Yesenin... And every person in Russia at least once experienced the same thing as S.
Sergey Yesenin - the most popular, most read poet in Russia.
The work of S. Yesenin belongs to the best pages not only of Russian, but also. world poetry, which he entered as a subtle, soulful lyricist.
Yesenin's poetry is distinguished by the extraordinary power of sincerity and spontaneity in the expression of feelings, and the intensity of moral searches. His poems are always a frank conversation with the reader and listener. “It seems to me that I write my poems only for my good friends,” the poet himself said.
At the same time, Yesenin is a deep and original thinker. The world of feelings, thoughts and passions of the lyrical hero of his works - a contemporary of an unprecedented era of tragic breakdown of human relations - is complex and contradictory. The poet himself also saw the contradictions of his work and explained them this way: “I sang when my land was sick.”
A faithful and ardent patriot of his Motherland, S. Yesenin was a poet, vitally connected with his native land, with the people, with his poetic creativity.
THE THEME OF NATURE IN YESENIN’S WORK
Nature is the all-encompassing, main element of the poet’s work, and the lyrical hero is connected with it innately and for life:
I was born with songs in a grass blanket.
The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow"
(“Mother walked through the forest in her bathing suit...”, 1912);
"May you be blessed forever,
what came to flourish and die"
(“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”, 1921).
The poetry of S. Yesenin (after N. Nekrasov and A. Blok) is the most significant stage in the formation of the national landscape, which, along with traditional motifs of sadness, desolation, and poverty, includes surprisingly bright, contrasting colors, as if taken from popular prints:
"Blue sky, colored arc,
<...>
My land! Beloved Rus' and Mordva!";
"Swamps and swamps,
Blue board of heaven.
Coniferous gilding
The forest is ringing";
"Oh Rus' - a raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river..."
"blue sucks eyes"; “smells like apple and honey”; “Oh, my Rus', sweet homeland, Sweet rest in the silk of kupirs”; “Ring, ring, golden Rus'...”
This image of a bright and ringing Russia, with sweet smells, silky grasses, blue coolness, was introduced into the self-consciousness of the people by Yesenin.
More often than any other poet, Yesenin uses the very concepts of “land”, “Rus”, “homeland” (“Rus”, 1914; “Go you, Rus', my dear...”, 1914; “Beloved land! To the heart dreaming...", 1914; "The hewn horns began to sing...",<1916>; “Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness...”, 1917; "O land of rain and bad weather...",<1917>).
Yesenin depicts celestial and atmospheric phenomena in a new way - more picturesquely, graphically, using zoomorphic and anthropomorphic comparisons. So, his wind is not cosmic, floating out of the astral heights, like Blok’s, but a living being: “a red, affectionate donkey,” “a youth,” “a schema-monk,” “thin-lipped,” “dancing trepak.” Month - “foal”, “raven”, “calf”, etc. Of the luminaries, in first place is the image of the moon-month, which is found in approximately every third work of Yesenin (in 41 out of 127 - a very high coefficient; cf. in the “star” Fet, out of 206 works, 29 include images of stars). Moreover, in the early poems up to about 1920, the “month” predominates (18 out of 20), and in the later ones - the moon (16 out of 21). The month emphasizes, first of all, the external form, figure, silhouette, convenient for all kinds of object associations - “horse face”, “lamb”, “horn”, “kolob”, “boat”; the moon is, first of all, light and the mood it evokes - “thin lemon moonlight”, “blue moonlight”, “the moon laughed like a clown”, “uncomfortable liquid lunarness”. The month is closer to folklore; it is a fairy-tale character, while the moon introduces elegiac, romance motifs.
Yesenin is the creator of a one-of-a-kind “tree novel”, the lyrical hero of which is a maple, and the heroines are birch and willow. Humanized images of trees are overgrown with “portrait” details: the birch has a “waist”, “hips”, “chest”, “leg”, “hairstyle”, “hem”; the maple has a “leg”, “head” (“You are a maple”) my fallen, icy maple..."; "I'm wandering through the first snow..."; "My path"; "Green hairstyle...", etc.). The birch tree, largely thanks to Yesenin, became the national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, rowan, and bird cherry.
