Great ones about poetry:
Poetry is like painting: some works will captivate you more if you look at them closely, and others if you move further away.
Small cutesy poems irritate the nerves more than the creaking of unoiled wheels.
The most valuable thing in life and in poetry is what has gone wrong.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Of all the arts, poetry is the most susceptible to the temptation to replace its own peculiar beauty with stolen splendors.
Humboldt V.
Poems are successful if they are created with spiritual clarity.
The writing of poetry is closer to worship than is usually believed.
If only you knew from what rubbish poems grow without knowing shame... Like a dandelion on a fence, like burdocks and quinoa.
A. A. Akhmatova
Poetry is not only in verses: it is poured out everywhere, it is all around us. Look at these trees, at this sky - beauty and life emanate from everywhere, and where there is beauty and life, there is poetry.
I. S. Turgenev
For many people, writing poetry is a growing pain of the mind.
G. Lichtenberg
A beautiful verse is like a bow drawn through the sonorous fibers of our being. The poet makes our thoughts sing within us, not our own. By telling us about the woman he loves, he delightfully awakens in our souls our love and our sorrow. He's a magician. By understanding him, we become poets like him.
Where graceful poetry flows, there is no room for vanity.
Murasaki Shikibu
I turn to Russian versification. I think that over time we will turn to blank verse. There are too few rhymes in the Russian language. One calls the other. The flame inevitably drags the stone behind it. It is through feeling that art certainly emerges. Who is not tired of love and blood, difficult and wonderful, faithful and hypocritical, and so on.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin
-...Are your poems good, tell me yourself?
- Monstrous! – Ivan suddenly said boldly and frankly.
- Do not write anymore! – the newcomer asked pleadingly.
- I promise and swear! - Ivan said solemnly...
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov. "Master and Margarita"
We all write poetry; poets differ from others only in that they write in their words.
John Fowles. "The French Lieutenant's Mistress"
Every poem is a veil stretched over the edges of a few words. These words shine like stars, and because of them the poem exists.
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok
Ancient poets, unlike modern ones, rarely wrote more than a dozen poems during their long lives. This is understandable: they were all excellent magicians and did not like to waste themselves on trifles. Therefore, behind every poetic work of those times there is certainly hidden an entire Universe, filled with miracles - often dangerous for those who carelessly awaken the dozing lines.
Max Fry. "Chatty Dead"
I gave one of my clumsy hippopotamuses this heavenly tail:...
Mayakovsky! Your poems do not warm, do not excite, do not infect!
- My poems are not a stove, not a sea, and not a plague!
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky
Poems are our inner music, clothed in words, permeated with thin strings of meanings and dreams, and therefore, drive away the critics. They are just pathetic sippers of poetry. What can a critic say about the depths of your soul? Don't let his vulgar groping hands in there. Let poetry seem to him like an absurd moo, a chaotic pile-up of words. For us, this is a song of freedom from a boring mind, a glorious song sounding on the snow-white slopes of our amazing soul.
Boris Krieger. "A Thousand Lives"
Poems are the thrill of the heart, the excitement of the soul and tears. And tears are nothing more than pure poetry that has rejected the word.
Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet
Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.
So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.
And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?
Isn’t it me, a meager vessel,
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements,
Trying to get at least a drop?
The image of a swallow, which in poetry is more often associated with the soul than other birds, is found at different stages of the development of Russian poetry - from the work of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin to the works of Nikolai Mikhailovich Rubtsov. One of the main singers of nature, Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, did not ignore him either. In particular, the image was reflected in the poem “Swallows,” written in 1884. The first stanza of the text creates a serene and contemplative mood. The lyrical hero, who calls himself an idle spy of nature, enthusiastically watches the flight of a lancet swallow over the pond. Everything changes literally in one moment, when the adverb “scary” appears in the second stanza. On the one hand, the observer worries about a bird flying too low over the water. On the other hand, fear for her reminds the character of the emotions he has to experience when he comes into contact with eternity. In Fetov's poetry, rapid flight is often compared with moments of inspiration and creative search, which can be observed in the text under consideration. In addition, Afanasy Afanasyevich often contrasts the vast sky with the limited space of the Earth. This antithesis goes back to the romantic dual world. For Fet, it acts not only as a tribute to the literary tradition, but also relates to the poet’s personal life. The fact is that he was both a subtle lyricist, an adherent of the so-called pure art, and a strong business executive, practically an exemplary landowner.
In the poem “Swallows,” creativity seems to be the artist’s attempt to scoop up at least a drop of “alien, transcendental element.” The hero of the work calls himself a meager vessel, that is, a mortal creature whose earthly life is incredibly short. He is fully aware of his own helplessness in trying to express the inexpressible. However, it never occurs to him to give up poetic activity. Throughout his entire creative career, Fet himself was engaged in the selection of words and images to describe phenomena and feelings that are extremely difficult to describe. In the work “Who has a crown: the goddess of beauty...” (1865) there are the following lines:
...And that one of your eyes expresses
The poet cannot retell this.
In one of the poems from 1887, the hero exclaims: “How poor our language is!..”. Like the character in “Swallows,” Fet understood that he was “daring on the forbidden path,” but at the same time he never gave up trying to find suitable words for the above-mentioned expression of the inexpressible.
V.V. Kavelmacher
"NATURE'S Idle Spy"
(reflections on Afanasy Fet)
Source: Kavelmacher V.V. “Nature’s idle spy” (reflections on Afanasy Fet). Early 2000s Compiled by S.V. Zagraevsky in 2009 from the author’s draft manuscripts. Published in the book: V.V. Kavelmacher. Reflections on Russian poets (collection of literary essays). M., 2009. pp. 47-62. All rights reserved.
Scanning, formatting, technical and literary editing: S.V. Zagraevsky, 2009. All rights reserved.
Afanasy Fet (1820–1892) - the last outstanding Russian lyricist X I 10th century, German by official origin, son of Darmstadt official Johann-Peter Feth and Caroline-Charlotte Feth. A month or two before the poet’s birth, Caroline-Charlotte was taken away from her husband by the Russian landowner Afanasy Shenshin. Fet was born in Russia, on Shenshin’s estate (Novoselki, Mtsensk district, Oryol province) as his illegitimate child, and was adopted by Shenshin only two years later, after Caroline-Charlotte and Shenshin got married. After the death of his adoptive father, Fet was deprived by court of all rights of inheritance, nobility and name, and was forced to bear the German “common” surname, which he glorified. The loss of his noble family, as well as the sudden onset of poverty, became a source of constant suffering for Fet.
