Yesenin's poetry ... Wonderful, beautiful, unique world! A world that is close and understandable to everyone, Yesenin is a true poet of Russia; a poet who rose to the heights of his skill from the depths of folk life. His homeland - the Ryazan soil - fed and watered him, taught him to love and understand what surrounds us all. Here, on the Ryazan land, for the first time Sergei Yesenin saw all the beauty of Russian nature, which he sang in his poems. From the first days of his life, the poet was surrounded by the world of folk songs and legends:
I was born with songs in a grass blanket.
Spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow.
In the spiritual form in Yesenin's poetry, the features of the people were dazzlingly revealed - its "restless, daring strength", scope, cordiality, spiritual restlessness, deep humanity. Yesenin's whole life is closely connected with the people. Maybe that's why the main characters of all his poems are ordinary people, in every line one can feel the close, not weakening over the years, connection between the poet and the person - Yesenin with Russian peasants.
Sergei Yesenin was born into a peasant family. “As a child, I grew up breathing the atmosphere of folk life,” the poet recalled. Yesenin was already perceived by his contemporaries as a poet of “great song power”. His poems are like smooth, calm folk songs. And the splashing of the wave, and the silvery moon, and the rustle of the reeds, and the immense blue of the sky, and the blue expanse of the lakes - all the beauty of the native land was embodied over the years in poems full of love for the Russian land and its people:
O Rus - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river -
I love to joy and pain
Your lake longing...
“My lyrics are alive with one great love,” Yesenin said, “love for the Motherland. The feeling of the motherland is the main thing in my work.” In Yesenin's poems, not only “Rus shines”, not only the poet’s quiet confession of love for her sounds, but also expresses faith in a person, in his great deeds, in the great future of his native people. The poet warms every line of the poem with a feeling of boundless love for the Motherland:
I became indifferent to shacks,
And the hearth fire is not nice to me,
Even apple trees spring blizzard
I fell out of love for the poverty of the fields.
Now I like it differently...
And in the consumptive moonlight
Sergey Yesenin - the most popular, most read poet in Russia.
Creativity S. Yesenin belongs to the best pages not only Russian, but also. world poetry, into which he entered as a subtle, penetrating lyricist.
Yesenin's poetry is distinguished by the extraordinary power of sincerity and immediacy in the expression of feelings, the intensity of moral quests. His poems are always a frank conversation with the reader, the listener. "It seems to me that I write my poems only for my good friends," the poet himself said.
At the same time, Yesenin is a deep and original thinker. The world of feelings, thoughts and passions of the lyrical hero of his works is complex and contradictory - a contemporary of an unprecedented era of the tragic breakdown of human relations. The poet himself also saw the contradictions of his work and explained them this way: "I sang when my land was sick."
A faithful and ardent patriot of his Motherland, S. Yesenin was a poet who was vitally connected with his native land, with the people, with his poetic work.
THE THEME OF NATURE IN YESENIN'S WORKS
Nature is a comprehensive, main element of the poet's work, and the lyrical hero is connected with it innately and for life:
I was born with songs in a grass blanket.
Spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow"
("Mother went to the bathing suit through the forest ...", 1912);
"Be blessed forever,
that came to flourish and die"
("I do not regret, I do not call, I do not cry ...", 1921).
The poetry of S. Yesenin (after N. Nekrasov and A. Blok) is the most significant stage in the formation of the national landscape, which, along with traditional motifs of sadness, desolation, poverty, includes surprisingly bright, contrasting colors, as if taken from popular popular prints:
"Blue sky, colored arc,
<...>
My end! Beloved Russia and Mordva!";
"Swamps and swamps,
Blue boards of heaven.
Coniferous gilding
The forest is ringing";
"O Russia - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river..."
"blue sucks his eyes"; "smells of apple and honey"; "Oh, my Russia, dear homeland, Sweet rest in the silk of kupyrs"; "Ring, ring golden Russia ...".
This image of bright and sonorous Russia, with sweet smells, silky herbs, blue coolness, was introduced into the self-consciousness of the people by Yesenin.
More often than any other poet, Yesenin uses the very concepts of "land", "Rus", "homeland" ("Rus", 1914; "Goy you, Russia, my dear ...", 1914; "Beloved land! Heart dreaming...", 1914; "Hewn drogs sang...",<1916>; "Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness...", 1917; "O land of rains and bad weather...",<1917>).
