What is special about feta from other writers. “The ideological and artistic originality of Fet’s lyrics
AFANASY AFANASIEVICH FET
In the famous pre-revolutionary work on the history of Russian literature
a riddle,” however, only repeating the definition that had already flashed
in criticism. This psychological riddle, however, has
social clue. Here lies the explanation of many mysteries that...
Fet's poetry has staged and continues to stage.
Already as if finally buried in the 60s of the past
century, this poetry was revived to a new life in the 80s. Explanation,
that this poetry came to court in the era of reaction is true,
but clearly not enough. Interest in Fet sometimes increased, sometimes
fell, but Fet has already entered Russian poetry forever, with new and new
resurrections refuting the next funeral.
We must also not forget that, significant in itself, poetry
Feta was included in Russian literature and, more broadly, in Russian art
and indirectly, fertilizing many of its great phenomena: enough
name Alexander Blok here.
Fet has always been regarded as the banner of “pure art” and
in fact he was. Nevertheless, critics who gravitated toward “pure
art" or even directly advocated for it (V. Botkin, A. Druzhinin),
Fet's poetry was not always understood and approved, and certainly
in their praise they were, in any case, more restrained than Leo Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky, who, in general, turned out to be “pure art”
And here's another mystery. Much has been said about anti-democracy
Feta. Indeed, the elitism of Fet’s poetry seems to
it is more certain that it was theoretically realized by him himself
in the spirit of Schopenhauer. Works published in 1863 in two volumes
The poets did not separate even for 30 years. It does not follow from this, however, that
Fet did not find a wide audience, probably wider than
anyone, with the exception of Nekrasov, is a democratic poet of his time.
“...Almost all of Russia sings his romances,”2 he also wrote
in 1863 Shchedrin, who, if one can blame him for partiality,
this is not in favor of Fet.
Fet's father, a wealthy and noble Oryol landowner Afanasy
Shenshin, while in Germany, secretly took his wife from there to Russia
Darmstadt official Charlotte. Soon Charlotte gave birth
son - the future poet, who also received the name Afanasy. However
official marriage of Shenshin with Charlotte, who passed
into Orthodoxy under the name of Elizabeth, several events took place
Later. Many years later, church authorities uncovered the “illegality”
birth of Afanasy Afanasyevich, and, already being fifteen years old
and the son of a German official, Fet, living in Russia. Mal-
Chick was shocked. Not to mention, he was deprived of all rights and privileges,
associated with nobility and legal inheritance.
Only in 1873 a request to recognize him as Shenshin’s son was
satisfied; however, the poet retained his literary name Fet.
All their lives two people lived in one place - Fet and Shenshin.
Creator of beautiful lyrical poems. And a tough landowner.
This duality, however, also penetrated into literature.
“...Even if this acquaintance is based only on
“Memoirs,” wrote the critic D. Tsertelev, “it may seem
that you are dealing with two completely different people, although
they both speak sometimes on the same page. One captures
eternal world questions so deeply and with such breadth that
human language lacks words with which to
express a poetic thought, and only sounds and hints remain
and elusive images - the other seems to laugh at him and know
doesn’t want him, talking about the harvest, about income, about plows, about the stud farm
and about justices of the peace. This duality struck everyone, close
who knew Afanasy Afanasyevich"3.
Understanding this duality requires broader sociological
explanations than those that have been very often offered
criticism: a defender of reaction and a serf owner wrote about flowers and
love feelings, leading away from life and social
“Fet - Shenshin” reveals a lot in the “psychological riddle”
German philosopher Schopenhauer (as is known, who fascinated Fet
and translated by him) with his own, ultimately coming from
Kant, by contrasting art as “useless”, truly
free activity to work - even more broadly - life practice
as subject to the laws of iron necessity or to what
Schopenhauer called it the “law of sufficient reason.” Each of these areas
has its own servants: “people of genius” or “people of benefit.”
Schopenhauer establishes a real contradiction in the world of private property
relations, it captures the real division into
“people of genius” and “people of benefit” as the inevitable result of the dominant
in the world of private property division relations
labor. But Schopenhauer, naturally, does not figure out the latter and,
finding himself in captivity of insoluble contradictions, turns the contradiction
into antinomy.
This contradiction was realized and justified, in any case,
taken for granted and unchangeable by Fet. Fet's originality,
however, it did not manifest itself in the fact that he understood and realized this contradiction,
but in the fact that he expressed it with his whole life and personal destiny
and embodied it. Schopenhauer seemed to explain to Fet what had already determined
his entire spiritual emotional structure, his deeply pessimistic
attitude. "He was an artist in every sense of the word."
words,” wrote Ap. Grigoriev, - was highly present
he has the ability to create... Creation, but not birth... He does not
knew the pain of birth of an idea. As the ability to create grew within him
indifference. Indifference - to everything except the ability to create -
to God's world, as soon as its objects ceased to be reflected
in his creative ability, to himself, how soon he stopped
be an artist. This is how this man realized and accepted his
purpose in life... This man had to either kill himself,
or become what he became... I have not seen a man
who would be so stifled by melancholy, for whom I would be more afraid
suicide"4.
Did Fet become the way he did so as not to “kill himself”?
he recognized in himself a “man of genius” and a “man of benefit”, “Fet” and
"Shenshin", separated them and put them in polar relations. And how would
to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the situation, the hated name
“Fet” turned out to be associated with his favorite art, and the desired and, finally,
by hook or by crook achieved noble
“Shenshin” - with that life and everyday practice from which
he himself suffered so cruelly and in which he himself was so cruel and inhuman.
I am among the crying Shenshin,
And Fet I am only among the singers, -
the poet admitted in one poetic message.
Fet's art was not a justification for Shenshin's practice, but rather
in opposition to it, he was born of endless dissatisfaction
everything that the “man of benefit” Shenshin lived with. Fet and Shenshin
organically fused. But this connection “Fet - Shenshin” shows
unity of opposites. Fet's art is not only closely related
with the entire existence of Shenshin, but also opposes him,
hostile and irreconcilable.
Fet's poetry organically entered into its era, was born by it
and was connected by many threads with the art of that time.
Nekrasov, although not equal, but comparing Fet with Pushkin,
wrote: “We can safely say that a person who understands poetry
and willingly opening his soul to her sensations, in no Russian
how much pleasure Mr. Fet will give him.”5 Tchaikovsky is not only
spoke about Fet’s undoubted genius: the music of Tchaikovsky
strongly connected with Fet's muse. And the point is not at all that
Fet turned out to be a convenient “text writer” for Tchaikovsky. Themselves by
Fet's talent turns out to be neither socially nor at all explainable.
Only Goncharov could write “Oblomov” - Dobrolyubov is
understood perfectly. One of the main advantages of the novel about the “new
man" Bazarov Pisarev saw in the fact that it was written by "an old
man" Turgenev. What Fet discovered, he could not open
Nekrasov and no one else except Fet himself. Fet really
got away from a lot, but, as another old critic noted, he
did not return empty-handed.
Fet went into nature and love, but in order for him to “find”
there is something there, objective historical
and social preconditions. Fet looked for beauty and found it. Fet
I was looking for freedom, integrity, harmony and found them. Another thing -
within what limits?
Fet is a poet of nature in a very broad sense. In a broader
than just a lyrical landscape painter. Nature itself in Fet's lyrics is socially
conditioned. And not only because Fet fenced himself off when leaving
into nature, from life in all its fullness, although for this reason too. Fet expressed
in Russian lyrics, more than anyone else, a free attitude
to nature.
Marx wrote about the importance of understanding exactly how human
became natural, and the natural became human. This one is already
a new, human naturalness in literature was revealed in the lyrics
nature and in the lyrics of love, the most natural and the most human
But art develops in a privately owned world
in grave contradictions. And human, free, social
naturalness, in order to express oneself in art, to express
the joy of free human existence required special conditions.
