At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia lived in anticipation of grandiose changes. This was especially felt in poetry. After the work of Chekhov and Tolstoy, it was difficult to create within the framework of realism, since the heights of mastery had already been reached. That is why the rejection of the usual foundations and a vigorous search for something new began: new forms, new rhymes, new words. The era of modernism began.
In the history of Russian poetry, modernism is represented by three main movements: symbolists, acmeists and futurists.
Symbolists strove to depict ideals, saturating their lines with symbols and premonitions. The mixture of mysticism and reality is very characteristic; it is no coincidence that the work of M. Yu. Lermontov was taken as the basis. The Acmeists continued the traditions of Russian classical poetry of the 19th century, striving to depict the world in all its diversity. Futurists, on the contrary, rejected everything familiar, conducting bold experiments with the form of poems, with rhymes and stanzas.
After the revolution, proletarian poets came into fashion, whose favorite themes were the changes that were taking place in society. And the war gave birth to a whole galaxy of talented poets, including such names as A. Tvardovsky or K. Simonov.
The middle of the century was marked by the flourishing of bardic culture. The names of B. Okudzhava, V. Vysotsky, and Yu. Vizbor are forever inscribed in the history of Russian poetry. At the same time, the traditions of the Silver Age continue to develop. Some poets look up to the modernists - Eug. Yevtushenko, B. Akhmadullina, R. Rozhdestvensky, others inherit the traditions of landscape lyrics with a deep immersion in philosophy - these are N. Rubtsov, V. Smelyakov.
Poets of the "Silver Age" of Russian literature
K. D. Balmont. The work of this talented poet was forgotten for a long time. The country of socialism did not need writers who created outside the framework of socialist realism. At the same time, Balmont left a rich creative heritage that still awaits close study. Critics called him a “sunny genius”, since all his poems are full of life, love of freedom and sincerity.
Selected poems:
I. A. Bunin- the largest poet of the 20th century, working within the framework of realistic art. His work covers the most diverse aspects of Russian life: the poet writes about the Russian village and the grimaces of the bourgeoisie, about the nature of his native land and about love. Finding himself in exile, Bunin leans more and more towards philosophical poetry, raising global questions of the universe in his lyrics.
Selected poems:
A.A. Block- the largest poet of the 20th century, a prominent representative of such a movement as symbolism. A desperate reformer, he left as a legacy to future poets a new unit of poetic rhythm - the dolnik.
Selected poems:
S.A. Yesenin- one of the brightest and most original poets of the 20th century. The favorite theme of his lyrics was Russian nature, and the poet called himself “the last singer of the Russian village.” Nature became the measure of everything for the poet: love, life, faith, strength, any events - everything was passed through the prism of nature.
Selected poems:
V.V. Mayakovsky- a real lump of literature, a poet who left a huge creative legacy. Mayakovsky's lyrics had a huge influence on the poets of subsequent generations. His bold experiments with poetic line sizes, rhymes, tonality and forms became a standard for representatives of Russian modernism. His poems are recognizable, and his poetic vocabulary is replete with neologisms. He entered the history of Russian poetry as the creator of his own style.
Selected poems:
V.Ya. Bryusov- another representative of symbolism in Russian poetry. I worked a lot on the word, each line of it is a precisely verified mathematical formula. He sang the revolution, but most of his poems are urban.
Selected poems:
N.A. Zabolotsky- a fan of the “cosmist” school, which welcomed nature transformed by human hands. Hence there is so much eccentricity, harshness and fantasticality in his lyrics. The assessment of his work has always been ambiguous. Some noted his loyalty to impressionism, others spoke of the poet’s alienation from the era. Be that as it may, the poet’s work still awaits detailed study by true lovers of fine literature.
Selected poems:
A.A. Akhmatova- one of the first representatives of truly “female” poetry. Her lyrics can easily be called “a manual for men about women.” The only Russian poet to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Selected poems:
M.I. Tsvetaeva- another adherent of the women's lyrical school. In many ways she continued the traditions of A. Akhmatova, but at the same time she always remained original and recognizable. Many of Tsvetaeva’s poems became famous songs.
Selected poems:
B. L. Pasternak- famous poet and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his lyrics he raised current topics: socialism, war, the position of man in contemporary society. One of Pasternak’s main merits is that he revealed to the world the originality of Georgian poetry. His translations, sincere interest and love for the culture of Georgia are a huge contribution to the treasury of world culture.
Selected poems:
A.T. Tvardovsky. The ambiguous interpretation of this poet’s work is due to the fact that for a long time Tvardovsky was the “official face” of Soviet poetry. But his work breaks out of the rigid framework of “socialist realism”. The poet also creates a whole series of poems about the war. And his satire became the starting point for the development of satirical poetry.
Selected poems:
Since the beginning of the 90s, Russian poetry has been experiencing a new round of development. There is a change in ideals, society again begins to deny everything old. At the lyrical level, this resulted in the emergence of new literary movements: postmodernism, conceptualism and metarealism.
In Russian lyrics XX centuries, the theme of poetry fades into the shadows. Firstly, too much has already been said about this by predecessors, and secondly, other topics are becoming more relevant (or feel so). And yet, almost every poet at least once thought about his poetic destiny, about the poet’s place in the world and in society. The traditions established by Russian classical literature continue to live in modern times. Thus, many poets are fascinated by the tradition of citizenship, coming from Ryleev, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky. With perhaps the greatest clarity and poetic power, Yevtushenko embodied this tradition in modern poetry. It is no coincidence that he refuses to contrast his intimate lyrics with political lyrics; moreover, he proudly calls the latter his intimate lyrics: “But when I wrote poems about the fascists there, in Finland, on an alarming night, my lips were hot and dry, I felt It’s impossible not to write. I wrote without closing my eyes until dawn, I covered every page of paper... It was both a direct social order and my intimate lyrics!” And it is no coincidence that it was this poet who said the significant words in the introduction to the poem “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”: “A poet in Russia is more than a poet. Only those in whom the proud spirit of citizenship roams, who have no comfort, no peace, are destined to be born as poets. The poet in it is an image of his century and the future, a ghostly prototype. Tsoet sums up, without falling into timidity, everything that came before him.”
Highly appreciating such geniuses of Russian poetry as Lermontov, Blok, Pasternak, Yesenin, Akhmatova, Yevtushenko still chooses, first of all, Pushkin, Nekrasov and Mayakovsky as his reference points, and the theme of poetry is associated by Yevtushenko primarily with a huge moral responsibility to people, whose experiences and expressions he expresses. a poet must have thoughts: “Oh, God grant me to be a poet! Don’t let me deceive people.”
Searched here:
- essay on Russian poetry of the 20th century
- Russian lyrics of the 20th century essay
- essay about finland
From Greek theme (the basis of the plot of the work).
Intimate lyrics
M.Yu. Lermontov “She is not proud of her beauty...”
B.L. Parsnip “Winter Evening”.
Landscape lyrics
A.A. Fet “Wonderful picture...”
S.A. Yesenin “behind the dark strand of woods...”.
Lyrics of friendship
B.Sh. Okudzhava "Ancient student song".
Theme of the poet and poetry
M.I. Tsvetaeva "Rolandov Horn".
Patriotic and civil lyrics
ON THE. Nekrasov "Motherland"
A.A. Akhmatova “I am not with those who abandoned the earth...”
Philosophical lyrics
F.I. Tyutchev "The Last Cataclysm"
I.A. Bunin "Evening".
The most important character in the lyrics is lyrical hero: It is his inner world that is shown in the lyrical work, on his behalf the lyricist speaks to the reader, and the external world is depicted in terms of the impressions it makes on the lyrical hero. Note! Do not confuse the lyrical hero with the epic one. Pushkin reproduced the inner world of Eugene Onegin in great detail, but this is an epic hero, a participant in the main events of the novel. The lyrical hero of Pushkin's novel is the Narrator, the one who is familiar with Onegin and tells his story, deeply experiencing it. Onegin becomes a lyrical hero only once in the novel - when he writes a letter to Tatyana, just as she becomes a lyrical heroine when she writes a letter to Onegin.
By creating the image of a lyrical hero, a poet can make him personally very close to himself (poems by Lermontov, Fet, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, etc.). But sometimes the poet seems to be “hiding” behind the mask of a lyrical hero, completely far from the personality of the poet himself; for example, A Blok makes Ophelia a lyrical heroine (two poems called “Ophelia’s Song”) or the street actor Harlequin (“I was covered in colorful rags...”), M. Tsvetaev - Hamlet (“At the bottom is she, where il..."), V. Bryusov - Cleopatra ("Cleopatra"), S. Yesenin - a peasant boy from a folk song or fairy tale ("Mother walked through the forest in a bathing suit..."). So, when discussing a lyrical work, it is more competent to talk about the expression in it of the feelings not of the author, but of the lyrical hero.
