The gravitation towards the epic, noticeable in the lyrics of Nekrasov, was especially fully expressed in his poems - the lyric-epic genre. Two poems are thematically united: "Grandfather" and "Russian Women"; the latter is a two-part cycle.

It is no coincidence that the poem "Grandfather" (1870) appeared in the collection of poetry in 1856: in 1855, after the death of Nicholas I, an amnesty was announced to the Decembrists. Nekrasov immediately responded to this event with his poem, just like Leo Tolstoy, who began in 1856 the story of the Decembrist, although his work stretched out for many years and grew into the concept of the novel War and Peace.

Nekrasov got acquainted with Herzen's editions - "Polar Star" and "Bell", used the memoirs of the Decembrist Baron Rosen, with whom he was familiar, "Notes of N. Volkonskaya". The key idea of ​​the poems was already expressed in "Grandfather":

The spectacle of the people's disasters

Unbearable, my friend;

Happiness of noble minds -

See contentment around.

Both in the poem "Grandfather" and in "Russian Women" Nekrasov develops a special type of lyric-epic narration, which can be called mosaic. There is no plot, as it is sometimes said, "stretched out", a sequential chain of events, but there are a number of scenes, individual episodes, landscapes, dialogues that make up a kind of artistic unity.

This principle was especially vividly reflected in the first of the poems about Russian women - in "Princess Trubetskoy", the text of which consists of two parts.

The first part describes farewell to his father, departure and travel across Siberia; real pictures, interspersed with memories of the serene youth and youth of a brilliant socialite, about a trip with her husband to Italy, about happiness experienced, and again the travel impressions of a trip, this time in Siberia. This whole part is built on an internal contrast: half-asleep, half-awake, struggling with reality, bright pictures of the serene past, interspersed with the terrible reality of the present - a journey into the depths of Siberia.

Each such episode is self-contained and resembles a lyrical expanded poem. For example, the second fragment of the description of the path - the most developed in this part of the poem - opens and ends with the motive of a rapid, persistent movement and a contrasting feeling of the experience:

Forward! The soul is full of longing

The road is getting harder

But dreams are peaceful and light -

She dreamed of her youth ...

In the finale, the princess is awakened from oblivion by a shackle ringing: a party of exiles is walking along the same path that her husband went through:

And she won't chase her thoughts away,

Do not forget to sleep!

"And that party here was ...

Yes, there are no other ways ...

But the blizzard covered their trail.

Hurry, coachman, hurry! .. "

With avaricious hints, the poet draws the image of Prince Trubetskoy. In one of the episodes of the return from Italy to Russia, the clue of the fate of many Decembrists is hidden: a young handsome man, fabulously rich, a man of the great world, is ready to give anything for a decent life for his homeland. Many of Nekrasov's earlier works, including The Poet and the Citizen, serve as a pretext for this fragment.

Gone are the rainbow dreams.

Before her a series of pictures

The God-Forgotten Side:

Harsh lord

And a wretched toiler-man

With my head down ...

As the first used to rule,

How the second slaves!

She dreams of groups of poor

In the fields, in the meadows,

She dreams of the moans of the barge haulers

On the Volga banks ...

Full of naive horror

She does not eat, does not sleep,

To fall asleep on the satellite she

In a hurry with questions:

"Tell me, is the whole region really like that?

There is no shadow of satisfaction? .. "

- You are in the kingdom of beggars and slaves! -

The short answer was ...

The second part of the poem is the conversation between the princess and the governor. The poet draws a clash of two characters: an old campaigner, who was ordered to detain this woman at all costs, and her will, her perseverance and her victory. The governor-general's stubbornness was broken by the nobility, the strength of feelings, and loyalty to the duty of a young woman. She sets off on a journey, he is shocked at how she has withstood all temptations, all trials and all threats.

Poem "Princess Volkonskaya" has a subtitle: "Grandma's Notes". The fact is that Nekrasov, while working on the poem, used memories Μ. N. Volkonskaya, at that time not published and kept in the archives of her son. By its construction, the poem is more complex than the previous one. It is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is arranged as if a good-natured grandmother-princess was writing notes for her grandchildren, bequeathed to them an iron bracelet, once forged by her husband, their grandfather, from the convict's own chain. This chapter contains the story of her father, General Raevsky, the famous hero of the Patriotic War of 1812. Nekrasov used not only Volkonskaya's memoirs, but also historical works dedicated to that time, Zhukovsky's poetic testimonies (his poem "A Singer in the Camp of Russian Soldiers"), Pushkin's memoirs about the old general (in one of the letters to his brother). The second chapter is full of a sense of trouble. The heroine leaves her father's estate for St. Petersburg and here she learns about her husband's participation in the conspiracy, in the uprising and about the sentence passed on him. A decision is made immediately:

Let the trouble be great.

I have not lost everything in the world.

Siberia is so awful

Siberia is far away

But people also live in Siberia! ..