Only in these conditions could a man feel like a Fetov
lyrics “the first inhabitant of paradise” (“And I, as the first inhabitant of paradise, Alone
saw the night in the face"), to feel one’s “divine”, i.e. truly
human essence (there is no talk of religiosity here, and indeed
Fet was an atheist), to resolutely defend before those who doubted
Leo Tolstoy has the right to compare:
And I know, sometimes looking at the stars,
That we looked at them like gods and you.
For this, Fet needed isolation from the actual social
life of society, from painful social struggle. Fet, in contrast,
Let's say that Nekrasov was quite ready for this. But there were victims
great: a free attitude towards nature at the expense of an unfree attitude
to society, leaving humanity in the name of expressing humanity,
achieving integrity and harmony through the renunciation of integrity
and harmony, etc., etc. This internal contradiction is not immediately
Freshness itself (the definition most often applied to Fet,
especially revolutionary democratic criticism), naturalness,
the wealth of human sensuality in Feta's lyrics gave birth to
Russian mid-century setting. The country not only concentrated
all the abomination and severity of social contradictions, but also prepared
to their permission. Anticipation of ever-renewing changes
cried out to a new man and a new humanity. Searches and finds
in literature were broader here than just the image
a new person - a commoner. They were also realized in Turgenev's
women, and in the “dialectics of the soul” of Tolstoy’s heroes, and in Russian
7 Order 539 193
skaya lyrics, in particular in Fet’s lyrics. Naturalness, naturalness
The main achievement of Fet's lyrics, which determined the main
features of his artistic system. That's why, let's say,
it already has more than just metaphorization:
Night flowers sleep all day long,
But as soon as the sun sets behind the grove,
The sheets are quietly opening
And I hear my heart bloom.
Fet's originality lies in the fact that the humanization of nature*
meets with him naturalness to man. In the given example
the first line reveals its true meaning only after the fourth,
and the fourth only in relation to the first. Nature in its
humanity (flowers are sleeping) merges with the natural life of the human
hearts (heart blooms).
Fet opens and reveals the richness of human sensuality,
not only the wealth of human feelings (which, of course, opened
lyrics before Fet, and here it is rather limited than broad), namely
sensuality, that which exists apart from the mind and is not controlled by the mind.
Sensitive critics, although differing in definitions, point out
on the subconscious as a special sphere of application of Fetov’s
lyrics. Ap. Grigoriev wrote that Fet’s feeling does not mature until
clarity and the poet does not want to reduce him to it, that he has rather half-satisfaction,
half-feelings. This doesn't mean that Fet is half
feels, on the contrary, he surrenders to the feeling like no one else, but the feeling itself
then it is irrational, unconscious. “The power of Fet lies in this,” wrote
Druzhinin, - that our poet... knows how to get into the innermost
secret places of the human soul..."6. “The area is open to him, he is familiar,
along which we walk with our hearts sinking and our eyes half closed
eyes..."7. For Fet, this is a clearly conscious creative principle:
"against the mind."
According to the strength of spontaneity and integrity of the manifestation of feelings
Fet is close to Pushkin. But Pushkin’s integrity and spontaneity
were infinitely wider, Pushkin’s “childishness” did not exclude
maturity of mind. "Long live the muses, long live the mind" -
exclaimed the poet, and the very glorification of reason organically entered into him
in the “Bacchic Song” - Fet’s thing is impossible. V. Botkin
said in connection with Fet’s work that in a “complete” poet one also needs
mind, soul, and education. Pushkin was such a “complete” poet.
“Pushkin’s nature, for example,” writes the same Botkin, “was in the highest
multilateral degree, deeply developed by moral
questions of life... In this regard, Mr. Fet seems to be ahead of him
a naive child." And the “incomplete” poet Fet was essentially addressing
"incomplete" person. That is why it was necessary for perception
Feta has what Botkin called a “sympathetic mood.”
The sphere of subconscious perception of the world required for its
expressions of a special method that has become an essential element
in the development of Russian literature. Not without reason, back in 1889,
Chairman of the Psychological Society N. Grot at the celebration of Fet
read on behalf of the members of the society an address that said: “... without
doubts, over time, when the techniques of psychological research
expand, your works should give the psychologist abundant
and an interesting material for illuminating many dark and complex
facts in the field of human feelings and emotions.”
It was no coincidence that Fet began his memoirs with a story about the impression
which the photograph produced on him, her own, only to her
available means of reflecting life: “Don’t we have the right to say that
details that easily escape in a living kaleidoscope
life, catch the eye more clearly, having passed into the past in the form of an unchangeable
snapshot from reality"8.
Fet values the moment very much. He has long been called the poet of the moment.
“...He captures only one moment of feeling or passion, he
all in the present... Each Fet song refers to one point
of being..."9 - noted Nikolai Strakhov. Fet himself wrote:
Only you, poet, have a winged sound
Grabs on the fly and fastens suddenly
And the dark delirium of the soul and the vague smell of herbs;
So, for the boundless, leaving the meager valley,
An eagle flies beyond the clouds of Jupiter,
Carrying an instant sheaf of lightning in faithful paws.
This consolidation of “suddenly” is important for a poet who appreciates and expresses
the fullness of organic being, its involuntary
states. Fet is a poet of concentrated, concentrated states:
I'm waiting, overwhelmed with anxiety, as if I've broken a string.
I’m waiting here on the very path: A beetle, having flown into a spruce;
This path through the garden Khriplo called his friend
You promised to come. There is a corncrake right there at your feet.
Crying, the mosquito will sing, Quietly under the forest canopy
A leaf will fall smoothly... The young bushes are sleeping...
The rumor, opening up, grows, Oh, how it smelled of spring!..
Like a midnight flower. It's probably you!
The poem, as often in Fet’s work, is extremely tense and tense
immediately not only because it is said here about anxiety: this anxiety
and from the tension-building repetition at the very beginning (“Waiting...
I’m waiting..."), and from a strange, seemingly meaningless definition -
"on the very path." A simple path “through the garden” became “the path itself”
with an endless ambiguity of meanings: fatal, first,
last, by burning bridges, etc. In this, the maximum
In a tense state, a person perceives nature more acutely
and he himself, surrendering to it, begins to live like nature. "The rumor, opening up,
grows like a midnight flower" - in this comparison with a flower
there is not only a bold and surprisingly visual objectification
human hearing, materialization that reveals its natural
ness. Here the process of this very experience of getting used to the world is conveyed
nature (“Hearing, opening up, grows...”). That’s why the poems “Hoarsely
I called my friend, There’s a crake right there at my feet” they’re already ceasing to be
a simple parallel from the life of nature. This "raucous" does not apply
only to the bird, but also to the man standing here, on the “very path”,
already, perhaps, with a tight, dry throat. And also organically
It turns out to be included in the natural world:
Quiet under the forest canopy
Young bushes are sleeping...
Oh, how it smelled like spring!..
It's probably you!
This is not an allegory, not a comparison with spring*. She is spring itself,
nature itself, also living organically in this world. "Oh, how
it smelled like spring!..” - this middle line applies just as much to her,
young, as to young bushes, but this same line unites
her and nature, so that she appears like the entire natural world, and the entire
the natural world like her.
Fet was not alone in this new, heightened perception of nature,
and this also confirms the correctness of his discoveries. When at Tolstoy's
Levin will hear “grass grows”, then this will be an exact match
discoveries, and perhaps a consequence of Fet’s discoveries
in the field of the so-called poetry of nature. And a poem by Nekrasov
1846 “Before the Rain” will be close to Fet and the general
composition of landscape miniature and, most importantly, immediacy
an experience that carries a special acuity of perception:
To a stream, pockmarked and motley,
A leaf flies after a leaf,
And a dry and sharp stream
It's getting cold.
But Fet and Nekrasov generalize differently. This is especially clear
can be seen where they conclude the same. Here's Fetov's, too
40s, landscape:
Wonderful picture, Light from the high heavens,
How dear you are to me: And the shining snow,
White plain, And distant sleighs
Full moon, Lonely running.
