18. Tyutchev, fet, toast.
Let's highlight them common features:
Unity of aesthetic views;
Common themes: love, nature, philosophical understanding of life;
The type of lyrical talent: psychological depth, subtlety of feeling, grace of style, refinement of language, ultra-sensitive artistic perception of nature.
Poets of “pure art” are characterized by high culture, admiration for perfect examples of classical sculpture, painting, music, increased interest in the art of Ancient Greece and Rome, a romantic craving for the ideal of beauty, and a desire to join the “other,” sublime world.
The highest achievement of F. I. Tyutchev’s love lyrics is the so-called “Denisevsky cycle,” dedicated to the love experienced by the poet “in his declining years” for Elena Alexandrovna Denisyeva. This amazing lyrical romance lasted 14 years, ending with Denisyeva’s death from consumption in 1864. Love in Tyutchev's view is a secret, the highest gift of fate. It's exciting, whimsical and out of control. A vague attraction lurking in the depths of the soul suddenly breaks through with an explosion of passion. Tenderness and self-sacrifice can unexpectedly turn into a “fatal duel” (“Predestination” 1950.
Love, love - says the legend -
Union of the soul with the dear soul -
Their union, combination,
And their fatal merger,
And... the fatal duel...
However, such a metamorphosis is still not capable of killing love; moreover, a suffering person does not want to get rid of the torments of love, for it gives him a fullness and acuteness of perception of the world.
Even the death of a loved one cannot rid a person of this all-consuming feeling, forcing him to relive again and again, already in memories, unique moments of happiness, tinged with suffering.
A. A. Fet's love lyrics are also inseparable from his fate, his personal drama, which explains the fact that in all his poems, sometimes growing stronger and sometimes weaker, a “desperate, sobbing note” sounds. Fet met Maria Lazich, the daughter of a poor Kherson landowner. They fell in love with each other, but the future poet did not dare to marry the girl, since he did not have sufficient funds. In 1851, Maria died: she was burned by a carelessly thrown match. It was even suggested that it was suicide. In any case, A. Fet could not forget Maria until the end of his days, experiencing a bitter feeling of guilt and remorse. Many of the poet’s poems are dedicated to her: “Old Letters”, “Still Eyes, Crazy Eyes”, “A ray of sun between the linden trees...”, “For a long time I dreamed of the cries of your sobs” and many others.
In Fet's love poems there is almost always one addressee. He addresses the deceased girl with passionate, excited monologues, full of confusion and remorse. In these poems, filled with passion and despair, the poet’s refusal to come to terms with eternal separation and the death of his beloved is heard. Here even “non-existence” is felt by him as something positive, as an inextricable connection with her.
In the winter of 1851, at a masquerade at the Bolshoi Theater A.K. Tolstoy met Sofya Andreevna Miller, an extraordinary woman, intelligent, strong-willed, well-educated (she knew 14 languages). He fell passionately in love, his love did not go unanswered, but they could not unite - she was married, albeit unsuccessfully. After 13 years, they were finally able to get married, and their marriage turned out to be happy. During these years, two-thirds of his lyric poems were born, which were published in almost all Russian magazines of that time. However, his love poems are marked by deep sadness. Where does it come from in the lines created by a happy lover? In his poems on this topic, as Vladimir Solovyov noted, only the ideal side of love is expressed: “Love is a concentrated expression of the universal connection and the highest meaning of existence; in order to be true to this meaning, it must be one, eternal and inseparable.”
But the conditions of earthly existence are far from corresponding to this highest concept of love; the poet is unable to reconcile this contradiction, but he also does not want to give up his idealism, in which there is the highest truth. ("Oh, don't rush there...")
Landscape lyrics:
The landscape is presented by the poet in dynamics and movement. Moreover, the dialectics of natural phenomena reflects the mysterious movements of the human soul. Concretely visible signs of the external world give rise to a subjective impression. For example, in a poem depicting the onset of autumn, the poet very accurately conveys the mood of light sadness, the idea of the transience and beauty of life .("There is in the primordial autumn"). Describing pictures of nature, Tyutchev creates not poetic natures, but “landscapes in verse,” because his visual images are imbued with thought, feeling, mood, and experience (“ The gray shadows mixed together...” In Tyutchev’s work, landscape lyrics are so closely intertwined with his philosophical thoughts about life that these main motives of his poetry should be considered in their inextricable, organic unity. Tyutchev’s philosophical depth of comprehension of existence is combined with a greedy interest in specific historical events, which he calls “high spectacles", with an attempt to unravel their meaning, to understand the patterns of development of human society. In a poem "Insomnia" reflects the depressed mood of the poet, who clearly hears the movement of world history, in which he feels like “a fragment of old generations.” However, Tyutchev could suppress the attacks of melancholy and doom in himself, and find the strength to joyfully welcome young life. His poetry is optimistic; she affirms a wonderful future, in which a new, happiest tribe will live, for which the sun of freedom “will warm more alive and hotter.” The poet’s entire worldview reflects love and thirst for life, embodied in jubilant lines "Spring Thunderstorm" And " Spring Waters".
A. Fet, like F. Tyutchev, reached brilliant artistic heights in landscape lyricism, becoming a recognized singer of nature. Here his amazing visual acuity, loving, reverent attention to the smallest details of his native landscapes, and their unique, individual perception were revealed.
A.K. Tolstoy very subtly grasped Fetov’s unique quality - the ability to convey natural sensations in their organic unity, when “the smell turns into the color of mother-of-pearl, into the glow of a firefly, and moonlight or a ray of dawn shimmers into sound.” Fet's sense of nature is universal, for he has the richest capabilities of poetic "hearing" and "vision". Examples of such a polyphonic perception of nature can be found in his poems such as “The First Furrow”, “By the Fireplace”, “A Swan Above the Lake...”, “What an Evening!” and many others. Fet's landscape lyrics, like Tyutchev's, are inseparable from the human personality, his dreams, aspirations and impulses. His poem “Swallows” is typical in this regard. His landscape lyrics contain many of the smallest details of the real life of nature, which correspond to the most diverse manifestations of the emotional experiences of the lyrical hero. For example, in the poem “It’s Still a May Night,” the charm of a spring night gives rise to a state of excitement, expectation, longing, and involuntary expression of feelings in the hero. Philosophical thoughts occupy a significant place in A. Fet's lyrics. These are thoughts about the frailty of man, about his fear of the inexplicable mystery of death ("Death").In the poem "Among the Stars", also related to Fet’s philosophical lyrics, the picture of the endless sky makes the lyrical hero feel like a grain of sand, whose life is only a moment compared to the eternal existence of the stars.
According to Solovyov:
Alexei Tolstoy, like F.I. Tyutchev, is one of the poet-thinkers; but unlike Tyutchev - a poet of exclusively contemplative thought - gr. A.K. Tolstoy was a poet of militant thought - a poet-fighter. This gentle, subtle man, with all the power of his talent, glorified, in prose and poetry, his ideal. Not limiting himself to a calm reflection of what came from the “land of rays,” his work was also determined by movements of the will and heart, and a reaction to hostile phenomena. And he considered hostile that which denied or insulted the highest meaning of life, the reflection of which is beauty. Beauty was dear and sacred to him as the radiance of eternal truth and love, as a reflection of the Supreme and Eternal Beauty. And he boldly walked for her against the tide (“Against the tide”)
Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov
"Poetry of A.K. Tolstoy"
Fet’s poems delighted Leo Tolstoy: “And where does this good-natured fat officer get such incomprehensible lyrical audacity, a property of great poets?” One cannot help but feel in his exclamation the emotional excitement caused by Fet’s poetic talent and familiar to everyone who has at least once come into contact with Fet’s muse. It is noteworthy that this statement is in tune with the aesthetic consciousness of the poet himself. “We have always stood and will stand,” Fet wrote, “not only for all courage, but even audacity in the arts, as long as this audacity does not tastelessly and senselessly go beyond the boundaries of art.” In Tolstoy’s words, in addition to admiration, there is also sincere bewilderment: the appearance of a “good-natured fat officer” really does not really agree with the idea of “lyrical audacity.” In this sense, however, Russian poetry and Russian literature in general are a truly unique phenomenon. The combination of life and poetic destinies of Russian writers is often paradoxical. Let us remember Pushkin - chamber cadet of the court of His Imperial Majesty - “the sun of Russian poetry”; Lermontov - guards lieutenant and mournful rebellious lyricist; Tyutchev - an official-diplomat and censor, in whose work sophistication merged with the “powerful dominance of the spirit”; Innokenty Annensky - the zealous director of the gymnasium and the famous forerunner of the Russian symbolists. And Leo Tolstoy himself? - the count, without whom there would be no real man in literature. Afanasy Fet is one of them.
For 72 years - Fet was born in October or November 1820, and died on November 21, 1892 - he sought to achieve a practical life goal - material independence, so that, like other writers, he would not serve anywhere and be provided for, moreover - even the rich, and at the same time he zealously defended and protected the ideal impulses of his soul.) In other words, Fet’s everyday sphere sharply diverged from the sphere of art: in the everyday sphere Fet followed tradition, in the poetic sphere he was on the side of “lyrical audacity” . “As much as in the matter of the liberal arts,” he asserted, “I value reason little in comparison with subconscious instinct (inspiration) ..., so in practical life I demand reasonable foundations, supported by experience.”
Fet called his songs “gifts of life.” In the preface to the third edition of “Evening Lights,” he wrote: “The hardships of life have forced us, for fifty years, from time to time to turn away from them and break through the everyday ice, so that at least for a moment we can breathe the clean and free air of poetry.”
Fet's will, with which he sought a strong place in society, his economic activities and at the same time his desperate contempt for everyday prose, as soon as he touched art, can hardly be explained outside the everyday and spiritual experience of the poet on the basis of the Russian reality of those years. This powerful will was not caused by the ambitious pettiness of nature, but by a conscious principle of social behavior. And to understand its essence, one must delve into its origins, full of drama and even tragedy.
