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The concept of romanticism in literature is brief. Main features of romanticism in literature

20.04.2019

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Municipal Educational Institution Children's secondary school No. 5

Romanticism

Completed:

Zhukova Irina

Dobryanka, 2004.

Introduction

1. The origins of romanticism

2. Romanticism as a movement in literature

3. The emergence of romanticism in Russia

4. Romantic traditions in the works of writers

4.1 The poem “Gypsies” as a romantic work by A. S. Pushkin

4.2 “Mtsyri” - a romantic poem by M. Yu. Lermontov.. 15

4.3 " Scarlet Sails» - romantic story A. S. Green.. 19

Conclusion

References

Introduction

romanticism literature Pushkin Lermontov

The words “romance” and “romantic” are known to everyone. We say: “the romance of distant travels”, “a romantic mood”, “to be a romantic at heart”... With these words we want to express the attractiveness of travel, the unusualness of a person, the mystery and sublimity of his soul. In these words one hears something desirable and alluring, dreamy and unrealizable, unusual and beautiful.

My work is devoted to the analysis of a special trend in literature - romanticism.

The romantic writer is dissatisfied with the everyday, gray life that surrounds each of us, because this life is boring, full of injustice, evil, ugliness... There is nothing extraordinary or heroic in it. And then the author creates his own world, colorful, beautiful, permeated with the sun and the smell of the sea, inhabited by strong, noble, beautiful people. Justice prevails in this world, and the fate of a person is in his own hands. You just have to believe and fight for your dream.

A romantic writer may be attracted to distant, exotic countries and peoples, with their own customs, way of life, concepts of honor and duty. The Caucasus was especially attractive to Russian romantics. Romantics love mountains and the sea - after all, they are sublime, majestic, rebellious, and people must match them.

And if you ask romantic hero What is more valuable to him than life, he will answer without hesitation: freedom! This word is written on the banner of romanticism. For the sake of freedom, the romantic hero is capable of anything, and even crime will not stop him - if he feels inner rightness.

The romantic hero is a complete personality. An ordinary person has a little bit of everything mixed in: good and evil, courage and cowardice, nobility and meanness... A romantic hero is not like that. One can always identify a leading, all-subordinating character trait in him.

The romantic hero has a sense of the value and independence of the human personality, its inner freedom. Previously, a person listened to the voice of tradition, to the voice of someone older in age, in rank, in position. These voices told him how to live, how to behave in this or that case. And now the main adviser for a person has become the voice of his soul, his conscience. The romantic hero is internally free, independent of other people’s opinions, he is able to express his disagreement with a boring and monotonous life.

The theme of romanticism in literature is still relevant today.

1. The origins of romanticism

The formation of European romanticism is usually attributed to the end of the 18th century. quarter of the XIX century. This is where his ancestry comes from. This approach has its own legitimacy. At this time, romantic art most fully reveals its essence and is formed as literary direction. However, writers of a romantic worldview, i.e. those who are aware of the incompatibility of the ideal and their contemporary society were creating long before the 19th century. Hegel, in his lectures on aesthetics, talks about the romanticism of the Middle Ages, when real social relations, due to their prosaicity and lack of spirituality, forced writers living by spiritual interests to go into religious mysticism in search of an ideal. Hegel's point of view was largely shared by Belinsky, who further expanded the historical boundaries of romanticism. The critic found romantic traits in Euripides and in the lyrics of Tibullus, and considered Plato the herald of romantic aesthetic ideas. At the same time, the critic noted the variability of romantic views on art, their conditionality by certain socio-historical circumstances.

Romanticism in its origins is an anti-feudal phenomenon. It was formed as a movement during a period of acute crisis of the feudal system, during the years of the Great French Revolution, and represents a reaction to a social order in which a person was assessed primarily by his title and wealth, and not by his spiritual capabilities. Romantics protest against the humiliation of humanity in man, they fight for elevation and emancipation of the individual.

The Great French Bourgeois Revolution, which shook the foundations of the old society to the core, changed the psychology of not only the state, but also the “private person.” By participating in class battles and in the national liberation struggle, the masses made history. Politics became their daily business. The changed life, the new ideological and aesthetic needs of the revolutionary era required new forms for their depiction. The life of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Europe was difficult to fit into the framework of an everyday novel or everyday drama. The romantics who replaced the realists are looking for new genre structures and transforming the old ones.

2. Romanticism as a movement in literature

Romanticism is, first of all, a special worldview based on the conviction of the superiority of “spirit” over “matter.” Creative beginning, according to the romantics, possesses everything truly spiritual, which they identified with the truly human. And, on the contrary, everything material, in their opinion, coming to the fore, disfigures the true nature of man, does not allow his essence to manifest itself, in the conditions of bourgeois reality, it divides people, becomes a source of hostility between them, and leads to tragic situations. A positive hero in romanticism, as a rule, rises in the level of his consciousness above the world of self-interest that surrounds him, is incompatible with it, he sees the purpose of life not in making a career, not in accumulating wealth, but in serving the high ideals of humanity - humanity, freedom , brotherhood. Negative romantic characters, in contrast to positive ones, are in harmony with society; their negativity lies primarily in the fact that they live according to the laws of the bourgeois environment around them. Consequently (and this is very important), romanticism is not only a striving for the ideal and poeticization of everything spiritually beautiful, it is at the same time an exposure of the ugly in its specific socio-historical form. Moreover, criticism of lack of spirituality was given to romantic art from the very beginning; it follows from the very essence of the romantic attitude towards public life. Of course, not all writers and not all genres manifest it with the required breadth and intensity. But critical pathos is evident not only in the dramas of Lermontov or in the “secular stories” of V. Odoevsky, it is also palpable in the elegies of Zhukovsky, revealing the sorrows and sorrows of a spiritually rich personality in the conditions of feudal Russia.

The romantic worldview, due to its dualism (the openness of “spirit” and “mother”), determines the depiction of life in sharp contrasts. The presence of contrast is one of the characteristic features romantic type creativity and therefore style. The spiritual and material in the works of the romantics are sharply opposed to each other. A positive romantic hero is usually depicted as a lonely creature, moreover, doomed to suffer in his contemporary society (Giaour, Corsair in Byron, Chernets in Kozlov, Voinarovsky in Ryleev, Mtsyri in Lermontov and others). In depicting the ugly, the romantics often achieve such everyday concreteness that it is difficult to distinguish their work from the realistic. Based on a romantic understanding of the world, it is possible to create not only individual images, but also entire works that are realistic in the type of creativity.

Romanticism is merciless towards those who, fighting for their own aggrandizement, thinking about enrichment or languishing with a thirst for pleasure, transgress universal moral laws in the name of this, trampling on universal human values (humanity, love of freedom and others).

In romantic literature there are many images of heroes infected with individualism (Manfred, Lara by Byron, Pechorin, Demon by Lermontov and others), but they look like deeply tragic creatures, suffering from loneliness, yearning to merge with the world ordinary people. Revealing the tragedy of individualistic man, romanticism showed the essence of true heroism, manifesting itself in selfless service to the ideals of humanity. Personality in romantic aesthetics is not valuable in itself. Its value increases as the benefit it brings to the people increases. The affirmation of a person in romanticism consists, first of all, in liberating him from individualism, from the harmful effects of private property psychology.

At the center of romantic art is the human personality, its spiritual world, its ideals, anxieties and sorrows in the conditions of the bourgeois system of life, the thirst for freedom and independence. The romantic hero suffers from alienation, from the inability to change his situation. Therefore, the popular genres of romantic literature, which most fully reflect the essence of the romantic worldview, are tragedies, dramatic, lyrical, epic and lyrical poems, short stories, and elegy. Romanticism revealed the incompatibility of everything truly human with the private property principle of life, and this is its great historical significance. He introduced into literature a man-fighter who, despite his doom, acts freely, because he realizes that struggle is necessary to achieve a goal.

Romantics are characterized by breadth and scale of artistic thinking. To embody ideas of universal human significance, they use Christian legends, biblical tales, ancient mythology, folk legends. Poets of the romantic movement resort to fantasy, symbolism and other conventional techniques of artistic depiction, which gives them the opportunity to show reality in such a wide spread that was completely unthinkable in realistic art. It is unlikely, for example, that it is possible to convey the entire content of Lermontov’s “Demon”, adhering to the principle of realistic typification. The poet embraces the entire universe with his gaze, sketches cosmic landscapes, in the reproduction of which realistic concreteness, familiar in the conditions of earthly reality, would be inappropriate:

On the air ocean

Without a rudder and without sails

Silently floating in the fog

Choirs of slender luminaries.

In this case, the character of the poem was more consistent not with accuracy, but, on the contrary, with the uncertainty of the drawing, which to a greater extent conveys not a person’s ideas about the universe, but his feelings. In the same way, “grounding” and concretizing the image of the Demon would lead to a certain decrease in the understanding of him as a titanic being, endowed with superhuman power.

