Love lyrics by A. Blok (Alexander Blok). All school essays on literature Essays on topics

One of the main features of A. Blok’s work is that it completes the development of many important themes and motifs that arose back in the 19th century and are associated with an awareness of the role and place of man in the world around him, in a given social environment. In A. Blok’s lyrics they receive their rebirth, are staged and formulated anew - already as themes and motives of his work, although the poet is quite clearly aware of their genetic connection with the past.

Already contemporaries noticed how often several key words were repeated in A. Blok’s lyrics. So, K.I. Chukovsky wrote that the favorite words of the early A. Blok were “fogs” and “dreams”. The entire corpus of A. Blok's lyrics is characterized by a stable repetition of the most important images, verbal formulas and lyrical situations.

Thanks to cross-cutting motifs, A. Blok’s poetry acquired a very high degree of unity. The poet himself wanted his readers to view his lyrics as a single work - as a three-volume novel in verse, which he called the “trilogy of humanization.”

The main motive that connects the disparate works and largely determines the composition of the “Collected Poems” is the “idea of the path,” the poet’s understanding of his own development, his own evolution. At the same time, Blok perceives his path as the path of a modern person and already as the path of an intellectual of the new century. In this regard, for his “trilogy of lyrics” the orientation towards the social novel of the 19th century is very significant. and above all to “Eugene Onegin”, by analogy with which he calls his “trilogy” a novel in verse.

The external composition of Blok’s “novel in verse” is divided into three volumes, each of which has ideological and aesthetic unity and corresponds to one of the stages of “humanization.” In addition to the external composition, A. Blok’s trilogy is also organized by a more complex internal composition - a system of motifs, figurative, lexical and intonation repetitions that connect individual poems and cycles into a single whole.

The central cycle of the first volume of Blok’s lyrical trilogy is “Poems about a Beautiful Lady.” The entire cycle is permeated with the pathos of chaste love for a woman, knightly service to her and admiration for her as the personification of the ideal of spiritual beauty, a symbol of everything sublimely beautiful. The heroine of A. Blok's poetry is seen by the hero not as an earthly woman, but as a deity. She has several names: Beautiful Lady, Forever Young, Holy Virgin, Lady of the Universe. She is heavenly, mysterious, inaccessible, detached from earthly troubles:

Transparent, unknown shadows

They swim to you, and with them

You're floating

Into the arms of azure dreams,

Incomprehensible to us, -

You give yourself. (1901)

Love is embodied in the motive of the Meeting of the lyrical hero and the Lady. The story of the Meeting, which should transform the world and the hero, destroy the power of time (“to unite tomorrow and yesterday with fire”), create the kingdom of God on earth (where “heaven returned to earth”) - this is the lyrical plot.

The painfully sensitive, exquisitely nervous A. Blok sees and hears signs of the end everywhere around him. But the motives of early disappointment do not prevent A. Blok from ardently believing in the happiness of love:

Now hearts are full of love,

One love and sweet bliss...

In high friendship: When we get tired on the way,

And a foggy stench will cover us

Come to me to rest

And I come to you, my welcome friend! (1898)

Particular tension marked the final first volume of the cycle “Crossroads” (1904). The bright emotional atmosphere of loving expectation is replaced by moods of dissatisfaction with oneself, self-irony, motives of “fears”, “laughter”, and anxieties. “Crossroads” anticipate important changes in the fate of the lyrical hero.

These changes are clearly visible in the second volume of the trilogy, corresponding to the second period of the poet’s work. The motives of waiting for a meeting and high service are replaced by the motives of immersion in the elements of life.

The second part of the trilogy covers the poet’s work from 1904 to 1908. It highlights such cycles as “The City” (1904-1908), “Snow Mask” (1907) - here the motives of wild passion find their peak expression, “Free Thoughts” (1907). The poet turns to reality, sees the contradictions and drama of what is happening. Social motives appear in the poems (“Factory” - 1903, “Fed” - 1905), and an urban theme. In the “City” cycle, A. Blok creates the image of a city hostile to beauty, vulgarity reigns in it, the edge of heaven is bursting, the alleys are buzzing.

The artistic world is becoming more complex, the symbolism of color is changing: azure, gold, white are giving way to dirty red and blue tones.

A. Blok constantly feels an alarming need to look for some new paths, new high ideals. And it is precisely this restlessness, a skeptical attitude towards universal skepticism, an intense search for new values that distinguishes him from internally self-satisfied decadence. In the famous poem “Stranger” (1906), the lyrical hero excitedly peers at a beautiful visitor to a country restaurant, trying in vain to find out who is in front of him: the incarnation high beauty, the image of “ancient beliefs”, or the Stranger – a woman from the world of drunkards “with the eyes of rabbits”? “Stranger” is a poem indicative of the second period of creativity. The two-part composition absolutely corresponds to the romantic dual world of the lyrical hero. The parts are contrasted according to the principle of contrast. The content, rhythmic structure, vocabulary, and figurative means of the two parts are contrasting.

We see not only the complexities of the relationship between the hero and the Soul of the World, but we also see the warmth of the “rosy forest”, motives of sadness, separation - the most earthly feelings.

One of the fundamental poems of the second volume is “Oh, spring without end and without edge...” (1907). It develops one of the most important motifs of A. Blok’s lyrics - “Both disgust from life and crazy love for it.”

