"The Corsair" is one of the famous "Eastern poems" by Lord George Byron.
In the winter of 1813, the romantic poet George Gordon Byron began his extensive work on creating a masterpiece of English poetry, the poem "The Corsair", written in heroic couplets. The work was completed in 1814. Byron develops the genre romantic poem, using rhyming pentameter verse.
The poetry begins with a preface dedicated to a close friend and author, Thomas Moore. The story consists of three songs. The action of the poem develops on the Greek islands, as well as on the shores of Greece in Koroni. Exact time The author does not indicate the poem, but it is not difficult to guess from the songs that this is the era of the enslavement of Greece by the Ottoman Empire.
The poet takes the conflict of the rebel protagonist with the world as a basis. He fights for love and fights against a society that once drove him away, calling him an enemy of the people.
The image of a lyrical hero
The main character of the poem “Corsair” is the sea pirate captain Konrath and his beloved Medora. The poet describes Konrath as a strong, gifted person who would have been able to do great good deeds if not for being expelled by society. He prefers to lead free life on a desert island, away from cities. As a brave, wise leader, he is cruel and powerful. He is respected and even feared.
Around, on all the seas,
The name alone sows fear in souls;
He is stingy in speech - he only knows the order,
The hand is strong, the eye is sharp and sharp.
But, despite all this, Konrat is a lone hero, in whose blood flows the spirit of struggle and the power of protest. He is fierce and wild, strong and wise. To distract his thoughts, he rushes into a fight with society, despite their advantage.
Conrath is a typical Byronic hero. He has no friends and no one knows his past life. Only after reading the poem can one say that in the past the hero was a completely different person who did good. The hero is an individualist, immersed in his unknown inner world.
Brief description of the plot
The first acquaintance with Konrath takes place on the top of a cliff, where he, leaning on his sword, examines the beauty of the waves. Byron introduces us to the hero, showing a detailed portrait of Konrath.
Tanned cheek, white forehead,
A wave of curls is like a crow's wing;
The curl of the lip involuntarily reveals
Arrogant thoughts are a secret passage;
Although the voice is quiet, but the appearance is straight and bold,
There is something in him that he would like to hide.
In the first song, the action develops on a pirate island, where the pirate leader Konrath receives some news, which forces him to say goodbye to his beloved Medora and raise the sails. Where and why the pirates went is clear from the second song of the poem.
In the second part main character is about to deal a mortal blow to his enemy Seyid Pasha. Konrath sneaks into the enemy's feast. He is going to commit his crime at the time when Seid Pasha's fleet is set on fire by pirates. Since the fleet was set on fire before the specified time, a fierce and hot battle begins, where Konrat rescues his enemy’s beloved wife, Gulnar, from the burning seraglio. Having made a mistake, the pirates were forced to flee, and Konrath himself was captured by enemies and thrown into prison.
In the third song, Seyid Pasha is going to execute the main character, inventing the most painful death for him. Gulnar, who was rescued by the pirate captain, falls in love with him. Secretly from Seid Pasha, she tries to persuade Konrat to arrange his escape. The captain did not want to owe her freedom, since he did not love her. His heart belongs to only one girl in the world - Medora. Blinded true love, Gulnar kills her husband and, having persuaded the guards, arranges an escape for Konrat. They run together to a ship that is heading to the pirate island. Upon arrival, the captain learns of the death of his beloved, who could not bear the news of his captivity.
Everything is in vain - day after day rolls by,
Conrad is gone, and there is no news of him,
And there is no trace of his fate anywhere:
Did he die or disappeared forever?
Having lost the meaning of his life, Konrat disappears without a trace and is never seen again. It remains a mystery what happened to the main character.
He is not in the tower, not on the shore;
We searched the whole island on the run,
Barren... Night; and the day has come again
Only an echo echoed among them among the rocks.
Every hidden grotto has been searched;
A piece of the chain securing the bot
He inspired hope: the brig would follow him!
Fruitless! A series of days passes,
No Conrad, he disappeared forever.
The poem "Corsair" is one of the classic examples of romanticism.
It is perhaps impossible to say about Joseph Conrad that he was unlucky in our criticism or in translation. They wrote a lot about him and almost all of his books were translated into Russian.
Critics differed in their assessment of Conrad - some criticized, others praised. By 1935, this dispute could be said to have been brought to an end - Conrad was no longer published, and critics stopped proving, some that Conrad was a romantic and therefore good, and others that he, Conrad, was a romantic and therefore bad.
A reader who happens to come across a novel by this author will probably have difficulty relating it to certain literary phenomena familiar to him. Conrad wrote about the sea, about adventures in distant unknown countries, about the audacity of pioneers, about people of strong passions, and at first glance it is easiest to classify him as an author of adventure novels.
However, Conrad will not satisfy the person who wants to see him as a second Stevenson. His characters will seem too complex, the action is sometimes too drawn out. To the short stories and short stories Conrad (such as the famous “Freya of the Seven Islands”, “The End of Slavery”, “Typhoon”, the wonderful anti-imperialist story “The Outpost of Civilization”) this applies to a lesser extent, to the novels - to a greater extent. Ultimately, all of Conrad's work is very far from the genre of adventure literature. The problems addressed by the writer are too complex. The tasks he sets for himself are too complex - ideological and creative.
On one thing, as we have seen, Conrad's enemies and friends agreed - that he was a romantic. The life he lived was also the life of a romantic.
Theodore Joseph Conrad Korzeniewski, the future English writer Joseph Conrad, was only five years old when his father, a little-known Polish writer, was exiled to Vologda for participating in the preparation of the 1863 uprising. As a boy, Theodor Joseph found himself in Ukraine, as a teenager in Galicia, as a young man he entered a French ship and a few years later passed the exam to become an officer in the English merchant fleet. A few years later we meet Theodore Kozhenevsky as the captain of the ship. In 1895, English readers met Joseph Conrad's first novel.