Everyday life dealt Fet blow after blow, and apart from bitter memories, it left nothing in his heart. Fet admitted that from childhood he only endured “the intrigues of the servants, the stupidity of the teachers, the severity of his father, the defenselessness of his mother and training in fear every day.”
As a boy, he learned that he could not bear the name of his father, the retired captain and Oryol landowner Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin, because he married the poet’s mother, Charlotte Fet, after the birth of his son. By becoming an illegitimate child, Fet lost all noble privileges. The parents managed to get their first-born to be recognized as the son of Fet, Charlotte's former husband. The legality of Fet's birth was established, but now he was deprived of Russian citizenship, and with it his hereditary nobility and the right to his father's inheritance. Fet was forced out of Russian society and considered this event truly catastrophic; the very name “Fet” became for him a symbol of troubles and therefore “hateful”: “If you ask,” he wrote, “what is the name of all the suffering, all the sorrows of my life, then I will answer: their name is Fet...”
After graduating from a German boarding school in the city of Verro (now Võru, Estonian SSR), Fet entered the verbal department of the Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow University in 1838. Here he enters the circle of talented youth. Among his friends are the later famous critic and gifted poet Apollo Grigoriev, the wonderful lyricist Yakov Polonsky, historian Sergei Solovyov, publicist Konstantin Kavelin and others. Fet enthusiastically devotes himself to poetic creativity. His early poems were noticed by M. P. Pogodin and favorably received by N. V. Gogol. In 1840, Fet published the first poetry collection “Lyrical Pantheon”, and a little later became an active participant in the leading literary and artistic magazines “Domestic Notes” and “Moskvityanin”. Fet's poems are praised by Belinsky, distinguishing the poet from countless poets. In the early 1840s, Fet, although not for long, became imbued with liberal sentiments.
In 1845, Fet completed his university education. Carrying out his “everyday program”, he began to serve in the army with the rank of non-commissioned officer and voluntarily imprisoned himself in the remote corners of remote provinces. Life in the provinces was boring and uninteresting. The poet received almost no help from his father. In these difficult conditions, Fet was supported by poetry - in the midst of vulgarity and boredom, his lyrical nature did not fade away. Fet prepared for publication a collection of poems, which was approved by censorship in 1847, but due to a lack of funds and direct connections with publishers, it was published only in 1850. By that time, Fet had become a cornet and a Russian citizen. However, his main hope - to receive hereditary nobility along with the officer rank - slipped away: hereditary nobility was now given not by the first officer rank, but by the rank of major (captain in the cavalry troops). Fet, however, did not give up. He continues to serve 1b, waiting for the rank of major. But life's surprises rain down on his head as if from a cornucopia. In 1856, shortly before Fet was promoted to the next rank, a new decree was issued, according to which the hereditary nobility was given the rank of colonel.
Due to poverty and an unsettled life, Fet could not marry for love, although his ardent feeling was answered by Maria Lazic, an educated, artistically gifted girl, a wonderful pianist. The love drama was aggravated by the fact that Maria Lazic, realizing the futility of hopes for marriage with Fet, according to the legend that has reached us, decided her fate sadly and cruelly: she deliberately dropped a lit match, which set her dress on fire. The tragic reflection of unhappy, hopeless love and the death of the human spirit in the flames of a fire will illuminate Fet’s life and work more than once.
In 1853, Fet managed to join the guard, and he could now visit St. Petersburg. Here he meets recognized writers - Nekrasov, Turgenev, Druzhinin, Goncharov, Annenkov, Grigorovich, Botkin, and later Leo Tolstoy, enters the Sovremennik magazine. In 1855, new friends, led by Turgenev, suggested that Fet publish a collection of his poems, which appeared in 1856.
Since that time, Fet has been a famous poet, and his name is constantly mentioned in critical articles. The greatest writers and critics of that glorious era write about him. Of course, Fet was known before, but it was in the mid-1850s that recognition and poetic maturity came to him. Nevertheless, literary successes did not affect life. Fet, however, felt less constrained financially, but he could not count on literary income. In his private life, nothing improved: he did not become a hereditary nobleman, he suffered a complete failure in his military career, having risen within 11 years to the rank of lieutenant, the rank of colonel was no longer available to him, his love perished. It was necessary to choose a new path.
A change in Fet's intentions occurred immediately after the decree of 1856. In 1857, he married the critic V.P. Botkin’s sister, Maria Petrovna Botkina, and the following year he retired. Since 1860, Fet went into economic activity. A few years earlier, he left the Sovremennik magazine.
Fet tried to justify his persistence in achieving a noble title and material wealth from an aesthetic point of view, believing that true culture is created by the nobles. He reproached writers from the nobility who forgot about their class interests. At a time when Russian society was indignant at the scant reform that abolished the shameful slavery, Fet attacked it for allegedly not sufficiently protecting the rights of landowners and only intensifying the discord between the nobles and peasants. In a word, in the raznochinsky era of Russian history, Fet showed himself to be a hopelessly belated, but persistent defender of noble culture, without separating the advanced in it from the caste.
Fet, a subtle lyricist, and Shenshin, a tight-fisted landowner, seem to be two different faces. But the fact of the matter is that Fet never allowed Shenshin into his poetry.
The starting premises of Fetov's understanding of art are inseparable from his rejection of social reality. It, according to the poet’s conviction, distorts a person, oppresses the highest, spiritual properties inherent in him by nature. Without allowing the vicious and unfair everyday life, where “nightingales peck butterflies,” to interfere in the poetry, Fet tore away from art everything “temporary”, transient, the very sociality that disfigured his own human destiny. Unlike the revolutionary democrats, Fet concluded not about the need to change the state and social structure, but, on the one hand, about “getting used to” the existing order, and on the other hand, about ignoring it. He “sat down” on the ground, but excluded political and other topical issues from the content of his art. The subject of poetry is “eternal” feelings. The artist's task is to break through to them and discover them in the most ordinary manifestations. In Fet's lyrics, he was attracted to aspects that are directly correlated with the natural, “ancestral” properties of a person. Here the soul speaks directly to the soul, to the entire universe, to the cosmos, to every grass and God’s creature. Here the world of creativity reigns, the flight of the spirit, beauty blossoms. Fet does not at all run away from everyday life and does not shun it, but his human life is cleared of all social layers, material and selfish concerns. Fet ascends from him into the realm of spiritual life, but the spiritual appears only in everyday, real - visible, audible, filled with sounds and smells - signs. Having protected his poetry from the fundamental contradictions of the despicable way of life in Russia at that time, he demarcated the reserved zone of lyricism, where this way of life did not intrude. Fet wanted his lyrics not to be tainted by those institutions from which he himself suffered every minute.
Time moves towards the reform of 1861, and political division becomes a fact. Now Fet's poems no longer meet with the same unanimous sympathy that marked the mid and late 50s. In 1863, Fet published a two-volume collection of poems and almost stopped his literary work. He wrote few poems and published them reluctantly. In the 60s and 70s he was busy mainly organizing his local life. His energy, common sense, prudence bear fruit - Fet becomes rich, sells his former estate, buys another. Among his friends, he communicates with Leo Tolstoy, Yakov Polonsky, Vasily Botkin, and from the late 70s until his last days with Nikolai Strakhov and Vladimir Solovyov. From 1883 to 1891, he published four collections of “Evening Lights”, was preparing a fifth, and was working on a collection of works, but death prevented him from realizing such extensive plans.
Contemporaries who knew Fet closely noted constant signs of melancholy and melancholy in him. They were shocked by Fet's indifference to life. It appeared in my youth and did not go away over the years. Apollo Grigoriev openly feared that Fet would commit suicide. In the end, Fet attempted suicide - he grabbed a steel stiletto and, when it was taken away by his secretary, rushed to the buffet where the knives lay, but then Death from a broken heart overtook him.
At the end of his life, Fet found everything he desired: the surname Shenshin, hereditary nobility, chamberlain title and wealth. But this did not soften the blows of fate experienced in childhood, adolescence and youth, as a result of which the “ideal world,” as Fet wrote, was “destroyed long ago.” This is the bribe paid by Fet for his newfound prosperity.
Fet’s “mystery” seemed incomprehensible to his contemporaries, and those close to him at that. The writer of Amphitheaters saw in the “two Fetas” a pathological example of the combination of “a man who, by the cruelty of social thought, resembled a primitive barbarian” and “a poet of amazing depth.” Yakov Polonsky wrote to his friend Fet: “What kind of creature are you - I don’t understand...” He “suspected” that “inside” Fet “there sits another, unknown to anyone, and to us, sinners, an invisible person, surrounded by radiance, with eyes of azure and stars, and winged!” “You,” Polonsky noted, “have grown old, but he is young! You deny everything, but he believes!.. You despise life, and he, kneeling, is ready to sob in front of one of its incarnations...”
It was this hidden, deeply hidden and intense spiritual life, which was revealed only to a few “initiates” when Fet was alive, that became the content of his immortal lyrical confessions.
Fet's talent is exceptional. Nature rewarded him with beauty - from the often printed drawings one can form only a faint impression of it. But the Oryol Museum houses one little-known portrait, and, really, you can’t take your eyes off it. Fet could be unusually charming. He was famous for his subtle wit. When he spoke, the listeners turned into attention itself. Philosophy in its highest manifestations was accessible to him. He unmistakably captured the charm of folk poetry. As for the lyrics, Fet seemed to easily penetrate the spirit of ancient authors and poets of the East and West. In letters, especially to K.R. (Konstantin Romanov) and Yakov Polonsky, his most valuable notes on world poetry have been preserved. Fet linked his own poetic experience with the world literary process, and his apt observations of style were accompanied by deep generalizations. We can say that these letters comprehend the history of European poetry from Horace to Fet’s contemporaries. Unfortunately, all this wealth has not yet been published in full and is not sufficiently appreciated.
