization,” V. Meyerhold wrote, “I do not mean the exact reproduction of the style of a given era or a given phenomenon, as a photographer does in his photographs. The concept of "stylization" is inextricably linked with the idea of ​​convention, generalization and symbol. To "stylize" an epoch or a phenomenon means by all expressive means to reveal the internal synthesis of a given epoch or phenomenon, to reproduce their hidden characteristic features, which are found in the deeply hidden style of some work of art.

Differences in approaches are due to the duality of the very concept of "stylization". As Yu. Tynyanov points out, the technique of stylization always involves two planes in the text: stylizing and stylized “through it”. This duality allows the author, in addition to displaying the features of the stylized work or genre, to express his own position. This manifests another function of stylization in the turn of the era - "updating the traditional genre form", when "stylization, referring to an outdated genre, retained the reference points of the composition, plot and plot narrative, but did not prevent the writer from expressing quite modern pathos.

his ideas about man and the world. Depending on which plan became the main one for the artist, the approach to stylization was determined.

Explaining the understanding of theatrical stylization by symbolism, A. Bely wrote about two types of stylization - symbolic and technical. Symbolic stylization, defined by him as the director’s ability to “merge both with the will of the author and with the will of the crowd”, “raises the veil over the innermost meaning of the symbols of the drama” and is therefore “playing into the void”, “destruction of the theater”. But, destroying the theater, symbolic stylization, creative in essence, comes into life and transforms it. Another type of stylization - technical - is more accessible for implementation in a modern theater, A. Bely believes. This is the director's ability to "give a neat, only externally harmonizing frame to the images of the author." Such stylization requires turning the actor's personality into a puppet, destroying everything personal and even human in him: only in this way can technical stylization reveal the innermost meaning of the symbolist drama. The mask promotes symbolic generalization, "maximization" of the image. Actors on the stage must turn into impersonal types expressing symbolic meaning. Within the limits of technical stylization, A. Bely demands “cardboard performers” from the theatre, because “puppets are harmless, irrespective of the author's intention; people, on the other hand, will certainly bring in a perverted attitude, which “destroys” symbolic dramas. Indicative in this regard is the title of one of M. Kuzmin's stories of 1907 - "The Cardboard House".

In our work, we use the definition given to the concept of "stylization" by V. Yu. Troitsky: "stylization is conscious, consistent and purposeful holding by the artist characteristic features<...>literary style, characteristic of a writer of some kind, who occupies a certain social and aesthetic position.

In the spread of stylization in Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. exist-

The artists of the World of Art played a significant role (13). For many members of this association, it was the theater or the principle of theatricalization of life that was the means of rethinking reality. On their canvases, the plots of the commedia del arte, its heroes, masquerades, holidays, folk festivals, carousels embodied the idea of ​​the theatricality of the world and human life.

The work of the "World of Art" in many respects contributed to the emergence in Russian art of serious attention to style as such, which is a necessary condition for the appearance of stylization. According to K. L. Rudnitsky, the pathos of the activity of these masters consisted in the enthusiastic disclosure of the beauty of the art of bygone times through style. Some researchers (G. Shmakov, E. Yermilova, A. Zhien) believe that it was the "World of Art" that most significantly influenced the work of M. Kuzmin and the formation of his aesthetic views: "... an indirect view of the world will later lead Kuzmin to that the objects of the real world and their relationships will be constantly considered by Kuzmin as if through a cultural and historical mediastinum, through the filter of art.

Mikhail Kuzmin in literary criticism is traditionally considered to be a "master of stylization". This characterization, given by B. Eikhenbaum in 1920, was firmly entrenched in the writer for all subsequent decades and largely determined the fate of his prose. Contemporaries (R. Ivanov-Razumnik, A. Izmailov, N. Abramovich, M. Hoffman and others) and literary critics of the second half of the 20th century also called M. Kuzmin a stylist. (G. Shmakov, A. Lavrov, R. Timenchik, A. Zhien) (14). For the first time, the question of the nature of Kuzmin's stylization was raised by V. Markov. Pointing out that M. Kuzmin’s stylizations are usually understood “as a more or less accurate reproduction with a touch of “aesthetic” admiration”, the scientist brings them closer to the work of artists * of the “World of Art” and casts doubt on the very definition of M. Kuzmin as a stylist. He believes that "notable examples of stylization" can be found

only in the early prose of M. Kuzmin (these are "The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf", "The Exploits of the Great Alexander" and "The Journey of Sir John Firfax"); the question of stylizations by M. Kuzmin after 1914 is debatable. In any case, "the number of "non-stylized" novels, novellas and short stories (that is, on modern topics) is much greater" . P. Dmitriev agrees with V. Markov, who considers the definition of M. Kuzmin as a stylist "unfair".

We find confirmation of this point of view among the writer's contemporaries, who highly valued style writer, not stylization: “But what was really valuable in Kuzmin is what he created your own(our italics. - I. A.) style, very skillfully resurrecting the archaic and naive language of sentimental madrigals and old love lyrics”; "Style. Refined, saturated, but transparent. There is a cultural unconsciousness in this style. It is not made, not created. But it is very processed, polished.<.. .="">This is an organic fusion of native Slavic with native Latin”; “Kuzmin's erudition in Russian antiquity did not raise the slightest doubt about the inviolability of Russian book speech: Karamzin and Pushkin. Following the classical models, he got to the most skillful literary work: to talk about nothing. Kuzmin's pages, written simply for the sake of vocabulary and very harmonious, exactly like Marlinsky's, his high-society cavaliers, bouncing under Vestris, talk to the ladies "in the midst of a noisy ball", or how children in the game talk to each other "on persons"". That is, it is impossible to speak of Kuzmin's entire prose as "stylized". Moreover, in our work we show that even those of his works, which are traditionally considered stylizations, are them only at the level of form.

The relevance of the dissertation is determined by the fact that it is a study of M. Kuzmin's prose as an integral phenomenon, a complete artistic system in which various literary tendencies are intertwined.

process and developed the leading artistic ideas of the time. The dissertation is devoted to the fundamental problem of the literary "anthropological renaissance" - the problem of man in the early prose of M. Kuzmin (until 1914).

The most significant prose works of M. Kuzmin before 1914 - the novels "Wings" (1905), "The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" (1907) and "The Exploits of the Great Alexander" (1909) became the subject of the analysis. The themes, ideas and principles that determine the philosophical and aesthetic concept of the writer and are important for the era at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries found expression in them. generally.

The works we have chosen for analysis most clearly represent the two lines traditionally distinguished in M. Kuzmin's prose. The first, which includes compositions “on modern subjects”, originates from “Wings”, the second, including stylizations, from “The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf”. These novels, as we show in the dissertation, arose at the intersection of a wide variety of ideological and aesthetic influences. The writer sensitively responded to all the trends and trends of our time and at the same time took into account the experience of European culture.

When designating the range of works under study, the issue of their genre affiliation should be clarified. Most modern literary critics (N. A. Bogomolov, G. A. Morev, A. G. Timofeev and others), based on the small - "non-novel" - volume of M. Kuzmin's works, define them as stories, while he himself The writer called his works novels. VF Markov, explaining this discrepancy, suggests that for M. Kuzmin the traditional genre division of prose meant little at all. However, in our opinion, the definition by M. Kuzmin of "Wings", "The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" and "The Exploits of the Great Alexander" as novels is not explained by the author's mistake or negligence. The problematics of these works, - the self-determination of a person, the search for his place in the world - is purely

manna. One of the basic principles of organizing a novel plot is the hero's overcoming of boundaries - both external (spatial) and internal: "The ability to cross boundaries is a characteristic feature of a novel hero." In the dissertation, we show that the entire life path of the heroes of the studied works is “an attempt to overcome the boundaries set by fate” . The novel world acts as "a reflection, a continuation of the real world, and as its overcoming, the denial of its boundaries"; in the picture of the world being created, “the artist also gives his answer to reality, objects to it, realizing his values” . We find these genre features in the named works of M. Kuzmin, therefore their definition as novels seems to be legitimate.

"Wings" is a novel that concentrates the ideas of all subsequent work of the artist, therefore, without analyzing this work, further research of the writer's prose is impossible. The novels "The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" and "The Exploits of the Great Alexander", except for the reviews of the writer's contemporaries, are considered for the first time. It was thanks to these works that M. Kuzmin gained the fame of a “stylist”, relegating his “everyday” prose to the background.

Purpose of the study: to consider the origins of the concept of man in the early prose of M. Kuzmin, to reveal the ideological and artistic originality of his works. The goal is determined research objectives: to substantiate the principles of periodization of the writer's prose work, to consider his early novels against the backdrop of the traditions of Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries, indicating the originality of the author's artistic searches.

Scientific novelty dissertation research lies in the fact that in it the early prose of M. Kuzmin is presented for the first time as an integral system and a continuing process; for the first time, the formation of the concept of a person in the prose of the writer is traced, the features of stylization as a semantic

dissolving reception.

The research methodology includes elements of system-holistic, historical-biographical, mythopoetic methods, intertextual and motivational analysis. In each separate section of the work, the studied material determines the predominance of one or another principle.

Theoretical basis dissertation research were the works of M. M. Bakhtin, Yu. N. Tynyanov, E. G. Mushchenko, N. T. Rymar, V. Yu. Troitsky, N. V. Barkovskaya and others; in the design of the research concept, an appeal was made to the heritage of the greatest philosophers and critics of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. (V. Solovyov, D. Merezhkovsky, V. Bryusov, Vyach. Ivanov, A. Blok, A. Bely, N. Gumilyov, P. Florensky, A. Losev, S. Bulgakov and others).

The following provisions are put forward for defense:

In the early prose of M. Kuzmin, the concept of a person is formed as a meaning-forming component of the poetic world of the artist. The first novel (Wings) reveals a synthesis of various literary traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries. - from the elements of the "educational novel" and autobiography, reminiscences of the works of F. Dostoevsky ("The Brothers Karamazov") and A. Chekhov ("The Man in the Case") to the allegorism of the symbolist concept. In this novel, the main parameters of the artistic world of M. Kuzmin are formed, the center of which is the continuous spiritual growth of a person, objectified by movement in space.

In the stylization of the French adventure novel of the XVIII century. “The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf” by M. Kuzmin creates a picture of the world in which the hero can only find himself, because he is as infinite and diverse as the world around him. Stylization acts as a form and meaning-forming beginning, which has the character of a game with the reader. “Resurrecting” the style of past eras at the level of form, in terms of content, M. Kuzmin reflects on the problems of the era

27 chi of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries.

3. In the novel "The Exploits of the Great Alexander", which stylizes literature
tradition of "Alexandria", reveals the opposition that cannot be removed for the author
state of the world and man. Harmony of a person both with the world and with himself
combat is tragically unattainable.

4. The fundamental novelty of the concept of man in early prose
M. Kuzmin is a revision of the traditional system of values. What's in
"Wings" looked like a special case of non-moral and asocial search
hero of his place in the world, in the stylizations of an adventure novel and "Alexander
rii” develops into a system of ethical and aesthetic relations, where the transport
states the right of a person, his inner world to independence from the external
environment.

The reliability of the results obtained is ensured by the use of a complex of modern literary methods, as well as by the internal consistency of the research results.

The practical significance of the dissertation is determined by the possibility of using the results of the study in the further study of the work of M. Kuzmin, in the university course on the history of Russian literature of the 20th century, as well as in special courses and seminars on literature of the era of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.

Approbation of work. The dissertation was discussed at the Department of Russian Literature of the 20th Century, Voronezh State University. Its main provisions are reflected in 5 publications, presented in reports at scientific conferences: scientific sessions of the Voronezh State University (Voronezh, 2001, 2002), an international scientific conference dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Faculty of Philology of the Voronezh State University (Voronezh, 2001), XIV Purishev Readings "World Literature in the Context of Culture" (Moscow, 2002), interuniversity scientific conference "National-state and general

Humanity in Russian and Western Literature of the 19th-20th Centuries (On the Problem of the Interaction of “Own” and “Them”)” (Voronezh, 2002).

Work structure. The dissertation consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, notes, a list of references, including 359 titles.

The novel "Wings" in the context of aesthetic searches for literature of the era of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries

The era of the turn as a transitional period forced people to rethink history and raised the question of the future with particular acuteness: what will the new century be like for mankind and what will man himself become in this century? Therefore, in the late XIX - early XX centuries. spiritual quests become especially intense, new philosophical concepts appear that are fundamentally different from the previous ones. This appearance, on the one hand, testified to the emergence of the consciousness of the new time, on the other hand, it formed this consciousness.

Russian literature actively reacted to what was happening in the spiritual life of society. The era of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. characterized by the emergence of many new trends that created a qualitatively new literature. The idea of ​​renewal of the sphere of art is present in one way or another in the work of all artists of the turn of the century, but it received its most vivid embodiment in symbolism. For the first time, this direction was announced in 1892 in a lecture by D. Merezhkovsky "On the causes of the decline and on new trends in modern Russian literature."

