Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet. poetry of life-affirming power, which fills every sound, poetry of pristine freshness and fragrance. Fet's lyrics are limited to a narrow range of topics. It does not contain civic motives, social issues. The essence of his views on the purpose of poetry is to escape the world of suffering and sadness surrounding life- immersion in the world of beauty.
It is beauty - main motive and the idea of the work of the great Russian lyricist. The secrets of beauty, the language of its consonances, its many-sided image are what Fet strives to embody in his creations. Poetry is the temple of art, and the poet is the creator of this temple.
The main themes of Fet's poetry are nature and love, as if fused together. It is in nature and love, as in a single melody, that all the beauty of the world, all the charm are united. Three poetic subjects - nature, love and song - are closely interconnected, penetrate each other, forming Fet’s universe of beauty. Using the technique of personification, Fet animates nature, it lives with him: “the forest woke up”, “the sun rose... fluttered” (“I came to you with greetings”). The poet is full of thirst for love and creativity.
The poet reproduces in words not an object, but an impression. We first encounter such a phenomenon in literature in the poetry of Fet (in painting this direction is called impressionism). Familiar images the surrounding world acquire completely unexpected properties. And although Fet’s poems contain many very specific flowers, trees, and birds, they are depicted in an unusual way. And this unusualness cannot be explained only by the fact that Fet widely uses personification:
Were going to die last flowers,
And we waited with sadness for the frost
Fet not so much likens nature to man, but rather fills it human emotions, since the subject of his poetry most often becomes precisely feelings, and not the phenomena that cause them.
For Fet, sometimes it is not so important to trace the development of feelings or events as to capture a fleeting state, stop a moment, delay it.
But in the poem "Whisper, timid breathing..." the rapid change of static pictures gives the verse an amazing dynamism, airiness, and gives the poet the opportunity to depict the subtlest transitions from one state to another.
Fet's poems are unusually musical. Composers and the poet’s contemporaries also felt this. Fet counted the music superior view art and brought his poems to musical sound.
A. A. Fet’s fame in Russian literature was due to his poetry. Moreover, in the reader’s consciousness it has long been perceived as central figure in the field of Russian classical poetry. Central from a chronological point of view: between the elegiac experiences of the romantics XIX century And Silver Age(in the famous annual reviews of Russian literature, which V. G. Belinsky published in the early 1840s, Fet’s name appears next to the name of M. Yu. Lermontov; Fet published his final collection “Evening Lights” in the era of pre-symbolism) . But it is central in another sense - by the nature of his work: it is in highest degree corresponds to our ideas about the very phenomenon of lyrics. One could call Fet the most “lyrical lyricist” of the 19th century.
One of the first subtle connoisseurs of Fetov’s poetry, critic V. P. Botkin, called its main advantage the lyricism of feelings. Another of his contemporary, the famous writer A.V. Druzhinin, wrote about this: “Fet senses the poetry of life, like a passionate hunter senses with an unknown instinct the place where he should hunt.”
It is not easy to immediately answer the question of how this lyricism of feeling is manifested, where this feeling of Fetov’s “feeling for poetry” comes from, what, in fact, is the originality of his lyrics.
In terms of its themes, against the background of the poetry of romanticism, Fet’s lyrics, the features and themes of which we will examine in detail, are quite traditional. These are landscape, love lyrics, anthological poems (written in the spirit of antiquity). And Fet himself, in his first (published while he was still a student at Moscow University) collection “Lyrical Pantheon” (1840), openly demonstrated his fidelity to tradition, presenting a kind of “collection” of fashionable romantic genres, imitating Schiller, Byron, Zhukovsky, Lermontov. But it was a learning experience. Readers heard Fet’s own voice a little later - in his journal publications 1840s and, most importantly, in his subsequent collections of poems - 1850, 1856. The publisher of the first of them, Fet's friend the poet Apollon Grigoriev, wrote in his review about Fet's originality as a subjective poet, a poet of vague, unspoken, vague feelings, as he put it - “half-feelings.”
Of course, Grigoriev did not mean the blurriness and obscurity of Fetov’s emotions, but the poet’s desire to express such subtle shades of feeling that cannot be unambiguously named, characterized, described. Yes Fet and does not gravitate towards descriptive characteristics, to rationalism, on the contrary, strives in every possible way to get away from them. The mystery of his poems is largely determined by the fact that they fundamentally defy interpretation and at the same time give the impression of a surprisingly accurately conveyed state of mind and experience.