These running sleighs, like someone galloping in the poem “By a Cloud”
wavy...”, and this is Fetov’s main generalization. For real
the picture begins to come to life only after the final lines
poems. Nekrasov does the same:
Over the passing tarataika
The top is down, the front is closed;
And went!" - standing up with a whip,
The gendarme shouts to the driver...
But he is not concerned about the picturesque perspective, but about the social one. Fet's
the main thing (we are not talking about other meanings) is that
the landscape evoked a feeling of, if not infinity, then enormity
world, hence the extraordinary depth of its perspective, which is created
distant sleigh (“Wonderful picture...*), distant horseman (“In a cloud
wavy...>). No wonder “A wavy cloud...” originally
was called “Dal” - distance, depth of perspective for him
basic. This is what gives birth to the actual lyrical motive:
“My friend, distant friend, Remember me,” unexpected and outwardly
not connected in any way with the landscape, but inevitably born precisely
space, a sense of distance.
Fetov's poetry of momentary, instantaneous, involuntary states
lived at the expense of immediate pictures of existence, real,
those around you. That is why he is a very Russian poet, very
organically absorbing and expressing Russian nature.
You are not surprised when you see how social, peasant,
such a Russian Nekrasov declares that “in Italy he wrote about Russians
exiles." But Fet, the poet of “pure art”, is also indifferent to Italy.
"with his cult of beauty, he almost repeats Nekrasov in poetry
“Italy, you lied to your heart!”, and in “Memoirs” he writes that
intends to pass over in silence the details of his stay
“on classical, Italian soil”10. For Fet, obviously, unacceptable
the very, so to speak, intentionality of classical beauties
Italy, their sanctification by tradition. He searched and found beauty,
but not where it turned out to be already given by the mind. Fet air-
Russian poetry is created by the Russian atmosphere. At the same time she is completely
devoid of any conscious motives: social,
like Nekrasov with his people’s Russia, or philosophical and religious,
like Tyutchev with his Russian messianism.
Fet's lyrics also played a well-known role in the democratization of Russian
poetry. What is its democracy? If, for example, democracy
Nekrasov and the poets of his school are directly related to the presence of characters,
then Fet's democracy - with their absence. Fet has a character
disintegrated, or rather, the psychological, even
psychophysical states, moods, feelings that carry it
poetry. They are subtle, elusive, but simple, even elementary.
“A world, European, national poet,” noted Druzhinin, “
Fet will never be; as an engine and educator he is not
will complete the path traversed by the great Pushkin. It does not contain
drama and breadth of vision, his worldview is a worldview
the simplest mortal..."11 (italics mine - N.S.). This
written in 1856. We will talk about the drama of late Fet later.
Here we note a clear indication that the poetic worldview
Fet has the worldview of the simplest mortal.
“Before any demands of modernity, there is a personal self,
this heart exists, this person..."12 - wrote Botkin, clearly narrowing
the very concept of modernity, since “the personal self... is the heart,
this man" were already a requirement of modern times and Fet also answered
Of course, in order to split the core of human character
down to elementary particles, a very complex apparatus was needed,
which is what Fet’s poetry became. “I see a muse covered in simplicity, And
It’s not simple delight that sweetly flows into my chest,” wrote Fet. However
what Fet reveals is characteristic of everyone, everyone, although it is perceived
not always and not by everyone. For perception you need a “sympathetic”
mood”, poetic preparation is needed.
“To understand Fet,” they finally began to assimilate some
criticism - one must have a certain poetic development. Very few
I like Fet right away. Usually at first it seems empty,
Fet became involved in that revision of human personality, which
Russian literature began to produce, primarily in the person of L. Tolstoy,
even preceded this process. He is especially close
Tolstoy. And this is determined by the fact that the subject of Fet’s attention is
a normal, healthy person. His feelings are sophisticated, but not perverted.
“...We will not find in Fet,” wrote N. Strakhov, “not a shadow of pain,
no perversion of the soul, no ulcers... reading Fet
strengthens and refreshes the soul."14 Fet's healthy lyrics are not accidental
an indispensable participant in school anthologies, literature for children
reading. You can blame him for his narrow-mindedness, but there is no need
forget that only in this limitation is he free.
Fet wrote most “freely” in the 40s and 50s. Just at this time
time, the largest number of works are created, to which
could include the definitions “fresh”, “clear”, “whole”
", "unbroken," - she was so generous to them then for
Feta is a Russian criticism of all camps. It is precisely this, and even exclusively
At this time, Fet’s poems include a village: pastures and fields,
and sketches of village life, and signs of peasant labor
(“Rainy summer”, “The rye is ripening over the hot fields...”, “You see,
behind the backs of the mowers..."). All this will be completely gone from the late Fet.
The desire to create some kind of unity, something like
poems: “Spring”, “Summer”, “Autumn”, “Snow”. Most of those who entered
in these cycles of works created in the 40-60s. Of course, at Fet's
and there is no hint of social definitions, but he doesn’t have a village
only external decorum. The fresh spontaneity of Fet's lyrics
Then she was not alienated from the village, the village also nourished her. In "Fortune-telling"
Feta, which can be compared both in plot and in how
they are alien to social overtones, with Zhukovsky’s “Svetlana”, we
We no longer find a conventionally folk one, as in Zhukovsky, but a living one,
folk, directly Nekrasov speech:
Lots of laughs! What's wrong with you?
Just like a market!
What a buzz! like bees
The barn is full.
There is the prowess and scope of the folk, or rather, Koltsovo song
in the 1847 poem “What an Evening...”:
This is how everything lives in the spring! Everything trembles and sings
In a grove, in a field Involuntarily.
We'll shut up in the bushes
These choirs, and not children, will pass like this
The grandchildren will come with a song on their lips:
Our children; They will come down to them in the spring
Same sounds.
That’s why Fet’s special predilection for Koltsov is not surprising.
one of his favorite poets. Already in old age, Fet wrote,
that he was under the “mighty” influence of Koltsov: “I have always
captivated by poetic exuberance, which Koltsov lacks
no... there is so much specifically Russian inspiration and enthusiasm in him
Fet remained a lyricist, albeit of a special kind. In Fet's lyrics
(at least in a significant part of it) there is a peculiar
primitiveness, which V. Botkin said well: “So naive
attentiveness of feelings and eyes can only be found among primitive
poets. He does not think about life, but unaccountably rejoices
to her. This is some kind of innocence of feeling, some kind of primitive
a festive view of the phenomena of life, characteristic of the original
era of human consciousness. That's why he is so dear to us,
like our irretrievable youth. That's why they're so attractive
Mr. Fet's anthological plays are whole and complete.
comprehensive significance, and it was given in 1856, that is
belongs to the first period of Fet’s work, but precisely with the feeling
life, which Botkin and Fet speak about and is close to Tolstoy’s epic
and Nekrasov in his poems of the early 60s. However, in order to
create an epic work (which is always popular) in new
conditions, on a new basis, it was necessary to solve the problem of people's
character. Unlike Tolstoy and Nekrasov, Fet did not do this
could. But Fet, who expressed the feeling of life fresh, unbroken,
Fet, who returned to the basic, initial elements of existence,
who in his lyrics elucidated the primary, infinitely small, this
One should not think, however, that Fet only records the immanent
and disparate psychological moods and subconscious states.
In this capacity, Fet's poetry would never have acquired
the influence it had on Russian culture.
Fet strives to build a bridge from this state to the whole world,
establish a connection between a given moment and life, ultimately in its
cosmic significance. A feeling of depth, space, distance,
already characteristic of early Fet, increasingly turns into a feeling
infinity and if not filled with the philosophical
meaning, it will point to it. This is the art of “everything”
sympathies,” to use Thomas Mann’s term, and reports
the main interest of his poetry becomes the main “typing
"beginning in it. His feelings and mood can become isolated
for everything in the world (we have already said that the world of social life, say,
the element of reason, even the simple existence of other people is excluded
is true, but this is what ensures the special selflessness of his lyrics),
merge with nature. It was this quality that delighted Tyutchev,
wrote to Fet:
beloved by the great mother,
Your lot is a hundred times more enviable;
More than once under the visible shell
You saw it right away...
