In Russian poetry it is difficult to find a more “major” poet than Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820-1892). This is the poetry of life-affirming power, with which every sound is filled with pristine freshness and fragrance. Fet's poetry is limited to a narrow range of topics. It lacks civic motives and social issues. The essence of his views on the purpose of poetry is to escape from the world of suffering and sadness of the surrounding life - immersion in the world of beauty. It is beauty that is the main motive and idea of ​​​​the work of the great Russian lyricist. The beauty revealed in Fet's poetry is the core of existence and the world. The secrets of beauty, the language of its consonances, its many-sided image are what the poet strives to embody in his creations. Poetry is the temple of art, and the poet is the priest of this temple.

Peculiarities of the themes of A. Fet's poetry

The main themes of Fet's poetry are nature and love, as if fused together. It is in nature and love, as in a single melody, that all the beauty of the world, all the joy and charm of existence are united. In 1843, Fet’s poem appeared, which can rightfully be called his poetic manifesto:

I came to you with greetings

Tell me that the sun has risen

What is it with hot light

The sheets began to flutter;

Three poetic subjects - nature, love and song - are closely interconnected, penetrate each other, forming Fet’s universe of beauty. Using the technique of personification, Fet animates nature, it lives with him: “the forest woke up,” “the sun rose... fluttered.” And the poet is full of thirst for love and creativity.

Impressionism in the lyrics of A. Fet

The poet's impressions of the world around him are conveyed in living images. Fet consciously depicts not the object itself, but the impression that this object makes. He is not interested in details and details, he is not attracted to motionless, complete forms, he strives to convey the variability of nature, the movement of the human soul. This creative task is helped to be solved by unique visual means: not a clear line, but blurred contours, not color contrast, but shades, halftones, imperceptibly turning into one another. The poet reproduces in words not an object, but an impression. We first encounter such a phenomenon in literature in Fet’s poetry. (In painting, this direction is called impressionism.) Familiar images of the surrounding world acquire completely unexpected properties.

Fet does not so much liken nature to man as fill it with human emotions, since the subject of his poetry is most often feelings, and not the phenomena that cause them. Art is often compared to a mirror that reflects reality. Fet in his poems depicts not an object, but its reflection; landscapes “overturned” into the choppy waters of a stream or bay seem to double; motionless objects vibrate, sway, tremble, tremble.

In the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...” the rapid change of static pictures gives the verse amazing dynamism, airiness, and gives the poet the opportunity to depict the subtlest transitions from one state to another:

Whisper, timid breathing,

The trill of a nightingale,

Silver and sway

Sleepy stream,

Night light, night shadows,

Endless shadows

A series of magical changes

Sweet face

In the smoky dots there is a purple rose,

Amber reflection

And kisses and tears,

And dawn, dawn!..

Without a single verb, only with short descriptive sentences, like an artist with bold strokes, Fet conveys an intense lyrical experience. The poet does not depict in detail the development of relationships in poems about love, but reproduces only the most significant moments of this great feeling.

Musicality of A. Fet's poetry

Poem “The night was shining. The garden was full of moonlight. They were lying..." reminiscent of Pushkin's "I remember a wonderful moment...":

The night was shining. The garden was full of moonlight. were lying

Rays at our feet in a living room without lights.

The piano was all open, and the strings in it were trembling,

Just like our hearts are for your song.

This poem is inspired by the singing of T. A. Kuzminskaya (sister of Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy), who described this episode in her memoirs.

Fet's poems are unusually musical. Composers and the poet’s contemporaries also felt this. P. I. Tchaikovsky said about him: “This is not just a poet, rather a poet-musician...” Fet considered music the highest form of art and brought his poems to a musical sound. Written in a romance-song vein, they are very melodic; it is not for nothing that Fet called the entire cycle of poems in the collection “Evening Lights” “Melodies.” Glorifying beauty, Fet strives to “strengthen the battle of fearless hearts.” In the poem “With one push to drive away a living boat...” the poet speaks about the calling of the “chosen one”:

Drive away a living boat with one push

From sands smoothed by the tides,

Rise in one wave into another life,

Feel the wind from the flowering shores...

Features of the creative path

The birth of the poet greatly affected his creative path. Fet's father, the rich and well-born Oryol landowner Afanasy Shenshin, while in Germany, secretly took the wife of a German official (Fet) Charlotte from there to Russia. Soon Charlotte gave birth to the son of the future poet, who received the name Afanasy. Charlotte converted to Orthodoxy under the name Elizabeth, and they got married in church. Many years later, the church authorities revealed all this, and at the age of 15 he began to be considered not the Russian nobleman Shenshin, but the son of the German official Fet living in Russia. He lost all rights associated with the nobility. This shocked him greatly. Only in 1873 the request to recognize him as Shenshin’s son was granted, but the poet decided to keep his name Fet as a literary one. All this greatly influenced his creative path. In order not to “kill himself,” he recognized in himself a “man of genius” (according to Schopenhauer, the philosopher) and a “man of benefit,” “Fet” and “Shenshin.” The hated name “Fet” turned out to be associated with the beloved art, and the desired and, by hook or by crook, achieved “Shenshin” - with that life and everyday practice from which he himself suffered so cruelly:

I am among the crying Shenshin,

And Fet I am only among the singers...

Fet’s “pure art” gave rise to endless dissatisfaction with everything that the “man of benefit” Shenshin lived with. “Fet-Shenshin” - the unity of opposites were inextricably and organically connected and intertwined in it. Tchaikovsky's music was closely connected with Fet's muse. Tchaikovsky, speaking about Fet's undoubted genius, spoke of his talent as an inexplicable phenomenon, neither socially nor in any way.

Lyrics

In the personality of Afanasy Fet, two completely different people surprisingly came together: a seasoned practitioner, beaten by life, and an inspired, tireless, literally until his last breath (he died at the age of 72), a singer of beauty and love.

