No, it’s not you that I love so passionately,
Your beauty is not for me:
I love the past suffering in you
And my lost youth.
When sometimes I look at you,
Looking into your eyes with a long gaze:
I'm busy talking mysteriously
But I’m not talking to you with my heart.
I'm talking to a friend from my younger days,
I'm looking for other features in your features,
In the mouths of the living, lips have long been mute,
In the eyes there is a fire of faded eyes.
Analysis of the poem “No, it’s not you I love so passionately” by Lermontov
M. Yu. Lermontov suffered all his life from a lack of understanding of people. This was due to his excessive passion for the ideas of romanticism, as well as political beliefs. By the end of his life, he had already become so accustomed to his image of an unsociable person that he even found a certain interest in it. This had a direct impact on his personal life. The poet strove for the feminine ideal created in his imagination, but could not find it in reality. In the last years of his life he became interested in V. Lopukhina. The girl reciprocated his feelings and was ready to agree to marriage. According to contemporaries, Lermontov himself abandoned his happiness. He considered his fate a failure and saw no prospects. The poet idolized Lopukhina, but was afraid that by marriage he would doom his beloved to shared suffering. In this noble endeavor, one can see how much Lermontov has lost the purpose and meaning of his existence. It is noteworthy that he gave Lopukhina’s final answer before his second exile to the Caucasus. The poem “No, it’s not you I love so passionately...” (1841) is dedicated to E. Bykhovets, whom the poet met on the way to exile and opened his soul to the girl.
The poem refers to pure love lyrics. It is imbued with a very sad and tragic mood. They say that E. Bykhovets was very similar to Lopukhina, so Lermontov saw his beloved in her and decided to have a very frank conversation. Recognizing the incredible beauty of the young girl, the poet exclaims with regret that his heart belongs to another. He believes that his youth and dreams died long ago, but were temporarily resurrected when he looked at his interlocutor.
Talking with E. Bykhovets, Lermontov cannot get rid of the memories of his beloved. The external similarity of the girls leads to the fact that the poet is engaged in a “mysterious conversation” with the mental image of Lopukhina.
Lermontov mentions his beloved only in the past tense. Moreover, he describes it with the help of images of “mouths... dumb”, “faded eyes”. By this, the author emphasizes that he buried his love forever. He considers the trip to the Caucasus a conscious search for death, so he says goodbye to everything that still connects him with life.
Many of Lermontov's poems became prophecies about his own death. “No, it’s not you that I love so passionately...” is one of them.
No, it’s not you that I love so passionately,
Your beauty is not for me:
I love the past suffering in you
And my lost youth.When sometimes I look at you,
Looking into your eyes with a long gaze,
I'm busy talking mysteriously
But I’m not talking to you with my heart.I'm talking to a friend from my younger days,
I'm looking for other features in your features,
In the mouths of the living - lips that have long been mute,
In the eyes - the fire of faded eyes.
Analysis of Lermontov’s poem “No, it’s not you I love so ardently...”
It is no secret that in the last years of his life, Mikhail Lermontov became very attached to Varvara Lopukhina, whom he literally idolized. However, the poet understood that a possible union of two loving hearts would only bring deep suffering to his chosen one. Lermontov explained this not only by his bad and hot-tempered character, but also by the meaninglessness of his own life. He believed that he could not make a woman happy if he was a deeply unhappy person confused in his aspirations. One way or another, Lermontov informed Lopukhina about his decision not to tie the knot. This happened shortly before the fatal duel, when the poet came to St. Petersburg for a short time and then went to the Caucasus again. On the way to his regiment, Lermontov stopped in Pyatigorsk, where fate brought him together with Ekaterina Bykhovets. It was to this girl that the poet dedicated the poem “No, it’s not you I love so passionately...”.
Subsequently, Ekaterina Bykhovets recalled that the poet had very tender feelings for her. However, this attitude could be explained very simply, since this young lady looked very much like Lermontov’s Varvara Lopukhina. Therefore, it is not surprising that, addressing Ekaterina Bykhovets in verse, the poet notes: “I love in you my past suffering and my lost youth.” Thus, from this phrase it becomes obvious that Lermontov really put an end to his relationship with Varvara Lopukhina, although this decision was not easy for him. Mentally, he is still close to his chosen one. Therefore, the author admits that when he looks at young Ekaterina Bykhovets, he is busy with a “mysterious conversation” that he is having in his soul. “But I’m not talking to you with my heart,” the poet emphasizes.
At the same time, Lermontov understands that Varvara Lopukhina has disappeared from his life completely and irrevocably. Mentally he buries her image, but his heart cannot control it. It is for this reason that he tries to find such familiar and sweet features in the appearance of another, hoping to see “the fire of faded eyes” in the eyes of his interlocutor. It is noteworthy that Lermontov, who did not let anyone into his inner world, turned out to be surprisingly frank during his brief acquaintance with Ekaterina Bykhovets. Perhaps the poet had a presentiment of his imminent death and understood that, albeit through a third party, but for the last time he would confess his love for Lopukhina. According to the memoirs of Ekaterina Bykhovets, the poet could talk for hours about the one to whom his heart belonged, but at the same time he remembered her in the past tense.
It is impossible to correctly read the poem “No, it’s not you I love so passionately” by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov without understanding the poet’s character. The author of the work considered his life meaningless, and himself - confused and unhappy. And for these reasons, he could not give happiness to the woman he loved - Varvara Lopukhina. His passion for the beauty came to him in the last years of his life, when the poet was completely disillusioned with everything. However, this poem, studied in a literature lesson in class, is dedicated not to the one who occupied his heart, but to a girl very similar to her, Ekaterina Bykhovets. It was this similarity that aroused tender feelings in the creator.