Fet wrote at a time when literature was charged with direct intervention in everyday life and was expected to resolve complex social problems. Of course, literature, while reflecting reality, cannot avoid them. However, the connection between literature and life was often understood in a crude, straightforward manner. And this led to the fact that mediocre writers, exploiting a modern theme, rose to the occasion, while talented artists were subjected to undeserved attacks due to the alleged lack of living social content in their work. Thus, Fet has a poem “The First Furrow”, in the initial quatrain of which an ancient image appears:
From the green-gray steppe
The fog is rising
And Ceres still sticks out
Hated weeds.
Confusion was expressed about this: why, they say, allegory intruded into the poem - it seemed inappropriate and violated the “true depiction of the beauties of nature.” The purpose of Fet's poem, however, is not to accurately capture peasant labor - the poet does not shy away from this, if necessary, and one cannot deny his ability:
The rusty plow is brightening up again!
Where the oxen, bending down, passed,
A velvet ribbon turns black
A block of cut earth,
They sparkle with something fresh and tender
The spring rays of the sun,
Following the diligent plowman
Greedy rooks are walking around.
In the poem “The First Furrow” we are talking about the harmony of man and nature, about the eternal, enduring value of labor and the ennobling role of man - it is in human creativity that Fet discovers a common meaning for all, a common content.
In the 1860s, accusations of the poet’s lack of attention to current socio-historical problems became commonplace. Fet really did not see the ideal of beauty and perfection in the social structure of that time. He considered attempts to change it a waste of time, a useless exercise for an artist. Fet’s spiritual world rested on different foundations - his primary interest was in social feelings and human experiences (unlike politics, he did not eliminate them), including love for his native land, people’s attitude towards each other, “eternal” moral questions, the mysteries of life and death, the creative principle in man, the contradiction of flesh and spirit. Fet's lyrics have an undeniable social content, but not a specific socio-historical one, but primarily psychological and philosophical. In this capacity, it is not devoid of signs of time, attention to such deep foundations of the spiritual life of Russian people that could be revealed at a sharp historical turning point from one social formation to another. The old feudal Russia was fading into the past and a new order was showing its face. Fyodor Tyutchev foresaw this acute feeling of imminent changes, social catastrophes and cosmic upheavals; they excite Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, prompting them to look more closely not only at their contemporary reality, but also at human nature in general. The great discoveries made by Russian literature in that era are inseparable either from the comprehension of objective reality or from insight into the essence of man. Fet does not stand aside from this process; he focuses on the person, on his spiritual wealth. Having rejected the socially hostile world, he looked for the ideal person in the highest and “pure”, in his opinion, spheres of spiritual manifestations of people transformed by beauty and harmony
Explaining SVOR's understanding of art, Fet wrote: “The world in all its parts is equally beautiful. Beauty is scattered throughout the universe and, like all the gifts of nature, it influences even those who are not aware of it...” And again: “... The question arises, what benefit, other than the common one with all other organisms, does a person derive from the area of beauty? The whole world of art testifies to the fact that man, in addition to all material benefits, seeks something else in beauty for his needs.” There is no doubt that Fet here enters the realm of aesthetic questions that occupied the minds of Hegel and Goethe, Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy, revolutionary democrats and Plekhanov. The fet thinker diverges from the Russian materialistic aesthetics of the 50s and 60s. However, does this mean that Fet is leaving real ground altogether? Of course, Fet is wrong in asserting that the socio-political sphere is alien to art. But Fet is right in rightly protesting against the crudely utilitarian attitude towards art. For Fet, an artist is “a slave to his art,” and he has no other concern than to find and embody the beautiful, giving it eternal life. These thoughts partly bring Fet closer to Leo Tolstoy, who wrote: “I am an artist, and my whole life is spent looking for beauty.”
What is purely “Fetov’s” here is not so much in the transmission of hidden movement or plastic picture, but in the diffuse and at the same time tangible thrill of expectation, welded, in the words of Dostoevsky, with “painful sadness.” Fet usually ended his poems at the highest point of emotional tension, inseparably intertwining admiration and pain, without giving precedence to either suffering or joy. “Diana” also combines exultation in beauty and longing for the ideal of life, and, unexpressed, endless sorrow for the present.
In Fet's lyrics, man strives for primordial harmony and beauty, for unity with the world. “Life,” he wrote, “is a harmonious fusion of opposites and a constant struggle between them, a good villain, a brilliant madman, melting ice. With the cessation of the struggle and with the final victory of one of the opposing principles, life itself ceases as such.” It is this merging of opposites, the overflow from calm into anxiety, the transition from one state to another, their incessant struggle, from which grows harmony, beauty, revealing the creative power of man and filling with the delight of the inexhaustibility of being, Fet experiences deeply intimately, and not abstractly and abstractly . The struggle of opposites and the created harmony appear both objectively, in the natural world, and subjectively, in the soul of the poet.
Fet never ceases to praise beauty as a kind of eternal law. But beauty for him is instantaneous, fleeting, and does not appear in its rational essence, but only as the result of inspiration, a revelation that suddenly descended on the poet.
Any phenomenon is brief, according to Fet, because it is placed between real existence and non-existence. One must be able to capture beauty in a short moment of flowering, in its fullest expression: in an inadvertently thrown loving glance, in a suddenly flared feeling, in an indistinct babbling, in an inexplicable emotional movement. However, beauty captured in words is more real than beauty perceived in life, because it no longer dies. This, according to Fet, is the meaning of artistic creativity - to objectify beauty, preserve, perpetuate its living, reverent image.
The desire to express the “inexpressible” through an instant lyrical flash, to inspire the reader with the mood that has gripped the poet is one of the fundamental properties of Fet’s poetry. The lyrical experience in this case cannot be long-lasting, and Fet, as a rule, creates short poems of two, three or four stanzas . Comprehending beauty unexpectedly and perpetuating it, Fet goes beyond the boundaries of the objective meaning of the word and revives dormant emotional halos in it. The poet is unusually skillful in managing verbal resources and the wealth inherent in the word, speech, verse, stanza itself.
However, Fet is not only a cheerful singer of beauty, love, reciprocity, filling his soul with delight and happiness, infinitely brave and inventive in crossing joy and torment, but also a huge tragic poet, whose consciousness is philosophically courageous and vigilant. Fet, running away from human society with its vanity, self-interest, and anger, unexpectedly reaches out to him. In his soul there lives a tragic discord between the artist, who is making his way to an immaculate ideal, and the preacher, who obtains the truth in order to convey it to the very people whose life’s hardships seemed to not interest him at all.
Fet is afraid of appealing to “fearless hearts” and understands that this is his duty. Thus, in his work, Fet overcomes the narrowness of his own aesthetic declarations. It is noteworthy that the “airy”, “elusive”, “unsteady” Fet uses high and stern words here - “Intensify the battle of fearless hearts.” No matter how distant and romantic Fet’s position may be, his verse cannot help but recall Pushkin’s “With a verb, burn the hearts of people.” Hidden in the storeroom of his soul, Fet’s thought, perhaps, was to arouse an impulse towards him with the very sensually beautiful face of the harmonious world and in this way lead a person to the kingdom of truth and beauty. It was not for nothing that Fet constantly struggled with solving the great and eternal mysteries of existence and was constantly amazed by them. He recognized the objective value of beauty that existed apart from him, and he had an ineradicable need to comprehend it. He believed in his powerful creative abilities and doubted them. Fet, who did not rely on anything other than his spirit, opposed the outside world as a whole. For him, I and the Universe are two equal forces.
Let your hand touch my head, And you will erase me from the list of existence. But before my judgment, as long as my heart beats, We are equal forces,” and I triumph.
However, Fet is not equally afraid of either life or death. He is neither a pessimist nor an optimist. He experiences cold indifference towards death, and life is justified only by creative “fire”, commensurate with the “whole universe”:
The source of Fet's lyrical audacity, purity, sincerity, freshness and unfading youth of his poetry lies in the unquenchable and bright flame that almighty nature endowed him with.
A mortal man carries a “fire” in his chest even “stronger and brighter than the entire universe,” and neither time nor space has power over him.
Tolstoy and Fet: life-building experience
This friendship began with a common trust in artistic revelation. She combined two experiences of Russian culture, its two traditions: Tolstoy - the experience of Russian enlightenment of the 18th century with esoteric reflection on man and the cosmos, with his moral attentiveness and God-centrism; Fet - Russian ontologism with his nostalgia for the ancient canons, where the poet was clairvoyant , questioned about the truth, by right of their gift, participants in Divine wisdom.
In the 60s, in the dispute between Slavophiles and Westernizing liberals with the offensive ideology of the commoners, Tolstoy and Fet took an independent position, questioning the method of ideological thinking as such. The main question for them turned out to be the question of a new quality of knowledge, which is open to the artist and which changes the quality of life. The epistemological position - the question of a new quality of knowledge and life - brought them closer, perhaps, to Ivan Kireevsky in his last works, although their emphasis was different: in Kireevsky - on the religious, and in Tolstoy and Fet - on artistic revelation.
At first glance, there is nothing more paradoxical than these two names - Tolstoy and Fet - placed side by side by life. A textbook example of thoughtlessness, lightness, “the poet of spring and love,” a man who made a bet with I. Vvedensky that even in twenty years he would deny the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, “a conservative and a serf owner” - Fet, and next to him is Tolstoy, painfully questioning his conscience about God, about the truth, seeking love and pity for his neighbor. The few researchers who paid attention to the interesting phenomenon of this friendship sought an explanation for it in the “commonality of noble instinct” or in the “limited perception of life.” This formulation of the question partly clarified, but did not reveal the essence of the conflict. Their joint desire to get out of the ideological context of the time, their dissatisfaction with all existing philosophical and aesthetic platforms remained unclear. Having started from people and concepts that did not solve the issues facing his conscience, Tolstoy unexpectedly found a like-minded person in the person of Fet, a man who did not seek compromises with his time, who tirelessly contrasted the voice of the Muses with the arguments of benefit and necessity. The poet’s aesthetic maximalism carried within itself the possibility of consciousness of such a reality, in which the overwhelming world of Tolstoy’s creativity, and Tolstoy’s merciless conversation with his conscience, and looking beyond good and evil found resonance and support. This real field of interests removed them from the topic of the day and determined the vectors of their life and creativity.
