The artistic originality of the poetry of Afanasy Fet. Love, nature and art as the main motives of feta poetry What is the discovery of feta lyrics
Love the book, it will make your life easier, it will help you sort out the colorful and stormy confusion of thoughts, feelings, events, it will teach you to respect people and yourself, it inspires your mind and heart with a feeling of love for the world, for people.
Maxim Gorky
Afanasy Fet made a significant contribution to literature. During Fet's student life, the first collection of works, “Lyrical Pantheon,” was released.
In his first works, Fet tried to escape reality, described the beauty of Russian nature, wrote about feelings, about love. In his works, the poet touches on important and eternal topics, but does not speak directly, but with hints. Fet skillfully conveyed the whole gamut of emotions and moods, while evoking pure and bright feelings in readers.
Creativity changed its direction after the death of Fet’s beloved. The poet dedicated the poem “Talisman” to Maria Lazic. Probably all subsequent works about love were also dedicated to this woman. The second collection of works aroused keen interest and positive reaction from literary critics. This happened in 1850, at which time Fet became one of the best modern poets of that time.
Afanasy Fet was a poet of “pure art”; in his works he did not touch on social issues and politics. All his life he adhered to conservative views and was a monarchist. The next collection was published in 1856, it included poems in which Fet admired the beauty of nature. The poet believed that this was precisely the goal of his work.
Fet had a hard time enduring the blows of fate; as a result, relationships with friends were interrupted and the poet began to write less. After two volumes of collected poems in 1863, he stopped writing altogether. This break lasted 20 years. The muse returned to Fet after he was restored to the privileges of a nobleman and his stepfather's surname. Later, the poet’s work touched upon philosophical themes; in his works, Fet wrote about the unity of man and the Universe. Fet published four volumes of the collection of poems “Evening Lights”, the last one was published after the poet’s death.
R.G. Magina
Literary position of A.A. Feta is well known. In modern literary criticism, the position of the romantic nature of his lyrics, the one-sidedness of the themes of his poetry, and the poet’s disposition to perceive only the beautiful has been proven.
This last feature determined Fet’s aestheticism, and it determined, in our opinion, the main features of the romantic style of his lyrics.
Like spring day, your face appeared in a dream again, -
I greet the beauty of my acquaintance, And on the waves of a caressing word
I will carry your lovely image...
A characteristic feature of Fetov’s intonation - its simultaneous nakedness and restraint - is due to the immutability of character lyrical hero his poems, based on a clearly expressed subjective perception of reality, on the conviction of the autonomy of art and the unacceptability of prosaic earthly life for the poet.
Romantic detailing, its fragmentation, some pretentiousness and pretentiousness create a stylistic correspondence between Fet’s extreme philosophical subjectivism and the poetic embodiment of this subjectivism. This happens for two reasons: firstly, Fet’s romantic detail is never dispassionate. This rule, almost obligatory for all romantics, manifests itself especially clearly in Fet’s lyrics. He plays with words, finding shades, colors, sounds in their unusual perspective, in an unexpected, sometimes paradoxical semantic relationship (singing torment, suffering of bliss, insanely happy grief) and does it on purpose.
Secondly, Fet’s romantic detail always carries a subjective-evaluative element, and its varieties should be determined by the following characteristics: traditional and unconventional, figurative concreteness and abstractness. Of course, the presence of unconventional abstract and concrete figurative details in romantic poetry is not yet proof of originality and uniqueness poetic creativity. The whole question is what is the relationship between traditionality and unconventionality of a romantic detail and how, in what individual manner, non-traditional verbal and visual means are used in the context of a poetic work, in what way the word is connected in the context of the poem with the general poetic worldview of the author, with the main poetic intonation works and all creativity in general.
It is known that Fet was a subtle observer, able to record transitional moments in the life of nature, its halftones, complex interweavings of shades, colors, and sounds. Researchers have long paid attention to this, sometimes calling Fet, in connection with such an individual manner, “a poet-impressionist, first of all, a poet of subtle hints, barely audible sounds and barely noticeable shades. In this he is a direct predecessor of the decadents and symbolists.” And, as D.D. rightly points out. Blagoy, “already almost from the very beginning, from the 40s, Fet’s romanticism is his poetry, capable of capturing... elusively musical impressions, unsteady spiritual movements in them, as in nature, surrounding a person, “trembling”, “trembling”, the living dynamics of the play of colors and sounds, “magical changes in a sweet face”, “incessant fluctuations”, “transitions, shades”, a dialectical combination of opposites - was painted with features that much later received the name “impressionism” .
No, don't expect a passionate song. These sounds are unclear nonsense,
The languid ringing of strings; But, full of sad torment,
These sounds evoke
Sweet dreams. They swooped down in a ringing swarm, swooped in and sang
In the bright heights. Like a child I listen to them,
I don’t know what was reflected in them.
And I don’t need...
Fet’s entire universe, as if in focus, focused on the consciousness of his “I” and on the desire to find the necessary verbal embodiment of such a perception of reality.
Another feature of his poetry follows from Fet’s general romantic concept: a sublime romantic detail in the context of one work is adjacent to a prosaic detail and, moreover, to a realistically convincing detail. This feature is a consequence of the fact that Fet does not turn away from the real world, he only selectively extracts from it the impressions he needs:
Sleep - it's still dawn
It's cold and early;
Stars behind the mountain
They sparkle in the fog;
Roosters recently
They sang for the third time,
Smoothly from the bell tower
The sounds flew by...
Brilliant misty stars and floating gentle sounds of a bell (details that are clearly romantic) stand in the context of the poem next to the recently crowed roosters. True, Fet’s roosters “crow,” but the realistic coloring of this detail is nevertheless obvious. As a result of this, a lexical inconsistency is created, which determines the unique style of Fetov’s lyrics and at the same time significantly expands the semantic possibilities of Russian romantic lyrics of the 19th century.
Fet's lyrics in style and intonation remained fundamentally within the Russian romanticism of the mid-19th century, although there is in it a significant feature of the expression of lyrical feeling, which brings Fet closer to the poetry of the early 20th century: this is a combination of concepts of various logical series in a single phrase (for example , from Blok: “...There the face was hidden in a multi-colored lie,” “A harlequin laughed at the thoughtful door,” “The queen has blue riddles”; from Bryusov: “On the furious swell of the instant, we are two,” “the silent cry of desire of a prisoner.. .").
Fet uses this technique more widely and boldly than the Symbolists, and a classic example of this is the poem “To the Singer”:
Take my heart into the ringing distance,
Where, like a month behind the grove, there is sadness;
In these sounds your hot tears
The smile of love shines gently...
In this poem, in our opinion, the individual poetic style of the author is most reflected, all the more character traits, characteristic of his lyrics: the apotheosis of personality and subjective authorial consciousness, reflection of the impressions of the objective world in an absolutized idealistic romantic hero; extensive use of evaluative romantic details, strong impressionistic overtones and, finally, the combination of concepts of various logical series in a single phrase (ringing distance, invisible swells, silvery path, a burning voice, a rush of pearls, gentle sadness). The metrical pattern of the verse, strictly and to the end, determines from the very beginning the given intonation of the poem written in anapest. Fet generally widely used the anapest with its rising intonation (“Everything around is colorful and noisy”, “The shaggy branches of the pine trees are frayed from the storm”, “I won’t tell you anything”, “He wanted my madness”, “They forbade you to go out”, “Evening”, “From the lights, from the merciless crowd”, etc.).
The poem “Incense Night, Blessed Night” is another example typical of Fet’s lyrics, repeating in many ways the style of the poem “The Singer”: the same strict alternation of tetrameter and trimeter anapest with only masculine endings, the same classical quatrains and an even more noticeable impressionistic subtext:
Fragrant night, blessed night,
The irritation of an ailing soul!
Everyone would listen to you - and I can’t bear to remain silent
In the silence that speaks so clearly...
In this poem, against a traditional romantic background (azure heights, unblinking stars, impenetrable shadow of branches, sparkling spring, whisper of streams), semantic turns characteristic only of Fet sound: the moon looks straight in the face, and it is burning; the night, filled with beauty, turns silver, and everything around burns and rings. Sound and visually tangible details are combined in one general presentation, in one almost fantastic picture. It appears in vague, vague outlines just at the moment when the concept of “impossible dream” appears in the poem:
It’s as if everything is burning and ringing at the same time,
To help an impossible dream;
As if, trembling slightly, a window will open
Look into the silvery night.
The idea (or dream) of a window opening in the silvery night is associated with dreams of love. Thus, thanks to a chain of associative details that arise in the human mind, Fet creates the lyrical subtext of the poem, reflecting a complex state of mind in which the life of nature and the movement of human thought merge into a single stream of lyrical consciousness.
Using details of the external world, which at first glance cannot be connected into one logical series, Fet often comes to unexpected associative connections, deliberately emphasizing this in his poems, easily moving from an object to an abstract concept, sometimes not connected in any way. It is important for the poet, first of all, to express his subjective perception, albeit illogical, poorly explained and fragmentarily reproduced:
I stood motionless for a long time
Peering into the distant stars,
Between those stars and me
Some kind of connection was born.
I thought... I don’t remember what I thought;
I listened to a mysterious choir
And the stars quietly trembled,
And I have loved the stars ever since...
There are five personal pronouns in the eight lines of this poem; four of them are 1st person pronouns. case - form a single semantic series with an intensifying sound from the first to the last phrase: I stood, I thought, I listened, I love . This gives a special confidence to the intonation and emphasizes the romantic subjectivity of the entire poem.
The subjectivity and illogicality of the narrative determine another feature of Fet’s poetry - its fragmentation. The fragmentary nature of the narrative, as a rule, was only stated by researchers and reproached by Fet without any attempt to explain this phenomenon or find its roots. Moreover, many parodies of the poet’s poems focused attention precisely on this feature of his lyrics, using it as a reason for ridicule and negative critical assessments. Meanwhile, we are convinced that this phenomenon is the author’s intentional position, an orientation towards emphasizing the subjectivity of the narrative, towards a certain universal freedom of lyrical feeling and its reflection in poetry. Fet gives numerous examples of such freedom (from logic, from generally accepted poetic templates, from stable semantic series of words), which Russian symbolists so stubbornly declared after Fet, mainly in theoretical terms. They elevated this freedom to an absolute and, in its extreme manifestations, brought it to the point of absurdity. For Fet, the main thing is to create a sincere intonation in a lyric poem, a poetic mood, an emotional subtext, even on the basis of illogical, absurd information, using it as an almost neutral background, as a faceless construction material; the main thing is to create an impression, this is the essence of the expression of feelings in Fet’s lyrics.
B. Ya Bukhshtab notes: “Fet published his first collection in the same year as Lermontov, and the last in the era when the Symbolist movement had already begun. Long creative path Fet seems to connect the romanticism of Zhukovsky with the romanticism of Blok in the history of Russian poetry.” This connection can be seen quite clearly in the verse forms of Fet’s lyrics.
