Above the boredom of dachas, above vegetable gardens. “Creative quests of Blok Ballad “Stranger”

LYRICAL HERO AND THE THEME OF FEMININITY. Blok believed in new world, in the fact that “the hope of the future” is the meaning of existence. The idea of ​​the female soul was associated with the belief in future harmony. He believed that the female soul also possessed extraordinary power in the lyrics of F. Tyutchev, but only the symbolists felt the catastrophic nature of the world and the possibility of its salvation through the feminine principle.

In love with L.D. Mendeleev Blok saw in his chosen one the earthly embodiment of Eternal Femininity. She became the heroine of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady.” The Beautiful Lady “sees distant worlds”, she is the “queen of purity”, the bearer of the “source of light”, the Mysterious Sunset Maiden, the Lady of the Universe, Kupina. Blok treated his beloved, then his wife, mystically, with a religious feeling; he saw in her a Christian symbol: “In the rays of your nebula / I understood the young Christ.” The verses were given the character of prayers.

However, the lyrical hero of the cycle is bifurcated: in Eternal Femininity he also feels an earthly woman. Blok wrote to L.D. Mendeleeva that he cannot “go into complete abstraction”, that she is his “earthly existence”. Already in the mystical world of his early poetry reality enters, which the poet expressed in the theme of earthly love: the hero wants to hug his girlfriend “in ecstasy”, overtake her “in the mansion”, “the desired friend” comes up to his porch, promises to unlock the door for him “ in the twilight of a winter day.” In elegy “We met you at sunset...” (1902) the feeling of the lyrical hero is conveyed not to the platonic Beautiful Lady, not to a symbol, but to an earthly woman: “I loved your white dress, / Having fallen out of love with the sophistication of a dream...” Their meeting is a reality, not an illusion; the figurative series is specific (“You cut through the bay with an oar”, a sand spit, “ripples and reeds near the shore”), although it is inscribed in the landscape and emotional context of “azure silence”, “evening fog”, thoughts about “pale”, characteristic of romantics and symbolists. beauty." Blok expressed some sensual fatigue: “No melancholy, no love, no resentment, / Everything has faded, passed, moved away...”, but such an emotional state reflected not only the intimate experience of the poet, but also the experience of any person, which distinguishes the poem from the romantic elegiac tradition. Subsequently, in Blok’s love lyrics, be it the cycles “Snow Mask”, “Faina” or “Carmen”, the theme of earthly love will acquire an independent, full-fledged sound. In the poem “We met you at sunset...” the poet expressed the Symbolists’ idea of ​​rapprochement, the attraction of ideal and reality.

Blok believed that the mysteries of life are broader than aesthetic concepts, that logic or people’s desires cannot replace providence. IN 1905 he wrote a poem “The girl sang in the church choir...”. The setting of a church service is depicted, and the imagery of liturgical petitions (litanies) for those floating, traveling, and suffering is used. In church, a girl sings “about all those who are tired in a foreign land, / About all the ships that have gone to sea, / About all who have forgotten their joy,” and thanks to her song, the parishioners gain hope: “That all the ships are in a quiet backwater, / That in a foreign land tired people / have found a bright life for themselves.” In the artistic system of the poem, the contrast between white and black, light and darkness, enlightenment and ignorance, characteristic of Blok’s subsequent works, emerged: the white shoulder, the white dress of the girl contrasts with the darkness of the temple in which people pray. The poem is built on opposition: after the song of the girl and the faith of the parishioners in the grace of all sailing, traveling, the turn of fate, God's secret comes: “no one will come back”; Human self-deception and self-consolation are opposed by a difficult, even tragic reality. The child feels the truth (“And only high, at the Royal Doors, / Participating in the Mysteries, - the child cried / That no one will come back”). In the romantic motifs of the unattainability of what one wants, doom, and the inability to unite with kindred souls, Blok expressed not only the theme of providence, but also his attitude to modernity as a tragedy.

But there is also a hidden meaning in the poem. Let us pay attention to the fact that the girl’s voice is addressed to God, “into the dome,” and she herself is illuminated by a heavenly ray; the poem uses the image of a ship - a religious symbol of the church; The Royal Doors, located in the middle of the iconostasis, also have religious symbolism: through them the Lord comes to nourish the suffering with His Body and Blood. The complete truth, therefore, is that no one will return to those praying in the temple, but everyone for whom they pray has found a “bright life” in another, extraterrestrial world. Like the image of the ship, a second, symbolic meaning is given to the motif of “foreign land” - not a geographical concept, but a mystical one. Therefore, the symbolic foreign land is contrasted with the earthly, literal meaning of the word “back” from the child’s cry.

The size of the work is also complex; it is written in dolmen.

Note: if before Blok’s lyrics were focused on the poet’s feelings, now they are addressed to the world. His poetry was filled with images of his contemporaries. This is not only a girl from the church choir or parishioners listening to her; these are toiling peasants (“It was hard for us under the blizzards...”), sailors (“Her Arrival”), people who encountered troops in January 1905 (“They went on the attack. Right in the chest...”). If in “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” the idea of ​​the catastrophic nature of the world was of a rather conventional nature, now the concept of the tragic has acquired certainty and is expressed in specific manifestations of earthly existence, including urban life. The city in Blok’s mind became an image of sin. On June 25, 1905, he wrote: “Petersburg is a gigantic brothel, I feel it.”

The poems of 1904-1908, united in the “City” cycle, trace the traditions of “Nevsky Prospekt”, “Portrait” by Gogol, “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky. Blokov's Petersburg is populated by beggars, workers, and harlots. Among the common people, “female faces”, “cheerful and drunk”, lives the lyrical hero, to whom the Stranger appears. This is a city of factory whistles and restaurants, hungry and well-fed. Blok introduced the image of the city into a biblical context; in the poem “Invisible” (1905), the image of a harlot riding on a scarlet beast appeared: “With a spilled cup of wine / On the Scarlet Beast is a Wife” - Blok’s version of the apocalyptic mother of harlots sitting on a scarlet beast with a cup filled with the uncleanness of fornication. Features of the urban landscape - the bloody tongue of a bell, “the graves of houses”, a tin sunset, dark gray fog, the “gray-stony body” of the city, the bloody sun.

The lyrical hero lives, “drowning despair in wine.” He, who once believed in his union with the mystical Beautiful Lady, in future harmony, is now experiencing the collapse of astral illusions: “The star has long since sunk into my glass.” Thus, Blok’s lyrics included the image of the Stranger; she personified not only astral secrets, but also the temptations of earthly life. The new incarnation of the feminine principle was no longer a symbol of absolute harmony. She appeared to the lyrical hero either in restaurants or in “unlit gates”; there was quite a lot of earthly things in her portrait; she was a star, either fallen to earth from heaven, or fallen. The poem “Your face is paler than it was...” (1906) expresses the tragedy of the fall: “Believe me, we both knew the sky: / You flowed like a bloody star, / I measured your path in sadness, / When you began to fall.”

One of the most famous poems in the cycle is “Stranger” (1906). The heroine is a lonely mystical maiden, whose appearance has enough recognizable features of an urban beauty: silk, “a hat with mourning feathers,” perfume, “a narrow hand in rings.” The setting of her meeting with the lyrical hero is also banal: “hot air is wild and deaf,” “corruptive spirit,” alley dust, boredom of dachas, the fake shine of a bakery pretzel, ladies and “tested wits,” etc.

