Silver Age. Silver age of Russian culture
1. The concept of "silver age".
2. Features of literary creativity at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries.
3. Bright representatives of the Silver Age of Russian poetry.
The concepts of the "Golden" and Silver Ages, which denote certain stages in the development of Russian literature, have firmly taken root in literary science. But where did such poetic names come from? They probably became a tribute to the mythological tradition of antiquity.
The "golden age" of Russian literature was the era of A. S. Pushkin. As for silver, it has become a landmark cultural phenomenon at the turn of the era. This period is characterized by the strengthening of the importance of the personal principle in the process of creativity, the desire to overcome the usual framework of the canons, to get rid of the artistic clichés that have developed in literature. It is interesting to note that the desire to go beyond the limits of tradition often concerned not only the canons of the past era, but also the principles of one or another literary movement, which was formed directly in the period called the Silver Age.
Despite the bright individuality of the poetic heritage of the Silver Age, one can single out a number of common features. So, at the turn of the century, the thematic preferences of poets changed. The theme of nature, traditional for Russian poetry, faded into the background; historical parallels also became less significant. The poets of the Silver Age were more willing to turn to the eternal themes of creativity: love, life and death. Interest in mythology, in the peculiarities of geographical and ethnographic coloring, has increased; the playful, theatrical beginning in poetry intensified.
The work of some poets of the beginning of the century, primarily symbolists, is characterized by attention to a fleeting moment. Naturally, the expression of contradictory or changeable feelings required a different attitude to the word: the place of clarity and accuracy of phrases was taken by hints and metaphors, built not on a noticeable similarity of phenomena and objects, but on fantasy associations that arise in a certain psychological situation. Such innovations naturally assumed and fundamentally new foundation relationship: poet - reader. The poets of the Silver Age did not strive for unambiguous, ordinary understandability. Their work was often intended for the reader, who, in a sense, became a co-author, co-creator of the work. The purpose of the poem was often not the most accurate presentation of the author's thoughts and feelings, but to encourage the reader to his own thoughts, the search for new sensations that contribute to spiritual growth.
Poets widely used mythological motifs and images, as well as quotations, which could be explicit or hidden. An appeal to mythology is typical, for example, for the work of V. Ya. Bryusov, I. I. F. Annensky, M. I. Tsvetaeva. Mythological images in the poetry of the Silver Age served to comprehend the eternal psychological and philosophical problems that a person has to face. In the poetry of the beginning of the century, two opposite tendencies appeared: the use of the semantic ambiguity of words and images - attention to the exact meaning of words; blurring, indefiniteness of the composition of the work - a clear logical construction.
The emotional impact of the poetic works of the Silver Age is largely due to their musicality, which was often achieved through phonetic consonances and rhythm features; at the same time, the logical interconnection of words sometimes weakened. Some poets used the effects of interrupted speech. For example, Annensky often used dots, and Tsvetaeva used dashes.
It should be noted that two opposite tendencies in the poetry of the Silver Age developed within the framework of two directions - symbolism and acmeism. Understatement, ambiguity and associativity were characteristic features of symbolism. Among the symbolist poets, the work of A. Blok, I. Annensky, A. Bely should be noted. As for acmeism, the clarity and logic of the composition, the clarity of the artistic intent of the work were proclaimed as the creative principles of this direction. The most prominent representatives of acmeism are N. S. Gumilyov, A. A. Akhmatova, O. E. Mandelstam; however, it should be noted that in their work they gradually moved away from the principles of this direction. In addition, a number of prominent poets of the Silver Age were outside the directions, for example, M. A. Voloshin, M. I. Tsvetaeva.
Russian literature of the XX century ("Silver Age". Prose. Poetry).
Russian literature XX century- the heiress of the tradition of the golden age of Russian classical literature. Her artistic level is quite comparable with our classics.
Throughout the century, there has been a keen interest in society and literature in the artistic heritage and spiritual potential of Pushkin and Gogol, Goncharov and Ostrovsky, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whose work is perceived and evaluated depending on the philosophical and ideological currents of the time, on creative searches in literature itself. . Interaction with tradition is complex: it is not only development, but also repulsion, overcoming, rethinking of traditions. In the 20th century, new artistic systems were born in Russian literature - modernism, avant-garde, socialist realism. Realism and romanticism continue to live. Each of these systems has its own understanding of the tasks of art, its own attitude to tradition, the language of fiction, genre forms, and style. His understanding of the personality, its place and role in history and national life.
The literary process in Russia in the 20th century was largely determined by the impact on the artist, culture in general, of various philosophical systems and policies. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the ideas of Russian religious philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries influenced literature (the works of N. Fedorov, V. Solovyov, N. Berdyaev, V. Rozanov, and others), and on the other hand, Marxist philosophy and Bolshevik practice. Marxist ideology, starting from the 1920s, establishes a rigid dictate in literature, banishing from it everything that does not coincide with its party guidelines and the strictly regulated ideological and aesthetic framework of socialist realism, which was approved by directive as the main method of Russian literature of the 20th century at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 year.
Beginning in the 1920s, our literature ceased to exist as a single national literature. It is forced to be divided into three streams: Soviet; Russian literature abroad (emigrant); and the so-called "detained" within the country, that is, not having access to the reader for censorship reasons. These streams were isolated from each other until the 1980s, and the reader did not have the opportunity to present a complete picture of the development of national literature. This tragic circumstance is one of the peculiarities of the literary process. It also largely determined the tragedy of fate, the originality of the work of such writers as Bunin, Nabokov, Platonov, Bulgakov and others. At present, the active publication of the works of émigré writers of all three waves, works that have lain in writers' archives for many years, allows you to see the richness and variety of national literature. The opportunity arose for a truly scientific study of it in its entirety, comprehending the internal laws of its development as a special, proper artistic area of the general historical process.
In the study of Russian literature and its periodization, the principles of exclusive and direct conditioning of literary development by socio-political causes are overcome. Of course, literature reacted to the most important political events of the time, but mainly in terms of themes and problems. According to its artistic principles, it retained itself as an intrinsically valuable sphere of the spiritual life of society. Traditionally, the following periods:
1) the end of the 19th century - the first decades of the 20th century;
2) 1920-1930s;
3) 1940s - mid-1950s;
4) mid-1950s-1990s.
The end of the 19th century was a turning point in the development of the social and artistic life of Russia. This time is characterized by a sharp aggravation of social conflicts, the growth of mass demonstrations, the politicization of life and the extraordinary growth of personal consciousness. The human personality is perceived as a unity of many principles - social and natural, moral and biological. And in literature, characters are not determined exclusively and primarily by environment and social experience. Different, sometimes polar, ways of reflecting reality appear.
Subsequently, the poet N. Otsup called this period the "silver age" of Russian literature. The modern researcher M. Pyanykh defines this stage of Russian culture as follows: "The Silver Age" - in comparison with the "golden", Pushkin's, - is usually called the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century in the history of Russian poetry, literature and art. If we keep in mind that the “Silver Age” had a prologue (the 80s of the XIX century) and an epilogue (the years of the February and October revolutions and the civil war), then Dostoevsky’s famous speech about Pushkin (1880) can be considered its beginning. , and at the end - Blok's speech "On the Appointment of the Poet" (1921), also dedicated to the "son of harmony" - Pushkin. The names of Pushkin and Dostoevsky are associated with two main, actively interacting trends in Russian literature of both the Silver Age and the entire 20th century - harmonic and tragic.
The theme of the fate of Russia, its spiritual and moral essence and historical perspectives becomes central in the work of writers of various ideological and aesthetic trends. Interest in the problem of national character, the specifics of national life, and human nature is growing. In the work of writers of different artistic methods, they are solved in different ways: in the social, concrete historical terms, by realists, followers and continuers of the traditions of critical realism of the 19th century. The realistic direction was represented by A. Serafimovich, V. Veresaev, A. Kuprin, N. Garin-Mikhailovsky, I. Shmelev, I. Bunin and others. . Symbolists F. Sologub, A. Bely, expressionist L. Andreev and others. A new hero is also born, a “continuously growing” person, overcoming the shackles of an oppressive and overwhelming environment. This is the hero of M. Gorky, the hero of socialist realism.
Literature of the early 20th century - Literature of philosophical problems par excellence. Any social aspects of life acquire a global spiritual and philosophical meaning in it.
The defining features of the literature of this period are:
interest in eternal questions: the meaning of the life of an individual and humanity; the mystery of the national character and history of Russia; worldly and spiritual; human and nature;
intensive search for new artistic means of expression;
the emergence of unrealistic methods - modernism (symbolism, acmeism), avant-garde (futurism);
tendencies towards interpenetration of literary genres into each other, rethinking of traditional genre forms and filling them with new content.
The struggle between the two main artistic systems - realism and modernism - determined the development and originality of the prose of these years. Despite the discussions about the crisis and the “end” of realism, new opportunities for realistic art opened up in the work of the late L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov, V.G. Korolenko, I.A. Bunin.
Young realist writers (A. Kuprin, V. Veresaev, N. Teleshov, N. Garin-Mikhailovsky, L. Andreev) united in the Moscow circle "Environment". In the publishing house of the “Knowledge” partnership, led by M. Gorky, they published their works, in which the traditions of democratic literature of the 60-70s developed and transformed in a peculiar way, with its special attention to the personality of a person from the people, his spiritual quest. The Chekhov tradition continued.
The problems of the historical development of society, the active creative activity of the individual were raised by M. Gorky, socialist tendencies are obvious in his work (the novel "Mother").
The necessity and regularity of the synthesis of the principles of realism and modernism were substantiated and implemented in their creative practice by young realist writers: E. Zamyatin, A. Remizov and others.
Symbolist prose occupies a special place in the literary process. Philosophical understanding of history is characteristic of D. Merezhkovsky's trilogy "Christ and Antichrist". We will see the history and stylization of history in the prose of V. Bryusov (the novel "The Fiery Angel"). In the novel "Without hope" "Small demon" by F. Sologub, the poetics of the modernist novel is formed, with its new understanding of classical traditions. A. Bely in "Silver Dove" and "Petersburg" makes extensive use of stylization, the rhythmic possibilities of language, literary and historical reminiscences to create a novel of a new type.
A particularly intensive search for new content and new forms took place in poetry. Philosophical and ideological-aesthetic tendencies of the era were embodied in three main currents.
In the mid-90s, articles by D. Merezhkovsky and V. Bryusov theoretically substantiated Russian symbolism. Big influence The symbolists were influenced by the idealist philosophers A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche, as well as the work of the French symbolist poets P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud. Symbolists proclaimed the mystical content as the basis of their creativity and the symbol - the main means of its embodiment. Beauty is the only value and the main criterion for evaluation in the poetry of the older symbolists. The work of K. Balmont, N. Minsky, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub is distinguished by extraordinary musicality, it is focused on the transfer of fleeting insights of the poet.
In the early 1900s, symbolism was in crisis. From symbolism, a new trend stands out, the so-called "young symbolism", represented by Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely, A. Blok, S. Solovyov, Y. Baltrushaitis. The Russian religious philosopher V. Solovyov had a great influence on the Young Symbolists. They developed the theory of "effective art". They were characterized by the interpretation of the events of modernity and the history of Russia as a clash of metaphysical forces. At the same time, the work of the Young Symbolists is characterized by an appeal to social issues.
The crisis of symbolism led to the emergence of a new trend that opposes it - acmeism. Acmeism was formed in the "Workshop of Poets" circle. It included N. Gumilyov, S. Gorodetsky, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, G. Ivanov and others. They tried to reform the aesthetic system of the Symbolists, asserting the inherent value of reality, made a setting for a “material” perception of the world, “proper” clarity image. Acmeist poetry is characterized by "beautiful clarity" of language, realism and accuracy of details, picturesque brightness of visual and expressive means.
In the 1910s, an avant-garde movement in poetry appeared - futurism. Futurism is heterogeneous: several groups stand out within it. The Cubo-Futurists (D. and N. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, V. Kamensky) left the greatest mark on our culture. Futurists denied the social content of art, cultural traditions. They are characterized by anarchist rebellion. In their collective programming collections (Slapping Public Taste, Dead Moon, etc.), they challenged "the so-called public taste and common sense." The Futurists destroyed the existing system of literary genres and styles, developed a tonic verse close to folklore on the basis of the spoken language, and experimented with the word.
Literary futurism was closely associated with avant-garde trends in painting. Almost all Futurist poets were professional artists.
Own special place in the literary process of the beginning of the century, new peasant poetry occupied, based on folk culture (N. Klyuev, S. Yesenin, S. Klychkov, P. Oreshin, etc.)
The Silver Age is not a chronological period. At least not only the period. And this is not the sum of literary movements. Rather, the concept of "Silver Age" is appropriate to apply to the way of thinking.
Atmosphere of the Silver Age
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Russia experienced an intense intellectual upsurge, which was especially pronounced in philosophy and poetry. Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (read about him) called this time the Russian cultural renaissance. According to Berdyaev's contemporary Sergei Makovsky, it is Berdyaev who also owns another, more well-known definition of this period - the "Silver Age". According to other sources, the phrase "Silver Age" was first used in 1929 by the poet Nikolai Otsup. The concept is not so much scientific as emotional, causing immediately associations with another short period history of Russian culture - with the "golden age", the Pushkin era of Russian poetry (the first third of XIX century).
