Blok's creativity is unique. It coincided with important historical events at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fate of the country and the personal fate of the author merged into one whole. The rhythm of the story is clearly reflected in the lyrics. An evolution of poetry is taking place: in place of light symbolism, realism comes with a heavy tread.
Blok can also be called a modernist, since one of the poet’s missions was to translate the culture of the past into a modern way. Despite the beauty and spirituality of the poems, the author emphasized the echoes of melancholy, despair, loss and a sense of impending tragedy. Perhaps this gave Akhmatova a reason to call him “the tragic tenor of the era.” But despite all this, the poet always remained a romantic.
The main themes of Blok’s work:
- the fate of the homeland and the fate of man in critical historical eras;
- revolution and the role of the intelligentsia in it;
- true love and friendship;
- fate and fate, fear and impending hopelessness;
- the role of the poet and poetry in the life of society;
- inextricable connection between man and nature;
- religion and the universe.
The ability to convey the subtle nuances of the soul is embodied in a variety of genres: poems and poems, dedications and songs, spells, romances, sketches and sketches, thoughts.
True human values are revealed only in an indissoluble relationship with the “unity of the world.” The wonderful future of humanity is achievable as a result of harsh and everyday work, readiness for heroism in the name of the prosperity of the Fatherland. This is the poet’s worldview, which he expressed in his work.
Image of the Motherland
Russia is Blok’s main lyrical theme, in which he found inspiration and strength for life. The homeland appears in the form of mother, lover, bride and wife.
The image of the Motherland has undergone a peculiar evolution. At first he is mysterious, shrouded as if in a veil. The country is perceived through the prism of a beautiful dream: “extraordinary”, “mysterious”, “dense” and “witchcraft”. In the poem “Russia” the motherland appears as “poor”, with gray huts. The author loves her with tender and heartfelt love, which has nothing to do with pity.
The poet accepted tormented Russia with all its ulcers and tried to love. He knew that this was still the same dear Motherland, only dressed in different clothes: dark and repulsive. Blok sincerely believed that Russia would sooner or later appear in the bright clothes of morality and dignity.
In the poem “To sin shamelessly, unremittingly...” the line between love and hatred is very clearly outlined. The image of a soulless shopkeeper, accustomed to the sleep of reason, is repulsive, and repentance in the church is hypocritical. At the end, the author’s clear “cry” is heard that even such a Russia he will never stop loving, it will always be dear to his heart.
The poet sees Russia in motion. In the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” she appears in the majestic image of a “steppe mare” rushing “at a gallop.” The country's path to the future is difficult and painful.
A note of foresight is heard in the poem “On the Railway,” where Blok draws a parallel between the difficult fate of his homeland and the difficult and tragic fate of women.
“How long should the mother push? // How long will the kite circle?” — anger and pain sound in these lines. The kite and the mother symbolize the people's fate, over which hangs the predatory wings of a bird.
The revolutionary flame illuminated Blok's face and gradually scorched his deepest dreams. However, the passions in the poet’s heart did not stop boiling. They splashed out from his pen and, like slaps in the face, fell on the enemies of the fatherland.
Blok's symbolism
Each poem of the poet contains a hidden symbol that helps to feel its taste. This is what connects the poet with the Symbolists - a modernist movement dating back to the Silver Age of Russian poetry. At the very beginning of his creative career, Blok perceived the phenomena of the surrounding world as something otherworldly, unreal. Therefore, in his work there are many symbols that reveal new facets of the lyrical image. They were chosen rather intuitively. The lyrics are filled with nebula, mysticism, dreams and even magic.
Symbolism is personal. Multicolored ranges of feelings “danced in a round dance” in it. My heart trembled like a tense string with admiration and worries for the lyrical hero. Being a symbolist, Blok felt certain “underground tremors.” It was a sign of fate. A mystical and intuitive view of the world followed the poet everywhere. Alexander Alexandrovich felt that the country was on the eve of something terrible, global, something that would turn over and cripple millions of lives. The revolution was coming.
Blok creates symbolism of colors in his poetry. Red is an attractive and alluring color, the color of passion, love and life. White and light is something pure, harmonious and perfect. The blue color symbolizes the starry sky, distant space, something high and unattainable. Black and purple are the colors of tragedy and death. Yellow color speaks of withering and decay.
Each symbol corresponds to a certain concept or phenomenon: the sea is life, people, historical movements and upheavals. Red worm - fire. In the poem “Factory” a “black someone” appears. For a poet, this is a disastrous force. The factory and He are an ominous image of the destroyer-oppressor.
Blok sought to express his feelings and emotions, and not just describe the world around him. He passed each poem through himself, through his soul, so the stanzas are imbued with his worldview, joys and anxieties, triumph and pain.
Love theme
Love, like a light breeze, penetrates Blok’s creations.
In the poem “About exploits, about valor, about glory...” the master addresses his wife. She was Alexander Alexandrovich's muse. In her the poet saw the embodiment of his ideals. Blok uses techniques to emphasize the sharp contrast between the illusions of the lyrical hero and the true appearance of his beloved: this is achieved by contrasting gray and blue colors and replacing the address “You” with “you”. The poet was forced to abandon this contrast and in the final version of the text change the intonation of his address to his heroine to a more restrained one. This desire to rise above the purely everyday perception of personal drama to its philosophical understanding is characteristic of Blok’s talent.
Another woman occupied an important place in Blok’s life—his mother. The poet trusted her with everything secret. In the poem “Friend, look how in the plain of heaven...” Alexander Alexandrovich describes the feeling of sadness and loss. He is upset that Lyubov Mendeleeva rejected his advances. But the poet does not need empathy. Blok is determined to survive the mental anguish. He forces himself to stop “striving for the cold moon” and taste real life. After all, she is wonderful!
Image of a Beautiful Lady
Blok believed that humanity, mired in vulgarity and sins, could still be saved by “Eternal Femininity.” The poet found her embodiment in the image of a Beautiful Lady. It is imbued with sublimity, personifies goodness and beauty. It exudes light that illuminates the dark souls of people. You can achieve the highest harmony with the world around you through love for an earthly woman. A sincere feeling changes us for the better: new horizons open up, the world becomes beautiful. We begin to feel the beauty of every moment, to hear the pulse of life.
Many poets have depicted the image of the Beautiful Lady, but Blok has his own: the fusion of the Blessed Virgin and an earthly woman. The image resembles the shining reflection of a lit candle and the image of an icon in a golden robe.
Each time the Beautiful Lady appears in a new guise - the Queen of Heaven, the Soul of the World and a sensual girl - which delights the lyrical hero, who agrees to be her slave in the service.
In the poem “I Anticipate You,” the lyrical hero is tormented by doubts about the fact that the Beautiful Lady can turn into a vicious creature and not a trace will remain of her spirituality. But he wants to see her so much! Only she has the power to save humanity from impending grief and show the way to a new sinless life.
The poem “I enter dark temples” merges into a single sound with the previous one. The quiet and solemn atmosphere of the church conveys the state of love and bliss, the expectation of the Beautiful Lady. An unearthly image gives rise to a feeling of beauty that is characteristic of an ordinary person.
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Municipal educational institution Sokolovskaya secondary school.
Examination essay on literature on the topic:
"A.A. Blok Basic themes of creativity."
Completed by: 9th grade student.
Rezunov Alexander.
Teacher: Bondarenko S.I.
2006
A short biography of A. Blok. ……………….……...2 pages.
Russia by A. A. Blok. … ………… ……………………………7 pp.
Petersburg to yours Blok's leadership. ………..…….………….....13 pp.
Bloc and revolution. ………………. ……………….…………...22 pp.
Themes of love by A. A. Blok. …………. ………….…………………27 pp.
References…………………………………… …...29 pp.
In the twenty years that separate Blok’s first serious poems from “The Twelve,” the content of his poetry and his creative style itself have undergone profound changes.
Blok was born in 1880 (November 16, old style), died in 1921 (August 7). He began writing poetry in the late nineties and finally emerged as a poet on the eve of the 1905 revolution. His work reached its full flowering and widest scope during the years of reaction, a new upsurge of the liberation struggle and the First World War (1907 - 1916). And finally, Blok’s last world-famous work - the poem “The Twelve” - was created after October, in January 1918, at the very beginning of our Soviet era.
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok
If we compare Blok’s youthful lyrics with his mature poems, at first glance it may even seem that we are dealing with two different poets. Here, for example, are his characteristic early poems, which speak about the intimate experiences of a solitary soul and look like solemn prayers with an obscured meaning:
I kept them in John's chapel,
The motionless guard kept the fire of the lamps.
And here - She, and to Her - my Oksana -
The crown of labor is above all rewards.
The poet himself very truly and accurately said about his life and creative path that it was “a path among revolutions.” This path was complex and difficult, full of sharp contradictions, but, ultimately, straight and steady. And how wonderful it is that Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was born within the walls of St. Petersburg University, in the so-called “rector’s house” (his grandfather A.N. Beketov was the rector at that time), and the future poet was received into the arms of his great-grandmother, who personally knew other friends Pushkin.