More sympathetically and soulfully than in previous poetry, the images of animals are revealed, which become independent subjects of tragically colored experiences and with which the lyrical hero has a blood-related affinity, as with “lesser brothers” (“Song of the Dog”, “Kachalov’s Dog”, “Fox”, “Cow”, “Son of a bitch”, “I won’t deceive myself...”, etc.).
Yesenin’s landscape motifs are closely connected not only with the circulation of time in nature, but also with the age-related flow of human life - the feeling of aging and fading, sadness about past youth (“This sadness cannot be scattered now...”, 1924; “The golden grove dissuaded me. ..”, 1924; “What a night! I can’t...”, 1925). A favorite motif, renewed by Yesenin almost for the first time after E. Baratynsky, is separation from his father’s home and return to his “small homeland”: images of nature are colored with a feeling of nostalgia, refracted through the prism of memories (“I left my home…”, 1918 ; "Confession of a Hooligan", 1920; "This street is familiar to me...",<1923>; "Low house with blue shutters...",<1924>; “I’m walking through the valley. On the back of my head is a cap...”, 1925; "Anna Snegina", 1925).
For the first time with such acuteness - and again after Baratynsky - Yesenin posed the problem of the painful relationship between nature and the victorious civilization: “the steel chariot defeated the living horses”; "...they squeezed the village by the neck // Stone hands of the highway"; “like in a straitjacket, we take nature into concrete” (“Sorokoust”, 1920; “I am the last poet of the village...”, 1920; “The world is mysterious, my ancient world...”, 1921). However, in the later poems the poet seems to force himself to fall in love with “stone and steel”, to stop loving the “poverty of the fields” (“Uncomfortable liquid moonlight”,<1925>).
A significant place in Yesenin’s work is occupied by fantastic and cosmic landscapes, designed in the style of biblical prophecies, but acquiring a human-divine and god-fighting meaning:
"Now on the peaks of the stars
I’m shaking up the earth for you!”;
"Then I'll rattle my wheels
The sun and moon are like thunder..."
Yesenin’s poetry of nature, which expressed “love for all living things in the world and mercy” (M. Gorky), is also remarkable in that for the first time it consistently pursues the principle of likening nature to nature, revealing from within the wealth of its figurative possibilities: “The moon is like a golden frog // Spread out on calm water..."; “rye does not ring with a swan’s neck”; “Curly-haired lamb - month // Walking in the blue grass”, etc.
FOLK MOTIVES IN THE WORK OF S. YESENIN
Love for his native peasant land, for the Russian village, for nature with its forests and fields permeates all of Yesenin’s work. For the poet, the image of Russia is inseparable from the national element; big cities with their factories, scientific and technological progress, social and cultural life do not evoke a response in Yesenin’s soul. This, of course, does not mean that the poet was not at all concerned about the problems of our time or that he looks at life through rose-colored glasses. He sees all the ills of civilization in isolation from the land, from the origins of people's life. “Revived Rus'” is rural Rus'; The attributes of life for Yesenin are the “edge of bread” and the “shepherd’s horn”. It is no coincidence that the author so often turns to the form of folk songs, epics, ditties, riddles, and spells.
It is significant that in Yesenin’s poetry, man is an organic part of nature, he is dissolved in it, he is joyfully and recklessly ready to surrender to the power of the elements: “I would like to get lost in your hundred-ringed greenery,” “the spring dawns entwined me in a rainbow.”
Many images borrowed from Russian folklore begin to live their own lives in his poems. Natural phenomena appear in his images in the form of animals, bearing the features of everyday village life. This animation of nature makes his poetry similar to the pagan worldview of the ancient Slavs. The poet compares autumn with a “red mare” who “scratches her mane”; his month is a sickle; Describing such an ordinary phenomenon as the light of the sun, the poet writes: “the oil of the sun is pouring on the green hills.” The tree, one of the central symbols of pagan mythology, becomes a favorite image of his poetry.
Yesenin's poetry, even clothed in traditional images of the Christian religion, does not cease to be pagan in its essence.
I’ll go in the bench, bright monk,
Steppe path to the monasteries.
This is how the poem begins and ends with the words:
With a smile of joyful happiness
I'm going to other shores,
Having tasted the ethereal sacrament
The author of brilliant lines about Russia, which cannot be measured by a common yardstick, according to K. Pigarev (literary critic, grandson of F.I. Tyutchev), is perceived by people, first of all, as a unique singer of nature. During the years of Soviet power, the work of this poet was not given due attention due to his social position; Tyutchev’s landscape lyrics were only briefly mentioned.