At the request of his mother, Fet was educated at a German boarding school in Verro (Võru) in Estonia, then graduated from the literature department of Moscow University. In order to serve the hereditary nobility, young Fet went to military service, which took place in the south of Russia, in a provincial garrison.
Having retired as a mature man, and never having risen to the rank of hereditary nobleman, Fet bought himself a rich estate with his wife’s dowry (and later a house in Moscow) and began farming with passion. As a German, Fet did everything he did well. Very quickly he turned into an exemplary landowner-agrarian, served as a peace mediator in his district, lived most of the year in the village, devoting himself entirely to literature and agriculture. He died a wealthy man, a large landowner, Leo Tolstoy's neighbor on the estate.
By the end of his life, already a famous poet, at the cost of incredible efforts, Fet regained his surname Shenshin and hereditary nobility (and even later became the leader of the nobility). “Fet” forever remained his literary pseudonym. In this story, the outstanding lyric poet showed himself to be a petty, easily vulnerable, vain person, one might even say unworthy of his great gift.
Fet remained ambivalent and contradictory in literally everything. He was a great pessimist, but at the same time a man of practical and small feelings. He was a rich, tight-fisted landowner, but at the same time a man of a microcosm of quiet joys. He was a “believing atheist” (this paradox is generally characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia). He was a contemptuous, grumbling, misanthrope disappointed in people, but at the same time a Germanophile, a European-educated person, an expert on German culture and a passionate admirer of Schopenhauer, whose work “The World as Will and Representation” he translated into Russian.
Fet published his first book of poems (imitative, like most young people) as a twenty-year-old student in the same year as Lermontov, the great romantic poet and brilliant, thoughtful prose writer, without competing or arguing in anything, which immediately determined his place as a “secondary "a poet who does not claim any noticeable role in the life of the society of his time. And even many years later, when Fet’s talent “matured,” a miracle did not happen: Fet did not immediately find himself as a poet. Sometimes it may even seem that Fet’s lyrical masterpieces are just an accident, he has so many mediocre poems, he was so repetitive, even graphomaniacal. He published everything he wrote, and at the end of his life, having become rich, he began to publish at his own expense.
Towards the end of Fet's life, the times of the dominance of amazing prose, the times of Chekhov, had come. The word “lyricist” has acquired an almost abusive, contemptuous connotation in society - not without the fault of Fet himself, the venerable old poet, known for his fierce retrograde views, who does not believe one iota in man, in the people, in progress, etc. Speaking in in the language of the Russian magazine press, Fet “took an antisocial position” in everything that worried the crazy Russian society, which was recklessly heading towards disaster - revolution.
The persistent rejection of his contemporaries taught Fet Spartan patience, sharpened his sense of beauty, taught him an understanding of aesthetics, and forced him to reflect on the nature of art. Fet became a convinced adept and inspired herald of the theory of “pure art.” In a land of lamentation and lamentation, where everything was compassionate for the people, he was in a state of gloomy delight, openly indulged in the cult of beauty and frenzied suffering. In his poems, he gave several ingenious definitions of the artistic phenomenon - for example, these devoid of rhetoric, sparse and precise lines:
You can't have petty worries
At least for a moment I wouldn’t be ashamed,
You can't stand in front of eternal beauty
Don't sing, don't praise, don't pray...
In Fet’s life, perhaps for the first time in the history of poetry, art became a struggle. And for more than a hundred years now it has always been a struggle. Poetry has lost the properties of human language, has lost its audience, and has become initially incomprehensible. To understand lyrical esotericism for the first time, initiation was required - as into a religious sect. The poet began to secretly, dizzyingly and illogically obey his demon. Since then, the poet and his squires have not taken off their armor in an eternal battle with the stupidity of their contemporaries.
Fet lived with the consciousness of his genius and his terrible loneliness in the artistic world. As a demiurge, as the founder of a new religion, he needed adherents. Leo Tolstoy did not understand poetry (he wrote the words: “Writing poetry is the same as dancing behind the plow”), and by the end of Fet’s life their paths diverged.
Fet was the first in Russian poetry to share his work with his beloved, the poor noblewoman Maria Lazic, calling her to play the role of his Muse, his Beatrice. Her opinion, even after her early tragic death, until the end of Fet’s own days, remained priceless for him. She became the first Fairy initiated into Russian poetry. Then Fet had both fans and epigones.
Fet's poems shocked poetry connoisseurs. He was a powerful versifier; nature became the object of his lyrical passion; he was the first to merge the language of nature with the language of the soul. His “birch trees are crying,” and his awakened roses “have a young heart squeezing.” This courage was stunning. As his neighbor on the estate and good friend Tolstoy said: “Where did this fat, good-natured officer get such incomprehensible lyrical audacity - a property of great poets?”
Nekrasov and other contemporaries of Fet have earthly suffering, the suffering of Anna Karenina. Fet's are unearthly. Only his heroine is Fairy. Deprived of specific signs - what are they for? - the poet and his Muse meet in the heavenly spheres. He listens to her lessons. Their existence is common, “double”. They are immortal.
Painfully inviting and in vain
Your pure ray burned before me;
He aroused silent delight autocratically,
But I couldn’t overcome the darkness all around...
This is already an inhuman relationship. This has never happened in Russian lyrics, and probably never will.
Many of Fet's poems about nature are elegant and melodic: he wrote and published a huge number of melodic poems. There have been rave reviews about the musicality of his poems (including from P.I. Tchaikovsky), but this was a mistake of his contemporaries: all of Fet’s melody-based poems are frankly weak. An excess of music ruins poetry. This is smooth writing, but the poems should be a little clumsy, they should stumble, like German richly syncopated poetic lines.
Fet’s lyrics completely lack such a bookish and literary concept as Russia (Gogol already has a literary “Rus”). No cultural reflection: Fet is all in the present, he is a poet, and his homeland is heaven. Folklore motifs – yes, they do occur. There is a lot of antiquity, but there is no Rus'. Perhaps, among other things, Fet was stopped here by his German origin and foreign surname.
A village dweller by conviction and habits, he was a true “Parnassian” in poetry, wrote anthological poems all his life, and could, without being lazy, translate ancient authors. He has no Russian history, no operatic mummers, no stylization “a la russe”. The anthological poems in Fet's collections go ahead, like heavily armed warriors, and this is declared, Russia never does. (The first poet to fall in love with the “Old Russianness” was Blok, who had seen enough of the new stylized painting in the Tretyakov Gallery).