Like other types of literature, lyrics include a number of genres. Some of them arose in ancient times, others - in the Middle Ages, some - quite recently, one and a half to two centuries ago, or even in the last century.
Motive
From French motif - lit. movement.
A stable formal and content component of a work. Unlike the topic, it has a direct verbal fixation in the text. Identifying the motive helps to understand the subtext of the work.
The motifs of struggle, flight, retribution, suffering, disappointment, melancholy, and loneliness are traditional in the lyrics.
Leitmotif
A leading motif in one or many works.
The motive of exile in the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov "Clouds".
The motive of loneliness in the early lyrics of V.V. Mayakovsky.
Bibliography.
MAIN MOTIVES OF S. A. ESENINA’S LYRICS
The beginning of the 20th century in Russian literature was marked by the emergence of a whole galaxy of various movements, trends, and poetic schools. The most outstanding movements that left a significant mark in the history of literature were symbolism (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, A. Bely), acmeism (A. Akhmatova, N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam), futurism (I. Severyanin, V. Mayakovsky , D. Burliuk), imagism (Kusikov, Shershenevich, Mariengof). The work of these poets is rightly called the lyricism of the Silver Age, that is, the second most important period of the heyday of Russian poetry. However, along with the above authors, the history of art of that time included others who did not belong to any particular school, original and bright poets, and first of all, Sergei Yesenin, whose work stands apart in the motley and diverse world of poetry at the beginning of the century.
The complex and interesting fate of the poet, many travels, changes in places and lifestyles, combined with a creative approach to understanding reality, determined the richness and variety of themes and motifs in Yesenin’s lyrics. His childhood and youth were spent in the village of Konstantinov, on the banks of the Oka, in a peasant family; The main theme of Yesenin’s early lyrics naturally becomes the description of nature, native paintings, landscapes imbued with warmth, loved ones from childhood, acquaintances, loved ones. At the same time, the poet personifies many natural phenomena, sees in them a living, intelligent principle, and attributes animal qualities to plants:
Where the cabbage beds are
The sunrise pours red water,
Little maple baby to the uterus
The green udder sucks.
Such imagery, the brightness of metaphors and comparisons will be characteristic of Yesenin’s subsequent work, but in the early lyrics it has a fresh, joyful, innovative character, which gives the poems a special touching and expressiveness. For the poet, native nature is an eternal source of admiration and inspiration; the description of the simplest and most everyday scenes in his perception becomes magical, fabulous, alluring (“Birch”, “Powder”). Just as touching as he treats landscapes in general, Yesenin treats each specific element of his native life, be it a tree branch looking through the window, household utensils or even an animal: many of Yesenin’s poems are dedicated specifically to animals (“Cow”, “Fox”, “Bitch” son"). The poet’s youthful perception of life is bright, joyful; in the early poems the theme of love also appears (“The scarlet color of dawn was woven on the lake...”), perceived with the same cheerfulness and freshness. Love for Yesenin in this period is some kind of romantic, fragile state of mind, his beloved is not a girl, but a vision, a symbol: the lyrical hero describes mainly not her, but his feelings and experiences, and in a youthfully romantic and touching way:
With a sheaf of your oat hair
You belong to me forever.
It is characteristic that love and nature in Yesenin’s early lyrics are interconnected and inseparable. All the variety of motives for describing nature (landscape sketches, poems about animals, everyday scenes) develop into one, global theme that is important for understanding all of Yesenin’s lyrics - the theme of the Motherland; One of the first in the poet’s understanding of it was the poem “Go, my dear Rus'!” The poet confesses his love to his Motherland and actually puts it above paradise, above heavenly life:
If the holy army shouts:
“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”
I will say: “There is no need for heaven,
Give me my homeland.”
Religious and Christian motifs appear in the poem, mainly associated with church paraphernalia. (“The huts are in the robes of the image”, “Your meek Savior smells of apple and honey in the churches.”) The poet imagines Rus' as only Christian, this motif is developed in the poem “The hewn horns began to sing” (1916):
And on the limestone bell towers
The hand involuntarily crosses itself.
In the same poem, the poet uses characteristic color painting:
About Rus' - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river...
When describing his native village, Yesenin usually uses blue, blue, green colors (the poet himself said: “...Russia! Dew and strength and something blue...”).
Moving to Moscow, a scandalous life, somewhat feigned behavior, shocking determined the divergence and duality of Yesenin’s themes: on the one hand, it was the shocking lyrics (“I’m deliberately walking unkempt...”), on the other, memories of his native village, life in it as about the brightest period. The theme of the Motherland is developed in the poems “Letter to Mother”, “Soviet Rus'”, “Leaving Rus'”, “Return to the Motherland”. The poet perceives the revolutionary transformations that took place in the village with a degree of tragedy; after all, bygone times are irrevocable, and so is a bright, carefree life; Yesenin feels the loss of connection with his native land, where now “Poor Demyan’s agitations are sung”:
The language of my fellow citizens has become like a foreign language to me,
The people do not perceive Yesenin as a poet, but Yesenin calls himself “the last poet of the village.” The author enhances the feeling of tragedy with direct comparisons emphasizing the change in ideals:
Sunday villagers
They gathered at the volost, as if they were going to church...
(“Soviet Rus'”)
And now my sister is cheatingHaving opened the pot-bellied “Capital” like the Bible...("Homecoming")
The motive of poetic creativity appears, its meaning, and acquires the same tragic sound:
My poetry is no longer needed here.
And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either.
The theme of the poet and poetry here is closely related to the theme of the Motherland: Yesenin perceives his work as a possible means of spiritual connection with the people. Changes in the village transformed both it and the people, making it different from the native land close to the poet, but the memory of his youth and Russia of those years remains bright and pure in Yesenin’s memory. In “Persian Motifs”, in the poem “You are my Shagane, Shagane...” Yesenin writes:
Because I'm from the north, or something,
That the moon is a hundred times bigger there,
No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,
But no better than the Ryazan expanses.
The theme of the Motherland is again connected with the theme of love and develops almost in parallel. The lyrics of the Moscow period and the last years of the poet’s life mainly describe unhappy love, doomed to separation. (“I remember, my love, I remember...”, “Letter to a Woman.”) A riotous, scandalous life cannot be combined with sincere love; In a number of poems, Yesenin writes about renouncing a crazy lifestyle in the name of love:
For the first time I sang about love,
For the first time I refuse to make a scandal.
(“A blue fire began to sweep...”)
I never lie with my heart,And therefore to the voice of swaggerI can confidently say
That I say goodbye to hooliganism.
(“Let you be drunk by others...”)
But still, hooligan bravado turns out to be stronger than feelings, the motive of separation appears (“Son of a Bitch”, “Letter to a Woman”). Both the lyrical hero and his beloved suffer from separation, but their lives turn out to be separated by the storm of life, the “fate of events.” And yet, in some poems there is an aching tenderness, touching; in the poem “To Kachalov’s Dog,” the poet writes (addressing the dog):
She will come, I give you my guarantee.
And without me, in her staring gaze,
For me, lick her hand gently
For everything I was and wasn’t guilty of.
The poet's last poems are again tragic, they contain the motif of unrequited, unhappy, unrequited love.
Love is one of the necessary conditions for human happiness, and a person’s understanding of the essence of happiness usually changes with age, as does the understanding of love. If in his early poems Yesenin describes happiness as the state of the soul of a person who sees his home, his beloved girl and mother:
This is stupid happiness
With white windows to the garden!
Along the pond as a red swan
A quiet sunset floats.
(1918)
...my quiet joy - Loving everything, wishing for nothing.(At the same time.)
However, over time, the poet comes to a deeper, philosophical understanding of the essence of happiness and the meaning of human life. Philosophical motives appear in the lyrics. The poems of recent years reflect Yesenin’s thoughts about his life (probably the poet had a presentiment of his end): he does not regret the past times, accepts with philosophical calm and wisdom the fact that “We are all, all of us in this world are perishable.” Yesenin’s true masterpieces are the poems “The golden grove dissuaded...” and “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” Their meaning and main ideas are similar:
The golden grove dissuaded
Birch, cheerful language...
Withered in gold,
I won't be young anymore.
The similarity even appears in the images; the poet feels that youth is irretrievably gone, there is no way to the past, and every person will someday leave this world, as he once came into it. Yesenin again conveys this harmonious, calm perception of life through images of nature, symbolic ones at that: “the grove” is the hero’s whole life, his fate; youth is always associated with blue or lilac flowers (“lilac blossoms of the soul”), old age with rowan brushes, and all life is conveyed through figurative comparison:
As if I were a booming early spring
He rode on a pink horse.