Interest in the conventional techniques of artistic representation is explained by the fact that romantics often pose philosophical and worldview questions for resolution, although, as already noted, they do not shy away from depicting the everyday, the prosaic, everything that is incompatible with the spiritual, human. In romantic literature (in a dramatic poem), the conflict is usually built on a collision not of characters, but of ideas, entire worldview concepts (“Manfred”, “Cain” by Byron, “Prometheus Unbound” by Shelley), which, naturally, took art beyond the limits of realistic concreteness.

The intellectuality of the romantic hero and his penchant for reflection are largely explained by the fact that he acts in different conditions than the characters in an educational novel or a “philistine” drama. XVIII century. The latter acted in the closed sphere of everyday relations, the theme of love occupied one of the central places in their lives. The romantics brought art to the wide expanses of history. They saw that the fate of people, the nature of their consciousness is determined not so much by the social environment as by the era as a whole, the political, social, and spiritual processes occurring in it, which most decisively influence the future of all humanity. Thus, the idea of the self-worth of the individual, its dependence on itself, its will, collapsed, and its conditionality was revealed complex world socio-historical circumstances.

Romanticism as a certain worldview and type of creativity should not be confused with romance, i.e. a dream of a wonderful goal, with aspiration towards an ideal and a passionate desire to see it realized. Romance, depending on a person’s views, can be either revolutionary, calling forward, or conservative, poeticizing the past. It can grow on a realistic basis and be utopian in nature.

Based on the assumption of the variability of history and human concepts, the romantics opposed the imitation of antiquity and defended the principles of original art based on the truthful reproduction of their national life, its way of life, morals, beliefs, etc.

Russian romantics defend the idea of “local color,” which involves depicting life in national-historical originality. This was the beginning of the penetration of national-historical specificity into art, which ultimately led to the victory of the realistic method in Russian literature.

3. The emergence of romanticism in Russia

In the 19th century, Russia was somewhat culturally isolated. Romanticism arose seven years later than in Europe. We can talk about his some imitation. In Russian culture there was no opposition between man and the world and God. Zhukovsky appears, who remakes German ballads in the Russian way: “Svetlana” and “Lyudmila”. Byron's version of romanticism was lived and felt in his work first by Pushkin, then by Lermontov.

Russian romanticism, starting with Zhukovsky, blossomed in the works of many other writers: K. Batyushkov, A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, E. Baratynsky, F. Tyutchev, V. Odoevsky, V. Garshin, A. Kuprin, A. Blok, A. Green, K. Paustovsky and many others.

4. Romantic traditions in the works of writers

In my work I will focus on the analysis of the romantic works of writers A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov and A. S. Green.

4.1 The poem “Gypsies” as a romantic work by A. S. Pushkin

Along with the best examples of romantic lyrics, the most important creative achievement of Pushkin the romantic was the poems created during the years of southern exile “ Caucasian prisoner"(1821), "The Robber Brothers" (1822), "The Bakhchisarai Fountain" (1823) and the poem "The Gypsies" completed in Mikhailovsky (1824). They most fully and vividly embodied the image of an individualist hero, disappointed and lonely, dissatisfied with life and striving for freedom.

Both the character of the demonic rebel and the genre of the romantic poem itself took shape in Pushkin’s work under the undoubted influence of Byron, who, according to Vyazemsky, “set to music the song of a generation,” Byron, the author of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” and a cycle of so-called “oriental” poems. Following the path paved by Byron, Pushkin created an original, Russian version of the Byronic poem, which had a huge impact on Russian literature.

Following Byron, Pushkin chooses extraordinary people as heroes of his works. They are characterized by proud and strong personalities, marked by spiritual superiority over others and at odds with society. The romantic poet does not tell the reader about the hero’s past, the conditions and circumstances of his life, and does not show how his character developed. Only in the most general outline, he says deliberately vaguely and unclearly about the reasons for his disappointment and enmity with society. It thickens an atmosphere of mystery and enigma around him.

The action of a romantic poem most often unfolds not in the environment to which the hero belongs by birth and upbringing, but in a special, exceptional setting, against the backdrop of majestic nature: the sea, mountains, waterfalls, storms - among semi-wild peoples not touched by European civilization. And this further emphasizes the unusualness of the hero, the exclusivity of his personality.

Lonely and alien to those around him, the hero of a romantic poem is akin only to the author, and sometimes even acts as his double. In a note about Byron, Pushkin wrote: “He created himself a second time, now under the turban of a renegade, now in the cloak of a corsair, now as a giaur...”. This characteristic is partially applicable to Pushkin himself: the images of the Prisoner and Aleko are largely autobiographical. They are like masks, from under which the author’s features are visible (the similarity is emphasized, in particular, by the consonance of names: Aleko - Alexander). The narration about the fate of the hero is therefore colored by a deep personal feeling, and the story about his experiences imperceptibly turns into the lyrical confession of the author.

Despite the undoubted commonality of the romantic poems of Pushkin and Byron, Pushkin’s poem is deeply original, creatively independent, and in many ways polemical in relation to Byron. As in the lyrics, the harsh features of Byron's romanticism in Pushkin are softened, expressed less consistently and clearly, and are largely transformed.

Much more significant in works are descriptions of nature, depictions of everyday life and customs, and finally, the function of other characters. Their opinions, their views on life coexist equally in the poem with the position of the main character.

The poem “Gypsies,” written by Pushkin in 1824, reflects the severe crisis of the romantic worldview that the poet experienced at that time (1823 - 1824). He was disappointed in all of his romantic ideals: freedom, high purpose poetry, romantic eternal love.

From criticism of the “high society” the poet moves on to a direct denunciation of European civilization - the entire “urban” culture. It appears in “Gypsies” as a collection of grave moral vices, a world of money-grubbing and slavery, as a kingdom of boredom and the tedious monotony of life.

If only you knew

When would you imagine

The captivity of stuffy cities!

There are people in heaps behind the fence,

They don’t breathe the morning cool,

Not the spring smell of meadows;

They are ashamed of love, thoughts are driven away,

They trade according to their will,

They bow their heads before idols

And they ask for money and chains, -

in these terms Aleko tells Zemfira “about the fact that he left forever.”

Aleko enters into a sharp and irreconcilable conflict with the outside world (“he is persecuted by the law,” Zemfira tells his father), he breaks all ties with him and does not think about returning back, and his arrival in the gypsy camp is a real rebellion against society.

In “Gypsies,” finally, the patriarchal “natural” way of life and the world of civilization confront each other much more clearly and sharply. They appear as the embodiment of freedom and slavery, bright, sincere feelings and “dead bliss,” unpretentious poverty and idle luxury. In a gypsy camp

Everything is meager, wild, everything is discordant;

But everything is so alive and restless,

So alien to our dead negligence,

So alien to this idle life,

Like a monotonous slave song.

The “natural” environment in “Gypsies” is depicted - for the first time in southern poems - as an element of freedom. It is no coincidence that the “predatory” and warlike Circassians are replaced here by free, but “peaceful” gypsies, who are “timid and kind in soul.” After all, even for the terrible double murder, Aleko only paid with expulsion from the camp. But freedom itself is now recognized as a painful problem, as a complex moral and psychological category. In “Gypsies,” Pushkin expressed a new idea about the character of an individualist hero, about personal freedom in general.

Aleko, having come to the “sons of nature,” receives complete external freedom: “he is free just like them.” Aleko is ready to merge with the gypsies, live their lives, obey their customs. “He loves their canopy lodgings, / And the rapture of eternal laziness, / And their poor, sonorous language.” He eats “unharvested millet” with them, leads a bear around the villages, finds happiness in Zemfira’s love. The poet seems to remove all the obstacles on the hero’s path to a new world for him.

Nevertheless, Aleko is not given the opportunity to enjoy happiness and experience the taste of true freedom. The characteristic features of a romantic individualist still live in him: pride, self-will, a sense of superiority over other people. Even a peaceful life in a gypsy camp cannot make him forget about the storms he experienced, about fame and luxury, about the temptations of European civilization:

Its sometimes magical glory

A distant star beckoned,

Unexpected luxury and fun

People came to him sometimes;

Over a lonely head

And the thunder often rumbled...

The main thing is that Aleko is unable to overcome the rebellious passions raging “in his tormented chest.” And it is no coincidence that the author warns the reader about the approach of an inevitable catastrophe - a new explosion of passions (“They will wake up: wait”).

The inevitability of a tragic outcome is thus rooted in the very nature of the hero, poisoned by European civilization and its entire spirit. It would seem that he has completely merged with the free gypsy community, but he still remains internally alien to it. It seemed that very little was required of him: that, like a true gypsy, he “did not know a safe nest and would not get used to anything.” But Aleko cannot “get used to it”, cannot live without Zemfira and her love. It seems natural to him even to demand constancy and fidelity from her, to consider that she belongs entirely to him:

Don't change, my gentle friend!

And I... one of my desires

Sharing love, leisure with you,

And voluntary exile.

“You are more precious to him than the world,” the Old Gypsy explains to his daughter the reason and meaning of Aleko’s insane jealousy.