Yesenin depicts celestial and atmospheric phenomena in a new way - more picturesquely, pictorially, using zoomorphic and anthropomorphic comparisons. So, his wind is not cosmic, floating out of the astral heights, like Blok’s, but a living being: “a tender red-haired colt”, “lad”, “schemnik”, “thin-lipped”, “dancing trepaka”. Month - "foal", "raven", "calf", etc. Of the luminaries, in the first place is the image of the moon-month, which is found in approximately every third work of Yesenin (in 41 out of 127 - a very high coefficient; compare with the "star" Fet out of 206 works, 29 include images of stars). At the same time, in the early verses until about 1920, the "month" prevails (18 out of 20), and in the later - the moon (16 out of 21). The month primarily emphasizes the external form, figure, silhouette, convenient for all kinds of subject associations - "horse muzzle", "lamb", "horn", "kolob", "boat"; the moon is first of all light and the mood caused by it - "thin lemon moonlight", "lunar reflection, blue", "the moon laughed like a clown", "uncomfortable liquid moonlight". The month is closer to folklore, it is a fairy-tale character, while the moon brings elegiac, romance motifs.
Yesenin is the creator of a one-of-a-kind "tree novel", the lyrical hero of which is a maple, and the heroines are birches and willows. The humanized images of trees are overgrown with "portrait" details: a birch has a "stand", "hips", "breasts", "leg", "hairstyle", "hem", a maple has a "leg", "head" ("Maple you my fallen, icy maple..."; "I am wandering through the first snow..."; "My way"; "Green hairstyle...", etc.). Birch, thanks in large part to Yesenin, has become a national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, mountain ash, bird cherry.
More sympathetically and penetratingly than in previous poetry, the images of animals are revealed, which become independent subjects of tragically colored experiences and with which the lyrical hero has a blood-kinship relationship, as with "smaller brothers" ("Song of the Dog", "Kachalov's Dog", "Fox", "Cow", "Son of a bitch", "I will not deceive myself ...", etc.).
Yesenin's landscape motifs are closely connected not only with the circulation of time in nature, but also with the age course of human life - a feeling of aging and withering, sadness about the past youth ("This sadness can not be scattered now ...", 1924; "The golden grove dissuaded. ..", 1924; "What a night! I can't...", 1925). A favorite motive, renewed by Yesenin for almost the first time after E. Baratynsky, is separation from his stepfather's home and returning to his "small homeland": images of nature are colored with a sense of nostalgia, refracted in the prism of memories ("I left my dear home ...", 1918 ; "Confessions of a Hooligan", 1920; "This street is familiar to me...",<1923>; "Low house with blue shutters...",<1924>; "I'm walking through the valley. On the back of the head is a kepi...", 1925; "Anna Snegina", 1925).
For the first time with such sharpness - and again after Baratynsky - Yesenin posed the problem of the painful relationship of nature with the victorious civilization: "a steel chariot defeated the living horses"; "... they squeezed the village by the neck // Stone hands of the highway"; "as in a straitjacket, we take nature into concrete" ("Sorokoust", 1920; "I am the last poet of the village ...", 1920; "Mysterious world, my ancient world ...", 1921). However, in later poems, the poet, as it were, forces himself to love "stone and steel", stop loving the "poverty of the fields" ("Uncomfortable liquid moonlight",<1925>).
A significant place in Yesenin's work is occupied by fantastic and cosmic landscapes, designed in the style of biblical prophecies, but acquiring a human-divine and god-fighting meaning:
"Now on the peaks of the stars
The earth is rearing you!";
"I will then thunder with wheels
Suns and moons like thunder..."
Yesenin's poetry of nature, which expressed "love for all living things in the world and mercy" (M. Gorky), is also remarkable in that for the first time it consistently pursues the principle of likening nature to nature, revealing from the inside the richness of its figurative possibilities: calm water..."; "rye does not ring with a swan's neck"; "a curly lamb - a month // Walks in the blue grass", etc.
FOLKLORE MOTIVES IN THE WORKS OF S. YESENIN
Love for the native peasant land, for the Russian village, for nature with its forests and fields pervades all of Yesenin's work. The image of Russia for the poet is inseparable from the element of the people; big cities with their factories, scientific and technological progress, social and cultural life do not evoke a response in Yesenin's soul. This, of course, does not mean that the poet was not at all concerned about the problems of the present or that he looks at life through rose-colored glasses. He sees all the troubles of civilization in isolation from the earth, from the origins of people's life. “Rising Rus” is rural Rus; the attributes of life for Yesenin are "a loaf of bread", "shepherd's horn". It is no coincidence that the author so often refers to the form of folk songs, epics, ditties, riddles, spells.