And the last, dying poem of the poet also belongs to philosophical lyrics; it, as it were, completes, puts an end to the end of a short but stormy creative journey:
Dying is nothing new in this life,
But life, of course, is not newer.
(“Goodbye, my friend, goodbye”)
Indeed, Yesenin lived a short but very bright life, tragic in many ways; The poets who worked after the revolution faced difficult trials, first of all, the oppressive problem of choice, which was very difficult for many to solve. And Yesenin, who called himself “the last poet of the village,” found it extremely difficult to continue creating under conditions of censorship, surveillance, and mistrust. But even in such a short period of time, the poet managed to understand, comprehend and express so much in poetic form that the literary legacy left by him, multifaceted, combining many motifs, images, themes, ideas, remains a monument to the talent of the Russian peasant poet, “the last poet of the village”, Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin.
LYRICAL HERO OF S. A. ESENINA
The decade and a half that S. Yesenin worked was one of the most difficult and unpredictable eras in Russian history. The turbulent events that took place in the country affected the life of every person, and especially strongly on the fate of geniuses endowed with hypersensitivity. Along with the change in the environment, Yesenin’s worldview changed. All this was reflected in the poet’s lyrics, and therefore influenced the image of the lyrical hero, who went through a difficult path of evolution.
Young Yesenin professed Christian morality, but Christ for him is not God, but, above all, an ideal person. Jesus, like many saints, can be found walking along with “kalikas” and “mantises” along the roads of holy Peasant Rus', depicted in the poet’s poems. The lyrical hero of early Yesenin is unusually harmonious. He is a wanderer, a “wandering pilgrim” (“Go you, Rus', my dear...”), going to “Skufiye as a humble monk” (“I will go to Skufia as a humble monk...”). His shrines are in the Russian land itself: “I pray at the red dawns, I take communion by the stream” (“I am a shepherd; my chambers...”); his temple was created by Russian nature: “At the farewell mass of the birch trees censing with leaves” (“I am the last poet of the village...”); one of his main feelings is love for his homeland:
But not to love you, not to believe
I can't learn.
(“The hewn horns began to sing...")
Already during these years Yesenin writes:
I came to this earth
To leave her quickly.
(“Beloved land! My heart dreams...”)
The awareness of the frailty of all things also reveals the harmony of the lyrical hero, who is completely reconciled with the natural cycle of life.
But in 1915, the image of a sinner and a fighter against God bursts into this calm world:
Don't look for me in God.
Don't call me to love and live...
I'll go down that road
I'll lay my head down
(“Our faith has not been extinguished..”)
This theme develops in early lyrics (“The Robber”, 1917) and throughout Yesenin’s work.
The only period of open opposition of the lyrical hero to God occurred during the 1917 revolution. In 1918, Yesenin wrote a cycle of ten short poems. In the most famous of them, “Inonia,” the lyrical hero proclaims himself a prophet and describes “another country,” “where the deity of the living lives.” He exclaims, renouncing Christianity: “The body, the body of Christ, I spit out of my mouth.” But soon Yesenin, and with him his lyrical hero, returns to traditional peasant philosophy, imbued, according to the poet, with the idea of the connection between man and the cosmos. The moon is directly involved in the fate of the hero:
And the moon clock is wooden
They will wheeze my twelfth hour.
(“I am the last poet of the village...”)
The same poem conveys the idea that peasant culture is dying resignedly, Russia the temple is perishing. The lyrical hero realizes the inevitability of what is happening in his homeland. The path from youth to “fading” is also logical and natural. In the poem “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” the idea of the frailty of life is developed: “...Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees,” the lyrical hero is reconciled with the existing order and is grateful for the fact that “I had to flourish and die." The enormous emotional tension of this poem is achieved through the use of appeals (“heart”, “wandering spirit”), lexical repetitions (“less often, less often”, “all of us, all of us”), inversions (“Withering in gold engulfed...”), questions (“My life? Or did I dream about you?”), unique color painting (white, gold, pink). The unexpected, vivid images of the poem made it one of the most famous in Yesenin’s work.
Bitterness over the disappearance of Peasant Rus' leads the poet to a tragic feeling of his loneliness, uselessness in his new life. The lyrical hero hides his tender, vulnerable soul under the mask of outrageousness. Most clearly, the duality of the hero, the poet’s relationship with the outside world, aggravated to the limit, was reflected in the cycle “Moscow Tavern”. In “Confession of a Hooligan,” behind the feigned bravado (“I purposely walk unkempt, with my head like a kerosene lamp on my shoulders.”), one senses loyalty to the true values (“I love my homeland. I love my homeland very much!”) of the character created by the lyricist.
The only way to achieve harmony is pure love (the cycle “Love of a Hooligan”: “For the first time I sang about love, For the first time I refuse to make a scandal”) and memories of my native village and the world of maternal care, contrasted with sinful life in the city (“Letter to a Mother” "). Sometimes animals become the closest people to the lyrical hero:
I have no friendship among people...
It's on everyone's neck here
I'm ready to give away my best tie.
(“I will not deceive myself...”)
The same idea is heard in the poem “Kachalov’s Dog,” where the poet confides his most secret thoughts to Jim, and not to his owner or guests.
The author makes an active attempt to overcome the ideological crisis during the creation of the “Persian Motifs” cycle. The lyrical hero strives to find peace of mind in love for a beautiful Persian woman. He manages to forget his loneliness for a while in poems such as “You said that Saadi...”, which focus solely on “sweet Shagane.” But most of the works are imbued with nostalgia. In “You are my Shagane, Shagane!..” the author cannot help but think “about the wavy rye under the moon”, about the “Ryazan expanse”. Even Shagane herself is not able to outshine the northern girl.
The brief period of relative harmony during the southern trip ends. The feeling of loneliness and uselessness in the new Russia is returning. In “Soviet Rus'” the lyrical hero exclaims: “...In my own country I am like a foreigner.” The only thing close to him is nature, which, like the poet, does not accept innovation: “the maples wrinkle” when the Red Army soldier tells his story. Here the duality of the lyrical hero is again manifested, who is ready to give “his whole soul to October and May” for freedom of creativity (“... I will not give up my dear lyre”). This is a continuation of a newly expressed struggle with his second self, which ended with the victory of the lyrical hero over the dark side of the soul in the poem “The Black Man” of 1925.
Before this victory, Yesenin made an attempt to adopt a new value system. In the poem “Letter to a Woman,” he proclaims “praise and glory to the helmsman,” perhaps referring to Lenin. In the work “Uncomfortable Liquid Lunarity...” the lyrical hero “through stone and steel” sees “the power... of his native side.” He tries to come to terms with the victory of the locomotive over the foal from “Sorokoust,” but remarks: “Maybe I’m not fit for a new life...” Finally, in the poem “The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain...” the author clearly speaks through the lips of the lyrical hero, so that he remains the poet of the “golden log hut.”
The world of the village, close to Yesenin, was leaving. And the poet himself increasingly thought about death. These thoughts sound especially vivid in the poem “The golden grove dissuaded...”. Its author was ready to die; he realized the irrevocability of the years he had lived. The lyrical hero, going through his life’s path, is compared in this poem with both the grove and the cranes, and his young soul with the “lilac flower.” Here again the motive of the connection between man and the cosmos arises:
The hemp plant dreams of all those who have passed away
With a wide moon over the blue pond.
The tragedy of death is smoothed over by the affirmation that life does not end with death:
Rowan berry brushes will not get burned,
Yellowness will not make the grass disappear.
A special milestone in the development of the lyrical hero Yesenin was the creation of the poem “Anna Snegina” (1925).
Sergei is both the main and lyrical hero, the author, and the narrator. But many assessments of what was happening, experiences, reactions to certain events could belong to the poet himself. This work is very optimistic: Yesenin found something that helps a person survive. The means of salvation from all adversity is a pure feeling of youthful love, carried throughout life.
There is a share of optimism in Yesenin’s very last poem. The lyrical hero believes that the life of the soul does not end with the death of the body:
Destined separation
Promises a meeting ahead
he wrote in a farewell message to a friend...
“LOVE FOR THE NATIVE LAND” IN THE LYRICS OF S. A. ESENINA
But most of all
Love for the native land
I was tormented
Tormented and burned.