In the early 60s, their mentality was most consistent with the position of supporters of “pure art,” which carried the possibility of resolving the contradictions of time in the harmonious manifestations of the spirit, in art. Essential for “pure art”, the opposition to the “temporary ideals” of eternal truths meant for Tolstoy and Fet the distinction between intuitive-sacral and rationalistic knowledge and was limited for both of them. Supporters of “pure art” contrasted moral and aesthetic platonism with social-accusatory literature, and intuitionistic and metaphysical ideas with radical rationalism. Behind this was a very definite desire to turn Russian social thought towards a creative source - literature, philosophy, religion, to return to it the need for unbiased, multifaceted knowledge, in “pure art”. N. Strakhov later tried to explain this position: “Art is naturally connected, by its very essence, with all the highest interests of the human soul and therefore should be free, should not be artificially subordinated to these interests.” (“Nekrasov and Pushkin”).
Tolstoy, dissatisfied with the accusatory tone and utilitarian attitude towards art that prevailed in Sovremennik after the transition of the critical department of the magazine in 1856 from Druzhinin to Chernyshevsky, was more organic with the ideas of contemplation and artistic revelation that were defended by Druzhinin, Botkin, Annenkov - his “ a priceless triumvirate.”
The position of the “triumvirs” was close to him, who approached spiritual and social conflicts through the facets and aspects of truth open to the artist and poet, people with a more sophisticated hearing and vision of the world. They preferred interest in new areas of artistic vision, the discovery of a new spiritual reality, to passing judgment on life, tendentiousness, and the didactics of the “natural school” of the 60s.
“Beauty is the eternal basis of the phenomena of the world spirit, the basis of all the unexplored creative power of the universe,” wrote Botkin in an article about Fet, which Tolstoy called “a catechism of poetry.”
Tolstoy was so captivated by these ideas that during this period he even reduced religion to art: “Christianity is all art,” he wrote. (Notebook, February 17, 1858) Busy with an intense search for spiritually active sources in life and literature, he responded to the recognition of art as the highest absolute reality, as well as to the idea of the messianism of the artist, called to teach people, especially important during the period , when, in essence, the question of who Russian society would follow was being decided. “Is it really a law of nature that the useful contradicts the beautiful, civilization contradicts poetry?” asked Tolstoy in a moment of doubt in “Excerpts from the Diary” (vol. 5, p. 15). He saw art as a real force that brings people together. He did not accept the “angry” accusatory literature of the “zhelcheviks” either morally or aesthetically, seeing in it the replacement of the sacred with the profane.
As an artist, in these years he was especially interested in the impact of beauty on the soul, the possibility inherent in art to transform a person: “Instead of fatigue, distraction, indifference to everything in the world, which I experienced a minute before, I suddenly felt the need for love, fullness of hope and causeless joy of life... Here it is... beauty and poetry. Inhale it..., enjoy, what more do you need! “Everything is yours, everything is good,” - this is how he describes in “Lucerne” this important moment for him in the internal dialectic leading to real relations with the world. He was always turned to the inner meaning of life and tried to “get to the original layers in everything.” The idea of transformation under the influence of creativity fascinated Tolstoy with the possibility of the direct influence of the world of Platonic norms and prototypes on a person.
Tolstoy’s assessment of his views of those years in “Confession” makes obvious the expectations that the young writer invested in the idea of “pure art.” The most important idea, and the one that deceived him first, was the idea of messianism, which he wanted to understand, first of all, as the idea of spiritual teaching. The question of “literary teaching” takes on the character of an “obvious lie” in the eyes of the veto.
The conviction that the ultimate truth is only in art, that only art gives “great revelation” and especially the confidence that “the increased well-being of peoples will certainly lead to an elevation of their moral needs” were not unconditional for Tolstoy even during his greatest rapprochement with “ triumvirs." They could not withstand the pressure of Tolstoy’s doubt and moral analysis and turned out to be powerless in the face of questions given “only so that they would forever remain questions” (“Lucerne”). The attempts of Annenkov, Botkin and Druzhinin to combine aesthetic platonism with the ideas of social progress were eclecticism in his eyes and soon alienated him from his “priceless triumvirate.”
Tolstoy called the views of this time “class-writerly.” His faith in them was destroyed by his question to himself: “What do I know and what should I teach?” By asking this question, Tolstoy involuntarily isolated himself from the sphere of socio-philosophical problems, thereby dissociating himself from all objective rational theories, transferring his dissatisfaction with time onto himself, returning to his task of “becoming better.” He contrasted the inner alchemy of making oneself and the struggle with oneself, with the low in oneself, to the struggle of ideas, opinions, public polemics, which so heated the atmosphere of his time. In terms of his secluded position and preoccupation with his “spiritual work” (“My work is the soul and the lasting work of life” N. Gogol), Tolstoy can only be compared with Gogol, who in his “Author’s Confession” called himself a man who spent “ for several years within myself.” Tolstoy's problematics have always been characterized by egocentricity, moral anxiety and the search for answers in oneself.
The question of a fundamentally different mental life, imbued with “a constant memory of the relationship of everything temporal to the eternal and the human to the Divine” could bring Tolstoy closer to the Slavophiles. The questions posed by the Slavophiles about the connection with the soil, the idea of the national spirit could not but arouse his sympathy. However, attention to the national spirit and attraction to patriarchal norms of life did not take the form of social doctrine in Tolstoy. He understood his nobility as a system of moral duties to the peasants and the land. It was a living, intuitive perception of the folk spirit, nature, and land. He contrasted the problem of the “internal state of Russia” formulated by K. Aksakov with his own “internal Russia,” generally sympathizing with the Slavophile formulation of the question of the moral state of society. The hopes that the Slavophiles placed on the community as an instrument for the social and moral development of society were not in tune with Tolstoy’s search for answers within himself, his distrust of external decisions.
Tolstoy could not find a common language with the Slavophiles on the very important issue of art. Serious differences in their approach to art were manifested in the objection of the chairman of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, A. S. Khomyakov, to Tolstoy’s speech when he was elected to membership in the society in 1859, in which Khomyakov acted as a representative of tendentious art. Tolstoy emphasized the fundamental differences between tendentious and proper art. While Dostoevsky, in his article “G.-bov and questions about art,” explained the division of art into “pure” and “utilitarian” by the extremes of the dispute, it was important for Tolstoy, with his heightened hopes for spiritually effective literature, to publicly dissociate himself from biased literature, reflecting the temporary interests of society and therefore one-sided.
“No matter how great the importance of political literature, which reflects the temporary interests of society, no matter how necessary it is for national development,” said Tolstoy in his speech at the Society, “there is other literature that reflects the eternal human interests, the most dear, sincere to the consciousness of the people.” , literature accessible to people of every nation and every time, literature without which not a single nation with strength and richness has developed.” Such literature represents “the serious consciousness of a serious people” (vol. 5, p. 273).
In the same year, Tolstoy recommended Fet as a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. Fet stood out for his maximalist demand for the uselessness of poetry, even among supporters of “pure art.” He opposed subjective experience, “direct knowledge” to the pressure of general opinions, objectifying his inner world, defending it cruelly and consistently, despite the outward good nature of his behavior. Unconditional trust in his poetic intuition and his talent were highly characteristic of him. Behind his anti-rationalism there was a sense of a deeper reality, a more serious synthesis. The musical elusiveness of his talent, the world of unclear hints and associations, the expression of anxiety of “half-feelings,” attention to subtle spiritual lines and drawings led the poet to that reality where, in his words, the “secret affinity of nature and spirit or even their identity."
The uniqueness of Fet’s poetic experience is his concentration on the spiritual moment, on the poetic “now,” a conscious focus on the intuitive in himself, and a new mental and spiritual reality, discovered along this path as a synthesis of natural-spiritual principles, giving insight “from time into eternity” - all this brought the poet closer to the same area of knowledge that Tolstoy strived for in his own ways. Fet’s maximalist position, his confident immersion in the inner world, in that inexhaustible flow in which he saw the only real foundations of life, made his position akin to Tolstoy.
Growing up in a German boarding school, Fet was nourished by German romantic poetry, remaining alien to the rationalism of German philosophy. The Novalis antithesis was close to him: “... whoever does not find what he is looking for, let him go into the world of books and art, into the world of nature - this is the eternal unity of antiquity and modernity, let him live in this lady church of a better world. He will find his beloved and friend, fatherland and God in them.”
But, unlike the romantics, Fet approached nature as a worker. The metaphysical-aesthetic meaning they brought to this antithesis combined it with a sober practical mind. Fet did not accept Plato’s disdain for the flesh and the world, nor abstract rationality. He preferred the sound experience of his grandfather to dialectical daydreaming. He advocated a knowledge that would include the total experience of man - both in his connection with the earth and in his intense questioning of heaven. His common sense is similar to the deep meaning hidden in folk tradition and perfectly resonated with the ancient system of thinking that was consonant with the poet.
The interest in the organic life of nature and man, the conviction in the unknowability of the laws of life, the distrust of reasonable paths of progress are not accidental for Fet - behind them stood a serious area of artistic and metaphysical quest, in which he and Tolstoy saw the possibility of new spiritual integrity.
Behind the appeal in a dispute with modernity to the truth of the earth, to the truth of “Buffalo and Lukashka” (Fet to Tolstoy, April 4, 1863) was the hearing of this “impulse of life,” the philosophical justification of which they later found in Schopenhauer. The conviction that the natural element, “swarm” life is closer to Plato’s prototypes than rationalistic concepts, the perception of the fullness of natural life, the essence of life, and not its “ephemeral shell”, by which they understood the ideological and social context, a polemically pointed distrust of questions like: “the dignity of the citizen, the dignity of labor, women and progress” (Fet to Tolstoy, November 19, 1862) - were the foundation on which the relationship between Tolstoy and Fet and the further joint experience of their life-building were built. They contrasted futuristic and retrospective reformism with the acceptance of existing life structures: (“He tells me about emancipation, but I will plant radishes.” A. Fet). They preferred managing their estates to newspaper and magazine passions, seeing in this real forms of connection with the world. In their social status - the nobility - they found a model of comprehensive service, including service to talent, land, and family.