For Fet, the ancient “Latin” was the Russian language, and iambic hexameter replaced the hexameter for him. Fet did not mix antiquity with Russian nature; in his landscapes, unlike Tyutchev’s landscapes, there are neither nymphs nor Pan. The specificity of his landscape is such that we breathe the Russian spring, find ourselves among the quiet Russian open spaces, outside the outskirts of a Russian village, in a Russian field... Russian arable land, Russian slopes are inhabited by ancient gods:
From the green-gray steppe
The fog is rising
And Ceres still sticks out
Hated weeds...
A contemporary of Tyutchev is recognized:
...And meets Jupiter
Gaia's womb is young.
But in Fet’s poems “nothing happens.” When there are no cultural associations, the poem becomes a simple sketch:
...And the lightning already glows brightly
Blue and green fire.
Although Fet himself collected his poems from the “Seasons” cycles, the reader, without a second’s hesitation, will understand what the poet prefers, what his “religion” is: Fet is an enthusiastic singer of spring. And although he did not write, like Tyutchev, his “ode to spring,” he serves it almost at the level of liturgical texts, singing spring in lofty terms, like Pushkin - autumn. Fet has about twenty-five poems in the spring, of which only two or three are weak. For Tyutchev, spring is “she”, for Fet it is “you”.
But it is very difficult to call Fet a “landscape lyricist” in the usual sense: he takes nature close-up, he has an almost cinematic close-up detail, a sharp vision, his nature is seen by him personally, each time as if for the first time, from an unusual angle, very detailed, very recognizable , but completely extraliterary. He doesn’t tell, but paints with words, takes paint out of words. His word is rich in nuances, sharp, precise, close to everyday life. This is real “painting with words.” Fet belongs to the New Age with his impressionistic imagery, and the rhythmic monotony of his musical poems belongs to X IX century. (The frequent use of trisyllabics was almost a mistake of taste on Fet’s part: Russian poetry is iambic in nature).
Fet has an amazing concentration of attention. Before him, the so-called “landscape lyrics” were written as on the canvases of old painters: a grandiose picture of eternal nature, under the eternal sun, under the eternal blue skies, invariably solemnly decorative and theatrical, as in the Alps. One could even make out Pan or the nymphs. Russian nature before Fet was also sung, but continued to remain Italian. Even Pushkin’s landscape is international. These are “forests” in general, “crimson and gold” in general, “dull times” in general.
Fet has an amazing visual acuity, previously unheard of among Russian poets. His word is unexpected and selective, lively and extraliterary. It is a paint so strong that its poems are mosaic-like, like plein air studies, executed as if with sparing, strong strokes of the painter’s brush. His feelings are vague and vague (after all, they are caused “merely” by the contemplation of nature - and therefore “unsystematic” and “stupid”). Fet is the first spontaneous impressionist in Russian art, and, surprisingly, he is a wordsmith! At the same time, Fet himself hardly had any idea about the painting of the French impressionists - his contemporaries.
Fet's themes are limited to observations of nature and outpourings of creative delight, which was wild and unusual for his time. This contradiction between the powerful picturesqueness and the smallness of the theme created a difficult conflict for his muse. Neither the philosophical pessimism according to Schopenhauer, which he translated into Russian, nor the tragic love to which many of his poems are devoted, nor his noble subtlety, nor his education saved him.
Fet’s lack of deep thought, his “half-childish worldview” (according to Saltykov-Shchedrin) was repulsive, like a “bad drawing” among the Impressionists. They admired children, played with them, Tolstoy resorted to a child’s vision in order to show “untruths,” but not a “semi-childish worldview”! Serious contemporaries did not understand how one could love something like this? Well, nice... They laughed at Fet; he, who repeatedly expressed his credo that only trifles are true, was called a “writer of trifles.” Vulgar criticism promised that in the future the only benefit from his poems would be that you could wrap herring in them. The only connoisseur of his poetry for many years (during the era of writing “War and Peace”) was his neighbor, the amateur landowner Lev Tolstoy.
In Fet's landscape lyrics, like in Japanese painting on rice paper, there are two plans - near and far, and no perspective. This shift in plans gave his poems a magical effect. Such a talent was surprisingly similar to the talent of Tolstoy, who soared in the heavens with his thoughts and at the same time saw some amazing little things on earth. It is not surprising that Tolstoy and Fet, who were in the prime of their creative powers, were disposed towards each other.
But then their paths began to diverge. Tolstoy moved toward abandoning artistic creativity as “sinful,” while Fet increasingly became a “frivolous sinner,” developing in himself the poisons of ancient pessimism. If outwardly he wore the mask of a respectable family man, then passions were already boiling inside him (his great student and follower Blok was already a complete immoralist). For Tolstoy, a religious thinker, Fet “danced behind the plow.”
Prone to humor, young Tolstoy once jokingly remarked about Fet’s masterpiece “The Night Shined. The garden was full of the moon...": by what non-lyrical right does the venerable father of the family, Fet, boldly and openly want to embrace Tanechka, a well-bred society young lady, his, Tolstoy's, sister-in-law in poetry? Something had already shocked the sensitive Tolstoy. However, Fet and Tolstoy did not reach an open break: Fet simply did not live to see Tolstoy’s self-immolation. Tolstoy, being eight years younger, outlived him by eighteen.
With Fet's death, landscape poetry in any form - generalized or detailed - ended. He was the last "contemplator". Already for Blok, nature is a place of passion. In Pasternak, she became the main or at least the second character, interlocutor (only the late, exhausted Pasternak, alas, again returns to description with almost zero effect: “Having swooped in from all sides, / A flock of jackdaws and crows...”). Pushkin is cheerful and active, active with his mind, he is not a contemplator. Fet looks into some depth and drowns in it.
There is no poetry without metaphysics. Fet's metaphysics are modest and quite traditional: he sings Life, sensing Death in it. But he lacks something without which the Russian poet previously seemed unthinkable: compassion for people. He is a bitter atheist, a stoic, his philosophy is gloomy, but his attitude towards life embodied in nature is enthusiastic. Fet is unique in this state of enthusiastic pessimism.
The poet sings. In fact, the poet himself no longer sings for a long time (rhapsodes of the first centuries sang), his speech sings. The poet constructs a phrase, selecting words according to their meaning and sound. More precisely, he builds his speech according to its meaning, finding himself in a haze of sounds. Sound writing dawns on him from above. This is the sphere of world harmony, the music of the worlds, and here the poet is not entirely in control. Of course, meaning and sound are contradictory, diverse in nature, their combination is always unexpected and miraculous. If the poet is the lord of words, then sounds seem to rule over him, this is already an interpreter of dreams, the son of harmony, a demon, God.
