Genius is always popular (A. Blok)

Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin was born in 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo. Yesenin's talent, his ideological quests, the themes of his work, aesthetic preferences, his ethics - all this was rooted in childhood. To understand Yesenin’s phenomenon, it should be borne in mind that he was born and raised in a religious family. Monks and artists lived in the house of the paternal grandmother located opposite the restored church. The maternal grandmother took her grandson to a monastery forty miles away! Blind people and wanderers gathered in her house, they sang spiritual poems - about paradise, about Mikola, about the Laser, about the unknown city. Already at that time, Yesenin learned about the promised land, about the inevitable future paradise, about another world - and these themes would later resonate in his work. On Saturdays and Sundays, grandfather Fyodor Andreevich Titov, an expert in spiritual verses and the Bible, expounded to him sacred history. Yesenin was not a church person; In his family, he became familiar with Orthodoxy, during exams at the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School according to the law. He received an A in reading and reading in Church Slavonic, but by nature he was “a bully and a tomboy.” This duality of the poet's nature - the desire for spiritual peace and rebellion, meekness and passion - was expressed in his lyrics.

Family traditions were complemented by Yesenin's education. He had a passion for reading. After graduating from Konstantinovskoe zemstvo school, he continued his education at the Spas-Klepikovsky church-teacher school. Yesenin early discovered his poetic gift: he began writing poetry while still at the zemstvo school.

In 1912 he came to Moscow. He was a young man with developed self-awareness. The young provincial did not have an apprenticeship complex. His self-confidence grew rapidly: he conflicts with the owner of the office where he works, conflicts with his father, who supports him, works in a bookstore and quits from there: he is a poet! poetry will feed him! In 1913, he got a job in the printing house of the partnership I.D. Sytin - receives both financial independence and the opportunity to read: everything, a lot and voraciously. In the same year, he began studying at the historical and philosophical department of the Moscow City People's University. A. L. Shanyavsky. In 1916, his first poetry collection “Radunitsa” was published. During these four years, he emerged as a poet of peasant culture.

Young Yesenin is a moral maximalist; he believed in the mission of a poet-prophet, ready to brand the vicious and blind crowd. A Christian in worldview, he perceived the world as a single whole, assuring that “all people are one soul,” that he could, like Christ, go to the cross for the good of his neighbor.

The motives of S. Yesenin's lyrics of the early 1910s are the sacrificial mission of the poet, spiritualized nature, God's chosenness of the peasant for whom St. Nicholas the Pleasant cares. Yesenin's poetry of this period revealed the peculiarities of his style. He built metaphorical rows: “The flood flooded with smoke / Covered the silt. / The yellow reins / The month dropped,” combining them with images in which he expressed immediate, precise meanings. He turned to the romance verse with his characteristic syntactic simplicity, the completeness of the phrase within the boundaries of the line: “The scarlet light of dawn was woven on the lake. / On the forest, wood grouse are crying with ringing sounds. / An oriole is crying somewhere, burying itself in a hollow. / Only I don’t cry, my soul is light.” His taste for dialectism, which he soon abandoned, did not detract from the precision and rigor of his style.

Yesenin entered Russian poetry as one of the brightest poets of the peasant movement, consciousness and aesthetic tastes which were characteristic religious culture, the influence of folklore, philosophy and poetics of literary monuments of Orthodox thought, including the literature of the Old Believers, focus on the fate of the peasantry! In 1919 Yesenin met the imagist poets, and his work underwent some aesthetic reorientation. His lyrics showed trends of late avant-gardeism.

Yesenin's poems were actively published in magazines and collective collections; he became one of the most popular poets in Russia. Collections of his poetry “Transfiguration” (1918), “Rural Book of Hours” (1918), “Dove” (1918), “Confession of a Hooligan” (1921), etc. were published. From May 1922 to August 1923, Yesenin lived abroad: in Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, USA.

In the fall of 1924, Yesenin made a trip to the Caucasus. He did not yet know that this time there would be almost no weather there, that this trip to the south would become his “Boldino autumn.” Here he wrote many of his “small poems”, here “Persian Motifs” and his “peak” poem “Anna Snegina” were created. Yesenin published twenty-seven new works in the Caucasus, and that was all in six months!

In December 1925, Yesenin left Moscow for Leningrad. There he dreamed, as friends said, of “starting a new life,” working, editing a magazine.

These intentions were not destined to come true. On the night of December 27-28, 1925, at the Angleterre Hotel, the poet’s life was cut short...

Now we rightly talk about Sergei Yesenin as a brilliant poet of the twentieth century.

The largest number of white spots has long been associated with Yesenin’s “village childhood” and youth in his native Ryazan region. Of the thirty years of the poet’s life, the first seventeen passed here. However, it so happened that until the mid-fifties, we, unfortunately, knew very little of the truth about the formation of Yesenin as a person, especially in his youth, about the early awakening of his “creative thoughts,” about the deep folk origins of his poetry. Many questions concerning the fate of the poet in adolescence and in teenage years, essentially remained unanswered.

But when you read and re-read Yesenin, including his early poems, where everything is truth, illuminated and sad, everything is life, joyful and tragic, poems and verses in which the artist’s confessional soul is completely exposed - their screaming incompatibility with various things becomes more and more obvious. kind of “novels without marriages.”

It is difficult, or rather almost impossible, to fully understand the poet, the movements of his soul, the birth of his poems, and finally, his fate, without visiting at least once the sacred land from where his life originates, his coming into the world, the land that the first conscious years of his steps and until death will fill his heart with love for the Fatherland.

Konstantinovo, the poet’s native village, is freely spread out on the right high hilly bank of the Oka - the high-water sister of the great Volga. The vast expanse of flooded meadows, copses running into the distance opens up to the eye, and at the very horizon - the haze of the forests of Meshchera.

For more than half a century, in any weather, in summer and winter, people come and go to Konstantinovo from all over the world to bow deeply to the ancient Ryazan land - the cradle of the great poet of Russia.

Ability to creative imagination, interest in folk songs, legends, fairy tales, and love of nature appeared in Yesenin in his childhood. Sergei Alexandrovich was “tenderly ill with childhood memories all his life.” “As a child, I grew up in an atmosphere of folk poetry,” he wrote. WITH early years the future poet listened attentively to the singing of his grandmother and the spiritual poems of the wanderers. His father composed songs himself, his mother was a wonderful songwriter. Alexandra, Yesenin’s younger sister, recalled: “It seems to me that there is no Russian folk song that our mother did not know... Whether she was lighting the stove, sewing, spinning, you could hear her singing at any work. And each of us, her children, listened to her tunes from the cradle, growing up, involuntarily memorized them and sang along with her...”

And in his mature years, when he came home, Sergei Alexandrovich always asked his mother to sing this or that song. The poet retained the charm of his mother’s singing in his memory for the rest of his life: “I was born with songs in a grass blanket. The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow.”

But the poet’s heart was even more touched by the mournful songs that his grandfather sang to him. “The mental man,” as Yesenin called him, awakened in him a love of beauty. Sergei Alexandrovich admitted: “Looking back at the entire path I have traveled, I still have to say that no one was as important to me as my grandfather. I owe him the most."

Yesenin eagerly listened to the singing of the peasants during their work or in short moments of rest, in the evenings at gatherings, on holidays. He wrote down some of these songs, others spontaneously remained in his memory. He sang many songs to his own accompaniment on guitar or accordion.

Yesenin began composing poetry early, at the age of nine. In them he captured bright, light images, the first heartfelt experiences, pictures of those near and dear that surrounded him.

Yesenin is the only poet among the great Russian lyricists in whose work it is impossible to separate poems about the Motherland into a separate section. Everything he wrote is imbued with a “feeling of homeland.” As the poet himself wrote: “The feeling of the Motherland is the main thing in my work.” Let us note not “theme”, but “feeling”. For example, in the poem “Go away, my dear Rus',” the image of the Motherland is drawn - paradise. Yesenin folk poet not only because he was born in the very Russian village, that he wrote about his native nature, that the language of his poems is simple and understandable, but also because every person in Russia at least once experienced the same feelings as Yesenin, that Yesenin expressed national character, national sentiments, dreams, doubts, hopes.

