The best poems of great poets. The best poems of great poets The general meaning of the poems

Russian poet Anna Andreevna Akhmatova ( real name Gorenko), bright representative creative intelligentsia, wife famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov until 1918. After publishing his first poems in 1912, Akhmatova became a cult figure among the intelligentsia and part of the St. Petersburg literary scene. Her second book, Rosaria (1914), was acclaimed by critics, who praised the virtues of conscious, carefully crafted verse, in contrast to the loose style of the Symbolists who dominated Russian literature of the period.

Anna Azhmatova wrote a lot of lyrical poems; her piercing love poetry is loved by millions of people of different generations. But her sharp attitude in her work towards the outrages of power led to a conflict. At Soviet power there was an unspoken ban on Akhmatova's poetry from 1925 to 1940. During this time, Akhmatova devoted herself to literary criticism, in particular, to translating Pushkin into other languages.

Changes in the political climate finally allowed Akhmatova to be accepted into the Writers' Union, but after World War II, there was an official decree prohibiting the publication of her poetry. Her son, Lev, was arrested in 1949 and spent in prison until 1956. To try to win his release, Akhmatova wrote poetry praising Stalin and the government, but it was to no avail.

Although Akhmatova often faced official government opposition to her work during her life, she was deeply loved and praised by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her country during difficult political times. Its the most experimental work, Requiem (which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987) and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of Stalin's terror, during which she experienced artistic repression as well as enormous personal loss. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she spent most of her life, in 1966.

A poem as a poetic genre is a poetic narrative work. Pushkin's poems, a list of which will be presented later, occupy a fairly large part in his work. He wrote twelve poems, and twelve more remained unfinished in outline and initial lines. Starting from 1820, from the period of southern exile, the poet created one after another very serious and deep in its content romantic poems, very modern and complex in highly poetic form and issues.

General meaning of the poems

Pushkin’s southern poems, the list of which includes such works as “The Robber Brothers”, “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “Bakhchisarai Fountain”, etc., bring a completely new direction to Russian literature, which came to be called advanced revolutionary romanticism. It expressed the poetic feelings and views of modern noble youth, in which the Decembrists were the most active. In this environment, dissatisfaction with the way of life and everything was ripening. political system then Russia. Life for such people was worse than prison, and a person was presented as a prisoner who ardently strived for freedom, which was generally the cult of the revolutionary romantics of the 20s. However, their social loneliness and the lack of any connection with the people, whose suffering they so strongly sympathized with, often gave an extremely subjective and tragic character to the worldview of the romantics.

Romantic poems of Pushkin: list

Sorrowful experiences and feelings of a proud and lonely person standing above the crowd became the main content in the poet’s work. Thus, he protests against social, moral and religious oppression, which is why the heroes whom the poet portrayed in his poems were often criminals and violators of generally accepted norms in society. Pushkin was inspired by the work of Byron, as well as other advanced Russian romantic writers. Pushkin also used the form of the “Byronic” poem; in the narrative form of the poem, a fictional hero and events that were presented absolutely far from the realities of the poet’s life perfectly expressed his soul, thoughts and life. Either he imagined himself as a prisoner in the Caucasus, or Aleko, escaping from the “captivity of stuffy cities,” etc.

Poem "Prisoner of the Caucasus"

Pushkin’s poems are amazing and unique in their own way; his list includes the famous poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” Using its analysis as an example, we can say that this is the first poem written by the poet in 1821, where romanticism is clearly expressed.

The hero, having lost heart and rushing after the “ghost of freedom,” is captured by the Circassians. A Circassian woman, in love with him, frees the hero, but she herself throws herself into the stormy waters of the Terek River.

Until that time, no one had created this kind of work, so the poem brought Pushkin great success, as it reflected a romantic hero - a captive who escaped from a civilized society and accepted undeserved suffering. He was captured because of his refined and sensual nature, which is not found in every ordinary person. Here Pushkin, in complete captivity, sees the freedom of his soul. His captive considers the diverse world completely empty and worthless. He found spiritual freedom, but never found happiness in it. This is how you can figuratively interpret the whole meaning of this work.

Poem "Bakhchisarai Fountain"

This poem was written by Pushkin in 1823, and it turned out to be the most romantic, as it is full of very deep drama and acute emotions. It tells the story of love for the Polish beauty Maria, but he has a harem, and one of the beautiful concubines named Zarema is jealous, passionate and determined. She did not want to deviate from her goals. But Mary in captivity only prayed in front of the icon of the Mother of God. Death was her best salvation for the day, which happened after a while. In memory of this love, the khan built a beautiful Bakhchisarai fountain. This is how the poem reflects not just two completely different natures of women, but also cultures.

Pushkin Alexander Sergeevich: poems (list)

Pushkin, creating romantic images of people and nature in his poems, practically did not invent them, since very often he relied on his personal and living impressions, for example, about the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Bessarabian steppes, etc.

Here, in fact, is a very brief description of what Pushkin’s poems brought to the reading masses. The list of these works included such works as “Angelo”, “Robber Brothers”, “Bakhchisaray Fountain”, “Vadim”, “Gavriliada”, “House in Kolomna”, “Count Nulin”, “Yezersky”, “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, "Poltava", " Bronze Horseman", "Tazit", "Ruslan and Lyudmila", "Gypsies". These, of course, are not all of Pushkin’s poems - the list can be continued, but for the most part these works will already be unfinished, since the life of this great literary artist was cut short very quickly and tragically.

The attraction to the epic, noticeable in Nekrasov’s lyrics, was especially fully expressed in his poems - the lyric-epic genre. Two poems are thematically combined: “Grandfather” and “Russian Women”; the latter is a cycle consisting of two parts.