This is, for example, one of the most famous poems that has become a textbook “ I came to you with greetings...». Lyrical hero, captured by the beauty of the summer morning, strives to tell his beloved about it - the poem is a monologue spoken in one breath, addressed to her. The most frequently repeated word in it is “tell.” It appears four times over the course of four stanzas - as a refrain defining persistent desire, internal state hero. However, there is no coherent story in this monologue. There is no consistently written picture of the morning; there are a number of small episodes, strokes, details of this picture, as if snatched at random by the enthusiastic gaze of the hero. But there is a feeling, a whole and deep experience of this morning to the highest degree. It is momentary, but this minute itself is infinitely beautiful; the effect of a stopped moment is born.
In an even more pointed form, we see the same effect in another poem by Fet - “ This morning, this joy..." Here it is not even episodes and details that alternate, mix in a whirlwind of sensual delight, as was the case in the previous poem, but individual words. Moreover, nominative words (naming, denoting) are nouns devoid of definitions:
This morning, this joy,
This power of both day and light,
This blue vault
This cry and strings,
These flocks, these birds,
This talk of water...
Before us seems to be just a simple enumeration, free of verbs, verb forms; poem-experiment. The only explanatory word that appears repeatedly (not four, but twenty-four (!) times) in the space of eighteen short lines is “this” (“these”, “this”). We agree: an extremely unpicturesque word! It would seem that it is so unsuitable for describing such a colorful phenomenon as spring! But when reading Fetov’s miniature, a bewitching, magical mood arises that directly penetrates the soul. And in particular, we note, thanks to the non-picturesque word “this”. Repeated many times, it creates the effect of direct vision, our co-presence in the world of spring.
Are the remaining words only fragmentary, outwardly jumbled? They are arranged in logically “wrong” rows, where abstractions (“power”, “joy”) and concrete features of the landscape (“blue vault”) coexist, where the conjunction “and” connects “flocks” and “birds”, although, obviously, refers to flocks of birds. But this unsystematic nature is also significant: this is how a person expresses his thoughts, captured by a direct impression and deeply experiencing it.
The keen eye of a literary scholar can reveal a deep logic in this seemingly chaotic enumeration series: first, a gaze directed upward (the sky, birds), then around (willows, birches, mountains, valleys), finally, turned inward, into one’s feelings (darkness and heat of the bed, night without sleep) (Gasparov). But this is precisely the deep compositional logic, which the reader is not obliged to restore. His job is to survive, to feel the “spring” state of mind.
The feeling is amazing beautiful world is inherent in Fet’s lyrics, and in many ways it arises due to such an external “accident” of the selection of material. One gets the impression that any features and details snatched at random from the surroundings are intoxicatingly beautiful, but then (the reader concludes) so is the whole world, which remains beyond the poet’s attention! This is the impression Fet strives for. His poetic self-recommendation is eloquent: “nature idle spy" In other words, beauty natural world does not require effort to identify it, it is infinitely rich and as if it itself goes towards a person.
The figurative world of Fet’s lyrics is created in an unconventional way: visual details give the impression of accidentally “catching the eye,” which gives reason to call Fet’s method impressionistic (B. Ya. Bukhshtab). Integrity and unity are given to Fetov’s world in to a greater extent not visual, but other types of figurative perception: auditory, olfactory, tactile.
Here is his poem entitled " Bees»:
I will disappear from melancholy and laziness,
Lonely life is not nice
My heart aches, my knees weaken,
In every carnation of fragrant lilac,
A bee crawls in singing...