The image of the Motherland in the poet’s lyrics is inseparable from the image of nature. The very first poem, as the poet himself remembered:

Where the cabbage beds are

The sunrise pours red water,

Maple baby for the little uterus

The green udder sucks.

An amazing miniature, the beginning of all of Yesenin’s future poetry.

Yesenin left his “birthplace” in the summer of 1912, leaving for Moscow to find a path into great literature. But life was difficult and not quite the way the young man wanted. The city did not leave any vivid images in the poet’s mind. Pictures of rural life, sounds and colors of nature always lived in his soul. And in his poems he created an image of a living Russia, capable of yearning and experiencing pain. Yesenin sometimes imagined his native and beloved land as “forgotten and abandoned,” surrounded by “swamps and swamps.” Yesenin’s Rus' is also a “cinder strip”, “uncut hayfield”, “cared-for huts”, “people torn by grief”. The poet sees not only “stacks of the sun in the waters of the bosom”, his gaze also notices something else: “the spruce girls are sad,” “a shadow hangs like a scarf behind the pine tree,” “the grove covers the grove with blue darkness,” “beggars are knitting twine over their bags.” “,” “The old church is withering away,” “Oh, you are not happy, my native land...”. But even in sadness, what is close and dear to the poet is sweet:

Black, then smelly howl!

How can I not caress you, not love you!

In sad thoughts about the fate of the homeland there is so much heartfelt warmth, sincere love, attachment to the memories of childhood, youth, tenderness for fields filled with sadness, for nature, for rural life, which gives birth to peace, clarity and tranquility in the poet’s soul.

Low house with blue shutters

I will never forget you, -

Were too recent

Sounded out in the twilight of the year.

The feather grass is sleeping.

Plain dear,

And the leaden freshness of wormwood.

No other homeland

It will not pour my warmth into my chest.

Know that we all have such a fate,

And, perhaps, ask everyone -

Rejoicing, raging and suffering,

Life is good in Rus'.

Both in joy and in sadness, no matter where fate threw Yesenin, his heart invariably reached out to his father’s threshold, to his dear arable lands and forests.

The feeling of sadness and longing for his native expanses gave rise in the poet’s soul to a feeling of loss of connection with the “blue Russia”. The revolutionary reality that he observed, the long years of severe disasters - war, famine, devastation, blood - deepened the painful and soul-tearing contradictions. This time for Yesenin, with his penchant for the ideal, with his acute, almost painful reaction to everything ugly, both literally and figuratively, could not pass without a trace, destroying his peace of mind.

Yesenin's worldview was formed under the influence of Russian nature. For the poet, nature and homeland are not just words with the same root, they are inseparable concepts. poet Yesenin creativity homeland

Nature is personified and spiritualized by Yesenin. The image of living nature is created, for example, by appeals: “You, bird cherry, are covered in snow, / Sing, you birds, in the forest”; “You are my abandoned land, / You are my ruin, wasteland”; “Black, then smelly howl! / How can I not caress you, not love you?”; “Beloved land! My heart dreams of / Stacks of the sun in the waters of the bosom, / I would like to get lost / In your withdrawn greenery.”...

Note that in the personification of “In the greenery of your hundred-ringed...” the sound image that most often voices Yesenin’s plots: ringing, the poet uses a neologism that enhances the sound impression - “hundred-belled,” the ringing is heard in the alliteration of these lines. Sound images are often found in Yesenin’s poems: “The forest rings with ringing gold”; “Winter sings and calls, / The shaggy forest lulls / With the ringing of the pine forest.” IN sound images color and visual phenomena are perceived: “In the grove along the birch trees / white chime”; “I would like to get lost /In your hundred-ringing greenery”; “And near the low outskirts / The poplars are withering loudly”; “A girl’s laughter will ring out towards me like earrings.” This series can be continued.

Yesenin’s poetry also contains quiet sounds: “the rustle of the reeds,” “the whisper of the pine forest,” “meek speech,” “a weak cry,” “a drawn-out sigh,” “the barley straw gently groans,” and whistling, and humming, and screaming, and prayer, and song, and many other sound images.

The poet felt nature in motion; he could convey one natural phenomenon through another: “The bird cherry tree is pouring snow,” “The bird cherry tree is waving its sleeve like a blizzard”; “And the cloud-covered forest burns in the lilac brocade.” In the last example we note the bright colors.

In Yesenin's poems there are various shades of red: pink, scarlet, crimson, crimson; shades of yellow often take on a “metallic” sound: gold, copper; a lot of green, blue and cyan. There are white, black, and gray colors, but in general Yesenin’s poems are painted in pure, clear, sometimes delicate, sometimes bright colors and shades. Yesenin's lyrics contain movement, sounds, and colors of the world. There are also smells.

The scarlet light of dawn was woven on the lake.

The silver river flows quietly

In the kingdom of evening green spring

The sun sets behind the forested mountains

The golden horn floats out of the moon...

Blue sky, colored arc,

Quietly the steppe banks flow,

Smoke trails near the crimson villages...

Yesenin most often depicts such natural phenomena as dawns, sunsets, snow, rain, wind, clouds, lakes, rivers... He paints both the animal world and the plant world. The image of a tree is especially common. The image of a girl is constantly associated with the image of a thin birch tree, the image of a soul with spring blossoms, the image of a lyrical hero with a maple tree.

Green hairstyle,

Maiden breasts

O thin birch tree,

Why did you look into the pond? ...

Bird cherry fragrant

Bloomed with spring

And golden branches,

Why did you curl your curls...

Yesenin writes about love already in his earliest poems, the origins of which are in Russian folklore (“Imitation of a song”, “You watered the horse from handfuls at the reins...”, 1910). Love for a woman is only an accent in the manifestation of a feeling of love for everything earthly, the beloved is often presented in the image of nature: “I’ll kiss you while you’re drunk, I’ll wear you out like a flower,” and nature is personified: “The scarlet color of dawn is woven on the lake” (1910); “Green hairstyle, / Girlish breasts, / O thin birch tree, / Why did you look into the pond?” All nature is permeated with love: “In the flowers of love, the spring princess / Unbraided her braids through the grove... And I, like a passionate violet, / Want to love, love spring” (“Enchantment”, 1913-1915).

The mood of love lyrics changes in the poet’s “urban” poems. The city tore Yesenin away from his “homeland-paradise”, and the feeling of happiness became a nostalgic experience, and the earthly “girl-nature” became a dream-memory, almost ethereal (“Here it is, stupid happiness”):

Somewhere beyond the garden timidly,

Where the viburnum blooms,

Tender girl in white

Sings a tender song.

The tonality of love lyrics in the urban cycle “Moscow Tavern” (1923) changes dramatically:

Rash, harmonica. Boredom... Boredom...

The finger accordionist pours out a wave.

Drink with me, you lousy bitch

Drink with me.

They loved you, they abused you -

Unbearable.

Why are you looking at those blue splashes like that?

Or do you want to punch me in the face?

Poetry and tenderness were replaced by embittered cynicism, cynicism as a defensive reaction, as despair. Love is reduced to a carnal, animal need, but at the end of the poem there is plaintive repentance: “Darling, I’m crying, / I’m sorry... I’m sorry...”.

The cycle “Love of a Hooligan” (1923, Yesenin’s return from abroad) is marked by renunciation of the “tavern” past, purification, salvation through love. An update comes to the lyrical hero:

A blue fire began to sweep,

Forgotten relatives.

For the first time I sang about love,

For the first time I refuse to make a scandal.

Tragic pathos, anguish is replaced by sincerity, lyricism, frankness:

Let others drink you,

But I have left, I have left

Your hair is glassy smoke

And the eyes are tired in autumn.

Honey, let's sit next to each other

Let's look into each other's eyes.

I want under the gentle gaze

Listen to the sensual blizzard.

The dream of “pure” love is one of the cross-cutting motifs of Yesenin’s lyrics. A complex range of emotions accompanies suffering, caused either by the thirst for love, or by the awareness of its impracticability:

The evening annoyed my black eyebrows.

