The work of Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820 - 1892) is one of the pinnacles of Russian poetry. Fet is a great poet, a poet of genius. Now in Russia there is no person who would not know Fet's poems. Well, at least “I came to you with greetings” or “Don’t wake her up at dawn…” At the same time, many do not have a real idea of the scale of this poet. The idea of Fet is distorted, starting even with the appearance. Someone maliciously constantly replicates those portraits of Fet that were made during his terminal illness, where his face is terribly distorted, swollen eyes - an old man in a state of agony. Meanwhile, Fet, as can be seen from the portraits made during his heyday, both human and poetic, was the most beautiful of Russian poets.
The drama is connected with the secret of Fet's birth. In the autumn of 1820, his father, Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin, took the wife of the official Karl Feth from Germany to his family estate. A month later, a child was born and was recorded as the son of A.N. Shenshin. The illegality of this record was discovered when the boy was 14 years old. He received the surname Fet and in the documents began to be called the son of a foreign citizen. A.A. Fet spent a lot of effort to return the name of Shenshin and the rights of a hereditary nobleman. Until now, the mystery of his birth has not been fully solved. If he is the son of Fet, then his father I. Fet was the great-uncle of the last Russian Empress.
The life of Fet is also mysterious. They say about him that in life he was much more prosaic than in poetry. But this is due to the fact that he was a wonderful host. Wrote a small volume of articles on economics. From a devastated estate, he managed to create an exemplary farm with a magnificent stud farm. And even in Moscow on Plyushchikha, in his house there was a garden and a greenhouse, in January vegetables and fruits ripened, with which the poet liked to treat guests.
In this regard, they like to talk about Fet as a prosaic person. But in fact, his origin is mysterious and romantic, and his death is mysterious: this death was, and was not, suicide. Fet, tormented by illness, finally decided to commit suicide. Sent his wife away, left a suicide note, grabbed a knife. The secretary prevented him from using it. And the poet died - died of shock.
The biography of the poet is, first of all, his poems. Fet's poetry is multifaceted, its main genre is a lyrical poem. Of the classical genres, there are elegies, thoughts, ballads, messages. As an "original Fetov genre" one can consider "melodies" - poems that are a response to musical impressions.
One of Fet's earliest and most popular poems is "I came to you with greetings":
I came to you with greetings
Tell that the sun has risen, that it is a hot light
The sheets fluttered;
Tell that the forest woke up
All woke up, each branch,
Startled by every bird
And full of spring thirst ...
The poem is written on the theme of love. The theme is old, eternal, and Fet's poems breathe freshness and novelty. It doesn't look like anything we know. For Fet, this is generally characteristic and corresponds to his conscious poetic attitudes. Fet wrote: "Poetry certainly requires novelty, and nothing is more deadly for it than repetition, and even more so of itself ... By novelty, I mean not new objects, but their new illumination with the magic lantern of art."
The very beginning of the poem is unusual - unusual in comparison with the then accepted norm in poetry. In particular, Pushkin's norm, which required the utmost precision in the word and in the combination of words. Meanwhile, the initial phrase of Fetov's poem is not at all accurate and not even quite "correct": "I came to you with greetings, to tell you ...". Would Pushkin or any of the poets of Pushkin's time have allowed himself to say so? At that time, these lines were seen as poetic insolence. Fet was aware of the inaccuracy of his poetic word, its proximity to living, sometimes seeming not quite correct, but from that especially vivid and expressive speech. He called his poems jokingly (but not without pride) poems "in a disheveled kind." But what is the artistic meaning in the poetry of the "disheveled kind"?
Inaccurate words and, as it were, sloppy, "disheveled" expressions in Fet's poems create not only unexpected, but also vivid, exciting images. One gets the impression that the poet does not seem to deliberately think about the words, they themselves came to him. He speaks in the very first, unintentional words. The poem is remarkably complete. This is an important virtue in poetry. Fet wrote: "The task of the lyricist is not in the harmony of the reproduction of objects, but in the harmony of tone." In this poem there is both harmony of objects and harmony of tone. Everything in the poem is internally connected with each other, everything is unidirectional, it is said in a single impulse of feeling, as if in one breath.
Another early poem lyric play"Whisper, timid breath...":
Whisper, timid breath,
trill nightingale,
Silver and flutter
sleepy stream,
Night light, night shadows,
Shadows without end
A series of magical changes
Sweet face...
The poem was written in the late 40s. It is built on one nominal sentence. Not a single verb. Only objects and phenomena that are named one after another: whisper - timid breathing - nightingale trills, etc.
But for all that, a poem cannot be called objective and material. This is the most surprising and unexpected. Fet's objects are non-objective. They exist not by themselves, but as signs of feelings and states. They glow a little, flicker. Naming this or that thing, the poet evokes in the reader not a direct idea of the thing itself, but those associations that can usually be associated with it. The main semantic field of the poem is between words, behind words.
"Behind the words" the main theme of the poem develops: feelings of love. The feeling is subtle, inexpressible in words, inexpressibly strong, So no one has written about love before Fet.