Blok's parents separated immediately after his birth. He grew up and was brought up in his grandfather’s family in the ambiance of a well-appointed St. Petersburg manor house and in the “fragrant wilderness” of Shakhmatov’s scarlet estate near Moscow, where the family invariably spent the summer months. But the main thing that shaped the poet’s personality and character was the atmosphere of ancient cultural traditions and legends of Beket’s house. Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin and other famous representatives of Russian literature were here not only famous and revered writers, but also simply good acquaintances. Here they still remembered Gogol and corresponded with Chekhov on friendly terms.
In general, literature played a very important role in the everyday life of the Becket family. Everyone here, starting with the botanist grandfather, wrote and translated in poetry and prose. Naturally, Sashura (as Blok was called in the family) began composing almost from the age of five. And a little later he was already “publishing” a handwritten journal, then, at the age of sixteen, he began to write seriously, but for a long time he did not show his writings to anyone except his mother. She remained the closest person to him for the rest of his life, and he often repeated: “Mom and I are almost the same thing.”
In 1889, Blok's mother remarried - to a guards officer. Nine-year-old Blok settled with his mother and stepfather in the Grenadier Barracks, located on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, on the banks of the Bolshaya Neva. Here he was surrounded by a peculiar landscape, reflected in his early poems: a river along which steamships, barges and boats floated, a shady Botanical Garden, a palisade of smoking factory chimneys on the other side of the river.
At the same time, Blok was sent to a gymnasium. Then he told how “for the first time in my life, from a cozy and quiet family” I found myself “into a crowd of smooth-haired and loudly screaming boys.” He himself was a quiet, silent boy, growing up alone among women who adored him - his mother, aunts, and grandmother. He never fused with the gymnasium environment until the end of his studies. In general, as he himself said, “he had no life experiences for a very long time. His family diligently protected him from contact with “rough life.”
In 1897, finding himself with his mother abroad, in the German resort town of Bad Nauheim, Blok experienced his first, but very strong, youthful love. She left a deep mark on his poetry. Many years later, having visited Bad Nauheim again, he seemed to relive his first love and devoted a whole cycle of poems, “After Twelve Years,” to the memory of her, one of the pearls of his lyrics.
In 1898, he graduated from the gymnasium, and Blok “rather unconsciously” entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. Three years later, convinced that he was completely alien to legal science, he transferred to the Slavic-Russian department of the Faculty of History and Philology, from which he graduated in 1906.
The university, like the gymnasium, did not leave a noticeable mark on Blok’s life. From his early youth, his spiritual interests and needs lay on a completely different plane. At first, he experienced a strong passion for theater, participated in amateur performances, became known as a good reciter and dreamed of entering the big stage. But in 1901, theatrical interests gave way to literary interests. By that time, Blok had already written many poems. This is the lyrics of love and nature, full of vague forebodings, mysterious hints and allegories. Young Blok is immersed in the study of idealistic philosophy, in particular the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who taught that, in addition to the real world, there is also a certain “super-real”, higher “world of ideas”.
By Blok’s own admission, he was completely overcome by “acute mystical experiences,” “restless and uncertain excitement.” He began to notice in nature, in fact, some “signs” that were incomprehensible to him, but disturbing his soul. Blok was not alone in such feelings and moods: they were characteristic of a whole circle of young people of that time who fell under the influence of ancient and new idealistic and religious-mystical philosophy.
Beginning in 1898, Blok experienced an unusually strong and deep feeling for Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, who later became his wife. One might say that all of Blok’s youthful poems (and many of his later ones) talk about this love. The poet created a certain myth about the divinely Beautiful Lady - the embodiment of Solovyov’s “eternal femininity”, but very often in this mythologized image one can see the “earthly”, real features of his beloved.
The years 1900-1908 were a time of Blok's literary growth and success. He becomes a professional writer, his name is already becoming quite widely known. He collaborates in many magazines and newspapers, and not only as a poet and playwright, but also as a critic and publicist. He actively participates in literary polemics, defending his views on the essence of art and the tasks of the artist, and gives public reports and lectures. The staging of his small play “Balaganchik” at the theater by V.F. Komissarzhevskaya (in December 1900) became a major event in theatrical life at that time. Blok's books were published one after another - collections of poems "Unexpected Joy" (1907), "Snow Mask" (1907), "Earth in the Snow" (1908), and the collection "Lyrical Dramas" (1908). Blok’s great drama “Song of Fate” was written in 1908 and published in 1909 (it was not staged).
Overcoming the influence of decadent, aesthetic art, which was evident in his early work, he turns to the life-giving traditions of Russian and world classical poetry, introducing into them his own, original, new. He strives to make poetic speech direct, clear and precise and achieves remarkable success along this path, without losing anything from the subtle musicality characteristic of him. Characteristic in this sense is Blok’s persistent desire to go beyond the boundaries of only lyric poetry - to create large, monumental narrative and dramatic works (the poem “Retribution”, begun in 1910 and unfinished: the drama “Rose and Cross”, written in 1912).
All this time, Blok continued to live in St. Petersburg, during the summer months, leaving for his beloved Shakhmatovo. In 1909, he made an interesting trip, but to Italy and Germany, the result of which was the cycle “Italian Poems” - the best that there is in Russian poetry about Italy. In 1911 he again traveled around Europe (Paris, Bretagne, Belgium, Holland, Berlin); in 1913 - for the third time (Paris and the Biscay coast of the Atlantic Ocean). Foreign impressions were reflected in Blok’s work - both directly (in poetry and the poem “The Nightingale Garden”), and in the form of historical memories (pictures of medieval Brittany in the drama “Rose and Cross”). Blok's new books continued to appear: the fourth collection of poems "Night Hours" (1911), the three-volume "Collected Poems" (1911-1912), "Poems about Russia" (1915), the four-volume "Poems" and "Theatre" (1916). In the spring of 1914, a theatrical production of Blok’s lyrical dramas “Stranger” and “Balaganchik” was carried out. The production of the drama "Rose and Cross" was also being prepared.
In May 1917, Blok was recruited to work in the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, which was established to investigate the activities of the tsarist ministers and dignitaries. This work captivated Blok and revealed to him the “giant trash heap” of autocracy. Based on the materials of interrogations and testimony, he wrote a documentary book, “The Last Days of Imperial Power.”
Blok worked a lot and fruitfully in his last years, wrote a lot, but not poetry, but articles, essays, reviews, notes on issues of history, culture, literature and theater. He worked in the State Commission for the Publishing of Classics, in the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat for Education, in the World Literature Publishing House founded by M. Gorky, in the Bolshoi Drama Theater, in the Union of Poets (he was elected its first chairman).
In the winter, spring and summer of 1921, Blok's last triumphant performances took place - with an inspired speech about Pushkin and reading his poems (in Petrograd and Moscow).
In May, Blok felt unwell, which soon turned into a serious illness. On the morning of August 7, he died.
Blok's death shocked everyone. This is how the writer Konstantin Fedin, who was just starting out at the time, remembers her: “Blok died young, but it was strangely felt that with Blok the old, old era had passed away, the one that, having lived to see the revolution, took a step into its domain, as if showing where to go ", and fell, exhausted by the weight of her long journey. It became obvious that no one from there would take such a step, and if he repeated it, he would not have such courage and such longing for the truth of the future, which Alexander Blok showed."
Alexander Blok lived and worked at the border of two worlds, during the era of preparation and implementation of the October Revolution. He was the last great poet of old, pre-October Russia, who completed with his work the poetic quest of the entire 19th century. And at the same time, his name opens the first, title page of the history of Russian Soviet history.
The theme of the homeland is one of the eternal ones in poetry. Artists of words have turned to it at all times. But in the work of A. Blok this theme takes on a special resonance. The poet himself wrote: “The homeland is a huge, dear, breathing creature, similar to a person, but infinitely more comfortable, affectionate and helpless than an individual person; a person is a small monad, consisting of cheerful steel muscles of body and soul, he is his own master in the world, when he is healthy and healthy, he will go wherever he wants and do what he wants, he is not responsible for his actions to anyone except God and himself. This is how Sophocles sang of a man, this is how he is always, forever young.
The Motherland is an ancient, infinitely ancient creature, large and therefore clumsy, and he himself can never count his strength, his muscles, his capabilities, since they are scattered throughout Mother Earth. The homeland is destined to be abandoned one day, like a mother, when her son, a man, grows to the stars and finds himself a bride. We always see this doom of abandonment in the big maternal eyes of our homeland, always sad, even when she quietly rejoices. It is not the homeland that leaves a person, but the person who leaves their homeland. We are still children and do not know the dates, we only read them by the stars; however, we already read that the time is near when the borders will be erased and the whole earth will become native, and then not just the earth, but the endless universe, only a few wings of canvas and steel, once the wings of the Spirit will carry us into the arms of eternity.”
