Tyutchev's lyrics are one of the peak phenomena of Russian philosophical poetry and Russian poetry in general. The high merits of Tyutchev's poems have long ceased to be a subject of debate. The debates around the name of Tyutchev, which were conducted in science, concerned not the value and merits of his poetry, but its place among other poetic phenomena and schools, its correlation with Pushkin and Pushkin’s poetic movement.
I. S. Turgenev, one of the first to fully appreciate Tyutchev’s talent, wrote: “... his poems reek of composition; they all seem to have been written for a certain occasion, as Goethe wanted, that is, they were not invented, but grew on their own, like fruit on a tree, and by this precious quality we recognize, among other things, the influence of Pushkin on them, we see in them a reflection of his time »
The rapprochement of Tyutchev’s poetry with Pushkin’s is generally characteristic of the perception of Tyutchev’s work in the 19th century. In the article “Russian Minor Poets,” Nekrasov spoke about the publication of Tyutchev’s poems in Pushkin’s Sovremennik: “... from the third volume in Sovremennik, poems began to appear in which there was so much originality, thought and charm of presentation, so many in a word, poetry that, it seemed, only the magazine publisher himself could be their author” 2.
I. Aksakov, characterizing the poets of Pushkin’s galaxy and Pushkin’s time, classifies Tyutchev among them according to the internal qualities of poetry: “Their poetic form breathes such freshness that no longer exists and cannot exist.
- I. S. Turgenev. A few words about the poems of F. I. Tyutchev. - Full. collection op. and letters in 28 volumes, vol. 5. M.-JL, Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1963, p. 424.
- N. A. Nekrasov. Collection op. in 8 volumes, volume VII. M., “Hood. lit.”, 1967, p. 192.
in poems of a later period; above it still lies the recent trace of the victory won over the material of the word; one can hear the triumph and joy of artistic possession" 3.
Already in the post-revolutionary era, in the 1920s, Yu. N. Tynyanov took up a decisive revision of the problem of “Pushkin and Tyutchev”. In articles entitled “Pushkin and Tyutchev” and “The Question of Tyutchev,” he presents arguments that, in his opinion, should have convinced not only of the absence of any closeness between Tyutchev and Pushkin, but also of the fundamental opposition of their poetic manners and directions4.
The other side of the “Tyutchev question” was pointed out by M. Aronson, N. Berkovsky, and K. Pigarev. Without directly touching on the problem of “Pushkin and Tyutchev,” they noted traditions in Tyutchev’s lyrics that were different from Pushkin’s and showed the typological similarity of Tyutchev’s lyrics with the poetry of the wise men.
M. Aronson wrote: “Tyutchev’s lyrics, built on several related thoughts and therefore seeming to be his philosophy, are a good example of the results to which the work of the wise men led” 5.
N. Berkovsky also speaks about the same thing, although not so categorically: “In some of his interests and in the details of poetics, often very special, Tyutchev coincides with the poetry of the Moscow “lyubomudrov” - with Shevyrev and Khomyakov...” 6.
K. Pigarev, in his major monograph on Tyutchev, notes that I. V. Kireevsky “was the first to establish a connection between Tyutchev’s poetry and the lyrics of the wise men” 7. These words assume the existence of such a connection as a matter of course.
What M. Aronson, N. Berkovsky, K. Pi- spoke about
8 I. S. Aksakov. Biography of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev. M., 1886, p. 80.
4 Yuri Tynyanov. Archaists and innovators. JI., “Surf”, 1929. The article “Pushkin and Tyutchev” was also published in the book: Yu. N. Tynyanov. Pushkin and his contemporaries. M., Publishing house "Science", 1969.
B M. Aronson. Mugs and salons. - In the book: M. Aronson and S. Reiser. Literary clubs and salons. L., 1929, p. 65.
N. Ya. Berkovsky. Introductory article. - F.I. Tyutchev. Poems. M.-L., “Sov. writer", 1969, p. 20.
"K. Pigarev. The life and work of Tyutchev. M., Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962, p. 81.
Sh
Garev, is to a certain extent confirmed by our own observations. In the previous chapters, examining the poetry of Venevitinov, Khomyakov and Shevyrev, we more than once recalled Tyutchev and found points of contact and similarity between Tyutchev and the wise men. In basic terms, this similarity boils down to the following: Tyutchev and the wise men had a common school - German, a common interest in philosophical systems and a desire to express them poetically; in their poetry the same “condensation” of themes and similarity in themes are noticeable; They also have similar verse structures and forms; they are united by didacticism in poetry, oratorical pathos, and archaic linguistic tendencies.
The similarity between Tyutchev and the wise men, as we see, is considerable, and, although it is primarily of a formal nature, it is impossible for a literary historian to ignore it. It is even more impossible that this similarity helps to understand the historical conditionality and pattern of such a large and unique poetic phenomenon as Tyutchev.
However, questions arise: were Turgenev and all those who asserted the correlation between Tyutchev’s poetry and Pushkin’s poetry completely wrong? To what extent is Tynyanov’s point of view correct? Is it possible to assert the identity of the artistic principles of Tyutchev and the wise men and the opposition of the principles of Tyutchev and Pushkin?
If we manage to answer these questions, it will be only after we turn directly to the consideration of Tyutchev’s poetry. Speaking about Tyutchev, we will deliberately avoid a sequential factual, thematic or biographical method of presentation. In accordance with the general objectives of the book, all attention will be paid not to thematic analysis and not to the “biography” of Tyutchev’s poems, but mainly to their poetics. This approach is also justified by the fact that the “biography” of Tyutchev’s poetry, after many substantive works on Tyutchev - and above all after the already mentioned monographic study by K. V. Pigarev - can be considered to be largely studied. As for Tyutchev’s poetics, the features of the “inner world” of his poetry, everything can never be said to the end.
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In almost all of Tyutchev’s poems, a focus on philosophical thought is noticeable. Moreover, like the philosophical poems of the wise men, Tyutchev's poems, considered as a whole, contain a relatively complete concept. For Tyutchev, this is primarily a pantheistic concept of the world.
All this, however, does not prevent Tyutchev from being first a poet, and then a philosopher. The direct poetic principle takes precedence over the rational and reflective principle in him. A. S. Khomyakov, noting this feature of Tyutchev the poet, finds an analogy for it in Pushkin and Yazykov: “He is a poet through and through (durch und durch), his poetic source cannot dry up. In him, like in Pushkin, like in Yazykov, the nature is antique in relation to art.”
I. Aksakov wrote about the same thing: “Tyutchev’s poems are distinguished by such spontaneity of creativity, which, equally at least, is unlikely to be found in any of the poets.”
The “spontaneity” of creativity is noticeable in Tyutchev’s poems on various topics, including, and first of all, in his poems about nature. “Tyutchev entered the reader’s consciousness primarily as a singer of nature,” notes K. Pigarev. This idea of him is justified by the fact that he was the first and only Russian poet of his kind in whose work images of nature occupied an exceptional place... for Tyutchev alone, the philosophical perception of nature constituted to such a strong degree the very basis of the vision of the world.”
“The main advantage of Mr. F. T [Yutchev’s] poems,” Nekrasov wrote back in the 50s of the last century, “lies in the living, graceful, plastically vivid depiction of nature,” etc.
In Tyutchev's poetry, which is pantheistic at its core, nature naturally occupies a paramount place.
V. Solovyov explained Tyutchev’s peculiar attitude to nature this way: “Of course, all real poets and artists feel the life of nature and represent it in animated images, but Tyutchev’s advantage over many of them is that he fully and consciously believed that felt - he accepted and understood the living beauty he felt not as his fantasy, but as the truth.”
There is a certain amount of truth in these words of V. Solovyov. Of course, it is not at all necessary that faith in the life and spirituality of nature was for Tyutchev a fact of his everyday consciousness, but this was a special property of his poetic consciousness. It was not Tyutchev in general who believed in living, spiritualized nature, but Tyutchev the poet. At the moment of poetic “insight”, in the process of creativity, life in everything is truly revealed to him, “like the truth”:
The sun is shining, the waters are sparkling, There is a smile on everything, there is life in everything, The trees are trembling joyfully, Bathing in the blue sky.
The trees sing, the waters sparkle, the air is dissolved with love, and the world, the blooming world of nature, is intoxicated with an abundance of life...
This fundamentally poetic faith of Tyutchev in the life of nature and its spirituality naturally gives rise to the humanization of nature in his poems. The concept of the living and the spiritual lies primarily in man. For a poet, what is alive and spiritual is always like a person. Tyutchev’s humanization of nature is not just a poetic device, but an expression of inner, poetic consciousness.
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Already in one of his early poems - “Summer Evening” - Tyutchev depicts nature as a huge human being:
The sun has already rolled a hot ball from its head, and the peaceful evening fire is swallowed up by a sea wave.
The bright stars have already risen and lifted the firmament gravitating above us with their moist eyes.
The river of air flows more fully between heaven and earth, the chest breathes easier and more freely, freed from the heat.
And a sweet thrill, like a stream, ran through nature’s veins, as if her hot feet had touched the spring waters.
The poem shows a very poetic and very romantic view of nature. The romantic Novalis wrote: “The landscape must be felt like a body. The landscape is an ideal body for a special kind of soul."
It is interesting that the metaphor on which the composition of “Summer Evening” is based is maintained so consistently and to the end that its metaphorical nature is almost not felt. This is a characteristic feature of many of Tyutchev’s compositions. The metaphor in them is often perceived outside of its stylistic purpose: not as a trope, but almost directly, untransferably. Tyutchev's metaphor seems very direct, Tyutchev's word about nature sounds like genuine.
We find features of the same poetics as in the play “Summer Evening” in the poem of 1830 “Autumn Evening”: There is a touching, mysterious charm in the lightness of autumn evenings: The ominous shine and variegation of trees, the languid, light rustle of crimson leaves... .
Tyutchev’s picture of a spring evening is full of lively, trembling breath. Evening nature is not only similar in some ways to a human being (“Everything has that gentle smile of withering, which in a rational being we call the divine shyness of suffering...”), but it is all alive and humanized. That is why the rustling of the leaves is both light and languid (in the play “Grey Shadows Mixed” the “quiet, sleepy, and languid” will be dusk), and the lightness of the evening is full of touching charm, and the earth is not only sad, but also humanly orphaned.
Nature in Tyutchev’s depiction is always alive and, as it were, genuine, and this is because behind it one always feels the poet’s peculiar “involvement” with nature, a deep understanding of it and sympathy for it. Tyutchev wrote about Goethe: “He talked prophetically with a thunderstorm or played cheerfully with zephyrs.” The same words can be said about Tyutchev himself: his poems about nature are also often like conversations with her - conversations about the most intimate: “What are you bending over the waters, willow, the top of your head?” or “Is it you, majestic Neman? Is your stream in front of me? etc.
Tyutchev feels nature intimately, he has a loving closeness to nature. Ultimately, this poet’s love for nature is the main source of its vitality in poetic depiction. The same can be said about Tyutchev as JI. Y. Ginzburg said about Pushkin: he “almost always loved what he wrote about, and made everything he touched beautiful” 15. Tyutchev’s nature bears little resemblance to Pushkin’s nature; Pushkin's Tyutchev has the very gift of living and imaginative reproduction of nature.
Tyutchev's poetry of nature is rich not so much in colors as in movement. Poems are, as a rule, not pictures, but sequences. Nature is depicted in time, in its open and hidden transitions. Tyutchev likes to talk not about any one state of nature, but about different states: he prefers to talk about living diversity, about the existence of nature. Hence the syntactic constructions characteristic of many poems, such as “yet... a...”: “The snow is still white in the fields, and the waters are already rustling in spring...” or “The earth still looks sad, and the air is already breathing in spring. .."
In the poem “Yesterday, in the Dreams of the Enchanted,” Tyutchev, depicting the movement of a sunbeam, strives to capture and verbally designate its every new move, every moment. The movement is shown as if in slow motion, and thus it is revealed especially clearly:
16 L. Ginzburg. About the lyrics. M.-JI., “Sov. writer", 1964, p. 227.
Here, quietly, quietly, as if blown by the wind, Smoky-light, hazy-lily, Suddenly something fluttered out the window.
Then it ran invisible across the darkly shimmering carpets, and then, grabbing the blanket, began to climb up the edges, -
Here, like a writhing snake, It climbed onto the bed, Here, like a fluttering ribbon, It developed between the canopies...