It was no coincidence that the poem “Grandfather” (1870) appeared in a collection of poems in 1856: in 1855, after the death of Nicholas I, an amnesty was declared for the Decembrists. Nekrasov immediately responded to this event with his poem, just like L.N. Tolstoy, who began the story about the Decembrist in 1856, although his work lasted for many years and grew into the concept of the novel “War and Peace.”

Nekrasov became acquainted with Herzen’s publications – “The Polar Star” and “The Bell”, and used the memoirs of the Decembrist Baron Rosen, with whom he was familiar, “The Notes of M. N. Volkonskaya”. Key idea poems were already expressed in “Grandfather”:

Spectacle of national disasters

Unbearable, my friend;

Happiness of noble minds -

See contentment around.

Both in the poem “Grandfather” and in “Russian Women” Nekrasov develops a special type of lyric-epic narrative, which can be called mosaic. There is no plot, as they sometimes say, “stretched out in a thread,” a sequential chain of events, but there is a series of scenes, individual episodes, landscapes, dialogues that make up a kind of artistic unity.

This principle is reflected especially clearly in the first of the poems about Russian women - in "Princess Trubetskoy", the text of which consists of two parts.

The first part describes farewell to my father, departure and journey through Siberia; real pictures, interspersed with memories of the serene youth and youth of a brilliant social beauty, about a trip with her husband to Italy, about the happiness experienced, and again the impressions of the road trip, this time in Siberia. This entire part is built on internal contrast: half-dream, half-reality, struggling with reality, bright pictures of a serene past, interspersed with the terrible reality of the present - a journey into the depths of Siberia.

Each such episode is closed in itself and resembles a lyrical extended poem. For example, the second fragment of the description of the path - the most developed in this part of the poem - opens and ends with the motive of rapid, persistent movement and the contrasting feeling of the experience:

Forward! The soul is full of melancholy

The road is getting more and more difficult

But dreams are peaceful and light -

She dreamed of her youth...

In the finale, the princess is awakened from oblivion by the ringing of shackles: a party of exiles is walking along the same path that her husband took:

And she can’t drive away her thoughts,

Don't forget about sleep!

"And that party was here...

Yes, there is no other way...

But the blizzard covered their tracks.

Hurry, coachman, hurry!..”

With meager hints, the poet paints the image of Prince Trubetskoy. In one of the episodes of the return from Italy to Russia, the clue to the fate of many Decembrists is hidden: a young handsome man, fabulously rich, a man of great society, ready to give anything for a decent life in his homeland. The pretext of this fragment is many more early works Nekrasov, including "The Poet and the Citizen".

The rainbow dreams have disappeared.

There is a row of paintings in front of her

Godforsaken side:

Stern gentleman

And a pathetic working man

With my head down...

As the first one got used to rule,

How the second one slaves!

She dreams of groups of poor people

In the fields, in the meadows,

She dreams of the groans of barge haulers

On the banks of the Volga...

Full of naive horror

She doesn't eat, doesn't sleep,

She will fall asleep to her companion

He rushes with questions:

“Tell me, is the whole region really like this?

Is there no contentment in the shadow?..”

- You are in the kingdom of beggars and slaves! –

The short answer was...

The second part of the poem is a conversation between the princess and the governor. The poet depicts a clash of two characters: an old servant, who is given the order to detain this woman at all costs, and her will, her perseverance and her victory. The stubbornness of the Governor-General is broken by the nobility, strength of feeling, and loyalty to the duty of the young woman. She goes on her way, he is shocked by how she withstood all the temptations, all the trials and all the threats.

Poem "Princess Volkonskaya" has the subtitle: "Grandmother's Notes." The fact is that Nekrasov, while working on the poem, used the memories of M. N. Volkonskaya, not published at that time and kept in the archives of her son. In its construction, the poem is more complex than the previous one. It is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is arranged as if a good-natured grandmother-princess writes notes for her grandchildren, bequeathing to them an iron bracelet, once forged by her husband, their grandfather, from his own convict chain. This chapter contains the story of her father, General Raevsky, the famous hero Patriotic War 1812 Nekrasov used not only Volkonskaya’s memoirs, but also historical works, dedicated to that time, poetic testimonies of Zhukovsky (his poem “The Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors”), Pushkin’s memories of the old general (in one of his letters to his brother). The second chapter is filled with a sense of misfortune. The heroine leaves her father's estate for St. Petersburg and here she learns about her husband's participation in the conspiracy, in the uprising and about the sentence passed on him. A decision is immediately made:

Let the trouble be great.

I haven't lost everything in the world.

Siberia is so terrible

Siberia is far away

But people also live in Siberia!..

Chapter three is reminiscent of the second part of “Princess Trubetskoy”: it describes the struggle that one has to endure for the right to go to her husband in Siberia. But here, a young woman who has decided on a difficult path and a life full of hardships is already struggling with close people who love her endlessly, mainly with her father, who cannot come to terms with the misfortunes to which she is dooming herself. The poem complements “Princess Trubetskoy” in the sense that it clearly, in laconic but expressive details, completes the image of Tsar Nicholas I. In his response to the princess, written in French, the emperor first frightens her with the horrors of the region where she wished to go, and then hints at the fact that in this case a return will no longer be possible for her. In other words, the threats of the tormentor of her predecessor, Princess Trubetskoy, are repeated not as their own improvisation, but from other people’s words, from the words of the tsar. This was truly a serious warning. However, the princess neglects this ominous “parting word.”

