On November 23, 1820, in the village of Novoselki, located near Mtsensk, the great Russian poet Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet was born into the family of Caroline Charlotte Fet and Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin. His parents got married abroad without an Orthodox ceremony (the poet’s mother was a Lutheran), which is why the marriage, legalized in Germany, was declared invalid in Russia.
Deprivation of a noble title
Later, when the wedding took place according to the Orthodox rite, Afanasy Afanasyevich was already living under his mother’s last name, Fet, being considered her illegitimate child. The boy was deprived, in addition to his father's surname, his title of nobility, Russian citizenship and rights to inheritance. For the young man for many years The most important goal in life was to regain the name Shenshin and all the rights associated with it. Only in his old age was he able to achieve this, regaining his hereditary nobility.
Education
The future poet entered the boarding school of Professor Pogodin in Moscow in 1838, and in August of the same year he was enrolled in the literature department at Moscow University. He lived with the family of his classmate and friend student years. The friendship of young people contributed to the formation of common ideals and views on art.
First attempts at writing
Afanasy Afanasyevich begins to compose poetry, and in 1840 a collection of poetry, published at his own expense, entitled “Lyrical Pantheon”, was published. In these poems, echoes of the poetic work of Evgeniy Baratynsky were clearly heard, and since 1842, Afanasy Afanasyevich has been constantly published in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski. Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky already wrote in 1843 that of all the poets living in Moscow, Fet is “the most gifted of all,” and puts the poems of this author on a par with the works of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov.
Necessity of a military career
Fet strove for literary activity with all his soul, but the instability of his financial and social situation forced the poet to change his destiny. In 1845, Afanasy Afanasyevich entered as a non-commissioned officer in one of the regiments located in the Kherson province in order to be able to receive hereditary nobility (the right to which was given by senior officer rank). Cut off from the literary environment and metropolitan life, he almost stops publishing, also because, due to the fall in demand for poetry, magazines show no interest in his poems.
A tragic event in Fet's personal life
In the Kherson years, a tragic event occurred that predetermined the poet’s personal life: his beloved Maria Lazich, a dowry girl whom he did not dare to marry because of his poverty, died in a fire. After Fet’s refusal, a strange incident happened to her: Maria’s dress caught fire from a candle, she ran into the garden, but could not cope with putting out the clothes and suffocated in the smoke. One could suspect this as an attempt by the girl to commit suicide, and Fet’s poems will echo this tragedy for a long time (for example, the poem “When you read the painful lines...”, 1887).
Admission to L Life Guards Uhlan Regiment
In 1853, there was a sharp turn in the poet’s fate: he managed to join the guard, the Ulan Regiment of the Life Guards stationed near St. Petersburg. Now Afanasy Afanasyevich gets the opportunity to visit the capital, resumes his literary activity, and begins to regularly publish poems in Sovremennik, Russky Vestnik, Otechestvennye Zapiski, and Library for Reading. He becomes close to Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, Vasily Botkin, Alexander Druzhinin - editors of Sovremennik. Fet's name, already half-forgotten by that time, again appears in reviews, articles, magazine chronicles, and since 1854 his poems have been published. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev became the poet’s mentor and even prepared a new edition of his works in 1856.
The fate of the poet in 1856-1877
Fet was unlucky in his service: each time the rules for obtaining hereditary nobility were tightened. In 1856, he left his military career without achieving his main goal. In Paris in 1857, Afanasy Afanasyevich married the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Maria Petrovna Botkina, and acquired an estate in Mtsensk district. At that time he wrote almost no poetry. As a supporter of conservative views, Fet sharply negatively perceived the abolition of serfdom in Russia and, starting in 1862, began regularly publishing essays in the Russian Bulletin, denouncing the post-reform order from the position of a landowner. In 1867-1877 he served as justice of the peace. In 1873, Afanasy Afanasyevich finally received hereditary nobility.
The fate of Fet in the 1880s
The poet returned to literature only in the 1880s, having moved to Moscow and becoming rich. In 1881, his long-time dream was realized - the translation he created of his favorite philosopher, “The World as Will and Representation,” was published. In 1883, a translation of all the works of the poet Horace, begun by Fet during his student years, was published. The period from 1883 to 1991 included the publication of four issues of the poetry collection “Evening Lights”.
Fet's lyrics: general characteristics
The poetry of Afanasy Afanasyevich, romantic in its origins, is like a connecting link between the works of Vasily Zhukovsky and Alexander Blok. The poet's later poems gravitated towards the Tyutchev tradition. Fet's main lyrics are love and landscape.
In the 1950-1960s, during the formation of Afanasy Afanasyevich as a poet, the literary environment was almost completely dominated by Nekrasov and his supporters - apologists for poetry glorifying social, civic ideals. Therefore, Afanasy Afanasyevich with his creativity, one might say, came out somewhat untimely. The peculiarities of Fet's lyrics did not allow him to join Nekrasov and his group. After all, according to representatives of civil poetry, poems must necessarily be topical, fulfilling a propaganda and ideological task.
Philosophical motives
Fet permeates all of his work, reflected in both landscape and love poetry. Although Afanasy Afanasyevich was even friends with many poets of Nekrasov’s circle, he argued that art should not be interested in anything other than beauty. Only in love, nature and art itself (painting, music, sculpture) did he find lasting harmony. Fet's philosophical lyrics sought to get as far away from reality as possible, contemplating beauty that was not involved in the vanity and bitterness of everyday life. This led to the adoption by Afanasy Afanasyevich of romantic philosophy in the 1940s, and in the 1960s - the so-called theory of pure art.
The prevailing mood in his works is intoxication with nature, beauty, art, memories, and delight. These are the features of Fet's lyrics. The poet often encounters the motif of flying away from the earth following the moonlight or enchanting music.
Metaphors and epithets
Everything that belongs to the category of the sublime and beautiful is endowed with wings, especially the feeling of love and song. Fet's lyrics often use metaphors such as "winged dream", "winged song", " winged hour", "winged words sound", "inspired by delight", etc.
Epithets in his works usually describe not the object itself, but the impression lyrical hero from what he saw. Therefore, they may be logically inexplicable and unexpected. For example, a violin might be defined as "melting." Typical epithets for Fet are “dead dreams”, “fragrant speeches”, “silver dreams”, “weeping herbs”, “widowed azure”, etc.
Often a picture is drawn using visual associations. The poem "To the Singer" is a vivid example of this. It shows the desire to translate the sensations created by the song’s melody into specific images and sensations, which make up Fet’s lyrics.
These poems are very unusual. So, “the distance rings,” and the smile of love “gently shines,” “the voice burns” and fades away in the distance, like “the dawn beyond the sea,” so that pearls will again splash out in a “loud tide.” Russian poetry did not know such complex, bold images at that time. They established themselves much later, only with the advent of the Symbolists.
Talking about in a creative manner Fet, they also mention impressionism, which is based on the direct recording of impressions of reality.
Nature in the poet's work
Fet's landscape lyrics - source divine beauty in eternal renewal and diversity. Many critics have mentioned that nature is described by this author as if from a window landowner's estate or from the perspective of the park, as if specifically to arouse admiration. Fet's landscape lyrics are a universal expression of the beauty of the world untouched by man.
For Afanasy Afanasyevich, nature is part of his own “I”, a background for his experiences and feelings, a source of inspiration. Fet's lyrics seem to blur the line between the external and internal world. Therefore, human properties in his poems can be attributed to darkness, air, even color.
Very often nature in Fet’s lyrics is night landscape, since it is at night, when the bustle of the day calms down, that it is easiest to enjoy the all-encompassing, indestructible beauty. At this time of day, the poet has no glimpses of the chaos that fascinated and frightened Tyutchev. A majestic harmony hidden during the day reigns. It is not the wind and darkness, but the stars and the moon that come first. According to the stars, Fet reads the “fiery book” of eternity (the poem “Among the Stars”).
The themes of Fet's lyrics are not limited to descriptions of nature. A special section of his work is poetry dedicated to love.
Fet's love lyrics
Love for a poet is a whole sea of feelings: timid languor, and the pleasure of spiritual intimacy, and the apotheosis of passion, and the happiness of two souls. The poetic memory of this author knew no bounds, which allowed him to write poems dedicated to his first love even in his declining years, as if he were still under the impression of a much-desired recent date.
Most often, the poet described the birth of a feeling, its most enlightened, romantic and reverent moments: the first touch of hands, long glances, the first evening walk in the garden, contemplation of the beauty of nature that gives rise to spiritual intimacy. The lyrical hero says that he values the steps to it no less than happiness itself.
Landscape and love lyrics Feta form an indivisible unity. A heightened perception of nature is often caused by love experiences. A striking example of this is the miniature “Whisper, timid breathing..." (1850). The fact that there are no verbs in the poem is not only original technique, but also a whole philosophy. There is no action because only one moment is actually being described or a whole series moments, motionless and self-sufficient. The image of the beloved, described in detail, seems to dissolve in the general range of the poet’s feelings. There is no complete portrait of the heroine here - it must be supplemented and recreated by the reader’s imagination.
Love in Fet's lyrics is often complemented by other motives. Thus, in the poem “The night was shining. The garden was full of the moon...” three feelings are united in a single impulse: admiration for the music, the intoxicating night and inspired singing, which develops into love for the singer. The poet’s entire soul dissolves in music and at the same time in the soul of the singing heroine, who is the living embodiment of this feeling.
It is difficult to classify this poem unambiguously as love lyrics or poems about art. It would be more accurate to define it as a hymn to beauty, combining the liveliness of experience, its charm with deep philosophical overtones. This worldview is called aestheticism.
Afanasy Afanasyevich, carried away on the wings of inspiration beyond the boundaries of earthly existence, feels like a ruler, equal to the gods, overcoming the limitations of human capabilities with the power of his poetic genius.
Conclusion
The whole life and work of this poet is a search for beauty in love, nature, even death. Was he able to find her? Only those who truly understood the creative heritage of this author can answer this question: heard the music of his works, saw landscape paintings, felt the beauty of poetic lines and learned to find harmony in the world around them.
We examined the main motives of Fet's lyrics, characteristic features the work of this great writer. So, for example, like any poet, Afanasy Afanasyevich writes about eternal theme life and death. He is not equally frightened by either death or life (“Poems about Death”). The poet experiences only cold indifference to physical death, and Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet justifies his earthly existence only by creative fire, commensurate in his view with the “entire universe.” The poems contain both ancient motifs (for example, “Diana”) and Christian ones (“Ave Maria”, “Madonna”).
You can find more detailed information about Fet’s work in school textbooks on Russian literature, in which Afanasy Afanasyevich’s lyrics are discussed in some detail.
A. A. Fet’s fame in Russian literature was due to his poetry. Moreover, in the reader’s consciousness he has long been perceived as a central figure in the field of Russian classical poetry. Central from a chronological point of view: between the elegiac experiences of the romantics early XIX century and the Silver Age (in the famous annual reviews of Russian literature, which V. G. Belinsky published in the early 1840s, Fet’s name stands next to the name of M. Yu. Lermontov; Fet published his final collection “Evening Lights” in the era pre-symbolism). But it is central in another sense - by the nature of his work: it corresponds to the highest degree with our ideas about the very phenomenon of lyricism. One could call Fet the most “lyrical lyricist” of the 19th century.
One of the first subtle connoisseurs of Fetov’s poetry, critic V. P. Botkin, called its main advantage the lyricism of feelings. Another contemporary of his wrote about the same thing, famous writer A.V. Druzhinin: “Fet senses the poetry of life, like a passionate hunter senses with an unknown instinct the place where he should hunt.”