Chapter three resembles the second part of "Princess Trubetskoy": it describes the struggle that one has to endure for the right to go to her husband in Siberia. But here the young woman, who has decided on a difficult path and full of hardships, is already struggling with close people who endlessly love her, mainly with her father, who cannot come to terms with the misfortunes to which she dooms herself. The poem complements "Princess Trubetskoy" in the sense that clearly, in laconic but expressive details, it completes the image of Tsar Nicholas I. In the answer to the princess, written in French, the emperor first frightens her with the horrors of the land where she wished to go, and then hints at the fact that the return in this case will no longer be possible for her. In other words, the threats of the torturer of her predecessor, Princess Trubetskoy, are repeated not as her own improvisation, but from hearsay, from the words of the tsar. This was really a serious warning. However, the princess also neglects this ominous "parting word".

The fourth chapter is the beginning of a long journey. In it, the Moscow high society and the flower of the Moscow intelligentsia appear in the salon of the heroine's relative by her husband, Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya. The most vivid impression of this last evening, spent among sympathetic, admired people (Nekrasov recalls musicians, famous writers Vyazemsky, Odoevsky), is the meeting of the heroine with Pushkin, who stopped by to say goodbye to her. They return to the time spent together, when the poet, sent by another tsar, Alexander I, to southern exile, made part of the journey with the family of General Raevsky. This final chapter, the most developed in it, and in the entire poem, a fragment testifies: Nekrasov knew to the smallest detail the life of Pushkin, who was the object of his most intent observations and reflections. The lines dedicated to Pushkin in "The Poet and the Citizen" were not accidental. N.A.Nekrasov again, now in a poem, returns to reflections on the motivations of the work of a true artist and gives them his own interpretation. A.S. Pushkin is the undisputed idol of Nekrasov, who recalls, using the memoirs of Raevskaya, a 20-year-old poet (in 1826, to whom the narration relates, he was already 27 years old), draws the image of a person who is direct, lively, sincere and, however immersed in his poetic world, busy with the creative process. Then Pushkin - an admirer and translator of Byron, carried away by observations of nature, paintings that will give him impulses for future romantic poems, now - busy with "The History of Pugachev". N.A.Nekrasov confuses the dates: the concept of the historical work about Pugachev dates back to a much later time, it arose only at the beginning of 1833, as well as a trip to the places of the Pugachev uprising, which took place in the fall of 1833. A.S. Pushkin could not speak about this with Volkonskaya. N.A.Nekrasov, displacing real facts, gives free rein to his artistic invention, draws a vivid image of Pushkin, open people whom he loved, but living in the world of his artistic ideas. The heroine catches herself thinking:

But I guess he didn't love anyone

Then, except for Muse: hardly

No more love occupied him

Her worries and sorrows ...

A.S. Pushkin in the poem most fully and vividly defines the essence of the feat of the Decembrists, referring to Μ. N. Volkonskaya:

Go, go! You are strong in soul

You are rich with bold patience,

May your fateful path be done peacefully,

Do not be confused by the loss!

Believe me, my soul is so pure

This hateful light is not worth it!

Blessed is he who changes his vanity

To the feat of unselfish love!

Chapter five - pictures of a desolate, harsh land, the path to the December cold and snowstorms along the Siberian highways. Some incidents could cost the heroine her life (a blizzard in the open steppe), and the news could sow confusion and chaos in the soul (a false rumor that Princess Trubetskoy was returned from the road). Self-righteous scoundrels in uniform, loyal to "the tsar and the fatherland", cause despair, but ordinary people always find a kind word for Volkonskaya in their hearts. The "Irkutsk test", similar to what happened to Trubetskoy, she also had to endure, as well as the terrible path no longer on a sleigh, but in a shaking cart along the snow-covered Siberian off-road, and, finally, the final happy episode: an unexpected meeting with Yekaterina Trubetskoy! The stronger in spirit Volkonskaya supports her in a moment of mental fatigue:

What have we lost? think, sister!

Vanity toys ... a little!

Now we have a road of goodness in front of us,

The road of God's chosen ones!

The sixth final chapter is the last distillation performed by the two women, before Blagodatsky the mine where the Decembrists are held in hard labor.

Thus, the two poems are not only thematically united ("Russian women"), but also were brought together by Nekrasov in a single story, glorifying the feat of female self-sacrifice. The last episode, a meeting with the Decembrist convicts and with her husband in the mine, is one of Nekrasov's stunning pictures of human grief and joy. It includes a thought that gives it special meaning and strength - the thought of the riches of the people's soul, which always, in any circumstances of life, gives its echo of someone else's pain and grief. This famous passage is included in the stanza of Chapter 6:

I want to say

Thank you, Russian people!

On the road, in exile, wherever I have been,

All the hard times of hard labor

People! I carried you more cheerful

My overwhelming burden.

May many sorrows fall to you in part,

You share other people's sorrows

And where my tears are about to fall

Yours fell there a long time ago! ..

You love the unfortunate, Russian people!

Suffering has made us related ...

"The law itself will not save you in hard labor!" -

At home they told me;

But I met good people there too,

At the extreme stage of the fall

They knew how to express us in their own way

Criminals pay homage;

Me with my inseparable Katya

They greeted with a satisfied smile:

"You are our angels!"

For our husbands

They did their lessons.

Please accept my low bow, poor people!

Thank you all!

Thank you! ... They considered their work nothing

For us, these people are simple.

But no one poured bitterness into the cup,

None of the people, relatives!