Fet builds much of the form of poetry based on authoritative poetic canons and traditions of Russian poetry (for example, the stanza of most of his poems is determined by their romance). Nevertheless, Fet's verse variations are quite diverse and interesting in all respects: in the field of rhyme, and in the syntactic structure of the verse, and in stanza, and in sound writing, and especially in metrics. As a rule, it is the meters that determine in Fet the main rhythmic pattern of the verse, its originality. The main difference between the poet’s metrics is the lack of rhythmic uniformity within a particular work. Fet very boldly varies the rhythm by combining and alternating different poetic meters in one verse or in one work. Trisyllabics are the main source of rhythmic variations in verse for the poet. Most of the new forms, first developed by him, are combinations of three-syllables and two-syllables, both in different verses and within a verse, but always within the same work.
Fet wrote a new page in the history of Russian free verse. Essentially, he is its discoverer, since isolated cases of free verse before Fet (Sumarokov, Zhukovsky, Glinka) remain just isolated cases, but after Fet, free verse firmly enters the practice of Russian versification. Fet's free verse has not yet been sufficiently studied, although one of the works devoted to the history of free verse states that “a significant page in the history of free verse in Russia was written by Fet.”
With a relatively small number of free verses, Fet developed a certain characteristic commonality in them, reflected, in our opinion, in the later poetic experiments of Russian poets - he defined for many decades to come the distinctive qualities of Russian free verse as a special form of national verse.
What is the reason for the poet's appeal to free forms? After all, he generally follows traditional syllabic-tonic rhythms quite strictly; Deviation from them is rather an exception to the rule. Free verses most decisively crossed out the traditional clear rhythm and metric, not to mention the musicality of the verse, which was important for Fet.
In our opinion, the most important reason for the appearance of free forms in Fet is the general philosophical nature of his poetry and the resulting desire of the poet to focus on the semantic side of the work (this tendency is very noticeable in works written in free verse). In traditional measured musical verse, he did not always find semantically accurate words - impressionistic uncertainty and understatement got in the way. Philosophy (most often emphasized) and the simultaneous brevity and refinement of poetic thought “fit” so well into the new ametric forms that there is no doubt about their non-accidental appearance in Fet’s poetry.
The form of free verse allowed Fet, first of all, to start from the old verse tradition, and it was in free verse that the philosophical sound of his poetry came to the fore, philosophicality appeared here as if in its pure form, devoid of metrical and musical framing (the poems “I love many things close to my heart”, “At night it’s somehow easier for me to breathe”, “Neptune Leverrier”, etc.).
The poetry of A. Fet completes the development of Russian philosophical and psychological romanticism in the lyric poetry of the 19th century. The undeniable originality of this poetry, the sincerity and depth of lyrical experience, the special bright view of the world captured in the music of the verse - this is the main thing that we value in Fet’s lyrics.
Lesson objectives:
Educational:
- Acquaintance with the views of A. A. Fet and N. A. Nekrasov on poetry, its role and purpose, with the poetic direction “pure art”,
- Repetition of what was previously studied in the course of literature of the 18th-19th centuries.
Educational:
- To develop the aesthetic culture and literary speech of students, the ability to substantiate their point of view, find “key words” in the text, and compare different works of art in terms of content and form.
Educators:
- To develop the ability to thoughtfully read a literary work, to treat with respect and understanding different points of view on a literary work and on the position of the author.
During the classes
The teacher reads a poem by V. Sokolov, written in 1965.
Far from all parnassus,
From ghostly vanities
Nekrasov is with me again
And Afanasy Fet.
They spend the night with me
In my remote village,
They are healing me
Classic verse.They sound, chasing chimeras
Empty self-indulgence
Transparent sizes,
Ordinary words.
And it’s good for me... In the valleys
Frosty fluff flies.
High lunar cold
Breathtaking.
Next to Nekrasov’s name, V. Sokolov put the name Feta. Even in the 60s of the 20th century, this caused outrage and misunderstanding among many. And a century and a half ago, in the 60s of the 19th century, such a poem simply could not be written. Why?
Late 50's - early 60's. - this is a time of radical social transformations in Russia, a time of new ideas and the demarcation of literary and social forces.
IN poetry XIX centuries, there was a tradition of poetic appeals to the Muse and reflections on the purpose of poetry.
Let's try to understand what the word “muse” means and why poems dedicated to it are important for us.
One of the students gives a definition from an explanatory dictionary :
1. In Greek mythology: the goddess is the patroness of the arts and sciences.
2. transfer The source of poetic inspiration, as well as inspiration itself, creativity (book).
So, poems about the muse characterize the work of the poets themselves, giving an idea of the themes, ideas, and originality of their poetry. Let's get acquainted with the work of A. A. Fet, who wrote several works about his high craft, by carefully reading one of his poems, painting a portrait of the muse.
Reading of the 1857 poem “Muse”
Assignment to students:
Let's write down in a notebook key words with the help of which the poet draws the image of the muse and gives his idea of the poet. (The left side of the table is filled in).
Notice how this poem echoes Pushkin’s “The Poet and the Crowd”:
Not for everyday worries,
Not for gain, not for battles,
We were born to inspire
For sweet sounds and prayers.
This is no coincidence, since representatives "pure art" in poetry, of which Fet can be considered the head, they considered this work programmatic for themselves.
Assignment to students: characterize the poetry of “pure” art” based on the poem “Muse”.
Fet's poetry is beautiful, gentle, light, calming, sublime. An integral feature of his poetry is musicality, the melody seems to be dissolved in the poem itself.
Fet does not set any political or didactic goals and objectives for art. His art is “pure” - it is “purified” of themes related to the struggle of the revolutionary-democratic camp, the ideas of the peasant revolution. For Fet, the only object of art is beauty, which brings pure joy and destroys suffering, and the source of beauty in the world is nature, creativity, and love. From the problems of reality, from its social vices and contradictions, Fet goes into the sublime world of a pure poetic soul, into the world of his imagination. A poet is a God-inspired creator, and his goal is to embody the divine beauty of the world in poetry. (Teacher's comment)
Throughout his life, Fet remained faithful to the sublime image of his Muse. In 1882 he wrote the poem “Muse”, stating in the last quatrain:
All is the same you, treasured shrine,
On a cloud, invisible on the ground,
Crowned with stars, imperishable goddess,
With a thoughtful smile on his brow.
And again a roll call with Pushkin: the second stanza of this work almost verbatim repeats the angry answer of the Pushkin Poet to the “uninitiated” crowd:
Carefully preserving your freedom,
I didn’t invite the uninitiated to you,
And I please their slavish rampage
I did not desecrate your speeches.
Let's listen to another poem by A. Fet - “With one push, drive away a living boat.”
Question for students: How does Fet determine the purpose of poetry in this poem?
Poetry, possessing Divine power, is capable of changing the usual course of things and transforming life. The poet’s purpose is to “rise in one wave into another life”, “whisper about something before which the tongue goes numb” - to feel what is inaccessible to others, and to be able to convey his experiences in words, “strengthening the battle of fearless hearts.” The task of poetry, like art in general, is to promote the moral self-improvement of everyone, to harmonize the inner world of a person. This reveals the intrinsic value of art. This is the view of poetry and its purpose as representatives of “pure art.”
Let us turn to the second direction in poetry, the head of which was N.A. Nekrasov. In the collection of 1856, from which the confrontation between Fet and Nekrasov began, which then turned into open antagonism, the poem “Muse” was published.
Reading of the poem "Muse" from 1852.
Question for students: What two parts can this poem be divided into?
The first part is a “characterization by contradiction” of Nekrasov’s muse. The abundance of denials emphasizes the contrast between Nekrasov’s muse and Pushkin’s muse. .
Assignment for students: compare this poem with the poems by A. S. Pushkin “Muse” - 1821 and “Confidant of Magical Antiquity” - 1822. Why does Nekrasov get into an argument with Pushkin? (Rather, Nekrasov is not arguing with Pushkin here, but with representatives of “pure art”, who saw in Pushkin’s poetry the embodiment of “pure artistry”, “free artistic art” - A.V. Druzhinin).
The second part begins with the conjunction “but” and depicts the appearance of Nekrasov’s muse.
What is she like, Nekrasov’s muse? Let's write down the words that characterize it and fill out the 2nd part of the table.
| ON THE. Nekrasov “Muse” 1852 | |
| Muse unkind, unloved, sad companion of the sad poor, crying, sick, humbly mourning, bent over by work, her simple, harsh melodies are full of melancholy and eternal complaint. Conclusion Nekrasov’s muse is a peasant woman, an earthly woman (you can read the poem “Yesterday at six o’clock” if it is difficult for students to draw a conclusion) sobbing |
(Here I usually do the following: in order to emphasize the difference between the muses of Fet and Nekrasov, to make this difference clear, obvious, visual, I hang on the board reproductions of female portraits by artists of the 19th century, for example, Bryullov, Kramskoy, Fedotov, Perov, and ask the guys to answer, which of them resemble Fet’s muse and how, and which ones are similar to Nekrasov’s muse).
Thus, K. Bryullov is characterized by a passion for everything magnificent and magnificent; he depicts beautiful faces, flowing draperies, velvet, and satin. Bryullov's paintings create an atmosphere of dreamy solitude and give rise to an elegiac mood. This is not surprising; Bryullov was one of the best graduates of the Academy of Arts, which required artists to depict mythological subjects rather than living reality. In contrast to Bryullov, V. Perov, a founding member of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, exposed the dark sides of Russian life in his genre paintings. The gray-brown palette of his canvases creates a mood of grief and sadness, corresponding to dramatic scenes from the life of suffering, disadvantaged people).
So, the muse, as we remember, characterizes poetic creativity itself.
Assignment to students: try, based on the text of the poem “Muse” and the works of Nekrasov you have read previously, to conclude what Nekrasov’s poetry is dedicated to, what its ideas are.
Nekrasov's poems describe the life of the common people, the difficult lot of women and children tortured by the backbreaking labor of men. Realizing his blood unity with the people, Nekrasov treats the people's suffering with deep sympathy and considers it necessary to tell the whole world about the disasters of the people.
Let's write down Nekrasov's statement in a notebook:
“In our fatherland, the role of the writer is, first of all, that of a teacher, if possible an intercessor for the voiceless and downtrodden.”
(Compare with Fet’s words: “Works that have any didactic tendency are rubbish”).
In the poem “Elegy,” Nekrasov clearly states what his poetry serves. Let's listen to an excerpt from this poem and find the answer to this question.
“I dedicated the lyre to my people.
Perhaps I will die unknown to him,
But I served him - and my heart is calm..."
There are few who served the people as selflessly as Nekrasov. Dostoevsky said about him: “This...was a heart wounded at the very beginning of his life, and it was this never-healing wound that was the beginning and source of all his passionate, suffering poetry for the rest of his life.”
But one should not think that the path chosen by Nekrasov was easy and pleasant, and that the choice itself was instantaneous and devoid of doubts and worries. Nekrasov’s lyrical hero is characterized by a painful duality; he reaches for the beautiful and sublime no less than the singers of “pure art,” but considers my duty talk about people's suffering. The last 10 lines of the poem “Muse” are about this.
Assignment to students: find and read them.
One of the quatrains of the poem “Blessed is the gentle poet” is about this, contrasting two types of poets in whom the features of representatives of antagonistic movements in poetry are clearly felt:
“Both believing and not believing again
A dream of a high calling..."