In our time, his poetry is recognized as the most precious asset of Russian classical literature, and the author of brilliant lines deservedly becomes especially quoted. But all the same, the poetic work of this famous wit and subtle thinker remains not fully studied and appreciated.
Unique property
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873) - academician and diplomat, an adherent of traditional values and order, which he defended in his journalistic activities, was a subtle lyricist who selflessly loved Russian nature. This amazing poet has amazing ones, such as “Modern,” for example, but man and nature in Tyutchev’s lyrics attract special attention from both fans of the poet’s work and critics. The author himself did not attach much importance to his poetic creativity, but it, consisting of more than 400 poems, always attracted smart and talented literary scholars, such as Yuri Nikolaevich Tynyanov. He, like I. Aksakov, appreciated the poet’s legacy. And Fet, paying tribute to the significance of the poet’s work, wrote the following words on a book of Tyutchev’s poems: “This book is small, many volumes are heavier.”
Beautiful and informative
Tyutchev's landscape lyrics from all periods of his work reflect the feelings of the great poet, which he loved selflessly. She always put him in a special joyful mood, delighted and calmed him. F.I. Tyutchev never described dirt and shortcomings, did not call Russia “unwashed” - this was not typical for him.
There is no trace of despondency inspired by nature in his poems. And some, according to Yu. Tynyanov, “fragments” (or “compressed odes” - this is what the literary critic called Tyutchev’s poems because of their maximum richness and intensity) sound like a joyful, triumphant hymn - for example, the well-known poem “Spring Thunderstorm”.
Priority of nature
Both man and nature in Tyutchev’s lyrics are meaningful in a special way. The poet endows nature with human feelings and characteristics. He claims that man himself can only be happy in merging with nature.
And if he is not in harmony with her, then he is deeply unhappy, but this is not nature’s fault. This homo sapiens, having absorbed the evil of chaos, lives an unnatural life, unable to understand and let the blessed world of nature into his heart.
The splendor and diversity of the surrounding world
Man and nature in Tyutchev’s lyrics are subject to passions and storms, which the poet tries to understand and comprehend. In his own way he is both an artist and a composer - his poems are so picturesque and musical. Having become acquainted with Tyutchev’s poetry, it is impossible to forget it. According to I. Turgenev, only those who are not familiar with his work do not think about Tyutchev. The poet, admiring nature, always finds something unknown in it, which promises interesting discoveries and only positive emotions. And the ordinary and mundane are not capable of carrying any joy.
Unique and self-sufficient
Fyodor Ivanovich was absolutely right in considering man to be the source of all troubles - a weak, disharmonious creature, unable to cope with his passions and vices, bringing destruction to nature. Whereas she all lives only according to the universal law of triumphant life.
Tyutchev's landscape lyrics glorify the self-sufficiency and majestic tranquility of nature, devoid of tearing passions. There are elements, but these are phenomena caused by the life of nature, and not by its malicious intent. And Tyutchev did not glorify tsunamis and volcanic eruptions - he was a patriot in the highest sense of the word and loved Russian nature. Some researchers believe that the term “landscape lyrics” by Tyutchev is more consistent with the phrase “landscape-philosophical”.
Poems about love
Tyutchev's lyrics occupy a certain place in the heritage. His poems about love are, so to speak, highly moral. An aristocrat of spirit, he did not like to flaunt his inner world, considering it shameful. But his lines, known to absolutely everyone - “I met you, and everything that was past came to life in an obsolete heart ...” - testify to the ability to write about love in simple words, behind which a great feeling is hidden. F.I. Tyutchev glorifies the feeling that lights up the stars, sublime and beautiful. Among modern cynics, it may cause rejection - just look at the “reviews”. But such statements only confirm what the poet wrote about - man is the bearer of evil on earth.
Diverse and dynamic
The main motives of Tyutchev's lyrics are devoid of far-fetchedness. A person with all his diversity of feelings, nature, unsolved, mysterious, but perfect and beautiful, love for a woman and the Motherland - everything is filled with drama, but taken from real life. The poet never tires of admiring the world, nothing bores him, nothing tires him. He tries to glorify the changeable, multifaceted nature in all its manifestations, to capture the moment of transition from one picture to another.