The third volume of the “novel in verse” synthesizes and rethinks the most important motifs of the first two volumes of the trilogy. It opens with the cycle “A Terrible World” (1910-1916). The leading motive of the cycle is the death of the world of modern urban civilization. The pole of the “terrible world” evokes in the minds of the lyrical hero the thought of impending retribution - this thought develops in the cycles “Retribution” (1908 – 1913) and “Iambics” (1907 – 1914). The logical development of the path of the lyrical hero is an appeal to new values - for A. Blok, this value is the people's life, the Motherland. The theme of Russia arises - the most important theme in the poet’s work, most fully embodied in the cycle “Motherland” (1907 - 1916) - the pinnacle of the “trilogy of humanization”.

In poems about Russia, the leading role belongs to the motives of the historical destinies of the country: the semantic core of patriotic lyrics is the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” (1908). The most important motive of poems about the Motherland is the motive of the path. At the end of the lyrical trilogy, this is the common “way of the cross” for the hero and his country. At the third stage of his creative path, A. Blok, passionately desiring change, seemed to have found a goal and took the right path - he began to “listen to the music of the revolution,” with which he connected hopes for the renewal of Russia, hopes for the emergence of a new man. But the revolution deceived A. Blok’s expectations - “that dream deceived, like any dream.” Instead of a new culture and reforms, there is a lack of concern for culture in general, pseudo-culture, a noose around the neck, trampling on freedom, bureaucratic squabbles. Joy and music disappeared from A. Blok’s life. Researchers associated this with a decline in creativity, with feelings of the end of the road, with a “lack of air” in Soviet Russia, which he called a police state. “The eyes of the Bolsheviks are the eyes of murderers.”– writes A. Blok.

The last months of life are the deepest depression and nervous exhaustion. “Gloominess, pessimism, reluctance and terrible irritability, aversion to everything, to walls, pictures, things, to me”- writes Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok in her memoirs about A. Blok.

In recent years, A. Blok experienced painful shocks, in his words, “days of hopeless melancholy.” The pre-death period of fading life was infinitely difficult. It still raises unresolved questions to this day. One thing is indisputable: A. Blok’s miraculous monument was his inspired word. The attraction to him, surprise, enjoyment of the rare gift of the artist, which revealed the secrets of our century, does not dry out.

To sum up what has been said, we can conclude that even when A. Blok’s lyrics spoke, it would seem, about the private, intimate, in it, through the personal, unique, the great, the world breaks through. “Unity with the world” is a common motif for all of A. Blok’s lyrics. In addition, the motives of the journey and meeting can be traced. The motive of loss and the motive of gain alternately replace each other, which is connected with the poet’s life realities. In some cycles, social motives arise, motives of melancholy, sadness, associated primarily with the author’s rethinking of his life and creative path.

The appearance of these motives can be explained by the fact that A. Blok lived in a difficult time, when the country did not have stability and confidence in the future. The poet wanted renewal, but never saw what he wanted. Also, the identified motives correspond to the psychotype of the poet (according to the memoirs of contemporaries, he was rather a gloomy, withdrawn, uncommunicative person, too deep in his sad thoughts). And finally, lyric poetry as a type of literature is characterized by the appearance of these motifs.

Alexander Blok is one of the brightest figures of Russian literature of the early 20th century. His poetry, from collection to collection, reflects not only the development of his talent, but also the complex evolution of the poet’s personality. Blok himself called the three volumes of his poems a poetic diary, a “novel in verse”, the main theme of which is “the history of becoming a man.” Blok felt like a descendant of a huge cultural heritage and, like no one else, was responsible for its fate, since he realized that terrible shocks and trials awaited his homeland. Like every true poet, he did not separate the personal and the public. In the first collection, “Poems in a Beautiful Lady,” leading images and symbols of his work appear. At first glance, the poet tells only the story of his love for a young girl. The image of the beloved is not clearly defined, ideal; she personifies “eternal femininity.” But already in this collection, the attentive reader will notice how the poet himself changes: high and ideal love grows into complex and tragic earthly love.

We met with you in the fuse. You cut through the bay with an oar. I loved your white dress, I fell out of love with the sophistication of dreams. No melancholy, no love, no deception. Everything faded, passed, moved away... The outline of a white figure. And your golden oar.

The poet perceives this transformation of feelings as his betrayal of a high ideal, but for him this is an important step on the path of “humanization.” It is no coincidence that the next collection of his works was called “Crossroads”. Earthly love forces him to turn to reality, to see the high in the everyday, to realize his responsibility for his time, for his country, its history and future. Thus, from the image-symbol of the Beautiful Lady, the image-symbol of Russia is born, one of the most difficult in its symbolism and the most controversial. For Blok, Russia is his wife, with whom his life is forever connected.

Oh, my Rus'! My wife! We have a long road to pain!

He is responsible, like a man for a woman, for everything that happens to his homeland. The historical events of the early 20th century could not help but evoke a sense of the tragedy of the era. He does not accept the lack of spirituality of “rabbit-eyed drunkards.” He is certain that Russia has its own historical path, on which “the impossible is possible.” Another leading symbol of the Blok is the road. This is a symbol of tarnish.

Again, as in the golden years, Three worn-out harnesses fray, And painted knitting needles get stuck in loose ruts... And the impossible is possible, The long, easy road, When the road flashes in the distance An instant glance from under a scarf, When the dull song of the coachman rings with guarded melancholy!..

Blok’s poetic symbolism is very clearly manifested in this poem. The beginning of the verse evokes an association with the famous image of the “troika” from Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls”. With the help of this association, the poet connects the past and the modern, introduces one of the most important symbols for him - the symbol of the road, the path that both the country and the poet follow. This is how the theme of the common fate of the people and the Poet arises, Russia for him is like “the first tears of love.” He knows that terrible trials await her, but he believes in her historical mission: “You will not be lost, you will not perish, And only care will cloud your beautiful features.” The symbolic images of Alexander Blok help the poet establish a connection between the past, modern, future, between the inner world, intimate experience and social, public life, between the ideal, cosmic and the real, earthly.