At the same time, the Stranger is a messenger of other worlds, of a distant shore. Behind her dark veil, the lyrical hero sees “an enchanted shore and an enchanted distance.” Since the time of romantic lyrics, the image of the shore has signified a harmonious, free, but unattainable world. In the artistic system of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” the image of the shore was also iconic; it symbolized the drama of separation between the poet and his mystical chosen one: the lyrical hero “cannot find his native shores,” and on the other shore “a lonely soul is crying,” and she “is on that laughs on the shore.” In “The Stranger,” the astral maiden brought the mystical world closer to reality; with her, the unreal world of “ancient beliefs” penetrates into restaurant life.

Now not only is she the chosen one, but also the lyrical hero is the chosen one. Both of them are lonely. Not only she, but also he, is entrusted with “deep secrets.” Despite this, the poem voiced the romantic theme of an unfulfilled union of kindred souls. However, in “The Stranger,” the tragic solution to this theme acquired an additional tone of self-irony: the hero suggests whether the Stranger is not just a game of a “drunk monster.” Irony allowed the lyrical hero to solve the riddle, to find a kind of compromise between reality and illusion. A compromise, however, is impossible between the Stranger and suburban life; the wonderful maiden leaves him. She and reality are two poles between which the lyrical hero resides.

In the poem, not only the artistic details of everyday life and “deep secrets” constitute an antithesis, not only the plot about the Stranger is based on the opposition of her appearance and disappearance, but also the phonetic series of the poem is built on the principle of contrast of assonance and alliteration. The harmony of vowels, consonant with the image of the Stranger, contrasts with the dissonant, rigid combinations of consonants, thanks to which the image of reality is created. The phonetics of the poem expresses the plasticity of the image of the Stranger: the hissing words convey the penetration of the heroine dressed in silk into the bustle of everyday life.

Duality as a principle of the poetics of a poem is also expressed in the methods of presenting what is happening. “The Stranger” has a descriptive beginning, consistency, and leisurely construction of artistic details; there is a semblance of plot, which allowed researchers to consider the poem as a ballad. At the same time, “The Stranger” is impressionistic. The heroine is a figment of the lyrical hero’s imagination to the extent that for an impressionist the world is adequate to his sensory sensations and expectations, a series of emotional states, a flow of smells and color images. Suburban wits, ladies, drunks are clear, typical, their actions are definite, purposeful, understandable, which does not happen with the Stranger. The poetics of impressionism is characterized by inertia: the lyrical hero is simply led by his imagination, no further development of action or initiative will follow.

The theme of “Stranger” is also developed in the poem “There the ladies flaunt their fashions...”, however, in it Blok, strengthening the realistic principle, gives the “unattainable and only” star that charmed the lyrical hero not only external, as was the case in “Stranger”, but also the inner features of an urban beauty. She became close to the vulgar reality: she was “stunned by wine”, there was no time full of secrets the veil became just a veil with flies, small features appeared in her portrait, the earthly contradictions of Dostoevsky’s heroines are discernible in her character: “She is shamelessly intoxicating / And humiliatingly proud.” The stranger also appeared in poems

1906 “Years have passed, but you are still the same...”, “Trail spattered with stars...” This image accompanied Blok’s imagination for many years. In February 1908, he wrote the poems “I passed the crimson sunset...”, “Cruel May with white nights!..”, which depicts “a woman with crazy eyes, / With an eternally crumpled rose on her chest.” In 1909, Blok created the poem “From the Crystal Fog...”, its heroine is a maiden with a “burning blue gaze” who came to the restaurant from an “unknown dream.”

The following year a poem was written “At the restaurant”, in which the once mystical maiden “Stranger” transformed into a restaurant seductress with an arrogant gaze: “But from the depths of the mirrors you cast your glances at me / And, casting them, you shouted: Catch!..” There is no impressionism in this image. The adaptation of both the lyrical hero and the woman to bohemian life was completed, mysticism gave way to the prose of life, astral relationships to flirting. There is no harmony in the heroine, in her soul there is the same cacophony, chaos, as in the restaurant world: the gypsy “squealed at the dawn about love,” her monisto “strummed,” the strings “strummed,” the bows sang “frantically,” but the chosen one also spoke “ deliberately sharply,” she “rushed with the movement of a frightened bird,” her silks “whispered anxiously,” she “cast her glances.”

In “The Stranger,” doubts about the reality of the meeting between the lyrical hero and the maiden were never resolved. In the poem “In the Restaurant,” the meeting took place, and in the same banal setting: lanterns, which in the “City” cycle were associated with vice, bows singing about love, attributes of gypsyism, romantic in the times of Pushkin’s “Gypsies” and the romances of Ya. Polonsky, Ap. . Grigoriev, but in Blok’s poem it lost its romantic sound and became a sign of the idle life of the beginning of the century. Restaurant ethics were also manifested in the action of the hero: “I sent you a black rose in a glass / As golden as the sky, ai.” If “The Stranger” is written in iambic tetrameter, then “In the Restaurant” is written in heterometeric anapest.

At the same time, in Blok’s lyrics at the end of 1906, the heroine of the poetic cycles “Snow Mask” and “Faina” appeared, for whom the lyrical hero felt passion. The poems were dedicated to actress N.N. Volokhova. The new embodiment of femininity expressed Blok's further retreat from the ideal of the Beautiful Lady. Of course, in the heroine of “Snow Mask” and “Faina” there was some continuity from the Stranger. This is evidenced by the figurative series. The beloved, “glittering from the wine cup,” snaked “in the golden cup,” appeared “through the wine crystal”; the lyrical hero addressed his chosen one: “You are suffocating with black silks, / The sable opened up...”, “Your dark silk teased me.” The line “The girl’s figure, seized with silk” was transformed into the line “My slender figure was seized with silk”; the images of veils were repeated: “As if behind a dark veil / For a moment, a distance opened up to me...” In one of his poems, he called her Stranger.

The cycles capture the transition of the lyrical hero from contemplation to a snowstorm, according to Blok - snowstorms, i.e. anxiety, from dreams to initiative, from static to dynamic. Blok sang “earthly beauty”: “I am familiar with the weakness of these hands, / And this whispering speech, / And the languor of the slender waist, / And the dullness of the sloping shoulders.” Not a dream of a date with a Beautiful Lady, not a hint of a possible date with a Stranger, but a love date with the heroine of “Faina” becomes the theme of poetry: “And, as if into an abyss, into the bosom of the night / We enter... Our steep ascent... / And delirium. And darkness. Eyes are shining. / Hair flows onto the shoulders / In a wave of lead - blacker than darkness... / Oh, the night of a painful marriage!..”

This motive of love-passion expressed Blok’s new worldview. Openness to the world, readiness to accept it as it is, became the theme of the poem 1907 “Oh, spring without end and without edge...”. The word “accept” dominates the figurative system of the poem. The lyrical hero is in harmony with life, there is no confrontation between the individual and the world, which is typical for romantics, and the contrasts that were unresolved in “The Stranger” are now consonant. The compatibility of opposites has become a sign of harmony. Therefore, success and failure, crying and laughter, night disputes and mornings, “desert weighings” and “wells of earthly cities”, “the vastness of the heavens and the languor of slave labor” are accepted. The intimate motif of the poem confirms the philosophical theme of the fullness and diversity of life: the last four stanzas are about a “hostile meeting”, about love relationships “hating, cursing and loving”.