It is not easy to immediately answer the question of how this lyricism of feeling is manifested, where this feeling of Fetov’s “feel for poetry” comes from, what, in fact, is the originality of his lyrics.
In terms of its themes, against the background of romanticism poetry, Fet’s lyrics, the features and themes of which we will examine in detail, are quite traditional. These are landscape, love lyrics, anthological poems (written in the spirit of antiquity). And Fet himself, in his first (published while he was still a student at Moscow University) collection “Lyrical Pantheon” (1840), openly demonstrated his loyalty to tradition, presenting a kind of “collection” of fashionable romantic genres, imitating Schiller, Byron, Zhukovsky, Lermontov. But it was a learning experience. Readers heard Fet's own voice a little later - in his magazine publications of the 1840s and, most importantly, in his subsequent collections of poems - 1850, 1856. The publisher of the first of them, Fet's friend the poet Apollon Grigoriev, wrote in his review about Fet's originality as a subjective poet, a poet of vague, unspoken, vague feelings, as he put it - “half-feelings.”
Of course, Grigoriev did not mean the blurriness and obscurity of Fetov’s emotions, but the poet’s desire to express such subtle shades of feeling that cannot be unambiguously named, characterized, described. Yes, Fet does not gravitate toward descriptive characteristics or rationalism; on the contrary, he strives in every possible way to get away from them. The mystery of his poems is largely determined by the fact that they fundamentally defy interpretation and at the same time give the impression of being surprisingly accurately conveyed. state of mind, experiences.
This is, for example, one of the most famous poems that has become a textbook “ I came to you with greetings..." The lyrical hero, captured by the beauty of the summer morning, strives to tell his beloved about it - the poem is a monologue spoken in one breath, addressed to her. The most frequently repeated word in it is “tell.” It appears four times over the course of four stanzas - as a refrain that defines the persistent desire, the internal state of the hero. However, there is no coherent story in this monologue. There is no consistently written picture of the morning; there are a number of small episodes, strokes, details of this picture, as if snatched at random by the enthusiastic gaze of the hero. But there is a feeling, a whole and deep experience of this morning to the highest degree. It is momentary, but this minute itself is infinitely beautiful; the effect of a stopped moment is born.
In an even more pointed form, we see the same effect in another poem by Fet - “ This morning, this joy..." Here it is not even episodes or details that alternate, mix in a whirlwind of sensual delight, as was the case in the previous poem, but individual words. Moreover, nominative words (naming, denoting) are nouns devoid of definitions:
This morning, this joy,
This power of both day and light,
This blue vault
This cry and strings,
These flocks, these birds,
This talk of water...
Before us seems to be just a simple enumeration, free of verbs, verb forms; poem-experiment. The only explanatory word that appears repeatedly (not four, but twenty-four (!) times) in the space of eighteen short lines is “this” (“these”, “this”). We agree: an extremely unpicturesque word! It would seem that it is so unsuitable for describing such a colorful phenomenon as spring! But when reading Fetov’s miniature, a bewitching, magical mood arises that directly penetrates the soul. And in particular, we note, thanks to the non-picturesque word “this”. Repeated many times, it creates the effect of direct vision, our co-presence in the world of spring.
Are the remaining words only fragmentary, outwardly jumbled? They are arranged in logically “wrong” rows, where abstractions (“power”, “joy”) and concrete features of the landscape (“blue vault”) coexist, where the conjunction “and” connects “flocks” and “birds”, although, obviously, refers to flocks of birds. But this unsystematic nature is also significant: this is how a person expresses his thoughts, captured by a direct impression and deeply experiencing it.
The keen eye of a literary scholar can reveal a deep logic in this seemingly chaotic enumeration series: first, a gaze directed upward (the sky, birds), then around (willows, birches, mountains, valleys), finally, turned inward, into one’s feelings (darkness and heat of the bed, night without sleep) (Gasparov). But this is precisely the deep compositional logic, which the reader is not obliged to restore. His job is to survive, to feel the “spring” state of mind.
The feeling of an amazingly beautiful world is inherent in Fet’s lyrics, and in many ways it arises due to such an external “accident” of the selection of material. One gets the impression that any features and details snatched at random from the surroundings are intoxicatingly beautiful, but then (the reader concludes) so is the whole world, which remains outside the poet’s attention! This is the impression Fet strives for. His poetic self-recommendation is eloquent: “nature’s idle spy.” In other words, the beauty of the natural world does not require effort to identify it, it is infinitely rich and seems to come to meet people halfway.
The figurative world of Fet’s lyrics is created in an unconventional way: visual details give the impression of accidentally “catching the eye,” which gives reason to call Fet’s method impressionistic (B. Ya. Bukhshtab). Integrity and unity are given to Fetov’s world to a greater extent not by visual, but by other types of figurative perception: auditory, olfactory, tactile.
Here is his poem entitled " Bees»:
I will disappear from melancholy and laziness,
Lonely life is not nice
My heart aches, my knees weaken,
In every carnation of fragrant lilac,
A bee crawls in singing...
If not for the title, the beginning of the poem might be puzzling with the vagueness of its subject: what is it about? “Melancholy” and “laziness” in our minds are phenomena that are quite far from each other; here they are combined into a single complex. “Heart” echoes “longing”, but in contrast to the high elegiac tradition, here the heart “aches” (folklore song tradition), to which is immediately added the mention of very low, weakening knees... The “fan” of these motives is focused in at the end of the stanza, in its 4th and 5th lines. They are prepared compositionally: the enumeration within the first phrase continues all the time, cross-rhyme sets the reader up to expect the fourth line, which rhymes with the 2nd. But the wait drags on, delayed by an unexpectedly continuing rhyme line with the famous “lilac carnation” - the first visible detail, an image immediately imprinted on the consciousness. Its emergence is completed in the fifth line with the appearance of the “heroine” of the poem - the bee. But here it is not the outwardly visible, but its sound characteristic that is important: “singing.” This chanting, multiplied by countless bees (“in every carnation”!), creates a single field of the poetic world: a luxurious spring hum-hum in a riot of flowering lilac bushes. The title comes to mind - and the main thing in this poem is determined: a feeling, a state of spring bliss that is difficult to convey in words, “vague spiritual impulses that do not lend themselves to even the shadow of prosaic analysis” (A.V. Druzhinin).
The spring world of the poem “This morning, this joy...” was created with the bird cry, “cry”, “whistle”, “fraction” and “trills”.
Here are examples of olfactory and tactile imagery:
What a night! The transparent air is constrained;
The aroma swirls above the ground.
Oh now I'm happy, I'm excited
Oh, now I'm glad to speak!
"What a night..."
The alleys are not yet a gloomy shelter,
Between the branches the vault of heaven turns blue,
And I’m walking - a fragrant cold is blowing
In your face - I’m walking - and the nightingales are singing.
"It's still spring..."
On the hill it is either damp or hot,
The sighs of the day are in the breath of the night...
"Evening"
Saturated with smells, moisture, warmth, felt in trends and blows, the space of Fet’s lyrics tangibly materializes - and cements the details of the external world, turning it into an indivisible whole. Within this unity, nature and the human “I” are fused together. The hero’s feelings are not so much in tune with the events of the natural world as fundamentally inseparable from them. This could be seen in all the texts discussed above; We will find the ultimate (“cosmic”) manifestation of this in the miniature “On a haystack at night...”. But here is a poem, also expressive in this regard, which no longer belongs to landscape, but to love lyrics:
I'm waiting, filled with anxiety,
I'm waiting here on the way:
This path through the garden
You promised to come.
A poem about a date, about an upcoming meeting; but the plot about the hero’s feelings unfolds through the demonstration of private details of the natural world: “crying, the mosquito will sing”; “the leaf will fall smoothly”; “It’s as if a beetle broke a string by flying into a spruce.” The hero’s hearing is extremely acute, the state of intense expectation, peering and listening to the life of nature is experienced by us thanks to the smallest touches of the life of the garden noticed by him, the hero. They are connected, fused together in the last lines, a kind of “denouement”:
Oh, how it smelled like spring!
It's probably you!
For the hero, the breath of spring (spring breeze) is inseparable from the approach of his beloved, and the world is perceived as holistic, harmonious and beautiful.
Fet built this image over many years of his work, consciously and consistently moving away from what he himself called “the hardships of everyday life.” IN real biography Feta had more than enough such hardships. In 1889, summing up his creative path in the preface to the collection “Evening Lights” (third issue), he wrote about his constant desire to “turn away” from the everyday, from sorrow that did not contribute to inspiration, “so that at least for a moment he could breathe clean and free.” the air of poetry." And despite the fact that the late Fet wrote many poems of both a sad-elegiac and philosophical-tragic nature, he entered the literary memory of many generations of readers primarily as the creator of a beautiful world that preserves eternal human values.
He lived with ideas about this world, and therefore strove to make its appearance convincing. And he succeeded. The special authenticity of Fetov's world - a unique effect of presence - arises largely due to the specificity of the images of nature in his poems. As it was noted long ago, in Fet, unlike, say, Tyutchev, we hardly find generic words that generalize: “tree”, “flower”. Much more often - “spruce”, “birch”, “willow”; “dahlia”, “acacia”, “rose”, etc. In an accurate, loving knowledge of nature and the ability to use it in artistic creativity Next to Fet, perhaps only I. S. Turgenev can be placed. And this, as we have already noted, is nature, inseparable from the spiritual world of the hero. She discovers her beauty in his perception, and through this same perception his spiritual world is revealed.
Much of what has been noted allows us to talk about the similarity of Fet’s lyrics with music. The poet himself drew attention to this; Critics have repeatedly written about the musicality of his lyrics. Particularly authoritative in this regard is the opinion of P. I. Tchaikovsky, who considered Fet to be a poet of “undoubted genius,” who “in his best moments goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and boldly takes a step into our field.”
The concept of musicality, generally speaking, can mean a lot: the phonetic (sound) design of a poetic text, the melody of its intonation, and the saturation of harmonious sounds and musical motifs of the inner poetic world. All these features are inherent in Fet's poetry.
We can feel them to the greatest extent in poems where music becomes the subject of the image, a direct “heroine”, defining the entire atmosphere of the poetic world: for example, in one of his most famous poems “ The night was shining...». Here the music forms the plot of the poem, but at the same time the poem itself sounds especially harmonious and melodious. This reveals Fet’s subtlest sense of rhythm and verse intonation. Such lyrics are easy to set to music. And Fet is known as one of the most “romantic” Russian poets.
But we can talk about the musicality of Fet’s lyrics in an even deeper, essentially aesthetic sense. Music is the most expressive of the arts, directly affecting the sphere of feelings: musical images are formed on the basis of associative thinking. It is this quality of associativity that Fet appeals to.
Meeting repeatedly - in one or another poem - his most beloved words “acquire” additional, associative meanings, shades of experiences, thereby becoming semantically enriched, acquiring “expressive halos” (B. Ya. Bukhshtab) - additional meanings.
This is how Fet uses, for example, the word “garden”. Fet's garden is the best, ideal place in the world, where an organic meeting between man and nature takes place. There is harmony there. The garden is a place of reflection and recollection of the hero (here you can see the difference between Fet and his like-minded A.N. Maikov, for whom the garden is a space of human transformative labor); It is in the garden that dates take place.
