A. A. Fet’s fame in Russian literature was due to his poetry. Moreover, in the reader’s consciousness he has long been perceived as a central figure in the field of Russian classical poetry. Central from a chronological point of view: between the elegiac experiences of the romantics of the early 19th century and the Silver Age (in the famous annual reviews of Russian literature, which V. G. Belinsky published in the early 1840s, the name of Fet stands 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 corresponds to the highest degree with our ideas about the very phenomenon of lyricism. One could call Fet the most “lyrical lyricist” of the 19th century.
One of the first subtle connoisseurs of 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 magazine publications of the 1840s and, most importantly, in his subsequent collections of poems - 1850, 1856. The publisher of the first of them, Fet's friend the poet Apollon Grigoriev, wrote in his review about Fet's originality as a subjective poet, a poet of 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 does not gravitate toward descriptive characteristics or rationalism; on the contrary, he 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..." The 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 that defines the persistent desire, the internal state of the 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, touches, 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 of an amazingly 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 outside the poet’s attention! This is the impression Fet strives for. His poetic self-recommendation is eloquent: “nature’s idle spy.” In other words, the beauty of the natural world does not require effort to identify it; it is infinitely rich and seems to come to meet people halfway.
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 to a greater extent not by visual, but by other types of figurative perception: auditory, olfactory, tactile.
Here is his poem entitled " Bees»:
I will disappear from melancholy and laziness,
Lonely life is not 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 that are quite far from each other; here they are combined into a single complex. “Heart” echoes “longing”, but in contrast to the high elegiac tradition, here the heart “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. The title comes to mind - and the main thing in this poem is determined: a feeling, a state of spring bliss that is difficult to convey in words, “vague spiritual impulses that 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! The transparent air is 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 of the external 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 belongs 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 Fet's real biography there were 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 desire to “turn away” from the everyday, from sorrow that did not contribute to inspiration, “so that at least for a moment he could breathe clean and free.” the air of poetry." And despite the fact that the late Fet wrote many poems of both a sad-elegiac and philosophical-tragic nature, 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 accurate, loving knowledge of nature and the ability to use it in artistic creativity, perhaps only I. S. Turgenev can be ranked next to Fet. And this, as we have already noted, is nature, inseparable from the spiritual world of the hero. She discovers her beauty in his perception, and through 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 shapes 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 of 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, ideal place in the world, where an organic meeting between man and nature takes place. 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 a single world of Fet’s lyrics. It is no coincidence that the poet was so drawn to combining his lyrical works into cycles (“Snow”, “Fortune-telling”, “Melodies”, “Sea”, “Spring” and many others), in which each poem, each image was especially actively enriched thanks to associative connections with neighbors.
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.
R.G. Magina
Literary position of A.A. Feta is well known. In modern literary criticism, the position of the romantic nature of his lyrics, the one-sidedness of the themes of his poetry, and the poet’s disposition to perceive only the beautiful has been proven.
This last feature determined Fet’s aestheticism, and it determined, in our opinion, the main features of the romantic style of his lyrics.
Like spring day, your face appeared in a dream again, -
I greet the beauty of my acquaintance, And on the waves of a caressing word
I will carry your lovely image...
A characteristic feature of Fetov's intonation - its simultaneous nakedness and restraint - is due to the immutability of the character of the lyrical hero of his poems, based on a pronounced subjective perception of reality, on the conviction of the autonomy of art and the unacceptability of prosaic earthly life for the poet.
Romantic detailing, its fragmentation, some pretentiousness and pretentiousness create a stylistic correspondence between Fet’s extreme philosophical subjectivism and the poetic embodiment of this subjectivism. This happens for two reasons: firstly, Fet’s romantic detail is never dispassionate. This rule, almost obligatory for all romantics, manifests itself especially clearly in Fet’s lyrics. He plays with words, finding shades, colors, sounds in their unusual perspective, in an unexpected, sometimes paradoxical semantic relationship (singing torment, suffering of bliss, insanely happy grief) and does it on purpose.
Secondly, Fet’s romantic detail always carries a subjective-evaluative element, and its varieties should be determined by the following characteristics: traditional and unconventional, figurative concreteness and abstractness. Of course, the presence of non-traditional abstract and concrete figurative details in romantic poetry is not yet proof of the originality and uniqueness of poetic creativity. The whole question is what is the relationship between traditionality and unconventionality of a romantic detail and how, in what individual manner, non-traditional verbal and visual means are used in the context of a poetic work, in what way the word is connected in the context of the poem with the general poetic worldview of the author, with the main poetic intonation works and all creativity in general.