LYRICS BY A. BLOK

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The beginning of the life of Alexander Blok (1880–1921) did not foreshadow the dramatic tension with which it would be fulfilled in his mature years. The poet subsequently wrote in one article about the “music of old Russian families”, these words sounded a grateful memory of the atmosphere of the house where he himself grew up, about the “bright” grandfather on his mother’s side - Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov, the famous botanist and liberal rector of St. Petersburg University, like the whole family, he doted on his grandson. The Beketovs were partial to literature; they not only read a lot, but also wrote poetry and prose themselves, or, in any case, did translations.

One of the first poems the boy learned by heart was “Rocking in a Storm” by Yakov Polonsky. It may have attracted him because some of the stanzas seemed to reflect the carefree atmosphere of his own childhood:

Lamp light on the pillows;
Moonlight on the curtains...
About some toys
Golden dreams.

As a child, it was fun to recite expressive lines about the squall that had flown in:

Thunder and noise. The ship is rocking;
The dark sea is boiling;
The wind breaks the sail
And it whistles in the gear.

As an adult, Blok found himself witnessing huge and formidable historical storms, which either inspired his poetry or took its breath away.

At first, he wrote lyrical poems, where the influence of Zhukovsky, Polonsky, Fet, and Apukhtin was noticeable - poets far from the “spite of the day.” But in the summer of 1901, as a student at St. Petersburg University, Blok became acquainted with the lyrics of the original philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and felt in it something close to the “restless and uncertain excitement” that he himself was beginning to experience. Close to the poets whom the young man imitated, Solovyov, however, differed sharply from them with a vague, mystically colored, but intense and menacing premonition of some approaching world upheaval. “Oh Rus', forget your past glory. The double-headed eagle has been crushed…” he prophesied during the “quiet” reign of Alexander III, although he saw the cause of the death of the empire in the coming invasion of Asian tribes.

The poet-philosopher turned out to be the forerunner of Russian symbolism, which believed that reality, the surrounding life, is just a kind of cover behind which something immeasurably more significant is hidden. “...Everything we see is only a reflection, only shadows from what is invisible with our eyes,” wrote Soloviev. Real events and phenomena were interpreted as symbols - signs, signals given about what was happening in another, ideal world.

Under the influence of Solovyov’s poems and theories, Blok’s passion for the daughter of the famous scientist, Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, who lived next door to Beket’s Shakhmatovo estate near Moscow, takes on a mystical, mysterious, exalted character. The “stately girl in a pink dress, with a heavy golden braid,” as she appeared before the poet, and all the surrounding Central Russian nature, the nearby forest and hills, behind which Mendeleev’s Boblovo was located, are fabulously transformed and mythologized:

You are burning above a high mountain,
Not available in Your tower...

It seems to an enthusiastic lover that the girl he knew from childhood (and soon, in 1903, became his wife) is mysteriously connected with the Eternal Femininity sung by Solovyov, Sophia, the World Soul, coming into the world to miraculously transform it. Meetings with the beloved, their languid wait, quarrels and reconciliations are interpreted mystically and take on unexpected shapes, acutely dramatized and filled with dull anxiety generated by various contacts with reality.

Blok, as it is said in his poems of this time, “is discordantly excited by the noise of life.” There is a vaguely felt discord in the previously peaceful Becket family, and a tense, difficult relationship with his father, Warsaw University professor A.L. Blok, a talented scientist, but an extremely unbalanced person. And most importantly, no matter how far the young poet shuns politics, stormy student gatherings, no matter how far from him peasant life and sometimes unrest that arise somewhere in nearby villages, no matter how arrogant the tone of his poems is that “people are all around about gold and bread the noisy ones scream,” - this “noise” still to some extent influences the pictures Blok draws of the end of the world and history, the approach of the Last Judgment.

There will be a day and the doors will open,
A white line will pass.
They will be terrible, they will be unspeakable
Unearthly face masks...

In Blok’s later poem, the image of the Madonna, created in the icon painter’s cell, is illuminated by the “fiery red” reflections of an approaching thunderstorm. Something similar happens in the poet’s first book, “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” where, too, “the whole horizon is on fire” and the image of the heroine undergoes a variety of metamorphoses, now illuminated by an unearthly light, now alarming and frightening:

I run away into the past moments,
I close my eyes in fear,
On the sheets of a cooling book -
Golden maiden braid.
Above me the firmament is already low,
A dark dream weighs heavily in my chest.
My destined end is near
Both war and fire are ahead.

A specific portrait feature, which in other poems made the image of the beloved especially captivating (“Young, with a golden braid, with a clear, open soul...”), here turns into an alarming vision, a sensual temptation that threatens spiritual darkness, “dark sleep”, and a series of catastrophic events.

Speaking about the natural rapprochement of the author of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” with the so-called young symbolists (in contrast to the older ones - K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, Z. Gippius, V. Ivanov, D. Merezhkovsky, F. Sologub), Boris Pasternak wrote , that at that time, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, “the symbolist was reality, which was all in transition and fermentation; everything meant something rather than constituted something, and served more as a symptom and a sign than as satisfying.” And Blok himself, already at the end of his life, argued that the Symbolists “turned out to be primarily carriers of the spirit of the times.”

However, unlike other “young people” - Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) and Sergei Solovyov (nephew of the poet-philosopher) - Blok was less bound by the speculative constructions of V. Solovyov. Rereading “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” Pasternak noted in them “the strong penetration of life into the scheme.” Already in the verses of 1901 “I wander within the walls of the monastery...” it was said:

I find the cold of these walls strange
And poverty is incomprehensible to life.
Sleepy captivity scares me
And the brothers are deathly pale.

