The main features and features of the poetics of A.A. Blok. Composition: Artistic features of Blok's lyrics What are the characteristic features of the block's poetics

The tragedy of the lyrical hero in the "terrible world". The peculiarity of lyrical intonation.

Topic "scary world"- cross-cutting in Blok's work.

Man living in "scary world" experiencing its harmful effects. At the same time, moral values ​​also suffer, destructive passions take possession of a person. The lyrical hero himself falls under the influence of these dark forces: his soul tragically experiences the state of his own sinfulness, unbelief, emptiness, mortal fatigue.

The tragic worldview takes on cosmic proportions:

The worlds are flying. The years are flying by. empty

The universe looks at us with the darkness of its eyes.

And you, soul, tired, deaf,

You keep talking about happiness - which time?

"In a restaurant"

I will never forget (it was, or was not, This evening): the fire of the dawn Burned and parted the pale sky, And at the yellow dawn - lanterns.

And immediately, in response, something struck the strings, Frantically sang bows ... But you were with me with all the contempt of the young, Slightly noticeable trembling of the hand ...

I sat at the window in a crowded room. Somewhere they sang bows about love. I sent you a black rose in a glass as golden as the sky, ai.

You rushed with the movement of a frightened bird, You passed like my dream is light ... And the spirits sighed, eyelashes dozed off, Silk whispered anxiously.

But from the depths of the mirrors you cast your eyes to me And, throwing, shouted: "Catch! .."

You looked. Embarrassed and boldly I met the arrogant gaze and bowed. Turning to the gentleman, deliberately abruptly You said: "And this one is in love."

Among the people surrounding the lyrical hero of this poem, there is no love: the lines sound rude "... monisto strummed, the gypsy danced and squealed the dawn of love." But the girl who confused the hero "haughty gaze" and words "And this one is in love", becomes a pity.

We understand that her behavior is only ostentatious: she talks "deliberately harsh" noticeably "trembling hand" and she leaves "movement of a frightened bird." The desire to love and be loved is hidden somewhere in the depths of her soul.

"Night, street, lamp, pharmacy..."

Night, street, lamp, pharmacy,

A meaningless and dim light.

Live at least a quarter of a century -

Everything will be like this. There is no exit.

If you die, you start over again

And everything will repeat, as of old:

Night, icy ripples of the channel,

Pharmacy, street, lamp.

The main idea of ​​the poem is the thought of the fatal cycle of life, of its hopelessness.)

This is facilitated by the ring composition of the work, accurate and capacious epithets ("meaningless and dim light", "icy ripples of the canal") and unusual hyperbole (“If you die, you start over again”)

"On the railway".

This poem is interesting because it combines real and symbolic .

Find signs of reality in the text.

"An unmowed ditch", "platform", "a garden with faded bushes".

The carriages were moving along the usual line,

They trembled and creaked;

Silent yellow and blue;

In green wept and sang.

Here we see not just real signs of a running train (yellow, blue, green - cars of the 2nd, 1st and 3rd classes), but symbols of differently formed human destinies.

This is a young woman who experienced the collapse of hopes for possible happiness ... "So the useless youth rushed, / In empty dreams, exhausted ...". And here she is crushed. And what - "love, dirt, or wheels" - does not matter: "everything hurts.")

Under the embankment, in the unmowed ditch,

Lies and looks, as if alive,

In a colored scarf, thrown on braids,

Beautiful and young.

Isn't it the desecrated, "crushed" Russia itself? Indeed, in Blok, she often appears in the guise of a woman in a colorful or patterned scarf.

The theme of the "terrible world" is continued by two small cycles - "Retribution" and "Yamba".

Retribution is a person's condemnation of himself, the judgment of his own conscience. Retribution - spiritual emptiness, fatigue from life. Poem "Retribution" consonant "urban" Blok's lyrics: the theme sounds in it "machine civilization", "the relentless roar of the machine, forging death day and night", warnings against her.

The city for Block is an indictment against the public order:

To the impenetrable horror of life

Open up, open your eyes

While the great storm

Everything did not dare in your homeland ... -

"Yes. This is how inspiration dictates...” (1911).

In a cycle "Yambs" retribution no longer threatens an individual, but everything "terrible world".

Thus the poet affirms the triumph of the human:

Oh, I want to live crazy

All that exists is to perpetuate,

Impersonal - incarnate,

Unfulfilled - to embody!

Block himself said: “Very unpleasant verses ... It would be better for these words to remain unsaid. But I had to say them. Difficult to overcome. And after him will be a clear day.

V "clear day" for Russia, the poet continues to believe and dedicates the best poems to his homeland.

Homework.

1. Trace through the images-symbols in Blok's verses (sea, wind, blizzard).

2. Individual report on the topic "The poem of the Block "Russia". Perception, interpretation, evaluation.

Oh, I want to live crazy

Everything that exists - perpetuate,

Impersonal - incarnate,

Unfulfilled - to embody!

Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok was a poet of the greatest historical milestone. This is the great poet of the old, pre-October Russia, who completed the poetic searches of the entire 19th century with his work. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova wrote: "Blok is not only the greatest European poet of the first quarter of the 20th century, but also a man-epoch."

In his work, Alexander Blok reflected the essential features of this turbulent, critical era. The reflection of the Russian revolution lies on his poems and poems.

Burning years!

Is there thoughtlessness in you, is there any hope?

From the days of war, from the days of freedom

Bloodshine c. there are faces.

It can be said that Blok's historical mission as a poet, critic, publicist was to bring the culture of the past into direct contact with his time. The poet was a link between the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is probably why in the work and appearance of Blok, incompatible personality traits and qualities are combined.

Blok is classical, restrained, deeply intellectual and intelligent. He is the most prominent representative of one of the most fashionable modernist trends - symbolism, in which he saw the expression of the rebellious searches of his time. In the content of his work, Blok went far beyond the symbolist doctrine, but he remained true to the aesthetics and poetics of symbolism until the end of his days, acutely feeling "the anxieties of his time."

In the passionate, musical language of his poetry, Blok brilliantly expressed his foreboding of the approaching turning point in world life.

And black earth blood

Promises us, inflating veins,

All destroying the frontiers,

Unheard of changes

Unseen riots.

In the poetic world of Blok, who, as a creator, was looking for compressed poetic forms, concrete images turned into capacious symbols that spoke of the infinite. One or two "magic" words could mean infinitely many things to him. We find the most famous, classic examples of this in the poems "The Beautiful Lady", "The Stranger", "Unexpected Joy". Moreover, the multidimensionality and depth of the implied meanings are of particular importance.

The symbolism of Blok does not remain unchanged, it is rethought in a new way, crossed with new symbols. In early poems, for example, in "The Stranger", we have one symbolic row: "a hat with mourning feathers", "bowed ostrich feathers", hiding "in a foggy ... window", behind a "dark veil", "stranger". In the late poem "On valor, on exploits, on glory ..." the image of tragic love, the memory of past happiness and youth is associated with another pictorial series.

The image of the beloved in the portrait appears before us without any haze: “your face is in a simple frame. The details associated with the world of everyday life are symbolically generalized: “and threw the cherished ring into the night”, “blue cloak”, “days flew by, spinning like a cursed swarm” The poem mentions the only detail of the toilet - the "blue cloak". It is not just put on by the beloved - she wrapped herself in it with sadness. Reappearing in a dream, this image takes on the meaning of a symbol. In this poem, we do not find any stars or secrets, nor a mysterious disappearance. "... On a damp night you left home" - the departure of your beloved is tangible and concrete. But this does not make the perception of the poem mundane, it, although sad, envelops in a romantic haze, the symbolism remains deep, with many subtexts .

A similar perception is expressed in Blok's metaphors. After all, according to Blok, metaphor is the sister of the symbol.

Sunset in blood!

Blood flows from the heart!

Cry, heart, cry...

There is no rest! steppe mare

Rushing up.

("On the Kulikovo field")

Alexander Blok created a special type of lyric poetry. This poetry is imbued with a keen sense of history and reality. Blok's lyrical style is not a destruction of old, traditional forms, but a free combination and redevelopment of elements of a wide variety of styles: from romance-elegiac to couplet-chastushek. The poet filled the romance with psychological content and created it as a phenomenon not just of "gypsyism", but of a great literary style:

Spring flutter, and babble, and rustle,

Deep, wild dreams

And your wild beauty

Like a guitar, like a tambourine of spring!

("You are like the echo of a forgotten hymn...")

The melodious and emotional intonation of the romance is adjacent to the colloquial poetic ditty:

The young woman put aside the winter tow ...

See how fun April is in the street!

Unwound over the river Red sundress,

Happiness, prowess, melancholy The fog breathed.

(From the cycle "Unnecessary Spring")

The principle of contrast, antithesis is a favorite artistic principle of Blok's poetics. So, the prologue to the poem "Retribution" is entirely built on the opposite of antonymous words: “Life is without beginning and end. Chance lies in wait for all of us...” Or: “He, affirming, denied. And he argued, denying ... "

In plot poems, Blok often uses parallelism to increase the tension of the narrative:

The carriages were moving in the usual way.

They trembled and creaked;

Silent yellow and blue;

In green wept and sang.

("On the railway")

The poet skillfully uses color metaphors: “yellow and blue1 (cars of 1st and 2nd classes), “green” (cars of 3rd class). Here, “yellow and blue” personify the upper class and its indifferent attitude towards the world of the destitute.

Blok rightly believed that the poet was assigned a special, great and responsible role: “Three things are assigned to him: firstly, to free the sounds from the native beginningless element in which they reside; secondly, to bring these sounds into harmony, give them a form thirdly, to bring this harmony into the external world.

The great attractive power of Blok's verse, the powerful inner energy of its rhythms have been tested by time. These subtle, varied musical rhythms excite, disturb, delight, sadden and inspire. These rhythms make you feel again and again the harmony brought into the world by the great poet. Decades later, we hear his prophetic voice:

Perhaps the young man is cheerful

In the future he will say about me:

Forgive the gloom - is it

Hidden engine of it?

He is all a child of goodness and light,

He is all - freedom triumph!

Blok's significance as an artist of the word will become clearer to other generations of his readers. If the predilection of a contemporary does not deceive us, he will take his place among the first Russian lyricists - along with Derzhavin, Pushkin, Baratynsky, Tyutchev, Lermontov and Fet. This is evidenced by the artistic saturation and completeness of his third book, in its final edition (1921), an event unprecedented in the history of modern Russian poetry. But being in this sense an absolutely significant, supra-historical phenomenon, Blok's poetic work retains the deep originality of the historical moment: his poems were an event in the history of Russian romantic lyrics, they have a tradition and had an influence that is already obvious now, but the extent of which we can talk about in at the present time only approximately and in the most general form.

In romantic poetry, the world appears to us poetically transfigured and enlightened. The main method of romantic transformation of the world is a metaphor; Therefore, from the point of view of the history of style, romanticism is the poetry of metaphor.