S. Yesenin
The theme of the Motherland in Russian literature is one of the most favorite themes of Russian writers and poets. There is not a single creator I know who would not touch on this topic in his works. Some of them only briefly touched on it, others dedicated all their creations to the Motherland, putting love and feelings into them, proving that the Motherland is an important, and sometimes the most important part of their lives and creativity. This attitude towards their native land burst into their works with a stormy flow of emotions, during which there was admiration for the Russian land and immense love for the Motherland.
“The theme of the Motherland, Russia, is the main one in all my poems...” - Yesenin often mentioned. Yes, it was precisely his ardent love for Russia, for the corner of the globe where he was born, that was the force that inspired him to create new works.
Face to face
You can't see the face.
Big things can be seen from a distance...
This is how one can characterize in the words of the poet himself his gaze, addressed to Russia from “beautiful distance.” Creating the cycle “Persian Motifs,” Yesenin, having never been to Persia, gives a wonderful image of the Motherland. Even being in a fertile land, he cannot forget that
The moon is a hundred times bigger there,
No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,
It is no better than the Ryazan expanses,
Because I'm from the north, or what?
Sharing with Russia the tragic turns of its fate, he often turns to her as to a loved one, seeking sympathy and answers to bitter insoluble questions.
Ah, homeland!
How funny I have become.
A dry blush flies onto the sunken cheeks.
I'm like a foreigner in my own country.
This is how he perceives revolutionary events, this is how he sees himself in the new Russia. During the years of the revolution, he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, “with a peasant bias.” Through the mouths of the peasants, Yesenin expresses his attitude towards the actions of the new masters of Russia:
Yesterday the icons were thrown off the shelf,
The commissioner removed the cross from the church...
But, regretting “the passing Rus',” Yesenin does not want to lag behind the “coming Rus'”:
But I'm still happy.
In a host of storms
I had a unique experience.
The whirlwind has dressed up my destiny
In golden bloom.
With all his love for patriarchal Russia, Yesenin is offended by its backwardness and wretchedness, he exclaims in his heart:
Field Russia! Enough
Dragging the plow across the fields!
It hurts to see your poverty
And birches and poplars.
But no matter what adversity tormented Russia, its beauty still remained unchanged, thanks to its marvelous nature. The charming simplicity of Yesenin’s paintings cannot but captivate readers. Already in one “Blue Fog. Snow expanse, subtle lemon moonlight,” you can fall in love with the poet’s Russia. Every leaf, every blade of grass lives and breathes in Yesenin’s poems, and behind them is the breath of his native land. Yesenin humanizes nature, even his maple tree looks like a person:
And, like a drunken watchman, stepping out onto the road
He drowned in a snowdrift and froze his leg.
Behind the apparent simplicity of the images there is great skill, and it is the master’s word that conveys to the reader a feeling of deep love and devotion to his native land.
But Rus' is unthinkable without a sense of respect and understanding of the complex nature of the Russian people. Sergei Yesenin, experiencing a deep feeling of love for the Motherland, could not help but bow to his people, their strength, power and endurance, a people who managed to survive both famine and devastation.
Ah, my fields, dear furrows,
You are good in your sadness!
I love these frail huts
Waiting for gray-haired mothers.
I will fall to the birch bark little shoes,
Peace be with you, rake, scythe and plow!
But it is impossible to clearly formulate why exactly the Motherland is loved. Lermontov also spoke about his strange love for Russia and the insubordination of this feeling to reason:
I love the Fatherland, but with a strange love...
Yesenin will echo almost a century later:
But I love you, gentle Motherland!
And I can’t figure out why.
“THE FEELING OF MOTHERLAND IS THE MAIN THING IN MY CREATIVITY” (S. Yesenin)
Characterizing his lyrics, Yesenin said: “My lyrics are alive with one great love, love for my homeland. The feeling of homeland is fundamental in my work.”
Indeed, every line of Yesenin’s poems is imbued with ardent love for the homeland, and for him the homeland is inseparable from Russian nature and the countryside. This fusion of the homeland, the Russian landscape, the village and the personal fate of the poet is the originality of S. Yesenin’s lyrics.
In the poet’s pre-revolutionary poems, there is pain for his poor homeland, for this “abandoned land.” In the poems: “The hewn horns began to sing...”, “Go you, Rus', my dear,” the poet says that he loves the “lake melancholy” of his homeland to the point of “joy and pain.” “But I can’t learn not to love you!” - he exclaims, turning to Rus'. The poet’s love for his homeland gave birth to such heartfelt lines:
If the holy army shouts:
“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”
I will say: “There is no need for heaven,
Give me my homeland.”
Yesenin greeted the Great October Socialist Revolution joyfully, but with certain doubts and hesitations; as he himself said: “He took everything in his own way with a peasant bias.”
Not knowing the Marxist-Leninist theory, Yesenin imagined socialism as a kind of peasant paradise, unknown by whom and how, created in his beloved, poor and wretched, illiterate and downtrodden peasant Russia. He believed that since the revolution had occurred, then give everyone a “new hut, covered with cypress planks,” give everyone, at their first request, a “golden ladle with mash.”
And in the country the fire of civil war did not go out, the interventionists tormented the homeland, devastation and hunger did their job. The poet saw empty villages, unsown fields, black cobwebs of cracks on the drought-scorched land, and his heart sank with pain.
And then it was necessary to heal the wounds, break the old way of village life, and put the peasantry on the “iron horse.” Seeing all this, Yesenin exclaimed bitterly:
Russia! Dear land to the heart!
The soul shrinks from pain!
Experiencing acute disappointment, Yesenin begins to curse the “iron horse” - the city with its industry, which brings death to the village dear to the poet’s heart, and begins to mourn the old, departing Rus'.
The anxious thoughts of the poet, who thought that the revolution had brought ruin to his lovely village, were reflected in the poem “Sorokoust”.
The break with the past was painful for Yesenin. It took him a while to understand the new things that were entering the life of the country. This was the heavy spiritual drama that the poet wrote about in the poem “Leaving Rus'.”
The old village was living out its last days. Yesenin felt this, understood it, and sometimes it began to seem to him that he, too, was living out his term together with her.
The trip abroad forced the poet to look at his country with new eyes, to re-evaluate everything that happens in it. He, in his words, “fell even more in love with communist construction.”
Having visited his native Konstantinov in 1924, after returning from abroad, Yesenin saw what changes had taken place there. He writes about this in the poem “Soviet Rus'”.
The poet returned to the country of his childhood and hardly recognized it. It seemed to him that death was coming to the village, life was ending, but he saw something completely different there: the men were discussing their “life.” It turns out that life is not over, it has turned in a different direction, and it is already difficult to catch up with it. Instead of the old desperate groans, instead of the mournful funeral service, new motives are born. And although he, the poet, does not find a place for himself in this life, and he is very sad at this thought. He accepts this life and glorifies the new one.
The poet, of course, is offended that his songs are not sung in the new village. He feels a bitter feeling of resentment for the fact that in his native place he is like a foreigner, but this resentment is already against himself. It’s his own fault that he didn’t sing new songs, it’s his own fault that in the village they don’t accept him as one of their own.
However, the greatness of Yesenin lies in the fact that he was able to rise above his personal fate and did not lose the prospect of development.
The poet feels that new people have a different life and still blesses it, regardless of his personal fate.
The poem ends with bright lines addressed to young people, to the future of their native country.
Yesenin declares his new views even more definitely in the poem “Uncomfortable Liquid Moon”. It is no longer the passing Rus', but the Soviet Rus' that the poet wants to glorify.
Now he is no longer fond of “shacks”, “songs of the taiga”, “hearth fire”, because all this is connected with our Russia, with the “poverty of the fields”. He wants to see Rus' “steel”, he already foresees the power of his native country.
Yesenin sang his song about Russia; he could not imagine life or creativity without his people.
Courageous, selfless love for his homeland helped Yesenin find his way to the great truth of the century.
THE THEME OF THE MOTHERLAND IN THE WORK OF S. A. ESENIN (I version)
In Yesenin’s poetry, he is struck by the aching feeling of his native land. The poet wrote that throughout his entire life he carried one great love. This is love for the Motherland. And indeed, every poem, every line in Yesenin’s lyrics is filled with warm filial love for the Fatherland.
Yesenin was born and raised in the outback, among the vast Russian expanses, among fields and meadows. Therefore, the theme of the Motherland in the poet’s work is inseparably linked with the theme of nature.
Yesenin wrote the poem “The bird cherry tree is pouring snow” at the age of fifteen. But how subtly the poet feels the inner life of nature, what interesting epithets and comparisons he gives to the spring landscape! The author sees how the bird cherry tree sprinkles not petals, but snow, how “silk grass is drooping,” feels the smell of “resinous pine”; hears the singing of “birds”.