What definition will we give to the direction in poetry headed by Nekrasov and his own poetry, taking into account the themes and ideas of his work? (Remember Lomonosov, who refused to sing of love, who chose the theme of feat in the name of a strong and mighty fatherland (“Conversation with Anacreon”); the Decembrist poet Ryleev).
Nekrasov's poetry - civil poetry
In this sense of Nekrasov’s responsibility for the fate of the working people, in his sensitivity to other people’s grief, to human suffering, in this civil indifference and sense of guilt before the people lies that high spirit of citizenship that E. Yevtushenko mentioned in the introduction to the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station” »
A poet in Russia is more than a poet.
Poets are destined to be born in it
To the one in whom the proud spirit of citizenship roams!
To whom there is no peace, no comfort!
Let's return to the confrontation between Fet and Nekrasov. Question to students: which of them do you think is right in their solution to the problem of the purpose of poetry? Can Nekrasov’s muse be considered down-to-earth and prosaic, and the feelings with which he defended the offended and humiliated obsolete and primitive?
(It seems to us that it is impossible to raise the question of someone’s right or wrong on the question of the purpose of poetry. As Mayakovsky said, we need more “good and different poets”).
Final words from the teacher:
Time passed, the disputes were forgotten, “passions subsided,” but in our memory, in our soul, in our culture, two such different and good poets remained. And despite all previous disagreements, “Nekrasov and Afanasy Fet are with me again!”
Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet was born on November 23, 1820 in the village. Novoselki near Mtsensk from A.N. Shenshin and K.Sh. Fet. His parents got married abroad without an Orthodox ceremony (Fet's mother was a Lutheran), as a result of which the marriage, legal in Germany, was declared invalid in Russia; when the Orthodox wedding ceremony was performed, the future poet was already living under his mother’s surname “Föth”, considered illegitimate child. The future poet found himself deprived not only of his father's surname, but also of his noble title, rights to inheritance, and even Russian citizenship. The desire to return the Shenshin surname and all rights became important for the young man for many years life goal. Only in his old age was the poet able to achieve his goal and regain his hereditary nobility.
In 1838 he entered the Moscow boarding school of Professor M.P. Pogodin, and in August of the same year he was admitted to Moscow University in the verbal department of the Faculty of Philology. During his student years, Fet lived in the house of his friend and classmate Apollon Grigoriev, later a famous critic and romantic poet, translator and enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare. This friendship contributed to the formation of common ideals and a common view of art between the two students. Fet begins to write poetry, and in 1840 he already publishes at his own expense a collection of poetic experiments called Lyrical Pantheon A.F., in which echoes of the poems of E. Baratynsky, I. Kozlov and V. Zhukovsky were clearly heard. Since 1842, Fet became a regular contributor to the journal Otechestvennye zapiski. Already in 1843, V. Belinsky wrote that “of all the poets living in Moscow, Mr. Fet is the most gifted,” whose poems he puts on a par with Lermontov’s.
Fet strives for literary activity with all his soul, but the instability of his social and financial situation forces him to dramatically change his destiny. In 1845, the “foreigner Afanasy Fet”, wanting to become a hereditary Russian nobleman (to which the first senior officer rank gave the right), entered as a non-commissioned officer in a cuirassier regiment stationed in the Kherson province. Cut off from metropolitan life and the literary environment, he almost ceases to be published - especially since magazines, due to the fall in reader demand for poetry, show no interest in his poems. In the Kherson years an event occurred that predetermined personal life Feta: Maria Lazich, who was in love with him and loved by him, a girl without a dowry, whom he, due to his poverty, did not dare to marry, died in a fire. Soon after Fet’s final refusal, a strange accident happened to her: her dress caught fire from a candle, she ran out into the garden, but was unable to put out the clothes and suffocated in the smoke that enveloped her. It was impossible not to suspect a suicide attempt, and for a long time echoes of this tragedy will be heard in Fet’s poems:
I don't want to believe it! When in the steppe, how wonderful it is,
In the midnight darkness, untimely grief,
In the distance in front of you is transparent and beautiful
The dawn suddenly rose
And my gaze was involuntarily drawn to this beauty,
Into that majestic brilliance beyond the entire dark limit,—
Did nothing really whisper to you at that time:
There's a man burned out there! (« When you read the painful lines..." 1887)
In 1853, the poet’s fate took a sharp turn: he managed to transfer to the guard, to the Life Ulan regiment, stationed near St. Petersburg. He gets the opportunity to visit the capital, resumes literary activity, regularly begins to be published in Sovremennik, Otechestvennye zapiski, Russkiy Vestnik, and Library for Reading. Having the opportunity to visit St. Petersburg often, Fet became close to the new editors of Sovremennik - N. Nekrasov, I. Turgenev, A. Druzhinin, V. Botkin. The half-forgotten name of Fet appears in articles, reviews, and chronicles of the leading Russian magazine; since 1854, his poems have been widely published there. Turgenev became his literary mentor and editor and even prepared a new edition of Fet's poems in 1856.
Fet was fatally unlucky in his military service: every time, shortly before his promotion to the next officer rank, a new decree was issued, tightening the conditions for obtaining hereditary nobility and forcing the poet to serve until the next rank. In 1856 Fet left military service, without achieving his goal. In 1857 in Paris, he married M.P. Botkina, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and already in 1860, with the money received as a dowry, he acquired the Stepanovka estate in his native Mtsensk district and became, according to Turgenev, “an agronomist-owner to the point of desperation.” During these years, Fet wrote almost no poetry. Adhering to extremely conservative views, Fet perceived the abolition of serfdom sharply negatively and from 1862 began to regularly publish essays in the Russky Vestnik, denouncing the post-reform order in the countryside from the perspective of the landowner. In 1867–1877, Fet zealously served as a justice of the peace. .
In 1873 The long-awaited decree of Alexander II to the Senate is issued, according to which Fet receives the right to join “the family of his father Shenshin with all the rights and titles belonging to the family.” Fet sells Stepanovka and buys the large estate Vorobyovka in the Kursk province.
Fet returned to literature only in the 1880s, having become rich and in 1881 bought a mansion in Moscow. After a long break, poetry is written again, they are published not in magazines, but in issues called Evening lights(I – 1883; II – 1885; III – 1888; IV – 1891) with circulations of several hundred copies. His youth friendship with Ya.P. Polonsky, L.N. is renewed. Tolstoy, he becomes close to the critic N.N. Strakhov, religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. The latter, being himself a poet, the forerunner of the Symbolists, actively helped Fet in the publication of “Evening Lights” and, admiring his poems, wrote a deep and heartfelt article about him About lyric poetry(1890). Soloviev considered his own lines to be programmatic for Fet: “... the winged sound of words / Grabs the soul and suddenly fixes / And the dark delirium of the soul, and the unclear smell of herbs.” He himself believed that in the amazing figurative and rhythmic richness of Fet’s poetry “the general meaning of the universe is revealed”: “from the outside, like the beauty of nature, and from the inside, like love.” This interpretation of Fet’s lyrics turned out to be as close as possible to the symbolists, who largely relied on Fet’s work in their aesthetic searches.
In 1881, Fet fulfilled his cherished dream - he completed and published the first Russian translation of the main work of Schopenhauer, his favorite philosopher, “ The world as will and representation", and in 1882-88 he translated “ Faust" J.W. Goethe. In 1883, his poetic translation of all the works of Horace was published - a work begun while still a student. And in 1886, Fet was awarded the title of corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences for his translations of ancient classics.
The artistic originality of Fet's poetry.
Fet’s lyrics, romantic in their origins (“the rapture of Byron and Lermontov was joined by a terrible passion for Heine’s poems,” Fet wrote) “was, as it were, a connecting link between the poetry of Zhukovsky and Blok,” while noting the closeness of the late Fet to the Tyutchev tradition.
Fet came out with his work in the space of Russian literature somewhat untimely: in the 50-60s, when he became a poet, poetry was almost completely dominated by Nekrasov and his followers - apologists of civil poetry, designed to glorify civil ideals. Poems, in their opinion, had to be topical, fulfilling an important ideological and propaganda task. “So you may not be a poet, but you must be a citizen!” - Nekrasov decisively proclaimed in his programmatic poem “The Poet and the Citizen.” It also condemned Pushkin, who believed that poetry is valued primarily for its beauty and is not obliged to serve any everyday purposes that go beyond the boundaries of art.
Not for everyday worries,
Not for gain, not for battles,
We were born to inspire
For sweet sounds and prayers... (“The Poet and the Crowd”).
Although Fet communicated a lot with Nekrasov and was even friends with many writers from the Sovremennik circle (for example, Turgenev), it was Pushkin’s assessment of poetry that was close to him. He expressed himself even more decisively: “I could never understand that art was interested in anything other than beauty,” which is present in a very limited range of life phenomena. Fet found true, lasting beauty only in nature, in love and in art itself (music, painting, sculpture). They became the main themes of his lyrics. In his poetry, Fet sought, in contrast to the democratic poets, to get as far away from reality as possible, to immerse himself in the contemplation of eternal beauty, not involved in the vanity, worries and bitterness of everyday life. All this led to Fet’s acceptance in the 40s of the romantic philosophy of art, and in the 60s of the theory of “pure art”.
Contemporaries often reproached Fet for the incomprehensibility of poetry, the uncertainty of content, for inattention to the demands of life (in the understanding of such critics as Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky), for gravitating toward themes of “pure art.” And yet, even the poets of the democratic camp, emphasizing their differences with Fet in the ideological sphere, always recognized his poetic genius: “A person who understands poetry... will not draw so much poetic pleasure from any Russian author after Pushkin,” Nekrasov wrote to Fet in 1856
In terms of his worldview, Fet remained an adherent of ancient philosophy all his life, from where he learned the worship of nature and beauty, and among the Western thinkers, Schopenhauer remained closest to him - a kind of romantic philosopher, with his mood of “worldly sorrow” and the constant tragedy of perception of reality. Throughout his life, Fet translated Schopenhauer’s main work, “The World as Will and Representation,” into Russian. Schopenhauer imagined human life as a chaotic and meaningless clash of individual egoistic wills, from which it is possible to renounce only by plunging into the world of pure contemplation. Awareness of the general tragedy of life does not plunge the poet into lethargy and despondency. Fet suffered a lot of suffering and failures, but nevertheless, a major tone predominates in his poems. Fet himself gave an explanation for this. In the preface to the third edition of Evening Lights, he wrote: “...sorrow could not inspire us. Against,<...>life’s hardships have forced us, for fifty years, from time to time to turn away from them and break through the everyday ice, so that at least for a moment we can breathe the clean and free air of poetry.” In his poems, Fet captures those rare moments when he moves away from the suffering and wounds of the everyday struggle for existence into pure contemplation of beauty (“the world as a representation,” in Schopenhauer’s terminology).
The prevailing mood in his poems is delight, intoxication with contemplated beauty, nature, love, art, and memories. Very often Fet appears as a motif of flying away from the earth, when the inspired soul “overthrows the languishing dust of the earth” and mentally flies away, following enchanting music or moonlight:
In this night, as in desires, everything is limitless,
Wings are growing on some aerial aspirations,
I would take you and rush away just as aimlessly,
Carrying away the light, leaving the faithless shadows.
Is it possible, my friend, to languish in heavy sorrow?