If not for the title, the beginning of the poem might be puzzling with the vagueness of its subject: what is it about? “Melancholy” and “laziness” in our minds are phenomena quite far from each other; here they are connected in single complex. “Heart” echoes “longing”, but in contrast to the high elegiac tradition, here the heart “aches” (folklore song tradition), to which is immediately added the mention of very sublime weakening knees... The “fan” of these motives is focused in at the end of the stanza, in its 4th and 5th lines. They are prepared compositionally: the enumeration within the first phrase continues all the time, cross-rhyme sets the reader up to wait for the fourth line, which rhymes with the 2nd. But the wait drags on, delayed by an unexpectedly continuing rhyme line with the famous “lilac carnation” - the first visible detail, an image immediately imprinted on the consciousness. Its emergence is completed in the fifth line with the appearance of the “heroine” of the poem - the bee. But here it is not the outwardly visible, but its sound characteristic that is important: “singing.” This chanting, multiplied by countless bees (“in every carnation”!), creates a single field of the poetic world: a luxurious spring hum-hum in a riot of flowering lilac bushes. I remember the title - and the main thing in this poem is determined: feeling, difficult conveyed by word a state of spring bliss, “vague spiritual impulses that do not lend themselves to even the shadow of prosaic analysis” (A.V. Druzhinin).
The spring world of the poem “This morning, this joy...” was created with the bird cry, “cry”, “whistle”, “fraction” and “trills”.
Here are examples of olfactory and tactile imagery:
What a night! Clear air constrained;
The aroma swirls above the ground.
Oh now I'm happy, I'm excited
Oh, now I'm glad to speak!
"What a night..."
The alleys are not yet a gloomy shelter,
Between the branches the vault of heaven turns blue,
And I’m walking - a fragrant cold is blowing
In person - I’m walking - and the nightingales are singing.
"It's still spring..."
On the hill it is either damp or hot,
The sighs of the day are in the breath of the night...
"Evening"
Saturated with smells, moisture, warmth, felt in trends and blows, the space of Fet’s lyrics tangibly materializes - and cements the details outside world, turning it into an indivisible whole. Within this unity, nature and the human “I” are fused together. The hero’s feelings are not so much in tune with the events of the natural world as fundamentally inseparable from them. This could be seen in all the texts discussed above; we will find the ultimate (“cosmic”) manifestation of this in the miniature “On a haystack at night...”. But here is a poem, also expressive in this regard, which no longer refers to landscape, but to love lyrics:
I'm waiting, filled with anxiety,
I'm waiting here on the way:
This path through the garden
You promised to come.
A poem about a date, about an upcoming meeting; but the plot about the hero’s feelings unfolds through the demonstration of private details of the natural world: “crying, the mosquito will sing”; “the leaf will fall smoothly”; “It’s as if a beetle broke a string by flying into a spruce.” The hero's hearing is extremely sharp, the state of intense expectation, peering and listening to the life of nature is experienced by us thanks to the smallest touches of the life of the garden noticed by him, the hero. They are connected, fused together in the last lines, a kind of “denouement”:
Oh, how it smelled like spring!
It's probably you!
For the hero, the breath of spring (spring breeze) is inseparable from the approach of his beloved, and the world is perceived as holistic, harmonious and beautiful.
Fet built this image over many years of his work, consciously and consistently moving away from what he himself called “the hardships of everyday life.” IN real biography Feta had more than enough such hardships. In 1889, summing up his creative path in the preface to the collection “Evening Lights” (third issue), he wrote about his constant striving“turn away” from the everyday, from sorrow that did not contribute to inspiration, “so that at least for a moment you can breathe the clean and free air of poetry.” And despite the fact that late Fet Many poems of both a sad-elegiac and philosophical-tragic nature appear; he entered the literary memory of many generations of readers primarily as the creator of a beautiful world that preserves eternal human values.
He lived with ideas about this world, and therefore strove to make its appearance convincing. And he succeeded. The special authenticity of Fetov's world - a unique effect of presence - arises largely due to the specificity of the images of nature in his poems. As it was noted long ago, in Fet, unlike, say, Tyutchev, we hardly find generic words that generalize: “tree”, “flower”. Much more often - “spruce”, “birch”, “willow”; “dahlia”, “acacia”, “rose”, etc. In an accurate, loving knowledge of nature and the ability to use it in artistic creativity Next to Fet, perhaps only I. S. Turgenev can be placed. And this, as we have already noted, is nature, inseparable from the spiritual world of the hero. She discovers her beauty in his perception, and through this same perception his spiritual world is revealed.
Much of what has been noted allows us to talk about the similarity of Fet’s lyrics with music. The poet himself drew attention to this; Critics have repeatedly written about the musicality of his lyrics. Particularly authoritative in this regard is the opinion of P. I. Tchaikovsky, who considered Fet to be a poet of “undoubted genius,” who “in his best moments goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and boldly takes a step into our field.”