“Now it is difficult to imagine the atmosphere of that time,” Nikolai Berdyaev wrote about the Silver Age in his “philosophical autobiography” “Self-Knowledge”. - Much of the creative upsurge of that time was included in the further development of Russian culture and now is the property of all Russian cultured people. But then there was an intoxication with a creative upsurge, novelty, tension, struggle, challenge. During these years, many gifts were sent to Russia. This was the era of the awakening of independent philosophical thought in Russia, the flowering of poetry and the sharpening of aesthetic sensibility, religious anxiety and quest, interest in mysticism and the occult. New souls appeared, new springs were discovered creative life, saw new dawns, combined the feeling of decline and death with the hope of the transformation of life. But everything happened in a rather vicious circle ... "
The Silver Age as a period and way of thinking
The art and philosophy of the Silver Age were distinguished by elitism and intellectualism. Therefore, it is impossible to identify all the poetry of the late XIX - early XX century with the Silver Age. This is a narrower concept. Sometimes, however, when attempting to determine the essence of the ideological content of the Silver Age through formal features (literary movements and groupings, socio-political subtexts and contexts), researchers mistakenly confuse them. In fact, within the chronological boundaries of this period, the most diverse phenomena in origin and aesthetic orientation coexisted: modernist movements, poetry of the classical realistic tradition, peasant, proletarian, satirical poetry ... But the Silver Age is not a chronological period. At least not only the period. And this is not the sum of literary movements. Rather, the concept of the “Silver Age” is appropriate to apply to the way of thinking, which, being characteristic of artists who were at enmity with each other during their lifetime, ultimately merged them in the minds of their descendants into an inseparable galaxy that formed that specific atmosphere of the Silver Age that Berdyaev wrote about. .
Poets of the Silver Age
The names of the poets who made up the spiritual core of the Silver Age are known to everyone: Valery Bryusov, Fedor Sologub, Innokenty Annensky, Alexander Blok, Maximilian Voloshin, Andrei Bely, Konstantin Balmont, Nikolai Gumilyov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Igor Severyanin, Georgy Ivanov and many others.
In its most concentrated form, the atmosphere of the Silver Age was expressed in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. It was the heyday of Russian modern literature in all its diversity of artistic, philosophical, religious searches and discoveries. First World War, the February bourgeois-democratic and October socialist revolutions partly provoked, partly shaped this cultural context, and partly were provoked and shaped by it. Representatives of the Silver Age (and Russian modernism in general) sought to overcome positivism, reject the legacy of the "sixties", denied materialism, as well as idealistic philosophy.
The poets of the Silver Age also sought to overcome the attempts of the second half of the 19th century to explain human behavior by social conditions, environment, and continued the traditions of Russian poetry, for which a person was important in itself, his thoughts and feelings, his attitude to eternity, to God, to Love are important. and Death in the philosophical, metaphysical sense. The poets of the Silver Age, both in their artistic work and in theoretical articles and statements, questioned the idea of progress for literature. For example, one of the brightest creators of the Silver Age, Osip Mandelstam, wrote that the idea of progress is "the most disgusting kind of school ignorance." And Alexander Blok in 1910 stated: “The sun of naive realism has set; it is impossible to comprehend anything outside of symbolism. Poets of the Silver Age believed in art, in the power of the word. Therefore, for their creativity, immersion in the element of the word, the search for new means of expression is indicative. They cared not only about the meaning, but also about the style - the sound, the music of the word and complete immersion in the elements were important for them. This immersion led to the cult of life creation (the inseparability of the creator's personality and his art). And almost always in connection with this, the poets of the Silver Age were unhappy in their personal lives, and many of them ended badly.
The literature of the Silver Age in Russia, created at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, is an important part of the artistic heritage of our country. This time was characterized by the presence of many different directions and currents, ideological inconsistency, inherent not only in various authors, but also taking place even in the work of individual writers, composers, and artists. During this period, there was an update, a rethinking of many types and genres of creativity. As noted by M.V. Nesterov, there was a "general reassessment of values."
Even among progressive thinkers and cultural figures, there was an ambivalent attitude towards the creative heritage left by the revolutionary democrats.
Decadence
In general, and the literature of the Silver Age in Russia, in particular, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, were marked by the widespread decadence (“decadence”), which proclaimed faith in reason, the loss of civic ideals, and withdrawal into personal, individual experiences. Thus, some part of the intelligentsia sought to "get away" from the difficulties of life into the world of irreality, dreams, and sometimes mysticism. This process took place, because at that time there was a crisis in public life, and artistic creativity only reflected it.
Decadence captured even the representatives of the realistic. However, most often such ideas were still characteristic of the representatives of the modernist trends.
Modernism and realism in art
The term "modernism" is used in relation to many types of art of the 20th century. It appeared at the beginning of the century, and its predecessor was realism. However, by that time the latter had not yet gone into the past, thanks to the influence of modernism, new features arose in it: the “framework” of the vision of life moved apart, and the search for means of self-expression of the individual in artistic creativity began.
The most important feature of the art of the early 20th century is the synthesis, the unification of various forms.
Turn of the century literature
Back in the 90s of the 19th century, directions were outlined in Russian literature that opposed the realism prevailing at that time. Chief among them was modernism. Many writers of the Silver Age (we will consider the list, directions and their main representatives below) one way or another left realism. They continued to create, creating new trends and directions.
Modernism
Literature of the Silver Age in Russia opens with modernism. It united various poets and writers, sometimes very different in their ideological and artistic appearance. At that time, active modernist searches began, which were largely inspired by F. Nietzsche, as well as some Russian writers, for example, A.A. Kamensky, M.P. Artsybashev and others. They proclaimed the freedom of literary creativity, called themselves its priests, preached the cult of the "superman" who renounced social and moral ideals.
Symbolism
As a direction, symbolism in Russia took shape at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Allocate "senior" symbolists, which include V. Bryusov, F. Sologub, K. Balmont, Z. Gippius and others who were the first to create in this direction. The younger representatives include the Silver Age writers A. Bely, V. Ivanov, S. Solovyov, A. Blok and others. The theoretical, aesthetic and philosophical foundations of this trend were very diverse. For example, according to V. Bryusov, symbolism was a purely artistic direction, and Merezhkovsky took Christianity as a basis; Vyacheslav Ivanov relied on the aesthetics and philosophy of antiquity as interpreted by Nietzsche, and A. Bely was fond of the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, V. Solovyov. The basis of the ideology of the "younger" symbolists is the philosophy of V. Solovyov with the idea of the advent of Eternal Femininity and the Third Testament.
The Symbolists left as a legacy both poetry and prose, drama. But the most characteristic was poetry, in various genres of which many writers of the Silver Age worked in this direction.
V.Ya. Bryusov
Creativity V.Ya. Bryusov (1873-1924) is marked by many ideological searches. The revolutionary events of 1905 aroused his admiration and marked the beginning of the poet's departure from symbolism. However, Bryusov did not immediately choose a new direction, as he formed his own attitude towards the revolution, which was very contradictory. The poet joyfully welcomed the forces that, in his opinion, were to cleanse Russia of its former principles and beliefs and put an end to the old world. However, in his work, he also noted that this elemental force carries destruction. "To break - I will be with you! To build - no!" - wrote V.Ya. Bryusov.
His work is characterized by a desire for a scientific understanding of life, a revival of interest in history, which was shared by other writers of the Silver Age (the list of representatives of symbolism was indicated above).
Realism
The ideological contradictions characteristic of the era as a whole also influenced some realist writers. For example, in the work of L.N. Andreev reflected a departure from realistic principles.
But in general, realism has not disappeared. The literature of the Silver Age, whose poets emerged from realism, retained this trend. The fate of an ordinary person, various social problems, life in many of its manifestations were still reflected in culture. One of the greatest representatives of realism at that time was the writer A. Bunin (1870-1953). In difficult pre-revolutionary times, he created the story "The Village" (in 1910) and "Dry Valley" (in 1911).
Acmeism
In 1910, there was a controversy around symbolism, and its crisis was outlined. This direction is gradually being replaced by acmeism ("acme" in Greek - the highest degree, blooming time). The founders of the new trend are considered to be N.S. Gumilyov and This group also included writers of the Silver Age O.E. Mandelstam, M.A. Kuzmin, V. Khodasevich, A.A. Akhmatova, M.A. Zenkevich and others.
In contrast to some obscurity, vagueness of symbolism, the acmeists proclaimed earthly existence, "a clear view of life" as their support. In addition, the acmeist literature of the Silver Age (whose poets and writers have just been listed) introduced an aesthetic-hedonistic function into art, trying to get away from social problems in poetry. In acmeism, decadent motifs are clearly audible, and philosophical idealism has become the theoretical support of this trend. Some Russian writers of the Silver Age went further in their work, which acquired new ideological and artistic qualities (for example, A.A. Akhmatova, M.A. Zenkevich, S.M. Gorodetsky).
In 1912, the collection "Hyperborea" was born, in which the new first declared itself. Acmeists considered themselves the successors of symbolism, about which Gumilyov said that he had "completed his circle of development", and proclaimed the rejection of rebellion, the struggle to change the conditions of life, which the literature of the Silver Age often expressed.
Writers - representatives of acmeism tried to revive the concreteness, objectivity of the image, to cleanse it of mysticism. However, their images are very different from realistic ones, as S. Gorodetsky put it, they seem to be "... born for the first time" and appear as something hitherto unseen.
A.A. Akhmatova
A.A. Akhmatova. The first collection of her poems "Evening" appeared in 1912. It is characterized by restrained intonations, psychologism, intimacy of themes, emotionality and deep lyricism. A.A. Akhmatova clearly started from the idea of "original Adam" proclaimed by the Acmeists. Her work is characterized by love for a person, faith in his abilities and spiritual strength. The main part of the works of this poetess falls on the Soviet years.
Akhmatova's first two collections, the aforementioned "Evening" and "Rosary" (1914), brought her great fame. They reflect an intimate, narrow world, in which notes of sadness and sadness are guessed. The theme of love here, the most important and the only one, is closely connected with the suffering caused by biographical facts from the life of the poetess.
N.S. Gumilyov
The artistic heritage of N.S. Gumilyov. In the work of this poet, the main themes were historical and exotic, and he also sang "a strong personality." Gumilyov developed the form of verse, made it more precise and precise.
The work of the acmeists was not always opposed to the symbolists, because in their works one can find "other worlds", longing for them. Gumilyov, who at first welcomed the revolution, a year later was already writing poems about the death of the world, the end of civilization. He suddenly understands the devastating consequences of the war, which can be fatal for humanity. In his poem "Worker" he seems to foresee his death from the proletarian's shot, a bullet "that will separate me from the earth." Nikolai Stepanovich was shot allegedly for participating in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy.
Some poets and writers of the Silver Age - representatives of acmeism subsequently emigrated. Others have never been able to do it. For example, Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, wife of N.S. Gumilyov, did not accept the Great October Revolution, but refused to leave her native country. These events left a big mark in her soul, and the poetess was not immediately able to return to creativity. However, the beginning of the Great Patriotic War again awakened in her a patriot, a poet, confident in the victory of his country (works "Courage", "Oath" and others).
Futurism
At the same time as acmeism (that is, in 1910-1912), futurism arises. He, like other directions, was heterogeneous, highlighting several currents. The largest of them, cubo-futurism, united the poets V.V. Mayakovsky, V.V. Khlebnikova, D.D. Burliuk, V.V. Kamensky, and others. Another variety of futurism was egofuturism, represented by the work of I. Severyanin. The Centrifuge group included poets who were beginning at that time and B.L. Pasternak, as well as other writers and writers of the Silver Age.
Futurism revolutionized form, which now became independent of content, proclaimed freedom of speech, completely abandoning literary continuity and traditions. The Futurists' Manifesto "Slapping the Face of Public Taste", published in 1912, called for the overthrow of such great authorities as Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky.
Writers of the Silver Age of Russian Literature V.V. Kamensky and V. Khlebnikov managed to conduct successful experiments with the word, which influenced the further development of Russian poetry.
V.V. Mayakovsky
Among the Futurists, the great poet V.V. Mayakovsky (1893-1930). In 1912, his first poems were published. Mayakovsky was not only against "all kinds of junk", but also proclaimed the need to create a new one in public life. Vladimir Vladimirovich foresaw the October Revolution, denounced the kingdom of the "fat", which was reflected in his poems "War and Peace", "A Cloud in Pants", "Man", "Flute-Spine", which denied all capitalist system and proclaimed faith in man.
Other poets and writers of the Silver Age
In the years preceding the revolution, there were other bright poets and writers of the Silver Age of Russian literature, who are difficult to attribute to one direction or another, for example, M.A. Voloshin and M.I. Tsvetaeva. The creativity of the latter is characterized by demonstrative independence, as well as rejection of generally accepted behavioral norms and ideas.
Russian culture of that time was the result of a long and difficult journey. Its integral features invariably remained high humanism, nationality and democracy, despite high pressure government reaction. More detailed information can be found in any textbook ("Literature", grade 11), the Silver Age is necessarily included in the school curriculum.
Silver Age in Russian Literature
The Russian poetic “silver age” traditionally fits into the beginning of the 20th century, in fact, its source is the 19th century, and it has all its roots in the “golden age”, in the work of A.S. Pushkin, in the legacy of Pushkin’s galaxy, in Tyutchev’s philosophy, into the impressionistic lyrics of Fet, into Nekrasov's proseisms, into the lines of K. Sluchevsky, full of tragic psychologism and vague forebodings. In other words, the 1990s began leafing through draft copies of books that soon formed the library of the 20th century. Since the 90s, literary sowing began, which brought shoots.