The illegitimate son of a minor German official, he lost his status as a noble son. He tried to “curately” to the nobility, but 13 years of army and guards service did not yield anything. Then he married an old and rich landowner for convenience and became a cruel and tight-fisted rural owner-exploiter. Fet never sympathized with revolutionaries or even liberals and, in order to achieve the desired nobility, he demonstrated his loyal feelings for a long time and loudly. And only when Fet was already 53 years old, Alexander II outlined a favorable resolution to his request. It got to the point of ridiculousness: if the thirty-year-old Pushkin considered it an insult when the tsar awarded him the rank of chamber cadet (this is a court rank usually given to young people under 20 years of age), then this Russian lyricist specifically obtained the rank of chamber cadet for himself at the age of 70? And at the same time, Fet wrote divine poetry. Here is a poem from 1888: “Half-destroyed, half-tenant of the grave, Why do you sing to us about the mysteries of love? Why, where the forces cannot take you, Like a daring young man, are you the only one calling us? I languish and sing. You listen and are thrilled. Your young spirit lives in the melodies of the old. The old gypsy woman is still singing."

That is, literally two people lived in a shell that was not the most pleasant to look at. But what strength of feeling, the power of poetry, what a passionate, youthful attitude towards beauty, towards love! Fet's poetry was briefly successful among his contemporaries in the 40s, but in the 70s and 80s it was a very intimate success, by no means widespread. But Fet was familiar to the masses, although they did not always know that the popular romances they sang (including gypsy songs) were based on Fet’s words. “Oh, for a long time I will be a secret in the silence of the night”, “What happiness! both the night and we are alone”, “The night was shining. The garden was full of the moon”, “For a long time there has been little joy in love”, “In the invisible haze” and, of course , “I won’t tell you anything” and “Don’t wake her up at dawn” - these are just a few of Fet’s poems, set to music by different composers. Fet's lyrics are thematically extremely poor: the beauty of nature and women's love - that's the whole theme. But what enormous power Fet achieves within these narrow limits. Here is a poem from 1883:

"Only in the world is there something shady
Dormant maple tent.
Only in the world is there something radiant
A childish, pensive look.
Only in the world is there something fragrant
Sweet headdress.
Only in the world is there this pure one,
Left running parting"

This is a kind of ontology (philosophical doctrine of being) of Fet, although it is difficult to call his lyrics philosophical. The poet’s world is very narrow, but how beautiful, full of grace. The dirt of life, the prose and evil of life never penetrated his poetry. Is he right about this? Apparently, yes, if you see poetry as art par excellence. Beauty should be the main thing in it. Fet’s nature lyrics are brilliant: “I came to you with greetings”, “Whisper. Timid breathing”, “What sadness! The end of the alley”, “This morning, this joy”, “I’m waiting, overwhelmed with anxiety” and many other lyrical miniatures. They are diverse, different, each is a unique masterpiece. But there is something in common: in all of them, Fet affirms the unity, the identity of the life of nature and the life of the human soul.

In his poetry of nature, Fet acts as an anti-nihilist: if for Turgenev’s Bazarov “nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man is a worker in it,” then for Fet nature is the only temple, a temple and a background, first of all, for love, a luxurious setting for the subtlest plot twists of love feelings, and secondly, a temple for inspiration, tenderness and prayer to beauty. If love for Pushkin was a manifestation of the highest fullness of life, then for Fet love is the only content of human existence, the only faith. He affirms this thought in his poems with such force that it makes one doubt whether he is a pagan. With him, nature itself loves - not together, but instead of a person (“In the Invisible Haze”). At the same time, quite in the Christian spirit, Fet considers the human soul to be a particle of heavenly fire, a spark of God (“Not that, Lord, mighty, incomprehensible”), sent down to man for revelations, daring, inspiration (“Swallows”, “Learn from them - from oak, near birch").

Fet's late poems, from the 80s to the 90s, are amazing. A decrepit old man in life, in poetry he turns into a hot young man, all of whose thoughts are about one thing - about love, about the exuberance of life, about the thrill of youth (“No, I haven’t changed”, “He wanted my madness”, “Love me! How only yours truly”, “I still love, I still yearn”).

Let's look at the poem "I won't tell you anything", dated September 2, 1885. It expresses the idea, often found among romantics, that the language of words cannot convey the life of the soul, the subtleties of feeling. Therefore, the love date, as always, surrounded by luxurious nature (opens with silence: “I won’t tell you anything...”). The Romantics did not trust the language of words as a means of expressing the soul of a person, especially a poet. However, it is difficult to call Fet a romantic: he is very “earthly.” However, the lot of the hero of the poem remains to “silently repeat” the words of a love confession. And this oxymoron (a combination of words that are contrasting in meaning) becomes the main verbal and artistic image of the poem. But still, why is he silent? What motivation is given for this? The second line clarifies: “I won’t alarm you in the least.” Yes, as other poems testify, his love can alarm and excite the virgin soul of his chosen one with its “longings” and even “shudders.”

There is another explanation, it is in the last line of the second stanza: his “heart blooms,” like the night flowers that are reported at the beginning of the stanza. This is the identity of the human soul and nature, expressed, as in many other works of Fet, with the help of a special artistic technique called psychological parallelism. In addition, the hero’s chest, that is, the container of the emotional and spiritual beginning, is “sick, tired” (first line of the third and last stanza). “I’m trembling” - whether from the chill of the night or from some internal spiritual reasons. And therefore, the end of the poem mirrors the beginning: “I won’t alarm you at all, / I won’t tell you anything.” The three-foot anapest of the poem sounds melodious: “I won’t tell you anything,” which has repeatedly inspired many composers. The poem attracts with the subtlety and grace of the feelings expressed in it and the naturalness, quiet simplicity of their verbal expression.