It is significant that in Yesenin's poetry, a person is an organic part of nature, he is dissolved in it, he is joyfully and recklessly ready to surrender to the power of the elements: “I would like to get lost in the greenery of your bells”, “Dawn springs twisted me into a rainbow”.
Many images borrowed from Russian folklore begin to take on a life of their own in his poems. Natural phenomena appear in his images in the form of animals, bear the features of everyday village life. Such animation of nature makes his poetry related to the pagan worldview of the ancient Slavs. The poet compares autumn with a "red mare" that "scratches her mane"; his month is a sickle; Describing such an ordinary phenomenon as the light of the sun, the poet writes - "solar oil is pouring on the green hills." A favorite image of his poetry is a tree, one of the central symbols of pagan mythology.
Yesenin's poetry, even clothed in the traditional images of the Christian religion, does not cease to be pagan in nature.
I'll go in a skullcap, bright monk,
Steppe path to the monasteries.
This is how the poem begins and ends with:
With a smile of joyful happiness
I go to other shores
Having tasted the incorporeal communion
Yesenin is a representative of the new, post-Nekrasov generation of peasant and landscape lyrics. Yesenin's poetry is a source of deep reflection on many socio-philosophical problems: history and revolution, village and city, life and death, state and people, people and the individual, and what interests us most of all - nature and man. The expression of deep human feelings through pictures of nature is the most characteristic feature of Yesenin's lyrics. Yesenin's lyrics are incredibly filled with soul, movement. She is very versatile. Openness of style, pressure, scope, feelings prevailing over rationalism, “riot of eyes and flood of feelings” “I do not regret, I do not call, I do not cry” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes Fiction. M. 1961 - her emotional business cards. Expressing itself in the transfer of images extremely succinctly, but, nevertheless, as picturesque as possible, his lyrics make us think about how Yesenin succeeded in such transfer of the image. How it was possible to feel like a “one-legged maple”, to feel how “the bush of my head withered” “Hooligan” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes Fiction. M.1961? But Yesenin's lyrics were not only the lyrics of nature. And if he grew his imagery in nature, sensuality in his nature, then he found persuasiveness in his era. Time lived in his poetry. The stormy time of wars and revolutions, the uncertainty hovering in the air, could not but leave its mark on the poetry of a person who is not indifferent to the fate of the Motherland. She is imbued with the understanding that the end of the Russia in which he was born is near, the patriarchal, mossy, dense, the one that he felt. Understanding the rigidity of the new. Understanding that that Russia cannot be returned by compassion "for all life on earth." The one who lives in Yesenin's lyrics, his lyrical hero is complex. His character is dramatic, and often even tragic. He, this hero exists at that point in the fate of the country, when not only the country is changing, but also the age-old way, the structure of social thought. Yesenin's poetry subjugates us to itself, does not let go a single step. Her emotional, soulful dance of verse is incredibly gossip with a clear inner rhythm. No matter how it sounds, but he was a truly inspired singer of his native land, its nature. The first publications of poems by a young, unknown poet in print date back to 1914. Then there are collections of his poems "Radunitsa" (1916) and "Dove" (1918). With these books, Yesenin revealed to the reader the charm and magic of Central Russian nature, the innermost world of his lyrical hero. Yesenin had the rarest gift to hear the almost inaudible, quiet vibrations of nature. He could hear the “ringing of a broken sedge” and how “gentle barley straw groans” “The road thought about the red evening” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961. The beauty of his poetic vision of nature, its "humanization", makes anyone see it with him. Bird cherry “in white cloaks”, “mournful spruce girls”, “green birch”, “maple on one leg”, “swallow stars”. All this mystical, quiet fairy-tale forest grows throughout its vast “blue Russia”, as an example of the absolute, in its uniqueness, metaphorical image. The person who managed to grow this forest and populated it with a “weeping blizzard”, “autumn, a red mare scratching her mane”, “scheme-wind” is the finest lyricist, a man of nature who found and understood her soul. The method of impersonation, the most frequent technique that Yesenin resorted to in his natural lyrics, made his style completely unique, inaccessible, practically, for copying. Yesenin should by no means be called only a landscape painter, a singer of native bushes and valleys. He was a comprehensive poet, with a great understanding of the generality and integrity of the world, a poet of a very tragic fate. What is his death worth? But this same man, the poet, reveled in life, loved life so much, without any regard for people's opinion. This same man, in his fierce love, was poetically observant, precise, noting, capturing in a rich image a momentary manifestation of beauty or tenderness. Especially natural beauty. With how accurate beautiful images he could fill the simple, it would seem, and unpretentious things that surrounded him - let's recall the verses that he himself called the first:
“Where the cabbage patches
Sunrise pours red water,
Maple tree small womb
The green udder sucks” “Where the cabbage beds are” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. . 1961
Stunningly beautiful and sensual, yet so simple. Absolutely all poetic objects, all images begin to live and move here. Such dynamics of pictures of nature, as in Yesenin, was not in Russian landscape lyrics either before or after Yesenin. Yesenin's nature is filled with color, there are countless colors, the palette is very wide. It contains the slightest shades of colors. There are also harmonious, easily combined and sharply contrasting ones: “silver dews are burning” “Good morning!” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. . 1961, “golden-brown whirlpool”, “golden decay in the fields”, “blue fire”. Everything seems to glow, plays, refracting in the rays of the sun or sparkling under the moon. But the main Yesenin colors are blue and blue. These colors in Yesenin create an atmosphere of the joy of being. Through a simple selection, I tried to count Yesenin's words that have a blue color or blue as their basis. She started and stopped, realizing that only on one page of a five-volume book there could be up to three of them. These colors, the colors of the sky, the colors of immense serenity emphasize, enhance the depth of the image. In blue there is some kind of piercing and endless space. Perhaps for Yesenin this color was something more than just a color, maybe it was for him some kind of memory from childhood, or symbolized a huge, immense Russia. It seems to me that for Yesenin, “blue” is everything. All that breathes and all that lives; what used to be called "ether". “The blue now dozes, then sighs” “The melted clay dries” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961. Blue is the color of our planet, the color of the globe. Any comparison, any metaphor, symbolism, and the blue color was for Yesenin, without a doubt, symbolic, it does not exist on its own, not for the sake of the beauty of the style. He uses them only as a single thing in order to more fully convey his feelings, their emotional structure, impulse. Does he have blue Russia “I left my dear home” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M .: Fiction .. 1961 or “blue sucks eyes” “Goy you, my dear Russia” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961, but it's always beautiful and presentable:
“Barankas hang on wattle fences
Bread brew pours warmth.
Sun planed shingles
They block the blue” “Barankas hang on the wattle fences” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961
Still, of course, there was a golden color, but this is a separate, personal part of Yesenin's poetic scale. This color was for him a connecting, almost druidic thread between him and nature, in autumn, withering leaves on trees. The idea of the original, deep unity of man and nature is undeniable for Yesenin. She is one of the main driving forces of his poetry. The roots of this poetry are folk. Among the ancient Slavs, as well as among the Celtic peoples, trees were revered as living beings. Yes, and life strongly depended on the tree. Shoes, dishes and other household items were made of wood. “Everything is from the tree - this is the religion of the thought of our people,” Yesenin said: “we are all apple trees and cherries of the blue garden” “Singing Call” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M .: Fiction .. 1961 Therefore, it is not surprising that nature itself, personified in trees, most visually resembling a person (crown-head, body, branches-arms). There are two images animated by Yesenin, which he carried through his entire poetic life. It is maple and birch. The Yesenin birch is multicolored and absolutely alive: “Birches! Birch girls!” “Letter to my sister” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M .: Fiction .. 1961. It can be “green-haired”, white - “slender and white, like a birch” “To the warm light, on the father's threshold” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961, “birch-candle”, also blue, walking, any. It was the birch that became one of the initial bridges from Yesenin to the reader. The first printed poem for Yesenin was precisely “Birch”, which appeared in the children's magazine “Mirok” in 1914. Having lived in Yesenin's lyrics all his poetic life, the birch tree turned for Yesenin from just a girl into a certain absolute of tenderness, silence, peace and tranquility: “And our path is tear-stained with birches” “Pugachev” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M .: Fiction .. 1961, “birch rustle of shadows” “I remember, my love, I remember” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M .: Fiction .. 1961. The Yesenin birch is perhaps one of the most beautiful poetic images in Russian poetry, personifying a girl, a woman:
“I returned
To the native home
green-haired,
In a white skirt
There is a birch over the pond” “My Way” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961