How not to forget, at least for a while, the stinging thorns?
The steppe grasses sparkle with the evening dew,
The mirror moon runs across the azure desert.
Everything that Fet classifies as “beautiful” and “sublime” is given wings, especially song and love. Metaphors such as “winged song”, “winged sound of words”, “winged dream”, “winged hour”, “inspired by delight”, “my spirit has taken wing”, etc. are often found in Fet’s lyrics.
Druzhinin defines the main property of Fet’s talent as “the ability to catch the elusive, to give an image and a name to what before him was nothing more than a vague, fleeting sensation of the human soul, a sensation without an image and a name.” Saltykov-Shchedrin, in a review of Fet’s collection of poems in 1863, notes the same property of Fet’s poetic thinking, albeit with some condemnation (for ideological reasons): “This is a world of vague dreams and unclear sensations, a world in which there is no direct and passionate feeling, but there is a timid, rather dark hint of it, there are no living, fully defined images, but there are sometimes attractive, but almost always pale outlines of them.<...>desires do not have a specific goal, and they are not desires at all, but some kind of anxiety of desire. A weak presence of consciousness is hallmark this half-childish worldview.” Indeed, Fet’s poems are born in the “darkness of an anxious consciousness.” His favorite epithets are “vague,” “unsteady,” “vague,” “languid,” or even indefinite pronouns, which are extremely rare in the poems of other poets (take just a line from the poem we just quoted, “Wings grow on some then aerial aspirations...", remarkable in its magical understatement). “I don’t know what I’m going to sing, but the song is just maturing” - this is how Fet directly declares his attitude towards the irrationality of the content. A little later, this principle will become the poetic credo of the Symbolists.
“Dreams and Dreams” - this, according to Fet, is the main source of his inspiration: He says about his poems:
It is hardly possible to get closer to music and poetry. In fact, we already have music in front of us: the poet wants to express not a thought, but a mood that cannot be expressed in words, and he does this mainly through a melodious melody. Main image poems are something invisible and barely perceptible - “languid”, “unclear” sounds, audible only to the soul of the poet. In another of his poetic miniatures, Fet formulates his basic creative principle most succinctly and clearly:
Speak to my soul;
What cannot be expressed in words -
Sound into the soul.
Fet himself said: “For an artist, the impression that caused the work is more valuable than the thing itself that caused this impression.” Epithets in Fet’s poems, as a rule, do not describe the contemplated object itself, but rather the state of mind of the lyrical hero, inspired by what he saw. Therefore, they can be the most unexpected and logically inexplicable. Thus, Fet’s violin can be called “melting” to convey the impression of the tenderness of its sound. “Fet’s characteristic epithets, such as “dead dreams”, “silver dreams”, “fragrant speeches”, “widowed azure”, “weeping herbs”, etc., cannot be understood in the literal sense: they lose their essence meaning and acquire broad and unsteady figurative meaning, connected with the main one by emotional association,” writes researcher of Fet’s creativity B.Ya. Accounting headquarters. Very often Fet paints a sound picture using visual associations. A striking example of this is the poem “ Singer", where the poet strives to embody in concrete images the sensations created by the melody of the song:
Take my heart into the ringing distance,
Where, like a month behind the grove, there is sadness;
In these sounds your hot tears
the smile of love shines meekly.
O child! how easy it is among the invisible swells
Trust me in your song:
Higher, higher I float on a silvery path,
Like a shaky shadow behind a wing.
Like the dawn at night across the sea, -
And from somewhere suddenly, I can’t understand,
A ringing tide of pearls will burst forth.
Take my heart into the ringing distance,
Where is sadness as gentle as a smile,
And I’ll rush higher and higher along the silvery path
I am like a shaky shadow behind a wing.
So, “the distance rings”, “the smile of love” “shines meekly”, the voice “burns” like “the dawn beyond the sea” and freezes in the distance, only to splash out again as a “loud tide of pearls”... Russian poetry has never known such bold, complex images . They and others like them established themselves only with the advent of the Symbolists in poetry. We feel that Fet does not intend a literal reading of his metaphors, but wants to convey a general mood: a combination of words is perceived as a single musical chord, where the harmony of the whole does not require listening to each individual sound. The poem stunned contemporaries with its illogicality (in the sounds a smile shines on the tears, etc.); Meanwhile, it is constructed essentially rationalistically.
Perhaps, before Fet, no one in Russian poetry possessed musicality similar to him, except for Nekrasov, with his unique melody of folk lament. To create a musical picture, Fet actively resorts to sound recording (“Suddenly thunder rushed through the mountains,” “Like timid strings cooing guitars,” “The steppe grasses sparkle with the evening dew,” “The mirror sparkled, with trembling babbling,” etc.) and verbal repeat. There are frequent repetitions of the initial verses at the end of the poem, without changes or with variations, as in the above-cited poems “The Singer” and “The Mirror Month...”. Such a ring composition is typical of the romance genre, which presupposes a clear strophic structure (division into couplets), generalized lyricism of content and the presence of refrains that play on a specific theme. One of Fet’s most famous romances is the poem “At dawn, don’t wake her up...”, almost immediately after its appearance, set to music by A. Varlamov and soon became, according to the critic Apollo Grigoriev, “almost a folk song.” Its amazing melodiousness is largely based on a wide variety of repetitions: one word (“long, long”, “more and more painful”), one epithet with different meanings (“And her pillow hot, / AND hot a tiring dream"), anaphora (unity of command in the lines: " At dawn don't wake her up / At dawn she sleeps so sweetly"), sound repetitions ("Morning breathes... / Bright exuberant..."), parallel syntactic constructions(“And the brighter... / And the louder”). Finally, the ring composition holds the entire structure of the poem together:
Don't wake her up at dawn
At dawn she sleeps so sweetly;
Don't wake her, don't wake her...
At dawn she sleeps so sweetly!
I. Kuznetsov makes interesting observations about this romance: “The final stanza is a variant of the initial one, with a changed intonation: “That’s why...”. It is implied that, after reading the poem, the reader has made a circle from the question raised by the first two stanzas (“why?”) to a complete clarification of the entire logic of the lyrical situation (“that’s why”). However, strictly speaking, the reader does not receive any explanation. There is a heroine in the poem, but there is not a single full-fledged event in her life, she is deprived not only of actions and speeches, but also of simple movements (in the present she is sleeping, “yesterday evening” - “she sat for a long, long time”), as well as a full-fledged portrait " Thus, the content of the poem consists of unsteady, completely inexpressible changes in the heroine’s mood, caused by changes in states in nature.
Composers immediately felt the connection between Fet’s “melodies” (the name of his large cycle of poems) and romance, and even before the release of the collection in 1850, his poems, set to music by the popular Varlamov and Gurilev, were performed by gypsy choirs. In the 60s, Saltykov-Shchedrin stated that “almost all of Russia sings Fet’s romances.” Subsequently, almost all of Fet's poems were set to music.
P.I. Tchaikovsky, in a letter to Grand Duke Konstantin (also a poet who wrote under the pseudonym K.R.), gave the following review of Feta: “I consider him an absolutely brilliant poet,<...>Fet, in his best moments, goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and boldly takes a step into our area.<...>This is not just a poet, but rather a poet-musician, seemingly avoiding even topics that can easily be expressed in words. This is also why he is often misunderstood, and there are even gentlemen who laugh at him or find that poems like, Take my heart into the ringing distance. . “is nonsense. For a limited and especially non-musical person, perhaps this is nonsense, but it’s not for nothing that Fet, despite his undoubted genius for me, is not at all popular.” Fet responded to this judgment: “Tchaikovsky is right a thousand times over.” , since I was always drawn from a certain area of words into an indefinite area of music, into which I went as far as my strength was sufficient.”
When characterizing Fet's creative style, they often talk about his impressionism, thus comparing him with the artists of the French impressionist school (Claude Monet, Pizarro, Sisley, Renoir), who tried to capture in their canvases subtle, subtle changes in the lighting of the landscape, so that they could paint a picture from life only half an hour a day. At the same time, light colors predominated in their paintings. Impressionism, according to P. V. Palievsky, is based “on the principle of the artist’s direct recording of his subjective observations and impressions of reality, changeable sensations and experiences.” The hallmark of this style is “the desire to convey the subject in sketchy strokes that instantly capture every sensation...”. The impressionistic style made it possible to “sharpen” and multiply the pictorial power of the word.”
Comparing Fet with impressionistic painting or music (Saint-Saëns, Debussy), of course, is quite conditional and can be perceived more as a metaphor than as a term, but this association is correct in the sense that Fet also describes individual, scattered, fleeting moments of life, striking in their beauty, as they appear to him in his memories.
Nature in Fet's lyrics. For Fet, nature is, first of all, an eternal source of divine beauty, inexhaustible in its diversity and eternal renewal. Contemplation of nature is the highest state of the soul of the lyrical hero, giving his existence meaning. This worldview comes first among all life values putting beauty is called aesthetic. Many critics wrote about Fet that he described nature as if from the window of a landowner’s house or from the perspective of a manor park, as if it was created specifically to be admired. Indeed, the old park with shady alleys that cast quaint shadows at night is often the backdrop for the poet’s romantic thoughts. However, the poet feels nature so deeply, subtly and soulfully that his landscapes become a universal expression of the beauty of Russian nature as such.
“Fet is without a doubt one of the most remarkable Russian landscape poets,” researcher B. Bukhshtab writes about him, “In his poems the Russian spring appears before us - with fluffy willows, with the first lily of the valley asking for sunlight, with translucent leaves of blossoming birches, with bees crawling “into every carnation of fragrant lilacs”, with cranes screaming in the steppe. And the Russian summer with sparkling, burning air, with a blue sky covered in haze, with the golden tints of ripening rye in the wind, with the purple smoke of sunset, with the aroma of mown flowers over the fading steppe. And Russian autumn is filled with motley forest slopes, with birds stretching into the distance or fluttering in leafless bushes, with herds on trampled stubble. And the Russian winter, with distant sleighs running on shiny snow, with the play of dawn on a snow-covered birch, with frost patterns on the double window glass.”
The night landscape is especially common in Fet, because it is at night, when the bustle of the day calms down, that it is easiest to merge into one with the natural world, enjoying its indestructible, all-encompassing beauty. In Fet’s night there are no glimpses of chaos that frightened and fascinated Tyutchev: on the contrary, a majestic harmony reigns in the world, hidden during the day. What comes first in the figurative series is not darkness and wind, but the moon and stars. The month takes the poet’s soul with it into the blue distance, and the stars turn out to be his mute, mysterious interlocutors. The poet reads from them the “fiery book” of eternity (“Among the Stars”), feels their gaze, and even hears them sing:
I stood motionless for a long time
Peering into the distant stars, -
Between those stars and me
Some kind of connection was born.
I thought... I don’t remember what I thought;
I listened to a mysterious choir
And the stars quietly trembled,
And I have loved the stars ever since...
Sometimes Fet manages to achieve in his emotional understanding of the nature the philosophical depth and power that we are accustomed to attribute to Tyutchev.
On a haystack at night in the south
I lay with my face to the firmament,
And the choir shone, lively and friendly,
Spread all around, trembling.