Fetov's lyrics could be called romantic. But with one important clarification: unlike the romantics, the ideal world for Fet is not a heavenly world, unattainable in earthly existence, “the distant native land.” The idea of ​​the ideal is still clearly dominated by the signs of earthly existence. Thus, in the poem “Oh no, I won’t call on the lost joy...” (1857), the lyrical “I,” trying to rid itself of the “dreary life of a chain,” represents another existence as a “quiet earthly ideal.” The “earthly ideal” for the lyrical “I” is the quiet beauty of nature and the “cherishing union of friends”:

Let the sick soul, tired of the struggle,
Without a rumble the chain of dreary life will fall,
And let me wake up in the distance, where to the nameless river
A silent steppe runs from the blue hills.

Where a plum argues with a wild apple tree,
Where the cloud creeps a little, airy and light,
Where the drooping willow slumbers over the water
And in the evening, buzzing, a bee flies towards the hive.

Perhaps... The eyes are forever looking into the distance with hope! -
A cherishing union of friends awaits me there,
With hearts as pure as the moon of midnight,
With a sensitive soul, like the songs of prophetic muses<...>

The world where the hero finds salvation from the “dreary life of a chain” is still filled with signs of earthly life - these are blossoming spring trees, light clouds, the buzzing of bees, a willow tree growing over the river - the endless earthly distance and heavenly space. The anaphora used in the second stanza further emphasizes the unity of the earthly and heavenly worlds, which constitute the ideal to which the lyrical “I” strives.

The internal contradiction in the perception of earthly life is very clearly reflected in the poem of 1866 “The mountains are covered with the evening shine”:

The mountains are covered in evening sparkle.
Dampness and darkness flow into the valley.
With secret prayer I lift my eyes:
- “Will I soon leave the cold and darkness?”

The mood, the experience expressed in this poem - an acute longing for another, higher world, which is inspired by the vision of majestic mountains, allows us to recall one of the most famous poems by A.S. Pushkin “Monastery on Kazbek”. But the ideals of the poets are clearly different. If for Pushkin’s lyrical hero the ideal is a “transcendental cell”, in the image of which dreams of lonely service, a break with the earthly world and ascent to the heavenly, perfect world are united, then the ideal of Fetov’s hero is also a world far from “cold and darkness” » valley, but not requiring a break with the world of people. This is human life, but harmoniously fused with the heavenly world and therefore more beautiful, perfect:

I see on that ledge with blush -
cozy nests moved on the roofs;
There they lit up under the old chestnut tree
Dear windows, like faithful stars.

The beauty of the world for Fet also lay in the hidden melody, which, according to the poet, all perfect objects and phenomena possess. The ability to hear and convey the melodies of the world, the music that permeates the existence of every phenomenon, every thing, every object can be called one of the features of the worldview of the author of “Evening Lights”. This feature of Fet's poetry was noted by his contemporaries. “Fet in his best moments,” wrote P.I. Tchaikovsky, “goes beyond the limits specified by poetry and boldly takes a step into our field... This is not just a poet, rather a poet-musician, as if avoiding even such topics that are easily expressed in words.”

It is known with what sympathy this review was received by Fet, who admitted that he was “always drawn from a certain area of ​​words to an indefinite area of ​​music,” into which he went as far as his strength. Even earlier, in one of the articles dedicated to F.I. Tyutchev, he wrote: “The words: poetry, the language of the gods, is not empty hyperbole, but expresses a clear understanding of the essence of the matter. Poetry and music are not only related, but inseparable.” “Seeking to recreate harmonic truth, the soul of the artist,” according to Fet, “itself comes into the corresponding musical order.” Therefore, the word “singing” seemed to him the most accurate to express the creative process.

Researchers write about “the exceptional sensitivity of the author of Evening Lights to the impressions of the musical series.” But the point is not only in the melody of Fet’s poems, but in the poet’s ability to hear the melodies of the world, clearly inaccessible to the ear of a mere mortal, not a poet. In an article dedicated to the lyrics of F.I. Tyutchev, Fet himself noted “harmonic singing” as a property of beauty, and the ability of only a chosen poet to hear this beauty of the world. “Beauty is spread throughout the entire universe,” he argued. - But for an artist it is not enough to be unconsciously influenced by beauty or even to be swept away in its rays. Until his eye sees its clear, albeit subtle-sounding forms, where we do not see it or only vaguely feel it, he is not yet a poet...” One of Fetov’s poems - “Spring and night covered the valley...” - clearly conveys how this connection arises between the music of the world and the soul of the poet:

Spring and night covered the valley,
The soul runs into sleepless darkness,
And she clearly heard the verb
Spontaneous life, detached.

And unearthly existence
Conducts his conversation with his soul
And it blows right at her
With its eternal stream.

As if proving Pushkin’s thought about the true poet-prophet as the owner of special vision and special hearing, Fetov’s lyrical subject sees the existence of things hidden from the eyes of the uninitiated, hears what is inaccessible to the hearing of an ordinary person. In Fet one can find striking images that in another poet would probably seem like a paradox, perhaps a failure, but they are very organic in Fet’s poetic world: “whisper of the heart”, “and I hear the heart blooming”, “resonant heart ardor and radiance pours all around”, “the language of the night rays”, “the alarming murmur of the shadow of the summer night”. The hero hears the “fading call of flowers” ​​(“Feeling the answer inspired by others...”, 1890), the “weeping of grass,” the “bright silence” of twinkling stars (“Today all the stars are so lush...”). The ability to hear is possessed by the heart and hand of the lyrical subject (“People are sleeping, - my friend, let’s go to the shady garden...”), a caress has a melody or speech (“The last tender caress has sounded...”, “Alien publicity... "). The world is perceived with the help of a melody hidden from everyone, but clearly audible to the lyrical “I”. “Chorus of luminaries” or “star choir” - these images appear more than once in Fetov’s works, pointing to the secret music that permeates the life of the Universe (“I stood motionless for a long time...”, 1843; “On a haystack at night in the south... ", 1857; "Yesterday we parted with you...", 1864).