Someone's horses are standing in the yard.

Wasn't it just yesterday that I drank away my youth?

Didn’t I stop loving you yesterday?

“Persian Motifs” (1924-1925) - an attempt to find agreement with oneself and with the world. Yesenin perceived the romantic plot about the love of a northerner and a southerner through the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov. The poems were written in the Caucasus, but the themes, plots, tonality, and the very image of love were influenced by Persian lyrics. The beloved in Persian poetry surpasses nature itself in its beauty, it is exceptional.

Yesenin created the image of a blue and cheerful country, which Russia has ceased to be. Previously, Russia was associated in Yesenin’s lyrics with a “blue country,” an ideal country, a dream (“The sand of heaven turns blue,” “The dust bathes in blue”). After the revolution, the color blue almost disappeared from his lyrics: “The sunset sprinkled the gray fields,” “Covered with gray chintz / These poor northern skies.” Now the fictional Persia ("The Blue Homeland of Firduosi") corresponded to the ideal: "It is good to wander among the peace / Blue and affectionate country." “Persian motives” - a counterweight to “Moscow Tavern”:

My old wound has subsided -

Drunken delirium does not gnaw at my heart.

Blue flowers of Tehran

I am treating them today in a teahouse.

I've never been to the Bosphorus,

Don't ask me about him.

I saw the sea in your eyes,

Blazing with blue fire.

Even the form of "Persian Motifs" corresponds to the form of ancient Persian lyrics:

The air is clear and blue,

I'll go out into the flower thickets,

A traveler leaving for the azure,

You won't reach the desert.

The air is clear and blue.

The symbol of Persian beauty and love is the image of a rose: “Quietly roses run through the fields...”; “Lips are drawn to roses, drawn”; “The rose splashed with petals”; “Kisses blow like a red rose, / Melting petals on the lips.”

However, Persia in the poet’s artistic imagination is only temporary peace. One of the themes of the cycle is nostalgia for Russia. The image of the homeland is certainly introduced into love motives, love for Russia intensifies: “In Russia, we don’t keep spring girls / On chains like dogs”; “No matter how beautiful Shiraz is, / It is no better than the expanses of Ryazan”; “There’s a girl in the north too / She looks terribly like you, “The heart dreams of another country”

Fifteen poems of the cycle convey a special lyrical plot - the dynamics, development of the feelings and moods of the lyrical hero, which culminate in a return to the Motherland:

I have seen many countries

I looked for happiness everywhere

Only for desires

I won't search anymore.

Don't beat your stupid heart.

Many of Yesenin's poems became songs. And this second life of the poet’s lyrics became part of our lives.

Time moves irresistibly. One generation will replace another.

The world of poetry moves and lives according to its own laws - the Universe of the soul of humanity. New poetic stars and asterisks are constantly being born and sparkling in this wonderful world. They burn out and fade away forever, even during the life of their “owner”, the light of others reaches us over the course of decades, and only a few, very few warm the people’s “living soul” over the centuries, flaring up brighter and brighter over time. The name of one of these most beautiful radiant stars in the immortal poetic constellation of Russia is Sergei Yesenin. It is eternal...

Literature

1. Two worlds (S. Yesenin) - In the book: Prokushev Yu. Time. Poetry. Criticism. M.: Fiction, 1980

2. Yesenin S. A. Favorites: Poems and Poems. Introductory article and comp. Yu. Prokusheva; Rice. E. Savich. - M.: Children's literature, 1983. - 283 p.

3. Yesenin S. Collected Works. In 2 volumes. Poems. Poems. - Mn.: Soviet Russia, Contemporary. - 1990

4. Yesenin S. Poems and poems: - Mn.: Yunatstva, 1982. - 159 p.

5. Khanaev B. The last poet of the village Sergei Yesenin // Soviet Belarus. - 1995. - September 27.

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PETITION

Abstract by Alena Vasilyeva. Moscow, 2006

MAIN MOTIVES IN THE LYRICS OF S. A. ESENINA

INTRODUCTION

Yesenin lived only thirty years, but the mark he left on poetry is indelible. The Russian land is rich in talents. Sergei Yesenin rose to the heights of poetry from the depths folk life. The world of folk poetic images surrounded him from childhood. All the beauty native land Over the years, she was depicted in poems full of love for the Russian land:

About Rus' - raspberry field,
And the blue that fell into the river,
I love you to the point of joy and pain
Your lake melancholy.

Pains and hardships peasant Rus', her joys and hopes - all this was reflected in the poetry of Sergei Yesenin. “My lyrics,” Yesenin said, not without pride, “are alive with one great love, love for the Motherland. The feeling of the Motherland is the main thing in my work.” Favorite region! The heart dreams of stacks of sun in the waters of the bosom, I would like to get lost in your hundred-ringed greenery, the poet wrote. Such lines, in my opinion, can only be born in the soul of a true artist, for whom the Motherland is life. Yesenin’s grandfather, “a bright personality, a broad nature,” according to the poet, had an excellent memory and knew by heart many folk songs and ditties. Yesenin himself knew Russian folklore perfectly, which he studied not from books. Yesenin’s mother knew many songs that Yesenin recalled more than once. Yesenin knew songs as few people knew them, he loved them - sad and cheerful, ancient and modern. Songs, legends, sayings - this is what Sergei Yesenin was brought up on. About four thousand miniature masterpieces were recorded in his notebooks.

Over time, Yesenin's talent gained strength. Blok, whom he admired, helped Yesenin enter the literary world. He (Blok) wrote a letter to his friend Gorodetsky asking him to help the young talent. In his diary, Blok wrote: “The poems are fresh, clear, vociferous. I have not experienced such pleasure for a long time.” Later, metropolitan magazines began to publish Sergei Yesenin’s poems: A rural dreamer - I am in the capital I have become a first-class poet. One of the reviewers said about the poet’s early poems: “A tired, jaded city dweller, reading Yesenin’s poems, becomes familiar with the forgotten aroma of the fields, something joyful emanates from his poetry.”

The first one started World War. With all his heart, with all his soul, the poet is devoted to his homeland and his people in these long years of grief and sadness: Oh, you, Rus', my meek homeland, I cherish my love only for you. The poem "Rus" is a wonderful and widely famous work, it is the artistic credo of the poet. The mood of “Rus” somewhat echoes Blok’s mournful thoughts about the Motherland:

Russia, poor Russia,
I want your gray huts,

Your songs are windy to me,
Like the first tears of love!

The time of Yesenin’s creativity is a time of sharp turns in the history of Russia. He wrote in his autobiography: “I accepted the revolution, but with a peasant bias.” It couldn't have been any other way. Yesenin is not just a lyricist, he is a poet of great intelligence and deep philosophical reflection. The drama of his worldview, his intense search for truth, mistakes and weaknesses - all these are facets of his enormous talent, but, studying him creative path, we can safely say that Yesenin was always true to himself in the main thing - in his desire to comprehend the difficult fate of his people. The year and a half the poet spent abroad was an exceptional period in his life: he did not write poetry, nothing inspired the poet far from his native land. It was there that the idea for the tragic poem “The Black Man” arose. This is Yesenin's last poetic work. Only abroad did he understand what tremendous changes were taking place in his homeland. He notes in his diary that perhaps the Russian revolution will save the world from hopeless philistinism. After returning from abroad, Yesenin visits his native land. He is sad, it seems to him that the people do not remember him, that huge changes have taken place in the village, but in what direction, he could not determine. The poet writes: This is the country!

For many years at school they studied the poetry of Demyan Bedny, Lebedev-Kumach, but young people did not know Khodasevich, who was talented from God, Yesenin’s lyrics were not included in school textbooks, falsely accusing him of lack of ideas, the best poets were erased from literature. But they are alive, their poems are read, loved, and believed. Yesenin wrote his poems “with the blood of feelings.” By giving himself away, he burned himself out early; his poetry is his destiny. Even earlier, in the poem “I’m tired of living in my native land,” he predicts his future:

I'm tired of living in my native land
Longing for the buckwheat expanses,
I will leave my hut, I will go as a vagabond and a thief...
And the month will float and float, dropping oars across the lakes,

And Rus' will still live, dance and cry at the fence.