The term “Silver Age” itself is very conditional and covers a phenomenon with controversial outlines and uneven relief. For the first time this name was proposed by the philosopher N. Berdyaev, but it finally entered the literary circulation in the 60s of this century.
The poetry of this century was characterized primarily by mysticism and a crisis of faith, spirituality, and conscience. The lines became the sublimation of mental illness, mental disharmony, internal chaos and confusion.
All the poetry of the "Silver Age", greedily absorbing the heritage of the Bible, ancient mythology, the experience of European and world literature, is closely connected with Russian folklore, with its songs, lamentations, legends and ditties.
However, sometimes they say that the "Silver Age" is a Western phenomenon. Indeed, he chose as his guidelines the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde, the individualistic spiritualism of Alfred de Vigny, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche's superman. The "Silver Age" found its ancestors and allies in the most different countries Europe and in different centuries: Villon, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Novalis, Shelley, Calderon, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, d'Annuzio, Gauthier, Baudelaire, Verhaarn.
In other words, at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries there was a reassessment of values from the standpoint of Europeanism. But in the light of the new era, which was the exact opposite of the one that it replaced, the national, literary and folklore treasures appeared in a different, brighter than ever light.
It was a creative space full of sunshine, bright and life-giving, longing for beauty and self-affirmation. And although we call this time the "silver" and not the "golden age", perhaps it was the most creative era in Russian history.
“Silver Age” is perceived by most readers as a metaphor for good, beloved writers of the early 20th century. Depending on personal taste, there may be A. Blok and V. Mayakovsky, D. Merezhkovsky and I. Bunin, N. Gumilyov and S. Yesenin, A. Akhmatova and A. Kruchenykh, F. Sologub and A. Kuprin.
“School literary criticism” for completeness of the picture is added by the named list of M. Gorky and a number of writers of the “Znanevites”
(artists grouped around the Gorky publishing house "Knowledge").
With this understanding, the Silver Age becomes synonymous with the long-standing and much more scientific concept of “literature of the late 19th - early 20th centuries”.
The poetry of the Silver Age can be divided into several main currents such as: SYMBOLISM. (D. Merezhkovsky,
K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, F. Sologub, A. Blok, A. Bely), PRE-ACMEISM. ACMEISM. (M. Kuzmin, N. Gumilyov,
A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam),
“PEASANT LITERATURE” (N. Klyuev, S. Yesenin)
FUTURISTS OF THE SILVER AGE (I. Severyanin, V. Khlebnikov)
SYMBOLISM
Russian symbolism as a literary trend developed at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The theoretical, philosophical and aesthetic roots and sources of creativity of writers-symbolists were very diverse. So V. Bryusov considered symbolism a purely artistic direction, Merezhkovsky relied on Christian teaching, Vyach. Ivanov was looking for theoretical support in the philosophy and aesthetics of the ancient world, refracted through the philosophy of Nietzsche; A. Bely was fond of Vl. Solovyov, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche.
The artistic and journalistic organ of the Symbolists was the journal Scales (1904-1909). . For us, there can be no question of reconciling the path of an individual heroic individual with the instinctive movements of the masses, always subordinated to narrowly selfish, material motives.
These attitudes determined the struggle of the symbolists against democratic literature and art, which was expressed in the systematic slander of Gorky, in an effort to prove that, having become in the ranks of proletarian writers, he ended as an artist, in an attempt to discredit revolutionary democratic criticism and aesthetics, its great creators. - Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky. The Symbolists tried in every possible way to make Pushkin, Gogol, called Vyach. Ivanov "a frightened spy of life", Lermontov, who, according to the same Vyach. Ivanov, the first one trembled with “a presentiment of the symbol of symbols - Eternal Femininity” c.
A sharp opposition between symbolism and realism is also connected with these attitudes. “While realist poets,” writes K. Balmont, “view the world naively, as simple observers, obeying its material basis, symbolist poets, recreating materiality with their complex impressionability, rule over the world and penetrate into its mysteries.” The Symbolists seek to oppose reason and intuition: "... Art is the comprehension of the world in other, non-rational ways," asserts V. Bryusov and calls the works of the Symbolists "mystical keys of secrets" that help a person reach freedom."
The legacy of the Symbolists is represented by poetry, prose, and drama. However, the most characteristic is poetry.
V. Ya. Bryusov (1873 - 1924) passed a complex and difficult path of ideological searches. The revolution of 1905 aroused the admiration of the poet and contributed to the beginning of his departure from symbolism. However, Bryusov did not immediately come to a new understanding of art. Bryusov's attitude to the revolution is complex and contradictory. He welcomed the cleansing forces that rose to fight the old world, but believed that they only bring the element of destruction:
I see a new fight in the name of a new will!
Break - I'll be with you! build no!
The poetry of V. Bryusov of this time is characterized by the desire for a scientific understanding of life, the awakening of interest in history. A. M. Gorky highly valued the encyclopedic education of V. Ya. Bryusov, calling him the most cultured writer in Rus'. Bryusov accepted and welcomed the October Revolution and actively participated in the construction of Soviet culture.
The ideological contradictions of the era (one way or another) influenced individual realist writers. In the creative fate of L. N. Andreev (1871 - 1919), they were reflected in a well-known departure from the realistic method. However, realism as a trend in artistic culture retained its position. Russian writers continued to be interested in life in all its manifestations, the fate of the common man, and the important problems of social life.
The traditions of critical realism continued to be preserved and developed in the work of the great Russian writer I. A. Bunin (1870 - 1953). His most significant works of that time are the stories “Village” (1910) and “Dry Valley” (1911).
1912 was the beginning of a new revolutionary upsurge in the social and political life of Russia.
D. Merezhkovsky, F. Sologub, Z. Gippius, V. Bryusov, K. Balmont and others are a group of “senior” symbolists who were the initiators of the movement. In the early 900s, a group of "younger" symbolists emerged - A. Bely, S. Solovyov, Vyach. Ivanov, "A. Blok and others.
The basis of the platform of the “younger” symbolists is the idealistic philosophy of Vl. Solovyov with his idea of the Third Testament and the advent of Eternal Femininity.Vl. Solovyov argued that the highest task of art is “... the creation of a universal spiritual organism”, that a work of art is an image of an object and phenomenon “in the light of the future world”, which explains the understanding of the role of the poet as a theurgist, a clergyman. This, according to A. Bely, "combines the heights of symbolism as an art with mysticism."
The recognition that there are “other worlds”, that art should strive to express them, determines the artistic practice of symbolism as a whole, the three principles of which are proclaimed in D. Merezhkovsky’s work “On the Causes of the Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature”. It is “... mystical content, symbols and expansion of artistic impressionability”.
Based on the idealistic premise of the primacy of consciousness, the symbolists argue that reality, reality is the creation of the artist:
My dream - and all spaces
And all the lines
The whole world is one of my decorations,
My footprints
(F. Sologub)
“Having broken the fetters of thought, to be shackled is a dream,” calls K. Balmont. The vocation of the poet is to connect the real world with the world beyond.
The poetic declaration of symbolism is clearly expressed in the poem by Vyach. Ivanov "Among the Deaf Mountains":
And I thought: “Oh genius! Like this horn
You must sing the song of the earth, so that in the hearts
Wake up another song. Blessed is he who hears."
.And from behind the mountains there was an answering voice:
“Nature is a symbol, like this horn. She
Sounds like an echo. And the sound is god.
Blessed is he who hears the song and hears the echo.”
Symbolist poetry is poetry for the elite, for the aristocrats of the spirit.
A symbol is an echo, a hint, an indication; it conveys a hidden meaning.
Symbolists strive to create a complex, associative metaphor, abstract and irrational. This is “sonorous-sounding silence” by V. Bryusov, “And bright eyes are dark rebelliousness” by Vyach. Ivanov, “dry deserts of dawn” by A. Bely and by him: “Day - dull pearls - a tear - flows from sunrise to sunset”. Quite accurately, this technique is revealed in the poem 3. Gippius "Seamstress".
On all phenomena there is a seal.
One seems to merge with the other.
Having accepted one - I try to guess
Behind him is something else, something that is hidden."
The sound expressiveness of the verse acquired a very great importance in the poetry of the Symbolists, for example, in F. Sologub:
And two deep glasses
From thin-voiced glass
You substituted for the light cup
And sweet lila foam,
Lila, lila, lila, rocked
Two dark scarlet glasses.
Whiter, lily, alley gave
Bela was you and ala... "
The revolution of 1905 found a peculiar refraction in the work of the Symbolists.
Merezhkovsky greeted the year 1905 with horror, having witnessed with his own eyes the coming of the “coming boor” predicted by him. Blok approached the events excitedly, with a keen desire to understand. V. Bryusov welcomed the cleansing thunderstorm.
By the tenth years of the twentieth century, symbolism needed to be updated. “In the depths of symbolism itself,” V. Bryusov wrote in the article “The Meaning of Modern Poetry,” new trends arose that tried to infuse new forces into a decrepit organism. But these attempts were too partial, their initiators too imbued with the same traditions of the school, for the renovation to be of any significance.
The last pre-October decade was marked by searches in modernist art. The controversy surrounding symbolism that took place in 1910 among the artistic intelligentsia revealed its crisis. As N. S. Gumilyov put it in one of his articles, “symbolism has completed its circle of development and is now falling.” It was replaced by akmeizl ~ (from the Greek “acme” - the highest degree of something, the flowering time). N. S. Gumilyov (1886 - 1921) and S. M. Gorodetsky (1884 - 1967) are considered the founders of acmeism. The new poetic group included A. A. Akhmatova, O. E. Mandelstam, M. A. Zenkevich, M. A. Kuzmin and others.
ACMEISM
Acmeists, in contrast to the symbolist nebula, proclaimed the cult of real earthly existence, "a courageously firm and clear outlook on life." But at the same time, they tried to affirm, first of all, the aesthetic-hedonistic function of art, evading social problems in his poetry. In the aesthetics of acmeism, decadent tendencies were clearly expressed, and philosophical idealism remained its theoretical basis. However, among the acmeists there were poets who in their work were able to go beyond this “platform” and acquire new ideological and artistic qualities (A. A. Akhmatova, S. M. Gorodetsky, M. A. Zenkevich).
In 1912, with the collection “Hyperborea”, a new literary trend declared itself, which appropriated the name acmeism (from the Greek acme, which means the highest degree of something, the time of prosperity). The “shop of poets”, as its representatives called themselves, included N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, S. Gorodetsky, G. Ivanov, M. Zenkevich and others. M. Kuzmin, M. Voloshin also joined this direction. , V. Khodasevich and others.
Acmeists considered themselves the heirs of a “worthy father” - symbolism, which, in the words of N. Gumilyov, “... has completed its circle of development and is now falling.” Approving the bestial, primitive principle (they also called themselves Adamists), the Acmeists continued to “remember the unknowable” and in its name proclaimed any refusal to fight for changing life. “To rebel in the name of other conditions of being here, where there is death,” writes N. Gumilyov in his work “The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism,” “is as strange as a prisoner breaking a wall when there is an open door in front of him.”
S. Gorodetsky also affirms the same: “After all the “rejections”, the world is irrevocably accepted by acmeism, in the totality of beauties and ugliness.” Modern man felt like a beast, “deprived of both claws and wool” (M. Zenkevich “Wild Porphyry”), Adam, who “... looked around with the same clear, keen eye, accepted everything that he saw, and sang hallelujah to life and the world.”
And at the same time, notes of doom and longing constantly sound among acmeists. The work of A. A. Akhmatova (A. A. Gorenko, 1889 - 1966) occupies a special place in the poetry of acmeism. Her first poetry collection “Evening” was published in 1912. Critics immediately noted the distinctive features of her poetry: restraint of intonations, emphasized intimacy of themes, psychologism. Akhmatova's early poetry is deeply lyrical and emotional. With her love for man, her faith in his spiritual powers and possibilities, she clearly departed from the acmeist idea of “original Adam”. The main part of the work of A. A. Akhmatova falls on the Soviet period.
The first collections by A. Akhmatova "Evening" (1912) and "Rosary" (1914) brought her great fame. A closed, narrow intimate world is displayed in her work, painted in tones of sadness and sadness:
I do not ask for wisdom or strength.
Oh, just let me warm myself by the fire!
I'm cold... Winged or wingless,
The merry god will not visit me."
The theme of love, the main and only one, is directly related to suffering (which is due to the facts of the biography of the petess):
Let it lie like a tombstone
On the life of my love."
Characterizing early work A. Akhmatova, Al. Surkov says that she appears “... as a poet of a sharply defined poetic individuality and strong lyrical talent ... emphatically “feminine” intimate lyrical experiences ...”.
A. Akhmatova understands that “we live solemnly and difficultly”, that “somewhere there is simple life and light, ”but she does not want to give up this life:
Yes, I loved them, those gatherings of the night -
Ice glasses on a small table,
Over black coffee odorous, thin steam,
Fireplace red heavy, winter heat,
The gaiety of a caustic literary joke
And a friend's first look, helpless and creepy."