It is this all-consuming passion, the rejection of any other view of life and love that makes Aleko internally unfree. This is where the contradiction between “his freedom and their will” manifests itself most clearly. Not being free himself, he inevitably becomes a tyrant and despot in relation to others. The hero's tragedy is thereby given a sharp ideological meaning. The point, then, is not simply that Aleko cannot cope with his passions. He cannot overcome the narrow, limited idea of freedom that is characteristic of him as a man of civilization. He brings into the patriarchal environment the views, norms and prejudices of the “enlightenment” - the world he left behind. Therefore, he considers himself entitled to take revenge on Zemfira for her free love for the Young Gypsy, to cruelly punish them both. The flip side of his freedom-loving aspirations inevitably turns out to be selfishness and arbitrariness.

This is best demonstrated by Aleko’s dispute with the Old Gypsy - a dispute in which a complete mutual misunderstanding is revealed: after all, the gypsies have neither law nor property (“We are wild, we have no laws,” the Old Gypsy will say in the finale), they have no and concepts of law.

Wanting to console Aleko, the old man tells him “a story about himself” - about the betrayal of his beloved wife Mariula to Zemfira’s mother. Convinced that love is alien to any coercion or violence, he will calmly and firmly overcome his misfortune. In what happened, he even sees a fatal inevitability - a manifestation of the eternal law of life: “Joy is given to everyone in succession; / What happened will not happen again.” This wise calm, uncomplaining humility in the face higher power Aleko can neither understand nor accept:

Why didn't you hurry?

Immediately after the ungrateful

And to predators and to her, the insidious one,

Didn't you plunge a dagger into your heart?

..............................................

I'm not like that. No, I'm not arguing

I will not give up my rights,

Or at least I’ll enjoy vengeance.

Particularly noteworthy is Aleko’s reasoning that in order to protect his “rights” he is able to destroy even a sleeping enemy, push him into the “abyss of the sea” and enjoy the sound of his fall.

But revenge, violence and freedom, the Old Gypsy thinks, are incompatible. For true freedom presupposes, first of all, respect for another person, for his personality, his feelings. At the end of the poem, he not only accuses Aleko of selfishness (“You only want freedom for yourself”), but also emphasizes the incompatibility of his beliefs and moral principles with the truly free morality of a gypsy camp (“You are not born for a wild lot”).

For the romantic hero, the loss of his beloved “is tantamount to the collapse of the “world.” Therefore, the murder he committed expresses not only his disappointment in wild freedom, but also a rebellion against the world order. Fleeing from the law pursuing him, he cannot imagine a way of life that would not be regulated by law and justice. Love for him is not a “whim of the heart,” as for Zemfira and the Old Gypsy, but marriage. For Aleko “renounced only the external, superficial forms of culture, and not its internal foundations.”

One can obviously speak of a dual, critical and at the same time sympathetic attitude of the author towards his hero, for the poet had liberating aspirations and hopes associated with the character of the individualist hero. By deromanticizing Aleko, Pushkin does not expose him at all, but reveals the tragedy of his desire for freedom, which inevitably turns into internal lack of freedom, fraught with the danger of egoistic tyranny.

For a positive assessment of gypsy freedom, it is enough that it is morally higher, purer than a civilized society. Another thing is that as the plot develops, it becomes clear that the world of the gypsy camp, with which Aleko so inevitably comes into conflict, is also not cloudless, not idyllic. Just as “fatal passions” lurk in the hero’s soul under the cover of external carelessness, so the life of the gypsies is deceptive in appearance. At first, it seems akin to the existence of a “migratory bird” that knows “neither care nor labor.” “Frisky will”, “the rapture of eternal laziness”, “peace”, “carelessness” - this is how the poet characterizes the free gypsy life.

However, in the second half of the poem the picture changes dramatically. “Peaceful,” kind, carefree “sons of nature” also, it turns out, are not free from passions. The signal heralding these changes is Zemfira’s song, full of fire and passion, which is not by chance placed in the very center of the work, in its compositional focus. This song is imbued not only with the rapture of love, it sounds like an evil mockery of a hateful husband, full of hatred and contempt for him.

Having arisen so suddenly, the theme of passion rapidly grows and receives a truly catastrophic development. One after another, there are scenes of Zemfira's stormy and passionate date with the Young Gypsy, Aleko's insane jealousy and the second date - with its tragic and bloody denouement.

The scene of Aleko's nightmare is noteworthy. The hero remembers his former love (he “pronounces a different name”), which was also probably resolved by a cruel drama (possibly the murder of his beloved). Passions, hitherto tamed, peacefully dormant “in his tormented chest,” instantly awaken and flare up with a hot flame. This mistake of passions, their tragic collision, constitutes the climax of the poem. It is no coincidence that in the second half of the work the dramatic form becomes predominant. This is where almost all of the dramatized episodes of Gypsy are centered.

The original idyll of gypsy freedom collapses under the pressure of a violent play of passions. Passions are recognized in the poem as a universal law of life. They live everywhere: “in the captivity of stuffy cities,” and in the chest of a disappointed hero, and in a free gypsy community. It is impossible to hide from them, there is no point in running. Hence the hopeless conclusion in the epilogue: “And everywhere are fatal passions, / And there is no protection from fate.” These words accurately and clearly express the ideological result of the work (and partly of the entire southern cycle of poems).

And this is natural: where passions live, there must also be their victims - people suffering, chilled, disappointed. Freedom in itself does not guarantee happiness. Escape from civilization is pointless and futile.

The material that Pushkin first artistically introduced into Russian literature is inexhaustible: the characteristic images of the poet’s peers, the European enlightened and suffering youth of the 19th century, the world of the humiliated and insulted, the elements of peasant life and the national historical world; great socio-historical conflicts and the world of experiences of a solitary human soul, engulfed in an all-consuming idea that has become its destiny, etc. And each of these areas found in the further development of literature its great artists - the wonderful successors of Pushkin - Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy.

4.2 “Mtsyri” - a romantic poem by M. Yu. Lermontov

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov began writing poetry early: he was only 13-14 years old. He studied with his predecessors - Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin.

In general, Lermontov’s lyrics are imbued with sorrow and seem to sound like a complaint about life. But a real poet speaks in poetry not about his personal “I”, but about a man of his time, about the reality around him. Lermontov speaks about his time - about the dark and difficult era of the 30s of the 19th century.

All the poet’s work is imbued with this heroic spirit of action and struggle. It recalls the time when the mighty words of the poet ignited a fighter for battle and sounded “like a bell on a veche tower in the days of national celebrations and troubles” (“Poet”). He uses as an example the merchant Kalashnikov, boldly defending his honor, or a young monk fleeing from a monastery to experience the “bliss of freedom” (“Mtsyri”). In the mouth of a veteran soldier, recalling the Battle of Borodino, he puts words addressed to his contemporaries, who insisted on reconciliation with reality: “Yes, there were people in our time, not like the current tribe: heroes - not you!” (“Borodino”).

Lermontov's favorite hero is a hero of active action. Lermontov's knowledge of the world, his prophecies and predictions always had as their subject the practical aspiration of man and served it. No matter how gloomy the poet’s forecasts were, no matter how bleak his forebodings and predictions were, they never paralyzed his will to fight, but only forced him to seek the law of action with new persistence.

At the same time, no matter what tests Lermontov’s dreams were subjected to when colliding with the world of reality, no matter how the surrounding prose of life contradicted them, no matter how the poet regretted unfulfilled hopes and destroyed ideals, he still went on with heroic fearlessness to achieve the feat of knowledge. And nothing could turn him away from a harsh and merciless assessment of himself, his ideals, desires and hopes.

Cognition and action are the two principles that Lermontov reunited in the single “I” of his hero. The circumstances of the time limited the range of his poetic possibilities: he showed himself mainly as a poet of a proud personality, defending himself and his human pride.

In Lermontov’s poetry, the public echoes the deeply intimate and personal: the family drama, “the terrible fate of father and son,” which brought the poet a chain of hopeless suffering, is aggravated by the pain of unrequited love, and the tragedy of love is revealed as the tragedy of the entire poetic perception of the world. His pain revealed to him the pain of others; through suffering, he discovered his human kinship with others, starting from the serf peasant of the village of Tarkhany and ending with the great poet of England Byron.

The topic of the poet and poetry particularly excited Lermontov and attracted his attention for many years. For him, this topic was connected with all the great questions of the time; it was an integral part of the entire historical development of mankind. The poet and the people, poetry and revolution, poetry in the fight against bourgeois society and serfdom - these are the aspects of this problem for Lermontov.

Lermontov was in love with the Caucasus from the very beginning early childhood. The majesty of the mountains, the crystal purity and at the same time dangerous power of the rivers, the bright unusual greenery and people, freedom-loving and proud, shook the imagination of a big-eyed and impressionable child. Perhaps this is why, even in his youth, Lermontov was so attracted to the image of a rebel, on the verge of death, making an angry protest speech (the poem “Confession”, 1830, the action takes place in Spain) before the elder monk. Or maybe it was a premonition of his own death and a subconscious protest against the monastic prohibition to rejoice in everything that is given by God in this life. This acute desire to experience ordinary human, earthly happiness is heard in the dying confession of young Mtsyri, the hero of one of Lermontov’s most remarkable poems about the Caucasus (1839 - the poet himself had very little time left).