The poetic word of the poet we are interested in is a predominantly metaphorical word, and it has many meanings. On the other hand, “wandering” from poem to poem, it connects them with each other, forming a single world of Fet’s lyrics. It is no coincidence that the poet was so drawn to combining his lyrical works into cycles (“Snow”, “Fortune-telling”, “Melodies”, “Sea”, “Spring” and many others), in which each poem, each image was especially actively enriched thanks to associative connections with neighbors.
These features of Fet's lyrics were noticed, picked up and developed by the next literary generation - the symbolist poets of the turn of the century.
Examination abstract work
Completed by 9th grade student “B” Ratkovsky A.A.
Secondary school No. 646
Moscow, 2004
Creativity of A. Fet
A. A. Fet occupies a very special position in Russian poetry of the second half of the 19th century century. The social situation in Russia in those years implied the active participation of literature in civil processes, that is, the pomp of poetry and prose, as well as their pronounced civic orientation. Nekrasov gave rise to this movement by declaring that every writer is obliged to “report” to society, to be first of all a citizen, and then a person of art. Fet did not adhere to this principle, remaining outside of politics, and thus filled his niche in the poetry of that era, sharing it with Tyutchev.
But if we remember Tyutchev’s lyrics, then they consider human existence in its tragedy, while Fet was considered a poet of serene rural joys, gravitating toward contemplation. The poet’s landscape is distinguished by calmness and peace. But perhaps this is the external side? Indeed, if you look closely, Fet’s lyrics are filled with drama and philosophical depth, which have always distinguished “great” poets from ephemeral authors. One of Fetov's main themes is the tragedy of unrequited love. Poems on this topic reveal the facts of Fet’s biography, or more precisely, the fact that he survived the death of his beloved woman. Poems related to this topic rightly received the name “monologues to the deceased.”
You suffered, I still suffer,
I'm destined to breathe with doubt,
And I tremble, and my heart avoids
Seek what cannot be understood.
Other poems of the poet are intertwined with this tragic motif, the titles of which speak eloquently about the theme: “Death”, “Life flashed by without an obvious trace”, “Simply in the darkness of memories...” Apparently, the idyll is not just “diluted” by the poet’s sadness , it is absent altogether. The illusion of well-being is created by the poet’s desire to overcome suffering, to dissolve it in the joy of everyday life, obtained from pain, in the harmony of the surrounding world. The poet rejoices along with all nature after the storm:
When, under a cloud, it’s transparent and clean,
The dawn will tell you that the day of bad weather has passed,
You won’t find a blade of grass and you won’t find a bush,
So that he does not cry and does not shine with happiness...
Fet’s view of nature is similar to Tyutchev’s: the main thing in it is movement, the direction of flow vital energy, which charges people and their poems. Fet wrote to Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: “in work of art tension is a great thing.” It is not surprising that Fet’s lyrical plot unfolds at a time of greatest tension in man’s spiritual powers. The poem “Don’t wake her up at dawn” demonstrates just such a moment,” reflecting the heroine’s state:
And the brighter the moon shone,
And the louder the nightingale whistled,
She became paler and paler,
My heart beat more and more painfully.
In consonance with this verse is the appearance of another heroine: “You sang until dawn, exhausted in tears.” But Fet’s most striking masterpiece, which reflected an internal spiritual event in a person’s life, is the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” In this poem there is a lyrical plot, that is, nothing happens at the event level, but a detailed development of the hero’s feelings and experiences is given, a change states of a soul in love, coloring the night date - namely, it is described in the poem - in bizarre colors. Against the background of night shadows, the silver of a quiet stream shines, and the wonderful night picture is complemented by the change in the appearance of the beloved. The last stanza is metaphorically complex, since it is the emotional climax of the poem:
There are purple roses in the smoky clouds,
The reflection of amber
And kisses and tears,
And dawn, dawn!...
Behind these unexpected images are hidden the features of the beloved, her lips, the sparkle of her smile. With this and other fresh poems, Fet is trying to prove that poetry is audacity, which claims to change the usual course of existence. In this regard, the verse “With one push can drive away a living boat...” is indicative. Its theme is the nature of the poet's inspiration. Creativity is seen as a high takeoff, a leap, an attempt to achieve the unattainable. Fet directly names his poetic guidelines:
Interrupt a dreary dream with a single sound,
To suddenly revel in the unknown, dear,
Give life a sigh, give sweetness to secret torments...
Another super-task of poetry is to consolidate the world in eternity, to reflect the random, elusive (“Instantly feel someone else’s as your own”). But in order for the images to reach the reader’s consciousness, a special, unique musicality is needed. Fet uses many sound writing techniques (alliteration, assonance), and Tchaikovsky even said: “Fet, in his best moments, goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and boldly takes a step into our field.”
So what did Fet’s lyrics show us? He walked from the darkness of the death of a loved one to the light of the joy of being, illuminating his path with fire and light in his poems. For this, he is called the sunniest poet of Russian literature (everyone knows the lines: “I came to you with greetings, to tell you that the sun has risen”). Fet is not afraid of life after shocks, he believes and maintains faith in the victory of art over time, in the immortality of a beautiful moment.
Poems by A. Fet are pure poetry, in the sense that there is not a bit of prose there. Usually he did not sing about hot feelings, despair, delight, lofty thoughts, no, he wrote about the simplest things - about pictures of nature, about rain, about snow, about the sea, about mountains, about forests, about stars, about the simplest movements of the soul, even about momentary impressions. His poetry is joyful and bright, it is characterized by a feeling of light and peace. He even writes about his ruined love lightly and calmly, although his feeling is deep and fresh, as in the first minutes. Until the end of his life, Fet was not changed by the joy that permeates almost all of his poems.
The beauty, naturalness, and sincerity of his poetry reach complete perfection; his verse is amazingly expressive, imaginative, and musical. It is not for nothing that Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Rachmaninov, and other composers turned to his poetry.
“Fet’s poetry is nature itself, looking mirror-like through the human soul...”
In traditional world and Russian lyrics, the theme of nature is one of the main, necessarily addressed topics. And Fet also reflects this theme in many of his poems. The theme of nature in his works is closely intertwined with love lyrics and with Fet’s characteristic theme of beauty, one and indivisible. In the early poems of the 40s, the theme of nature is not expressed explicitly; the images of nature are general and not detailed:
Wonderful picture
How dear you are to me:
White plain,
Full moon...
When describing nature, poets of the 40s relied mainly on techniques characteristic of Heine, i.e. Instead of a coherent description, individual impressions were given. Many of Fet's early poems were considered "Heine" by critics. For example, “The midnight blizzard was noisy,” where the poet expresses the mood without psychological analysis it without clarifying the plot situation with which it is connected. Outer world as if colored by the moods of the lyrical “I”, enlivened, animated by them. This is how Fet’s characteristic humanization of nature appears; emotional expression, excited by nature, often appears; there are no bright and precise details that are so characteristic later, allowing one to judge the picture as a whole. Fet's love for nature, knowledge of it, concretization and subtle observations of it are fully manifested in his poems in the 50s. Probably, his passion for landscape poetry at that time was influenced by his rapprochement with Turgenev. The phenomena of nature become more detailed, more specific than those of Fet’s predecessors, which is also characteristic of Turgenev’s prose of the day. Fet depicts not a birch tree in general, as a symbol of the Russian landscape, but a specific birch tree at the porch of his own house, not a road in general with its infinity and unpredictability, but that specific road that can be seen right now from the threshold of the house. Or, for example, in his poems there are not only traditional birds that have a clear symbolic meaning, but also birds such as harrier, owl, black duck, sandpiper, lapwing, swift and others, each of which is shown in its own uniqueness:
Half hidden behind the cloud,
The moon doesn't dare shine during the day yet.
So the beetle took off and buzzed angrily,
Now the harrier swam by without moving its wing.
The landscapes of Turgenev and Fet are similar not only in the accuracy and subtlety of observations of natural phenomena, but also in sensations and images (for example, the image of the sleeping earth, “dormant nature”). Fet, like Turgenev, strives to record and describe changes in nature. His observations can be easily grouped or, for example, in the depiction of the seasons, the period can be clearly defined. Is late autumn depicted:
The last flowers were about to die
And they waited with sadness for the breath of frost;
The maple leaves turned red around the edges,
The peas faded and the rose fell, -
or end of winter:
More fragrant spring bliss
She didn’t have time to come down to us,
The ravines are still full of snow,
Even before dawn the cart rattles
On the frozen path...
This can be easily understood, because... The description is given accurately and clearly. Fet likes to describe precisely a certain time of day, signs of this or that weather, the beginning of this or that phenomenon in nature (for example, rain in “Spring Rain”). In the same way, it can be determined that Fet, for the most part, gives a description of the central regions of Russia.
It is nature middle zone The cycle of poems “Snow” and many poems from other cycles are dedicated to Russia. According to Fet, this nature is beautiful, but not everyone is able to capture this dim beauty. He is not afraid to repeatedly repeat declarations of love for this nature, for the play of light and sound in it” to that natural circle, which the poet many times calls a shelter: “I love your sad shelter and the dull evening of the village...”. Fet always worshiped beauty; the beauty of nature, the beauty of man, the beauty of love - these independent lyrical motifs are stitched into art world poet into a single and indivisible idea of beauty. He escapes from everyday life to “where thunderstorms fly by...” For Fet, nature is an object of artistic delight and aesthetic pleasure. She is man's best mentor and wise advisor. It is nature that helps solve the riddles and mysteries of human existence. In addition, for example, in the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” the poet perfectly conveys instant sensations, and, alternating them, he conveys the state of the characters, in harmony with nature with the human soul, and the happiness of love:
Whispers, timid breathing,
The trill of a nightingale,
Silver and sway
Sleepy stream....
Fet managed to convey the movements of the soul and nature without verbs, which undoubtedly was an innovation in Russian literature. But does he also have paintings in which verbs become the main supports, as, for example, in the poem “Evening”?
Sounded over the clear river,
It rang in a darkened meadow"
Rolled over the silent grove,
It lit up on the other side...
Such a transfer of what is happening speaks of another feature of Fet’s landscape lyrics: the main tonality is set by elusive impressions of sounds, smells, vague outlines, which are very difficult to convey in words. It is the combination of concrete observations with bold and unusual associations that allows us to clearly imagine the described picture of nature. We can also talk about the impressionism of Fet’s poetry; It is precisely with the bias towards impressionism that innovation in the depiction of natural phenomena is associated. More precisely, objects and phenomena are depicted by the poet as they appeared to his perception, as they seemed to him at the time of writing. And the description focuses not on the image itself, but on the impression it makes. Fet describes the apparent as real:
Over the lake the swan pulled the reeds,
The forest overturned in the water,
With the jagged peaks he sank at dawn,
Between two curving skies.
In general, the motif of “reflection in water” is found quite often in the poet’s work. Probably, an unsteady reflection provides more freedom to the artist’s imagination than the reflected object itself. Fet depicts the outside world as his mood gave it. For all its truthfulness and specificity, the description of nature primarily serves as a means of expressing lyrical feelings.
Usually A. Fet in his poems dwells on one figure, on one turn of feelings, and at the same time his poetry cannot be called monotonous; on the contrary, it amazes with its diversity and multitude of themes. The special charm of his poems, in addition to the content, lies precisely in the nature of the mood of the poetry. Fet's muse is light, airy, as if there is nothing earthly in it, although she tells us exactly about the earthly. There is almost no action in his poetry; each of his verses is a whole kind of impressions, thoughts, joys and sorrows. Take at least such of them as “Your ray, flying far...,” “Motionless eyes, crazy eyes...”, “The sun’s ray between the linden trees...”, “I stretch out my hand to you in silence... "etc.