Fet liked the reality of life, and this was reflected in his poems. Nevertheless, Fet can hardly be called a realist, noticing how he gravitates in poetry to dreams, dreams, intuitive movements of the soul. Fet wrote about beauty spilled in all the diversity of reality. Aesthetic realism in Fet's poetry in the 1940s and 1950s was really directed towards the mundane and the most ordinary.
The nature and tension of Fet's lyrical experience depend on the state of nature. The change of seasons occurs in a circle - from spring to spring. In the same kind of circle, the movement of feelings in Fet takes place: not from the past to the future, but from spring to spring, with its necessary, inevitable return. In the collection (1850) the cycle "Snow" is given the first place. Fet's winter cycle is multi-motive: he also sings about a sad birch tree in winter attire, about how "the night is bright, frost shines," and "frost drew patterns on double glass." Snowy plains attract the poet:
wonderful picture,
How are you related to me?
white plain,
Full moon,
the light of the heavens above,
And shining snow
And distant sleigh
Lonely run.
Fet confesses his love for the winter landscape. Fet's poems are dominated by a radiant winter, in the prickly brilliance of the sun, in the diamonds of snowflakes and snow sparks, in the crystal of icicles, In the silvery fluff of frosty eyelashes. The associative series in this lyric does not go beyond nature itself, here is its own beauty, which does not need human spiritualization. Rather, it spiritualizes and enlightens the personality. It was Fet who, following Pushkin, sang the Russian winter, only he managed to reveal its aesthetic meaning in such a multifaceted way. Fet introduced rural landscape, scenes into poetry folk life, appeared in the poems "grandfather bearded", he "groans and crosses himself", or a coachman on a daring troika.
Feta has always attracted the poetic theme of evening and night. The poet early developed a special aesthetic attitude to the night, the onset of darkness. At a new stage of creativity, he already began to call entire collections "Evening Lights", in them, as it were, a special, Fetov's philosophy of the night.
Fet's "night poetry" reveals a complex of associations: night - abyss - shadows - sleep - visions - secret, intimate - love - the unity of the "night soul" of a person with the night element. This image receives a philosophical deepening in his poems, a new second meaning; in the content of the poem, a second plan appears - symbolic. Philosophical and poetic perspective is given to him by the association "night-abyss". She begins to get closer to human life. The abyss is an air road - the path of a person's life.
MAY NIGHT
Retarded clouds are flying over us
Last crowd.
Their transparent segment melts gently
At the crescent moon
Mysterious power reigns in spring
With stars on my forehead. -
You gentle! You promised me happiness
On a vain land.
Where is happiness? Not here, in a miserable environment,
And there it is - like smoke
Follow him! after him! air way -
And fly away to eternity.
May night promises happiness, a person flies through life for happiness, the night is an abyss, a person flies into the abyss, into eternity. Further development this association: the night-the existence of man-the essence of being.
Fet represents the night hours revealing the secrets of the universe. The night insight of the poet allows him to look "from time to eternity", he sees "the living altar of the universe."
Tolstoy wrote to Fet: "A poem is one of those rare ones in which it is impossible to add, subtract or change words; it is alive and charming. It is so good that, it seems to me, this is not an accidental poem, but that this is the first jet of a long delayed stream ".
The association night - abyss - human existence, developing in Fet's poetry, absorbs the ideas of Schopenhauer. However, the proximity of the poet Fet to the philosopher is very conditional and relative. The ideas of the world as a representation, of man as a contemplator of being, thoughts of intuitive insights, apparently, were close to Fet.
The idea of death is woven into the figurative association of Fet's poems about the night and human existence (the poem "Sleep and Death", written in 1858). Sleep is full of the bustle of the day, death is full of majestic peace. Fet gives preference to death, draws her image as the embodiment of a kind of beauty.
In general, Fet's "night poetry" is deeply original. His night is beautiful no less than the day, maybe even more beautiful. Fetov's night is full of life, the poet feels "the breath of the immaculate night." Fetovskaya night gives a person happiness:
What a night! Transparent air is bound;
Fragrance swirls over the earth.
Oh now I'm happy, I'm excited
Oh, now I'm glad to speak! …
Man merges with night existence, he is by no means alienated from it. He hopes and expects something from him. The association repeated in Fet's poems - night - and expectation and trembling, trembling:
The birches are waiting. Their leaf is translucent
Shyly beckons and amuses the gaze.
They tremble. So maiden newlywed
And her dress is joyful and alien ...
Fet has a nocturnal nature and a person is full of expectations of the innermost, which is available to all living things only at night. Night, love, communication with the elemental life of the universe, the knowledge of happiness and higher truths in his poems, as a rule, are combined.
Fet's work is the apotheosis of the night. For the Feta philosopher, the night is the basis of world existence, it is the source of life and the keeper of the secret of "double being", the relationship of man with the universe, she is the knot of all living and spiritual connections.
Now it is impossible to call Fet only a poet of sensations. His contemplation of nature is filled with philosophical profundity, poetic insights are aimed at discovering the secrets of being.
Poetry was the main business of Fet's life, a vocation to which he gave everything: soul, vigilance, sophistication of hearing, richness of imagination, depth of mind, skill of hard work and inspiration.
In 1889, Strakhov wrote in the article "The Anniversary of Fet's Poetry": "He is the only poet of his kind, incomparable, giving us the purest and real poetic delight, true diamonds of poetry ... Fet is a true touchstone for the ability to understand poetry ...".