“Mtsyri” is a romantic poem by M. Yu. Lermontov. The plot of this work, its idea, conflict and composition are closely related to the image of the main character, with his aspirations and experiences. Lermontov is looking for his ideal hero-fighter and finds him in the image of Mtsyri, in whom he embodies the best features of the progressive people of his time.

The uniqueness of Mtsyri's personality as a romantic hero is also emphasized by the unusual circumstances of his life. From childhood, fate doomed him to a dull monastic existence, which was completely alien to his ardent, fiery nature. Captivity could not kill his desire for freedom; on the contrary, it even more fueled his desire to “go to his native country” at any cost.

The author pays main attention to the world of Mtsyri’s internal experiences, and not to the circumstances of his external life. The author briefly and epically calmly talks about them in the short second chapter. And the entire poem is a monologue by Mtsyri, his confession to the monk. This means that such a composition of the poem, characteristic of romantic works, imbues it with a lyrical element that prevails over the epic. It is not the author who describes Mtsyri’s feelings and experiences, but the hero himself who talks about it. The events that happen to him are shown through his subjective perception. The composition of the monologue is also subordinated to the task of gradually revealing his inner world. First, the hero talks about his secret thoughts and dreams, hidden from outsiders. “A child at heart, a monk by destiny,” he was possessed by a “fiery passion” for freedom, a thirst for life. And the hero, as an exceptional, rebellious personality, challenges fate. This means that Mtsyri’s character, his thoughts and actions determine the plot of the poem.

Having escaped during a thunderstorm, Mtsyri for the first time sees the world that was hidden from him by the monastery walls. That’s why he peers so intently at every picture that opens to him, listens to the polyphonic world of sounds. Mtsyri is blinded by the beauty and splendor of the Caucasus. He retains in his memory “lush fields, hills covered with a crown of trees growing all around,” “mountain ranges as bizarre as dreams.” These pictures evoke in the hero vague memories of his native country, which he was deprived of as a child.

The landscape in the poem not only constitutes a romantic background that surrounds the hero. It helps to reveal his character, that is, it becomes one of the ways to create a romantic image. Since nature in the poem is given in Mtsyri’s perception, his character can be judged by what exactly attracts the hero to it, how he talks about it. The diversity and richness of the landscape described by Mtsyri emphasize the monotony of the monastery environment. The young man is attracted by the power and scope of Caucasian nature; he is not afraid of the dangers lurking in it. For example, he enjoys the splendor of the vast blue vault in the early morning, and then endures the withering heat of the mountains.

Thus, we see that Mtsyri perceives nature in all its integrity, and this speaks of the spiritual breadth of his nature. Describing nature, Mtsyri first of all draws attention to its greatness and grandeur, and this leads him to the conclusion about the perfection and harmony of the world. The romanticism of the landscape is enhanced by how figuratively and emotionally Mtsyri speaks about it. His speech often uses colorful epithets (“angry shaft”, “burning abyss”, “sleepy flowers”). The emotionality of the images of nature is also enhanced by the unusual comparisons found in Mtsyri’s story. In the young man's story about nature, one can feel love and sympathy for all living things: singing birds, a jackal crying like a child. Even the snake slithers, “playing and basking.” The culmination of Mtsyri's three-day wanderings is his fight with the leopard, in which his fearlessness, thirst for fight, contempt for death, and humane attitude towards the defeated enemy were revealed with particular force. The battle with the leopard is depicted in the spirit of the romantic tradition. The leopard is described very conditionally as bright image a predator in general. This “eternal guest of the desert” is endowed with a “bloody gaze” and a “mad leap.” The victory of a weak youth over a mighty beast is romantic. It symbolizes the power of a person, his spirit, the ability to overcome all obstacles encountered on his way. The dangers that Mtsyri faces are romantic symbols of the evil that accompanies a person throughout his life. But here they are extremely concentrated, since the real life of Mtsyri is compressed to three days. And in his dying hour, realizing the tragic hopelessness of his situation, the hero did not exchange it for “paradise and eternity.” Throughout his short life, Mtsyri carried a powerful passion for freedom, for struggle.

In Lermontov's lyrics, issues of social behavior merge with a deep analysis of the human soul, taken in the fullness of its life feelings and aspirations. The result is a complete image of the lyrical hero - tragic, but full of strength, courage, pride and nobility. Before Lermontov, there was no such organic fusion of man and citizen in Russian poetry, just as there was no deep reflection on issues of life and behavior.

4.3 “Scarlet Sails” - a romantic story by A. S. Green

The romantic story “Scarlet Sails” by Alexander Stepanovich Green personifies a wonderful youthful dream that will certainly come true if you believe and wait.

The writer himself lived hard life. It is almost incomprehensible how this gloomy man, unsullied, carried through his painful existence the gift of a powerful imagination, purity of feelings and a shy smile. The difficulties he experienced robbed the writer of his love for reality: it was too terrible and hopeless. He always tried to get away from her, believing that it was better to live with elusive dreams than with the “trash and rubbish” of every day.

Having started writing, Greene created in his work heroes with strong and independent characters, cheerful and courageous, who inhabited a beautiful land full of flowering gardens, lush meadows and the endless sea. This fictitious “happy land”, not marked on any geographical map, should be that “paradise” where everyone living is happy, there is no hunger and disease, wars and misfortunes, and its inhabitants are engaged in creative work and creativity.

Russian life for the writer was limited to the philistine Vyatka, a dirty trade school, shelters, backbreaking labor, prison and chronic hunger. But somewhere beyond the gray horizon sparkled countries created from light, sea winds and flowering herbs. People, brown from the sun, lived there - gold miners, hunters, artists, cheerful vagabonds, selfless women, cheerful and gentle, like children, but above all - sailors.

Green loved not so much the sea as his fictional sea coasts, where everything that he considered the most attractive in the world was combined: archipelagos of legendary islands, sand dunes overgrown with flowers, foamy sea distances, warm lagoons sparkling bronze with an abundance of fish, centuries-old forests mixed with the smell of salty breezes the smell of lush thickets, and, finally, cozy seaside towns.

Almost every story by Green contains descriptions of these non-existent cities - Lissa, Zurbagan, Gel-Gyu and Gerton. The writer put into the appearance of these fictional cities the features of all the Black Sea ports he had seen.

All the writer’s stories are full of dreams of a “dazzling incident” and joy, but most of all his story “Scarlet Sails”. It is characteristic that Green thought about and began writing this captivating and fabulous book in Petrograd in 1920, when, after typhus, he wandered around the icy city, looking for a new place to stay every night with random, semi-familiar people.

In the romantic story “Scarlet Sails” Green develops his long-standing idea that people need faith in a fairy tale, it excites hearts, does not allow them to calm down, makes them passionately desire such a thing. romantic life. But miracles do not come by themselves; every person must cultivate a sense of beauty, the ability to perceive the surrounding beauty, and actively intervene in life. The writer was convinced that if you take away a person’s ability to dream, then the most important need that gives rise to culture, art and the desire to fight for a wonderful future will disappear.

From the very beginning of the story, the reader finds himself in an extraordinary world created by the writer’s imagination. The harsh region and gloomy people make Longren, who has lost his beloved and loving wife, suffer. But a strong-willed man, he finds the strength to resist others and even raise his daughter as a bright and bright creature. Rejected by her peers, Assol perfectly understands nature, which accepts the girl into its arms. This world enriches the heroine’s soul, making her a wonderful creation, the ideal to which we should strive. “Assol penetrated the tall, dew-sprinkling meadow grass; holding her hand palm down over her panicles, she walked, smiling at the flowing touch. Looking into the special faces of flowers, into the tangle of stems, she discerned almost human hints there - postures, efforts, movements, features and glances...”

Assol's father made a living by making and selling toys. The world of toys in which Assol lived naturally shaped her character. And in life she had to face gossip and evil. It was quite natural that the real world scared her. Running away from him, trying to keep a sense of beauty in her heart, she believed in a beautiful fairy tale about scarlet sails, told to her by a kind man. This kind but unhappy man undoubtedly wished her well, but his fairy tale turned out to be suffering for her. Assol believed in the fairy tale and made it part of her soul. The girl was ready for a miracle - and a miracle found her. And yet, it was the fairy tale that helped her not to sink into the swamp of philistine life.

There, in this swamp, lived people for whom dreams were inaccessible. They were ready to mock any person who lived, thought, and felt differently from the way they lived, thought, and felt. Therefore, they considered Assol, with her beautiful inner world, with her magical dream, to be a village fool. It seems to me that these people were deeply unhappy. They thought and felt limitedly, their very desires were limited, but subconsciously they suffered from the thought that they were missing something.