Fet’s great idea was to “speak without words,” to abandon logic, the logical word:
Oh, if only without a word
It was possible to speak from the soul!..
Fet learned to speak in vague hints, like the French impressionist artists, learned from nature to paint God's world without drawing. For example:
Fixed wing
Silent over your shoulder...
Whose wing? Whose shoulder? But this poem is a miracle!
Fet appears allegorical; the subject to which the poet is addressing is unclear. New biblicalisms are born:
You're all on fire. Your lightning
And I am decorated with sparkles...
Who is this? What is this? He doesn't say what - he's a bit of a psalmist. He speaks prayerfully, rolling and choking. They have never sung like that in Russian poetry.
“Your bright angel whispers to me / Inexpressible verbs...”, “While the soul boils in the crucible of the body...”. Fet is a poet of incomprehension. Tyutchev's lyrics are tightly constructed, her metaphors are logical, Fet's metaphors are not well thought out. Tyutchev is a classicist, Fet is choking.
Fet also emerged early as a poet of the original genre - short lyrical-philosophical elegies, like this one - with an epigraph from Schopenhauer:
Exhausted by life, by the treachery of hope,
When I surrender my soul to them in battle,
Day and night I keep my eyelids together
And somehow strangely sometimes I see the light.
Even darker is the darkness of everyday life,
Like after a bright autumn lightning,
And only in the sky, like a sincere call,
The stars' golden eyelashes sparkle.
And the infinity of lights is so transparent,
And so the entire abyss of ether is accessible,
That I look directly from time to eternity
And I recognize your flame, the sun of the world.
And motionless on the fiery roses
The living altar of the universe is smoking,
In its smoke, as in creative dreams,
All power trembles and all eternity dreams.
And everything that rushes through the abyss of the ether,
And every ray, carnal and incorporeal, -
Your only reflection, O sun of the world,
And only a dream, only a fleeting dream.
And these dreams in the world's breath
I rush like smoke and melt involuntarily,
And in this epiphany, and in this oblivion
It’s easy for me to live, and it doesn’t hurt to breathe.
But criticism did not recognize Fet’s deep philosophical thought - after all, he was a generally recognized “poet of trifles.” “Civil” thoughts were valued, and a “position” was considered a “thought.” Russia was not a country of philosophers, but of utopian knowledge, political philosophizing, faith, which overshadowed philosophy and replaced it for Russians. And each of Fet’s poems is a sketch, born in nature, on a walk, and at the same time aimed at the sky. There is no distance, perspective, middle shot, anything thought out, seen from afar. A moment - and the sky: here and now.
Fet is one of the three main names of Russian poetry of the mid-second half of the twentieth century. IX century. Tyutchev, Nekrasov and Fet were the whole of Russian poetry, they shared among themselves everything that it was then. But the aristocrat Tyutchev did not participate in literary life, remaining a private person, as if keeping a poetic diary. Nekrasov and Fet fought for human hearts.
Fet turned out to be the antipode of Nekrasov, a poet of the lyric-epic genre, a favorite of the nation, who wrote semi-literary, semi-folk poetry, including in the vernacular of his day. And Fet lost to Nekrasov in the eyes of the reading public, and then in the eyes of the “demiurge people” (a specifically Russian category of philosophy of culture). I lost, as they say in sports, by points. (He simply could not lose by knockout, since Nekrasov was not a lyricist). It is interesting that their elder contemporary Tyutchev, just like Fet, who did not have an audience, adhered to traditional lyrical plots in everything, wrote both nature and panoramic landscapes of the Alps, avoided any accusations of pettiness of themes, lack of depth and humanity : critics (including Nekrasov, and even Lenin) spoke only enthusiastically about him. But Fet, unlike Tyutchev, defended his understanding of the purpose of poetry with militant fervor, and they hastened to deal with him literary.
In the history of Russian literature of the second half XIX century, Fet was the only one who held the banner of “pure poetry”; he was faithful to the end to the ideas of the German romantics about the high purpose of the poet, about chosenness, about the poet-demiurge, etc. In a country completely carried away by the “people's idea,” he, to the detriment of his reputation, remained a knight of high art. There is nothing populist about Fet. For him, the people are not god, not the final truth - as, for example, for Tolstoy. The people were a new Russian religious cult, but in this sense Fet was a fearless atheist. He was considered a retrograde and even a laughing stock; he made a comical impression on many, lost acquaintances, and gradually lost his friendship with Tolstoy.
The country was torn in two, and hearts were torn as well. It was a real crisis. Next to the great Russian prose, poetry has become a trifle. “Talented, but writes nonsense,” is a common review of Fet by his contemporaries, even those most prepared to perceive art. Fet was comical and tragic at the same time. Devoid of a heroic pose, he was understandable only to a few. He sang Russian nature, gardens, flowers, girls' and children's heads, curls on the back of the head, mornings, sunrises, sunsets, the night sky - the same thing a hundred times. All this often had a tinge of bad taste. At the same time, he was a genuine and talented impressionist - but who understood this in a crazy country on the eve of the revolution? His vacuity was the subject of ridicule.
Fet sang flowers and girls' heads, but did not write a single (as did Nekrasov) love poem, although he remembered his lost love heartbreakingly. He felt only the World's evil, but did not worry at all about the evil that surrounded him. In Russia at that time, such a way of thinking as Fet’s was “forbidden.” Perhaps his position in some way suggested to the Bolsheviks the idea of exterminating poets and poetry - for “prophetic” sin, for declared “inhumanity”. In the conditions of flat, mercantile and fraught with revolution X I In the 10th century, Fet’s conviction either looked comical or shocked.
The vices of Fet the poet were excessive smooth writing, verses and musicality. Fet, with his love for “trifles,” easily slipped onto the path of external euphony and imitated the gypsy romance. A suffering philosopher and an affectionate operatic “shepherdess” coexisted strangely in him.
It is paradoxical that Fet, with his odious aristocratic views on art, became the first Russian folk - bourgeois! - the poet, thanks to the light and innocent eroticism of his superficially and smoothly written poems like: “At dawn, don’t wake her up...”. While literary criticism scolded him, the people sang him. Based on his poems, which imitated gypsy singing, amateurs wrote romances, as if in competition (only one was written based on Tyutchev’s poems, and that was later). In Russia of the twentieth century, the concept of a “songwriter” appeared. B X I In the 10th century, as fate would have it, it turned out to be Fet.
Fet was tragic, but not serious. Leo Tolstoy, who rose to the level of all mankind, was serious but boring, and towards the end of his life he turned into a religious preacher, retaining, however, the power of words. And Fet, surrounded by his countless epigones, began to write weakly, “to write himself out,” and drowned in a huge number of mediocre poems.