The work of A. A. Fet is one of the brightest pages in the history of Russian poetry. Together with F. I. Tyutchev, they gave the lyrics such depth and inclusiveness that poetry did not know before them. Philosophical richness, direct feeling of nature, harmonious unity with it - we find all this in Fet's poems.
The fate of Fet was unusual and largely predetermined the features of his poetic work. The son of a minor German official, Fet was recorded for a bribe as the son of the Oryol landowner Shenshin, who took the poet's mother away from his father. But the deception was revealed, and Fet experienced for many years what it means to be illegitimate. The main thing is that he lost the status of a noble son. He tried to "serve out" the nobility, but 13 years of army and guards did not give anything. Then he married an old and rich woman for money, became a cruel and stingy farmer.
Fet never sympathized with revolutionaries and even liberals, and in order to achieve the desired nobility, he demonstrated his loyal feelings for a long time and loudly. And only when Fet was already 53 years old, Alexander II set out a favorable resolution on his petition. It got ridiculous: if the thirty-year-old Pushkin considered it an insult to grant him the rank of chamber junker (a court rank usually given to young people under 20 years old), then this Russian lyric poet specially procured himself a chamber junker at the age of 70.
Fet also collaborated in Sovremennik. However, despite the fact that the employees of Sovremennik in the 50s. had a beneficial effect on the development of Fet’s work, the poet’s complete rapprochement with their circle did not happen. Even among those who were personally more friendly to him than others, there were essential points of ideological and aesthetic divergence from him. J.I. Tolstoy - especially later, during the period of their friendly closeness - was irritated in Fet by his indifference to the problems of morality and religion. Ultimately, they could not agree on art, its tasks and goals, because Fet denied the social and ethical significance of art, which Tolstoy seemed to be the main one.
Fet defended the unconsciousness and subjectivity of creativity. At the same time, Fet sought not to disunite, but to bring people together through art. Not believing in historical and social progress, he believed in the natural ability of people to mutual understanding and saw in communication a source of happiness and an expression of the fullness of life. It is from the acute thirst for the fullness of spiritual communication that Fet has a feeling of “insufficiency” of verbal expression, logical speech. In Fet's greedy desire to "supplement" verbal speech with other languages, his criticism of the mind and the rationalistic principle of consciousness, on the one hand, and his love for the physical natural life of a person, for all its appearances, on the other, affected. Fet seeks and finds, in addition to words, other means of conveying thoughts and feelings, and enjoys these new ways leading to rapprochement between people.
It is known that Fet adored music, literally revered it. It is no coincidence that many popular romances were written on his poems (“Oh, for a long time I will be in the silence of a secret night ...”, “What happiness! And the night, and we are alone ...”, “The night shone. The moon was full of garden...”, “For a long time there is little joy in love...”, “In the invisible haze...”, “I won’t tell you anything...”, “Don’t wake her up at dawn...” and etc.).
Thematically, Fet’s lyrics are not too diverse: the beauty of nature (“I came to you with greetings ...”, “Whisper. Timid breathing ...”, “What sadness! The end of the alley ...”, “This morning, this joy. ..”, “I’m waiting, I’m filled with anxiety...”) and female love(“No, I didn’t change ...”, “He wanted my madness ...”, “Love me! As soon as your humble ...”, “I still love, I still yearn ...”) - that’s all subject. But what great power Fet achieves within these narrow limits! In addition, merging together, they paint a striking, truly Fetovsky image of Russia. In the province, in the remote corners of the country, he was formed: literary success did not give Fet certain place in society, after graduating from the university, he was forced to wander around the deaf provincial corners, rotate in a circle of army officers-soldiers and local landowners.
Feta's Russia is the Russia of a patriarchal rural way of life with its harsh, snow-covered plains, trios carried away into the distance, mysterious Christmas evenings, and the longing of its wooden cities. At the same time, Fet keenly feels the beauty of the world and nature, and expresses this in perfect, classical, eternally beautiful forms. Behind this perception of life is a departure from the traditional attitude to beauty as an ideal that lies outside of modern reality. Fet acutely perceives the beauty of reality and considers beauty as an indispensable attribute of life. Native nature in its immediate real life appears in Fet's poetry as the main sphere of manifestation of beauty. And the "low life", and the boredom of long evenings, and the languishing melancholy of everyday monotony, and the painful disharmony of the soul of the Russian Hamlet become the subject of poetic reflection in Fet's work.
The difference between Fet’s perception of his native space and that expressed, for example, in his works by Lermontov and (in “ dead souls ah”) Gogol, consists in the greater spatial limitation of his images. If Gogol in the lyrical digressions of "Dead Souls" looks around, as it were, the entire Russian plain from a point of view raised above it, and Lermontov sees a vast panorama of the homeland through the eyes of a wanderer riding along its endless roads and fields, then Fet perceives the nature immediately surrounding his settled life, his house. He notes the changes in the dead winter nature precisely because they occur in the area well known to him in the smallest detail. For example,
How they like to find thoughtful eyes
Winded ditches, winded mountains...
Ile among the naked fields,
Where is the bizarre hill...