According to its theoreticians - D. Merezhkovsky, V. Bryusov - symbolism had to be fundamentally different from the art of all previous eras. It was a new doctrine of man and life, "a radical attempt to build a new world", based on the desire "to embrace in a single artistic vision both long-terminated halves of the world, the earthly world and the divine world". “Our path is in connecting the earth with the sky, life with religion, duty with creativity,” wrote Andrei Bely.

Substantiating the new trend and explaining the regularity of its appearance, the Symbolists inscribed it in the context of Russian (D. Merezhkovsky) and world (V. Bryusov) culture, but at the same time emphasized that the new art is qualitatively different from all previous ones. Being part of the literary process, symbolism was at the same time a new way of knowing, a way of penetrating into the mystery of being, a “key” that “dissolves the doors for humanity ... to eternal freedom.”

Symbolism was based on the teachings of Vladimir Solovyov about the need to transform a person and the existing reality according to the laws of Beauty. V. Solovyov saw the main reason for the imperfection of the modern world in its division into the divine and the earthly. This division is also inherited by man and gives rise to a dual world, which is expressed in the eternal opposition of the Spirit and the flesh. The spiritual principle testifies to the divine origin of man and gives him hope for immortality, but the bodily - "sinful" - prevents this. Therefore, according to V. Solovyov, there is a need for the spiritualization of the flesh in order to overcome the two worlds and recreate the integrity of man and the whole world. The spiritualization of the flesh will give a person the opportunity to gain not only spiritual, but also bodily immortality. That is, Solovyov's philosophy recognizes the imperfection of the world and the need to change this world. The subject of transformation must be a person, but for this it is necessary first to change him. The main idea of ​​Solovyov's philosophy is the idea of ​​restoring the divine-human unity, creating an "absolute personality" capable of accommodating "absolute content", "which in religious language is called eternal life, or the kingdom of God-it" . In the process of creative evolution, a person must reach a spiritual level commensurate with the level of the divine sphere, and be reincarnated as a free co-creator with God. This is the full realization of its conformity and likeness to God. At the same time, a person will freely, on the basis of his own knowledge, reason and faith, come to the realization that he was created precisely in order to realize the last idea of ​​cosmic creation - to finally organize reality in accordance with the Divine plan. Solovyov also calls the “absolute personality” “bodily spirituality”, “true man” or “new man”. Such a personality, preserving human nature, will be ready to cognize and transform the world on new grounds - according to the laws of Beauty, since beauty is “the transformation of matter through the embodiment in it of another, supermaterial principle.” However, the "true person" does not exist in the modern world, because it is divided into "male and female individuality". To create an "absolute personality", it is necessary to combine these individualities, since "only a whole person can be immortal." The means of unification are art and love. Creativity is understood by the philosopher as an active creative activity of people, inextricably linked with the divine sphere and oriented towards the embodiment of Beauty. Creativity has three degrees of realization: technical art (material degree), fine art (formal degree) and mysticism (absolute degree), of which the highest is mysticism - “an earthly likeness of divine creativity”, since it “abolishes the contradiction between the ideal and the sensual, between spirit and thing, ... and the deity manifests itself as the beginning of a perfect unity ... ". That is, according to Solovyov, the business of art is not to decorate reality with “pleasant fictions,” as they said in the old aesthetics, but to embody “in the form of tangible beauty” the highest meaning of life. Therefore, in Solovyov's system, the artist becomes a person who continues the divine work to improve the world - a theurgist. Beauty is the light of the Eternal Truth, therefore the theurge contemplating Beauty reveals to people the truth of being. For Solovyov, theurgy is the art that embodies the ideal in material life, creating this life according to the laws of Beauty. The highest task of art is "the transformation of physical life into spiritual life", and therefore - into immortality, into one that has the ability to spiritualize matter. A lover turns out to be akin to an artist, creating “his female complement”: “The task of love is to justify in practice the meaning of love, which at first was given only in feeling; what is required is such a combination of two given limited beings that would create from them one absolute ideal personality.

"The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" as "approbation of new aesthetic ideas"

"The Adventures of Aimé Leboeuf" as "testing new aesthetic ideas" The ideas expressed in "Wings" marked the basis of Mikhail Kuzmin's worldview and determined all his subsequent work. However, "Wings" was more of a program than a work of art. Reproaches for some sketchiness, artistic imperfection of the novel are justified. But in this work, it was important for the novice author to express his own position, to determine his attitude to what was happening in the cultural life of the country. In the next novel, The Adventures of Aime Leboeuf (1907), M. Kuzmin implements the same ideas in a completely different artistic environment. To do this, he turns to stylization; Recall that one of the specific functions of stylization in the boundary eras is the function of testing new ideas: the stylization technique allows the artist to place modern ideas in a different cultural era and thus “test” them for artistic universality.

At the beginning of the XX century. a whole stylistic school was taking shape in Russian literature (V. Bryusov, S. Auslender, B. Sadovskoy, and others). The appeal to stylization in literature was largely due to the general atmosphere of the era of the turn, as well as the installation of symbolism as part of modernism on the unity of cultural space, which was continuously enriched with new discoveries and opportunities. The Symbolists proceeded from the idea of ​​the continuity of literary development, that before every word there was always some other person's word. For example, according to V. Bryusov, the principles of classicism, romanticism, realism are present in literature from the very beginning: “Romantic motifs can be pointed out even in ancient literatures; realism, as an artistic principle, existed, of course, even before the realistic school and continues to exist to this day; symbolism is rightly noted by the ancient tragedians, and by Dante, and by Goethe, etc. Schools only put forward these principles in the first place and comprehended them. F. Sologub says the same thing: “We never start. ... We come into the world with a ready legacy. We are eternal successors” (32). Any literary work in symbolism was perceived as a fragment of a single culture and was included in the system of general cultural relations: “... every new creation of an art form is only a new comparison, opposition of the elements that existed before it,” Kuzmin wrote. This is the reason for the cultural saturation of works of symbolism, often containing references to several traditions of world literature at once.

The appeal to the styles of past eras reflected the high level of cultural knowledge among the representatives of the "new art". “Our time was very cultured and well-read,” Kuzmin wrote. The cultural erudition of M. Kuzmin himself was unique even for that era, which was noted more than once by contemporaries: “The circle of his interests and passions is characteristic of Russian culture of the 20th century, created or, better, implanted by the figures of the World of Art and the younger generation of symbolists. Kuzmin's business was first-hand. He himself was among those who planted this culture. ... It is impossible to name a single significant phenomenon of European spiritual life, art, literature, music or philosophy, about which he would not have his own, clear, fully competent and independent opinion. Kuzmin himself, defining the range of his interests, wrote: “I love things in art that are either indelibly vital or aristocratically secluded. I do not like moralizing bad taste, stretched and purely lyrical. I'm leaning towards the French and Italians. I love sobriety and frank heaps of pomp. So, on the one hand, I love Italian novelists, French comedies of the 17th-18th centuries, the theater of contemporaries of Shakespeare, Pushkin and Leskov. On the other hand, some of the German romantic prose writers (Hoffmann, J. P. Richter, Platen), Musset, Merimee, Gautier, Stendhal a, d Annunzio, Wilde and Swinburn a.

However, contemporaries believed that this list could be continued: “The basis of his education was the knowledge of antiquity, freed from everything school and academic, perceived, perhaps, through Nietzsche - even though Mikhail Alekseevich did not like him - and, first of all, through the great German philosophy. Erwin Rode's book "Die Phyche" Kuzmin read constantly, more often than Holy Scripture, in his own words.

Almost bypassing the Middle Ages, in which he was attracted only by echoes of the ancient world, such as the apocryphal stories about Alexander the Great, Kuzmin's interests turned to the Italian Renaissance, especially to Quattrocento Florence with its wonderful novelists and great artists Botticelli and the young Michelangelo.

From the Italian Renaissance Kuzmin's attention turned to Elizabethan England with its great dramaturgy; further - to Venice of the 18th century with the commedia del arte, the fairy tales of Gozzi and the household theater of Goldoni; even further - to the 18th century in pre-revolutionary France, to Watteau, Abbot Prevost and Casotte, and, finally, to the German Sturm und Drang y and the era of Goethe ”; "Lots of books. If you look at the roots - the selection is motley. Lives of the Saints and Notes of Casanova, Rilke and Rabelais, Leskov and Wilde. On the table is an unfolded Aristophanes in the original "; “Kuzmin's living inspiration is Pierre Lougs, and the temptation is French novellas of the 18th century. Favorite writers: Henry Regnier and Anatole France. From "Songs of Bilitis" - Alexandrian songs; from the short stories - "The Adventures of Aime Leboeuf" and "Cagliostro"; from Anatole France - "The Journey of Sir John Firfax", "Aunt Sonya's Couch", "Anna Meyer's Decision". From the Russians: Melnikov-Pechersky and Leskov - Prologues and Apocrypha, from where Kuzmin's actions came out - "About Alexei, the man of God", "About Evdokia from Heliopolis" ". M. Kuzmin's erudition is also recognized by modern researchers: “Kuzmin's reading circle has always been huge in scope, and in our time of the gradual disappearance of humanistic knowledge, it seems incredible. His only rivals among contemporary poets are Vyacheslav Ivanov and Bryusov. But the second one is inferior to Kuzmin in refinement and freedom of handling the material, and the first one is somewhat limited by the sphere of "high", while Kuzmin absorbed an incredible amount of "pulp" like third-rate French novels, and in his other profession - music - also did not shun low genres. : songs, operettas".

"The Exploits of the Great Alexander": the ideological overcoming of symbolism

M. Kuzmin's novel in the context of tradition Mikhail Kuzmin addressed the theme of fate and the problem of its awareness throughout his life both in poetry and in prose. Fate is the central theme of his work. The writer was interested not in a simple dependence of a person on fate, but in the problem of a conscious attitude towards it. This problem is considered in a new way in the novel "The Exploits of the Great Alexander". This novel, published in 1909 in the first two issues of the journal Libra, is a stylization of Alexandria, a narrative about the life and exploits of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), which is widespread in Greek and medieval literature. .

In "Alexandria" the historical and literary traditions of the image of the legendary king are distinguished. The first, which includes the works of ancient writers (Flavius ​​Arrian, Plutarch, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Diodorus, Justin), is characterized by the desire for objectivity and reliability of the description of the life of Alexander the Great. The pinnacle of this tradition is the work of the Roman historian Flavius ​​Arrian "Alexander's Campaign", the author of which strives for maximum reliability of presentation and therefore seriously questions all the evidence about the life of Alexander, trying to find the most truthful and debunking various legends surrounding the name of the king. Also, Diodorus does not attach importance to legends, giving in his "Historical Library" a brief description of the life and campaigns of Alexander the Great. On the contrary, in Plutarch’s “Biography”, historical events fade into the background, since the author considers the disclosure of Alexander’s character to be his main task: “We do not write history, but biographies, and virtue or depravity is not always visible in the most glorious deeds, but often some insignificant act, word or joke reveals the character of a person better than battles in which tens of thousands die, the leadership of huge armies and the siege of cities. Therefore, in the work of Plutarch, in addition to historical facts, one can find many legends. However, Plutarch, like Arrian, strives to be reliable and therefore often questions the legends or tries to find a plausible explanation for them. Thus, Plutarch explains the appearance of a snake in the chambers of Olympias by the queen's commitment to the religious cult of Dionysus, and not by a visit to Zeus. However, despite the differences in the works of ancient authors, they all rely on historical facts without distorting them. Legends and traditions that are not confirmed by historical data occupy an insignificant place in them.

The literary tradition of the story of Alexander the Great pays much more attention to fiction. Historical events are subject to changes and distortions depending on the place, time of occurrence and objectives of each particular work. This tradition includes oriental poems about Iskander, fairy tales, "Alexandria" of medieval Europe and Russia.

The ancestor of the literary tradition is considered to be Callisthenes, a contemporary of Alexander and nephew of Aristotle, to whom the Romance of Alexander (or the Acts of Alexander) is attributed. In fact, this work obviously appeared later, in the II-III centuries. AD, therefore, in literary criticism, the author of the "Acts of Alexander" is usually called Pseudo-Callisthenes. The original of this novel has not been preserved, but it laid the foundation for many works centered on the life and wanderings of Alexander the Great.

In medieval Europe, the story of Macedonian turns into a chivalric romance. The campaigns of the king, caused by the conflict between Persia and Macedonia, are approaching feudal wars, feats are performed in the name of the lady of the heart. For example, in the poem by Rudolf von Ems, the knight Alexander serves the beautiful Amazonian queen Talistria, and the military state of the Amazons turns into a "garden of love". In the East, the image of Alexander the Great is also being rethought. The vowel of the name is changing - Iskander, from the Macedonian king Alexander turns into the Persian Shah.