It is known that Fet was a subtle observer, able to record transitional moments in the life of nature, its halftones, complex interweavings of shades, colors, and sounds. Researchers have long paid attention to this, sometimes calling Fet, in connection with such an individual manner, “a poet-impressionist, first of all, a poet of subtle hints, barely audible sounds and barely noticeable shades. In this he is a direct predecessor of the decadents and symbolists.” And, as D.D. rightly points out. Blagoy, “already almost from the very beginning, from the 40s, Fet’s romanticism - his poetry, capable of capturing ... subtly musical impressions, unsteady mental movements in their, as in the nature surrounding man, “trembling”, “trembling” ”, the living dynamics of the play of colors and sounds, “magical changes in a sweet face”, “incessant fluctuations”, “transitions, shades”, the dialectical combination of opposites - was painted with features that much later received the name “impressionism”.
No, don't expect a passionate song. These sounds are unclear nonsense,
The languid ringing of strings; But, full of sad torment,
These sounds evoke
Sweet dreams. They swooped down in a ringing swarm, swooped in and sang
In the bright heights. Like a child I listen to them,
I don’t know what was reflected in them.
And I don’t need...
Fet’s entire universe, as if in focus, focused on the consciousness of his “I” and on the desire to find the necessary verbal embodiment of such a perception of reality.
Another feature of his poetry follows from Fet’s general romantic concept: a sublime romantic detail in the context of one work is adjacent to a prosaic detail and, moreover, to a realistically convincing detail. This feature is a consequence of the fact that Fet does not turn away from the real world, he only selectively extracts from it the impressions he needs:
Sleep - it's still dawn
It's cold and early;
Stars behind the mountain
They sparkle in the fog;
Roosters recently
They sang for the third time,
Smoothly from the bell tower
The sounds flew by...
Brilliant misty stars and floating gentle sounds of a bell (details that are clearly romantic) stand in the context of the poem next to the recently crowed roosters. True, Fet’s roosters “crow,” but the realistic coloring of this detail is nevertheless obvious. As a result of this, a lexical inconsistency is created, which determines the unique style of Fetov’s lyrics and at the same time significantly expands the semantic possibilities of Russian romantic lyrics of the 19th century.
Fet's lyrics in style and intonation remained fundamentally within the Russian romanticism of the mid-19th century, although there is a significant feature of the expression of lyrical feeling in it, which brings Fet closer to the poetry of the early 20th century: this is a combination of concepts of various logical series in a single phrase (for example , from Blok: “...There the face was covered in a multi-colored lie”, “A harlequin laughed at the thoughtful door”, “The queen has blue riddles”; from Bryusov: “On the furious swell of the moment we are two”, “the silent cry of desire of a prisoner.. .").
Fet uses this technique more widely and boldly than the Symbolists, and a classic example of this is the poem “To the Singer”:
Take my heart into the ringing distance,
Where, like a month behind the grove, there is sadness;
In these sounds your hot tears
The smile of love shines gently...
This poem, in our opinion, most fully reflected the author’s individual poetic style, all the most characteristic features of his lyrics: the apotheosis of the personality and subjective author’s consciousness, the reflection of the impressions of the objective world in an absolutized idealistic romantic hero; extensive use of evaluative romantic details, strong impressionistic overtones and, finally, the combination of concepts of various logical series in a single phrase (ringing distance, invisible swells, silvery path, a burning voice, a rush of pearls, gentle sadness). The metrical pattern of the verse, strictly and to the end, determines from the very beginning the given intonation of the poem written in anapest. Fet generally widely used the anapest with its rising intonation (“Everything around is colorful and noisy”, “The shaggy branches of the pine trees are frayed from the storm”, “I won’t tell you anything”, “He wanted my madness”, “They forbade you to go out”, “Evening”, “From the lights, from the merciless crowd”, etc.).
The poem “Incense Night, Blessed Night” is another example typical of Fet’s lyrics, repeating in many ways the style of the poem “The Singer”: the same strict alternation of tetrameter and trimeter anapest with only masculine endings, the same classical quatrains and an even more noticeable impressionistic subtext:
Fragrant night, blessed night,
The irritation of an ailing soul!
Everyone would listen to you - and I can’t bear to remain silent
In the silence that speaks so clearly...
In this poem, against a traditional romantic background (azure heights, unblinking stars, impenetrable shadow of branches, sparkling spring, whisper of streams), semantic turns characteristic only of Fet sound: the moon looks straight in the face, and it is burning; the night, filled with beauty, turns silver, and everything around burns and rings. Sound and visually tangible details are combined in one general presentation, in one almost fantastic picture. It appears in vague, vague outlines just at the moment when the concept of “impossible dream” appears in the poem:
It’s as if everything is burning and ringing at the same time,
To help an impossible dream;
As if, trembling slightly, a window will open
Look into the silvery night.