While Blok’s book was perceived as one of the programmatic works of symbolism, the author himself began, in his own words, to look “on the other side” and at times even sharply, defiantly dissociated himself from the “brothers.” The “monastic” morals of the symbolist circle, the imitation of religious exaltation, false significance (or, in Blok’s expression, “hysterical choking on the “depths” that quickly become shallow, and literary winking”) were caustically ridiculed by the poet in the sensational play “Balaganchik.”

And if before, as it is said in his poems, “brother from distant cells informed his brother:“ Praise! in blasphemy and betrayal of Solovyov’s covenants.

However, there was no more severe critic of Blok’s poems than... their author himself. If immediately after its release he called his second book “Unexpected Joy” “Desperate Nasty” as a joke, then years later he wrote quite seriously that he could not stand it (“with some exceptions”) and likened it to a “swampy forest.”

Nevertheless, the new collection was for the poet a way out of that “lyrical solitude” in which, by his own definition, the first book was born. And the very image of the swamp, so critically rethought later with an eye on everything experienced, at the time of the creation of “Unexpected Joy” served as the antithesis of the sublime “solitude” of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” their detachment from “noisy life.”

In a review of the same time about the book of one of the “brothers,” Sergei Solovyov, Blok wrote so irreconcilably about the “complete contempt for the entire natural world that was manifested in it... complete disregard for the outside world and the visual blindness that results from this,” perhaps because he himself felt this danger lurking in front of him too.

The poet almost defiantly contrasts the “cursed abstraction” that pursues him (as Blok writes to his mother) with the most “base” concreteness of his native nature - “the sky, gray, like a peasant’s sheepskin coat, without blue gaps, without heavenly roses flying to the earth from the German dawn, without subtle profile of the castle above the horizon." “Here from edge to edge there is stunted bush,” says his 1905 article “The Girl of the Pink Gate and the Ant King.” - You will be lost in it, but you love it with mortal love. You go out into the bushes and stand in the swamp. And nothing else is needed. Gold, gold is singing somewhere in the depths.”

The poet’s vision noticeably sharpens, distinguishing in the Chessovsky surroundings familiar from childhood “the purple slopes of the ravine”, “golden sawdust” flying from under the saw, and the “dawn” of the autumn rowan tree, which suggested to him the soulful image of the beauty of his native nature:

And far, far away it waves invitingly
Your patterned, your colored sleeve.

In Blok’s poems, bizarre creatures appear - “swamp little devils”, “spring creatures”, the images of which are drawn from the “forest of popular beliefs and superstitions”, from that “ore” where, in the author’s words, “the gold of genuine poetry glitters” (also - “gold, gold is singing somewhere in the depths”!).

Sometimes the poet’s image of his native land appears in a somewhat stylized, fairy-tale-folklore guise (for example, in the poem “Rus” - “sorcerers with sorcerers enchant the grains in the fields, and witches amuse themselves with devils in the road snow pillars”). But at the same time, in his most significant works of the same period, “broad breathing”, complete freedom and naturalness are palpable:

I set out on a path open to view,
The wind bends the elastic bushes,
The broken stone lay along the slopes,
There are scant layers of yellow clay.

Lines that are close, even purely rhythmically, to both Russian classics (for example, Lermontov’s “I go out alone on the road...”) and free-spirited folk songs.

Some contemporaries already guessed what path was opening up for the author of such poems. The poet Sergei Gorodetsky wrote that at that time there were two “formulas” regarding Blok: B = b(Where B- his creative potential, and b - what he has already written) and B = b + X."This X it still flickers with sparkles... but its certainty is visible. It seems huge to me...” Gorodetsky concluded prophetically.

“I feel it’s distant...” - it is said in Blok’s own poems of that time.

One of these “distances” is the diverse life of a big city, depicted by the poet in all its bitter, heart-grabbing everyday unadornedness, with clear pictures of St. Petersburg life, making one remember Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, or Apollo Grigoriev (“Windows to the Courtyard,” “In the Attic”, “In October”), and in a bizarre fantastic frame, based, however, on very real features of the then capital and the self-perception of a modern person (“Stranger”).

We met you in the temple
And they lived in a joyful garden,
But the stinking courtyards
Let's go to damnation and labor.
We've passed all the gates
And in every window they saw,
How hard the work is
On every bent back.

The words that title the poem that begins with these lines are “Cold Day” - a symbol of a new, sober and bitter outlook on life. And the whole poem is not about any specific day, but about the spiritual path made by the poet from the “temple” of the first book. Soon, the hero of Blok’s play “Song of Fate,” German, whose home and everyday life resemble Shakhmatov’s “fragrant wilderness” in detail, will tell his wife: “I realized that we are alone, on a blissful island, separated from the whole world. Is it possible to live so alone and happily?”

“Only one thing makes a person a person,” the poet would later write in his diary, “knowledge of social inequality.”

However, the exit from “lyrical solitude” and the onset of a “cold day” entailed not only a fruitful expansion of the circle of life observations and poetic themes, but also painful wanderings in search of new positive values: seduction by individualistic sentiments and ideals, destructive skepticism, corrosive irony - everything what Blok later dubbed the “swampy forest” and depicted in the poem “To Friends”:

What to do! After all, everyone tried
Poison your own home
All the walls are saturated with poison,
And there is nowhere to lay our heads!
What to do! Believing in happiness,
We're going crazy laughing
And, drunk, we look from the street,
How our houses are collapsing!