The poet sang beauty where he saw it, and he found it everywhere. He was an artist with an exceptionally developed sense of beauty, which is probably why the pictures of nature in his poems are so beautiful, which he took as it is, without allowing any decorations of reality. The landscape of central Russia is clearly visible in his poems.
In all his descriptions of nature, A. Fet is impeccably faithful to its smallest features, shades, and moods. It is thanks to this that the poet created amazing works that for so many years have amazed us with psychological precision, filigree precision. These include such poetic masterpieces as “Whisper, timid breathing...”, “I came to you with greetings... ", "Don't wake her up at dawn...", "Dawn says goodbye to the earth...".
Fet builds a picture of the world that he sees, feels, touches, hears. And in this world everything is important and significant: the clouds, the moon, the beetle, the harrier, the crake, the stars, and the Milky Way. Every bird, every flower, every tree and every blade of grass is not just a component big picture- they all have characteristics unique to them, even character. Let's pay attention to the poem "Butterfly":
You are right. With one airy outline
I'm so sweet.
All the velvet is mine with its living blinking -
Only two wings.
Don't ask: where did it come from?
Where am I hurrying?
Here I lightly sank onto a flower
And here I am breathing.
For how long, without purpose, without effort,
Do I want to breathe?
Just now, sparkling, I will spread my wings
Fet's “sense of nature” is universal. It is almost impossible to highlight Fet’s purely landscape lyrics without breaking ties with its vital organ - the human personality, subordinate general laws natural life.
Defining the quality of his worldview, Fet wrote: “Only man, and only he alone in the entire universe, feels the need to ask: what is the surrounding nature? Where does all this come from? What is he himself? Where? Where? For what? And the higher a person is, the more powerful his moral nature, the more sincerely these questions arise in him.” “Nature created this poet in order to eavesdrop on itself, spy on it and understand itself. In order to find out what a person, her brainchild, thinks about her, nature, how he perceives her. Nature created Fet in order to find out how the sensitive human soul perceives it” (L. Ozerov).
Fet's relationship with nature is a complete dissolution in its world, a state of anxious anticipation of a miracle:
I'm waiting... Nightingale echo
Rushing from the shining river,
Grass under the moon in diamonds,
Fireflies burn on caraway seeds.
I'm waiting... Dark blue sky
In both small and large stars,
I can hear the heartbeat
And trembling in the arms and legs.
I'm waiting... There's a breeze from the south;
It’s warm for me to stand and walk;
The star rolled to the west...
Sorry, golden one, sorry!
Let's turn to one of the most famous poems Fet, which at one time brought the author a lot of grief, causing with its appearance the delight of some, confusion of others, numerous ridicule of adherents of traditional poetry - in general, a whole literary scandal. This little poem became for democratic critics the embodiment of the idea of the emptiness and lack of ideas of poetry. More than thirty parodies have been written on this poem. Here it is:
Whisper, timid breathing,
The trill of a nightingale,
Silver and sway
Sleepy Creek
Night light, night shadows,
Endless shadows
A series of magical changes
Sweet face
There are purple roses in the smoky clouds,
The reflection of amber
And kisses and tears,
And dawn, dawn!...
A feeling of movement, dynamic changes occurring not only in nature, but also in the human soul is immediately created. Meanwhile, there is not a single verb in the poem. And how much joyful rapture of love and life there is in this poem! It is no coincidence that Fet’s favorite time of day was night. She, like poetry, is a refuge from the bustle and toil of the day:
At night it’s somehow easier for me to breathe,
Somehow more spacious...
the poet admits. He can speak to the night, he addresses it as a living creature, close and dear:
Hello! a thousand times my greetings to you, night!
Again and again I love you
Quiet, warm,
Silver-edged!
Timidly, after putting out the candle, I go to the window...
You can't see me, but I see everything myself...
The poems of A. A. Fet are loved in our country. Time has unconditionally confirmed the value of his poetry, showing that we, the people of the 20th century, need it, because it touches the innermost strings of the soul and reveals the beauty of the world around us.
Fet's aesthetic views
Aesthetics is the science of beauty. And the poet’s views on what is beautiful in this life are formed under the influence of a variety of circumstances. Here everything plays its part special role- and the conditions in which the poet spent his childhood, which shaped his ideas about life and beauty, and the influence of teachers, books, favorite authors and thinkers, and the level of education, and the conditions of his entire subsequent life. Therefore, we can say that Fet’s aesthetics are a reflection of the tragedy of the duality of his life and poetic destiny.
So Polonsky very correctly and accurately defined the confrontation between two worlds - the everyday world and the poetic world, which the poet not only felt, but also declared as a given. “My ideal world was destroyed a long time ago...” Fet admitted back in 1850. And in place of this destroyed ideal world, he erected another world - a purely real, everyday one, filled with prosaic affairs and concerns aimed at achieving a far from lofty poetic goal. And this world unbearably weighed on the poet’s soul, not letting go of his mind for a minute. It is in this duality of existence that Fet’s aesthetics is formed, main principle which he formulated for himself once and for all and never deviated from: poetry and life are incompatible, and they will never merge. Fet was convinced; to live for life means to die for art, to be resurrected for art means to die for life. That is why, immersed in economic affairs, Fet left literature for many years.
Life is hard work, oppressive melancholy and
suffering:
To suffer, to suffer for the whole century, aimlessly, without compensation,
Try to fill the emptiness and look,
As with every new attempt the abyss becomes deeper,
Again go crazy, strive and suffer.
In understanding the relationship between life and art, Fet proceeded from the teachings of his favorite German philosopher Schopenhauer, whose book “The World as Will and Representation” he translated into Russian.
Schopenhauer argued that our world is the worst of all possible worlds,” that suffering is an inevitable part of life. This world is nothing more than an arena of tortured and intimidated creatures, and the only possible way out of this world is death, which gives rise to an apology for suicide in Schopenhauer's ethics. Based on the teachings of Schopenhauer, and even before meeting him, Fet never tired of repeating that life in general is base, meaningless, boring, that its main content is suffering and there is only one mysterious, incomprehensible sphere of true, pure joy in this world of sorrow and boredom - the sphere of beauty, a special world,
Where storms fly by
Where the passionate thought is pure, -
And only visibly to the initiated
Spring blossoms and beauty
(“What sadness! The end of the alley...”)
The poetic state is a cleansing from everything too human, an exit into the open space from the narrowness of life, an awakening from sleep, but above all, poetry is the overcoming of suffering. Fet speaks about this in his poetic manifesto “Muse”, the epigraph of which is Pushkin’s words “We were born for inspiration, For sweet sounds and prayers.”
Fet says about himself as a poet:
Cherishing captivating dreams in reality,
By His Divine Power
I call for high pleasure
And to human happiness.
The key images of this poem and the whole aesthetic system Feta becomes the words “Divine power” and “high pleasure”. Possessing enormous power over the human soul, truly Divine, poetry is capable of transforming life, cleansing the human soul of everything earthly and superficial, only it is capable of “giving life a sigh, giving sweetness to secret torments.”
According to Fet, the eternal object of art is beauty. “The world in all its parts,” wrote Fet, “is equally beautiful. Beauty is spread throughout the universe. The entire poetic world of A. Fet is located in this area of beauty and fluctuates between three peaks - nature, love and creativity. All these three poetic subjects not only come into contact with each other, but are also closely interconnected, penetrate each other, forming a single fused artistic world - Fetov’s universe of beauty, the sun of which is spilled in everything, hidden for normal eye, but the harmonic essence of the world, sensitively perceived by the poet’s sixth sense, is music. According to L. Ozerov, “Russian lyricism found in Fet one of the most musically gifted masters. Written on paper in letters, his lyrics sound like notes, though for those who know how to read these notes
Fet's words were composed by Tchaikovsky and Taneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov and Grechaninov, Arensky and Spendiarov, Rebikov and Viardot-Garcia, Varlamov and Konyus, Balakirev and Rachmaninov, Zolotarev and Goldenweiser, Napravnik and Kalinnikov and many, many others. The number of musical opuses is measured in hundreds.”
Motives of love in Fet's lyrics.
In his later years, Fet “lit the evening lights” and lived with the dreams of his youth. Thoughts about the past did not leave him, and visited him at the most unexpected moments. The slightest external reason was enough, say, the sound of words similar to those spoken long ago, the glimpse of a dress on a dam or in an alley, similar to what was seen on it in those days.
This happened thirty years ago. In the Kherson outback he met a girl. Her name was Maria, she was twenty-four years old, he was twenty-eight. Her father, Kozma Lazic, is a Serb by origin, a descendant of those two hundred of his fellow tribesmen who in the middle of the 18th century moved to the south of Russia along with Ivan Horvat, who founded the first military settlement here in Novorossiya. Of the daughters of retired general Lazic, the eldest Nadezhda, graceful and playful, an excellent dancer, had bright beauty and a cheerful disposition. But it was not she who captivated the heart of the young cuirassier Fet, but the less flashy Maria.
A tall, slender brunette, reserved, not to say strict, she was, however, inferior to her sister in everything, but surpassed her in the luxury of her black, thick hair. This must have been what made Fet pay attention to her, who valued hair in the beauty of women, as many lines of his poems convince.
Usually not participating in noisy fun in the house of her uncle Petkovich, where she often visited and where young people gathered, Maria preferred to play for those dancing on the piano, because she was an excellent musician, which Franz Liszt himself noted when he once heard her play.
Having spoken to Maria, Fet was amazed at how extensive her knowledge of literature was, especially poetry. In addition, she turned out to be a long-time fan of his own work. It was unexpected and pleasant. But the main “field of rapprochement” was George Sand with her charming language, inspired descriptions of nature and completely new, unprecedented relationships between lovers. Nothing brings people together like art in general - poetry in in a broad sense words. Such unanimity is poetry in itself. People become more sensitive and feel and understand something that no words are enough to fully explain.
“There was no doubt,” Afanasy Afanasyevich would recall in his later life, “that she had long understood the sincere trepidation with which I entered her sympathetic atmosphere. I also realized that words and silence in this case are equivalent.”
In a word, a deep feeling flared up between them, and Fet, filled with it, writes to his friend: “I met a girl - a wonderful home, education, I was not looking for her - she was me, but fate - and we found out that we would be very happy after various everyday storms, if only they could live peacefully without any claims to anything. We said this to each other, but for this it is necessary somehow and somewhere? You know my means, she has nothing either...”
The material issue has become the main stumbling block on the path to happiness. Fet believed that the most painful grief in the present does not give them the right to go to the inevitable grief of the rest of their lives - since there will be no prosperity.
Nevertheless, their conversations continued. Sometimes everyone would leave, it would be past midnight, and they couldn’t talk enough. They sit on the sofa in the alcove of the living room and talk, talk in the dim light of a colored lantern, but they never talk about their mutual feelings.
Their conversations in a secluded corner did not go unnoticed. Fet felt responsible for the girl’s honor - after all, he is not a boy who gets carried away by the moment, and was very afraid of putting her in an unfavorable light.
And then one day, in order to burn the ships of their mutual hopes at once, he gathered his courage and bluntly expressed to her his thoughts about the fact that he considered marriage impossible for himself. To which she replied that she liked to talk with him, without any encroachment on his freedom. As for people’s rumors, I especially don’t intend to deprive myself of the happiness of communicating with him because of gossip.
“I will not marry Lazic,” he writes to a friend, “and she knows this, but meanwhile she begs not to interrupt our relationship, she is in front of me cleaner than snow- to interrupt indelicately and not to interrupt indelicately - she is a girl - Solomon is needed.” A wise decision was needed.