Kuzmin indicates his focus on the literary tradition at the very beginning of the story: “I am aware of the difficulty of writing about this after a number of names, ranging from the ever-memorable Callisthenes, Julius Valery, Vincent from Beauvais, Gualteria de Castiglione, up to the German Lamprecht, Alexander of Paris, Peter de S. Klu, Rudolf of Emsky, the excellent Ulrich von Yeshinbach and the unsurpassed Firdusi”, thus, as it were, inscribing himself into the tradition (38). Although in the novel by M. Kuzmin one can also find much in common with the works of ancient historians, in particular, Plutarch, M. Kuzmin does not name the authors of the historical tradition among his predecessors, quite clearly orienting the reader not to the historical chronicle, but to the adventure novel.

If we compare M. Kuzmin's novel with "Alexandria" by those authors whom he considers his predecessors, then the greatest plot similarity is found with the novel of Pseudo-Callisthenes, in which there are almost all episodes of the commander's life that Kuzmin dwells on: the flight of Nectaneb from Egypt, the story about the birth of Alexander, the taming of Bukefal, a journey to the Land of Gloom, a meeting with Indian sages, an attempt to ascend into the sky for divine knowledge and go down under water, a meeting with the Amazons and Queen Candace (39).

Like Pseudo-Callisthenes, in Kuzmin's novel myths become part of the commander's biography, "truthfully" told by the author. For example, such an episode as the meeting of the king with the Amazons is as real an event as the battle with Darius. “Soon they came to a large river where the warlike Amazon maidens lived. The king, having long heard of their prowess, sent Ptolemy to ask them for a military detachment and learn their customs. After some time, with the returned Ptolemy came a hundred tall, masculine women, with scorched right breasts, short hair, in men's shoes and armed with lances, arrows and slings. ... The king asked a lot more, marveling a lot at their answers, and, having sent gifts to the country, he moved on.

“I myself was born on the Volga ...”

Mikhail Kuzmin was born in Yaroslavl (6) October 18, 1872 in a large family of an old noble family.

His father is a retired naval officer, his mother is the great-granddaughter of the famous French actor, invited to Russia under Catherine. In the poem "My Ancestors" Kuzmin raises them all from oblivion, and with them - a whole slice of Russian life. Soon the Kuzmin family moved to Saratov, where the poet spent his childhood and adolescence. The State Archive of the Saratov Region stores “a formal list of the service of a member of the Saratov Court of Justice A.A. Kuzmin" - the father of Mikhail, who in February 1874, by order of the Minister of Justice, was appointed to serve in Saratov.
In Saratov, the actual State Councilor A.A. Kuzmin served until the early 80s. The Kuzmin family lived in house number 21 on Armenian (now Volzhskaya) street. Unfortunately, the house has not survived.

Mikhail Kuzmin attended the same gymnasium as Chernyshevsky.

Almost no impressions of Saratov have been preserved in Kuzmin's poetry and prose, except for a cursory landscape in the unfinished novel Melt Track: Uveka. It seemed like the sun was always there.”

And I know how long the nights are
How bright and short a winter day is,
I myself was born on the Volga,
Where laziness made friends with prowess,

Where everything is free, everything is sedate,
Where everything shines, everything blooms,
Where is the Volga slowly and foamy
The path leads to distant seas.

I know the ringing of Great Lent,
In a distant forest, a small skete, -
And in life sweet and inert
Some secret there is a magnet.

After the gymnasium, Kuzmin entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory in the composition class (he was a student of Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov). The first poems appear exclusively as texts for their own music - operas, romances, suites, vocal cycles. He did not graduate from the conservatory, but continued to play music all his life. In 1906, at the request of Meyerhold, he wrote the music for Blok's Puppet Show and would be appreciated by the poet.

“I don’t have music, but music,” said Kuzmin, “but it has its own poison, acting instantly, beneficially, but not for long ...”
His songs immediately became popular in St. Petersburg bohemian circles. In literary secular salons they were crazy about them.

From the memoirs of I. Odoevtseva "On the banks of the Neva":

Love spreads nets
From strong snares.
Lovers are like children
Looking for shackles...

I listen and feel how, little by little, the poison of his “music” penetrates into my ears, into my consciousness, into my blood. Seductive, languid and terrible poison, coming not only from this "music", but also from his crafty wide-open eyes, from his languid smile and coyly flying fingers. The poison is disbelief and denial. The poison of grace, lightness and frivolity. Sweet seductive, intoxicating poison.

Yesterday you don't know love
Today is on fire
Yesterday you despise me
Today you swear to me.

Love - who will love
When the time comes
And what will be will be
What fate has in store for us.

Kuzmin narrows his eyes. His face takes on a slightly predatory expression. Does he realize the power over the souls of his listeners? .. Next to me on the sofa, a pretty student girl bites her lips in excitement and I see how dizzy this intoxicating poison is to her.

"The spirit of small things, charming and airy..."

Kuzmin's early poems are characterized by cheerfulness, Hellenic attachment to life, loving perception of every little thing. In 1890, he writes in a letter: “God, how happy I am. Why? Yes, because I live, because the sun is shining, a sparrow is chirping, because the wind has torn off the hat of a passing lady ... look how she runs after her - oh, funny! because... 1000 reasons. I would be glad to hug and press everyone to my chest. And in another letter: “So joyful that there is nature and art, you feel the forces, and poetry penetrates everywhere, even into trifles, even into everyday life!” The last quote accurately predicts the stanza of Kuzmin's famous poem, which has become a literal symbol of his entire work:

The spirit of trifles, lovely and airy,
Love of nights, sometimes stinging, sometimes stuffy,
Cheerful lightness of thoughtless living!

The clear, serene view of the world that shines through in this poem will then form the basis of Kuzmin's 1912 program article "On Beautiful Clarity", where he will express his creative credo.

K. Somov. Portrait of M. Kuzmin

Against the backdrop of thoughtful symbolism, preaching the poetry of shades and halftones, Kuzmin was the first to speak about the simple and accessible things of external life. His poems are filled with concrete concepts and realities of life:

Where can I find a syllable to describe the walk,
Chablis on ice, toasted bread
And ripe sweet agate cherries?

“I cannot help but feel the souls of inanimate things,” he writes in his diary. Kuzmin, following Pushkin, loved earthly life, strove for harmony. The “spirit of small things” appears in his poetry as a synonym for lightness, homeliness, careless grace and some kind of unexpected tenderness. We will not find in him an exaggerated expression of feelings and passions, as in Tsvetaeva. As evidence of Kuzmin's love, we unexpectedly meet:

I console myself with miserable joy,
I bought the same hat as yours.

This is instead of the epithets familiar to us “I turn pale, tremble, languish, suffer.” How simple and how expressive! And the fact is that it is not invented, truthfully.
This was the period of Kuzmin's falling in love with the artist Sudeikin, about whom he writes in his diary: “I went to buy a hat and gloves. I bought the gogol style and will wear it with the visor turned down, like Sergey Yuryevich.

artist S. Sudeikin

Then Sudeikin will be recaptured from Kuzmin by Olga Glebova, who became his wife, the heroine of Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero.

Olga Sudeikina

Olga Sudeikina twice "crosses the road" to Kuzmin - the second time because of her, Vsevolod Knyazev, a young poet, who, because of the same Olga, will commit suicide, will leave him.

Vsevolod Knyazev

Mikhail Kuzmin experienced many betrayals in his life, but the most irreparable betrayal for him was with a woman. In the life of Kuzmin, there was no other sex at all.

In literary circles, Kuzmin was assigned the role of a fatal seducer, from whom parents must hide their sons.

Blok wrote: "Kuzmin is now one of the most famous poets, but I would not wish such fame to anyone."

Russian homosexuals almost for the first time received works that described not only the experiences, but also the life of their own kind, expressing the spirit of purely male love. This was the reason that a variety of people were drawn to Kuzmin in his apartment on Spasskaya, they were looking for acquaintances with him and for some time occupied a certain place in his life.

House on Spasskaya 11 (now Ryleeva 10), where M. Kuzmin lived

If I list only the most famous guests of Kuzmin, then many will be very shocked: Gordeev, Somov, Diaghilev, Benois, Bakst, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Remizov, Auslander. Who does not believe - I refer to the monograph by Bogomolov "Articles and Materials" (M., New Literary Review, 1995) and John Malmstad "M. Kuzmin. Art, life, era”, to the diaries of the poet himself.
Kuzmin's love is presented not only in its sublime, but also in its "low", carnal aspects. Such is the cycle of poems "Curtained Pictures" (originally called "Forbidden Garden"), more than once called "pornographic" in the press.

Cover of the book "Curtain Pictures"

After the revolution of 1905, censorship was abolished, and the first fruits of freedom of the press were Pushkin's Gavriliad, Pushkin's Dangerous Neighbor, and free poems by Roman poets. This series also includes Curtained Pictures, which gave Kuzmin the opportunity to show the entire range of human erotic experiences. Here is one of the most "decent" poems of this cycle:

clarinetist

I'll take the mail
I will write a letter with the answer:
"My clarinetist, clarinetist,
Come to me with the clarinet.

Chernobrov you and blush,
With a veil of a languid eye,
And when not very drunk
Talkative like a magpie

I won't let anyone in
My cheerful, cute rabbit,
I'll pull down the curtain
I'll move the table to the stove.

Delightful moment!
I will not say a rude word ... "
Mil me very instrument
With a wonderful twist!

I follow the clarinet
To merge into cavatina
And I run my hand
By the open ocarina.

The first prose work of Kuzmin "Wings" received scandalous fame because of the topic of same-sex love raised there.

The story was understood as a glorification of vice, as a "malevolent novel" (Z. Gippius), most readers perceived it only as a physiological essay, not noticing there any philosophical content or orientation to Plato's "Dialogues" (primarily to "Feast" and "Phaedrus").

The most successful in Kuzmin's prose is his novel The Extraordinary Life of Joseph Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro (1919), which showed his interest in the occult and magic. Kuzmin himself was compared by many contemporaries with Cagliostro, the Italian adventurer, so wonderfully portrayed by him in this story.

In fact, of course, Kuzmin did not in any way resemble his literary hero, "a fat and fussy Italian." Perhaps they meant something satanic, magical, infernal, which was seen by many in the appearance of the poet.
After the revolution, he somehow suddenly aged and, once handsome, became terrible with his eyes that have become even larger, gray hair in sparse hair, wrinkles and teeth that have fallen out. It was a portrait of Dorian Gray. Quite close to this description is the portrait of Kuzmin by Yu. Annenkov in 1919.

The satanic beginning was seen in Kuzmin by A. Akhmatova, who captured his ominous portrait in the “Poem without a Hero”:

Do not fight off the motley junk,
This is the old freak Cagliostro -
The most graceful Satan himself,
Who does not cry with me over the dead,
Who does not know what conscience means
And why does it exist.

Kuzmin through the eyes of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva

Once Kuzmin "brought to the people" Akhmatova, one of the first to catch the originality and charm of her early poems, wrote the preface to her first collection. Akhmatova gave him her "Plantain" with the inscription: "To Mikhail Alekseevich, my wonderful teacher."

However, towards the end of Kuzmin's life, in the 30s, Akhmatova stopped meeting with him, resolutely denied him. Lydia Chukovskaya in "Notes on A. Akhmatova" wrote down her words about Kuzmin:

“Some people do only bad things all their lives, but everyone says good things about them. In the memory of people, they are preserved as good. For example, Kuzmin did nothing good to anyone. Everyone remembers him fondly." Akhmatova said with condemnation: "Kuzmin was a very bad man, unfriendly, vindictive."
But Tsvetaeva had a completely opposite opinion about Kuzmin. She dedicated the essay “An Unearthly Evening” to him, where she conveyed her impressions of the first meeting with Kuzmin at his place.

Her essays - memories of Balmont, Bely, Voloshin, as well as Kuzmin - are not literary portraits in the usual sense - each time they are portraits of the poet's soul and herself. You never cease to be amazed at the grateful memory of Tsvetaeva, who has kept the warmth of human relations for decades. Her "myths" about her contemporaries were born from this warmth, it gave them the visibility and tangibility of reality. I have no doubt that all these heroes of her myths were the same as Tsvetaeva recreated them. She knew how to feel and see the most important thing in a person, something that few can see.
Akhmatova, in Kuzmin's assessment, has a moment of settling personal and literary scores. He himself was a very vindictive person.

So, she could not forgive Kuzmin for the fact that he, in the home circle, chuckling, called Anna Andreevna “a poor relative” because she, after a divorce from Punin, continued to live with him in the same house next door to his former and new wife ( which was convenient for her for everyday reasons, to which she preferred moral ones). This evil witticism can explain something in Akhmatov's later hostility to Kuzmin, which poured out on the pages of her Poem without a Hero.

However, here is such a curious nuance: the poem was written in a special stanza, which has already received the name "Akhmatov's stanza". Six-line stanzas consist, as it were, of two three-verse lines. But this peculiar stanza, like the rhythm itself, was taken from Kuzmin's Trout Breaks the Ice. The researchers found an explanation for this: “Akhmatova’s poem is directed against Kuzmin, he is her main “anti-hero” (Cagliostro, Lord of Darkness), therefore his rhythm arises.” But the fact remains: the “Akhmatov stanza” is actually a Kuzmin stanza.