From the text of Lermontov’s poem “No, it’s not you I love so ardently” it is easy to understand that he is well aware of the reflected nature of his feelings. And therefore, speaking with the beauty who so reminds him of his lost love, he seems to confess his love to the one from whom he left for the Caucasus. It is enough to study the lines he wrote in full to understand both the depth of his love and the irreversibility of his sadness. Read online, this poem will reveal the inner world of the poet, who was very secretive during personal conversations: it was as if he had a presentiment of his death and was saying goodbye to his beloved.
No, it’s not you that I love so passionately,
Your beauty is not for me:
I love the past suffering in you
And my lost youth.
When sometimes I look at you,
Looking into your eyes with a long gaze:
I'm busy talking mysteriously
But I’m not talking to you with my heart.
I'm talking to a friend from my younger days;
I am looking for other features in your features;
In the mouths of the living, lips have long been mute,
In the eyes there is a fire of faded eyes.
The poem “No, it’s not you I love so passionately...” was written by M. Yu. Lermontov in 1841 and, as is typical for many of his works of this period, touches on the theme of tragic love and the inevitable loneliness of the lyrical hero, characteristic of romanticism.
The central motive is the appeal to past love and the simultaneous inability to accept the present one. The lyrical hero admits that his beloved is beautiful, but this beauty does not touch his heart as much as memories:
“No, it’s not you that I love so passionately,
Your beauty is not for me."
The unrealizability of what is desired even in love makes the hero deeply unhappy and dissatisfied with his own life, forcing him to turn to the past over and over again:
“I love the past suffering in you
And my lost youth."
Such an appeal to the memories of past days shows the depth of the tragedy of the lyrical hero, who no longer strives to realize his dreams, because they all crumbled under the yoke of cruel reality. He finds a way out in rejecting reality and returning - albeit mentally - to the past:
"I'm talking to a friend of my youth,
I'm looking for other features in your features,
In the mouths of the living, lips have long been mute,
In the eyes there is a fire of faded eyes.”
The inability to look at the whole picture also gives rise to the absence of a specifically considered situation, which makes it difficult to draw any conclusions about the two images present in the poem. They can overlap each other and represent portraits of the same woman, but in different time periods and, accordingly, with different attitudes of the lyrical hero towards her, or they can reflect portraits of two completely different people: from the past and the present. It is also impossible to exclude the romantic option, where the past is that most idealized and a priori unattainable, which the lyrical hero no longer strives for due to the futility of searching for harmony with the world, but which he still dreams about.
However, the mood of the poem, like the mood of the main character, is quite specific: lack of mental balance and disappointment actually lead to inevitable and, in a sense, voluntary loneliness:
“When sometimes I look at you,
Looking into your eyes with a long gaze:
I'm busy talking mysteriously
But I’m not talking to you with my heart.”
The value of M. Yu. Lermontov’s poems lies not only in the imagery of his language, but also in his incredible ability to reveal global literary themes with his inherent emotionality.
“No, it’s not you that I love so passionately”- romance based on poems by M. Yu. Lermontov (1841). The music was composed in the early 1900s by composer A.V. Shishkin
Poem |
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov composed this poem shortly before his death - apparently in April 1841 or, according to other sources, in the summer of 1841 (Lermontov died on July 15, 1841).
To whom exactly these lyrical lines are addressed has not been definitively established. It was suggested that its addressee was Ekaterina Grigorievna Bykhovets (1820-1880), a distant relative of the poet, whom Lermontov met in Pyatigorsk. In a letter dated August 5, 1841, Bykhovets wrote: “He was passionately in love with V. A. Bakhmeteva<Лопухину>... I think he loved me because he found similarities in us, and his favorite conversation was about her.”.
However, this has not been definitely established. According to the literary critic and literary historian P. A. Viskovatova, Lermontov’s lines are addressed to Sofya Mikhailovna Sollogub (née Vielgorskaya, 1820-1878), the wife of the writer V. A. Sollogub.
Countess Sofya Mikhailovna, an ideal and in all respects beautiful woman, an impeccable life, completely devoted to her family, told me that Lermontov visited her on his last visit to St. Petersburg. The poet used to silently look at her with his expressive eyes, which had a magnetic influence, so that “you involuntarily had to turn in the direction from which they were looking at you.” “My husband,” said Sofya Mikhailovna, “really didn’t like it when Mikhail Yuryevich looked at me like that, and one day I said to Lermontov when he stared at me again: “Vous savez, Lermontoff, que mon mari n'aime pas cette manière de fixer le monde, pourquoi me faites-vous ce désagrement?“ (You know, Lermontov, that my husband does not like this manner of peering closely, why are you giving me this trouble?). Lermontov did not answer, got up and left. The next day he brought me poems: “No, it’s not you that I love so passionately.” My husband took them from me, and I don’t know where they remained. This was just before the poet’s departure” (“M. Yu. Lermontov. Life and Creativity”, M., 1891, pp. 326-327).
If Viskovatov’s story is true, then the poem was apparently written in April 1841 in St. Petersburg.
It is not clear which “friend of his youthful days,” who died long ago (“the lips have long been mute”), was written here by Lermontov. Among his youthful poems there is one in which Lermontov talks about the death of his beloved girl (“Illness in my chest”, 1832).
The poem “No, it’s not you that I love so ardently” was first published in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski in 1843 (vol. XXVIII, no. 6, p. 194), after the poet’s death