We call. metaphor, the use of a word in a modified meaning (i.e., in a figurative sense), based on similarity. So, the stars resemble pearls, hence the metaphor “pearl stars”, the stars are “pearls of the sky”. The sky resembles a blue vault, dome or bowl; the usual metaphors of the literary language are “vault of heaven”, “firmament”, “dome of heaven”; a rarer specially poetic metaphor is "heavenly cup". Both metaphorical series can enter into conjunction; then the starry sky becomes a "pearl cup". Such a metaphorical allegory has the ability for further independent development, following the internal, immanent law of the poetic image itself. If the sky is a pearly cup, then the cup may be filled with "azure wine"; the poet, seized before the night sky by the excitement of a mystical feeling, communicating

with the mysterious life of nature, "drinks azure wine from a pearl cup." Consistently developing, the metaphorical allegory unfolds into an independent theme of the whole poem; in such metaphorical themes of a simple allegorical epithet or a verb used in a figurative sense (“pearl stars”), the metaphor becomes, as it were, a poetic reality. This process of realizing the metaphor is the essential feature of the Romantic style that most distinguishes it from the laws of ordinary colloquial speech.

In practical language, changing the meaning of a word according to the category of metaphor serves the urgent need for new words to denote new concepts; for example, "river arm", "bottle neck". The natural process of development of such new meanings leads to the oblivion of the old meaning and the separation of the new into an independent word, for example, "horses" from "little horses". The sooner this process is completed, the more convenient it is for the speaker: the use of a new word is done with the least effort, automatically. On the contrary, the poet makes the linguistic metaphor artistically effective, reviving its metaphorical meaning. The revival of a metaphor can be accomplished with the help of a slight change in word usage, which brings our consciousness out of the automatism of habitual meanings; for example, in Blok, instead of the epithet “feathery clouds”, which is customary in prose speech (and even became a term of science), there is a new poetic phrase “in golden feathers of clouds”. Perhaps, however, a more daring and individual revival of the metaphor, a metaphorical neologism (semantic neoplasm), replacing the usual metaphor with another, original one, similar in general meaning, but different in verbal expression. So, when Blok says, following Lermontov: “And the shishak - a golden cloud - Pulls up with white feathers ...”, or, when instead of the usual “cold feeling”, “cold heart”, he talks about “snowy love”, about the heart , brought by the "snow blizzard". We feel the peculiar effectiveness of the metaphorical style precisely by the degree of deviation of the metaphor from the usual word usage in prose speech.

Blok is a poet of metaphor. He himself recognizes the metaphorical perception of the world as the main property of a true poet, for whom the romantic transformation of the world with the help of metaphor is not an arbitrary poetic game, but a genuine insight into the mysterious essence of life. In the lyrical drama "Rose and Cross", the poet Gaetan, in a series of metaphors borrowed from the poetic traditions of his native Brittany, reveals his romantic animation of natural phenomena, and the representative of everyday life, the knight Bertrand, exposes his insights from the point of view of practical, prosaic thinking:

"Scene III. Ocean coast. Gaetan and Bertrand on horseback.

Now - the underwater city is not far away,

Do you hear the bells ringing?

How the noisy sea sings.

And you see

The gray robe of Gwennole rushes

Above the sea?

I see gray fog

Divergent.

Now you see

How did the roses play on the waves?

Yes. This sun rises behind the fog.

Not! That siren of evil scales! ..

Morgana rushes through the waves... Look:

Gwennole lifts the cross over her!

The fog thickened again.

Do you hear the groans?

The treacherous siren sings...

Don't delay, friend! Through the fog - forward!

As a poet of metaphor, Blok has forerunners in the romantic work of the first Russian Symbolists. 1 Instead of a large number of examples, we will limit ourselves to two quotations from Bryusov. In Bryusov's urban poetry, the modern city is fantastically transformed, mysterious and fabulous. This is achieved using the techniques of metaphorical "detachment":

Burning with electricity moon

On curved, long stems.

Telegraph rings are ringing strings

In invisible and thin hands.

Circles of dials amber

Magically lit up over the crowd,

AND thirsty paving slabs

touched cool rest.

Even closer to Blok's metaphorical style: - a description of a meeting with a mysterious Stranger on the streets of a night city:

She passed and intoxicated

languishing, dusk of spirits

And shaded with a quick glance

Possibility of impossible dreams.

Through the street iron roar,

AND drunk from blue fire

I suddenly heard a greedy laughter,

AND snakes wrapped around me.

And in the horror of a stubborn struggle,

Between oaths, prayers and threats,

I was entangled black moisture

Her loose hair.

However, despite such predecessors as Bryusov, Blok's peculiar place in the history of Russian romantic lyrics is determined by the decisive significance that metaphor received in his poetry as a dominant device, as a stylistic "dominant" (B. Christiansen's term), 2 and special original forms the use of this approach.

In the memorable image of Blok's Stranger, we already find these features of the metaphorical style, subordinated to the main artistic task - the transformation of earthly reality into a romantically wonderful, earthly beauty - into a fabulous Stranger: "Girl's camp, seized by silks, In a foggy window moves, "Breathing in spirits and mists, She sits by the window, and blow ancient beliefs Her elastic silks...”, “And bottomless blue eyes bloom on the far shore." Let us recall once again the appearance of the Stranger "in the restaurant": the perfume "breathes", the eyelashes "doze", the silks "whisper anxiously". Some favorite metaphors are repeated: "You strangle with black silks ...", "Everything is in tight silks." We have a version of the ballad "The Stranger" with the same metaphors:

sighing ancient beliefs

silks black noisy

Under helmet, With mourning feathers...

And another option, like the first sketch:

And here are her eyes and shoulders

And black feathers waterfall...

In other cycles, the image of the Beloved changes (for example, the gypsy Carmen), but the method of metaphorical poeticization, in essence, remains unchanged: “Looks at mill her melodious..",“... I will dream of your mill, your fire, “.... a sea of ​​stuffy lace ..." etc.; the solemn procession of the Stranger and the mysterious ruler is repeated in the verses of the last period:

And yours wildling charm -

How guitar, how tambourine of spring!

And you pass in thoughts and dreams,

How queen blessed times,

With a head drowning in roses

Immersed in a sweet dream.

Since one can speak of specific details of the romantic image of the Beloved, these details are also given in a metaphorical transformation. In this sense, a comparison with Akhmatova, a poet of a different era and a different style, is especially interesting, accurate, strict and dry in the details of the description she noticed: “The pupils of dazzling eyes have dimmed and, it seems, have already become”, my ring”, “Only laughter in the eyes of his calm Under the light gold eyelashes”, “Your dry, rosy lips!”, “But, raising his dry hand, He lightly touched the flowers”, “How different from the embrace of the Touch of these hands”, etc. item 3

Otherwise, Block. The eyes of his Beloved "sing from the dark lodge." “Bottomless blue”, they “bloom on the far shore” (cf. also: “And under the mask - eyes bloomed so calmly”, “Look: I confused all the pages While your eyes were blooming”). They shine like “stars” (“The stars of blue eyes went out”), or glow like “candles”, or flare up like “fire” (“But eyes with a silent fire ...”). Their gaze “burns through the stone”, “strikes” like a “dagger” (“Your smashing, your gaze, your dagger!”), “Pierces with swords”, pierces with an “arrow” (“She looked sweetly into her eyes with her gaze like an arrow”). They are "big as the sky"; the poet "throws" his heart "into the dark source of shining eyes". Above the eyes are lowered "eyelashes-arrows", "lancet eyelashes". From "velvet eyelashes" fall "shadows"; under them “twilight lurks” (“Where you lived and, pale, walked, Under the eyelashes, the twilight is melting ...”). A “winged gaze” looks out from under the eyelashes: “Flame, mourning dawns, My winged eyes!”, “And I only disturb the darkness with the Living fire of winged eyes” (cf. also; “And with winged eyes Gently looks height”).

The Beloved's hair also stands out: “In whose eyes is light, in whose braids is darkness”, “I believe the darkness of your hair ...”, “Is this the red night of your braids?”; and another metaphorical series: "A storm of tangled braids ..."; finally, in a different direction of metaphorization - braids - "snakes": Beloved - with "... an innocent smile In heavy snake hair", "With a violent whirlwind in snake curls ...", "And black snakes Unraveled the braid." The last metaphor in its development becomes a poetic reality: “And the snakes twisted My mind and high spirit They crucified me on the cross, And in a whirlwind of snow dust I am faithful to the black-eyed Serpentine beauty.” Or in another passage: “I am all tormented by you, Podkolodnaya snake! Braiding the blue-black scythe of Mila-friend, You are mine and not mine! (cf. in the above poem by Bryusov: “I was entangled in the black moisture of Her loose hair”, “And the snakes entwined me”).

Even the name of the Beloved is the subject of a metaphorical transformation: “I love your subtle name...”, “But your subtle name...”, “I know your flattering name...”, “The living name of the Snow Maiden...”, "Their golden names." How much more accurately Akhmatova said: "A short, sonorous name."

There are very few cases in which Blok confines himself to a simple renovation of an outdated metaphor of language. Usually, according to the type of linguistic metaphors, he creates new, original and bold metaphorical neologisms. So, in colloquial language, the expression "eyes are burning" or "sparkling" is usually. Blok instead says “And the eyes glow like night candles...” or, with the realization of the metaphor as a technique of amplification, with hyperbole: “So that the black gaze of blessed Galla, Waking up, does not burn the stone.” Or in a similar way, instead of the usual metaphor “sharp”, “piercing” look - an unexpected metaphorical neoplasm: “Your gaze is a piercing gaze with swords”, “Your smashing, your gaze, your dagger!”. We often use the metaphor "under the cover of night" in language; Blok speaks instead of the “helmet of the night” (as already in ancient Germanic poetry, where the word “helmet” - “Helm” was probably still felt as connected with the verb “helan” - “hide”, “cover”, whence the usual expression “ under the helmet of the night"):

She ascended the milky path.

Osiyanaya - floats.

Red peaked helmet

Furrows the vault of heaven.

We say "the wind howls", "the blizzard sings". The last metaphor, less common in colloquial speech, becomes for Blok the starting point in the development of a long metaphorical series: “The blizzard sang”, “Songs of the light blizzard ...”, “There is no way out of the melodious blizzards!”, “When a snowstorm sings, sings .. .". More original metaphorical neoplasms are “blizzard trills” (cf. Fet: “At pur-

of the purple cradle Trills of May rang out ...") and "blizzard tambourine", "bells" ("And the blizzard's tambourine taking off, Invitingly tinkling with bells"). But most often Blok uses another, no less bold semantic neologism: he speaks of "blizzard trumpets". For example: “How a blizzard sang in the distance, Raising a pipe to heaven”, “And we rush to the autumn distances, And we listen to distant pipes ...”, “And death walks in the fields - Snow trumpeter ...”, - or with the transfer of metaphor to akin to light impressions: “And behind the lace of a thin birch, the Golden Trumpet sang” (“Autumn Dances”). Or another neoplasm related in the direction of metaphorization - “the horns of a blizzard sound”. For example: “... the horns sounded like a snowy blizzard choir... The snows flew, The horns of the flying night rang”, “And the horns sing, sing”, - and with the expansion of the subject of metaphorization:

The roosters sing in the morning

The night is frightened.