Absolute tragedy is alien to Blok’s consciousness: in the same years, a lyrical hero appeared in his work, inclined to perceive life both as the embodiment of earthly vulgarity and as world harmony. The poem was included in the cycle “The Spell of Fire and Darkness.” The epigraph to the cycle was lines from Lermontov’s “Gratitude,” which express the theme of gratitude for life, close to Blok, not only with joys, but also with “secret torments of passions,” “the poison of a kiss,” “revenge of enemies.”

The theme of accepting earthly trials is expressed in Blok’s love lyrics, in the motives of gratitude for fading and unfaithful love, forgiveness of betrayal, which go back to Pushkin’s poem “How God grant that your beloved be different.” IN 1908 Blok wrote a poem “About valor, about exploits, about glory...”, which tells about the dramatic relationship between the poet and L.D. Block. The poem is written in the genre of a message. The lyrical hero addresses his beloved with a confessional monologue about his feelings. The woman who left him is “sweet”, “tender”, she is the inspirer of his poetry, she is the highest truth, next to which other ideals of the “sorrowful land” were forgotten - valor, exploits, glory. She is the personification of his youth. Having parted with her, he also parted with his Symbolist illusions: his beloved left, wrapped in a cloak, the color of which, blue, was iconic in Symbolist poetry. The poem is included in the cycle “Retribution”. The loss of a beloved woman is retribution for illusions, for the symbolist aestheticization of living life.

Six stanzas describe a love story, compositionally framed by the image of the beloved (“Your face in its simple frame”). Each stanza of the poem, as if repeating the compositional principle of Pushkin’s poem “k***” (“I remember a wonderful moment...”), is plot-wise and emotionally independent and expresses certain period in the life of the lyrical hero after the betrayal of his beloved: oblivion, the desire to find other supports in life (“Wine and passion tormented my life”), the desire to return her love, then the torment gives way to a different state - life becomes a “deep sleep” about her, about her leaving and, finally, humility, recognition of the impossibility of returning love. However, the dramatic ending distinguishes the problematics of Blok’s poem from “K***”.

IN 1914 a cycle of 10 poems was created “Carmen”, in which the main theme was the power of love, passion, inspiring “creative dreams.” The poems are dedicated to the performer of the role of Carmen in Bizet’s opera L.A. Andreeva-Delmas. “I’ve lost my head, everything in me is confused...”, the poet, passionate about the singer, noted in his notebook.

Blok saw in his contemporary the character of a seductive gypsy who did not know humility. This combination of female natures gave the result - “the delirium of my vain passions.” The story about a Spanish gypsy is akin to the life of St. Petersburg, where “March brings wet snow.” Blok created a syncretic image in which female nature, the conventions of the stage, and the perception of P. Merimee’s text are not dissected. Blok spoke about this synthesis in the poems “The snowy spring is raging...”, “The angry gaze of colorless eyes...”, “Oh yes, love is free like a bird...” and others.

In the description of Carmen there are features of Delmas: her “tender shoulders”, perfume, “frightening sensitivity” of “nervous arms and shoulders”, contempt in her gaze, lion-like “in the movements of her proud head”. But Delmas or Carmen is jealous of Escamillo: “You will not take up the braid, / To dim the unnecessary light, / And the row of pearls will not flash / The unfortunate man’s teeth”? This scenic, conventional situation of the poem “The angry gaze of colorless eyes...” is, as it were, transferred to St. Petersburg life in the poem “Oh, yes, love is free like a bird...”, and what Escamillo is no longer destined to experience will enter the life of the lyrical hero: “And in the quiet hour of the night, like a flame, / Flashing for a moment, / Your persistent face will flash to me with white teeth.”

Such a synthesis of artistic fiction and reality, the deliberate inclusion of stage and literary conventions in the fate of the lyrical hero creates a feeling of transparency of the boundaries of the poetic text and life, the free movement of the image into reality and reality into the artistic space.

Carmen's love and hatred are extreme, as are the feelings of the lyrical hero. Such maximalism - characteristic and “hulks of love”, “hulks of hatred” of the lyrical hero V. Mayakovsky. In Russian literature, this feature went back to the romantic tradition.

In Blok's lyrics, love is associated with natural elements. The window of the chosen one of the “tender month”, “the dawn of sunset is higher”, her voice is filled with “the roar of forgotten storms”, “red-red” appears in the gold of her curls, just as “the azure shines through the darkness of the night”, in her braids - “red night” , and the heart of the lyrical hero is like the ocean.

The emotionality and intimacy of the cycle corresponds to the genre of the message in which some of his poems were created. The last of them, “No, never mine, and you will not be anyone’s...”, is written in the traditional epistle in iambic hexameter. Comparisons and parallelisms became frequent artistic techniques of the cycle. One of the means of depicting feelings in “Carmen” is a combination of contrasting meanings: love is manifested in delight and fear, “mute creepiness”, the characters of Carmen and the lyrical hero are expressed in the line “Sadness and joy sound like the same melody,” the hero is “sad and wondrous” because that I had a dream about my beloved, etc.

Thus, the theme of femininity reflected the poet’s deep ideological changes on the path of “incarnation” - from contemplation of earthly life to immersion in living life. Over time, the embodiment of femininity appeared in his poetry in the image of Russia.

LYRICAL HERO AND THE THEME OF RUSSIA. One of the main themes of Blok’s poetry, which expressed the poet’s democratic sentiments, his transition to an active perception of life, his sense of time, was the theme of Russia. In a letter to K.S. Stanislavsky dated December 9, 1908. Blok wrote that he devoted his life to the topic of Russia, that this topic is “the primary question, the most vital, the most real.”

In the context of this topic, the poet also perceived the problems of relations between the people and the intelligentsia. In 1907, his correspondence began with the Olonets Old Believer and at the same time poet Nikolai Klyuev, who was close to sectarian movements, in whose letters he heard reproach for himself as a representative of the noble class, the intelligentsia for indifference to the fate of the people. Blok included thoughts and quotes from Klyuev’s letters both in the 1908 dramatic poem “Song of Fate” and in the article “Literary Results of 1907.” Blok was close to Tolstoy’s hero - the conscience-tormented Nekhlyudov from the novel “Resurrection”, a nobleman who was at first indifferent to the people’s world, and who later peered into this world and, through comprehension of its troubles, solved his primary spiritual task of overcoming evil by admitting himself guilty before God, through fulfillment of Christ's commandments. In the article “The People and the Intelligentsia” (1909), the poet wrote: “Since Catherine’s time, love for the people has awakened in the Russian intelligentsia and has not diminished since then.” The poet, not without the influence of Klyuev, came to the idea that in due time the people would sweep away the intelligentsia, including him, Blok. Perceiving this course of events as just retribution, he wrote to Stanislavsky: the people “will trample us holy.” Later, the justification of the people’s anger and the feeling of guilt before the people’s Russia will take shape as an independent theme in the poem “The Twelve.”

To Stanislavsky, Blok outlined his concept of national identity, his special return to Slavophilism, but without Orthodoxy and autocracy. He was not inclined to connect Russia’s mission with the destinies of the Slavic world as a whole, with the Slavs. Russia was perceived by him as something valuable and exceptional.