“I hate my decadence,” the poet wrote in the summer of 1906, and at the same time admitted that he sometimes “flirtated” with his demonic moods, willful freedom, and wasting his life.

“I forgot everyone I loved...”, “There is no way out of the blizzards, And it’s fun for me to die...”, “There will be no spring, and there is no need...”, “Like a frozen heart Has sunk forever...”, “Trust me, in this world there is no more sun...", "Secretly the heart asks for death..." - these are the dominant motives of the book of poems “The Snow Mask”, the heroine of which often resembles the Snow Queen (from the famous Andersen fairy tale, not by chance re-read by Blok), whose chilling kisses make everyone forget before loved ones and loved ones.

The story of the author of this book falling in love with one of the performers of the “Balaganchik” in the theater of Vera Fedorovna Komissarzhevskaya - N. N. Volokhova is again so unrecognizably transformed that the actress herself, according to her admission, was “embarrassed by the sound of the tragic note running through all the poems.” A cheerful bohemian pastime of a small literary and artistic circle, a light love game, home masquerades - all this turned into menacing snowstorms in the book, rampant elements, sometimes liberating and attractive, sometimes destructive and difficult to relate to the historical storms of those years - the bloody drama of the Russian-Japanese War , the outbreak of revolution, terror and reaction.

Like a path leading out of a “swampy forest,” in the central female character of “Snow Mask” and the subsequent cycle “Faina” (the heroine of “Song of Fate” bears the same name), national Russian features begin to emerge more and more clearly:

But for me they are inseparable
With you is the night and the darkness of the river,
And congealing smokes,
And rhymes of cheerful lights.
"They read poetry"

What kind of dance is this? What kind of light is this
Are you teasing and beckoning?
In this whirling
When will you get tired?
Whose song? And sounds?
What am I afraid of?
Pinching sounds
And – free Rus'?
“Oh, what a sunset blush is to me...”

Little by little, a theme emerges, to which, as the poet will soon say, he devotes his life - the theme of Russia, powerfully embodied in the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field” and other poems of 1908–1910, which formed the basis of the “Motherland” section in Blok’s later collected works (“ Russia”, “Autumn Day”, “My Rus', my life, should we suffer together?...”, “On the railway”).

A passionate craving for the fatherland in its most modest, unprepossessing guise makes the author of these poems similar to Lermontov, with his “strange love” not for loud glory, but for the “trembling lights of sad villages”, and with Tyutchev, and with Nekrasov:

Russia, poor Russia,
I want your gray huts,
Your songs are windy to me -
Like the first tears of love!

After the virtuoso-varied, capriciously whimsical rhythm and stanzas of “Snow Mask”, matching the author’s changeable moods, the poems of the mature Blok, which made up the third volume of his lyrics, look much more traditional in appearance and do not amaze with their effects. “...The Russian muse of Blok now stands before us both naked and beggarly,” Andrei Bely, a frequent opponent of the author and at the same time a sensitive connoisseur of him, wrote upon the publication of this volume, “but Blok is closer to us armored Bryusov form, Ivanovsky lush roses and Balmontovsky shine: he is as poor as... Russia.”

Of course, this is imaginary poverty. In fact, we are talking about the greatest severity of poetic form, its “invisibility” due to its exact correspondence to the content. Let’s re-read at least the least famous poem – “Autumn Day”:

We walk through the stubble, slowly,
With you, my humble friend,
And the soul pours out,
Like in a dark rural church.
The autumn day is high and quiet,
Only audible - the raven is deaf
Calls his comrades,
Yes, the old woman coughs.
The barn will spread low smoke,
And for a long time under the barn
We are keeping a close eye on
Behind the flight of the crane...
They fly, they fly at an oblique angle,
The leader rings and cries...
What is it ringing about, what, what?
What does autumn crying mean?
And low beggar villages
You can’t count it, you can’t measure it with your eye,
And shines on a darkened day
A fire in a distant meadow...
Oh, my poor country,
What do you mean to your heart?
Oh my poor wife
Why are you crying bitterly?

Not only is the author’s nameless companion modest, so is the entire setting in which the “soul is poured out” and which is not without reason likened to a rural church. With spare, but unmistakably selected and impressive strokes, the autumn Russian landscape is further drawn, and the tense emotion and musicality of the verse continues to grow. Here is another barely noticeable, unobtrusive alliteration: “We are watching with a close gaze the flight of the crane... They are flying, they are flying at an oblique angle...”, which, perhaps even unconsciously, reflected the memory of the crane’s click - the purr. Here are more and more obvious repetitions and parallelisms: “The leader is ringing and crying... What is he ringing about, about what, about what?... And the low, poor villages cannot be counted, cannot be measured with the eye... Oh, my poor country... Oh, my poor wife...”

In an understandable desire to characterize a new stage in Blok’s work, criticism sometimes simplified and coarsened its content, arguing, for example, that “the young singer of love turned into a singer of the homeland.” In reality, everything was immeasurably more complicated.

Once, while preparing poems for publication, the poet wrote: “You can publish “personal songs” and “objective songs.” It’s funny to share... the devil himself will break his leg.” The “external” and “internal” world, man and modernity, man and history are closely connected with each other in Blok.

The “terrible world” depicted in his lyrics is not so much the social reality of that time, although the poet indeed has a sharply negative attitude towards it, but rather the tragic world of a restless, distrustful and despairing soul, experiencing the ever-increasing “atmospheric pressure” of the era:

Those born in the year are deaf
They don’t remember their own paths.
We are children of the terrible years of Russia -
I can't forget anything.
... From the days of war, from the days of freedom -
There is a bloody glow in the faces.
“Those born in the year are deaf...”