Birch branches for Yesenin can be completely different. Either these are “silk braids”, then “green earrings”. A birch trunk could turn into the most delicate “white milk” or become “white chintz”, “canvas sundress”. You can see that for Yesenin, birch is an absolute prototype of the feminine in nature and life, as well as a thread that connects him with his small homeland. Of course, the use of the image of a birch is most characteristic of the early period of Yesenin's work. But this image does not leave Yesenin's lyrics all his life. It appears in his very late work. He appears every time the poet refers to his native places, to his small homeland, Konstantinovo: “Letter to my sister”, “My way”, “You sing me that song that was before”. The second stunning image created by Yesenin is maple. But this image is very personal, not masculine in general, but applied to oneself, to one's emotional world, to one's own experiences. No, this is not a poetic double of the poet. It's a friend. The unity of man and nature, in the image of Yesenin, can be practically self-portrait: “Oh, the bush withered my head” “Hooligan” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961., “That old maple tree looks like me with its head” “I left my dear home” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961, “I seemed to myself the same maple” “You are my fallen maple, icy maple” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961 .. “Klenonechek” appears in Yesenin’s very first poems and, undergoing various metamorphoses, illnesses, aging reaches the end of creativity, becoming completely tangible in the amazing poem “You are my fallen maple”. As a rule, in Yesenin's poetry, maple appears where the poet touches on the theme of a person who has gone astray. Where a person quarrels, gets sick with his soul, yearns: “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry”, “Son of a bitch”, “Grey, gloomy heights”, “Poem about 36”, “Sorokoust”, etc. Creating this image, the poet sought to bring reality and figurativeness closer together. Therefore, sometimes he characterizes the maple with adjectives in their literal sense: (old, fallen, rotten, small, etc.), and often animates it, drawing metaphorically: (maple on one leg, etc.) Using inconsistent definitions ( maple on one leg), the poet endows the tree-image with more life. The maple is just as much a living participant in the scene as the birch: “maple trees wrinkle their ears with long branches” “Soviet Russia” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes Fiction. M. 1961..
This desire to humanize nature is deeply rooted in folklore. All folk, ancient metaphors were built on the desire of a person to make natural phenomena understandable to himself, to “domesticate” nature itself. Make them someone you can talk to, ask for intercession. If we take Russian folk tales, then in almost every other and man's helper was nature. Yesenin's landscape lyrics, if it can be fully called such, just the same, in my opinion, first of all, it is characterized by some difference in understanding, feeling of nature, rather than that of many Russian poets and writers who operated in their work with images of Russian nature. In his poetry, the moment of Russian folklore itself is much stronger. Yesenin often borrows a well-known folk technique for describing nature; several phenomena or material objects or animals are taken and combined in one image: “the hut-old woman with the jaw of the threshold” “The road thought about the red evening” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes Fiction. M. 1961., “The moon, the sad rider, dropped the reins” “The mountain ash turned red” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes Fiction. M. 1961 .. Yesenin himself called this method of association a “screen saver”. Having developed a “screensaver”, the poet could build a whole chain of poetic images, stringing them on top of each other, and creating an endless narrative, which only he could interrupt at his own discretion:
“The word swells with wisdom,
Elm earing fields.
Above the clouds, like a cow,
Tail lifted dawn.
I see you from the window
Generous builder,
Robe above the earth
Dangling heaven.
sun like a cat
From heavenly willow
paw of gold
Touches my hair” “Transfiguration” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961..
Many of these “screensavers”, or rather the foundations for “screensavers”, Yesenin took directly from Russian riddles, from folk mythology: (the month is a horseman, a heavenly sower, the wind is a horse), and created his own, unique world of folk poetic images. Animation of the landscape, common for folk lyrics, living parallels in Yesenin's work play a lesser role than the methods of lyrical interpretation of the image that he himself found. But all the same, folk-poetic "feeding", even being creatively developed and reworked by Yesenin, remained dominant in the creation of poetic images. There is a mythology present, that ancient, pagan, shamanistic essence of Russia. Nature then was for man an independent, formidable, but at the same time very close, kind force. A force that could punish, but could also love tenderly, as the mother of a child loves:
“I was born with songs in a grassy blanket,
Spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow.