The earth is like a vague, silent dream,
She flew away unknown
And I, as the first inhabitant of paradise,
One saw the night in the face.
Was I rushing towards the midnight abyss,
Or were hosts of stars rushing towards me?
It seemed as if in a powerful hand
I hung over this abyss.
And with fading and confusion
I measured the depth with my gaze,
In which with every moment I
I'm sinking more and more irrevocably.<1857>
Under Fet’s gaze, nature seems to come to life, personified, and moved by human feelings and emotions. Even in Tyutchev’s poetry we could come across similar imagery: his shadow squints, the azure laughs, the vault of heaven looks sluggishly. But Fet goes much further in “humanizing” nature: in his poems “flowers look with the longing of a lover”, the rose “smiled strangely”, “the grass is sobbing”, the willow is “friendly with painful dreams”, the stars pray, “and the pond dreams, and the sleepy poplar slumbers.”
However, the personification of nature has completely different foundations in the philosophy of Fet and Tyutchev. If Tyutchev understands nature as a kind of independent, living and omnipotent force (in the language of philosophers, substance), completely incomprehensible, opposing man, then for Fet nature is rather a part of his own “I”, a source of inspiration and a background for his feelings and experiences. The poet’s lyrical emotion seems to spill out into nature, filling the world with his feelings and experiences. The poet seems to blur the line between the inner and outer world, and for him it is palpable how “... in the air behind the nightingale’s song / Anxiety and love are heard.”
Therefore, in Fet’s world, human properties can be attributed to such phenomena as air, darkness, and even color:
Everything around is tired: the color of heaven is tired,
And the wind, and the river, and the month that was born,
And the night, and in the greenery the dim sleeping forest...
– But in fact, all the images only reflect the languid fatigue in the soul of the lyrical hero, with whom all of nature seems to “empathize.”
Fet's love lyrics.
Fet's love lyrics are an inexhaustible sea of feelings, an enveloping and timid languor of a nascent feeling, and the rapturous pleasure of spiritual intimacy, and the happiness of two souls striving towards each other in a single impulse, and the apotheosis of passion, leaving behind an unfading memory. Fet's poetic memory knew no bounds, which allowed him even in his declining years to write poems about his first love, as if he were still under the impression of a recent, much-desired date. Most often, Fet painted in his poems the very beginning of love, its most romantic, enlightened and reverent moments: long gazes of unwavering eyes, the first touching of hands, the first walk in the evening in the garden, enthusiastic contemplation of the beauty of nature together, giving rise to spiritual intimacy. “I value the steps to painful happiness no less than happiness,” says his lyrical hero. Love and landscape lyrics Fet often makes up one whole. A heightened perception of the beauty of nature is often caused by love experiences. Let's take one romance as an example:
I won't tell you anything
And I won’t worry you at all,
And what I silently repeat,
I don't dare hint at anything.
Night flowers sleep all day long,
But as soon as the sun sets behind the grove,
The sheets are quietly opening
And I hear my heart bloom.
And into the sore, tired chest
The moisture of the night blows... I'm trembling,
I won't alarm you at all
I won't tell you anything
The imagery of this poem is directly based on the parallelism of the life of the soul and nature. At dusk, when night flowers bloom, it comes to life and “blooms” loving heart, cramped and languishing during the day. The poet’s feeling turns out to be as natural to his soul as beauty and flowering in nature are organic. Love so fills the poet’s entire being that he lives by it, happy, even despite the torment of forced silence. The amazing melodiousness of this poem, elegantly emphasized by its circular, mirror composition, is also natural, for love sings silently in the hero’s soul. The roll call of figurative rows in another, the most famous love miniature by Fet, is organized even more subtly:
Whisper, timid breathing. The trill of the nightingale, the silver and swaying of the Sleepy stream. Night light, night shadows, Shadows without end, A series of magical changes of a sweet face, In the smoky clouds the purple of a rose, A glimmer of amber, And kisses and tears, And dawn, dawn!.. (1850)
Only upon careful reading does it become clear that a night meeting in the manor park is being described. The fact that there is not a single verb in the poem is not just an original poetic device, but a whole philosophy of feeling. There is no action, because only one moment, or a series of moments, is described, each of which is self-sufficient and motionless in itself: the action, divided into moments, is a state in each of them. But in order to describe each such precious moment, the poet needs a whole series of subtle, unnoticeable at first glance details that recreate the unique aroma of experiences. In the poem, natural images are so closely linked with the description of the date and the beloved herself that efforts are required to recreate the clarity and completeness of the picture. The feelings of lovers (whispers, timid breathing) are in the same semantic row with the “trills of a nightingale”, the swaying of a stream, and “a series of magical reflections of a sweet face” is created by the play of night shadows cast by the crowns of rustling trees. It is interesting to note that all the images of the poem are presented indirectly, through their attribute: thus, it is said not directly about the stream, but about the “silver and swaying” of the stream, not about the face, but “a series of magical changes” of the face, and not even about amber, but about the “glimmer of amber.” This technique allows you to somewhat “blur” the outlines of objects, plunging them into romantic uncertainty.
In the last quatrain comes the culmination of feeling, which is also reflected in nature: instead of “whispers” and “timid breathing” one hears “...and kisses and tears”, and the “silver of the stream” and “night shadows” is replaced by a flaring dawn, coloring world in purple roses and golden amber. Exciting moments of love happiness absorb the intoxication of the beauty of the earthly world, the harmony of the universe, and all feelings merge into a single magical symphony.
The method of detailing leads to the fact that the poem does not create a complete image of the beloved - rather, the experience of her closeness in the soul of the lyrical hero is given. The image seems to dissolve in the general range of sensations of the poet, becoming part of his inner world. The rest must be recreated and completed by the reader’s own imagination.
In the poem “The night was shining. The garden was full of the moon..." the poet combines three feelings in one impulse: admiration for the intoxicating night, admiration for the music and inspired singing, which involuntarily develop into love for the beautiful singer. The very first line depicts a night landscape, illuminated by bright moonlight. Saying that the garden was full the moon, Fet evokes in us an involuntary association with another expression: I / my soul full delight, feelings, love - transferring the states of the inner world to the outer. Just below he writes:
The piano was all opened, and the strings in it trembled,
Just like our hearts follow your song.
The addition of the particle “whole” gives the phrase a completely new meaning, because this can only be said about a person (I all open towards you). And finally, speaking of strings, trembling, like hearts, Fet repeats the same technique for the third time, finally exposing it.
The poet’s entire soul emanates, dissolves in music - and at the same time in the soul of the singing heroine, who appears before him as the living embodiment of love (“That you alone are love, that there is no other love”). Fet attaches almost no importance to the huge time gap that lay between the first unforgettable evening and the new meeting, devoting only one line to it in passing (“And many years have passed, tedious and boring...”). In his mind, both evenings merge together, overcoming all the laws of earthly life. In those hours when a sweet voice sounds, the poet finds the meaning of existence, and for him time in reality turns into eternity:
... but there is no end to life, and there is no other goal,
As soon as you believe in the sobbing sounds,
Love you, hug you and cry over you!
It is difficult to unequivocally classify this poem as both love lyrics and poems about art. It would be more correct to define it as a sublime hymn to beauty, combining the charm and liveliness of a vivid experience with a deep philosophical meaning: the poet “believes in sobbing sounds” as in a religion, and lives for them. This worldview is called aestheticism.
Swept away on the wings of inspiration beyond the boundaries of earthly existence, Fet feels like an all-powerful ruler, equal to the gods, overcoming the limitations of human capabilities with the power of poetic genius. If Zhukovsky in “The Inexpressible” complained about the powerlessness of art to convey in words the beauty of the visible, God’s world, if Tyutchev believed that “expressed thought” coarsens feelings and therefore inevitably becomes a “lie” (“Silentium!”), then for Fet poetry is capable of transforming the world, resolving any contradictions: making the unknown - native, torment - sweet, someone else's - yours, and even utter the inexpressible - “whisper about something before which the tongue goes numb.”
Interrupt a dreary dream with a single sound,
Suddenly revel in the unknown, dear,
Give life a sigh, give sweetness to secret torments,
Instantly feel someone else’s as your own,
Whisper about something that makes your tongue go numb,
Strengthen the fight of fearless hearts -
This is what only a select few singers possess,
This is his sign and crown! (« Drive away a living boat with one push...»)
© All rights reserved
AFANASY AFANASIEVICH FET
In the famous pre-revolutionary work on the history of Russian literature
a riddle,” however, only repeating the definition that had already flashed
in criticism. This psychological riddle, however, has
social clue. Here lies the explanation of many mysteries that...
Fet's poetry has staged and continues to stage.
Already as if finally buried in the 60s of the past
century, this poetry was revived to a new life in the 80s. Explanation,
that this poetry came to court in the era of reaction is true,
but clearly not enough. Interest in Fet sometimes increased, sometimes
fell, but Fet has already entered Russian poetry forever, with new and new
resurrections refuting the next funeral.
We must also not forget that, significant in itself, poetry
Feta was included in Russian literature and, more broadly, in Russian art
and indirectly, fertilizing many of its great phenomena: enough
name Alexander Blok here.
Fet has always been regarded as the banner of “pure art” and
in fact he was. Nevertheless, critics who gravitated toward “pure
art" or even directly advocated for it (V. Botkin, A. Druzhinin),
Fet's poetry was not always understood and approved, and certainly
in their praise they were, in any case, more restrained than Leo Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky, who, in general, turned out to be “pure art”
And here's another mystery. Much has been said about anti-democracy
Feta. Indeed, the elitism of Fet’s poetry seems to
it is more certain that it was theoretically realized by him himself
in the spirit of Schopenhauer. Works published in 1863 in two volumes
The poets did not separate even for 30 years. It does not follow from this, however, that
Fet did not find a wide audience, probably wider than
anyone, with the exception of Nekrasov, is a democratic poet of his time.
“...Almost all of Russia sings his romances,”2 he also wrote
in 1863 Shchedrin, who, if one can blame him for partiality,
this is not in favor of Fet.
Fet's father, a wealthy and noble Oryol landowner Afanasy
Shenshin, while in Germany, secretly took his wife from there to Russia
Darmstadt official Charlotte. Soon Charlotte gave birth
son - the future poet, who also received the name Afanasy. However
official marriage of Shenshin with Charlotte, who passed
into Orthodoxy under the name of Elizabeth, several events took place
Later. Many years later, church authorities uncovered the “illegality”
birth of Afanasy Afanasyevich, and, already being fifteen years old
and the son of a German official, Fet, living in Russia. Mal-
Chick was shocked. Not to mention, he was deprived of all rights and privileges,
associated with nobility and legal inheritance.
Only in 1873 a request to recognize him as Shenshin’s son was
satisfied; however, the poet retained his literary name Fet.
All their lives two people lived in one place - Fet and Shenshin.
Creator of beautiful lyrical poems. And a tough landowner.
This duality, however, also penetrated into literature.
“...Even if this acquaintance is based only on
“Memoirs,” wrote the critic D. Tsertelev, “it may seem
that you are dealing with two completely different people, although
they both speak sometimes on the same page. One captures
eternal world questions so deeply and with such breadth that
human language lacks words with which to
express a poetic thought, and only sounds and hints remain
and elusive images - the other seems to laugh at him and know
doesn’t want him, talking about the harvest, about income, about plows, about the stud farm
and about justices of the peace. This duality struck everyone, close
who knew Afanasy Afanasyevich"3.