Conrad was already about forty years old at this time. He accumulated impressions for the rest of his life. Literary experience by that time there were also quite a few of them. For many years in a row, this taciturn, reserved and strict naval officer, rising from his place at the head of the wardroom table, locked himself in the cabin and, pushing aside the chronometers, put in front of him a sheet of the manuscript he had begun, which had to be copied out completely, then edited again and again. rewrite Only once in all these years had he read what he had written to another person. Among the passengers of his ship, he once met a young lawyer specializing in maritime law. They started talking - first about the sea, then about literature, which interested the passenger much more than his own profession. Conrad took him to his cabin and read to him for a long time. The young man listened and praised, but did not say a word about the fact that he was also going to write. A few years later, the young man turned to the writer Conrad with a request to help him publish a collection of stories, “By the Four Winds,” written in a manner very close to Conrad’s. The young man's last name was Galsworthy. They remained friends for life.
Several years later, Galsworthy diligently bought and hid the surviving copies of his first romantic book. Conrad remained faithful to the romantic novel to the end. And yet, in a sense, Conrad and Galsworthy were doing the same thing.
At the end of the nineteenth century, English literature began to increasingly move away from the specifically English tradition of “grotesque realism”, from the principles of Fielding. Smollett, Dickens. The circumstances of the characters’ lives become more ordinary, and the psychological analysis becomes more detailed. English realism is gradually moving closer to French and Russian realism. The names of Turgenev, Maupassant, Flaubert, and somewhat later - Tolstoy and Chekhov became the central names in the novel and short story for English writers.
On the move from realism XIX to the realism of the 20th century, from the realism of the era of “free” bourgeois development to the realism of the era of imperialism, Conrad played a significant, albeit very specific, role.
Some critics even refused to recognize Conrad as an English writer, declaring him some kind of “Slavic soul” or, in best case scenario, a “pan-European writer” who happened to write in English. These critics referred to the fact that, listing the authors to whom he is most indebted, Conrad talks about Turgenev, Maupassant, France, Daudat, Flaubert, but does not mention a single Englishman. At the same time, they forget that Galsworthy also did not name a single English writer among his teachers. In neither case, this, of course, does not mean that there were none. It’s just that the English tradition was assimilated by Conrad and Galsworthy so organically that there was no need to talk about it; Conrad, who studied English language in literature, and primarily in Dickens, whose “Bleak House” forever remained his favorite work, adopted this tradition, perhaps even more organically than his young friend. Galsworthy, along with Hardy, was the creator of the English realistic novel. Conrad, although he had come a very long way from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, continued to work in the old English tradition of the romantic novella. It is enough to read at least one story by Conrad to be convinced how fully and deeply he learned the lessons of style and skill taught English classics de nineteenth century.
Conrad emphasized and highlighted the romantic elements of Dickens. But the extraordinary in Dickens becomes ordinary in Conrad, because the very environment in which his heroes act is unusual, and, moreover, if in Dickens psychological analysis comes into its own in cases where the hero is experiencing the most intense, crisis moment of his life, in Conrad he is present everywhere, for his heroes live a life in which every moment is the most intense. Psychology becomes for Conrad, as for Galsworthy, the lot of everyday life, but everyday life itself is unusual for him because the passions of his heroes are not the passions of people sitting at home. They are common at sea and unusual on land.
Conrad's heroes are always faced with a decisive action. Everything they do serves as internal preparation for this act. They live in the feeling of this main, final act, although for now they only do the most ordinary things. The hero’s spiritual life is not just rich, but purposefully intense. He lives in a world full of events. He fights the elements. He is often given only a few fractions of a second to make the most important decisions.
This is where Conrad’s psychological subtext is born, which constituted one of the most important achievements of realism of the 20th century. A similar subtext is typical, for example, for “ Quiet American"Graham Green or, going beyond the boundaries of English literature itself, for Hemingway. It cannot be said that this method has already crystallized in Conrad. Although his heroes are laconic, the author very often introduces us to one or even several narrators who explain the actions of the hero. But the less Conrad explains, the stronger he is.
However, haven’t too many names of realist artists appeared around the name of the romantic Conrad? Is it not surprising that Conrad himself does not count a single romantic among his predecessors - and there are none among those for whom he paved the way. No, this is not surprising. The path from the realism of the Enlightenment to the realism of the nineteenth century lay through romanticism. The path, or at least part of the path, from nineteenth-century realism to twentieth-century realism lay through a temporary strengthening of romantic tendencies in literature. And every time you go through romantic tendencies, realism came out more psychologically rich.
He took his heroes to countries bright sun, where a person is not constrained by so many conventions, where spiritual movements are broader and passions flow more freely, he took him away from the disgusting world of bourgeois meanness and bourgeois self-interest. Not only does he write almost exclusively about the sea and distant countries; he talks about those long-gone times when they “still took individual people into account.” But, having isolated a person as much as possible in order to study him separately from society, Conrad, in the process of studying, discovers the complete conditioning of his fate by the same society.
Conrad's hero can escape the slums of London - he will not escape the problems that were born in these slums.
It can be said that if Conrad had not been a romantic, he would not have entered the tradition of realism. Conrad wrote at a time when decadent literature was exploring themes of decline, crisis, and disintegration of human connections in every possible way. And if we have the right to consider Conrad today as a writer who in many ways breaks the boundaries of decadent literature, it is solely because Conrad’s romanticism was ultimately able to triumph over pessimism and disbelief in man.
Conrad, in the true sense of the word, was the son of his age. It is difficult to find a writer who felt so keenly the crisis of his era, who almost physically felt the impasse into which bourgeois thought had reached. When the social ideals of the past are outdated, when the ideals of the future are unclear or unacceptable, the main theme of literature becomes the theme of loneliness. She is the focus of Conrad's attention. Every person speaks his own own language; everyone pursues their own selfish goals; no one can understand another.
Man’s doom to loneliness was declared already in Conrad’s first novel, “Ohlmeyer’s Caprice” (1895). The Dutchman Ohlmeyer lives in one of the distant principalities of the Malay Archipelago. He's the only white one here; some invisible partitions stand between him and everyone around him. But even in his own family, Ohlmeyer is lonely. His wife despises him, his daughter does not respect him - and why should we respect this weak, degraded man? However, Naina, Olmeyer’s daughter, is tormented by loneliness - she is tormented by the fact that there is no person who can understand her, she is tormented by the fact that she cannot love her unfortunate father and help him with her love. However, Naina has a way to get rid of her loneliness, a method available only to the young. She runs away from home with the Malayan prince Dane - she runs, taking away the last affection from another person - her father, she runs so that when love will pass, again feel the full measure of human loneliness.