Here lies the explanation of Fet’s love lyrics, which are not
just love lyrics. Fet's love is natural. But this love
natural not only because, first of all, it is sensual, although*
she was even accused of eroticism. However, in this case, misunderstanding
Feta occurs not only as a consequence of aesthetic deafness
or bias, but also reflects the peculiarities of the poet’s own system.
Fet's people, we said, live like nature, and nature like
People. And this is no longer the usual humanization, animation,
personification, etc. In Fet’s nature is not just spiritualized,
she lives not as a person in general, but as a person precisely in this
intimate moment, this momentary state and tension,
sometimes directly replacing it. The humanization of Tyutchev's "Fountain"
"For all the specificity of the description, it is based on a general comparison
with the “mortal thought” of a water cannon, Fet’s water cannon lives in unison
with a person, his impulse of this moment:
Now the month has emerged in its wondrous radiance
To the heights
And a water cannon in continuous kissing, -
Oh, where are you?
The tops of the linden trees are breathing
It's gratifying,
And the corners of the pillow
Cool moisture.
The natural world lives an intimate life, and the intimate life receives
sanction of all-natural existence.
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!
This is the finale of the poem “I’m waiting ...”, the third stanza in it with already
repeating “I’m waiting” three times and resolving the tense
waiting for a star to fall. Again nature and human life
are linked by bonds of infinitely polysemantic meanings: say, farewell
with a star (the epithet “golden” makes us perceive precisely
so) it also feels like a farewell to her (the epithet can be attributed
and to her), not coming, not coming... She is not just likened
star, they can no longer be separated from each other.
Polysemy, which is relatively easily accepted by modern
a reader brought up on the poetry of the 20th century, with great effort
the house was perceived by Fet's contemporaries. Parsing a poem
“Swinging, the stars blinked with rays...”, Polonsky wrote indignantly
the sky, the depth of the sea - and the depth of your soul - I believe that you
here you are talking about the depths of your soul”17. "Uncertainty of content
it is taken to the last extreme... - quoting the beautiful
the poem “Wait for a clear day tomorrow...”, B. Almazov was indignant.-
What is this, finally? And here is what Druzhinin wrote
in his “Letters from a Nonresident Subscriber” about the poem “In the Long
nights": "...Mr. Fet's poem with its desperate confusion
and in darkness surpasses almost everything ever written in such
sort of in the Russian dialect!”18.
The poet, who so boldly “concluded” from the particular to the general, although
separated the spheres of the poetic, but in these spheres themselves he had to
take the path of shifting the usual ideas about the poetic:
Dense nettles Jolly boats
It makes noise under the window, blue in the distance;
Green Willow Iron Lattice
Hung like a tent; Squeals under the saw.
The poem is characterized by its extraordinary decisiveness
transition from the lowest, the closest (nettle under the window)
to the farthest and highest (distance, sea, freedom) and back.
It all rests on the combination of these two plans. There is no average.
In general, Fet’s middle link usually falls out. The same thing happens
and in Fet’s love lyrics, where we never see her, character, person,
nothing that implies character and that communication with a person,
carries character. Fet has it very specific (with the smell
hair, with the rustle of a dress, parting to the left), extremely
the experiences associated with her are specific, but she and these experiences
just a reason, an excuse to break through to the universal, worldly, natural
apart from it as a human certainty.
In the poems “Pseudo-poet”, obviously addressed to Nekrasov,
Fet reproached him for “lack of freedom”:
Dragging at the whim of the people Did not ascend piously
In the mud, a low-bowed verse, You in that fresh darkness,
You are the words of the proud, freedom, where selflessly and freely
I never understood it with my heart. Free song and eagle.
Let's not indulge in moral maxims about sycophancy
Fet himself before the powers that be. “It’s the same in life
Shenshin,” Fet would object to this, although Fet is nasty and flattering
The same strong ones wrote a lot of poems.
But in the poems “To the Pseudopoet” Fet himself has too much bitterness
for a free relationship with the world. And this is not bitterness
accidentally. It is not only a rejection of a person of another party, another
social camp. These poems were written in 1866, and the 60s, especially
their second half, a time of crisis in Fet’s development. One
was the first to point out the danger that the position was fraught with
“songbird”, Nekrasov, who at one time fully saw the power of
This is Fet's position. A. Ya. Panaeva recalls: “Fet conceived
publish a complete collection of his poems and gave them to Turgenev and Nekrasov
carte blanche throw out those poems from the old edition that
they will find it bad. Nekrasov and Turgenev talk about this
There were frequent disputes. Nekrasov found it unnecessary to throw away
some poems, but Turgenev insisted. Very
I remember well how Turgenev passionately argued to Nekrasov that in
one stanza of the poem: “... I don’t know what I’ll sing, -
but only the song is ripening! Fet exposed<^ои телячьи мозги»19.
In 1866, Nekrasov spoke out in print on the same issue.
already ironically: “As you know, we have poets of three kinds:
those who “they themselves don’t know what they will sing,” as they aptly put it
their ancestor, Mr. Fet. These are, so to speak, songbirds."20
The sixties brought a new, complex sense of life,
and a new method was needed to express her joys and her sorrows,
first of all an epic. Nekrasov the lyricist could successfully create in the 60s
precisely because he became one of the creators of the Russian epic of this
pores, namely the epic, and not just the poems that he wrote before. Life
was included in literature to a extent that had never been included in it
earlier, and perhaps later too. Suffice it to say that this
the time of the creation of "War and Peace". It was in the 60s that Nekrasov
will write “Green Noise”, due to its harmony, closeness to nature,
perhaps most akin to Fet and yet for Fet himself
impossible work.
The position of the “one”, the look for Fet is natural and inevitable,
for peace above people and beyond them, true “complete” harmony
excluded, although Fet himself was sensitively and inevitably drawn to her. This
especially clearly visible when compared with “full” completely harmonious
creatures that appeared at different stages of human
history and art history: Venus de Milo, Sistine Madonna,
Christ. We did not take the examples arbitrarily, they are pointed to
works by Fet himself. When Fet wrote the poems “Venus
Milo”, then they turned out to be only a glorification of female beauty
as such. And maybe good in themselves, being attributed
to the Venus de Milo, seemed almost blasphemous to Gleb Uspensky.
“Little by little I finally convinced myself that Mr. Fet
without any reason, but only under the impression of the word
"Venus", which obliges us to glorify feminine beauty, sang what
which does not constitute even a small edge in the Venus de Milo
in the overall enormity of the impression it makes... And how
no matter how carefully you examine this great creature from the point of view
view of “feminine charm”, you will be convinced at every step
that the creator of this work of art had some kind of
another higher goal"21. However, Gleb Uspensky was sure that
Venus de Milo would also not have been understood by Yaroshenko’s Wanderer.
When Fet tried to write about the Sistine Madonna, then, in essence,
was powerless to do so. In the verses “To the Sistine Madonna”
"he said about Saint Barbara, and about Sixtus, and about the clouds in the picture,
but, limiting himself to circumlocutions, he did not dare to “describe”
her, as happened with the Venus de Milo, and thus showed at least
least artistic tact.
Fet was largely brought out of the crisis of the 60-70s by Schopenhauer,
albeit in a paradoxical way: by helping to understand and express this crisis
in truly tragic verses. In the 70-80s, Fet remained
servant of beauty. But this very service was realized more and more
like a heavy duty. Fet once again proved how not free from
life position of a “free” artist. He was still a priest
“pure art”, but not only those who served him, but also
who made heavy sacrifices:
Who will tell us that we did not know how to live,
Soulless and idle minds,
That kindness and tenderness did not burn in us
And we didn’t sacrifice beauty?
This burden of service is clearly recognized and expressed in the “Obrochnik”
(1889) and in other poems of this time (“Curse us...”). In place
The legal autonomy of art comes, as Vl said. Soloviev
about supporters of “pure art”, “aesthetic separatism”.
The narrow-mindedness and obsession of sectarianism appears. In verse,
written as if on a private occasion, expressed a whole
program:
There's no time to think, apparently
It’s like there’s a noise in the ears and in the heart;
It’s a shame to talk today,
And being crazy is reasonable.