The definition of “singer of love” in relation to Blok looks especially banal.

Of course, he has many poems that captivate with the strength, purity, and chastity of the feelings imprinted in them, and it is not for nothing that such different people as Fyodor Sologub and Nikolai Gumilyov compared Blok with Schiller.

The sound is approaching. And, submissive to the aching sound,
The soul becomes younger.
And in a dream I press your old hand to my lips,
Not breathing.
I dream that I’m a boy again, and a lover again,
And the ravine and the weeds,
And in the weeds there are prickly rose hips,
And the evening fog.
Through flowers and leaves and thorny branches, I know
The old house looks into my heart,
The sky will look again, turning pink from edge to edge,
And the window is yours.
“The sound is approaching. And, submissive to the aching sound...”

The conspicuous “irregularity”, “discordance” of the even lines of this poem, sometimes extremely short (“Not breathing”), sometimes lengthening, wonderfully conveys the excitement and pain of this – truly – dream, the happy and sad “heartbeat” of dear memories.

The rhythmic “pulse” of another poem is also expressive:

Years have flown by,
And blind and stupid me
Just today I had a dream,
That she never loved me...
“Years have passed over the years...”

It’s not for nothing that the last line is difficult to pronounce: oh like this you can’t say it evenly and calmly...

But how many other poems does the “singer of love” have - about monstrous metamorphoses, when instead of a real feeling only its grimacing shadow appears, “black blood” triumphs (a remarkable name for Blok’s cycle) and a “terrible abyss” opens up between people and in their own souls!

The poem “Humiliation” intensifies images that seem incompatible with the “normal” everyday life of a brothel, but mercilessly expose all the destructiveness, inhumanity, blasphemy of what is happening: the scaffold, the procession to execution, the features on the icon distorted by flour...

The “orchestration” of the poem is remarkable: from the first lines a special note arises - a tense, incessant sound (“Yellow Winter Sunset Outside the window... the condemned will be led to execution at such a Sunset”), permeating literally all the stanzas and sometimes reaching extreme drama:

Is this house really a home?
Isn't it So destined between people?
... Only lips with dried blood
On your Golden icon
(Did we really call it love?)
Refracted by a crazy line...

No, if we compare Blok to a singer, then only in the same way as Anna Akhmatova did, calling him in one poem “the tragic tenor of the era.” Not the traditional sweet “darling tenor,” as she herself explained, but a completely different, unusual one - with a voice full of deep drama and a “terrible, smoky face” (these words from another work by Akhmatova echo the poet’s own lines about the “bloody reflection in faces").

Blok not only magnetically attracted his contemporaries with the beauty and musicality of his verse (“The Stranger” was repeated by heart by a variety of people), but also shocked him with his fearless sincerity, high “Schiller” humanity and conscientiousness.

The “string of doomed”, which was mentioned in relatively early poems, constantly stood before his eyes, not allowing him to “go into beautiful comforts”, to be seduced by the hope of his own, “personal” happiness, no matter how alluring it might be. In the poem “So. The storm of these years has passed..." the thought of the peasant, who, after the suppressed revolution, again dejectedly "trudged along a damp and black furrow", seems to be ready to retreat before the rainbow temptation of love, a return to the land of happy memories, but the insinuating call to "forget about the terrible world" is stern and is adamantly rejected by the poet.

The tragedy of the World War was reflected in such poems by Blok as “The Petrograd sky was clouded with rain...”, “Kite”, “I did not betray the white banner...”, assessed by critics as “an oasis in the emptiness scorched by drum mediocrity” of official-patriotic verses, and more His love for his homeland and the premonition of inevitable upheavals intensified more. It is not surprising that he perceived everything that happened in 1917 with the greatest hopes, although he did not delude himself about what the raging “sea” threatened (an image that has long symbolized for the poet a formidable element, people, history). With remarkable sincerity, he expressed his then state of mind in the poetic message “3. Gippius":

Scary, sweet, inevitable, necessary
I should throw myself into the foamy shaft...

His sensational poem “The Twelve,” in the words of his sensitive contemporary, Academician S. F. Oldenburg, illuminated “both the truth and the untruth of what happened.” The subsequent events of the Civil War and “war communism” with all their hardships, deprivations and humiliations led Blok to deep disappointment. “But we did not call for these days,” says his last poem, “To the Pushkin House.” His muse almost falls silent.

And yet, even in the rare, last “drops” of Blok’s lyrics, infinitely much was expressed: both a grateful admiration for life, beauty, the “near-heart sound” of Russian culture (“Pushkin House”), and a passionate impulse through the coming “bad weather” in “ the coming centuries,” and a farewell message to his own poems, in which the idea that was so dear to him about the inseparability of “objective” and “personal”, which formed the precious and unique composition of his poetry, was again heard. In the inscription made on one of his last collections, donated to the heroine of the Carmen series, actress L.A. Delmas, he addressed his “songs” with the words:

Rush! Storm and alarm
You were given light wings,
But a little tender whim
To others of you she gave...

The death of Alexander Blok deeply shocked a variety of people.

“Our sun, extinguished in agony,” Anna Akhmatova wrote about the deceased.

“Blok has no children left... but he has more left, and there is not a single one of the new poets on whom the ray of his star would not fall,” another wonderful writer, Alexei Remizov, responded to the sad news. “And his star is the thrill of his word, how it beat, the thrill of the hearts of Lermontov and Nekrasov - his star never sets.”

She still shines today.