In the poetry of subsequent years, the motif of sadness and regret for wasted strength is increasingly heard; his poetry emanates a kind of hopelessness. In “The Black Man” he writes the tragic lines: “My friend, I am very, very sick, I don’t know where this pain came from, either the wind is rustling over an empty and deserted field, or, like a grove in September, alcohol is showering my brains ". This is not a momentary weakness of the poet, this is a clear understanding that his life is coming to an end. Recently, a message appeared in our press that Yesenin did not commit suicide, that he was killed because he had a great influence on the minds of the Russian people. The question is controversial, but the lines (“in this life, dying is not new, but life, of course, is not new”) indicate that he is tired of fighting the surrounding reality. I would like to end my essay with lines from his poem “We are now leaving little by little.” His words are a tribute to the Motherland and descendants:

I thought a lot of thoughts in silence,
I composed many songs to myself,
And on this gloomy land
Happy that I breathed and lived.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Yesenin Sergei Alexandrovich (1895-1925 )

« About Me»

Born in 1895, September 21, in the Ryazan province, Ryazan district, Kuzminsk volost, in the village of Konstantinov.

From the age of two I was raised by a rather wealthy maternal grandfather, who had three adult unmarried sons, with whom I spent almost my entire childhood. My uncles were mischievous and desperate guys. When I was three and a half years old, they put me on a horse without a saddle and immediately started galloping. I remember that I went crazy and held my withers very tightly. Then I was taught to swim. One uncle (Uncle Sasha) took me into a boat, drove away from the shore, took off my underwear and threw me into the water like a puppy. I flapped my hands ineptly and frightenedly, and until I choked, he kept shouting: “Eh! Bitch! Well, where are you good for?..” “Bitch” was a term of endearment. After about eight years, I often replaced another uncle’s hunting dog and swam around the lakes after shot ducks. He was very good at climbing trees. Among the boys he was always a horse breeder and a big fighter and always walked around with scratches. Only my grandmother scolded me for my mischief, and my grandfather sometimes encouraged me to fight with my fists and often said to my grandmother: “You’re a fool, don’t touch him, he’ll be stronger that way!” Grandmother loved me with all her might, and her tenderness knew no bounds. On Saturdays they washed me, cut my nails and crimped my hair with cooking oil, because not a single comb could handle curly hair. But the oil didn’t help much either. I always yelled obscenities and even now I have some kind of unpleasant feeling about Saturday.

This is how my childhood passed. When I grew up, they really wanted to make me a village teacher and therefore sent me to a church teachers' school, after graduating from which I was supposed to enter the Moscow Teachers' Institute. Fortunately, this did not happen.

I started writing poetry early, at the age of nine, but I date my conscious creativity to the age of 16-17. Some poems from these years are included in “Radunitsa”.

At the age of eighteen, I was surprised when I sent my poems to magazines that they were not published, and I went to St. Petersburg.

I was received very cordially there. The first person I saw was Blok, the second was Gorodetsky. When I looked at Blok, sweat dripped from me, because for the first time I saw a living poet. Gorodetsky introduced me to Klyuev, about whom I had never heard a word. Despite all our internal strife, we developed a great friendship with Klyuev.

During these same years, I entered Shanyavsky University, where I stayed for only 1 1/2 years, and again went to the village. At the University I met the poets Semenovsky, Nasedkin, Kolokolov and Filipchenko.

Of the contemporary poets, I liked Blok, Bely and Klyuev the most. Bely gave me a lot in terms of form, and Blok and Klyuev taught me lyricism.

In 1919, with a number of comrades, I published a manifesto of Imagism. Imagism was the formal school that we wanted to establish. But this school had no basis and died by itself, leaving the truth behind the organic image.

I would gladly give up many of my religious verses and poems, but they have great value like the path of a poet before the revolution.

From the age of eight, my grandmother dragged me to different monasteries; because of her, all sorts of wanderers and pilgrims were always living with us. Various spiritual poems were chanted. Grandfather is opposite. He was not a fool to drink. On his part, eternal unmarried weddings were arranged.

Afterwards, when I left the village, I had to understand my way of life for a long time.

During the years of the revolution he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, with a peasant bias.

In terms of formal development, I am now drawn more and more towards Pushkin.

As for the rest of the autobiographical information, it is in my poems.

October 1925

WORK OF S. A. ESENINA

The work of Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin, uniquely bright and deep, has now firmly entered our literature and enjoys enormous success among numerous Soviet and foreign readers. The poet's poems are full of heartfelt warmth and sincerity, passionate love for the boundless expanses of his native fields, the “inexhaustible sadness” of which he was able to convey so emotionally and so loudly.

Sergei Yesenin entered our literature as an outstanding lyricist. It is in the lyrics that everything that makes up the soul of Yesenin’s creativity is expressed. It contains the full-blooded, sparkling joy of a young man rediscovering amazing world, subtly feeling the fullness of earthly charm, and the deep tragedy of a person who remained for too long in the “narrow gap” of old feelings and views. And if in the best poems of Sergei Yesenin there is a “flood” of the most secret, most intimate human feelings, they are filled to the brim with the freshness of pictures of native nature, then in his other works there is despair, decay, hopeless sadness. Sergei Yesenin is, first of all, a singer of Rus', and in his poems, sincere and frank in Russian, we feel the beating of a restless, tender heart. They have a “Russian spirit”, they “smell of Russia”. Even in love lyrics Yesenin's theme of love merges with the theme of the Motherland. The author of "Persian Motifs" is convinced of the fragility of serene happiness far from his native land. AND the main character the cycle becomes distant Russia: “No matter how beautiful Shiraz is, it is no better than the expanses of Ryazan.” Yesenin met with joy and warm sympathy October Revolution. Together with Blok and Mayakovsky, he took her side without hesitation. The works written by Yesenin at that time ("Transfiguration", "Inonia", "Heavenly Drummer") are imbued with rebellious sentiments. The poet is captured by the storm of the revolution, its greatness and strives for something new, for the future. In one of his works, Yesenin exclaimed: “My motherland, I am a Bolshevik!” But Yesenin, as he himself wrote, perceived the revolution in his own way, “with a peasant bias,” “more spontaneously than consciously.” This left a special imprint on the poet’s work and largely predetermined his future path. The poet's ideas about the purpose of the revolution, about the future, about socialism were characteristic. In the poem "Inonia" he depicts the future as a kind of idyllic kingdom of peasant prosperity; socialism seems to him a blissful "peasant paradise." Such ideas were also reflected in Yesenin’s other works of that time:

I see you, green fields,
With a herd of dun horses.
With a shepherd's pipe in the willows
Apostle Andrew wanders.

But the fantastic visions of peasant Irony, naturally, were not destined to come true. The revolution was led by the proletariat, the village was led by the city. “After all, the socialism that is coming is completely different from what I thought,” Yesenin declares in one of his letters from that time. Yesenin begins to curse the "iron guest" bringer of doom patriarchal village way of life, and mourn the old, fading “wooden Rus'”. This explains the inconsistency of Yesenin’s poetry, who went through a difficult path from the singer of patriarchal, impoverished, dispossessed Russia to the singer of socialist Russia, Leninist Russia. After Yesenin’s trip abroad and to the Caucasus, a turning point occurs in the poet’s life and work and a new period is designated. She makes him fall in love with his socialist fatherland more deeply and strongly and appreciate everything that happens in it differently." ...I fell even more in love with communist construction," Yesenin wrote upon returning to his homeland in the essay "Iron Mirgorod." Already in the cycle “Love of a Hooligan,” written immediately upon arrival from abroad, the mood of loss and hopelessness is replaced by hope for happiness, faith in love and the future. The wonderful poem “A blue fire swept up...”, full of self-condemnation, pure and tender love, gives a clear idea of ​​the new motives in Yesenin’s lyrics:

A blue fire began to sweep,
Forgotten relatives.
For the first time I sang about love,
For the first time I refuse to make a scandal.

I was all like a neglected garden,
He was greedy for women and potions.
I stopped liking singing and dancing
And lose your life without looking back.