I grew up to maturity, the grandson of the Kupala night,
The haze prophesies happiness to me” “Mother in the bathing suit” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961.
This is reminiscent of a folk song-spell. In Yesenin's work, one can feel that ancient attitude to nature, when a person was on an equal footing with her and did not try only to conquer and control her. Yesenin recognizes nature as a living being in almost every poem. Another confirmation of the direct connection of Yesenin's lyrics with the Slavic, folk language tradition can be the abundant use of folk vocabulary. Here is a small part of the dialectisms that are often found in his early work: “zhamkat” (chew), “buldyzhnik” (buyan), “korogod” (round dance), “plakida” (mourner), “twilight” (twilight), “elanka " (Glade). The choice of verbs by Yesenin is also interesting. Apart from direct verbs that reflect the action, “voiced verbs” are scattered throughout Yesenin’s poems, the forest “rings”, the river cooes, the clouds “neigh”, the stars “chirped”. Yesenin fully feels independence nature, its animation.This sounds especially strong where nature is the only hero:
“Schemnik-wind with a cautious step
Creasing leaves on road ledges
And kisses on the rowan bush
Red sores to the invisible Christ” “Autumn” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. M. 1961.
“Autumn”, in general, is one of the most lively, in the sense of natural living poems by Yesenin. Autumn here is accurately depicted both in the color “red”, “rowan”, and in the embodied image “red mare - scratching her manes”. Here Yesenin is just an internal observer, he feels like a part of nature, her student and good neighbor. He is one with her. He does not paint it, he is not a landscape painter, he is not a pastoral, sweet poet admiring only the beauties of the sunset and the bird on the branch. It's as if he lives in it:
“Forgetting human grief,
I sleep on clearings of branches.
I pray for scarlet dawns,
I take communion by the stream” “I am a shepherd, my chambers…” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961.
That is why he does not have purely landscape poems. Landscape for Yesenin is not just a way to illustrate the feelings that the poet owns. Nature for him is a close being, whose sensual, emotional coloring coincides with Yesenin's. Nature and man exist side by side, live side by side, they are friends. Feeling eternity, the recurring cycle of life and death, nature, together with Yesenin, is calm. They do not try to interfere with the natural course of life:
“Whom to pity? After all, every wanderer in the world -
Pass, enter and leave the house again.
Hemp dreams about all the departed
With a wide month over the blue pond” “I will not return to my father's house” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961.
From all of the above, the conclusion logically follows that the poet, who so idolized his native nature and so thoughtfully studied the folklore of the people, valued his fatherland above all else in the world. Love for nature, for his native Ryazan fields, for his "country of birch calico", an understanding of one's own origin, one's origins and roots turns Yesenin's lyrics into a huge poem about home, about Russia, and about nature, as part of it. The significance of Yesenin's lyrics lies in the fact that in it the feeling of love for the Motherland is expressed not abstractly and rhetorically, but concretely, in visible and clear landscape images:
“O Russia - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river -
I love to joy and pain
Your lake melancholy” “Hewn drogs sang” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961.
In my opinion, few people have been able to write about Russia so penetratingly and so figuratively as he did. So they write about the beloved woman, about the mother, about the living. And in these verses, Russia appears before us alive, capable of yearning, experiencing pain. Yesenin is the son of Russia, who sympathizes with his "country of birch chintz", filled with "blue", and lives in it. And always this “blue”, “blue that fell into the river” emphasizes the moment of its merger with Russia and its nature. He, as a person who has experienced many hardships and misfortunes, but who has also known the great happiness of love, understands that even in the most difficult moment, or in the moment of absolute human joy, the Motherland, native nature is something that will always share happiness and sorrow with you. . You will turn to her at any moment and be accepted:
“But most of all
Love for the native land
tormented me,
Tormented and burned” “Stans” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961.
Yesenin understands that leaving nature, from his homeland, from his roots is tragic. However, the tragedy of Yesenin's fate lies in the fact that, being a more powerful creative unit, he, like everyone else, a truly great artist, was equally great in both strength and weakness. Realizing the perniciousness of this separation, he could not resist it, both personally and under the pressure of circumstances. Over time, Yesenin's lines begin to take on a fatal connotation:
"I do not regret, do not call, do not cry,
Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees.
Withering gold embraced,
I won't be young anymore.
Now you won't fight so much
Cold touched heart
And the country of birch chintz
It will not lure you to wander around barefoot” “I don’t regret it, I don’t call, I don’t cry” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961.