Andrey Turkov

In 1910–1911 Blok prepared a collection of his poems in three books, which was soon published by the Symbolist publishing house Musaget (M., 1911–1912). In a short preface, the poet emphasized the special character of this three-volume work: “... each poem is necessary to form a chapter; a book is compiled from several chapters; each book is part of a trilogy; I can call the entire trilogy a “novel in verse”: it is dedicated to one circle of feelings and thoughts, to which I was devoted during the first twelve years of my adult life.” In a letter to Andrei Bely (June 6, 1911), Blok explained that this publication reflects the dramatic path he had traveled: “... all the poems together are a “trilogy of incarnation” (from a moment of too bright light - through the necessary swampy forest - to despair, curses, “retribution” and... – to the birth of a “social” man, an artist, courageously facing the world...).”

Love lyrics occupy a special place in Russian literature of the 20th century. Each writer described the magical feeling of love in his own way, created special female images, and found their embodiment in various objects and phenomena. In my opinion, one of the most outstanding poets who turned to love lyrics in their work is A.A. Block. He had his own, different, unique, perception of love, and sought to find an ideal.

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The creative path of this poet is unusually complex and contradictory. At first glance, the different stages of his work are in no way similar to each other, they have different plans and ideas. However, having studied Blok’s biography, I understood the integrity and continuity of his creative path - from “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” to the poem “The Twelve”. Blok himself defined his life and creative path as a “trilogy of incarnation,” putting into this concept the search for the earthly embodiment of all great truths and ideals. He considered his works in their unity and indissoluble integrity, which is confirmed by the words of A. Bely.

The poet's creative destiny has always been inextricably linked with his personal life. The main and only woman who inspired him along the way was L.D. Mendeleeva. At the first stage of his work, he dedicated a collection of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” to his beloved, the plot of which is a plot of passionate anticipation and an exciting meeting. The young poet, inspired by a feeling of unearthly love, saw something unearthly in ordinary things. The space of the cycle “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” is a world of concrete sensory phenomena, filled with a different mystery of content. In it, the author created the image of an ideal, unattainable woman, calling her differently: Lady of the Universe, Soul of the World, Incomprehensible, Beautiful Lady, Queen of Heaven. The strength of the poet’s feelings is evidenced by equating his love with something mystical, endowing his beloved with the signs of a real deity. The poet calls himself a kneeling monk, a slave, a knight. The lyrical hero does not experience the joy of finding happiness; he thinks of his life only as a prayerful service to his beloved. By creating the “SPD” cycle, Blok abandoned reality and went into the world he created. The Beautiful Lady accompanied the further path of his work in other images. It was the initial period of Blok’s work that was called the “thesis,” as evidenced by the poet’s belief in the unreal, unearthly.

As he grew older, A.A. Blok overestimated life values and his attitude to what was happening. The events of the beginning of the 20th century affected the writer; now he was already moving away from previous ideals, in search of new meaning. At the second stage of creativity, the theme of Blok’s poems changes: the theme of sublime love turns into the theme of struggle - love. It is opposed to the first stage, which is why it is called “antithesis”. The main poem characterizing this period of life is “The Stranger.” The image of the Beautiful Lady in the new work takes on real features. It is difficult to understand whether the girl exists in reality or is just a dream of the hero in a dream, but the features of a Beautiful Lady are clearly visible in her. In my opinion, in this poem A.A. Blok showed the collision of a beautiful dream and reality. The second period of his work is filled with such images as a blizzard, fire, a comet, which speaks of the unrest in the poet’s soul. He was confused by reality, trying to find his new ideal, but love for the beautiful lady still lived in his heart.

The poem “The Twelve” became the finale in Blok’s work. It would seem that she has nothing in common with the beautiful female image of her beloved. But even here Blok finds the embodiment of the Beautiful Lady. Two images of a real and unearthly woman are reflected in the image of Katka, a fallen woman, and in the symbol of purity - the “white crown of roses”. In Katka's death, the poet finds a solution to the question of “Eternal Femininity.” The author made it clear to me that in the end of everything, only the highest, otherworldly ideal will remain. The central symbol of the poem is the 12 soldier-apostles who go from the old world to the new in the darkness of the night. In my opinion, in this symbolism Blok embodied his own state of mind, which haunted him throughout his life. The poet lived not waiting for an ideal future, but looking for ideals in the present. Probably at the end of his life he became disillusioned with his beliefs and realized that revolution was inevitable to achieve the beautiful.

This stage of the poet’s work, just like the others, is filled with various images, colors, rhythm and is called “synthesis”.

Analyzing Blok’s creative path, I understood the meaning of A. Bely’s statement. Indeed, this writer carried his life beliefs throughout his journey, embodying them in his work. All the works of different stages of his life are connected by the symbolism of images, colors, mystery, the search for an ideal, the image of a Beautiful Lady. A distinctive feature of women in Blok’s works is unreality, vagueness, and mystery. They all have one thing in common - the author’s attitude towards the heroine. The reason for this was the uniqueness of the poet’s inspiration with the heroines of the works. After all, it was Mendeleva who was the Beautiful Lady, the Stranger and Katka in Blok’s works.

1. Poet A. A. Blok.
2. The main themes in Blok’s work.
3. Love in the poet’s poetry.

...A writer who believes in his calling, no matter what the size of this writer, compares himself with his homeland, believing that he suffers from its diseases, is crucified with it...
A. A. Blok

A. A. Blok was born into a noble intellectual family. According to Blok, his father was a connoisseur of literature, a subtle stylist and a good musician. But he had a despotic character, which is why Blok’s mother left her husband before the birth of her son.

Blok spent his childhood in an atmosphere of literary interests, which early awakened in him a craving for poetry. At the age of five, Blok began writing poetry. But a serious turn to poetic creativity dates back to the years when the poet graduated from high school.