The hoarse horn of morning mists

Behind her trumpets.

Another essential feature of Blok's metaphorical style is the consistent development of metaphor. For example, the usual language metaphors “bitter words”, “sweet speeches”, etc. are deployed as follows: “Am I a bright butterfly? The honey of your words is bitter to me! At the same time, as we have said above, the metaphor from a simple metaphorical sign becomes a complex metaphorical theme - as if a poetic reality. So, the “snake-curls” of the Beloved in the above example are no longer curls, but snakes entangling the poet: “And the braid untangled with black snakes. And the serpents have twisted My mind and high spirit…”, etc. Fanning out like cards, the lights of a distant city become “maps of the night”, according to which the Beloved wonders:

Swampy, desert meadow

Let's fly. Alone.

Look like cards, in a semicircle

The lights go out.

Guess, child, according to the cards of the night,

Where is your beacon...

The metaphor deployed in this way according to its internal immanent laws often comes into conflict with the material-logical meaning of the surrounding words, which the poet deliberately ignores. The lights can "spread out like cards" - in a semicircle; one can guess by cards, but one cannot (from a logical point of view) "guess by cards of the night."

Actualizing the visual representation, the visual image hidden in the potential state in each separate part of the verbal construction, we get a complex whole - with a logical

from the point of view of internal contradiction, irrational. 4 A similar example is in another poem. We say "hot heart", "flame of passion", "heart burns". Hence - in a consistent development - the "bonfire of the soul", the heart, "burning at the stake" (cf. Bryusov in the cycle "Moments": "The fire, the broken power of Two bodies burned one dream ..."). The poet invites us on a dark starry night to see how "hearts burn over the abyss", illuminating the surrounding darkness. Here is already a deliberate contradiction, from a logical point of view, between the real and the metaphorical plan:

Dark in the rooms and stuffy -

Come out at night - starry night,

Love indifferently

How hearts burn above the abyss.

Their fires far visible,

Illuminating the darkness surrounding.

Their dreams are insatiable

Unfathomable, unknown...

In another poem (“Having accepted the world as a ringing gift”), the eyes of the Beloved burn and light a fire in which the whole city burns:

I look: it grows, the fire makes noise -

Your eyes are burning.

How creepy and bright!

The whole city is a bright sheaf of fire,

The river is clear glass

Your eyes are burning, burning

Like two black dawns!

I will be here. We'll all burn

The whole city is mine, the river and I...

Baptize with fire baptism,

Oh my dear!

Under the name of catachresis, ancient rhetoric united various cases of such internally contradictory images - a contradiction between the original real meaning of the word and its metaphorical, figurative use (such as "red ink", "steam horse") or a contradiction between two metaphorical series compared by the poet (the most famous example is Shakespeare, in Hamlet's monologue: "to take arms against a sea of ​​troubles"). From the point of view of rational, logical poetics of the era of classicism, catachresis is a mistake in style. However, the logical point of view is not applicable to a work of art: before the court of the logical laws of identity and contradiction, any metaphor, even “pearl stars”, is a logical error.

"poetic lie". Consistent representatives of rationalism in art really went so far as to reject metaphor as a "poetic lie" (for example, E. Bara in his book "Le style poétique et la révolution romantique" criticizes the romantics, especially Hugo, for the poetic "falsity" of the literary style); in the rationalistic poetics of French classicism, new metaphors, not consecrated by long-term use in the literary language, among the great poets of the 17th century, which did not receive a place in the Academic Dictionary (that is, in other words, did not lose, due to their familiarity, the specific nature of the original and new device ) were treated as a style error. Romantic poetics again introduces individual metaphor into art as a device for the romantic transformation of the world. Along with it, catachresis also appears - a sign of irrational poetic verse. We can say about Blok that catachresis in his work is a constant and especially effective technique. Expanding the metaphor according to internal artistic laws, he not only does not avoid logical contradictions with the real, material meaning of other words, but, as it were, deliberately emphasizes this inconsistency in order to create the impression of irrational, super-real, fantastic. In those places of his poems, where the mystical ecstasy or frenzy of the poet does not find expression in the rational word, these dissonant metaphors break in like "outrageous sounds":

In a light heart - passion and carelessness,

As if from the sea I was given a sign.

breathless, a trotter is flying.

The source of the last metaphor in the phenomena of language is quite clear. We often say “the abysses lurk in his soul”, “he walks over the abyss”, “love over the abyss”, etc. ...”), completely regardless of the contradiction that arises when this image is actualized in the real situation of a trip in a reckless car to the islands (“A trotter flies panting”). In some poems of an earlier period, this bold catachresis is, as it were, prepared, its variants are given, more cautious, psychologically and rationally motivated; for example: “Only a horse’s uneven stomp As if from a distant height...", "And this over the desert From the clatter of hooves ... "," And we measure the night roads, Cold heights my...". Comparing these examples gradually creates that feeling of height and depth and the flight of a horse over the abyss, which is then given in the quoted stanza unmotivated and in a seeming contradiction of real and allegorical meaning.

The impression of catachresis also arises in those cases when the poet introduces a metaphorical series into the successive development of a real series quite unexpectedly and unpreparedly, without any logical justification and clear connection. The most characteristic examples are again found in the depiction of amorous ecstasy, a mystically agitated passionate feeling; moreover, the impression of the irrational, fantastic, going beyond the boundaries of ordinary consciousness is emphasized by dissonance. So in the already quoted "message" to V.:

Valentine, star, dream!

How sing your nightingales...

Scary world! It is too small for the heart!

In it - your kisses are nonsense,

Dark haze gypsy songs,

Hasty flight of comets!

A similar example is in one of the "restaurant" poems:

Eye to eye - and burning blue

There was space.

Magdalene! Magdalene!

The wind blows from the desert

Blowing fire.

In the same way, the symbolic image of the steppe mare suddenly and logically unpreparedly breaks into the real historical images of the Kulikovo Field, as if from another reality:

Let the night Let's go home. Let's light up the bonfires

Steppe distance.

The holy banner will flash in the steppe smoke

And the steel of the Khan's saber...

And eternal battle! Rest only in our dreams

Through blood and dust...

Flying, flying steppe mare

And crushes the feather grass ...

The impression of the irrational is no less strong, when the beginning of the poem directly and without preparation introduces us into a metaphorical series, into a sequence of allegories, the “guess” of which is not given:

A under the mask was stellar.

Someone's story smiled

The night passed quietly.

And a thoughtful conscience

Quietly floating above the abyss

She took time away.

And in the hands, once strict,

There was a glass of glass moisture.

The night descended on the halls,

Slowing down.

We would say in a sequential story: “The poet returned home from the guests. Now he is alone and can take off his mask. “And under the mask” - in the soul of the poet, “it was stellar”. Memories of his former life smiled at him, like "someone's" alien, but familiar "story". And, remembering the past, his conscience did not look into the abyss of what he experienced, but only quietly leaned over it ... ", etc. Another interpretation is possible: "The poet looked into the eyes of an unfamiliar mask. And under the mask it was stellar. Someone's unfamiliar story smiled at him ... ". Be that as it may, in such a presentation, the metaphors are prepared, psychologically connected and motivated; in Blok's story, they amaze with mystery due to the sudden beginning and sudden transitions. Wed the most difficult poem in this respect, dedicated to the Night?.. or the Beloved?

A train splattered with stars

Blue, blue, blue eyes.

Between earth and heaven

Whirlwind raised fire.

Life and death in eternal whirling,

All - in tight silks -

You are open to the milky ways,

Hidden in storm clouds.

Even if a “guess” is given - the logical meaning of a metaphor, it usually follows the “riddle”, and does not prepare it, does not weaken its surprise; for example, the beginning in the "Three Epistles":

Black Raven in the snowy dusk

Black velvet on swarthy shoulders...

Or akin to:

Only scarlet velvet with a scarlet robe,

Only the light of dawn - covered me.

A special form of catachresis are cases of collision of two different metaphorical series (according to the above type of “arm against the sea of ​​worries”). The actualization of all the elements of a complex whole in a visual image is already decidedly impossible here, the impression of the irrationality of the entire construction reaches its greatest strength. Such cases in Blok are extremely numerous: the main metaphor immediately becomes the object of metaphorization for one or several derivative metaphors, as it were, of the second degree, going in different directions. So, the first metaphor - “the cries of the violins” - is joined by the second, derivative metaphor: “The cry of the distant violins is foggy ...”, “So that in the desert cry of the violins ...”; to the main me-

tafore - “the snowstorm is moaning” (cf. Balmont: “... the quiet moan of the snowstorm ...”) - a derivative from another metaphorical series is added: “And under the sultry snowy moan ...” - or from the third: “The fire of the snowstorm white-winged..." The same interweaving of heterogeneous metaphors in the above poem "And under the mask it was starry ...". Already the sudden onset of the allegorical nature of "And under the mask ..." makes it difficult to understand logically; all the more striking is the new metaphor, which just as suddenly turns into a different series of ideas, completely dissonant: "And under the mask it was ... stellar." But the same law that governs the combination of heterogeneous metaphors in a small unit - a sentence - extends to a whole stanza and further - to a whole poem; for example, in the image of the "Demon" (more Vrubel than Lermontov):

In your frenzied languor

Anguish unprecedented spring

It burns me with a beam remote

AND stretches out the song zurny.

………………………………..

And in the mountain sunset fire,

V spills blue wings,

With you, with the dream of Tamara,

I, the mountain, forever without strength ...

Thus, as the poetry of metaphor, Blok's lyrics unusually boldly and consistently develop the techniques of metaphorical style. The romantic poet not only finally frees himself from dependence on the logical norms of the development of speech, from a timid glance towards logical clarity, consistency, he even refuses the opportunity to actualize the verbal construction into a consistent image (visual representation), i.e. embarks on the path logical contradiction, dissonance as an artistic device, motivated by the irrationality of the general idea of ​​the poet. In this respect, Blok is quite original and has only timid predecessors among the Russian romantic poets and the first symbolists. As for the latest poets, some of them, like Mandelstam, or Mayakovsky, or the Imagists, went even further than Blok in emancipating metaphorical construction from the norms of logically understandable and consistent practical speech, but nevertheless - basically - they are entirely his students. . So, for example, Mayakovsky’s “fire of the heart”, with firefighters in “boots”, etc., from a formal point of view, is no different from the heart “burning at the stake” and lighting up the “surrounding darkness” at night in the Blok poem quoted above . In both examples, the development of a metaphor leads to its realization, and this latter leads to a contradiction between the metaphorical reality and the reality of life, the metaphorical

series and a series of real. The only difference is that the contradiction, dissonance, catachresis in Blok's romantic work is motivated by the irrationality of poetic experience; Mayakovsky's technique is devoid of this motivation, is valuable in itself and, as a result, naturally gives the impression of a comic grotesque, grandiose and captivating buffoonery, and at the same time may seem more original and new than when carefully compared with the same techniques in Blok's poetry.