However, there is nothing wrong with Fet’s (as Blok did at one point) tendency toward graphomania. Yes, there were poets of a completed form (like Pushkin, Tyutchev, Mayakovsky, Yesenin), in whom any poem appears in its finished form, but there were also poets who splashed out obviously weak things from their hearts in an attempt to “catch” something.
And at the age of 60, Fet wrote as temperamentally as in his youth, continuing, no, no, but creating his masterpieces - for example, “Swallows”:
Nature's idle spy, I love you, forgetting everything around you, Watch out for the swallowtail Over the evening pond. So I rushed and drew - And it's scary to smooth the glass I didn’t grab hold of the alien element Lightning wing. And again the same boldness And the same dark stream - Isn't that what inspiration is? And human me? Isn’t it me, a meager vessel, I dare to take the forbidden path, Alien, transcendental elements, Trying to get at least a drop?Fet's late poems are little known, the signs of his late muse are invisible at first glance, but they are there. It is probably no coincidence that when Fet was published, he did not adhere to chronology, placed his early and late poems together, and collected them in groups not by year, but by season.
Fet didn’t so much say as whisper the cherished truths about the unconsciousness of creativity:
Everything, everything that is mine, that is and was before, In dreams and dreams there is no time of shackles; The soul did not share the blissful dreams: There are no dreams of old age or youth. Every day abroad Although for a moment it is joyful and light; While the soul boils in the crucible of the body, She flies wherever her wing takes her. Don't talk about happiness, about freedom Where iron fate reigns. Here! here! there is no slavery here to nature - She herself is a faithful slave here.Freely, as in a dream, Fet rose into the musical spheres. Just as the ancients humanized the gods, so the poet spiritualizes the natural world, ready to pray to allegories.
He conveyed the happiness of seeing and hearing in a strikingly inappropriate but amazing poem:
It was a wonderful May day in Moscow;
The crosses of the churches sparkled,
Killer whales hovered under the window
And they chirped loudly.
I was sitting under the window, in love,
Young and sick at heart.
Like bees, sounds in the distance
They were buzzing from the bell towers...
And the singing choir went and grew, -
And the black ridge
The people reached out devoutly
With an open head.
And the singing choir passed by,
I passed him by with my eyes,
And the pink coffin passed
Behind the loud choir...
The mother walked staggering behind the coffin.
Funeral lament! –
But it seemed easy to me
And the most suffering.
This great Christian act through the eyes of a young atheist, I remember, caused heated controversy in our 70s - more than a hundred years after it was written. The poet Tatyana Glushkova, arguing with the critic Stanislav Rassadin, who condemned Fet for “immorality,” defended the poet’s sacred right to his mood, the right not to take into account the generally accepted, and rightly argued that “this” is possible, because a poet can do anything.
Fet is the first case in Russian poetry when a poet deliberately became inarticulate, and a simple reader was unable to understand what he was writing about. With Fet, for the first time in Russian lyrics, something reminiscent of a mirage in the desert began to emerge. With an audacity unusual for Russian poets, he brought to the fore the purely musical organization of verse - to the detriment of thought, meaning and specifics. His speech became incomprehensible, like that of a sick person. His poems sometimes turn into babble. He sought to express the inexpressible through the means of poetry, and what he saw, no one saw.
Soon, at the turn of the XIX century X X centuries, this will become the universal norm. A fearless innovator, Fet became the forerunner of decadence.
Symbolism - the next step in the development of “pure art” - glorified the “non-existent”. Fet nevertheless wrote an easily recognizable real world, and after him began the abstruse, psalmody, appeal to imperishable entities, mirages, hallucinations, fantasies, scenery, scenes, and the creation of his own mythology. However, symbolist poetry requires a separate comment.
Was Fet himself the leader of the literary movement? He probably was, although his army was weak. In his later years, he wrote many “leader” poems - for example, this one:
Drive away a living boat with one push
From sands smoothed by the tides,
Rise in one wave into another life,
Feel the wind from the flowering shores,
Interrupt a dreary dream with a single sound,
Suddenly revel in the unknown, dear,
Give life a sigh, give sweetness to secret torments,
Instantly feel someone else’s as your own,
Whisper about something that makes your tongue go numb,
Strengthen the fight of fearless hearts -
This is what only a select few singers possess,
This is his sign and crown!
By the end of his life, he had many imitators. His overly strong techniques, which were initially stunning, became cliches in the hands of mediocre poets and graphomaniacs, which also had a bad effect on his reputation. But Fet himself felt like a genius and was not afraid to make mistakes:
Let them shout, worry and argue,
Let them say: this is the delirium of a sick soul,
But I walk on the shaky foam of the sea
With a brave, unsinking foot.
In verbal art, Fet was an impressionist, a singer of the moment. He lived by insights; nature became an event for him. His heart was callous in its own way, he did not share public passions, did not have compassion for the people, which in X I The 10th century was in bad taste, but he did not squeal and did not lie. Having developed new literary techniques, he made a revolution in the art of speech, went beyond the limits of contemporary literature, and bravely stepped into the “alien element beyond the limits.” And - he won!
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“Swallows” Afanasy Fet
Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?Isn’t it me, a meager vessel,
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements,
Trying to get at least a drop?
Analysis of Fet's poem "Swallows"
The image of a swallow, which in poetry is more often associated with the soul than other birds, is found at different stages of the development of Russian poetry - from the work of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin to the works of Nikolai Mikhailovich Rubtsov. One of the main singers of nature, Afanasy Afanasievich Fet, did not ignore him either. In particular, the image was reflected in the poem “Swallows,” written in 1884. The first stanza of the text creates a serene and contemplative mood. The lyrical hero, who calls himself an idle spy of nature, enthusiastically watches the flight of a lancet swallow over the pond. Everything changes literally in one moment, when the adverb “scary” appears in the second stanza. On the one hand, the observer worries about a bird flying too low above the water. On the other hand, fear for her reminds the character of the emotions he has to experience when he comes into contact with eternity. In Fetov's poetry, rapid flight is often compared with moments of inspiration and creative search, which can be observed in the text under consideration. In addition, Afanasy Afanasievich often contrasts the vast sky with the limited space of the Earth. This antithesis goes back to the romantic dual world. For Fet, it acts not only as a tribute to the literary tradition, but also relates to the poet’s personal life. The fact is that he was both a subtle lyricist, an adherent of the so-called pure art, and a strong business executive, practically an exemplary landowner.