Understanding this duality requires broader sociological
explanations than those that have been very often offered
criticism: a defender of reaction and a serf owner wrote about flowers and
love feelings, leading away from life and social
“Fet - Shenshin” reveals a lot in the “psychological riddle”
German philosopher Schopenhauer (as is known, who fascinated Fet
and translated by him) with his own, ultimately coming from
Kant, by contrasting art as “useless”, truly
free activity to work - even more broadly - life practice
as subject to the laws of iron necessity or to what
Schopenhauer called it the “law of sufficient reason.” Each of these areas
has its own servants: “people of genius” or “people of benefit.”
Schopenhauer establishes a real contradiction in the world of private property
relations, it captures the real division into
“people of genius” and “people of benefit” as the inevitable result of the dominant
in the world of private property division relations
labor. But Schopenhauer, naturally, does not figure out the latter and,
finding himself in captivity of insoluble contradictions, turns the contradiction
into antinomy.
This contradiction was realized and justified, in any case,
taken for granted and unchangeable by Fet. Fet's originality,
however, it did not manifest itself in the fact that he understood and realized this contradiction,
but in the fact that he expressed it with his whole life and personal destiny
and embodied it. Schopenhauer seemed to explain to Fet what had already determined
his entire spiritual emotional structure, his deeply pessimistic
attitude. "He was an artist in every sense of the word."
words,” wrote Ap. Grigoriev, - was highly present
he has the ability to create... Creation, but not birth... He does not
knew the pain of birth of an idea. As the ability to create grew within him
indifference. Indifference - to everything except the ability to create -
to God's world, as soon as its objects ceased to be reflected
in his creative ability, to himself, how soon he stopped
be an artist. This is how this man realized and accepted his
purpose in life... This man had to either kill himself,
or become what he became... I have not seen a man
who would be so stifled by melancholy, for whom I would be more afraid
suicide"4.
Did Fet become the way he did so as not to “kill himself”?
he recognized in himself a “man of genius” and a “man of benefit”, “Fet” and
"Shenshin", separated them and put them in polar relations. And how would
to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the situation, the hated name
“Fet” turned out to be associated with his favorite art, and the desired and, finally,
by hook or by crook achieved noble
“Shenshin” - with that life and everyday practice from which
he himself suffered so cruelly and in which he himself was so cruel and inhuman.
I am among the crying Shenshin,
And Fet I am only among the singers, -
the poet admitted in one poetic message.
Fet's art was not a justification for Shenshin's practice, but rather
in opposition to it, he was born of endless dissatisfaction
everything that the “man of benefit” Shenshin lived with. Fet and Shenshin
organically fused. But this connection “Fet - Shenshin” shows
unity of opposites. Fet's art is not only closely related
with the entire existence of Shenshin, but also opposes him,
hostile and irreconcilable.
Fet's poetry organically entered into its era, was born by it
and was connected by many threads with the art of that time.
Nekrasov, although not equal, but comparing Fet with Pushkin,
wrote: “We can safely say that a person who understands poetry
and willingly opening his soul to her sensations, in no Russian
how much pleasure Mr. Fet will give him.”5 Tchaikovsky is not only
spoke about Fet’s undoubted genius: the music of Tchaikovsky
strongly connected with Fet's muse. And the point is not at all that
Fet turned out to be a convenient “text writer” for Tchaikovsky. Themselves by
Fet's talent turns out to be neither socially nor at all explainable.
Only Goncharov could write “Oblomov” - Dobrolyubov is
understood perfectly. One of the main advantages of the novel about the “new
man" Bazarov Pisarev saw in the fact that it was written by "an old
man" Turgenev. What Fet discovered, he could not open
Nekrasov and no one else except Fet himself. Fet really
got away from a lot, but, as another old critic noted, he
did not return empty-handed.
Fet went into nature and love, but in order for him to “find”
there is something there, objective historical
and social preconditions. Fet looked for beauty and found it. Fet
I was looking for freedom, integrity, harmony and found them. Another thing -
within what limits?
Fet is a poet of nature in a very broad sense. In a broader
than just a lyrical landscape painter. Nature itself in Fet's lyrics is socially
conditioned. And not only because Fet fenced himself off when leaving
into nature, from life in all its fullness, although for this reason too. Fet expressed
in Russian lyrics, more than anyone else, a free attitude
to nature.
Marx wrote about the importance of understanding exactly how human
became natural, and the natural became human. This one is already
a new, human naturalness in literature was revealed in the lyrics
nature and in the lyrics of love, the most natural and the most human
But art develops in a privately owned world
in grave contradictions. And human, free, social
naturalness, in order to express oneself in art, to express
the joy of free human existence required special conditions.
Only in these conditions could a man feel like a Fetov
lyrics “the first inhabitant of paradise” (“And I, as the first inhabitant of paradise, Alone
saw the night in the face"), to feel one’s “divine”, i.e. truly
human essence (there is no talk of religiosity here, and indeed
Fet was an atheist), to resolutely defend before those who doubted
Leo Tolstoy has the right to compare:
And I know, sometimes looking at the stars,
That we looked at them like gods and you.
For this, Fet needed isolation from the actual social
life of society, from painful social struggle. Fet, in contrast,
Let's say that Nekrasov was quite ready for this. But there were victims
great: a free attitude towards nature at the expense of an unfree attitude
to society, leaving humanity in the name of expressing humanity,
achieving integrity and harmony through the renunciation of integrity
and harmony, etc., etc. This internal contradiction is not immediately
Freshness itself (the definition most often applied to Fet,
especially revolutionary democratic criticism), naturalness,
the wealth of human sensuality in Feta's lyrics gave birth to
Russian mid-century setting. The country not only concentrated
all the abomination and severity of social contradictions, but also prepared
to their resolution. Anticipation of ever-renewing changes
cried out to a new man and a new humanity. Searches and finds
in literature were broader here than just the image
a new person - a commoner. They were also realized in Turgenev's
women, and in the “dialectics of the soul” of Tolstoy’s heroes, and in Russian
7 Order 539 193
skaya lyrics, in particular in Fet’s lyrics. Naturalness, naturalness
The main achievement of Fet's lyrics, which determined the main
features of his artistic system. That's why, let's say,
it already has more than just metaphorization:
Night flowers sleep all day long,
But as soon as the sun sets behind the grove,
The sheets are quietly opening
And I hear my heart bloom.
Fet's originality lies in the fact that the humanization of nature*
meets with him naturalness to man. In the given example
the first line reveals its true meaning only after the fourth,
and the fourth only in relation to the first. Nature in its
humanity (flowers are sleeping) merges with the natural life of the human
hearts (heart blooms).
Fet opens and reveals the richness of human sensuality,
not only the wealth of human feelings (which, of course, opened
lyrics before Fet, and here it is rather limited than broad), namely
sensuality, that which exists apart from the mind and is not controlled by the mind.
Sensitive critics, although differing in definitions, point out
on the subconscious as a special sphere of application of Fetov’s
lyrics. Ap. Grigoriev wrote that Fet’s feeling does not mature until
clarity and the poet does not want to reduce him to it, that he has rather half-satisfaction,
half-feelings. This doesn't mean that Fet is half
feels, on the contrary, he surrenders to the feeling like no one else, but the feeling itself
then it is irrational, unconscious. “The power of Fet lies in this,” wrote
Druzhinin, - that our poet... knows how to get into the innermost
secret places of the human soul..."6. “The area is open to him, he is familiar,
along which we walk with our hearts sinking and our eyes half closed
eyes..."7. For Fet, this is a clearly conscious creative principle:
"against the mind."
According to the strength of spontaneity and integrity of the manifestation of feelings
Fet is close to Pushkin. But Pushkin’s integrity and spontaneity
were infinitely wider, Pushkin’s “childishness” did not exclude
maturity of mind. "Long live the muses, long live the mind" -
exclaimed the poet, and the very glorification of reason organically entered into him
in the “Bacchic Song” - Fet’s thing is impossible. V. Botkin
said in connection with Fet’s work that in a “complete” poet one also needs
mind, soul, and education. Pushkin was such a “complete” poet.
“Pushkin’s nature, for example,” writes the same Botkin, “was in the highest
multilateral degree, deeply developed by moral
questions of life... In this regard, Mr. Fet seems to be ahead of him
a naive child." And the “incomplete” poet Fet was essentially addressing
"incomplete" person. That is why it was necessary for perception
Feta has what Botkin called a “sympathetic mood.”
The sphere of subconscious perception of the world required for its
expressions of a special method that has become an essential element
in the development of Russian literature. Not without reason, back in 1889,
Chairman of the Psychological Society N. Grot at the celebration of Fet
read on behalf of the members of the society an address that said: “... without
doubts, over time, when the techniques of psychological research
expand, your works should give the psychologist abundant
and an interesting material for illuminating many dark and complex
facts in the field of human feelings and emotions.”
It was no coincidence that Fet began his memoirs with a story about the impression
which the photograph produced on him, her own, only to her
available means of reflecting life: “Don’t we have the right to say that
details that easily escape in a living kaleidoscope
life, catch the eye more clearly, having passed into the past in the form of an unchangeable
snapshot from reality"8.
Fet values the moment very much. He has long been called the poet of the moment.
“...He captures only one moment of feeling or passion, he
all in the present... Each Fet song refers to one point
of being..."9 - noted Nikolai Strakhov. Fet himself wrote:
Only you, poet, have a winged sound
Grabs on the fly and fastens suddenly
And the dark delirium of the soul and the vague smell of herbs;
So, for the boundless, leaving the meager valley,
An eagle flies beyond the clouds of Jupiter,
Carrying an instant sheaf of lightning in faithful paws.
This consolidation of “suddenly” is important for a poet who appreciates and expresses
the fullness of organic being, its involuntary
states. Fet is a poet of concentrated, concentrated states:
I'm waiting, overwhelmed with anxiety, as if I've broken a string.
I’m waiting here on the very path: A beetle, having flown into a spruce;
This path through the garden Khriplo called his friend
You promised to come. There is a corncrake right there at your feet.
Crying, the mosquito will sing, Quietly under the forest canopy
A leaf will fall smoothly... The young bushes are sleeping...
The rumor, opening up, grows, Oh, how it smelled of spring!..
Like a midnight flower. It's probably you!
The poem, as often in Fet’s work, is extremely tense and tense
immediately not only because it is said here about anxiety: this anxiety
and from the tension-building repetition at the very beginning (“Waiting...
I’m waiting..."), and from a strange, seemingly meaningless definition -
"on the very path." A simple path “through the garden” became “the path itself”
with an endless ambiguity of meanings: fatal, first,
last, by burning bridges, etc. In this, the maximum
In a tense state, a person perceives nature more acutely
and he himself, surrendering to it, begins to live like nature. "The rumor, opening up,
grows like a midnight flower" - in this comparison with a flower
there is not only a bold and surprisingly visual objectification
human hearing, materialization that reveals its natural
ness. Here the process of this very experience of getting used to the world is conveyed
nature (“Hearing, opening up, grows...”). That’s why the poems “Hoarsely
I called my friend, There’s a crake right there at my feet” they’re already ceasing to be
a simple parallel from the life of nature. This "raucous" does not apply
only to the bird, but also to the man standing here, on the “very path”,
already, perhaps, with a tight, dry throat. And also organically
It turns out to be included in the natural world:
Quiet under the forest canopy
Young bushes are sleeping...