The fourth chapter is the beginning of a long journey. In it, Moscow high society and the flower of the Moscow intelligentsia appear in the salon of the heroine’s relative by marriage, Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya. The most vivid impression of this last evening, spent among sympathetic people who admired her (Nekrasov recalls musicians, famous writers Vyazemsky, Odoevsky), is left by the heroine’s meeting with Pushkin, who came to say goodbye to her. They return to the time spent together, when the poet, sent by another tsar, Alexander I, into southern exile, traveled part of the way with the family of General Raevsky. This final chapter, the most detailed fragment in it, and in the entire poem, testifies: Nekrasov knew to the smallest detail the life of Pushkin, who was the object of his most careful observations and thoughts. The lines dedicated to Pushkin in “The Poet and the Citizen” were not an accident. N. A. Nekrasov again, now in the poem, returns to reflections on the motivations for the work of a true artist and gives them his interpretation. A. S. Pushkin is the undisputed idol of Nekrasov, who recalls, using the memoirs of Raevskaya, a 20-year-old poet (in 1826, to which the story relates, he was already 27 years old), paints an image of a spontaneous, living, sincere and, yet , immersed in his poetic world, engaged in the process of creativity. Then Pushkin was a fan and translator of Byron, captivated by observations of nature, paintings that would give him impulses for future romantic poems, now he is busy with “The History of Pugachev.” N. A. Nekrasov confuses the dates: the idea of ​​​​historical work about Pugachev dates back to a much later time, it arose only at the beginning of 1833, as well as a trip to the sites of the Pugachev uprising, which took place in the fall of 1833. A. S. Pushkin could not speak about this with Volkonskaya. N. A. Nekrasov, shifting real facts, gives free rein to his artistic imagination, paints a vivid image of Pushkin, open people whom he loved, but living in the world of his artistic ideas. The heroine catches herself thinking:

But I don't think he loved anyone

Then, except for the Muse: hardly

No more love occupied him

Her worries and sorrows...

A. S. Pushkin in the poem most fully and clearly defines the essence of the feat of the Decembrists, turning to M. N. Volkonskaya:

Go, go! You are strong at heart

You are rich in courageous patience,

May your fateful journey be completed peacefully,

Don't let losses bother you!

Believe me, such spiritual purity

This hateful world is not worth it!

Blessed is he who changes his vanity

To the feat of selfless love!

Chapter five - pictures of a deserted, harsh region, the path to the December cold and snowstorms along the Siberian highways. Some incidents could cost the heroine her life (a snowstorm in the open steppe), and the news could sow confusion and chaos in the soul (a false rumor that Princess Trubetskoy was returned from the road). Self-righteous scoundrels in uniform, loyal to the “tsar and fatherland,” cause despair, but simple people they always find a kind word in their hearts for Volkonskaya. She also had to endure the “Irkutsk test”, similar to what happened to Trubetskoy, as well as the terrible journey not on a sleigh, but in a shaking cart along the snowy Siberian off-road, and, finally, the final happy episode: an unexpected meeting with Ekaterina Trubetskoy! More strong in spirit Volkonskaya supports her in a moment of mental fatigue:

What have we lost? think about it, sister!

Vanity toys... A little!

Now the road of goodness lies before us,

The path of God's chosen ones!

The sixth final chapter is the last journey made by the women together, until Blagodatsky the mine where the Decembrists were kept at hard labor.

Thus, the two poems are not just thematically combined (“Russian Women”), but also were plotted together by Nekrasov into one narrative, glorifying the feat of female self-sacrifice. The last episode, the meeting with the Decembrist convicts and with her husband in the mine, is one of Nekrasov’s stunning pictures of human sorrow and joy. It includes a thought that gives it special meaning and strength - the thought of the riches of the people's soul, which always, in any circumstances of life, gives its echo to the pain and grief of others. Here is this famous passage included in the sixth stanza:

I want to say

Thank you, Russian people!

On the road, in exile, wherever I was,

All the hard hard labor time,

People! I was more cheerful with you

My unbearable burden.

May many sorrows befall you,

You share other people's sorrows

And where my tears are ready to fall,

Yours fell there a long time ago!..

You love the unfortunate Russian people!

Suffering has brought us closer together...

“The law itself will not save you in hard labor!” –

At home they told me;

But good people I met there too

At the extreme stage of the fall,

They were able to express to us in their own way

Criminals pay tribute;

Me and my inseparable Katya

We were greeted with a satisfied smile:

"You are our angels!"

For our husbands

They did their homework.

Accept my deepest bow, poor people!

I send thanks to you all!

Thank you!... They considered their work worthless

For us these people are simple.

But no one added bitterness to the cup,

No one - from the people, dear ones!

Nekrasov subsequently said that the poem was met with such success, “which none of the previous writings had.” To a large extent, this was due to the poetic form that he happily found for the lyric-epic genre. If in the poet’s lyrical poems, as already mentioned, the breath of the epic is felt, then in the epic works there is a strong influence of the lyrical element and even lyrical structures. The same principle of fragmentation of detailed poetic compositions, which makes itself felt so clearly in the cycle “Russian Women”, determines the poems “Sasha”, “Frost, Red Nose”, “Peddlers”, and especially his last brilliant creation - the poem "Who lives well in Rus'". This work will forever remain a mystery, some great secret. N. A. Nekrasov began working on the poem already in the 1860s. (The Prologue was published in 1866), but never completed it; the work was interrupted by death. However, if the poem does not fully implement the plan and one can only guess about it, then by some miracle the ending appeared, where all the plot and ideological lines were flawlessly brought together.