Reading Conrad's novels, you are amazed at how often his heroes find themselves alone with nature somewhere in the far corners of the earth, on uninhabited islands, among people of a different language, different customs, and a different life.
On uninhabited islands... Isn't this a Robinsonade?
Yes, this is a kind of Robinsonade, only the catastrophe that scattered Conrad’s heroes was worse than the wreck of the ship on which the merchant from York, Robinson Crusoe, sailed - this is the collapse of all the illusions of a century, or rather, two centuries.
The 18th century declared humanity to be numerous Robinson Crusoe, each of whom fights for himself, but thereby contributes to the good of all mankind, Robinson Crusoe, who have concluded a social contract among themselves. Conrad knows that the social contract has long ceased to bear fruit. Feudal cruelty was curbed, but it was replaced by the cruelty of the pure.
Obviously, material interest alone cannot serve as a healthy basis for the life of society. Self-interest is incapable of raising people to an awareness of great morals. natural principles, nor to combine them. Robinsonade is loneliness. But Robinsonade remains, at the same time, a fact of life in bourgeois society, and for Conrad, in any society, because society, in the end, cannot be based on anything other than material interests. Hence the longing for what is truly human, which permeates all of Conrad’s novels and stories, hence the deep pessimism that serves as the starting point for all his constructions. The starting point, but not the final conclusion.
Conrad idolized the sea. Few people with such love, with such knowledge and skill described his calm days and terrible storms, the roar of the coastal surf and the quiet change of colors on the surface of the sea, through which the immeasurable depths of the ocean seem to be visible. But Conrad also loved the sea because it reveals the strength and fearlessness of a person.
“Do I need to tell you what it means to sail on the ocean in an open boat? I remember the nights and days of complete calm, when we rowed, and the boat seemed not to move, as if doomed to remain forever in the empty horizon of the seas. I remember the heat and the rain that threatened to drown us (but filled our barrel), I remember the last sixteen hours at the steering oar, which guided my first ship along the breaking wave. And the way my mouth dried up like ash. Before that, I had no idea what kind of person I was. I remember the sunken cheeks, the limp bodies of my two sailors, and I remember my youth and a feeling that will never return - the feeling that I will live forever, will outlive the sea, the land and all people...” (“Youth”, 1898).
Conrad, unlike Stevenson, does not hide all the hardships from the reader sea life. He does not hide all its dangers from him. Its sea is not a picturesque sea from a blue lithograph. His villains are not Stevenson's picturesque pirates who fire pistols continuously but never hit their target. Cramped cubicles, salty clothes, dirty heavy nets swollen in water - and labor, continuous hard labor...
And for this, Conrad loves the sea even more, loves it in a way that a tourist could never love, as a worker who has forever associated himself with it loves the sea, as only a man who brought “his first ship” to the shore - a small boat - could love it. when the ship he was serving on caught fire in the middle of the sea.
The world, according to Conrad, is like the sea - just as huge, just as incomprehensible, uncontrollable and requiring all of us entirely, all our strength and all our thoughts. And every time Conrad writes about how people overcome the elements, we learn about how a person knows how to defend himself and everything that is dear to him from cruel opposing forces. A man is not alone on a ship at sea. Here he works side by side with others, here people have common joys and common dangers, Here they have a common destiny, and it is in the hands of each member of the team.
Conrad's sea stories, short stories and novels, appearing one after another after his first novel, indicate that Conrad is increasingly asserting his ideals. The romance of the sea, the romance of great human destiny - this is the theme of the novel “The Negro from Narcissus” (1897), and the story “Youth”, and the novel “Lord Jim” (1900), and the story “Typhoon” (1903). Their heroes are often very ordinary people with very large shortcomings, but the value of a person is determined by what he is at the moment of testing. Then something remarkable, often invisible, is revealed. to the naked eye what is hidden in a person. Captain McQuir ("Typhoon"), a sullen dullard, most concerned that the locks on the ship were in order and that the elephant on the flag (the ship sails under the Siamese flag) would not somehow be raised upside down by mistake, reveals himself at the moment of a storm a real hero. He doesn't think about himself. When the entire deck crew huddled in secluded corners, he stood for hours on the captain's bridge, continuing to stubbornly repeat in his former grumbling voice: “I would not like to lose it” - his ship.
The sailors, the heroes of the novel “The Negro from the Narcissus,” bear a heavy burden, but in their free time from the watch they pour out onto the deck, enthusiastically watching the progress of their ship, a “beautiful creature” created somewhere on the banks of the Clyde under the roar of hammers, in black whirlpools of smoke and floating away into the sunny world to win the hearts of people...
In 1904, Conrad released the novel “Nostromo” - his most socially specific and, one might say, realistic novel. Conrad tells the story of a South American republic that, over the course of just a decade, made its way from feudalism to capitalism. The heroes of this novel are destined to see from their own experience that their dreams of establishing a just system go to waste when faced with the reality of bourgeois purity. So much blood was shed, so many lives were ruined, so that feudal cruelty was replaced by the cruelty of capitalism...
After writing Nostromo, Conrad constantly alternated between ups and downs. In 1911, Conrad published the novel "In the Eye of the West", written under the obvious influence of the poorly understood Dostoevsky, and just a year later he released one of his best books - "Freya of the Seven Islands" - a story about the beauty and power of human love. In the collection of short stories “Ebb and Flow,” which appeared in 1915, next to the wonderful, humane story “Because of the Dollars” stands a typical “horror story” - “The Inn of the Two Witches.”
In 1915, twenty years after Ohlmeyer's Caprice, Conrad published the novel Victory, in which the writer summed up his spiritual development over the past - the most creative - two decades of his life.
Axel Geist, the hero of “Victory,” left Europe in his youth and wandered around the islands of the Malay Archipelago for many years. But even here he did not find a place for himself. Despising the bourgeois, he lost faith in man in general. Return to wildness? But there is enough savagery in modern “civilized society”; wasn’t that what he was running away from? Geist wanders around the world as an observer, shunning any action, because, in his opinion, it is inevitably of a selfish nature. In the end, he settles on a desert island and only occasionally visits people.