Human feelings and experiences also remain in memory as a melody (“Some sounds rush around / And cling to my headboard. / They are full of languid separation, / They tremble with unprecedented love”). It is interesting that Fet himself, explaining Tyutchev’s lines “the trees sing,” wrote this: “We will not, like classical commentators, explain this expression by the fact that birds sleeping in the trees sing here - this is too rational; No! It is more pleasant for us to understand that the trees sing with their melodic spring forms, they sing in harmony, like the celestial spheres.”

Many years later, in the famous article “In Memory of Vrubel” (1910), Blok will give his definition of genius and recognizes the ability to hear as a distinctive feature of a brilliant artist - but not the sounds of earthly existence, but mysterious words coming from other worlds. A.A. was fully endowed with this talent. Fet. But, like no other poet, he had the ability to hear the “harmonic tone” of all earthly phenomena, and convey precisely this hidden melody of things in his lyrics.

Another feature of Fet’s worldview can be expressed using the poet’s own statement in a letter to S.V. Engelhardt: “It’s a pity that the new generation,” he wrote, “is looking for poetry in reality, when poetry is only the smell of things, and not the things themselves.” It was the fragrance of the world that Fet subtly felt and conveyed in his poetry. But here, too, there was one feature that was first noted by A.K. Tolstoy, who wrote that in Fet’s poems “smells of sweet peas and clover,” “the smell turns into the color of mother-of-pearl, into the glow of a firefly, and moonlight or a ray of dawn shimmers into sound.” These words correctly capture the poet’s ability to describe the secret life of nature, its eternal variability, without recognizing the clear boundaries between color and sound, smell and color, which are customary for everyday consciousness. So, for example, in Fet’s poetry “the frost shines” (“The night is bright, the frost shines”), sounds have the ability to “burn” (“It’s as if everything is burning and ringing at the same time”) or shine (“the sonorous ardor of the heart pours radiance all around "). In the poem dedicated to Chopin (“Chopin”, 1882), the melody does not stop, but rather fades away.

The idea of ​​Fet’s impressionistic manner of painting the world of natural phenomena has already become traditional. This is a correct judgment: Fet strives to convey the life of nature in its eternal variability; he does not stop the “beautiful moment,” but shows that in the life of nature there is not even an instantaneous stop. And this internal movement, “vibrating vibrations”, inherent, according to Fet himself, to all objects and phenomena of existence, also turns out to be a manifestation of the beauty of the world. And therefore, in his poetry, Fet, according to the precise observation of D.D. Good, "<...>even motionless objects, in accordance with his idea of ​​their “innermost essence,” sets in motion: makes them oscillate, sway, tremble, tremble.”

The originality of Fet's landscape lyrics is clearly conveyed by the 1855 poem "Evening". Already the first stanza powerfully includes man in the mysterious and formidable life of nature, in its dynamics:

Sounded over the clear river,
It rang in a darkened meadow,
Rolled over the silent grove,
It lit up on the other side.

The absence of natural phenomena to be described allows us to convey the mystery of natural life; dominance of verbs - enhances the feeling of its variability. Assonance (o-oo-yu), alliteration (p-r-z) clearly recreate the polyphony of the world: the rumble of distant thunder, its echoes in the meadows and groves that are quiet in anticipation of a thunderstorm. The feeling of rapidly changing, life-filled nature in the second stanza is even more intensified:

Far away, in the twilight, with bows
The river runs to the west;
Having burned with golden borders,
The clouds scattered like smoke.

The world is, as it were, seen by the lyrical “I” from above, his eye covers the boundless expanses of his native land, his soul rushes after this rapid movement of the river and clouds. Fet is amazingly able to convey not only the visible beauty of the world, but also the movement of air, its vibrations, allowing the reader to feel the warmth or cold of the evening before the storm:

On the hill it is either damp or hot -
The sighs of the day are in the breath of the night...
But the lightning is already glowing brightly
Blue and green fire.

Perhaps one could say that the theme of Fetov’s poems about nature is precisely variability, the mysterious life of nature in perpetual motion. But at the same time, in this variability of all natural phenomena, the poet strives to see some kind of unity, harmony. This idea about the unity of being determines the frequent appearance in Fet’s lyrics of the image of a mirror or the motif of reflection: earth and sky reflect each other, repeat each other. D.D. Blagoy very accurately noticed Fet’s “predilection for reproduction, along with a direct image of an object, its reflected, mobile “double”: the starry sky reflected in the night mirror of the sea<...>, “repeating” landscapes, “overturned” into the choppy waters of a stream, river, bay.” This persistent motif of reflection in Fet’s poetry can be explained by the idea of ​​the unity of being, which Fet declared declaratively in his poems: “And as in a barely noticeable dewdrop / You recognize the whole face of the sun, / So united in the cherished depths / You will find the entire universe.”

Subsequently, analyzing Fetov’s “Evening Lights,” the famous Russian philosopher Vl. Soloviev will define Fetov’s concept of the world as follows: “<...>Not only is each inseparably present in everything, but everything is inseparably present in each<...>. True Poetic Contemplation<...>sees the absolute in an individual phenomenon, not only preserving, but also infinitely strengthening its individuality.”