The word “here” here is a direct indication of a new state, a new phase in movement. Tyutchev generally loves words that denote the instability of time, signal changes, all kinds of transitions. In addition to the word “here”, these are the words “still”, “when”, “now” and especially the favorite word “suddenly”: “Where the cheerful sickle walked and the ear fell, now everything is empty...”; “...the forest and valleys are still in the fog”; “...another minute, and in all the immeasurability of the etheric, the worldwide tidings of victorious sun rays will be heard”; “... look - it has already turned pale, another minute or two - and then what? It’s gone, somehow it’s gone completely, what you breathe and live with”; “...suddenly the sun. a welcoming ray will stealthily come to us”; “...suddenly the fragrant air smells at us through the window”; “... as if by an appointed sign, suddenly a stripe of the sky will flash, and fields and distant forests will quickly emerge from the darkness,” etc.
The poem “December Morning,” characteristic of Tyutchev and his special poetics, depicts the coming morning, on the way. Everything that is static, motionless, remains outside the poet’s field of vision. The poem is a kind of action in which a number of moments-phenomena are consistently and accurately recorded: “... the darkness of the night has not yet moved” - “... ray cries out after ray, and the sky is still completely shining with nightly triumph” - “.. But within two or three moments, the night will evaporate over the earth, and in the full splendor of its manifestations the daylight world will suddenly engulf us.”
The dynamic principle in Tyutchev’s poems about nature is very organic, it embraces everything and internally determines everything: the compositional course of the poem, the words, the meanings, and the sounds:
How good you are, O night sea, - Here it is radiant, there it is bluish-dark... In the moonlight, as if alive, It walks and breathes, and it shines...
In this movement of words and sounds, we almost see the moonlight with our own eyes. The word “radiance”, which contains not only a strong semantic, but also sound image, is not without reason in the poem appears again and again. It serves as a leitmotif, it is both thematically and compositionally leading : “... in the moonlight, as if alive” - “... the sea bathed in a dim glow, how good you are in the solitude of the night!” - “... in this excitement, in this radiance, all as if in a dream, I stand lost - oh, how willingly I would drown my entire soul in their charm.”
The dynamics of words and sounds and meanings are even more noticeably manifested in the poem “Spring Waters”:
The snow is still white in the fields, And in the spring the waters are noisy - They run and wake up the sleepy shore, They run, and shine, and cry...
They shout all over the place: “Spring is coming, spring is coming!” We are messengers of the young spring, She sent us forward!
One source of dynamism here is in the repetition of words. Without constancy, at least in some respects, there is no movement, only something stable moves. Verbal repetitions, along with the performance of other artistic functions, create the illusion of this stable mobility.
In “Spring Waters” one can clearly see how words in a poetic context, repeating themselves, each time appear in a new role, partly with a new meaning and with new energy. They are both the same and not the same. Repeating and updating, the words in the poem (“spring”, “walking”, “running”, “saying”) convey not only movement in nature, but also a strong movement of feelings: spring floods and the poetry of feelings.
Something close to what happens in the poem with words also happens with sounds: “...they run and wake up the sleepy breg, they run and shine and shout, they shout...” (bgt-bdt-bg-bgt-blt-glt -gl...). Here it is easy to notice an internally harmonious sound recording system, a strict and harmonious sound series. Sounds do not just replace each other: they arise, repeat, disappear, and appear again precisely according to some internal need, according to an internal law. They move in a single and integral row - and they convey the thematic movement well, imperceptibly. The same thing happens with the sounds and words in the poem as with Tyutchev’s nature: the breath of life is felt in them. For Tyutchev, not only what he depicts lives, but also the material of the image itself.
The living wealth of Tyutchev's nature is limited, however, in one important respect. Tyutchev’s nature is all like a living organism, like a huge, intimately close, humanly intelligent creature, but not everything objectively alive in nature touches and interests the poet. So to speak, the “population” of nature - birds, animals, insects - is present in Tyutchev’s poems in a limited and seemingly incorporeal manner. In some of his poems one hears “the voice of a lark,” the larks “raise a ringing bell,” the voice of a nightingale is heard, “the ringing voice of a dragonfly,” “the invisible flight of a moth,” “the chirping of a swallow,” “the fragrance of roses,” etc., but all this is portrayed by Tyutchev not as valuable and individual in itself, but as parts and embodiments of something immeasurably more significant and essential. For Tyutchev, Pushkin’s “the beetle buzzed” or “the hungry wolf comes out onto the road with his wolf…” is positively impossible: in his works it is difficult to detect nature in its everyday, prosaic, everyday guise. Pushkin's objective simplicity of depiction and the poetry of the everyday are alien to Tyutchev. In this respect, his artistic method is more reminiscent of the method of the wise men than of Pushkin.
Tyutchev loved nature most of all in its entirety, but not specifically, not locally. B. Ya. Bukhshtab rightly noted that natural phenomena are perceived by Tyutchev “not in detail.” In essence, Tyutchev recognized only one true individuality in nature: nature itself, nature as a universe, nature in its cosmic manifestations: in a thunderstorm, in the night, in a storm, in the spring influx and flowering, in menacing gusts of wind, in the bright light of the sun or - even more often - during moonlight. Tyutchev loves not objects and particulars in nature, but its elements and its secrets; he loves nature in its most sublime and mysterious face.
Tyutchev’s poem “Morning in the Mountains” begins as a bright landscape sketch: The azure of the sky laughs, Washed by a night thunderstorm, And a dewy Valley winds like a bright stripe between the mountains...
This picture makes up the first part of the poem. Its contextual meaning has not yet been revealed here. It comes to light in the second, final part of the lyrical play, when the picture is given unexpected scale and mysterious majesty:
Only half of the highest mountains are covered with fogs, like aerial ruins created by the magic of chambers.
Something similar is observed in the poem “Snowy Mountains”. The picture of a well-known, familiar, sun-drenched world gradually - and especially in the last, concluding quatrain - acquires a lofty, mysterious and philosophical meaning:
... And meanwhile, as our half-asleep, low-lying world, devoid of strength, Is permeated with the bliss of an incense, It rests in the midday darkness, -
Burning like dear deities, Above the dying earth The icy heights play With the azure of the fiery sky.
The final image of the poem is full of gloomy grandeur: high, and gloomy, and mysterious is this fatal gravity and the collision of the polar, this “game” over the “dying earth” of icy heights and a fiery sky. Nature in Tyutchev's poetry is characterized not only by its vitality, but also by the fact that it is sublime, that it is filled with higher, philosophical interest and meaning.
Tyutchev’s muse always gravitates towards the heights, craves heights:
Even though I have made a nest in the valley, But sometimes I feel how life-giving an air stream runs at the top, How it bursts from the thick layer, How our chest thirsts for the heavenly, How everything suffocatingly earthly It would like to push away!..
The upward thrust of Tyutchev’s poetry is a craving for the true and pure, a craving for “unearthly revelations”: “And there, in solemn peace, exposed in the morning, the White Mountain shines like an unearthly revelation.”
The sky is a high symbol of purity and truth in Tyutchev’s poems. Without this, at the same time real and symbolic sky, without this atmosphere of height and eternity, it is impossible to imagine Tyutchev’s poetry. Her poetics are largely determined by this. It is not for nothing that Tyutchev himself, speaking about poetry (and, of course, first of all about his own), depicts it “among thunder, among fires, among seething passions, in elemental fiery discord” - and at the same time inseparable from the sky: “She is from heaven flies to us, heavenly to earthly sons..."
This internal property of Tyutchev’s poetry is reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy, with his “Austerlitz sky”, with his upward gravitation. It is no coincidence that L. Tolstoy loved Tyutchev so much. There were undoubtedly similarities in their vision of the world. And among others - “purity of moral feeling”, the desire to depict life in the light of the eternal and true.
One of Tyutchev’s closest poems to Tolstoy, close in internal poetics, is “The feast is over, the choirs have fallen silent.” Leo Tolstoy marked this poem with the letters “T.” TO." - Tyutchev. Beauty. In it, the vanity of human affairs, life devoid of spirituality, is illuminated by Tyutchev’s sky - and, as happens in Tolstoy, it is denounced by the sky. In the first part of the poem, a generalized, almost symbolic image of the vain world appears before the reader, and at the very end of the first part the motif of the eternal is introduced, until just a little, almost a hint, as if the very first light of the sky lights up above the everyday and ghostly earthly:
... Having finished the feast, we got up late - The stars were shining in the sky, The night had reached halfway ...
The second part of the poem outwardly repeats the plot of the first part. It contains the same semantic antithesis of the vain-earthly and the lofty, but only with its full manifestation, with the final and decisive poetic conclusion. The theme of the sky, at first only outlined, given slightly and muffled, now sounds strong and full-bodied:
... As above the restless city, Above the palaces, above the houses, Noisy street traffic With dim red lighting And sleepless crowds, - As above this child of the valley, In the lofty mountain limit The pure stars burned, Answering mortal glances With immaculate rays...
Both in this poem and in many others, the picture painted by the poet is both non-domestic and, in a certain sense, exotic in nature, while it is devoid of precise signs of time and place of action. For Tyutchev, this is a sign of both romantic and even more philosophical poetry. Let us remember that the exotic and extra-ordinary also characterize other philosophical experiments of Pushkin. In both Pushkin and Tyutchev, this type of image takes it beyond the limits of the private and special and helps to solve the topic in a generalized, philosophical manner.
In the lyrical play “Where the mountains run away...”, also rich in exotic images and colors, nature tells a wonderful, mysterious tale of the past:
... There, they say, in the old days, On azure nights, fairies danced under the water and across the waters;
I listened for a month, the waves sang, and, hanging from the steep mountains,
The castles of the knights looked at them with sweet horror...
Despite all their unusualness, these are quite typical poems for Tyutchev, and the world depicted in them is very Tyutchevian: a world of the unusual and lofty. In it, Tyutchev is especially easy and free as a poet. Everything literary “extraordinary” is full of amazing life for him: he has a special authenticity and a special truth. Tyutchev both knows how and loves to create the truth of a fairy tale, the truth of the unprecedented and mysterious.
It is interesting that in Tyutchev’s works, high nature imperceptibly merges with everything high and unusual in life. In the same emotional and semantic series are “azure nights”, “month”, “singing waves”, “steep mountains” and “round dances of fairies”, “castles of knights”, “ancient tower of Ogopek”, “warrior guard on the wall”. In Tyutchev's world of the sublime, the lines between nature and non-nature are almost erased.
In the world of the sublime in which Tyutchev the poet lives, many familiar boundaries are erased, even between words. The heterogeneous becomes homogeneous, the opposite often becomes almost unambiguous. Words in Tyutchev’s poems, including landscape ones, sometimes form the most unexpected and at the same time meaningful combinations in their own way. In the above poem, an example of such a combination is “with sweet horror.” This is not a traditional oxymoron, not a stylistic figure - behind this one senses a world of the sublime, in which pleasure and horror are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are so often related and inseparable. As Kant said, “an object is perceived as sublime with a feeling of pleasure, which is possible only through displeasure.”
There are many cases of such combinations in Tyutchev’s lyrics. In the poem “What are you howling about, night wind?”, for example, the sharply antonymic, from the point of view of everyday reason, concepts of “scary songs” and “favorite story” get along quite well with each other, forming together the plot node of the lyrical composition:
... Oh, don’t sing these terrible songs About ancient chaos, about your dear one! How greedily the world of the night soul listens to the story of its beloved I
In Tyutchev, concepts that are opposite in terms of their vocabulary are close not directly, but correlatively: in terms of belonging, in relation to the sphere of the lofty. In this sphere of the spiritually sublime, even the “terrible” can be “beloved,” for the most sublime moments for a person, the most frightening and the most joyful, are when the “peace of his soul” bursts from the “mortal breast” and “longs to merge with the infinite.”
The philosophically sublime in Tyutchev's lyrics about nature is both a meaning-generating and formative principle. This can be seen not only in the special nature of Tyutchev’s use of words. The craving for the sublime, the repulsion from the private and everyday is also reflected in the originality of some of Tyutchev’s comparisons, so to speak, “elevating”:
The night sky is so gloomy, Clouded on all sides. It’s not a threat or a thought, It’s a sluggish, joyless dream. Some lightning fires, igniting in succession, Like deaf-mute demons, Conversing among themselves...