The idea (or dream) of a window opening in the silvery night is associated with dreams of love. Thus, thanks to a chain of associative details that arise in the human mind, Fet creates the lyrical subtext of the poem, reflecting a complex state of mind in which the life of nature and the movement of human thought merge into a single stream of lyrical consciousness.
Using details of the external world, which at first glance cannot be connected into one logical series, Fet often comes to unexpected associative connections, deliberately emphasizing this in his poems, easily moving from an object to an abstract concept, sometimes not connected in any way. It is important for the poet, first of all, to express his subjective perception, albeit illogical, poorly explained and fragmentarily reproduced:
I stood motionless for a long time
Peering into the distant stars,
Between those stars and me
Some kind of connection was born.
I thought... I don’t remember what I thought;
I listened to a mysterious choir
And the stars quietly trembled,
And I have loved the stars ever since...
There are five personal pronouns in the eight lines of this poem; four of them are 1st person pronouns. case - form a single semantic series with an intensifying sound from the first to the last phrase: I stood, I thought, I listened, I love . This gives a special confidence to the intonation and emphasizes the romantic subjectivity of the entire poem.
The subjectivity and illogicality of the narrative determine another feature of Fet’s poetry - its fragmentation. The fragmentary nature of the narrative, as a rule, was only stated by researchers and reproached by Fet without any attempt to explain this phenomenon or find its roots. Moreover, many parodies of the poet’s poems focused attention precisely on this feature of his lyrics, using it as a reason for ridicule and negative critical assessments. Meanwhile, we are convinced that this phenomenon is the author’s intentional position, an orientation towards emphasizing the subjectivity of the narrative, towards a certain universal freedom of lyrical feeling and its reflection in poetry. Fet gives numerous examples of such freedom (from logic, from generally accepted poetic templates, from stable semantic series of words), which Russian symbolists so stubbornly declared after Fet, mainly in theoretical terms. They elevated this freedom to an absolute and, in its extreme manifestations, brought it to the point of absurdity. For Fet, the main thing is to create a sincere intonation in a lyric poem, a poetic mood, an emotional subtext, even on the basis of illogical, absurd information, using it as an almost neutral background, as a faceless building material; the main thing is to create an impression, this is the essence of the expression of feelings in Fet’s lyrics.
B. Ya Bukhshtab notes: “Fet published his first collection in the same year as Lermontov, and the last in the era when the Symbolist movement had already begun. Fet’s long creative path seems to connect the romanticism of Zhukovsky with the romanticism of Blok in the history of Russian poetry.” This connection can be seen quite clearly in the verse forms of Fet’s lyrics.
Fet builds much of the form of poetry based on authoritative poetic canons and traditions of Russian poetry (for example, the stanza of most of his poems is determined by their romance). Nevertheless, Fet's verse variations are quite diverse and interesting in all respects: in the field of rhyme, and in the syntactic structure of the verse, and in stanza, and in sound writing, and especially in metrics. As a rule, it is the meters that determine in Fet the main rhythmic pattern of the verse, its originality. The main difference between the poet’s metrics is the lack of rhythmic uniformity within a particular work. Fet very boldly varies the rhythm by combining and alternating different poetic meters in one verse or in one work. Trisyllabics are the main source of rhythmic variations in verse for the poet. Most of the new forms, first developed by him, are combinations of three-syllables and two-syllables, both in different verses and within a verse, but always within the same work.
Fet wrote a new page in the history of Russian free verse. Essentially, he is its discoverer, since isolated cases of free verse before Fet (Sumarokov, Zhukovsky, Glinka) remain just isolated cases, but after Fet, free verse firmly enters the practice of Russian versification. Fet's free verse has not yet been sufficiently studied, although one of the works devoted to the history of free verse states that “a significant page in the history of free verse in Russia was written by Fet.”
With a relatively small number of free verses, Fet developed a certain characteristic commonality in them, reflected, in our opinion, in the later poetic experiments of Russian poets - he defined for many decades to come the distinctive qualities of Russian free verse as a special form of national verse.
What is the reason for the poet's appeal to free forms? After all, he generally follows traditional syllabic-tonic rhythms quite strictly; Deviation from them is rather an exception to the rule. Free verses most decisively crossed out the traditional clear rhythm and metric, not to mention the musicality of the verse, which was important for Fet.
In our opinion, the most important reason for the appearance of free forms in Fet is the general philosophical nature of his poetry and the resulting desire of the poet to focus on the semantic side of the work (this tendency is very noticeable in works written in free verse). In traditional measured musical verse, he did not always find semantically accurate words - impressionistic uncertainty and understatement got in the way. Philosophy (most often emphasized) and the simultaneous brevity and refinement of poetic thought “fit” so well into the new ametric forms that there is no doubt about their non-accidental appearance in Fet’s poetry.