In the poem “Swallows,” creativity seems to be the artist’s attempt to scoop up at least a drop of “alien, transcendental element.” The hero of the work calls himself a meager vessel, that is, a mortal creature whose earthly life is incredibly short. He is fully aware of his own helplessness in trying to express the inexpressible. However, it never occurs to him to give up poetic activity. Throughout his entire creative career, Fet himself was engaged in the selection of words and images to describe phenomena and feelings that are extremely difficult to describe. In the work “Who has a crown: the goddess of beauty...” (1865) there are the following lines:
...And that one of your eyes expresses
The poet cannot retell this.
In one of the poems from 1887, the hero exclaims: “How poor our language is!..”. Like the character in “Swallows,” Fet understood that he was “daring on the forbidden path,” but at the same time he never gave up trying to find suitable words for the above-mentioned expression of the inexpressible.
| Dark Side | Pupil (176), closed 5 years ago
A. Fet "Swallows" 1884
exactly 1884
please also answer the questions. can the words daring and dare be considered the key words of the poem, since they connect the swallow and the hero;
what other poems about inspiration and its power over man and the world do you know and how do they resonate with Fetov’s
Gulshakh Sage (16831) 5 years ago
Fet’s poem describes the impressions of a man - an “idle spy”, closely watching the flight of a swallow (in Dahl’s dictionary, “spy” means a secret scout, spy, sent observer, spy)
Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
The image of a swallow, symbolizing the thirst for spiritual food in the Christian tradition, is associated with a person’s reflections on the meaning of life and the nature of inspiration:
So I rushed and drew -
The alien element did not grab the Lightning Wing.
And again the same boldness And the same dark stream - Isn’t this the inspiration of the human I?
I know Bryusov’s poem “In response”, there are lines there
Forward, dream, my faithful ox!
Perforce, if not willingly!
I'm near you, my whip is heavy,
I work myself, and you work too!
This cry is more like a sigh. If Bryusov was ever truthful - to the bottom, then it was in this sigh. From strength, from veins, like an ox - what is this, the work of a poet? No, his dream! Inspiration + ox labor, here is a poet, ox labor + ox labor, here is Bryusov: an ox pulling a cart.
Source: Poems by Fet, Bryusov, Dahl's dictionary
Analysis of FETA's poem "SWALLOWS"
ANALYSIS OF THE POEM BY A.A. FETA “SWALLOWS”. PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, EVALUATION
The poem “Swallows” was written by A.A. Fet in 1884. Its main theme is the incomprehensibility of the creative process and inspiration. It contains both elements of landscape and elements of philosophical reflection.
The composition of the poem is based on a comparison of a natural phenomenon and the process of human life. The swallow’s flight “over the evening pond”, its “boldness” remind the poet of the nature of inspiration as something transcendental, far from everyday life.
Compositionally, we can distinguish two parts in the poem. The first part is a picture of nature, a description of the flight of a swallow that completely captured the lyrical hero. Here we see the gradual development of the theme. At first he simply denotes a phenomenon - his constant interest in nature:
Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the lancet swallow Over the evening pond.
Then the phenomenon becomes more specific - now we clearly see this evening landscape. At the same time, the hero here also denotes his own feelings:
So I rushed and drew -
And it’s scary that the surface of the glass will not grab the lightning wing with an alien element.
The following lines are a kind of culmination, a turning point in the development of the theme. The lyrical hero turns his thoughts to inspiration. And this is the second part of the work. We see that the creative process for him is a miracle, a mystery, something that goes beyond everyday life:
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements,
The poem is written in iambic, quatrains, cross-rhyme, the poet uses various means of artistic expression: metaphor and rhetorical question (final stanza), epithet (“meager vessel”, “lightning wing”), anaphora (“And again the same boldness And the same dark stream").
Works for comparison: V.A. Zhukovsky “The Inexpressible”, F.I. Tyutchev “Silentium”, A. A. Akhmatova “Creativity (“It happens like this: some kind of languor...”)”
Skrepa: The motive of the incomprehensibility of the creative process; the motive of the artist’s audacity, striving to convey living life in colors and words; inspiration as a sacrament.
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Afanasy Fet - Nature's idle spy (Swallows)
Prirody prazdny soglyadatay,
Lyublyu, zabyvshi vse krugom,
Sledit za lastochkoy strelchatoy
Nad vechereyushchim prudom.
Vot poneslas i zachertila, -
I'm afraid, because I'm glad glass
Stikhiyey chuzhdoy ne skhvatila
Molniyevidnogo kryla.
I again to zhe derznovenye
I ta zhe darknaya struya, -
It's not like that
I love you?
Ne tak li ya, sosud skudelny,
Derzayu na zapretny put,
Stikhii chuzhdoy, zapredelnoy,
Stremyas khot kaplyu zacherpnut?
Ghbhjls ghfplysq cjukzlfnfq,
K/,k/, pf,sdib dct rheujv,
Cktlbnm pf kfcnjxrjq cnhtkmxfnjq
Yfl dtxtht/obv gheljv/
Djn gjytckfcm b pfxthnbkf, -
B cnhfiyj, xnj,s ukflm cntrkf
Cnb, but the graphic connection with the original ST sound complex is certainly preserved here. The phonetic appearance of the word “disappeared” is skillfully played out in the last stanza of the poem: “involuntarily”, “cry”, “field”, “tumbleweed”, “jumps”.
The rhythmic and melodic features of the poem find their correspondence in its intonation and syntactic structure, which is also divided into two parts. The first and second stanzas are distinguished by relatively even and calm intonation; there are no exclamatory sentences or sharp syntactic shifts (anges); as a means of intonation-syntactic connection between the first and second stanzas, the repetition of function words is used - the particle “everything” and the conjunction “yes”, as a result of which a certain symmetry of syntactic construction arises. In the second part, the intonation-syntactic symmetry of stanzas (3 and 4) is much more pronounced. At the same time, the means of creating it is different. This is an intonation roll call in the initial verses of the third and fourth stanzas. In the second part of the poem we are faced with sharp angebemans (Cf: “As if in fright / Screaming ...”; “You will go out - involuntarily / It’s hard ...”; “Tumbleweed / Jumps like a ball”). Moreover, in the last stanza, in connection with concentration single-part sentences and syntactic shifts, strong pauses appear within lines, and the number of logical stresses increases, which leads to a slowdown in tempo and an increase in intonation emphasis (emphasis). All this is combined with the use of syntactic parallelism (“You’ll come out...; “Look..." ), as well as the technique of repetition, the deliberateness of which is emphasized and strengthened by rhyme (“field” - “Tumbleweed”), make the ending exceptionally expressive in terms of intonation.