From the very first verses, the life of nature is depicted here as lofty and mysterious. But she seems even higher and more mysterious thanks to the comparison. The image in comparison does not clarify the subject, does not make it clearer for the reader. On the contrary, it makes it more incomprehensible. None of the readers could see the “demons of the deaf and dumb”; Naturally, they do not give an idea of “fire bolts,” but they take you into the world of the mysteriously sublime and extremely thicken the alarming atmosphere of the poem.
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One of the main themes of Tyutchev’s nature lyrics is the theme of night. Many of the poems quoted here were not just about nature, but about nature at night. Tyutchev especially loves the last one; he turns to her most often. A. Blok called Tyutchev “the very night soul of Russian poetry.”
Among the poets of wisdom, as we know, Shevyrev developed the theme of the night in his lyrics. In “night” poems he was to a certain extent the predecessor of Tyutchev. In Tyutchev, in comparison with Shevyrev, the night is not flat and speculative, but alive and immeasurable in its depth and secret meanings. All this, however, cannot cancel the similarities in the presentation of the topic and, partly, in its interpretation. Developing the theme of the night, Shevyrev acted both as a romantic poet and as a poet-psychologist. The same, but to an incomparably greater degree, is also characteristic of Tyutchev.
Tyutchev’s night helps to penetrate into the “secret secrets” of a person. At the same time, she is the bearer of the mysteries and secrets of the entire universe. Perhaps that is why the night in Tyutchev’s depiction seems so majestic and grandiose, so tragic and terrible: ... But the day fades - night has come; It has come, and from the fatal world the cloth of grace has been torn off and thrown away... And the abyss is exposed to us With its fears and darkness, And there are no barriers between it and us - That’s why the night is scary for us!
At night a person is like an orphan, he feels immensely alone. The poem “Insomnia” talks about it this way: “It seems to us: the orphaned world of irresistible Doom has overtaken - and we, in the struggle, have abandoned the whole nature -
chickpeas on ourselves.” But in this fatal and cosmic loneliness it is given to man to know the world and himself: And, like a vision, the outside world has gone... And man, like a homeless orphan, now stands, weak and naked, Face to face before a dark abyss.
He is abandoned to himself - The mind is abolished, and thought is orphaned - In his soul, as in an abyss, he is immersed, And there is no outside support, no limit... And it seems like a long-ago dream To him now everything is bright, alive... And in the alien , unsolved, night He recognizes the ancestral heritage.
For all the gloom and tragedy of the color, the night for Tyutchev is, first of all, “holy.” It is with this word that the poem that we just quoted begins: “The holy night has risen on the horizon...”. The gloomy and the holy merge into one in the poet’s mind. The night reveals to man the deepest abysses and the most intimate secrets - and this knowledge for man is both the most terrible and the highest.
In Tyutchev’s nocturnal nature, everything is full of mysteries: the “host of stars”, and the “exclamations” of some “distant music”, and the “sweet light of the month”, and most of all the “wonderful nightly hum” - a “disembodied world born in chaos, audible, but invisible":
... A curtain fell on the world of day; Movement has become exhausted, labor has fallen asleep. Above the sleeping city, as in the tops of a forest, A wonderful, nightly roar has awakened... Where does it come from, this incomprehensible hum?.. Or mortal thoughts, freed by sleep, The disembodied world, audible, but invisible, Now swarming in the chaos of the night? ..
Tyutchev the poet is attracted to the incomprehensible, and for him everything incomprehensible is ultimately embodied in the single concept of “chaos.” Chaos is both the greatest mystery and the hidden, “fatal” basis of all things. It contains both the subconscious and consciousness itself, the human soul itself, mysterious in its contradictions. Chaos is those abysses that constantly hold a person in their power and which open before him in the silence of the night. Chaos, for Tyutchev, is an equally cosmic and generalized psychological concept.
Particularly noticeable in Tyutchev’s lyrics of the night is the indissolubility of the natural and human, natural philosophy and psychology, which is generally characteristic of Tyutchev’s poetry. In Tyutchev’s poems, nature is both as a person and for a person. Tyutchev could well have said, following Tick: “Everything in nature kindred to the soul and tuned in the same way, she responds to every song, she is an echo, and is often the first to sing what I think...”
In Tyutchev’s attitude towards nature one can always feel a purely human interest. For Tyutchev, nature is not only a special material for his poetry, but also a special language. Close in many respects to Tyutchev, V. Odoevsky asserted through the mouth of his hero Faust: “You know my constant conviction that a person, even if he can solve any question, can never correctly translate it into ordinary language. In these cases, I always look for some object in external nature that, by its analogy, could serve at least as an approximate expression of thought.”
These words well explain the poetics of not only V. Odoevsky, but also Tyutchev. Nature in Tyutchev's poems is a language of analogies - a language that helps to reveal secrets and express the inexpressible.
Tyutchev the poet constantly and intently peers into nature, peers into her mysterious faces, listens to her mysterious and prophetic voices - and tortures her, passionately inquires, searching not so much for her own, but for human, spiritual secrets.
In the poem “What are you howling about, night wind?” the poet asks the wind about his “complaints”, about “incomprehensible torment” - and we feel and hear behind this both direct human questions and not directly named human complaints and torments. The poet speaks of the world of the “night soul,” and for us it is like our own inner world. And the storms, and the chaos that “moves” “under the storms,” and the spells themselves
The poet’s point is that all this is human, close, all this is in ourselves, first of all.
The poem “The gray shadows mixed...” aphoristically accurately expresses the inextricable unity of the spiritual and the natural in Tyutchev’s poetry: “Everything is in me, and I am in everything...”. The fact that pantheistic lyrics are lyrics of deeply human and psychological content was also noticeable in the pantheistic poems of Khomyakov and Shevyrev. In Tyutchev’s poems this manifests itself even more noticeably and incomparably stronger.
In Tyutchev's pantheistic feeling, the eternal and most tragic questions of human existence are poetically and spiritually resolved: questions of life and death. The personal, individual-temporal disappears in the impulse of the human soul towards the general and universal. And in this disappearance, new life and high joy are born:
... Feelings are the haze of self-forgetfulness Fill it over the edge!.. Let me taste destruction, Mix it with the slumbering world!
A person’s oblivion of his own “I”, the dissolution of the individual in the universal - this is one of the favorite themes of Tyutchev’s poetry. Tyutchev constantly returns to these motives in his work. In the late poem “So, in life there are moments...” he again recalls the possibility of merging the human “I” with nature, glorifies a kind of “nirvana” of the soul - this is the highest moment for poetic feeling:
So, in life there are moments -
They are difficult to convey, they are self-forgetting
Earthly grace. The tree tops are noisy
High above me, And the birds are only heavenly
They talk to me. Everything vulgar and false Gone so far, Everything sweet and impossible
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So close and easy. And I love it, and it’s sweet to me,
And peace is in my chest, I am enveloped in drowsiness - Oh time, wait!
For Tyutchev, it is not just the merging of the human soul with nature, but all their true communication is “grace” and peace. In nature for him lies the source of a certain “catharsis”, because in nature very often, as if on a higher level, as a cosmic-universal thing, what in a person’s life seems to be his exceptional, unique tragedy is repeated:
Look how in the expanse of the river, along the slope of the newly revived waters, into the all-encompassing sea, the ice floe floats after the ice floe.
Whether shining iridescently in the sun, or at night in the late darkness, But everything, inevitably melting, They float towards the same place.
All together - small, large, Having lost their former image, All - indifferent, like an element - Will merge with the fatal abyss! ..
Oh, the illusion of our thoughts, You, human I, Isn’t this your meaning, Isn’t this your destiny?
In poems of this kind, Tyutchev acts as both a poet-philosopher and a poet-psychologist. Tyutchev's psychologism is all the more akin to philosophy in that it always has a generalized character and starts from the particular. Tyutchev speaks, as a rule, not about the psychology of a specific person and a specific case, but about the possible psychology of any human soul. This is a special, non-Pushkin path of psychologism in Russian poetry, but it also turned out to have its own prospects and its own great achievements* The best proof of this is the work of Tyutchev himself.
Natural philosophical poetry acquired for itself in Tyutchev’s poems a fairly stable structure corresponding to pantheistic consciousness. This is a two-part poem
a composition based on hidden or open parallelism of phenomena from the natural world and the human world.
In the poem “Silence in the Stifling Air,” two parts of his composition are interconnected by the image of a thunderstorm: a thunderstorm in nature and, parallel to it, internal turmoil (also a thunderstorm) in a woman’s soul:
...Virgo, maiden, what worries the Haze of the Perseus of the young? What is clouded, what is yearning, The wet shine of your eyes? Why does the flame of virgin cheeks fade away, turning pale? Why is your chest heaving and your lips burning? .. Two tears appeared through silk eyelashes... Or were they raindrops of the incipient thunderstorm? ..
In the poem, both parallel figurative series are both independent and at the same time dependent. The contextual interconnectedness of both series leads to the fact that images from the natural world allow for double perception and interpretation: they are recognized both in their direct meaning and in their possible correlation with man and with the human. What, in fact, is the meaning of the verses: “Two tears appeared through silken eyelashes... Or were they raindrops of an incipient thunderstorm?..”. What is the “thunderstorm” here: a metaphor or not a metaphor? Any categorical answer to this question is not only difficult, but also fundamentally unacceptable. The word is perceived at once in both of its possible meanings. This makes the poetic word extremely filled, voluminous, as if with an internal perspective - it makes it figurative in the exact meaning of this concept.
AND*
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In Tyutchev’s two-part compositions, there may be cases of a more or less close connection between both parts of the poem, more or less of their dismemberment, but at the same time the very nature of the poetic structure, as a rule, remains unchanged. This is a structure based on the fact that a fact from the human world is compared and, most importantly, verified by a fact from the natural world:
When surrounded by murderous worries
Everything disgusts us - and life is like a pile of stones,
It lies on us - suddenly, God knows from where,
It brings joy to our souls,
The past will envelop and embrace us
And the terrible load will be lifted in a minute.
So sometimes, in the autumn, when the fields are already empty, the groves are bare, the sky turns paler, cloudier than the valley, suddenly the wind blows, warm and damp, the fallen leaf is driven before it and showers our souls as if in spring...
Compared to the poem “There is silence in the stuffy air...” the rationalistic principle is more noticeable in this composition: it is more straightforward. The images and words here do not merge in a single, structurally organizing metaphor, but exactly echo: “it will breathe joy into our souls” - “and it will pour into our souls as if in spring”; “everything disgusts us, and life is like a pile of stones” - “the fields are already empty, the groves are bare,” etc. The poet finds similar things in nature to everything that is in man. The comparison is carried out consistently and to the end. The parallelism in the poem seems almost mathematically precise.
However, the difference between this poem and the lyrical play “Silence in the stuffy air...” does not in the least cancel out their similarities in the most important and internally defining aspects. Both poems equally belong to that widespread structural type in Tyutchev, which is based on generalization and a kind of mythologization of a specific psychological fact and observation. In poems of a similar structure, no matter how outwardly they differ from each other, an incident from human life or simply the poet’s thought about a person, through comparison with something similar in nature, seems to acquire all the features of truth and is filled with universal philosophical content. This is not only a characteristic, but also a very natural structure for natural philosophical poetry.
Tyutchev has a poem that, both in theme and content, is reminiscent of Pushkin’s poem “The Poet” (“Until it requires a poet”). In general, Tyutchev writes little about the poet and poetic vocation, and in his work this poem is in some way exceptional.
chenie. But it is an exception in terms of thematic and problematic, but not at all in its poetics: You saw him in the circle of great society - Now waywardly cheerful, now gloomy, 4 Scattered, wild or full of secret thoughts, Such is the poet - and you despised the poet!
Look at the month: all day long, like a skinny cloud, He almost fainted in the heavens, - Night has come - and, luminous god, He shines over the sleepy grove!
In a single-subject poem by Pushkin, the idea expressed about the poet can be convincing in itself. Pushkin never looks for evidence of the truth of thought outside its own life sphere. With Tyutchev, everything happens differently. And in this poem, and in many others, he tests his thoughts about man by the “court of last resort” - nature and the life of nature.
Among Tyutchev’s two-part compositions there are also those where the nature-man parallel has the appearance not of similarity, but of opposition. The purity and truth of what nature is turns out to be in direct contradiction and hostility to what is happening in the human world. We encountered such a contrast in the poem “The smoked feast, the choirs fell silent...”. Another example:
And the coffin was already lowered into the grave, And everything crowded around... They jostle, breathe through force, A pernicious spirit constricts their chest...