The composition of the entire work still remains unclear - and will never be clarified. Disputes about the sequence of parts continue to this day. There are indeed many oddities here: there are two “Prologues” in the poem (in the beginning and in “The Peasant Woman”); belated introduction, moreover, before the last part; Some chapters have names, others are simply numbered (“The Last One”). Now the text of the poem is printed as follows: “Prologue”; "Last One"; "Peasant Woman"; "A feast for the whole world." However, this is not an entirely accurate reflection of the lifetime edition. After all, even then Nekrasov did not hide the fact that he was talking specifically about fragments of an unfinished work. In the last collection of “Poems by N. A. Nekrasov” (1873–1874), the poem was published in the following sequence: “Prologue”; part one (1865); “The Last One” (from the second part “Who Lives Well in Rus'”) (1872); “Peasant Woman” (from the third part “Who Lives Well in Rus'”) (1873).

The final part, “A Feast for the Whole World,” has not yet appeared here: it will be published only in 1876. However, the author’s note to it at the time of its appearance was as follows: “This chapter follows the chapter “The Last One.”” However, “The Feast for the Whole World” the whole world" must complete the entire poem; it also contains epilogue, associated with the image of Grisha Dobrosklonov.

In other words, in modern editions it is allowed to change the author's text or its layout based on a critical reading of the entire poem. This often happens in the work of textual critics: errors are possible due to the inattention or haste of the author, or changes in the idea itself during the work process.

However, textual criticism cannot help here any more. Perhaps only more clear comments, which, unfortunately, are most often absent. It is not possible to answer the fundamental question about the author’s “last will” for the simple reason that it does not exist.

For example, “Peasant Woman” in one of the manuscripts belonged to the second part (“From the second part”), which does not correspond to the content of the plot movement in the poem:

We've already figured it out,

They brought the landowner

Yes, straight to you!

At the same time, “A Feast for the Whole World,” as already mentioned, had a note: “This chapter follows the chapter “The Last One,” i.e. there is obvious confusion in the author’s proposals themselves (in the lifetime edition, we recall, “The Last One” was followed by “The Peasant Woman”),

The poem does not exist as a completed artistic whole; the work continued, and the alternation of parts could well have changed, like the text itself. After all, the sequence of “Belkin’s Tales” changed, and in a significant way, when Pushkin compiled a cycle from them; the same thing happened with Lermontov’s “Hero of Our Time,” and later with Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter.” The composition of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” was never fully completed.

The mosaic principle, i.e. discreteness, isolation of individual fragments of the text, can be traced throughout the construction of the poem (in its division into parts), and in the individual parts themselves, divided into chapters:

Ch. I. Pop; Ch. II. Rural Fair; Ch. III. Drunken night; Ch. IV. Happy; Ch. V. Landowner.

Last One

(consists of three chapters, but they are not named, but only numbered)

Peasant woman

Prologue; Ch. I. Before marriage; Ch. II. Songs; Ch. III. Savely, the Holy Russian hero; Ch. IV. Demushka; Ch. V. She-wolf; Ch. VI. Difficult year; Ch. VII. Governor's wife; Ch. VIII. An old woman's parable.

Feast for the whole world

Introduction; Ch. I. Bitter times - bitter songs (sub-chapters: Merry, Corvee, About an exemplary slave - Yakov the Faithful); Ch. II. Wanderers and pilgrims (the ending is highlighted in a separate fragment: “About two great sinners”); Ch. III. Both old and new (sub-chapters: Peasant sin, Hungry, Soldier's); Ch. IV. Good time - good songs (sub-chapters: Solenaya, Burlak, Rus); Ch. V does not have a title; in terms of its compositional functions, it is an epilogue.

The scenes of the feast, like the feast itself, end at dawn. The ending sounds symbolic. The wanderers and pilgrims fall asleep, and the seven truth-seekers also fall asleep. And at this very time happy man- Grisha Dobrosklonov (his prototype for Nekrasov was N.A. Dobrolyubov) - returns home, singing his song:

Share of the people

His happiness

Light and freedom

First of all!

The poet repeats this stanza twice: it opens and ends Grisha’s “song,” but this is the central motif of Nekrasov’s entire work.

“A Feast for the Whole World” concludes with a song symbolically called “Rus.” The initial and final stanzas are a ring frame consisting of invariant (identical) and variable lines:

You're miserable too.

You are also abundant

You're downtrodden

You and the omnipotent

Mother Rus'!..

You're miserable too

You are also abundant.

You are mighty

You and the powerless

Mother Rus'!..

Once again a great master of verse appears before us, who operates with the most complex constructions, translates sublime rhetoric and pathos into the subtlest associative connections speaking in their own figurative, poetic language, which is subject only to poetic forms. Indeed, in this rearrangement of previous artistic thought in the reverse flow of ideas, the hope that lives in the poet’s soul about a future happy Russia is expressed, no matter how difficult its present is!

You and mighty,

You and powerless

You and stuffed,

You and omnipotent

The poem ends with an untitled text (marked with the Roman numeral V) - the shortest subtitle in the last part, and indeed in the entire poem, which is a condensed epilogue works. Once again before the readers is Grisha Dobro-slopes, even in half sleep thinking in verse, like a true poet. The last six-line is the final, generally expressed, central idea of ​​the poem and at the same time the denouement of the plot, turning us back to the “Prologue” with its painful questions:

If only our wanderers could be under their own roof.

If only they could know what was happening to Grisha.

He heard the immense strength in his chest,

The sounds of grace delighted his ears,

The radiant sounds of the noble hymn -

He sang the embodiment of people's happiness!..