When the mystic poet recognizes the inexpressibleness in the word of the experience of the infinite, he designates the inexpressible and mysterious by means of an allegory or a symbol. Romantic poetry in this sense has always been the poetry of symbols, and modern symbolists only continue a poetic tradition that goes back centuries.

We call a symbol in poetry a special type of metaphor - an object or action of the external world, denoting the phenomenon of the spiritual or spiritual world according to the principle of similarity. A folk song has its own traditional symbolism: pearls mean grief (tears), picking a rose means kissing a girl, tasting her love (cf. Goethe's famous poem "Wild Rose" ("Heidenröslein"), written in the spirit of a folk song). The traditional symbolism of religious art is often based on a reinterpretation of a folk poetic symbol; for example, a rose is the Virgin Mary, a mystical rose is the Eternal Femininity (cf. Pushkin: “Lumen coeli, Sancta Rosa!”). In turn, mystical poetry willingly uses the already established religious symbolism; We find the "poetics of the Rose" among a number of medieval poets (for example, Dante), 5 in modern times - among the romantics ("Romances about Roses" by Brentano, "Elixirs of Satan" by Hoffmann). Vladimir Solovyov in the "Song of the Ophites" follows the traditional symbolism of the Gnostic sects: White lily With rose, With a scarlet rose we combine, With a secret prophetic dream, we gain Eternal truth.

Following Vladimir Solovyov, the Symbolists (Vyacheslav Ivanov in Gazelles on the Rose, Andrei Bely) often resorted to the symbols of the church or mystical sects. Blok used this tradition in the lyrical drama "The Rose and the Cross" (the symbolism of the Rosicrucians is a cross crowned with roses; cf. especially Goethe's "Sacraments" ("Die Geheimnisse")):

Oh, how far from you, Isora,

The one given by the fairy

That faded cross! -

Bloom, oh rose

In the cherished garden

Fragrant while over the world

The sacred spring is floating!

…………………………..

Stay on guard, Bertrand!

…………………………..

Your rose will not fade.

But in the poetry of the Symbolists, based on an individualistic experience of the infinite, on a subjectively colored mystical experience, traditional symbols are usually replaced by individual ones, or at least traditional symbols appear in a new, subjective interpretation. So - in the poetry of Blok, who among our contemporaries is, par excellence, a poet of allegories and symbols.

The language of Blok's lyrical poems, especially in the first two books, is composed of a series of habitual allegories. The poet, as it were, neglects the usual meaning of words and creates for himself a special metaphorical speech, a second stage of language above the first, normal stage, using this symbolic language to designate experiences that are inexpressible for prose speech. Of course, this notation is not logically precise, as in the language of concepts; it only marks the complex and elusive phenomenon of spiritual life, gives a hint of the indefinable and mysterious world of mystical experiences, creates a poetic mood favorable for immersing the soul in this world. Reading the works of Blok, we can make ourselves a whole dictionary of such allegories: “night”, “evening”, “gloom”, “fogs” (especially “blue fogs”), “haze”, “twilight”, “wind”, “storm ”, “blizzard”, “blizzard”, “hoarfrost”, “winter”, “spring”, “azure”, “roses”, “morning”, “dawn” (“dawn”), “dal” (“distant country ”, “far coast”), “path” (“road”, “path”) and many others, as well as the usual metaphors of passion: “flame”, “bonfire”, “wine”, “goblet”, etc. In choosing of these symbols, the dependence of the young Blok on Vladimir Solovyov, the first Russian symbolist poet, is especially clear. We find in Solovyov almost all the favorite symbols that acquired such importance in the poetry of his student. For example, spring: “Still invisible, the coming spring already sounds and blows with the breath of eternity”, “Spring has rushed off, and only the memory of spring remains for us ...”; azure; “Oh, how many pure azures are in you And black, black clouds!”, “All in azure today my queen appeared before me ...”, “Azure is all around, azure is in my soul” (cf. Blok: “You are azure strong”, “You have shone with golden azure forever!”, “Prosper with your azure”); "roses": "Light from darkness. The Faces of your roses could not rise above the black block...”, “And suddenly the dawn of the evening rose fell down ...”, “The earth and sky breathed roses

a circle"; "dawn": "Dawn fought with the last stars..."; "fogs": "When in the blue fog the life's path is before you...", "In the morning mist with unsteady steps...", "...Among the gray fogs You came into the world..."; “blizzards” (“snowy”, “sultry”): “In the country of frosty blizzards, among gray fogs ..”, “Under the alien power of a sultry blizzard ...”, “Heart blizzards subside ...” (cf. Blok: "Burn out in the snows of oblivion..."); “distant shore”, “distant temple”: “I went to the mysterious and wonderful shores”, “My cherished temple will wait for me”, etc.

In Blok's youthful poems, the solution to these symbols is not difficult; they are stereotyped and motionless and have not yet received an independent poetic reality:

Let the moon shine - the night is dark,

May life bring happiness to people -

In my soul love spring

Won't change stormy storm.

This is a naive symbolism of the type: "The darker the night, the brighter the stars", with a frank exposure of the allegorical nature of word usage: spring of love - in my soul. Wed in other poems of the same years: "A in heart, fading, the distant voice sang the song of dawn. Or: "When I could breathe to her In the soul Spring happiness on a winter day! So often with Solovyov: “The ice is melting. subside cardiac blizzards ... ". But after the first experiments of this kind, the poet moves on to a freer and bolder use of the language of allegory. In "Poems about the Beautiful Lady" the usual type of construction of a symbolic poem is as follows: from the main situation, the allegorical theme, separate details follow, which also have some general symbolic meaning. Such a situation is, for example, the image of a poet as a knight, prayerfully bowed before the divine Bride (“I enter dark temples ...”, “I foresee You. The years pass by ...”, “Indistinctly pink shadows grow ...”) , or as a wanderer on a long journey, to an unknown country, to a distant temple or the queen’s chamber (“Rest is in vain. The road is steep ...”, “I went to bliss, the Way shone ...”; cf. Solovyov: "In the mist of the morning with unsteady steps..."). In connection with the main symbolic task, various elements of the usual landscape of Blok's poems - spring morning, dawn, twilight, etc. - acquire a symbolic meaning; a deeper meaning, as it were, shines through the immediate, closest meaning of the words used, for example, in a poem written on the usual theme of “swimming” on the “sea of ​​life”:

Loses shore outlines.

swim, shuttle!

Swim forward without a shudder -

My sleep is deep.

His peace will not be disturbed

Gromada waves,

When with a groan it will bring down

On a fragile boat.

V fog pure and deep

Shuttle, swim!

All about immortality in a distant dream

My dreams.

Unraveling the individual elements of a complex symbolic image in a system of logically precise abstract concepts is no longer possible in such cases. Individual elements of the symbolic landscape enter the main symbolic situation according to an immanent artistic law, as if developing the details of the outlined general theme. Even more inconspicuous is this symbolic background in such a spring landscape:

We live in an old cell

At the flood of water.

Spring is full of fun here

And the river sings.

But as a harbinger of joy,

On the day of spring storms

Cells will spill to us at the door

Light azure.

And full of cherished trembling

Long awaited years

We will rush off-road

Into the unspeakable world.

In the second book of poems, not only the content of the symbols changes (a new "landscape of the soul": instead of "spring dawns" - "winter blizzards", "snow blizzards"), but the very method of symbolization. Symbols lose their static immobility, acquire movement, dynamism. The process of unfolding the symbol, its implementation into the metaphorical theme of the whole poem, the complex interweaving of individual symbolic rows is reminiscent of what was said above about the process of development and implementation of the metaphor. In this regard, the poems in the "Snow Mask" section are especially instructive.

We say in colloquial language "cold feeling", "cold heart". “I defeated cold oblivion ...” (Balmont) is a common prose metaphor. Blok updates this metaphor, he creates a metaphorical neologism of the type familiar to our linguistic thinking, but with an unusual combination of words: “snowy heart”, “heart covered with snow” - or for this example: “burn out in the snows of oblivion ...”. The consistent development of the symbol leads to its realization as a poetic theme. The poet no longer says that the “snow blizzard” is “in the heart” (cf.: “And in the heart, fading, the distant voice sang the song of dawn”); it is no longer in the soul of the poet that a “vociferous blizzard” sweeps, but the poet himself is

sen this blizzard, which has become a reality - at least poetic:

And there is no my enviable share -

Burn out in the snows of oblivion

And on the coastal snow field

Under the ringing blizzard to die.

The poetic symbol of the "snow blizzard" goes back to the lyrics of Vladimir Solovyov (cf. in particular "In the land of frosty blizzards"), and in the spirit of Solovyov it develops in Blok's early poems:

You will wake up night and winter storm.

You then with the soul of a reliable friend

Let around winter and the wind howls,

I'm with you!

friend you from storms will cover

With all my heart!

Here the poetic symbol remains motionless and stereotyped; its allegorical meaning is naked. Quite differently in the "Snow Mask", where the metaphor develops according to its own internal laws, the image receives movement, is enriched with new features and, as a special poetic reality, comes into conflict with material reality:

I forgot everyone I loved

I twisted my heart with a blizzard,

I threw my heart away white mountains,

It's at the bottom!

Thus, through the gradual development of a metaphor-symbol, a whole poem "The Snow Mask" is created, which tells about snow blizzards and blizzards, about snowy love and the Snow Maiden. In the preface to the collection "Earth in the Snow", the poet depicts the "spiritual landscape" of his new poems as a poetic reality: "And now Ground in the snow.. 6 And the snows that obscure the radiance of the One Star will subside. And the snow covering the ground - before spring. In the meantime, the snow blinds the eyes and the cold, fettering the soul, blocks the way, the lonely song of the Peddler comes from afar: a victorious, sad, inviting tune, carried by a blizzard ... ".

The development of the main symbolic theme of the "snow blizzard" is complicated by the introduction of secondary themes, as if by crossing various metaphorical rows. So, already the theme of the “snow blizzard” is of dual origin: it connects the metaphorical series “cold heart” - “snowy heart” with another metaphorical series “stormy feelings” - “stormy heart” - “in a whirlwind of passion”. Both rows, however, always appear together; hence - Blok's usual expression about his love: "snow blizzard", "blizzard".

A new complication is introduced by the usual metaphor of passion - "hot feeling", "fiery love". Hence the poetic new formation “fire of the soul”, “bonfire”, etc. (cf. the above example: “... like hearts burn above the abyss. Their fires are far visible ...”). When metaphorical themes merge, the “blizzard” becomes a “snow fire” (“The fire of a white-winged blizzard ...”), a “snow fire”, on which the poet “burns out” (implementation of the metaphor): “I myself go to your fire! Burn me!”, “And a high fire went up Above the one crucified on the cross... Fly, light, fly, flame, Fly around the cross!”. Snowflakes become white "sparks", "snow blizzard" - a "sheaf" of sparks:

And the wind was rushing fast

By the weeds

And sparks rushed in sheaves

Through the fog...

If snowflakes are "sparks", then a blizzard is a huge forge. Hence - a new stage in the development and implementation of the metaphor:

And a raised hammer of snow whirlwinds

Threw us into the abyss, where the sparks flew,

Where the snowflakes shyly curled ...