In the early poetry of A. Blok, the theme of Russia does not sound independent. But all the events of his spiritual life take place against the backdrop of the Russian landscape. For example, in the 1901 poem “Apparently the golden days have come...”:
Apparently, the golden days have come,
All the trees stand as if in a radiance.
At night the cold blows from the ground;
In the morning, a white church in the distance
And close and clear in outline.
The heroine of Blok's early years takes on the features of a fairy-tale princess from Russian fairy tales, her home is an enchanted mansion, and the hero is a prince, a prince, a groom. A. Blok’s poetry of these years is permeated by images of Russian culture, often in their romantic form, for example, in the poem “New Year’s Night” the image of Svetlana, the heroine of V. Zhukovsky’s ballad, appears. The world of A. Blok's early poetry is a world of a beautiful dream, and the image of Russia is shrouded in this beautiful dream.
To comprehend the true homeland, far from an enchanting fairy tale, the poet walked through the motives of a terrible world. It is into this terrible world that Blok’s hero finds himself, having left the Beautiful Lady, emerging from the reserved garden of his early poems into the terrible world of nature, where stars and dawns are replaced by a world of mosses, swamps with lame frogs, rusty hummocks and stumps. This nature is inhabited by strange creatures: sorcerers and shaggy witches, “spring creatures”, little devils, “sick mermaid”. The appearance of the people living in this world is no less terrible: these are the heroes of an ominous booth, bearers of “worldwide vulgarity,” the living dead, as for example, in the cycle of poems “Dances of Death.” The most famous poem of this cycle is “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy...”, in which the composition itself emphasizes complete hopelessness, the isolation of life in a terrible circle. However, the terrible world is not only the world around the poet, it is also the world within him. Thus, in his most famous poem, which has long become a symbol of A. Blok’s poetry - “The Stranger” - the lyrical hero belongs to two worlds: the world of dreams, poetry, where everything is shrouded in a haze of mystery, and the poet is the keeper of this secret. But he does not separate himself from the base, vulgar world of “tested wits,” soulless and deathly nature, in which its most poetic phenomenon - the moon in the sky - turns into a dead disk. It is not for nothing that the poem ends with the return of the lyrical
hero from dream to reality. The terrible world created by A. Blok is also Russia, and the poet’s highest courage is not not to see this, but to see and accept, to love his country even in such an unsightly guise.
A. Blok himself extremely openly expressed this love-hate of his in the poem “Sin shamelessly, uncontrollably...”, written in 1914. In him there appears an extremely disgusting, immensely repulsive appearance of a soulless man, a shopkeeper, whose whole life is an endless sleep of the spirit, even his repentance is only momentary. Having given a penny in church, he immediately returns and deceives his neighbor with this penny. Then, about himself and his contemporaries, he said: “We are the children of the terrible years of Russia.” The premonition of “unheard-of changes” and “unprecedented rebellions” cast a special shadow on A. Blok’s love for Russia, making it contradictory and aggravated, the poem sounds almost like a satire. His hero takes on symbolic features. And the more unexpected and powerful the ending of the poem sounds:
Yes, and so, my Russia,
You are dearer to me from all over the world.
One of A. Blok’s first direct references to the topic of Russia as an independent one was his 1906 poem “Rus”. The country appears in this poem as reserved, fabulous. That's just it
her space:
Rus' is surrounded by rivers
And surrounded by wilds
With swamps and cranes
And with the vague gaze of a sorcerer...
Russia in this work is like a sleeping enchanted kingdom, and the lyrical hero is imbued with its mystery, his living soul is immersed in slumber. Rus' lulled her to sleep in its vastness. The result of A. Blok’s thoughts about the fate of his country was the cycle of poems “Motherland,” which was created from 1907 to 1916. The poet addresses the most diverse aspects of a complex and dramatic topic in this cycle. Here are thoughts about Rus' as a protected country, whose mistress is a fairy-tale princess, who is distinguished by the traditional appearance of a Russian beauty - stately, with a braid. The symbol of this country becomes a quiet house in thick grass, abandoned by the hero for the sake of anxiety and battle. This cycle also includes the poem “On the Railway,” which in some ways echoes Nekrasov’s “Why are you looking greedily at the road...” Here, the fate of Russia is interpreted through a woman’s fate, bitter and tragic, and this is also traditional for Russian poetry.
One of the most famous poems in the cycle is “Russia” (“Again, like in the golden years...”). In the last works of the “Motherland” cycle, a new note appears, connected with the fact that a turn has come in the country’s fate, the war of 1914 has begun, and the motives for the future tragic fate of Russia sound more and more clearly in the poet’s poems. This can be felt in the poems “The Petrograd sky was clouded with rain”, “I did not betray the white banner...”, “Kite” and others.
However, the theme of tragic foresight is heard in poems from the Rodina cycle, written long before the 1914 war, in poems united by the theme indicated in the title: “On the Kulikovo Field.” These poems were written in 1908 and are dedicated to one of the most significant events in Russian history. In 1912, Blok wrote: “The Battle of Kulikovo belongs, according to the author, to the symbolic events of Russian history. Such an event is destined to return. The solution to them is yet to come.” The significance of the Battle of Kulikovo (September 8, 1380) was not so much military and political as spiritual. And it is no coincidence that the poet turns to this event in anticipation of the tragic years of Russia. I would like to analyze the first poem of the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field”:
The river spread out. Flows, lazily sad,
And washes the banks.
Over the meager clay of the same cliff
The haystacks are sad in the steppe.
O my Rus'! My wife! To the point of pain
We have a long way to go!
Our path is an arrow of the ancient Tatar will
Pierced us through the chest.
Our path is steppe, our path is in boundless melancholy.
In your melancholy, oh, Rus'!
And even the darkness - night and foreign -
I'm not afraid.
Let it be night. Let's get home. Let's light up the fires
The steppe distance.
The holy banner will flash in the steppe smoke
And the Khan's saber is steel...
And eternal battle! Rest only in our dreams
Through blood and dust...
The steppe mare flies, flies
And the feather grass crumples...And there is no end! Miles and steep slopes flash by...
Stop it!
The frightened clouds are coming,
Sunset in the blood!
Sunset in the blood! Blood flows from the heart;
Cry, heart, cry...
There is no peace! Steppe mare
He's galloping!
The poem is dedicated to understanding the historical fate of Russia. And this fate is prophetically described by the author as tragic. Its symbol is the rapidly racing steppe mare. A traditional poetry understanding of the unity of human life and the life of nature arises. The natural phenomena themselves here are painted in a bloody, tragic color (“Sunset in the Blood!”). This motif is also found in other poems of the “Motherland” cycle, for example, in the poem “The Petrograd sky was clouded with rain...”:
In the sunset distance
There were smoky clouds in the blood.
In the poem "The River Spreads..." the object of poetic speech changes several times. It begins as a description of a typically Russian landscape; meager and sad. Then there is a direct appeal to Russia, and, I must say, at one time it seemed shocking to many - after all, A. Blok called his country “Oh, my Rus'! My wife!” However, there is no poetic license in this; there is the highest degree of unity of the lyrical hero with Russia, especially if we take into account the semantic aura given to the word “wife” by symbolist poetry. In it he goes back to the gospel tradition, to the image of a majestic wife.
And finally, at the end of the poem, a new object of address appears: “Cry, heart, cry...” In the poem, A. Blok uses the author’s “we”, reflecting on the fate of the people of his generation. They seem tragic to him, rapid movement is a movement towards death, the eternal battle here is not joyful, but dramatic. The theme of the poem corresponds to its intonation structure, the very tempo of poetic speech. It begins calmly, even slowly, then the pace rapidly increases, sentences are made short, half or even a third of a poetic line (for example: “Let it be night. Let us go home. Let us illuminate with fires.”). Exclamatory intonations increase - this is also realized at the syntactic level: in seven stanzas of the poem, the author uses an exclamation mark seven times. Poetic speech here is extremely excited. This feeling is also created by the verse structure of the text. The work is written in iambic meter, which gives it a special dynamism and swiftness, conveying an uncontrollable and terrible impulse, eternal battle, and a tragic approach to death.
A. Blok’s poem about Russia, spoken in those years when its fate was steadily approaching disaster, when love for the motherland itself acquired an internal drama, sounds surprisingly modern today and shows us an example of that courageous all-seeing devotion to his country, which was perceived by the poet from the best traditions of classical Russian literature.
One of the most beautiful and perfect creations of the Russian national genius, St. Petersburg - both as a theme and as an image - left a deep, indelible mark in the consciousness of people of different generations. Russian art (painting and graphics, mainly) captured the complex, multifaceted image of the majestic city in its external expression, in all the richness and beauty of its monumental forms.