Yesenin's work is one of the brightest, deeply moving pages in the history of Soviet literature. Yesenin's era has receded into the past, but his poetry continues to live, awakening a feeling of love for his native land, for everything close and different. We are concerned about the sincerity and spirituality of the poet, for whom Rus' was the most precious thing on the entire planet.

THE THEME OF HOMELAND AND NATURE IN THE LYRICS OF S. A. ESENINA

The theme of the homeland is one of the main themes in the work of S. Yesenin. It is customary to associate this poet, first of all, with the village, with his native Ryazan region. But the poet left the Ryazan village of Konstantinovo very young, then lived in Moscow, and in St. Petersburg, and abroad, and came to his native village from time to time as a guest. This is important to know to understand S. Yesenin’s position. It was the separation from his native land that gave his poems about it that warmth of memories that distinguishes them. In the very descriptions of nature, the poet has that measure of detachment that allows this beauty to be seen and felt more acutely.

Already in the early poems of S. Yesenin there are declarations of love for Russia. Thus, one of his most famous works is “Go away, my dear Rus'...” From the very beginning, Rus' appears here as something sacred, the key image of the poem is a comparison of peasant huts with icons, images in vestments, and behind this comparison there is a whole philosophy, value system. The world of the village is like a temple with its harmony of earth and sky, man and nature. The world of Rus' for S. Yesenin is also a world of wretched, poor, bitter peasant houses, an abandoned region, a “village in potholes,” where joy is short and sadness is endless:

"Sad song, you are Russian pain."

This feeling is especially intensified in the poet’s poems after 1914 - the beginning of the war: the village seems to him like a bride, abandoned by his beloved and awaiting news from him from the battlefield. For a poet, his native village in Russia is something unified; his homeland, especially in his early work, is first of all his native land, his native village, something that later, at the end of the 20th century, literary critics defined as the concept of a “small homeland” . With the inherent tendency of S. Yesenin, the lyricist, to animate all living things, everything around him, he also addresses Russia as a person close to him: “Oh, you, Rus', my meek homeland, / I cherish my love only for you.” Sometimes the poet’s poems take on a note of aching sadness, a feeling of restlessness arises in them, their lyrical hero is a wanderer who left his native hut, rejected and forgotten by everyone. And the only thing that remains unchanged, that retains eternal value, is nature and Russia:

And the month will float and float
Dropping oars across the lakes...
And Rus' will still live
Dance and cry at the fence.

S. Yesenin lived in a turning point era, full of dramatic and even tragic events. In the memory of his generation - war, revolution, war again - now civil. The poet, like many artists of his circle, met the turning point year for Russia - 1917 - with hopes for renewal, for a happy turn in the peasant lot. The poets of S. Yesenin's circle of that time were N. Klyuev, P. Oreshin, S. Klychkov. These hopes are expressed in the words of N. Klyuev, a close friend and poetic mentor of S. Yesenin: “Now it is a peasant land, / And the church will not hire a government official.” In Yesenin’s poetry in 1917, a new feeling of Russia appears: “The tar has already been washed away, erased / Resurrected Rus'.” The feelings and moods of the poet of this time are very complex and contradictory - these are hopes and expectations of the bright and new, but this is also anxiety for the fate of his native land, philosophical thoughts on eternal topics. One of them - the theme of the collision of nature and the human mind, invading it and destroying its harmony - sounds in S. Yesenin's poem "Sorokoust". In it, the central thing becomes deeply symbolic meaning competition between a foal and a train. At the same time, the foal embodies all the beauty of nature, its touching defenselessness. The locomotive takes on the features of an ominous monster. In Yesenin's "Sorokoust" the eternal theme of the confrontation between nature and reason, technological progress merges with reflections on the fate of Russia.

In the post-revolutionary poetry of S. Yesenin, the theme of the homeland is filled with difficult thoughts about the poet’s place in the new life; he painfully experiences alienation from his native land, it is difficult for him to find mutual language with the new generation, for whom the calendar Lenin on the wall replaces the icon, and the pot-bellied “Capital” - the Bible. The poet is especially saddened by the knowledge that the new generation is singing new songs: “They are singing the propaganda of Poor Demyan.” This is all the more sad that S. Yesenin rightly notes: “I am a poet! And no match for some Demyans.” That’s why his lines sound so sad: “My poetry is no longer needed here, / And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either.” But even the desire to merge with a new life does not force S. Yesenin to give up his calling as a Russian poet; he writes: “I will give my whole soul to October and May, / But I will not give up my dear lyre.” And that is why his confession is filled with such deep pathos:

"I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land

With a short name "Rus".

Today it is difficult for us, living in Russia, to fully understand the meaning of these lines, but they were written in 1924, when the very name - Rus' - was almost forbidden, and citizens were supposed to live in "Recefeser". S. Yesenin’s understanding of his poetic mission, his position as “the last singer of the village,” the keeper of its covenants, its memory, is connected with the theme of the homeland. One of the poet’s programmatic poems, important for understanding the theme of the homeland, was “The Feather Grass Is Sleeping”:

The feather grass is sleeping.Plain dear
And the leaden freshness of wormwood!
No other homeland
It will not pour my warmth into my chest.

Know that we all have such a fate,
And, perhaps, ask everyone -
Rejoicing, raging and tormented,
Life is good in Rus'.

The light of the moon, mysterious and long,
The willows are crying, the poplars are whispering,
But no one listens to the crane's cry
He will not stop loving his father's fields.

And now, when the new light
And my life was touched by fate,
I still remain a poet
Golden log hut.

At night, huddled against the headboard,
I see him as a strong enemy
How someone else's youth splashes with newness
To my glades and meadows.

But still pressed by that newness,
I can sing with feeling:
Give me in my beloved homeland,
Loving everything, die in peace."

This poem is dated 1925 and belongs to the poet’s mature lyricism. It expresses his innermost thoughts. In the line “rejoicing, raging and tormenting” - the difficult historical experience that befell the Yesenin generation. The poem is built on traditionally poetic images: feather grass as a symbol of the Russian landscape and at the same time a symbol of melancholy, wormwood with its rich symbolism and the cry of a crane as a sign of separation. The traditional landscape, in which the personification of poetry is the no less traditional “light of the moon,” is opposed by the “new light,” which is rather abstract, inanimate, and devoid of poetry. And in contrast to this, the lyrical hero of Yesenin’s poem recognizes his commitment to the age-old village way of life. The poet’s epithet “golden” is especially significant: “I will still remain a poet / of the Golden log hut.” It is one of the most frequently encountered in S. Yesenin’s lyrics, but it is usually associated with a color concept: golden - that is, yellow, but certainly with a connotation of the highest value: “golden grove”, “golden frog moon”. In this poem, the shade of value predominates: gold is not only the color of the hut, but a symbol of its enduring value as a symbol of the way of village life with its inherent beauty and harmony. A village hut is a whole world; its destruction is not redeemed for the poet by any tempting new thing. The ending of the poem sounds somewhat rhetorical, but in the general context of S. Yesenin’s poetry it is perceived as a deep and sincere recognition of the author. Thus, the theme of the homeland in S. Yesenin’s poetry develops from an unconscious, almost childishly natural attachment to the native land to a conscious one that has withstood the tests difficult time changes and turning points in the author's position.

I am not a new person, what to hide, I remain in the past with one foot, Trying to catch up with the “steel army”, I slide and fall with the other. Yesenin “My entire autobiography is in verse,” wrote Yesenin. The larger the artist, the larger his work, the more original his talent, the more difficult it is for his contemporaries to fully appreciate his contribution to the spiritual life of the nation. In later poems Yesenin, as if summing up his creative activity, wrote: “My village will only be famous for the fact that here a woman once gave birth to a Russian scandalous piita.”

SPACE MOTIF IN THE POETRY OF S. YESENIN

“Cosmos” - (from the Greek order, universe) in the mythological and mythologized early philosophical tradition, the universe is understood as an integral universe, organized in accordance with a certain law.