Sculpted at midnight -
Whirling whirlwinds distant ... "
The poet knows where the ditches were, covered with snow, notes that a flat field was covered with snowdrifts, that a hill grew during the night, which was not there.
The poet is surrounded by a special sphere, "his own space", and it is this space that is the image of his homeland for him.
This range of lyrical motifs is reflected, for example, in Fet's poem "The Sad Birch". The image of a birch in the poems of many poets symbolizes Russian nature. "The couple of whitening birches" and in "Motherland" Lermontov appears as the embodiment of Russia. Fet depicts one birch, which he sees every day through the window of his room. For the poet, the slightest changes on this tree, naked in winter, as if dead in the cold, serve as the embodiment of the beauty and peculiar life of the nature of his native land.
The poet's house is the center of space, nature, which are depicted in his landscape lyrics. Therefore, in his poems there are frequent references to the fact that the poet contemplates nature through the window. The originality of the poetic perception of nature inherent in Fet is conveyed, for example, in his poem "The Village". The poet loves the village as the world surrounding the girl dear to him, which is her "sphere". The poet loves nature and the people surrounding the girl, the sounds and play of light around her, the aromas and movement of the air of her forest, her meadow, her home. He loves the cat that frolics at her feet and the work in her hands. After all, it's all about her. It is not for nothing that the poem bears the collective name "Village", that is, the world that constitutes a living and organic unity. The girl is the soul of this unity, but she is inseparable from it, from her family, her home, her village. Therefore, the poet speaks of the village as a shelter for the whole family (“I love your sad shelter ...”).
Within this poetic circle, there are no more important or less important subjects for the poet. All of them are equally sweet to the poet. The poet himself becomes a part of it, and a new relationship to himself opens up in him. He begins to love himself as a part of this world, to love his own stories, which from now on become part of the moral atmosphere surrounding the girl. Perceiving the homeland as a spatial unity, Fet also perceives it in time. This is not only a “village”, but also “deaf evening of the village”, and the hours from “blessing” to the sunrise of the month, and “speech in slow motion”, and “silent birds”. That is, these are the phenomena that surround it in space and time. Fet not only loves the world around him, he seems to dissolve in it. If for Pushkin love was a manifestation of the highest fullness of life, then for Fet love is the only content of human existence, the only faith. He affirms this idea in his poems with surprising force.
So, Fet's lyrics raise the cornerstone, most important questions of being. She talks about man and his connection with nature. Belief in the infinity of the life of nature and in the possibility of a harmonious merging of a person with it pervades many of Fet's poems. Being their philosophical basis, it gives them a light, pacifying sound. Fet in a new way displayed the theme of the motherland in his poetry, on the one hand, limiting it, but on the other, deepening it, making it immeasurably richer.
A. A. Fet was one of the founders of Russian impressionism, which appeared as a style in Europe in late XIX in. He brought into Russian poetry a completely new sense of the world, a new look at things, having a huge impact on all subsequent Russian literature.
The main themes and ideas of the lyrics of A.A. Fet
In the personality of Afanasy Fet, two absolutely different person: a hardened, heavily worn, beaten by life practitioner and inspired, tireless literally to the last breath (and he died at the age of 72), a singer of beauty and love.
The son of a minor German official, Fet was recorded for a bribe as the son of the Oryol landowner Shenshin, who took the poet's mother away from his father. But the deception was revealed, and Fet experienced for many years what it means to be illegitimate. The main thing is that he lost the status of a noble son. He tried to "serve out" the nobility, but 13 years of the army and guards did not give anything. Then he married an old and rich woman for money, became a cruel and tight-fisted farmer-exploiter. Fet never sympathized with revolutionaries and even liberals, and in order to achieve the desired nobility, he demonstrated his loyal feelings for a long time and loudly. And only when Fet was already 53 years old, Alexander II set out a favorable resolution on his petition. It got ridiculous: if the thirty-year-old Pushkin considered it an insult to grant him the title of chamber junker (this is a court rank usually given to young people under 20 years old), then this Russian lyric poet specially procured himself a chamber junker at the age of 70?
And at the same time, Fet wrote divine verses. Here is a poem from 1888:
"Half-destroyed, half-dweller of the grave,
About the sacraments of love, why do you sing to us?
Why, where forces can't rush you,
Like a daring young man, are you the only one who calls us?
- I languish and sing. You listen and you care;
In the melodies of the senile, your young spirit lives.
The old gypsy woman still sings alone.
That is, literally two people lived in one, by the way, very unpleasant-looking shell. But what a strength of feeling, the power of poetry, what a passionate, youthful attitude towards beauty, towards love!
Fet's poetry did not have long success with his contemporaries in the 40s, and in the 7080s it was a very chamber success, by no means massive. But Fet was familiar to the masses, although they did not always know that the popular romances that they sing (including gypsy ones) were to Fet's words. “Oh, for a long time I will be in the silence of a secret night”, “What happiness! And the night and we are alone”, “The night was shining. The garden was full of moon”, “For a long time there has been little joy in love”, “In the invisible haze” and, of course , “I won’t tell you anything” and “Don’t wake her up at dawn” _ these are just a few of Fet’s poems set to music by different composers.