The concept of musicality, generally speaking, can mean a lot: the phonetic (sound) design of a poetic text, the melody of its intonation, and the saturation of harmonious sounds and musical motifs of the inner poetic world. All these features are inherent in Fet's poetry.
We can feel them to the greatest extent in poems where music becomes the subject of the image, a direct “heroine”, defining the entire atmosphere of the poetic world: for example, in one of his most famous poems “ The night was shining...». Here the music forms the plot of the poem, but at the same time the poem itself sounds especially harmonious and melodious. This reveals Fet’s subtlest sense of rhythm and verse intonation. Such lyrics are easy to set to music. And Fet is known as one of the most “romantic” Russian poets.
But we can talk about the musicality of Fet’s lyrics in an even deeper, essentially aesthetic sense. Music is the most expressive of the arts, directly affecting the sphere of feelings: musical images are formed on the basis associative thinking. It is this quality of associativity that Fet appeals to.
Meeting repeatedly - in one or another poem - his most beloved words “overgrow” with additional, associative meanings, shades of experiences, thereby becoming semantically enriched, acquiring “expressive halos” (B. Ya. Bukhshtab) - additional meanings.
This is how Fet uses, for example, the word “garden”. Fet's garden is the best perfect place a world where there is an organic meeting between man and nature. There is harmony there. The garden is a place of reflection and recollection of the hero (here you can see the difference between Fet and his like-minded A.N. Maikov, for whom the garden is a space of human transformative labor); It is in the garden that dates take place.
The poetic word of the poet we are interested in is a predominantly metaphorical word, and it has many meanings. On the other hand, “wandering” from poem to poem, it connects them with each other, forming one world Fet's lyrics. It is no coincidence that the poet was so drawn to uniting his lyrical works into cycles (“Snow”, “Fortune-telling”, “Melodies”, “Sea”, “Spring” and many others), in which each poem, each image was especially actively enriched thanks to associative connections with neighboring ones.
These features of Fet's lyrics were noticed, picked up and developed by the next literary generation - the symbolist poets of the turn of the century.
Lesson literature in 10th grade.Lesson topic. MAIN THEMES AND MOTIVES OF A. A. FET'S WORK. ARTISTIC ORIGINALITY OF HIS POETRY
Goals : expand students’ understanding of Fet’s work and the artistic originality of his poetry; to help high school students feel the poetic charm, melodiousness and musicality of most of Fet’s texts; find out what amazed contemporaries in the poet’s character, why Fet’s poems caused a large number of disputes, parodies, and ridicule; build skills independent analysis lyrical work.
Visual aids : portrait of A. A. Fet; recording of romances and songs based on the poet's poems.
During the classes
I. Checking homework.
Conversation on issues:
1. What, in your opinion, is unusual in Fet’s life and work?
2. What is the relationship between the poet and his fellow writers? Why did Fet “break off” relations with Sovremennik magazine?
3. What is the essence of the theory of “pure art”?
4. What struck contemporaries in Fet’s actions and character?
(Duality: Fet is a soulful lyricist and admirer of beauty in all its forms, and Fet is a tough and calculating owner of large estates, a fierce defender of landowner interests.)
5. What are the main themes and motives of Fet’s lyrics?(Fet was alien to emotional storms and anxieties. He can be called a singer of nature and love. Love in Fet’s depiction is the personification of sadness, anxiety, and light joy. Love lyrics are distinguished by a richness of shades, tenderness and warmth.
Fet's landscape lyrics are poetic and musical. He knew how to “humanize” nature, to find in it an echo of his moods.
Fet has poems about art, about the role of the poet and poetry: “With one push to drive away a living boat...”, “On a haystack at night in the south...”, etc. Art, according to Fet, should not be connected with life. True poetry is available only to a select few.)
II. Expressive reading poems. Analysis of Fet's lyrical works.
1. Reading a poem“Whisper, timid breathing...”
This poem is " business card» A. Feta.
Conversation with students on the following questions:
1) What is the poem about?
2) What are the features of poetic language?(There is no solid image in the poem. Some vague outlines yes unclear sounds... The poet conveys the uniqueness of what is happening. The whole poem is one big one difficult sentence, consisting of a chain of nouns. A poem without a single verb! In the words of the great L. Tolstoy, “every expression is a picture.”)