And a strange thing: Fet, who himself considered indecision main feature of his character, here he unexpectedly showed firmness. However, was it really so unexpected? If we remember his own words that the school of life, which kept him in check all the time, developed reflection in him to the extreme and he never allowed himself to take a step thoughtlessly, then this decision of his will become clearer. Those who knew Fet well, for example, L. Tolstoy, noted his “attachment to everyday things,” his practicality and utilitarianism. It would be more accurate to say that the earthly and the spiritual fought in him, the mind fought with the heart, often prevailing. It was a difficult struggle with his own soul, deeply hidden from prying eyes, as he himself said, “the rape of idealism into a vulgar life.”
So, Fet decided to end his relationship with Maria, which he wrote to her about. In response came “the most friendly and reassuring letter.” This, it seemed, ended the time of “spring of his soul.” After some time, he was told the terrible news. Maria Lazic died tragically. She died terrible death, the mystery of which has not yet been revealed. There is reason to think, as D.D. Blagoy believes, for example, that the girl committed suicide. He saw her with some special power of love, almost with physical and mental closeness, and he realized more and more clearly that the happiness that he experienced then was so much that it was scary and sinful to desire and ask God for more.
In one of his most beloved poems, Fet wrote:
I dare to mentally caress,
Awaken your dream with the strength of your heart
And with bliss, timid and sad
Remember your love.
Natural and human in fusion give harmony and a sense of beauty. Fet's lyrics inspire love for life, for its origins, for the simple joys of existence. Over the years, getting rid of the poetic cliches of time, Fet asserts himself in his lyrical mission as a singer of love and nature. The morning of the day and the morning of the year remain symbols of Fetov's lyrics.
The image of love-memories in Fet's lyrics
A. Fet's love lyrics are a very unique phenomenon, since almost all of them are addressed to one woman - Fet's beloved Maria Lazic, who died untimely, and this gives it a special emotional flavor.
The death of Mary completely poisoned the already “bitter” life of the poet - his poems tell us about this. “The enthusiastic singer of love and beauty did not follow his feelings. But the feeling experienced by Fet passed through his entire life until he was very old. Love for Lazic vengefully broke through into Fet’s lyrics, giving it drama, confessional looseness and removing from it the shade of idyllicity and tenderness.”
Maria Lazic died in 1850, and the more than forty years that the poet lived without her were filled with bitter memories of his “burnt love.” Moreover, this metaphor, traditional for denoting a departed feeling, in Fet’s mind and lyrics was filled with quite real and therefore even more terrible content.
IN last time your image is cute
I dare to mentally caress,
Awaken your dream with the strength of your heart
And with bliss, timid and sad
Remembering your love...
What fate could not unite, poetry united, and in his poems Fet again and again turns to his beloved as a living being, listening to him with love,
What a genius you are, unexpected, slender,
A light flew from heaven to me,
She calmed my restless mind,
She attracted my eyes to my face.
The poems of this group are distinguished by a special emotional flavor: they are filled with joy, rapture, and delight. The image of love-experience, often fused with the image of nature, dominates here. Fet's lyrics become the embodied memory of Mary, a monument, a “living statue” of the poet’s love. A tragic shade is given to Fet's love lyrics by the motives of guilt and punishment, which are clearly heard in many poems.
For a long time I dreamed of the cries of your sobs, -
For a long, long time I dreamed of that joyful moment,
As I, the unfortunate executioner, begged you...
You gave me your hand and asked: “Are you coming?”
I just noticed two drops of tears in my eyes;
These sparkles in the eyes and cold trembling
I endured sleepless nights forever.
The stable and infinitely varied motif of love and burning in Fet’s love lyrics is noteworthy. Truly burned, Maria Lazic also scorched the poetry of her lover. “No matter what he wrote about, even in poems addressed to other women, her image, her short life, burned with love. No matter how banal this image or its verbal expression may sometimes be, Fet’s work is convincing. Moreover, it forms the basis of his love lyrics."
The lyrical hero calls himself an “executioner,” thereby emphasizing his awareness of his guilt. But he is an “unhappy” executioner, since, having destroyed his beloved, he also destroyed himself, his own life. And therefore, in love lyrics, next to the image of love-memory, the motif of death persistently sounds as the only opportunity not only to atone for one’s guilt, but also to reunite with one’s beloved. Only death can return what life has taken away:
Those eyes are gone - and I’m not afraid of coffins,
I envy your silence,
And, without judging either stupidity or malice,
Hurry, hurry into your oblivion!
Life lost its meaning for the hero, turning into a chain of suffering and loss, into a “bitter”, “poisoned” cup, which he had to drink to the bottom. In Fet's lyrics, an inherently tragic opposition arises between two images - the lyrical hero and heroine. He is alive, but dead in soul, and she, long dead, lives in his memory and in poetry. And he will remain faithful to this memory until the end of his days.
Perhaps Fet's love lyrics are the only area of the poet's work in which his life impressions are reflected. This is probably why poems about love are so different from those dedicated to nature. They do not have that joy, the feeling of happiness in life that we will see in Fet’s landscape lyrics. As L. Ozerov wrote, “Fet’s love lyrics are the most inflamed zone of his experiences. Here he is not afraid of anything: neither self-condemnation, nor curses from the outside, nor direct speech, nor indirect, nor forte, nor pianissimo. Here the lyricist judges himself. Goes to execution. Burns himself."
Features of impressionism in Fet's lyrics
Impressionism is a special direction in art of the 19th century century, which developed in French painting in the 70s. Impressionism means impression, that is, an image not of an object as such, but of the impression that this object produces, the artist’s recording of his subjective observations and impressions of reality, changeable sensations and experiences. A special feature of this style was “the desire to convey the subject in sketchy strokes that instantly capture every sensation.”
Fet's desire to show the phenomenon in all the diversity of its changeable forms brings the poet closer to impressionism. Vigilantly peering into the outside world and showing it as it appears at the moment, Fet develops completely new techniques for poetry, an impressionistic style.
He is interested not so much in the object as in the impression made by the object. Fet depicts the outside world in a form that corresponds to the poet’s momentary mood. Despite all the truthfulness and specificity, descriptions of nature primarily serve as a means of expressing lyrical feelings.
Fet's innovation was so bold that many contemporaries did not understand his poems. During Fet's lifetime, his poetry did not find the proper response from his contemporaries. Only the twentieth century truly discovered Fet, his amazing poetry, which gives us the joy of recognizing the world, knowing its harmony and perfection.
“For everyone who touches Fet’s lyrics a century after its creation, what is important, first of all, is its spirituality, spiritual attentiveness, the unspentness of the young forces of life, the trembling of spring and the transparent wisdom of autumn,” wrote L. Ozerov. - You read Fet - and you give up: your whole life is still ahead of you. The day ahead promises so much good. Worth living! This is Fet.
In a poem written in September 1892 - two months before his death - Fet admits:
The thought is fresh, the soul is free;
Every moment I want to say:
"It's me!" But I'm silent.
Is the poet silent? No. His poetry speaks."
References
R. S. Belausov “Russian love lyrics” printed at the Kurskaya Pravda printing house - 1986.
G. Aslanova “Captive of legends and fantasies” 1997. Vol. 5.
M. L. Gasparov “Selected Works” Moscow. 1997. T.2
A. V. Druzhinin “Beautiful and Eternal” Moscow. 1989.
V. Solovyov “The Meaning of Love” Selected Works. Moscow. 1991.
I. Sukhikh “The Myth of Fet: Moment and Eternity // Zvezda” 1995. No. 11.
Examination abstract work
Completed by 9th grade student “B” Ratkovsky A.A.
Secondary school No. 646
Moscow, 2004
Creativity of A. Fet
A. A. Fet occupies a very special position in Russian poetry of the second half of the 19th century. The social situation in Russia in those years implied the active participation of literature in civil processes, that is, the pomp of poetry and prose, as well as their pronounced civic orientation. Nekrasov gave rise to this movement by declaring that every writer is obliged to “report” to society, to be first of all a citizen, and then a person of art. Fet did not adhere to this principle, remaining outside of politics, and thus filled his niche in the poetry of that era, sharing it with Tyutchev.
But if we remember Tyutchev’s lyrics, then they consider human existence in its tragedy, while Fet was considered a poet of serene rural joys, gravitating toward contemplation. The poet’s landscape is distinguished by calmness and peace. But perhaps this is the external side? Indeed, if you look closely, Fet’s lyrics are filled with drama and philosophical depth, which have always distinguished “great” poets from ephemeral authors. One of Fetov's main themes is the tragedy of unrequited love. Poems on this topic reveal the facts of Fet’s biography, or more precisely, the fact that he survived the death of his beloved woman. Poems related to this topic rightly received the name “monologues to the deceased.”
You suffered, I still suffer,
I'm destined to breathe with doubt,
And I tremble, and my heart avoids
Seek what cannot be understood.
Other poems of the poet are intertwined with this tragic motif, the titles of which speak eloquently about the theme: “Death”, “Life flashed by without an obvious trace”, “Simply in the darkness of memories...” Apparently, the idyll is not just “diluted” by the poet’s sadness , it is absent altogether. The illusion of well-being is created by the poet’s desire to overcome suffering, to dissolve it in the joy of everyday life, obtained from pain, in the harmony of the surrounding world. The poet rejoices along with all nature after the storm:
When, under a cloud, it’s transparent and clean,
The dawn will tell you that the day of bad weather has passed,
You won’t find a blade of grass and you won’t find a bush,
So that he does not cry and does not shine with happiness...
Fet's view of nature is similar to Tyutchev's: the main thing in it is movement, the direction of the flow of vital energy that charges people and their poems. Fet wrote to Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: “in a work of art, tension is a great thing.” It is not surprising that Fet’s lyrical plot unfolds at a time of greatest tension in man’s spiritual powers. The poem “Don’t wake her up at dawn” demonstrates just such a moment,” reflecting the heroine’s state:
And the brighter the moon shone,
And the louder the nightingale whistled,
She became paler and paler,
My heart beat more and more painfully.
In consonance with this verse is the appearance of another heroine: “You sang until dawn, exhausted in tears.” But Fet’s most striking masterpiece, which reflected an internal spiritual event in a person’s life, is the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” In this poem there is a lyrical plot, that is, nothing happens at the event level, but a detailed development of the hero’s feelings and experiences is given, a change states of a soul in love, coloring the night date - namely, it is described in the poem - in bizarre colors. Against the background of night shadows, the silver of a quiet stream shines, and the wonderful night picture is complemented by the change in the appearance of the beloved. The last stanza is metaphorically complex, since it is the emotional climax of the poem:
There are purple roses in the smoky clouds,
The reflection of amber
And kisses and tears,
And dawn, dawn!...
Behind these unexpected images are hidden the features of the beloved, her lips, the sparkle of her smile. With this and other fresh poems, Fet is trying to prove that poetry is audacity, which claims to change the usual course of existence. In this regard, the verse “With one push can drive away a living boat...” is indicative. Its theme is the nature of the poet's inspiration. Creativity is seen as a high takeoff, a leap, an attempt to achieve the unattainable. Fet directly names his poetic guidelines:
Interrupt a dreary dream with a single sound,
To suddenly revel in the unknown, dear,
Give life a sigh, give sweetness to secret torments...