The theme of Russia in Blok’s work has undergone a rather complex evolution. In “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” Blok created an image of a space in which Russia as such did not yet exist. In “Crossroads,” symbolist conventional images such as “enchanted and rare” fog gave way to prosaism: “The rooster crows far away,” “The alder branches have darkened, / A light has flickered across the river,” sad fields, gray branches, etc.

With “Bubbles of the Earth,” the image of Russia as a myth, which was accompanied by pantheistic, pre-Christian mysticism, entered Blok’s lyrics. Blok wrote about the Christ of the field as God for every creature - both man and the undead: swamp imps, dwarfs, mermaids, nymphs... Therefore, in his lyrics, the devil asks to go to holy places, and the swamp priest loves everyone and prays for everyone. The idea of ​​the unity of all things has become central to the understanding of Russia. Note: in the poem “The Twelve” the image of Russia will already be presented as a split, warring world. Even sadness in “Bubbles of the Earth” was not the antonym of joy. The poet created oxymoronic images: “sadness smiled,” “I meet spring in sad joy.”

The lyrical hero felt his involvement in such Russia. He discovered the field homeland of the “arboreal orgiasm,” in which “the juices were still walking in the forests and fields,” and came to the idea that “it was humiliating not to be one of these elements,” as he wrote in 1905.

At the same time, social motives also emerged in Blok’s version of Russia. In the 1900s Peasants, sailors, and workers appeared among Blok’s images. The January events of 1905 became the reason for the appearance of the image of a revolutionary people in Blok’s lyrics. So, in the poem “We went to attack. Right in the chest...” the blood motif sounded, “they gave it bloody.”

Blok was looking for his own image of Russia. Ultimately, in his work, an idea of ​​a multifaceted Russia took shape - folk, meek, robber, epic, intimate, aspiring, steppe-boundless, free... Blok’s feeling of Russia expressed the traditions of Russian literature of the previous century, especially Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol. In the desire to be useful to the people of Russia, the influence of Nekrasov’s poetry was felt. Blok is close to Tyutchev’s concept of “Russia cannot be understood with the mind,” and his belief in the “universal destiny” of the homeland, which Gogol also prophesied in the eleventh chapter of “Dead Souls.”

Blok, having adopted the lyrical, intimate interpretation of the theme of Russia from his predecessors, interpreted in his own way Pushkin and Gogol’s images of “daring revelry” and melancholy, troika, roads, unknown plains, Lermontov’s images of “river floods”, “sad villages”. Thus, in Blok’s motifs from the “beggarly” Russia that cared for “gray huts” with its “robber beauty”, the cautious melancholy of the coachman’s song, “songs of the wind” ( “Russia”, 1908) or in “I will listen to the voice of drunken Rus', / Relax under the roof of a tavern” (“Autumn Will”, 1905) one can hear an echo of Lermontov’s love for the fatherland: the lyrical hero of “Motherland,” receiving Russia’s thatched huts, looked “at the dance with stomping and whistling / Accompanied by the chatter of drunken peasants,” which in turn is perceived as a reminiscence from “Onegin’s Travels,” where Pushkin also showed the peasant homeland: “There are heaps of straw in front of the threshing floor,” “Yes, the drunken tramp of a trepak / In front of the threshold of the tavern.” Lermontov wrote about his “strange” love for the common people of Russia, Blok, like Nekrasov, does not see anything “strange” in his feeling for such a homeland, and in the poem “Russia” he definitely writes about “tears of first love” and about love as his cross (“And I carefully carry my cross”). The motives of Pushkin’s “Winter Road” and Nekrasov’s “Troika” are also obvious in the poem. Reminiscence is the main compositional technique of “Russia”.

Already in the very first stanza of the poem “Russia” a reminiscence from “Dead Souls” is given:

Again, like in the golden years,
Three worn out flapping harnesses,
And the painted knitting needles knit
Into loose ruts...

Speaking not about pity (“I don’t know how to feel sorry for you”), but about love for Russia, Blok writes about love for Russia that is unpredictable, spontaneous, impulsive, in which there is “cautious melancholy,” “robber beauty.” The fate of Russia is such that she can give her beauty to the “sorcerer”, he will “lure and deceive” her, but she will emerge from these trials wise and healthy, showing her vitality: “And only care will cloud / Your beautiful features.”

Blok focuses on the feminine essence of Russia (“robber beauty”, “beautiful features”, “a patterned dress up to the eyebrows”, “an instant glance from under a scarf”), and in this he sees her vitality and salvation. Thus, the saving essence of the ideal of Eternal Femininity was concretized in Blok’s ideas about the homeland.

If the beginning of the poem does not foretell hope of overcoming the difficult path (“erased,” “wagging,” “stuck,” “loose”), then the last two stanzas are in a major key, in the spirit of the lyrical digression of the eleventh chapter of “Dead Souls.” They are dominated by the motive of Russia’s striving forward: “And the impossible is possible, / The long road is easy.” The theme of overcoming, elemental strength, vitality is also expressed rhythmically, the poem is written in iambic tetrameter. Remember what Belinsky wrote about the iambic “Mtsyri”: this is an elastic meter, it falls like the blow of a sword.

IN 1908 Blok created a cycle of five poems “On the Kulikovo Field”, which was accompanied by a note that the Battle of Kulikovo is a symbol of Russian history, the solution to which lies ahead. The idea about the historical connection between the Battle of Kulikovo and modernity is also expressed in the article “The People and the Intelligentsia”: “There is a roar over the cities, like the one that stood over the Tatar camp on the night before the Battle of Kulikovo, as the legend says”; The Tatar camp was compared in the article with the modern intelligentsia, its “hasty fermentation” and “change of battle flags,” the camp of Dmitry Donskoy - with the state of the people of the beginning of the 20th century, when a genuine life, unknown to the intelligentsia, was hidden under the external silence.

Historical realities are specified: “Khan’s saber

steel”, Nepryadva, Don, “Mamai lay down with the Horde”, “princely army”, “trumpet cries of the Tatars”. The lyrical hero is one of the medieval warriors. Russian troops “rose over the steppe at midnight,” a friend calls on him to “sharpen his sword.” But Russia is eternal and indivisible in time, therefore the lyrical hero is a contemporary of two eras, he is experiencing the alarming eve of the Battle of Kulikovo and the eve of new, 20th century, “wild passions”. “The thunder of the wonderful battle can no longer be heard,” but “high and rebellious days” are coming, the lyrical hero hears “over the enemy camp, as it used to be, / And the splashing and trumpets of swans.”

The patriotic feeling of the lyrical hero is personal, intimate, it expresses a person’s need to feel his unity with his homeland: “Sunset in the blood! Blood flows from the heart! Cry, heart, cry...”

Blok’s concept of the fate of Russia, reflected in the cycle, is in many ways similar to Pushkin’s and Gogol’s perception of the homeland: in the vastness of the steppes, in the “boundless melancholy,” in the “long journey,” in the eternal overcoming of historical trials, the idea of ​​Russia’s endless striving forward is expressed. She is destined, according to Blok, to remain forever in a restless state, in a state of overcoming, of battle. Therefore, the symbol of Russia is the racing steppe mare: “And eternal battle! Rest only in our dreams. / Through blood and dust... / The steppe mare flies, flies / And crushes the feather grass...”