Nekrasov later said that the poem was greeted with such success, "which none of the previous writings had." This was largely due to the poetic form he happily found for the lyric-epic genre. If in the poet's lyric verses, as already mentioned, the breath of the epic is felt, then in the epic works - the strongest influence of the lyric element and even lyrical structures. The same principle of fragmentation of expanded poetic compositions, which makes itself felt so vividly in the cycle "Russian Women", defines the poems "Sasha", "Frost, Red Nose", "Peddlers", and especially his last genius creation - the poem "Who Lives Well in Russia"... This work will forever remain a mystery, a kind of great secret. N.A.Nekrasov began working on the poem already in the 1860s. (in 1866 the "Prologue" was published), but never completed it, the work was interrupted by death. However, if in the poem there is no complete implementation of the plan and one can only guess about it, then by some miracle the finale appeared, where all the plot and ideological lines were flawlessly brought together.

Until now, it remains unclear - and will never be clarified - the composition of the entire work. Disputes about the sequence of the parts continue to this day. There are indeed many oddities here: there are two Prologues in the poem (in the beginning and in The Peasant Woman); belated introduction, moreover, before the last part; some chapters have titles, others are simply numbered ("The Last One"). Now the text of the poem is printed like this: "Prologue"; "The Last One"; "Peasant Woman"; "A feast for the whole world." However, this is not an entirely accurate reflection of the lifetime edition. After all, even then Nekrasov did not hide the fact that he was talking about fragments of an unfinished work. In the last collection "Poems of N. A. Nekrasov" (1873–1874), the poem was published in the following sequence: "Prologue"; part one (1865); "The Last One" (from the second part "Who Lives Well in Russia") (1872); "Peasant Woman" (from the third part "Who Lives Well in Russia") (1873).

The final part, "Feast to the whole world", has not yet been here: it will be published only in 1876. However, the author's note to it at the time of its appearance was as follows: "This chapter follows the chapter" The Last One. " the whole world "must complete the whole poem, in addition there is epilogue, associated with the image of Grisha Dobrosklonov.

In other words, in modern editions, it is allowed to change the author's text or its layout based on a critical reading of the entire poem. This often happens in the work of textual critics: either mistakes are possible due to the author's carelessness or haste, or changes in the idea itself in the process of work.

However, textual criticism can do nothing more here. Perhaps only with more distinct comments, which, unfortunately, are often absent. It is not possible to answer the most fundamental question about the author's "last will" for the simple reason that it does not exist.

For example, "Peasant" in one of the manuscripts belonged to the second part ("From the second part"), which does not correspond to the content of the plot movement in the poem:

We already brought the priest,

They brought the landlord,

Yes, straight to you!

At the same time, "A Feast for the Whole World", as already mentioned, had a note: "This chapter follows the chapter" The Last One "", i.e. there is an obvious confusion in the author's proposals themselves (in the lifetime edition, we recall, behind the "Last" was "Peasant"),

As a complete artistic whole, the poem does not exist, the work continued, and the alternation of parts could well have changed, like the text itself. After all, the sequence of "Belkin's Tales" changed, and in a significant way, when Pushkin composed a cycle of them; the same thing happened with Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, and later with Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter. The composition of the poem "Who Lives Well in Russia" was never completed.

The mosaic principle, i.e. discreteness, isolation of individual fragments of the text, can be traced in the entire structure of the poem (in its division into parts), and in the individual parts themselves, falling into chapters:

Ch. I. Pop; ch. II. Rural fair; ch. III. Drunken night; ch. IV. Happy; ch. V. Landowner.

The last one

(consists of three chapters, but they are not named, but only numbered)

Peasant woman

Prologue; ch. I. Before marriage; ch. II. Songs; ch. III. Savely, the bogatyr of the Holy Russian; ch. IV. Demushka; ch. V. She-wolf; ch. Vi. A difficult year; ch. Vii. Governor's wife; ch. VIII. Woman's parable.

A feast for the whole world

Introduction; ch. I. A bitter time - bitter songs (subheadings: Merry, Barshchinnaya, About an exemplary servant - Yakov the faithful); ch. II. Wanderers and pilgrims (the ending is highlighted in a separate fragment: "About two great sinners"); ch. III. Both old and new (subheads: Peasant Sin, Hungry, Soldier); ch. IV. Good time - good songs (subheads: Salt, Burlak, Rus); ch. V has no title, in its compositional functions it is an epilogue.

The feast scenes, like the feast itself, end at dawn. The ending sounds symbolic. Wanderers and pilgrims fall asleep, and the seven truth seekers fall asleep. And at the same time, a happy man - Grisha Dobrosklonov (his prototype for Nekrasov was N.A.Dobrolyubov) - returns home, singing his song:

Share of the people

His happiness

Light and freedom

First of all!

The poet will repeat this stanza twice: it opens and ends with Grisha's "song", but this is the central motive of Nekrasov's entire work.

The "Feast for the whole world" concludes with a song symbolically named "Rus". Its initial and final stanzas represent a ring frame, consisting of invariant (identical) and variable lines:

You are wretched.

You are abundant

You and downtrodden

You and the omnipotent

Mother Russia! ..

You and wretched

You are abundant.

You and mighty

You and powerless

Mother Russia! ..

Once again, a great master of verse appears before us, who operates with the most complex constructions, translates sublime rhetoric, pathos into the subtlest associative connections, speaking in his own figurative, poetic language, which is subject only to poetic forms. Indeed, in this rearrangement of the old artistic thought in the reverse flow of ideas, the hope that lives in the poet's soul about a future happy Russia, no matter how hard its present, is expressed!

