Igor Severyanin used Myatlev’s lines to write a poignant poem about the difficult fate of Russia after the October events of 1917:
How beautiful, how fresh the roses will be,
My country threw me into a coffin.
It is these two lines that are engraved on the tombstone of Igor Severyanin in Tallinn, where he is buried.
Why does the poet use the device of allusion? What is his role?
The first quatrain of “Classical Roses” is an exact quote from the beginning of Myatlev’s poem, an allusion in the second stanza of Severyanin’s poem already from Turgenev:
In those times when dreams swarmed
In the hearts of people, transparent and clear,
How beautiful, how fresh the roses were
My love, and glory, and spring!
“Those times” here are pre-revolutionary Russia, the image of which was given with such love by Turgenev.
The third stanza with the word “memory” also refers us to Turgenev’s poem:
The summers have passed, and tears are flowing everywhere...
There is neither a country nor those who lived in the country...
How beautiful, how fresh the roses are today
Memories of the past day!
For Turgenev, the “past day” is the abandoned Motherland and the memories of his youth associated with it. For Severyanin, this is pre-revolutionary Russia, which no longer exists.
In the third stanza, changes are made to the quote, which refers us back to K.R.’s technique: the word “were” is changed to the word “now” (in K.R. “now”), which clearly correlates with time.
The fourth stanza at first reads as an allusion to the lines of K.R. “And after the gloomy winter / again ... / Joys and dreams will return, / How good then, How fresh the roses will be!”:
But as the days go by, the thunderstorms have already subsided.
Return to the house Russia is looking for a path.
How beautiful, how fresh the roses will be.
The last line hits the heart:
... My country threw me into a coffin.
And again roses and death are intertwined into one, as in Myatlev and Turgenev.
1825 The Civil War is over, the past is destroyed. Fate brought Northerner to Estonia. Only memories remain. The poet believes that the Motherland will overcome all adversity, and then, someday, will quickly remember him and bring flowers. But you can read these lines in another way: I will be remembered only after death.
1925 was the time of the New Economic Policy, a time when many returned to Russia (to their destruction): “Russia is looking for a path to return to home.” But he won't come back.
How much one line of one poem has revealed to us! How the technique of allusive inclusions expands the semantic and figurative space of the work! How this technique reveals the idea of continuity in Russian literature!
Her Majesty Queen Maria of Yugoslavia
with sincere admiration respectfully
I'm donating my book
Poems 1922–1930
Queen Mary
Once upon a time in our northern newspaper
I saw you with a fishing rod in your hands, -
And sympathy flared up in the poet
To the Monarch's Wife in sunny lands.And since then, filled with melody,
One dream fascinates me.
Stands in the Queen's palace park,
Casting a fishing rod from a bridge.I cut this picture at the same time
And since then he has always been with me.
I can't even imagine
How I lived in the past years without him.I'll never be dissuaded
In a dream, above the Finnish created wave,
What a beautiful queen of the south
He has a poetic soul!
Classic roses
In my garden! How they seduced my gaze!
How I prayed for the spring frosts
Do not touch them with a cold hand!
In those times when dreams swarmed
In the hearts of people, transparent and clear,
How beautiful, how fresh the roses were
My love, and glory, and spring!The summers have passed, and tears are flowing everywhere...
There is neither a country nor those who lived in the country...
How beautiful, how fresh the roses are today
Memories of the past day!But as the days go by, the thunderstorms are already subsiding.
Back to the house Russia is looking for a path...
How beautiful, how fresh the roses will be,
My country has thrown me into a coffin!
Desired holiday
Desired holiday
(starter)
To sing about Russia - why strive to go to church
Through forested mountains, field carpets...To sing about Russia - to welcome spring,
What to wait for the bride, what to console the mother...To sing about Russia is to forget the melancholy,
What is love to love, what is it to be immortal!
Who are you?
Goy, kingdom of farce!
You are a complete carousel!
By the evil will of a bully
You slurp blood like jelly...The whole world is amazed at you,
Can't figure it all out:
You are a walking girl
Or God's grace?
Pre-Sunday
To the east, there, to the Ural mountains,
A strange country is scattered,
That more than once seemed to die,
Like love, like the sun, like spring.And when the people fell silent sternly
And, orphaned, blind from tears,
By God's will she was resurrected again, -
Like spring, like the sun, like Christ!
What you need to know
You have lost your Russia.
Did you resist the elements?
Good elements of dark evil?
No? So shut up: you took me away
You are destined for a reason
To the edges of an unkind foreign land.
What's the use of moaning and groaning -
Russia must be earned!
And it will be soon...
And soon there will be a spring day,
And we will go home to Russia...
Put on your silk hat:
You are especially beautiful in it...And there will be a holiday... big, big,
Which there were, perhaps,
Since the entire globe was created,
So funny and shabby...And you whisper: “Are we not in a dream?...”