What a paradox: it is reasonable to be mad. But this means that
madness ceases to be madness, it becomes intentionality.
A warning was carried out by Turgenev, who wrote
Fet back in 1865, that in “a constant fear of prudence
much more precisely this prudence, in front of which you
you tremble so much than any other feeling.”22.
Beauty is no longer as immediate and fresh as in
40-50s. It has to be obtained through suffering, from suffering
defend, and finally, even in suffering, seek and find “joy”
flour." Suffering, pain, torment are increasingly breaking into poetry
Feta. Beauty and joy for Fet are still the main thing,
but not on their own, but as “healing from torment”, as opposing
suffering, which also begins to live in the poem itself:
With a pure and free soul,
Clear and fresh as night
Laugh at the sick song,
Drive her away, away!
As if for a little attention
To a free heart until then
Following living compassion
The same pain did not creep in!
And into the sore, tired chest
The moisture of the night blows...
Suffering, grief, pain burst into poetry. And if one poet (Nekrasov)
as duty realized the need to write about them, then another.
(Fet), who previously simply turned away from them, now realizes
like a grave duty it is necessary not to write about them:
You want to curse, sobbing and groaning,
Seek scourges to the law.
Poet, stop! don't call me -
Call Tisiphone from the abyss.
When, offended by outrages again,
In your chest you will hear a call to sob, -
I will not change for the sake of your torment
Freedom is an eternal calling.
And here, in service, in struggle, albeit of a special kind, Fet
revealed a new powerful vitality. Even more tragic
than the more powerful, death-defying ("Death") god
(“Not to those, Lord...”) and not withstanding the weight of the struggle, because
There were no values other than beauty. But without values, outside
the beauty of the lying ones, the beauty itself was weakened, giving birth to new waves
pessimism and suffering. To the fiftieth anniversary of the creative
activities Fet wrote poems beginning with the words
“They are holding a funeral service for us...” and amazed their friends with their gloom.
In beauty itself, the poet begins to strive for the highest. Higher,
He also looks for the ideal in a woman. Characteristic sympathies in painting
in late Feta: Raphael, Perugino accurately determine the direction
search for the ideal.
I say that I love meeting with you
For the shine of your curls falling on your shoulders,
For the light that burns in the depths of your eyes.
Oh, it's all flowers, insects and stones,
Which ones the child is happy to pick up from all sides
To my beloved mother in those sweet moments,
When he looks into her eyes he is so happy.
What the poet’s gaze so readily stopped on and what completely
was satisfied (“the shine of the curls”, “the color is on the cheeks”, “running to the left
parting”, etc.) - all these are “flowers, insects and stones”. Need to
different, better and higher. But it will not be given:
In diligent searches, everything seems: just about
The familiar face accepts the mystery, -
But the poor heart's flight ends
One powerless languor.
He was powerless to express her in all the complexity of her feelings,
in character, in spirituality, in ideality. Fet rushed towards
Nekrasov's path, on the path of Tyutchev, looking for her, creating his own “lyrical
novel,” and yet the unity of the cycle will remain only the unity
moods.
The poem "Never" may be the most accurate expression
late Fet crisis. This is a poetic fantasy on the theme
resurrection on an already frozen and deserted land:
No winter birds, no midges on the snow.
I understood everything: the earth has long cooled down
And died out. Who should I take care of?
Breathing in your chest? For whom is the grave
Did she bring me back? And my consciousness
What is it connected with? And what is his calling?
Where to go, where there is no one to hug,
Where time is lost in space?
Come back, death, hurry up to accept
The last life is a fatal burden.
And you, frozen corpse of the earth, fly,
Carrying my corpse along the eternal path!
Fet expresses such a resurrection in the future as nothing more than
dying in the present. Here are the questions: to whom? for whom? Where? And the answer
- “no one to hug.” L. Tolstoy clearly understood the essence of this poem
and wrote to Fet: “...the spiritual question is posed perfectly. And I
I answer it differently than you do. “I wouldn’t want to go to the grave again.”
For me and with the destruction of all life except me, it is still not
it's over. For me, my relationship with God still remains... God willing
I wish you health, peace of mind and that you recognize
the need for a relationship with God, the absence of which you are so clearly
deny in this poem"23.
For Fet there was no “God” and, more broadly, there were no “gods”, there were no
social, moral, religious values. Was alone
God is Art, which, as Valery Bryusov noted, is not
withstood the loads of the fullness of existence. The circle is closed and exhausted.
And for Fet’s closest heir - Alexander
Blok will need the antagonist Fet - Nekrasov with his search
social, worldly values in real life in all its
complexity and breadth.
The work of Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820 - 1892) is one of the pinnacles of Russian poetry. Fet is a great poet, a genius poet. Now there is not a person in Russia who does not know Fet’s poems. Well, at least “I came to you with greetings” or “Don’t wake her up at dawn...” At the same time, many have no real idea of the scale of this poet. The idea of Fet is distorted, even starting with his appearance. Someone maliciously constantly replicates those portraits of Fet that were made during his dying illness, where his face is terribly distorted, his eyes are swollen - an old man in a state of agony. Meanwhile, Fet, as can be seen from the portraits made during his heyday, both human and poetic, was the most beautiful of the Russian poets.
The drama is connected with the mystery of Fet's birth. In the fall of 1820, his father Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin took the wife of the official Karl Feth from Germany to his family estate. A month later the child was born and was registered as the son of A.N. Shenshina. The illegality of this recording was discovered when the boy was 14 years old. He received the surname Fet and in documents began to be called the son of a foreign subject. A. A. Fet spent a lot of effort trying to return the name of Shenshin and the rights of a hereditary nobleman. The mystery of his birth has not yet been fully solved. If he is the son of Fet, then his father I. Fet was the great-uncle of the last Russian empress.
Fet's life is also mysterious. They say about him that in life he was much more prosaic than in poetry. But this is due to the fact that he was a wonderful owner. Wrote a small volume of articles on economics. From a ruined estate he managed to create a model farm with a magnificent stud farm. And even in Moscow on Plyushchikha, in his house there was a vegetable garden and a greenhouse; in January, vegetables and fruits ripened, which the poet loved to treat his guests to.
In this regard, they like to talk about Fet as a prosaic person. But in fact, his origin is mysterious and romantic, and his death is mysterious: this death was and was not suicide. Fet, tormented by illness, finally decided to commit suicide. He sent his wife away, left a suicide note, and grabbed a knife. The secretary prevented him from using it. And the poet died - died of shock.
The biography of a poet is, first of all, his poems. Fet's poetry is multifaceted, its main genre is the lyric poem. Classical genres include elegies, thoughts, ballads, and epistles. “Melodies” - poems that represent a response to musical impressions - can be considered as the “original Fetov genre”.
One of Fet’s early and most popular poems is “I came to you with greetings”:
I came to you with greetings,
Tell me that the sun has risen, that it is a hot light
The sheets began to flutter;
Tell me that the forest has woken up,
All woke up, every branch,
Every bird was startled
And full of thirst in spring...
The poem is written on the theme of love. The theme is old, eternal, and Fet’s poems emanate freshness and novelty. It doesn't look like anything we know. This is generally characteristic of Fet and corresponds to his conscious poetic attitudes. Fet wrote: “Poetry certainly requires novelty, and for it there is nothing more deadly than repetition, and especially oneself... By novelty I do not mean new objects, but their new illumination by the magic lantern of art.”
The very beginning of the poem is unusual - unusual in comparison with the then accepted norm in poetry. In particular, the Pushkin norm, which required extreme precision in words and in combinations of words. Meanwhile, the initial phrase of Fetov’s poem is not at all accurate and not even entirely “correct”: “I came to you with greetings, to tell you...”. Would Pushkin or any of the poets of Pushkin’s time allow himself to say so? At that time, these lines were seen as poetic audacity. Fet was aware of the inaccuracy of his poetic word, its closeness to living, sometimes seeming not entirely correct, but that made it especially bright and expressive speech. He called his poems jokingly (but not without pride) poems “in a disheveled manner.” But what is the artistic meaning in poetry of the “disheveled kind”?