You and mighty,

You and powerless

You and stuffed,

You and omnipotent

The poem ends with a text that is not entitled in any way (marked with the Roman numeral V) - the shortest in the last part, and in the whole poem, a subhead, which is a condensed epilogue works. Once again before the readers Grisha Dobro-slopes, even half asleep thinking in poetry, like a true poet. The last six-line is the final, generalized, central idea of ​​the poem and at the same time the denouement of the plot, which turns us back to the "Prologue" with its agonizing questions:

Our wanderers should be under their own roof.

If only they could know what happened to Grisha.

He heard immense strength in his chest,

His blessed sounds delighted the ear,

The radiant sounds of the noble anthem -

He sang the embodiment of national happiness! ..

The striking phenomenon of Nekrasov's genius poem - the feeling of completeness, the completeness of a work that did not have a "last coinage", did not receive the final edition of the author who was dying at that moment, lies in the fact that it turned out to be permeated with through streams of ideas that receive organic and intensive development, so to return to their roots in the final. This is another example of an amazing sense of form that lives in the mind of a great artist, because the narrative spaces of the poem are very large, this is the most expanded of the works left by Nekrasov.

But this is not just the result of the poem, in itself remarkable for its inner integrity, it is also the result of the poet's entire creative and life destiny. From his first steps, he really knew "only one thought for power, one, but a fiery passion." Best of all and most accurately, it was expressed by him himself and also at the end of the road, in anticipation of inevitably approaching death:

I was called to sing of your suffering,

Patience amazing people!

And throw a single ray of consciousness

On the path that God leads you ...

I will die soon. A miserable legacy ...

In Pushkin's work, poems occupy the largest place along with lyrics. Pushkin wrote twelve poems (one of them - "Tazit" - remained unfinished), and more than twelve more survived in sketches, plans, initial lines.

At the Lyceum, Pushkin began, but did not finish the very weak, still quite childish playful poem "Monk" (1813) and the playful fairy tale poem "Bova" (1814). In the first, a Christian church legend is parodied in the spirit of Voltaire's freethinking, in the second - a popular folk tale.

In these works, young Pushkin is not yet an independent poet, but only an unusually talented student of his predecessors, Russian and French poets (Voltaire, Karamzin, Radishchev). The history of Pushkin's poem does not begin with these youthful experiences; and they were not published during the life of the author.

In 1817, Pushkin began his largest poem - "Ruslan and Lyudmila" - and wrote it for three whole years.

These were the years of the rise of revolutionary sentiments among the noble youth, when secret circles and societies were created that prepared the December uprising of 1825.

Pushkin, not being a member of the Secret Society, was one of the largest figures in this movement. He was the only one in these years (before the exile to the south) wrote revolutionary poems, which immediately dispersed in handwritten copies throughout the country.

But even in legal, printed literature, Pushkin had to fight against reactionary ideas. In 1817 Zhukovsky published the fantastic poem "Vadim" - the second part of the large poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" (the first part of it - "Thunderbolt" - was published in 1811). Standing on conservative positions, Zhukovsky wanted with this work to lead young people away from political action into the realm of romantic, religiously colored dreams. His hero (to whom the poet not accidentally gave the name of Vadim - the legendary hero of the uprising of Novgorodians against Prince Rurik) is an ideal young man striving for exploits and at the same time feeling in his soul a mysterious call to something unknown, otherworldly. He eventually overcomes all earthly temptations and, following this call unswervingly, finds happiness in mystical union with one of the twelve virgins whom he awakens from their wonderful sleep. The action of the poem takes place in Kiev, then in Novgorod. Vadim defeats the giant and saves the Kiev princess, whom her father intends to marry him. This reactionary poem was written with great poetic power, beautiful poetry, and Pushkin had every reason to fear its strongest influence on the development of young Russian literature. In addition, "Vadim" was at that time the only major work created by a representative of the new literary school, which had just finally won the fight against classicism.

Pushkin replied to "Vadim" with "Ruslan and Lyudmila", also a fairy tale poem from the same era, with a number of similar episodes. But all of its ideological content is sharply polemical in relation to the ideas of Zhukovsky. Instead of mysterious mystical feelings and almost ethereal images - in Pushkin everything is earthly, material; the whole poem is filled with playful, mischievous eroticism (description of Ruslan's wedding night, Ratmir's adventures with twelve virgins, Chernomor's attempts to take possession of the sleeping Lyudmila, etc., as well as in a number of author's digressions).

The polemic meaning of the poem is fully revealed at the beginning of the fourth canto, where the poet directly points to the object of this polemic - Zhukovsky's poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" - and mockingly parodies it, turning its heroines, mystically minded pure virgins, "nuns of saints", into frivolous inhabitants of the roadside "hotels", luring travelers to themselves.

The witty, brilliant, sparkling with joy Pushkin's poem immediately dispelled the mystical fog that surrounded folk fairy-tale motifs and images in Zhukovsky's poem. After Ruslan and Lyudmila, it became impossible to use them for the embodiment of reactionary religious ideas.

The good-natured Zhukovsky himself admitted his defeat in this literary struggle, giving Pushkin his portrait with the inscription: "To the winner student from the defeated teacher, on that highly solemn day when he finished his poem Ruslan and Lyudmila."