Oh, how it smelled like spring!..
It's probably you!
This is not an allegory, not a comparison with spring*. She is spring itself,
nature itself, also living organically in this world. "Oh, how
it smelled like spring!..” - this middle line applies just as much to her,
young, as to young bushes, but this same line unites
her and nature, so that she appears like the entire natural world, and the entire
the natural world like her.
Fet was not alone in this new, heightened perception of nature,
and this also confirms the correctness of his discoveries. When at Tolstoy's
Levin will hear “grass grows”, then this will be an exact match
discoveries, and perhaps a consequence of Fet’s discoveries
in the field of the so-called poetry of nature. And a poem by Nekrasov
1846 “Before the Rain” will be close to Fet and the general
composition of landscape miniature and, most importantly, immediacy
an experience that carries a special acuity of perception:
To a stream, pockmarked and motley,
A leaf flies after a leaf,
And a dry and sharp stream
It's getting cold.
But Fet and Nekrasov generalize differently. This is especially clear
can be seen where they conclude the same. Here's Fetov's, too
40s, landscape:
Wonderful picture, Light from the high heavens,
How dear you are to me: And the shining snow,
White plain, And distant sleighs
Full moon, Lonely running.
These running sleighs, like someone galloping in the poem “By a Cloud”
wavy...”, and this is Fetov’s main generalization. For real
the picture begins to come to life only after the final lines
poems. Nekrasov does the same:
Over the passing tarataika
The top is down, the front is closed;
And went!" - standing up with a whip,
The gendarme shouts to the driver...
But he is not concerned about the picturesque perspective, but about the social one. Fet's
the main thing (we are not talking about other meanings) is that
the landscape evoked a feeling of, if not infinity, then enormity
world, hence the extraordinary depth of its perspective, which is created
distant sleigh (“Wonderful picture...*), distant horseman (“In a cloud
wavy...>). No wonder “A wavy cloud...” originally
was called “Dal” - distance, depth of perspective for him
basic. This is what gives birth to the actual lyrical motive:
“My friend, distant friend, Remember me,” unexpected and outwardly
not connected in any way with the landscape, but inevitably born precisely
space, a sense of distance.
Fetov's poetry of momentary, instantaneous, involuntary states
lived at the expense of immediate pictures of existence, real,
those around you. That is why he is a very Russian poet, very
organically absorbing and expressing Russian nature.
You are not surprised when you see how social, peasant,
such a Russian Nekrasov declares that “in Italy he wrote about Russians
exiles." But Fet, the poet of “pure art”, is also indifferent to Italy.
"with his cult of beauty, he almost repeats Nekrasov in poetry
“Italy, you lied to your heart!”, and in “Memoirs” he writes that
intends to pass over in silence the details of his stay
“on classical, Italian soil”10. For Fet, obviously, unacceptable
the very, so to speak, intentionality of classical beauties
Italy, their sanctification by tradition. He searched and found beauty,
but not where it turned out to be already given by the mind. Fet air-
Russian poetry is created by the Russian atmosphere. At the same time she is completely
devoid of any conscious motives: social,
like Nekrasov with his people’s Russia, or philosophical and religious,
like Tyutchev with his Russian messianism.
Fet's lyrics also played a well-known role in the democratization of Russian
poetry. What is its democracy? If, for example, democracy
Nekrasov and the poets of his school are directly related to the presence of characters,
then Fet's democracy - with their absence. Fet has a character
disintegrated, or rather, the psychological, even
psychophysical states, moods, feelings that carry it
poetry. They are subtle, elusive, but simple, even elementary.
“A world, European, national poet,” noted Druzhinin, “
Fet will never be; as an engine and educator he is not
will complete the path traversed by the great Pushkin. It does not contain
drama and breadth of vision, his worldview is a worldview
the simplest mortal..."11 (italics mine - N.S.). This
written in 1856. We will talk about the drama of late Fet later.
Here we note a clear indication that the poetic worldview
Fet has the worldview of the simplest mortal.
“Before any demands of modernity, there is a personal self,
this heart exists, this person..."12 - wrote Botkin, clearly narrowing
the very concept of modernity, since “the personal self... is the heart,
this man" were already a requirement of modern times and Fet also answered
Of course, in order to split the core of human character
before elementary particles, we needed a very complex apparatus,
which is what Fet’s poetry became. “I see a muse covered in simplicity, And
It’s not simple delight that sweetly flows into my chest,” wrote Fet. However
what Fet reveals is characteristic of everyone, everyone, although it is perceived
not always and not by everyone. For perception you need a “sympathetic”
mood”, poetic preparation is needed.
“To understand Fet,” they finally began to assimilate some
criticism - one must have a certain poetic development. Very few
I like Fet right away. Usually at first it seems empty,
Fet became involved in that revision of human personality, which
Russian literature began to produce, primarily in the person of L. Tolstoy,
even preceded this process. He is especially close
Tolstoy. And this is determined by the fact that the subject of Fet’s attention is
a normal, healthy person. His feelings are sophisticated, but not perverted.
“...We will not find in Fet,” wrote N. Strakhov, “not a shadow of pain,
no perversion of the soul, no ulcers... reading Fet
strengthens and refreshes the soul."14 Fet's healthy lyrics are not accidental
an indispensable participant in school anthologies, literature for children
reading. You can blame him for his narrow-mindedness, but there is no need
forget that only in this limitation is he free.
Fet wrote most “freely” in the 40s and 50s. Just at this time
time is created greatest number works to which
could include the definitions “fresh”, “clear”, “whole”
", "unbroken," - she was so generous to them then for
Feta is a Russian criticism of all camps. It is precisely this, and even exclusively
At this time, Fet’s poems include a village: pastures and fields,
and sketches of village life, and signs of peasant labor
(“Rainy summer”, “The rye is ripening over the hot fields...”, “You see,
behind the backs of the mowers..."). All this will be completely gone from the late Fet.
The desire to create some kind of unity, something like
poems: “Spring”, “Summer”, “Autumn”, “Snow”. Most of those who entered
in these cycles of works created in the 40-60s. Of course, at Fet's
and there is no hint of social definitions, but he doesn’t have a village
only external decorum. The fresh spontaneity of Fet's lyrics
Then she was not alienated from the village, the village also nourished her. In "Fortune-telling"
Feta, which can be compared both in plot and in how
they are alien to social overtones, with Zhukovsky’s “Svetlana”, we
We no longer find a conventionally folk one, as in Zhukovsky, but a living one,
folk, directly Nekrasov speech:
Lots of laughs! What's wrong with you?
Just like a market!
What a buzz! like bees
The barn is full.
There is the prowess and scope of the folk, or rather, Koltsovo song
in the 1847 poem “What an Evening...”:
This is how everything lives in the spring! Everything trembles and sings
In a grove, in a field Involuntarily.
We'll shut up in the bushes
These choirs, and not children, will pass like this
The grandchildren will come with a song on their lips:
Our children; They will come down to them in the spring
Same sounds.
That’s why Fet’s special predilection for Koltsov is not surprising.
one of his favorite poets. Already in old age, Fet wrote,
that he was under the “mighty” influence of Koltsov: “I have always
captivated by poetic exuberance, which Koltsov lacks
no... there is so much specifically Russian inspiration and enthusiasm in him
Fet remained a lyricist, albeit of a special kind. In Fet's lyrics
(at least in a significant part of it) there is a peculiar
primitiveness, which V. Botkin said well: “So naive
attentiveness of feelings and eyes can only be found among primitive
poets. He does not think about life, but unaccountably rejoices
to her. This is some kind of innocence of feeling, some kind of primitive
a festive view of the phenomena of life, characteristic of the original
era of human consciousness. That's why he is so dear to us,
like our irretrievable youth. That's why they're so attractive
Mr. Fet's anthological plays are whole and complete.
comprehensive significance, and it was given in 1856, that is
belongs to the first period of Fet’s work, but precisely with the feeling
life, which Botkin and Fet speak about and is close to Tolstoy’s epic
and Nekrasov in his poems of the early 60s. However, in order to
create an epic work (which is always popular) in new
conditions, on a new basis, it was necessary to solve the problem of people's
character. Unlike Tolstoy and Nekrasov, Fet did not do this
could. But Fet, who expressed the feeling of life fresh, unbroken,
Fet, who returned to the basic, initial elements of existence,
who in his lyrics elucidated the primary, infinitely small, this
One should not think, however, that Fet only records the immanent
and disparate psychological moods and subconscious states.
In this capacity, Fet's poetry would never have acquired
the influence it had on Russian culture.
Fet strives to build a bridge from this state to the whole world,
establish a connection between a given moment and life, ultimately in its
cosmic significance. A feeling of depth, space, distance,
already characteristic of early Fet, increasingly turns into a feeling
infinity and if not filled with the philosophical
meaning, it will point to it. This is the art of “everything”
sympathies,” to use Thomas Mann’s term, and reports
the main interest of his poetry becomes the main “typing
"beginning in it. His feelings and mood can become isolated
for everything in the world (we have already said that the world of social life, say,
the element of reason, even the simple existence of other people is excluded
is true, but this is what ensures the special selflessness of his lyrics),
merge with nature. It was this quality that delighted Tyutchev,
wrote to Fet:
beloved by the great mother,
Your lot is a hundred times more enviable;
More than once under the visible shell
You saw it right away...
Here lies the explanation of Fet’s love lyrics, which are not
just love lyrics. Fet's love is natural. But this love
natural not only because, first of all, it is sensual, although*
she was even accused of eroticism. However, in this case, misunderstanding
Feta occurs not only as a consequence of aesthetic deafness
or bias, but also reflects the peculiarities of the poet’s own system.
Fet's people, we said, live like nature, and nature like
People. And this is no longer the usual humanization, animation,
personification, etc. In Fet’s nature is not just spiritualized,
she lives not as a person in general, but as a person precisely in this
intimate moment, this momentary state and tension,
sometimes directly replacing it. The humanization of Tyutchev's "Fountain"
"For all the specificity of the description, it is based on a general comparison
with the “mortal thought” of a water cannon, Fet’s water cannon lives in unison
with a person, his impulse of this moment:
Now the month has emerged in its wondrous radiance
To the heights
And a water cannon in continuous kissing, -
Oh, where are you?
The tops of the linden trees are breathing
It's gratifying,
And the corners of the pillow
Cool moisture.
The natural world lives an intimate life, and the intimate life receives
sanction of all-natural existence.
I'm waiting... There's a breeze from the south;
It’s warm for me to stand and walk;
The star rolled to the west...
Sorry, golden one, sorry!
This is the finale of the poem “I’m waiting...”, the third stanza in it with already
repeating “I’m waiting” three times and resolving the tense
waiting for a star to fall. Again nature and human life
are linked by bonds of infinitely polysemantic meanings: say, farewell
with a star (the epithet “golden” makes us perceive precisely
so) it also feels like a farewell to her (the epithet can be attributed
and to her), not coming, not coming... She is not just likened
star, they can no longer be separated from each other.