But fine art, by its very nature, could not fully embody the feeling of St. Petersburg as a phenomenon of cultural history and a theme of spiritual experiences. Fiction was a mirror that absorbed the diverse reflections of St. Petersburg in the consciousness of Russian society.
Many Russian writers, in poetry and prose, have touched on the topic of St. Petersburg to one degree or another. But, without going into detail, it is necessary to name four great literary artists for whom this theme became organic, and in whose work the most complete and clear artistic embodiment was found of the main aspects of the perception of St. Petersburg in different eras of its history. These are Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Blok.
In the consciousness and work of Alexander Blok, the theme and image of St. Petersburg played an extremely important role. For Blok, Petersburg was a truly “effective” city, which had a strong and profound effect on his artistic consciousness. Blok is the most “Petersburg” of all Russian poets. All his work is imbued with the spirit of St. Petersburg, saturated with its atmosphere. Although Blok very rarely names the material details of the St. Petersburg landscape in his poems, the entire landscape of his poetry is inseparable in our perception and imagination from this landscape - from the St. Petersburg fogs, white nights, pale dawn, the wide flow of the Neva and the fresh sea wind. With tremendous force, Blok was able to poetically express his feeling for St. Petersburg.
This was noted a long time ago, when Blok, in essence, was just beginning his creative path. Literary critics of the 90s unanimously certified Blok as the “poet of the city,” and not just the city, namely St. Petersburg, and even more precisely, as the “genius poet” of Nevsky Prospekt.
Here, for example, is what they wrote about Blok in 1908: “Alexander Blok, truly, can be called the poet of Nevsky Prospect... Blok is the first poet of this barren street. It contains the white nights of Nevsky Prospekt, and the mystery of its women, and the darkness of its visions, and the transparency of its promises. City poems have now appeared in Russia, but Blok is the poet of this street alone, the most melodious, the most lyrical of all the world’s streets. Walking along Nevsky, you worry about Blok’s poems - these bloodless and deceiving, and languishing poems that you read and cannot stop.
Even though in Blok’s poems we relatively rarely encounter specific material details of the St. Petersburg landscape, but at the same time these poems (and not only the “City” section of Blok’s collection of lyrics) are very local. And in “Snow Mask”, and in “A Scary World”, and in other lyrical poems by Blok, a solid and complex image appears before us, not of an impersonal big city, but of St. Petersburg. And no matter what Blok wrote about - “a fashionable restaurant” or “about the roofs of distant taverns”, about “wells in courtyards” or about “icy ripples of a canal”, about a “snow blizzard” or about a “yellow dawn” - these are always St. Petersburg restaurants and taverns, St. Petersburg courtyards and canals, St. Petersburg blizzard and St. Petersburg dawn.
Speaking about Blok’s St. Petersburg lyrics, it is important to take into account that the theme of St. Petersburg is not isolated from the general ideological and moral issues of the poet’s work. This theme was in close, organic relationship with the most basic themes of his philosophical, historical, social and artistic worldview. In the “urban” poems of the mature Blok, his ideas about the world and about man, about history and about modernity are expressed with no less clarity and convincingness than in his patriotic civic lyrics. 
House in Shakhmatovo. Drawing by A. Blok.
A.A.Blok and A.L. Blok, the poet's parents. 1979
A.A. Blok and L.D. Mendeleev. 1903
Alexander Blok. 1984
Poster for A. A. Blok’s evening at the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Petrograd.
Autograph of A. A. Blok’s poem “Factory”, 1903.
Blok's Petersburg is a “terrible world”, full of acute contradictions of social life; it is a capitalist city with its own real-historical features of its appearance. This is a city where “the rich are angry and happy” and “the poor are humiliated.” And at the same time, this is a city full of rebellious revolutionary energy, a city of people “rising from the darkness of the cellars” to storm the old world. The “urban” poems of the mature Blok are imbued with that humanistic and democratic feeling and that anxious feeling of the approaching great revolutionary upheavals, which are expressed with such impressive force in his work.
Alexander Blok had a vital connection with St. Petersburg. He was a Petersburger in the full and precise sense of the word. He was born in St. Petersburg, lived his entire life and died. All of his literary activity took place here.
Blok loved and knew his city perfectly - and not only its central quarters, but also its most remote corners, and all the immediate surroundings. The poet was a great lover of city and country walks. His diaries, notebooks and letters to family and friends are replete with references to frequent and lengthy wanderings around the city and outside the city.
And, although in Blok’s urban poems there are not many references to architectural and other material monuments of St. Petersburg, his poems are replete with lyrical perceived images of the St. Petersburg landscape, in many cases amenable to precise topographic definition. It is curious that even in the seemingly abstract and mystical verses of the young Blok, very real connections with certain places in St. Petersburg are sometimes discovered.
So, for example, in the 1901 poem “Five Hidden Curves...”, as it turns out from Blok’s diary, the mysterious “bends” mean nothing more than those streets along which L.D. Mendeleeva (Blok’s bride) passed, heading daily to the Higher Women's Courses, and Blok himself “kept an eye on her, unnoticed by her.” These streets are Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth, as well as Vasilyevsky Island and Sredny Prospekt, and in this regard the lines become clear: “Five inspired bends, Seven and ten at the edges, Eight, nine, the middle temple...”. Also regarding the poem “There was a house in the street...” it is known that Blok in this case had in mind a certain house (on Mokhovaya Street), which housed the dramatic Reading courses that L.D. Mendeleeva attended .
The landscape of the lyrical drama “The Stranger” (1906), according to biographer Blok, was “inspired by wandering around the remote corners of the St. Petersburg side.” The beerhouse depicted in the “First Edition” of the play was located on the corner of Hesperovsky Avenue and Bolshaya Zelenaya Street. “The entire setting, from the ships on the wallpaper to the characters, was taken from life: the “spitting image” of Hauptmann and Verlaine, a gentleman sorting out crayfish, a girl in a headscarf, a seller of curiosities - all these are faces seen by the poet during his visits to the tavern with ships "
The landscape of the “Second Vision” of the drama “The Stranger” could also be confined to a specific place in St. Petersburg. “The end of the street is on the edge of town. The last houses ended suddenly, revealing a wide vista: a dark, deserted bridge over a large river. On both sides of the bridge, quiet ships with flashing lights slumber. Behind the bridge stretches an endless alley, straight as an arrow, framed by chains of lanterns and trees white with frost.” A Petersburger will recognize in this description the bridge and alley leading to Krestovsky Island from Bolshaya Zelenaya Street.”
Even such a poem, seemingly completely unrelated to the St. Petersburg theme, as “The Commander’s Steps,” in which the old plot about Don Juan was reinterpreted, according to Blok himself, was associated with some complex associations with impressions of the St. Petersburg landscape.
In the mystical poems of the young Blok, the theme and image of St. Petersburg is not yet present. In them there are only random, scattered and impressionistic fleeting details of the St. Petersburg landscape, interspersed in the fabric of lyrical subjects: the noise and lights of the city, “evening shadows” on the “blue snow”, fogs, plains and swamps, “dusk of the day”, “dim streets sketches” sleepy”, ice drift on the river, “gloomy sky”, “street crackling” and “row of lanterns running away”, a wall merging with the darkness, bell ringing and church domes, gas-colored flickering, “blind dark gates”, and “dark temples” . These details do not yet contain a complete image of the city, even in cases where the topographical ones are clarified:
Dark night covered the islands.
The moon has risen. Spring has returned.
Sadness is light. My soul is alive.
And the eternal cold Neva
It swayed sternly at my feet.
The islands and the Neva are only named here: there is no complete image of St. Petersburg yet. The details of the St. Petersburg landscape, found in Blok’s youthful poems, did not have independent significance, but played a purely ornamental role - within the framework of the main theme of the poet’s spiritual experiences.
With all this, in Blok’s youthful poems one can already feel that lyrical feeling of St. Petersburg, which is expressed with such force in his later works. An example is the poem “Do you remember the anxious city...”, where we find such an emotionally expressive image as “the blue haze of the city”, so typical for the entire landscape of St. Petersburg lyricism and with all the impressionistic fluency.
In his urban poems of the early 20th century, Blok is still very far from a realistic depiction of reality. The city appears in them, for the most part, in fantastic and “eschatological” (often borrowed from the Apocalypse) images, like a kind of phantasmagoria, a ghostly and deceptive vision. This city of “strange and terrible” phenomena, inhabited by “black men”, “drunk red dwarfs”, “invisible people”. Even strict plastic images of the St. Petersburg landscape, such as Claude’s famous equestrian groups on the Anichkov Bridge (“Statue”), are interpreted in the same sense of “strange and terrible.”