And above the open grave, At the head where the coffin stands, a learned pastor, dignified, says the funeral speech...
It speaks of the frailty of man, the Fall of Sin, the blood of Christ... And with intelligent, decent speech the Crowd is variously occupied...
And the sky is so loopy and clear, So boundless above the earth..., And the birds soar loudly In the blue abyss of air...
The whole structure of the poem, and not least the sharp antithesis underlying it, makes the work largely moralistic. Contrast in poetry, like any linguistic contrast, turns out to be an excellent means of moralizing. The poem “And the coffin has already been lowered into the grave...”, like the poem “The feast is over, the choirs have fallen silent...”, is not only a philosophical and poetic reflection, but also a moral lesson, an important lesson to people.
In such poems it is especially easy to notice the didactic features inherent in Tyutchev’s poetry. In pantheistic lyric poetry there is always the possibility of a lesson, for in it nature is very often like “the teacher’s last argument.” Tyutchev takes advantage of these possibilities of pantheistic poetry. Like many other Russian writers, he feels a constant need to be not just a poet, but also a teacher, a mentor of life.
One of Tyutchev’s most characteristic didactic works is his poem “Not what you think, nature.” It is didactic both in purpose and in its style. The teacher’s pathos is felt both in the special intonations of the speech, its “colloquiality”, and in the composition - in such a change of plans for poetic reflection and conversation, which reflects the very logic of the lesson: “Not what you think, nature” (not only the initial thesis , but also a deliberately rejected false judgment) - “You see a leaf and a flower on a tree: did the gardener glue them on? Or does the fetus ripen in the womb by the play of external, alien forces? (evidence in favor of the true) - “They do not see or hear, they live in this world as if in darkness” (moral maxim, behind which there is anger, dissatisfaction with the results of the teaching), etc. Before you is a lesson with all the visible pathos of the lesson , we have before us the teacher’s speech, full of mood and emotional transitions, reproduced in all its possible authenticity:
...Not theirs: understand, if possible, Organa’s life is deaf and dumb! Alas, the soul in him will not be disturbed by the voice of his mother herself!
It is not the lesson and instruction itself that makes such poems by Tyutchev poetic. For Khomyakov, the role of a teacher often prevented him from being a poet. And Tyutchev, in his didactic poems, is a poet not thanks to didactics, but despite it. It is not the form of the lesson, but its content, its depth that attracts Tyutchev, how attractive are the words included in the lesson, touching in their timeliness and freshness, not at all “teacher’s” words: “With them the forests did not speak and the night in the stars was silent! And with unearthly tongues, stirring rivers and forests, the thunderstorm did not consult with them in friendly conversation in the night!”
In natural philosophical poetry, images from the natural world can easily appear in allegorical interpretation. This is one of the sources of its potential didacticism. Allegorism of nature in pantheistic lyrics suggests, as a rule, not a random lesson, but, so to speak, a “planned” one. In terms of artistic impact, this is fraught with danger. However, not for Tyutchev. One can say about Tyutchev’s allegories what Belinsky said about V. Odoevsky’s allegories: “... the allegories of the book. Odoevsky were filled with life and poetry, despite the fact that the very word allegory is so opposite to the word poetry” 26.
In Tyutchev, the allegorical meaning of the landscape is in most cases obscured. While painting pictures of nature, Tyutchev definitely forgets about his psychological and moral tasks. Or rather, he remembers them - and does not pomp. In the process of creativity, he experiences a lively and passionate fascination with the subject of the image - and nature in his poems bears traces of this fascination, as signs of its independent, unsubordinate existence.
23 V. G. Belinsky. About the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol. - Full. collection cit., vol. 1, p. 275.
The poem “Fountain” is a typical Tyutchev work of pantheistic structure. Its philosophical plot is revealed from the comparison of the fountain with human thought. The first part of the poem is about the fop-tap, the second is about the “mortal thought of a water cannon.” Both parts are connected by a plan, an idea. But Tyutchev’s image of the fountain itself is both “connected” and, to a lesser extent, autonomous. This is not only a subordinate world, but also a “world in itself.” His subordination is hidden for the time being, it is not imposed on the reader in any way and becomes clear only when another picture appears, a new - also partly independent - chain of poetic images and thoughts arises:
See how the shining fountain swirls like a living cloud; How it burns, how its moist smoke breaks up in the sun. Rising to the sky with a ray, he touched the cherished heights - And again, with fire-colored dust, he was condemned to fall to the ground.
O mortal thought water cannon, O inexhaustible water cannon! What incomprehensible law strives for you, troubles you? How greedily you strive for the sky!.. But the hand of the invisible fatal, refracting your persistent ray, overthrows in the spray from the heights.
There are not even the traditional “like”, “like”, “so” for such compositions. The parts of the poem are grammatically independent. Their actual, internal dependence is revealed through the semantic roll call of key images that arises as the narrative unfolds: “a shining fountain swirls” - “a water cannon of mortal thought”; “having risen like a ray to the sky, he touched the cherished height” - “how greedily you strive for the sky,” etc. It seems that the parallelism here was not conceived in advance, but naturally appeared in the very act of poetic creation.
One of Tyutchev’s later poems, “The East is Doubtfully Silent...” at first glance looks like Khomyakov’s transparently teacher-like poems on the theme of Russia. Opo and on
is actually close to Khomyakov in thought and in the nature of the composition. However, in one respect, Tyutchev remains true to himself as a poet here: unlike Khomyakov, he avoids overly straightforward allegory. The artist clearly prevails over the didactician in him: ... Look: the streak is visible, And, as if glowing with a secretive passion, It is becoming brighter, more and more alive - It is all flaring up - Another minute, and in all the Immeasurability of the ethereal, the worldwide announcement of the Victorious rays of the sun will be heard.
The picture, designed to explain Tyutchev’s political ideas, turns out to be so bright in itself, so rich in colors and so immediate in its impact that you easily forget about its allegorical meaning. The direct impression of the picture, the very first and familiar meaning of words and images turn out to be stronger than the meanings hidden in the words. Here the text triumphs over the subtext, and the poet, thanks to this, remains teaching
first of all a poet.
* * *
Tyutchev's philosophical lyrics are not limited to natural philosophical verses. In his poetry, Tyutchev was not afraid of direct lessons of wisdom. Straight, but not straightforward! His lyrical and philosophical experiments are almost always both lessons and prayers. In this sense, they correlate with the poetry of Pushkin to a lesser extent than with the poetics of the wise men.
One of Tyutchev’s most remarkable philosophical poems is “Silentium”. L. Tolstoy especially loved him. He said about it: “What an amazing thing! I don’t know a better poem.”
"Silentium" is a good example of poetic wisdom that can become winged. This is a smart instruction and at the same time an intimate confession of the poet.
This combination is typical for Tyutchev; it contains one source of the artistic effectiveness of his poetic and philosophical lessons.
The main idea of the poem “Silentium” is strong and lively. Tyutchev knows how to revive not only what he sees, but also what he thinks about. His instructions themselves turn out to be filled with signs of life.
The poem consists of three parts. Three-part compositions are almost as common among Tyutchev as two-part ones. The first part of the poem is instruction in its most direct form. The poem ends with the instruction and lesson contained in the third part. The second, middle part is least like a teaching:
... How can the heart express itself?
How can someone else understand you?
Will he understand what you live for?
A spoken thought is a lie...
It is remarkable that it is in this part of the poem that the most important, key words are heard: “A thought expressed is a lie.” The words seem to rush in along with the questions, their appearance seems involuntary, and this feature of them makes them not an ordinary maxim, but a living voice of the mind. It is like wisdom revealed to the poet on the path of reflection.
However, not only the middle part of the poem, but all of it seems organic, unspecified: it is full of unexpected insights. This poem by Tyutchev is like a lesson in which discoveries are made not only for the students, but also to a lesser extent for the teacher himself.
Tyutchev's experiments in direct poetic wisdom are very emotional in sound, in the nature of the verse and speech. They are full of internal movement - movement not only of thoughts, but also of feelings. Such, for example, is the poem “From edge to edge. .." This lyrical play is about the fatal throwing of a person, and she herself, by the nature of the speech composition, creates a complete illusion of continuous forced movement, the illusion of the eternal “Forward, forward!”:
From edge to edge, from city to city, Fate, like a whirlwind, sweeps people away, And are you glad or not glad that it was granted? .. Go-go!
The wind brought us a familiar sound: Forgive me for the last time... There are many, many tears behind us, Tumap, obscurity lies ahead! .,
“Oh, look around, oh, wait, Where to run, why run? .. Love remains behind you, Where can you find the best in the world?
Love remained behind you, In tears, with despair in your chest... Oh, take pity on your melancholy, Spare your bliss!
Bring the bliss of so many, so many days to your memory... You leave everything dear to your soul on the way!..
The words here seem to move from place to place, they end one thought and start a new one, while they serve as a strong source of both thematic and musical development of the verse composition. We have already encountered something similar when we became acquainted with Tyutchev’s lyrics about nature. In terms of poetics, there is no fundamental difference between Tyutchev’s natural-philosophical poems and simply philosophical ones.
In the poem “My Soul is an Elysium of Shadows...”, which is similar in certain poetic features to the poem “From Edge to Edge...”, although different in other respects, Tyutchev creates an image amazing in its unexpected accuracy: the soul is the eternal abode of dear ones. shadows Everything rests on this image; it determines the logic of the poetic narrative. Not everyday and not rational, but strong and understandable.
The two parts of the poem begin with the same words. But, repeating themselves, they appear in a new capacity. They have a different intonation - less stately, more nervous; opportunity and need for even greater depth
bins; they intonationally set the anxiety and high pain of the questions concluding the poem: My soul is an Elysium of shadows, Silent, bright and beautiful shadows, Neither the thoughts of this violent time, nor the joys, nor sorrows of those involved.
My soul, Elysium of shadows,
What do life and you have in common?
Between you, ghosts of past, better days,
And by this insensitive crowd? ..
The poem “My Soul is an Elysium of Shadows” is an example of a philosophical miniature. Over the years, Tyutchev's passion for this genre has grown more and more. Tyutchev's miniature is most often a hidden lesson of wisdom. And if at the same time it is distinguished by all the properties of real poetry, it is mainly because its lesson is never banal.
There are not only poetic images and poetic style, but also poetic ideas. These are always discovery ideas that amaze with their unexpected, although not necessarily completely new, truth. Tyutchev’s miniatures always contain such unexpectedly truthful, poetic thoughts:
There is a high meaning in separation:
No matter how much you love, even one day, even a century,
Love is a dream, and a dream is one moment,
And whether it’s early or late to awaken, But a person must finally wake up...
Pli:
Alas, what is our ignorance that is more helpless and sadder? Who dares to say: goodbye Across the abyss of two or three days?
Tyutchev's philosophical miniatures represent both reflection and the final, refined conclusion of thought. Their very brevity, expressive conciseness, internal energy of thought and words make the poems aphoristic:
It is not given to us to predict how our word will respond, - And we are given sympathy, Just as grace is given to us...
In philosophical poems of this kind - both small and large - Tyutchev more often (albeit mainly in appearance) resembles poets of wisdom than in natural philosophical lyrics. Some of his poems are reminiscent of Khomyakov (especially those that have a political overtones), others make us remember Venevitinov, “Venevitinovsky,” for example, the poem seems: When decrepit forces begin to betray us And we must, like old-timers, Give new arrivals a place, -
Save us then, good genius, From cowardly reproaches, From slander, from embitterment towards life changing;
From a feeling of hidden anger At the world being renewed, Where new guests sit down for the feast prepared for them...
The poem sounds like a spell, like a high moral instruction from the poet to himself. Vepevitinov’s poem “Prayer” is similar to this - also like a spell and instruction to oneself: “Invisible guardian of souls, hear my prayer! Bless my monastery and become a guard at its gates..."
The poems of Tyutchev and Venevitinov are similar, but so much in content as in their dynamically excited style of speech, and the special moral purity of poetic feeling. Tyutchev wrote a poem in his declining years. Venevitinov wrote his, like all his other poems, in the prime of his youth. But, despite the difference in years, both poets in their works are close in the structure of their souls: in the purity and passion of deep thought.