All mythological systems have a common set of features that define the cosmos. It opposes chaos and is always secondary. The relationship between space and chaos occurs not only in time, but also in space. And in this case, space is often presented as something included within the chaos that surrounds space from the outside. Cosmic law connects the cosmos and man (macrocosm and microcosm) even more closely.

Cosmic motifs can be found in the works of many poets; Yesenin also has them. Almost every poem of his contains celestial phenomena and cosmic landscapes. For example, the month (moon) is mentioned in 52 poems, the sun (10), stars (32), sky (14).

If in mythologized concepts the vertical structure of the cosmos is three-membered and consists of the upper world (sky), middle (earth) and lower (underground kingdom), then S. Yesenin’s cosmic model of the world is two-membered (sky and earth). To the first - upper world- include celestial phenomena (sky, sun, moon, stars), the second tier - the middle - includes the earth, trees, animals, humans, housing and other buildings. These tiers are very closely interconnected.

Near the forest clearing there are heaps of bread in the piles,
The spruce trees, like spears, pointed to the sky.
("The evening began to smoke...", 1912)

The sun went out. Quiet on the meadow.
("Herd", 1915)

I'll look into the field, I'll look into the sky -
There is paradise in the fields and in the sky.
(“I’ll look into the field...”, 1917)

Three star birch trees above the pond...

The house, being the center of the universe, is connected to space through the roof.

There is great light from the moon
Right on our roof.
(“It’s already evening. Dew...”, 1910)

The moon above the roof is like a golden hillock.
(“Under the red elm there is a porch and a yard...”, 1915)

A flock of jackdaws on the roof
Serves the evening star.
("Here it is, stupid happiness...", 1918)

Leaving home and going on a journey, the lyrical hero also feels his connection with the universe. This is where the “law of microcosm and macrocosm” comes into force. Man is a kind of microcosm, with all his sensations and impressions. He receives these impressions from interaction with nature, with other people, that is, from the macrocosm.

I want to measure the ends of the earth,
Trusting a ghostly star.
(“I will go to Skufya as a humble monk...”, 1914)

An overnight stay beckons, not far from the hut,
The garden smells of limp dill,
On the beds of gray wavy cabbage
The horn of the moon pours oil drop by drop.
("Dove", 1916)

The silent milkiness does not oppress,
Doesn't worry about star fear
I fell in love with the world and eternity,
Like a parent's hearth
(“The winds did not blow in vain…”, 1917)

Animals in Yesenin’s works are also part of the universe and their experiences and attitudes are also connected with space. For example, in the poem "Song of the Dog" the author shows the pain of the animal, its suffering through cosmic motifs.

A month seemed to her above the hut
One of her puppies.
(1915)

Golden frog moon
Spread out on the calm water.
(“I left my home…”, 1918)

Metaphor in these cases arises from shape, figure, silhouette. But the moon is not only heavenly body, but also moonlight, which evokes different moods in the lyrical hero.

Moonlight, mysterious and long
The willows are crying, the poplars are whispering.
But no one listens to the crane's cry

He will not stop loving his father's fields.
(“The feather grass is sleeping…”, 1925)

Blue fog. Snow expanse,
Subtle lemon moonlight.
("Blue Fog...", 1925)

Uncomfortable liquid lunarness
And the melancholy of endless plains...
("Uncomfortable liquid moon...", 1925)

Cosmic motifs closely coexist with religious ones.

From the blue of the invisible bush
Starry psalms flow.
(“It’s not the winds that shower the forests…”, 1914)

Quiet - quiet in the divine corner,
Kneading kutya on the floor for a month.
(“Night and the field, and the crow of roosters.”, 1917)

In this poem, “month” and “Kutia” are interconnected by ancient beliefs. In popular belief, the month is associated with the afterlife, and kutia is a dish that is prepared for the funeral of dead people. Also in the works, along with celestial phenomena, “paradise inhabitants” are also mentioned:

Oh mother of God,
Fall like a star
Off-road

Into a deaf ravine.
("Oh Mother of God...", 1917)

"Oh Virgin Mary! -
The heavens are singing.
("Octoichus", 1917)

Religious ceremonies and holidays:

With a Maundy Thursday candle
A star is burning above you.
("Silver Road", 1918)

In works on revolutionary themes, Yesenin again turns to the “universal” space, trying to understand and rethink the events taking place:

But know this
Deep sleepers:
She caught fire

Star of the East!
("The Singing Call", 1917)

The sky is like a bell
The month is a language
My mother is my homeland,
I am a Bolshevik.
("Jordan Dove", 1918)

as well as the poems "Heavenly Drummer" (1918) and "Pantocrator" (1919). Yesenin, describing the heavenly bodies, turns to folklore themes in relation to the heavenly bodies. For example, in the poem “Martha the Posadnitsa” (1914).

Not the sister of the month from the dark swamp
In pearls, she threw the kokoshnik into the sky, -
Oh, how Martha walked out of the gate...

In folklore, the “sister of the month” is the sun, which is opposed to it as the source of life, warmth and light.

Thus, having examined the lyrics of S. Yesenin, we see that the poet turns to cosmic motifs in order to comprehend some events and understand the world around him.

"WOOD MOTIF" LYRICS BY S. Yesenin

Nature is the all-encompassing, main element of the poet’s creativity. Many of S. Yesenin’s early poems are imbued with a feeling of an inextricable connection with the life of nature (“ Mother in the Bathing Suit…", "I do not regret, do not call, do not cry..."). The poet constantly turns to nature when he expresses the most intimate thoughts about himself, about his past, present and future. In his poems, she lives rich poetic life. Like a person, she is born, grows and dies, sings and whispers, is sad and rejoices.

Yesenin’s nature is anthropomorphic: birches are likened to girls, maples are like a tipsy watchman, a lyrical hero. The image of nature is built on associations from rural peasant life, and the human world is usually revealed through associations with the life of nature.

Spiritualization and humanization of nature is characteristic of folk poetry. “Ancient man had almost no knowledge of inanimate objects,” notes A. Afanasyev, “he found reason, feeling and will everywhere. In the noise of the forests, in the rustling of leaves, he heard those mysterious conversations that trees conduct among themselves.”

The central, comprehensive concept of the poetic views of the Slavs, according to A. Afanasyev, is the image of the world tree or “tree of life,” personifying world harmony, the unity of all things. Such is this image in folk poetry, such is it in Yesenin’s poetics, which is why the image of a tree is at the center of many of S. Yesenin’s poems.

From childhood, the poet absorbed this popular worldview; one might say that it formed his poetic individuality.

“Everything is from the tree - this is the religion of thought of our people... The tree is life. Wiping their faces on a canvas with a picture of a tree, our people silently say that they have not forgotten the secret of the ancient fathers of wiping themselves with leaves, that they remember themselves as the seed of a supermundane tree and, running under the cover of its branches, plunging their faces into a towel, they seem to want imprint on his cheeks at least a small branch of it, so that, like a tree, he can shed the cones of words and thoughts and stream from the branches of his hands the shadow of virtue,” wrote S. Yesenin in his poetic and philosophical treatise “The Keys of Mary.”

In ancient myths, the image of a tree had many meanings.

The tree, in particular, symbolized life and death (blooming or dry), ancient ideas about the universe (top is the sky, bottom is the underworld, the middle is the earth), the tree as a whole could be compared with a person (the head is the top going into the sky, legs are roots, feeling the strength in the earth, outstretched arms, like branches, hug the world around). So, a tree is a mythological symbol denoting the universe, the harmony of the universe.

However, for Yesenin, the likening of man to a tree is more than a “religion of thought”: he not only believed in the existence of a central connection between man and the natural world, he felt himself to be a part of this nature.

Yesenin’s “tree romance” motif, highlighted by M. Epstein, goes back to the traditional motive of assimilating man to nature. Relying on the traditional trope of “man-plant”, Yesenin creates a “woody novel”, the heroes of which are maple, birch and willow.

The humanized images of trees are overgrown with “portrait” details: the birch has “a waist, hips, breasts, legs, hairstyle, hem, braids,” and the maple has “a leg, head.”

I just want to close my hands
Over the tree hips of the willows.