Live nature
The features of the depiction of nature in Tyutchev’s lyrics have already been noted above. This is the identity of the human soul, his feelings and experiences with the phenomena of the external world, and the animation of nature. F.I. Tyutchev constantly draws parallels between different periods of human life, the state of his soul and natural phenomena. This is one of his main artistic techniques.
The animation of nature is emphasized by words such as “the spirit fell asleep.” The poet himself calls nature not a cast and a soulless face, but something that is capable of breathing freely, loving and telling about all this to a caring, sensitive person.
One whole
The theme of nature in Tyutchev’s lyrics is the main and leading one. He finds amazing, touching words to describe her, for example, “the divine modesty of suffering.” This is how the poet speaks about autumn, about the quiet withering of nature. And how does he describe a ray of sunshine that “grabbed the blanket”, or what are his words about the evening worth - “the movement was exhausted, the work fell asleep...”. Few people can find such words.
From all that has been said, we can conclude that man and nature in Tyutchev’s lyrics are connected by an invisible thread into a single whole. And, despite the fact that sometimes a person tries to break away from the integrity of the world and the divine principle, he certainly realizes that he can only be truly happy and calm by becoming one with Mother Nature. Some researchers noted the cosmic nature of Tyutchev's poetry. S. L. Frank wrote about it, saying that the poet’s poems reflect ideas about space. Indeed, the poet has enough references, for example, “... and we are floating, surrounded by a burning abyss on all sides...”.
Yesenin's worldview was formed under the influence of Russian nature. For the poet, nature and homeland are not just words with the same root, they are not separate concepts...
How does Yesenin depict nature?
“My lyrics are alive with one great love - love for the homeland,” said Sergei Yesenin about his work. And the image of his homeland for him is inextricably linked with his native nature. Russian nature for Yesenin is eternal beauty and eternal harmony of the world, healing human souls. This is exactly how we perceive the poet’s poems about our native land, this is exactly how, sublimely and enlightened, they act on us. The poet seems to be telling us: stop at least for a moment, look at the world of beauty around you, listen to the rustle of meadow grass, the song of the wind, the voice of a river wave, look at the morning dawn, heralding the birth of a new day, at the starry night sky. Living pictures of nature in the poems of Sergei Yesenin not only teach us to love the beauty of our native nature, they lay the moral foundations of our character, make us kinder and wiser. After all, a person who knows how to appreciate earthly beauty will no longer be able to oppose himself to it.
Confessing his love for his homeland, the poet reverently describes the beauty of Russian nature, likening it to a living creature: the feather grass is “sleeping,” the willows are “crying,” the poplars are “whispering”:
The feather grass is sleeping. Plain dear,
And the leaden freshness of wormwood.
No other homeland
The light of the moon, mysterious and long,
The willows are crying, the poplars are whispering.
But no one listens to the crane's cry
He will not stop loving his father's fields.
Often using the technique of personifying nature, characteristic of his lyrics, Yesenin creates his own unique world. Nature in his poems feels, laughs and is sad, is surprised and upset. The poet himself feels at one with the trees, flowers, and fields.
Perceiving nature as one with himself, the poet sees in it a source of inspiration. His native land endowed the poet with an amazing gift - folk wisdom, which was absorbed with all the originality of his native village, with those songs, beliefs, stories that he heard from childhood and which became the main source of his creativity. And even the exotic beauty of distant countries could not overshadow the modest charm of our native spaces. Wherever the poet was, wherever fate took him, he belonged to Russia with his heart and soul.
All researchers of Yesenin’s work note the bright, incomparable color painting in his poems.
Find examples of color images of phenomena, which colors predominate and why?
In Yesenin's poems there are shades of red: pink, scarlet, crimson, crimson; shades of yellow often take on a “metallic” sound: gold, copper; a lot of green, blue and cyan. There are white, black, and gray colors, but in general Yesenin’s poems are painted in pure, clear, sometimes delicate, sometimes bright colors and shades.
The most commonly used colors with which the poet skillfully colored his poetic work are yellow and gold.
I do not regret, do not call, do not cry,
Withered in gold,
I won't be young anymore.
Yesenin emphasizes the golden color in the poem as the strength and height of Russian nature.