The “noble instinct” of both writers, which some researchers spoke about and which Fet himself wrote about, pointing to Tolstoy’s “fresh, unbroken instinct of the patriarchal landowner,” was, first of all, a form of affirmation of independent internal space. For them, creativity and the earth turned out to be connected by their “unreasonableness,” and in both they looked for hidden meaning. Fet understood and was close to Tolstoy’s intention to reach higher knowledge through the world of the given.
The usual forms of literary groups and a magazine turned out to be insufficient to establish their view of the world, and their plans to jointly publish a literary magazine in 1857-1858 could not take place.
We learn more about the magazine being started from Tolstoy’s letter to V. Botkin, in which Tolstoy invites him to participate in the magazine, where, according to Tolstoy and Fet, it was supposed to concentrate “everything that is and will be purely artistic” (Jan. 4, 1858).
Many writers responded to the projects for publishing the magazine, with whom Tolstoy and Fet agreed in their views on art on the issues formulated by Tolstoy in connection with the planned program of the magazine in the same letter to V. Botkin: “at the present time ... the political dirty stream wants to decisively collect “If you don’t destroy everything in yourself, then you despoil art,” it is necessary to organize a “purely artistic magazine” that will unite people who believe “in the independence and eternity of art.” These people will save “the eternal and independent from the random, one-sided and captivating political influence.” (4 Jan 1858).
Fears for the fate of art temporarily united Tolstoy and Fet with the ideologists of “free art” P. Annenkov and A. Druzhinin, with the liberal I. Goncharov, with the commoner writer A. Pisemsky and the “pure artist” A. Maikov. The purpose of the magazine is pointedly untendentious: “To cry and laugh.” This magazine was supposed to establish other artistic principles, traditions of high art, its purpose was “to become a teacher of the public in the matter of artistic taste.”
However, Tolstoy’s interest in the magazine was pushed aside by a more important question about knowledge related to his internal self-determination, with Tolstoy’s constantly returning question: “what do I know and what should I teach?” (vol. 23, 5). This is precisely what explains the categorical tone in the letter to Druzhinin: “there is no reason to include me in the list of writers.”
Druzhinin was far from the truth when he tried to explain the departure of two writers from literature only by literary fatigue and creative failures. The uncompromisingness of Tolstoy and Fet in the pursuit of organic holistic knowledge, removing the one-sided lie of rationality, bringing to the forefront of life the spiritual experience open to the poet and artist, and, at the same time, the ability to find the same knowledge in practical agricultural activity determined “ estate” form of their objection to their contemporaries. Seeing the insufficiency of the literary opposition, they turned to two indisputable realities - creativity and the earth - “...and she is cold and taciturn, and important, and demanding, but at the same time she is the kind of friend whom you will not lose until you die, but you will die - that’s all.” You’ll go into it,” Tolstoy writes to Fet on May 12, 1861.
The question of their “soil origin” is ambiguous. Fet sought and found social status, “mental settledness” and material independence in local life. For him it was the sphere of practical activity, where the irresponsibility of rational theories ended. Fet's position was characterized by the delimitation of regions, and in each of them he was a maximalist. “As much as in the matter of the liberal arts I value reason little in comparison with unconscious instinct (inspiration)..., in practical life I demand reasonable foundations, supported by experience.”
For Tolstoy, his economic activity was an expression of the idea of a manager close to him, carefully caring for the estate entrusted to him - one of the deep Gospel images to which he constantly returned.
Tolstoy and Fet witnessed the establishment of rational-pragmatic ideas in Russian public opinion at the expense of intuitive-sacral ones. Their departure from the writing and journalistic environment was a realization of the incompatibility of these two approaches, a solution to the conflict through solitude and creativity. Their world, the circle of their life now constituted rural local life. In this traditional way of life, Tolstoy saw great moral opportunities for himself: “love for the rural landowner life... the charm of rural life... lies not in tranquility, not in idyllic beauty, but in the direct goal that it represents - to devote your life to goodness - and in its simplicity and clarity” (vol. 4, p. 363). The literary environment was replaced by creativity addressed to each other. Voluntarily taking on the worries and responsibilities associated with running the household and teaching peasant children at Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana school, they viewed it as a reality that returned them to the original relationships in life - between owner and worker, teacher and student. Tolstoy tended to view these relationships as supporting points of human life and the general world order. G. Florovsky is right when he asserts that “For Tolstoy, God is not so much a Father as a Master, and man is his worker.” And Tolstoy understood this work as “spiritual warfare,” remaking oneself, getting closer to the human prototype.
Tolstoy represented the idea of teaching as universal. He approached it, first of all, as a seeker of moral and aesthetic truth. This affected the structure of the Yasnaya Polyana school. The radicalism of his approach can be judged by the article: “Who should learn to write from whom: peasant children from us or us from peasant children?”, where peasant children acted as carriers of knowledge.
For several years, Tolstoy became enthusiastically immersed in pedagogy: “I never stop thinking about this and... I hope to compile books from all this with the conclusion that came to me from my three-year passion for this matter.” (Fetu, May 16, 1865). For Tolstoy, his teaching activities were, at the same time, a solution to the moral issues that tormented him. He imagines his responsibilities at this time very clearly: “We need to teach Marfut and Tarask at least a little of what we know.” (Fetu, 23 Feb. 1860).
If Tolstoy, in his Yasnaya Polyana teaching practice, tried to come to a possible harmonious relationship with the world, in which teaching and apprenticeship were consistent for him, then Fet in “Latin grammar” thought to find a panacea for all ills. For Tolstoy, his lifelong studies with “peasant children” remained “the brightest period of his life” (vol. 74, p. 239), and his moral world in the 60s cannot be understood without pedagogical studies. The establishment of a school for peasant children and Tolstoy's interest in pedagogy were for him a form of influence on the world. Needing connections with those around him and losing some, Tolstoy looked for and tried others. Pedagogy at this time gave him “spiritual settledness, rigor, pride, strength” (Druzhinin, October 9, 1859). In a letter to Chicherin, Tolstoy writes about his teaching activities: “I do something that is as natural to me as breathing air, and at the same time one from the height of which... I often look at you others with criminal pride” (Feb. 1860) .
Just as Tolstoy’s economic activity was a response to the political and economic ideas of liberals and democrats, so his pedagogical activity was a response to the educational ideas of the time. He understood his nobility as a teacher, as a system of duties to his “younger brother.” For Tolstoy, many internal lines converged in his pedagogical studies - a sense of noble duty, a Rousseauian interest in the “natural” person, and the opportunity to observe the movements of a child’s soul and control them - a task whose importance in spiritual and social terms he heard well. Tolstoy built his pedagogy on the principle of “conformity with nature” of John Amos Comenius, for whom the teacher was a servant of nature.
This interest in human nature, still close to its original forms, and understanding of the natural beauty of a child were, without a doubt, close to Fet, however, the educational impulse of Tolstoy’s pedagogical activities was alien to him. And therefore the very raising of the “primary” consciousness was in many ways dissimilar among them. The idea of harmony, an objection to the discord that the “Iron Age” man carried within himself, were of a different nature among them.
Dissatisfaction with the present and disbelief in the future, expressed in disappointment in progress, in the search for an ideal, inevitably turned the poet's gaze to the past. It was a form of passeism. Fet's artistic instinct told him the artificial reality of the times of the Iliad. In search of an ideal time, he recreated in himself the aesthetically complete world of ancient poetry and philosophy, believing, like Chaadaev, that “our development lacked the classical ancient world.”
The strength of longing for the perfection of the past can be judged by Fet’s poem “Diana,” which delighted Botkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Nekrasov. Dostoevsky, in his 1861 article ““G-bov” and the question of art,” wrote about “Diana”: “This is an outdated, former thing that is resurrected after two thousand years in the soul of the poet... with such strength that he waits and believes in prayer and enthusiasm that the goddess would now leave the pedestal and walk in front of him, “flickering milky whiteness between the trees.”
Approaching Fet’s “past ideal” “not naively, but historically,” Dostoevsky sees in it “an endless call, a longing for the present.” The reason for this sadness and melancholy, according to Dostoevsky, is that the ancient goddess “does not need to be resurrected..., she does not need to live, she has already reached the highest moment of life; she is already in eternity”: “I waited... But the immovable marble became white before me with incomprehensible beauty.”
Fet, contrary to historical logic, did not want to reckon with the irreversibility of time, and he transferred the perfection of the past into the future. He looked at the present (“looked back”) from the past. In a letter to Tolstoy, the same opposition is outlined: “When you sit with the ancients... and look back at our century, is it really possible to call it a funny and stupid word progress. Those like Horace, Juvenal have behind... Rome and the whole solid philosophy "... (June 7, 1884) The idea of Rome was decisive in his philosophical associations.
Rejecting social reforms and social transformations as utopias, Fet recognized his local activities as the only realistic way to solve social problems.
The question of his attitude towards his farm, towards the responsibilities of a landowner, acquires even greater fundamental importance for him; it becomes a question about his life ideals. And the philosophy of Schopenhauer helped Fet to realize “that blind will that guided him all his life” (Tolstoy, May 27, 1880), achieving hereditary nobility.
In the mid-70s, Tolstoy’s search for the meaning of life began to run counter to everything that had been the content of his life for ten to fifteen years: neither pedagogy, nor family, nor farming no longer gave him the same satisfaction. His interests focus on “eternal” questions - about life and death, interest in “life-building” gives way to concentration on topics of the “otherworldly”. But even during this period, painfully colored by opinions, Tolstoy does not refuse to understand his necessary connection with the earth, his duty to it. Awareness of the mutual connection between the soil and the sower, their mutual support, and a deep conviction in the viability of these relationships, as opposed to direct interference in the structure of life, was a common feature of Tolstoy and Fet.