B.M. Eikhenbaum writes that highlighting the musical side, melody and phonics in A. Fet’s poems leads to a weakening of the semantic “material-logical” side of the word in them. This statement echoes the assessment of A. Fet’s language by his contemporaries, who reproached the poet for the “illogicality” and “irregularity” of speech.
At the same time, deviations from the norm in the context of A. Fet cannot be considered as speech errors; in the overwhelming case, they are aesthetically determined. In parallel with the weakening of linguistic semantic connections, the objective-material side of words, hypersemantization occurs, the emergence of its own system of meanings, subject to internal artistic logic.
A typical example of a “violation of the norm” in the poem “The Swallows Are Missing” is the use of the form “dawn” (“And yesterday dawn All the rooks flew…”). The grammatical context (relationship with the adverb “yesterday”) dictates the perception of this word form in its temporal meaning, but there are lexical and semantic restrictions here. The temporal meaning for the word “dawn” is secondary (unlike the words “morning”, “evening”) and appears normally, only in its prepositional forms (cf. “from dawn”, “at dawn”), while the non-prepositional form “ dawn” is perceived, rather, in a series of forms of the instrumental case of words of objective semantics, used in the adverbial meaning: “the space within which movement occurs.” Wed. “field”, “forest”, “sea” (walk, swim).
The combination of spatial and temporal categorical meanings in the form of “dawns” gives grounds to consider it as a kind of “grammatical metaphor”. simultaneously associated with the pictorial and expressive planes (the image of a flock of rooks against the background of dawn and the image-experience of passing time). This grammatical metaphor gives us the key to understanding a significant part of the poem’s word patterns, which have a dual figurative and expressive character.
Thus, the comparison of a flock of rooks with a net seems purely figurative, but in the context of the poem its verbal and expressive side turns out to be no less important: the word “net” evokes in our minds the idea of captivity, captivity. The theme of bondage is also hidden in the words “sleep” and “falls” (verbs with impersonal reflexive and passive reflexive meanings), in which the moment of compulsory action in the absence or passivity of the subject comes to the fore. A similar function is performed by the use of the singular form “leaf” instead of “leaves”, which creates the image of a continuous multitude, an unformed, undifferentiated mass, in which the possibility of any separateness, individuality and thereby freedom is lost.
What is hidden in the first part “between the lines”, remaining outside the “bright field of consciousness” of the reader, in the second part is brought out and becomes more accessible to perception. Thus, the motive of bondage receives direct expression in the phrase: “If you go out, it’s against your will. It’s hard, even if you cry.”
The image of a tumbleweed embodies the experience of life as an endless and aimless wandering across the earth. Tumbleweeds, like leaves, are dead versions of birds. Free, rapid flight, the symbol of which is the word “swallows” (commonly “lasta” literally means “flying”) is contrasted with a parody of flight: “jumping like a ball.”
The most important phrase for understanding the meaning and pathos of the poem is “It would be better if I were glad to meet the snow and blizzard!” At first glance, here we have a traditional continuation of the landscape theme. However, we are talking here not just about waiting for winter (cf. Pushkin: “That year, the autumn weather stood for a long time in the yard. Winter was stinging, nature was waiting,” but about an active desire to meet hostile elements and even an irrational desire to engage in battle with them ( cf. phraseological unit: “beat chest to chest”).
The explosion of the lyrical hero’s feelings may seem unexpected, outwardly unmotivated against the backdrop of the peaceful content and relatively calm background of the previous poems. The transition from the call for a fight with the winter elements to the description of the “hasty flight of the cranes to the south (“As if in fright, Screaming out in fright, the Cranes are flying to the south”) looks equally poorly motivated. The weakening of external logical connections is compensated by lyrical pressure, unity and harmony of the rhythmic and intonation-metric structure. These structural bonds at the same time initiate the emergence of new semantic connections - a deep, subtextual level. In this case, we have a clear illustration of M. Maeterlinck’s statement: “Next to the necessary dialogue there is almost always another dialogue that seems superfluous. You will see that the merit and duration of this useless dialogue determines the quality and inexpressible significance of the work.”
It can be assumed that the sharp rhythmic and melodic difference between the 12th and 13th verses (Cf. 21+21+1 and 65; the difference in the consonant pattern is also significant) reflects some internal breakdown. Behind the images of snow and blizzard there arises the image of death, of death: life seems to be captivity, compulsion, liberation from which is expected in death, and voluntary death, but the suicidal impulse is replaced by fear (the nervous tongue-tiedness of the phrase is noteworthy: “as if from fear”). The chanting of the sound combinations re - ru - ra in the stressed position in verse 12 (“I am glad to meet with my breast”) refers us to the sound image ra - ar of the initial verses and through it to the rooks, who act as messengers of death in Fet.
In the analyzed text, the connection between the image of rooks and the theme of death is present hidden, but it receives its open expression in the late poem by A. Fet “Lounging on the armchair, I look at the ceiling” (1890), where the wavering shadows from the lamp evoke in the poet, broken by illnesses, immersed in thoughts about approaching death, a characteristic circle of associations:
“There is a trace of the autumn dawn in this flickering:
Over the roof, it seems, and the garden,
Unable to fly away and not daring to land
The rooks are circling in a dark herd.”
The next two stanzas begin with the words: “No, then there is the noise of wings, then horses have wings...” and “I am silent, lost, looking at the distant path...”
In the quoted quatrain we find a figurative series well known to us: evening - autumn dawn - a flock of rooks. Also noteworthy is the use here of the word “flicker”, etymologically related to the word “flickered” (both of these words go back to “fade”: “r” alternates with “l”, “k” goes with “c”.
The poem “Swallows Are Missing” is related in meaning to another work of late lyricism by A. Fet, in which the noun “Swallows” is included in the title, whereas in the analyzed text it is only part of the first line:
Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.
So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.
And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?
Aren't I, a meager vessel?
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements
Trying to cross out even a drop?
(1884).
As we see, in this text, swallows act as a symbol of balancing on the brink of life and death, and inspiration, a creative poetic impulse is associated with risk, forbidden paths and a daring challenge to God (the use of biblical words “meager vessel” here, i.e. made of clay, is indicative). ashes); at the same time, death “an alien and transcendental element” simultaneously frightens and attracts the lyrical hero.