The form of free verse allowed Fet, first of all, to start from the old verse tradition, and it was in free verse that the philosophical sound of his poetry came to the fore, philosophicality appeared here as if in its pure form, devoid of metrical and musical framing (the poems “I love many things close to my heart”, “At night it’s somehow easier for me to breathe”, “Neptune Leverrier”, etc.).
The poetry of A. Fet completes the development of Russian philosophical and psychological romanticism in the lyric poetry of the 19th century. The undeniable originality of this poetry, the sincerity and depth of lyrical experience, the special bright view of the world captured in the music of the verse - this is the main thing that we value in Fet’s lyrics.
Artistic features. Fet's poetry, although not so broad in subject matter, is unusually rich in various shades of feeling and emotional states. It is unique in its melodic pattern, saturated with endless combinations of colors, sounds, and paints. In his work, the poet anticipates many discoveries of the “Silver Age”. The novelty of his lyrics was already felt by his contemporaries, who noted “the poet’s ability to catch the elusive, to give an image and a name to what before him was nothing more than a vague, fleeting sensation of the human soul, a sensation without an image and a name” (A.V. Druzhinin).
Indeed, Fet's lyrics are characterized by impressionism (from the French impersion - impression). This is a special quality of an artistic style, which is characterized by associative images, the desire to convey primordial impressions, fleeting sensations, “instant snapshots of memory” that form a coherent and psychologically reliable poetic picture. These are, in essence, all of Fet’s poems.
The poet’s words are polyphonic and polysemantic, epithets show not so much direct as indirect signs of the objects to which they relate (“melting violin”, “fragrant speeches”, “silver dreams”). So the epithet “melting” to the word violin conveys not the quality of the musical instrument itself, but the impression of its sounds. The word in Fet's poetry, losing its precise meaning, acquires a special emotional coloring, while the line between direct and figurative meaning, between the external and internal worlds is blurred. Often the entire poem is built on this instability of meanings, on the development of associations (“A fire blazes in the garden with the bright sun…”, “Whisper, timid breathing…”, “The night shone. The garden was full of the moon…”). In the poem “Lounging on the armchair, I look at the ceiling...” a whole series of associations are strung on top of each other: a circle from a lamp on the ceiling, spinning slightly, evokes an association with rooks circling over the garden, which, in turn, evokes memories of parting with a beloved woman .
Such associative thinking, the ability to convey moments of life, fleeting, elusive feelings and moods helped Fet come close to solving the problem of “inexpressibility” in poetic language of the subtlest movements of the human soul, over which Zhukovsky, Lermontov, Tyutchev struggled. Feeling, like them, “how poor our language is,” Fet moves away from words into the element of musicality. Sound becomes the basic unit of his poetry. Composer P.I. Tchaikovsky even called Fet a poet-musician. The poet himself said: “Seeking to recreate harmonic truth, the artist’s soul itself comes into the appropriate musical order. No musical mood - no work of art." The musicality of Fet's lyrics is expressed in the special smoothness and melodiousness of his verse, the variety of rhythms and rhymes, and the art of sound repetition.
We can say that the poet uses musical means to influence the reader. For each poem, Fet finds an individual rhythmic pattern, using unusual combinations of long and short lines (“The garden is all in bloom, / The evening is on fire, / It’s so refreshing and joyful for me!”), sound repetitions based on assonances and consonances (in the poem “ Whisper, timid breathing..." assonances in -a: nightingale - stream - end - face - amber - dawn), various meters, among which three syllables stand out, perfectly fitting into the tradition of romances (“At dawn, don’t wake her up...”, written anapest). It is no coincidence that many of Fet’s poems were set to music.
Fet's artistic discoveries were adopted by the poets of the "Silver Age". Alexander Blok considered him his direct teacher. But it was not immediately that Fet’s unusual, unlike anything else lyrics won the recognition of readers. Having released the first collections of his poems back in the 1840-1850s, Fet left literature for a long time. life and remains known only to a narrow circle of connoisseurs. Interest in him increased at the turn of the century, during a new heyday of Russian poetry. It was then that Fet’s work received its well-deserved appreciation. He was rightfully recognized as the one who, according to Anna Akhmatova, discovered “not a calendar, a real twentieth century” in Russian poetry.
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Goals and objectives of the lesson:
– introduce students to the features of the poetic world of A.A. Fet;
– deepen knowledge about the means of artistic expression; prepare lyceum students for the Unified State Exam in literature (through analysis of poetic text) and the Russian language (task B8 - analysis of means of artistic expression);
– teach high school students
- understand the figurative nature of verbal art,
- reproduce the text (through recitation),
- analyze and interpret poetic works,
- formulate your attitude to what you read,
- compare poetic texts;
– to form a personal attitude towards the statements of critics, writers, composers about the peculiarities of Afanasy Fet’s poetic style,
– to instill in high school students a high artistic taste, to instill a love for Russian classical poetry.