The introduction of a new metaphorical series causes a further complication. We are talking about love "drunk"; the poet speaks of the "wine" of love passion, of the "goblet" of passionate wine. Hence, Blok has “snow wine” and “snow blizzard” as intoxication:

Light brew of snow hops

Finally, we observe how the main metaphor "snow blizzard" in turn becomes the subject of further metaphorization. This metaphorization develops in different directions: the whiteness of snowflakes resembles white foam ("In the snow foam"); their brilliance is like silver (“snow silver”, “blizzard silver”, “silver star snow”); silver threads are combined into yarn (“yarn of a tangled tow”) or lowered by a silver curtain (“I curtained my blizzards with silver ...”), spread out with a white sleeve (“Sleeve of my blizzards I will choke”). Snowflakes rush like “sparks” or “stars” (“And the stars pour snow dust”, “And from the heights of silver stars ...”, etc.). The Snow Maiden is showered with the stars of a snow blizzard (“Everything is shrouded in blizzard stars ...”, “It used to be that a blizzard would shower Stars on her shoulders, chest and waist ...”). The metaphor of "star" displaces the basic concept of "snowflake"; no longer a “snowstorm” sweeps the poet, but “star whirlwinds” sweep over him: “And star after star Rushed, Opening New abysses to starry whirlwinds.” Metaphor real-

licks: the poet flies "... with an arrow ringing Into the abyss of black stars!":

Listen, the wind drives the stars,

Listen, cloudy horses

Trample the stellar limits

And they bite the bit...

Or the wind of a blizzard is compared with the movement of a large wing (cf.: “The fire of a white-winged blizzard ...”). From here - a blizzard is like a bird; "Bird of the dark-winged blizzard..."; and with the further realization of a derivative metaphor: "The big wings of a snow bird My mind was swept by a blizzard." Finally, a new series of derivative metaphors is given by the howls of a snow blizzard, its “groans” and “songs” - with the original neoplasm, which was mentioned above: “blizzard trumpets”, “snow horns”, “blizzard trills”, etc.

Here float her blizzards trills,

Stars light train dragging,

And taking off tambourine blizzards,

Bells invitingly jangling.

As in the last example, various series of derivative metaphors often collide, form a dissonance, create the impression of an irrational, romantic catachresis of the type indicated above: “The fire of a white-winged blizzard ...”; for example, blizzards trills"float" (we say "sounds are approaching, advancing, flowing"), and in their movement they entail behind you snowflake stars, how plume. The poem "Her Songs" combines several rows of heterogeneous derivative metaphors for the main poetic symbol - love as a "snow blizzard":

Sleeve of my blizzards

Silver of my joys

On the air carousel

Yarn tangled tow

Light brew of snow hops

When the poet wants to introduce a new, independent theme into the main symbolic theme of his poem (“snow blizzard” - “snow love” - “Snow Maiden”), it must combine with the main theme into an artistically coherent whole. This is how the theme of the "troika" is introduced. It is based on the metaphor of the colloquial language: happiness "passed", "swept", youth "rushed". Blok renews the old metaphor by introducing the symbolic image of the "troika" that takes away happiness (cf. for the history of this

Taphora of the poem "The Cart of Life" by Pushkin and "The Coachman Kronos" ("An Schwager Kronos") by Goethe):

Earthly happiness is late

On his mad troika!

If in these verses the metaphorical meaning of the poetic image is still naked, then with the development and complication of the metaphor, it is realized, it becomes a poetic reality, the theme of a whole poem:

I'm nailed to the tavern counter.

I've been drunk for a long time. I do not care.

There is my happiness - on the troika

In the silvery smoke carried away ...

Flies on a troika, drowned

In the snow of time, in the distance of centuries...

And only the soul was overwhelmed

Silvery mist from under the horseshoes...

Sparks are thrown into the deaf darkness,

From sparks all night, all night light ..,

The bell babbles under the arc

That happiness has passed...

And only a golden harness

Seen all night... Heard all night...

And you, soul... deaf soul...

Drunk drunk... Drunk drunk...

The metaphorical image unfolds according to internal artistic laws. Therefore, it would be useless to strive for a rational-logical interpretation of all the details of the symbol and ask: what does the harness mean, what do the bells on the symbolic triple mean? We reveal only the basic symbolic meaning of the entire poem as a whole, its main aspiration as an allegory. Details follow from the immanent laws of the artistic development of the image and are only chosen by the poet in such a way as to symbolize a certain general mood - life hopelessly carried away, powerless daring, sadness and regret for the past, etc.

The combination of the image of a troika, which takes away happiness, youth and love, and a snow blizzard, a blizzard, sweeping the heart, is given in the following poem below. The symbol reaches the extreme limits of realization: the troika no longer takes away the poet's happiness - it takes away the poet himself and his Beloved, the Snow Maiden:

Here she came. shielded

All smart, all girlfriends.

And my soul entered

In her intended circle.

And under the sultry snow moan

Your features flourished.

Only the troika rushes with a ringing

In snow-white oblivion.

You waved your bells

Take me to the fields...

Strangle with black silks,

Sable opened up...

And about that free will

The wind cries along the river

And they ring and go out in the field

Bells, yes lights?

Thus, the entire lyrical poem "The Snow Mask", like a complex orchestral composition, can be interpreted as a harmonization of several initial metaphorical themes.

In the third volume of poems, the method of symbolization changes again, and so significantly that some critics have not quite rightly pointed out Blok's transition from romantic poetics to some kind of new realism. True, from the world of gypsy song, new elements of the urban landscape enter Blok’s poetry, replacing the “spring dawns” of the first volume and the “snow blizzards” of subsequent collections: “troika”, “sleigh” and “scorcher”, “violins” of a city restaurant, “gypsy ”, etc. But even these most real objects in the art of the symbolist poet are subdivided, become a “landscape of the soul”, a commemoration of internal, spiritual events; with the only essential difference that in the "Poems about the Beautiful Lady" the image of the poet as a knight, prayerfully bowed before the Divine Bride, is conceived from the very beginning as a poetic allegory and the whole poem, already in the main idea, has a symbolic meaning, while in In the verses of the third volume, some trip from the Beloved to the islands, which in itself is a real, even biographically reliable event, as if recognized as corresponding to a certain inner mood, emotional situation, is its typical expression. That is why this situation returns so often in a number of poems (cf .: “Here and there”, “Here it appeared. She blocked ...”, “Cold shoulders under the wind ...”, “With my bitter tears ...” (in second volume), “On the Islands”, “I am nailed to the tavern counter...”, “The spicy spirit of March was in the lunar circle...”, “Swampy desert meadow...” (in the third volume)). We discussed the origin of this symbol above. The symbolic meaning of the situation is often revealed in the words of the poet himself:

And rings through thin gloves,

And a stern look

And echo over the ringing desert

From the repentance of hooves -

Everything speaks of the infinite

Everyone wants to help us

Like this world, fly aimlessly

On a shining night!

The metaphorical style allows the poet here, too, by romantically transforming reality, to prepare us for the possibility of a symbolic perception of a real event. The following verses are particularly revealing in this regard:

Over the bottomless pit into eternity,

Panting, the trotter flies.

The phenomena of the outside world, the "environment", are metaphorically animated, come to life and acquire a human meaning, consonant with the mood of the poet. So - violins in the cycle of restaurant, gypsy poems: “And now, in response, the strings struck something, Frantically sang bows...”, “Distant violins scream foggy ... "," And the tenor sang hymns on stage insane. violins and spring...”, “And violins, melting and weakening. Surrender frenzied bows." In its frequent repetition, in a kind of metaphorical revival, the motif of the violin becomes a constant symbolic accessory of a certain spiritual disposition. Hence the indisputably allegorical title of the whole section of “Harp and Violin” or such verses in which the symbolic meaning of this motif appears quite clearly, for example, in the depiction of frenzied passion: “I don’t want to go blind from thunder lightning, Nor listen to the howl of violins (furious sounds! )..” - or impending death: “So that in the desert cry of violins Frightened eyes Mortal dusk extinguished” - and somewhat differently in another poem: “You hear through the pain of torment. Like your friend, old friend, Touched my heart with a gentle violin? - or in the picture of liberation, violent will that broke the shackles of the former life:

Far, wet valleys

And close, stormy happiness!

Alone I stand and listen

Because the violins sing to me.

They sing wild songs

About the fact that I became free! ..

Or, finally, in the philosophical symbolism of the poem “Voices of the Violins”, in which Tyutchev’s “thinking reed” (“There is melodiousness in the sea waves ...”) is replaced by a metaphorical allegory more familiar to Blok:

Why, in a clear hour of celebrations

You're angry, my bow is shrill

Breaking into the world orchestra

A separate song hurried?

But the art of the poet in these last verses lies precisely in the fact that he builds his work, as it were, on the very border of the contact of two worlds - the real and the super-real - so that the transition from the world of realities to the world of symbols eludes the reader and the most ordinary objects seem to shine through in a different way. meaning without losing its material meaning. So - in the "Steps of the Commander": fog outside the window, dead night, the onset of dawn and the cry of a rooster "from a country blissful, unfamiliar, distant" - the usual symbols of Blok's poetry - seem here, in a night poem, almost real objects of the landscape, and together with to those they already give a premonition of another reality entering this world, until with the appearance of a ghost this other reality does not become directly before us.

In the history of Russian symbolism, Blok's poetry denotes the highest level - the most sophisticated methods in using metaphor and symbol as ways of transforming reality and marking it with familiar images of other realities (“from the real to the realest” - a realibus ad realiora - in the words of Vyacheslav Ivanov). For literary Old Believers who are not accustomed to reading poetic allegories, his art, especially in the first two volumes, should remain incomprehensible, counter-logical, in any case - in such examples as those given above: “And under the mask it was ... starry ... "," I threw my heart ... from the white mountains, It lies at the bottom! In your time, setting artistic attention to this background, the well-known habit of feeling the presence of the infinite, super-real, some new dimension in the artistic image, makes reading these poetic allegories quite simple and familiar. But for future generations of poets and writers, the situation can easily change. It was not for nothing that Gorodetsky, a representative of the “new realism”, attacked Blok as early as 1913 for the poetics of allusions and allegories and demanded from the poet a “real troika”, and not a symbol: “The troika is successful and good with its bells, coachman and horses, and not drawn under its cover of politics ... ". 7 Here the requirements of a different artistic taste and, perhaps, a different worldview come into their legal rights.