2. Personal message student.
Question and task:
1) Why exactly did the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” cause a lot of controversy and ridicule?
2) Read poetic parodies of this work by Fet.
It was the content of the poem that was criticized, not Fet's poetic skill. Here is one of the parodies.
Satire "Conversation with the Muse"
(1863)
- Stop! - Muse interrupted, -
In this song host important persons
And he’ll just shout to you:
Tsits! Tsits! Tsits!
They will say: the song is not flattering...
You will incur just their wrath,
Better sing, brother, about the lovely ones
Dev, dev, dev.
Turn to the moon, nature,
Sing the joys of your youth -
After all, he sings like this
Fet, Fet, Fet.
V. Bogdanov
3. Expressive readingmemorize Fet's favorite poem.
Questions:
1) How does A. A. Fet’s skill in depicting the finest states of mind person?
2) Which poems by Fet are devoted to the theme of love? Who are they addressed to?
3) What is unique about Fet’s landscape lyrics? .
4. Individual message "A. A. Fet is a poet-musician.”
One of the first to be set to music by composer Varlamov was the poem “At dawn, don’t wake her up...”. Fet conveys the woman’s feelings with exceptional artistic expressiveness.
Listening to romances and songs based on Fet's poems.
conclusions . Fet's muse served the ideals of beauty and love. The poet “knew how to notice subtle, subtle manifestations of the life of nature and human experiences". Unusual combinations of simple Russian words, permeated with rhythmic music, forced readers to feel the poet’s mood. Fet's poetic courage and simplicity in depicting nature and man were highly appreciated by progressive readers.
Homework.
1. Essay (writing period – 10 days). Approximate e topics:
1) Russian nature in the lyrics of F. I. Tyutchev.
2) How does A. A. Fet understand the purpose of poetry?
3) How do I imagine A. A. Fet (F. I. Tyutchev)?
4) Mine favorite poem F. I. Tyutcheva (A. A. Feta). (Perception, interpretation, evaluation.)
2. Prepare for a survey (quiz) on the works of A. A. Fet and F. I. Tyutchev.
3. Individual tasks:
1) Why is N. A. Nekrasov called the poet of “revenge and sorrow”? Essay on life and creativity (with analysis of previously covered works: “Reflections at the Main Entrance”, “ Railway" and etc.).
He was always concerned about the problems of the country, so he raised these questions in his prose, journalistic works and memoirs. In journalism, his angry tirades exposed reality existing world. However, when it came to poems, about poetry, everything changed immediately.
Features and originality of Fet's lyrics
According to the poet, lyrics should be beautiful and should not be associated with everyday life and problems. Lyrics should be like music. She should glorify the beauty of the world around her, exalt the feelings of beauty. Strings lyric poems must be kept away from political dirt and rudeness. The mission of poetry should be the service of beauty and all that is beautiful. This was the peculiarity and originality of Fet’s lyrics.
Themes and motives of Fet's lyrics
When we read Fet's poems, we feel the pleasure of happiness and peace. Fet has truly become a master of lyrical landscape, reflecting human feelings in it and revealing the main themes and motives that concern the writer. In his poems, the writer sang nature, love, human happiness and eternity. Moreover, all his poetry is romantic. However, in Fet’s lyrics the romance is not heavenly, it is quite earthly and understandable.
Let's look at the main lyrical directions of Fet's poetry separately.
Fet's love lyrics
I really like Fet's poetry. With particular pleasure I read poems with love themes, and the writer has a lot of them. In his poems love is depicted in all its angles and in different shades. Here we see happy love, but at the same time, the author shows that this wonderful feeling can carry not only joy, but also suffering with the torment of experiences. This is how it really is. After all, love can be reciprocal and unrequited. Love can be sincere, or it can be feigned. Feelings can be played with or reciprocated.
Fet devotes a lot of his work to his only muse, the woman he loved very much, Maria Lazic. However, the death of his beloved, so unexpected and inexplicable, brings pain to the writer. Despite this, time passed, years flew by, and he still loved the one whom fate had taken away. And only in Fet’s poems did his beloved come to life and the lyrical hero could talk to his beloved.