S. Yesenin's poems are painted in pure, clear, sometimes gentle, sometimes bright colors and shades. One of these shades is “scarlet”. In the poem “Do not wander, do not crush in the scarlet bushes...” the female appearance merges with the “scarlet”:
With scarlet berry juice on the skin,
She was tender and beautiful.
You look like a pink sunset
And, like a sword, radiant and light.
Yesenin vividly shows the colorfulness of summer: “in the crimson bushes,” “with the scarlet juice of the berries.” And one word “pink” creates an unforgettable picture:
I have now become stingier in my desires,
My life, did I dream about you?
As if I were a booming early spring
He rode on a pink horse.
Nature is colorful and multicolored. The color scheme also contributes to the transmission of the subtlest states of the human soul:
I do not regret, do not call, do not cry,
Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees.
Withered in gold,
I won't be young anymore.
"Gold of Withering..." This image, which runs through all of Yesenin’s lyrics and meant a lot to him, speaks of the tones in which Yesenin’s thoughts “about old age and decay” were painted. The colors of “golden autumn” - yellow, crimson, slow leaf fall - are a symbol of diminishing vitality and a clear “autumn” thought about what has been lived, about what has been lost, about the unique, and a sharp, heightened sensitivity to the beauty of the world.
Yesenin, as a great artist, turned out to be much more complex. His discovery was that a color image, just like a figurative one, can absorb a complex definition of thought. With the help of words corresponding to colors, he was able to convey the subtlest emotional shades, depict the most intimate movements of the soul. His color scheme contributed to the transmission of various moods, romantic spirituality, and added freshness to the image. So, where it seemed that the landscape was ordinary, where light and shadows do not suddenly capture the imagination, where at first glance, there are no catchy, memorable pictures in nature and much has already become familiar, the poet suddenly unexpectedly and boldly reveals new colors: blue, scarlet, green, red and gold splashes and shimmers in Yesenin’s poems.
Nature is glorified by Yesenin, like a living being. Prove this with examples from the text
In Yesenin’s poems, nature lives a rich poetic life. She is all in perpetual motion, in endless development and change. Like a person, she is born, grows and dies, sings and whispers, is sad and rejoices. In depicting nature, Yesenin uses the rich experience of folk poetry.
He often resorts to personification.
Since childhood, Sergei Yesenin perceived nature as a living being. Therefore, in his poetry one can sense an ancient, pagan attitude towards nature.
The poet animates her:
The feather grass is sleeping. Plain dear,
And the leaden freshness of wormwood.
No other homeland
It will not pour my warmth into my chest.
Know that we all have such a fate,
And, perhaps, ask everyone -
Rejoicing, raging and suffering,
Life is good in Rus'.
Through images of his native nature, the poet perceives the events of a person’s life.
The poet brilliantly conveys his state of mind, using for this purpose simple to genius comparisons with the life of nature:
I do not regret, do not call, do not cry,
Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees.
Withered in gold,
I won't be young anymore.
Now you won't fight so much,
A heart touched by a chill,
And the country of birch chintz
It won't tempt you to wander around barefoot.
Sergei Yesenin, albeit with bitterness, accepts the eternal laws of life and nature, realizing that “we are all perishable in this world,” and blesses the natural course of life:
May you be blessed forever,
What came to flourish and die.
In the poem “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” the poet’s feelings and the state of nature merge. Man and nature are in complete harmony with Yesenin. Yesenin poems color nature
Sergei Yesenin sincerely admits: “My lyrics are alive with one great love for my homeland. The feeling of homeland is fundamental in my work.” For the poet, the concept of homeland merged “everything close and dear, which makes it so easy to cry.” The poet cannot imagine himself without Russian nature. “The Country of Birch Calico” became a source of vitality and inspiration for the poet.
The poems of Sergei Yesenin, I think, are close to every Russian person, because the poet was able to convey in his lyrics those bright, beautiful feelings that pictures of our native nature evoke in us. And if we sometimes find it difficult to find the right words to express the depth of our feelings for our native land, then we definitely turn to this poet.
“Letter to a Mother” is based on opposition. Explain what is opposed to what?
In “Letter to a Mother,” a man appears who is tired of life and dreams of returning to his homeland as the only means of salvation, “I will return when our white garden spreads its branches like spring...”, for everything that is purest and brightest is connected only with one’s native home.