Fet's lyrics are extremely poor thematically: the beauty of nature and women's love - that's the whole theme. But what great power Fet achieves within these narrow limits. Here is a poem from 1883:
"Only in the world is there that shady
Dormant maple tent.
Only in the world and there is that radiant
A childish thoughtful look.
Only in the world is there that fragrant
Cute headdress.
Only in the world is this pure
To the left is a running parting."
This is a kind of ontology philosophy about being) Fet, although it is difficult to call his lyrics philosophical. The world of the poet is very narrow, but what a beautiful, full of grace. The filth of life, prose and the evil of life never penetrated his poetry. Is he right about this? Apparently, yes, if you see art par excellence in poetry. Beauty should be the main thing in it.
Fet's ingenious lyrics of nature: "I came to you with greetings", "Whisper. Timid breathing", "What sadness! The end of the alley", "This morning, this joy", "I'm waiting, I am embraced with anxiety" and many other lyrical miniatures. They are diverse, dissimilar, each is a unique masterpiece. But there is something in common: in all of them, Fet affirms the unity, the identity of the life of nature and the life of the human soul. And involuntarily you think: where is the source, where does this beauty come from? Is this the creation of the Heavenly Father? Or is the source of all this _ the poet himself, his ability to see, his bright soul, open to beauty, every moment ready to glorify the surrounding beauty? In his lyrics of nature, Fet acts as an anti-nihilist: if for Turgenev's Bazarov "nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man is a worker in it", then for Fet nature is the only temple, temple and background, above all, love, a luxurious decoration for the subtlest plot twists of love feelings, and secondly, a temple for inspiration, tenderness and prayer to beauty.
If for Pushkin it was a manifestation of the highest fullness of life, then for Fet love is the only content of human existence, the only faith. He affirms this idea in his verses with such force that it makes one doubt whether he is a pagan. With him, nature itself loves - not together, but instead of a person ("In the invisible haze"). At the same time, quite in the Christian spirit, Fet considers the human soul a particle of heavenly fire, a divine spark (“Not by that, Lord, mighty, incomprehensible”), sent down to man for revelations, daring, inspiration (“Swallows”, “Learn from them _ from oak, birch"). The later poems of Fet, 80-90s, are amazing. A decrepit old man in life, in poetry, he turns into a hot young man, all of whose thoughts are about one thing - about love, about the riot of life, about the thrill of youth ("No, I did not change", "He wanted my madness", "Love me! How only yours humble", "I still love, I still languish").
Let's analyze the poem "I won't tell you anything", dated September 2, 1885. It expresses the idea, often found among romantics, that the life of the soul, the subtlety of feeling, cannot be conveyed by the language of words. For example, Fet's poem "Like midges at dawn" (1844) ends with the dream "Oh, if without a word / It was possible to say with my soul!". Therefore, a love date, as always, surrounded by luxurious nature, (opens with silence: "I won't tell you anything ...".
Romantics did not trust the language of words as a means of expressing the soul of a person, especially a poet. However, it is difficult to call Fet a romantic: he is very "earthly". Nevertheless, the lot of the hero of the poem remains to "silently repeat" the words of a love confession. And this oxymoron (a combination of contrasting words) becomes the main verbal and artistic image of the poem. But why is he still silent? What is the motivation for this? The second line elaborates: "I won't disturb you in the slightest." Yes, as other poems testify, his love can also alarm, excite the virgin soul of his chosen one with its "languishing" and even "shudders". There is another explanation, it is in the last line of the second stanza: his "heart blooms", like the flowers of the night, which are reported at the beginning of the stanza. Here is the identity of the human soul and nature, expressed, as in many other works of Fet, with the help of a special artistic technique called psychological parallelism. In addition, the chest, i.e. the receptacle of the emotional and spiritual beginning, the hero "sick, tired" (the first line of the third, last stanza). "I'm trembling" - whether from the chill of the night or from some internal mental causes. And so the end of the poem mirrors the beginning: "I won't disturb you at all, / I won't tell you anything."
The three-foot anapaest of the poem sounds melodious: "I won't tell you anything" has repeatedly inspired many composers. The poem attracts with the subtlety and elegance of the feelings expressed in it and the naturalness, the quiet simplicity of their verbal expression.
The glory of A. A. Fet in Russian literature was his poetry. Moreover, in the reader's mind, he has long been perceived as a central figure in the field of Russian classical lyrics. Central from a chronological point of view: between the elegiac experiences of the Romantics early XIX century and the Silver Age (in the famous annual reviews of Russian literature, which V. G. Belinsky published in the early 1840s, the name Fet is next to the name of M. Yu. Lermontov; Fet publishes his final collection “Evening Lights” in the era pre-symbolism). But it is also central in another sense, in the nature of his work: it is in the highest degree consistent with our ideas about the very phenomenon of lyricism. One could call Fet the most "lyrical lyricist" of the 19th century.
One of the first subtle connoisseurs of Fet's poetry, critic V.P. Botkin, called the lyricism of feeling its main advantage. Another of his contemporarys, the famous writer A. V. Druzhinin, also wrote about this: “Fet senses the poetry of life, like a passionate hunter senses with an unknown instinct the place where he should hunt.”
It is not easy to immediately answer the question of how this lyricism of feeling manifests itself, where does this feeling of Fetov's "sense of poetry" come from, what, in fact, is the originality of his lyrics.