However, is it so easy to leave society? A man of great soul, Geist saved the poor girl Lena, who was being pursued by the innkeeper Schomberg, and transported her to his prison. Now they are alone, away from people. But soon “envoys of society” appear to them - adventurers Jones Ricardo (perverted mind and primitive cruelty hand in hand). Geist probably buried a treasure on the island. We need to force him to shell out the money... Jones and Ricardo may not be so strong, but Geist, poisoned by a lack of faith in people, incapable of decisive action, turns out to be unable to resist them, unable to protect either himself or Lena . He has no real will to live. Lena has to fight for both. And here, perhaps too late, Geist was given the opportunity to be convinced that the bourgeois is not yet human. Geist realizes the power of the spiritual impulse of which a person is capable, the beauty of active humanity only when Lena sacrifices her life for him, “... woe to the man whose heart in his youth did not learn to hope, love and believe in life!” - these are last words Geista. This is Lena’s victory - the victory of love, loyalty, honor - over the meanness of society, over Genst’s disbelief. This is the victory of the Geist the man over the Geist the thinker.
Conrad the artist defeated Conrad the thinker much earlier - two decades earlier. And even if this victory was not final, it turned out to be significant enough that the theme of his works, unlike decadent literature, was not poeticization and not the suffering of loneliness, and the search for a way out of it. Loneliness is contrary to human nature. Robinsonade is absurd. Loneliness kills, just as it killed one of the heroes of “Nostromo” - Martin Deco, who found himself on a desert island and committed suicide a few days later. A person should fight not in order to live better himself, but in order for other people to live better. And Conrad's heroes do not revel in their loneliness - they are looking for a way out of it. Together with the author.
Sometimes it is difficult to judge at the first reading whether Conrad was successful in this or that image or not - even the most seemingly poorly developed images are imbued with some kind of extraordinary, hard-to-understand charm. Perhaps the secret of this lies in the author’s exceptional interest in the fate of his heroes. No matter how far the author is from the hero, we in Conrad will not for a minute feel that cold and somewhat arrogant separation from him, which is so unpleasantly striking in the works of naturalists... “He was one of us,” as Conrad often repeats this phrase ! A writer, Conrad said, must have such a power of penetration into the souls of heroes, which is given only by sympathy and sympathy. Did Conrad accurately define the nature of his attitude towards the heroes? Not good. Rather, it was not sympathy and sympathy, but love - demanding love. In relation to literature this means, perhaps, the same as in life. Demand that a person possess his own charm and universal human virtues. To love a person because he is this way and not another, to love him in all his uniqueness and at the same time demand that he in no way deviate from the ideal that everyone creates for himself in love. Feeling the joy of love is not just the joy of contemplation or the joy of possession, but also the joy of recognition, that measure of recognition of another person that is given only by love.
With such love Conrad loves the young sailor Jim (“Lord Jim”), a man who once committed a shameful act and later atoned for it with his whole life. Once upon a time, Jim became faint-hearted and jumped overboard from a sinking ship, leaving helpless passengers to the mercy of fate. At the decisive moment, Jim thought only of himself and therefore lost himself. Jim manages to find his human self again only when he devotes himself to serving the people of an abandoned native principality, sacrificing his love for them, and then his life.
Conrad loves with such love the old man Captain Woley, the hero of the story “The End of Slavery” (1902), who, hiding his blindness from everyone, continues to drive the ship because otherwise his daughter will have nothing to live on - and dies on his last voyage.
Conrad loves Captain Davidson, the hero of many of his works, with such love, cruising on his fragile boat across the seas and navigable rivers to help people abandoned by the will of fate to the far corners of the earth. He is wise in life, this good sailor, he knows that more than once he will encounter evil, ingratitude, lies, but he also knows that to be a man means to be faithful, brave and generous. Conrad always remembers this.
The fact that Conrad's theme becomes loneliness is the most important sign of the era in which Conrad lived, a sign that bourgeois ties have become obsolete for all people with a real conscience. However, the fact that Conrad does not recognize the inescapability of loneliness, although the way out of it is depicted to him as painful, sometimes tragic, through death for the sake of the triumph of humanity - this, in fact, is the overcoming of the rotten philosophy of decadence.
Conrad, like many others, did not know where to take out the dirt that bourgeois society had become overgrown with. An enthusiastic supporter of national liberation movements, he did not recognize the social revolution, did not believe that it would be able to change anything in the relationships of people in bourgeois society, and was indignant against the socialists because they intended to “fight capitalists with their own weapons.” But Conrad, unlike many others, hated this dirt and did not see its source in man. When asked who is to blame - the individual or society - he gave an answer opposite to that given by the decadents. He wrote a lot about the sick man, and this is not surprising, for he wrote about a sick century. But he did not relish the disease, but hated it.
Conrad remained a major artist until the end of the First World War. In the future, his defeats become more frequent, his victories less and less frequent. He looked for a way out for a long time, but when a significant part of humanity found this way out, he was not happy. He completely personified, so to speak, the “romantic” period of searching for ways by the Western intelligentsia. He retained his disbelief that the social revolution could change anything in relations between people even when the revolution had already changed a lot. And from that moment on, Conrad was destined to cease being a major artist.
It cannot be said about Conrad that he outlived his fame. The number of his reprints all over the world now numbers in the hundreds, five collected works of his works have been published in England alone, and a dozen films have been made based on Conrad’s plots. But Conrad outlived himself as a writer. He continued to talk even when he had nothing left to say.
Conrad did not pretend to be a life teacher. He knew that what his predecessors taught turned out to be untrue, and he himself did not know what truth to teach. But Conrad considered himself an educator - an educator of real human feelings. “My goal,” he wrote, “is, through the power of the printed word, to make you hear, to make you feel, and—above all—to make you see. It’s not much, but that’s all.” Let us say here for the writer what he said with his novels, stories, stories: learn to hear the voices of the world. Know how to feel the sorrow and joy of the world. Know how to see the colors of the world - and look for yourself with with open eyes your way. He cannot show it to you. But this way, with open eyes, it’s easier to look for it.