One can trace, feel how gradually, Yesenin comes to feel the eternal circular, repetitive flow of life, and the inevitability of death as an immutable law of this life. In the last years of his life, Yesenin was strangely divided. In the East, peace plays in his reflection of nature, spring “evening light of the saffron region, quietly roses run through the fields” “Evening light of the saffron region” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961.. The world is filled with “silent cypresses at night” “Why the moon shines so dimly” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction.. 1961 ., rose petals, that “like lamps burn” “The Blue Homeland of Firdusi” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M.: Fiction. 1961., “the smell of oleander and levkoy” is poured into the air. The picture of native nature is completely opposite. There is a sad undergrowth, there is winter and a snowstorm, nature seems to be sleeping. The poem “You are my fallen maple, icy maple” looks especially poignant. Yesenin identifies his native landscape with a place where “frozen aspens”, “frozen birches” reign, where “birches in white are crying through the forests”, there are no flowers on the lindens, there is snow and hoarfrost on the “lindens”, there you have to “honor the blizzard for the blue pollen of May” “Maybe too late, maybe too early” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes Fiction. M. 1961 .. Yesenin's lyrics “get colder”. She becomes almost hysterical. Summer leaves it, instead of gold and blue, instead of the eternal “blue”, everything gradually becomes white, sometimes snowy. The birch trees freeze, his favorite maple stands “frozen”, and it’s not a maple already, but “just a shameful pillar - they would hang on it, or scrap it” “Snowstorm” S. Yesenin. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes - M .: Fiction .. 1961 .. Nature, as it were, freezes. Nature is here, it has not gone away, but it does not have that stormy movement, there is no dynamics that it used to be. Everything comes to an end. The description of nature is reminiscent of its own epitaph:
Snowy plain, white moon,
Our side is covered with a shroud.
And birches in white are crying through the forests.
Who died here? Died? Am I myself?
Yesenin's nature went through all the life cycles with him - spring, summer, autumn, stopping forever at the point of winter. The creative heritage of S. A. Yesenin is very close to today's resurgent ideas about the world and nature, where a person is only a particle of living nature, not opposing it, but depending on it and living with it. The feeling of nature, the feeling of being in it a person, the unity of the world, this is Yesenin's poetic testament. Getting into the world of his poetic images, we, willingly or involuntarily, can feel like brothers and sisters of a birch, maple, rowan bush, various "beasts", an endless field, a moon and the sun. Having borrowed from the people, in folk mythology and folklore, his loving, reverent view of nature, Yesenin developed it and was able to convey to us, translated what our ancestors felt, understanding and feeling nature as themselves. His image of nature helps us to feel more human and not lose humanity.
“My lyrics are alive with one great love - love for the motherland,” said Sergei Yesenin about his work. And the image of the motherland for him is inextricably linked with his native nature. Russian nature for Yesenin is the eternal beauty and eternal harmony of the world, healing human souls. This is how we perceive the poet's poems about our native land, this is how, sublimely and enlightened, they act on us: They knit lace over the forest In the yellow foam of the cloud. In a quiet slumber under a canopy I hear the whisper of a pine forest. The poet, as it were, tells us: stop at least for a moment, look at the world of beauty around you, listen to the rustle of meadow grasses, the song of the wind, the voice of the river wave, look at the morning dawn, foreshadowing the birth of a new day, at the starry night sky. Living pictures of nature in the poems of Sergei Yesenin not only teach us to love the beauty of our native nature, they lay the moral foundations of our character, make us kinder, wiser. After all, a person who knows how to appreciate earthly beauty will no longer be able to oppose himself to it. The poet admires his native nature, filling his lines with tender awe, looking for bright, unexpected and at the same time very accurate comparisons:
Behind the dark strand of copses,
In unshakable blue
Curly lamb - a month
Walking in the blue grass.
Often using the personification of nature, characteristic of his lyrics, Yesenin creates his own unique world, forcing us to see how “the moon, the sad rider, dropped the reins”, how “the blown up road is dozing”, and “thin birch ... looked into into the pond." Nature in his poems feels, laughs and mourns, is surprised and upset.