The amazing phenomenon of Nekrasov’s brilliant poem - the feeling of completeness, completeness of a work that did not have a “last mint”, did not receive the final edition of the author who was dying at that moment - lies in the fact that it turned out to be permeated with through flows of ideas receiving organic and intensive development, so in order to return to its roots in the finale. This is another example of the amazing sense of form that lives in the mind of the great artist, because the narrative spaces of the poem are very large, this is the most developed of Nekrasov’s works.

But this is not just the result of the poem, which in itself is remarkable for its internal integrity, it is also the result of the poet’s entire creative and life destiny. From his first steps, he really knew “only one thought, power, one, but fiery passion.” Best of all and most accurately, it was expressed by him himself and also at the end of the journey, in anticipation of his inevitably approaching death:

I was called to sing of your suffering,

Amazing people with patience!

And throw at least a single ray of consciousness

On the path that God leads you...

I'll die soon. Pathetic legacy...

In Pushkin's work, poems occupy the largest place along with lyrics. Pushkin wrote twelve poems (one of them, “Tazit,” remained unfinished), and more than twelve more were preserved in sketches, plans, and initial lines.

At the Lyceum, Pushkin began, but did not finish, a very weak, still quite childish, humorous poem “The Monk” (1813) and a humorous fairy-tale poem “Bova” (1814). In the first, a Christian church legend is parodied in the spirit of Voltairean freethinking, in the second, a popular folk tale.

In these works, young Pushkin is not yet an independent poet, but only an unusually talented student of his predecessors, Russian and French poets (Voltaire, Karamzin, Radishchev). The history of Pushkin’s poem does not begin with these youthful experiences; Yes, they were not published during the author’s lifetime.

In 1817, Pushkin began his greatest poem - “Ruslan and Lyudmila” - and wrote it for three whole years.

These were the years of rising revolutionary sentiment among the noble youth, when secret circles and societies were created that prepared the December uprising of 1825.

Pushkin without being a member secret society, was one of the major figures in this movement. He was the only one in these years (before exile to the south) who wrote revolutionary poems, which were immediately distributed in handwritten copies throughout the country.

But even in legal, printed literature, Pushkin had to fight reactionary ideas. In 1817, Zhukovsky published the fantastic poem "Vadim" - the second part of the large poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" (the first part of it - "Thunderbreaker" - was published back in 1811). Taking a conservative position, Zhukovsky wanted with this work to lead young people away from political actions into the realm of romantic, religiously colored dreams. His hero (to whom the poet did not accidentally give the name Vadim - legendary hero uprising of the Novgorodians against Prince Rurik) is an ideal young man, striving for exploits and at the same time feeling in his soul a mysterious call to something unknown, otherworldly. He eventually overcomes all earthly temptations and, following steadily this call, finds happiness in a mystical union with one of the twelve virgins, whom he awakens from their wonderful sleep. The action of the poem takes place either in Kyiv or Novgorod. Vadim defeats the giant and saves the Kyiv princess, whom her father intends for him to be his wife. This reactionary poem was written with great poetic power, beautiful verses, and Pushkin had every reason to fear its strong influence on the development of young Russian literature. In addition, “Vadim” was at that time the only major work created by a representative of the new literary school, which has just finally won the fight against classicism.

Pushkin responded to “Vadim” with “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” also a fairy-tale poem from the same era, with a number of similar episodes. But all its ideological content is sharply polemical in relation to the ideas of Zhukovsky. Instead of mysterious and mystical feelings and almost ethereal images, Pushkin’s everything is earthly, material; the entire poem is filled with playful, mischievous eroticism (description of Ruslan’s wedding night, Ratmir’s adventures with twelve maidens, Chernomor’s attempts to take possession of the sleeping Lyudmila, etc., as well as a number of author’s digressions).

The polemical meaning of the poem is fully revealed at the beginning of the fourth canto, where the poet directly points to the object of this polemic - Zhukovsky's poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" - and mockingly parodies it, turning its heroines, mystically minded pure maidens, "nuns of saints", into frivolous inhabitants of a roadside "hotels" that lure travelers to their place.

Pushkin's witty, brilliant, sparkling poem immediately dispelled the mystical fog that surrounded folk fairy-tale motifs and images in Zhukovsky's poem. After “Ruslan and Lyudmila” it became no longer possible to use them to implement reactionary religious ideas.

The good-natured Zhukovsky himself admitted defeat in this literary struggle, giving Pushkin his portrait with the inscription: “To the winning student from the defeated teacher, on that highly solemn day when he finished his poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila.”

This poem put Pushkin in first place among Russian poets. They began to write about him in Western European magazines.

However, being the largest phenomenon in Russian literature and social life, Pushkin’s playful fairy-tale poem did not yet put Russian literature on a par with the literature of the West, where Goethe in Germany, Byron and Shelley in England, Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant in France were active in those years, each in their own way resolved the most important issues of our time in their work.