Having lived out his Solovyovism, Blok discovered a new “beautiful, rich and refined” theme, which he defined as “mysticism in everyday life.” This theme was primarily developed by him in 1904-1907, and especially widely in poems about the city. In the preface to the second collection of his lyrics (“Unexpected Joy”), Blok wrote that his soul was disturbed by the city: “There, in a magical whirlwind and light, terrible and beautiful visions of life.” Blok now turns entirely to depicting reality, but still sees it in a “magical light” and still endows it with features of fantasy and mystery. In the methods of developing the theme of “mysticism in everyday life,” he turns out to be especially close to Dostoevsky. At this time he reads a couple of his novels.
In Blok’s poems about the city, written in 1904-1907, an integral and local image of St. Petersburg appears. This is a “brilliant city, full of trembling,” full of contradictions, “a scary” and a “magical world,” where “the restaurant is open like a temple, and the temple is open like a restaurant.” Behind its gray, prosaic appearance one can see a different, romantic image of the “incomprehensible city.” There is a mystery going on in it, and the new heroine of Blok’s poetry - the Snow Maiden - “the night daughter of other times” and other, distant countries, accepts this beautiful and “enchanting” city as her kingdom:
And my city is iron gray
Where is the wind, rain, swell, and darkness,
With some strange faith
She, like a creature, accepted.
Here is the pinnacle of Blok’s acceptance of St. Petersburg. Subsequently, this image of the “incomprehensible city” always retained its powerful power over the poet’s consciousness.
The theme of St. Petersburg, as it was posed and resolved by Blok in his poems of 1904-1907, is not limited to the depiction of “strange and beautiful visions of life.” There is already another side that was no less important for Blok and played a more significant role in the process of his ideological and creative development - the social side.
In poems about the city, its theme sounds with particular tension. In a powerful stream, scenes of grief and deprivation of a simple working man, doomed to be a victim of capitalist exploitation, enter these poems. Blok's urban poems paint a vivid picture of social inequality and the contrasts of human existence in a big city:
In taverns, in alleys, in twists and turns,
In an electric dream in reality
I was looking for endlessly beautiful
And immortally in love with rumors.
In Blok’s poems there is a whole gallery of images of people humiliated and insulted in this sparkling and well-fed world: a suicidal mother who abandoned her children (“From the Newspapers”), a tramp “in a crumpled cap over a pewter gaze,” walking women, girls with bowed faces over meager work, “an old woman beggar with a stick,” a wandering organ grinder...
In the “philistine” cycle of 1906 (“Cold Day”, “In October”, “Windows into the Courtyard”, “I Walk, I Wander Dejectedly...”, “In the Attic”), urban everyday life appears without any complicating social themes illusory ideas, but in all realistic concreteness:
I opened the window. How gloomy
The capital in October!
Slaughtered brown horse
Walking in the yard...
Blok’s urban poems also capture another image of St. Petersburg - the appearance of working St. Petersburg. The poet saw in urban everyday life not only “magical” visions in an “electric waking dream”, but also the “very real” yearnings of “slave labor”, saw “how hard the work lies on every bent back”, and found worthy and strong words about unfortunate people “killed by their labor”:
...I remember these faces
And the silence of empty orbits
And a line of doomed
Standing in front of me everywhere.
For Blok, St. Petersburg was an inexhaustible source of new images, themes, and landscapes. The city was precisely the poet’s inspiration, without whom he would not have existed. By devoting a very large part of his work to his native city, Blok showed that St. Petersburg occupied one of the first places in his life. One day, walking with V. Rozhdestvensky between the old linden trees near the Engineering Castle, Blok said: “I love this place. Look, the city is running wild, soon it will be completely overgrown with grass, and this will make it even more beautiful... Behind these ruins there is always new life. The old one should be overgrown with grass. And there will be a new city in this place. How I would like to see him! But Blok could not see him. It's a pity. We have lost a lot!
After the February revolution, Blok increasingly doubted the bourgeois-republican regime established in the country, since he had not brought the people deliverance from the criminally disorganized war. Blok became increasingly concerned about the fate of the revolution, and he began to listen more attentively to the slogans of the Bolsheviks. They captivate him with their clarity: peace to the peoples, land to the peasants, power to the Soviets. Shortly before the October Block; admits in a conversation: “Yes, if you want, I’m rather with the Bolsheviks, they demand peace...” Then he writes in his diary that “Lenin alone” (Blok emphasized these words) believes in the future “with a good vision”, believes that "the seizure of power by democracy will truly eliminate the war and improve everything in the country."
At a crucial hour in history, Blok found the spiritual strength to courageously break his ties with the old world and enthusiastically welcome the new world, born in the fire and storm of the proletarian revolution. From the very first days of October, he openly and honestly defined his socio-political position as a “supporter and collaborator of Soviet power. Among the best (very few at that time) representatives of the old Russian intelligentsia, he immediately went to work with the Bolsheviks, accepted the most vital and active participation in the construction of a new, socialist culture.
But what is immeasurably more important is that the October Revolution inspired Blok as an artist, inspired him to create “The Twelve,” his best work, after finishing which he, usually mercilessly strict with himself, said: “Today I am a genius!”
A. Blok's poem "The Twelve" was written in 1918. It was a terrible time: behind four years of war, the feeling of freedom in the days of the February Revolution, the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks coming to power, and finally the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the first Russian parliament. The intellectuals of the circle to which A. Blok belonged perceived all these events as a national tragedy, as the death of the Russian land. Against this background, Blok’s poem sounded in clear contrast; to many of his contemporaries it seemed not only unexpected, but even blasphemous. How could the singer of the Beautiful Lady create poems about fat-faced Katya? How could a poet, who dedicated such heartfelt lyrical poems to Russia, write the words in those terrible days: “Let’s fire a bullet at Holy Rus'?” These questions were posed after the first publication of the poem “The Twelve” in the newspaper “Znamya Truda”.
Today, more than a third of a century later, all these questions have arisen before us with renewed vigor, the poem “The Twelve” has aroused keen interest, we are peering into it, peering into the past, trying to understand the present and predict the future, to understand the poet’s position that dictated the lines of this poem to him . “Epigraph of the century” - this is what modern researchers call Blok’s poem, offering various options for reading it.
In the last nineties, interpreters sometimes try to read the poem “by contradiction”, to prove that Blok in it gave a satire on the revolution, and his Christ is actually the Antichrist. However, is this so? First of all, A. Blok warned that the importance of political motives in the poem “The Twelve” should not be overestimated. It has a broader meaning. At the center of the work is the element, or rather, the intersection of four elements: nature, music, and the social element; the action of the poem itself takes place not only in Petrograd in 1918, but, as the poet writes, “in all of God’s world.” The elemental forces of nature are rampant, and for the romantic poet, the symbolist poet, who was A. Blok, this is a symbol that opposes the most terrible thing - philistine peace and comfort. Even in the cycle “Iambics” (1907-1914) he wrote: “No! It’s better to perish in the fierce cold! There is no comfort. There is no peace.” That is why the elements of nature are so consonant with his soul; it is conveyed in “The Twelve” with many images: wind, snow, blizzard and blizzard. In this revelry of the elements, through the howling of the wind and blizzard, A. Blok heard the music of the revolution - in his article “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution” he called: “With all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness - listen to the Revolution.” The main thing that the poet heard in this music was its polyphony. It is reflected in the rhythm of the poem - it is all built on changing musical melodies. Among them are a battle march, and everyday conversation, and an old romance, and a ditty (it is known that A. Blok began writing his poem from the lines “I’ll slash and slash with a knife,” which he heard and amazed him with its sound writing). And behind all this polyphony and disharmony, the poet hears a powerful musical pressure, a clear rhythm of movement with which the poem ends. Love is also spontaneous in her. This is a dark passion with black drunken nights, with fatal betrayal and the absurd death of Katka, who is killed while aiming at Vanka, and no one repents of this murder. Even Petrukha, ashamed of his comrades, feels the inappropriateness of his suffering:
He throws his head up
He became cheerful again.
A. Blok very accurately felt the terrible thing that had entered life: the complete devaluation of human life, which is no longer protected by any law, no one even thinks that they will have to answer for the murder of Katka. Moral feeling does not keep one from killing either - moral concepts have become extremely devalued. It is not without reason that after the death of the heroine, revelry begins, now everything is permitted:
Lock the floors
There will be robberies today!
Unlock the cellars -
The bastard is on the loose these days!
Faith in God is also unable to keep us from dark, terrible manifestations of the human soul. She, too, is lost, and the twelve who went “to serve in the Red Guard” themselves understand this:
Petka! Hey, don't lie!
What did I save you from?
Golden iconostasis?
and add:
Ali's hands are not covered in blood
Because of Katka's love?
But murder occurs not only because of love - another element has appeared in it, a social element. In revelry, in robbery - a rebellion of "badness". These people are not just raging, they came to power, they accuse Vanka of being a “bourgeois”, they seek to destroy the old world:
We are at the mercy of all bourgeoisie
Let's fan the world fire...