This poem put Pushkin in first place among Russian poets. They began to write about him in Western European magazines.

However, being the largest phenomenon in Russian literature and public life, Pushkin's playful fairy tale poem did not yet put Russian literature on a par with the literature of the West, where Goethe in Germany, Byron and Shelley in England, Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant in France acted in those years, each in his own way solved the most important issues of our time in his work.

Since 1820, Pushkin has been included in this series, creating one after another of his romantic poems, serious and deep in content, modern in terms of problems and highly poetic in form. With these poems ("The Prisoner of the Caucasus", "The Robber Brothers", "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai"), a new direction enters Russian literature: progressive, revolutionary romanticism - a poetic expression of the feelings and views of the most advanced social stratum, revolutionary-minded noble youth, the most active part of which were the Decembrists. Sharp dissatisfaction with everyone around, with the entire social order, in which life seems to be a prison, and a person is a prisoner; ardent desire for freedom; freedom as an object of almost religious cult (1) - this is one side of the attitude of the revolutionary romanticists of the 1920s. At the same time, their social loneliness, the lack of a living connection with the people, whose sufferings they deeply sympathized with, but whose life they knew little and little understood - all this gave a tragic and extremely subjective, individualistic character to their worldview. Feelings and tragic experiences of a lonely, proud, high above the crowd of a standing personality became the main content of Pushkin's romantic work. The protest against any oppression that gravitates over a person in a "civilized" society - political, social, moral, religious oppression - forced him, like all revolutionary romantics of that time, to sympathetically portray his hero as a criminal. a violator of all norms accepted in society - religious. legal, moral. The image favored by romantics is "a criminal and a hero" who "was worthy of both the horror of people and glory." Finally, characteristic of the romantics was the desire to divert poetry from reproducing the everyday reality they hated into the world of the unusual, exotic, geographical or historical. There they found the images of nature they needed - mighty and rebellious ("deserts, waves of the edge of pearl, and sea noise, and heaps of rocks"), and images of people, proud, brave, free, not yet touched by European civilization.

An important role in the poetic embodiment of these feelings and experiences was played by the work of Byron, in many respects close to the world outlook of the progressive Russian romantics. Pushkin, and behind him and other poets, first of all used the form of the "Byronic poem" successfully found by the English poet, in which the poet's purely lyrical experiences are clothed in a narrative form with a fictional hero and events that are far from the real events of the poet's life, but perfectly express his inner life, his soul. "... He comprehended, created and described a single character (precisely his own)," wrote Pushkin in a note about Byron's dramas. . ". So Pushkin in his romantic poems tried to "create himself a second time", now a prisoner in the Caucasus, now fleeing the "captivity of the stuffy cities" Aleko. Pushkin himself repeatedly pointed to the lyrical, almost autobiographical character of his romantic heroes.

The external features of Pushkin's southern poems are also associated with the Byron tradition: a simple, undeveloped plot, a small number of characters (two, three), fragmentary and sometimes deliberate vagueness of presentation.

A permanent property of Pushkin's poetic talent is the ability to vigilantly observe reality and the desire to speak about it in precise words. In poems, this was reflected in the fact that, creating romantic images of nature and people, Pushkin did not invent them, did not write (like, for example, Byron about Russia or, later, Ryleev about Siberia) about what he himself did not see, but always based on live personal impressions - the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabian steppes.

Pushkin's poems created and for a long time predetermined the type of romantic poem in Russian literature. They caused numerous imitations of secondary poets, and also had a strong influence on the work of such poets as Ryleev, Kozlov, Baratynsky and, finally, Lermontov.

In addition to The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Robber Brothers and the Bakhchisarai Fountain, written before 1824 and soon published, Pushkin conceived other romantic poems. "There are still poems wandering in my head," he wrote to Delvig in March 1821. His manuscripts contain sketches of several poems, where Pushkin, in different ways, with different plots and in different nationalities, thought to develop the same "heroic" or "criminal" romantic image and show his inevitably tragic fate. An excerpt from one of these poems, where the ataman of the Volga robbers was to become a hero, Pushkin published under the title "Brothers-robbers". The beginning of the great romantic poem "Vadim" has also survived.

In these years, perhaps under the influence of the tremendous success of "Ruslan and Lyudmila", Pushkin also thought about poems of a completely different type - magical and fairy-tale, with an adventurous plot and historical or mythological characters: about Bove the king, about the son of Vladimir Saint Mstislav and his the fight against the Circassians, about Actaeon and Diana. But these plans, which distracted the poet from his main task - the development and deepening of romantic themes - were never realized by him.

However, in the spring of 1821, Pushkin wrote a short poem "Gabrieliada", a witty, brilliant anti-religious satire - a response to the intensified political reaction, colored in those years by mysticism and religious hypocrisy.

In 1823, Pushkin experienced a severe crisis in his romantic worldview. Disappointed in the hope of a near realization of the victory of the revolution, first in the West, and then in Russia - and in this victory Pushkin, full of "careless faith", was completely convinced - he soon became disillusioned with all his romantic ideals - freedom, an exalted hero , high-end poetry, romantic eternal love. At this time he wrote a number of gloomy, bitter poems, pouring out in them his "bile" and "cynicism" (in his words) - "The Sower", "The Demon", "The Conversation of the Bookseller with the Poet" (and a little later - "Scene from Faust ") and others that remained unfinished in the manuscript. In these verses, he subjects to bitter ridicule all the main provisions of his romantic worldview.