Since 1820, Pushkin has been included in this series, creating one after another his romantic poems, serious and deep in content, modern in subject matter and highly poetic in form. With these poems ("Caucasian Prisoner", "Robber Brothers", "Bakhchisarai Fountain") a new direction enters Russian literature: advanced, revolutionary romanticism - a poetic expression of the feelings and views of the most advanced social stratum, the revolutionary-minded noble youth, the most active of which the Decembrists were part. Sharp dissatisfaction with everything around, with the entire social structure, in which life seems to be a prison, and a person is a prisoner; fiery desire for freedom; freedom as an object of almost religious cult (1) is one side of the worldview of the revolutionary romantics of the 20s. At the same time, their social loneliness, the lack of a living connection with the people, whose suffering they deeply sympathized with, but whose life they knew poorly and understood little - all this gave a tragic and extremely subjective, individualistic character to their worldview. The feelings and tragic experiences of a lonely, proud person standing high above the crowd became the main content of Pushkin’s romantic work. Protest against any oppression weighing on a person in a “civilized” society - political, social, moral, religious oppression - forced him, like all revolutionary romantics of that time, to sympathetically portray his hero as a criminal. a violator of all accepted social norms - religious ones. legal, moral. The favorite image of the romantics is “a criminal and a hero,” who “was worthy of both the horror of people and glory.” Finally, characteristic of the romantics was the desire to take poetry away from the reproduction of everyday reality, which they hated, into the world of the unusual, exotic, geographical or historical. There they found the images they needed of nature - powerful and rebellious (“deserts, edges of pearly waves, and the noise of the sea, and piles of rocks”), and images of people, proud, brave, free, not yet touched by European civilization.

Byron's work, which in many ways was close to the worldview of Russian advanced romantics, played a major role in the poetic embodiment of these feelings and experiences. Pushkin, and after him other poets, used, first of all, the form of the “Byronic poem” successfully found by the English poet, in which the purely lyrical experiences of the poet are clothed in a narrative form with a fictional hero and events far from real events the life of the poet, but perfectly expressing his inner life, his soul. “...He comprehended, created and described a single character (namely his own), - Pushkin wrote in a note about Byron’s dramas. - He created himself a second time, now under the turban of a renegade, now in the cloak of a corsair, now as a giaur dying under the schema... ". So Pushkin, in his romantic poems, tried to “create himself a second time,” either as a prisoner in the Caucasus, or as Aleko, who escaped from the “captivity of stuffy cities.” Pushkin himself more than once pointed out the lyrical, almost autobiographical nature of his romantic heroes.

The external features of Pushkin’s southern poems are also associated with the Byronian tradition: a simple, undeveloped plot, a small number of characters (two, three), fragmentary and sometimes deliberately unclear presentation.

A constant characteristic of Pushkin’s poetic talent is the ability to vigilantly observe reality and the desire to speak about it in precise words. In his poems, this was reflected in the fact that, when creating romantic images of nature and people, Pushkin did not invent them, did not write (like, for example, Byron about Russia or, later, Ryleev about Siberia) about what he himself did not see, but was always based on living personal impressions - the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabian steppes.

Pushkin's poems created and for a long time predetermined the type of romantic poem in Russian literature. They caused numerous imitations by minor poets, and also had a strong influence on the work of such poets as Ryleev, Kozlov, Baratynsky and, finally, Lermontov.

In addition to "The Prisoner of the Caucasus", "The Robber Brothers" and "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai", written before 1824 and soon published, Pushkin also conceived other romantic poems. “There are still poems wandering around in my head,” he wrote to Delvig in March 1821. In his manuscripts there were sketches of several poems, where Pushkin, in different ways, with different plots and in different national environments, thought to develop the same “heroic” or "criminal" romantic image and show it inevitably tragic fate. Pushkin published an excerpt from one of these poems, where the ataman of the Volga robbers was to become the hero, under the title “The Robber Brothers.” The beginning of the great romantic poem "Vadim" has also been preserved.

During these same years, perhaps under the influence of the enormous success of "Ruslan and Lyudmila", Pushkin also thought about poems of a completely different type - magical fairy tales, with an adventurous plot and historical or mythological characters: about Bova the Prince, about Vladimir's son St. Mstislav and his the fight against the Circassians, about Actaeon and Diana. But these plans, which distracted the poet from his main task - the development and deepening of romantic themes - were never implemented by him.

However, in the spring of 1821, Pushkin wrote a short poem "Gabriiliad", a witty, brilliant anti-religious satire - a response to the intensified political reaction, colored in these years by mysticism and religious hypocrisy.

In 1823, Pushkin experienced a severe crisis in his romantic worldview. Disappointed in the hope of the imminent realization of the victory of the revolution, first in the West, and then in Russia - and Pushkin, full of “careless faith”, was completely convinced of this victory - he soon became disillusioned with all his romantic ideals - freedom, an exalted hero , high purpose poetry, romantic eternal love. At this time he writes a number of gloomy, bitter poems, pouring out his “bile” and “cynicism” (in his words) - “The Sower”, “Demon”, “Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet” (and a little later - “Scene from Faust") and others that remained unfinished in the manuscript. In these verses, he bitterly ridicules all the basic tenets of his romantic worldview.

Among such works is the poem “The Gypsies,” written in 1824. Its content is a critical exposure of the romantic ideal of freedom and the romantic hero. Romantic hero Aleko, who finds himself in the desired environment of complete freedom, the opportunity to do whatever he wants without hindrance, reveals his true essence: he turns out to be an egoist and a rapist. In "Gypsies" the very romantic ideal of unlimited freedom is debunked. Pushkin convincingly shows that complete freedom of action, the absence of restrictions and obligations in public life would be feasible only for people who are primitive, idle, lazy, “timid and kind souls", and in personal life, in love, it turns out to be a purely animal passion, not associated with any moral experiences. The inability to go beyond the purely romantic, subjective view of life inevitably leads the poet to the deeply gloomy conclusion that happiness on earth is impossible." and there is no protection from fate." "Gypsies" is a turning point poem, transition period- is ideologically and artistically a huge step forward compared to previous poems. Despite the completely romantic nature of its style, exotic setting, and heroes, Pushkin here for the first time uses the method of a purely realistic test of the fidelity of his romantic ideals. He does not suggest the speeches and actions of his characters, but simply places them in a given setting and observes how they behave in the circumstances they encounter. In fact, Aleko, a typical romantic hero, well known to us from Pushkin’s poems and lyrics of the early 20s, could not have acted differently in the situation in which he found himself. The double murder he commits out of jealousy is fully consistent with his character and worldview, revealed both in the poem itself and in other romantic works of that era. On the other hand, Zemfira, such as she is shown by Pushkin, also could not do otherwise, could not remain faithful to Aleko forever - after all, she is a gypsy, the daughter of Mariula, and her story only repeats - with the exception of the tragic ending - the story of her mother.