Inaccurate words and seemingly sloppy, “disheveled” expressions in Fet’s poems create not only unexpected, but also bright, exciting images. One gets the impression that the poet doesn’t seem to deliberately think about the words; they came to him on their own. He speaks with the very first, unintentional words. The poem is distinguished by its amazing integrity. This is an important virtue in poetry. Fet wrote: “The task of a lyricist is not in the harmony of the reproduction of objects, but in the harmony of tone.” In this poem there is both harmony of objects and harmony of tone. Everything in the poem is internally connected to each other, everything is unidirectional, it is said in a single impulse of feeling, as if in one breath.
Another early poem is the lyrical play “Whisper, timid breathing...”:
Whisper, timid breathing,
The trill of a nightingale,
Silver and sway
Sleepy stream,
Night light, night shadows,
Endless shadows
A series of magical changes
Sweet face...
The poem was written in the late 40s. It is built on nominative sentences alone. Not a single verb. Only objects and phenomena that are named one after another: whispers - timid breathing - trills of a nightingale, etc.
But despite all this, the poem cannot be called objective and material. This is the most amazing and unexpected thing. Fet's objects are non-objective. They do not exist on their own, but as signs of feelings and states. They glow a little, flicker. By naming this or that thing, the poet evokes in the reader not a direct idea of the thing itself, but those associations that can usually be associated with it. The main semantic field of a poem is between the words, behind the words.
“Behind the Words” the main theme of the poem develops: feelings of love. The most subtle feeling, inexpressible in words, inexpressibly strong, No one had ever written about love like this before Fet.
Fet liked the reality of life, and this was reflected in his poems. Nevertheless, it is difficult to call Fet simply a realist, noticing how in poetry he gravitates toward dreams, dreams, and intuitive movements of the soul. Fet wrote about the beauty diffused in all the diversity of reality. Aesthetic realism in Fet's poems in the 40s and 50s was really aimed at the everyday and the most ordinary.
The character and tension of Fet's lyrical experience depend on the state of nature. The change of seasons occurs in a circle - from spring to spring. Fet’s feelings move in the same kind of circle: not from the past to the future, but from spring to spring, with its necessary, inevitable return. In the collection (1850), the cycle “Snow” is given first place. Fet's winter cycle is multi-motive: he sings about a sad birch tree in winter clothing, about how “the night is bright, the frost shines,” and “the frost has drawn patterns on the double glass.” Snowy plains attract the poet:
Wonderful picture
How dear you are to me:
White plain,
Full moon,
Light of the high heavens,
And shining snow
And distant sleighs
Lonely running.
Fet confesses his love for the winter landscape. In Fet's poems, shining winter prevails, in the brilliance of the prickly sun, in the diamonds of snowflakes and snow sparks, in the crystal of icicles, in the silvery fluff of frosty eyelashes. The associative series in this lyric does not go beyond the boundaries of nature itself; here is its own beauty, which does not need human spirituality. Rather, it itself spiritualizes and enlightens the personality. It was Fet, following Pushkin, who sang the Russian winter, only he managed to reveal its aesthetic meaning in such a multifaceted way. Fet introduced rural landscapes and scenes of folk life into his poems; he appeared in his poems as “a bearded grandfather,” he “groans and crosses himself,” or a daring coachman in a troika.
Fet was always attracted to the poetic theme of evening and night. The poet early developed a special aesthetic attitude towards the night and the onset of darkness. At the new stage of his creativity, he already began to call entire collections “Evening Lights”, they seem to contain a special, Fetov philosophy of the night.
Fet’s “night poetry” reveals a complex of associations: night - abyss - shadows - sleep - visions - secret, intimate - love - the unity of the “night soul” of a person with the night element. This image receives philosophical deepening and a new second meaning in his poems; in the content of the poem a symbolic second plane appears. His association “night-abyss” takes on a philosophical and poetic perspective. She begins to get closer to human life. The abyss is an airy road - the path of human life.
MAY NIGHT
Lagging clouds fly over us
The last crowd.
Their transparent segment softly melts
At the crescent moon
A mysterious power reigns in spring
With stars on the forehead. -
You, tender! You promised me happiness
On a vain land.
Where is the happiness? Not here, in a wretched environment,
And there it is - like smoke
Follow him! follow him! by air -
And we'll fly away into eternity.
The May night promises happiness, a person flies through life in pursuit of happiness, the night is an abyss, a person flies into the abyss, into eternity.
Further development of this association: night - human existence - the essence of being.
Fet imagines the night hours as revealing the secrets of the universe. The poet's nocturnal insight allows him to look "from time to eternity", he sees the "living altar of the universe."
Tolstoy wrote to Fet: “The poem is one of those rare ones in which no words can be added, subtracted or changed; it is alive in itself and charming. It is so good that, it seems to me, this is not a random poem, but that this is the first stream of a long-delayed stream ".
The association night - abyss - human existence, developing in Fet's poetry, absorbs the ideas of Schopenhauer. However, the closeness of the poet Fet to the philosopher is very conditional and relative. The ideas of the world as a representation, man as a contemplator of existence, thoughts about intuitive insights, apparently, were close to Fet.
The idea of death is woven into the figurative association of Fet’s poems about the night and human existence (the poem “Sleep and Death,” written in 1858). Sleep is full of the bustle of the day, death is full of majestic peace. Fet gives preference to death, draws its image as the embodiment of a peculiar beauty.
In general, Fet’s “night poetry” is deeply unique. His night is as beautiful as the day, maybe even more beautiful. Fetov's night is full of life, the poet feels the "breath of the immaculate night." Fetov's night gives a person happiness:
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! ...
Fet's nocturnal nature and man are full of expectation of the innermost, which turns out to be accessible to all living things only at night. Night, love, communication with the elemental life of the universe, knowledge of happiness and higher truths in his poems, as a rule, are combined.
Fet's work represents the apotheosis of the night. For Feta the philosopher, night represents the basis of world existence, it is the source of life and the keeper of the secret of “double existence”, the kinship of man with the universe, for him it is the knot of all living and spiritual connections.
Now Fet can no longer be called just a poet of sensations. His contemplation of nature is full of philosophical profundity, his poetic insights are aimed at discovering the secrets of existence.
Poetry was the main work of Fet’s life, a calling to which he gave everything: soul, vigilance, sophistication of hearing, wealth of imagination, depth of mind, skill of hard work and inspiration.
In 1889, Strakhov wrote in the article “Anniversary of Fet’s Poetry”: “He is the only poet of his kind, incomparable, giving us the purest and truest poetic delight, true diamonds of poetry... Fet is a true touchstone for the ability to understand poetry...”
By the middle of the 19th century, two directions were clearly identified in Russian poetry and, polarized, developed: democratic and the so-called “pure art”, which was Fet. The poets of “pure art” believed that the purpose of art is art; they did not allow any possibility of deriving practical benefit from poetry.
Pisarev also spoke about Fet’s complete inconsistency with the “spirit of the times,” arguing that “a wonderful poet responds to the interests of the century not out of duty of citizenship, but out of involuntary attraction, out of natural responsiveness.” Fet not only did not take into account the “spirit of the times” and sang in his own way, but he decisively and extremely demonstratively opposed himself to the democratic trend of Russian literature of the 19th century. After the great tragedy that Fet experienced in his youth, after the death of the poet’s beloved Maria Lazic, Fet consciously divides life into two spheres: real and ideal. And he transfers only the ideal sphere into his poetry. Poetry and reality now have nothing in common for him; they turn out to be two different, diametrically opposed, incompatible worlds. The contrast between these two worlds: the world of Fet the man, his worldview, his everyday practice, social behavior and the world of Fet’s lyrics, in relation to which the first world was an anti-world for Fet, was a mystery for most contemporaries and remains a mystery for modern researchers. In the preface to the third issue of Evening Lights, looking back at his entire creative life, Fet wrote: “The hardships of life forced us to turn away from them for sixty years and break through the everyday ice, so that at least for a moment we could breathe the clean and free air of poetry.”