And here the most difficult question arises, which torments readers of Blok’s poem even now, as it tormented three quarters of a century ago: how could A. Blok glorify this robbery and debauchery, this destruction, including the destruction of the culture in which he was raised and which he himself was the bearer of? Much in A. Blok’s position can be clarified by the fact that the poet, being always far from politics, was brought up in the traditions of Russian intelligentsia culture of the 19th century with its inherent ideas of “worship of the people” and the feeling of guilt of the intelligentsia before the people. Therefore, the revelry of the revolutionary element, which sometimes acquired such ugly features as, for example, the destruction of wine cellars mentioned by the poet, robberies, murders, the destruction of manorial estates with hundred-year-old parks, the poet perceived as popular retribution, including the intelligentsia, on whom the sins lie fathers. Having lost moral guidelines, overwhelmed by the revelry of dark passions, the revelry of permissiveness - this is how Russia appears in the poem “The Twelve”. But in the terrible and cruel thing that she has to go through, that she experiences in the winter of the year 18, A. Blok sees not only retribution, but also immersion in hell, in the underworld, but in this, too, her purification. Russia must get past this terrible thing; Having plunged to the very bottom, ascend to the sky. And it is in this connection that the most mysterious image in the poem arises - the image that appears in the finale, Christ. An infinite amount has been written about this finale and the image of Christ. It was interpreted very differently. In studies of past years, there was a voluntary or involuntary (or rather, often involuntary) desire to explain the appearance of Christ in the poem almost as an accident, as A. Blok’s misunderstanding of who should be ahead of the Red Guards.
Today there is no longer any need to prove the regularity and deeply thought-out nature of this ending. And the image of Christ in the work is predicted from the very beginning - from the title: for the reader of that time, brought up in the traditions of Christian culture, who studied the Law of God at school, the number twelve was the number of the apostles, disciples of Christ. The entire path that the heroes of Blok’s poem follow is the path from the abyss to resurrection, from chaos to harmony. It is no coincidence that Christ follows the path “above the blizzard”, and in the lexical structure of the poem, after deliberately reduced, rude words, such beautiful and traditional for A. Blok words appear:
With a gentle tread above the storm,
Snow scattering of pearls,
In a white corolla of roses
Ahead is Jesus Christ."
On this note, the poem ends, imbued with A. Blok’s faith in the coming resurrection of Russia and the resurrection of the human in man. The struggle of the worlds in the work is, first of all, an internal struggle, overcoming the dark and terrible in oneself.
Alexander Blok entered the history of literature as an outstanding lyric poet. Having begun his poetic journey with a book of mystical poems about a beautiful Lady, Blok ended his twenty years of work in Russian literature with a curse on the old world in the poem “The Twelve.” Blok went through a difficult creative path from a symbolist poet, from a barren romantic dream to reality, to revolution. Many former “friends” of Blok, having fled from the revolution to other countries, shouted in Parisian newspapers that Blok had sold out to the Bolsheviks, that his refined taste and talent had become coarse, but this was not the case. Blok himself suffered in the revolution (the peasants burned his Shakhmatovo estate), but he was able to understand something else - the people’s patience was overflowing. Blok listened sensitively to life and showed the deepest interest in the fate of Russia, in the fate of the Russian people.
The early period of the poet’s work was marked by religious dreams that led to “other worlds.” In 1904, he created a cycle of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” full of anxiety, a feeling of imminent catastrophe. The poet became isolated in personal experiences, he yearned for the ideal woman. The poems are dedicated to his future wife Mendeleeva, whom he loved dearly. Blok grows up, and his views on life change; he realized that he cannot go to “other worlds” when there is devastation, hunger, struggle, death all around. The theme of the people and the intelligentsia powerfully bursts into Blok’s work. In the poem "Stranger" Blok shows the collision of a beautiful dream and dirty reality. He
writes: “And slowly, walking among the drunken, always without companions, alone, breathing perfume and mists, she sits down by the window.” What musicality? What lyricism and melody. Even earlier, Blok writes in his diary: “She is a certain ideal of beauty, capable, perhaps, of re-realizing
life, to expel from it everything ugly and bad."
Blok's connections with his own environment, with the degrading bourgeois culture, have weakened a little, because he is in love with his Motherland and is shocked by the bitter fate of the Russian people. The people were deliberately made drunk and reduced to the level of animals. “In the evenings, above the restaurants, the transparent air is wild and deaf, and the drunken shouts of spring and the corruptive spirit rule,” he writes in “The Stranger.” Blok’s search for ways to real life was accompanied by outbursts of despair, disbelief, curses at the “well-fed,” and attempts to reconsider his own position in life. Blok with his poems proved that he is not only a deep, extraordinary personality, but also showed the connection between the Universe and Eternal beauty. It's a pity that he never found his ideal in life. Mendeleeva, tired of enthusiastic love, went to Andrei Bely, but Blok’s deep poems remained. They are full of feeling, young girls learn real, poetic love, this greatly brightens up our monotonous modern everyday life, full of fatigue and anxiety. If it were not for the poets, then in the words of Blok one could say: “So life is boring when there is no struggle. There is no beauty, love and life.” Love for the Motherland echoes love for a woman. “Oh, my Rus', my wife! The long road is painfully clear to us!” - writes Blok. Freeing himself from the influence of symbolism, Blok sought to continue the traditions of great Russian classical literature, which saw its task as serving the people. The block is independent and unique. His poetry expresses the characteristic features of the spiritual life of many people and a premonition of social change. The poet with great passion wanted to see in man a free creator of life. Blok’s whole life is permeated with the dream of an ideal person who does not feel duality and confusion within himself. The cult of the Beautiful Lady meant a protest against the bourgeois prose of life and was a unique form of non-recognition and denial of the bourgeois way of life.
The ambiguity and mystery of the cycle about love encourages us to think about the mysteries of human existence. "The Stranger" is a flight of creative imagination that transforms the world. The depth of the poet’s experiences determines the significance of the themes in his lyrics. Blok passed away early, but his poems concern all thinking people, they help us live.
M. F. Pyanykh “Listen to the revolution. Poetry of A. Blok." Lenizdat 1980.
A. A. Blok “Favorites. Poems and poets." Moscow-L. 1960
M. A. Beketova. "Memories of Alexander Blok." Lenizdat 1980.
V.N. Orlov. “The Poet and the City” L. 1975.
Rita Solovyova
The main motives of Blok's lyrics
The poet himself wanted his readers to view his lyrics as a single work - as a three-volume novel in verse, which he called the “trilogy of incarnation.” At the center of his lyrics is the very personality of modern man. It is the personality in its relationship with the whole world (social, natural, and “cosmic”) that forms the core of the problematics of Blok’s poetry. Blok’s personality became the hero of the “trilogy of incarnation.” Therefore, in relation to him in literary criticism, the category of “lyrical hero” is used. This term first appeared in the works of the literary critic Tynyanov in his articles on Blok’s poetry. According to him, Blok’s biggest lyrical theme was the poet’s personality itself. “Incarnation” is a word from the theological lexicon that means the appearance of the Son of Man, the incarnation of God in human form. In Blok’s poetic consciousness, the image of Christ is associated with the idea of a creative personality who renounces himself for the sake of the ideals of goodness and beauty.