Another super-task of poetry is to consolidate the world in eternity, to reflect the random, elusive (“Instantly feel someone else’s as your own”). But in order for the images to reach the reader’s consciousness, a special, unique musicality is needed. Fet uses many sound writing techniques (alliteration, assonance), and Tchaikovsky even said: “Fet, in his best moments, goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and boldly takes a step into our field.”
So what did Fet’s lyrics show us? He walked from the darkness of the death of a loved one to the light of the joy of being, illuminating his path with fire and light in his poems. For this, he is called the sunniest poet of Russian literature (everyone knows the lines: “I came to you with greetings, to tell you that the sun has risen”). Fet is not afraid of life after shocks, he believes and maintains faith in the victory of art over time, in the immortality of a beautiful moment.
A. Fet's poems are pure poetry, in the sense that there is not a drop of prose. Usually he did not sing about hot feelings, despair, delight, lofty thoughts, no, he wrote about the simplest things - about pictures of nature, about rain, about snow, about the sea, about mountains, about forests, about stars, about the simplest movements of the soul, even about momentary impressions. His poetry is joyful and bright, it is characterized by a feeling of light and peace. He even writes about his ruined love lightly and calmly, although his feeling is deep and fresh, as in the first minutes. Until the end of his life, Fet was not changed by the joy that permeates almost all of his poems.
The beauty, naturalness, and sincerity of his poetry reach complete perfection; his verse is amazingly expressive, imaginative, and musical. It is not for nothing that Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Rachmaninov, and other composers turned to his poetry.
“Fet’s poetry is nature itself, looking mirror-like through the human soul...”
In traditional world and Russian lyrics, the theme of nature is one of the main, necessarily addressed topics. And Fet also reflects this theme in many of his poems. The theme of nature in his works is closely intertwined with love lyrics and with Fet’s characteristic theme of beauty, one and indivisible. In the early poems of the 40s, the theme of nature is not expressed explicitly; the images of nature are general and not detailed:
Wonderful picture
How dear you are to me:
White plain,
Full moon...
When describing nature, poets of the 40s relied mainly on techniques characteristic of Heine, i.e. Instead of a coherent description, individual impressions were given. Many of Fet's early poems were considered "Heine" by critics. For example, “The midnight blizzard was noisy,” where the poet expresses the mood without psychological analysis of it and without clarifying the plot situation with which it is connected. The outside world is, as it were, colored by the moods of the lyrical “I”, enlivened, animated by them. This is how Fet’s characteristic humanization of nature appears; emotional expression, excited by nature, often appears; there are no bright and precise details that are so characteristic later, allowing one to judge the picture as a whole. Fet's love for nature, knowledge of it, concretization and subtle observations of it are fully manifested in his poems in the 50s. Probably, his passion for landscape poetry at that time was influenced by his rapprochement with Turgenev. The phenomena of nature become more detailed, more specific than those of Fet’s predecessors, which is also characteristic of Turgenev’s prose of the day. Fet depicts not a birch tree in general, as a symbol of the Russian landscape, but a specific birch tree at the porch of his own house, not a road in general with its infinity and unpredictability, but that specific road that can be seen right now from the threshold of the house. Or, for example, in his poems there are not only traditional birds that have a clear symbolic meaning, but also birds such as harrier, owl, black duck, sandpiper, lapwing, swift and others, each of which is shown in its own uniqueness:
Half hidden behind the cloud,
The moon doesn't dare shine during the day yet.
So the beetle took off and buzzed angrily,
Now the harrier swam by without moving its wing.
The landscapes of Turgenev and Fet are similar not only in the accuracy and subtlety of observations of natural phenomena, but also in sensations and images (for example, the image of the sleeping earth, “dormant nature”). Fet, like Turgenev, strives to record and describe changes in nature. His observations can be easily grouped or, for example, in the depiction of the seasons, the period can be clearly defined. Is late autumn depicted:
The last flowers were about to die
And they waited with sadness for the breath of frost;
The maple leaves turned red around the edges,
The peas faded and the rose fell, -
or end of winter:
More fragrant spring bliss
She didn’t have time to come down to us,
The ravines are still full of snow,
Even before dawn the cart rattles
On the frozen path...
This can be easily understood, because... The description is given accurately and clearly. Fet likes to describe precisely a certain time of day, signs of this or that weather, the beginning of this or that phenomenon in nature (for example, rain in “Spring Rain”). In the same way, it can be determined that Fet, for the most part, gives a description of the central regions of Russia.
The cycle of poems “Snow” and many poems from other cycles are dedicated to the nature of central Russia. According to Fet, this nature is beautiful, but not everyone is able to capture this dim beauty. He is not afraid to repeatedly repeat declarations of love for this nature, for the play of light and sound in it” to that natural circle, which the poet many times calls a shelter: “I love your sad shelter and the dull evening of the village...”. Fet always worshiped beauty; the beauty of nature, the beauty of man, the beauty of love - these independent lyrical motifs are stitched together in the poet’s artistic world into a single and indivisible idea of beauty. He escapes from everyday life to “where thunderstorms fly by...” For Fet, nature is an object of artistic delight and aesthetic pleasure. She is man's best mentor and wise advisor. It is nature that helps solve the riddles and mysteries of human existence. In addition, for example, in the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” the poet perfectly conveys instant sensations, and, alternating them, he conveys the state of the characters, in harmony with nature with the human soul, and the happiness of love:
Whispers, timid breathing,
The trill of a nightingale,
Silver and sway
Sleepy stream....
Fet managed to convey the movements of the soul and nature without verbs, which undoubtedly was an innovation in Russian literature. But does he also have paintings in which verbs become the main supports, as, for example, in the poem “Evening”?
Sounded over the clear river,
It rang in a darkened meadow"
Rolled over the silent grove,
It lit up on the other side...
Such a transfer of what is happening speaks of another feature of Fet’s landscape lyrics: the main tonality is set by elusive impressions of sounds, smells, vague outlines, which are very difficult to convey in words. It is the combination of concrete observations with bold and unusual associations that allows us to clearly imagine the described picture of nature. We can also talk about the impressionism of Fet’s poetry; It is precisely with the bias towards impressionism that innovation in the depiction of natural phenomena is associated. More precisely, objects and phenomena are depicted by the poet as they appeared to his perception, as they seemed to him at the time of writing. And the description focuses not on the image itself, but on the impression it makes. Fet describes the apparent as real:
Over the lake the swan pulled the reeds,
The forest overturned in the water,
With the jagged peaks he sank at dawn,
Between two curving skies.
In general, the motif of “reflection in water” is found quite often in the poet’s work. Probably, an unsteady reflection provides more freedom to the artist’s imagination than the reflected object itself. Fet depicts the outside world as his mood gave it. For all its truthfulness and specificity, the description of nature primarily serves as a means of expressing lyrical feelings.
Usually A. Fet in his poems dwells on one figure, on one turn of feelings, and at the same time his poetry cannot be called monotonous; on the contrary, it amazes with its diversity and multitude of themes. The special charm of his poems, in addition to the content, lies precisely in the nature of the mood of the poetry. Fet's muse is light, airy, as if there is nothing earthly in it, although she tells us exactly about the earthly. There is almost no action in his poetry; each of his verses is a whole kind of impressions, thoughts, joys and sorrows. Take at least such of them as “Your ray, flying far...,” “Motionless eyes, crazy eyes...”, “The sun’s ray between the linden trees...”, “I stretch out my hand to you in silence... "etc.
The poet sang beauty where he saw it, and he found it everywhere. He was an artist with an exceptionally developed sense of beauty, which is probably why the pictures of nature in his poems are so beautiful, which he took as it is, without allowing any decorations of reality. The landscape of central Russia is clearly visible in his poems.
In all his descriptions of nature, A. Fet is impeccably faithful to its smallest features, shades, and moods. It is thanks to this that the poet created amazing works that for so many years have amazed us with psychological precision, filigree precision. These include such poetic masterpieces as “Whisper, timid breathing...”, “I came to you with greetings... ", "Don't wake her up at dawn...", "Dawn says goodbye to the earth...".
Fet builds a picture of the world that he sees, feels, touches, hears. And in this world everything is important and significant: the clouds, the moon, the beetle, the harrier, the crake, the stars, and the Milky Way. Every bird, every flower, every tree and every blade of grass are not just components of the overall picture - they all have unique characteristics, even character. Let's pay attention to the poem "Butterfly":
You are right. With one airy outline
I'm so sweet.
All the velvet is mine with its living blinking -
Only two wings.
Don't ask: where did it come from?
Where am I hurrying?
Here I lightly sank onto a flower
And here I am breathing.
For how long, without purpose, without effort,
Do I want to breathe?
Just now, sparkling, I will spread my wings
Fet's “sense of nature” is universal. It is almost impossible to highlight Fet's purely landscape lyrics without breaking ties with its vital organ - the human personality, subject to the general laws of natural life.
Defining the quality of his worldview, Fet wrote: “Only man, and only he alone in the entire universe, feels the need to ask: what is the surrounding nature? Where does all this come from? What is he himself? Where? Where? For what? And the higher a person is, the more powerful his moral nature, the more sincerely these questions arise in him.” “Nature created this poet in order to eavesdrop on itself, spy on it and understand itself. In order to find out what a person, her brainchild, thinks about her, nature, how he perceives her. Nature created Fet in order to find out how the sensitive human soul perceives it” (L. Ozerov).
Fet's relationship with nature is a complete dissolution in its world, a state of anxious anticipation of a miracle:
I'm waiting... Nightingale echo
Rushing from the shining river,
Grass under the moon in diamonds,
Fireflies burn on caraway seeds.
I'm waiting... Dark blue sky
In both small and large stars,
I can hear the heartbeat
And trembling in the arms and legs.
I'm waiting... There's a breeze from the south;
It’s warm for me to stand and walk;
The star rolled to the west...
Sorry, golden one, sorry!
Let us turn to one of Fet's most famous poems, which at one time brought the author a lot of grief, causing the delight of some, confusion of others, numerous ridicule of adherents of traditional poetry - in general, a whole literary scandal. This little poem became for democratic critics the embodiment of the idea of the emptiness and lack of ideas of poetry. More than thirty parodies have been written on this poem. Here it is:
Whisper, timid breathing,
The trill of a nightingale,
Silver and sway
Sleepy Creek
Night light, night shadows,
Endless shadows
A series of magical changes
Sweet face
There are purple roses in the smoky clouds,
The reflection of amber
And kisses and tears,
And dawn, dawn!...
A feeling of movement, dynamic changes occurring not only in nature, but also in the human soul is immediately created. Meanwhile, there is not a single verb in the poem. And how much joyful rapture of love and life there is in this poem! It is no coincidence that Fet’s favorite time of day was night. She, like poetry, is a refuge from the bustle and toil of the day:
At night it’s somehow easier for me to breathe,
Somehow more spacious...
the poet admits. He can speak to the night, he addresses it as a living creature, close and dear:
Hello! a thousand times my greetings to you, night!
Again and again I love you
Quiet, warm,
Silver-edged!
Timidly, after putting out the candle, I go to the window...
You can't see me, but I see everything myself...
The poems of A. A. Fet are loved in our country. Time has unconditionally confirmed the value of his poetry, showing that we, the people of the 20th century, need it, because it touches the innermost strings of the soul and reveals the beauty of the world around us.
Fet's aesthetic views
Aesthetics is the science of beauty. And the poet’s views on what is beautiful in this life are formed under the influence of a variety of circumstances. Here everything plays its own special role - the conditions in which the poet spent his childhood, which shaped his ideas about life and beauty, and the influence of teachers, books, favorite authors and thinkers, and the level of education, and the conditions of his entire subsequent life. Therefore, we can say that Fet’s aesthetics are a reflection of the tragedy of the duality of his life and poetic destiny.