A symbol of anxiety extended over time is the image of swans: “Behind Nepryadva, the swans screamed, / And again, again they scream...” Nature is a participant in events, a harbinger of both Russian and Tatar tragedies: “The eagle’s screeching over the Tatar camp / Threatened with disaster.” The final poem of the cycle “Again over the Kulikovo field...” is preceded by an epigraph from a poem by Vl. Solovyov’s “Dragon”: “And the darkness of irresistible troubles / The coming day was shrouded,” which expressed the theme of the ever-present nature of Russia’s trials. Blok writes: “The homeland will be sick for a long time.”

But the fate of Russia is protected by its intercessor. In the image of the Eternal Feminine, Ta appears, who was with the warriors in the “dark field”, refreshed the chain mail on the shoulder of the lyrical hero, Whose voice he heard in the cry of swans, Whose face flashed on the sword of a friend. Blok writes: “And with the fog over Sleeping Nepryadva, / Directly towards me / You descended in clothes streaming with light, / Without frightening the horse.” Her miraculous bright face was on the warrior’s shield. Most likely, “You”, “Your”, “Your” is a paraphrase of the image of the Virgin Mary. Thus, the “eternal battle” of Russia, the eternal restlessness in the heart, the belligerence of the Russians are considered by Blok as a holy mission: the lyrical hero, his friend, the Russian regiments opposing the “filthy horde” are performing a “holy work”, and “the holy banner will flash in the steppe smoke " The image of the Virgin Mary is the culmination of the theme of femininity; in the cycle, a “bright wife” is mentioned, who will remember the lyrical hero “at early mass,” and there is also an image of a mother (“And in the distance, in the distance, she beat on the stirrup, / The mother voiced”).

The development of the motif of Russian restlessness is facilitated by a figurative series, including phonetics, rhythm, and intonation of the verse. In the poem “The river spreads out. Flows, lazily sad...” the image of a lazy river corresponds to an extended stream of vowels. The second stanza, breaking the calm intonation, begins with a ringing exclamation “Oh, my Rus'!” and introduces the motif of the path into the poem. The fourth stanza begins with short phrases that give the rhythm of the poem speed, and the emotional content - a feeling of anxiety: “Let the night. Let's get home. Let’s illuminate the steppe distance with fires.” Next, the image of movement - a steppe mare - was introduced into the artistic system. The seventh and final stanza reveals the theme of tragedies and their overcoming: “Sunset in the blood! Blood flows from the heart! / Cry, heart, cry... / There is no peace! The steppe mare / Gallops!” Thus, the poem is dynamic both due to the change of motives and due to specific artistic techniques. This emotional construction of lyrical speech is called emphasis.

The cycle uses various poetic meters: iambic, trochaic, amphibrachic. Important from a semantic point of view are the verbs of motion that correspond to the theme of the historically conditioned aspiration of Russia (“Our path is an arrow of the ancient Tatar will / Pierced our chest”): “flies, flies,” “go, go,” “rushes at a gallop,” “raised like a cloud ”, “rushed away”, etc. A frequent device of the cycle is metaphor: “the river has spread out”, “the haystacks are sad”, “frightened clouds”, “The mist has disappeared with fog”, etc. Blok resorts to lexical repetitions, for example in the poem “Again with the centuries-old longing...”, which gives the cycle expression: “Wild passions are unleashed / Under the yoke of the flawed moon” at the end of the second stanza and “And I, with age-old melancholy, / Like a wolf under the flawed moon” at the beginning of the third stanza. Direct speech is introduced into poetic texts. Reminiscences from the chronicle “The Tale of the Massacre of Mamaev” play an important role in revealing the content of the cycle.

In the first poem of the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field,” the poet addressed Russia: “My wife!” In a poem “On the Railway...” (1910) the homeland was associated with the image of a girl “in a colored scarf thrown over her braids.” We saw the same motive in “Russia”. The idea of ​​a feminine mentality in Russia is quite traditional; it was expressed in the works of the Slavophiles, developed in the concepts of the philosophers of the Silver Age - Vl. Solovyova, V. Rozanov, N. Berdyaev. In the poem “Rus” (1906), the lyrical hero perceived his homeland as a woman: “You are extraordinary even in a dream. / I won’t touch your clothes.” In the poem “In the thick grass you will be lost with your head...” (1907) the homeland again appeared in the form of a woman: “She will hug you with her hand, braid her hair / And, stately, she will say: “Hello, prince.” In “Autumn Day” (1909), the lyrical hero said to a poor country: “Oh, my poor wife.”

In Blok’s mind, this tradition was strengthened due to the attitude towards the feminine as saving. However, in the poem “On the Railway” the theme of a person’s responsibility for his homeland, for its salvation, is rather heard. The dominant motive of the poem is conscience, the lyrical hero’s feeling of guilt for his carefree youth, for indifference to people’s Russia: “So the useless youth rushed, / Exhausted in empty dreams...” The lyrical hero reproaches himself for inattention to human troubles: “So many greedy glances are thrown / into the deserted eyes of the carriages.”

Such generalizations contribute to the symbolization of a specific situation - the first stanza presents a genre picture:

Under the embankment, in the unmown ditch,
Lies and looks as if alive,
In a colored scarf thrown on her braids,
Beautiful and young.

The next two stanzas contain a plot about the girl’s usual path through the forest to the railway platform, about how she met rushing trains, symbolizing in the poem an alien and alluring life: “Perhaps one of those passing / Will look more closely from the windows.” In Blok’s poem there is a recognizable reminiscence from Nekrasov’s “Troika”: a young peasant woman “greedily” looks at the road along which the cornet rushed. In both poems, in a realistically described everyday situation, there is hidden the theme of disconnection, the alienness of two worlds - peasant Russia and Russia of the enlightened classes. The block strengthens the textual associations with the sixth stanza:

Just once a hussar, with a careless hand
Lean on the scarlet velvet,
He slid a gentle smile over her...
He slipped and the train sped off into the distance.

These same fragments of Blok’s poem reveal another reminiscence - from L. Tolstoy’s “Resurrection”. This refers to the episode in which the maid Katyusha Maslova, greedily peering out the window of the carriage, sees there the young master Nekhlyudov who has seduced her. Compare: “Katyusha<...>I covered myself with a scarf, picked myself up and ran to the station.<...>Katyusha, although she knew the road well, lost her way in the forest and reached a small station.<...>Running out onto the platform, Katyusha immediately saw him in the window of the first class carriage. There was a particularly bright light in this carriage. Two officers without frock coats sat opposite each other on velvet armchairs and played cards.<...>One of the players stood up with cards in his hands and began to look out the window.<...>“A train will pass under the carriage, and that’s it,” Katyusha thought meanwhile...” The theme of love also brings both texts together: “By love, by mud or by wheels / She is crushed - everything hurts.”

The poem uses such techniques as repetition (the situation described in the first stanza is repeated in the fifth stanza: “Her, the gendarme is next to her...”), metonymy (“The yellow and blue ones were silent; / In the green ones they cried and sang”), metaphor (the melancholy “whistled”, “the deserted eyes of the carriages”), ellipse, i.e. omission of a word in a phrase (“They got up sleepy behind the windows”), comparison (of a rushing train and rushing youth).