Poetry was for Fet the only way to escape reality and everyday life and feel free and happy. " Fet believed that a real poet in his poems should glorify, first of all, beauty, that is, according to Fet, nature and love. However, the poet understood that beauty is very fleeting and that moments of beauty are rare and brief. Therefore, in his poems, Fet always tries to convey these moments, to capture a momentary phenomenon of beauty. Fet was able to remember any transient, momentary states of nature and then reproduce them in his poems. This is the impressionism of Fet's poetry. Fet never describes a feeling as a whole, but only states, certain shades of feeling. Fet's poetry is irrational, sensual, impulsive. The images of his poems are vague, vague; Fet often conveys his feelings, impressions of objects, and not their image. In the poem “Evening” we read: It sounded over a clear river, It rang in a darkened meadow, It rolled over a silent grove, It lit up on the other bank... And what “sounded”, “ringed”, “rolled” and “lit” is unknown. On the hill it is either damp or hot, The sighs of the day are in the breath of the night, - But the lightning already glows brightly with blue and green fire... This is only one moment in nature, a momentary state of nature, which Fet managed to convey in his poem. Fet is a poet of detail, of a separate image, so in his poems we will not find a complete, holistic landscape. Fet has no conflict between nature and man; the lyrical hero of Fet's poetry is always in harmony with nature. Nature is a reflection of human feelings, it is humanized: Gently at night, a soft haze falls from the brow; In the poem “A fire burns with a bright light in the forest...” the narrative unfolds in parallel on two levels: externally landscape and internally psychological. These two plans merge, and by the end of the poem, only through nature does it become possible for Fet to talk about the internal state of the lyrical hero. A special feature of Fet's lyrics in terms of phonics and intonation is its musicality. Along with the traditional genres of elegies, thoughts, and messages, Fet actively uses the romance-song genre. This genre determines the structure of almost the majority of Fetov’s poems. For each romance, Fet created his own poetic melody, unique to him. The famous 19th century critic N. N. Strakhov wrote: “Fet’s verse has a magical musicality, and at the same time constantly varied; The poet has his own melody for every mood of the soul, and in terms of the richness of melodies no one can equal him.” Fet achieves the musicality of his poetry both by the compositional structure of the verse: a ring composition, constant repetitions (for example, as in the poem “At dawn, don’t wake me up...”), and by an extraordinary variety of strophic and rhythmic forms. Fet especially often uses the technique of alternating short and long lines: Dreams and shadows, Dreams, tremulously alluring into the darkness, All stages of Asleep pass in a light swarm... Fet considered music the highest of the arts. For Fet, the musical mood was an integral part of inspiration. The poetry of “pure art” saved Fet’s poetry from political and civil ideas and gave Fet the opportunity to make real discoveries in the field of poetic language. Not only was Fet’s ingenuity in strophic composition and rhythm, his experiments in the field of grammatical structure of poetry were bold (the poem “Whisper. Timid Breathing...” is written in only nominal sentences, there is not a single verb in it), in the field of metaphorics (to Fet’s contemporaries who perceived his poems literally, it was very difficult to understand, for example, the metaphor of “grass in weeping” or “spring and night covered the valley”).
So, in his poetry, Fet continues the transformations in the field of poetic language begun by the Russian romantics of the early 19th century. All his experiments turn out to be very successful, they continue and are consolidated in the poetry of A. Blok, A. Bely, L. Pasternak. The variety of forms of poems is combined with a variety of feelings and experiences conveyed by Fet in his poetry. Despite the fact that Fet considered poetry to be an ideal sphere of life, the feelings and moods described in Fet's poems are real. Fet's poems do not become outdated to this day, since every reader can find in them moods similar to the state of his soul at the moment.
Afanasy Fet (1820 – 1892)
Fet was the greatest poet of “pure art”, who also left behind the theoretical principles of this movement. He stated: “I have never been able to understand that art is interested in anything other than beauty.”
The poets of “pure art” opposed citizenship, ignored the social content of art, preached purely individualism, withdrawing into the world of experiences. The intimate theme was developed in a special way. The intimate world obscured reality from them. For the lyrical hero, love was the goal and meaning of life. Moving away from reality, the poets of “pure art” sought to sing the eternal norms of beauty. Beauty, as a mood, is the main theme of their lyrics.
Fet admired Arthur Schopenhauer. Fet denies the importance of reason in art. The poet speaks directly about this: In the matter of the liberal arts, I value reason little in comparison with instinct, the causes of which are hidden from us.”
Fet believed that one must create according to intuition and inspiration. Nature, love, beauty... - objects of art.
Fet flaunted his disregard for social issues, for the real facts of public life. In the 60s of the 19th century, Fet acted as a publicist and sang of a contented and prosperous life on the bed of nature. In poetry, Fet hiccuped “the only refuge from all sorrows, including civil ones.”
However, Fet’s work was broader than poetic theories: The poet in his lyrics captured the feelings and experiences of a person of the 19th century, created pictures of nature, and went down in the history of Russian poetry as a lyric poet, a master of lyrical miniatures.
Fet's poems amaze with the brightness and richness of colors, great emotional intensity, the ability to convey a specific detail, capable of causing a strong impression, a changing flow of feelings. Fetov's poetry is dominated by light colors. His pictures of nature play with all the colors of the rainbow, breathe all the smells. Fet's poetry is musical, in the truest sense of the word. It is impossible to classify Fet's poems by themes and genres. Love lyrics occupy a large, main place.
According to L.N. Tolstoy, Fet “showed lyrical audacity, a characteristic of great poets.” What did Fet's friend mean?
Firstly, Fet was able to notice and discover in the spiritual world of people and in the relationship between man and nature that no one had noticed or discovered before him. Secondly, he achieved figurative and metaphorical perfection in depicting the subtle experiences of a person feeling his unity with nature.
To confirm these theses, there is just one quatrain about the white St. Petersburg night:
The moon looks timidly into the eyes,
I'm amazed that the day hasn't passed,
But wide into the area of the night
The day spread its arms.
In this passage - in a condensed form - the whole essence of Fet's poetics: epithets (timidly, broadly), personifications (the month is looking, the day is spreading), metaphor (3-4th lines) create not only a picture of nature, but also convey sensations and moods people accompanying this picture.
Fet appears here as a poet-painter. But he is also a poet-composer, hearing and conveying not only meaning, but also sound inextricably linked with meaning. The word “autumn” has two supporting consonants – soft “s” and “n”. And in the poem “In Autumn” (1870), in eight lines, the autumn mood is created by alliteration to these two sounds: “n” and its soft version occur 14 times, and “s” and its soft pair - 12! Such an increased frequency of these sounds seems to create an autumn mood in itself, intertwined with the philosophical meaning of the poem, which tells about the changing stages of the life of nature and human life.
Fet always paints human experiences not at the level of fact, plot, or even, perhaps, at the level of words, but at the level of sensations, associations - picturesque, musical, emotional, spiritual, moral, mystical, religious, mythological - all kinds of things! Fet is an impressionist poet who creates an impression; lyricist who rejects the plot. He draws not the action, but its results, the consequences in his own feelings. That is why there are not many verbs in his lyrics, because the process and results of an action can be conveyed using other parts of speech.
It is no coincidence that it was Fet who was responsible for verbless poetic experiments, when an entire lyric poem is written without a single verb, in fact - in continuous nominal sentences, and at the same time a picture appears full of movement and life. Examples include two poetic masterpieces: “Whisper, timid breathing...” (1850) and “This morning, this joy...” (1881).
Analysis of A.A. Fet’s poem “This morning, this joy...”
Fet's poems are often lyrical miniatures with the most compressed action and the highest artistic perfection. They have a slow-motion effect: after the first reading, everything seems simple and understandable, but human depth and philosophical height are revealed only after intense work of the soul and mind.