"Make you hear... Make you feel... Make you see..."
That's not all. But that's a lot.
"The Giaour", "Corsair", "Manfred", "Cain" by J. Byron. The evolution of the romantic rebel hero. Features of romantic imagery. Creativity D.G. Byron reflected the complex and turning point era in the history of Europe that came after french revolution. Being a son of his age, Byron as a person absorbed the contradictory aspirations of the post-revolutionary era, characterized by unstable public relations. Much in the poet’s personality is explained not so much by the natural innate qualities inherited from his aristocratic ancestors, but by his high position English peer, as much as social cataclysms, not the perfection of bourgeois relations being established throughout Europe.
Poems "Gyaur", 1813; “The Corsair”, 1814 – the cycle “Oriental Poems”, as well as “Manfred” and “Cain” are united by the presence in them of a rebel-individualist who rejects all the legal orders of a proprietary society. This is a typical romantic hero, he is characterized by the exclusivity of his personal destiny, strong passions, unbending will, tragic love. Individualistic and anarchic freedom is his ideal. These heroes are best characterized by the words Belinsky said about Byron himself: “This is a human personality, indignant against the common and, in his proud rebellion, leaning on himself.” The praise of individualistic rebellion was an expression of Byron's spiritual drama, the reason for which should be sought in the very era that gave rise to the cult of individualism.
“The Corsair” is Byron’s lyric-epic poem, which fuses together the lyrical principle in the depiction of the central character and the epic, narrative principle, which manifests itself in the richness and variety of action. Conrad is a hero who represents the purest example of a romantic worldview in all of Byron’s work, and the poetics of “The Corsair” is the most characteristic example of the construction of a romantic poem. The plot is based on the culminating episode from the hero’s life, which decides his fate; neither his past nor the further development of his life are described, and in this sense the poem is fragmentary. In addition, the plot is built as a chain of bright paintings-fragments, the cause-and-effect relationships between which are not always clearly stated in the poem, and fragmentation becomes the structure-forming principle of a romantic poem. The hero is taken at the moment high voltage vitality, in exceptional circumstances even for his robber life. At such moments, a person’s character is revealed to the end, and the demonic, gloomy, majestic character of Conrad is created in the poem with the help of various artistic means: a portrait, the author’s characteristics, the attitude of the women who love him towards him, but mainly through a description of his actions. One of the leitmotif images of the poem is the image of the sea, so characteristic of all of Byron’s poetry; freestyle sea element becomes a symbol of freedom for him. The plot of the poem “The Giaur” (1813) boils down to the following: The Giaur confesses to a monk on his deathbed. His incoherent story is the ravings of a dying man, some scraps of phrases. It is only with great difficulty that one can grasp the train of his thoughts. Gyaur passionately loved Leila, she reciprocated his feelings and the lovers were happy. But Leila’s jealous and treacherous husband Hassan tracked her down and villainously killed her. The giaur took revenge on the tyrant and executioner of Leila. The giaur is tormented by the thought that his “rich feelings” have been wasted. His monologue sounds like an accusation against society, which humiliated him and made him an unfortunate renegade. The hero of the poem "Corsair" is the leader of pirates - fearless people who reject the despotic laws of the society in which they are forced to live and to whom they prefer a free life on a desert island. The corsair, their brave leader, is as much a rebel as the Giaur. On the island of pirates, everyone obeys him and fears him. He is harsh and domineering. Enemies tremble at the mere mention of his name. But he is lonely, he has no friends, a fatal secret hangs over him, no one knows anything about his past. Only from two or three hints thrown in passing, one can conclude that Conrad in his youth, like other heroes of “oriental poems,” passionately “longed to do good”:
He was created for good, but evil
It was drawn towards itself, distorting it... (Translated by Yu. Petrov)
As in the fate of Gyaur, love plays a fatal role in Conrad’s life. Having fallen in love with Medora, he forever remains faithful to her alone. With the death of Medora, the meaning of life for Conrad is lost, he mysteriously disappears. The hero of “The Corsair” is always immersed in his inner world, he admires his suffering, his pride and jealously guards his loneliness. This reflects the individualism of the hero, as if standing above other people whom he despises for their insignificance and weakness of spirit. Thus, he is unable to appreciate the sacrificial love of the beautiful Gulnara, who saved him from prison at the risk of his life. The image of Gulnara is also shrouded in gloomy romance.
Having learned true love, she can no longer put up with the hateful life of a concubine and slave Seid; her rebellion is active; she kills her tyrant Seid and forever abandons her homeland, where she can no longer return. The poem "The Corsair" is a masterpiece of English poetry. The passionate power of a romantic dream is combined in it with the comparative simplicity of the artistic development of the theme; the heroic energy of the verse in “The Corsair” is combined with its subtlest musicality; the poetry of the landscapes - with depth in depicting the psychology of the hero. In these poems, Byron continued to develop the genre of romantic poem. Having used English rhymed pentameter verse for most of his poems, Byron filled it with new stylistic devices, allowing him to achieve the greatest expressiveness for depicting action, the mood of the hero, descriptions of nature, shades of people’s emotional experiences. He freely addresses the reader with questions, widely uses exclamatory sentences, builds his plots not in a strict logical order (as was customary among classical poets), but in accordance with the character and mood of the hero. It should also be noted the evolution of Byron's hero: if Childe Harold - the first romantic character of the English poet - does not go beyond a passive protest against the world of injustice and evil, then for the rebels of his poems the whole meaning of life lies in action, in struggle. They respond to the injustices committed by the “lawless law” of a “civilized” society with fearless confrontation, but the futility of their lonely struggle gives rise to their “proud and furious despair.”