This awareness of the unity of the natural world also determines the comprehensiveness of Fetov’s landscapes: the poet, as it were, strives with one glance to embrace the boundlessness of space in one moment of world life: the earth - the river, fields, meadows, forests, mountains, and sky and to show the harmonious harmony in this boundless life. The gaze of the lyrical “I” instantly moves from the earthly world to the heavenly one, from close to the distance that endlessly extends into infinity. The originality of Fetov’s landscape is clearly visible in the poem “Evening”, with the unstoppable movement of natural phenomena captured here, which is opposed only by the temporary peace of human life:

Wait for a clear day tomorrow.
Swifts flash and ring.
Purple streak of fire
Transparent illuminated sunset.

Ships are dozing in the bay, -
The pennants barely flutter.
The heavens have gone far away -
And the distance of the sea went to them.

The shadow approaches so timidly,
So secretly the light goes away,
What won't you say: the day has passed,
Don't say: night has come.

Fetov's landscapes seem to be seen from the top of a mountain or from a bird's eye view; they amazingly merge the vision of some insignificant detail of the earthly landscape with a river rapidly running into the distance, or a boundless steppe, or the sea and even more boundless heavenly space. But the small and the great, the near and the far, are united into a single whole, into the harmoniously beautiful life of the universe. This harmony is manifested in the ability of one phenomenon to respond to another phenomenon, as if to mirror its movement, its sound, its aspiration. These movements are often invisible to the eye (the evening is blowing, the steppe is breathing), but are included in the general unstoppable movement into the distance and upward:

The warm evening blows quietly,
The steppe breathes fresh life,
And the mounds turn green
Runaway chain.

And far between the mounds
Dark gray snake
Until the fading mists
The native path lies.

To unaccountable fun
Rising to the skies
Trill after trill falls from the sky
The voices of spring birds.

Very accurately the originality of Fetov’s landscapes can be conveyed by his own lines: “As if from a wonderful reality / You are carried away into the airy vastness.” The desire to depict the constantly changing and at the same time unified in its aspirations life of nature also determines the abundance of anaphoras in Fetov’s poems, as if connecting with a common mood all the numerous manifestations of natural and human life.

But the entire endless, boundless world, like the sun in a drop of dew, is reflected in the human soul and is carefully preserved by it. The consonance of the world and the soul is a constant theme of Fetov's lyrics. The soul, like a mirror, reflects the instantaneous variability of the world and itself changes, obeying the inner life of the world. That is why in one of Fet’s poems he calls the soul “instant”:

My horse moves quietly
Along the spring backwaters of the meadows,
And in these backwaters there is fire
Spring clouds are shining,

And a refreshing mist
Rising from the thawed fields...
Dawn, and happiness, and deception -
How sweet you are to my soul!

How tenderly my chest shuddered
Above this shadow is golden!
How to cling to these ghosts
I want an instant soul!

One more feature of Fetov’s landscapes can be noted - their humanization. In one of his poems the poet will write: “What is eternal is human.” In an article dedicated to the poems of F.I. Tyutchev, Fet identified anthropomorphism and beauty. “There,” he wrote, “where the ordinary eye does not suspect beauty, the artist sees it,<...>puts a purely human mark on her<...>. In this sense, all art is anthropomorphism<...>. By embodying the ideal, man inevitably embodies man.” “Humanity” is reflected primarily in the fact that nature, like man, is endowed by the poet with “feeling.” In his memoirs, Fet stated: “It is not for nothing that Faust, explaining to Margarita the essence of the universe, says: “Feeling is everything.” This feeling, Fet wrote, is inherent in inanimate objects. Silver turns black, sensing the approach of sulfur; the magnet senses the proximity of iron, etc.” It is the recognition of the ability to feel in natural phenomena that determines the originality of Fetov’s epithets and metaphors (a gentle, immaculate night; a sad birch; ardent, languid, cheerful, sad and immodest faces of flowers; the face of the night, the face of nature, the faces of lightning, the dissolute escape of prickly snow, the air is timid , joy of oak trees, happiness of weeping willow, stars praying, heart of a flower).

Fet’s expressions of the fullness of feelings are “trembling”, “trembling”, “sigh” and “tears” - words that invariably appear when describing nature or human experiences. The moon (“My Garden”) and the stars are trembling (“The night is quiet. The firmament is unsteady”). Trembling and trembling convey Fet’s fullness of feelings, fullness of life. And it is to the “trembling”, “trembling”, “breath” of the world that the sensitive soul of a person responds, responding with the same “trembling” and “trembling”. Fet wrote about this consonance of soul and world in his poem “To a Friend”:

Understand that the heart only senses
Inexpressible by nothing,
What is invisible in appearance
Trembling, breathing harmony,
And in your treasured hiding place
The immortal soul preserves.

Inability to “tremble” and “tremble”, i.e. to feel strongly, for Fet it becomes proof of lifelessness. And therefore, among the few negative natural phenomena for Fet are the arrogant pines, which “do not know trembling, do not whisper, do not sigh” (“Pines”).

But trembling and trembling are not so much a physical movement, but, to use Fet’s own expression, “the harmonic tone of objects,” i.e. internal sound captured in physical movement, in forms, hidden sound, melody. This combination of “trembling” and “sounding” of the world is conveyed in many poems, for example, “On a haystack on a southern night”:

On a haystack at night in the south
I lay with my face to the firmament,
And the choir shone, lively and friendly,
Spread all around, trembling.

It is interesting that in the article “Two Letters on the Significance of Ancient Languages ​​in Our Education,” Fet wondered how to understand the essence of things, say, one of a dozen glasses. Study of shape, volume, weight, density, transparency, he argued, alas! leaving "the secret impenetrable, silent as death." “But,” he writes further, “our glass trembled with its entire indivisible essence, trembled in a way that only it can tremble, due to the combination of all the qualities we have studied and unexplored. She is all in this harmonic sound; and you just have to sing and reproduce this sound with free singing, so that the glass instantly trembles and responds to us with the same sound. You have undoubtedly reproduced its individual sound: all other glasses like it are silent. Alone she trembles and sings. Such is the power of free creativity." And then Fet formulates his understanding of the essence of artistic creativity: “It is given to a human artist to fully master the most intimate essence of objects, their quivering harmony, their singing truth.”