Two worlds, two spaces are opposed in the plot of this poem. In one world (the world of the mother), the “evening unspeakable light” “flows” over the village hut, silence, calm and maternal anticipation of the return of her son. In the other world (the world of the son, perceived by the mother) there is idleness and stabbing of tavern fights. However, already in this poem the world of the tavern is interpreted by the poet not as a consequence of moral instability, but as a consequence of “rebellious melancholy,” the reasons for which are not explained in the poem. But the image of “rebellious melancholy” says that this feeling is a consequence of attempts to comprehend some deep social patterns.
“Letter to Mother” was written in 1924, during the last period of creativity and almost at the very end of his life. For Yesenin, this is the time to take stock. In many poems, the theme of an irretrievably gone past arises. Along with this theme, the “Letter to a Mother” contains the theme of the mother, and the poem is an appeal to her. This is a fairly traditional theme for Russian lyrics, but Yesenin’s works can perhaps be called the most touching declarations of love for his mother. The entire poem is permeated with inescapable tenderness and touching care for her.
The lyrical hero admires the endless patience and tender love of his “old lady”:
They write to me that you, harboring anxiety,
She was very sad about me,
That you often go on the road
In an old-fashioned dilapidated shushun.
The lyrical hero bitterly realizes that “his old lady” has reason to worry about her unlucky son: she knows about “tavern fights” and binges. The mother’s melancholy is so great, and her forebodings are so sad that she “often goes on the road.” The hero’s spiritual crisis is emphasized by the epithets “evening” and “painful.” It is no coincidence that the word “sadanul” was used - colloquial, reduced, indicating its distance from eternal values. The harshness of this verb softens in the fourth stanza:
Nothing, dear! Calm down.
This is just a painful nonsense.
I'm not such a bitter drunkard,
So that I can die without seeing you.
The lyrical hero tries to console his mother, promising to return “when our white garden spreads its branches like spring.” The last stanzas are the utmost intensity of emotions, the bitter realization that too much has been “dreamed of” and “did not come true.” The poem ends with a heartfelt request:
So forget about your worries,
Don't be so sad about me.
Don't go on the road so often
In an old-fashioned dilapidated shushun.
Realizing that even in his native village, where everything is familiar, close and understandable since childhood, he is unlikely to be able to find peace of mind. Sergei Yesenin is confident that the upcoming meeting will not be long and will not be able to heal his emotional wounds. The author feels that he is moving away from his family, but is ready to accept this blow of fate with his own fatalism. He worries not so much for himself as for his mother, who is worried about her son, so he asks her: “Don’t be so sad about me.” This line contains a premonition of his own death, an attempt to somehow console the one for whom he remains the best, dearest and most beloved person.
Based on the material of your research, draw conclusions about the significance of S. Yesenin’s work
![](https://i2.wp.com/vuzlit.ru/imag_/35/16291/image002.jpg)
Sergei Yesenin, who understood and accepted Rus' with all his soul, and possessed an amazing, subtle sense of beauty, in his poetry was able to surprisingly fully and deeply reflect all the changes in the life of his homeland that were taking place before his eyes. He lived in an era of great changes in Russia and warmly welcomed everything that, in his opinion, could benefit his native land. And yet, until his death, he remained the son of the “country of birch calico.”
S. Yesenin entered our literature as an outstanding lyricist. It is in the lyrics that everything that makes up the soul of Yesenin’s creativity is expressed. It contains the full-blooded, sparkling joy of a young man who is rediscovering an amazing world, subtly feeling the fullness of earthly charm, and the deep tragedy of a person who has remained for too long in the “narrow gap” of old feelings and views. And if in the best poems of Sergei Yesenin there is a “flood” of the most secret, most intimate human feelings, they are filled to the brim with the freshness of pictures of native nature, then in his other works there is despair, decay, hopeless sadness. Sergei Yesenin is, first of all, a singer of Rus', and in his poems, sincere and frank in Russian, we feel the beating of a restless, tender heart. They have a “Russian spirit”, they “smell of Russia”. They absorbed the great traditions of national poetry. Even in Yesenin’s love lyrics, the theme of love merges with the theme of the Motherland.