Feature of this lesson– original presentation of material through presentation (slide film: frames 1–29), as well as quotes from famous writers, composers, critics, and modern researchers about the work of A.A. Fet proposed for interpretation. Everyone received individual cards with quotes and questions on the topic of the lesson, were familiarized with the “ready” slide in advance, or created their own version, which was used to illustrate the answer. The students chose their own musical accompaniment for the poetic text.
Lesson plan.
1. Organizational moment. Introduction to the topic, goals and objectives of the lesson (Slide 1)
2. The teacher's word. Everything in Fet’s life and fate is mysterious, enigmatic, inexplicable, paradoxical. Here are a few points that require “solving”:
– secret of birth (exact date unknown):
- 29th of November?
- or October 2?
- or October 29?
- or November 23? 1820?
– mystery of origin (who is the father):
- Johann-Peter-Karl-Wilhelm Feth?
- Afanasy Shenshin?
– the tragic death of a loved one (why did Maria Lazic burn? – versions),
– where did the letter “e” go from the surname Fet? (information about the first publication of A. Fet’s poems)
why, in his student years, Fet received the nickname of the hero of N. Polevoy’s novel “Abadonna” (the hero-poet Reichenbach said: “I have never found agreement in the world and peace between life and poetry”).
I think we will find the answers by discussing and analyzing individual homework.
3. Speeches by students on the proposed issues(Slides 1, 2, 3)
3.1. E.Vinokurov: “His poetry is always overcoming gravity for a minute, it is always a takeoff, a jerk, an attempt to rise and look somewhere.” This is Fetov’s Universe of beauty.
Recitation of a poem followed by text analysis (Slide 4).
Conclusion. “I came to you with greetings...”- A. Fet’s calling card for poetry, as it fully gives us an idea of the lyricist’s views on life (through emotions, subtle changes in the soul, love appeals), on the vocation of a poet (the process of birth of a verse-song).
3.2. V. Baevsky:“The correspondence between the natural world and the human world is strictly maintained. And although there is not a single verb, the poem is full of action.” What poem are we talking about? How does Fet manage to achieve such an effect?
Individual homework: student’s answer on card No. 1
Card No. 1. Writers and readers were divided into fans and opponents of the poet. Leo Tolstoy: “And where does this... officer get such incomprehensible lyrical audacity, a property of great poets?” Saltykov-Shchedrin saw Fet’s poetic world as “cramped, monotonous and limited.” What is your opinion on this matter? Justify it.
Reading, morphological and syntactic analysis of the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” (Slide 5)
Conclusion. The entire text is presented in one sentence; despite the apparent “verblessness”, the reader observes the development of the action. Again there are 3 poetic subjects forming Fetov's Universe of Beauty(Slide3). The concept of “mind” is opposed to the world of feelings, emotions, experiences. We call this new and unusual impressionism of Fet's poetics. Perhaps this is where some critics, writers and poets misunderstand Afanasy Fet’s lyrics. “Whisper, timid breathing...”- a symbol of A. Fet’s poetry.
3.3. E. Vinokurov: “He sought to capture not the movements of love and nature themselves, but the impressions of these movements. His poems created a mood, like impressionist paintings. Basic technique – psychological parallelism. A person’s mood is always in tune with the state of nature.” Individual homework: reading and parsing art. “This morning, this joy.” Slide 7
3.4. Individual homework: recitation of poems “The spruce covered my path with its sleeve...”, “Evening”, “Dawn bids farewell to the earth...” etc. at the students' choice , musical illustration of poetic texts, creation Slides 8, 10, 11.
Conclusion. Nature is a constant source of inspiration, the container of Fetov’s Universe of beauty.
3.5. Musicality is the main feature of the lyrics, as evidenced by the musical background you created for the lyrical miniatures of Afanasy Afanasyevich. Fet believes: “Poetry and music are not only related, but inseparable. All centuries-old poetic works from the prophets to Goethe and Pushkin inclusive are, in essence, musical works—songs.”
Card No. 2. P. I. Tchaikovsky: “Fet is a completely exceptional phenomenon; there is no way to compare him with other first-class or foreign poets... Rather, we can say that Fet, in his best moments, goes beyond the limits indicated by poetry and boldly takes a step to our region. Therefore, Fet often reminds me of Beethoven “..." He is not just a poet, but rather a poet-musician.” Give examples of the “musicality” of Fet’s poetry.
Recitation of poems to music.
Card No. 3. Fet admitted: “The poet is a crazy and worthless person, babbling divine nonsense.” Try to confirm or refute these words of the poet with the help of his own poetic lines. Individual homework.