The cycle dedicated to Maria Lazic can be called a masterpiece of love lyrics, where each time a loved one came to life female image. And even after forty years, he still remembered the woman he lost and dedicated poems to her. Maybe that’s why his poems about love are not only admiration and admiration for beauty, but also tragic experiences.
Getting to know love theme Feta, we understand how extraordinary love can be, and it works miracles.
Nature in Fet's lyrics
In addition to love lyrics, the poet devotes his poems to the theme of nature. When I read poems dedicated by the poet to nature, it seems that I am looking at a painting. We not only see a beautiful landscape, but hear the sounds surrounding it. Everything comes to life, because the author gives nature human images. That’s why Fet’s grass is crying, the forest is waking up, and the azure is widowed. Fet was a true singer of nature, thanks to whom we see all the beauty of the world around us with its colors, sounds and mood.
Philosophical lyrics by Fet
Being a singer of love and a singer of nature, Fet could not ignore philosophical reflections, because questions of existence worried absolutely everyone. Therefore, Afanasy Fet also has philosophical lyrics, which were mainly formed under the influence of the philosophy of Schopenhauer. It was on his works that the writer worked with translations. Schopenhauer's philosophical articles were interesting to Fet and he tried not only to rethink them, but also used them in his poems. Thus, analyzing the philosophical lyrics, we see the poet’s reflections on eternity, on the wisdom of being. Fet also touches on issues of creative freedom, reflects on the futility of human vanity, the poverty of man’s knowledge of the surrounding reality, and the baseness everyday life. And this is only a small list of philosophical arguments that the author reveals in his poems that relate to Fet’s philosophical lyrics.
The man in Fet's lyrics
Having studied the poet’s work, we can confidently say that his works are based on a special philosophy, where the author wants to convey to readers both invisible and visible connections between man and nature. For these reasons, touching on the theme of nature, the poet tries to convey many shades of human experiences, to convey the state and emotions of the lyrical hero. Take the famous verbless poem
On November 23, 1820, in the village of Novoselki, located near Mtsensk, the great Russian poet Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet was born into the family of Caroline Charlotte Fet and Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin. His parents got married abroad without an Orthodox ceremony (the poet’s mother was a Lutheran), which is why the marriage, legalized in Germany, was declared invalid in Russia.
Deprivation of a noble title
Later, when the wedding took place according to the Orthodox rite, Afanasy Afanasyevich already lived under his mother’s surname - Fet, considering her illegitimate child. The boy found himself deprived of all but his father's surname, and title of nobility, Russian citizenship and inheritance rights. For the young man long years most important life goal began to regain the name Shenshin and all the rights associated with it. Only in his old age was he able to achieve this, regaining his hereditary nobility.
Education
The future poet entered the boarding school of Professor Pogodin in Moscow in 1838, and in August of the same year he was enrolled in the literature department at Moscow University. He lived with the family of his classmate and friend student years. The friendship of young people contributed to the formation of common ideals and views on art.
First attempts at writing
Afanasy Afanasyevich begins to compose poetry, and in 1840 a collection of poetry, published at his own expense, entitled “Lyrical Pantheon”, was published. In these poems one could clearly hear echoes poetic creativity Evgeniy Baratynsky, and since 1842 Afanasy Afanasyevich has been constantly published in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski. Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky already in 1843 wrote that of all the poets living in Moscow, Fet is “the most talented,” and puts the poems of this author on a par with the works of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov.
Necessity of a military career
Fet strove for literary activity with all his soul, but the instability of material and social status force the poet to change his fate. Afanasy Afanasyevich in 1845 entered as a non-commissioned officer in one of the regiments located in the Kherson province in order to be able to obtain hereditary nobility (the right to which was given by the eldest officer rank). Isolated from the literary environment and a hundred personal life he almost stops publishing, also because, due to the fall in demand for poetry, magazines show no interest in his poems.
A tragic event in Fet's personal life
In the Kherson years, a tragic event occurred that predetermined the poet’s personal life: his beloved Maria Lazich, a dowry girl whom he did not dare to marry because of his poverty, died in a fire. After Fet’s refusal, a strange incident happened to her: Maria’s dress caught fire from a candle, she ran into the garden, but could not cope with putting out the clothes and suffocated in the smoke. One could suspect this as an attempt by the girl to commit suicide, and Fet’s poems will echo this tragedy for a long time (for example, the poem “When you read the painful lines...”, 1887).