Among such works is the poem "Gypsies", written in 1824. Its content is a critical exposure of the romantic ideal of freedom and the romantic hero. The romantic hero Aleko, who has fallen into the desired environment of complete freedom, the ability to freely do whatever he wants, reveals his true essence: he turns out to be an egoist and a rapist. The Gypsies also debunk the romantic ideal of unlimited freedom itself. Pushkin convincingly shows that complete freedom of action, the absence of restrictions and obligations in public life would be feasible only for primitive, idle, lazy, "timid and kind soul" people, and in personal life, in love, it turns out to be a purely animal passion, not connected with no moral worries. The inability to go beyond the purely romantic, subjective outlook on life inevitably leads the poet to a deeply gloomy conclusion that happiness on earth is impossible "and there is no protection from fate." "The Gypsies" - a poem of a turning, transitional period - is in ideological and artistic terms a huge step forward in comparison with the previous poems. Despite the completely romantic character and style of her, and the exotic setting, and the heroes, Pushkin here for the first time uses the method of purely realistic verification of the loyalty of his romantic ideals. He does not suggest speeches and actions to his characters, but simply places them in a given setting and traces how they manifest themselves in the circumstances they encounter. In fact, Aleko, a typical romantic hero, well known to us from Pushkin's poems and lyrics of the early 1920s, could not have acted otherwise in the position in which he found himself. The double murder he commits out of jealousy is fully consistent with his character and worldview, revealed both in the poem itself and in other romantic works of that era. On the other hand, Zemfira, as she is shown by Pushkin, could not have done otherwise, could not remain faithful to Aleko forever - after all, she is a gypsy, Mariula's daughter, and her story only repeats - with the exception of the tragic ending - the story of her mother.

This "objective" position of the author of "The Gypsy" in relation to the actions and feelings of his heroes was reflected in the form itself: most of the episodes of the poem are given in the form of dialogues, in a dramatic form, where the author's voice is absent, but the characters themselves speak and act.

"The Gypsies" is a work in which the crisis of the worldview of Pushkin the romantic is most profoundly reflected; at the same time, according to the method of developing the theme, it opened up new paths in Pushkin's work - the path to realism.

In the summer of 1824, Pushkin was expelled from Odessa to Mikhailovskoye, without the right to leave there. Constant and close communication with the peasants, with the people, apparently more than anything else, contributed to overcoming the severe crisis in the poet's worldview. He became convinced of the injustice of his bitter reproaches to the people for their unwillingness to fight for their freedom (2), he realized that "freedom" is not some abstract moral and philosophical concept, but a concrete historical one, always associated with social life, and for such freedom - political, economic - the people have always fought tirelessly (constant peasant revolts against the landowners, not to mention the uprisings of Pugachev, Razin, or the era of "Time of Troubles"). He should have seen that all his disappointments in previous romantic ideals are the result of insufficient knowledge of reality itself, its objective laws and little poetic interest in it itself. In 1825, a sharp turn took place in Pushkin's work. Having finally broken with romanticism, Pushkin emerges from his crisis. His poetry takes on a clear and generally light, optimistic character. The former task of his poetry - the expression of his own feelings and suffering, a poetic response to the imperfections of life, contrary to the subjective, albeit noble, requirements of the romantic, the embodiment of romantic ideals in the images of the unusual - exotic, idealized nature and extraordinary heroes - is replaced by a new one. Pushkin consciously makes his poetry a means of cognition of ordinary reality, which he had previously rejected, strives to penetrate into it as an act of poetic creativity, to understand its typical phenomena, objective laws. The desire to correctly explain human psychology inevitably leads him to the study and artistic embodiment of social life, to the depiction of social conflicts in various plot forms, the reflection of which is human psychology.

The same desire to cognize reality, modernity pushes him to study the past, to reproduce important moments in history.

In connection with these new creative tasks, both the nature of the objects depicted in Pushkin and the very style of the depiction change: instead of exotic, unusual - everyday life, nature, people; instead of the poetically sublime, abstract, metaphorical style - a simple, close to colloquial, but nevertheless highly poetic style.

Pushkin creates a new direction in literature - realism, which later (from the 40s) became the leading direction of Russian literature.

The main, predominant embodiment of this new, realistic direction, these new tasks of correct knowledge of reality and its laws, Pushkin gives at this time not so much in poems as in other genres: in drama (Boris Godunov, "small tragedies"), in prose novels ("Belkin's Tales", "The Captain's Daughter", etc.), in the poetic novel - "Eugene Onegin". In these genres, it was easier for Pushkin to implement new principles and develop new methods of realistic creativity.

The historical folk tragedy Boris Godunov (1825) and the central chapters of Eugene Onegin (3) (1825-1826) were a kind of manifesto for this new trend in Russian literature.