System of motives - figurative, lexical, intonation repetitions that connect individual poems and cycles into a single whole. Motif, unlike theme, is a formal-substantive category. That is, the motif in poetry serves as a compositional organization of many individual poems into a tangible lyrical whole. It is created by lyrical situations and images (metaphors, numbers, color designations) that are repeated many times and vary from poem to poem. Central cycle first volume trilogy - “Poems about a Beautiful Lady”. They reflected Blok’s love affair with Mendeleeva and his passion for the philosophical ideas of V.S. Solovyova. In the teachings of the philosopher Blok, he was attracted by the idea of eternal femininity, that through love it is possible to eliminate selfishness and unite man and the world. In a woman it is necessary to see her heavenly nature. The plot of the poems “About a Beautiful Lady” is the plot of waiting to meet your beloved. The lyrical hero and the beautiful lady are obviously unequal; this is a contrast between the earthly and the heavenly. In their relationship there is an atmosphere of medieval chivalry, it is at an unattainable height. Recurring motifs - “unknown shadows”, “incomprehensible secret”, “everything will be known”, “waiting”, “watching”, “guessing”. The hero is yearning for love. Figurative church signs - lamps, candles, scarlet, white and gold colors. At the same time, the hero is afraid of meeting the muse: “... The whole horizon is on fire, and the appearance is near. But I'm scared - you'll change your appearance. And you will sharply arouse suspicion, By changing the usual features in the end.” (In short, it all ended with Blok never touching Mendeleeva, and she was so tired of his chivalry that she went to Bely. This just means that Blok very literally perceived and experienced his lyrics, and this was not always compatible with practical life.) Second volume- the motive of immersion in the elements of life. Now the hero’s consciousness is turned to a non-invented life. The elements of nature, urban civilization, earthly love are reflected in these lyrics. The hero's field of vision is the national and social life of the country. The element is the key symbol. The Beautiful Lady is supplanted by the Stranger - a woman of two worlds, a reminder of a high ideal in a world of debauchery and drunkards. The main thing for Blok is the courageous idea of confronting a terrible world, the idea of duty. You can understand his philosophy at this stage of life using the example of this poem: Oh, spring without end and without end - Without end and without end, a dream! I recognize you, life! I accept! And I greet you with the ringing of the shield! I accept you, failure, and luck, my greetings to you! In the enchanted area of crying, In the secret of laughter - there is no shame! I accept sleepless arguments, Morning in the curtains of dark windows, So that spring irritates and intoxicates my inflamed eyes! I accept desert weights! And the wells of earthly cities! The illuminated expanse of the skies And the languor of slave labor! And I meet you at the threshold - With a wild wind in snake curls, With the unsolved name of God On cold and compressed lips... Before this hostile meeting I will never throw down my shield... You will never open your shoulders... But above us is an intoxicated dream! And I look and measure the enmity, Hating, cursing and loving: For torment, for death - I know - It’s all the same: I accept you! Third volume. The leading motive is the death of the world of modern urban civilization. “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy...” is a vivid example. The hero is sinful, callous, and tired. A feeling of hopelessness, the thought of impending retribution for betraying the ideal. New values - people's life, Motherland. The theme of Russia is now the most important in his work. For the lyrical hero, love for the Motherland is an intimate feeling. The images of Rus' and the Wife are very close. Poem “Russia” Again, as in the golden years, Three worn-out harnesses fray, And the painted knitting needles get stuck in loose ruts... Russia, poor Russia, Your gray huts are to me, Your wind songs are to me, - Like the first tears of love! I don’t know how to feel sorry for you And I carefully carry my cross... Whichever sorcerer you want Give away the robber’s beauty! Let him lure and deceive, - You will not be lost, you will not perish, And only care will cloud Your beautiful features... Well, then? With one care more - With one tear the river is noisier And you are still the same - a forest, and a field, And a patterned scarf up to the eyebrows... And the impossible is possible, The long road is easy, When the road flashes in the distance An instant glance from under a scarf, When it rings with longing prison The dull song of the coachman!.. Motif of the path. At the end of the lyrical trilogy, this is a common “way of the cross” for the hero and his country.
Excerpt from the poem "On the Kulikovo Field". Alexander Blok 1. The river spreads out. It flows, is sad lazily and washes the banks. Above the meager clay of the yellow cliff, the haystacks are sad in the steppe. Oh, my Rus'! My wife! To the point of pain We have a long way to go! Our path - the arrow of the ancient Tatar will pierced our chest. Our path is steppe, our path is in melancholy..................... boundless, In your melancholy, oh, Rus'! And even the darkness - night and foreign - I am not afraid. Let it be night. He'll get home. Let's illuminate the steppe distance with fires. In the steppe smoke the holy banner will flash and the steel of the khan's saber... And eternal battle! Rest only in our dreams Through blood and dust... The steppe mare flies and flies And crushes the feather grass... And there is no end! Miles and steep turns flash by... Stop it! The frightened clouds are coming, Sunset in the blood! Sunset in the blood! Blood flows from the heart! Cry, heart, cry... There is no peace! The steppe mare gallops!
One of the main features of A. Blok’s work is that it completes the development of many important themes and motifs that arose back in the 19th century and are associated with an awareness of the role and place of man in the world around him, in a given social environment. In A. Blok’s lyrics they receive their rebirth, are staged and formulated anew - already as themes and motives of his work, although the poet is quite clearly aware of their genetic connection with the past.
Already contemporaries noticed how often several key words were repeated in A. Blok’s lyrics. So, K.I. Chukovsky wrote that the favorite words of the early A. Blok were “fogs” and “dreams”. The entire corpus of A. Blok's lyrics is characterized by a stable repetition of the most important images, verbal formulas and lyrical situations.
Thanks to cross-cutting motifs, A. Blok’s poetry acquired a very high degree of unity. The poet himself wanted his readers to view his lyrics as a single work - as a three-volume novel in verse, which he called the “trilogy of humanization.”
The main motive that connects the disparate works and largely determines the composition of the “Collected Poems” is the “idea of the path,” the poet’s understanding of his own development, his own evolution. At the same time, Blok perceives his path as the path of a modern person and already as the path of an intellectual of the new century. In this regard, for his “trilogy of lyrics” the orientation towards the social novel of the 19th century is very significant. and above all to “Eugene Onegin”, by analogy with which he calls his “trilogy” a novel in verse.
The external composition of Blok’s “novel in verse” is divided into three volumes, each of which has ideological and aesthetic unity and corresponds to one of the stages of “humanization.” In addition to the external composition, A. Blok’s trilogy is also organized by a more complex internal composition - a system of motifs, figurative, lexical and intonation repetitions that connect individual poems and cycles into a single whole.
The central cycle of the first volume of Blok’s lyrical trilogy is “Poems about a Beautiful Lady.” The entire cycle is permeated with the pathos of chaste love for a woman, knightly service to her and admiration for her as the personification of the ideal of spiritual beauty, a symbol of everything sublimely beautiful. The heroine of A. Blok's poetry is seen by the hero not as an earthly woman, but as a deity. She has several names: Beautiful Lady, Forever Young, Holy Virgin, Lady of the Universe. She is heavenly, mysterious, inaccessible, detached from earthly troubles:
Transparent, unknown shadows
They swim to you, and with them
You're floating
Into the arms of azure dreams,
Incomprehensible to us, -
You give yourself. (1901)
Love is embodied in the motive of the Meeting of the lyrical hero and the Lady. The story of the Meeting, which should transform the world and the hero, destroy the power of time (“to unite tomorrow and yesterday with fire”), create the kingdom of God on earth (where “heaven returned to earth”) - this is the lyrical plot.
The painfully sensitive, exquisitely nervous A. Blok sees and hears signs of the end everywhere around him. But the motives of early disappointment do not prevent A. Blok from ardently believing in the happiness of love:
Now hearts are full of love,
One love and sweet bliss...
In high friendship: When we get tired on the way,
And a foggy stench will cover us
Come to me to rest
And I come to you, my welcome friend! (1898)
Particular tension marked the final first volume of the cycle “Crossroads” (1904). The bright emotional atmosphere of loving expectation is replaced by moods of dissatisfaction with oneself, self-irony, motives of “fears”, “laughter”, and anxieties. “Crossroads” anticipate important changes in the fate of the lyrical hero.
These changes are clearly visible in the second volume of the trilogy, corresponding to the second period of the poet’s work. The motives of waiting for a meeting and high service are replaced by the motives of immersion in the elements of life.
The second part of the trilogy covers the poet’s work from 1904 to 1908. It highlights such cycles as “The City” (1904-1908), “Snow Mask” (1907) - here the motives of wild passion find their peak expression, “Free Thoughts” (1907). The poet turns to reality, sees the contradictions and drama of what is happening. Social motives appear in the poems (“Factory” - 1903, “Fed” - 1905), and an urban theme. In the “City” cycle, A. Blok creates the image of a city hostile to beauty, vulgarity reigns in it, the edge of heaven is bursting, the alleys are buzzing.
The artistic world is becoming more complex, the symbolism of color is changing: azure, gold, white are giving way to dirty red and blue tones.
A. Blok constantly feels an alarming need to look for some new paths, new high ideals. And it is precisely this restlessness, a skeptical attitude towards universal skepticism, an intense search for new values that distinguishes him from internally self-satisfied decadence. In the famous poem “Stranger” (1906), the lyrical hero excitedly peers at a beautiful visitor to a country restaurant, trying in vain to find out who is in front of him: the incarnation high beauty, the image of “ancient beliefs”, or the Stranger – a woman from the world of drunkards “with the eyes of rabbits”? “Stranger” is a poem indicative of the second period of creativity. The two-part composition absolutely corresponds to the romantic dual world of the lyrical hero. The parts are contrasted according to the principle of contrast. The content, rhythmic structure, vocabulary, and figurative means of the two parts are contrasting.
We see not only the complexities of the relationship between the hero and the Soul of the World, but we also see the warmth of the “rosy forest”, motives of sadness, separation - the most earthly feelings.
One of the principal poems of the second volume is “Oh, spring without end and without edge...” (1907). It develops one of the most important motifs of A. Blok’s lyrics - “Both disgust from life and mad love for it.”
The third volume of the “novel in verse” synthesizes and rethinks the most important motifs of the first two volumes of the trilogy. It opens with the cycle “A Terrible World” (1910-1916). The leading motive of the cycle is the death of the world of modern urban civilization. The pole of the “terrible world” evokes in the minds of the lyrical hero the thought of impending retribution - this thought develops in the cycles “Retribution” (1908 – 1913) and “Iambics” (1907 – 1914). The logical development of the path of the lyrical hero is an appeal to new values - for A. Blok, this value is the people's life, the Motherland. The theme of Russia arises - the most important theme in the poet’s work, most fully embodied in the cycle “Motherland” (1907 - 1916) - the pinnacle of the “trilogy of humanization”.