I'll pinch you laughing
And I’ll cry, praying to spring
And kissing the Russian land!
Or is it a miracle?
Or is it a miracle?
Or is it true?
Quietly whispers: “It will come true:
To the light this darkness.
Just don't take it apart
Accumulated rays."
Whose voice are you, gentle voice?
Whose eyes are you shining?A grid girl appears.
You look - nothing.
Heard, but not seen.
What witchcraft!
A duck swims by
On the recruiting crack.
Or is it a miracle?
Or is it true?
That May
It was May. On the trimmed Strelka
They were already selling violets.
The kids played with burners,
And the horizontal lines basked.And the tires of the strollers crunched,
The pressed, disturbed gravel.
It was May, and on May pastels
Everything was in the Ostrov frame.Beleso overnight capital
Beyond the Nevka and beyond the Neva.
And the faces were covered
Lifeless lilacs that May...Swampy, consumptive, white
They were covered in lilacs.
Isabella's lips breathed -
A little tart, a little perishable laziness...There was doom and death
In the eyes, in the Islands, in the white horror.
And in every block of stone
There was a story about the last minute.The burners were extinguished
And chilly horizontal lines
That May, half dead on Strelka,
Where the violets became dead...
Pre-wrath
Moscow didn’t understand yesterday
But tomorrow, believe me, Moscow will understand:
To be born Russian is too little,
So that the Russians have rights...And remembering the soul of his ancestors, he will stand up,
Moving from words to deeds,
And anger will break out in the people's souls,
Like the thunder of living rain.And she will break the oppression, as she broke the oppression
More than once the army of rebels...
To be born Russian is too little:
They need to be, they need to become!
In 1918, after the October Revolution, the poet and writer Igor Severyanin moved to live from St. Petersburg to Estonia, to Est-Toila, where he always spent the spring and summer. Historical upheavals changed the life not only of the entire country, but also of each individual person in it. The poet found himself in an atmosphere alien to him. Everything that was dear and sweet to him remained in the past. And life offered new options for political strife and fierce struggle. The values that had previously been recognized by humanity were called into question. Time contributed little to poetry, but still the poet published 9 books and made many translations.
The poet expressed his search for the true path, the path to himself, to the past in his poem “Classic Roses,” written in 1925. Homesickness is the main background of this work, and the theme of unfulfilled patriotic hopes is the main element of its content. The minor pathos of the poem conveys the tragedy of the events of that time and the author’s experiences.
The poem is divided into three semantic parts. The first talks about the past, emphasizing it with the phrase “How beautiful, how fresh the roses were”. At that time people's dreams were "transparent and clear", and the poet himself had both love and fame. In the second, the author describes the present: “How beautiful, how fresh the roses are today”. Although "Tears are flowing everywhere", and the whole country ceased to exist, the people who lived in it no longer exist. And the third part tells about what will happen: the thunderstorms subside, Russia is looking for its paths. Roses are still beautiful, but someday they will have to fall on the poet’s coffin. There is a clear contrast between all three parts, except for one similarity - how beautiful the roses are in the past, present and future.
Poets have always responded with pain to dramatic events in the political life of their homeland. True patriots dreamed of seeing her happy, and, therefore, free. Word artists serve their purpose in serving their people, the Fatherland.
In the work “Classic Roses” there is concern for Russia and its people. The author expresses hope that his homeland will still find a way out.
Understanding and accepting the inevitable, with his mind's eye the lyrical hero followed his departure from life.
Concept "rose", which the author put in the title of the work, expresses a symbol of beauty, solemnity, but at the same time the danger contained in the thorns of a flower. It is customary that flowers symbolize the joy of life, its victory over death. However, they also put flowers on the grave and plant them, hence the association with mourning. So in the poem “Classic Roses” this majestic flower is used in a double meaning: first it is a symbol of love and positive memories, and then a symbol of mourning - roses thrown into a coffin.
The lyrical work “Classic Roses” is a poem genre which the author himself defined as “a poem without rhyme or meter.” Three time layers - past, present and future, are clearly distributed among the stanzas. Each stanza ends with an exclamation mark, which emphasizes the emotional coloring of the speech.
Half the lines of the verse are metaphors And epithets - "How fresh the roses are", "dreams swarmed", roses of love, summers are gone, "Russia is looking for a path".
Intertext plays an important role: a line from I. Myatlev’s elegy “Roses” is repeated three times in the poem unchanged.
After reading the poem “Classical Roses,” it becomes clear that behind the mask of the lyricist and dreamer Igor Severyanin, the suffering face of the poet was hidden. His compatriots were not given the opportunity to throw roses into the poet’s coffin, but their descendants are destined to read and comprehend the works of a man who waited too long for understanding.