With an interval of 31 years, Fet wrote two verbless poetic masterpieces. In the later of these, the poem “This Morning...”, in addition to the fact that it contains no verbs, there are two more strikingly bold innovations in the field of poetic syntax. First, the eighteen-line poem is a single sentence with countless homogeneous subjects. And secondly, demonstrative pronouns are used twenty-four times in different forms: “this”, “These”, “this”, “this”. All eighteen lines begin with these pronouns and, accordingly, with the sound “e”. It is easy to assume that such a design should be intrusive and create a feeling of uniformity and monotony. But this doesn't happen. Why?
Firstly, monotony is relieved precisely by alternating the forms of pronouns. For example, in the first stanza the scheme is as follows:
This...,...this,
This… … …,
This… …,
This… … …,
These..., these...,
This… … …, ….
Various enumeration options are also used in the other two stanzas.
Secondly, the monotony of constructions is overcome by the diversity and extreme capacity and expressiveness of the poem’s vocabulary. In addition to connecting prepositions and numerous connecting conjunctions “and”, the author uses 36 (!) nouns and only two adjective epithets – “blue” and “night”. Some of these nouns, governed by other nouns, in addition to adjectives, act as epithets: “the power of both day and light”, “speaking of the waters”, “dawns without eclipse”, “sigh... of the village”, “heat of the bed”. Some of these combinations also have metaphorical features (for example, “heat of the bed” or “talk of the waters”). All these techniques diversify the poetic language and eliminate monotony.
Another interesting detail: the sound of the poem is completely special. The clear predominance of voiced consonants and the sounds “z”, “s” seems to bring the music of the verse closer to the sound of the last and main word in the poem - “spring”. It is this word that the author gives the broadest meaning, and everything listed before is only partial components of the wonderful, always youthful and festive concept called by this bright word.
It is also interesting that the even and rhythmic alternation of tetrameter and trimeter trochee shortened every two lines, combined with the unstoppable enumeration of spring phenomena and signs, imitates the equally unstoppable running of a babbling spring brook. This deprives the painted picture of static nature and gives it vitality and movement.
How does Fet manage to compensate for the lack of verbs while still painting a picture full of action? The fact is that among the nouns listed in the poem there are many that denote the process of movement, action. In a hidden form, such nouns as “morning”, “joy”, “power”, “light”, “drops”, “flocks” are full of movement. The dynamics are conveyed even more clearly by the words “scream”, “talk”, “tongue”, “whistle”, “sigh”, “fraction”, “trill”.
This creates a picture of the coming spring of life, where human feelings and relationships (joy, tears, a sigh at night, a night without sleep, the heat of the bed) echo the awakening of natural phenomena (morning, the blue vault, screams and strings, the chatter of waters, willows and birches, midges , bees, dawns without eclipse, fractions and trills). This interweaving of the state of nature and human mood is one of the features of Afanasy Fet’s lyrics.
So, in this poem, the poet managed to depict the revival of young hopes in a completely daring and unexpected way, violating certain canons of versification and at the same time creating a unique poetic masterpiece.
An analysis of the innovation of Fet's poetry should begin with identifying the features of his poetic worldview. Despite the similarity of Fet’s poetry with the romantic lyrics of the beginning of the century (the predominance of the emotional element over the rational, the desire to express the “inexpressible,” the striving for the ideal, etc.) there is a fundamental difference. If for the romantic tradition the most important concept is duality, discord, disharmony (dream and reality, man and nature, lover and beloved, etc.), then for Fet’s poetry the fundamental concept is unity, fusion, harmony.
Analysis of the poem " Another May night“convinces that Fet sees man as the center of the universe, the favorite and chosen one of nature, for whom everything in it trembles joyfully and shines with beauty. A grateful song in response is all that nature expects from a poet. For Fet, nature is not a sphinx or an indifferent goddess with a metallic voice. He does not need to assure himself that in her “there is a soul... freedom... love and language.” Fet hears this voice every minute in the alarming song of the nightingale, sees this soul in the gentle gaze of the stars, feels this love in the shy trembling of birch foliage. For Fet, nature is alive and spiritual. But the poet himself is extremely open to all natural elements. His soul is like a perfect musical instrument, tuned in harmony with the harmony of the universe. The poet is literally permeated with these currents, ripples, and sounds.
The same unity is characteristic of those who love. They may be separated by unspoken words, years of separation, even death, but the merging of souls knows no limits or obstacles. The fragrant night, the fire of the fireplace, the maple leaf, the sobbing sounds of the piano speak for the people.
It is precisely this feature of Fet’s worldview that holds the key to his poetics. Hence the poet’s apparent “isolation” on himself, his attentiveness to the subtlest overflows of his own experiences. Hence the reluctance to express oneself in complete syntactic constructions, to develop a consistent thought, to “explain.” Emotional resonance is the action that the poet strives for and to which all specific techniques of his lyrics are subordinated (to which they are conditioned). So, for example, turning to the poem “ This morning, this joy...", we can identify some features of its form:
Simplicity of the composition: without any introduction, signs are strung together, signs are listed, and the last line sums it up: “This is all spring.”
Uniformity of repeated syntactic constructions (combinations of the demonstrative pronoun this all with new nouns) and against the background of their repetition, which sets the fast, volatile rhythm of the poem, lines stand out intonationally, where the uniformity is broken each time in a different way (either by the definition: “this blue vault”, then by the addition: “this talk of waters”, then a special sign that gives a different meaning to the line: “these drops are these tears” (instead of listing - an explanation with a touch of opposition), then a negative turn “this fluff is not a leaf”). This achieves a sense of diversity in unity, movement in a seemingly static image.
The verblessness of poetic speech is Fet’s favorite technique, violating the usual ideas about the possibilities of language.
Another of his favorite techniques is mixing rhythms and variety of stanzas. In this case, the general trochaic pattern is diversified by the rather complex structure of each stanza, in which tetrameters rhymed in pairs are interrupted by shortened 3rd and 6th lines that rhyme with each other, and in the 1st-2nd and 4th-5th verses the rhyme is female , and in the 3rd-6th - male.
The dynamics are also contained in the movement of the lyrical plot from morning to daylight, to the evening dawn and darkness of the night with nightingale trills.
In the string of spring signs, images of nature (flocks, willows, birches, midges, bees) and symbols of human states (joy, tears) are mixed, given in a single stream.
Also paradoxically mixed are simply the names of objects, phenomena that in themselves are not associated specifically with spring (willows, birches, mountains, valleys), and metaphors, personifications (the power of light, the sound of waters, drops - tears) depicting the features of spring. Thanks to this, a feeling is created that the mountains and valleys have re-emerged, just born along with spring.
Reticence, non-manifestation of images (this voice and whistle, this sigh of the night village, this darkness and heat of the bed), allowing for multiple meanings.
As a result, all the features of the poem are subordinated to one goal: to create a unique feeling of spring choking joy, deafened by sounds, overflowing with unclear but powerful feelings. Let us note once again that Fet is far from carefully recreating spring paintings. The instantaneousness of the impression is conveyed by the breakdown of the completed (formulated) image into picturesque details (willows - birches - drops - tears - fluff - leaf). If you try to “restore” the completeness of the image in an “academic manner”, you will get something like “on the leaves of willows and birches, tender as green fluff, drops glisten like tears.” After Fet’s impressionistic brushstrokes, such an image seems old-fashioned, ponderous and too rationalistic. Of course, Fet's lyrics are not limited to these airy visions, weightless images. It contains the embodiment of very real everyday experience, and thoughts about human destiny, and specific signs of the times. However, it is precisely the poetry of elusive moments that constitutes its innovative feature and is therefore at the center of our attention.
Innovation of poetic language was not an end in itself for Fet; it was not poetic experimentation. The originality of the lyrics was due to the special spiritual appearance of the poet, as if he left everything “material”, rationally mundane, to his double Shenshin and, as a result, achieved inhuman subtlety and sensitivity in poetry.
Book materials used: Yu.V. Lebedev, A.N. Romanova. Literature. Grade 10. Lesson-based developments. - M.: 2014