4. Preparation for the Unified State Exam in Russian language (element of integration of humanitarian disciplines) Part B, task No. 8(analysis of means of artistic expression in the texts of A.A. Fet).
Valery Bryusov urged: “Believe in the sound of words: // The meaning of the secrets is in them.” (Slides 15, 16). In Y. Belinsky’s article “Fet’s Bee” we read: “She flew out of the hive more than a century ago. Great events took place in the world during this time “...” But we also clearly hear now the golden buzz of this ever-living bee.” What artistic means helped Fet achieve this effect? What “sound mysteries” were you able to unravel after reading and analyzing A.A. Fet’s poem “Bee”?
4.1.Whole class assignment: phonetic text analysis.
Conclusion. The sound organization of the poem “Bee” helps the author find a special artistic expression; sound writing in a text is not just a “decoration”, but a “bundle of meanings”, a way of conveying feelings and emotions.
4.2. Love is like a fatal duel. Phonogram (backing track “Don’t wake her up at dawn...”, romance performed by a student). Slides 17, 18.
E. Vinokurov: “The drama of life from within, like an underground spring, fed his lyrics.” Excerpt from presentation “Letters – windows into poetic souls” (The student who prepared the presentation talks about Maria Lazic, Fet’s tragic love. Musical accompaniment: C. Debussy “Reflection in Water” ).
4.3. Preparation for the Unified State Exam. Part B. task No. 8 (analysis of means of artistic expression in the text, continuation of work).
Card No. 4 Fet wrote: “A poet is one who sees in an object something that no one else would see without his help.” What did you manage to “see” in Afanasy Fet’s poem “Willow”? Slides 19, 20
Exploration of the “hidden” possibilities of Fet’s verse. Slide 21.
5. Features of Fet’s poetic world. Poems as a Divine Gift. Slide 22.
“How poor our language is! // I want and I can’t - // I can’t convey this to either friend or enemy, // What is raging in my chest like a transparent wave...” - admits Afanasy Fet. What should a poet do in this case? He turns to heaven for help... And suddenly the soul begins to “speak” for the poet!
5.1. Reading a poem "Ave Maria"
The soul of the poet, having heard the Divine sounds, transfers them to paper - this is how truly brilliant lines are born.
5.2.Task : sound research, study of the rhythmic pattern of Fetov's text ( Art. “Ave Maria”). Slides 22, 23, 24.
Conclusion. Fet’s “whisper” sounds thinner and more penetrating than ordinary speech, which means it is perceived more sharply; only a sensitive reader’s ear can catch the Divine overflows. This feature of Fetov’s poetics is noticed by the critic Yu. Aikhenvald. In the article “Fet” he calls the lyrics “the whisper of Russian poetry”
5.3. Phonogram “Franciscan monks” and reading of a poem by A. Fet “The Lord is not so powerful, he is incomprehensible...”. Slides 25, 26.
Conclusion. The poem sounds majestic and monumental, because it is the Divine fire that burns in the soul of the Poet with a capital P.
6. Summarizing. I listen to students’ answers to the question: what is unique about Fet’s lyrics?
Conclusion. Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet had an unusual, even original poetic credo: “Whoever is not able to throw himself headfirst from the seventh floor with an unshakable belief that he will soar through the air is not a lyricist.”. Faith in God and Love for everything that God gave to planet Earth - these are the wings of Inspiration that help Afanasy Fet soar above the everyday bustle, escape from everyday life, see the beauty of the world and convey his impressions of unique and bright moments to us, descendants, through years, centuries, time...
This is him, our fellow countryman, woven from paradoxes and contradictions, but who gave the world pure, special and, perhaps, that’s why such paradoxically beautiful art!
7. Reflection. Slide 27.
Homework. Written analysis of the poetic text of A.A. Fet (at the students' choice).
Additional Information. The presentation uses photographic materials from the Internet resource. I thank all the authors of photographs for these materials.
The work of Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820 - 1892) is one of the pinnacles of Russian poetry. Fet is a great poet, a genius poet. Now there is not a person in Russia who does not know Fet’s poems. Well, at least “I came to you with greetings” or “Don’t wake her up at dawn...” At the same time, many have no real idea of the scale of this poet. The idea of Fet is distorted, even starting with his appearance. Someone maliciously constantly replicates those portraits of Fet that were made during his dying illness, where his face is terribly distorted, his eyes are swollen - an old man in a state of agony. Meanwhile, Fet, as can be seen from the portraits made during his heyday, both human and poetic, was the most beautiful of the Russian poets.