The late poetry of Kuzmin - the poetry of the 20s - is becoming more and more complex, refracting through the prism of art, philosophical systems. His collections Parabola and Trout Breaks the Ice created an image of him as one of the most enigmatic and esoteric poets of the 20th century. Outwardly, individual poems look simple and clear, but suddenly unexpected connections form strange patterns that turn out to be almost impossible to decipher without resorting to complex methods of analysis.

In the poem "The Trout Breaks the Ice" we are talking, in particular, about what happens to a person who has lost the three-dimensional perception of the world that is characteristic of a lover. The main thing in the love-brotherly relations sung by Kuzmin is the spiritual “exchange” and “reinforcement” with warmth that arise in the communication of close people. The result of the loss of this perception is the de-winging unambiguity of the world, which has lost its fullness and mystery:

Our angel of transformation has flown away.
A little more - I'm completely blind,
And the rose will become a rose, the sky will become the sky,
And nothing more! Then I, dust,
And I return to dust! I've run out
Blood, bile, brains and lymph. God!
And there is no reinforcement and no exchange?

(This is what happens in the poem with the literalness of the naturalistic grotesque: it both “sinks”, and dries up, and turns into some kind of fantastic miserable creature).
The sound of a trout's tail on the ice responds with 12 strokes of the clock on New Year's Eve. This night brings with it the final conclusion of the duel between trout and ice:

That's my last trout
breaks the ice...

Kuzmin did not divide life into high and low. For him, there were no low subjects unworthy of standing in a line of poetry. It turns out that Chablis in ice, a toasted bun, the smell of dust and turpentine, a Dutch hat, a cardboard house - a gift from a friend and other "cute little things" do not in the least interfere with the presence of the divine principle in poetry. It seems that Kuzmin loved earth and sky more than rhyming and non-rhyming lines about earth and sky, contrary to Blok's assertion that the writer will always prefer the latter. Kuzmin loved life.

It must be said that the appearance of such a poet was, as it were, prepared by the very soil of the Silver Age. After the refinements of symbolism, the audacity of futurism, I wanted simplicity, lightness, an ordinary human voice. This is how acmeism declared itself, a prominent representative of which was Mikhail Kuzmin. The high style was replaced by "beautiful clarity":

The bright room is my cave,
Thoughts are tame birds: cranes and storks;
My songs are cheerful akathists;
Love is my constant faith.

Come to me, who is confused, who is cheerful,
Who found, who lost the engagement ring,
So that your burden, bright and sad,
I hung clothes on a carnation.

Love is his main theme, the basis of creativity.

***
we all loved four, but all had different
"because":
one loved, because so father and mother
she was told
the other loved because her lover was rich,
the third loved because he was famous
painter,
and I loved because I loved.

We were four sisters, we were four sisters,
we all four wished, but we all had different
wishes:
one wanted to raise children and cook porridge,
the other wished to wear new dresses every day,
the third wanted everyone to talk about her,
I wanted to love and be loved.

We were four sisters, we were four sisters,
we all fell out of love four, but all had different
the reasons:
one fell out of love because her husband died,
the other fell out of love because her friend went bankrupt,
the third fell out of love because the artist abandoned her,
and I fell out of love because I fell out of love.

We were four sisters, we were four sisters,
maybe there were not four of us, but five?

* * *
How strange
that your feet are walking
along some streets
wearing funny shoes
And they would need to kiss endlessly.
What are your hands
write,
fasten gloves,
holding a fork and a ridiculous knife,
like they were made for it!
What are your eyes
beloved eyes
read the Satyricon
and in them to look,
like a spring puddle!
But your heart
does as it should:
it beats and loves.
There are no shoes
no gloves
no "Satyricon" ...
Is not it?
It beats and loves...
nothing else.
What a pity that he can not be kissed on the forehead,
like a well-behaved child!

***
I see your open mouth
I see bashful cheeks
And the look of the eyes is still sleepy,
And the neck is a fine twist.

The stream murmurs to me a new dream,
I greedily drink jets of life -
And again I love for the first time
Forever I'm in love again!

This love is direct, natural, love without pathos. Love opens our eyes to the beauty of God's world, it makes us simple as children:

The shepherd found his shepherdess
and the simpleton his simpleton.
The whole world is based on love.
She flies: catch, catch!

Life is given once, the body is perishable, the joys of love are transient, we must appreciate every happy moment given to us by nature. Here is Kuzmin's simple philosophy. Or maybe this is the highest wisdom of life?

***
The smell of the beds is spicy and sweet,
Harlequin is greedy for affection,
Columbine is not strict.
Let the minute colors of rainbows
Sweet, fragile world of riddles,
I'm on fire with your arc!

This is probably the only non-tragic poet in Russia.

Tears will not notice on my face
crybaby reader,
Fate does not put a point at the end,
But only a blot.

How typical for Kuzmin - instead of moaning and tears - a light thin ironic smile of understanding.

M. Kuzmin. Lithograph by O. Vereisky

Instead of spirituality with its direct appeal to God, Kuzmin offered spiritual life, the life of the heart, to poetic attention.

Heart, heart, have to
to keep you account with the sky.

This spiritual life is not at all simple. He reveals to us its nuances, subtleties:

Don't know how to express tenderness!
What to do: regret, wish?

Or:

You are so close to me, so dear,
that you seem unloved.
Probably just as cold
in paradise to each other seraphim.

He has a striking poem where he speaks of the tireless creative work of the heart, acting as if apart from the lazy and sleepy everyday existence:

Some kind of laziness of the week hides,
Worries slow down an easy moment, -
But the heart prays, the heart builds:
It is a carpenter, not an undertaker.

A cheerful carpenter will put together a tower.
Light tes is not cold granite.
Let it seem to us that we do not believe:
It believes in us and protects us.

It's all in a hurry, beats under a bushel,
And we are like dead: without thoughts, without dreams,
But suddenly we wake up before our own miracle:
After all, we all slept, and the tower is ready.

One of the main themes of creativity is the path of the soul through mistakes and suffering to spiritual enlightenment:

What roosters crow and know
from the dark darkness?
What do the dark verses signify,
what do we know?
Dawn moved over the horizon.
A blind soul is waiting for a guide.

Refined simplicity

Kuzmin is a completely open and very sincere poet. There is “something eerily intimate” in his poems, wrote I. Annensky.
"Conscious negligence and baggy speech" - defined the peculiarity of Kuzmin's style Mandelstam. This evokes a sense of lyrical excitement. His dolnik is like an artless children's conversation:

Love grows on its own
Like a child, like a sweet flower,
And often forgets
About a small, muddy source.

I did not follow her changes -
And suddenly... oh my god
Completely different walls
When I came home!

What exquisite simplicity! Because it is by no means childish feelings and observations that are expressed here, they hurt especially strongly. This is the whole Kuzmin, with his softness, warmth and tenderness.
If symbolist poetry was characterized by the requirement of musicality (“music is first of all” - Verlaine), then Kuzmin introduced colloquial intonation into the verses (mainly due to variations of complex dolniks). But this colloquialism is not prosaic, while preserving the naturalness of living speech, it does not lose its verse melody:

Maybe there is a rainbow in the sky
Because you saw me in a dream?
Maybe in a simple daily bread
I know that you kissed me.

When the soul becomes full-flowing,
She trembles all over, touch her a little.
And life seems bright and free to me,
When I feel your palm in my palm.

Gradually, however, Kuzmin's poems begin to be perceived as a fragment of the past, a clear archaism in the literature of the 1920s. He also translates (Kuzmin translated Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Merimee, Apuleius, Boccaccio, France), collaborates with theaters, talks with young people who from time to time enter his rooms in a communal apartment on Ryleeva Street,

but this already bears very little resemblance to the brilliant life of one of the most attractive people in St. Petersburg for many poets.

G. Adamovich writes: “If it can be said that any of the old writers did not suit the court of the new regime, then about Kuzmin - first of all. He was a man of the most sophisticated and refined culture, closed in on himself, afraid of big words: in the current Russian life, he had to remain alone and alien to everything.

.

Back in 1920, Blok understood this when, in a welcoming speech at the anniversary of Kaverin, he said: “Mikhail Alekseevich, I am afraid that in our era life will not hurt you.”
Kuzmin spent the last five years of his life on the most difficult translation of Don Juan, and did not receive a penny for it. By this time he was already seriously ill. There was nothing to pay for the apartment, treatment. Kuzmin sells books, icons, paintings of friends, and his own manuscripts. From his last poems:

* * *
December freezes in the pink sky,
unheated blackening house,
and we, like Menshikov in Beryozov,
read the Bible and wait.

And what are we waiting for? Do you yourself know?
What saving hand?
Already swollen fingers cracked
and the shoes fell apart.

They no longer talk about Wrangel,
stupid days go by.
On a gold-forged archangel
only the fires are sweetly dazzling.

Send a little patience
and a light spirit, and sound sleep,
and sweet books holy reading,
and unchanging sky.

But if the angel bows mournfully,
crying "This is forever"
let it fall like a lawless one,
the star that guided me.

paints lips pink
the minute house is not cold.
And we, like Menshikov in Beryozov,
read the Bible and wait.

I am not bitter need and captivity,

And destruction and hunger
But the cold penetrates the soul,
Ashes curl in a sweet stream.

What does "bread", "water", "firewood" mean -
We understand, and as if we know
But every hour we forget
Other, better words.

We lie like pitiful litter,
On a trampled, bare field
And we will lie like this until
The Lord will not breathe a soul into us.

Death saved Kuzmin from the inevitable repressions. No matter how paradoxical and monstrous it sounds, Kuzmin was really “lucky” - he managed to die a natural death.
The poet died on March 1, 1936 in the Mariinsky hospital of Leningrad from pneumonia .. He was buried at the Volkovskoye cemetery.

“On March 5, I stood at the coffin of M.A., looked into his strict, waxy face, which was once illuminated by slightly sly, and sometimes slightly sleepy eyes, and thought about what a peculiar, unique literary phenomenon this exceptional person embodied, little understood and underestimated. A weak and sinful man left, but a beautiful, gentle poet remained, a writer of the finest culture, a true artist, whose goodwill, ironic wisdom and amazing spiritual grace (despite a fair amount of cynicism and as if in spite of it!), Charming modesty and simplicity are unforgettable »

.

With these words, as if defining the inner essence of the poet, one could finish. But I would like to end the story with the lines of Kuzmin himself:

All schemes are stingy and skinny,
Let's break free from the shackles
Will we ossify like relics,
Surprisingly centuries?

And they will open, like news of a miracle,
The imperishable life of our cage,
Saying: “How strange people lived:
Could love, dream and sing!”

CHAPTER 1 AESTHETICS OF M. KUZMIN AND PRINCIPLES

HIS POETICAL USE.

§ 1. THE PLACE OF M. KUZMIN IN RUSSIAN POETRY

EARLY XX CENTURY.

§2. AESTHETIC PRINCIPLES M. KUZMIN.

§ 3. PECULIARITIES OF WORD USE IN RUSSIAN POETRY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE XX CENTURY AND THE STYLE OF M.

CHAPTER 2

SEMANTICS.

§ 1. FUNCTIONING OF THE TERM

PARADIGMA IN LINGUISTICS.

§ 2. STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC

FEATURES OF THE IMAGED PARADIGMA.

CHAPTER 3 IMAGERY PARADIGMS IN M. KUZMIN'S LYRICS.

§ 1. IMAGED PARADIGMS WITH LEFT

COMPONENT "WATER".

§ 2. IMAGED PARADIGMS WITH A LEFT TERM

§ 3. IMAGED PARADIGMS WITH A LEFT TERM

HEAVENLY LIGHT".

§ 4. IMAGED PARADIGMS WITH A LEFT TERM

§ 5. IMAGED PARADIGMS WITH THE LEFT COMPONENT "SOUL".

Dissertation Introduction 1999, abstract on philology, Shustina, Irina Viktorovna

The work of M. Kuzmin is estimated very contradictory both by his contemporaries and by critics and researchers of a later time. In the literature, one can find a number of statements containing an extremely harsh assessment of his works. Yes, A.A. Izmailov wrote in 1910: "In general, the poems of M. Kuzmin, like most of what he writes, are stylized primitives, a fake for the naive tone of the 18th century, some kind of literary restoration" (48, 90). O. Mandelstam also spoke very unflatteringly about the poetry of M. Kuzmin: “In his poems, he quite successfully cultivated conscious carelessness and baggy speech, speckled with Gallicisms and Polonisms. gives the reader the illusion of a completely artificial and premature decrepitude of Russian poetic speech. Kuzmin's poetry is the premature senile smile of Russian lyrics "(77, 25). M. Hoffman in Petersburg Memoirs noted: “Another leader, but spoiled, was at that time M.A. Kuzmin. There was something of a mask in him, but it was impossible to make out where the mask ended and where the real face began.