In the later poem “Beloved Land, My Heart Dreams...” we feel that the poet is merging with nature: “I would like to get lost in the greenery of your hundred-ringing rings.” Everything about the poet is beautiful: the mignonette, the cassock robe, the evocative willows, the swamp, and even the “smoldering fire in the heavenly rocker.” These beauties are dreams of the heart. The poet meets and accepts everything in Russian nature; he is happy to merge in harmony with the world around him.
In his works, Yesenin spiritualizes nature, merges with it, gets used to its world, speaks its language. He not only gives it the feelings and sensations of a person, but often compares human dramas with the experiences of animals. The theme of “our little brothers” has always been present in Yesenin’s work. He depicted animals, caressed and offended, domesticated and destitute. The poet sympathizes with a decrepit cow dreaming of a heifer (“Cow”), feels the pain of a whelping dog (“Song of a Dog”), empathizes with a wounded fox (“Fox”).
A characteristic feature of Yesenin’s poetry of this period is that, together with nature, he glorifies patriarchal and religious Rus'. In the poem “Go away, my dear Rus',” huts, low outskirts, and churches appear before the poet’s gaze. Yesenin connected the life and customs of the Russian village with these poetic images. He is happy to hear girlish laughter, ringing like earrings, and to contemplate the merry dance in the meadows. Therefore, to the cry of the holy army - “Throw away Rus', live in paradise!” - the poet can only answer this way:
I will say: “There is no need for heaven,
Give me my homeland.”
Similar motives are heard in the poem “The hewn horns began to sing.” The feelings of “warm sadness” and “cold sorrow” are as contradictory as the landscape of the Russian village.
On the one hand, there are chapels and memorial crosses along the road, and on the other, poetic and “prayerful” feather grass rings.
The year 1917 became a definite milestone in Yesenin’s understanding of the theme of the Motherland. The poet becomes painfully aware of his duality and attachment to the old patriarchal Rus'. We find such experiences in the poems “Leaving Rus'”, “Letter to Mother”, “Hooligan”, “I am the last poet of the village”. In the work “Letter to a Woman,” the poet feels himself “in a life torn apart by a storm.” He is tormented because he will not understand “where the fate of events is taking us.” In the poem “The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain...” the poet pronounces confessional words. If someone “rejoices, rages and suffers, lives well in Rus',” then Yesenin, lost in the new life, preserves his own “I”.
And now, when the new light
And my life was touched by fate,
I still remain a poet
Golden log hut.
Old rituals and traditions are becoming a thing of the past. Festive haymaking is replaced by the “iron guest”. In the poems “Sorokoust”, “Return to the Motherland”, “Soviet Rus'” the poet tries to penetrate the Soviet style of life, tries to understand “Rus reared up by the Commune”.
But the new light of a different generation still does not warm up. Yesenin feels like a gloomy pilgrim. His words sound annoyed and sad...
Ah, homeland! How funny I have become.
A dry blush flies onto sunken cheeks,
The language of my fellow citizens has become like a foreign language to me,
I'm like a foreigner in my own country.
With the image of the Motherland, Yesenin personifies maternal affection. The poems “Letter to Mother”, “Letter from Mother”, “Answer” are written in the form of a message in which Yesenin opens his soul to the closest person - his mother. The poet connects the image of the Motherland with the spring floods of rivers; he calls spring “the great revolution.” Despite the despair sounding in this poem, the poet believes in Pushkin’s style: “she will come, the desired time!”
And this time came for Yesenin at the end of his life. He glorifies Soviet Rus' in the lyrical-epic works “The Ballad of Twenty-Six” and “Anna Snegina”. The author strives to understand his new native Fatherland, to become a real son of the “great states of the USSR.” After all, even in “Persian Motifs” Yesenin remains a singer of the Ryazan expanses, contrasting them with the “saffron land”.
Thus, the theme of the Motherland runs through the poet’s entire work. Despite all the doubts and disappointments in Soviet Russia, Yesenin’s heart remained with his Motherland and its beauty.
In our minds, the poet will forever be remembered as a singer of the Russian expanses.
THE THEME OF THE MOTHERLAND IN THE WORK OF S. A. ESENINA (II version)
I love my homeland very much...
(“Confession of a Hooligan”)
“Genius is always popular,” said Alexander Blok. Perhaps these words can be applied to any writer whose works are commonly called world classics. And we are talking here not only about the “accessibility” of works to the widest circle of readers or about topics that literally concern the people. Blok very accurately grasped the relationship that exists between talent and a special feeling for the Motherland. Everyone, to one degree or another, feels their connection with the people, and therefore with the Motherland, because these two concepts are inseparable. A truly great person, capable of “rising” above modernity and looking “from above,” must especially feel this connection, feel that he belongs to the galaxy of faithful sons of his fatherland. At the same time, a specific time period and a specific country do not matter - after all, the concepts of “people” and “genius” are eternal.
Speaking about the theme of the Motherland in Russian literature, one cannot help but recall Sergei Yesenin and his role in the poetry of the early 20th century. The era called classical has ended, but eternal themes were developed in the works of new writers, who eventually also became classics.
Yesenin's earliest poems (1913-1914) are landscape sketches of amazing beauty, in which the Motherland is, first of all, the corner of the world where the poet was born and raised. Yesenin makes nature animated in order to reflect as clearly as possible the beauty of the surrounding world, its living essence. Everything around lives its own life: “the cabbage beds are watered with red water by the sunrise,” “the birch trees stand like big candles.” Even “the nettle was dressed in bright mother-of-pearl” in the poem “Good Morning.”
The identification of the Motherland with the native village is also characteristic of Yesenin’s later lyrics. The village is conceptualized as a kind of microcosm. In the poem “Go you, Rus', my dear...” and “The hewn horns began to sing...” the theme of the holiness of the Russian land begins to sound latently:
And on the lime with a bell
The hand involuntarily crosses itself.
(“The hewn horns began to sing...")
Like a visiting pilgrimI'm looking at your fields.(“Go away, Rus', my dear...”)
Christian motives are not accidental - we are talking about the highest value. However, the poet paints a landscape full of piercing, ringing melancholy, the image of “funeral crosses”, the theme of “cold grief” arises. But at the same time, Yesenin speaks of an all-consuming love for the Motherland, love “to the point of joy and pain.” Such love, which every truly Russian probably experiences, cannot exist without “lake melancholy”, without a drop of bitterness... “I will not give up these chains,” says Yesenin about that unaccountable melancholy that mixes with love and makes it the feeling is truly deep and eternal. “Chains” are familiar to the lyrical hero, and there is sweetness in their heaviness.
This theme, which runs through Yesenin’s work, finds its logical continuation in the “Rus” cycle. Here the image of the people appears, which, together with nature, is inseparable for the poet from the concept of “Rus”. Yesenin introduces pictures of folk life (“And how the guys bark with a talyanka, the girls come out to dance around the fires”), as well as folklore images: here are “forest evil spirits” and sorcerers.
In the third part of the cycle, social motives are heard, but they are developed in the light of the author’s previous perception of the topic. Yesenin describes a “time of adversity”: a militia is gathering, the peaceful course of life is disrupted. The landscape takes on a cosmic scope.
The described event - recruitment in the village - goes beyond the ordinary, turning into a universal catastrophe:
Thunder struck, the cup of the sky was split...
The lamps of heaven began to sway.
The heroes of the cycle, “Peaceful Ploughmen,” are also symbolic. The basis of the life of the Russian people, in Yesenin’s understanding, is peaceful peasant labor, “a rake, a plow and a scythe.” It is not for nothing that this is a “meek homeland,” so after the battle the soldiers dream of “a cheerful mowing above the rays.” Yesenin strives to explore the national character, understand the secret of the Russian soul, and comprehend the logic of the development of this mysterious country. It was the feeling of a deep spiritual connection with the people that prompted Yesenin to turn to the historical past of Russia. Some of his first major works were the poems “Marfa Posadnitsa” and “Song of Evpatiy Kolovrat”, and later “Pugachev”. The characters in these poems are heroes whose names are preserved in the people's memory, epic, almost epic heroes. The main antithesis of all Yesenin’s works on historical subjects is “will - captivity.” Freedom for the Russian people has always been the highest value, for which it is not scary to enter into battle with the Antichrist himself. Novgorod liberty is the ideal of the poet, which will subsequently lead him to the adoption of a revolutionary idea.
Thinking about the past of the Motherland, Yesenin could not help but try to look into its future. His dreams, premonitions, desires were reflected in his poems in 1917. Yesenin says that he accepted the October Revolution “in his own way, with a peasant bias.” He perceived the “Bright Future” as the arrival of a “peasant paradise,” that is, a society based on the peaceful labor of peasants, universal equality and justice. Yesenin called this utopian “welfare state” Inonia. He sees the revolution as a reorganization of the Universe, a protest against everything old and outdated:
Long live the revolution.