Tyutchev is never calm and coldly confident in his wisdom. He has a restless wisdom. In his poems, he does not just reflect - he utters a prophetic word in excitement and anguish. He constantly exclaims, rejoices, suffers. His thoughts are in ups and downs, in discoveries, which are not only fun, but also painful. Like Dostoevsky’s heroes, his “soul trembles with tears”:
Oh, my prophetic soul! Oh, heart full of anxiety, Oh, how you beat on the threshold of a double existence, as it were!..
Both Tyutchev’s poetry and speech rarely flow calmly: they explode every now and then. Tyutchev the poet often speaks in cries, he has a feeling that reaches an extreme degree of strength. Tyutchev has entire poems constructed as a series of “screams”, as a chain of questions about life, as an outcry of words and thoughts:
I sit thoughtfully and alone, on the dying fireplace.
I look through my tears... With longing I think about the past And I can’t find words in my despondency.
The past - did it ever happen? What is now - will it always be? ..
It will pass - It will pass, as everything has passed, And will sink into a dark crater Year after year...
Tyutchev's philosophical thought comes from different sources in life, it arises on different occasions and is inspired by different subjects. The structures of his poems are a different matter: they, as we may have noticed, turn out to be quite stable. Often this is a kind of philosophical parable with a direct or implied lesson. Essentially, most of Tyutchev’s poems about nature are original parables, for nature in them serves as a source of didactic. But in Tyutchev’s poems it is not only nature that serves as the material and source for teaching, but also, for example, history. So it is in the poems “Columbus”, “Cicero”, etc.
In the two-part lyrical-philosophical composition “Cicero”, the first part contains the winged word of the famous Roman and a commentary on it. They are the artistic basis on which the moralistic and philosophical conclusion contained in the second part of the poem is built:
... Blessed is he who visited this world in its fatal moments! He was called by the all-good as an interlocutor to a feast. He is a spectator of their high spectacles, He was admitted to their council - And alive, like a celestial being, He drank immortality from their cup!
Both in terms of language and compositional features, the poem “Cicero” is noticeably didactic. But his lesson is flat and not one-line. The poet's thought cannot be decomposed into concepts. It is not only the result of reflection, but also encourages it. The bliss that the poet asserts is far from unconditional, and it does not allow for an unambiguous interpretation. The poem is categorical in words, in the sound of words, but not in meaning. In the forms of parables, in traditionally dogmatic forms (such as they were, for example, in Khomyakov), Tyutchev achieves the acute problematic nature of poetic thinking. In non-Pushkin forms, he achieves an artistic effect similar to Pushkin’s and equal in strength.
Like Tyutchev's nature, his wisdom is rarely commonplace. Moreover, it requires a certain detachment from everyday life, from an overly “sound” mind. A mundane, non-poetic consciousness will not accept or understand the thoughts and conclusions contained in the poem “Cicero”. This applies even more to one of the most profound philosophical poems of the mature Tyutchev, “Two Voices”:
1
Take courage, O friends, fight diligently, Although the battle is unequal, the struggle is hopeless! Above you the luminaries are silent in the heights, Below you the graves are silent too. Let the gods bliss in the mountainous Olympus: Their immortality is alien to labor and anxiety; Anxiety and labor are only for mortal hearts... For them there is no victory, for them there is an end.
2
Take courage, fight, O brave friends, No matter how cruel the battle is, no matter how stubborn the struggle!
Above you are silent, starry circles, Below you are silent, deaf coffins. Let the Olympians with an envious eye look at the struggle of unyielding hearts. Who, while fighting, fell, defeated only by fate, He snatched the victorious crown from their hands.
V. M. Zhirmunsky, pointing out the connection of this poem by Tyutchev with the Masonic hymn “Symbolum” (“Symbol”), created by Goethe in 1816 for the Weimar lodge of “freemasons”, wrote: “Goethe also determined the general intention of the poem - a teaching address to the “initiated”, and the general solemn and mysterious tone of the hymn, indicating a transcendental reward ... ".
The conclusions of V. M. Zhirmunsky raise doubts in some significant points. In Tyutchev one can more likely see an argument with Goethe, a creative overcoming of Goethe’s plan, rather than closeness and imitation. Goethe's “Symbol” is a hymn, a calling monologue, an internally dogmatic and “one-voice” work, as a hymn should be. Tyutchev has something exactly the opposite of this. A. Blok, who for some time was under the strong influence of the poem “Two Voices,” noted the tragic beginning in it: “In Tyutchev’s poem there is a Hellenic, pre-Christ sense of fate, tragic. .."
Tyutchev's poem is two-voice not only in title. It is polyphonic in its entire structure and in its entire meaning. This philosophical play, speaking about the dignity and courage of man in the face of death, treating the deepest and most painful questions of human existence, does not have a final solution. It does not talk about any “exorbitant reward”. There is nothing unconditional about it at all. In the poem, the voices of hopelessness and triumph sound not as two opposite ones, but as two parallel and similar voices.
Tyutchev's lessons and teachings are not obligatory, but alternative and at the same time antinomic in nature. So it is in the poem “Two Voices”, and in many others. Tyutchev's poems are a strong impulse towards truth, a spiritual, human aspiration towards it, but not the ultimate truth. More precisely, for him it is the truth in possible poetic expression. The unambiguity of truth is alien to the poetic consciousness of Tyutchev, just as it was alien to the consciousness of Pushkin. Despite the apparent difference in forms of expression, the deep dialectic of Tyutchev’s thought is akin to Pushkin’s dialectic.
* * *
Yu. Tynyanov wrote about Tyutchev: “Tyutchev develops a special language, exquisitely archaic. There is no doubt that archaism was a conscious part of his style...”
In Tyutchev’s world of sublime thoughts and feelings, this special archaic speech, with its majestic and solemn flow, with its extraordinary words, seems very appropriate. That striving upward, which was noted as the most characteristic feature of Tyutchev’s poetry, naturally manifests itself in the language of Tyutchev’s poetry.
In the poem “Vision” Tyutchev speaks about the great miracle of nature, about the night, worldwide silence, about poetry, which at this hour “in prophetic dreams the gods disturb.” And he speaks about this precisely in detached from everything earthly and prosaic words: “at a certain hour”, “at that hour”, “the living chariot of the universe”, “the sanctuary of heaven”, “the muses are the virgin soul”, etc.
Tyutchev writes about Pushkin, about the great and bitter loss of Pushkin - this is also from the world of the most sublime, and in his poem again majestic, densely and emphatically archaic words and phrases sound: “divine vial”, “meager vessel”, “the living organ of the gods” , “banner of the people’s sorrow”, “and sow with noble blood”, etc.
The sublime, bookish, archaic language serves a wide variety of themes and plots in Tyutchev’s poetry - and this is because all the themes and plots of Tyutchev’s lyrics, all of its images and motifs are to a greater or lesser extent involved in the realm of the sublime. Not only Tyutchev’s poetry was the poetry of thought,1 but accordingly its language was the language of thought. The very tasks that Tyutchev set for his poetry, his very original poetic metaphysics, required a non-everyday and generalizing language. This is what became for him a language with obvious archaic tendencies, but seemingly ennobled and simplified, a language old in formal features, but with new and greater artistic possibilities discovered in it.
What seemed or could seem unpoetic in the poems of Khomyakov and Shevyrev was perceived not only for granted, but also as direct success in Tyutchev’s stylistic system. Outwardly, Tyutchev’s archaisms are similar to those found in the language of poets of wisdom. But unlike Shevyrev, for example, Tyutchev’s archaisms are always internally justified and appropriate. The relevance, the artistic motivation of words is one of the secrets of the effectiveness of the archaic language of Tyutchev’s poetry.
The general sublime character of speech in Tyutchev’s poems depends not only on the archaic and bookish nature of the words he uses. Words in Tyutchev’s language may not be archaic or sublime in their vocabulary characteristics. But they become sublime in a poetic context, the poet gives them a lofty poetic sound. Tyutchev often perceives non-archaisms just like archaisms.
I will give several typical beginnings of Tyutchev’s poems: “I drove through the Livonian fields...”; “There is a touching, mysterious charm in the lightness of autumn evenings...”; “On the high tree of humanity, you were its best leaf...”; “Golden clouds float above the grape hills...”, etc.
Most of the poems that begin here
given, written in iambic tetrameter. This meter is flexible, with different rhythmic possibilities. In Pushkin, for example, it most often sounds lively, relaxed, and sometimes conversational. In Tyutchev, iambic tetrameter looks majestic and solemn, and the words of iambic verse also seem majestic and solemn in him, although there may not be direct archaisms among them.
This solemnity of the sound of iambic verse and the words in the letters is largely explained by the fact that Tyutchev’s verse is built mainly not on short, unsyllabic words, but on long, polysyllabic words. It is Tyutchev’s “long” words that, as a rule, are found in key positions and carry an increased intonation, emotional and, ultimately, increased semantic load. In the examples given, these are the words “Livonian”, “touching”, “mysterious”, “humanity”, “grape”.
A polysyllabic word, in comparison with a low-syllable one, is longer and therefore more solemn. In Tyutchev’s poems, such “long” and “solemn” words help from the very beginning to switch the reader’s perception “to a high wave”, transfer it to an unusual, non-prosaic dimension. The long, stressed words at the beginning of the poem give the poems a kind of rhythmic and intonation acceleration and determine their overall emotional and semantic pattern.
Sometimes in Tyutchev’s initial, key position there are not just long words, but at the same time exotic ones, not ordinary for the reader: “And having said goodbye to the anxiety of everyday life, and shielded by the cypress grove, - a blissful shadow, an Elysian shadow, she fell asleep at a good hour. ..”; “Once again I see your eyes - and one of your southern” glances of the Cimmerian sad night suddenly dispelled the sleepy chill...”; “There is melodiousness in the waves of the sea, harmony in spontaneous disputes, and the harmonious musikan rustle flows in the unsteady reeds...”, etc.
179
12*
Tyutchev's love for the exotic word is also in connection with the deep properties of his poetry. The exotic in language takes us beyond the limits of the routine and everyday. Stylistically, it is partly related to the archaic. An exotic word, like art
chaotic, all the more special and dear to Tyutchev because it helps him break away from the too prosaic and everyday and establish himself in the world of high poetry.
It is not enough to say about polysyllabic words in Tyutchev’s language that they are long. They seem to be elongated. These are both majestic-sounding words and very moving internally. The very length of a word determines its potential rhythmic dynamism, its intonation flexibility. A long word, by virtue of its length, breaks out of the strict iambic scheme and gives the verse intonation variety. Polysyllabic words do not simply exist in Tyutchev’s verse, but seem to “appear” in it - stretched out in time, long and solemn.
In the verses “On the mysterious world of spirits, over this nameless abyss, a gold-woven cover is thrown by the high will of the gods. ..” the key long words “mysterious”, “nameless”, “golden-dropped” seem to be moving words, words with an inner impulse and thus very alive. Tyutchev’s poetic word does not in this case alone give the impression of being lofty, majestic in its sound and at the same time alive, in action and effective.
What we conventionally called the “long” and “elongated” word is both a characteristic and quite conscious feature of Tyutchev’s style. Its awareness is evidenced by Tyutchev’s widespread use of not only naturally polysyllabic, but also artificially polysyllabic words. In Tyutchev’s language there are frequent cases of “word formation”, the use of compound words: “And everything was so cold and colorless for the heart and for the eyes, it was so sad and unresponsive, but someone’s song suddenly rang out...”; “And the sleeping city, deserted and majestic, filled with its silent glory...”; “And through their gloss, the harsh cloudy-crimson evening shines with a rainbow ray...”; “And in the pure fiery ether the soul is so kindred - light ...”, etc.
The poet does not find complex words like “cold-colorless”, “sad-unresponsive”, “deserted-majestic”, etc. ready-made in the language. They are the result of his own linguistic creativity. Tyutchev does not passively use long words, but actively strives for them, often being their creator.
Sometimes Tyutchev’s even conjunctions, in cases where they are syntactically optional, are intended as if to “lengthen” and elevate the poetic word, to make it slowly solemn both in sound and in its deep lyrical meaning:
... And the sun hesitated, saying goodbye to the hill, and the castle, and you. And the quiet wind, passing by, played with Your clothes, And from the wild apple trees, color by color, fell onto the shoulders of the young...
In such cases, which are quite frequent in Tyutchev, conjunctions closely merge with significant words and, lengthening them, give them musicality, and with it a special intonational weight and majesty.