Since the time of Trediakovsky and Lomonosov, syllabo-tonic versification has dominated, a system based, on the one hand, on

in verse (tonic principle), on the other hand, on a constant number of unstressed syllables between stresses (syllabic principle). In such versification, the number of syllables in a line is a constant value, and the simplest unit of metrical repetition is the foot, as a constant combination of a metrically stressed syllable with a known number of unstressed ones. Trediakovsky and Lomonosov borrowed the syllabo-tonic metric from the Germans. But among the German peoples themselves, this principle of versification is not national, but inspired by ancient and French influences. National German poetry used exclusively the tonic principle of a constant number of stresses in a verse, with a change in the number of unstressed syllables between stresses and before the first stressed one. On a purely tonic principle, the ancient Germanic alliterative epic is built; it was preserved by the German folk song, when the poetry of an educated society submitted to the non-national principle of stop building. In the era of Goethe and Romanticism, this older metrical principle is revived, thanks to the influence of folk song and the development of a rhythmically freer song style in book poetry. The beginning of Goethe's Faust, the ballad about the king from Fula, the King of the Forest (not translated by Zhukovsky, but in the original), many poems by Heine, Eichendorff, Uhland and other romantics, written under the influence of a folk song, use various forms of pure tonic verse . We can show its structure in Blok's translation of the famous "Lorelei" by Heine, which conveys the metrical features of the German original:

Cool twilight is blowing,

And the Rhine is quiet expanse;

In the evening rays alleyut

Tops of distant mountains.

Here, with three obligatory stresses in each line, the number of unstressed syllables between stresses (as well as the total number of syllables in a line) is a variable value: in the first line - 1, 1, 2; in the second verse - 1, 1, 1; in the third verse - 1, 2, 1; in the fourth verse - 1, 1, 1. The general metric scheme of such a three-strike verse:

x-x-x-x,

where x \u003d 0, 1, 2, 3, etc., i.e., is the value of the variable (most often, x \u003d 1 or 2). Of course, a purely tonic verse cannot be divided into identical stops, it is divided into parts consisting of independent words or verbal groups (speech measures), united by stronger stresses, for example: “Coolness | twilight | veyut, || and Reina | quiet | space...”, which is why, in Russian metrics, poems of this type are semi

chili is the name of the dolniks (three-part, or three-strike, four-part, or four-strike, verse, etc.).

Compared to the metrical connectedness of book syllabic-tonic verse, in which both the number of stresses and the number of syllables between them are metrically ordered, Russian folk verse is much freer and more diverse in its rhythmic structure, since in it only the number of stresses predetermined by the rhythmic structure is a constant value. the structure of the tune (cf., for example, the usual four-strike epic verse). In the era of romanticism, in our country, as in Germany, they pointed to the rhythmic richness and freedom of folk art (for example, Vostokov in his remarkable experiment “On Russian versification”) and tried to imitate it. But the victory of the principle of pure tonicity over Lomonosov's stop-position has already taken place in our days, in the era of neo-romanticism, and in this we see as significant a revolution in the history of Russian verse as the very introduction of the syllabo-tonic system by Trediakovsky and his followers. In this revolution, undoubtedly, the decisive role belongs to Blok's creativity.

Of course, Blok had predecessors, like any innovative artist. The element of pure tonicity seeped into Russian poetry in various ways. In addition to imitation of the Russian song and various experiments in assimilation of ancient lyrical meters, the main role was played by translations of German and English romantic dolniks, for example, already in Zhukovsky’s “The Shepherd’s Complaint” (from Goethe), in Lermontov’s “Beware! beware! over the Burgos way ... ”(from Byron), from Tyutchev“ Oh, don’t lay me ... ”(from Uhland), finally, especially - translations from Heine in the size of the original - from Fet“ You are all in pearls and diamonds .. . ”, “In a dream I saw a sweetheart ...”, “They loved each other ...”, etc., at Ap. Grigorieva "They tormented me ...", "Once upon a time there was an old king ...", "I dreamed again ...". In this tradition, Block's translations from Heine - "Again at home" ("Die Heimkehr") also stand in the metrical relation. They seemed new against the background of P. I. Weinberg and the translators of his school, but they are well substantiated in the old traditions of translators, who are more sensitive to the rhythmic structure of the verse.

Under the influence of folk lyrics are also the original poems of Russian romantic poets written by dolniks: Lermontov, for example, “Song” (“I don’t know if I was deceived ...”), “I used to consider kisses ...”, Tyutchev “Last Love” (“Oh, how on the slope of our years ...”) and a number of poems in the “Contemporary” of 1836 (by the way, “Silentium”, “Dream on the Sea”, etc.), subsequently reworked by Turgenev in the spirit of a school footprint for the 1861 edition, by Fet “Torn out by life, by the insidiousness of hope ...”, by Ap. Grigoriev “That the spirit of immortals gladdens grief ...”, etc. The era of symbolism is especially rich in examples; long list open

3. Gippius “Song” (“My window is high above the earth ...”) and the poem “Flowers of the Night” (“Oh, do not believe the hour of the night!”); Bryusov follows (poems of 1896, for example, “With lowered eyes, in a white cape ...”, “She was hardly fourteen years old ...”, “There is something shameful in the power of nature ...”, etc. .), Balmont with his “intermittent lines” (“Swamp”, “Old House”, etc.), Vyacheslav Ivanov (“Praise to the Sun”), etc. Some of these poems precede the first dolniks of Blok (“Poems about the Beautiful Lady” ), others were written simultaneously or later, in any case, they are completely independent. Nevertheless, like the poems of Zhukovsky, Lermontov and other poets, they give the impression of experiments, an uncanonical, underground literary stream. For the first time in Blok, free tonic measurements sounded like a matter of course, they received a kind of melodiousness, a complete artistic style. And in this way, at least for our era, the victory of the tonic element over the ancient foot position was resolved, the Russian poetic language assimilated this new, until recently unusual form:

Darkened, faded halls.

Blackened window grille.

Vassals whispered at the door:

"The queen, the queen is ill."

And the king, furrowed his brows,

Passed without pages and servants.

And in every word thrown

Caught a mortal disease.

Wrong! Where are you? Through the sleepy streets

A long chain of lanterns stretched out,

And, couple after couple, lovers go,

Warmed by the light of their love.

Where are you? Why for the last couple

Do not join us in the appointed circle?

I'll go strum a sad guitar

Under the window where you dance in the choir of your friends!

In essence, these two varieties of tonic verse - three-shock and four-shock (with different endings - masculine, feminine, dactylic) - limit the metrical possibilities of Blok's dolniks. Usually these verses have an emphatically melodious, melodic character, which corresponds to the song style of romantic lyrics. Between stresses most often (almost exclusively) one or two syllables. But Blok also has other tonic verses, of a colloquial warehouse, and in them the size of each share increases, that is, three or more syllables can stand between stresses, and sometimes two stressed syllables stand side by side, for example in the poem "From the Newspapers":

Kolya woke up, sighed disgustingly,

Blue dream is still happy in reality.

The glass rumble rolled and froze:

The jingling door slammed downstairs.

Hours passed. a man came

With a tin plaque on a warm hat.

A man knocked and waited at the door.

Nobody unlocked. Played hide and seek.

There were cheerful frosty Christmas holidays.

Thus, with Blok begins the decisive liberation of Russian verse from the principle of counting syllables in footsteps, the destruction of the canonized requirement of Trediakovsky and Lomonosov to metrically order the number and arrangement of unstressed syllables in verse. In this sense, all the latest Russian poets learned from Blok and not from his predecessors, just as Derzhavin, Batyushkov and Pushkin learned Russian verse from Lomonosov and not from Trediakovsky. Dolniki Akhmatova built on the same purely tonic principle; if they produce a slightly different artistic impression, it is mainly due to the choice of words (from the colloquial language, in a material-logical combination, without metaphors) and syntactic features that destroy the melodiousness inherent in Blok's dolniks.

Mayakovsky's poems, no matter how revolutionary in form they may seem, in their metrical structure are the same dolniks, with four or three stresses, with the only difference that Mayakovsky's share often includes a large speech tact, a whole verbal group, united by a strong stress , which, however, is sometimes found in Blok (for example, in the poem “Poet” (“They are sitting by the window with dad ...”)). Be that as it may, these differences are less significant than the facts of similarity: the name of Blok will later determine the decisive moment in the decanonization of the old system of versification and the victory of the pure tonic element.

Whether this victory is permanent is difficult to say. Perhaps the liberation of verse from the principles of the old meter is connected with some temporary and transient features of the romantic era of Russian poetry. It is characteristic that the poets of the classical style are returning from dolniks to a more strict, artistically more ordered system of stasis, for example, Akhmatova in The White Flock. On the other hand, such a poet as Kuzmin (cf. his last collection "Evenings Out of This Place") knows how to use purely tonic meters in complete and strict classical verses. Blok himself, after the first song dolniks in "Poems about the Beautiful Lady" and the rhythmic revelry of free verses in "Snow Mask" in the most mature verses of the third volume, is much stricter and more restrained. It seems that at the last stage of development he mastered a new metric form

mine makes full use of it and uses it on a par with the old one, like a wise artist, for whom all means are good if they serve a conscious and deliberate artistic goal. eight

If Blok's poetry plays a decisive role in the process of liberating Russian verse from the principles of stasis, then his work has a similar significance in the history of the decanonization of exact rhyme that has taken place in Russian verse in recent years.

We call a rhyme a sound repetition at the end of the corresponding rhythmic groups (verse, half-line, period), which plays an organizing role in the strophic composition of the poem. The understanding of rhyme in different eras of the history of poetry may be broader or narrower. The modern notion of exact rhyme is already specified in the definition. It assumes the unconditional identity of the final sounds of the rhythmic series, starting with the last stressed vowel. The conditionality of the concept of exact rhyme is evident, however, from the following: for masculine rhyme in an open final syllable, we currently require the rhyming of a supporting (i.e., pre-stressed) consonant; to you: crown, river: country for us, insufficient (“poor”) rhymes. However, Russian poets of the XIX century. to varying degrees and in various cases, they allow "poor" rhymes in their poems.

Thus, the concept of exact rhyme is relative and changeable; it means the limit, determined by the artistic tastes of the era, freer or more demanding. In the history of rhyme, we observe, on the one hand, the process of canonization of certain limits of accuracy, the establishment of more or less definite norms for a sound ending, on the other hand, the destruction of these norms, liberation from established canons, decanonization of exact rhyme. At the same time, it naturally turns out that the simple and familiar to us concept of exact rhyme is theoretically and historically composed of several forming elements.