This “something” was not food, shelter, although for many even this was not what they would like, no, it was a person’s spiritual need to at least occasionally see the beautiful, to come into contact with the beautiful. It seems to me that this need in a person cannot be eradicated by anything.

And it is not their crime, but their misfortune that they have become so coarse in soul that they have not learned to see beauty in thoughts and feelings. They saw only a dirty world and lived in this reality. Assol lived in another, fictional world, incomprehensible and therefore not accepted by the average person. Dream and reality collided. This contradiction ruined Assol.

This is a very life fact, probably experienced by the writer himself. Very often, people who do not understand another person, maybe even a great and beautiful person, consider him a fool. It's easier for them this way.

Green shows how, through intricate paths, two people, created for each other, move towards a meeting. Gray lives in a completely different world. Wealth, luxury, power are given to him by birthright. And in the soul there lives a dream not about jewelry and feasts, but about the sea and sails. In defiance of his family, he becomes a sailor, sails around the world, and one day an accident brings him to the tavern of the village where Assol lives. Like a crude joke, they tell Gray the story of a madwoman who is waiting for the prince on a ship with scarlet sails.

Seeing Assol, he fell in love with her, appreciating the beauty and spiritual qualities of the girl. “He felt like a blow - a simultaneous blow to his heart and head. Along the road, facing him, was that same Ship Assol... The amazing features of her face, reminiscent of the secret of indelibly exciting, although simple words, appeared before him now in the light of her gaze.” Love helped Gray understand Assol’s soul and make the only possible decision - to replace his galliot “Secret” with scarlet sails. Now for Assol he becomes fairy-tale hero, whom she had been waiting for so long and to whom she unconditionally gave her “golden” heart.

The writer rewards the heroine with love for her beautiful soul, kind and faithful heart. But Gray is also happy with this meeting. The love of such an extraordinary girl as Assol is a rare success.

It was as if two strings sounded together... Soon the morning will come when the ship approaches the shore, and Assol shouts: “I’m here! Here I am!” - and starts running straight through the water.

The romantic story “Scarlet Sails” is beautiful for its optimism, faith in a dream, and the victory of a dream over the philistine world. It is beautiful because it inspires hope that there are people in the world who are able to hear and understand each other. Assol, accustomed only to ridicule, nevertheless escaped from this terrible world and sailed to the ship, proving to everyone that any dream can come true if you really believe in it, do not betray it, do not doubt it.

Green was not only a magnificent landscape painter and master of plot, but also a subtle psychologist. He wrote about self-sacrifice, courage - the heroic traits inherent in the most ordinary people. He wrote about his love for work, for his profession, about the lack of knowledge and the power of nature. Finally, very few writers wrote so purely, carefully and emotionally about love for a woman, as Greene did.

The writer believed in man and believed that everything beautiful on earth depends on the will of strong, honest-hearted people (“Scarlet Sails”, 1923; “Heart of the Desert”, 1923; “Running on the Waves”, 1928; “Golden Chain”, “Road” nowhere", 1929, etc.).

Greene said that “the whole earth, with everything that is on it, is given to us for life wherever it is.” A fairy tale is needed not only for children, but also for adults. She causes excitement - the source of high human passions. She does not allow you to calm down and always shows new, sparkling distances, a different life, she worries and makes you passionately desire this life. This is its value, and this is the value of the clear and powerful charm of Greene's stories.

What unites the works of Green, Lermontov and Pushkin that I reviewed? Russian romantics believed that the subject of the image should only be life, taken in its poetic moments, primarily the feelings and passions of a person.

Only creativity that grows on a national basis can, according to the theorists of Russian romanticism, be inspired and not rational. The imitator, in their opinion, is devoid of inspiration.

The historical significance of Russian romantic aesthetics lies in the struggle against metaphysical views on aesthetic categories, in the defense of historicism, dialectical views on art, in calls for the concrete reproduction of life in all its connections and contradictions. Its main provisions played a major constructive role in the formation of the theory of critical realism.

Conclusion

Having examined romanticism as an artistic movement in my work, I came to the conclusion that the peculiarity of every work of art and literature is that it does not die with its creator and its era, but continues to live later, and in the process of this later life historically naturally enters into new relationships with history. And these relationships can illuminate the work for contemporaries with a new light, can enrich it with new, previously unnoticed semantic facets, bring from its depth to the surface such important, but not yet recognized by previous generations, moments of psychological and moral content, the meaning of which for the first time could be realized. - truly appreciated only in the conditions of a subsequent, more mature era.

References

1. A. G. Kutuzov “Textbook-reader. In the world of literature. 8th grade", Moscow, 2002. Articles "Romantic traditions in literature" (pp. 216 - 218), "Romantic hero" (pp. 218 - 219), "When and why romanticism appeared" (pp. 219 - 220).

2. R. Gaim " Romantic school", Moscow, 1891.

3. “Russian Romanticism”, Leningrad, 1978.

4. N. G. Bykova “Literature. Schoolchildren's Handbook", Moscow, 1995.

5. O. E. Orlova “700 best school essays”, Moscow, 2003.

6. A. M. Gurevich “Romanticism of Pushkin”, Moscow, 1993.

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Representatives of romanticism in literature

Romanticism is an ideological and artistic movement that arose in American and European culture at the end of the 18th century - beginning of the 19th century, as a reaction to the aesthetics of classicism. Romanticism first developed in the 1790s in German poetry and philosophy, and later spread to France, England and other countries.

Basic ideas of romanticism– recognition of the values of spiritual and creative life, the right to freedom and independence. In literature, heroes have a rebellious, strong character, and the plots are characterized by intense passions.

The main representatives of romanticism in Russian literature of the 19th century

Russian romanticism combined the human personality, enclosed in a beautiful and mysterious world of harmony, high feelings and beauty. Representatives of this romanticism in their works depicted a non-real world and a main character filled with experiences and thoughts.

Representatives of English Romanticism

The works are distinguished by gloomy Gothic, religious content, elements of the culture of the working class, national folklore and peasant class. The peculiarity of English romanticism is that the authors describe in detail travel, journeys to distant lands, as well as their exploration. The most famous authors and works: “Childe Harold’s Travels”, “Manfred” and “Oriental Poems”, “Ivanhoe”.

Representatives of Romanticism in Germany

The development of German romanticism in literature was influenced by philosophy, which promoted freedom and individualism of the individual. The works are filled with reflections on the existence of man, his soul. They are also distinguished by mythological and fairy-tale motifs. The most famous authors and works: fairy tales, short stories and novels, fairy tales, works.

Representatives of American Romanticism

In American literature, romanticism developed much later than in Europe. Literary works divided into 2 types - eastern (supporters of plantation) and abolitionist (those who support the rights of slaves and their emancipation). They are filled with intense feelings of struggle for independence, equality and freedom. Representatives of American romanticism - (“The Fall of the House of Usher”, (“Ligeia”), Washington Irving (“The Phantom Bridegroom”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“The House of the Seven Gables”, “The Scarlet Letter”), Fenimore Cooper ("The Last of the Mohicans"), Harriet Beecher Stowe ("Uncle Tom's Cabin"), ("The Legend of Hiawatha"), Herman Melville ("Typee", "Moby Dick") and (poetry collection "Leaves of Grass") .

We hope that from this article you learned everything about the most prominent representatives of the movement of romanticism in literature.

period in the history of literature of the late 18th - first half of the 19th century, as well as a movement in art and literature that arose in Europe and America at that time with common artistic ideas and literary style, distinguished by a certain set of themes, images and techniques. Romantic works are characterized by a rejection of rationalism and rigid literary rules characteristic of classicism, the literary movement from which romanticism was based. Romanticism contrasts the strict rules of classicism with the freedom of the writer-creator. The individuality of the author, his unique inner world are the highest values for romantics. The worldview of the romantics is characterized by the so-called dual world - the opposition of an ideal to a meaningless, boring or vulgar reality. The ideal beginning in romanticism can be either a creation of the imagination, an artist’s dream, or the distant past, or the way of life of “natural” peoples and people, free from the chains of civilization, or the other world. Melancholy, sadness, inescapable grief, despair are the moods that distinguish romantic literature.

The word "romantic" existed in European languages long before the Romantic era. It meant, firstly, belonging to the genre of the novel, and secondly, belonging to the literatures that emerged in the Middle Ages in the Romance languages - Italian, French, Spanish. Thirdly, what was especially expressive and exciting (sublime and picturesque) in life and literature was called romantic. The word “romantic” as a characteristic of medieval poetry, which was in many ways unlike ancient poetry, spread after the publication in England of T. Wharton’s treatise “On the Origin of Romantic Poetry in Europe” (1774). Definition new era in European literature and the new ideal of beauty, the word “romantic” appeared in aesthetic treatises and literary critical articles of the late 1790s. German writers and thinkers belonging to the so-called. "Jena school" (named after the city of Jena). Works by the brothers F. and A. Schlegel, Novalis (the poetic cycle “Hymns for the Night,” 1800; the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” 1802), L. Tieck (the comedy “Puss in Boots,” 1797; the novel “The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald” , 1798) expressed such features of romanticism as focus on folk poetry and medieval literature, focusing on the connection between literature and philosophy and religion. They own the concept of “romantic irony,” meaning irony caused by the discrepancy between a sublime ideal and reality: romantic irony is outwardly aimed at an abstract ideal, but in essence its subject is ordinary, dull or vicious reality. In the works of the late romantics: the prose writer E. T. A. Hoffman (the cycle of fantastic short stories and fairy tales “Serapion’s Brothers”, 1819–21; the novel “The Everyday Views of the Cat Moore...”, 1819–21, not completed), the poet and prose writer G. Heine (poetic “Book of Songs”, 1827; poem “Germany, a Winter’s Tale”, 1844; prosaic “Travel Pictures”, 1829–30) - the prevailing motif is the gap between dreams and everyday reality, grotesque techniques are abundantly used, incl. for satirical purposes.