The acmeists sought to return to the image its living concreteness, objectivity, to free it from mystical encryption, about which O. Mandelstam spoke very angrily, assuring that the Russian symbolists “... sealed all the words, all the images, destining them exclusively for liturgical use. It turned out to be extremely uncomfortable - neither pass, nor stand up, nor sit down. You can't dine on a table, because it's not just a table. It’s stupid to light a fire, because this, perhaps, means such that you yourself will not be happy later. ”
And at the same time, acmeists argue that their images are sharply different from realistic ones, because, in the words of S. Gorodetsky, they “... are born for the first time” “as hitherto unseen, but now real phenomena.” This determines the sophistication and peculiar mannerism of the acmeistic image, no matter how deliberate animal wildness it appears. For example, Voloshin:
People are animals, people are reptiles,
Like a hundred-eyed evil spider,
They entwine their glances."
The range of these images is narrowed, which achieves extreme beauty, and which allows you to achieve ever greater sophistication when describing it:
Slower snow hive
More transparent than crystal windows,
And a turquoise veil
Carelessly thrown on a chair.
Fabric intoxicated with itself
Indulged in the caress of light,
She experiences summer
As if untouched by winter.
And if in ice diamonds
Eternity frost flows,
Here is the flutter of dragonflies
Fast-living, blue-eyed."
(O. Mandelstam)
Significant in its artistic value is the literary heritage of N. S. Gumilyov. Exotic and historical themes prevailed in his work, he was a singer of a “strong personality”. Gumilyov played a large role in the development of the form of verse, which was distinguished by its sharpness and accuracy.
In vain did the Acmeists dissociate themselves so sharply from the Symbolists. We meet the same “other worlds” and longing for them in their poetry. Thus, N. Gumilyov, who hailed the imperialist war as a “holy” cause, asserting that “seraphim, clear and winged, visible behind the shoulders of warriors,” a year later wrote poems about the end of the world, about the death of civilization:
Monsters are heard peaceful roars,
Suddenly, the rain is pouring down,
And everyone tightens up the fat ones
Light green horsetails.
Once a proud and brave conqueror understands the destroyer
the destructiveness of the enmity that has engulfed mankind:
Isn't it all the same? Let the time roll
We understand you, earth:
You're just a gloomy porter
At the entrance to God's fields.
This explains their rejection of the Great October socialist revolution. But their fate was not uniform. Some of them emigrated; N. Gumilyov allegedly "took an active part in the counter-revolutionary conspiracy" and was shot. In the poem "Worker" he predicted his end at the hands of the proletarian, who cast a bullet, "which will separate me from the earth."
And the Lord will reward me in full
For my short and short century.
I did it in a light gray blouse
A short old man.
Such poets as S. Gorodetsky, A. Akhmatova, V. Narbut, M. Zenkevich could not emigrate.
For example, A. Akhmatova, who did not understand and did not accept the revolution, refused to leave her homeland:
I had a voice. He called comfortingly
He said: "Come here,
Leave your land deaf and sinful,
Leave Russia forever.
I will wash the blood from your hands,
I will take out black shame from my heart,
I will cover with a new name
The pain of defeat and resentment.
But indifferent and calm
I covered my ears with my hands
She did not immediately return to creativity. But the Great Patriotic War again awakened in her a poet, a patriot poet, confident in the victory of his Motherland (“My-zhestvo”, “Oath”, etc.). A. Akhmatova wrote in her autobiography that for her in verse "... my connection with time, with the new life of my people."
FUTURISM
Simultaneously with acmeism in 1910 - 1912. futurism emerged. Like other modernist currents, it was internally contradictory. The most significant of the futuristic groups, which later received the name of cubo-futurism, united such poets as D. D. Burliuk, V. V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, V. V. Kamensky, V. V. Mayakovsky, and some others. A variety of futurism was the ego-futurism of I. Severyanin (I. V. Lotarev, 1887 - 1941). In a group of futurists called "Centrifuge" they began their creative way Soviet poets N. N. Aseev and B. L. Pasternak.
Futurism proclaimed a revolution of form, independent of content, the absolute freedom of poetic speech. Futurists abandoned literary traditions. In their manifesto with the shocking title "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste", published in a collection with the same name in 1912, they called for Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy to be thrown off the "Steamboat of Modernity". A. Kruchenykh defended the poet's right to create an “abstruse” language that does not have a specific meaning. In his writings, Russian speech was indeed replaced by a meaningless set of words. However, V. Khlebnikov (1885 - 1922), V.V. Kamensky (1884 - 1961) managed to realize in their creative practice interesting experiments in the field of the word, which had a beneficial effect on Russian and Soviet poetry.
Among the futurist poets, the creative path of V. V. Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930) began. His first poems appeared in print in 1912. From the very beginning, Mayakovsky stood out in the poetry of Futurism, introducing his own theme into it. He always spoke not only against "all sorts of junk", but also for the creation of a new one in public life.
In the years leading up to the Great October Revolution, Mayakovsky was a passionate revolutionary romantic, an accuser of the realm of the "fat", foreseeing a revolutionary thunderstorm. The pathos of the denial of the entire system of capitalist relations, the humanistic faith in man sounded with great force in his poems “A Cloud in Pants”, “Flute-Spine”, “War and Peace”, “Man”. The theme of the poem "A Cloud in Pants", published in 1915 in a truncated form by censorship, Mayakovsky later defined as four cries of "down": "Down with your love!", "Down with your art!", "Down with your system!" , “Down with your religion!” He was the first of the poets who showed in his works the truth of the new society.
In the Russian poetry of the pre-revolutionary years there were bright individualities that are difficult to attribute to a particular literary trend. Such are M. A. Voloshin (1877 - 1932) and M. I. Tsvetaeva (1892 - 1941).
After 1910, another trend arose - futurism, which sharply opposed itself not only to the literature of the past, but also to the literature of the present, which entered the world with the desire to overthrow everything and everyone. This nihilism was also manifested in the external design of futuristic collections, which were printed on wrapping paper or reverse side wallpaper, and in the titles - "Mare's Milk", "Dead Moon", etc.
In the first collection “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912), a declaration signed by D. Burliuk, A. Kruchenykh, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky was published. In it, the Futurists asserted themselves and only themselves as the only spokesmen for their era. They demanded “Give up Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and so on. and so on. from the Steamboat of our time”, they denied at the same time “Balmont’s perfumery fornication”, talked about the “dirty mucus of books written by the endless Leonid Andreevs”, indiscriminately discounted Gorky, Kuprin, Blok, etc.
Rejecting everything, they affirmed “The lightning of the new coming Beauty of the Self-valuable (self-sufficient) Word”. Unlike Mayakovsky, they did not try to overthrow the existing system, but only sought to update the forms of reproduction of modern life.
The basis of Italian futurism with its slogan “war-on is the only hygiene of the world” was weakened in the Russian version, but, as V. Bryusov notes in the article “The Meaning of Modern Poetry”, this ideology “... appeared between the lines, and the masses of readers instinctively shunned this poetry."
“For the first time, the Futurists raised the form to the proper height,” V. Shershenevich claims, “giving it the value of an end in itself, the main element of a poetic work. They completely rejected the verses that are written for the idea.” This explains the emergence of a huge number of declared formal principles, such as: “In the name of the freedom of a personal case, we deny spelling” or “We have destroyed punctuation marks - rather than the role of the verbal mass - put forward and realized for the first time” (“The Judges' Garden”).
Futurist theorist V. Khlebnikov proclaims that the language of the world's future "will be a 'transrational' language." The word loses its semantic meaning, acquiring a subjective coloring: “We understand vowels as time and space (the nature of aspiration), consonants - paint, sound, smell.” V. Khlebnikov, seeking to expand the boundaries of the language and its possibilities, proposes the creation of new words based on the root feature, for example:
(roots: chur... and charm...)
We are enchanted and shy.
Enchanted there, avoiding here, Now churahar, then charahar, Here churil, there charil.
From the churyn, the gaze of the charyn.
There is a churavel, there is a charavel.
Charari! Churari!
Churel! Charel!
Chares and chures.
And shy away and shy away."
Futurists oppose deliberate de-aestheticization to the emphasized aestheticism of the poetry of the Symbolists and especially the Acmeists. So, in D. Burliuk, “poetry is a frayed girl”, “the soul is a tavern, and the sky is a tear”, in V. Shershenevich “in a spitting park”, a naked woman wants to “squeeze milk out of her saggy breasts”. In the review “The Year of Russian Poetry” (1914), V. Bryusov, noting the deliberate rudeness of the Futurists’ poems, rightly notes: “It is not enough to vilify everything that was, and everything that is outside your circle with swear words, in order to already find something new.”
He points out that all their innovations are imaginary, because we met with some of them among the poets of the 18th century, with others at Pushkin and Virgil, that the theory of sounds - colors was developed by T. Gauthier.
It is curious that with all the denials of other trends in art, the futurists feel their continuity from symbolism.
It is curious that A. Blok, who followed the work of Severyanin with interest, says with concern: “He has no theme,” and V. Bryusov, in an article of 1915 dedicated to Severyanin, points out: “Lack of knowledge and inability to think belittle the poetry of Igor Severyanin and extremely narrow its horizon. He reproaches the poet for bad taste, vulgarity, and especially sharply criticizes his military poems, which make a “painful impression”, “breaking the cheap applause of the public.”
A. Blok doubted back in 1912: "I'm afraid of the modernists that they have no core, but only talented curls around, emptiness."
. Russian culture on the eve of the Great October Revolution was the result of a complex and long journey. Its distinctive features have always been democracy, high humanism and genuine nationality, despite periods of cruel government reaction, when progressive thought and advanced culture were suppressed in every possible way.
The richest cultural heritage of the pre-revolutionary period, cultural values created over the centuries constitute the golden fund of our national culture
Velimir Khlebnikov
(Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov)
28.X. (09.XI.)1885-28.VI.1922
Khlebnikov attracted attention and aroused interest with his original personality, struck by his worldview and independence of views, rare for his age. He gets acquainted with the circle of metropolitan modernist poets (including Gumilyov and Kuzmin, whom he calls “his teacher”), visits the “bath” Vyach, famous in the artistic life of St. Petersburg of those years. Ivanov, where writers, philosophers, artists, musicians, artists gathered.
In 1910-1914, his poems, poems, dramas, prose were published, including such well-known ones as the poem "Crane", the poem "Maria Vechora", the play "Marquise Deses". In Kherson, the first brochure of the poet with mathematical and linguistic experiments "Teacher and Student" was published. A scientist and a science fiction writer, a poet and a publicist, he is completely absorbed in creative work. The poems "Rural Charm", "Forest Horror", etc., the play "Mistake of Death" were written. The books “Roar! Gloves. 1908 - 1914", "Creations" (Volume 1). In 1916, together with N. Aseev, he issued a declaration "The Trumpet of the Martians", in which Khlebnikov's division of mankind into "inventors" and "purchasers" was formulated. The main characters of his poetry were Time and the Word, it was through Time, fixed by the Word and turned into a spatial fragment, that the philosophical unity of “space-time” was realized for him. O. Mandelstam wrote: “Khlebnikov fiddles with words like a mole, meanwhile he dug passages in the earth for the future for a whole century ...” In 1920 he lives in Kharkov, writes a lot: “War in a mousetrap”, “Ladomir”, “ Three Sisters”, “Scratch in the Sky”, etc. In the city theater of Kharkov, Khlebnikov was elected “Chairman of the Globe”, with the participation of Yesenin and Mariengof.
The work of V. Khlebnikov is divided into three parts: theoretical studies in the field of style and illustrations for them, poetic creativity and comic poems. Unfortunately, the boundaries between them are drawn extremely carelessly, and often a beautiful poem is spoiled by an admixture of an unexpected and awkward joke or word formation that is still far from thought out.
Very sensitive to the roots of words, Viktor Khlebnikov deliberately neglects inflections, sometimes discarding them completely, sometimes changing them beyond recognition. He believes that each vowel contains not only an action, but also its direction: thus, the bull is the one who strikes, the side is that which is struck; beaver - what they hunt for, babr (tiger) - the one who hunts, etc.
Taking the root of a word and adding arbitrary inflections to it, he creates new words. So, from the root "sme", he produces "smekhachi", "smeevo", "smeyunchiki", "to laugh", etc.
As a poet, Viktor Khlebnikov incantably loves nature. He is never satisfied with what he has. His deer turns into a carnivorous beast, he sees dead birds come to life on the ladies' hats at the "opening day", how clothes fall off people and turn - woolen into sheep, linen into blue flowers of flax.
Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 into a Jewish family. From his mother, Mandelstam inherited, along with a predisposition to heart disease and musicality, a heightened sense of the sounds of the Russian language.
Mandelstam, being a Jew, chooses to be a Russian poet - not just "Russian-speaking", but precisely Russian. And this decision is not so self-evident: the beginning of the century in Russia is a time of rapid development of Jewish literature, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, and, to some extent, in Russian. Combining Jewry and Russia, Mandelstam's poetry carries universalism, combining national Russian Orthodoxy and the national practice of the Jews.
My staff, my freedom -
core of life,
Soon the truth of the people
Will my truth become?
I did not bow to the earth
Before I found myself
Staff took, cheered
And went to distant Rome.
And the snow on the black fields
Will never melt
And the sadness of my family
I'm still a stranger.
The first Russian revolution and the events accompanying it, for the Mandelstam generation, coincided with the entry into life. During this period, Mandelstam became interested in politics, but then, at the turning point from adolescence to youth, he left politics for the sake of poetry.