Tolstoy’s reflections on “the relationship of the finite to the infinite” (vol. 23, p. 36) introduce an element of intense reflection into their relationship, and in the correspondence of these years, reflections on the finite: the purpose of being in general and one’s own, in particular, occupy a lot of space.
The idea of death among Tolstoy and Fet in the 60s was similar in many ways. It was not for nothing that Tolstoy was so frank with Fet: in expressing sorrowful feelings and thoughts after the death of his brother. In a letter to Fet on October 17, 1860, Tolstoy shares with him his terrible doubts: “what is the point of everything, when tomorrow the agony of death begins with all the abomination, meanness of lies, self-deception.” In the 60s, this feeling of despair, fear, horror and powerlessness in the face of inevitability forced Tolstoy to abandon the idea of progress, but at that time Tolstoy contrasted him with belief in the extra-rational principles of life. In the first half of the 70s, the basic principles of life were understood as will, constituting the inner essence of the world. The question of “nothingness” that remains beyond the boundaries of the desire for life again brought Tolstoy back to the fact of death. Over the years, he began to think more and more intensely about the philosophical meaning of death, and it seemed to him that Fet should agree with him in many respects.
Tolstoy writes to Fet on May 3, 1876 “I have never met people who would look so sincerely, so truly at the great nirvana, even samsara. People don’t usually talk about them.” Tolstoy, agreeing with Fet, wrote “I agree that, no matter how much I think about it, I can’t come up with anything other than that this Nirvana is nothing” (January 30, 1873).
And Fet, in his letters to Tolstoy, calls death “negative Nirvana, the door to darkness.” (20 January 1873).
Now Tolstoy in Fet becomes close to another side of his personality: the ability “in this life to look beyond its limits.” “Deeply related... nature-soul” (April 28, 1876), this is how Tolstoy speaks of his friend, referring to this commonality.
In the second half of the 70s, the leitmotif of their relationship became a common pessimistic outlook on life.
But only after Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis, about which he wrote in his “Confession,” did his respect for the great mystery of nature take on the character of an “attraction” to death: “This was a force similar to the previous desire for life, only in the opposite relation. I tried with all my might to get away from life” (chapter 4).
The question of the meaning of finite existence in an infinite world, with all its painful unresolvedness, arose before Tolstoy in the light of the philosophy of Schopenhauer.
Tolstoy was led to Schopenhauer by thoughts about “the whole complexity of the conditions under which history takes place” (letter to Fet, November 12, 1876). This philosopher interested Tolstoy all the more so because, arguing in a different way (“approaching from the other side”), he draws the same conclusions as Tolstoy (“says... the same thing as me,” Fetu May 10, 1869).
Tolstoy's sincere sympathy was evoked by Schopenhauer's desire to contrast the social ideals of his contemporaries with individual morality. In “The World as Will and Idea,” the philosopher says this: “it is to the moral that everything comes down to the testimony of our innermost consciousness, and this moral is rooted only in the individual as the direction of his will... only the life of the individual has unity, connection and true meaning "
Tolstoy, in Schopenhauer’s opposition of the private to the general, the individual to the public, heard the preaching of moral improvement, and Fet received the philosophy that systematized his requirements for life.
Those previous activities that occupied most of his soul and were the meaning of his “ultimate” existence: creativity and family - did not console him in the awareness of the futility of life.
Fet tries to reduce all of Tolstoy’s moral work to the fear of death, which he contrasts with his bold indifference to these issues:
“If I sometimes think about death, it is without shudder or disgust, and it seems to me that bothering with this inevitable operation so stubbornly is cowardly.” (To Tolstoy, October 18, 1880).
Fet was alien to the fear of death: “non-existence. I remember him...” He, who understood Tolstoy at a glance, just like Tolstoy, who valued the tone of understanding to the point of half-hints that established between them, in matters of Tolstoy’s ethical quests, shows amazing deafness. It is no coincidence that Fet confessed to Tolstoy that he “despite his eloquence, did not understand the fourth book of Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation” (Sept. 28, 1880). We are talking about Schopenhauer’s thoughts about justice, kindness and suffering with the epigraph “When knowledge came, at the same time love rose from the middle.” Without knowledge of this “practical philosophy” of Schopenhauer, our understanding of Tolstoy’s ethics of compassion will be incomplete.
Fet was closer and clearer to the ethics of suffering (“Where joy glimmers in suffering”), the inevitable consequence of which was fatalism and humility before the meaningless, indifferent cruelty of life: “it is not necessary and senseless to preach the will not to devour... only being is scary, those. life, not its denial.” (To Tolstoy, October 18, 1880). Fet believed that the recognition of suffering as the fundamental law of life was noble courage and true courage: putting it above everyone: “for the booger and Napoleon, suffering is a guard at the line that does not need to be crossed” (Tolstoy, September 28, 1880).
The consequence of recognizing evil as the basis of the world order was Fet’s distrust of self-improvement, his egocentrism is associated to a large extent with rejection of the idea of compassion, and his personal metaphysical experience excluded abstract hopes for absolute justice. Fet's worldview was tragic in its naked hopelessness. He did not believe in either an earthly or a heavenly paradise. A. Grigoriev writes about the “terrible, chaotic fermentation of the elements... of the soul” in young Fet and continues: “I have not seen a person who was so stifled by melancholy, for whom I was more afraid of suicide.”
But the stronger was Fet’s faith and devotion to art, admiration for the beauty of the world and the possibilities of creativity: |
“Only you have fleeting dreams
They look like old friends at heart,
Only you have fragrant roses
Delight always shines with tears.
From the markets of life, colorless and stuffy,
It’s such a joy to see subtle colors.”
To Tolstoy, with his ideal of retribution, retribution for evil, the world in the light of Schopenhauer’s philosophy seemed like a cruel joke played by someone omnipotently cruel. All his “inner Egyptian work”, his ideals of self-improvement became meaningless, “if the happiness of people is to devour each other... as it turns out with Schopenhauer” (Fetu, October 5, 1880)
Tolstoy saw the meaning of life in serving the highest moral principle. He contrasted the merciless Schopenhauerian world with the Christian idea of non-resistance - one of the most powerful moral imperatives: “happiness lies in not resisting evil and forgiving and loving one’s neighbor” (Fetu, October 5, 1880). The teachings of Christ returned Tolstoy to the world of justice, the faith in which “Schopenhauer crucified,” and became “a proclamation of good in life.”
And in the faith of billions, in their unreasonable knowledge, Tolstoy found support for himself, giving him the opportunity to live. Schopenhauer's will was replaced by faith as the basis of life: “Faith is the power of life. If a person lives, then he believes in something” (chapter 9). In matters of faith in the “infinite God,” “the connection of human affairs with God, the concepts of moral good and evil” (chapter 9), Fet, brought up in ancient stoic models, could no longer be an understanding interlocutor.
In Tolstoy’s perception of Christianity, the stamp of the Russian 18th century is clearly visible - a mixture of educational normativity with Freemasonry, moral pathos with religious reflection. Fet, who did not accept Tolstoy’s rationalistic reflection and observed his moral quests from the side, gave due credit to the intensity and universality of the internal work taking place in him. “You stick to the only Lev Nikolaevich and Yasnaya Polyana, representing the real Yasnaya Polyana in the impenetrable darkness of the moral dense forest,” he wrote to Tolstoy on March 31, 1878.
Tolstoy's temporary interest in Homer and Herodotus, about whom he wrote to the “lover of antiquities” Fet, did not make any major changes in the content of their relationship. Although the re-reading of the Iliad made him agree with the necessity of ancient experience for Russian education - “You can triumph - without knowledge of Greek there is no education,” “of all the truly beautiful ... that the human word has produced, I still knew nothing ”, (January 1, 1871) - on the most important question, the question of knowledge, he did not learn anything new for himself: “... what knowledge? How to purchase it? What is it for? For this I have arguments as clear as day." (January 1, 1871). The ancient logos added nothing to the dynamic model of Christian achievement that captured Tolstoy.
For the first time, Tolstoy discovered the extent of his disagreements with Fet after reading his poem “Never”, which the latter sent him. With the same interest in otherworldly topics, with the same formulation of the question:
“...Who should I take it to?
Breathing in your chest? For whom is the grave
Did she bring me back? And my consciousness
What is it connected with? And what is his calling?
Where to go, where there is no one to hug,
Where time is lost in space?”
Tolstoy looks at life and death differently. He writes: “I answer it differently than you. I wouldn't want to go to the grave again. For me, my relationship to God still remains, i.e. relationship with the force that produced me, pulled me towards itself and will destroy or modify me.”
Tolstoy outlined his “relationship to God” in detail to Fet many years later, only in 1880.
In the love of God, two internal principles of equal importance for Tolstoy turned out to be brought together - the mind and the heart, the desires of people and the good. Social good was revealed to him as a result of inner balance found through faith. Like Kireyevsky, Tolstoy’s “internal integrity of thinking” becomes accessible to the “believing mind,” in which the distinction between morality and knowledge, education and conscience disappears, and spiritual truth becomes the measure of the arbitrary truths of the human mind: “happiness” people should consist of non-resistance to evil and love and reasonable understanding. How can I not love, not believe, and not follow that light in which what my heart strives for seems good to me, what is possible, what, if others saw good in it, would give everyone the highest happiness, that is, as a result of which the whole world of living people was not some kind of evil joke of someone, but the environment in which both understanding and goodness are realized.” (Oct 5, 1880).
Christian truth returned to Tolstoy a more holistic and higher world than the one that they, objecting to their contemporaries, were able to build with Fet. Their friendship turned out to be a stepping stone to a new “spiritual warfare” that Tolstoy discovered in Christianity. Their joint “quest for life” was over. Tolstoy was already unsuccessfully knocking on the doors of Optina Pustyn.