In his lyrics, as a rule, Tyutchev avoids not only the last, obligatory decision, but also the last, too categorical word. His words are not so much precise in their meanings as they are deep. An example from the poem “There is in the primordial autumn...”, which is usually cited as proof of the accuracy of Tyutchev’s words (“Only a thin hair of a cobweb shines on an idle furrow”), is the exception rather than the rule. For Tyutchev, the precision of the word is also its well-known limitation. The exact word is “explainable,” and Tyutchev most of all strives to express the inexplicable. He prefers the special baking precision of artistic meaning and poetic solution to the accuracy of the concept.
It is significant in this regard that one of the most common and characteristic words in Tyutchev’s language is the word “as if”: “As if the spring waters touched her hot feet...”; “as if the sky flowed through the veins like an ethereal stream...”; “like airy ruins created by the magic of chambers...”; “the whole day stands as if it were crystal...”, etc.
Tyutchev's “as if” is a verbal sign of deep meaning. This is a sign of the non-finite, non-conditional, non-dogmatic. The language of Tyutchev's poetry, archaic in form and thus close to the language of the wise men, in its internal characteristics corresponds, however, not only to their poetics, but in some significant way to the poetics of Pushkip. In any case, the non-dogmatism of Tyutchev’s words -
This is a purely Pushkip trait.
* * *
Speaking about Tyutchev's poetry, touching on various aspects of its poetics, we have more than once discovered both important differences and significant similarities between Tyutchev and Pushkin. Tyutchev’s similarities with Pushkin increase significantly in the last period of his work. “There is no doubt,” wrote the famous scientist N. Ya. Berkovsky, “that over the years Tyutchev did not move away from Pushkin, but came closer to him...”
Some of Tyutchev's later poems are especially reminiscent of Pushkin in their semantic and formal unpredictability. Thus, the poem of 1864 “Oh, this South, oh, this Nice!” represents an infrequent case of purely intimate poetic recognition for Tyutchev. The poem is not a universal, but a very personal drama. Its general psychological significance is revealed not directly, as was most often the case with Tyutchev, but indirectly, through the concrete and individually unique. We noted something similar in Pushkin - for example, in the poem “Memory” and other meditative poems. Tyutchev’s poem “Oh, this South, oh, this Nice!” characterizes Pushkin’s path of development of Russian philosophical and psychological lyrics.
Tyutchev’s poem of 1865 “There is also a suffering stagnation in my suffering” is of the same kind. Here is the same immediacy of recognition - Pushkin's immediacy, here the pain of the soul is so strong that it cannot be separated from the personality of the poet. It seems that the poet’s plea in the poem sounds very individual, very personal:
... O Lord, grant me burning suffering and dispel the deadness of my soul: You took it, but the torment of remembering, leave the living torment for me to sing...
The poet’s message in a poetic message to Ya. P. Polonsky is also personal, unique and individual: There are no more living sparks for your welcoming voice - There is a dead night in me, and there is no morning for it... And soon it will fly away - unnoticed in the darkness - The Last One, scanty smoke from an extinguished fire.
The closeness of Tyutchev to Pushkin in some of his last poems, even more so, the kinship of their poetic natures, their poetic temperament, which we repeatedly pointed out during our observations, allows us to come to the conclusion that the concept of Yu. N. Tynyanov, which affirmed the fundamental difference in Tyutchev’s poetics from Pushkin's poetics, suffers from noticeable one-sidedness. Tyutchev the poet is equally similar to Pushkin and different from him. He is similar in size and elemental power of talent, the organic anti-dogmatism of his artistic thinking - and he is distinguished by many features of his external poetics.
Precisely in the very thing where Tyutchev differs from Pushkin, he resembles Venevitinov and the poets of his circle. By their formal features of poetics, Tyutchev’s poems directly correlate with the quest and practice of poets of wisdom. In a certain sense, in Tyutchev’s work, in his philosophical lyrics, the Pushkin direction in Russian poetry and that conceptual, philosophically forward direction, which was represented by the names of Venevitinov, Khomyakov and Shevyrev, seemed to intersect. All this largely determined Tyutchev’s special historical place in the development of Russian lyric poetry.
In the article “F. I. Tyutchev” V. Bryusov wrote: “Tyutchev has completely his own methods of creativity and the reception of verse, which in his time, at the beginning of the 19th century, stood completely apart...” 36.
86 V. Bryusov. Favorite op. in 2 volumes, vol. 2. M., 1955, p. 222.
Bryusov's conclusion is either erroneous, or it should be recognized as a simple metaphor. In the exact meaning of these words, Tyutchev’s poetic path was not exceptional and isolated. It was in line with the general movement of Russian poetic thought, was determined by its entire life, its history, its internal struggle, contradictions, and searches. Comparison of Tyutchev's poetry with the trends of Russian philosophical poetry of the second quarter of the 19th century. allows us to see in his work an organic phenomenon and, from a historical point of view, a highly natural one.
* * *
Don't argue, don't bother!..
Madness seeks, stupidity judges;
Heal daytime wounds with sleep,
And tomorrow there will be something, something will happen.
While living, be able to survive everything:
Sadness, and joy, and anxiety.
What do you want? Why bother?
The day will be survived - and thank God!
1850?
Silentium! *
Be silent, hide and hide
And your feelings and dreams -
Let it be in the depths of your soul
They get up and go in
Silently, like stars in the night, -
Admire them - and be silent.
How can the heart express itself?
How can someone else understand you?
Will he understand what you live for?
A spoken thought is a lie.
Exploding, you will disturb the keys, -
Feed on them - and be silent.
Just know how to live within yourself -
There is a whole world in your soul
Mysteriously magical thoughts;
They will be deafened by the outside noise,
Daylight rays will disperse, -
Listen to their singing - and be silent!..
* Silence! (lat.).
<1829>, early 1830s
Twins
There are twins - for earth-born
Two deities, Death and Sleep,
Like a brother and sister who are wonderfully similar -
She is gloomier, he is meeker...
But there are two other twins -
And there are no more beautiful couple in the world,
And there is no more terrible charm
Her betraying heart...
Their union is blood, not accidental,
And only on fateful days
With your unsolvable mystery
They fascinate us.
And who is in excess of sensations,
When the blood boils and freezes,
I didn’t know your temptations -
Suicide and Love!
<1852>
* * *
So, in life there are moments -
They're hard to convey
They are self-forgetting
Earthly grace.
The tree tops are noisy
High above me
And the birds are only heavenly
They talk to me.
Everything is vulgar and false
Gone so far
Everything is cute and impossible
So close and easy.
And I love it, and it’s sweet to me,
And peace in my chest
I am enveloped in drowsiness -
Oh time, wait!
1855 (?)
* * *
Not everything painful to the soul dreams of:
Spring has come and the sky will clear.
* * *
We can't predict
How our word will respond, -
And we are given sympathy,
How grace is given to us...
* * *
There are two forces - two fatal forces,
We've been at their fingertips all our lives,
From lullabies to the grave, -
One is Death, the other is Human Judgment.
Both are equally irresistible,
And both are irresponsible,
There is no mercy, protests are intolerable,
Their verdict closes everyone's lips...
But Death is more honest - alien to partiality,
Not touched by anything, not embarrassed,
Humble or grumbling brothers -
With her scythe she equals everyone.
And woe to her - alas, double woe -
That proud force, proudly young,
Entering with determination in her gaze,
With a smile on your lips - into an unequal battle.
When she, with the fatal consciousness
All your rights, with the courage of beauty,
Fearlessly, in some kind of charm
She goes towards slander herself,
The mask does not cover the brow,
And does not allow the brow to be humbled,
And from the young curls it blows like dust
Threats, abuse and passionate blasphemy, -
Yes, woe to her - and the more simple-heartedly,
The more guilty she seems...
Such is the light: it is more inhuman there,
Where is the humane and sincere wine.
March 1869
* * *
What a wild gorge!
The key is running towards me -
He's in a hurry to go to the housewarming party...
I climb up to where the spruce stands.
<1836>
* * *
You don’t know what is more flattering for human wisdom:
Or the Babylonian pillar of German unity,
Or French outrage
Republican cunning system.
1848
Glimpse
Did you hear in the deep twilight
The airy harp is lightly ringing,
When it's midnight, inadvertently,
Will the slumbering strings be disturbed by sleep?..
Those amazing sounds
Then suddenly freezing...
Like the last murmur of agony,
Having responded to them, it went out!
Every breath of Zephyr
Sorrow explodes in her strings...
You will say: angelic lyre
Sad, in the dust, across the skies!
Oh, how then from the earthly circle
We fly with our souls to the immortal!
The past is like the ghost of a friend,
We want to press you to our chest.
As we believe with living faith,
How joyful and bright my heart is!
As if by an ethereal stream
The sky flowed through my veins!
But, ah! We were not the ones who judged him;
We'll soon get tired in the sky, -
And no insignificant dust is given
Breathe divine fire.
With barely a minute's effort
Let's interrupt the magical dream for an hour
And with a trembling and vague gaze,
Having risen, we will look around the sky, -
And with a burdened head,
Blinded by one ray,
Again we fall not to peace,
But in tedious dreams.
<1825>
Insomnia
Hours of monotonous battle,
A languid tale of the night!
The language is still foreign to everyone
And understandable to everyone, like conscience!
Who among us listened without longing,
In the midst of worldwide silence,
Muffled groans of time,
Prophetic farewell voice?
It seems to us that the world is orphaned
Irresistible Rock has overtaken -
And we, in the struggle, by nature as a whole
Left to ourselves.
And our life stands before us,
Like a ghost at the end of the earth
And with our century and friends
Turns pale in the gloomy distance...
And a new, young tribe
Meanwhile it blossomed in the sun,
And us, friends, and our time
It has long been forgotten!
Only occasionally, a sad rite
Coming to the midnight hour,
Metal funeral voice
Sometimes he mourns us!
<1829>
The Last Cataclysm
When nature's last hour strikes,
The composition of the parts of the earth will collapse:
Everything visible will be covered by waters again,
And God's face will be depicted in them!
<1829>
* * *
Not what you think, nature:
Not a cast, not a soulless face -
She has a soul, she has freedom,
It has love, it has language...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You see the leaf and color on the tree:
Or did the gardener glue them?
Or the fetus is ripening in the womb
The play of external, alien forces?..
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They don't see or hear
They live in this world as if in the dark,
For them, even the suns, you know, do not breathe,
And there is no life in the sea waves.
The rays did not descend into their souls,
Spring did not bloom in their chests,
The forests didn't speak in front of them
And the night in the stars was silent!
And in unearthly tongues,
Wavering rivers and forests,
I didn’t consult with them at night
There is a thunderstorm in a friendly conversation!
It's not their fault: understand, if possible,
Organa life of the deaf and dumb!
Soul him, ah! won't alarm
And the voice of the mother herself!..
<1836>
* * *
My soul is an Elysium of shadows,
Silent, light and beautiful shadows,
Not to the thoughts of this violent time,
Neither the joys nor the sorrows are involved.
My soul, Elysium of shadows,
What do life and you have in common?
Between you, ghosts of past, better days,
And by this insensitive crowd?..
<1836>
* * *
When surrounded by murderous worries
Everything disgusts us - and life is like a pile of stones,
It lies on us - suddenly, God knows from where,
It brings joy to our souls,
The past will envelop and embrace us
And the terrible load will be lifted in a minute.
So sometimes, in the autumn,
When the fields are already empty, the groves are bare,
Pale sky, cloudier valley,
Suddenly the wind blows, warm and damp,
The fallen leaf will be driven before it
And he will give us soul as if in spring...
Sea and cliff
And it rebels and bubbles,
Whips, whistles, and roars,
And he wants to reach the stars,
To unshakable heights...
Is it hell, is it hellish power
Under the bubbling cauldron
The fire of Gehenna was spread out -
And turned up the abyss
And put it upside down?
Waves of frantic surf
Continuously the sea shaft
With a roar, a whistle, a squeal, a howl
It hits the coastal cliff, -
But, calm and arrogant,
I am not overcome by the foolishness of the waves,
motionless, unchanging,
The universe is modern,
You stand, our giant!
And, embittered by the battle,
Like a fatal attack,
The waves are howling again
Your huge granite.
But, O immutable stone
Having broken the stormy onslaught,
The shaft splashed out, crushed,
And swirls with muddy foam
Exhausted impulse...
Stop, you mighty rock!
Wait just an hour or two -
Tired of the thunderous wave
To fight with your heel...