Mandelstam avoids words that are too conspicuous: he has neither the revelry of exquisite archaisms, like Vyacheslav Ivanov, nor the injection of vulgarisms, like Mayakovsky's, nor the abundance of neologisms, like Tsvetaeva's, nor the influx of everyday phrases and catchphrases, like Pasternak's.
There are chaste charms -
High way, deep world,
Far from ethereal lyres
Lars installed by me.
At carefully washed niches
At watchful sunsets
I listen to my penates
Always ecstatic silence.
The beginning of the First World War - the turn of the times:
My age, my beast, who can
look into your pupils
And glue with his blood
Two centuries of vertebrae?
Mandelstam notes that the time has passed for the final farewell to the Russia of Alexander (Alexander III and Alexander Pushkin), European, classical, architectural Russia. But before its end, it is precisely the doomed "greatness", namely the "historical forms and ideas" that surround the poet's mind. He must be convinced of their internal emptiness - not from external events, but from the internal experience of efforts to sympathize with the “sovereign world”, to feel into its system. He says goodbye to him in his own way, sorting through old motives, putting them in order, compiling a catalog for them by means of poetry. In the Mandelstam cipher system, the doomed Petersburg, precisely in its capacity as the imperial capital, is equivalent to that Judea, about which it is said that, having crucified Christ, “petrified” and is associated with the holy apostate and perishing Jerusalem. The colors that characterize the basis of grace Judaism are black and yellow. So these are the colors that characterize the St. Petersburg “sovereign world” (the colors of the Russian imperial standard).
The most significant of Mandelstam's responses to the 1917 revolution was the poem "The Twilight of Freedom". It is very difficult to bring it under the rubric of "accepting" or "not accepting" the revolution in a trivial sense, but the theme of despair is very loud in it:
Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom,
Great twilight year!
In the boiling night waters
The heavy forest is lowered.
You rise in deaf years, -
O sun, judge, people.
Let's glorify the fatal burden
Which the people's leader takes in tears.
Let us glorify the power of the gloomy burden,
Her unbearable oppression.
Who has a heart - he must hear the time,
As your ship sinks.
We are fighting legions
They tied the swallows - and now
The sun is not visible; all elements
Twittering, moving, living;
Through the nets - thick twilight -
The sun is not visible, and the earth is floating.
Well, let's try: huge, clumsy,
Squeaky steering wheel.
The earth is floating. Take heart, men.
Like a plow, dividing the ocean,
We will remember in the letey cold,
That the earth cost us ten heavens.
In this report, I tried to talk about the most interesting writers and their works. I deliberately chose writers not as famous as, for example: I. Bunin and N. Gumilyov, A. Blok and V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin and A. Akhmatova, A. Kuprin. But no less brilliant and famous in their time.
Poets of the Silver Age (Nikolai Gumilyov)
The "Silver Age" in Russian literature is the period of creativity of the main representatives of modernism, the period of the emergence of many talented authors. Conventionally, the year 1892 is considered the beginning of the "silver yoke", but its actual end came with the October Revolution.
Modernist poets denied social values and tried to create poetry designed to promote the spiritual development of man. One of the most famous trends in modernist literature was acmeism. Acmeists proclaimed the liberation of poetry from symbolist impulses to the "ideal" and called for a return from the ambiguity of images to the material world, object, "nature". But their poetry was also characterized by a tendency to aestheticism, to the poeticization of feelings. This is clearly seen in the work of a prominent representative of acmeism, one of the best Russian poets of the early 20th century, Nikolai Gumilyov, whose poems amaze us with the beauty of the word, the loftiness of the created images.
Gumilyov himself called his poetry the muse of distant wanderings, the poet was faithful to her until the end of his days. The famous ballad "Captains" from the collection of poems "Pearls", which brought Gumilyov wide fame, is a hymn to people who challenge fate and the elements. The poet appears before us as a singer of the romance of distant wanderings, courage, risk, courage:
The swift-winged ones are led by captains --
Discoverers of new lands
Who is not afraid of hurricanes
Who has known the maelstroms and stranded.
Whose is not the dust of lost charters -
The chest is soaked with the salt of the sea,
Who is the needle on the torn map
Marks his audacious path.
Even in the military lyrics of Nikolai Gumilyov, one can find romantic motives. Here is an excerpt from a poem included in the Quiver collection:
And bloody weeks
Dazzling and light
Above me, shrapnel is torn,
The blades of the birds take off faster.
I scream and my voice is wild
It's copper hitting copper
I, the bearer of a great thought,
I can't, I can't die.
Like thunder hammers
Or the waters of angry seas,
Golden heart of Russia
Beats rhythmically in my chest.
The romanticization of the battle, the feat was a feature of Gumilyov - a poet and a man with a pronounced rare chivalrous beginning both in poetry and in life. Contemporaries called Gumilyov a poet-warrior. One of them wrote: "He accepted the war with simplicity ... with straightforward fervor. He was, perhaps, one of those few people in Russia whose soul the war found in the greatest combat readiness." As you know, during the First World War, Nikolai Gumilyov volunteered to go to the front. From his prose and poetry, we can judge that the poet not only romanticized the military feat, but also saw and realized the whole horror of the war.
In the collection "Kolchan" a new theme for Gumilyov begins to emerge - the theme of Russia. Completely new motifs sound here - the creations and genius of Andrei Rublev and the bloody bunch of mountain ash, ice drift on the Neva and ancient Rus'. He gradually expands his themes, and in some poems he reaches the deepest insight, as if predicting his own fate:
He stands before a fiery mountain,
A short old man.
A calm look seems submissive
From the blinking of reddish eyelids.
All his comrades fell asleep,
Only he does not sleep alone yet:
He is all busy casting a bullet,
That will separate me from the earth.
The last lifetime collections of poems by N. Gumilyov were published in 1921 - these are "Tent" (African poems) and "Pillar of Fire". In them we see a new Gumilyov, whose poetic art was enriched by the simplicity of high wisdom, pure colors, and the masterful use of prosaic everyday and fantastic details. In the work of Nikolai Gumilyov, we find a reflection of the world around us in all its colors. In his poetry - exotic landscapes and customs of Africa. The poet penetrates deeply into the world of legends and traditions of Abyssinia, Rome, Egypt:
I know funny tales of mysterious lines
About the black maiden, about the passion of the young leader,
But you inhaled the heavy mist for too long,
You don't want to believe in anything but rain.
And how can I tell you about the tropical garden,
About slender palm trees, about the smell of unimaginable herbs.
You are crying? Listen... far away, on Lake Chad
Exquisite giraffe roams.
Each poem by Gumilyov opens up a new facet of the poet's views, his moods, his vision of the world. The content and refined style of Gumilyov's poems help us to feel the fullness of life. They are confirmation that a person himself can create a bright, colorful world, leaving the gray everyday life. An excellent artist, Nikolai Gumilyov left an interesting legacy and had a significant impact on the development of Russian poetry.
Gumilyov Nikolay Stepanovich
N. S. Gumilyov was born in Kronstadt in the family of a military doctor. In 1906 he received a certificate of graduation from the Nikolaev Tsarkoselskaya gymnasium, the director of which was I. F. Annensky. In 1905, the first collection of the poet, The Path of the Conquistadors, was published, which attracted the attention of V. Ya. Bryusov. The characters in the collection seem to have come from the pages of adventure novels from the era of the conquest of America, which the poet read in his adolescence. With them, the lyrical hero identifies himself - "a conquistador in an iron shell." The originality of the collection, saturated with common literary passages and poetic conventions, was given by the features that prevailed in Gumilyov's life behavior: love for the exotic, the romance of a feat, the will to live and create.
In 1907, Gumilyov left for Paris to continue his education at the Sorbonne, where he listened to lectures on French literature. He follows the artistic life of France with interest, establishes correspondence with V. Ya. Bryusov, and publishes the Sirius magazine. In Paris in 1908 Gumilyov's second collection "Romantic Flowers" was published, where the reader was again expected to meet with literary and historical exoticism, but the subtle irony that touched individual poems translates the conventional methods of romanticism into game plan and thereby outlines the contours of the author's position. Gumilyov works hard on poetry, achieving its "flexibility", "confident rigor", as he wrote in his program poem "To the Poet", and in the manner of "introducing realism of descriptions into the most fantastic plots" he follows the traditions of Leconte de Lisle, the French parnassian poet , considering such a path "salvation" from the symbolist "nebulae". According to I. F. Annensky, this "book reflected not only the search for beauty, but also the beauty of the search."
In the autumn of 1908 Gumilev made his first trip to Africa, to Egypt. The African continent captivated the poet: he becomes the discoverer of the African theme in Russian poetry. Acquaintance with Africa "from the inside" turned out to be especially fruitful during the following travels, in the winter of 1909-1910 and 1910-1911. in Abyssinia, the impressions of which were reflected in the cycle "Abyssinian Songs" (collection "Alien Sky").
Since September 1909, Gumilyov became a student of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. In 1910, the collection "Pearls" was published with a dedication to the "teacher" - V. Ya. Bryusov. The venerable poet responded with a review, where he noted that Gumilyov "lives in an imaginary and almost ghostly world ... he creates countries for himself and inhabits them with creatures created by him: people, animals, demons." Gumilyov does not leave the heroes of his early books, but they have changed markedly. In his poetry, psychologism is intensified, instead of "masks" people appear with their own characters and passions. Attention was also drawn to the confidence with which the poet went to mastering the skill of poetry.
In the early 1910s, Gumilyov was already a prominent figure in St. Petersburg literary circles. He is a member of the "young" editorial office of the journal "Apollo", where he regularly publishes "Letters on Russian Poetry" - literary critical studies, which represent a new type of "objective" review. At the end of 1911, he headed the "Workshop of Poets", around which a group of like-minded people formed, and acted as the ideological inspirer of the new literary direction- Acmeism, the basic principles of which he proclaimed in the manifesto article "The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism." His collection Alien Sky (1912), the pinnacle of Gumilyov's "objective" lyrics, became a poetic illustration for theoretical calculations. According to M. A. Kuzmin, the most important thing in the collection is the identification of the lyrical hero with Adam, the first man. The acmeist poet is like Adam, the discoverer of the world of things. He gives things "virgin names", fresh in their originality, freed from the old poetic contexts. Gumilyov formulated not only new concept poetic word, but also his understanding of man as a being who is aware of his natural givenness, "wise physiology" and accepts the fullness of the surrounding being.
With the outbreak of World War I, Gumilyov volunteered for the front. In the newspaper "Birzhevye Vedomosti" he publishes chronicle essays "Notes of a Cavalryman". In 1916, the book "Quiver" was published, which differed from the previous ones primarily by expanding the thematic range. Italian travel sketches side by side with meditative poems of philosophical and existential content. Here, for the first time, the Russian theme begins to sound, the poet's soul responds to the pain of his native country, devastated by the war. His gaze, turned to reality, acquires the ability to see through it. The poems included in the collection "Bonfire" (1918) reflected the intensity of the poet's spiritual search. As the philosophical nature of Gumilyov's poetry deepens, the world in his poems appears more and more as a divine cosmos ("Trees", "Nature"). He is disturbed by "eternal" themes: life and death, the perishability of the body and the immortality of the spirit, the otherness of the soul.
Gumilyov was not an eyewitness to the revolutionary events of 1917. At that time, he was abroad as part of the Russian expeditionary force: in Paris, then in London. His creative pursuits of this period were marked by an interest in Eastern culture. Gumilev compiled his collection The Porcelain Pavilion (1918) from free transcriptions of French translations of Chinese classical poetry (Li Bo, Du Fu, and others). The "oriental" style was perceived by Gumilyov as a kind of school of "verbal economy", poetic "simplicity, clarity and authenticity", which corresponded to his aesthetic attitudes.
Returning to Russia in 1918, Gumilyov immediately, with his characteristic energy, is included in the literary life of Petrograd. He is a member of the editorial board of the publishing house "World Literature", under his editorship and in his translation the Babylonian epic "Gilgamesh", the works of R. Southey, G. Heine, S. T. Coleridge are published. He lectures on the theory of verse and translation at various institutions, and runs the "Sounding Shell" studio for young poets. According to one of the poet's contemporaries, critic A. Ya. Levinson, "the young people were drawn to him from all sides, admiringly submitting to the despotism of the young master, who owns the philosopher's stone of poetry..."
In January 1921, Gumilyov was elected chairman of the Petrograd branch of the Union of Poets. In the same year, the last book, Pillar of Fire, was published. Now the poet is delving into the philosophical understanding of the problems of memory, creative immortality, the fate of the poetic word. The individual life force that fed Gumilyov's poetic energy earlier merges with the supra-individual. The hero of his lyrics reflects on the unknowable and, enriched with inner spiritual experience, rushes to the "India of the Spirit". This was not a return to the circles of symbolism, but it is clear that Gumilyov found in his worldview a place for those achievements of symbolism, which, as it seemed to him at the time of the acmeist "Sturm und Drang" a, led "into the realm of the unknown". , which sounds in Gumilyov's last poems, enhances the motives of empathy and compassion and gives them a universal and at the same time deeply personal meaning.
Gumilyov's life was tragically interrupted: he was executed as a participant in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, which, as it has now become known, was fabricated. In the minds of Gumilyov's contemporaries, his fate evoked associations with the fate of the poet of another era - Andre Chenier, who was executed by the Jacobins during the French Revolution.