On earth and in heaven!..
If it's the sun
In conspiracy with them,
We are his whole army
Let's raise our pants.
(“Heavenly Drummer”)
The lyrical hero of the poems of the revolutionary cycle stands at the head of the fighters paving the way to a bright paradise. Having abandoned the old God, he takes his place, creating his own universe:
New ascension
I'll leave footprints on the ground...
Today I have an elastic hand
Ready to turn the world around.
("Irony")
The heroes of “The Heavenly Drummer,” the creators of a new paradise, are not afraid to encroach on the sacred. The heavens are becoming within reach, and it is the “swarthy army, the friendly army”, led by the heavenly drummer, who marches across them so fearlessly and swiftly. Blasphemous images appear: “icon saliva”, “barking bells”.
Yesenin understands that in order to create a “peasant paradise” it is necessary to sacrifice his former Motherland - a way of life dear to his heart; “in the robes of the image” and “merry dancing in the meadows” should become a thing of the past. But he agrees to this sacrifice in order to finally find the “meadow Jordan,” where they believe in a new god, “without a cross and flies,” and where the Apostle Andrew and the Mother of God descend to earth.
But soon the fervor of a reckless, almost fanatical passion for revolutionary ideas passes. “...What is happening is not the kind of socialism that I thought about,” says Yesenin. He expresses his new understanding in the poem “Letter to a Woman,” where he compares Russia to a ship in a rocking motion. This poem is consonant with the earlier poem “Sorokoust”, where the lyrical hero comes to complete disappointment and despair: ..
Blows, blows the death horn
What should we do, what should we do now?..
Already without youthful romance, from the position of a mature person, Yesenin looks at what is happening and draws real pictures of people's life. In the poem “Anna Snegina” he shows how the “struggle for Inonia” ended for the Russian village. People like the Ogloblin brothers, Pron and Labutya, came to power: “They should be sent to prison after prison...” The heavenly drummer’s campaign led to a dead end:
There are now thousands of them
I hate to create in freedom.
Race is gone, gone...
The nurse Rus died...
But this is his homeland, and the lyrical hero is not able to renounce it, no matter what happens. The last period of Yesenin’s work (20s) can be called “return to the homeland,” in consonance with the poem of 1924.
The lyrical hero of these years acquires the facial features of a tragic one. Returning after many years of tossing and searching for himself to his parents’ house, he is bitterly convinced that “you cannot step into the same river twice.” Everything has changed: youth has gone, and with it dreams of heroism and glory; the old, familiar way of life was destroyed... The former Motherland is gone forever. Life is a stormy sea, but now another generation is on the crest of the wave (“Here is the life of sisters, sisters, not mine”). The lyrical hero turns out to be a stranger in his native land, like “a gloomy pilgrim from God knows from what distant side.” The only thing he has left is “Dear Lyre” and the old, timeless love for the Motherland. Even if this “orphaned land” is no longer what it used to be (“Bell tower without a cross”, “Capital” instead of the Bible), and in Soviet Rus' there is little left of that departed “meek motherland”. The lyrical hero is still inextricably linked with the Motherland, and neither time, nor trials, nor “the thick of storms and blizzards” could break the “chains” that Yesenin wrote about at the very beginning of his journey.
The poet turned out to be able to capture the contradictory soul of the Russian person with its thirst for rebellion and an ingenuous dream of peace. This attitude towards paradox leads to the choice of contrasting epithets that define the word “Motherland”: it is “meek” and “violent” at the same time.
Yesenin writes with pain about the bloody path of Russia, about the dead end into which the revolution led the country. He is not looking for the direct culprits of the Russian tragedy:
It's a pity that someone was able to scatter us
And no one’s fault is clear
The poet only prays to some higher power, hopes for a miracle:
Protect me, gentle moisture,
May is my blue, June is blue...
Temporary landmarks and ideas appear and go, but the eternal always remains eternal. Yesenin said about this in one of his later poems “Soviet Rus'”:
But then,
When in the whole planet.
The tribal feud will pass.
Lies and sadness will disappear,
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.
NATURE AND HOMELAND IN THE WORK OF S. A. YESENIN
Yesenin's poetry... A wonderful, beautiful, unique world! A world that is close and understandable to everyone. Yesenin is a true poet of Russia; a poet who rose to the heights of his skill from the depths of folk life. His homeland - the Ryazan land - nurtured and nourished him, taught him to love and understand what surrounds us all. Here, on Ryazan soil, Sergei Yesenin first saw all the beauty of Russian nature, which he sang in his poems. From the first days of his life, the poet was surrounded by the world of folk songs and legends:
I was born with songs in a grass blanket.
The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow.
In the spiritual appearance in Yesenin’s poetry, the features of the people were clearly revealed - its “restless, daring strength”, scope, cordiality, spiritual restlessness, deep humanity. Yesenin’s whole life is closely connected with the people. Maybe that’s why the main characters of all his poems are ordinary people; in every line one can feel the close connection between the poet and the man - Yesenin - with the Russian peasants, which has not weakened over the years.
Sergei Yesenin was born into a peasant family. “As a child, I grew up breathing the atmosphere of folk life,” the poet recalled. Already by his contemporaries Yesenin was perceived as a poet of “great song power.” His poems are similar to smooth, calm folk songs. And the splash of the waves, and the silvery moon, and the rustle of the reeds, and the immense blue of the sky, and the blue surface of the lakes - all the beauty of the native land has been embodied over the years in poems full of love for the Russian land and its people:
O Rus' - the raspberry field And the blue that fell into the river, - I love Your lake melancholy to the point of joy and pain... “My lyrics are alive with one great love,” said Yesenin, “love for the homeland. The feeling of homeland is fundamental in my work.” In Yesenin’s poems, not only “Rus' shines,” not only does the poet’s quiet declaration of love for her sound, but also faith in man, in his great deeds, in the great future of his native people is expressed. The poet warms every line of the poem with a feeling of boundless love for the Motherland:
I became indifferent to the shacks.
And the hearth fire is not dear to me,
Even the apple trees are in the spring blizzard
Now I like something else...
And in the consumptive light of the moon
Through stone and steel
I see the power of my native side.
With amazing skill, Yesenin reveals to us pictures of his native nature. What a rich palette of colors, what precise, sometimes unexpected comparisons, what a sense of unity between the poet and nature! In his poetry, according to A. Tolstoy, one can hear “the melodious gift of the Slavic soul, dreamy, carefree, mysteriously excited by the voices of nature.” Everything about Yesenin is multicolored and multicolored. The poet eagerly peers at the pictures of the world renewed in spring and feels like a part of it, tremblingly awaits the sunrise and stares for a long time at the brilliant colors of the morning and evening dawn, at the sky covered with thunderclouds, at old forests, at fields flaunting flowers and greenery. With deep sympathy Yesenin writes about animals - “our smaller brothers.” In M. Gorky’s memoirs about one of his meetings with Yesenin and his poem “Song of the Dog” the following words were heard: “... and when he said the last lines:
The dog's eyes rolled
Golden stars in the snow
Tears also sparkled in his eyes.”
After these poems, I couldn’t help but think that S. Yesenin is not so much a person as an organ created by nature exclusively for poetry, to express the inexhaustible “sadness of the fields, love for all living things in the world and mercy, which - more than anything else - is deserved by man.”
Yesenin’s nature is not a frozen landscape background: it lives, acts, and reacts passionately to the destinies of people and the events of history. She is the poet's favorite hero. She always attracts Yesenin to her. The poet is not captivated by the beauty of eastern nature, the gentle wind; and in the Caucasus thoughts about the homeland do not leave:
No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,
It is no better than the expanses of Ryazan.
Yesenin, without turning aside, walks the same road together with his Motherland, with his people. The poet anticipates great changes in the life of Russia:
Come down and appear to us, red horse!
Harness yourself to the earth's shafts...
We give you a rainbow - an arc.
The Arctic Circle is on the harness.
Oh, take out our globe
On a different track.
In his autobiography, Yesenin writes: “During the years of the revolution he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, with a peasant bias.” He accepted the revolution with indescribable delight:
Long live the revolution
On earth and in heaven!
New features appear in Yesenin’s poetry, born of revolutionary reality. Yesenin's poems reflect all the contradictions of the early period of the formation of the Soviets in the country. The violent revolutionary pathos in the early 20s, when the new economic policy was being implemented, gave way to pessimistic sentiments, which were reflected in the “Moscow Tavern” cycle. The poet cannot determine his place in life, feels confused and bewildered, and suffers from the consciousness of spiritual duality:
Russia! Dear land to the heart!