The drama is connected with the mystery of Fet's birth. In the fall of 1820, his father Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin took the wife of the official Karl Feth from Germany to his family estate. A month later the child was born and was registered as the son of A.N. Shenshina. The illegality of this recording was discovered when the boy was 14 years old. He received the surname Fet and in documents began to be called the son of a foreign subject. A. A. Fet spent a lot of effort trying to return the name of Shenshin and the rights of a hereditary nobleman. The mystery of his birth has not yet been fully solved. If he is the son of Fet, then his father I. Fet was the great-uncle of the last Russian empress.
Fet's life is also mysterious. They say about him that in life he was much more prosaic than in poetry. But this is due to the fact that he was a wonderful owner. Wrote a small volume of articles on economics. From a ruined estate he managed to create a model farm with a magnificent stud farm. And even in Moscow on Plyushchikha, in his house there was a vegetable garden and a greenhouse; in January, vegetables and fruits ripened, which the poet loved to treat his guests to.
In this regard, they like to talk about Fet as a prosaic person. But in fact, his origin is mysterious and romantic, and his death is mysterious: this death was and was not suicide. Fet, tormented by illness, finally decided to commit suicide. He sent his wife away, left a suicide note, and grabbed a knife. The secretary prevented him from using it. And the poet died - died of shock.
The biography of a poet is, first of all, his poems. Fet's poetry is multifaceted, its main genre is the lyric poem. Classical genres include elegies, thoughts, ballads, and epistles. “Melodies” - poems that represent a response to musical impressions - can be considered as the “original Fetov genre”.
One of Fet’s early and most popular poems is “I came to you with greetings”:
I came to you with greetings,
Tell me that the sun has risen, that it is a hot light
The sheets began to flutter;
Tell me that the forest has woken up,
All woke up, every branch,
Every bird was startled
And full of thirst in spring...
The poem is written on the theme of love. The theme is old, eternal, and Fet’s poems emanate freshness and novelty. It doesn't look like anything we know. This is generally characteristic of Fet and corresponds to his conscious poetic attitudes. Fet wrote: “Poetry certainly requires novelty, and for it there is nothing more deadly than repetition, and especially oneself... By novelty I do not mean new objects, but their new illumination by the magic lantern of art.”
The very beginning of the poem is unusual - unusual in comparison with the then accepted norm in poetry. In particular, the Pushkin norm, which required extreme precision in words and in combinations of words. Meanwhile, the initial phrase of Fetov’s poem is not at all accurate and not even entirely “correct”: “I came to you with greetings, to tell you...”. Would Pushkin or any of the poets of Pushkin’s time allow himself to say so? At that time, these lines were seen as poetic audacity. Fet was aware of the inaccuracy of his poetic word, its closeness to living, sometimes seeming not entirely correct, but that made it especially bright and expressive speech. He called his poems jokingly (but not without pride) poems “in a disheveled manner.” But what is the artistic meaning in poetry of the “disheveled kind”?
Inaccurate words and seemingly sloppy, “disheveled” expressions in Fet’s poems create not only unexpected, but also bright, exciting images. One gets the impression that the poet doesn’t seem to deliberately think about the words; they came to him on their own. He speaks with the very first, unintentional words. The poem is distinguished by its amazing integrity. This is an important virtue in poetry. Fet wrote: “The task of a lyricist is not in the harmony of the reproduction of objects, but in the harmony of tone.” In this poem there is both harmony of objects and harmony of tone. Everything in the poem is internally connected to each other, everything is unidirectional, it is said in a single impulse of feeling, as if in one breath.
Another early poem is the lyrical play “Whisper, timid breathing...”:
Whisper, timid breathing,
The trill of a nightingale,
Silver and sway
Sleepy stream,
Night light, night shadows,
Endless shadows
A series of magical changes
Sweet face...
The poem was written in the late 40s. It is built on nominative sentences alone. Not a single verb. Only objects and phenomena that are named one after another: whispers - timid breathing - trills of a nightingale, etc.
But despite all this, the poem cannot be called objective and material. This is the most amazing and unexpected thing. Fet's objects are non-objective. They do not exist on their own, but as signs of feelings and states. They glow a little, flicker. By naming this or that thing, the poet evokes in the reader not a direct idea of the thing itself, but those associations that can usually be associated with it. The main semantic field of a poem is between the words, behind the words.
“Behind the Words” the main theme of the poem develops: feelings of love. The most subtle feeling, inexpressible in words, inexpressibly strong, No one had ever written about love like this before Fet.
Fet liked the reality of life, and this was reflected in his poems. Nevertheless, it is difficult to call Fet simply a realist, noting how in poetry he gravitates toward dreams, dreams, and intuitive movements of the soul. Fet wrote about the beauty diffused in all the diversity of reality. Aesthetic realism in Fet's poems in the 40s and 50s was really aimed at the everyday and the most ordinary.