In English literature, romanticism was expressed primarily in the works of the so-called poets. “Lake School” by W. Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, R. Southey, in the poetry of P. B. Shelley and J. Keats. Like German, English romanticism cultivates national antiquity, but it is less philosophical and religious. In Europe, the most famous of the English romantics was J. G. Byron, who created examples of the genre of romantic poems (“The Giaour,” 1813; “The Bride of Abydos,” 1813; “Lara,” 1814). The poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–21) enjoyed particular success. Byron created sublime images of individualistic heroes challenging the world; his poetry has strong atheistic motives and criticism modern civilization. In prose English romantic W. Scott created the genre historical novel, and C.R. Methurin - the adventure-fantasy novel “Melmoth the Wanderer” (1820). The term “romanticism” as a designation for a new literary period began to be used in England quite late, in the 1840s.

French romanticism clearly manifested itself in the genre of the novel dedicated to selfishness and the “disease of the century” - disappointment: “Adolphe” (1815) by B. Constant, the novels of Stendhal, “Confession of a Son of the Century” (1836) by A. de Musset. French romantics turn to the exotic material of the life of the social bottom, like, for example, the early O. de Balzac, like J. Janin in the novel “The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman” (1829). Prose of Balzac, V. Hugo, J. Janin, dedicated to the image strong passions, full of bright contrasts and spectacular images, was called “frantic literature.” In French drama Romanticism was established in a fierce struggle with classicism (the dramas of V. Hugo).

In US literature, romanticism is represented in prose: novels from history North America J. F. Cooper, novels and stories by W. Irving, science fiction and detective stories by E. A. Poe.

First in Russia romantic works became the lyrical poems and ballads of V. A. Zhukovsky, inspired by Western European romanticism. The influence of J. G. Byron is noticeable in the works of A. S. Pushkin, especially in the works of the first half. 1820s (Russian version of the Byronic romantic poem). Romantic features are characteristic of the lyrics and poems of E. A. Baratynsky and other poets. The prose of Russian romanticism is dominated by the so-called. secular, fantastic, philosophical and historical stories (A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, V. F. Odoevsky, N. V. Gogol, etc.). Romantic motives of loneliness are presented in the works of M. Yu. Lermontov. Romantic symbolism of dissonance, discord between man and the natural world, existence as an unstable combination of two principles: harmony and chaos - the motives of F. I. Tyutchev’s poetry.

The term "romanticism" is also used to refer to artistic method, which includes works created after the end of romanticism as a literary period. Thus, researchers attribute many works of literature of the 20th century to romanticism, for example, the prose of A. Green and K. G. Paustovsky. A literary movement such as symbolism is sometimes considered as a variant of romanticism.

Excellent definition

Incomplete definition ↓

Romanticism is a concept that is difficult to define precisely. In different European literatures it is interpreted in its own way and is expressed differently in the works of various “romantic” writers. Both in time and in essence, this literary movement is very close to; For many writers of the era, both of these directions even merge completely. Like sentimentalism, the romantic movement was, throughout European literature, a protest against pseudo-classicism.

Romanticism as a literary movement

Instead of the ideal of classical poetry - humanism, the personification of everything human, at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, Christian idealism appeared - the desire for everything heavenly and divine, for everything supernatural and miraculous. At the same time, the main goal human life It was no longer the enjoyment of happiness and joys of earthly life that was supplied, but purity of soul and peace of conscience, patient enduring of all the disasters and sufferings of earthly life, hope for the future life and preparation for this life.

Pseudoclassicism demanded from literature rationality, subordination of feeling to reason; he chained creativity in those literary shapes, which were borrowed from the ancients; he obliged writers not to go beyond ancient history And ancient poetics. Pseudoclassicists introduced strict aristocracy content and form, brought in exclusively “court” moods.

Sentimentalism opposed all these features of pseudo-classicism with the poetry of free feeling, admiration for one’s free sensitive heart, one’s “beautiful soul,” and nature, artless and simple. But if the sentimentalists undermined the significance of false classicism, then it was not they who began a conscious struggle against this trend. This honor belonged to the “romantics”; they put forth greater energy, broader literary program and, most importantly, an attempt to create a new theory of poetic creativity. One of the first points of this theory was the denial of the 18th century, its rational “enlightenment” philosophy, and its forms of life. (See Aesthetics of Romanticism, Stages of development of Romanticism.)

Such a protest against the rules of outdated morality and social forms of life was reflected in the fascination with works in which the main characters were protesting heroes - Prometheus, Faust, then “robbers”, as enemies of outdated forms of social life... With the light hand of Schiller, even a whole “ bandit literature. Writers were interested in the images of “ideological” criminals, fallen people, but retaining high human feelings (such was, for example, the romanticism of Victor Hugo). Of course, this literature no longer recognized didacticism and aristocracy - it was democratic was far from edifying and, in the manner of writing, approached naturalism, accurate reproduction of reality, without choice and idealization.

This is one movement of romanticism created by the group protesting romantics. But there was another group - peaceful individualists, whose freedom of feeling did not lead to social struggle. These are peaceful enthusiasts of sensitivity, limited by the walls of their hearts, lulling themselves to quiet delight and tears by analyzing their sensations. They, pietists and mystics, can adapt to any church-religious reaction, and get along with the political one, because they have moved away from the public into the world of their tiny “I”, into solitude, into nature, which speaks of the goodness of the Creator. They recognize only “inner freedom” and “nurture virtue.” They have a “beautiful soul” - the schöne Seele of the German poets, the belle âme of Rousseau, the “soul” of Karamzin...

Romantics of this second type are almost no different from “sentimentalists.” They love their “sensitive” heart, they know only tender, sad “love”, pure, sublime “friendship” - they willingly shed tears; “sweet melancholy” is their favorite mood. They love sad nature, foggy or evening landscapes, and the gentle glow of the moon. They willingly dream in cemeteries and around graves; they like sad music. They are interested in everything “fantastic”, even “visions”. Paying close attention to the whimsical shades of the various moods of their hearts, they take on the task of depicting complex and unclear, “vague” feelings - they try to express the “inexpressible” in the language of poetry, to find a new style for new moods, unknown to the pseudo-classics.

It is precisely this content of their poetry that was expressed in that unclear and one-sided definition of “romanticism” that Belinsky made: “this is a desire, aspiration, impulse, feeling, sigh, groan, a complaint about unfulfilled hopes that had no name, sadness for what was lost.” happiness, which God knows what it consisted of. This is a world alien to all reality, inhabited by shadows and ghosts. This is a dull, slowly flowing... present that mourns the past and does not see the future; finally, this is love that feeds on sadness and which, without sadness, would not have anything to support its existence.”

Romanticism (French romantisme) is a phenomenon of European culture in the 18th-19th centuries, which is a reaction to the Enlightenment and the scientific and technological progress stimulated by it; ideological and artistic direction in European and American culture of the late 18th century - the first half of the 19th century century. It is characterized by an affirmation of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the depiction of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, spiritualized and healing nature. It has spread to various spheres of human activity. In the 18th century, everything strange, fantastic, picturesque and existing in books and not in reality was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, romanticism became the designation of a new direction, opposite to classicism and the Enlightenment.

Romanticism in literature

Romanticism first arose in Germany, among writers and philosophers of the Jena school (W. G. Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, brothers F. and A. Schlegel). The philosophy of romanticism was systematized in the works of F. Schlegel and F. Schelling. In its further development, German romanticism was distinguished by an interest in fairy-tale and mythological motifs, which was especially clearly expressed in the works of the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, and Hoffmann. Heine, starting his work within the framework of romanticism, later subjected it to critical revision.

Theodore Gericault Raft "Medusa" (1817), Louvre

In England it is largely due to German influence. In England, its first representatives are the poets of the “Lake School”, Wordsworth and Coleridge. They installed theoretical foundations his direction, having become acquainted with the philosophy of Schelling and the views of the first German romantics during a trip to Germany. English romanticism is characterized by an interest in social problems: They contrast modern bourgeois society with old, pre-bourgeois relations, the glorification of nature, simple, natural feelings.

A prominent representative of English romanticism is Byron, who, according to Pushkin, “clothed himself in dull romanticism and hopeless egoism.” His work is imbued with the pathos of struggle and protest against modern world, praising freedom and individualism.