Chapter I. The history of acquaintance and the nature of the relationship between L.N. Tolstoy and
Chapter II. The aesthetic views of L.N. Tolstoy and A.A. Fet are the basis of their creative interactions.
Chapter III. L. Tolstoy is the “editor” of A. Fet’s poems.
Chapter IV. Poetry of A. Fet in the creative workshop of the prose writer
L. Tolstoy.
Introduction of the dissertation 2002, abstract on philology, Matveeva, Nelli Nikolaevna
It is well known that A.A. Fet and L.N. Tolstoy were on friendly terms. The content of these relationships was studied in most detail by S.A. Rozanova1. She was the first to draw attention to the importance for literature of the personal and creative relationships of two writers of the second half of the 19th century and showed in her work the chronological history of their long-term friendship. She also touched upon the creative connections of writers.
E.A. Maimin also worked on this topic for a long time. In his article “A.A. Fet and L.N. Tolstoy”2 he explains the reasons for the emergence of mutual human sympathy between people who were different in many ways. A significant place in this work is given to the correspondence between Fet and Tolstoy - a wonderful monument to their friendship and creative interaction. E.A. Maimin was the first to pay so much attention to the correspondence of writers.
Other researchers of their work also wrote about the creative interactions between Fet and Tolstoy in their works3. Thus, L.I. Cheremisinova’s master’s thesis4 examines the interaction of writers in the context of the historical and literary movement, reveals the epic tendencies of Fet’s work, their connection with Tolstoy’s aesthetic system. The author examines the interpenetration of the artistic worlds of Fet and Tolstoy. The work is the first to analyze Fet's agricultural program, which became one of the sources of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina.
Meanwhile, the question of creative interactions between two writers deserves further study.
The relevance of this dissertation research is due to the interest in studying the creative interactions of writers, the characteristics of their writing style, the possibilities of changes made by the authors under the direct influence of the recommendations of contemporaries - opponents (“editors”) in the texts of works created during a period of particularly close personal and creative interaction, as well as to the use by contemporary writers of each other’s creative discoveries when creating their own works.
The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the mutual influence of two writers of the second half of the 19th century is considered systematically. We tried to bring together all the observations of our predecessors and look at this process as bidirectional.
The work makes an attempt to identify the maximum number of both real examples of interaction and its forms. A specific typology of these forms is outlined.
The scientific novelty of the work is also determined by the study of one of the features of Fet’s creative style, which is the poet’s use of friends and iterators as “editors” of his works, primarily L.N. Tolstoy, with whom the poet maintained an intensive correspondence in the 60s. e and 70s.
For the first time, a number of archival materials are introduced into scientific circulation, in particular, Tolstoy’s notes on books of Fet’s poems.
All of the above allows us to formulate the goal of this study: to explore the mechanism of creative interaction between writers, taking into account the facts of their long-term friendly communication.
The following tasks serve to achieve this goal:
1) trace the chronology of the relationship between A. Fet and L. Tolstoy, establish the reasons for their rapprochement and rupture;
2) compare the aesthetic views of artists;
3) determine Tolstoy’s place as the “editor” of Fet’s poems, consider his role in the creation and revision of specific works;
4) identify the forms of influence of Fet’s poetry on Tolstoy’s prose, determine the range of themes, motifs and images characteristic of the work of both artists;
5) outline a typology of the identified creative interaction of writers with each other.
When solving the assigned problems, biographical, comparative-historical, and textual research methods were used. Archival materials are also used in the work.
The subject of the study was the work of two writers of the second half of the 19th century, considered in various forms of interaction. From the huge number of poems by Fet, we highlight those that were created during the period of the most active creative collaboration between Fet and Tolstoy, that is, in the 60-70s. From Tolstoy’s works we will consider the novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” written in the same years, in which the influence of Fet’s lyrics was especially obvious.
Particular attention was paid to the study of text edits and notes in them, as well as to archival materials. Of great importance for the work were the direct evidence of writers (epistolary heritage, memoir sources), which made it possible to establish the role of advice, recommendations, and comments expressed by Tolstoy and Fet to each other. Journalistic articles, memoirs and reviews of contemporaries and biographers of writers are also used.
The nature of the material being studied determines the structure of the work. It consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion.
The first chapter of the work examines the history of acquaintance and the nature of personal relationships between two writers, which are difficult to separate from creative ones.
The second chapter compares the views of the poet and prose writer on literature and art, especially on the art of poetry and poetic usage. Many statements by Tolstoy and Fet help to explain the similarities and differences in their creative styles, to understand the evaluation criteria and requirements that writers place on each other’s works.
The third chapter examines Tolstoy's influence on Fet, the role of Lev Nikolaevich in editing Fet's texts.
The history of the texts of Fet’s poems is described in most detail in the work of B.Ya. Bukhshtab, then in his comments to the poems of A.A. Fet5. A well-known fetologist examines the “peculiar need of Fet’s creative personality” for “outside instructions.” B.Ya. Bukhshtab mentions all the famous “editors” of the poet’s poems, evaluates the role of the main ones - I.S. Turgenev and N.N. Strakhov.
Turgenev's editing of the collection of poems of 1856 is also examined in detail by D.D. Blagoy6.
Recently, a new view on the edition of Fet’s poems was presented by M.J1. Gus Parov7, who analyzed in detail the results of Turgenev’s edits to the endings of Fetov’s poems. M.L. Gasparov came to the conclusion that in most cases such edits had “a result opposite to Turgenev’s intentions.” However, until recently, the role of Tolstoy as a “co-author” of Fet’s lyrics has received insufficient attention. Our work is intended to fill this gap to some extent.
The third chapter analyzes the poet’s poems, which were finalized taking into account Tolstoy’s advice or comments. Of no less interest are such comments, which in the work are conventionally called edits “in the spirit of Tolstoy.” In addition, the study involves Fet’s poems, for which Tolstoy’s direct responses are unknown to us. However, these poems also have significant edits. It is assumed that Fet, while working on them, one way or another (perhaps unconsciously) took into account Tolstoy’s comments made about other poems.
The study of different editions of Fetov's texts clearly shows Tolstoy's influence on the poet's creative process, allows us to evaluate the special place of the writer among other advisers - editors and, in addition, allows us to see the differences between his comments and the demands of other contemporaries.
The fourth chapter examines the reverse process - specific forms of influence of Fet's lyrics on Tolstoy's prose. To do this, it seemed necessary to us to compare individual poems by the poet and excerpts from Tolstoy’s novel, which overlap thematically and figuratively.
The comparison confirms that the creative interaction between Fet and Tolstoy was carried out in line with the peculiarities of the literary era, primarily in the fact that poetry of the 1880s played a large role in the formation of the novel. It was at this time that the importance of poetry was reassessed and at the same time the method of Russian psychological prose was born. The role of poetry turned out to be invaluable in revealing the spiritual life of the heroes.
A comparative analysis of intertextual connections allows us to conclude that the work of both artists is saturated with similar life realities, motives, echoes, imagery, and general moods. In the poetry of Fet and the novels of Tolstoy, the “dialectic of the soul” penetrates into the images of nature; both writers attach great importance to the connections between the feelings and experiences of man and nature.
The main conclusion we came to is that as a result of the personal and creative interaction of writers, a process of creative enrichment of each other occurs. Moreover, it does not matter how this process occurs: consciously or unconsciously. Various forms of creative interaction between A. Fet and L. Tolstoy help us understand the features of the real literary process of the second half of the 19th century, and through them - the patterns common to this process.
The practical significance of the work lies in the fact that the direct observations made in it can be used in a university lecture course on the history of Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century, in practical classes and seminars, in teaching literature in a school course, in a secondary educational institution (teacher college) , directly when analyzing poetic texts.
The main provisions and results were reflected in five publications and speeches at three conferences (“L.N. Tolstoy as an editor of Fetov’s texts”, Second Maimin Readings, Pskov, 1998; “A.A. Fet and L.N. Tolstoy (to the problem parallels and interactions of lyrics and prose)", Third Maimin Readings, Pskov, 2000; "Contemporary Writers in the Creative Process of A. Fet", Second International Conference "Literary Text: Problems and Research Methods", Tver, 1998; "On the History of Fet's texts", Dergachev readings - 98. International scientific conference, Ekaterinburg, 1998; "Sevastopol brotherly cemetery" by A. Fet and "Sevastopol stories" by L. Tolstoy", Dergachev readings - 2000. International scientific conference, Ekaterinburg, 2000).
NOTES
1. Rozanova S.A. Leo Tolstoy and Fet (The Story of a Friendship) // Russian Literature. - 1963. - No. 2. - P.86-107.
3. See about this: Ozerov L.A. A.A. Fet (On the skill of the poet). - M.: Knowledge, 1970; Gromov P.P. About the style of Leo Tolstoy. The formation of the “dialectics of the soul.” -L.: Artist. lit., 1971; Gromov P.P. About the style of Leo Tolstoy. "Dialectics of the Soul" in "War and Peace". - L.: Artist. lit., 1977; Eikhenbaum B.M. Lev Tolstoy. Seventies. - L.: Artist. lit., 1974; Berkovsky N.Ya. On the global significance of Russian literature. - L.: Nauka, 1975; Kozhinov V.V. A book about Russian lyric poetry of the 19th century. Development of style and genre. - M.: Sovremennik, 1978; Babaev E.G. Essays on the aesthetics and creativity of Leo Tolstoy. - M.: Publishing house Mosk. Univ., 1981; Skatov N.N. Lyrics of Afanasy Fet (Origins, method, evolution) // Skatov N.N. Far and near. Literary critical essays. - M.: Sovremennik, 1981. - P. 119-149; Bukhshtab B.Ya. A.A.Fet. Essay on life and creativity. - L.: Science, 1990.