The character and tension of Fet's lyrical experience depend on the state of nature. The change of seasons occurs in a circle - from spring to spring. Fet’s feelings move in the same kind of circle: not from the past to the future, but from spring to spring, with its necessary, inevitable return. In the collection (1850), the cycle “Snow” is given first place. Fet's winter cycle is multi-motive: he sings about a sad birch tree in winter clothing, about how “the night is bright, the frost shines,” and “the frost has drawn patterns on the double glass.” Snowy plains attract the poet:
Wonderful picture
How dear you are to me:
White plain,
Full moon,
The light of the high heavens,
And shining snow
And distant sleighs
Lonely running.
Fet confesses his love for the winter landscape. In Fet's poems, shining winter prevails, in the brilliance of the prickly sun, in the diamonds of snowflakes and snow sparks, in the crystal of icicles, in the silvery fluff of frosty eyelashes. The associative series in this lyric does not go beyond the boundaries of nature itself; here is its own beauty, which does not need human spirituality. Rather, it itself spiritualizes and enlightens the personality. It was Fet, following Pushkin, who sang the Russian winter, only he managed to reveal its aesthetic meaning in such a multifaceted way. Fet introduced rural landscapes and scenes of folk life into his poems; he appeared in his poems as “a bearded grandfather,” he “groans and crosses himself,” or a daring coachman in a troika.
Fet was always attracted to the poetic theme of evening and night. The poet early developed a special aesthetic attitude towards the night and the onset of darkness. At the new stage of his creativity, he already began to call entire collections “Evening Lights”, they seem to contain a special, Fetov philosophy of the night.
Fet’s “night poetry” reveals a complex of associations: night - abyss - shadows - sleep - visions - secret, intimate - love - the unity of the “night soul” of a person with the night element. This image receives philosophical deepening and a new second meaning in his poems; in the content of the poem a symbolic second plane appears. His association “night-abyss” takes on a philosophical and poetic perspective. She begins to get closer to human life. The abyss is an airy road - the path of human life.
MAY NIGHT
Lagging clouds fly over us
The last crowd.
Their transparent segment softly melts
At the crescent moon
A mysterious power reigns in spring
With stars on the forehead. -
You, tender! You promised me happiness
On a vain land.
Where is the happiness? Not here, in a wretched environment,
And there it is - like smoke
Follow him! follow him! by air -
And we'll fly away into eternity.
The May night promises happiness, a person flies through life in pursuit of happiness, the night is an abyss, a person flies into the abyss, into eternity.
Further development of this association: night - human existence - the essence of being.
Fet imagines the night hours as revealing the secrets of the universe. The poet's nocturnal insight allows him to look "from time to eternity", he sees the "living altar of the universe."
Tolstoy wrote to Fet: “The poem is one of those rare ones in which no words can be added, subtracted or changed; it is alive in itself and charming. It is so good that, it seems to me, this is not a random poem, but that this is the first stream of a long-delayed stream ".
The association night - abyss - human existence, developing in Fet's poetry, absorbs the ideas of Schopenhauer. However, the closeness of the poet Fet to the philosopher is very conditional and relative. The ideas of the world as a representation, man as a contemplator of existence, thoughts about intuitive insights, apparently, were close to Fet.
The idea of death is woven into the figurative association of Fet’s poems about the night and human existence (the poem “Sleep and Death,” written in 1858). Sleep is full of the bustle of the day, death is full of majestic peace. Fet gives preference to death, draws its image as the embodiment of a peculiar beauty.
In general, Fet’s “night poetry” is deeply unique. His night is as beautiful as the day, maybe even more beautiful. Fetov's night is full of life, the poet feels the "breath of the immaculate night." Fetov's night gives a person happiness:
What a night! The transparent air is constrained;
The aroma swirls above the ground.
Oh now I'm happy, I'm excited
Oh, now I'm glad to speak! ...
Fet's nocturnal nature and man are full of expectation of the innermost, which turns out to be accessible to all living things only at night. Night, love, communication with the elemental life of the universe, knowledge of happiness and higher truths in his poems, as a rule, are combined.
Fet's work represents the apotheosis of the night. For Feta the philosopher, night represents the basis of world existence, it is the source of life and the keeper of the secret of “double existence”, the kinship of man with the universe, for him it is the knot of all living and spiritual connections.
Now Fet can no longer be called just a poet of sensations. His contemplation of nature is full of philosophical profundity, his poetic insights are aimed at discovering the secrets of existence.
Poetry was the main work of Fet’s life, a calling to which he gave everything: soul, vigilance, sophistication of hearing, wealth of imagination, depth of mind, skill of hard work and inspiration.
In 1889, Strakhov wrote in the article “Anniversary of Fet’s Poetry”: “He is the only poet of his kind, incomparable, giving us the purest and truest poetic delight, true diamonds of poetry... Fet is a true touchstone for the ability to understand poetry...”