Tired of evil fun,
She will calm down again -
And without howling, and without fighting
Under the giant heel
The wave will subside again...
1848
* * *
The holy night has risen into the sky,
And a joyful day, a kind day,
She wove herself like a golden shroud,
A veil thrown over the abyss.
And, like a vision, the outside world left...
And the man is like a homeless orphan,
Now he stands weak and naked,
Face to face before a dark abyss.
He will be abandoned to himself -
The mind is abolished and thought is orphaned -
In my soul, as in an abyss, I am immersed,
And there is no outside support, no limit...
And it seems like a long-ago dream
Now everything is bright and alive for him...
And in the alien, unsolved night
He recognizes the family heritage.
* * *
Like over hot ashes
The scroll smokes and burns
And the fire is hidden and dull
Devours words and lines -
My life is dying so sadly
And every day it goes up in smoke,
So I gradually fade away
In unbearable monotony!..
Oh heaven, if only once
This flame developed at will -
And, without languishing, without suffering any longer,
I would shine - and go out!
<1829>, early 1830s
Loneliness
(From A. Lamartine)
How often, casting a glance from a rocky peak,
I sit down thoughtfully in the shade of the thick trees,
And develop before me
Various evening paintings!
Through the dark green trees
The last ray of dawn is still noticeably wandering,
The moon has been rising slowly since midnight
On a chariot of clouds,
And from the lonely bell tower
The blast rang out, long-drawn and dull;
A passerby listens, and the bell is distant
His voice merges with the last noise of the day.
It's a wonderful world! But with admiration
There is no room in a withered heart!..
In a land alien to me I wander as an orphan shadow,
And the light of the sun is powerless to warm the dead.
My sad gaze slides from hill to hill
And it fades slowly into a terrible emptiness;
But, oh, where will I meet something that would stop my gaze?
And there is no happiness, despite all the beauty of nature!..
And you, my fields, and groves, and valleys,
You are dead! And the spirit of life has flown away from you!
And what do I care about you now, soulless pictures!..
There is no one in the world - and the whole world is empty.
Does the day rise, or the shadows of the night go away, -
Both darkness and light are disgusting to me...
My destiny knows no changes -
And eternal sorrow in the depths of the soul!
But how long can a wanderer languish in captivity?
When I leave the dust for a better world,
That world where there are no orphans, where faith is fulfilled,
Where are the true suns in the imperishable heavens?..
How brightly the hosts of stars glow above me,
Living thoughts of the Divine!
What night has thickened over the earth,
And how the earth, in view of the heavens, is dead!..
A thunderstorm arises, and a whirlwind, and a deserted leaf turns!
And to me, and to me, like a dead leaf,
It's time to leave the valley of life, -
Speed away, stormy ones, speed away the orphan!..
Between 1820 and the first half of March 1822;<1823>
In the village
What desperate screams
And the din and the fluttering of wings?
Who is this hubbub insanely wild
So inappropriately aroused?
Flock of tame geese and ducks
Suddenly she goes wild and flies.
Flying - where, without knowing,
And how crazy she sounds.
What a sudden alarm
All these voices are heard!
Not a dog, but a four-legged demon,
The demon turned into a dog
In a fit of riot, for fun,
Self-confident impudent
Confused their majestic peace
And he opened them, dispersed them!
And as if he himself, following them,
To complete the insults,
With your nerves of steel,
Having risen into the air, it will fly!
What is the point in this movement?
Why all this waste of energy?
Why are you afraid of such a flight?
Did you give wings to geese and ducks?
Yes, there is a purpose here! In the lazy herd
A terrible stagnation was noticed,
And it became necessary, for the sake of progress,
The sudden onslaught of the fatal.
And here is good providence
The tomboy has been released from the chain,
To fulfill your destiny
Don't forget them completely.
So modern manifestations
The meaning is sometimes stupid, -
But the same modern genius
I'm always ready to find out.
Others, you say, just bark,
And he performs his highest duty -
He, comprehending, develops
Duck and goose talk.
* * *
Est in arundineis modulatio musica ripis*
There is melodiousness in the sea waves,
Harmony in spontaneous disputes,
And the harmonious musky rustle
Flows through the shifting reeds.
Equanimity in everything,
Consonance is complete in nature, -
Only in our illusory freedom
We are aware of the discord with her.
Where and how did the discord arise?
And why in the general choir
The soul doesn’t sing like the sea,
And the thinking reed murmurs?
* There is musical harmony
in coastal reeds (lat.)
May 11, 1865
When the decrepit forces
They're starting to cheat on us
And we must, like old-timers,
Give new arrivals a place, -
Save us then, kind genius,
From cowardly reproaches,
From slander, from bitterness
To life changing;
From a feeling of hidden anger
To a renewed world,
Where new guests sit
For the feast prepared for them;
From the bile of bitter consciousness,
That the stream no longer carries us
And that others have callings,
Others are called forward;
From everything that is the more fervent,
The deeper it lay for a long time, -
And senile love is more shameful
Grumpy old man's fervor.
Early September 1866
1856
We stand blindly before Fate,
It’s not for us to tear the cover off her...
I won't reveal mine to you,
But the delirium of prophetic spirits...
We are still far from our goal,
The storm is roaring, the storm is growing, -
And here - in an iron cradle,
The New Year will be born in thunder...
His features are terribly strict,
Blood on my hands and forehead...
But not only wars of anxiety
He brought it to people on earth.
He won't just be a warrior,
But the executor of God's punishments, -
He will commit, like a late avenger,
A long-planned blow...
He was sent for battles and reprisals,
He brought with him two swords:
One is a bloody sword of battles,
The other is the executioner's axe.
But for whom?.. Is it the only neck,
Is the whole people doomed?..
The fatal words are unclear,
And the sepulchral dream is vague...
It's so heavy on my chest
And the heart languishes,
And darkness is only ahead;
Without strength and without movement,
We're so depressed
What even consolation
Friends are not funny to us, -
Suddenly a ray of sunshine welcomes
He will sneak in to us
And the fire-colored one will splash
Stream along the walls;
And from the supportive firmament,
From the azure heights
Suddenly the air is fragrant
There's a smell coming through the window...
Lessons and tips
They don't bring us
And from fate slander
They won't save us.
But we feel their strength,
We hear them grace,
And we yearn less
And it's easier for us to breathe...
So sweet and gracious
Airy and light
to my soul a hundredfold
Your love was there.
[FROM MICHELANGELO]
Be quiet, please don't you dare wake me up.
Oh, in this criminal and shameful age
Not living, not feeling is an enviable lot...
It's nice to sleep, it's nicer to be a stone.
From the life that raged here,
From the blood that flowed like a river here,
What has survived, what has reached us?
Two or three mounds, visible as you approach...
Yes, two or three oak trees grew on them,
Spread out both wide and bold.
They show off, they make noise, and they don’t care,
Whose ashes, whose memory their roots dig.
Nature does not know about the past,
Our ghostly years are alien to her,
And in front of her we are vaguely aware
Ourselves are just a dream of nature.
One by one all your children,
Those who accomplish their useless feat,
She equally greets her
An all-consuming and peaceful abyss.
I am omnipotent and at the same time weak,
I am the ruler and at the same time a slave,
Whether I do good or evil, I don’t talk about it,
I give a lot, but I get little,
And in my name I command myself,
And if I want to beat someone,
Then I beat myself.
1810s
Like a bird, early dawn
The world, awakening, perked up...
Ah, just one chapter of mine
The blessed dream did not touch!
Even though the morning freshness blows
In my disheveled hair,
On me, I feel it gravitating
Yesterday's heat, yesterday's ashes!..
Oh, how piercing and wild,
How hateful to me
This noise, movement, talking, screams
Have a nice, fiery day!..
Oh, how crimson its rays are,
How they burn my eyes!..
O night, night, where are your covers,
Your quiet darkness and dew!..
The wreckage of old generations,
You who have outlived your age!
Like your complaints, your penalties
Wrong righteous reproach!..
How sad a half-asleep shadow is,
With exhaustion in the bones,
Towards the sun and movement
To wander after a new tribe!..
Submit to the command of the highest,
Thoughts are on guard,
We weren't very perky
Albeit with a fitting in his hands.
We owned it reluctantly
They rarely threatened - and soon
Not a prisoner, but an honorary one
They kept guard with her.
I sit thoughtfully and alone,
On the dying fireplace
I look through my tears...
With sadness I think about the past
And words in my despondency
I can't find it.
The past - did it ever happen?
What is now - will it always be?..
It will pass -
It will pass, as it all passed,
And sinks into a dark crater
Year after year.
Year after year, century after century...
Why is the man indignant?
This earthly grain!..
It fades quickly, quickly - so,
But with a new summer, a new cereal
And a different leaf.
And again everything that is will be
And the roses will bloom again,
And thorns too...
But you, my poor, pale color,
There is no rebirth for you,
You won't bloom!
You were torn off by my hand,
With what bliss and longing,
God knows!..
Stay on my chest
Until love froze in her
Last breath.
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev Oryol province - Tsarskoe Selo - Russian poet, diplomat, conservative publicist, corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences since 1857, privy councilor.
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev was born on December 5, 1803 in the family estate of the Oryol province. Tyutchev was educated at home. Under the guidance of teacher, poet and translator S.E. Raich, who supported the student’s interest in versification and classical languages, Tyutchev studied Latin and ancient Roman poetry, and in spent twelve years translating Horace's odes . In 1817, as a volunteer student, he began attending lectures at the Literature Department at Moscow University. Even before enrolling, he was accepted as a student in November 1818, and in 1819 he was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.
Having received his university certificate in 1821, Tyutchev enters the service of the State Collegium of Foreign Affairs and goes to Munich as a freelance attaché of the Russian diplomatic mission. Here he met Schelling and Heine and in 1826 married Eleanor Peterson, née Countess Bothmer, with whom he had three daughters. The eldest of them, Anna, later marries Ivan Aksakov.
Service in Russia
Returning to Russia in 1844, Tyutchev again entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1845), where from 1848 he held position of senior censor.
Philosophy and poetry are close to each other, after all, the instrument with which both a poetic stanza and a philosophical treatise are created , serves human thought. In ancient times, great philosophers such as Aristotle expressed their philosophical thoughts in the form of poetry, thereby demonstrating the power and grace of thought. Aristotle, who is called the father of many sciences, was also the author of works on poetics. This suggests that poetic perception of reality can be combined with philosophical searches for truth. A poet who rises above everyday problems and penetrates into the deepest questions of existence, strives for the very essence of our existence - for knowledge of the life of the human soul in the world around us.
Fyodor Tyutchev is exactly such a poet for us.. His work dates back to the second half of the 19th century, when literature was being formed in Russia, which the whole world would call the golden age of Russian poetry, “Olympic lyrics.” Researchers of Tyutchev's poetic heritage classify him as a poet of the romantic movement, because his lyrics are always removed from everyday life and turned to eternity, unlike, for example, Nekrasov, who was interested in the social environment and moral issues. Poetry can reflect different aspects of life, and Tyutchev’s lyrics have their own specifics - the problems of this poet’s poems are philosophical in nature.
If you examine the lyrics of Fyodor Tyutchev, you will notice that the most important The problem for him is the problem of the unity of man with nature, as well as the problem of discord with it!!!
“Quicksand up to your knees” - echoes of Mtsyri's poem, Mtsyri, left alone in the forest, dreams of unity with nature, kills a leopard, wakes up in the morning on the edge of an abyss, understands his helplessness.
T. He shows us a traveler walking through the desert, and as soon as the sun sets, fear is born in his soul.
In the early period of his work, the poet was concerned with the question mutual understanding between people. After all, if two thinking human beings, endowed with reason and speech, are unable to come to an agreement, then how to find mutual understanding with the outside world, which does not have the ability to speak?
How can the heart express itself? How can someone else understand you? Will he understand what you live for? A spoken thought is a lie.(« Silentium!)
The author comes to the conclusion that words not only do not contribute to understanding, they, on the contrary, only confuse , because the same phrase can be understood differently by different people. This is where the line in the form of an aphorism comes from - “ a spoken thought is a lie" A person can keep feelings and dreams deep in his soul, but if he wants to express them, he must be prepared for the fact that the bustle of life will give them a different meaning, and perhaps the thought that excites the soul will seem banal to the interlocutor: “mysteriously magical” thoughts can be deafened by “external noise” (“Silentium!”). Thus, in his youth, Tyutchev tried to raise one of the key philosophical questions in his poems - how can one convey a thought to another person without distorting its meaning and without losing the feeling invested into this thought.