The works of Shelley, John Keats, and William Blake also belong to English romanticism.

Romanticism became widespread in other European countries, for example, in France (Chateaubriand, J. Stael, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Prosper Merimee, George Sand), Italy (N. U. Foscolo, A. Manzoni, Leopardi) , Poland (Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian Norwid) and in the USA (Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, W. C. Bryant, Edgar Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Longfellow, Herman Melville).

Stendhal also considered himself a French romantic, but he meant something different by romanticism than most of his contemporaries. In the epigraph of the novel “Red and Black” he took the words “The truth, the bitter truth,” emphasizing his vocation for a realistic study of human characters and actions. The writer was partial to romantic, extraordinary natures, for whom he recognized the right to “go on the hunt for happiness.” He sincerely believed that it depends only on the structure of society whether a person will be able to realize his eternal, given by nature itself, craving for well-being.

Romanticism in Russian literature

It is usually believed that in Russia romanticism appears in the poetry of V. A. Zhukovsky (although some Russian poetic works of the 1790-1800s are often attributed to the pre-romantic movement that developed from sentimentalism). In Russian romanticism, freedom from classical conventions appears, a ballad and romantic drama are created. A new idea is being established about the essence and meaning of poetry, which is recognized as an independent sphere of life, an expression of the highest, ideal aspirations of man; the old view, according to which poetry seemed to be empty fun, something completely serviceable, turns out to be no longer possible.

The early poetry of A. S. Pushkin also developed within the framework of romanticism. The poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov, the “Russian Byron,” can be considered the pinnacle of Russian romanticism. The philosophical lyrics of F. I. Tyutchev are both the completion and overcoming of romanticism in Russia.

The emergence of romanticism in Russia

ADDITIONALLY.

Romanticism (from the French Romantisme) is an ideological and artistic movement that emerged at the end of the 18th century in European and American culture and continued until the 40s of the 19th century. Reflecting disappointment in the results of the Great French Revolution, in the ideology of the Enlightenment and bourgeois progress, romanticism contrasted utilitarianism and leveling of the individual with the aspiration for boundless freedom and the “infinite”, the thirst for perfection and renewal, the pathos of the individual and civil independence.

The painful disintegration of the ideal and social reality is the basis of the romantic worldview and art. The affirmation of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the depiction of strong passions, spiritualized and healing nature, is adjacent to the motives of “world sorrow”, “world evil”, the “night” side of the soul. Interest in the national past (often its idealization), the traditions of folklore and culture of one’s own and other peoples, the desire to publish a universal picture of the world (primarily history and literature) found expression in the ideology and practice of Romanticism.

Romanticism is observed in literature, fine arts, architecture, behavior, clothing and human psychology.

REASONS FOR THE ARISE OF ROMANTICISM.

The immediate cause of the emergence of romanticism was the Great French bourgeois revolution. How did this become possible?

Before the revolution, the world was orderly, there was a clear hierarchy in it, each person took his place. The revolution overturned the “pyramid” of society; a new one had not yet been created, so the individual had a feeling of loneliness. Life is a flow, life is a game in which some are lucky and others are not. In literature, images of players appear - people who play with fate. You can recall such works of European writers as “The Gambler” by Hoffmann, “Red and Black” by Stendhal (and red and black are the colors of roulette!), and in Russian literature these are “The Queen of Spades” by Pushkin, “The Gamblers” by Gogol, “Masquerade” Lermontov.

THE BASIC CONFLICT OF ROMANTICISM

The main one is the conflict between man and the world. A psychology of rebellious personality emerges, which was most deeply reflected by Lord Byron in his work “Childe Harold’s Travels.” The popularity of this work was so great that a whole phenomenon arose - “Byronism”, and entire generations of young people tried to imitate it (for example, Pechorin in Lermontov’s “Hero of Our Time”).

Romantic heroes are united by a sense of their own exclusivity. “I” is recognized as the highest value, hence the egocentrism of the romantic hero. But by focusing on oneself, a person comes into conflict with reality.

REALITY is a strange, fantastic, extraordinary world, as in Hoffmann’s fairy tale “The Nutcracker,” or ugly, as in his fairy tale “Little Tsakhes.” In these tales, strange events occur, objects come to life and enter into lengthy conversations, the main theme of which is the deep gap between ideals and reality. And this gap becomes the main THEME of the lyrics of romanticism.

THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM

To the writers early XIX centuries, whose work took shape after the Great French Revolution, life set different tasks than before their predecessors. They were to discover and artistically shape a new continent for the first time.

The thinking and feeling man of the new century had behind him the long and instructive experience of previous generations, he was endowed with a deep and complex inner world, images of the heroes of the French Revolution hovered before his eyes, Napoleonic wars, national liberation movements, images of the poetry of Goethe and Byron. In Russia Patriotic War 1812 played the role of a most important historical milestone in the spiritual and moral development of society, profoundly changing the cultural and historical appearance of Russian society. In terms of its significance for national culture, it can be compared with the period of the 18th century revolution in the West.

And in this era of revolutionary storms, military upheavals and national liberation movements, the question arises: can a new literature arise on the basis of a new historical reality, not inferior in its artistic perfection to the greatest phenomena of literature of the ancient world and the Renaissance? And can the basis of its further development be a “modern man”, a man of the people? But a man from the people who participated in the French Revolution or on whose shoulders fell the burden of the struggle against Napoleon could not be depicted in literature using the means of novelists and poets of the previous century - he required other methods for his poetic embodiment.

PUSHKIN - PROLAGER OF ROMANTICISM

Only Pushkin was the first in Russian literature of the 19th century to find, in both poetry and prose, adequate means to embody the versatile spiritual world, historical appearance and behavior of that new, deeply thinking and feeling hero of Russian life, who took a central place in it after 1812 and in features after the Decembrist uprising.

In his Lyceum poems, Pushkin could not yet, and did not dare, make him the hero of his lyrics. real person new generation with all its inherent internal psychological complexity. Pushkin’s poem seemed to represent the resultant of two forces: the poet’s personal experience and the conventional, “ready-made,” traditional poetic formula-scheme, according to the internal laws of which this experience was formed and developed.

However, gradually the poet frees himself from the power of the canons and in his poems we no longer see a young “philosopher”-epicurean, an inhabitant of a conventional “town,” but a man of the new century, with his rich and intense intellectual and emotional inner life.

A similar process occurs in Pushkin’s works in any genre, where conventional images of characters, already sanctified by tradition, give way to figures of living people with their complex, varied actions and psychological motives. At first it is the somewhat distracted Prisoner or Aleko. But soon they are replaced by the very real Onegin, Lensky, young Dubrovsky, German, Charsky. And, finally, the most complete expression of the new type of personality will be the lyrical “I” of Pushkin, the poet himself, whose spiritual world represents the deepest, richest and most complex expression of burning moral and intellectual questions time.

One of the conditions for the historical revolution that Pushkin made in the development of Russian poetry, drama and narrative prose was his fundamental break with the educational-rationalistic, ahistorical idea of the “nature” of man, the laws of human thinking and feeling.

A complex and contradictory soul " young man” of the beginning of the 19th century in “Caucasian Prisoner”, “Gypsies”, “Eugene Onegin” became for Pushkin an object of artistic and psychological observation and study in its special, specific and unique historical quality. By placing your hero in certain conditions each time, depicting him in different circumstances, in new relationships with people, exploring his psychology from different angles and using it every time new system artistic “mirrors”, Pushkin in his lyrics, southern poems and “Onegin” strives from various sides to approach the understanding of his soul, and through it, further to the understanding of the patterns of contemporary socio-historical life reflected in this soul.

The historical understanding of man and human psychology began to emerge with Pushkin in the late 1810s and early 1820s. We find its first clear expression in the historical elegies of this time (“The daylight has gone out...” (1820), “To Ovid” (1821), etc.) and in the poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” the main character of which was conceived by Pushkin, by the poet’s own admission, as a bearer of feelings and moods characteristic of the youth of the 19th century with its “indifference to life” and “premature old age of the soul” (from a letter to V.P. Gorchakov, October-November 1822)

32. The main themes and motives of A.S. Pushkin’s philosophical lyrics of the 1830s (“Elegy”, “Demons”, “Autumn”, “When outside the city...”, Kamennoostrovsky cycle, etc.). Genre-style searches.

Reflections on life, its meaning, its purpose, death and immortality become the leading philosophical motives of Pushkin’s lyrics at the stage of completion of the “celebration of life”. Among the poems of this period, “Do I wander along the noisy streets…” is especially notable. The motif of death and its inevitability persistently sounds in it. The problem of death is solved by the poet not only as an inevitability, but also as a natural completion of earthly existence:

I say: the years will fly by,

And how many times we are not visible here,

We will all descend under the eternal vaults -

And someone else's hour is near.

The poems amaze us with the amazing generosity of Pushkin’s heart, capable of welcoming life even when there is no longer room for him in it.