Green hairstyle,
Girlish breasts,
O thin birch tree,
Why did you look into the pond?
("Green Hairstyle", 1918)

I won't be back soon, not soon!
The blizzard will sing and ring for a long time.
Guards blue Rus'
Old maple on one leg.
(“I left my home…”, 1918)

According to M. Epstein, “the birch tree, largely thanks to Yesenin, became the national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, rowan, and bird cherry.”

Of the 339 poems examined by S. Yesenin, 199 poems contain a mention of one tree or another.

Birch most often becomes the heroine of his works - 47. Next come spruce (17), maple (15), bird cherry, willow, pine (14), linden (11), poplar, aspen (10), rowan (9), willow ( 8), apple tree (7), lilac (6), broom (5), viburnum (4), oak (3), willow (3), alder and cedar (1).

The most plot-length, the most significant in Yesenin’s poetry are still birches and maples.

The birch tree in Russian folk and classical poetry is a national symbol of Russia. This is one of the most revered trees among the Slavs. In ancient pagan rituals, the birch often served as a “Maypole,” a symbol of spring.

Yesenin, when describing folk spring holidays, mentions the birch tree in the meaning of this symbol in the poems “Trinity Morning...” (1914) and “The reeds rustled over the backwater...” (1914)

Trinity morning, morning canon,
In the grove, the birch trees are ringing white.

In the poem "The reeds rustled over the backwater" we're talking about about the important and fascinating event of the Semitic-Trinity week - fortune telling on wreaths.

The beautiful girl told fortunes at seven o'clock.
A wave unraveled a wreath of dodder.

The girls wove wreaths and threw them into the river. By the wreath that floated far away, washed up on the shore, stopped or sank, they judged the fate that awaited them (distant or nearby marriage, girlhood, death of the betrothed).

Oh, a girl won’t marry in the spring,
He intimidated her with forest signs.

In the poem “Green Hairstyle” (1918), the humanization of the appearance of the birch tree in Yesenin’s work reaches full development. The birch tree becomes like a woman.

Green hairstyle,
Girlish breasts,
O thin birch tree,
Why did you look into the pond?

In poems such as “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” (1921) and “The golden grove dissuaded...” (1924), the lyrical hero reflects on his life and his youth:

I do not regret, do not call, do not cry,
Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees.
Withered in gold,
I won't be young anymore.
...And the country of birch chintz
It won't tempt you to wander around barefoot.

“Apple tree smoke” - the blossoming of trees in the spring, when everything around is reborn to new life. “Apple tree”, “apples” - in folk poetry this is a symbol of youth - “rejuvenating apples”, and “smoke” is a symbol of fragility, fleetingness, illusoryness. In combination, they mean the fleeting nature of happiness and youth. Birch, a symbol of spring, also has this meaning. “The country of birch chintz” is the “country” of childhood, the time of the most beautiful things. It’s not for nothing that Yesenin writes “to wander around barefoot,” a parallel can be drawn with the expression “barefoot childhood.”

All of us, all of us in this world are perishable,
Copper quietly pours from the maple leaves...
May you be blessed forever,
What has come to flourish and die.

Before us is a symbol of transience human life. The symbol is based on the trope: “life is the time of flowering”, withering is the approach of death. In nature, everything inevitably returns, repeats itself and blooms again. Man, unlike nature, is one-time, and his cycle, coinciding with the natural, is already unique.

The theme of the Motherland is closely intertwined with the image of the birch. Each Yesenin line is warmed by a feeling of boundless love for Russia. The strength of the poet's lyrics lies in the fact that in it the feeling of love for the Motherland is expressed not in the abstract, but concretely, in visible images, through pictures of the native landscape.

Maple, unlike other trees, it does not have such a definite, formed figurative core in Russian poetry. He did not play in folklore traditions associated with ancient pagan rituals significant role. Poetic views of him in Russian classical literature mainly developed in the 20th century and therefore have not yet acquired clear outlines.

The image of the maple is most formed in the poetry of S. Yesenin, where he appears as a kind of lyrical hero of a “tree novel”. Maple is a daring, slightly rollicking guy, with a lush head of unkempt hair, as he has a round crown, similar to a head of hair or a hat. Hence the motive of likening, the primary similarity from which the image of the lyrical hero developed.

Because that old maple
The head looks like me.
(“I left my home…”, 1918)

In the poem “Son of a Bitch” (1924), the lyrical hero is sad about his lost youth, which “has faded away”

Like a maple tree rotting under the windows.

In folk poetry, a rotten or dried tree is a symbol of grief, the loss of something dear that cannot be returned.

The hero remembers his youthful love. The symbol of love here is the viburnum, with its “bitter” semantics; it is also combined with the “yellow pond”. In popular superstitions, the color yellow is a symbol of separation and grief. Therefore, we can say that parting with the girl he loved was already destined by fate itself.

In the ethnological legends of the Slavs, maple or sycamore is a tree into which a person is turned ("sworn"). S. Yesenin also anthropomorphizes the maple tree; it appears as a person with all his inherent mental states and periods of life. In the poem “You are my fallen maple...” (1925), the lyrical hero is like a maple with his daring, he draws a parallel between himself and the maple:

And, like a drunken watchman, going out onto the road,
He drowned in a snowdrift and froze his leg.
Oh, and I myself have become somewhat unstable these days,
I won’t make it home from a friendly drinking party.

It’s not even always clear who this poem is talking about - a person or a tree.

There I met a willow, there I noticed a pine tree,
I sang songs to them during the snowstorm about summer.
I seemed to myself to be the same maple...

Resembling a maple with its “carefree-curly head”, poplar at the same time aristocratically “slim and straight.” This harmony, upward striving is distinctive feature poplars, right up to the poetry of our days.

In the poem “Village” (1914), S. Yesenin compares poplar leaves with silk:

In silk poplar leaves.

This comparison was made possible by the fact that poplar leaves have a double structure: on the outside the leaves are shiny green, as if polished, on the inside they are matte silver. Silk fabric also has a double color: the right side is shiny and smooth, and the left side is matte and expressionless. When silk shimmers, the shades of color can change, just as the leaves of poplar shimmer in the wind with a greenish-silver color.

Poplars grow along roads and are therefore sometimes associated with barefoot wanderers. This theme of wandering is reflected in the poem “Without a hat, with a bast knapsack...” (1916).

In Yesenin’s works, poplars are also a sign of the Motherland, like birch.

Saying goodbye to home, leaving for foreign lands, the hero is sad that

They will no longer be winged leaves
I need the poplars to ring.
(“Yes! Now it’s decided...”, 1922)

Yiwu called "crying". The image of the willow tree is more unambiguous and has the semantics of melancholy.

In Russian folk poetry, the willow is a symbol not only of love, but also of any separation, the grief of mothers parting with their sons.

In the poetry of S. Yesenin, the image of the willow is traditionally associated with sadness, loneliness, and separation. This sadness for past youth, for the loss of a loved one, for parting with one’s homeland.

For example, in the poem “Night and the Field, and the Cry of Roosters...” (1917)

“The dilapidated hem of the willows” is the past, the old time, something that is very dear, but something that will never return. The destroyed, distorted life of the people, the country.

The same poem also mentions aspen. It emphasizes bitterness and loneliness, since in folk poetry it is always a symbol of sadness.

In other poems, the willow, like the birch, is a heroine, a girl.

And they call to the rosary
Willows are meek nuns.
("Beloved Land...", 1914)

I just want to close my hands
Over the tree hips of the willows.
(“I’m wandering through the first snow…”, 1917)

Lyrical hero, remembering his youth, sad about it, also turns to the image of a willow.

And he knocked on my window
September with a crimson willow branch,
So that I am ready and meet
His arrival is unpretentious.
(“Let you be drunk by others...”, 1923)

September is autumn, and the autumn of life is the imminent arrival of winter - old age. The hero meets this “age of autumn” calmly, although with a little sadness about “mischievous and rebellious courage,” because by this time he has acquired life experience and looks at the world around him from the height of his past years.

Everything that makes a tree stand out among other forms of vegetation (strength of the trunk, powerful crown) sets it apart oak among other trees, making him, as it were, the king of the tree kingdom. He personifies highest degree firmness, courage, strength, greatness.