In terms of its subject matter, against the backdrop of the poetry of romanticism, Fet's lyrics, the features and themes of which we will analyze in detail, are quite traditional. These are landscape, love lyrics, anthological poems (written in the spirit of antiquity). And Fet himself in his first (published when he was still a student at Moscow University) collection "Lyrical Pantheon" (1840) openly demonstrated his loyalty to tradition, presenting a kind of "collection" of fashionable romantic genres, imitating Schiller, Byron, Zhukovsky, Lermontov. But it was a student experience. Readers heard Fet's own voice a little later - in his journal publications of the 1840s and, most importantly, in his subsequent collections of poems - 1850.1856. The publisher of the first of them, Fet's friend, the poet Apollon Grigoriev, wrote in his review about Fet's originality as a subjective poet, a poet of indefinite, unsaid, vague feelings, as he put it - "semi-feelings".
Of course, Grigoriev had in mind not the vagueness and obscurity of Fetov's emotions, but the poet's desire to express such subtle shades of feeling that cannot be unambiguously named, characterized, described. Yes, Fet does not gravitate towards descriptive characteristics, towards rationalism, on the contrary, he strives in every possible way to get away from them. The mystery of his poems is largely determined precisely by the fact that they are fundamentally not amenable to interpretation and at the same time give the impression of a surprisingly accurately conveyed state of mind, experience.
Such, for example, is one of the most famous, which has become a textbook poem “ I came to you with greetings...". The lyrical hero, captured by the beauty of a summer morning, seeks to tell his beloved about her - the poem is a monologue uttered in one breath, addressed to her. The most frequently repeated word in it is "tell". It occurs four times over the course of four stanzas - as a refrain that determines the persistent desire, the inner state of the hero. However, there is no coherent story in this monologue. There is also no consistently written picture of the morning; there are a number of small episodes, strokes, details of this picture, as if snatched at random by the enthusiastic look of the hero. But the feeling, the integral and deep experience of this morning is supremely there. It is momentary, but this minute itself is infinitely beautiful; the effect of a stopped moment is born.
In an even more pointed form, we see the same effect in another poem by Fet - “ This morning, this joy...". Here they alternate, mix in a whirlwind of sensual delight, not even episodes, details, as it was in the previous poem, but individual words. Moreover, nominative words (naming, denoting) are nouns devoid of definitions:
This morning, this joy
This power of both day and light,
This blue vault
This cry and strings
These flocks, these birds,
This voice of water...
Before us, it seems, is only a simple enumeration, free from verbs, verb forms; experiment poem. The only explanatory word that repeatedly (not four, but twenty-four (!) times) appears in the space of eighteen short lines is “this” (“these”, “this”). Let's agree: an extremely non-pictorial word! It would seem that it is so little suitable for describing such a colorful phenomenon as spring! But when reading Fetov's miniature, a bewitching, magical mood, directly penetrating the soul, arises. And in particular, we note, thanks to the non-pictorial word "this". Repeated many times, it creates the effect of direct vision, our co-presence in the world of spring.
Are the rest of the words only fragmentary, outwardly disordered? They are arranged in logically “wrong” rows, where abstractions (“power”, “joy”) and specific features of the landscape (“blue vault”) coexist, where “flocks” and “birds” are connected by the union “and”, although, obviously, flocks of birds are meant. But even this lack of system is significant: this is how a person, captured by a direct impression and deeply experiencing it, expresses his thoughts.
The keen eye of a researcher-literary critic can reveal deep logic in this seemingly chaotic enumeration series: first, a look directed upwards (sky, birds), then around (willows, birches, mountains, dales), finally - turned inward, into one’s feelings (darkness and heat of the bed, night without sleep) (Gasparov). But this is precisely the deep compositional logic, which the reader is not obliged to restore. His job is to survive, to feel the "spring" state of mind.
Feeling amazing beautiful world inherent in Fet's lyrics, and in many respects it arises due to such an external "accident" in the selection of material. One gets the impression that any traits and details randomly snatched from the surroundings are delightfully beautiful, but then (the reader concludes) the whole world is like that, remaining outside the poet's attention! Fet achieves this impression. His poetic self-recommendation is eloquent: "Nature is an idle spy." In other words, beauty natural world it does not require any effort to reveal it, it is infinitely rich and, as it were, goes towards a person.
The figurative world of Fet's lyrics is created in an unconventional way: visual details give the impression of accidentally "catching the eye", which gives reason to call Fet's method impressionistic (B. Ya. Bukhshtab). Wholeness, unity of the Fetov world is given to a greater extent not by visual, but by other types of figurative perception: auditory, olfactory, tactile.
Here is his poem, entitled " bees»:
I will disappear from melancholy and laziness,
Lonely life is not sweet
Heart aching, knees weak,
In every carnation of fragrant lilac,
Singing, a bee crawls in ...