The artistic originality of the lyrics (“My soul is gloomy”, “Jewish melody”, “Prometheus”). In formation artistic method Byron's "oriental poems" along with "Childe Harold" played a decisive role. Perceived by contemporaries as a great poetic discovery, they laid the foundations of Byronism in all its genre varieties, first of all - purely lyrical. Of course, the rich area of Byron’s lyricism is chronologically connected not with individual periods of the poet’s activity, but with his entire creative way. However, its basic artistic principles were developed in parallel with the poems of 1812-1815, and their internal connection is undeniable. Despite the fact that, by the nature of its immediate content, Byron's lyrical legacy can be divided into two groups: intimate-psychological and heroically rebellious, in essence it represents a single whole. Its different thematic aspects are connected by the commonality of the lyrical “I”. Although the lyrical hero of Byron's poetry evolved along with his author, the main features of his spiritual appearance: world sorrow, rebellious intransigence, fiery passions and freedom-loving aspirations remained unchanged. The richness and diversity of these psychological shades determines the sonority of the resonance that was caused by Byron's lyrics and did not cease throughout the 19th century, causing responses in world poetry. Each of Byron's European poets-fans and successors found in him motives that were in tune with his own thoughts and feelings, and, using Byron's poems as a form of self-expression, simultaneously reproduced both the English poet and himself. Thus, Russian readers are given a vivid idea of the nature of Byron’s psychological lyricism by his poem “My Soul Is Gloomy...”, which became the property of Russian poetry thanks to the translation by M. Yu. Lermontov, whose perception is especially close to the sentiments embodied in this example of the English poet’s lyrical creativity. Inspired by a biblical legend (King Saul, overcome by madness, calls upon the young singer David to dispel his master’s melancholy), this poem with enormous tragic force reproduces the state of a deep, gloomy, stern soul, tormented by some mysterious sorrow. The impression of the bottomless depth of this soul and the unbearable weight of the sadness oppressing it is enhanced by poetic structure poems. Its main theme, set already in the first line (“My soul is gloomy”), is revealed according to the principle of increasing drama, which reaches its culmination in the last two stanzas:
Let your song be wild. Like my crown
The sounds of fun are painful to me!
Or your chest will burst from pain.
She was full of suffering,
She languished for a long time and silently;
Like a cup of death, full of poison.
The confessional, deeply personal nature of this unique lyrical monologue, only formally connected with the Bible (the only word “crown”, going back to the biblical source, belongs to M. Yu. Lermontov and is absent in the original), is also inherent in Byron’s political lyrics. Her distinctive feature is the fusion of intimate, personal emotions with the civic feelings of the poet.
"My soul is gloomy."
My soul is gloomy. Hurry, singer, hurry!
Here is a golden harp:
Let your fingers, rushing along it,
The sounds of paradise will awaken in the strings.
And if fate did not take away hope forever,
They will wake up in my chest,
And if there is a drop of tears in the frozen eyes -
They will melt and spill.
Let your song be wild. - Like my crown,
The sounds of fun are painful to me!
I tell you: I want tears, singer,
Or your chest will burst from pain.
She was full of suffering,
She languished for a long time and silently;
And the terrible hour has come - now it is full,
Like a cup of death, full of poison.
"My soul is dark."
My soul is dark-Oh! quickly string
The harp I yet can brook to hear;
And let your gentle fingers fling
Its melting murmurs o"er mine ear.-
If in this heart a hope be dear,
That sound shall charm it forth again-
If in these eyes there lurk a tear,
"Twill flow-and cease to burn my brain-
But bid the strain be wild and deep,
Nor let thy notes of joy be first-
I tell thee-Minstrel! I must weep
Or else this heavy heart will burst-
For it hated by sorrow nurst,
And ached in sleepless silence long-
And now "tis doom"d to know the worst,
And break at once-or yield to song.
"Prometheus".
Titanium! To our earthly destiny,
To our sorrowful vale,
For human pain
You looked without contempt;
But what did you get as a reward?
Suffering, stress
Yes kite, that without end
The proud man's liver is tormented,
Rock, chains sad sound,
A suffocating burden of torment
Yes, a groan that is buried in the heart,
Depressed by you, I became quiet,
So that about your sorrows
He couldn't tell the gods.
Titanium! You knew what fighting meant
Courage with torment... you are strong,
You are not afraid of torture,
But shackled by a furious fate.
Almighty Rock is a deaf tyrant,
Overwhelmed by universal malice,
Creating for the joy of heaven
What he himself can destroy,
Delivered you from death
He bestowed the gift of immortality.
You accepted the bitter gift as an honor,
And the Thunderer from you
All I could achieve was a threat;
This is how the proud god was punished!
Having loved your suffering,
You didn't want to read it to him
His fate is but a sentence
Your proud gaze opened to him.
And he comprehended your silence,
And the arrows of lightning trembled...
You are kind - that is your heavenly sin
Or crime: you wanted
There is a limit to misfortunes,
So that reason makes everyone happy!
Rock destroyed your dreams,
But the fact is that you did not reconcile yourself -
An example for all human hearts;
What was your freedom,
Hidden example of greatness
For the human race!
You are a symbol of strength, demigod,
You have illuminated the path for mortals, -
Human life is a bright current,
Running, sweeping away the path,
Partly a person can
Anticipate the running of your watch:
Aimless existence
Resistance, vegetation...
But the soul will not change,
Breathing with immortal firmness,
And the feeling that he can suddenly
In the depths of the most bitter torments
To gain your own reward,
Celebrate and despise
And turn Death into Victory.
Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was your pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.
Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus"d they even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine-and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of your rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with your precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in your patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thin impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself-and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter"d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
In 1812-1816. Byron created a number of lyric-epic poems, known in the history of literature under the name “Eastern”: “Guyar”, “The Bride of Abydos”, “Corsair”, “Lara”, “The Siege of Corinth”, “Parisina”. Byron himself did not combine them into a single cycle, and the action of these poems did not always take place in the East: Byron uses an ethnographically accurate oriental flavor to add special drama and freshness to an already known plot.
The Author's personality emerges weakly, in contrast to “Pilgrimage...”. Most often, a fictitious narrator participates (on whose behalf it is spoken - a person disinterested in the events taking place and therefore impartial). The lyrical element is associated only with lyrical digressions depicting the beauties of the East. Each of the poems is dedicated to one of Byron’s close friends: “Guyar” - to Rogers, “Ab. Bride" - Holland. “Guyar” went through 13 editions.
All poems are united by the type of romantic hero, free composition, open dramatic conflict, fatal passion that makes one devote his life either to revenge or to mysterious and enigmatic actions, some intriguing understatement and tension.