On the other hand, along with sharply critical assessments, there are also high assessments of M. Kuzmin's work. V. Bryusov in the book "Far and near Notes on Russian poets from Tyutchev to the present day" wrote: "Elegance is the pathos of M. Kuzmin's poetry. M. Kuzmin's poems are poetry for poets. Only knowing the technique of verse, one can correctly evaluate all of it charm" (16, 171). A. Blok repeatedly spoke enthusiastically about his work: "Kuzmin is a truly Russian poet who has rented absolutely nothing from the West, except for a satin camisole and a booklet by some fashionable Frenchman" Pierre Louis "(75, 25).

Blok's remark in "Jubilee Greetings to M. Kuzmin" (1920) is also characteristic: "In your person, we do not want to protect civilization, which in essence has not yet been, and when there will be, but something from Russian culture, which was, is and will be."

Creativity M. Kuzmin - the most important stage in the development of Russian poetry. It reflects the features of artistic speech at the beginning of the 20th century and is therefore of particular interest for research.

Recently, a number of works devoted to the study of M. Kuzmin's work have appeared. For the most part, these are works of a literary nature: A. Purin's article "Double Shadow. Notes on the Poetry of M. Kuzmin", A. Kushner's article "Music in Ice", J. Platek's article "The Joy of Simplicity. Notes on M. Kuzmin", a number of articles A.V. Ledeneva. V. Orlov gives an assessment of M. Kuzmin's work in his work "Crossroads. From the history of Russian poetry at the beginning of the 20th century." A special place among these studies is occupied by the monograph NA. Bogomolov and J Malmstad "Mikhail Kuzmin: art, life, era", in which the authors dwell in detail on the biography of the poet, the evolution of his work, on the originality of his aesthetics.

Recently, proper linguistic studies have begun to appear, dedicated to the individual style of M. Kuzmin. Of particular note is the dissertation research of AV. Geek "Word usage by M. Kuzmin and V. Khlebnikov (functional and typological analysis of some figurative microsystems)", which is a comparative analysis of the idiostyles of the two authors, which makes it possible to identify the specifics of the poetic language of M. Kuzmin. A.V. Geek examines in detail the phonetic, lexical, word-formation features of word usage in the poetry of M. Kuzmin. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of figurative microsystems "Book" and "Memory". However, many aspects of M. Kuzmin's idiosgal remain unexplored. In particular, the figurative paradigms characteristic of the poet's lyrics have not been studied.

The concept of a paradigm in linguistics is considered at different levels of the language (from phonetics to syntax). Relatively recently, the system of paradigms was supplemented with a special type of paradigm - the figurative paradigm. A detailed description of this phenomenon is first found in the monograph by N.V. Pavlovich "Language of images. Paradigms of images in the Russian poetic language" 1995. The study of figurative paradigms in artistic speech seems to be very important, since it allows you to better understand the poetic language in its dynamics, get the most complete picture of the originality of the author's idiosgal, trace the evolution of his work, determine the author's place among other poets of a particular period or all literature. generally.

The object of our study is the structural and semantic features of figurative paradigms in the poetry of M. Kuzmin. We will consider figurative paradigms with the left member "sky", "celestial body", "water", "love", "heart", "soul". The choice of these paradigms is justified by the fact that they are widely represented in the works of M. Kuzmin, as well as in the poetry of many Russian authors, which makes it possible to identify the traditional and individual authorial in the poetic style of M. Kuzmin. The analysis of these paradigms is significant for a consistent analysis of the language of Russian poets at the beginning of the 20th century.

The purpose of the study is a structural-semantic analysis of figurative paradigms in the lyrics of M. Kuzmin.

This goal led to the following tasks:

1) definition of the aesthetic principles of M. Kuzmin and his place in the system of literary movements of the early 20th century;

2) identifying the features of word usage in the poetry of M. Kuzmin;

3) substantiation of the concept of "figurative paradigm" and identification of its structural and semantic features;

4) the allocation of figurative paradigms with the left member "sky", "light", "water", "heart", "love", "soul" in the poetry of M. Kuzmin;

5) analysis of these paradigms.

The tasks set determined the methods of work. We used a descriptive method, comparison, linguistic commentary.

The material of the study is the poetic texts of M. Kuzmin, included in the collections "Networks", "Autumn Lakes", "Counsellor", "Unearthly Evenings", "Parabolas", "Trout breaks the ice". For commenting on the texts, the Dictionary of Symbols of H.E. Kerlot, as well as explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language. In order to identify the traditional and individual-author's in the figurative system of M. Kuzmin, observations made in the works of PA were taken into account. Kozhevnikova, N.V. Pavlovich, A.D. Grigorieva and N.N. Ivanova, as well as an independent analysis of the work of a number of authors (A. Akhmatova, N.A. Nekrasova).

The relevance of the study is determined by the importance of the analysis of figurative paradigms in the work of M. Kuzmin for studying the evolution of figurative means in Russian poetry, as well as the need to develop a methodology for analyzing poetic language using the understood "figurative paradigm". ~

Insufficient knowledge of the figurative system of M. Kuzmin and the features of his idiostyle as a whole determines the scientific novelty of the study.

The theoretical significance of the work lies in the systematic description of the structural and semantic features of figurative paradigms in the poetry of M. Kuzmin, which contributes to a deeper study of the work of this poet in the linguistic aspect.

The practical value of the dissertation lies in the possibility of wide use of the materials of the work in lecturing and conducting practical classes, on linguistic analysis of the text, stylistics, lexicology of the Russian literary language, as well as in lexicographic practice.

Work structure.

The work consists of an introduction, three chapters, a conclusion, a list of references. The first chapter is devoted to defining the aesthetic principles of M. Kuzmin, the place of M. Kuzmin in the system of literary trends in Russian literature of the early 20th century, and the features of his word usage. The second chapter gives a range of interpretations of the term "paradigm" in relation to different levels of the language, substantiates the concept of "figurative paradigm". The third chapter contains a detailed analysis of paradigms with the left component "sky", "celestial body", "heart", "water", "love", "soul". In conclusion, the results of the study are summarized.

Conclusion of scientific work thesis on "Image paradigms in the poetry of M. Kuzmin"

CONCLUSION

M. Kuzmin occupies a special place in Russian literature of the early 20th century. This is primarily due to the fact that his work cannot be unambiguously attributed to any of the literary movements of that time. M. Kuzmin creatively uses the traditions of word usage in Russian poetry of the early 20th century and creates his own aesthetics. Its main principle was "beautiful clarity", which presupposed the logical design, the logical composition, the logical construction of phrases. In addition, Kuzmin's aesthetic principles required a careful attitude to the traditions of Russian poetic speech. However, at the same time, he advocated an active search for new forms, advocated word creation, but reasonable, not contrary to the laws of the language, not violating its harmony.

Of course, the philosophy of M. Kuzmin's poetic creativity was reflected in the figurative structure of his works, first of all, in poetic word usage. Kuzmin's poetic language is distinguished by the richness of its lexical composition, it is characterized by the interaction of different layers of vocabulary: everyday colloquial, book words, vernacular, mythologisms, etc.

The poet steadily follows those stable norms of word usage that developed in Russian poetry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. M. Kuzmin expands the range of words with abstract semantics used both in the literal and figurative sense, introduces them into combinations of different types that have a figurative meaning: nominal and verbal metaphors, comparison metaphors, etc. Kuzmin widely uses repetition, and in In his work, we find a significant number of variants of this technique: phonetic repetition, repetition of the same word, words with the same root, words with similar semantics, syntactic parallelism, anaphora, epiphora, repetition of a part of a stanza, repetition of an entire stanza.

Tropical constructions are distinguished by a great variety in the poet's lyrics. M. Kuzmin uses comparisons-applications, predicative metaphors, metaphorical paraphrases, genitive metaphors-comparisons, attributive metaphors-comparisons, riddle metaphors. The poet refers to the traditional ways of combining tropes of the same type - a verbal and nominal metaphor, two nominal or two verbal metaphors, a metaphorical epithet and a metaphor, a combination of tropes of different types - a comparative trope with a metonymy of a sign, a metaphorical paraphrase with an epithet from a direct name. Finally, he often uses comparative tropes in conjunction with oxymoron and paronymy.

M. Kuzmin regularly refers to word creation in his texts, however, there are mostly potential words created according to the laws of the word-formation system. They are usually tropic in nature (the sky bloomed in the evening, the moon squares the books and the floor, the dawn shines ruby ​​and amber) and are used as a means of constructing images.

Of particular interest is the figurative system of M. Kuzmin's poetry. For a more thorough and in-depth analysis of Kuzmin's poetic system, it is advisable to use the concept of a figurative paradigm that systematizes artistic knowledge of reality.

The figurative paradigm is an invariant of the image in conjunction with the images in which it is realized. Image paradigms have such qualities as productivity, reversibility, ambivalence, stability. The analysis of figurative paradigms contributes to an adequate interpretation of images, allows you to determine the degree of their novelty and capacity, to establish systemic relationships between images.

The most productive in the lyrics of M. Kuzmin are figurative paradigms with the left member "water", "celestial body", "sky", "heart", "soul", "love". As the right member of the paradigm, such names of realities as "living being", "substance", "tissue", "vessel", "water", "fire", "plant" often act.

The most productive paradigms can be considered such as "water -> living being", "celestial body -" living being", "love -" living being", "soul -" living being", "heart -" living being", "love - "bonds". "love -> plant", "sky -" substance", "celestial body -> substance", "celestial body -> liquid", since the invariants are represented by a large number of images, and the paradigms themselves are concretized by parallel small paradigms: "water -" man", "water -" animal", "reservoir -" living being", "love -" man", "love -" organ", "love -> animal", "love -" network", "love -> chain", "love -" thread", "love -" captivity", "love -" stigma", "love -" tourniquet", etc. ", "bird", "insect", "organ".

Some of the paradigms in Kuzmin's poetry are of an unproductive nature: they are represented by a small number of images and do not have small paradigms \ ("water -> substance", "water -" vessel", "celestial body -" weapon", "celestial body -> vessel" , "sky -> fire", "sky -> weapon", etc.).

A significant part of the figurative paradigms of M. Kuzmin is of a traditional nature and is widely represented in Russian poetry: "celestial body - "substance", "love - "drink", "sky -" structure ", etc. However, in his lyrics there are also individual author's invariants: "star - "mole", "dawn -\u003e heel", "heart -\u003e garden", "love -" structure ", etc.

Turning to traditional invariants, the poet updates them, creating fresh, capacious, often complex images due to:

1) introduction of marginal names of realities (sun - stylite, cloud - ambassador),

2) the use of exoticisms (water - a dervish),

3) the use of colloquial vocabulary (dawn - heel, sun - pan, heart - garden),

4) introduction of obsolete words (face, golden, pasture),

5) the use of vernacular (vomited, belly),

6) combinations of colloquial vocabulary with mythonyms (nymph heels),

7) the creation of neoplasms of a tropic character (the sky has blossomed, love is radiant, clouds of snow are floating, the dawn is saffron-midday, the moon is square, etc.),

8) the use of non-traditional epithets (pygmy dawn),

9) introduction of lexical units of the general thematic field (guide of the blind to the blind, love is blind),

10) the use of syntactic constructions: appeals (.Love! boat your pier., Sky, sea, gush, cover.,. flow, o heart, flow.), syntactic parallelism (Look up at the vault of the sky: all the stars! Bend down over a bowl of waters: all the lights!, How sweet g (to bear love, How sweet to weave a web of love.).

Complicated images are one of the most common features of M. Kuzmin's figurative system. | The capacity of the image is determined by the simultaneous realization of several invariants; (As if raising white horses, Trumpeters galloped., Love, oh friend of the body, you took off like a lark.). The capacity of the image is achieved through all sorts of combinations of tropes, mixing, interaction of different lexical layers.

The most frequent means of creating images in the lyrics of M. Kuzmin are pictorial epithets, nominal and verbal metaphors, metaphorical paraphrase. Less often the author turns to comparisons and metamorphoses.

All this leads to the fact that traditional invariants receive an individual author's embodiment and characterize the poetic language of M. Kuzmin as an inimitable, unique system.

An analysis of figurative paradigms in the lyrics of M. Kuzmin allows us to judge his "picture of the world" as a complex and contradictory system: the world of nature and the world of human feelings are extremely ambiguously perceived by the poet,

199 are presented either as benevolent, saving forces, or as hostile, formidable phenomena.

An analysis of Kuzmin's figurative paradigms reveals a distinctive feature: the poet's style - the concretization of poetic generalization, which manifests itself in specific texts in the contextual concretization of images and the expansion of verbal associative series. This feature indicates that the author consistently embodies in his works the principle of "beautiful clarity" proclaimed by him.

It should be noted that the work of M. Kuzmin is intertextual in nature, since in his poems we find elements of other texts: traditional images, mythological images and imitations of hymns, biblical images and symbols. All this allows us to conclude that the work of M. Kuzmin organically fits into the context of Russian culture and world culture as a whole.