If not for the title, then the beginning of the poem could puzzle with the indistinctness of its subject: what is it about? "Melancholy" and "laziness" in our minds are phenomena quite far from each other; here they are combined into a single complex. “Heart” echoes “longing”, but in contrast to the high elegiac tradition, here the heart “whines” (folklore and song tradition), to which is immediately added the mention of completely sublime, weakening knees ... The “fan” of these motives is focused in end of the stanza, in its 4th and 5th lines. They are prepared compositionally: the enumeration within the first phrase continues, the cross-rhyming sets the reader to expect the fourth line, which rhymes with the 2nd. But the expectation drags on, is delayed by a line that unexpectedly continues the rhyme series with the famous “lilac carnation” - the first visible detail, immediately imprinted in the consciousness of the image. Its appearance is completed in the fifth line by the appearance of the "heroine" of the poem - a bee. But here it is not the outwardly visible, but its sound characteristic that is important: “singing”. This chanting, multiplied by countless bees ("every carnation"!), And creates a single field of the poetic world: a luxurious spring hum-buzz in a riot of flowering lilac bushes. The title is remembered - and the main thing in this poem is determined: a feeling, a state of spring bliss that is difficult to convey in words, “vague spiritual impulses that defy even the shadow of prosaic analysis” (A. V. Druzhinin).
The bird's cry, "tongue", "whistle", "shot" and "trills" created the spring world of the poem "This morning, this joy ...".
And here are examples of olfactory and tactile imagery:
What a night! Transparent air is bound;
Fragrance swirls over the earth.
Oh now I'm happy, I'm excited
Oh, now I'm glad to speak!
"What a night..."
Still alleys are not gloomy shelter,
Between the branches the vault of heaven turns blue,
And I'm going - fragrant cold blows
In the face - I go - and the nightingales sing.
"It's still spring..."
On the hillside it is either damp or hot,
The sighs of the day are in the breath of the night...
"Evening"
Saturated with smells, moisture, warmth, felt in the winds and breaths, the space of Fet's lyrics tangibly materializes - and cements the details of the outside world, turning it into an indivisible whole. Within this unity, nature and the human "I" are merged into one. The feelings of the hero are not so much consonant with the events of the natural world, but are fundamentally inseparable from them. This could be seen in all the texts discussed above; the ultimate (“cosmic”) manifestation of this can be found in the miniature “On a Haystack at Night...”. And here is a poem, also expressive in this regard, which no longer refers to landscape, but to love lyrics:
I'm waiting, anxious
I'm waiting here on the way:
This path through the garden
You promised to come.
A poem about a date, about an upcoming meeting; but the plot about the feelings of the hero unfolds through the demonstration of private details of the natural world: “crying, the mosquito will sing”; “a leaf will fall off smoothly”; "as if a string was broken by a Beetle, flying into a spruce." The hero's hearing is extremely sharpened, the state of intense expectation, peering and listening to the life of nature is experienced by us thanks to the smallest strokes of garden life noticed by him, the hero. They are connected, fused together in the last lines, a kind of "denouement":
Oh, how it smelled like spring!
It's probably you!
For the hero, the breath of spring (spring breeze) is inseparable from the approach of his beloved, and the world is perceived as integral, harmonious and beautiful.
Fet built this image over the long years of his work, consciously and consistently moving away from what he himself called "the hardships of everyday life." In the real biography of Fet, there were more than enough such hardships. In 1889, summing up his creative way in the preface to the collection “Evening Lights” (third edition), he wrote about his constant desire to “turn away” from everyday life, from sorrow, which did not contribute to inspiration, “in order to at least for a moment breathe in the pure and free air of poetry.” And despite the fact that the late Fet has many poems of both a sad-elegiac and philosophical-tragedy character, he entered the literary memory of many generations of readers primarily as the creator of a beautiful world that preserves eternal human values.
He lived with ideas about this world, and therefore strove for the credibility of its appearance. And he succeeded. The special authenticity of Fetov's world - a peculiar effect of presence - arises largely due to the specific nature of the images of nature in his poems. As noted long ago, in Fet, unlike, say, Tyutchev, we almost never find generic words that generalize: “tree”, “flower”. Much more often - "spruce", "birch", "willow"; “Dahlia”, “acacia”, “rose”, etc. In the exact, loving knowledge of nature and the ability to use it in artistic creativity, perhaps only I. S. Turgenev can be placed next to Fet. And this, as we have already noted, is nature, inseparable from the spiritual world of the hero. She discovers her beauty - in his perception, and through the same perception his spiritual world is revealed.
Much of what has been noted allows us to talk about the similarity of Fet's lyrics with music. The poet himself drew attention to this; criticism has repeatedly written about the musicality of his lyrics. Particularly authoritative in this regard is the opinion of P. I. Tchaikovsky, who considered Fet a poet “unconditionally brilliant”, who “in his best moments goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry, and boldly takes a step into our field.”
The concept of musicality, generally speaking, can mean a lot: both the phonetic (sound) design of a poetic text, and the melodiousness of its intonation, and the richness of harmonious sounds, musical motives of the inner poetic world. All these features are inherent in Fet's poetry.
To the greatest extent, we can feel them in poems, where music becomes the subject of the image, a direct “heroine”, defining the whole atmosphere of the poetic world: for example, in one of his most famous poems “ The night shone...». Here the music forms the plot of the poem, but at the same time the poem itself sounds especially harmonious and melodious. This manifests Fet's finest sense of rhythm, verse intonation. Such texts are easy to set to music. And Fet is known as one of the most "romantic" Russian poets.