The theme of the life attitudes of the lyrical hero is closely connected with the theme of Russia. The lyrical hero of the third book of poems (1907-1916) was demanding of himself, his dissatisfaction with his life grew, which was expressed in the theme of the idle soul and its responsibility. It received special insight in works with the elegiac tradition, which corresponds to intimacy, reflections on the meaning of life, on one’s own life, on loneliness, etc.

His poetry developed the idea of ​​the intrinsic value of life's moments. Theme of the poem “I am nailed to a tavern counter...” (1908)- the irrevocability of moments, nostalgia for rushed happiness: it was “carried away into the silver smoke” on the troika, drowned “in the snow of time, in the distance of centuries.” The motif of a flashing life is expressed in characteristic artistic details: the sound of bells, “silver smoke”, the three “throws sparks”, etc. Happiness is changeable; after it, a period of apathy and lack of will began in the fate of the lyrical hero: “I’ve been drunk for a long time. I don't care"; he is in the grip of a spiritual crisis.

The antithesis of the states of joy and apathy is expressed in the opposition of phonetic series, the sonorous sounds of the words “silver”, “happiness”, “carried away”, “in the snow”, “sparks”, “golden stream” contrast with the dull ones: “And you, soul .. ... the soul is deaf... / Drunk drunk... Drunk drunk..." To reveal the theme of happiness, verbs of motion are used: “carried away”, “flies”, “overwhelmed”, “throws”; the static image of despondency is expressed in verbless phrases.

The same sentiments were reflected in the elegy “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy...” (1912). The city’s “meaningless and dim light”, in addition to its literal meaning, also has an associative meaning: the existence of the lyrical hero is meaningless, being is meaningless. Thirsty for the union of his inner world and the spontaneous, social movements of Russia, Blok acutely experienced states of static, which in his understanding was akin to death. That’s why there is a line in the poem: “Everything will be like this. There is no outcome”; therefore the last verse is a free repetition of the first verse: “Pharmacy, street, lantern.” Even death will not change the eternal repetition (“And everything will repeat itself as of old”) of the images of the world. The life described in this poem is eventless, and the motive of movement is presented in a reduced version, expressed in the emotionally negative image of “icy ripples of a canal.” The poem is included in the “Dances of Death” cycle.

Participating in the fate of his homeland, the lyrical hero experiences periods of both despair and spiritual, emotional revival. In 1913, the modern life of the country seemed absurd to the poet. He tried to return to his condition “courageous will”, “creative will”, which he wrote down in his diary: “To conquer at least a small space of air that you breathe of your own free will...”, “How conscience torments! Lord, give me strength, help me.” The poet’s dissonance with the era, unfulfilled hopes for the harmony of the poet’s soul and the music of the era were perceived by him as tragic.

Blok’s sense of Russian modernity as timelessness was also tragic. In a poem written by dactyl “The Artist” (1913) world boredom, having become a sign of the times, doomed the poet to creative dissatisfaction. The theme of the poet and the crowd has now been interpreted in its own way: the poet sings to please the crowd, without inspiration (“Wings are clipped, songs are memorized”). The lyrical hero, trying to overcome “mortal boredom,” strives to gain insight into something new; and although its outlines are vague: either “an angel is flying,” or “the Sirens of Paradise are singing a song,” or an apple blossom is crumbling, “or a whirlwind from the sea,” - the poet for some time returns to a passionate attitude towards life, no longer monotonous, but multidimensional: “Sounds, movement and light are expanding.” But the boredom of life overcomes. An antithesis is used in the composition of the poem, hope is contrasted with the doom of “unknown forces” and the creative doom of the poet, his mind is opposed to his soul. Blok introduced a tragic symbol of poetic creativity into the artistic system of the poem: a bird “flying to save the soul” is imprisoned in a cage, now it “swings its hoop, sings on the window.”

However, the life of the country prompted the poet to be inspired, both poetic and civil, which we see in the poems of the “Iambic” cycle (1907-1914). “Oh, I want to live madly...” (1914) testifies to Blok’s faith in his own strength. The poet overcame the pessimism expressed in “The Artist”. He wants to live with the worries of the era. Now he is not only a singer of the saving feminine principle, the task of his poetry is “to perpetuate everything that exists, / to humanize the impersonal, / to embody the unfulfilled.” We see that the lyrical hero, living through his “trilogy of incarnation,” is able to live in harmony with his time and take responsibility for it. In his poetry there is no romantic detachment of the lyrical hero from the bustle of the world, and “the heavy sleep of life” is not a burden for him.

The “Iambic” cycle also includes a poem “The earthly heart grows cold again...” (1914), in which peace and “beautiful comforts” are contrasted with the lyrical hero’s love for people, the desire to actively invade life, the readiness for self-sacrifice: “But I meet the cold with my chest,” “No! It’s better to perish in the fierce cold!” Written in the genre of stanzas with four verses, iambic tetrameter, and strophic closure characteristic of each stanza, it expressed a civil version of the theme about the purpose of the poet and poetry, in which pathos is combined with a dramatic, conflicting mood. The poet is ready with anger to read in the eyes of people “the stamp of oblivion, or election,” but he also experiences “unrequited love” for them, which distinguishes Blok’s solution to the theme of the poet and the crowd from its interpretation by Pushkin in the poems “To the Poet”, “The Poet and the Crowd” and Lermontov in “The Prophet”. The “Iamba” cycle captured the lyrical hero as a person whom Blok, in one of his letters to Andrei Bely, called “social”, “courageously looking the world in the face... at the cost of losing part of his soul.” He expressed the same idea about the synthesis of public and personal in the poem “The Nightingale Garden” (1915).

The work of the great Russian poet A.A. Blok, like the work of any great poet, is inextricably linked with the events of his personal life and the time in which he lived. The years of Blok's life included a period of the greatest upheavals that have ever happened in human history. Also, when considering his work, one should take into account the fact that it is mainly the work of a young man. That is why the image of the Muse, the Eternal Virgin, the Virgin-Dawn-Bush, the Majestic Eternal Wife, the Beautiful Lady, the Stranger, the Motherland-Wife is central in his work. (Blok died at the age of 40; in recent years he stopped writing poetry; his last works, in particular “The Twelve,” stand out from the general structure of his work).

Blok himself, generally adhering to a chronological sequence, divided his lyrics into three books. The first book included poems from 1898-1904, the second from 1904-1908, and the third from 1907-1916. However, chronology in this case has a deeper meaning; each book marks not just a segment of the path, but a certain stage of its internal development, colored in its own color. The same can be said about the image of the Muse. In the verses of the first book, the Muse appears as an abstract image of a medieval, almost alchemical Beautiful Lady, then becomes a more down-to-earth Stranger, or rather an ideal image, immersed in the dark colors of reality, and, finally, when turbulent historical events finally pull the poet out of the world of lyrical, abstract images , The Muse appears in her third incarnation - in the image of the Motherland.

The first hypostasis of Blok's Muse is inspired, on the one hand, by the aesthetics of symbolism and by the philosophy and poetry of Vl. Solovyov (the doctrine of the World Soul or Eternal Femininity, called upon to renew and revive the world), on the other - love for his wife Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva. “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” is certainly autobiographical, as far as this word can be applied to a poetic work. Blok embodied in them the intimate and lyrical experiences of his youth. The Muse is a real young woman (the image of the Muse is based on the image of the beloved woman), and even more precisely, it is what the beloved personifies in the mind of the lover, something unearthly, alluring, promising something unimaginable and unattainable. The beloved girl becomes in verse the Holy, Most Pure Virgin, a symbol of femininity and beauty.