Admission to L Life Guards Uhlan Regiment
In 1853, there was a sharp turn in the poet’s fate: he managed to join the guard, the Ulan Regiment of the Life Guards stationed near St. Petersburg. Now Afanasy Afanasyevich gets the opportunity to visit the capital, resumes his literary activity, begins to regularly publish poems in Sovremennik, Russian Bulletin, Otechestvennye Zapiski, Library for Reading. He becomes close to Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, Vasily Botkin, Alexander Druzhinin - editors of Sovremennik. Fet's name, already half-forgotten by that time, again appears in reviews, articles, magazine chronicles, and since 1854 his poems have been published. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev became the poet’s mentor and even prepared a new edition of his works in 1856.
The fate of the poet in 1856-1877
Fet had no luck in the service: each time the rules for receiving hereditary nobility. In 1856 he left military career, never having achieved his goal main goal. In Paris in 1857, Afanasy Afanasyevich married the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Maria Petrovna Botkina, and acquired an estate in Mtsensk district. At that time he wrote almost no poetry. As a supporter of conservative views, Fet sharply reacted negatively to the abolition of serfdom in Russia and, starting in 1862, began regularly publishing essays in the Russian Bulletin, denouncing the post-reform order from the position of a landowner. In 1867-1877 he served as justice of the peace. In 1873, Afanasy Afanasyevich finally received hereditary nobility.
The fate of Fet in the 1880s
The poet returned to literature only in the 1880s, having moved to Moscow and become rich. In 1881, his long-time dream was realized - the translation he created of his favorite philosopher, “The World as Will and Representation,” was published. In 1883, a translation of all the works of the poet Horace, begun by Fet during his student years, was published. The period from 1883 to 1991 included the publication of four issues of the poetry collection “Evening Lights”.
Fet's lyrics: general characteristics
The poetry of Afanasy Afanasyevich, romantic in its origins, is, as it were, link between the works of Vasily Zhukovsky and Alexander Blok. The poet's later poems gravitated towards the Tyutchev tradition. Fet's main lyrics are love and landscape.
In the 1950-1960s, during the formation of Afanasy Afanasyevich as a poet, the literary environment was almost completely dominated by Nekrasov and his supporters - apologists for poetry glorifying social, civic ideals. Therefore, Afanasy Afanasyevich with his creativity, one might say, came out somewhat untimely. The peculiarities of Fet's lyrics did not allow him to join Nekrasov and his group. After all, according to representatives of civil poetry, poems must necessarily be topical, fulfilling a propaganda and ideological task.
Philosophical motives
Feta permeates all his work, reflected in both landscape and love poetry. Although Afanasy Afanasyevich was even friends with many poets of Nekrasov’s circle, he argued that art should not be interested in anything other than beauty. Only in love, nature and art itself (painting, music, sculpture) did he find lasting harmony. Philosophical lyrics Feta sought to get as far away from reality as possible, contemplating beauty that was not involved in the bustle and bitterness of everyday life. This led to the adoption by Afanasy Afanasyevich of romantic philosophy in the 1940s, and in the 1960s - the so-called theory of pure art.
The prevailing mood in his works is intoxication with nature, beauty, art, memories, and delight. These are the features of Fet's lyrics. The poet often encounters the motif of flying away from the earth following the moonlight or enchanting music.
Metaphors and epithets
Everything that belongs to the category of the sublime and beautiful is endowed with wings, especially the feeling of love and song. Fet's lyrics often use metaphors such as "winged dream", " winged song", "winged hour", " winged words sound", "inspired by delight", etc.
Epithets in his works usually describe not the object itself, but the lyrical hero’s impression of what he saw. Therefore, they may be logically inexplicable and unexpected. For example, a violin might be defined as "melting." Typical epithets for Fet are “dead dreams”, “fragrant speeches”, “silver dreams”, “weeping herbs”, “widowed azure”, etc.
Often a picture is drawn using visual associations. Poem "To the Singer" - bright that example. It shows the desire to translate the sensations created by the song’s melody into specific images and sensations, which make up Fet’s lyrics.