Data on the semantics of its meter are of great importance for the analysis and interpretation of the text of the poem “The Swallows Are Missing.” In poetry, the opinion has long been established that each meter has its own semantic halo, is associated with one or another poetic tradition and therefore entails a certain range of themes and images. As already noted, the poem “The Swallows Are Missing” is written in trochaic trimeter, and this meter, according to the observations of M.L. Gasparov, became widespread in Russian poetry after the poem by M.Yu. Lermontov’s “Mountain Peaks”, which, in turn, repeats in its rhythmic pattern the first stanza of the German prototype - the poem by N.V. Goethe's "Night Song of the Wanderer". The sophisticated rhythmic and melodic organization of A. Fet's poem brings it closer to Goethe's text than to Lermontov's poem (note that N.V. Goethe was A. Fet's favorite poet). The motif of the path, the themes of life and death, developed in the poems of Lermontov and Goethe, receives an exclusively unique refraction in Fet.
Goethe's poem begins with the words “Over all the tops of the fields” (;ber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh) and ends with the verse “You too will rest” (Ruhest du auch). From “all the peaks” Fet has only one “mountain” left, above which instead of “peace” there are rooks. Goethe talks about the eternal peace that awaits a person at the end of his life's journey. The rooks in Fet’s poem, as already noted, act as messengers of death. The words “The swallows are gone” correspond to Goethe’s verse: “The birds have fallen silent in the forest (Die V;gelein schweigen in Walde).
The call to the wanderer “Wait” (Warte nur) implies the absence in his soul of the peace that reigns in nature. At the same time, this motive, muffled and barely audible in Goethe and Lermontov, gains crushing power in A. Fet’s poem, turning into an open rebellion against the world order.
It is noteworthy that Fet himself did not include the poem “Swallows Are Missing” in his collected works. There is reason to believe that in this poem the deepest aspects of the poet’s inner world, hidden not only from others, but also from himself, were involuntarily reflected. Indirect evidence of this can be the text of A. Fet’s posthumous note: “I don’t understand the deliberate increase in inevitable suffering. I voluntarily go towards the inevitable.” According to the testimony of the poet’s secretary Ekaterina Vladimirovna Fedorova, after A. Fet dictated this text to her, he tried to commit suicide with a knife. However, at the last moment, Fet (the following is a recording of E.V. Fedorova’s oral history), “breathing frequently, fell onto a chair with the word “damn.” Then his eyes opened wide, as if seeing something terrible: his right hand moved as if to make the sign of the cross and immediately fell. He died fully conscious.
.
A. Fet’s suicide note can also be considered as part of the poet’s “intertextual space”. The nature and sequence of the events described to a certain extent echoes the fourth stanza of the poem “The Swallows Are Missing”: a suicide attempt and fright at the end.
It would be better if there was snow and a blizzard
Glad to meet you with breasts!
As if in fright
Shouting out to the south
The cranes are flying.
The appearance of the image of cranes in Fet, like the images of rooks and swallows, is not accidental. The meaning and function of this word image partly helps to understand the appeal to the letter of the poet L.N. Tolstoy dated September 28, 1880. In this letter, Fet describes how he, accompanying his wife Maria Ivanovna on her pilgrimage to the relics of St. Mitrophan of Voronezh, admired the graceful dance of unusually beautiful hand-held cranes in the monastery courtyard. At the same time, Fet notes: “I love only what dances charmingly in the crane, for the secret life, die Sache an sich, which only poets know for people.” And further: “And to everyone what pleases him. For Marya Petrovna - Mitrofania’s icons, and for me cranes, and I don’t even think about dragging her into the crane faith.”
So, the crane appears here as a symbol of the religion of earthly beauty, the sacrament of poetic creativity, equated to the sacraments of the Church. This pathos of worship of beauty and art permeates all the work and life of A. Fet. In the poem “The Swallows Are Missing” we see a perfect example of the “germination” of the plane of content and the plane of expression into each other. “The image becomes similar to what is depicted.” And the image of a flying bird encrypted in the rhythmic-melodic and intonation structure of the poem is the icon of the “crane faith” of Afanasy Fet.
Boris Bobylev. 2015
215052401120
“Swallows (Nature’s idle spy...)” A. Fet
“Swallows” Afanasy Fet
Nature's idle spy,
I love you, forgetting everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond.
So I rushed and drew -
And it's scary to smooth the glass
I didn’t grab hold of the alien element
Lightning wing.
And again the same boldness
And the same dark stream, -
Isn't that what inspiration is?
And human me?
Isn’t it me, a meager vessel,
I dare to take the forbidden path,
Alien, transcendental elements,
Trying to get at least a drop?
Analysis of Fet's poem "Swallows"
The image of a swallow, which in poetry is more often associated with the soul than other birds, is found at different stages of the development of Russian poetry - from the work of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin to the works of Nikolai Mikhailovich Rubtsov. One of the main singers of nature, Afanasy Afanasievich Fet, did not ignore him either. In particular, the image was reflected in the poem “Swallows,” written in 1884. The first stanza of the text creates a serene and contemplative mood. The lyrical hero, who calls himself an idle spy of nature, enthusiastically watches the flight of a lancet swallow over the pond. Everything changes literally in one moment, when the adverb “scary” appears in the second stanza. On the one hand, the observer worries about a bird flying too low above the water. On the other hand, fear for her reminds the character of the emotions he has to experience when he comes into contact with eternity. In Fetov's poetry, rapid flight is often compared with moments of inspiration and creative search, which can be observed in the text under consideration. In addition, Afanasy Afanasievich often contrasts the vast sky with the limited space of the Earth. This antithesis goes back to the romantic dual world. For Fet, it acts not only as a tribute to the literary tradition, but also relates to the poet’s personal life. The fact is that he was both a subtle lyricist, an adherent of the so-called pure art, and a strong business executive, practically an exemplary landowner.
In the poem “Swallows,” creativity seems to be the artist’s attempt to scoop up at least a drop of “alien, transcendental element.” The hero of the work calls himself a meager vessel, that is, a mortal creature whose earthly life is incredibly short. He is fully aware of his own helplessness in trying to express the inexpressible. However, it never occurs to him to give up poetic activity. Throughout his entire creative career, Fet himself was engaged in the selection of words and images to describe phenomena and feelings that are extremely difficult to describe. In the work “Who has a crown: the goddess of beauty...” (1865) there are the following lines:
...And that one of your eyes expresses
The poet cannot retell this.
In one of the poems from 1887, the hero exclaims: “How poor our language is. " Like the character in “Swallows,” Fet understood that he was “daring on the forbidden path,” but at the same time he never gave up trying to find suitable words for the above-mentioned expression of the inexpressible.
Listen to Fet's poem Swallows of nature the idle spy
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