The general tone of the poems - sublimely tragic and poetic-lyrical - is determined by Byron's general plan, which is trying to philosophically comprehend the hero's conflict with reality. The heroes of all works are maximalists, they do not accept half measures, they defend the freedom of love and their personality to the last, choosing death if victory is unattainable. The death of a loved one leads to the death of the lover, if not physical, then spiritual. Both the past of the heroes and the ending of their destinies are mysterious. Compositionally, the poems are associated with the traditions of the ballad, which conveyed only the most intense moments in the development of the plot and did not recognize the sequential development of events.
In “The Corsair,” events develop sequentially, but the Author preserves secrets related to the characters’ past and does not give an unambiguous ending. This poem is the most significant in ideological and artistic terms; the main character is a sea robber, a man who broke the law. But there is no passion for profit, for he lives the harsh life of a hermit.
He was trusting, but people deceived him, he became embittered and disillusioned with everything, speaking out not only against people, but also against heaven.
The romantic Byron thinks strictly as a rationalist. The anti-God motive arises as a consequence of the conviction that there is no justice in the world created by God! A powerful and mysterious hero suffers and is alone. Repeatedly there is a confrontation between two images: a snake, which, being crushed, is not defeated and stings, and a worm, which can be crushed with impunity. The image of a snake is associated with Conrad. But he has one joy that binds him to life - Medora’s love. She is the embodiment of the ideal, only with her the heart can be tender. The world and soul of Medora are 2 poles that cannot be connected. Conrad's tragedy is that he recognizes only his will, his idea of the world. Having opposed the tyranny of public opinion and the laws established by God, he in turn becomes a tyrant. However, Byron makes the hero think whether he has the right to take revenge on everyone for the evil of a few: the episode after the fight with Seid → in captivity and awaiting execution → here and remorse: “What seemed simple and light, suddenly became a crime on the soul.” – First awareness of the mistake. Secondly, when the slave of the Sultan who fell in love with him (a parallel with Lermontov’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus”), frees him, he returns home and sees the ship of the corsairs who are rushing to meet him: he never imagined that he could evoke love in the hearts of the pirates submissive to him.
The theme of individualism, the individual right of a person to decide what is good and what is evil, becomes more acute from poem to poem.
Romantic hero in J. Byron's poem “The Corsair”.
George Gordon Lord Byron (1788–1824) was in the first quarter of the XIX century “ruler of thoughts”, the living personification of romanticism. He, like no one else, embodied the romantic ideal of the complete merging of biography and creativity, when the artist lives by the same laws by which his heroes live, and the events of his life immediately turn into the material of his works. The “Byronic Legend” is still alive today, and it is important to separate myth from fact.
Byron was born into an aristocratic family, at the age of ten inherited the title of lord and family estate in the north of England, and was educated at privileged educational institutions - at Harrow School and the University of Cambridge. He was preparing for a career as a statesman and for a long time did not regard poetry as the main work of his life. Despite belonging to the ruling elite, he was a rebel by nature, and his whole life was a challenge to the conventions accepted in society. He considered English society inert and hypocritical, and did not want to make any concessions public opinion and after a short period of glory in his homeland (1812–1816), he left England forever, settling in Italy. His life ended in Greece, where he took part in the national liberation struggle of the Greeks against the Turks.
Byron's poetic heritage is great and varied. Recognition came to him with the publication of the poem “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” (1812), where he brought the first romantic hero into English literature and created the genre of romantic lyric-epic poem. Its forms were developed in the cycle of “Eastern Poems” (1813–1816), where romanticism reaches classical forms. With the move to Italy, his work is enriched in terms of genre (the drama “Manfred”, the mystery “Cain”, the poems “Beppo”, “Mazeppa”). Main work The last years of Byron's life remained unfinished - this is the novel in verse “Don Juan”.
An example of Byron's romanticism can be the poem “The Corsair” (1814) from the cycle “Oriental Poems”. In all six poems of the cycle, Byron draws on impressions of his southern journey, which he undertook through the Mediterranean countries in 1809–1811. For the first time, he presented pictures of southern nature to the reader in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and this was one of the components of the success of this poem; the public expected new exotic landscapes from the young poet, and in “The Corsair” Byron develops Orientalist motifs so characteristic of romanticism in general. The East in romantic art is contrasted with European civilization as a world of free, natural passions playing out against the backdrop of beautiful, fertile nature. But for Byron, the East is more than a conventional romantic background: the action in “The Corsair” takes place on the islands of the Greek archipelago and in coastal Greece, which is under the rule of the Turks (Seyid Pasha in the poem), and the routes of the pirate raids of the protagonist Conrad are topographically accurate, maybe be traced on the map, and in the descriptions of Greece at the beginning of the third song of the poem, Byron directly relies on his own impressions four years ago. Thus, for romantic landscape the poems reveal pictures of nature and morals taken from life; Byron often gave an accurate reproduction of the historical and ethnographic environment in his poems.
At the heart of “The Corsair,” as in all other “Eastern poems,” is the conflict of the hero with the world; The plot is reduced to one dramatic situation - the struggle for love.
The hero of “Corsair” is the leader of the pirates Conrad, his beloved is the meek Medora. The action in the poem begins with the receipt of some news on the pirate island, which forces Conrad to say goodbye to Medora and give the order to urgently raise the sails. Where the pirates are going and what Conrad's plan is becomes clear from the second song of the poem. The leader of the pirates decides to forestall the blow of his longtime enemy Seid Pasha and, in the guise of a dervish pilgrim, makes his way to a feast in the Pasha's palace. He must strike the enemy in his house, while his pirates set fire to Seid Pasha's fleet on the eve of going to sea, but the fire in the bay begins earlier than agreed, a hot battle breaks out, in which Conrad rescues Seid's beloved wife from the burning seraglio. Pasha, Gulnar. But military fortune is fickle, and now the pirates are fleeing, and Conrad is captured and thrown into prison. In the third song of the poem, Seyid Pasha delays the execution of Conrad, inventing the most painful death for him. Meanwhile, Gulnar, grateful to Conrad and falling in love with him, offers to arrange his escape. At first, Conrad rejects her proposal: he does not want to owe his freedom to a woman whose love he cannot respond to, because he loves only Medora. But when Gulnar sneaks into his dungeon again, he sees a bloody stain on her forehead - she herself killed Seyid Pasha, and together they board a ship heading to the pirate island. Upon his return, Conrad learns of Medora's death. The beloved could not bear the news of his captivity, and, having lost the meaning of life with her, Conrad disappears:
Everything is in vain - day after day rolls on, Conrad is gone, and there is no news about him, And there is no trace of his fate anywhere: Did he die or disappeared forever? The pirates cried for him alone... They erected a stone for Medora. The monument to Conrad was not erected: Who knows, maybe he did not die - the Corsair, whose name resurrects again the Darkness of crimes and one love.