But we can talk about the musicality of Fet's lyrics in an even deeper, essential aesthetic sense. Music is the most expressive of the arts, directly affecting the sphere of feelings: musical images are formed on the basis of associative thinking. It is to this quality of associativity that Fet appeals.
Meeting repeatedly - now in one, then in another poem - the words he most loves "acquire" additional, associative meanings, shades of experiences, thereby enriching themselves semantically, acquiring "expressive halos" (B. Ya. Bukhshtab) - additional meanings.
This is how Fet, for example, the word "garden". Fet's garden is the best, ideal place in the world, where a person meets nature organically. There is harmony there. The garden is a place of thoughts and memories of the hero (here you can see the difference between Fet and A. N. Maikov, who is close to him in spirit, whose garden is the space of human transforming labor); it is in the garden that meetings take place.
The poetic word of the poet we are interested in is predominantly a metaphorical word, and it has many meanings. On the other hand, "roaming" from poem to poem, it links them together, forming a single world of Fet's lyrics. It is no coincidence that the poet gravitated so much towards combining his lyrical works into cycles (“Snow”, “Fortune-telling”, “Melodies”, “Sea”, “Spring” and many others), in which each poem, each image was especially actively enriched thanks to associative links. with neighbors.
These features of Fet's lyrics were noticed, picked up and developed already in the next literary generation - by symbolist poets of the turn of the century.
Afanasy Fet is a man who combines two completely different personalities. One is a grated, coarsened and beaten by life practitioner, the second is the complete opposite - an inspired singer of beauty and love. The poet wrote about this until his last breath, and he died at the age of 72, offended by all of humanity. His mother was taken away by the landowner Shenshin, and for a bribe Fet was recorded as his son, but the deception was revealed, and all his life A. Fet experienced for himself what it means to be illegitimate. The loss of the status of a noble son turned out to be a tragedy for him. An attempt to curry favor with the nobility for 13 years in the army and guards did not help the poet, and then he married an old and wealthy landowner. As a master, he was a cruel and stingy exploiter. Trying to get the nobility, A. Fet long and loudly demonstrated his agreement with the regime, completely not sympathizing with either the revolutionaries or even the liberals. And only at the age of 53 his request was granted, Alexander II allowed Fet to be given the nobility. Returning to high society was the goal of his life for him: Fet specially secured the title of chamber junker for himself already at the age of 70.
It is hard to imagine that such a person wrote magnificent poems about love, heartfelt, unique. His poetry is the charm of the finest lyrics. Trying to express his soul and feelings, A. Fet liberated the word, did not shackle it into the framework of traditional forms.
Complaining about the lack of verbal material, the poet perfectly used the flight of his imagination, and this gives his works a unique charm:
How poor is our language! - I want and I can't
Do not pass it on to friend or foe,
What rages in the chest with a transparent wave.
The phrases found in the poet's poems amazed and outraged many of his critics. However, readers appreciated his poems, reading which, you plunge into the world of unusual magical colors, fabulous pictures and wonderful sounds:
As if the hair was already starting to burn
Hot gold roses to her lush shoulders.
Hot clothes fell lower and lower,
And the young chest was more and more exposed,
And passionate eyes, intoxicated with a tear,
Rotated slowly, desires are full.
Reading the lines of The Bacchae, it is impossible not to imagine a beauty dancing in front of her master, because only beautiful woman can have "shoulder roses" and only such can have hair comparable to hot gold.
The lines of A. Fet's poems are simply mesmerizing, beautiful music flows from the pages, birds fly up, and the heart is carried away into the “ringing distance”.
His associative-metaphorical thinking conveys unusual images to us, he makes only a hint of what he wanted to say with his poems, but it remains for us to think out the situation presented in the poems.
A. Fet wrote poems not only about love, he is an excellent poet-painter. His nature is “humanized”, and in his verses one can find “weeping grass”, “widowed azure”. Fet's word has always "gravitated" not only to poetry, but also to painting:
Shaggy pine branches frayed from the storm,
The autumn night burst into icy tears,
No fire on earth, no star in widowed azure,
The wind wants to rip everything off, the downpour wants to wash it off in streams.
The poems of A. Fet entered the musical life earlier than the literary one. Some of his poems were written as romances, and the composers felt this. Poems set to music by A.E. Varlamov and A.L. Gulevich, literally immediately gained popularity. Romances based on poems by A. Fet are still performed today: “Don’t wake her up at dawn ...”, “I won’t tell you anything”, “Take away my heart”, etc.
One of the greatest composers of the world P.I. Tchaikovsky turned to the poetry of A. Fet, while still very young. His first romance, written at the age of 18, was based on Fet's poems "My genius, my angel, my friend ...". Subsequently, Tchaikovsky wrote about Fet “... Fet, in his best moments, goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and takes a bold step into our field (i.e., music). Therefore, Fet often reminds us of Beethoven, but never of Pushkin, Goethe or Byron, or Musset. Like Beethoven, he was given the power to touch such strings of our soul that are inaccessible to artists, however strong, but limited by the limits of the word. This is not just a poet, but rather a poet-musician, as if avoiding even those topics that can easily be expressed in words.