These poems are very unusual. So, “the distance rings,” and the smile of love “gently shines,” “the voice burns” and fades away in the distance, like “the dawn beyond the sea,” so that pearls will splash out again in a “loud tide.” Russian poetry did not know such complex, bold images at that time. They established themselves much later, only with the advent of the Symbolists.
Speaking about Fet’s creative style, they also mention impressionism, which is based on the direct recording of impressions of reality.
Nature in the poet's work
Landscape lyrics Feta is a source of divine beauty in eternal renewal and diversity. Many critics have mentioned that nature is described by this author as if from the window of a landowner’s estate or from the perspective of a park, as if specifically to arouse admiration. Fet's landscape lyrics are universal expression the beauty of a world untouched by man.
For Afanasy Afanasyevich, nature is part of his own “I”, a background for his experiences and feelings, a source of inspiration. Fet's lyrics seem to blur the line between external and inner world. That's why human properties in his poems can be attributed to darkness, air, even color.
Very often, nature in Fet’s lyrics is a night landscape, since it is at night, when the bustle of the day calms down, that it is easiest to enjoy the all-encompassing, indestructible beauty. At this time of day, the poet has no glimpses of the chaos that fascinated and frightened Tyutchev. A majestic harmony hidden during the day reigns. It is not the wind and darkness, but the stars and the moon that come first. According to the stars, Fet reads the “fiery book” of eternity (the poem “Among the Stars”).
The themes of Fet's lyrics are not limited to descriptions of nature. A special section of his work is poetry dedicated to love.
Fet's love lyrics
For a poet, love is a whole sea of feelings: timid longing, the pleasure of spiritual intimacy, the apotheosis of passion, and the happiness of two souls. The poetic memory of this author knew no bounds, which allowed him to write poems dedicated to his first love even in his declining years, as if he were still under the impression of a much-desired recent date.
Most often, the poet described the birth of a feeling, its most enlightened, romantic and reverent moments: the first touch of hands, long glances, the first evening walk in the garden, the contemplation of the beauty of nature that gives rise to spiritual intimacy. The lyrical hero says that no less than happiness itself, he values the steps to it.
Fet's landscape and love lyrics form an inseparable unity. A heightened perception of nature is often caused by love experiences. A striking example This is the miniature “Whisper, timid breathing...” (1850). The fact that there are no verbs in the poem is not only an original technique, but also a whole philosophy. There is no action because only one moment is actually being described or whole line moments, motionless and self-sufficient. The image of the beloved, described through detail, seems to dissolve in the general range of the poet’s feelings. There is no complete portrait of the heroine here - it must be supplemented and recreated by the reader’s imagination.
Love in Fet's lyrics is often complemented by other motives. Thus, in the poem “The night was shining. The garden was full of the moon...” three feelings are united in a single impulse: admiration for the music, the intoxicating night and inspired singing, which develops into love for the singer. The poet’s entire soul dissolves in music and at the same time in the soul of the singing heroine, who is the living embodiment of this feeling.
It is difficult to classify this poem unambiguously as love lyrics or poems about art. It would be more accurate to define it as a hymn to beauty, combining the liveliness of experience, its charm with deep philosophical overtones. This worldview is called aestheticism.
Afanasy Afanasyevich, carried away on the wings of inspiration beyond the boundaries of earthly existence, feels like a ruler, equal to gods, with the power of his poetic genius overcoming the limitations of human capabilities.
Conclusion
The whole life and work of this poet is a search for beauty in love, nature, even death. Was he able to find her? Only those who truly understand can answer this question. creative heritage of this author: I heard the music of his works, saw landscape paintings, felt the beauty of poetic lines and learned to find harmony in the world around me.
We examined the main motives of Fet's lyrics, characteristics the work of this great writer. So, for example, like any poet, Afanasy Afanasyevich writes about eternal theme life and death. He is not equally frightened by either death or life (“Poems about Death”). The poet experiences only cold indifference to physical death, and Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet justifies his earthly existence only by creative fire, commensurate in his view with the “entire universe.” They sound in verse and antique motifs(for example, "Diana"), and Christian ("Ave Maria", "Madonna").
More detailed information about Fet's work you can find in school textbooks on Russian literature, in which the lyrics of Afanasy Afanasyevich are discussed in some detail.