This “objective” position of the author of “Gypsy” in relation to the actions and feelings of his characters was reflected in the form itself: most of the episodes of the poem are given in the form of dialogues, in a dramatic form, where the author’s voice is absent, and the characters themselves speak and act.

“Gypsies” is a work in which the crisis of the worldview of Pushkin the romantic was most deeply reflected; at the same time, in terms of the method of developing the theme, it opened up new paths in Pushkin’s work - the path to realism.

In the summer of 1824, Pushkin was expelled from Odessa to Mikhailovskoye, without the right to leave there. Constant and close communication with the peasants and the people, apparently more than anything else, helped to overcome the grave crisis in the poet’s worldview. He became convinced of the injustice of his bitter reproaches to the people for their reluctance to fight for their freedom (2), he realized that “freedom” is not some abstract moral and philosophical concept, but a concrete historical one, always connected with social life, and for such freedom - political, economic - the people have always tirelessly fought (constant peasant revolts against the landowners, not to mention the uprisings of Pugachev, Razin or the era of the “Time of Troubles”). He had to see that all his disappointments in previous romantic ideals were the result of insufficient knowledge of reality itself, its objective laws and little poetic interest in it itself. In 1825, a sharp turn occurred in Pushkin’s work. Having finally broken with romanticism, Pushkin emerges from his crisis. His poetry takes on a clear and generally bright, optimistic character. The former task of his poetry - the expression of his own feelings and suffering, a poetic response to the imperfections of life, contrary to the subjective, albeit noble demands of the romantic, the embodiment of romantic ideals in the images of the unusual - exotic, idealized nature and extraordinary heroes - is replaced by a new one. Pushkin consciously makes his poetry a means of understanding the ordinary reality that he previously rejected, strives to penetrate into it through an act of poetic creativity, to understand its typical phenomena, objective laws. The desire to explain correctly human psychology inevitably leads him to the study and artistic embodiment of social life, to depiction in certain plot forms social conflicts, the reflection of which is human psychology.

The same desire to understand reality and modernity pushes him to study the past, to reproduce important moments in history.

In connection with these new creative tasks, both the nature of the objects depicted in Pushkin and the very style of depiction change: instead of the exotic, unusual - everyday life, nature, people; instead of a poetically sublime, abstract, metaphorical style - a simple, close to colloquial, but nevertheless highly poetic style.

Pushkin creates a new direction in literature - realism, which later (from the 40s) became the leading direction of Russian literature.

Pushkin gives the main, primary embodiment of this new, realistic direction, these new tasks of correct knowledge of reality and its laws not so much in poems as in other genres: in drama ("Boris Godunov", "little tragedies"), in prose stories ("Belkin's Tales", " Captain's daughter", etc.), in the poetic novel - "Eugene Onegin". In these genres, it was easier for Pushkin to implement new principles and develop new methods of realistic creativity.

A kind of manifesto of this new direction in Russian literature were the historical folk tragedy "Boris Godunov" (1825) and the central chapters of "Eugene Onegin" (3) (1825-1826).

At the same time (December 1825) Pushkin wrote his first realistic poem - the playful, cloudlessly cheerful "Count Nulin". In it, on a simple, almost anecdotal plot, many beautiful paintings, landscapes, and conversations of the most ordinary, “prosaic,” everyday content, turned into true poetry, are strung together. Here you can find almost all the images with which Pushkin, in a half-serious and half-joking stanza from “Onegin’s Travels,” characterizes his new realistic style, as opposed to the romantic “piles of rocks,” “the sound of the sea,” “deserts,” and the image of a “proud maiden” (4) : here is a slope, and a fence, and gray clouds in the sky, and rainy season, and a backyard, and ducks, and even a “housewife” (albeit a bad one) as the heroine of the poem...

The defeat of the December uprising of 1825 and the subsequent political and public reaction, a temporary stop in the development of the Russian revolutionary movement changed the nature of Russian literature: the theme of the struggle for freedom disappeared from it for several years. Pushkin, returned from exile by Nicholas I, given the opportunity to communicate with friends, enjoying enormous popularity among the public, nevertheless did not feel happy.

The stuffy social atmosphere after the defeat of the Decembrists, the reactionary, cowardly, philistine sentiments, supported by the new reactionary journalism, which reigned in society and infected many of his friends - all this at times caused Pushkin to have attacks of complete despair, expressed in such poems as “A gift in vain, a random gift, life, why were you given to me?” or “In the worldly steppe, sad and boundless...” (“The last key is the cold key of oblivion, it will quench the heat of the heart sweetest of all”).

The idea that death is preferable to life, Pushkin thought to form the basis of a gloomy poem he began in 1826 about the hero of the gospel legend - Ahasfer ("The Eternal Jew"), punished for his crime before God with immortality. However, these dark themes remained a temporary episode in Pushkin’s work. He managed to overcome his difficult mood, and the poem about Agasphere was left at the very beginning.