Blok's lyrics are unique. With all the variety of themes and means of expression, it appears before the reader as a single whole, as a reflection of the “path” traveled by the poet. Blok himself pointed out this feature of his work. A. A. Blok went through a difficult creative path. From symbolist, romantic poems - to an appeal to real revolutionary reality. Many contemporaries and even former friends of Blok, having fled from revolutionary reality abroad, shouted that the poet had sold out to the Bolsheviks. But that was not the case. The bloc suffered from the revolution, but was also able to understand that the time of change was inevitable. The poet felt life very sensitively and showed interest in the fate of his native country and the Russian people.

For Blok, love is the main theme of his creativity, be it love for a woman or for Russia. The poet's early work is distinguished by religious dreams. The cycle of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” is filled with anxiety and a feeling of an approaching catastrophe. The poet yearned for the ideal woman. Blok's poems are dedicated to his future wife, D. I. Mendeleeva. Here are the lines from the poem “I enter dark temples...”:

I enter dark temples,
I perform a poor ritual.
There I am waiting for the Beautiful Lady
In the flickering red lamps.
In the shadow of a tall column
I'm shaking from the creaking of the doors.
And he looks into my face, illuminated,
Only an image, only a dream about Her.

The poet’s love for his future wife in “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” was combined with a passion for the philosophical ideas of V. S. Solovyov. The philosopher's teaching about the existence of the Great Feminine, the Soul of the World, turned out to be closest to the poet. Inextricably linked with the Great Feminine is the idea of saving the world through its spiritual renewal. The poet was especially struck by the philosopher’s idea that love for the world is revealed through love for a woman.

In “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” the ideas of dual worlds, which are a combination of the spiritual and the material, are embodied through a system of symbols. The appearance of the heroine of this cycle is ambiguous. On the one hand, this is a very real woman:

She is slim and tall
Always arrogant and harsh.
On the other hand, this is a mystical image.
The same applies to the hero.

Blok's story of earthly love is embodied in a romantic symbolic myth. “Earthly” (lyrical hero) is contrasted with “heavenly” (Beautiful Lady), there is a desire for their reunion, thanks to which complete harmony should come.

But over time, Blok’s poetic orientation changed. The poet understood that when there is hunger and devastation, struggle and death around, one cannot go to “other worlds.” And then life burst into the poet’s work in all its diversity. The theme of the people and the intelligentsia appears in Blok's poetry. For example, the poem “Stranger” shows the collision of a beautiful dream with reality:

And slowly, walking between the drunken,
Always without companions, alone,
Breathing spirits and mists,
She sits by the window.

Blok wrote in his diary: “She is a certain ideal of beauty, capable, perhaps, of re-creating life, of expelling from it everything ugly and bad.” Duality - the contact between an ideal image and a repulsive reality - is reflected in this poem. This was even reflected in the two-part composition of the work. The first part is filled with anticipation of a dream, an ideal image of the Stranger:

And every evening my only friend
Reflected in my glass...

But the meeting place with the ideal is the tavern. And the author skillfully escalates the situation, preparing the reader for the appearance of the Stranger. The appearance of the Stranger in the second part of the poem temporarily transforms reality for the hero. The poem “Stranger” reveals the image of the lyrical hero in a surprisingly psychological way. The change in his states is very important for Blok. Love for the homeland is clearly manifested in Blok’s poetry. Blok’s love for his native country clearly echoes his deep feeling for a woman:

Oh, my Rus'! My wife! To the point of pain
We have a long way to go!

Blok sought to continue the traditions of Russian classical literature and saw his task as serving the people. In the poem “Autumn Will” Lermontov's traditions are visible. M. Yu. Lermontov in his poem “Motherland” called love for the fatherland “strange”; the path for the poet was not “glory bought with blood”, but “the cold silence of the steppes”, “the trembling lights of sad villages”. The same is the love of Blok:

I will cry over the sadness of your fields,
I will love your space forever...

Blok's attitude towards his homeland is more personal, intimate, like his love for a woman. It is not for nothing that in this poem Rus' appears before the reader in the form of a woman:

And far, far away it waves invitingly
Your patterned, your colored sleeve

In the poem “Rus,” the homeland is a mystery. And the solution to the mystery lies in the soul of the people. The motif of a terrible world is reflected in Blok’s poetry. The hopelessness of life is most clearly manifested in the well-known poem “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy...”:

Night, street, lantern, pharmacy,
Pointless and dim light.
Live for at least another quarter of a century -
Everything will be like this. There is no outcome.
If you die, you'll start over again,
And everything will repeat itself as before:
Night, icy ripples of the channel,
Pharmacy, street, lamp.

The fatal cycle of life, its hopelessness are surprisingly clearly and simply reflected in this poem.

Blok's poems are tragic in many ways. But the time that gave birth to them was tragic. But the essence of creativity, according to the poet himself, is in serving the future. In his last poem, “To Pushkin’s House,” Blok speaks about this again:

Skipping the days of oppression
A short-term deception

We saw the days to come
Blue-pink fog.

To understand the poet’s work, the image of his lyrical hero is in many ways important. After all, as we know, people reflect themselves in their works.

In the poem “Factory” we see the symbolist poet’s appeal to reality, to social themes. But reality correlates with symbolic philosophy, the lyrical hero’s awareness of his place in life. Three images can be distinguished in the poem: a crowd of people gathered at the gate; a mystical character (“motionless someone, black someone”) and a lyrical hero who says: “I see everything from my top...”. This is typical of Blok’s work: to see everything “from the top,” but at the same time the poet himself acutely felt life in all its diversity and even in its tragedy.