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Mikhail Kuzmin Bogomolov Nikolai Alekseevich

Autobiographical beginning in the early work of Kuzmin[*]

In memory of Z. G. Mints

Autobiography is a common feature of literature, but the degree of its expression in a particular work, in a particular artistic system is decisively different, and in each individual case, researchers face a special problem, for the solution of which it is necessary to resort to a wide variety of methods of study - from source study to psychoanalytic.

It is unlikely that we can now set ourselves the task of describing the work of Mikhail Kuzmin as an integral system. We are rather interested in the answer to the question clearly formulated by V.N. perspective - what is the purpose of its author)? Having a certain amount of material not previously introduced into scientific circulation, we can turn to the problem of the correlation in his work of reality (naturally, as far as we can imagine it from various texts that have come down to us) and artistic reality. The need for such a study is dictated by the fact that M. Kuzmin is one of the writers with a “mysterious” biography, therefore it is so tempting to see elements of autobiography in many of his works, allowing you to directly project artistic reality onto life reality and draw certain conclusions about the second on the basis of the first. In our understanding, the connection between literature and reality in his work seems to be much more complex. Its interpretation is a task of work completely different from ours, but it can be assumed that the materials introduced into scientific use will enable future researchers (we deliberately use the plural, because, as it seems to us, even with the establishment of absolutely accurate biographical data - which, generally speaking, , it is hardly possible - the interpretation of their relationship with the artistic structure of the work will always be hypothetical to a certain extent) to be more thorough in their constructions. We will try to show how easily disclosed autobiography acquires specific properties in Kuzmin, becoming a means of artistic generalization, and not introducing “undigested” fragments of reality into the work.

A kind of model of the author's attitude to reality is already created by his first literary work, which has become the property of the press - the cycle of "XIII Sonnets", published at the end of 1904 (1905 is on the cover) in the "Green Collection of Poems and Prose". Kuzmin never reprinted this cycle again, but it was noted and remembered by readers.

The history of the creation of these sonnets with quite satisfactory completeness emerges from Kuzmin's letters to GV Chicherin. In an undated letter, clearly dated July 1903, he writes from Vasilsursk, where he spent the summer: “A strange case - when we went to the convent through the forests four of us: my sister, nephew Seryozha, I and Serezhin’s comrade Alyosha Bekhli, among the most inconsistent situation, I suddenly wanted to portray a series of scenes from the Italian Renaissance, passionately. There could be several departments (Canzoniere, Alchemist, Venice, etc.), and even I started the words from Canzoniere (3 sonnets) and the introduction. Both the texts of the sonnets and the music for them were written very quickly, and by August 20 all the texts were ready, and for 8 sonnets - the music. But at the moment we are more interested not in the history of the creation of sonnets, but in their connection with the life of Kuzmin, and here we find a paradoxical situation, which the poet himself undoubtedly felt. The fact is that his interests of the previous and several subsequent years were quite definitely directed to life ideals of a completely different plan. So, on July 11, 1902, just a year before the creation of the sonnets, he wrote to the same Chicherin:

“I live in apple orchards above the confluence of the Sura with the Volga, behind the Sura there are fishing lines, fields and meadows with villages, but I sit with my back to this view, similar and going to the center of the black earth of Russia, with a look beyond the Volga, where, behind a wide frame overgrown with herbs, bushes, crossed by a river, streams and swamps, an oak forest begins, and a dark forest rises on the horizon, stretching northeast to semi-Siberia. You can’t take your eyes off him, and so the heart aches from this river and forest expanse. Before that, I was in different places and in Kazan. Merezhkovsky proceeded to Semyonovsky sketes and Vladimir villages to the holy lake, and the landlords of the zemstvo stations were dissatisfied with the obligation to deliver troikas to him as a gift. But I do not write anything and do not know what will come out. In a large, bright room, surrounded by windows, they sit at work and sing:

Dear Vanya, daring head,

I hear you are going far away from me.

Who will I spend the winter with?

With whom do you order the red summer to walk?

Walk, honey, summer is red alone -

I'm leaving for distant cities.

And Vanya, curly-haired, in a blue Siberian coat, like Sorokin, is going somewhere to Kungur, and she is thin, in a dark sundress and a scarf in dissolution, walks alone in the mountains, looking at the forests behind which her Vanya disappeared.

This letter gives a clear idea of ​​the state of mind in which Kuzmin worked on the vocal-instrumental cycles "Spiritual Poems", "Seasons" and the cycle "Cities", unknown to us. At this time, for him, a folk song is not just a testament to the life of a certain circle of people, but also an organic merger with it, the song explains life, and life most directly turns into a song. Obviously, this was the intention of Kuzmin himself: to create a number of works that are just as directly related to reality, to recreate such a type of relationship between art and reality, in which creativity is part of life, some kind of analogue of those forms of art that are allowed and natural for the Old Believers. , the truth of whose life Kuzmin is trying in these years to verify the truth of his life: icon painting, church singing, aestheticized life. Against this background, the figure of Merezhkovsky looks very comical, who decides to comprehend the truly folk life in a swoop, like a police rank suddenly swooping down.

It is this state of mind that dictates Kuzmin's quest, which he speaks of in his letters to Chicherin in 1903. In the first of them, written on January 9 (postmarked), he defines his attitude to culture as a holistic phenomenon:

“Of course, it is impossible not to see what is; that there is a movement of thought in the 19th century, that Dante, Voltaire and Nietzsche are stages, that in Russia there are 2 directions, but one cannot but see that in reality this is one millionth of the whole society (because to him (as well as to the 20th century .) belong to all those living at a given time, and again I will say that the opinion of the mentor from Okhta is equal in rights and equally to the 20th century, like the same Nietzsche) and from this millionth is not 1/10 sincere? So these "trends" and so on, of course, exist, but they are a bunch of writers, journalists and talkers; there are fewer of them than there are nihilists in Possessed, where all the committees and subcommittees, covering the whole of Russia in a network, turn out to be one scoundrel and a bunch of fools. This is all of more than negligible value and is not even worth a race.<…>I don't know if there will be a synthesis and what kind, I'm more interested in the coming of the Antichrist; having the truth of faith, life and art, it makes no difference to me what everything else that is not true will be, since it does not literally coincide with the true even in form. There are many cultures, and what will be the meeting of Russian culture with European culture: will it turn away and go to bathe in a bath, or put on a “jacket” and go to listen to a cafe-chantan (because what else can that stranger give) - I don’t know. Still, I will not accept ... ".

Leaving aside the obvious parallels with the current state of Russian culture, let us pay attention to the fact that Kuzmin fixed the extremely important problem of the correlation of the true culture of the people, presented, however, by him in a somewhat utopian idealized form: fully preserving all the features of the ancient, primordial way of life and the cult of zealots " ancient piety”, and what is offered to her by people with the experience of an ordinary “European” education, upbringing and even creativity. He considers it possible to find a true balance between these two poles of Russian life of his time only in the personal experience of everything that happens and the transformation of his existential experience into creativity. At the same time, at every single moment of being in the world, it is necessary to observe internal harmony between the external and internal. It was this circumstance that led Kuzmin to rethink the experience of his long-standing trip to Italy, which for him will forever remain one of the most precious memories. On May 11, 1902, he wrote to Chicherin:

“... I remember Canon Mori, who taught me with naive impudence, considering himself at least Machiavelli: “Never say anything important to your friends, for they will always follow you like legionnaires in the triumph of Caesar and speak long forgotten and shaming memories.” Of course, this is naive and vile, but there is some truth in this. And how much easier it is for people who are not so strong to start a new, renewed life, without dragging old rubbish behind them (although nothing passes without a trace, but this is a trace in the soul for oneself, and not a fact is obvious), going to completely different places, to completely different people who would know them only already renewed, for whom my past is only a general formula: “There was a pagan and a sinner - he repented and turned”, or a confession with an anguish, and not an actual recollection full of colors and bends of the soul. And behind me is a whole tail - my things, and to anyone who surveys them as a whole, it seems that after yesterday's Hellenism, today's housing construction, something new, something Mexican, is possible, if not probable. And that coup that you believed and considered during Tsarskoselsk<их>walks more than Thais' appeal is an empty, albeit interesting twist on the kaleidoscope. It doesn't really matter to me. And if those real people who do me a joyful honor, considering me almost their own, who often do not even suspect my music<альных>classes (except hooks), learned about Babylon and Cleopatra? Of course, the circle where the dissemination of my things is possible is so far from another, but the impossible is small, and this is certainly not indifferent to me. These things (before last<едних>2, 3 years old) must be hidden or burned, as suitors burn love letters to cocottes. Wherever I go, I will get into trouble. Whether I’m sitting at Kazakov’s, whether I live with my sister in the summer, whether I travel with summer acquaintances along the Volga and forests, whether I work on hooks at home, I feel and absorb life and poetry and see the absurdity of music; Do I read Sokalsky or listen with trepidation to Step<ана>You<ильевича Смоленского>- I am embraced by a living stream, but I see painfully clearly all artificial<ность>and the literature of their dreams of music and the vanity of reconciling the incompatible. Do I see the place and meaning of my music, playing it to Verkhovsky, Sandulenka and (what to hide) to you, I feel a huge distance of interests, concepts and ideas, so everything seems to me alien, unnecessary and unreal.

Against this background, the appearance of the “XIII Sonnets” should have looked completely unexpected, and Kuzmin was forced to justify himself to Chicherin: “Knowing that after the“ Hyacinth ”the“ bitterness ”went, and after“ Treasure ”-“ The Last Judgment ”, I look without fear on this desire, only making sure that it is long enough for the end of the plan.

Apparently, the key to understanding such a sharp transition from "Russian" to "Italian" should be sought in Kuzmin's personal life, about which he quite briefly, but definitely reports in "Histoire? difiante de mes commencements": "The second summer I fell desperately in love into a certain boy, Alyosha Bekhli, who then lived at the dacha in Vasil Varya's acquaintances. Having parted, I went to St. Petersburg, he went to Moscow, we carried on a correspondence, which was opened by his father, who raised a scandal, involved my sister in this matter and thus stopped this adventure. Recall that the initials A.B. stand as a dedication to the "XIII sonnets", they are also mentioned in the later "Sonnets", written, apparently, in 1904.

This particular episode of Kuzmin's life, it seems, can also explain the appearance of the Italian theme in the sonnets that interest us. Describing his Italian trip, he recalled: “Rome made me drunk; then I became interested in lift-you Luigino, who was taken from Rome with the consent of his parents to Florence, so that later he would go to Russia as a servant. I was very shy about money, spending it without an account. I was very cheerful, and all the Neoplatonists influenced only by the fact that I considered myself to be something demonic. Mom turned to Chicherin in despair. He unexpectedly galloped to Florence, Luigino was already tired of me, and I willingly allowed myself to be saved. Yusha introduced me to Canon Mori, a Jesuit, who first took me into his own hands, and then moved me completely to himself, taking up my conversion. We sent Luigino to Rome; all letters were dictated to me by Mori.” A clearly visible parallel between the two "adventures" (flared passion, finding reciprocity, scandal and parting) brings to the surface the strongest Italian impressions, about which Kuzmin repeatedly wrote both in epistolary prose, and in verse, and in artistic prose.

But the same episode, in our opinion, allows us to take a more sober look at the autobiographical basis of the story "Wings". It was stated by many who wrote about the Wings, beginning, apparently, with Chicherin, but the question of the nature of this autobiographical nature was never clearly raised.

Meanwhile, this issue should be fundamentally resolved, since already at that time Kuzmin's views on the relationship between reality and fiction in creativity were being formed.

First of all, when talking about this, one should keep in mind the complex genre nature of the story. The nature of "Wings" as a philosophical treatise is obvious to today's reader, however, apparently, reading it as a work of a completely naturalistic, depicting the life of a homosexual underground, did not seem to Kuzmin something fundamentally alien to this nature. Already after the first reading of "Wings" to the members of the "Evenings of Contemporary Music" he wrote in his diary: "Pokrovsky<…>he talked for a long time about people like Stroop, that he has 4 such acquaintances that, as it happens, for a long time they lead, develop young men disinterestedly, fight, think to manage in this way, somehow, they are ashamed even after the 5th, 6th novel to confess; as he heard in the bathhouses on the 5th line, almost the same conversations as I have, that in the south, in Odessa, Sevastopol, they look at it very simply and even high school students just go to the boulevard to look for meetings, knowing that in addition to pleasure they can get cigarettes , theater ticket, pocket money. In general, he showed sufficient awareness. By the way, I got caught: he has a brother-in-law Strup. Here's a coincidence." And even the mockery of the press, which almost unanimously perceived "Wings" as an exceptionally "malevolent" work, was neither a surprise nor a particular nuisance for him.

However, such a perception of the story should have left the majority of readers with the idea that the autobiographical beginning is extremely strong here, and the author can be unconditionally identified with the main character of the story. Meanwhile, as far as we can judge, the autobiography in it is quite clearly distributed among the various characters.