"Silver Age" of Russian literature
Composition
V. Bryusov, N. Gumilyov, V. Mayakovsky
The 19th century, the "golden age" of Russian literature, was ending, and the 20th century began. This pivotal time went down in history under nice name"silver age". He gave rise to the great rise of Russian culture and became the beginning of its tragic fall. The beginning of the "Silver Age" is usually attributed to the 90s of the XIX century, when the poems of V. Bryusov, I. Annensky, K. Balmont and other remarkable poets appeared. The heyday of the "Silver Age" is considered 1915 - the time of its highest rise and end. The socio-political situation of that time was characterized by a deep crisis of the existing government, a stormy, restless atmosphere in the country, requiring decisive changes. Maybe that's why the paths of art and politics crossed. Just as society was intensely looking for ways to a new social order, writers and poets strove to master new artistic forms and put forward bold experimental ideas. The realistic depiction of reality ceased to satisfy the artists, and in the polemic with the classics of the 19th century, new literary trends were established: symbolism, acmeism, futurism. They offered different ways comprehension of being, but each of them was distinguished by the extraordinary music of the verse, the original expression of the feelings and experiences of the lyrical hero, and the aspiration to the future.
One of the first literary movements was symbolism, which united such different poets as K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, A. Bely and others. to express the moods, feelings and thoughts of the poet. Moreover, truth, insight can appear in the artist not as a result of reflection, but at the moment of creative ecstasy, as if sent down to him from above. Symbolist poets were carried away by the dream, asking global questions about how to save humanity, how to restore faith in God, achieve harmony, merging with the Soul of the World, Eternal Femininity, Beauty and Love.
V. Bryusov becomes a recognized meter of symbolism, embodied in his poems not only the formal innovative achievements of this movement, but also its ideas. A kind of creative manifesto of Bryusov was a small poem "To the Young Poet", which was perceived by contemporaries as a program of symbolism.
A pale young man with burning eyes,
Now I give you three covenants:
First accept: do not live in the present,
Only the future is the realm of the poet.
Remember the second: do not sympathize with anyone,
Love yourself endlessly.
Keep the third: worship art,
Only to him, recklessly, aimlessly.
Of course, the creative declaration proclaimed by the poet is not exhausted by the content of this poem. Bryusov's poetry is multifaceted, multifaceted and polyphonic, like the life it reflects. He possessed a rare gift to accurately convey every mood, every movement of the soul. Perhaps the main feature of his poetry lies in the precisely found combination of form and content.
And I want all my dreams
Reached to the word and to the light,
Found the traits you want.
The difficult goal expressed by Bryusov in "Sonnet to Form", I think, has been achieved. And this is confirmed by his amazing poetry. In the poem "Creativity" Bryusov managed to convey the feeling of the first, still semi-conscious stage of creativity, when the future work still looms "through the magic crystal".
Shadow of Uncreated Creatures
Swaying in a dream
Like blades of patching
On the enamel wall.
purple hands
On the enamel wall
Sleepily draw sounds
In resounding silence.
The Symbolists viewed life as the life of the Poet. Concentration on oneself is characteristic of the work of the remarkable symbolist poet K. Balmont. He himself was the meaning, theme, image and purpose of his poems. I. Ehrenburg very accurately noticed this feature of his poetry: "Balmont did not notice anything in the world, except for his own soul." Indeed, the external world existed for him only so that he could express his poetic "I".
I hate humanity
I run away from him, in a hurry.
My united fatherland -
My desert soul
The poet did not tire of following the unexpected turns of his soul, his changing impressions. Balmont tried to capture in the image, in words, the running moments, the flying time, raising transience into a philosophical principle.
I do not know wisdom suitable for others,
Only transiences I compose in verse.
In every evanescence I see worlds,
Full of changeable rainbow play.
The meaning of these lines, probably, is that a person must live every moment in which the fullness of his being is revealed. And the task of the artist is to wrest this moment from eternity and capture it in words. Symbolist poets were able to express their era in poetry with its instability, unsteadiness, transitivity.
Just as the rejection of realism gave birth to symbolism, a new literary movement - acmeism - arose in the course of the polemic with symbolism. He rejected the craving of symbolism for the unknown, focusing on the world of his own soul. Acmeism, according to Gumilyov, was not supposed to strive for the unknowable, but to turn to what can be understood, that is, to reality, trying to capture the diversity of the world as fully as possible. With such a view, the acmeist artist, unlike the symbolists, becomes involved in the world rhythm, although he gives an assessment of the phenomena depicted. In general, when you try to understand the essence of the program of acmeism, you encounter obvious contradictions and inconsistencies. In my opinion, Bryusov is right when he advised Gumilyov, Gorodetsky and Akhmatova "to abandon the fruitless pretension to form some kind of school of acmeism" and write good poetry instead. Indeed, now, at the end of the 20th century, the name of acmeism has been preserved only because the work of such outstanding poets as N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam is associated with it.
Gumilyov's early poems amaze with their romantic masculinity, the energy of rhythm, and emotional intensity. In his famous "Captains" the whole world appears as an arena of struggle, constant risk, the highest tension of forces on the verge of life and death.
Let the sea rage and lash
The crests of the waves rose into the sky -
Not one trembles before a thunderstorm,
None will turn the sails.
In these lines one hears a bold challenge to the elements and fate, they are opposed to risk-taking, courage and fearlessness. Exotic landscapes and customs of Africa, jungles, deserts, wild animals, the mysterious Lake Chad - all this wonderful world embodied in the collection "Romantic Flowers". No, this is not book romance. One gets the impression that the poet himself is invisibly present and involved in the verses. So deep is his penetration into the world of legends and legends of Abyssinia, Rome, Egypt and other exotic countries for a European. But for all the virtuosity of the depiction of reality, social motives are extremely rare in Gumilyov and other acmeist poets. Acmeism was characterized by extreme apoliticality, complete indifference to the topical problems of our time.
This is probably why acmeism had to give way to a new literary trend - futurism, which was distinguished by revolutionary rebellion, oppositional disposition against bourgeois society, its morality, aesthetic tastes, and the entire system of social relations. No wonder the first collection of futurists, who consider themselves poets of the future, bore the obviously defiant title "Slap in the face of public taste." Mayakovsky's early work was associated with futurism. In his youthful poems, one can feel the desire of the novice poet to amaze the reader with the novelty, unusualness of his vision of the world. And Mayakovsky really succeeded. For example, in the poem "Night" he uses an unexpected comparison, likening the illuminated windows to the player's hand with a fan of cards. Therefore, in the mind of the reader, the image of a city-player arises, obsessed with temptations, hopes, and a thirst for pleasure. But the dawn, extinguishing the lanterns, "kings in the crown of gas", dispels the night mirage.
Crimson and white discarded and crumpled,
handfuls of ducats were thrown into the green,
And the black palms of the runaway windows
handed out burning yellow cards.
Yes, these lines are not at all similar to the verses of classical poets. They clearly show the creative declaration of the futurists, who deny the art of the past. Such poets as V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky guessed the special spiritual state of their time in the union of poetry and struggle and tried to find new rhythms and images for the poetic embodiment of the seething revolutionary life.
The fates of the remarkable poets of the "Silver Age" developed differently. Someone could not bear life in an inhospitable homeland, someone, like Gumilyov, was shot without guilt, someone, like Akhmatova, remained in his native land until his last days, having experienced all the troubles and sorrows with her, someone put "a bullet point at his end" like Mayakovsky. But all of them created a real miracle at the beginning of the 20th century - the "silver age" of Russian poetry.
Analysis of the poem by N. Gumilyov "Giraffe"
Nikolai Gumilyov combined courage, courage, poetic ability to predict the future, childish curiosity for the world and a passion for travel. The poet managed to put these qualities and abilities into a poetic form.
Gumilyov was always attracted by exotic places and beautiful, music-sounding names, bright, almost colorless paintings. It was in the collection "Romantic Flowers" that the poem "Giraffe" (1907) was included, which for a long time became " calling card Gumilyov in Russian literature.
Nikolai Gumilyov from early youth attached exceptional importance to the composition of the work, its plot completeness. The poet called himself a "master of a fairy tale", combining in his poems dazzlingly bright, rapidly changing pictures with an extraordinary melody and musicality of the narration.
Exquisite giraffe roams.
Turning to a mysterious woman, whom we can only judge from the position of the author, the lyrical hero conducts a dialogue with the reader, one of the listeners of his exotic tale. A woman immersed in her worries, sad, does not want to believe in anything - why not a reader? Reading this or that poem, we willy-nilly express our opinion about the work, criticize it in one way or another, do not always agree with the poet's opinion, and sometimes do not understand it at all. Nikolai Gumilyov gives the reader the opportunity to observe the dialogue between the poet and the reader (listener of his poems) from the outside.
In his fairy-tale poem, the poet compares two spaces, distant on the scale of human consciousness and very close on the scale of the Earth. About the space that is "here", the poet says almost nothing, and this is not necessary. There is only a "heavy fog" that we inhale every minute. In the world we live in, only sadness and tears remain. This leads us to believe that heaven on Earth is impossible. Nikolai Gumilyov tries to prove the opposite: "... far, far away, on Lake Chad // An exquisite giraffe roams." Usually the expression "far, far" is written with a hyphen and refers to something that is completely unattainable. However, the poet, perhaps with some degree of irony, focuses the reader's attention on whether this continent is really so far away. It is known that Gumilev had a chance to visit Africa, to see with his own eyes the beauties he described (the poem "Giraffe" was written before Gumilev's first trip to Africa).
The world in which the reader lives is completely colorless, life here seems to flow in gray tones. On Lake Chad, like a precious diamond, the world glistens and shimmers. Nikolai Gumilyov, like other acmeist poets, uses objects in his works, not specific colors, giving the reader the opportunity to imagine one or another shade in his imagination: the skin of a giraffe, which is decorated with a magical pattern, seems to me bright orange with red-brown spots , the dark blue color of the water surface, on which moonlight glare spreads like a golden fan, bright orange sails of a ship sailing during sunset. Unlike the world we are accustomed to, in this space the air is fresh and clean, it absorbs the vapors from Lake Chad, the "smell of inconceivable herbs"...
Nikolai Gumilyov did not accidentally choose the giraffe in this poem. Standing firmly on its feet, with a long neck and a "magic pattern" on the skin, the giraffe has become the hero of many songs and poems. Perhaps one can draw a parallel between this exotic animal and man: he is just as calm, stately and gracefully built. It is also human nature to exalt oneself over all living beings. However, if peacefulness, "graceful harmony and bliss" are given to a giraffe by nature, then a person by nature is created to fight primarily with his own kind.
Analysis of the poem by N.S. Gumilyov "Giraffe"
In 1908, the second book of Nikolai Gumilyov, Romantic Flowers, was published in Paris, which was favorably evaluated by Valery Bryusov. It was in this book that the poem "Giraffe" was first published.
The poem consists of five quatrains (twenty lines). The idea of the poem is to describe the beauties and wonders of Africa. Gumilyov talks in great detail, multicolored and visibly about the landscapes of a hot country. Nikolai Stepanovich actually observed this splendor, because he visited Africa three times!
In his poem, the author uses the antithesis technique, but not specific, but implied. A person whose eye is accustomed to the Russian landscape paints a picture of an exotic country so visibly.
The story is about a "refined giraffe". The giraffe is the epitome of beautiful reality. Gumilyov uses vivid epithets to emphasize the unusualness of the African landscape: an exquisite giraffe, graceful harmony, a magical pattern, a marble grotto, mysterious countries, unthinkable grasses. The comparison is also used:
“Away, he is like the colored sails of a ship,
And his run is smooth, like a joyful bird flight.
The author addresses the whole poem to his beloved in order to improve her mood, to distract her from sad thoughts in rainy weather. But it doesn't work. It not only does not distract, but, on the contrary, enhances sadness precisely from the feeling of the opposite. The tale exacerbates the loneliness of the characters.
This is especially emphasized by the last stanza. The arrangement of punctuation marks suggests that the author failed to cheer up the girl:
"Listen: Far, far away on Lake Chad
Exquisite giraffe roams.
"You are crying? Listen... far away, on Lake Chad
Exquisite giraffe roams.
The person pauses for no reason. This suggests that he is no longer in the mood to talk.
Creativity of Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov.
N. S. Gumilyov was born in 1886 in the city of Kronstadt in the family of a military doctor. At the age of twenty, he received a certificate (triples in all the exact sciences, fours in the humanities, five only in logic) about the end of the Nikolaev Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium, the director of which was Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky. At the insistence of his father and of his own free will, he entered the Naval Corps.
While still a high school student, Gumilyov published his first collection of poems, The Path of the Conquistadors, in 1905. But he preferred not to remember it, never republished it, and even omitted it when counting his own collections. In this book, traces of a wide variety of influences are visible: from Nietzsche, who glorified a strong man, a creator who proudly accepts a tragic fate, to a contemporary of Gumilyov French writer Andre Gide, whose words “I became a nomad to voluptuously touch everything that wanders!” taken as an epigraph.
Critics believed that there were many poetic clichés in The Way of the Conquistadors. However, behind a variety of influences - Western aesthetes and Russian symbolists - we can distinguish our own author's voice. Already in this first book, Gumilyov's constant lyrical hero appears - a conqueror, a wanderer, a sage, a soldier who trustingly and joyfully learns the world. This hero opposes both modernity with its everyday life, and the hero of decadent verses.