But evidence of the fullness of nature’s existence becomes for the poet the ability not only to tremble and tremble, but also to breathe and cry. In Fet's poems the wind breathes (“The sun is lowering its rays into a plumb line...”), night (“My day rises like a poor toiler...”), dawn (“Today all the stars are so lush...”), forest ( “The sun is lowering its rays into a plumb line...”), the sea bay (“Sea Bay”), spring (“At the Crossroads”), the wave is sighing (“What a night! How clean the air is...”), frost (“September Rose "), midday ("The Nightingale and the Rose"), the night village ("This morning, this joy..."), the sky ("It came - and everything around melts..."). In his poetry, grasses weep (“In the moonlight...”), birches and willows cry (“Pines”, “Willows and Birches”), lilacs tremble in tears (“Don’t ask what I’m thinking about...”). , “shine” with tears of delight, roses cry (“I know why you, sick child...”, “It’s enough to sleep: you have two roses...”), “the night cries with the dew of happiness” (Don’t blame me for being embarrassed. .."), the sun is crying (“So the summer days are diminishing...”), the sky (“Rainy Summer”), “tears are trembling in the gaze of the stars” (“The stars are praying, twinkling and blushing...”).

He believed that the main goal of creativity is to glorify the beauties of this world, nature, love. Trembling, delight, tenderness, and piercing tenderness are heard in his poem “Even more fragrant spring bliss...” The soulful lyricism of this work captivated me. How does the poet manage to express his emotions? Let's turn to the poem. Before us is a monologue of a lyrical, romantic, dreamy person who is in love with nature, probably of his native land. He awaits spring with excitement, dreams about it as if about a miracle:

The fragrant pegasus has not yet had time to descend upon us...

Spring is associated with something elegant, thin, fragile, light. This is what I think the metaphor reveals to us in the first lines.

The aroma adds richness to the sensual image of spring. The author manages to show this with the help of the epithet “fragrant”. Fet is right. Spring is perhaps the most fragrant time of the year because it awakens our entire being. We open up to meet it entirely, to the hidden corners of the soul, acutely perceiving, as for the first time, colors, feelings, and smells. The verb “descend” with a high stylistic connotation adds sublimity to the image, ennobles spring, distinguishing it from the no less majestic, but simpler winter:

The ravines are still full of snow, Even at dawn the cart is rattling along the frozen path.

Here, inversion gives greatness to the images, as at the beginning of the poem, and so

The same shift of stress to “full”. However, the appearance of a rattling cart in

The ending of the first stanza, I believe, characterizes winter as not entirely poetic

Season. You can't say the same about spring. This is emphasized by the second stanza of the work, where, in my opinion, Fet’s impressionism is most clearly revealed. Poet

Strives to show the arrival of spring in all its diversity of changeable forms.

The images, sensations, and moods here are barely perceptible, and that’s their beauty:

As soon as the sun warms at noon, the linden tree in the heights turns red, through, the birch tree turns a little yellow...

How much dynamics there is in these “barely” and “slightly”! as if telling us that spring is approaching very smoothly, slowly, timidly, almost imperceptibly. But she moves and certainly makes herself known to those who are waiting for her, step by step, moment by moment. While the singer of spring and love, “the nightingale does not yet dare to sing in the currant bush,” but the impressionable consciousness of the romantic hero is already drawing this. This is probably how the dream of May, flowering plants, bright evenings filled with confusion and audacity of a loving heart comes true. The hero’s wishes will certainly come true, because even the negations in this poem (“didn’t have time”, “doesn’t dare”), I think, on the contrary, affirm spring, the legitimacy of its grace-filled arrival, which is about to come, there is very little left. The final stanza of the work opens with a deep philosophical thought, which is contained in a metaphor:

But is there a living message of rebirth in the passing cranes?

Nature awakens from its winter sleep and the birds return. They are the joyful messengers of spring, bringing it on their wings. The murmur of cranes also enlivens everything around, so they can rightfully be called symbols of the rebirth of nature. ,

And, following them with her eyes, stands the beauty of the steppe With a bluish blush on her cheeks.

In the last lines of the work, a lyrical character unexpectedly appears before us - the “steppe beauty.” I think this image is not accidental. He is a reflection of spring. Interestingly, the “beauty” has a “gray-gray” blush, and not pink or red. Why? This is probably again a feature of the impressionistic style. Fet depicted, recorded, as it were, not the color of the cheeks itself, but his impression, instantaneous, changeable, that this detail made on him. The blush could become “blue,” for example, under the influence of bright sunlight.

So gradually the full picture appears before us. The main idea of ​​the poem is a premonition of spring. The lyrical hero seems to dissolve in nature, fascinated by the upcoming renewal of the world, which at the same time is already taking place before his eyes. This simultaneity of what is happening, inconsistency, constant movement, development create an extraordinary, special sensory space that reveals the human soul.

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet is a Russian poet and lyricist. The author of numerous poems, the themes of which are able to attract and interest the reader with their depth, elusiveness and ability to touch hearts. Afanasy Fet was able to tell the reader about many pressing problems or immerse him in the world of beauty, dreams and memories. One of the poems I liked and remembered most was “Village”.

The poem “Village” was written in 1842 and dates back to the early period of the poet’s work, when he was a student at Moscow University.

The main theme of this poem is love for the homeland and places close to the heart. The theme of the homeland in fiction is eternal and each poet and author conveys these joyful, melodic and bright feelings in their own special way:

I love your sad shelter,

And the evening of the village is deaf...