Much in the poetics of F. I. Tyutchev may seem traditional at first glance. He was not the only one who compared natural phenomena with human emotional experiences. But while for others such a technique of comparison or assimilation was just a pictorial means, and, moreover, one of many, for Tyutchev it flowed from the very depths of his worldview and was, without exaggeration, the main one.
The main feature that prevails in Tyutchev’s lyrical works is some kind of universal objective feeling that is cosmic in nature. At the same time, the feeling has a completely objective and realistic character. Tyutchev felt himself a part of the world, and therefore considered all the feelings and moods of a person to be a manifestation of cosmic existence as such. Life, the phenomena and processes occurring in it, were perceived by the poet as manifestations of nature itself, the cosmos, as the state and actions of the living universal soul. For him, nature is a clot of passions, forces, feelings, and is by no means a dead material obedient to the will of the artist:
Not what you think, nature:
Not a cast, not a soulless face -
She has a soul, she has freedom,
It has love, it has language...
This is how Tyutchev begins one of his poems, created in the spring of 1836. This work fully reflects the poetic features that I previously listed. The poem conveys an extremely vivid and immediate feeling of nature that reigns in the poet’s heart. It contains neither mythological images found in Tyutchev’s lyrics, nor obvious personifications. However, nature here is depicted as a kind of animated whole. And this is not just an artistic device. Only a person who sincerely believed in the mysterious life of nature could speak with such passion and conviction about its soul, freedom, love and special language.
The first stanza is the ideological basis of the poem, the main point that the poet explains and proves with all further content. It is no coincidence that the second and third quatrains are compositionally separated from the rest. By this, the poet makes intonation and thereby semantic pauses, separating one thought from another. He invites us to think about what has been said. The following lines after the initial stanza paint vivid images of the world around us:
You see the leaf and color on the tree:
Or did the gardener glue them?
Or the fetus is ripening in the womb
The play of external, alien forces?..
The poet addresses the reader with a rhetorical question. But for what purpose? What idea does he want to convey to us by drawing images of nature? We learn the answer to these questions only at the very end of the poem.
The closed life of the fetus “in the womb” does not give him the opportunity to experience all the beauty and harmony that reigns in nature. He does not realize that the world around him breathes, lives and pleases those who are fused with him:
The rays did not descend into their souls,
Spring did not bloom in their chests,
The forests didn’t speak in front of them,
And the night in the stars was silent!
For a closed, mind-limited soul, the unique world of colors and sounds is inaccessible. The poet does not separate the seasons, natural phenomena and images in the quatrains. On the contrary, he tries to connect them in order to let the reader feel the fullness and integrity of the single living soul of the world. The surrounding nature is a sunny, radiant day and a starry night, these are seas, rivers and forests, conducting a conversation in “unearthly tongues”. Listen to the voices of nature, and spring will bloom in your soul. Even a thunderstorm, such a dangerous phenomenon in real life, is transformed in the poem and becomes “friendly.” Gradually we begin to understand the meaning that the poet put into the figurative content of the poem. Images of nature serve Tyutchev to embody his thoughts about man.
Nature will not reveal its soul to those who do not believe and do not want to believe in it. It is not rationalistic thinking, but feeling and contemplation that can open the doors to the secrets of the universe and the universal soul.
It's not their fault: understand, if possible,
Organa life of the deaf and dumb!
Soul him, ah! Doesn't bother
And the voice of the mother herself!..
In the last stanza, Tyutchev metaphorically calls nature an “organ.” He says that a person for whom the life of an “organ” is silent is not able to be alarmed even by the voice of his mother. The main idea of the poem “Nature is not what you think” is the poet’s call to open his soul to the music that sounds in the world around us.
It’s interesting how this music sounds in the work itself. A subtle master, Tyutchev does not strive to show off external effects and sophistication of form. The poet uses a traditional meter for his work - iambic tetrameter. There are frequent metrical interruptions in the poem. However, deviations from the main size are internally justified, justified by meaning. Extra unstressed syllables give the work rhythmic expressiveness, which is in full accordance with the content. There are no unusual words or phrases in the poem. The simple but soft flow of words acquires resonance due to the inner meaning of the poem.
The exceptional richness of thought and the perfection of its artistic expression make Tyutchev’s poem “Not what you think, nature...” bright and emotional. A palette of colors, polyphony of sound, diversity of feelings - this is what the poet is trying to convey to people.