As in all “Eastern Poems,” Conrad is a lone rebel, professing extreme individualism. Byron does not show his past, the poem only says that his innate virtues were so high that the world was jealous of him and slandered him:
He was pure until he began his battles with people and the Almighty; He was wise, but the world considered him stupid and spoiled him with his training; He was too proud to drag out his life, humbled, And too firm to fall into the dirt before the strong. Instilling fear, slandered with youth, He became a friend of Anger, but not of Humility, He considered the call of anger to be a call from the Divine to take revenge on the majority for the machinations of the minority.
Conrad is a strong, courageous nature, he rules the pirates with an iron fist, everyone respects and fears him for his unparalleled courage and success in business:
Around, on all the seas, the name alone sows fear in souls; He is stingy in speech - he knows only the order, The hand is firm, the eye is sharp and sharp; He does not give their feasts any joy, But he is a favorite beyond reproaches.
Conrad's first appearance in the poem is typical of a romantic hero. He stands on the top of a cliff, leaning on a sword, looking at the waves, and his very position in space at this moment - he is higher than the others, pirates are rising up to him with a report - this spatial solution of the scene emphasizes the exclusivity of the hero. The same idea of exclusivity is carried out in the portrait of Conrad (ninth stanza of the first canto). This is a detailed portrait based on a combination of opposites, where each external feature becomes an expression of the character properties of the hero. Byron creates such a vivid portrait of a romantic hero that some of his features will forever become part of the characteristic appearance of a romantic literary character:
A tanned cheek, a white forehead, A wave of curls - like a crow's wing; The curl of the lip involuntarily reveals a secret passage to an arrogant thought; Although his voice is quiet, and his appearance is straight and bold, there is something in him that he would like to hide. Seeing the sharp features of the faces, you will be both captivated and embarrassed. It’s as if in him, in his soul, where the darkness has frozen, the work of terrible, vague forces is in full swing.
Contempt for people, cruelty, and the habit of violence did not completely dry out Conrad’s soul. For the first time in the history of world literature, when creating his romantic hero, Byron justifies in him actions and feelings that are far from the Christian ideal, and a substitution of moral values occurs - the author endows the criminal Conrad, who sheds human blood without hesitation, with irresistible charm. The only feeling, connecting the hero with humanity, the last living string in his soul, which he therefore values so much, is love.
In love, the character of the romantic hero is most fully revealed; love in romanticism is an uncompromising passion, the highest value of life, therefore the romantic hero fights for love against any hostile forces. The plot in all “Eastern Poems” is based on that episode in the hero’s life where he enters into the last, fatal battle for love. Only death separates the hero of “Eastern Poems” from his beloved, like Conrad and Medora. Both female images of the poem - the meek Medora, who is all devotion and adoration, and the ardent Gulnar, capable of committing a crime for the sake of love - are contrasted with each other.
As in other Byronian poems, the main way to create the character of the hero is through action. Conrad is an active nature, his ideal is anarchic personal freedom, and the plot of the poem is characterized by increased drama. The reader is presented with a series of motley, spectacular scenes, contrasted with each other on the principle of contrast: the pirates’ song glorifying the sea space and freedom opens the poem; the opposite is the sad song of the lonely Medora; the picture of a feast in the luxurious palace of Seyid Pasha is replaced by a picture of a bloody battle; the despondency of Conrad in prison during a night visit to Gulnar and the cheerful freshness of the sea during their flight. The poem amazes with its richness of moods and colors.
The words of V. G. Belinsky, which he said about the poet himself, are quite applicable to Conrad and other heroes of the “Eastern Poems”: “This is a human personality, indignant against the general and, in his proud rebellion, relying on himself.” A. S. Pushkin also speaks about the same extreme individualism of Byron’s heroes:
Lord Byron, by a lucky whim, clothed himself in dull romanticism and hopeless selfishness...
And although Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” contains many elements directly borrowed from Byron, Pushkin does not exalt, but condemns the individualism of the romantic hero.
Thus, “Corsair” is a lyric-epic poem in which the lyrical principle in the depiction of the central character and the epic, narrative principle are fused together, which manifests itself in the richness and variety of action. Conrad is a hero who represents the purest example of a romantic worldview in all of Byron’s work, and the poetics of “The Corsair” is the most characteristic example of the construction of a romantic poem. The plot is based on the culminating episode from the hero’s life, which decides his fate; neither his past nor the further development of his life are described, and in this sense the poem is fragmentary. In addition, the plot is built as a chain of bright paintings-fragments, the cause-and-effect relationships between which are not always clearly stated in the poem, and fragmentation becomes the structure-forming principle of a romantic poem. The hero is taken at the moment of the highest tension of vital forces, in circumstances that are exceptional even for his robber life. At such moments, a person’s character is revealed to the end, and Conrad’s demonic, gloomy, majestic character is created in the poem using a variety of artistic means: a portrait, author’s characteristics, the attitude of the women who love him towards him, but mainly through the description of his actions. One of the leitmotif images of the poem is the image of the sea, so characteristic of all of Byron’s poetry; The free sea element becomes a symbol of freedom for him. The pirate song that opens the poem contains these words:
In the midst of the jubilation of dark blue waters, the thought is boundless, the soul is free to fly Above the foamy, endless wave - This is our kingdom, this is our home!
The lyrical element that permeates the poem is most clearly revealed in the end-to-end image of the sea.