At the same time (in December 1825) Pushkin wrote the first realistic poem - the playful, cloudless, cheerful "Count Nulin". In it, on a simple, almost anecdotal plot, many beautiful paintings, landscapes, conversations of the most ordinary, "prosaic", everyday content, turned into genuine poetry, are strung. Almost all the images with which Pushkin, in a half-serious, half-joking stanza from Onegin's Travel, characterizes his new realistic style, as opposed to the romantic “heaps of rocks”, “the sound of the sea”, “deserts”, the image of the “proud maiden” (4) : here is a slope, and a fence, and gray clouds in the sky, and a rainy season, and a backyard, and ducks, and even a "mistress" (albeit a bad one) as the heroine of the poem ...

The defeat of the December uprising of 1825 and the ensuing political and social reaction, a temporary halt in the development of the Russian revolutionary movement changed the character of Russian literature: the theme of the struggle for freedom disappeared from it for several years. Pushkin, returned by Nicholas I from exile, having the opportunity to communicate with friends, enjoying immense popularity among the public, nevertheless did not feel happy.

The stifling public atmosphere after the defeat of the Decembrists, reactionary, cowardly, philistine sentiments, supported by new reactionary journalism, which reigned in society and infected many of his friends - all this caused at times in Pushkin attacks of complete despair, expressed in such verses as "Gift in vain, an accidental gift, life, why are you given to me? " or "In the mundane steppe, sad and boundless ..." ("The last key is the cold key of oblivion, it will quench the heat of the heart sweeter than everyone else").

The idea that death is preferable to life, Pushkin thought to base the gloomy poem, begun by him in 1826, about the hero of the Gospel legend - Agasfera ("Eternal Jew"), who was punished for his crime before God by immortality. However, these dark themes remained a temporary episode in Pushkin's work. He managed to overcome his difficult mood, and the poem about Ahasfera was left at the very beginning.

During these years of social decline, Pushkin's creative work did not stop, but at this time he developed topics that were not directly related to the theme of the liberation movement. The subject of the poet's close attention is the human psyche, characters, "passions", their influence on the human soul (central chapters of "Eugene Onegin", "little tragedies", sketches of prose stories).

Among the works of Pushkin in 1826-1830, inspired by the "psychological" theme, we do not find a single poem. (True, in the poems "Poltava" and "Tazit" the development of the psychology of heroes occupies a large place, but it is not the main task of these purely political works.) A novel in verse, a dramatic study, a prose story, or story.

In the same years, Pushkin wrote a number of major works of political content, but of a different nature. In his work of this time, the theme of the Russian state, the fate of Russia in the struggle with the West for its independence finds its embodiment - an echo of Pushkin's youthful memories of the events of 1812-1815. In parallel with this, he poetically develops the most important theme of the multinationality of the Russian state, writes about the historical regularity of the unification of many different peoples into one state whole. In the poem "Poltava" these themes are developed on the historical material of the struggle of Russia at the beginning of the 18th century. with the then strongest military state - Sweden. Here Pushkin poetically reveals his assessment of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. In another, unfinished, poem "Tazit", based on Pushkin's impressions from his second trip to the Caucasus (1829). and reflections on the complexity and difficulty of the issue of ending the enmity of the peoples of the Caucasus with the Russians, the same national-political theme is developing.

In the 30s. Pushkin's work is again almost entirely devoted to the development of social issues. The people, the serf peasantry, their life, their poetry, their struggle for their liberation - are becoming one of the main themes of Pushkin the artist and historian, as he is in these years. The life of a serf village is shown in the unfinished "History of the village of Goryukhina", in "Dubrovsky"; in the fairy tales and drama "Mermaid" motifs of folk poetry are reproduced and artistically processed. Pushkin first shows the struggle of the peasants against the landowners in the form of "robbery" (in "Dubrovsky"), and these are no longer romantic "robber brothers", but living, real types of peasants and household servants. Pushkin devotes two great works to the real peasant war, "Pugachevism" - the story "The Captain's Daughter" and the historical research "The History of Pugachev". The popular uprising against the feudal lords-knights and the participation of representatives of the bourgeois class in it constitute the unfinished drama "Scenes from the times of knights".

During these years, Pushkin introduced a new hero into literature - a suffering, oppressed "little man", a victim of an unfair social order - in the story "The Station Keeper", in the novel "Yezersky", which he had begun, in the poem "The Bronze Horseman".

Pushkin reacts sharply to the changes taking place before his eyes in the class composition of the intelligentsia, in particular the writers' environment. If before "only the nobles were engaged in literature", as Pushkin repeated more than once, seeing in this the reason for the independent behavior of the writer in relation to the authorities. to the government, now representatives of different ranks, bourgeois intelligentsia are beginning to play an ever larger role in literature. In those years, this new democracy was not yet a "revolutionary democracy"; on the contrary, most of its leaders, fighting against representatives of the ruling noble, landlord class for their place in life, showed no opposition to the government or the tsar.

The only force capable of opposing its independence to government arbitrariness, to be a "powerful defender" of the people, Pushkin considered the nobility from which the Decembrists emerged, the impoverished nobility, but "with education", "with hatred against aristocracy" (5). “There is no such terrible element of rebellion in Europe,” wrote Pushkin in his diary. “Who were on the square on December 14?

These thoughts about the role of the ancient nobility in the liberation movement (in the past and in the future), the condemnation of its representatives, who do not understand their historical mission and creep before the authorities, before the "new nobility", tsarist servants, - Pushkin embodied not only in publicistic notes, but and in works of art, in particular, they constitute the main, the main content of the first stanzas of "Yezersky" written by Pushkin.