Polysemy, which is relatively easily accepted by modern
a reader brought up on the poetry of the 20th century, with great effort
the house was perceived by Fet's contemporaries. Parsing a poem
“Swinging, the stars blinked with rays...”, Polonsky wrote indignantly
the sky, the depth of the sea - and the depth of your soul - I believe that you
here you are talking about the depths of your soul”17. "Uncertainty of content
it is taken to the last extreme... - quoting the beautiful
the poem “Wait for a clear day tomorrow...”, B. Almazov was indignant.-
What is this, finally? And here is what Druzhinin wrote
in his “Letters from a Nonresident Subscriber” about the poem “In the Long
nights": "...Mr. Fet's poem with its desperate confusion
and in darkness surpasses almost everything ever written in such
sort of in the Russian dialect!”18.
The poet, who so boldly “concluded” from the particular to the general, although
separated the spheres of the poetic, but in these spheres themselves he had to
take the path of shifting the usual ideas about the poetic:
Dense nettles Jolly boats
It makes noise under the window, blue in the distance;
Green Willow Iron Lattice
Hung like a tent; Squeals under the saw.
The poem is characterized by its extraordinary decisiveness
transition from the lowest, the closest (nettle under the window)
to the farthest and highest (distance, sea, freedom) and back.
It all rests on the combination of these two plans. There is no average.
In general, Fet’s middle link usually falls out. The same thing happens
and in Fet’s love lyrics, where we never see her, character, person,
nothing that implies character and that communication with a person,
carries character. Fet has it very specific (with the smell
hair, with the rustle of a dress, parting to the left), extremely
the experiences associated with her are specific, but she and these experiences
just a reason, an excuse to break through to the universal, worldly, natural
apart from it as a human certainty.
In the poems “Pseudo-poet”, obviously addressed to Nekrasov,
Fet reproached him for “lack of freedom”:
Dragging at the whim of the people Did not ascend piously
In the mud, a low-bowed verse, You in that fresh darkness,
You are the words of the proud, freedom, where selflessly and freely
I never understood it with my heart. Free song and eagle.
Let's not indulge in moral maxims about sycophancy
Fet himself before the powers that be. “It’s the same in life
Shenshin,” Fet would object to this, although Fet is nasty and flattering
The same strong ones wrote a lot of poems.
But in the poems “To the Pseudopoet” Fet himself has too much bitterness
for a free relationship with the world. And this is not bitterness
accidentally. It is not only a rejection of a person of another party, another
social camp. These poems were written in 1866, and the 60s, especially
their second half, a time of crisis in Fet’s development. One
was the first to point out the danger that the position was fraught with
“songbird”, Nekrasov, who at one time fully saw the power of
This is Fet's position. A. Ya. Panaeva recalls: “Fet conceived
publish full meeting of his poems and gave them to Turgenev and Nekrasov
carte blanche throw out those poems from the old edition that
they will find it bad. Nekrasov and Turgenev talk about this
There were frequent disputes. Nekrasov found it unnecessary to throw away
some poems, but Turgenev insisted. Very
I remember well how Turgenev passionately argued to Nekrasov that in
one stanza of the poem: “... I don’t know what I’ll sing, -
but only the song is ripening! Fet exposed<^ои телячьи мозги»19.
In 1866, Nekrasov spoke out in print on the same issue.
already ironically: “As you know, we have poets of three kinds:
those who “they themselves don’t know what they will sing,” as they aptly put it
their ancestor, Mr. Fet. These are, so to speak, songbirds."20
The sixties brought a new, complex sense of life,
and a new method was needed to express her joys and her sorrows,
first of all an epic. Nekrasov the lyricist could successfully create in the 60s
precisely because he became one of the creators of the Russian epic of this
pores, namely the epic, and not just the poems that he wrote before. Life
was included in literature to a extent that had never been included in it
earlier, and perhaps later too. Suffice it to say that this
the time of the creation of "War and Peace". It was in the 60s that Nekrasov
will write “Green Noise”, due to its harmony, closeness to nature,
perhaps most akin to Fet and yet for Fet himself
impossible work.
The position of the “one”, the look for Fet is natural and inevitable,
for peace above people and beyond them, true “complete” harmony
excluded, although Fet himself was sensitively and inevitably drawn to her. This
especially clearly visible when compared with “full” completely harmonious
creatures that appeared at different stages of human
history and art history: Venus de Milo, Sistine Madonna,
Christ. We did not take the examples arbitrarily, they are pointed to
works by Fet himself. When Fet wrote the poems “Venus
Milo”, then they turned out to be only a glorification of female beauty
as such. And maybe good in themselves, being attributed
to the Venus de Milo, seemed almost blasphemous to Gleb Uspensky.
“Little by little I finally convinced myself that Mr. Fet
without any reason, but only under the impression of the word
"Venus", which obliges us to glorify feminine beauty, sang what
which does not constitute even a small edge in the Venus de Milo
in the overall enormity of the impression it makes... And how
no matter how carefully you examine this great creature from the point of view
view of “feminine charm”, you will be convinced at every step
that the creator of this work of art had some kind of
another higher goal"21. However, Gleb Uspensky was sure that
Venus de Milo would also not have been understood by Yaroshenko’s Wanderer.
When Fet tried to write about the Sistine Madonna, then, in essence,
was powerless to do so. In the verses “To the Sistine Madonna”
"he said about Saint Barbara, and about Sixtus, and about the clouds in the picture,
but, limiting himself to circumlocutions, he did not dare to “describe”
her, as happened with the Venus de Milo, and thus showed at least
least artistic tact.
Fet was largely brought out of the crisis of the 60-70s by Schopenhauer,
albeit in a paradoxical way: by helping to understand and express this crisis
in truly tragic verses. In the 70-80s, Fet remained
servant of beauty. But this very service was realized more and more
like a heavy duty. Fet once again proved how not free from
life position of a “free” artist. He was still a priest
“pure art”, but not only those who served him, but also
who made heavy sacrifices:
Who will tell us that we did not know how to live,
Soulless and idle minds,
That kindness and tenderness did not burn in us
And we didn’t sacrifice beauty?
This burden of service is clearly recognized and expressed in the “Obrochnik”
(1889) and in other poems of this time (“Curse us...”). In place
The legal autonomy of art comes, as Vl said. Soloviev
about supporters of “pure art”, “aesthetic separatism”.
The narrow-mindedness and obsession of sectarianism appears. In verse,
written as if on a private occasion, expressed a whole
program:
There's no time to think, apparently
It’s like there’s a noise in the ears and in the heart;
It’s a shame to talk today,
And being crazy is reasonable.
What a paradox: it is reasonable to be mad. But this means that
madness ceases to be madness, it becomes intentionality.
A warning was carried out by Turgenev, who wrote
Fet back in 1865, that in “a constant fear of prudence
much more precisely this prudence, in front of which you
you tremble so much than any other feeling.”22.
Beauty is no longer as immediate and fresh as in
40-50s. It has to be obtained through suffering, from suffering
defend, and finally, even in suffering, seek and find “joy”
flour." Suffering, pain, torment are increasingly breaking into poetry
Feta. Beauty and joy for Fet are still the main thing,
but not on their own, but as “healing from torment”, as opposing
suffering, which also begins to live in the poem itself:
With a pure and free soul,
Clear and fresh as night
Laugh at the sick song,
Drive her away, away!
As if for a little attention
To a free heart until then
Following living compassion
The same pain did not creep in!
And into the sore, tired chest
The moisture of the night blows...
Suffering, grief, pain burst into poetry. And if one poet (Nekrasov)
as duty realized the need to write about them, then another.
(Fet), who previously simply turned away from them, now realizes
like a grave duty it is necessary not to write about them:
You want to curse, sobbing and groaning,
Seek scourges to the law.
Poet, stop! don't call me -
Call Tisiphone from the abyss.
When, offended by outrages again,
In your chest you will hear a call to sob, -
I will not change for the sake of your torment
Freedom is an eternal calling.
And here, in service, in struggle, albeit of a special kind, Fet
revealed a new powerful vitality. Even more tragic
than the more powerful, death-defying ("Death") god
(“Not to those, Lord...”) and not withstanding the weight of the struggle, because
There were no values other than beauty. But without values, outside
the beauty of the lying ones, the beauty itself was weakened, giving birth to new waves
pessimism and suffering. To the fiftieth anniversary of the creative
activities Fet wrote poems beginning with the words
“They are holding a funeral service for us...” and amazed their friends with their gloom.
In beauty itself, the poet begins to strive for the highest. Higher,
He also looks for the ideal in a woman. Characteristic sympathies in painting
in late Feta: Raphael, Perugino accurately determine the direction
search for the ideal.
I say that I love meeting with you
For the shine of your curls falling on your shoulders,
For the light that burns in the depths of your eyes.
Oh, it's all flowers, insects and stones,
Which ones the child is happy to pick up from all sides
To my beloved mother in those sweet moments,
When he looks into her eyes he is so happy.
What the poet’s gaze so readily stopped on and what completely
was satisfied (“the shine of the curls”, “the color is on the cheeks”, “running to the left
parting”, etc.) - all these are “flowers, insects and stones”. Need to
different, better and higher. But it will not be given:
In diligent searches, everything seems: just about
The familiar face accepts the mystery, -
But the poor heart's flight ends
One powerless languor.
He was powerless to express her in all the complexity of her feelings,
in character, in spirituality, in ideality. Fet rushed towards
Nekrasov's path, on the path of Tyutchev, looking for her, creating his own “lyrical
novel,” and yet the unity of the cycle will remain only the unity
moods.
The poem "Never" may be the most accurate expression
late Fet crisis. This is a poetic fantasy on the theme
resurrection on an already frozen and deserted land:
No winter birds, no midges on the snow.
I understood everything: the earth has long cooled down
And died out. Who should I take care of?
Breathing in your chest? For whom is the grave
Did she bring me back? And my consciousness
What is it connected with? And what is his calling?
Where to go, where there is no one to hug,
Where time is lost in space?
Come back, death, hurry up to accept
The last life is a fatal burden.
And you, frozen corpse of the earth, fly,
Carrying my corpse along the eternal path!
Fet expresses such a resurrection in the future as nothing more than
dying in the present. Here are the questions: to whom? for whom? Where? And the answer
- “no one to hug.” L. Tolstoy clearly understood the essence of this poem
and wrote to Fet: “...the spiritual question is posed perfectly. And I
I answer it differently than you do. “I wouldn’t want to go to the grave again.”
For me and with the destruction of all life except me, it is still not
it's over. For me, my relationship with God still remains... God willing
I wish you health, peace of mind and that you recognize
the need for a relationship with God, the absence of which you are so clearly
deny in this poem"23.
For Fet there was no “God” and, more broadly, there were no “gods”, there were no
social, moral, religious values. Was alone
God is Art, which, as Valery Bryusov noted, is not
withstood the loads of the fullness of existence. The circle is closed and exhausted.
And for Fet’s closest heir - Alexander
Blok will need the antagonist Fet - Nekrasov with his search
social, worldly values in real life in all its
complexity and breadth.