The entire cycle of poems about the Beautiful Lady is permeated with the pathos of chaste love for a woman, knightly service to her and admiration for him, as the personification of the ideal of spiritual beauty, a symbol of everything sublimely beautiful. There is no image of a specific woman. His Muse appears in the image of eternal femininity, tenderness, and purity. The beautiful Lady of Blok personifies an ordinary earthly woman, something sublime, combining the best feminine traits:

Transparent, unknown shadows

They swim to you, and you swim with them,

Into the arms of azure dreams,

Incomprehensible to us - You give yourself away.

Oh, Holy One, how tender the candles are,

How pleasing are Your features!

I can't hear neither sighs nor speeches,

But I believe: Darling - You.

(“I enter dark temples”)

But it is inaccessible to the hero, because he is just a man, earthly, sinful, mortal:

And here, below, in the dust, in humiliation,

Seeing immortal features for a moment,

An unknown slave, full of inspiration,

Sings you. You don't know him...

(“Transparent, unknown shadows”)

A knight, a kneeling monk, a slave, he performs his service to the beautiful queen, the Most Pure Virgin:

I enter dark temples,

I perform a poor ritual,

There I am waiting for the Beautiful Lady

In the flickering red lamps.

(“I enter dark temples”)

At the same time, the heroine is almost ethereal, incorporeal, her image does not imply anything concrete, “tangible”, because everything earthly is alien to her:

There, in the howling cold of the night

In the field of stars I found a ring.

Here is a face emerging from lace,

A face emerges from the lace.

Here her blizzard trills float,

The bright stars trail in a trail.

(“There, in the howling cold of the night”)

To describe the object of his worship, the author uses epithets such as “radiant”, “mysterious”, “ineffable”, “illuminated”, “gratifying”. But in some poems about the Beautiful Lady, her image takes on more specific, earthly features, devoid of a touch of mysticism:

I'll get up on a foggy morning,

The sun will hit your face.

Are you, dear friend,

Are you coming up to my porch?

(“I’ll get up on a foggy morning”)

Before us is no longer an abstract image, but an earthly woman; it should be noted that, speaking about her, the poet refuses capital letters. One thing is certain: in his early poems, Blok is based on his experiences, feelings, he opens his soul, and is who he really is - a dreamy young man in love.

In his early youth, Blok, to use his own words, was still “protected from rough life” both by his abstract idealistic mindset, his warm upbringing in the bosom of a noble, highly cultured, but very closed family, and the nature of his spiritual experiences. But then comes the inevitable crisis of youthful daydreaming, which gives way to an awareness of reality. This is due to biographical aspects. With his young wife, Blok moved to St. Petersburg in 1903. Here, after some time, the relationship between Blok and his wife became complicated; in the winter of 1906-1907, she became interested in the poet A. Bely, he became interested in the actress N.N. Volokhova, to whom he dedicates a collection of poems.

Peaceful rural landscapes, against which the poet’s romance with his Beautiful Lady develops, are replaced by sharply outlined, often phantasmagoric pictures of the big city, the imperial capital. He perceives and depicts the lush Northern Palmyra as the scene of “strange and terrible” incidents. The city is “creepy”, “demonic”, inhabited by silent “black men”, “drunk red dwarfs”, laughing “invisible people”, apocalyptic characters. Under the weight of disappointment and unrealizability, a person inevitably grows up and it is no longer possible not to reckon with reality, with its rudeness, dirt, and vulgarity. But this man is a poet, and he cannot surrender to reality without ceasing to be himself. The very everydayness and vulgarity of everyday life becomes “mysterious” in Blok’s poems. The lofty image of the Muse is alive, the poet continues to believe in the lofty, in his Muse, and inevitably, it no longer depends on him whether to place it or not to place it in reality. The virgin ends up in a tavern, but because of this she is not vulgarized by everyday life, is not corrupted, but, on the contrary, gives reality itself a reflection of the best.

The Star Maiden suddenly falls to the ground:

You flowed like a bloody star,

I measured your path in sorrow,

When you started to fall.

poet block muse creativity

The metaphysical fall of the Virgin worries and saddens the hero, but then he understands, having found his beloved on unconsecrated ground, in the “unlit gate”, that:

And this gaze is no less bright,

What was in the foggy heights.

(“Your face is paler than it was”)

Having descended from “heaven,” the heroine did not lose her beauty, charm, and charm. This is how the Stranger is born - an angel descended to earth. In the poem “A Trail Spattered with Stars,” the heroine is compared to a comet falling down, connecting heaven and earth with its fall:

A train spattered with stars

Blue, blue, blue gaze.

Between earth and heaven

A fire raised by a whirlwind.

Inevitably, the image of the mystical “Eternal Femininity” is transformed into the image of the Stranger living on earth. And then another conflict arises:

In the midst of this mysterious vulgarity,

Tell me what to do with you -

Unattainable and the only one

How's the evening smoky blue?

(“There are ladies flaunting fashion”)

The heroine is doomed to stay in a world of vulgarity and dirt. How is it possible for the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the ordinary to coexist? There is only one condition: understatement, the existence of a secret, the comprehension of which will give answers to all painful questions and abolish vulgarity and dirt. This is how a new hypostasis of the Muse arises - the Stranger.

The Beautiful Lady takes on certain features and becomes more earthly. In “The Stranger,” Blok, depicting his new Muse, transfers her from an elevated environment to an ordinary one, characteristic of every simple woman:

In the evenings above the restaurants

The hot air is wild and deaf,

And rules with drunken shouts

Spring and pernicious spirit.

She is still beautiful, proud, rising above monotony and vulgarity. But still there have been changes:

And every evening, at the appointed hour

(Or am I just dreaming?),

The girl's figure, captured by silks,

A window moves through a foggy window.

And slowly, walking between the drunks.

Always without companions, alone,

Breathing spirits and mists.

She sits by the window.

And they breathe ancient beliefs

Her elastic silks

And a hat with mourning feathers.

And in the rings there is a narrow hand.

("Stranger")

This description leads us to think about her aristocratic, noble origin. Her face is covered with a veil, which symbolizes some kind of secret. We still don’t know everything about the new Beautiful Lady; it seems that behind her wonderful appearance there is something unknown:

And chained by a strange intimacy,

I look behind the dark veil.

And I see the enchanted shore

And the enchanted distance.

Silent secrets have been entrusted to me.

Someone's sun was handed to me,

And all the souls of my bend

Tart wine pierced.

("Stranger")

Perhaps it was this secret that formed the basis of the title of the poem.

The first two lines of lyrical creativity (“Beautiful Lady” and “Stranger”) reach their highest point of development in the cycle “Snow Mask” (January 1907). The metaphorical style, the musical verbal flow, and the bewitching “magic of sounds” reign supreme here. The themes and motifs of “Snow Mask” are tragic passion, suffering, despair, doom and death, unfolding against the backdrop of snowstorms, blizzard flights and chases. “Snow Mask” essentially ends the love-lyrical stage of Blok’s work. It already contains a premonition of change.

And entering a new world, I know

That people exist and there are things to do...