The soul shrinks from pain.
The field has not heard for many years
Cocks crowing, dogs barking.
How many years has our quiet life
Lost peaceful verbs.
Like smallpox, hoof pits
Pastures and valleys are dug up.
What pain is felt in the poet’s tragic song about the internecine discord that is tearing “the native country apart,” anxiety for the future of Russia. The question painfully arises before him: “Where is the fate of events taking us?” It was not easy to answer this question; it was then that a breakdown occurred in the poet’s spiritual perception of the revolution, his utopian plans collapsed. Yesenin thinks and suffers about the doomed village:
Only for me, as a psalm-reader, to sing
Hallelujah over our native land.
The passage of time is tireless, and Yesenin feels it; lines full of mental confusion and anxiety appear more and more often:
I am the last poet of the village,
The plank bridge is modest in its songs.
At the farewell mass I stand
Birch trees burning with leaves.
Yesenin's inconsistency is most dramatically reflected in his thoughts about the future of the village. The poet's commitment to the peasantry is becoming more and more evident. In Yesenin’s poems one can hear a longing for nature, which civilization will lose. Unforgettable Yesenin’s “red-maned foal”: Dear, dear, funny fool.
Well, where is he, where is he going?
Doesn't he really know that live horses
Did the steel cavalry win?
In Yesenin, the opposition between city and countryside takes on a particularly acute character. After a trip abroad, Yesenin acts as a critic of bourgeois reality. The poet sees the harmful impact of the capitalist system on the souls and hearts of people, and acutely feels the spiritual squalor of bourgeois civilization. But the trip abroad had an impact on Yesenin’s work. He again remembers the “melancholy of endless plains”, familiar to him from his youth, but now, however, he is no longer pleased with the “cart song of wheels”:
I became indifferent to the shacks,
And the hearth fire is not dear to me,
Even the apple trees are in the spring blizzard
Because of the poverty of the fields, I stopped loving them.
Pictures of the past evoke a passionate thirst for the renewal of one’s native village:
Field Russia! Enough
Dragging the plow across the fields!
It hurts to see your poverty
And birches and poplars.
I don't know what will happen to me.
Maybe I'm not fit for a new life,
But I still want steel
See poor, beggarly Rus'.
Isn’t it this truth of feelings that burns the heart and soul that is especially dear to us in Yesenin’s poems? Isn’t this the true greatness of the poet?
S. Yesenin deeply knew the peasant life of Russia, and this contributed to the fact that he was able to become a truly people's poet.
No matter what Yesenin writes about: about the revolution, about the peasant way of life, he still returns to the theme of his homeland. For him, his homeland is something bright and writing about it is the meaning of his whole life:
I love my homeland
I love my homeland very much!..
The homeland both worries and calms the poet. In his lyrical works one can hear boundless devotion to the Motherland and admiration for it:
But even then.
When in the whole planet
The tribal feud will pass.
Lies and sadness will disappear,
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.
From Yesenin’s poems emerges the image of a poet-thinker, vitally connected with his country. He was a worthy singer and a citizen of his homeland. In a good way, he envied those “who spent their lives in battle, who defended a great idea,” and wrote with sincere pain “about days wasted in vain”:
After all, I could give
Not what he gave.
What was given to me for the sake of a joke.
Yesenin was a bright individual personality. According to R. Rozhdestvensky, he possessed “that rare human quality that is usually called the vague and indefinite word “charm” ... “Any interlocutor found in Yesenin something of his own, familiar and beloved - and this is the secret of such a powerful influence of his poems."
How many people warmed their souls around the miraculous fire of Yesenin’s poetry, how many enjoyed the sounds of his lyre. And how often they were inattentive to Yesenin the Man. Maybe this was what ruined him. “We have lost a great Russian poet...” wrote M. Gorky, shocked by the tragic news.
S. A. ESENIN - A TRUE PEOPLE'S POET
I cherish my love only for you.
S. Yesenin
The village of Konstantinovo, where the famous Russian poet S. Yesenin spent his childhood, is located along the right hilly bank of the Oka. From here, an immense expanse of flooded meadows, buried in flowers, the smooth surface of meadow lakes, and copses running into the distance opens up.
Yesenin grew up among the expanse of nature, which taught him “to love in this world everything that puts the soul into flesh,” therefore the theme of his first lyrical poems is the theme of his native nature. All the beauties of his native land: the fire of dawn, and the splash of waves, and the silvery moon, and the immense blue of the sky, and the blue surface of the lakes - everything was reflected in his poems, full of love for the Russian land:
About Rus' - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river -
I love you to the point of joy and pain
Your lake melancholy...
We are infinitely close to both the road and the “green-haired, white-skirted” Yesenin birch tree - the poet’s favorite image, and his old maple tree, symbolizing “blue Rus'”:
I am weaving a wreath for you alone.
I sprinkle flowers on the gray stitch.
O Rus', a peaceful corner.
I love you, I believe in you.
In depicting nature, Yesenin uses the rich experience of folk poetry, epithets, comparisons, metaphors, and personification. His bird cherry “sleeps in a white cape,” the willows cry, the poplars whisper, “the sleepy earth smiled at the sun.” Yesenin's nature is multicolored and colorful. The poet's favorite colors are blue and light blue. They seem to enhance the feeling of the vastness of the expanses of Russia, expressing a feeling of tenderness and love.
His nature is always alive, it reacts ardently to the fate of people and the events of history. The mood of nature is always in tune with the mood of man:
The golden grove dissuaded
Birch's cheerful tongue,
And the cranes, sadly flying,
They don’t regret anyone anymore.
Yesenin rose to the heights of poetry from the depths of people's life. “My father is a peasant, and I am a peasant’s son,” the poet wrote. Sergei Yesenin was flesh and blood of rural Russia, that “blue Rus'” that he sang in his poems:
Goy, Rus', my dear.
Huts - in the robes of the image...
No end in sight
Only blue sucks his eyes.
And in short joyful moments, and in long years of grief and sadness, the poet is with the people. The poem “Rus” is a significant milestone in Yesenin’s entire pre-October work. In it, the poet talks about the difficult trials that Russia was going through. The people do not need war, because without it there is a lot of grief - this is the main idea of Yesenin’s “Rus”. The war was a severe disaster for the peasantry. The poet’s story about the Motherland in times of military adversity is stern, sad, and truthful:
The village drowned in potholes,
The huts of the forest were obscured.
Only visible on the bumps and depressions,
How blue the skies are all around.
The villages were empty, the huts were orphaned.
Occasionally soldiers' news came to the village: .
They believed in these scribbles
Bred with hard work,
And they cried with happiness and joy,
Like the first rain in a drought.
It is difficult to find another poem where the poet would reveal with such force the feeling of love for the Motherland:
Oh, my gentle Rus', my homeland,
I cherish my love only for you.
Your joy is short-lived.
With a loud song in the spring in the meadow.
The main thing in Yesenin’s poetry is service to the Motherland. His words have long become popular:
If the holy army shouts:
“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”
I will say: “There is no need for heaven.
Give me my homeland.”
Love for the Motherland cannot exist without love for the mother. His mother, endowed with intelligence, amazing beauty, and a wonderful gift of song, had a great influence on the poet. Tatyana Fedorovna possessed rare skill in performing Russian folk songs. Sergei Yesenin and his sisters, whose constant companions were their mother’s songs, imperceptibly themselves became familiar with the “song word”.
Yesenin retained and carried his love for his mother throughout his life. In difficult moments, he turned to his mother as his most faithful friend:
I'm still as gentle
And I only dream about that.
So that rather from rebellious melancholy
Return to our low house.
In Yesenin’s works one can feel the unity of man with nature, with everything living on earth. In one of his meetings with Yesenin, A. M. Gorky said: “... that he is the first in Russian literature to write about animals so skillfully and with such sincere love.” “Yes, I really love all kinds of animals,” answered Yesenin.
Yesenin's time is a time of dramatic revolutions in the history of Russia. From field Rus', patriarchal to Russia, transformed by the revolution, Soviet Russia - such is the historical path traversed by the poet, together with his Motherland, with his people. Everything that happened in Russia during the days of October was unusual and unique. Yesenin greeted the revolution with joy and warm sympathy; he took its side without hesitation. The revolution gave Yesenin the opportunity to feel his connection with the people, with the Motherland in a new way; it gave him a new social theme. The main thing in Yesenin’s new works is the awareness of one’s strength, the freedom that October brought to both the poet and peasant Rus'. He exclaims:
Long live the revolution
On earth and in heaven!