In poems about Russia, the leading role belongs to the motives of the historical destinies of the country: the semantic core of patriotic lyrics is the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” (1908). The most important motive of poems about the Motherland is the motive of the path. At the end of the lyrical trilogy, this is the common “way of the cross” for the hero and his country. At the third stage of his creative path, A. Blok, passionately desiring change, seemed to have found a goal and took the right path - he began to “listen to the music of the revolution,” with which he connected hopes for the renewal of Russia, hopes for the emergence of a new man. But the revolution deceived A. Blok’s expectations - “that dream deceived, like any dream.” Instead of a new culture and reforms, there is a lack of concern for culture in general, pseudo-culture, a noose around the neck, trampling on freedom, bureaucratic squabbles. Joy and music disappeared from A. Blok’s life. Researchers associated this with a decline in creativity, with feelings of the end of the road, with a “lack of air” in Soviet Russia, which he called a police state. “The eyes of the Bolsheviks are the eyes of murderers.”– writes A. Blok.
The last months of life are the deepest depression and nervous exhaustion. “Gloominess, pessimism, reluctance and terrible irritability, aversion to everything, to walls, pictures, things, to me”- writes Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok in her memoirs about A. Blok.
In recent years, A. Blok experienced painful shocks, in his words, “days of hopeless melancholy.” The pre-death period of fading life was infinitely difficult. It still raises unresolved questions to this day. One thing is indisputable: A. Blok’s miraculous monument was his inspired word. The attraction to him, surprise, enjoyment of the rare gift of the artist, which revealed the secrets of our century, does not dry out.
To sum up what has been said, we can conclude that even when A. Blok’s lyrics spoke, it would seem, about the private, intimate, in it, through the personal, unique, the great, the world breaks through. “Unity with the world” is a common motif for all of A. Blok’s lyrics. In addition, the motives of the journey and meeting can be traced. The motive of loss and the motive of gain alternately replace each other, which is connected with the poet’s life realities. In some cycles, social motives arise, motives of melancholy, sadness, associated primarily with the author’s rethinking of his life and creative path.
The appearance of these motives can be explained by the fact that A. Blok lived in a difficult time, when the country did not have stability and confidence in the future. The poet wanted renewal, but never saw what he wanted. Also, the identified motives correspond to the psychotype of the poet (according to the memoirs of contemporaries, he was rather a gloomy, withdrawn, uncommunicative person, too deep in his sad thoughts). And finally, lyric poetry as a type of literature is characterized by the appearance of these motifs.
1. Poet A. A. Blok.
2. The main themes in Blok’s work.
3. Love in the poet’s poetry.
...A writer who believes in his calling, no matter what size this writer may be, compares himself with his homeland, believing that he suffers from its diseases, is crucified with it...
A. A. Blok
A. A. Blok was born into a noble intellectual family. According to Blok, his father was a connoisseur of literature, a subtle stylist and a good musician. But he had a despotic character, which is why Blok’s mother left her husband before the birth of her son.
Blok spent his childhood in an atmosphere of literary interests, which early awakened in him a craving for poetry. At the age of five, Blok began writing poetry. But a serious turn to poetic creativity dates back to the years when the poet graduated from high school.
Blok's lyrics are unique. With all the variety of themes and means of expression, it appears before the reader as a single whole, as a reflection of the “path” traveled by the poet. Blok himself pointed out this feature of his work. A. A. Blok went through a difficult creative path. From symbolist, romantic poems - to an appeal to real revolutionary reality. Many contemporaries and even former friends of Blok, having fled from revolutionary reality abroad, shouted that the poet had sold out to the Bolsheviks. But that was not the case. The bloc suffered from the revolution, but was also able to understand that the time of change was inevitable. The poet felt life very sensitively and showed interest in the fate of his native country and the Russian people.
For Blok, love is the main theme of his creativity, be it love for a woman or for Russia. The poet's early work is distinguished by religious dreams. The cycle of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” is filled with anxiety and a feeling of an approaching catastrophe. The poet yearned for the ideal woman. Blok's poems are dedicated to his future wife, D. I. Mendeleeva. Here are the lines from the poem “I enter dark temples...”:
I enter dark temples,
I perform a poor ritual.
There I am waiting for the Beautiful Lady
In the flickering red lamps.
In the shadow of a tall column
I'm shaking from the creaking of the doors.
And he looks into my face, illuminated,
Only an image, only a dream about Her.
The poet’s love for his future wife in “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” was combined with a passion for the philosophical ideas of V. S. Solovyov. The philosopher's teaching about the existence of the Great Feminine, the Soul of the World, turned out to be closest to the poet. Inextricably linked with the Great Feminine is the idea of saving the world through its spiritual renewal. The poet was especially struck by the philosopher’s idea that love for the world is revealed through love for a woman.
In “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” the ideas of dual worlds, which are a combination of the spiritual and the material, are embodied through a system of symbols. The appearance of the heroine of this cycle is ambiguous. On the one hand, this is a very real woman:
She is slim and tall
Always arrogant and harsh.
On the other hand, this is a mystical image.
The same applies to the hero.
Blok's story of earthly love is embodied in a romantic symbolic myth. “Earthly” (lyrical hero) is contrasted with “heavenly” (Beautiful Lady), there is a desire for their reunion, thanks to which complete harmony should come.
But over time, Blok’s poetic orientation changed. The poet understood that when there is hunger and devastation, struggle and death around, one cannot go to “other worlds.” And then life burst into the poet’s work in all its diversity. The theme of the people and the intelligentsia appears in Blok's poetry. For example, the poem “Stranger” shows the collision of a beautiful dream with reality:
And slowly, walking between the drunken,
Always without companions, alone,
Breathing spirits and mists,
She sits by the window.
Blok wrote in his diary: “She is a certain ideal of beauty, capable, perhaps, of re-creating life, of expelling from it everything ugly and bad.” Duality - the contact between an ideal image and a repulsive reality - is reflected in this poem. This was even reflected in the two-part composition of the work. The first part is filled with anticipation of a dream, an ideal image of the Stranger:
And every evening my only friend
Reflected in my glass...
But the meeting place with the ideal is the tavern. And the author skillfully escalates the situation, preparing the reader for the appearance of the Stranger. The appearance of the Stranger in the second part of the poem temporarily transforms reality for the hero. The poem “Stranger” reveals the image of the lyrical hero in a surprisingly psychological way. The change in his states is very important for Blok. Love for the homeland is clearly manifested in Blok’s poetry. Blok’s love for his native country clearly echoes his deep feeling for a woman:
Oh, my Rus'! My wife! To the point of pain
We have a long way to go!
Blok sought to continue the traditions of Russian classical literature and saw his task as serving the people. In the poem “Autumn Will” Lermontov's traditions are visible. M. Yu. Lermontov in his poem “Motherland” called love for the fatherland “strange”; the path for the poet was not “glory bought with blood”, but “the cold silence of the steppes”, “the trembling lights of sad villages”. The same is the love of Blok:
I will cry over the sadness of your fields,
I will love your space forever...
Blok's attitude towards his homeland is more personal, intimate, like his love for a woman. It is not for nothing that in this poem Rus' appears before the reader in the form of a woman:
And far, far away it waves invitingly
Your patterned, your colored sleeve
In the poem “Rus,” the homeland is a mystery. And the solution to the mystery lies in the soul of the people. The motif of a terrible world is reflected in Blok’s poetry. The hopelessness of life is most clearly manifested in the well-known poem “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy...”:
Night, street, lantern, pharmacy,
Pointless and dim light.
Live for at least another quarter of a century -
Everything will be like this. There is no outcome.
If you die, you'll start over again,
And everything will repeat itself as before:
Night, icy ripples of the channel,
Pharmacy, street, lamp.
The fatal cycle of life, its hopelessness are surprisingly clearly and simply reflected in this poem.
Blok's poems are tragic in many ways. But the time that gave birth to them was tragic. But the essence of creativity, according to the poet himself, is in serving the future. In his last poem, “To Pushkin’s House,” Blok speaks about this again:
Skipping the days of oppression
A short-term deception
We saw the days to come
Blue-pink fog.
To understand the poet’s work, the image of his lyrical hero is in many ways important. After all, as we know, people reflect themselves in their works.
In the poem “Factory” we see the symbolist poet’s appeal to reality, to social themes. But reality correlates with symbolic philosophy, the lyrical hero’s awareness of his place in life. Three images can be distinguished in the poem: a crowd of people gathered at the gate; a mystical character (“motionless someone, black someone”) and a lyrical hero who says: “I see everything from my top...”. This is typical of Blok’s work: to see everything “from the top,” but at the same time the poet himself acutely felt life in all its diversity and even in its tragedy.