("Second Baptism")

Blok described the “Snow Mask” cycle as “subjective to the last degree.” And he, in fact, entered the world of “people and deeds” with increasing confidence, began a direct conversation about life and man, boldly expanded the boundaries of his creativity and affirmed the new nature of the “lyrical element” itself.

Finally, external events, a whirlwind of changes, capture the poet, and the image of the Muse moves further and further away from the image of the Beautiful Lady and the Stranger. During this period, Blok dedicated most of his creations to the Motherland. Many poets represented the Motherland in their works as a mother. Blok spoke of her as a wife, as a beloved:

Oh, my Rus'! My wife! To the point of pain

We have a long way to go!

This is what Blok writes about Russia in the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field.” In the poem “Autumn Day,” Blok again represents his Motherland as his wife:

Oh, my poor country,

What do you mean to your heart?

Oh my poor wife

Why are you crying bitterly?

Thus, Blok was constantly changing, and with him the image of his Muse was constantly changing. These poems, filled with great love for femininity and the Motherland:

The whole horizon is on fire, and the appearance is near,

But I’m scared - you’ll change your appearance,

And you will arouse impudent suspicion,

Changing the usual features at the end.

(“I Feel You”)

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Above the dust of sunny lakes

Beckons there with scarlet fingers

And summer residents are worried in vain

Above dusty train stations

Unattainable dawn

Where I miss you so painfully,

comes to me sometimes

She is shamelessly delightful

And humiliatingly proud.

Behind thick beer mugs,

Behind the sleep of the usual bustle

A veil covered with flies shows through,

Eyes and small features

What am I waiting for, enchanted

My lucky star

And stunned and excited

Wine, dawn and you?

Sighing with ancient beliefs,

Noisy with black silks,

Under a helmet with mourning feathers

And are you stunned by the wine?

In the midst of this mysterious vulgarity,

Tell me what to do with you -

Unattainable and the only one

How's the evening smoky blue?

There is no girlish form - there is only a veil; behind the veil is not “an enchanted shore” and not “bottomless blue eyes,” but “eyes and small features.” She is “shamelessly intoxicating and humiliatingly proud.” Beauty has been vulgarized. And yet the heroine of the poem remains “unattainable and unique” - she is opposed to “mysterious vulgarity”, and is interpreted as its victim. The poem “There are ladies flaunting fashion” was written simultaneously with “The Stranger,” but Blok completed it 5 years later.

The symbolism of Blok’s sound images developed under the sign of the constant deepening of the semantic sphere of his poems. The mysterious world of sounds, incomprehensible and fatal, opened its circle over the years, approaching living life and people, until it merged with them in one indissoluble unity, becoming part of the indivisible whole “sound - living life”.

In the evolution of the symbolism of sound in Blok’s figurative structure, a movement from the particular, concrete, random to the generalized typological, all-encompassing meaning of sounds, to the element of sound pressure and from it to universal sound harmony is clearly noticeable.

Conclusion.

In a 1902 poem entitled “Religio,” Blok wrote:

I loved tender words

I was looking for mysterious inflorescences.

In fact, it is color symbolism and visual imagery in general that is the main feature of the poetic model of the world created by Blok. But Blok not only looked for mysterious color correspondences: he also listened to the mysterious sound correspondences of the surrounding world. In 1919, in the preface to the poem “Retribution,” he says: “I am used to comparing facts from all areas of life accessible to my vision in given time, and I’m sure that all of them together create a single musical force.” The musical sensation of phenomena finds expression in Blok both through repeated images, similar to the leitmotifs of his lyrical cycles and poems, and through the subtle elaboration of the sound fabric and rhythmic diversity of his verse. Rhythm and sound in his poetry very often carry very specific information, captured by the reader synaesthetically, on a subconscious level.

Let us explain the concept of synesthesia.

The word "synesthesia" comes from the Greek synaisthesis and means mixed sensation (as opposed to "anesthesia" - the absence of sensation). Synesthesia is a phenomenon of perception when, upon stimulation of one sense organ, along with sensations specific to it, sensations corresponding to another sense organ also arise, in other words, signals emanating from different sense organs are mixed and synthesized. A person not only hears sounds, but also sees them, not only touches an object, but also feels its taste.

Synesthesia refers primarily to intersensory connections in the psyche, as well as the results of their manifestations in specific areas - poetic tropes of intersensory content; color and spatial images evoked by music; and even interactions between the arts (visual and auditory) (according to B.M. Galeev).

What is the essence of the concept of “intersensory connection” (synesthesia) and its functions in art? It's about about interactions in the polysensory system of sensory reflection, arising according to the principle of association. The simplest connections, as is known, are “associations by contiguity,” and the most significant for art are “associations by similarity.” Similarity can be similarity in form, structure, gestalt (shape/appearance) of auditory and visual images (for example, this is the basis of the analogy: melody-drawing). The similarity can be both in content and in emotional impact (for example, the synesthetic analogies “timbre-color”, tonality-color are based on this). The last type of synesthesia is most characteristic of art, and with the recognition of the connecting mediation of higher, “smart” emotions , in the formation of synesthesia one can see the participation of mental operations (even if they are carried out most often on a subconscious level). In this regard, synesthesia should be classified as complex specific forms of non-verbal thinking, arising in the form of “co-representation”, “sympathy”, but by no means not “co-sensation”, as it is interpreted according to the etymology of this word.

Thus, being a specific form of interaction in the integral system of human sensuality, synesthesia is a manifestation of the essential forces of a person, but is by no means some kind of epiphenomenon, and, of course, not an anomaly, but a norm - although due to the possible “hiddenness” of its origin in each specific case, it inaccessible to superficial scientific study. Moreover, synesthesia can be characterized as a concentrated and simultaneous actualization of the sensory in a wide range of its manifestations: firstly, “multiplied” sensory and, secondly, emotions that mediate this “multiplication”.

We did not set out to dwell in detail on the personality of Blok as a typical synesthete, however, we consider it our duty to note how the tonality of the sound images of A. Blok’s lyrics is reflected in the perception of his poems. Alexander Blok, being one of the brightest representatives of symbolism, possessing a synesthetically developed mental structure, was a true singer of the colors of the era, its “voice” in world history.

Blok's poetic images cannot be considered as simple reflections of real objects or as ordinary metaphors and metonymies, simply loaded with some abstract meaning. His images always retain both concrete and abstract meaning, that is, they are symbols. Blue visions, pink horizons, white churches over the river in his early poems - and the yellow St. Petersburg sunset, purple twilight, night, street, lantern, pharmacy in his later poems - all of this equally resists interpretation on just one level of meaning, because everything it is loaded with complex polysemic information.

The central image of Blok's early lyrics (1901 -1902), the image of the Beautiful Lady, sometimes embodies the real features of Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, the future bride and wife of the poet, but much more often it is a sublime symbol of Eternal Femininity. The very name “Beautiful Lady” contains in its stressed syllables two compact sound"A". The distinctive feature of compactness is usually associated with a feeling of spaciousness, fullness, completeness, grandeur, balance, strength and power. All these and similar sensations can be reduced to the concept of stability. Therefore, it is not surprising that in some poems about the Beautiful Lady these stressed “a” dominate in the very first lines: “She was young and beautiful.”, “She grew up behind the distant mountains.”, “She is slender and tall.”, “You went to the fields without returning.”