Innokenty Annensky joyfully greeted this book (“... my sunset is cold and smoky / Looks at the dawn with joy”). Bryusov, whose influence on the novice poet was undoubtedly, although he noted in his review “rehashings and imitations, far from always successful”, wrote an encouraging letter to the author.
However, a year later he leaves the naval school and goes to study in Paris, at the Sorbonne University. Such an act at that time is difficult to explain. The son of a ship's doctor, who always dreamed of long-distance sea voyages, suddenly gives up his dream, leaves a military career, although in spirit and temperament, habits and family tradition, Nikolai is a military man, a campaigner, in the best sense of the word, a man of honor and duty . Of course, studying in Paris is prestigious and honorable, but not for a military officer, in whose family people in civilian clothes were treated condescendingly. In Paris, Gumilyov did not show any particular diligence or interest in the sciences; subsequently, for this reason, he was expelled from a prestigious educational institution.
At the Sorbonne, Nikolai wrote a lot, studied poetic technique, trying to develop his own style. The requirements of the young Gumilyov for poetry are energy, clarity and clarity of expression, the return of the original meaning and brilliance to such concepts as duty, honor and heroism.
The collection, published in Paris in 1908, Gumilyov called "Romantic Flowers". According to many literary critics, most of the landscapes in verse are bookish, the motives are borrowed. But the love for exotic places and beautiful, music-sounding names, bright, almost colorless painting are unborrowed. It was in "Romantic Flowers" - that is, before Gumilev's first travels to Africa - that the poem "Giraffe" (1907) entered, which for a long time became Gumilev's "calling card" in Russian literature.
A certain fabulousness in the poem "Giraffe" is manifested from the first lines:
Listen: far, far, on Lake Chad
Exquisite giraffe roams.
The reader is transferred to the most exotic continent - Africa. Gumilyov writes seemingly absolutely unreal pictures:
In the distance it is like the colored sails of a ship,
And his run is smooth, like a joyful bird flight...
The human imagination simply does not fit the possibility of the existence of such beauties on Earth. The poet invites the reader to look at the world differently, to understand that "the earth sees many wonderful things", and a person, if desired, is able to see the same thing. The poet invites us to cleanse ourselves of the "heavy fog" that we have been inhaling for so long, and to realize that the world is huge and that there are still paradises on Earth.
Turning to a mysterious woman, whom we can only judge from the position of the author, the lyrical hero conducts a dialogue with the reader, one of the listeners of his exotic tale. A woman immersed in her worries, sad, does not want to believe in anything - why not a reader? Reading this or that poem, we willy-nilly express our opinion about the work, criticize it in one way or another, do not always agree with the poet's opinion, and sometimes do not understand it at all. Nikolai Gumilyov gives the reader the opportunity to observe the dialogue between the poet and the reader (listener of his poems) from the outside.
Ring framing is typical for any fairy tale. As a rule, where the action began, it ends there. However, in this case, one gets the impression that the poet can talk about this exotic continent again and again, draw magnificent, vivid pictures of a sunny country, revealing more and more new, previously unseen features in its inhabitants. The ring frame demonstrates the poet's desire to talk about "heaven on Earth" again and again in order to make the reader look at the world differently.
In his fairy-tale poem, the poet compares two spaces, distant on the scale of human consciousness and very close on the scale of the Earth. About the space that is "here", the poet says almost nothing, and this is not necessary. There is only a "heavy fog" that we inhale every minute. In the world we live in, only sadness and tears remain. This leads us to believe that heaven on Earth is impossible. Nikolai Gumilyov tries to prove the opposite: "... far, far away, on Lake Chad / An exquisite giraffe roams." Usually the expression "far, far" is written with a hyphen and refers to something that is completely unattainable. However, the poet, perhaps with some degree of irony, focuses the reader's attention on whether this continent is really so far away. It is known that Gumilev had a chance to visit Africa, to see with his own eyes the beauties he described (the poem "Giraffe" was written before Gumilev's first trip to Africa).
The world in which the reader lives is completely colorless, life here seems to flow in gray tones. On Lake Chad, like a precious diamond, the world glistens and shimmers. Nikolai Gumilyov, like other acmeist poets, uses in his works not specific colors, but objects, giving the reader the opportunity to imagine one or another shade in his imagination: the skin of a giraffe, which is decorated with a magical pattern, appears bright orange with red-brown spots, the dark blue color of the water surface, on which the lunar glare spreads like a golden fan, the bright orange sails of a ship sailing during sunset. Unlike the world we are accustomed to, in this space the air is fresh and clean, it absorbs the vapors from Lake Chad, the "smell of inconceivable herbs"...
The lyrical hero seems to be so passionate about this world, its rich color palette, exotic smells and sounds, that he is ready to tirelessly talk about the vast expanses of the earth. This inextinguishable enthusiasm is certainly passed on to the reader.
Nikolai Gumilyov did not accidentally choose the giraffe in this poem. Standing firmly on its feet, with a long neck and a "magic pattern" on the skin, the giraffe has become the hero of many songs and poems. Perhaps one can draw a parallel between this exotic animal and man: he is just as calm, stately and gracefully built. It is also human nature to exalt oneself over all living beings. However, if peacefulness, "graceful harmony and bliss" are given to a giraffe by nature, then a person by nature is created to fight primarily with his own kind.
The exoticism inherent in the giraffe fits very organically into the context of a fairy tale story about a distant land. One of the most remarkable means of creating the image of this exotic animal is the method of comparison: the magical pattern of the skin of a giraffe is compared with the brilliance of the night star, "in the distance it is like the colored sails of a ship," "and its run is smooth, like a joyful bird's flight."
The melody of the poem is akin to the calmness and grace of a giraffe. The sounds are unnaturally lingering, melodic, complement the fabulous description, give the story a touch of magic. Rhythmically, Gumilyov uses amphibrach pentameter, rhyming lines with masculine rhyme (with the accent on the last syllable). This, combined with voiced consonants, allows the author to more colorfully describe the exquisite world of African fairy tales.
In "Romantic Flowers" another feature of Gumilyov's poetry was manifested - a love for rapidly developing heroic or adventurous plots. Gumilyov is a master of fairy tales, short stories, he is attracted by famous historical plots, violent passions, spectacular and sudden endings. From early youth, he attached exceptional importance to the composition of the poem, its plot completeness. Finally, already in this collection, Gumilyov developed his own methods of poetic writing. For example, he fell in love with feminine rhyme. Usually Russian poems are built on the alternation of male and female rhymes. Gumilyov in many poems uses only female. This is how a melodious monotony, musicality of the narration, smoothness is achieved:
Following Sinbad the Sailor
In foreign countries I collected gold pieces
And wandered on unfamiliar waters,
Where, splitting, the glare of the sun was burning [“The Eagle of Sinbad”, 1907]
No wonder V. Bryusov wrote about "Romantic Flowers" that Gumilyov's poems "are now beautiful, elegant and, for the most part, interesting in form."
On his first visit to Paris, Gumilyov sent poems to Moscow, to the main magazine of the Symbolists, Libra. At the same time, he began publishing his own magazine, Sirius, which promoted "new values for a refined worldview and old values in a new aspect."
It is also curious that he became interested in traveling, but not in abstract trips over distant seas, but in traveling to a specific country - Abyssinia (Ethiopia). A country that is unremarkable, impoverished and with a very tense military-political situation. Then this part of the black continent was torn apart by England, France and Italy. In a word, the background was not the most suitable for a romantic trip. But there can be several reasons for the explanation: Abyssinia is the country of the ancestors of the great Pushkin, and black Abyssinians were then mostly Orthodox people. Although his father refused to provide money, Nicholas made several trips to Abyssinia.
Leaving the Sorbonne in 1908, Gumilyov returned to St. Petersburg and completely devoted himself to creativity, actively communicating in the literary environment. In 1908, he started his own magazine, Ostrov. It can be assumed that the title was supposed to emphasize the remoteness of Gumilyov and other authors of the journal from their contemporary writers. On the second issue the magazine burst. But later, Gumilyov met the critic Sergei Makovsky, whom he managed to ignite with the idea of creating a new magazine. This is how “Apollo” appeared - one of the most interesting Russian literary magazines of the beginning of the century, in which the declarations of the acmeists were soon published. He publishes in it not only his poems, but also acts as a literary critic. Gumilyov wrote excellent analytical articles on the work of his contemporaries: A. Blok, I. Bunin, V. Bryusov, K. Balmonte, A. Bely, N. Klyuev, O. Mandelstam, M. Tsvetaeva.
In 1910, returning from Africa, Nikolai published the book "Pearls". The poem, as is usually the case with symbolists (and in "Pearls" he still follows the poetics of symbolism), has many meanings. We can say that it is about the inaccessibility of a harsh and proud life for those who are accustomed to bliss and luxury, or about the unfulfillment of any dream. It can also be interpreted as an eternal conflict between male and female. feminine: the feminine is false and changeable, the masculine is free and lonely. It can be assumed that in the image of the queen calling on heroes, Gumilyov symbolically depicted modern poetry, which is tired of decadent passions and wants something alive, even rude and barbaric.
Gumilyov is categorically not satisfied with the shrinking, meager Russian and European reality of the beginning of the century. He is not interested in everyday life (everyday stories are rare and taken more from books than from life), love is most often painful. Traveling is another matter, in which there is always a place for the sudden and the mysterious. The true manifesto of the mature Gumilyov is "Journey to China" (1910):
What anguish gnaws at our hearts,
What are we trying to be?
The best girl can't give
More than what she has.
We all knew evil grief,
Threw all the cherished paradise
All of us, comrades, believe in the sea,
We can sail to distant China.
The main thing for Gumilyov is a deadly craving for danger and novelty, an eternal delight in the unknown.
Starting with "Pearls", Gumilyov's poetry is an attempt to break through beyond the visible and the material. The flesh for the lyrical hero Gumilyov is a prison. He proudly says: “I am not chained to our age, / If I see through the abyss of time.” The visible world is only a screen for another reality. That is why Akhmatova called Gumilyov a "visionary" (a contemplator of the secret essence of things). The country referred to in “Journey to China” is least of all literal China, rather a symbol of mystery, dissimilarity to what surrounds the heroes of the poem.
His favorite hunters of the unknown have learned to recognize the limits of their capabilities, their impotence. They are ready to admit that
…there are other areas in the world
The moon of agonizing languor.
For a higher power, a higher prowess
They are forever unattainable. ["Captain", 1909]
In the same year, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov entered into a marriage alliance, they had known each other since Tsarskoye Selo, and their fates crossed many times, for example, in Paris, where Gumilyov, being a student at the Sorbonne, managed to publish a small magazine Sirius. Anna Akhmatova published in it, although she was very skeptical about the venture of her close friend. The magazine soon fell apart. But this episode from Gumilyov's life characterizes him not only as a poet, dreamer, traveler, but also as a person who wants to do business.
Immediately after the wedding, the young went on a trip to Paris and returned to Russia only in the fall, almost six months later. And no matter how strange it may seem, almost immediately after returning to the capital, Gumilyov quite unexpectedly, leaving his young wife at home, leaves again for distant Abyssinia. This country mysteriously strangely attracts the poet, thereby giving rise to various rumors and interpretations.
In St. Petersburg, Gumilyov often visited Vyacheslav Ivanov's "Tower", read his poems there. Ivanov, the theoretician of symbolism, patronized young writers, but at the same time imposed his tastes on them. In 1911 Gumilyov broke with Ivanov, for symbolism, in his opinion, had outlived itself.
In the same year, Gumilyov, together with the poet Sergei Gorodetsky, created a new literary group - the Workshop of Poets. In its very name, the approach to poetry that was originally inherent in Gumilyov was manifested. According to Gumilyov, a poet must be a professional, a craftsman and a minter of verse.
In February 1912, in the editorial office of Apollo, Gumilyov announced the birth of a new literary movement, which, after rather heated debate, was given the name "Acmeism". In the work “The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism”, Gumilyov spoke about the fundamental difference between this trend and symbolism: “Russian symbolism directed its main forces into the area of the unknown.” Angels, demons, spirits, Gumilyov wrote, should not "outweigh other ... images". It is with the acmeists that the ecstasy of real landscape, architecture, taste, and smell returns to Russian verse. No matter how different the acmeists are from each other, they all had in common the desire to return the word to its original meaning, to saturate it with concrete content, blurred by symbolist poets.
In the first collections of Gumilyov, there are very few external signs of the years when they were written. There is almost no social problem, there is no hint of events that worried contemporaries ... And at the same time, his poems add a lot to the palette of the Russian “Silver Age” - they are saturated with the same expectation of great changes, the same fatigue from the old, a premonition of the coming of some then a new, unprecedented, harsh and pure life.
Gumilyov's first acmeist book is "Alien Sky" (1912). Its author is a strict, wise poet who has abandoned many illusions, whose Africa acquires quite concrete and even everyday features. But the main thing is that the book called “Alien Sky” actually speaks not so much about Africa or Europe, but about Russia, which was previously quite rare in his poems.