We distinguish the following elements in rhyme: 1) the identity of metrical endings, or verse clauses, consisting of an equal number of syllables with stress in the same place; 2) identity of stressed vowels (vowel harmony); 3) the identity of post-stressed vowels (since this can be significant from an acoustic point of view: in Russian, post-stressed vowels are usually reduced to a greater or lesser extent into an “indifferent” or “deaf” vowel sound); 4) exact repetition and the same arrangement of post-stressed consonants (according to Brick's terminology - "direct sound repetition"). 9

In the process of canonization of exact rhyme (in ancient Germanic poetry, in the Old French epic and Spanish romance, in the middle

century-old Latin lyric poetry, in Russian folk song, insofar as it tends to use rhymes, being influenced by books or independently, in old Russian syllabic verses, etc.), we find all these elements of exact rhyme in independent development as endings that organize the verse. There may be rhymes that are different in the number of syllables and the location of stresses (i.e., in the structure of the metric ending - unequal and unequal stressed); rhymes built on the repetition of consonants with a difference in the stressed vowel (the so-called consonance); rhymes with the same vowels but different consonants ("assonance"); finally, with various partial deviations in the number and arrangement of consonants that form a repetition, etc. Rhymes broken down in this way into their constituent elements turn out to be identical with various types of sound repetitions within a verse that determine the verbal instrumentation of a poem (harmony of stressed vowels, consonant repetitions and etc.). The researcher of the history of rhyme understands the formation of a rhyme from ordinary, “random” sound repetitions, its canonization in a special function of the ending that organizes the strophic composition of the poem. On the other hand, in the process of decanonization of exact rhyme, these forming elements again become independent and give rise to artistic phenomena, in many respects similar to those initial stages in the history of exact rhyme, which we find in the ancient German epic or in Latin hymnography. 10

The decanonization of exact rhyme in modern poetry has various reasons. Of these, the most important is the desire to break the monotonous and already ceased to be effective return of the same sounds at predetermined places, that is, something similar to the development of syntactic transfer (enjambement) in romanticism against the backdrop of a strict and harmonious division of the sentence into verses and half-verses among classical poets or with the use of unresolved dissonances in contemporary music. In this regard, it is essential to update the composition of rhymes, the formation of new and unexpected rhyme combinations instead of boring and already banal rhyme pairs; the search for a new rhyme finds satisfaction here in addition to those exotic and rare combinations (Bryusov: asp: crucified; mooring: basalt etc.) that would break the intimate song or conversational style of many contemporary poets. The use of inaccurate rhyme in this sense can be illustrated by an example from Blok (“In an uncertain, unsteady flight ...”):

In gray spheres fly and roam,

Let the orchestra on the podium rumble

But to the light waltz music

The heart will stop - and the screw.

In this ending of the poem dedicated to the aviator and built on exact rhymes in the first two stanzas, we would expect the same rhymes in the last stanza, for example - wander: rush; get down and similar "verbal" rhymes; rumbles: seething, silent or view: closed. But the poet deceives our expectation with an unexpected rhyme combination - wander: waltz; rattles: screw. New unforeseen words acquire extraordinary semantic expressiveness; at the same time, the annoying strumming of identical sound endings is obscured, an unresolved dissonance bursts into the harmonious movement of sounds, in this example it is quite motivated and from the semantic side - by the sudden fall of the aviator.

If we leave aside the solitary experiments of Derzhavin and some of his contemporaries in the field of inexact rhyme, as well as the practice of Nikitin, Blok's few predecessors are the first symbolists, and almost the only one - Bryusov, who, following the French modernists, made a number of experiments in the field of inexact rhyme . With the advent of Blok, especially his second and third collections (now the second book of poems), inaccurate rhyme from the stage of theoretical experiments becomes an organic phenomenon of style. Using a number of examples from the second book, we would like to show the richness and variety of Blok's devices in the field of inaccurate rhyme, since in the usual presentation his role in the history of this device is underestimated. 12

First of all, we have a long series of examples of rhymes with a cut-off final closing syllable consonant (especially feminine rhymes), for example - cold: lace, comes: steamboat, creatures: flashlight, forget: people, victim: dead and others. This type of inaccurate rhyme was especially widespread in the poems of Akhmatova and the poets of her circle; for example, in the "Rosary" - flame: memory, lips: shore, ours; given away etc. The final syllable can be closed by a group of consonants, of which one is cut off or dropped out, for example - thunders: propeller, mast: trumpeter. The closing consonant can be different in both rhyming words - omitted: to come, person: dawn, door: shadow; in the same way - the last consonant in the closing group - tornado: death; the simplest case of such a distinction is when one of the final consonants is palatalized (the soft consonant rhymes with the corresponding hard one), for example - charm: rustle, lantern: old etc. Especially in female rhymes, deviations are possible in the group of consonants that separate the stressed vowel from the unstressed one, for example, the loss of one of the middle consonants - response: mortal, impudent: curtains, dim: narrow, mob - overthrow and etc.; or middle consonants are completely different - dome: listened, ashes: light, wind: evening; or, finally, one of the group of middle consonants remains unchanged, the other - in both words -

various - spark: fast, rest: air, death: branches etc. The same is possible in dactylic rhymes, for example - kapore: across the sea, death: brought out, palm: first, piers: from afar; only in dactylic rhymes is there also a permutation of middle consonants from one internal syllable to another, for example - behavior: cherished, cloud: sharp. Of particular importance are those cases of variation of middle consonants when the final unstressed syllable forms the same suffix in both rhymes (type: stressed vowel + x + suffix: stressed vowel +, y + suffix). For example, for feminine rhymes - porch: tablecloth, bunny: boy, forget: love, hug: knock over; for dactylic - prays: bows, dwarfs: crackers, Trinity: outskirts, threw up: showered. Such inaccurate suffix rhymes are characteristic of Russian folk songs, where they often appear as an involuntary consequence of more or less consistent rhythmic-syntactic parallelism, for example: “You are young fellows, you are my pretty friends ...” - or “Men are old, men some rich, townsman peasants ... ". The influence of the folk song is also felt in Blok in many cases of using inaccurate suffix rhyme, especially dactylic:

Boys yes girls

Candles and willows

They carried it home.

The flames are glowing

Passers-by are baptized

And it smells like spring.

We have a much stronger destruction of exact rhyme in those cases where the vowel element of the ending is affected. So - in various examples of unequal rhymes with a cut-off final vowel - unknown: next, open: blurred, hoarfrost: blue, eyes: night; or with a drop in the middle vowel (sometimes the middle syllable) - snowy: hopeless, important: wells, ray: martyr, breaking: falling. With the so-called consonance, the stronghold of exact rhyme is affected - the stressed syllable - sun: heart (one of Blok's favorite rhymes in the Snow Mask era), give: ice; and here often we are dealing with an incomplete suffixal rhyme of the folk warehouse - harmonica: buttercups, whistling: rustling, little room: baby. Finally, we note a few examples of unequal rhyme - kidneys: vents, gates: werewolf, the bandage lies still : v snake's lair that took my soul: what about you, I sing to you, my steppe is burned, the grass is felled: and whom I kissed is not my fault.

After the verses of the second book of Blok, the process of decanonization of exact rhyme proceeds more boldly and consciously. We pointed out above the so-called rhymes in colloquial verse

Akhmatova, where the desire to dull annoying sonorous rhymes is completely understandable, in Kuzmin and many others. Blok himself in the poems of the third volume returns, as in the field of metrics, to more canonical and conservative forms. verse. But here, too, the liberation from the traditional norm took place precisely in Blok's work. Such revolutionaries of form as Mayakovsky and other Futurists, of course, developed this principle more consistently; in particular, with Mayakovsky, unequally stressed rhymes, composed of two words with independent stresses, are of particular importance - a technique that Blok is only in its infancy (here we could include some compound rhymes that are not phonetically accurate, for example, Bryusov - what was known only to us: I meet with a welcoming hymn; at Blok - this wanderer, surely, is not happy: we are divine incense and especially lies still: lair). But otherwise, Mayakovsky's classification of inaccurate rhymes will mark the same basic categories that we found in Blok, and not in isolated cases, but as a consistently carried out stylistic device (in the second book - up to 90 examples).

When the poem "The Twelve" appeared, some critics pointed out that Blok was becoming a student of Mayakovsky here, obviously in the texture of the verse and in the use of rhyme. These indications, as it appears from the foregoing, are completely unfair. The peculiar artistic power of Blok's poem, which in this respect has nothing equal in Russian poetry, lies in creating the impression of a grandiose unresolved dissonance, as in modern music. In the first place is the above-mentioned dissonance in the thematic content itself - ups and downs of delight, ecstasy with the overflow of rebellious elements (“Let's fire a bullet at Holy Russia ...”) and hopeless longing that dominates all ups and downs of feeling. Next to this, there are screaming contradictions in the choice of vocabulary material: uncanonized, as if not yet artistically processed elements of rough everyday speech, verbal turns of a factory ditty and a new revolutionary language burst into the irrational, metaphorical style of the modern romantic poet. Finally, a decisive destruction of the habitually harmonic and symmetrical structure of Russian classical verse: the rhythmic freedom of sound sequences built on a purely tonic principle, changing in the number of stresses and in the nature of the verse ending; in connection with this - the deformation of the usual stanza of four verses with cross-rhymes into freer and more variable strophic formations and the decanonization of exact rhyme with all the variety of its techniques. All these elements of dissonance, elevated to the dominant artistic principle, were already in the work of Blok himself: the expansion of the poetic vocabulary with “non-canonical” material - in the gypsy and “realistic” poems of the third volume,

decanonization of old metrical norms and exact rhyme in the second book, especially in the sections "Bubbles of the Earth" and "Snow Mask", where much anticipates the poem "The Twelve". In this sense, Blok is by no means a student, but rather a teacher of the futurists.

The poem "The Twelve" is only the most consistent expression of that romantic element in the work of Blok and his contemporaries, which made symbolism a critical, revolutionary epoch in the development of Russian poetry. Romanticism seeks the unconditional in life; realizing the infinity of the human soul, he turns to life with endless demands and denies its finite, limited, imperfect forms that do not satisfy his spiritual maximalism. As an artistic trend, romanticism feels the literary tradition as a heavy convention, sees the artistic norm as a limitation of creative freedom; he strives to destroy established, canonized, conventional artistic forms in the name of the ideal of a new form, unconditional, absolute; and even the word in this respect for him is not so much a legitimate material for poetic skill, but a barrier for a poet who would like to "speak without a word." This dynamism of artistic and life aspirations, destroying the hardened boundaries of art and culture, melting immovable life values, like the cooled lava of an initially free, individual and creative impulse, the poet himself liked to call in the last years of his life the “spirit of music” in the romantic art of the early 19th century. . I saw historically the closest manifestation of this spirit to us (in the remaining unpublished article on romanticism). The study of the poetic style (an irrational metaphor that contradicts the material-logical meaning of words) and even the very texture of the verse (the deformation of classical Russian versification) reveals in this respect the same basic aspirations that were revealed to us earlier in the facts of the poet’s inner development, his spiritual maximalism, his tragic the gap between the "ideal of the Madonna" and the "ideal of Sodom". Whatever our personal assessment of romantic maximalism as an artistic and life fact, we cannot forget the exceptional significance of Blok's poetry and his appearance among us. In Blok's songs, the romantic element of Russian poetry and Russian life has reached the pinnacle of its development, and the "spirit of music", about which the poet spoke, appeared in its most perfect manifestation.

Blok's work is unique. It coincided with important historical events at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fate of the country and the personal fate of the author merged into one. The rhythm of history is vividly reflected in the lyrics. There is an evolution of poetry: in place of light symbolism, realism comes with a heavy tread.

Blok can also be called a modernist, since one of the poet's missions was to translate the culture of the past into a modern way. Despite the beauty and spirituality of the poems, the author emphasized the echoes of longing, despair, loss and a sense of impending tragedy. Perhaps this gave Akhmatova a reason to call him "the tragic tenor of the era." But with all this, the poet has always remained a romantic.

The main themes of Blok's work:

1. the fate of the motherland and the fate of man in critical historical epochs;
2. revolution and the role of the intelligentsia in it;
3. true love and friendship;
4. fate and fate, fear and impending hopelessness;
5. the role of the poet and poetry in the life of society;
6. the inextricable link between man and nature;
7. religion and the universe.