The poet himself feels himself one with the trees, flowers, fields. Yesenin's childhood friend K. Tsybin recalled that Sergei perceived flowers as living beings, talked to them, trusting them with his joys and sorrows:
Aren't people flowers? Oh dear, feel you, These are not empty words. Like a stem shaking its body, Isn't this head a golden rose for You? The emotional experiences of the poet, important events in his life are always inextricably linked with changes in nature:
Leaves are falling, leaves are falling
The wind is moaning, Long and deaf.
Who will please the heart?
Who will comfort him, my friend?
In poems of the early period, Yesenin often uses Church Slavonic vocabulary. He represents the merging of earth and sky, showing nature as the crown of their union. The poet embodies the state of his soul in pictures of nature, full of bright colors:
Weaved out on the lake the scarlet light of dawn.
Capercaillie are crying in the forest with bells.
An oriole is crying somewhere, hiding in a hollow.
Only I don’t cry - my heart is light.
But carefree youth is over. A colorful, light landscape is replaced by pictures of early withering. In Yesenin's poems, the maturity of a person often echoes the autumn season. The colors have not faded, they even acquired new shades - crimson, gold, copper, but these are the last flashes before the long winter:
The golden grove dissuaded
Birch, cheerful language,
And the cranes, sadly flying,
No more regrets.
And at the same time:
The bitter smell of black burning,
Autumn groves set on fire.
In the lyrics of an even later period, in Yesenin's description of pictures of nature, there is a premonition of untimely death. The poems of this period are full of longing for lost youth, tragedy.
Snowy plain, white moon,
Our side is covered with a shroud.
And birches in white cry through the forests:
Who died here? Died?
Am I myself?
Perceiving nature as a whole with himself, the poet sees in it a source of inspiration. The native land endowed the poet with an amazing gift - folk wisdom, which was absorbed with all the originality of his native village, with those songs, beliefs, tales that he heard from childhood and which became the main source of his work. And even the exotic beauty of distant lands could not overshadow the modest charm of their native expanses. Wherever the poet was, wherever his fate brought him, he belonged to Russia in heart and soul.
Our time is a time of cruel trials for man and mankind. It became clear that the confrontation between man and nature is fraught with mortal danger for both of them. Yesenin's poems, imbued with love for nature, help a person find a place in it.
Already in the early period of S. Yesenin's work, the strongest side of his poetic talent becomes apparent - the ability to draw pictures of Russian nature. Yesenin's landscapes are not deserted paintings, they always, in Gorky's words, "are interspersed with a man" - the poet himself, in love with his native land. The natural world surrounds him from birth.
I was born with songs in a grassy blanket
Spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow.
I grew up to maturity, the grandson of the Kupala night,
Witchcraft turmoil predicts happiness for me.
You are my fallen maple, icy maple,
Why are you standing, bending down, under a white blizzard?
Or what did you see? Or what did you hear?
As if you went out for a walk in the village.
His bird cherry “sleeps in a white cape”, willows cry, poplars whisper, “a cloud tied lace in a grove”, “spruce girls were sad”, “sleepy land smiled at the sun”, etc. As at the children of one mother Earth, he looked it is on humanity, on nature, on animals. The tragedy of the mother dog becomes very close to the human heart, emphasizing the feeling of human kinship with all life on earth. About them, about our smaller brothers, the poet speaks very often with great love. When you read "Kachalov's Dog", you are amazed at his ability to talk with the beast respectfully, in a friendly way, on an equal footing. It can be seen that he really likes everything in the dog: “... to touch you on the velvet wool,” “I have never seen such a paw.” With Jim you can talk about everything: about love, joy, sadness, even about life. With the same feeling, the poet relates to an ordinary mongrel:
And you, my love,
Faithful no one's dog?
With what love does the poet address the galloping colt in Sorokoust: "Dear, dear, funny fool." In the most difficult moments for himself, Yesenin always remains a man:
A stele of verses, green matting, I want to tell you tenderly.
To whom is this "you"? People, humanity. The poem “Now we are leaving a little” is about life, love and how people are dear to the poet:
That's why people are dear to me
that live with me on earth.
There is something in Yesenin's poetry that makes the reader not only understand the complexity of the world and the drama of the events taking place in it, but also believe in a better future for man. It, of course, will come, and there will be no place for indifference, cruelty, violence in it.
The creative legacy of S. Yesenin is very close to our current ideas about the world, where a person is only a particle of living nature. Having penetrated the world of poetic images of S. Yesenin, we begin to feel like brothers of a lonely birch, an old maple, a rowan bush. These feelings should help preserve humanity, and hence humanity.