And let at the tomb entrance

The young one will play with life,

And indifferent nature

Shine with eternal beauty, -

The poet writes, completing the poem.

In “Road Complaints” A.S. Pushkin writes about the unsettled nature of his personal life, about what he lacked since childhood. Moreover, the poet perceives his own fate in the all-Russian context: Russian impassability has both a direct and figurative meaning in the poem, the meaning of this word includes the historical wandering of the country in search of the right path of development.

Off-road problem. But it’s different. Spiritual properties appear in A.S. Pushkin’s poem “Demons”. It tells about the loss of man in the whirlwinds of historical events. The motif of spiritual impassability was suffered by the poet, who thinks a lot about the events of 1825, about his own miraculous deliverance from the fate that befell the participants in the popular uprising of 1825, about the actual miraculous deliverance from the fate that befell the participants in the uprising on Senate Square. In Pushkin's poems, the problem of chosenness arises, the understanding of the high mission entrusted by God to him as a poet. It is this problem that becomes the leading one in the poem “Arion”.

The so-called Kamennoostrovsky cycle continues the philosophical lyrics of the thirties, the core of which consists of the poems “Desert Fathers and Immaculate Wives ...”, “Imitation of the Italian”, “Worldly Power”, “From Pindemonti”. This cycle brings together reflections on the problem of poetic knowledge of the world and man. From the pen of A.S. Pushkin comes a poem adapted from the Lenten prayer of Efim the Sirin. Reflections on religion and its great strengthening moral power become the leading motive of this poem.

Pushkin the philosopher experienced his real heyday in the Boldin autumn of 1833. Among the major works about the role of fate in human life, the role of personality in history, the poetic masterpiece “Autumn” attracts attention. The motive of man’s connection with the cycle of natural life and the motive of creativity are leading in this poem. Russian nature, life merged with it, obeying its laws, seems to the author of the poem to be the greatest value; without it there is no inspiration, and therefore no creativity. “And every autumn I bloom again...” the poet writes about himself.

Peering into the artistic fabric of the poem “... Again I visited...”, the reader easily discovers a whole complex of themes and motifs of Pushkin’s lyrics, expressing ideas about man and nature, about time, about memory and fate. It is against their background that the main philosophical problem of this poem sounds - the problem of generational change. Nature awakens in man the memory of the past, although it itself has no memory. It is updated, repeating itself in each update. Therefore, the sound of the new pines of the “young tribe,” which descendants will someday hear, will be the same as now, and it will touch those strings in their souls that will make them remember their deceased ancestor, who also lived in this repeating world. This is what allows the author of the poem “...Once again I visited...” to exclaim: “Hello, Young, unfamiliar tribe!”

The great poet’s path through the “cruel century” was long and thorny. He led to immortality. The motive of poetic immortality is the leading one in the poem “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands...”, which became a kind of testament of A.S. Pushkin.

Thus, philosophical motives were inherent in Pushkin's lyrics throughout his entire work. They arose in connection with the poet’s appeal to the problems of death and immortality, faith and unbelief, change of generations, creativity, and the meaning of existence. All of A.S. Pushkin’s philosophical lyrics can be periodized, which will correspond to the life stages of the great poet, at each of which she thought about some very specific problems. However, at any stage of his work, A.S. Pushkin spoke in his poems only about things that are generally significant for humanity. This is probably why “the folk trail” to this Russian poet will not become overgrown.

ADDITIONALLY.

Analysis of the poem “When outside the city, I wander thoughtfully”

“... When outside the city, I wander thoughtfully...” So Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

begins the poem of the same name.

Reading this poem, his attitude towards all feasts becomes clear.

and the luxury of city and metropolitan life.

Conventionally, this poem can be divided into two parts: the first is about the capital’s cemetery,

the other is about rural things. In the transition from one to another, the

the poet's mood, but highlighting the role of the first line in the poem, I think it would be

It is a mistake to take the first line of the first part as defining the entire mood of the verse, because

lines: “But how I love it, sometimes in the autumn, in the evening silence, to visit the village

family cemetery…” They radically change the direction of the poet’s thoughts.

In this poem, the conflict is expressed in the form of a contrast between the urban

cemeteries, where: “Grids, columns, elegant tombs. Under which all the dead rot

capitals In a swamp, somehow cramped in a row..." and rural, closer to the poet’s heart,

cemeteries: “Where the dead slumber in solemn peace there are undecorated graves

space..." But, again, when comparing these two parts of the poem one cannot forget about

the last lines, which, it seems to me, reflect the author’s entire attitude towards these two

completely different places:

1. “That evil despondency comes over me, At least I could spit and run...”

2. “The oak tree stands wide over the important coffins, swaying and making noise...” Two parts

One poem is compared as day and night, moon and sun. Author via

comparing the true purpose of those who come to these cemeteries and those lying underground

shows us how different the same concepts can be.

I'm talking about the fact that a widow or widower will come to city cemeteries just for the sake of

in order to create the impression of grief and sorrow, although it is not always correct. Those who

lies under “inscriptions and prose and verse” during their lifetime they cared only about “virtues,

about service and ranks.”

On the contrary, if we talk about a rural cemetery. People go there to

pour out your soul and talk to someone who is no longer there.

It seems to me that it is no coincidence that Alexander Sergeevich wrote such a poem for

a year before his death. He was afraid, I think, that he would be buried in the same city

capital cemetery and he will have the same grave as those whose tombstones he contemplated.

“Burns unscrewed from poles by thieves

The slimy graves, which are also here,

Yawning, they are waiting for the tenants to come home in the morning.”

Analysis of A.S. Pushkin’s poem “Elegy”

Crazy years of faded fun

It's hard for me, like a vague hangover.

But like wine - the sadness of days gone by

In my soul, the older, the stronger.

My path is sad. Promises me work and grief

The troubled sea of the future.

But I don’t want, O friends, to die;

And I know that I will have pleasures

In the midst of sorrows, worries and anxiety:

Sometimes I’ll get drunk again with harmony,

I will shed tears over the fiction,

A. S. Pushkin wrote this elegy in 1830. It refers to philosophical lyrics. Pushkin turned to this genre as an already middle-aged poet, wise in life and experience. This poem is deeply personal. Two stanzas form a semantic contrast: the first discusses the drama of life’s path, the second sounds like the apotheosis of creative self-realization, the high purpose of the poet. Lyrical hero we can fully identify with the author himself. In the first lines (“the faded joy of crazy years / is heavy on me, like a vague hangover.”), the poet says that he is no longer young. Looking back, he sees the path traveled behind him, which is far from flawless: past fun, from which his soul is heavy. However, at the same time, the soul is filled with longing for the days gone by; it is intensified by a feeling of anxiety and uncertainty about the future, in which one sees “work and sorrow.” But it also means movement and a full creative life. “Toil and Sorrow” is perceived by an ordinary person as hard rock, but for a poet it means ups and downs. Work is creativity, grief is impressions, significant events that bring inspiration. And the poet, despite the years that have passed, believes and awaits “the coming troubled sea.”

After lines that are rather gloomy in meaning, which seem to beat out the rhythm of a funeral march, suddenly a light takeoff of a wounded bird:

But I don’t want, O friends, to die;

I want to live so that I can think and suffer;

The poet will die when he stops thinking, even if blood runs through his body and his heart beats. The movement of thought is true life, development, and therefore the desire for perfection. Thought is responsible for the mind, and suffering is responsible for feelings. “Suffering” is also the ability to be compassionate.

A tired person is burdened by the past and sees the future in the fog. But the poet, the creator confidently predicts that “there will be pleasures among sorrows, worries and anxiety.” What will these earthly joys of the poet lead to? They bestow new creative fruits:

Sometimes I’ll get drunk again with harmony,

I will shed tears over the fiction...

Harmony is probably wholeness Pushkin's works, their impeccable form. Or this is the very moment of creation of works, a moment of all-consuming inspiration... The fiction and tears of the poet are the result of inspiration, this is the work itself.

And maybe my sunset will be sad

Love will flash with a farewell smile.

When the muse of inspiration comes to him, maybe (the poet doubts, but hopes) he will love and be loved again. One of the poet’s main aspirations, the crown of his work, is love, which, like the muse, is a life companion. And this love is the last. “Elegy” is in the form of a monologue. It is addressed to “friends” - to those who understand and share the thoughts of the lyrical hero.

The poem is a lyrical meditation. It is written in the classical genre of elegy, and the tone and intonation correspond to this: elegy translated from Greek means “lamentable song.” This genre has been widespread in Russian poetry since the 18th century: Sumarokov, Zhukovsky, and later Lermontov and Nekrasov turned to it. But Nekrasov’s elegy is civil, Pushkin’s is philosophical. In classicism, this genre, one of the “high” ones, obliged the use of pompous words and Old Church Slavonicisms.

Pushkin, in turn, did not neglect this tradition, and used Old Slavonic words, forms and phrases in the work, and the abundance of such vocabulary in no way deprives the poem of lightness, grace and clarity.

The concept of romanticism in literature is brief. Main features of romanticism in literature

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