The ability to convey the subtle nuances of the soul has found its embodiment in a variety of genres: poems and poems, dedications and songs, spells, romances, sketches and sketches, thoughts.

True human values ​​are revealed only in the indissoluble kinship with the "unity of the world." The wonderful future of mankind is feasible as a result of harsh and everyday work, readiness for a feat in the name of the prosperity of the Fatherland. This is the worldview of the poet, which he expressed in his work.

The image of the motherland

Russia is Blok's main lyrical theme, in which he found inspiration and strength for life. The homeland appears in the image of a mother, a lover, a bride and a wife.

The image of the Motherland has undergone a peculiar evolution. At first, he is mysterious, shrouded as if in a veil. The country is perceived through the prism of a beautiful dream: "extraordinary", "mysterious", "dense" and "sorcerous". In the poem "Russia" the fatherland appears as a "beggar", with gray huts. The author loves her with a tender and heartfelt love that has nothing to do with pity.

The poet accepted tormented Russia with all its plagues and tried to fall in love. He knew that it was still the same dear Motherland, only dressed in different clothes: dark and repulsive. Blok sincerely believed that sooner or later Russia would appear in bright robes of morality and dignity.

In the poem "To sin shamelessly, unprobably..." the line between love and hatred is very precisely outlined. The image of a soulless shopkeeper, accustomed to the deep sleep of the mind, is repulsive, and repentance in the church is hypocritical. At the end, a distinct “cry” of the author is heard that even such a Russia he will never stop loving, she will always be dear to his heart.

The poet sees Russia in motion. In the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field”, she appears in the majestic image of a “steppe mare”, rushing “at a gallop”. The path to the future of the country is not easy and painful.

A note of foresight sounds in the poem "On the Railroad", where Blok draws a parallel between the difficult fate of the motherland and the difficult and tragic fate of women.

“How long will mothers grieve? // How long will the kite circle? - anger and pain sound in these lines. The kite and mother symbolize the fate of the people, over which the predatory wings of a bird hang.

The revolutionary flame lit up Blok's face and gradually scorched his most secret dreams. However, the passions in the heart of the poet did not cease to boil. They splashed out from under his pen and, like slaps in the face, fell upon the enemies of the fatherland.

Symbolism of Blok

Each poem of the poet keeps a hidden symbol that helps to feel his taste. This is what connects the poet with the symbolists - a modernist movement dating back to the silver age of Russian poetry. At the very beginning of his career, Blok perceived the phenomena of the surrounding world as something otherworldly, unreal. Therefore, in his work there are many symbols that reveal new facets of the lyrical image. They were chosen rather intuitively. The lyrics are filled with nebula, mysticism, dreams and even magic.

Symbolism is individual. Multi-color scales of feelings “danced in a round dance” in it. The heart trembled like a stretched string, from admiration and worries for the lyrical hero. Being a symbolist, Blok felt some kind of "underground tremors". It was a sign of fate. A mystical and intuitive view of the world pursued the poet everywhere. Alexander Alexandrovich felt that the country was on the eve of something terrible, global, something that would upend and cripple millions of lives. The revolution was coming.

Blok creates the symbolism of colors in his poetry. Red color is attractive and alluring, the color of passion, love and life. White and light is something pure, harmonious and perfect. The blue color symbolizes the starry sky, deep space, something high and unattainable. Black and purple are the colors of tragedy and death. Yellow color speaks of withering and smoldering.

Each symbol corresponds to a certain concept or phenomenon: the sea is life, people, historical movements and upheavals. Red worm - fire. In the poem "Factory" a "black someone" appears. For a poet, this is a fatal force. The factory and He are the sinister image of the oppressor-destroyer.

Blok sought to express his feelings and emotions, and not just describe the world around him. He passed each poem through himself, through his soul, so the stanzas are saturated with his attitude, joys and anxieties, triumph and pain.

Love Theme

Love, like a light breeze, penetrates Blok's creations.

In the poem "About exploits, about valor, about glory ..." the master addresses his wife. She was the muse of Alexander Alexandrovich. In her, the poet saw the embodiment of his ideals. Blok uses techniques to emphasize the sharp contrast between the illusions of the lyrical hero and the true appearance of his beloved: this is achieved by contrasting gray and blue colors and replacing the appeal "You" with "you". The poet was forced to abandon this contrast and, in the final version of the text, change the intonation of the appeal to his heroine to a more restrained one. Such a desire to rise above the purely worldly perception of personal drama to its philosophical understanding is characteristic of Blok's talent.

In Blok's life, another woman, a mother, occupied an important place. The poet trusted her with everything secret. In the poem "Friend, look how in the heavenly plain ..." Alexander Alexandrovich describes the feeling of sadness and loss. He is upset that Lyubov Mendeleev rejected his courtship. But the poet does not need sympathy. Blok is determined to survive the mental anguish. He forces himself to stop "reaching for the cold moon" and get a taste of real life. After all, she is wonderful!

The image of a beautiful lady

Blok believed that mankind, mired in vulgarity and sins, could still be saved by the "Eternal Femininity". The poet found its embodiment in the image of the Beautiful Lady. It is saturated with sublimity, personifies goodness and beauty. Light radiates from him, illuminating the dark souls of people. It is possible to achieve the highest harmony with the surrounding world through love for an earthly woman. A sincere feeling changes us for the better: new horizons open up, the world becomes beautiful. We begin to feel the charm of every moment, to hear the pulse of life.

Many poets portrayed the image of the Beautiful Lady, but Blok has her own: the fusion of the Blessed Virgin and the earthly woman. The image resembles the shining reflection of a lit candle and the image of an icon in a gold riza.

Each time, the Beautiful Lady appears in a new guise - the Queen of Heaven, the Soul of the World and a sensual girl - which delights the lyrical hero, who agrees to be her slave in the service.

In the poem “I Anticipate You”, the lyrical hero is tormented by doubts that the Beautiful Lady can turn into a vicious creature and there will be no trace of her spirituality. But he really wants to see her! Only she is able to save humanity from impending grief and show the way to a new, sinless life.

The poem "I enter the dark temples" merges into a single sound with the previous one. The quiet and solemn atmosphere of the church conveys the state of love and bliss, the expectations of the Beautiful Lady. The image of the unearthly gives rise to a sense of beauty, which is characteristic of an ordinary person.

Interesting? Save it on your wall!

Oh, I want to live crazy

Everything that exists - perpetuate,

Impersonal - incarnate,

Unfulfilled - to embody! Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok was a poet of the greatest historical milestone. This is the great poet of the old, pre-October Russia, who completed the poetic searches of the entire 19th century with his work. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova wrote: "Blok is not only the greatest European poet of the first quarter of the 20th century, but also a man-epoch."

In his work, Alexander Blok reflected the essential features of this turbulent, critical era. The reflection of the Russian revolution lies on his poems and poems.

Burning years!

Is there thoughtlessness in you, is there any hope?

From the days of war, from the days of freedom

Bloodshine c. there are faces.

It can be said that Blok's historical mission as a poet, critic, publicist was to bring the culture of the past into direct contact with his time. The poet was a link between the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is probably why in the work and appearance of Blok, incompatible personality traits and qualities are combined.

Blok is classical, restrained, deeply intellectual and intelligent. He is the most prominent representative of one of the most fashionable modernist trends - symbolism, in which he saw the expression of the rebellious searches of his time. In the content of his work, Blok went far beyond the limits of the symbolist doctrine, but he remained true to the aesthetics and poetics of symbolism until the end of his days, acutely feeling \"anxiety of his time\".

In the passionate, musical language of his poetry, Blok brilliantly expressed his foreboding of the approaching turning point in world life.

And black earth blood

Promises us, inflating veins,

All destroying the frontiers,

Unheard of changes

Unseen riots.

In the poetic world of Blok, who, as a creator, was looking for compressed poetic forms, concrete images turned into capacious symbols that spoke of the infinite. One or two "magic" words could mean infinitely many things to him. We find the most famous, classical examples of this in the poems \"Beautiful Lady\", \"Stranger\", \"Unexpected Joy\". Moreover, the multidimensionality and depth of the implied meanings are of particular importance.

The symbolism of Blok does not remain unchanged, it is rethought in a new way, crossed with new symbols. In early poems, for example, in \"Stranger\" we have one symbolic row:\"a hat with mourning feathers\", \"bowed ostrich feathers\", hiding\"in a foggy ... window\", behind\"dark veil\",\"stranger\". In the late poem \"About valor, about exploits, about glory...\" the image of tragic love, the memory of past happiness and youth is connected with another pictorial series.

The image of the beloved in the portrait appears before us without any haze: \"your face in a simple frame. Details associated with the world of everyday life are symbolically summarized:\"and threw the cherished ring into the night\",\"blue cloak\", \"flying days, spinning like a cursed swarm.\" The poem mentions the only detail of the toilet - \"blue cloak \". It is not just put on by the beloved - \"she wrapped herself in sadness\". Arising repeatedly in a dream, this image takes on the meaning of a symbol. In this poem, we do not find any stars, no secrets, no mysterious disappearance.\"... On a damp night you left the house\", - the departure of your beloved is tangible and concrete. But this does not make the perception of the poem mundane, it is, although sad , but envelops in a romantic haze, the symbolism remains deep, with many subtexts.

A similar perception is expressed in Blok's metaphors. After all, according to Blok, metaphor is the sister of the symbol.

Sunset in blood!

Blood flows from the heart!

Cry, heart, cry...

There is no rest! steppe mare

Rushing up.

(\"On the Kulikovo field\")

Alexander Blok created a special type of lyric poetry. This poetry is imbued with a keen sense of history and reality. Blok's lyrical style is not a destruction of old, traditional forms, but a free combination and redevelopment of elements of a wide variety of styles: from romance-sleep-elegiac to couplet-chastushechny. The poet filled the romance with psychological content and created it as a phenomenon not just of \"gypsy\", but of a great literary style:

Spring flutter, and babble, and rustle,

Deep, wild dreams

And your wild beauty

Like a guitar, like a tambourine of spring!

("You are like the echo of a forgotten hymn...\")

The melodious and emotional intonation of the romance is adjacent to the colloquial poetic ditty:

The young woman put aside the winter tow ...

See how fun April is in the street!

Unwound over the river Red sundress,

Happiness, prowess, melancholy The fog breathed.

(From the cycle \"Unnecessary Spring\")

The principle of contrast, antithesis is a favorite artistic principle of Blok's poetics. So, the prologue to the poem \"Retribution\" is entirely built on the opposite of antonymous words: “Life is without beginning and end. Chance lies in wait for all of us...” Or: “He, affirming, denied. And he argued, denying ... "

In plot poems, Blok often uses parallelism to increase the tension of the narrative:

The carriages were moving in the usual way.

They trembled and creaked;

Silent yellow and blue;

In green wept and sang.

(\"On the railway\")

Masterfully the poet uses color metaphors: \"yellow and blue1 (cars of 1 and II classes),\"green\" (cars)