Of course, Vanya Smurov, the main character of Wings, is to a certain extent an autobiographical character. However, at the same time, one should not forget that the events of Kuzmin's real life in no way correspond to the chronological realities of the story. Vanya is a high school student, while Kuzmin's trip to Italy took place in 1897, when he was 25 years old, and he began to spend the summer months in Vasilsursk from 1902, quite an adult. We know nothing of the kind in the author's gymnasium life and, as it seems, we can talk about the practical improbability of such incidents - at the same time, certain autobiographical features are given to completely different characters in the story.

So, the Greek teacher Daniil Ivanovich, taking Vanya from Vasilsursk to Italy, has at home the sculptural head of Antinous, “standing alone, like the penates of this dwelling”. But among friends, Kuzmin himself had the nickname "Antina" and sealed his letters with colored sealing wax with the imprint of Antinous's profile on it. In the Vasilsur episode, it is rather permissible to see Alyosha Bekhli, almost unknown to us, also a schoolboy who fell under the influence of a man much older than himself.

Kuzmin gives his own "Alexandrian Song" to one of Stroop's guests, and Stroop himself gives some traits of his character: addiction to classical antiquity, the desire to learn languages ​​​​not from dictionaries, but as if in live communication with texts: "... time for preparatory grammar very little is needed. All you have to do is read, read, read. Read, looking at every word in the dictionary, making your way, as if through a thicket of a forest, and you would get unexperienced pleasures ”(Judging by the letters to Chicherin, Kuzmin mastered the Italian language in this way), even the story of the bath attendant Fyodor, who becomes Shtrup’s servant, to a certain extent resembles the story of Kuzmin with Luigi Cardoni, who was supposed to go with him to Russia as a servant.

Accordingly, communication with Mori on confessional issues, which was fundamentally important for Kuzmin, was removed from Smurov's life. Apparently, the canon hoped that Kuzmin would convert to Catholicism and become a secret agent of the Jesuits in Russia, but the story does not talk about anything like that, nor about any religious quests at all, which are very significant for the young Kuzmin. Vanya’s interest in religion (as well as Strup’s) is primarily aesthetic and semi-ethnographic: “No one was particularly surprised that Strup, among other hobbies, began to engage in Russian antiquity; that they began to go to him now speechy in German dress, then old "from the deity" in long-brimmed semi-caftans, but equally roguish merchants with manuscripts, icons, antique materials, fake castings; that he became interested in ancient singing, read Smolensky, Razumovsky and Metallov, sometimes went to listen to singing on Nikolaevskaya Street and, finally, himself, under the guidance of some pockmarked chanter, to learn hooks. “This corner of the world spirit was completely unfamiliar to me,” Strup repeated, trying to infect Vanya with this hobby, who, surprisingly, also succumbed to this particular direction.

At the same time, it should be noted that Kuzmin gives part of his cherished thoughts and feelings not to the main “ideological” heroes of the story, but to completely different characters. So, the Italian composer Ugo Orsini is endowed with clearly unsightly and even sinister features: “Orsini smiled sweetly with a thin mouth on a white fattening face with black eyes without shine, and the rings glittered on his musically developed fingers in ligaments with short-cut nails. “This Hugo looks like a poisoner, doesn’t he?” Vanya asked his companion ... ”At the same time, it is in Orsini’s monologue about his future, dreaming work that one can clearly distinguish the motives of many poems that Kuzmin will write, although significantly later, in the twenties: “The first picture: the gray sea, the rocks, the golden sky calling into the distance, the Argonauts in search of the golden fleece - everything that is frightening in its novelty and unprecedentedness and where you suddenly recognize ancient love and homeland. The second is Prometheus, chained and punished: “No one can see with impunity the secrets of nature without violating its laws, and only a parricide and incest will guess the riddle of the Sphinx!” the variegation of a discordant life, nor the harmony of prophetic dreams. Everyone is horrified. Then the third: on the blissful lawns of the scene from the Metamorphoses, where the gods assumed every form for love; Icarus falls, Phaeton falls, Ganymede says: “Poor brothers, only I from those who flew up to heaven remained there, because pride and children’s toys attracted you to the sun, and noisy love, incomprehensible to mortals, took me.” Flowers, prophetically huge, fiery, bloom; birds and animals walk in pairs and 48 samples of human compounds are seen in a fluttering pink fog from the Indian "manuels? rotiques". And everything begins to rotate in a double rotation, each in its own sphere, and in an ever larger circle, faster and faster, until all the outlines merge and the entire moving mass takes shape and freezes in the rocks standing above the sparkling sea and treeless, yellow and under the unbearable sun rocks. , a huge radiant figure of Zeus-Dionysus-Helios!

Using autobiographical material and introducing it into the narrative quite openly, Kuzmin at the same time decisively transforms it, which makes one critical of any attempts to present this material in a filmed form, as material for Kuzmin's biography, without additional verification from available sources in each case.

From this point of view, of considerable interest is the structure of the collection "Network" as a book of poems, where a through plot is clearly read, both biographical and mystical.

This construction was the fruit of quite a lot of thought and trials. On January 20, 1908, inquiring about the fate of the Networks manuscript, Kuzmin wrote to Bryusov: “Have you received the Networks manuscript in a fairly good condition? Your opinion about verses unknown to you is extremely important to me. I wrote to Mikhail Fedorovich<Ликиардопуло>about a possible (and desirable, in my opinion) shortening of Love This Summer. If it doesn't make it difficult for you, I would be happy to provide you with this solution, as well as a choice of 8 poems ("Different Poems"), where I stand exclusively for retaining the last one: "When looking at spring flowers." What can be omitted without losing the meaning of The Interrupted Tale? "Dreams of Moscow"? "Unhappy day"? "Cardboard House"? Having received a response letter, where Bryusov persuaded him not to cut the manuscript, Kuzmin suggested another option: “Let it be like this: I won’t throw anything out of the book, but here’s what I think. Since the last two cycles do not really fit in with the rest of the book, and since I intend to write a few more closely related to these two cycles, do not put them in the Nets, but leave them for a possible later small separate edition<…>It's a pity that the book is getting smaller, but I think my reasoning is correct." As it becomes clear from the diary, these last two cycles were planned to be published as a separate book in Ory, Vyach's home publishing house. Ivanova.

For all the accidental appearance of just such a composition of the book, in the end it acquired a completely complete character, and moreover, if the last two cycles were excluded at some stage (however, this could only be in the last days before sending the manuscript to Scorpio) , since they were the last to write), the plot of the whole book would not have its logical ending. True, even in this form, the collection did not seem to receive at least some correct assessment in criticism, for which the most authoritative and giving an unambiguous orientation was Bryusov’s review, published already in 1912 and thus, as it were, summing up: “Elegance - here is the pathos of M. Kuzmin's poetry.<…>M. Kuzmin's poems - poetry for poets. Only knowing the technique of verse, one can truly appreciate all its charm. And the old adage is not applicable to anyone as it is to M. Kuzmin: his glass is not large, but he drinks from his own glass. Meanwhile, it is quite obvious (for more details, see the article “Love is my everlasting faith”) that the book was built (if you do not take into account the section “Alexandrian Songs” that ends it, which is not included in the lyrical plot) as a trilogy of the embodiment of true love , which is openly associated in the third part of the book with divine love, into earthly love and striving for carnal completion, but bearing in itself all the qualities of the mystical and heavenly.

We do not rule out that Kuzmin himself could quite decisively oppose such a judgment about his book. Let us recall the words already cited from a letter to Bryusov on May 30, 1907: “You cannot imagine how much joy your kind words brought me now that I am being attacked from all sides, even from people whom I sincerely would like to love. According to the stories of friends who returned from Paris, the Merezhkovskys even ranked me among the mystical anarchists, and as a consolation they left me the company of the same: Gorodetsky, Potemkin and Auslander. Vyacheslav Ivanov himself, taking my “Comedy about Evdokia” in “Ora”, looks at it as an experience of recreating the mystery of “nationwide action”, from which I consciously(our italics. - N.B.) I renounce, seeing in her, if only she expresses what I want(our italics. - N.B.), a touching, frivolous and mannered tale of a saint through the 18th century. After such protests, outwardly seeming very sincere, one does not really want to look for anything in Kuzmin's works outside the sphere that he himself assigns to them. However, looking more carefully at the text of the letter, one should definitely take into account its general polemical context (Kuzmin prudently played on the obvious contradiction between Bryusov and Vyach. Ivanov in the polemic about “mystical anarchism”, presenting himself as a faithful supporter of Bryusov, while almost certainly It can be assumed that in conversations with Vyach. Ivanov, the position was outlined much softer), and Kuzmin’s fundamental unwillingness to be associated to any degree with any literary groupings, even if his works demonstrate an internal attraction to one or another principles proclaimed by symbolists, acmeists, futurists or any other poetic associations.

If we look impartially into the cross-cutting theme of the collection “Networks”, we will see that the first part in it is “Love of this Summer” and “Interrupted Tale” - cycles about ghostly, deceptive, inauthentic love, then turning into an external burning of carnal passion in the absence of any either spiritual content (only sometimes brought in from outside, by a lyrical hero), or culminating in betrayal, and the most terrible betrayal, associated with the final withdrawal into another sphere of attraction. The second part, which includes “Rockets”, “Deceived Deceiver” and “Joyful Traveler”, is dedicated to the revival of hope for the future that arises in the direct living of life, and not destined by someone in advance:

You are a reader of your life, not a scribe,

Unknown to you to lead the end.

And finally, in the third part, even lexically oriented to Scripture, the highest meaning of human life is openly seen, given by the "Wise Meeting" with the "Guide", who simultaneously bears the features of both an ordinary earthly person and a heavenly warrior in shining armor (most clearly associated with Saint Kuzmin - the Archangel Michael, the leader of God's armies).

The autobiographical implications of the first part are obvious, and Kuzmin did not think to hide them from friends, and from many readers as well. "Love of This Summer" is devoted to relations with an unremarkable young man Pavlik Maslov, and Kuzmin's friends of that time easily projected poetry directly onto reality. A typical example is a letter from V.F. Nouvel dated August 1, 1906: “... the third day I saw him (Maslova. - N.B.) in Tauris (Tavrichesky garden. - N.B.). Unfortunately, I could not talk with him for a long time, because I was not alone, but I can say that he is the same as before. And Pierrot's nose, and sly eyes, and juicy mouth - everything is in place (I did not consider the rest)<…>Where is the ease of life that you constantly defended? Can it really lead to such fatal consequences? Then everything collapses and you have betrayed the "flowers of the cheerful earth". And the nose of Pierrot, and Marivo, and the "Marriage of Figaro" - all this is only temporarily taken away from you, and you have to stop loving them completely in order to lose hope of seeing them again and soon. Quotations from the earliest poems of "Love of this Summer", written back in St. Petersburg, before leaving for Vasilsursk on vacation, are quite obvious in the text of the letter. The autobiographical subtext of The Interrupted Tale was just as obvious, especially since it was published for the first time in the White Nights almanac, along with the even more frank story The Cardboard House in this respect (for more details, see below).

However, the last, third part of "Networks", the most sublime and intended for the high end of the collection, was also based on frank autobiography, hidden from the eyes of the ordinary reader, to whom it was supposed to be located on the other side of human existence in the real world.

October 2, 1907. Kuzmin wrote in his diary: “I went to Vyach. Iv.<Иванову>, there this woman Mintslov settled down. Vyach. languid, sad, but not killed, in my opinion. We talked." Anna Rudolfovna Mintslova appeared in the life of the Ivanov family at the end of 1906 or at the very beginning of 1907 and quickly took the place of a trusted person who became aware of all the most intimate secrets of the family, as evidenced by the confessional letters of L. D. Zinovieva-Annibal, excerpts from which are given in the article "Petersburg hafizites". After the death of Zinovieva-Annibal, Mintslova, convinced of her own occult power, launched a decisive attack on Ivanov, trying to bend him to her will. Ivanov's relationship with Mintslova is a special chapter in his biography, but it is significant to note that for Kuzmin this mystical connection did not go unnoticed.

As far as we can judge from Kuzmin's diary entries, he was rather skeptical about all kinds of theosophical, occultist, Masonic and the like concepts. However, the personality of Minclova made a very strong impression on him, supported by his own experiences of this time.

In March 1907, Kuzmin met Viktor Andreyevich Naumov, a friend of M. L. Hoffmann at the cadet school, and fell passionately in love with him. However, endless attempts at rapprochement did not bring success - Naumov did not express much desire to turn acquaintance into an intimate relationship. And then Kuzmin resorted to mysticism.

This was facilitated by the atmosphere established on Ivanov's "tower" after the death of his wife. Ivanov not only listened to the advice of Mintslova, but also came into close contact with B. A. Leman, absorbed in all kinds of mystical teachings, began to cultivate various forms of meditation, which ended in visionary and created the effect of the complete infusion of the soul of Zinoviev-Annibal into his earthly body. And for Kuzmin, who was very close to him at that time, this hobby also did not go in vain.