I am sad from the book, yearning for the moon,
Maybe I don't need a hero at all
Here they are walking along the alley, so strangely tender,
A schoolboy with a schoolgirl, like Daphnis and Chloe. [“Modernity”, 1911-1912]
His subsequent collections (Kolchan, 1915; Pillar of Fire, 1921) cannot do without poems about Russia. If for Blok holiness and brutality in Russian life were inseparable, mutually conditioned, then Gumilyov, with his sober, purely rational mind, could in his mind separate rebellious, spontaneous Russia from the rich, powerful and patriarchal Russian state.
Rus' raves about God, red flame,
Where you can see angels through the smoke...
They dutifully believe in signs,
Loving yours, living yours. ["Old Estates", 1913]
“They” are the inhabitants of deep Rus', who are remembered by the poet on the estate of the Gumilyovs in Slepnev. No less sincere admiration for the old, grandfather's Russia and in the poem "Gorodok" (1916):
The cross is lifted over the church
A symbol of clear, Fatherly power,
And destroys the raspberry ring
Speech wise, human.
Savagery and self-forgetfulness, the spontaneity of Russian life appear to Gumilyov as the demonic face of his Motherland.
This path is light and dark,
The whistle of robbers in the fields,
Quarrels, bloody fights
In terrible, like dreams, taverns. ["The Man", 1917]
This demonic face of Russia sometimes makes Gumilyov admire it poetically (as in the poem “The Man”, which is imbued with a premonition of a great storm, which is clearly inspired by the image of Grigory Rasputin). However, more often such a Russia - wild, brutal - causes rejection and rejection in him:
Forgive us, stinking and blind,
Forgive the humiliated to the end!
We lie on the dung and weep
Not wanting God's way.
…………………………………………….....
Here you are calling: “Where is sister Russia,
Where is she, beloved always?
Look up: in the constellation Serpent
A new star has lit up. ["France", 1918]
But Gumilyov also saw another, angelic face - monarchical Russia, the stronghold of Orthodoxy and, in general, the stronghold of the spirit, steadily and widely moving towards the light. Gumilyov believed that his homeland could, after passing through a cleansing storm, shine with a new light.
I know in this town
Human life is real
Like a boat on a river
To the goal of the driven outgoing. ["Gorodok", 1916]
The First World War seemed to Gumilyov such a cleansing storm. Hence the conviction that he should be in the army. However, the poet was prepared for such a step with his whole life, with all his views. And Nikolai, who fell ill on every journey, already in August 1914 went to the front as a volunteer. Adventurism, the desire to test oneself with the proximity of danger, the longing to serve a high ideal (this time - Russia), for the proud and joyful challenge that a warrior throws down to death - everything pushed him to war. He ended up in a cavalry reconnaissance platoon, where raids were made behind enemy lines at a constant risk to life. He managed to perceive trench everyday life romantically:
And it's so sweet to dress up Victory,
Like a girl in pearls
Walking on a smoke trail
Retreating enemy. [“Offensive”, 1914]
However, the war paid him in return: he was never wounded (although he often caught a cold), his comrades adored him, the command celebrated with awards and new ranks, and women - friends and admirers - recalled that the uniform suited him more than a civilian suit.
Gumilyov was a brave fighter - at the very end of 1914 he received the St. George Cross of the IV degree and the rank of corporal for courage and courage shown in intelligence. In 1915, for distinction, he was awarded the St. George Cross of the III degree, and he became a non-commissioned officer. Nikolai actively wrote at the front; in 1916, friends help him publish a new collection, Quiver.
In May 1917, Gumilyov was assigned to a special expeditionary corps of the Russian army stationed in Paris. It was here, in the military attache, that Gumilyov would carry out a number of special assignments not only for the Russian command, but also prepare documents for the mobilization department of the joint headquarters of the allied forces in Paris. You can find many documents of that time similar in style to Gumilyov's style, but all of them are labeled with the mysterious “4 departments”.
In the summer of the same year, Gumilyov got stuck in Paris on his way to one of the European fronts, and then left for London, where he was actively engaged in creativity. In 1918 he returned to Petrograd.
Craving for the old way of life, order, loyalty to the laws of noble honor and service to the Fatherland - this is what distinguished Gumilyov in the troubled times of the seventeenth year and the Civil War. Speaking to revolutionary sailors, he defiantly read: “I gave him a Belgian pistol and a portrait of my sovereign” - one of his African poems. But the general upsurge seized, seared him too. Gumilyov did not accept Bolshevism - for the poet he was just the embodiment of the demonic face of Russia. A consistent aristocrat in everything (however, he rather played aristocracy - but after all, his whole life was built according to the laws of art!), Gumilyov hated the “Russian rebellion”. But he largely understood the reasons for the uprising and hoped that Russia would eventually find its original, wide and clear path. And therefore, Gumilyov believed, it was necessary to serve any Russia - he considered emigration a shame.
And Gumilyov gave lectures to the workers, gathered the “Sounding Shell” circle, where he taught the young to write and understand poetry, translated for the publishing house “World Literature”, published book after book. Friends and students of Gumilyov - K. Chukovsky, V. Khodasevich, A. Akhmatova, G. Ivanov, O. Mandelstam and his other contemporaries - are unanimous: the poet has never been so free and at the same time harmonious, ambiguous and clear.
At the turn of epochs, life is more mysterious than ever: everything is permeated with mysticism. The theme of the mature Gumilyov is the clash of reason, duty and honor with the elements of fire and death, which endlessly attracted him - the poet, but also promised death to him - the soldier. This attitude to modernity - love-hate, exultation-rejection - was akin to his attitude to a woman ("And it's sweet for me - don't cry, dear - / To know that you poisoned me").
The collections of poems “The Bonfire”, “Pillar of Fire”, “To the Blue Star” (1923; prepared and published posthumously by friends) are full of masterpieces that mark a completely new stage in Gumilev's creativity. Anna Akhmatova called Gumilyov a “prophet” for a reason. He also predicted his own execution:
In a red shirt, with a face like an udder,
The executioner also cut off my head,
She lay with the others
Here in a slippery box, at the very bottom. ["Lost tram", 1919 (?)]
This is one of Gumilyov's favorite poems. For the first time here, Gumilyov's hero is not a conquering traveler, not a winner, and not even a philosopher who steadfastly accepts the misfortunes that rain down on him, but a man shocked by the abundance of deaths, exhausted, who has lost all support. He seemed to get lost in the "abyss of time", in the labyrinths of crimes and villainy - and each coup turns into the loss of his beloved. Never before had Gumilyov had such a helpless, humanly simple intonation:
Mashenka, you lived and sang here,
I, the groom, weaved a carpet,
Where is your voice and body now
Could it be that you are dead!
The lyrical hero of Gumilyov is served by the image of sovereign Petersburg with the “stronghold of Orthodoxy” - Isaac and the monument to Peter. But what can become a support for a thinker and a poet does not console a person:
And yet forever the heart is gloomy,
And it's hard to breathe, and it hurts to live ...
Masha, I never thought
What can be so love and sadness.
Late Gumilyov is full of love and compassion, shocking and audacity of youth are in the past. But there is no need to talk about peace. The poet felt that a great upheaval was brewing, that humanity was on the threshold of a new era, and painfully experienced the invasion of this unknown:
As once in overgrown horsetails
Roared from the consciousness of impotence
The creature is slippery, feeling on the shoulders
Wings that have not yet appeared -
So century after century, is it soon, Lord? —
Under the scalpel of nature and art
Our spirit screams, the flesh languishes,
Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense. [“The Sixth Sense”, 1919 (?)]
This feeling of a great promise, a certain threshold, leaves the reader with the whole suddenly cut short life of Gumilyov.
On August 3, 1921, Gumilyov was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy in the “Tagantsev Case”, and already on August 24, by the decision of Petrgubchek, he was sentenced to capital punishment - execution.
Then, in August 1921, famous people of their time spoke in defense of Gumilyov, who wrote a letter to the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission, in which they petitioned for the release of N. S. Gumilyov under their guarantee. But this letter could not change anything, since it was received only on September 4, and the decision of Petrgubchek took place on August 24.
For seven decades, his poems were distributed in Russia in lists, and were published only abroad. But Gumilyov nourished Russian poetry with his cheerfulness, the strength of passions, and his readiness for trials. For many years he taught readers to maintain dignity in all circumstances, to remain themselves regardless of the outcome of the battle and face life directly:
But when bullets whistle around
When the waves break the sides
I teach them how not to be afraid
Don't be afraid and do what needs to be done.
…………………………………………...........
And when their last hour comes,
Smooth red fog will cover the eyes,
I'll teach them to remember right away
All the cruel, sweet life
All native, strange land
And standing before the face of God
With simple and wise words,
Wait quietly for His judgment. [“My Readers”, 1921]
GIRAFFE
Today, I see your eyes are especially sad
And the arms are especially thin, hugging their knees.
Listen: far, far, on Lake Chad
Exquisite giraffe roams.
Graceful harmony and bliss is given to him,
And his skin is decorated with a magic pattern,
With whom only the moon dares to equal,
Crushing and swaying on the moisture of wide lakes.
In the distance it is like the colored sails of a ship,
And his run is smooth, like a joyful bird flight.
I know that the earth sees many wonderful things,
When at sunset he hides in a marble grotto.
I know funny tales of mysterious countries
About the black maiden, about the passion of the young leader,
But you inhaled the heavy mist for too long,
You don't want to believe in anything but rain.
And how can I tell you about the tropical garden,
About slender palm trees, about the smell of unimaginable herbs.
You are crying? Listen... far away, on Lake Chad
Exquisite giraffe roams.
Each poem by Gumilyov opens up a new facet of the poet's views, his moods, his vision of the world. The content and refined style of Gumilyov's poems help us to feel the fullness of life. They are confirmation that a person himself can create a bright, colorful world, leaving the gray everyday life. An excellent artist, Nikolai Gumilyov left an interesting legacy and had a significant impact on the development of Russian poetry.
The first lines of the poem reveal a rather bleak picture before us. We see a sad girl, she probably sits by the window, pulling her knees up to her chest, and through a veil of tears looks out into the street. Nearby is a lyrical hero who, trying to console and entertain her, leads a story about distant Africa, about Lake Chad. So adults, trying to console the child, tell about wonderful lands...
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov was born on April 15 (3 according to the old style) in Kronstadt in April 1886 in the family of a ship's doctor. He spent his childhood in Tsarskoe Selo, where in 1903 he entered the gymnasium, the director of which was the famous poet Innokenty Annensky. After graduating from the gymnasium, Gumilev went to Paris, to the Sorbonne. By this time, he was already the author of the book "The Way of the Conquistadors", noticed by one of the legislators of Russian symbolism, Valery Bryusov. In Paris, he published the Sirius magazine, actively communicated with French and Russian writers, and was in intensive correspondence with Bryusov, to whom he sent his poems, articles, and stories. During these years he twice visited Africa.
In 1908, Gumilyov's second poetic book, Romantic Flowers, was published, with a dedication to his future wife Anna Gorenko (who later became the poetess Anna Akhmatova).
Returning to Russia, Gumilyov lives in Tsarskoye Selo, studies at the Faculty of Law, then at the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, but never finishes the course. He enters the literary life of the capital, is published in various magazines. Since 1909, Gumilyov has become one of the main contributors to the Apollon magazine, where he maintains the Letters on Russian Poetry section.
He goes on a long journey through Africa, returns to Russia in 1910, releases the collection "Pearls", which made him famous poet, and marries Anna Gorenko. Soon Gumilyov again went to Africa, in Abyssinia he recorded local folklore, communicated with local residents, got acquainted with life and art.
In 1911-1912. Gumilyov departs from symbolism. Together with the poet Sergei Gorodetsky, he organized the "Workshop of Poets", in the depths of which the program of a new literary trend, acmeism, was born. A poetic illustration for theoretical calculations was the collection "Alien Sky", which many considered the best in Gumilyov's work.
In 1912, Gumilyov and Akhmatova gave birth to a son, Leo.
In 1914, in the very first days of the World War, the poet volunteered for the front - despite the fact that he was completely freed from military service. By the beginning of 1915, Gumilyov had already been awarded two St. George's Crosses. In 1917, he ended up in Paris, then in London, in the military attache of a special expeditionary corps. Russian army, which was part of the unified command of the Entente. Here, according to some biographers, Gumilyov performed some special tasks. During the war years, he did not stop his literary activity: the collection "Quiver" was published, the plays "Gondla" and "Poisoned Tunic", a series of essays "Notes of a Cavalier" and other works were written.
In 1918 Gumilyov returned to Russia and became one of the prominent figures in the literary life of Petrograd. He publishes a lot, works at the World Literature publishing house, lectures, directs the Petrograd branch of the Union of Poets, works with young poets in the Sounding Shell studio.
In 1918, Gumilyov divorced Akhmatova, and in 1919 he married a second time, to Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt. They have a daughter, Elena. Anna Engelhardt-Gumilyova is dedicated to the collection of poems "The Pillar of Fire", the announcement of the release of which appeared after the death of the poet.
On August 3, 1921, Gumilyov was arrested on charges of participating in the anti-Soviet conspiracy of Professor Tagantsev (this case, according to most researchers today, was fabricated). According to the verdict of the court, he was shot. The exact date of the execution is not known. According to Akhmatova, the execution took place near Bernhardovka near Petrograd. The poet's grave has not been found.
Gumilyov died in the prime of his creative life. In the minds of contemporaries, his fate evoked associations with the fate of the poet of another era - Andre Chenier, who was executed by the Jacobins during the French Revolution. For sixty-five years, Gumilev's name remained under the strictest official ban.
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