T. believes that man is the smallest grain of sand in nature, but a thinking grain of sand. Verse “There is a melodiousness in the sea waves” - The voice of one crying in the wilderness is a biblical character.
Man, instead of understanding nature and merging with it in harmony, tries to subjugate it to himself. For man, the vast world is a desert.
Tyutchev is trying to reveal the problem of mutual understanding at the highest level - philosophical, he is looking for the root of evil and finds it in the eternal discord between man and nature, with the universe. A person, as Tyutchev understood, should not rely only on the external form of things and on words. Z The dark world of man has moved too far from the divine world, man does not understand the laws Universe and therefore suffers, feeling lonely and unprotected, not feeling how nature cares for him (“The holy night has risen on the horizon”). But if human beings turned to nature, listened to the “voice of the mother,” then they would find a way to communicate with the world around them in a special, understandable and accessible language...
T. follows science, but believes that it is impossible to finally understand the mechanisms that weigh on earthly life with the mind. "Fountain"- the first part is a story about a fountain that everyone admires. The fountain is a demonstration of man's technical achievements, because man made water flow from bottom to top. The second part talks about the human mind. A person’s thought strives upward, but there is a limit to everything.
Tyutchev passionately protests against those narrow-minded individuals who strive to see in everything only a random coincidence, a probable occurrence, or, conversely, the arbitrariness of exclusively human will. Such people, answering the question of where leaves come from on trees and how a fetus is formed in the mother’s womb, will never talk about the power of Mother Nature, about the rational divine world, about the harmonious principle in the Universe.
In the second half and at the end of the 19th century, the secular minds of Europe and Russia were dominated by new radical ideas: the theory of the origin of species on earth through the process of evolution, which was later formulated by the English naturalist Charles Darwin. This moment is extremely philosophical, because we are talking about the struggle between the principles of the world - matter and spirit, which of them is primary? For Tyutchev, the answer is obvious; he speaks with all conviction through his poetry about the soul of nature as the beginning of everything, including as the source of life for man himself. The author in the program poem “Not what you think, nature...” compares skeptics with cripples who are unable to distinguish not only the voice of the subtle world, but also the simplest and most natural things for everyone, such as the voice of a mother..
If at first T. had a romantic direction, then in 60 it came to realism. But at the same time he always remains a romantic. T. addresses Pushkin, his verse is realistic: "Mascot".
T. writes a poem “Where the mountains are, running away...” The romantic traditions of Zhukovsky and Pushkin are shown here. Suddenly there is a turning point in the stanza. Everything he writes about the Danube is his novel. The past. As a realist, he writes: “everything has passed, everything has taken years...you too have succumbed to fate.”
His realism is due to the fact that he Social motives also appear. He is trying to understand life in Russia. His element “These poor villages”, “Human tears”.
T. contrasts the West with Russia. According to its historical purpose, the West is to increase material wealth. Russia should not follow the path of the West. She has a different mission, to preserve the value of a person’s high spirituality. The main thing for a Russian person is spiritual wealth.
The motive of memories in the lyrics of T. This motive is important for him based on the concept that man is a microcosm, man lives in the atmosphere of his spiritual experience. A person's worth is determined by the depth of his soul and the memory of history. He was married 2 times and both times happily. The image of his beloved Eleanor never left him (memory motive). He associated his best memories with her.
Theme of historical memory – he believed that a people who had lost their memory could no longer be considered a people. He has a whole cycle of poems dedicated to. Tsarskoye Selo. He describes both the beauty of the couples and philosophical reasoning. . ..
“I drove through Livonian fields” - T. remembers everything that the people of this Baltic land have forgotten. This country has never been independent. Russia was the liberator of this people. And if the Balts remembered this, they would treat the Russians differently.
During the fight against the Turks, many people thought about a single Slavic union. "Brothers Slavs."
Philosophy of love in Tyutchev’s lyrics- another commentary on his tragic worldview. For Tyutchev, love is always passion, since it is passion that brings us closer to chaos. Tyutchev calls passion itself “violent blindness” and thus, as it were, identifies it with the night. The theme of love is intertwined with the theme of death: “Oh, how murderously we love.”
"Last love"- uses a comparison with the colors of nature - the last dawn. The last love is the brightest, most unusual. But this is also a consolation before the horse disappears from this world forever.
We can't predict
How our word will respond, -
And we are given sympathy,
How grace is given to us...
F. I. Tyutchev
Tyutchev's lyrics are one of the peaks of Russian philosophical poetry. In his work, high poetry is combined with a philosophical worldview. The depth and power of his best works are comparable to the poetry of Pushkin.
Already in the late 1820s - early 1830s, Tyutchev created poems, the main content of which was philosophical thought. The “hero” of these works is the human mind, thirsting for knowledge. The poem “The Last Cataclysm” seems to paint a picture of the destruction of the world:
When the last hour of nature strikes, the composition of the earth’s parts will collapse: Everything visible will again be covered by waters, And God’s face will be depicted in them!
But the meaning of this work is not in a gloomy prophecy, but in the desire to understand the fundamental principle of all things, that is, God.
Tyutchev was distinguished not only by his lively and faithful depiction of nature, but also by its deep philosophical comprehension. Nature interested him in its elemental and cosmic manifestations - in a thunderstorm, in the night, in a storm, in the spring influx and flowering, in menacing gusts of wind, in the light of the sun or in the moonlight.
The symbol of purity and truth in Tyutchev’s poems is the sky. Without this atmosphere of height and eternity there is no Tyutchev's poetry. He himself speaks about this in his poem “Poetry”:
Among thunder, among fires, Among bubbling passions, In elemental, fiery discord, She flies from heaven to us - Heavenly to earthly sons...
Pictures of the world drawn by Tyutchev, as a rule, are devoid of strict and precise signs of time and place of action. This is typical for philosophical poetry in general - it has an extra-everyday character. Thus, Tyutchev’s night is grandiose, majestic and tragic. It leaves a person alone with himself and with the terrible mysteries of the universe:
And the abyss is exposed to us With its fears and darkness, And there are no barriers between it and us - That’s why the night is scary for us!
It is in this cosmic, tragic loneliness that man is given the opportunity to know the world and himself:
In his soul, as in an abyss, he is immersed, And there is no support from the outside, no limit... And now everything that is bright and alive seems to Him like a long-past dream... And in the alien, unsolved, nocturnal, He recognizes the ancestral heritage.
The lyrical plot of the poem “Fountain” is the languor of the mind, striving for instant insight and realizing the limitations of its capabilities:
O mortal thought water cannon, O inexhaustible water cannon! What incomprehensible law strives for you, troubles you? How greedily you strive for the sky! But the invisibly fatal hand, refracting your stubborn ray, sparkles in the spray from above.
Sometimes the poet seems to get tired of his own concentration on the depths of knowledge. In the poem “No, my passion for you...” Tyutchev frees himself from the burden of thoughts, from a complex spiritual life and returns to earthly life with its simple joys:
Wander around idle and without a goal And inadvertently, on the fly, Come across the fresh spirit of chenille Or a bright dream...
In the poem “There is melodiousness in the waves of the sea...” sounds the protest of a man who is unable to come to terms with his fate as a mortal speck of dust opposed to the Universe: Material from the site
An imperturbable order in everything, a complete consonance in nature, - Only in our illusory freedom do we recognize discord with it.
Tyutchev realizes that translating philosophical ideas into the language of poetry is extremely difficult, because this is a transition to another dimension, where thought is subordinated to image, rhyme, and rhythm. The poet speaks about this complexity in the poem “Silentium”:
How can the heart express itself? How can someone else understand you? Will he understand what you live for? A spoken thought is a lie.
This poem is also about human disunity, about the impossibility of fully explaining oneself even to a person close in spirit.
In his philosophical lyrics, Tyutchev does not just reflect. In excitement and torment, he pronounces his prophetic word, makes discoveries, experiences ups and downs. The poet infects us with his feelings and his thoughts. And we feel Tyutchev’s excitement, the passion of his thoughts, and comprehend the restless wisdom of his poems:
O my prophetic soul! O heart full of anxiety, Oh, how you beat on the threshold of a double existence!..
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On this page there is material on the following topics:
- essay on the topic of Tyutchev's philosophical lyrics
- philosophical poems by Tyutchev
- Tyutchev imperturbable system in everything
- Tyutchev's philosophical verse
- Tyutchev philosophical lyrics
Composition
We can't predict
How our word will respond, -
And we are given sympathy,
How grace is given to us...
F. I. Tyutchev
Tyutchev's lyrics are one of the peaks of Russian philosophical poetry. In his work, high poetry is combined with a philosophical worldview. The depth and power of his best works are comparable to the poetry of Pushkin.
Already in the late 1820s - early 1830s, Tyutchev created poems, the main content of which was philosophical thought. The “hero” of these works is the human mind, thirsting for knowledge. The poem “The Last Cataclysm” seems to paint a picture of the destruction of the world:
When nature's last hour strikes,
The composition of the parts of the earth will collapse:
Everything visible will be covered by waters again,
And God's face will be depicted in them!
But the meaning of this work is not in a gloomy prophecy, but in the poet’s desire to know the fundamental principle of all things, that is, God.
Tyutchev was distinguished not only by his lively and faithful depiction of nature, but also by her deep philosophical comprehension. Nature interested him in its elemental and cosmic manifestations - in a thunderstorm, in the night, in a storm, in the spring influx and flowering, in menacing gusts of wind, in the light of the sun or in the moonlight.
The symbol of purity and truth in Tyutchev’s poems is the sky. Without this atmosphere of height and eternity there is no Tyutchev's poetry. He himself speaks about this in the poem “Poetry”:
Among the thunder, among the lights,
Among the seething passions,
In spontaneous, fiery discord,
She flies from heaven to us -
Heavenly to earthly sons...
Pictures of the world drawn by Tyutchev, as a rule, are devoid of strict and precise signs of time and place of action. This is typical for philosophical poetry in general - it has an extra-everyday character. Thus, Tyutchev’s night is grandiose, majestic and tragic. It leaves a person alone with himself and with the terrible mysteries of the universe:
...And the abyss is laid bare to us
With your fears and darkness,
And there are no barriers between her and us -
This is why the night is scary for us!
It is in this cosmic, tragic loneliness that man is given the opportunity to know the world and himself:... In his soul, as in an abyss, immersed,
And there is no outside support, no limit...
And it seems like a long-ago dream
Now everything is bright and alive for him...
And in the alien, unsolved, night
He recognizes the family heritage.
The lyrical plot of the poem “Fountain” is the languor of the mind, striving for instant insight and realizing the limitations of its capabilities:
About mortal thought water cannon,
O inexhaustible water cannon!
What an incomprehensible law
Does it urge you, does it bother you?
How greedily you strive for the sky!
But the hand is invisible and fatal,
Your stubborn beam refracts,
Sparkles in the spray from above.
Sometimes the poet seems to get tired of his own concentration on the depths of knowledge. In the poem “No, my passion for you...” Tyutchev frees himself from the burden of thoughts, from a complex spiritual life and returns to earthly life with its simple joys:
Wandering around idle and without purpose
And inadvertently, on the fly,
Find the fresh spirit of chenille
Or for a bright dream...
In the poem “There is melodiousness in the waves of the sea...” sounds the protest of a man who is unable to come to terms with his fate as a mortal speck of dust opposed to the Universe:
Equanimity in everything,
There is complete harmony in nature, -
Only in our illusory freedom
We are aware of the discord with her.
Tyutchev realizes that translating philosophical ideas into the language of poetry is extremely difficult, because this is a transition to another dimension, where thought is subordinated to image, rhyme, and rhythm. The poet speaks about this complexity in the poem “Silentium”:
...How can the heart express itself?
How can someone else understand you?
Will he understand what you live for?
A spoken thought is a lie.
This poem is also about human disunity, about the impossibility of fully explaining oneself even to a person close in spirit.
In his philosophical lyrics, Tyutchev does not just reflect. In excitement and torment, he pronounces his prophetic word, makes discoveries, experiences ups and downs. The poet infects us with his feelings and his thoughts. And we feel Tyutchev’s excitement, the passion of his thoughts, and comprehend the restless wisdom of his poems:
O my prophetic soul!
O heart full of anxiety,
Oh, how you beat on the threshold
As if double existence!..