Line by line, the author talks about what is most beloved and dear to him: nature, people, homework, household items. In his mind, the village becomes a whole world and a big family, which he loves and remembers every detail with trepidation. Be it “an old lady’s cap and glasses” or “farewell to the silent birds.”

In order to reveal the theme, the author used various artistic means, for example, the anaphora “I love”, which is repeated at the beginning of each new phrase. The epithets “deaf village evening”, “golden oats”, which help create a lively performance. And thanks to the metaphor of “the coolness of the evening stream,” Afanasy Fet increases the emotional expressiveness of his poem.

Thus, Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet is one of the outstanding Russian poets of the 19th century, the originality of whose lyrics lies in the fact that he is able to convey the subtlest shades of mood by describing details. He has his own view of what is happening, which is why he is so easily and naturally able to convey all his emotions to the reader.

The work of Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820 - 1892) is one of the pinnacles of Russian poetry. Fet is a great poet, a genius poet. Now there is not a person in Russia who does not know Fet’s poems. Well, at least “I came to you with greetings” or “Don’t wake her up at dawn...” At the same time, many have no real idea of ​​the scale of this poet. The idea of ​​Fet is distorted, even starting with his appearance. Someone maliciously constantly replicates those portraits of Fet that were made during his dying illness, where his face is terribly distorted, his eyes are swollen - an old man in a state of agony. Meanwhile, Fet, as can be seen from the portraits made during his heyday, both human and poetic, was the most beautiful of the Russian poets.

The drama is connected with the mystery of Fet's birth. In the fall of 1820, his father Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin took the wife of the official Karl Föt from Germany to his family estate. A month later the child was born and was registered as the son of A.N. Shenshina. The illegality of this recording was discovered when the boy was 14 years old. He received the surname Fet and in documents began to be called the son of a foreign subject. A.A. Fet spent a lot of effort trying to return Shenshin's surname and the rights of a hereditary nobleman. The mystery of his birth has not yet been fully solved. If he is Fet's son, then his father I. Fet was the great-uncle of the last Russian Empress.

Fet's life is also mysterious. They say about him that in life he was much more prosaic than in poetry. But this is due to the fact that he was a wonderful owner. Wrote a small volume of articles on economics. From a ruined estate he managed to create a model farm with a magnificent stud farm. And even in Moscow on Plyushchikha, in his house there was a vegetable garden and a greenhouse; in January, vegetables and fruits ripened, which the poet loved to treat his guests to.

In this regard, they like to talk about Fet as a prosaic person. But in fact, his origin is mysterious and romantic, and his death is mysterious: this death was and was not suicide. Fet, tormented by illness, finally decided to commit suicide. He sent his wife away, left a suicide note, and grabbed a knife. The secretary prevented him from using it. And the poet died - died of shock.

The biography of a poet is, first of all, his poems. Fet's poetry is multifaceted, its main genre is the lyric poem. Classical genres include elegies, thoughts, ballads, and epistles. “Melodies” - poems that represent a response to musical impressions - can be considered as the “original Fetov genre”.

One of Fet’s early and most popular poems is “I came to you with greetings”:

I came to you with greetings,

Tell me that the sun has risen, that it is a hot light

The sheets began to flutter;

Tell me that the forest has woken up,

All woke up, every branch,

Every bird was startled

And full of thirst in spring...

The poem is written on the theme of love. The theme is old, eternal, and Fet’s poems exude freshness and novelty. It doesn't look like anything we know. This is generally characteristic of Fet and corresponds to his conscious poetic attitudes. Fet wrote: “Poetry certainly requires novelty, and for it there is nothing more deadly than repetition, and especially oneself... By novelty I do not mean new objects, but their new illumination by the magic lantern of art.”

The very beginning of the poem is unusual - unusual in comparison with the then accepted norm in poetry. In particular, the Pushkin norm, which required extreme precision in words and in combinations of words. Meanwhile, the initial phrase of Fetov’s poem is not at all accurate and not even entirely “correct”: “I came to you with greetings, to tell you...”. Would Pushkin or any of the poets of Pushkin’s time allow himself to say so? At that time, these lines were seen as poetic audacity. Fet was aware of the inaccuracy of his poetic word, its closeness to living, sometimes seeming not entirely correct, but that made it especially bright and expressive speech. He called his poems jokingly (but not without pride) poems “of a disheveled kind.” But what is the artistic meaning in poetry of the “disheveled kind”?

Inaccurate words and seemingly sloppy, “disheveled” expressions in Fet’s poems create not only unexpected, but also bright, exciting images. One gets the impression that the poet doesn’t seem to deliberately think about the words; they came to him on their own. He speaks with the very first, unintentional words. The poem is distinguished by its amazing integrity. This is an important virtue in poetry. Fet wrote: “The task of a lyricist is not in the harmony of the reproduction of objects, but in the harmony of tone.” In this poem there is both harmony of objects and harmony of tone. Everything in the poem is internally connected to each other, everything is unidirectional, it is said in a single impulse of feeling, as if in one breath.

Another early poem is the lyrical play “Whisper, timid breathing...”:

Whisper, timid breathing,

The trill of a nightingale,

Silver and sway

Sleepy stream,

Night light, night shadows,

Endless shadows

A series of magical changes

Sweet face...

The poem was written in the late 40s. It is built on nominative sentences alone. Not a single verb. Only objects and phenomena that are named one after another: whispers - timid breathing - nightingale trills, etc.

But despite all this, the poem cannot be called objective and material. This is the most amazing and unexpected thing. Fet's objects are non-objective. They do not exist on their own, but as signs of feelings and states. They glow a little, flicker. By naming this or that thing, the poet evokes in the reader not a direct idea of ​​the thing itself, but those associations that can usually be associated with it. The main semantic field of a poem is between the words, behind the words.