So Polonsky very correctly and accurately defined the confrontation between two worlds - the everyday world and the poetic world, which the poet not only felt, but also declared as a given. “My ideal world was destroyed a long time ago...” Fet admitted back in 1850. And in place of this destroyed ideal world, he erected another world - a purely real, everyday one, filled with prosaic affairs and concerns aimed at achieving a far from lofty poetic goal. And this world unbearably weighed on the poet’s soul, not letting go of his mind for a minute. It is in this duality of existence that Fet’s aesthetics is formed, the main principle of which he formulated for himself once and for all and never deviated from it: poetry and life are incompatible, and they will never merge. Fet was convinced; to live for life means to die for art, to be resurrected for art means to die for life. That is why, immersed in economic affairs, Fet left literature for many years.
Life is hard work, oppressive melancholy and
suffering:
To suffer, to suffer for the whole century, aimlessly, without compensation,
Try to fill the emptiness and look,
As with every new attempt the abyss becomes deeper,
Again go crazy, strive and suffer.
In understanding the relationship between life and art, Fet proceeded from the teachings of his favorite German philosopher Schopenhauer, whose book “The World as Will and Representation” he translated into Russian.
Schopenhauer argued that our world is the worst of all possible worlds,” that suffering is an inevitable part of life. This world is nothing more than an arena of tortured and intimidated creatures, and the only possible way out of this world is death, which gives rise to an apology for suicide in Schopenhauer's ethics. Based on the teachings of Schopenhauer, and even before meeting him, Fet never tired of repeating that life in general is base, meaningless, boring, that its main content is suffering and there is only one mysterious, incomprehensible sphere of true, pure joy in this world of sorrow and boredom - the sphere of beauty, a special world,
Where storms fly by
Where the passionate thought is pure, -
And only visibly to the initiated
Spring blossoms and beauty
(“What sadness! The end of the alley...”)
The poetic state is a cleansing from everything too human, an exit into the open space from the narrowness of life, an awakening from sleep, but above all, poetry is the overcoming of suffering. Fet speaks about this in his poetic manifesto “Muse”, the epigraph of which is Pushkin’s words “We were born for inspiration, For sweet sounds and prayers.”
Fet says about himself as a poet:
Cherishing captivating dreams in reality,
By His Divine Power
I call for high pleasure
And to human happiness.
The key images of this poem and Fet’s entire aesthetic system are the words “Divine power” and “high pleasure.” Possessing enormous power over the human soul, truly Divine, poetry is capable of transforming life, cleansing the human soul of everything earthly and superficial, only it is capable of “giving life a sigh, giving sweetness to secret torments.”
According to Fet, the eternal object of art is beauty. “The world in all its parts,” wrote Fet, “is equally beautiful. Beauty is spread throughout the universe. The entire poetic world of A. Fet is located in this area of beauty and fluctuates between three peaks - nature, love and creativity. All these three poetic objects not only come into contact with each other, but are also closely interconnected, penetrate each other, forming a single fused artistic world - Fetov’s universe of beauty, the sun of which is the harmonic, diffused in everything, hidden for the ordinary eye, but sensitively perceived by the poet’s sixth sense the essence of the world is music. According to L. Ozerov, “Russian lyricism found in Fet one of the most musically gifted masters. Written on paper in letters, his lyrics sound like notes, though for those who know how to read these notes
Fet's words were composed by Tchaikovsky and Taneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov and Grechaninov, Arensky and Spendiarov, Rebikov and Viardot-Garcia, Varlamov and Konyus, Balakirev and Rachmaninov, Zolotarev and Goldenweiser, Napravnik and Kalinnikov and many, many others. The number of musical opuses is measured in hundreds.”
Motives of love in Fet's lyrics.
In his later years, Fet “lit the evening lights” and lived with the dreams of his youth. Thoughts about the past did not leave him, and visited him at the most unexpected moments. The slightest external reason was enough, say, the sound of words similar to those spoken long ago, the glimpse of a dress on a dam or in an alley, similar to what was seen on it in those days.
This happened thirty years ago. In the Kherson outback he met a girl. Her name was Maria, she was twenty-four years old, he was twenty-eight. Her father, Kozma Lazic, is a Serb by origin, a descendant of those two hundred of his fellow tribesmen who in the middle of the 18th century moved to the south of Russia along with Ivan Horvat, who founded the first military settlement here in Novorossiya. Of the daughters of retired general Lazic, the eldest Nadezhda, graceful and playful, an excellent dancer, had bright beauty and a cheerful disposition. But it was not she who captivated the heart of the young cuirassier Fet, but the less flashy Maria.
A tall, slender brunette, reserved, not to say strict, she was, however, inferior to her sister in everything, but surpassed her in the luxury of her black, thick hair. This must have been what made Fet pay attention to her, who valued hair in the beauty of women, as many lines of his poems convince.
Usually not participating in noisy fun in the house of her uncle Petkovich, where she often visited and where young people gathered, Maria preferred to play for those dancing on the piano, because she was an excellent musician, which Franz Liszt himself noted when he once heard her play.
Having spoken to Maria, Fet was amazed at how extensive her knowledge of literature was, especially poetry. In addition, she turned out to be a long-time fan of his own work. It was unexpected and pleasant. But the main “field of rapprochement” was George Sand with her charming language, inspired descriptions of nature and completely new, unprecedented relationships between lovers. Nothing brings people together like art in general—poetry in the broad sense of the word. Such unanimity is poetry in itself. People become more sensitive and feel and understand something that no words are enough to fully explain.
“There was no doubt,” Afanasy Afanasyevich would recall in his later life, “that she had long understood the sincere trepidation with which I entered her sympathetic atmosphere. I also realized that words and silence in this case are equivalent.”
In a word, a deep feeling flared up between them, and Fet, filled with it, writes to his friend: “I met a girl - a wonderful home, education, I was not looking for her - she was me, but fate - and we found out that we would be very happy after various everyday storms, if only they could live peacefully without any claims to anything. We said this to each other, but for this it is necessary somehow and somewhere? You know my means, she has nothing either...”
The material issue has become the main stumbling block on the path to happiness. Fet believed that the most painful grief in the present does not give them the right to go to the inevitable grief of the rest of their lives - since there will be no prosperity.
Nevertheless, their conversations continued. Sometimes everyone would leave, it would be past midnight, and they couldn’t talk enough. They sit on the sofa in the alcove of the living room and talk, talk in the dim light of a colored lantern, but they never talk about their mutual feelings.
Their conversations in a secluded corner did not go unnoticed. Fet felt responsible for the girl’s honor - after all, he is not a boy who gets carried away by the moment, and was very afraid of putting her in an unfavorable light.
And then one day, in order to burn the ships of their mutual hopes at once, he gathered his courage and bluntly expressed to her his thoughts about the fact that he considered marriage impossible for himself. To which she replied that she liked to talk with him, without any encroachment on his freedom. As for people’s rumors, I especially don’t intend to deprive myself of the happiness of communicating with him because of gossip.
“I will not marry Lazic,” he writes to a friend, “and she knows this, and yet she begs not to interrupt our relationship, she is purer than snow in front of me - interrupt indelicately and not interrupt indelicately - she is a girl - Solomon is needed.” A wise decision was needed.
And a strange thing: Fet, who himself considered indecision the main trait of his character, suddenly showed firmness. However, was it really so unexpected? If we remember his own words that the school of life, which kept him in check all the time, developed reflection in him to the extreme and he never allowed himself to take a step thoughtlessly, then this decision of his will become clearer. Those who knew Fet well, for example, L. Tolstoy, noted his “attachment to everyday things,” his practicality and utilitarianism. It would be more accurate to say that the earthly and the spiritual fought in him, the mind fought with the heart, often prevailing. It was a difficult struggle with his own soul, deeply hidden from prying eyes, as he himself said, “the rape of idealism into a vulgar life.”
So, Fet decided to end his relationship with Maria, which he wrote to her about. In response came “the most friendly and reassuring letter.” This, it seemed, ended the time of “spring of his soul.” After some time, he was told the terrible news. Maria Lazic died tragically. She died a terrible death, the mystery of which has not yet been revealed. There is reason to think, as D.D. Blagoy believes, for example, that the girl committed suicide. He saw her with some special power of love, almost with physical and mental closeness, and he realized more and more clearly that the happiness that he experienced then was so much that it was scary and sinful to desire and ask God for more.
In one of his most beloved poems, Fet wrote:
I dare to mentally caress,
Awaken your dream with the strength of your heart
And with bliss, timid and sad
Remember your love.
Natural and human in fusion give harmony and a sense of beauty. Fet's lyrics inspire love for life, for its origins, for the simple joys of existence. Over the years, getting rid of the poetic cliches of time, Fet asserts himself in his lyrical mission as a singer of love and nature. The morning of the day and the morning of the year remain symbols of Fetov's lyrics.
The image of love-memories in Fet's lyrics
A. Fet's love lyrics are a very unique phenomenon, since almost all of them are addressed to one woman - Fet's beloved Maria Lazic, who died untimely, and this gives it a special emotional flavor.
The death of Mary completely poisoned the already “bitter” life of the poet - his poems tell us about this. “The enthusiastic singer of love and beauty did not follow his feelings. But the feeling experienced by Fet passed through his entire life until he was very old. Love for Lazic vengefully broke through into Fet’s lyrics, giving it drama, confessional looseness and removing from it the shade of idyllicity and tenderness.”
Maria Lazic died in 1850, and the more than forty years that the poet lived without her were filled with bitter memories of his “burnt love.” Moreover, this metaphor, traditional for denoting a departed feeling, in Fet’s mind and lyrics was filled with quite real and therefore even more terrible content.
For the last time your image is cute
I dare to mentally caress,
Awaken your dream with the strength of your heart
And with bliss, timid and sad
Remembering your love...
What fate could not unite, poetry united, and in his poems Fet again and again turns to his beloved as a living being, listening to him with love,
What a genius you are, unexpected, slender,
A light flew from heaven to me,
She calmed my restless mind,
She attracted my eyes to my face.
The poems of this group are distinguished by a special emotional flavor: they are filled with joy, rapture, and delight. The image of love-experience, often fused with the image of nature, dominates here. Fet's lyrics become the embodied memory of Mary, a monument, a “living statue” of the poet’s love. A tragic shade is given to Fet's love lyrics by the motives of guilt and punishment, which are clearly heard in many poems.
For a long time I dreamed of the cries of your sobs, -
For a long, long time I dreamed of that joyful moment,
As I, the unfortunate executioner, begged you...
You gave me your hand and asked: “Are you coming?”
I just noticed two drops of tears in my eyes;
These sparkles in the eyes and cold trembling
I endured sleepless nights forever.
The stable and infinitely varied motif of love and burning in Fet’s love lyrics is noteworthy. Truly burned, Maria Lazic also scorched the poetry of her lover. “No matter what he wrote about, even in poems addressed to other women, her image, her short life, burned with love, is vengefully present. No matter how banal this image or its verbal expression may sometimes be, Fet’s work is convincing. Moreover, it forms the basis of his love lyrics."
The lyrical hero calls himself an “executioner,” thereby emphasizing his awareness of his guilt. But he is an “unhappy” executioner, since, having destroyed his beloved, he also destroyed himself, his own life. And therefore, in love lyrics, next to the image of love-memory, the motif of death persistently sounds as the only opportunity not only to atone for one’s guilt, but also to reunite with one’s beloved. Only death can return what life has taken away:
Those eyes are gone - and I’m not afraid of coffins,
I envy your silence,
And, without judging either stupidity or malice,
Hurry, hurry into your oblivion!