4. Cheremisinova L.I. A.A. Fet and L.N. Tolstoy. Creative connections. - L., 1989.
5. Bukhshtab B.Ya. The fate of A.A. Fet’s literary heritage // Literary heritage. - M., 1935. - T. 22-24. - pp. 564-581; Bukhshtab B.Ya. A.A.Fet // Complete collection of poems. - L.: Sov. writer, 1937. - S. V-XXV; Bukhshtab B.Ya. A.A.Fet // Complete collection of poems. - L.: Sov. writer, 1959.-S. 5-78.
6. Blagoy D.D. From the past of Russian literature. Turgenev - editor of Fet // Print and revolution. - 1923. - Book. 3. - pp. 45-64; Blagoy D.D. The world as beauty (About “Evening Lights” by A. Fet) // Fet A.A. Evening lights. - M.: Nauka, 1979.
7. Gasparov M.L. Composition of lyrical poems // Theory of literature. In 4 volumes. T. 2. Work. - M.; Heritage, in press.
Conclusion of scientific work dissertation on the topic "L. Tolstoy and A. Fet"
The results of the study show that the artistic worlds of contemporary writers are interpenetrable. They are mutually permeable even when there are no direct creative contacts, but only indirect influence occurs (for example, this was the case with edits “in the spirit of Tolstoy”). This, we believe, is the theoretical meaning of our research, which goes beyond the historical and literary aspect in understanding the contact between two writers.
CONCLUSION
In this work, using the example of two outstanding writers of the last century, we tried to show what the study of creative interactions between a prose writer and a poet gives, how poetry and prose actually interact in literature, how poetry influences prose and vice versa.
As a result of the study, it seems possible to us to talk about the typology of the literary influence of writers who lived at the same time on each other.
We highlight the following forms of such interaction:
1) Direct personal communication between writers.
It is known that Fet and Tolstoy knew each other, were friends for more than twenty years, and met repeatedly in Yasnaya Polyana, Moscow, Novoselki, Vorobyovka in the 60-70s of the 19th century. They came to visit each other. We assume that Fet’s decision to become a landowner, engage in agriculture, and create village sketches was not least the result of this direct communication. Thus, Tolstoy advised Fet on how best to conduct “plowing.” In the 60s, Tolstoy was temporarily fascinated by the same thing.
An example of this form of interaction is the creation by Fet, inspired by the singing of T.A. Kuzminskaya, of the poem “The night was shining. The garden was full of the moon."
2) Correspondence of writers.
Fet and Tolstoy maintained an active correspondence for many years, from 1858 to 1881. We know of 171 letters from Tolstoy to Fet and 139 letters from Fet. Since 1881, S.A. Tolstaya took over the correspondence function. However, Fet knew that his letters would also be read by L.N. Tolstoy. The bulk of this correspondence took place in the 1980s.
An example of creative contacts through correspondence is the process of creating mountain songs that we analyzed. Tolstoy did not have such contact with other poets. Tolstoy, in a letter dated October 26, 1875, provides a prose translation of the songs of the mountaineers. Fet translated these translations into poetry, sent them to Tolstoy, and then published them under the title “Songs of the Caucasian Highlanders.”
3) Appeal to a single external source that shapes the aesthetic views of writers (in particular, to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer).
As a result of communication, Fet and Tolstoy had a common literary idea to translate the works of Schopenhauer. However, each writer solved this problem in his own way.
4) Interaction of aesthetic concepts.
Tolstoy and Fet repeatedly expressed their views on art and literature. We were convinced that in many respects their views coincided, especially in the early period of creativity. There are statements both in their articles and in letters. It can be said with some certainty that they read each other's articles and drew their own conclusions. One way or another, we find reflections of their views and ideas in their creativity.
An example of such interaction is Fet’s article “On the Poems of F. Tyutchev,” published in February 1859, and L. Tolstoy’s oral speech in defense of “pure art,” which is close in spirit to Fet’s.
5) Criticism of each other.
Both Fet and Tolstoy often spoke out about each other's works. There are critical reviews both in letters and in the direct statements of writers.
An example of this form of interaction is the discussion of Fet’s article “Our Intelligentsia.” Fet read the article to Tolstoy in August 1878 in Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy, in a letter to Fet, recommended correcting the connections between individual parts of the article. After such advice, Fet divided it into 17 chapters.
6) “Editing” of Fet’s poems by Tolstoy.
Editing" was both direct (Tolstoy made comments about individual expressions, lines, stanzas) and indirect (Fet made changes to the texts under the influence of Tolstoy’s requirements for them).
7) The similarity of motives, themes, images of Fet’s poems and the corresponding passages from the novels “War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina” by Tolstoy.
An example of such creative interaction is Fet’s poem “Lonely Oak” and the scene of Andrei Bolkonsky’s meeting with an oak tree in the novel “War and Peace,” as well as the poem “Hound Hunt” and the hunting scene from the same novel.
8) The use in the works of both writers of commonplaces of romantic poetry (poetisms), such as “black canopy of the night” - “starry canopy of the night”, the epithet “silver” and the verb “silver”, “vault of heaven” - “vault of the sky”, “the air is clean” - “clean morning air”, etc.
9) Direct influence of works and borrowings from them.
An example is Fet’s creation of the poem “Sevastopol Brotherhood Cemetery,” written under the clear impression of reading Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol Stories.”
An example of creative contact through correspondence is the metaphorically expressed idea about the screw that is in every person, expressed first in Fet’s letter to Tolstoy, and then used by Tolstoy in his novels.
Having analyzed the role of Tolstoy as the “editor” of Fet’s poems and Fet’s poetry as the basis for the creation of Tolstoy’s psychological novels, we come to the conclusion that each of the writers used images from each other’s works at the level of borrowing and figurative overlap.
In the case of Tolstoy and Fet, one can see all forms of direct creative interaction, both direct (for example, Tolstoy as the “editor” of Fet’s poems) and indirect (the similarity of motives, themes, images in Fet’s poems and excerpts from the novels “War and Peace”, "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy).
Thus, we saw that two independent writers living at the same time, in the same country, among the same culture, could not be independent of each other. Their creative interaction through various forms continued for more than twenty years, even when they separated.
The poet and prose writer followed each other’s work and read each other’s works. Tolstoy continued to read Fet's poems even after his death, and never ceased to admire them, despite his changed views. The communication between Fet and Tolstoy was direct. In their friendship and creative contacts one can see all forms of interaction.
Using the example of the interaction of two artists, we can draw conclusions about other artists living in the same era. For example, the creative interaction of Goethe and Schiller, who communicated, corresponded, and wrote together. In this sense, the case of Fet and Tolstoy can be considered typical.
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“For the second year I have been living in a philosophical world that is extremely interesting to me, and without it it is hardly possible to understand the source of my latest poems,” wrote L.N. Fet. Tolstoy in 1879, referring to the philosophy of Schopenhauer.
In Fet's late lyrics, it is not lyrical emotion, but philosophical thought that comes first. The poet's later work contains reflections on the wisdom of nature, on the vulgarity of everyday life and on moving away from it into the world of beauty, on the freedom of art and its power to stop the moment and on the poverty of art in comparison with the eternal beauty of the world.
Collection “Evening Lights”
Images of nature are becoming more and more symbolic and cosmic, which often gives literary researchers a reason to compare the late Fet and Tyutchev. Nature in “Evening Lights” does not respond to the hero’s feelings, but appears before him as a mysterious all-encompassing force. This is the image of the stars, which was also found in early poetry; but if in youthful poems the meek and warm stars reflected the dreamy and pensive mood of the lyrical hero, now they embody the incomprehensible mystery of existence, which the poet seeks to unravel.
Thus, the impressionistic nature of Fet's early poems is replaced by philosophical symbolism - even in landscape poems.
In later lyric poetry, the associative and metaphorical nature of images increases, their role in revealing the theme of the poem and in creating a clear composition increases. A poem sometimes represents one extended metaphor or a chain of interconnected metaphors that sharply separate real reality from the ideal world (“With one push to drive away a living boat...”).
The collection “Evening Lights” contains many poems about love. These are poems dedicated to Maria Lazic, containing rather memories of a past tragic love, and poems full of real strong feelings.
In the poet's later love poems, the desire for life, beauty, youth, and love is manifested more than ever. These poems are not so much about love as about its transformative power and joy.
The musicality of Fet's lyrics does not weaken - on the contrary: his poems are full of harmonic consonances, and often in the most intonationally strong places, in rhyming words.
Fet’s most famous poem dedicated to music is undoubtedly “The Night Shined. The garden was full of the moon...”, attributed by the poet to the “Melodies” cycle. This poem was written in memory of two musical evenings at which Fet was shocked and excited by the way T.A. sang the romances of Bulakhovsky and Glinka. Kuzminskaya (Bers), sister of S.A. Tolstoy. This ugly, but extremely charming and lively woman with a beautiful voice served as one of the prototypes for Natasha Rostova and the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace". “Lev Nikolaevich liked the poems,” wrote Kuzminskaya, “and one day he read them out loud to someone in front of me. Having reached the last line: “Love you, hug you and cry over you,” he made us all laugh: these poems are beautiful,” he said, “but why does he want to hug Tanya... a married man...”
The refrain, which seemed so absurd to the writer, creates a feeling of repetition of the moment of true existence, contrasted with a boring and tedious life. This is how the theme of time and its overcoming, as well as overcoming suffering with the help of art, is stated, important for the late Fet.
The poem is built on a chain of associative images: “open piano” - “trembling strings” - “trembling hearts” - “open hearts”. The appearance of the heroine is unknown to the reader, but the beauty of her voice is conveyed through the perception of the lyrical hero, whose delight is heard in every line.
The main features of Fet's late lyrics: psychologism akin to Tolstoy (the philosophy of the late Fet is often compared to Tyutchev), musicality (romanticism in the traditions of Zhukovsky), realism (in the poetry of Pushkin and the prose of Turgenev), as well as humanity.
Source (abbreviated): Lanin B.A. Russian language and literature. Literature: 10th grade / B.A. Lanin, L.Yu. Ustinova, V.M. Shamchikova. - M.: Ventana-Graf, 2016