Here are some characteristic entries from his diary, dating back to the end of 1907 and the beginning of 1908: “Leman came, he said amazing things in numbers, unclear to me. In 14 days it will start to clear up<иктор>BUT<ндреевич>, in a month everything will stand firmly, in April - May there is great light and happiness, in the morning a clear awakening. It calmed me down a lot.<…>Yes, Leman advises not to see each other for 10 days, otherwise it may slow down, but it is very difficult. April morning will come, no matter what I do. I will live up to 53 years old, but I could live up to 62-70 years old, if not for the current story. Madness does not threaten ”(January 23); “Leman came with predictions. It's like I'm in a fairy tale or a novel. Is he spoiling us? after all, he was in love with me” (December 29).

And in this environment, Kuzmin begins to have fairly regular visions, some of which are described in detail in the diary. On December 29, such a vision was recorded for the first time: “In the afternoon I saw an angel in gold<исто->brown coat and gold<ых>armor with the face of Victor and, m<ожет>b<ыть>, Prince Georges. He was standing at the window when I entered from the virgins. This clearest vision lasted<нд>eight". On January 28, Kuzmin records that meditations begin, and immediately after this, the visions resume with even greater distinctness and regularity. So, on February 16, the entry follows: “Anna Rud<ольфовна Минцлова>After talking, she took me to her room and ordered me to renounce my surroundings, to rush to one, to try to get up, to leave, she herself embraced me in a big impulse. Cold and trembling - through a thick veil, I saw Victor without a bag on his head, hands on a blanket, ruddy, as if sleeping. Returning, I saw a sword for a long time, my sword, and scraps of swaddling clothes.

The reader, who remembers Kuzmin's poems well, should be familiar with many things in these notes. The guide in the form of an angel dressed in armor, with a changing face - now Naumov, then Prince Georges, then Kuzmin himself (and then this angel is identified with the archangel Michael, armed with a sword) - all these are symbols of the third part of "Networks". Some of the poems in this series are generally impossible to understand outside the diary entries, so their symbolism is immensely wide and narrows only when substituting extra-textual reality. Such, for example, is the second poem of the "Jets" cycle:

Run out, O heart, run out!

Bloom, oh rose, bloom!

The heart, drunk with a rose, trembles.

I burn from love, from love;

Do not call, oh dear, do not call:

Because of the rose, the threatening sword shines.

However, when referring to the diary, the meaning of the poem becomes almost obvious: “During the day I clearly saw 2 transparent roses and it was as if blood flowed from my heart to the floor” (February 7). And a day later: "The chest hurts, where the blood came from."

But the most obvious key to all these poems is given by the description of a vision that happened to Kuzmin on January 31, 1908: “In a large room that can accommodate 50 people, there are a lot of people in pink dresses, but unclear and unrecognizable by their faces - a foggy host. On an armchair, with your back to the only one<ному>window, where the transparent blue night sky was seen, sits a clearly visible L<идия>Dmitrievna Zinovieva-Annibal> in the headdress and dress of the Byzantine empresses, her forehead, ears and part of her cheeks, and her throat are covered with heavy gold embroidery; sits motionless, but with open, lively eyes and lively colors of her face, although it is known that she is gone. There is an empty space in front of the armchair, and a vague, hesitant host of people on the sides become clearly visible. It is known that someone has to cense. Viktor (Naumov. - N.B.) in a uniform with a cleaver at the waist. Voice of Vyacheslav (Ivanov. - N.B.) from the crowd: "Don't touch the incense, you don't have to do it." L. Dm., without moving, loudly: "Leave it, Vyacheslav, it's all the same." Here a piece of incense, near which a small knife and a hammer are placed, falls on the floor itself and crumbles into golden filings, in which there are several golden ears of corn. Naumov raises a censer that was not burning and without incense, from which smoke suddenly flows in clouds, filling the whole peace with clouds, and a strong smell of incense. Vyacheslav, having gone to the middle, takes handfuls of golden sand and ears of corn, and L. Dm. rises on armchairs, and it turns out to be so huge that it hides the entire window and surpasses everyone in growth. All the time a thick pink dusk. I woke up, still long and clearly hearing the smell of incense, all the time of meditation and then.

From this passage it becomes clear that the Wise Encounter cycle is dedicated to Vyach. Ivanov not only “because he especially likes it,” as Kuzmin reported to V.V. Ruslov, but also by the most direct connection of Kuzmin’s experiences with the thoughts that overwhelmed Ivanov during these difficult months for him. Love, death and resurrection in a new, divine love - this is the main content of the three cycles combined in the third part of the collection "Networks", and thus the completion of the through plot of the entire book, and this is most closely connected with two autobiographical subtexts: love for V. Naumov and empathy for the state of Vyach. Ivanov after the death of his wife with her mystical resurrection into a new, completely different life.

Thus, autobiographism in its various refractions permeates the entire first book of Kuzmin's poems, constituting the psychological basis that allows it to hold on as an integral work of art, without falling apart into separate fragments. But it is significant that the autobiography in different parts of the book is different: from almost complete openness in the first, through fragmentation and irreducibility to a single basis in the second, to the sublimely sublimated third, which is perceived by an ordinary reader who is not immersed in the circle of experiences of Kuzmin the man, is perceived as completely detached from reality. In a sense, "Networks" can be likened to Kuzmin's entire work in general, where autobiography becomes multifaceted and, depending on its type in a particular work, provokes decoding by the reader and researcher.

The most generally recognized example of open autobiography in Kuzmin's prose is undoubtedly the story "Cardboard House". Even quite far from the circle in which Kuzmin revolved, the poet A. A. Kondratiev immediately after the appearance of the story informed his acquaintance: “In this novel, he himself appears under the name Demyanova, the artist Somov, renamed Nalimov, the faces of Vyach pass through. Ivanov, Kommissarzhevskaya, Sologub and others. For close friends of Kuzmin, who ended up in the "Cardboard House" as characters, autobiography was all the more obvious. So, V. F. Nouvel, unmistakably recognizable on the pages of the story, wrote to its author: “... I must say that all these Wafils and other Daphnis-like young men are a little tired of me and I want something more specific, well, for example<имер>, a modern student or cadet. In general, moving deeper into Alexandria, Roman decline, or even the 18th century somewhat discredits modernity, which, in my opinion, deserves much more attention and interest. That's why I prefer your interrupted story and "Cardboard House" (despite the "boot") to "Aimé Leboeuf" and similar romantic distances from what is now, here, around us. And if in this passage from the letter there is still some desire to separate the artistic and “real” sides (meaning, of course, as everywhere below, that in any non-artistic evidence the fact is always reflected not directly, but through the prism biased observation), then the letter of F. Sologub to Kuzmin completely removes their opposite, when the senior writer, recognizing himself in one of the passing characters of the story, was resolutely offended precisely at discrediting himself as a person, and not as a character: “In your“ Cardboard House ” there are some contemptuous words about me too - more precisely, about my appearance and my manners, which you do not like. There is no artistic need in these lines, but there is only mockery. I consider these lines an act hostile to me, not caused by me, in no way necessary and, I dare to think, accidental.

In fact, most of the characters in the story quite clearly have obvious prototypes and are easily “guessed” by readers, both those who were relatively close to the events described, and the current ones, who at least superficially imagine the life of St. Petersburg bohemia in the mid-nineties. R. D. Timenchik, V. N. Toporov and T. V. Tsivyan in the excellent article “Akhmatova and Kuzmin” have already partly made this decoding the property of today's reader, at the same time defining the principles by which true surnames were coded: Demyanov - Kuzmin himself, Myatlev - S. Yu. Sudeikin, Nalimov - K. A. Somov, Elena Ivanovna Borisova - Olga Afanasievna Glebova (married Sudeikin), Temirov - N. N. Sapunov, Petya Smetanin - Pavlik Maslov. To this list should be added director Oleg Feliksovich (like V. E. Meyerhold, an old Russian name is combined with a foreign patronymic), Nadezhda Vasilievna Ovinova - Vera Viktorovna Ivanova (in addition to the pair name Vera - Nadezhda, there is also metathesis of vowels in the surname), Valentin - S. A. Auslender (obviously, by the title of his story "Valentine of Miss Belinda", published in the same almanac as "Cardboard House"), Wolfram Grigorievich Daxel - Walter Fedorovich Nouvel, Matilda Petrovna - L. N. Vilkina ( just at that time she was closely associated with K. A. Somov and even considered herself his “mistress”, while the letter written by Valentin to Matilda Petrovna at the end of the story is quite consistent with the real letter from S. A. Auslender to Vilkina). Thus, for us, in fact, only the prototypes of the old woman Kurmysheva remain mysterious (apparently, she was Kuzmin's aunt, about whom, unfortunately, we know practically nothing) and her daughter, as well as the very briefly mentioned Saks.

Such a completeness of coincidences provokes literally transferring the entire factual side of the matter from the story to reality. However, the attentive reader should be stopped by at least what V.P. Verigina, a close witness of the events, reported in her memoirs. Quoting from the story a description of the famous “evening of paper ladies”, which took place at the apartment of V. V. Ivanova after the premiere of “The Puppet Show”, Verigina makes a remark: “It must be said, however, that the heroes of this novel were not at our evening.”

An appeal to Kuzmin's diary allows us to restore with sufficient completeness the course of events described in the "Cardboard House" as it really was, and to see that "poetry" and "truth" diverge in this case quite significantly, even if we do not pay attention to the differences. psychological, which could also be the fruit of the author's artistic imagination, since his diary was not only perceived as a literary work, but could even fulfill its function.

First of all, this refers to the style and spirit of the relationship between the characters in the story. So, Demyanov is connected with Nalimov only by friendship, while in the autumn of 1906, when all the events of the story took place, Somov and Kuzmin had by no means a platonic romance. Close friendship and communication between Demyanov and Temirov do not correspond to reality, moreover, in a number of cases Temirov combines the features of two real persons: Sapunov and N. P. Feofilaktov. Demyanov's relationship with Smetanin, described as already purely platonic and self-exhausting, was in fact quite carnal, and although Kuzmin was already pretty tired of Maslov, their relationship did not stop.

Chronological and topographic inconsistencies between the texts of the story and life are quite noticeable. Even without referring to the unpublished text of the diary, several inconsistencies can be found. So, "The Wedding of Zobeida" by G. von Hoffmannsthal, which is mentioned in the sixth chapter, was staged at the Kommissarzhevskaya Theater already in 1907, much later than the events described. An appeal to published materials shows that Kuzmin's acquaintance with Sudeikin, in contrast to Demyanov's acquaintance with Myatlev, did not occur on October 28, 1906, at the reading of F. Sologub's tragedy "The Gift of the Wise Bees", but two weeks earlier, at Blok's reading of "The King on area". The "Evening of Paper Ladies" took place on December 30, and Sudeikin's break with Kuzmin happened a few days before.

Even more fundamental discrepancies are added by an appeal to unpublished or only partially published pages of Kuzmin's diary. So, the explanation of Sudeikin and Kuzmin in the presence of N. P. Feofilaktov (and not at all Sapunov-Temirov, as in the story) did not take place in a cab on the way from a country restaurant, but at Kuzmin’s house:

“I started writing“ Summer ”, languished, waiting for guests. Finally they came. Sudeikin, Feofilaktov, Nouvel, Hoffmann, Gorodetsky. Sudeikin made a sketch, he will paint a portrait without me; very black en face, wreath behind head, 2 silver angels in depth; said that on Saturday our society was emphasized<…>Feofilaktov and Sudeikin remained for a very long time; the latter still dragged the first one to leave, but the [second] first one, out of spite, did not leave. Finally, Sudeikin sat down in an armchair and said: “Well, I stay as long as you like, and I answer the truth to any questions, and the first thing I will say is that I don’t know a person more talented than Mikh<аил>Alex<еевич>and I will say it all the time.” Feof<илактов>: "Well, do you love Mikh<аила>Al<ексеевича>?" - "I love". - "How?" - "Whatever." - "In every possible way?" - "In every possible way". - "Do you think I love you?" - "Love." - "Why do you think that?" - "I feel it." - "Since when?" - "From the first meeting." - "Do you know that I do not love you, but am in love with you?" - "I know." - “Does this surprise you?” - “No, but I didn’t think that you would speak in front of Nikolai Petrovich” - “Does this make you uncomfortable?” - “Oh no.” - "And if I hadn't told you?" - "I would have told you myself." - "First?" - "First". - "And you're not sorry that I said that?" - "No, I'm very happy." Feofilaktov listened, listened, and finally announced that he had not spent such a pleasant time in a long time as he did today, and that this was the most pleasant evening in Petersburg for him. That's strange!"

Analytical Psychotherapy (Autobiographical Supplement) 1 I am an unbalanced person, that is, a cyclic person, do not feed me bread - just let me compose some kind of cycle. Since the event in the headline has, to some extent, determined my life on