In the 30s. Pushkin had to wage a fierce literary struggle. His opponents were reactionary, cowardly, unscrupulous journalists and critics, who seized almost the entire readership, indulging the philistine tastes of readers from small landowners and officials, not disdaining political denunciations of their literary enemies. They persecuted Pushkin for everything new that he introduces into literature - a realistic direction, simplicity of expression, unwillingness to moralize ... The polemic with modern journalism about the tasks of literature was included by Pushkin in the initial stanzas of Yezersky, the same polemic constitutes the main content of the whole poem - "House in Kolomna".

A long series of poems, written from 1820 to 1833, Pushkin ended with The Bronze Horseman - a poem about the conflict between the happiness of an individual and the welfare of the state - his best work, remarkable both in terms of the extraordinary depth and courage of thought, the sharpness of the historical and social problem posed by the poet and for the perfection of artistic expression. This work still causes controversy and various interpretations.

Pushkin used many genres in his work, but the poem has always remained a favorite form for expressing his "mind of cold observations and heart of sorrowful notes." Pushkin marked almost every stage of his development with a poem, almost every life problem that faced him found expression in the poem. The enormous distance between the light, brilliant poem of twenty-year-old Pushkin - "Ruslan and Lyudmila" - and the deeply philosophical poem "The Bronze Horseman", written by the thirty-four-year-old sage poet, clearly shows the swiftness of Pushkin's path, the steepness of the peak to which Pushkin climbed, and with him and all Russian literature.

(1) Freedom! he was looking for you alone in the desert world .... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... And with faith, fiery prayer, Your proud idol embraced. ("Prisoner of the Caucasus".) (2) Graze, peaceful peoples! A cry will not awaken you for honor. Why do the flocks need the gifts of freedom? They must be cut or sheared. Their inheritance from clan to clan Yarmo with rattles and whip. ("The Desert Sower of Freedom ...", 1823) (3) The original concept (1823) and the first chapters of the novel date back to the period of the Pushkin crisis. Realistic images in them are given polemically, in order to mockingly reduce traditional romantic images and situations in everyday life. "... I am writing a new poem," Eugene Onegin ", where I choke on bile" (letter to AI Turgenev dated December 1, 1823); "... do not believe N. Raevsky, who scolds him (" Eugene Onegin ". - S. B.) - he expected romanticism from me, found satire and cynicism and did not swell decently" (letter to his brother, January-February 1824 G.). (4) I need other pictures: I love the sandy slope, In front of the hut there are two mountain ash, A gate, a broken fence, There are gray clouds in the sky, Heaps of straw in front of the threshing floor Yes, a pond in the shadow of thick willows, Expansion of young ducks. My ideal now is the mistress .... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Sometimes, rainy the other day, I turned to the barnyard ... (Excerpts from "Onegin's Travel", 1829) (5) That is, the ruling elite.

CM. Bondi. Poems by Pushkin.

Russian poet Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (real name Gorenko), a prominent representative of the creative intelligentsia, wife of the famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov until 1918. After the publication of her first poems in 1912, Akhmatova became a cult figure among the intelligentsia and part of the literary scene of St. Petersburg. Her second book, Rosary (1914), was critically acclaimed, who praised the merits of deliberate, carefully crafted verse, in contrast to the vagueness of the Symbolist style that dominated Russian literature of the period.

Anna Azhmatova wrote a lot of lyric poems, piercing love poetry is loved by millions of people of different generations. But her harsh attitude in her work to the atrocities of power led to a conflict. Under Soviet rule, there was an unspoken ban on Akhmatova's poetry from 1925 to 1940. During this time, Akhmatova devoted herself to literary criticism, in particular, translating Pushkin into other languages.

A change in the political climate finally allowed Akhmatova to be admitted to the Writers' Union, but after World War II, there was an official decree banning the publication of her poetry. Her son, Lev, was arrested in 1949 and held in prison until 1956 to try to win his release, Akhmatova wrote poetry praising Stalin and the government, but it was useless.

Although Akhmatova often faced official government opposition to her work during her life, she was deeply loved and praised by the Russian people, in part because she did not leave her country during difficult political times. Her most accomplished works, Requiem (which was not published in full in Russia until 1987) and Poem Without a Hero, are a reaction to the horror of Stalin's terror, during which she experienced artistic repression, as well as enormous personal loss. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she spent most of her life, in 1966.

Pushkin's poems, a list of which is presented in this review, occupy a prominent place in the history of Russian poetry. They had a tremendous impact on the development of Russian literature of the 19th century, defining the main themes of the works of this genre for several decades to come.

Historical

Pushkin's poems, the list of which should begin with the most famous works, are devoted to different topics. But most of all the author was interested in the plots of the past and topics relevant to his time.

So, the poet paid great attention to the plots of the story.

Romantic

Some of Pushkin's poems, the list of which should be continued by mentioning his freedom-loving works, were written under the influence of J. Byron.

In them, the poet portrayed strong natures who value freedom more than life.

So, Pushkin's romantic poems are permeated with the pathos of love of freedom.

Other works

The poet's poems are distinguished by both an interesting plot and magnificent language.

Pushkin's works show the diversity of his interests.