Life lost its meaning for the hero, turning into a chain of suffering and loss, into a “bitter”, “poisoned” cup, which he had to drink to the bottom. In Fet's lyrics, an inherently tragic opposition arises between two images - the lyrical hero and heroine. He is alive, but dead in soul, and she, long dead, lives in his memory and in poetry. And he will remain faithful to this memory until the end of his days.
Perhaps Fet's love lyrics are the only area of the poet's work in which his life impressions are reflected. This is probably why poems about love are so different from those dedicated to nature. They do not have that joy, the feeling of happiness in life that we will see in Fet’s landscape lyrics. As L. Ozerov wrote, “Fet’s love lyrics are the most inflamed zone of his experiences. Here he is not afraid of anything: neither self-condemnation, nor curses from the outside, nor direct speech, nor indirect, nor forte, nor pianissimo. Here the lyricist judges himself. Goes to execution. Burns himself."
Features of impressionism in Fet's lyrics
Impressionism is a special movement in the art of the 19th century, which emerged in French painting in the 70s. Impressionism means impression, that is, an image not of an object as such, but of the impression that this object produces, the artist’s recording of his subjective observations and impressions of reality, changeable sensations and experiences. A special feature of this style was “the desire to convey the subject in sketchy strokes that instantly capture every sensation.”
Fet's desire to show the phenomenon in all the diversity of its changeable forms brings the poet closer to impressionism. Vigilantly peering into the outside world and showing it as it appears at the moment, Fet develops completely new techniques for poetry, an impressionistic style.
He is interested not so much in the object as in the impression made by the object. Fet depicts the outside world in a form that corresponds to the poet’s momentary mood. Despite all the truthfulness and specificity, descriptions of nature primarily serve as a means of expressing lyrical feelings.
Fet's innovation was so bold that many contemporaries did not understand his poems. During Fet's lifetime, his poetry did not find the proper response from his contemporaries. Only the twentieth century truly discovered Fet, his amazing poetry, which gives us the joy of recognizing the world, knowing its harmony and perfection.
“For everyone who touches Fet’s lyrics a century after its creation, what is important, first of all, is its spirituality, spiritual attentiveness, the unspentness of the young forces of life, the trembling of spring and the transparent wisdom of autumn,” wrote L. Ozerov. - You read Fet - and you give up: your whole life is still ahead of you. The day ahead promises so much good. Worth living! This is Fet.
In a poem written in September 1892 - two months before his death - Fet admits:
The thought is fresh, the soul is free;
Every moment I want to say:
"It's me!" But I'm silent.
Is the poet silent? No. His poetry speaks."
References
R. S. Belausov “Russian love lyrics” printed at the Kurskaya Pravda printing house - 1986.
G. Aslanova “Captive of legends and fantasies” 1997. Vol. 5.
M. L. Gasparov “Selected Works” Moscow. 1997. T.2
A. V. Druzhinin “Beautiful and Eternal” Moscow. 1989.
V. Solovyov “The Meaning of Love” Selected Works. Moscow. 1991.
I. Sukhikh “The Myth of Fet: Moment and Eternity // Zvezda” 1995. No. 11.
To prepare this work, materials from the site http://www.referat.ru/ were used
Examination abstract work
Completed by 9th grade student “B” Ratkovsky A.A.
Secondary school No. 646
Moscow, 2004
Creativity of A. Fet
A. A. Fet occupies a very special position in Russian poetry of the second half of the 19th century. The social situation in Russia in those years implied the active participation of literature in civil processes, that is, the pomp of poetry and prose, as well as their pronounced civic orientation. Nekrasov gave rise to this movement by declaring that every writer is obliged to “report” to society, to be first of all a citizen, and then a person of art. Fet did not adhere to this principle, remaining outside of politics, and thus filled his niche in the poetry of that era, sharing it with Tyutchev.
But if we remember Tyutchev’s lyrics, then they consider human existence in its tragedy, while Fet was considered a poet of serene rural joys, gravitating toward contemplation. The poet’s landscape is distinguished by calmness and peace. But perhaps this is the external side? Indeed, if you look closely, Fet’s lyrics are filled with drama and philosophical depth, which have always distinguished “great” poets from ephemeral authors. One of Fetov's main themes is the tragedy of unrequited love. Poems on this topic reveal the facts of Fet’s biography, or more precisely, the fact that he survived the death of his beloved woman. Poems related to this topic rightly received the name “monologues to the deceased.”
You suffered, I still suffer,
I'm destined to breathe with doubt,
And I tremble, and my heart avoids
Seek what cannot be understood.
Other poems of the poet are intertwined with this tragic motif, the titles of which speak eloquently about the theme: “Death”, “Life flashed by without an obvious trace”, “Simply in the darkness of memories...” Apparently, the idyll is not just “diluted” by the poet’s sadness , it is absent altogether. The illusion of well-being is created by the poet’s desire to overcome suffering, to dissolve it in the joy of everyday life, obtained from pain, in the harmony of the surrounding world. The poet rejoices along with all nature after the storm:
When, under a cloud, it’s transparent and clean,
The dawn will tell you that the day of bad weather has passed,
You won’t find a blade of grass and you won’t find a bush,
So that he does not cry and does not shine with happiness...
Fet's view of nature is similar to Tyutchev's: the main thing in it is movement, the direction of the flow of vital energy that charges people and their poems. Fet wrote to Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: “in a work of art, tension is a great thing.” It is not surprising that Fet’s lyrical plot unfolds at a time of greatest tension in man’s spiritual powers. The poem “Don’t wake her up at dawn” demonstrates just such a moment,” reflecting the heroine’s state:
And the brighter the moon shone,
And the louder the nightingale whistled,
She became paler and paler,
My heart beat more and more painfully.
In consonance with this verse is the appearance of another heroine: “You sang until dawn, exhausted in tears.” But Fet’s most striking masterpiece, which reflected an internal spiritual event in a person’s life, is the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” In this poem there is a lyrical plot, that is, nothing happens at the event level, but a detailed development of the hero’s feelings and experiences is given, a change states of a soul in love, coloring the night date - namely, it is described in the poem - in bizarre colors. Against the background of night shadows, the silver of a quiet stream shines, and the wonderful night picture is complemented by the change in the appearance of the beloved. The last stanza is metaphorically complex, since it is the emotional climax of the poem:
There are purple roses in the smoky clouds,
The reflection of amber
And kisses and tears,
And dawn, dawn!...
Behind these unexpected images are hidden the features of the beloved, her lips, the sparkle of her smile. With this and other fresh poems, Fet is trying to prove that poetry is audacity, which claims to change the usual course of existence. In this regard, the verse “With one push can drive away a living boat...” is indicative. Its theme is the nature of the poet's inspiration. Creativity is seen as a high takeoff, a leap, an attempt to achieve the unattainable. Fet directly names his poetic guidelines:
Interrupt a dreary dream with a single sound,
To suddenly revel in the unknown, dear,
Give life a sigh, give sweetness to secret torments...
Another super-task of poetry is to consolidate the world in eternity, to reflect the random, elusive (“Instantly feel someone else’s as your own”). But in order for the images to reach the reader’s consciousness, a special, unique musicality is needed. Fet uses many sound writing techniques (alliteration, assonance), and Tchaikovsky even said: “Fet, in his best moments, goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and boldly takes a step into our field.”
So what did Fet’s lyrics show us? He walked from the darkness of the death of a loved one to the light of the joy of being, illuminating his path with fire and light in his poems. For this, he is called the sunniest poet of Russian literature (everyone knows the lines: “I came to you with greetings, to tell you that the sun has risen”). Fet is not afraid of life after shocks, he believes and maintains faith in the victory of art over time, in the immortality of a beautiful moment.
A. Fet's poems are pure poetry, in the sense that there is not a drop of prose. Usually he did not sing about hot feelings, despair, delight, lofty thoughts, no, he wrote about the simplest things - about pictures of nature, about rain, about snow, about the sea, about mountains, about forests, about stars, about the simplest movements of the soul, even about momentary impressions. His poetry is joyful and bright, it is characterized by a feeling of light and peace. He even writes about his ruined love lightly and calmly, although his feeling is deep and fresh, as in the first minutes. Until the end of his life, Fet was not changed by the joy that permeates almost all of his poems.
The beauty, naturalness, and sincerity of his poetry reach complete perfection; his verse is amazingly expressive, imaginative, and musical. It is not for nothing that Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Rachmaninov, and other composers turned to his poetry.
“Fet’s poetry is nature itself, looking mirror-like through the human soul...”
In traditional world and Russian lyrics, the theme of nature is one of the main, necessarily addressed topics. And Fet also reflects this theme in many of his poems. The theme of nature in his works is closely intertwined with love lyrics and with Fet’s characteristic theme of beauty, one and indivisible. In the early poems of the 40s, the theme of nature is not expressed explicitly; the images of nature are general and not detailed:
Wonderful picture
How dear you are to me:
White plain,
Full moon...
When describing nature, poets of the 40s relied mainly on techniques characteristic of Heine, i.e. Instead of a coherent description, individual impressions were given. Many of Fet's early poems were considered "Heine" by critics. For example, “The midnight blizzard was noisy,” where the poet expresses the mood without psychological analysis of it and without clarifying the plot situation with which it is connected. The outside world is, as it were, colored by the moods of the lyrical “I”, enlivened, animated by them. This is how Fet’s characteristic humanization of nature appears; emotional expression, excited by nature, often appears; there are no bright and precise details that are so characteristic later, allowing one to judge the picture as a whole. Fet's love for nature, knowledge of it, concretization and subtle observations of it are fully manifested in his poems in the 50s. Probably, his passion for landscape poetry at that time was influenced by his rapprochement with Turgenev. The phenomena of nature become more detailed, more specific than those of Fet’s predecessors, which is also characteristic of Turgenev’s prose of the day. Fet depicts not a birch tree in general, as a symbol of the Russian landscape, but a specific birch tree at the porch of his own house, not a road in general with its infinity and unpredictability, but that specific road that can be seen right now from the threshold of the house. Or, for example, in his poems there are not only traditional birds that have a clear symbolic meaning, but also birds such as harrier, owl, black duck, sandpiper, lapwing, swift and others, each of which is shown in its own uniqueness:
Half hidden behind the cloud,
The moon doesn't dare shine during the day yet.
So the beetle took off and buzzed angrily,
Now the harrier swam by without moving its wing.
The landscapes of Turgenev and Fet are similar not only in the accuracy and subtlety of observations of natural phenomena, but also in sensations and images (for example, the image of the sleeping earth, “dormant nature”). Fet, like Turgenev, strives to record and describe changes in nature. His observations can be easily grouped or, for example, in the depiction of the seasons, the period can be clearly defined. Is late autumn depicted:
The last flowers were about to die
And they waited with sadness for the breath of frost;
The maple leaves turned red around the edges,
The peas faded and the rose fell, -
or end of winter:
More fragrant spring bliss
She didn’t have time to come down to us,
The ravines are still full of snow,
Even before dawn the cart rattles
On the frozen path...
This can be easily understood, because... The description is given accurately and clearly. Fet likes to describe precisely a certain time of day, signs of this or that weather, the beginning of this or that phenomenon in nature (for example, rain in “Spring Rain”). In the same way, it can be determined that Fet, for the most part, gives a description of the central regions of Russia.