During these years of social decline creative work Pushkin’s work does not stop, but at this time he is developing themes that are not directly related to the theme of the liberation movement. The subject of the poet's close attention is the human psyche, characters, "passions", their influence on the human soul (the central chapters of "Eugene Onegin", "small tragedies", sketches of prose stories).

Among Pushkin's works of 1826-1830, inspired by a “psychological” theme, we do not find a single poem. (True, in the poems "Poltava" and "Tazit" the development of the psychology of the heroes occupies a large place, but it is not the main task of these purely political works.) A more suitable form for artistic analysis human psychology were a novel in verse, a dramatic sketch, a prose story or a story.

During these same years, Pushkin also wrote a number of major works of political content, but of a different nature. In his work of this time, the theme of the Russian state, the fate of Russia in the struggle with the West for its independence is embodied - an echo of Pushkin’s youthful memories of the events of 1812-1815. In parallel with this, he poetically develops the most important theme of the multinationality of the Russian state, writes about the historical pattern of the unification of many different peoples into one state whole. In the poem "Poltava" these themes are developed on the historical material of the struggle of Russia early XVIII V. with the then strongest military state - Sweden. Here Pushkin poetically reveals his assessment of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. In another, unfinished poem, "Tazit", based on Pushkin's impressions from his second Caucasian trip (1829). and reflections on the complexity and difficulty of the issue of ending the enmity of the peoples of the Caucasus with the Russians, the same national-political theme develops.

In the 30s Pushkin's work is again almost entirely devoted to the development of social issues. The people, the serf peasantry, their life, their poetry, their struggle for their liberation - becomes one of the main themes of Pushkin the artist and historian, as he became in these years. The life of a fortress village is shown in the unfinished “History of the Village of Goryukhin”, in “Dubrovsky”; In fairy tales and the drama "Rusalka" the motifs of folk poetry are reproduced and artistically processed. Pushkin first shows the struggle of the peasants against the landowners in the form of “robbery” (in “Dubrovsky”), and these are no longer romantic “robber brothers”, but living, real types of peasants and servants. This peasant war, "Pugachevism" Pushkin devotes two large works - the story "The Captain's Daughter" and the historical study "The History of Pugachev." Popular uprising against the feudal knights and the participation in it of representatives of the bourgeois class make up the unfinished drama “Scenes from Knightly Times”.

During these years, Pushkin introduced a new hero into literature - the suffering, oppressed " little man", a victim of an unfair social structure - in the story" Stationmaster", in the begun novel "Yezersky", in the poem "The Bronze Horseman".

Pushkin reacts sharply to the changes taking place before his eyes in the class composition of the intelligentsia, in particular the literary community. Previously, “only nobles were engaged in literature,” as Pushkin repeated more than once, seeing this as the reason for the writer’s independent behavior in relation to the authorities. to the government, then now representatives of the common, bourgeois intelligentsia are beginning to play an increasingly larger role in literature. In those years, this new democracy was not yet a “revolutionary democracy”; on the contrary, most of its leaders, fighting with representatives of the ruling noble, landowner class for their place in life, did not reveal any oppositional sentiments towards the government or the tsar.

Pushkin considered the only force capable of opposing its independence to government arbitrariness, to be a “powerful defender” of the people, the nobility from which the Decembrists emerged, an impoverished nobility, but “with education”, “with hatred against the aristocracy” (5). “There is no such terrible element of rebellion in Europe either,” Pushkin wrote in his diary. “Who were on the square on December 14? Only nobles. How many of them will there be at the first new indignation? I don’t know, but it seems like a lot.”

These thoughts about the role of the ancient nobility in liberation movement(in the past and in the future), the condemnation of its representatives who do not understand their historical mission and grovel before the authorities, before the “new nobility”, the tsar’s servants - Pushkin embodied not only in his journalistic notes, but also in works of art, in particular, they constitute the main, main content of the first stanzas of “Yezersky” written by Pushkin.

In the 30s. Pushkin had to wage a fierce literary struggle. His opponents were reactionary, cowardly, unscrupulous journalists and critics who had captured almost the entire mass of readers, pandering to the philistine tastes of readers from small landowners and officials, who did not disdain political denunciations against their literary enemies. They persecuted Pushkin for everything new that he introduced into literature - the realistic direction, simplicity of expression, reluctance to moralize... Pushkin included polemics with modern journalism about the tasks of literature in the initial stanzas of "Yezersky", this same polemic constitutes the main content of the entire poem - "House in Kolomna."

Pushkin completed a long series of poems written from 1820 to 1833 with “The Bronze Horseman” - a poem about the conflict between the happiness of an individual and the good of the state - his best work, remarkable both for the extraordinary depth and courage of thought, the acuteness of the poet’s historical and social problem, and in the perfection of artistic expression. This work still causes controversy and different interpretations.

Pushkin used many genres in his work, but the poem always remained his favorite form for expressing his “mind of cold observations and heart of sorrowful notes.” Pushkin celebrated almost every stage of his development with a poem; almost every life problem that arose before him found expression in a poem. The enormous distance between the light, brilliant poem of the twenty-year-old Pushkin - "Ruslan and Lyudmila" - and the deeply philosophical poem "The Bronze Horseman", written by the thirty-four-year-old sage poet - clearly shows the swiftness of Pushkin's path, the steepness of the peak to which Pushkin, and with him, climbed and all Russian literature.

(1) Freedom! He was still looking for you alone in the desert world... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And with faith, fiery prayer, Your proud idol embraced.(“Caucasian captive.”) (2) Graze, peaceful peoples!

A cry of honor will not awaken you.