“Behind the Words” the main theme of the poem develops: feelings of love. The most subtle feeling, inexpressible in words, inexpressibly strong, No one had ever written about love like this before Fet.

Fet liked the reality of life, and this was reflected in his poems. Nevertheless, it is difficult to call Fet simply a realist, noticing how in poetry he gravitates toward dreams, dreams, and intuitive movements of the soul. Fet wrote about the beauty diffused in all the diversity of reality. Aesthetic realism in Fet's poems in the 40s and 50s was really aimed at the everyday and the most ordinary.

The character and tension of Fet's lyrical experience depend on the state of nature. The change of seasons occurs in a circle - from spring to spring. Fet’s feelings move in the same kind of circle: not from the past to the future, but from spring to spring, with its necessary, inevitable return. In the collection (1850), the cycle “Snow” is given first place. Fet's winter cycle is multi-motive: he sings about a sad birch tree in winter clothing, about how “the night is bright, the frost is shining,” and “the frost has drawn patterns on the double glass.” The snowy plains attract the poet:

Wonderful picture

How dear you are to me:

White plain,

Full moon,

The light of the high heavens,

And shining snow

And distant sleighs

Lonely running.

Fet confesses his love for the winter landscape. In Fet's poems, shining winter prevails, in the brilliance of the prickly sun, in the diamonds of snowflakes and snow sparks, in the crystal of icicles, in the silvery fluff of frosty eyelashes. The associative series in this lyric does not go beyond the boundaries of nature itself; here is its own beauty, which does not need human spirituality. Rather, it itself spiritualizes and enlightens the personality. It was Fet, following Pushkin, who sang the Russian winter, only he managed to reveal its aesthetic meaning in such a multifaceted way. Fet introduced rural landscapes and scenes of folk life into his poems; he appeared in his poems as “a bearded grandfather,” he “groans and crosses himself,” or a daring coachman on a troika.

Fet was always attracted to the poetic theme of evening and night. The poet early developed a special aesthetic attitude towards the night and the onset of darkness. At the new stage of his creativity, he already began to call entire collections “Evening Lights”, they seem to contain a special, Fetov philosophy of the night.

Fet’s “night poetry” reveals a complex of associations: night - abyss - shadows - sleep - visions - secret, intimate - love - the unity of the “night soul” of a person with the night element. This image receives philosophical deepening and a new second meaning in his poems; In the content of the poem, a second plan appears - symbolic. His association “night-abyss” takes on a philosophical and poetic perspective. She begins to get closer to human life. The abyss is an airy road - the path of human life.

MAY NIGHT

Lagging clouds fly over us

The last crowd.

Their transparent segment softly melts

At the crescent moon

A mysterious power reigns in spring

With stars on the forehead. -

You, tender! You promised me happiness

On a vain land.

Where is the happiness? Not here, in a wretched environment,

And there it is - like smoke

Follow him! follow him! by air -

And we'll fly away into eternity.

The May night promises happiness, a person flies through life in pursuit of happiness, the night is an abyss, a person flies into the abyss, into eternity. Further development of this association: night - human existence - the essence of being.

Fet imagines the night hours as revealing the secrets of the universe. The poet's nocturnal insight allows him to look "from time to eternity", he sees the "living altar of the universe."

Tolstoy wrote to Fet: “The poem is one of those rare ones in which no words can be added, subtracted or changed; it is alive in itself and charming. It is so good that, it seems to me, this is not a random poem, but that this is the first stream of a long-delayed stream ".

The association night - abyss - human existence, developing in Fet's poetry, absorbs the ideas of Schopenhauer. However, the closeness of the poet Fet to the philosopher is very conditional and relative. The ideas of the world as a representation, man as a contemplator of existence, thoughts about intuitive insights, apparently, were close to Fet.

The idea of ​​death is woven into the figurative association of Fet’s poems about the night and human existence (the poem “Sleep and Death,” written in 1858). Sleep is full of the bustle of the day, death is full of majestic peace. Fet gives preference to death, draws its image as the embodiment of a peculiar beauty.

In general, Fet’s “night poetry” is deeply unique. His night is as beautiful as the day, maybe even more beautiful. Fetov's night is full of life, the poet feels the "breath of the immaculate night." Fetov's night gives a person happiness:

What a night! The transparent air is constrained;

The aroma swirls above the ground.

Oh now I'm happy, I'm excited

Oh, now I'm glad to speak! ...

Man merges with night life, he is by no means alienated from it. He hopes and expects something from him. The association repeated in Fet's poems is night - and expectation and trembling, trembling:

The birches are waiting. Their leaves are translucent

Shyly beckons and pleases the eye.

They are shaking. So to the newlywed virgin

And her attire is joyful and alien...

Fet's nocturnal nature and man are full of expectation of the innermost, which turns out to be accessible to all living things only at night. Night, love, communication with the elemental life of the universe, knowledge of happiness and higher truths in his poems, as a rule, are combined.

Fet's work represents the apotheosis of the night. For Feta the philosopher, night represents the basis of world existence, it is the source of life and the keeper of the secret of “double existence”, the kinship of man with the universe, for him it is the knot of all living and spiritual connections.

Now Fet can no longer be called just a poet of sensations. His contemplation of nature is full of philosophical profundity, his poetic insights are aimed at discovering the secrets of existence.

Poetry was the main work of Fet’s life, a calling to which he gave everything: soul, vigilance, sophistication of hearing, wealth of imagination, depth of mind, skill of hard work and inspiration.

In 1889, Strakhov wrote in the article “Anniversary of Fet’s Poetry”: “He is the only poet of his kind, incomparable, giving us the purest and truest poetic delight, true diamonds of poetry... Fet is a true touchstone for the ability to understand poetry...”.