Revolutionary reality gave birth to new features of the artistic style. In those days, clear, intense rhythms burst into his poems from his turbulent life:
The sky is like a bell.
Month - language, .
My mother is my homeland.
I am a Bolshevik.
The life of revolutionary Rus' became more and more intense: the fire of the civil war did not go out, the interventionists tormented the country, devastation and hunger did their dirty work. It was during this period of class battles that Yesenin’s “peasant deviation” manifested itself most noticeably. Deep pain is heard in the poems of the “last poet of the village” about the irrevocable, historically doomed old village.
A trip abroad helped Yesenin understand the need for industrialization, to understand that Russia needs to catch up with Europe. Upon returning to his homeland, he writes:
I don't know what will happen to me...
Maybe I’m not fit for the new one,
But I still want steel.
See poor, beggarly Rus'.
As if the result of the change in his views was the poem “Soviet Rus'”, imbued with love and pride for the Soviet homeland, the Soviet people:
But even then
When in the whole planet
The tribal feud will pass,
Lies and sadness will disappear,
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.
The multifaceted image of the Motherland in the works of S. Yesenin is historically specific and filled with great social content. Here is a critical look at Russia’s past, faith in its present and future.
Yesenin's poetry is near and dear to all the peoples of our planet. She is immortal. The strength and brightness of his verse speaks for itself. His poems cannot grow old. In their veins flows the ever-young blood of ever-living poetry.
Let's consider the main features and trends in Russian poetry of the second half of the 20th century.
Poets of the older generation
In the 1950s, the development of Russian poetry was marked by creative revival. The work of the older generation of poets was devoted to understanding the “moral experience of the era” (O. Berggolts). In their poems N. Aseev, A. Akhmatova. B. Pasternak, A. Tvardovsky, N. Zabolotsky, V. Lugovskoy, M. Svetlov and others reflected philosophically on the problems of both the recent past and the present. During these years, the genres of civil, philosophical, meditative and love lyrics, as well as various lyric-epic forms, actively developed.
The pinnacles of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s were the philosophical lyrics and lyric epic works of A. Tvardovsky, “Northern Elegies” and “Requiem” by A. Akhmatova, poems from the novel “Doctor Zhivago” and the poetic cycle “When it clears up” by B. Pasternak.
In general, the work of poets of the older generation is distinguished by attention to the moral sphere of modern man in connection with history, the past, present and probable future.
The poets of the front-line generation also turned to “eternal” themes in their work, expressing their own vision of war and man in war. Of course, the main motive of their work was the theme of memory. For S. Gudzenko, B. Slutsky, S. Narovchatov, A. Mezhirov, the Great Patriotic War forever remained the main, if not the only measure of morality. Poems by poets who died in the war, such as P. Kogan, also became an integral part of the literary process. M. Kulchitsky, N. Mayorov, N. Otrady, G. Suvorov and others.
Variety singers
In the 1950s, a new generation of poets, whose youth occurred in the post-war period, entered literature - E. Yevtushenko, R. Rozhdestvensky, A. Voznesensky, R. Kazakova - their verse was focused on the oratorical tradition. The continuation of this tradition was determined by the journalistic orientation of the work of young poets who raised issues relevant to their time. It was these poets who were called pop singers by their contemporaries. The years of the “thaw” were marked by a real poetic boom: poems were read, written down, and memorized. Poets gathered sports, concert, and theater halls in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities of the country. It was the “pop performers” who were later called the “sixties”.
"Silent Lyrics"
The counterbalance to the “loud” poetry of the sixties in the second half of the 1960s was the lyrics, which were defined as “quiet”. The poets of this movement were united by a commonality of moral and aesthetic values. If the poetry of the sixties was guided by the traditions of Mayakovsky, then the quiet lyrics inherited the traditions of the philosophical and landscape poetry of F. Tyutchev, A. Fet, S. Yesenin. The “quiet lyricism” includes the work of poets N. Rubtsov, V. Sokolov, S. Kunyaev and others. Their poetry is united by the desire to comprehend the complex contradictions of the century and the search for new harmony. In its pathos, the work of the “quiet lyricists” is close to the realistic direction of “village prose”. Yu. Kuznetsov, who entered literature in the 1960s, is also close to “village prose.”
The civic pathos of the sixties poets and the subtle lyricism of the “quiet lyricists” were combined in the work of the Dagestan poet R. Gamzatov, to whose poems many songs were written. What Gamzatov has in common with “quiet lyricism” is the timeless, philosophical orientation of his poetry and appeal to national folklore imagery.
Modernist poetry
The poetry of A. Tarkovsky, I. Brodsky, poets of the front generation D. Samoilov and S. Lipkin, the sixties B. Akhmadulina, A. Kushner, O. Chukhontsev, poets is connected with the traditions of modernist poetry of N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam, A. Akhmatova 1970-1980s V. Krivulin, O. Sedakova. Their poetry as a whole is characterized by a sense of historicism, expressed in explicit or implicit dialogical quoting of classical works, in the understanding of memory as the basis of morality, saving man and culture from chaos.
I. Brodsky
Forced to leave the country in 1972, I. Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, and in 1991 received, as A. Akhmatova did in his time, a mantle and a doctorate from Oxford. Brodsky's talent clearly manifested itself in a variety of prose, lyrical and lyric-epic genres. The uniqueness of this poet lies in the fact that his poetry has absorbed the rich artistic traditions of both domestic and foreign poetry from mythology to the 20th century.
Author's song
Since the 1950s, the genre of art song has been developing, which has become extremely popular over time. Creativity of B. Okudzhava. A. Galich, N. Matveeva. V. Vysotsky, Yu. Vizbor and others was one of the forms of overcoming formal-substantive dogmatism, officialdom of official-patriotic poetry and shallow pop hits. The attention of these poets was focused on the life of an ordinary, “small”, “private” person. The 1960s - 1970s are a classic period in the development of this genre, the key figures of which are rightfully recognized as B. Okudzhava, A. Galich and V. Vysotsky.
Vanguard
Since the 1960s, avant-garde experiments have resumed in Russian poetry. The modern avant-garde has united various poetry groups: Lianozovskaya, SMOG, and many other unofficial poetry clubs. As a rule, poets of this movement were deprived of the opportunity to publish their works; it was with them that the emergence of the underground was associated, which expanded significantly in the 1970s. Confident of the absurdity and inhumanity of social reality, modern avant-garde artists are devoid of the dystopian pathos that was inherent in the avant-garde of the early 20th century. This worldview also determines artistic means. Refusing artistic verisimilitude, poets create a deformed image of the world, of which man is a particle. A characteristic technique in the poetry of the modern avant-garde is the centon (a poem composed of lines from other poems), which allows one to ironically play on quotes from classical literature, various cliches of official propaganda and mass culture. This, in turn, determines the mixing of various stylistic layers of vocabulary, the discovery of the high in the low and vice versa.
Conceptualism
One of the first directions of the modern avant-garde was conceptualism, with which the work of G. Sapgir, Vs. was associated at different times. Nekrasov, D. Prigov, I. Kholina, L. Rubinstein. In the 1980s, conceptual poetry was developed in the ironic poems of A. Eremenko, E. Bunimovich and in the works of T. Kibirov and M. Sukhotin. Conceptualism arose as an aesthetic reaction to the totalitarianism of the Soviet era, therefore the ideological and artistic possibilities of this direction (playing with the political and ideological cliches of the officialdom of the Soviet era) have now been exhausted.
The development of visual poetry is associated with the experiments of the futurists of the early 20th century. In the second half of the 20th century, this poetic tradition was inherited by A. Voznesensky, G. Sapgir, N. Iskrenko and others. Modern video poetry is an international phenomenon associated with the general desire of culture for liberation from ideological pressure.
Poetic journalism
The mid-1980s, like the years of the “thaw,” were marked by the rise of poetic journalism by E. Yevtushenko, A. Voznesensky, and R. Rozhdestvensky. The works of V. Sokolov, B. Akhmadulina, V. Kornilov, O. Chukhontsev, Yu. Kuznetsov, A. Kushner and many other poets were devoted to understanding the tragic events of the past and eternal human problems.
Spiritual poetry
A unique result of the tragic 20th century was spiritual poetry, which is based on a feeling of repentance and sincere faith in God. At the turn of the 1980s - 1990s, the poetry of the famous scientist S. Averintsev and poets Yu. Kublanovsky received a religious overtones. I. Ratushinskaya, N. Gorbanevskaya. Young poets also join this trend: M. Rakhlina, A. Zorina, O. Nikolaeva, S. Kekova.
Book materials used: Literature: textbook. for students avg. prof. textbook institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M.: "Academy", 2010
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