Tall, mighty, blooming - these are the characteristic epithets of the oak, which poets use as an image of vital power.

In the poetry of S. Yesenin, the oak is not such a constant hero as the birch and maple. The oak is mentioned in only three poems ("The Heroic Whistle", 1914; "Oktoich" 1917; "Unspeakable, blue, tender..." 1925)

The poem "Octoechos" mentions the Mauritius oak. Yesenin subsequently explained the meaning of this image in his treatise “The Keys of Mary” (1918) “... that symbolic tree that means “family” is not at all important that in Judea this tree bore the name of the Mauritius oak...”

Under the Mauritian oak
My red-haired grandfather is sitting...

The introduction of the image of the Mauritius oak into this poem is not accidental, since it talks about the homeland:

O homeland, happy
And it’s an unstoppable hour!

about relatives -

"my red-haired grandfather."

In the poem “The Heroic Whistle,” Yesenin introduces the image of an oak tree to show the power and strength of Russia and its people. This work can be put on a par with Russian epics about heroes. Ilya Muromets and other heroes, jokingly, playfully felled oak trees. In this poem the man also “whistles”, and from his whistle

the hundred-year-old oaks trembled,
The leaves on the oak trees are falling from the whistling sound.

Coniferous trees convey a different mood and carry a different meaning than deciduous ones: not joy and sadness, not various emotional outbursts, but rather mysterious silence, numbness, self-absorption.

Pines and spruce trees are part of a gloomy, harsh landscape; wilderness, darkness, and silence reign around them. Permanent greenery evokes associations of coniferous trees with eternal peace, deep sleep, over which time and the cycle of nature have no power.

These trees are mentioned in poems from 1914 such as" It is not the winds that shower the forests..." , " Thawed clay dries" , " I smell God's rainbow..." , "Us", "A cloud tied lace in the grove" (1915).

In Yesenin's poem" Porosha" (1914) the main character, the pine tree, appears as an “old woman”:

Like a white scarf
The pine tree has tied up.
Bent over like an old lady
Leaned on a stick...

The forest where the heroine lives is fabulous, magical, also alive, just like her.

Bewitched by the invisible
The forest slumbers under the fairy tale of sleep...

We meet another fairy-tale, magical forest in the poem" Witch" (1915). But this forest is no longer bright and joyful, but rather formidable (“The grove threatens with spruce peaks”), gloomy, harsh.

The dark night is silently afraid,
The moon is covered with shawls of clouds.
The wind is a singer with a howl of whoops...

Having examined the poems where images of trees are found, we see that S. Yesenin’s poems are imbued with a feeling of an inextricable connection with the life of nature. It is inseparable from a person, from his thoughts and feelings. The image of a tree in Yesenin’s poetry appears in the same meaning as in folk poetry. The author's motif of the "tree novel" goes back to the traditional motif of likening man to nature and is based on the traditional trope of "man- plant".

Drawing nature, the poet introduces into the story a description of human life, holidays that are in one way or another connected with animals and flora. Yesenin seems to intertwine these two worlds, creating one harmonious and interpenetrating world. He often resorts to personification. Nature- This is not a frozen landscape background: it reacts passionately to the fate of people, the events of history. She is the poet's favorite hero.

IMAGES OF ANIMALS IN S. YESENIN'S LYRICS

Images of animals in literature- it is a kind of mirror of humanistic self-consciousness. Just as the self-determination of a person is impossible outside of his relationship to another person, so the self-determination of the entire human race cannot be accomplished outside of its relationship to the animal kingdom."

The cult of animals has existed for a very long time. In a distant era, when the main occupation of the Slavs was hunting, and not agriculture, they believed that wild animals and humans had common ancestors. Each tribe had its own totem, that is, a sacred animal that the tribe worshiped, believing that it was their blood relative.

In the literature of different times, images of animals have always been present. They served as material for the emergence of Aesopian language in fairy tales about animals, and later in fables. In the literature of “modern times,” in epic and lyric poetry, animals acquire equal rights with humans, becoming the object or subject of the narrative. Often a person is “tested for humanity” by his attitude towards an animal.

The poetry of the 19th century is dominated by images of domestic and farm animals tamed by man, sharing his life and work. After Pushkin, the everyday genre becomes predominant in animalistic poetry. All living things are placed within the framework of household equipment or a household yard (Pushkin, Nekrasov, Fet). In the poetry of the 20th century, images of wild animals became widespread (Bunin, Gumilyov, Mayakovsky). The reverence for the beast has disappeared. But the “new peasant poets” reintroduce the motif of “brotherhood of man and animal.” Pets dominate their poetic work- cow, horse, dog, cat. Relationships reveal features of a family structure.

Sergei Yesenin’s poetry also contains the motif of “blood relationship” with the animal world; he calls them “lesser brothers.”

I'm happy that I kissed women,
Crushed flowers, lying on the grass
And animals, like our smaller brothers

Never hit me on the head.
(“We are now leaving little by little,” 1924)

Along with domestic animals, we find images of representatives of wild nature. Of the 339 poems examined, 123 mention animals, birds, insects, and fish.

Horse (13), cow (8), raven, dog, nightingale (6), calves, cat, dove, crane (5), sheep, mare, dog (4), foal, swan, rooster, owl (3), sparrow, wolf, capercaillie, cuckoo, horse, frog, fox, mouse, tit (2), stork, ram, butterfly, camel, rook, goose, gorilla, toad, snake, oriole, sandpiper, chickens, corncrake, donkey, parrot , magpies, catfish, pig, cockroaches, lapwing, bumblebee, pike, lamb (1).

S. Yesenin most often turns to the image of a horse or cow. He introduces these animals into the story of peasant life as an integral part of the life of a Russian peasant. Since ancient times, a horse, a cow, a dog and a cat have accompanied a person in his hard work, sharing both joys and troubles with him.

The horse was an assistant when working in the field, in transporting goods, and in military combat. The dog brought prey and guarded the house. The cow was the waterer and wet nurse in a peasant family, and the cat caught mice and simply personified home comfort.

The image of a horse, as an integral part of everyday life, is found in the poems “The Herd” (1915), “Farewell, dear Pushcha...” (1916), “This sadness cannot be scattered now...” (1924). Pictures of village life change in connection with events taking place in the country. And if in the first poem we see "in the hills green herds of horses", then in subsequent ones:

A mowed hut,
The cry of a sheep, and in the distance in the wind
The little horse wags his skinny tail,
Looking into the unkind pond.
(“This sadness cannot now be scattered…”, 1924)

The village fell into decay and the proud and majestic horse “turned” into a “little horse,” which personifies the plight of the peasantry in those years.

The innovation and originality of S. Yesenin the poet was manifested in the fact that when drawing or mentioning animals in everyday space (field, river, village, yard, house, etc.), he is not an animalist, that is, he does not set the goal of recreating the image of one or another animal. Animals, being part of everyday space and environment, appear in his poetry as a source and means of artistic-philosophical understanding of the surrounding world, allow us to reveal the content of a person’s spiritual life.

In the poem "Cow" (1915) S. Yesenin uses the principle of anthropomorphism, endowing the animal with human thoughts and feelings. The author describes a specific everyday and life situation- old age of the animal

decrepit, teeth have fallen out,
scroll of years on the horns...

and his further fate, "soon... they will tie a noose around her neck // and will be taken to slaughter", he identifies the old animal and the old man

Thinks a sad thought...

If we turn to those works in which the image of a dog is found, then, for example, in the poem “Song of the Dog” (1915). “Song” (an emphatically “high” genre) is a kind of hymnography, made possible due to the fact that the subject of “chanting” is the sacred feeling of motherhood, characteristic of a dog to the same extent as a woman-mother. The animal is worried about the death of its cubs, which the “gloomy owner” drowned in an ice hole.

Introducing the image of a dog into poems, the poet writes about the long-standing friendship of this animal with man. The lyrical hero of S. Yesenin is also a peasant by birth, and in childhood and youth- villager. Loving his fellow villagers, he at the same time is completely different from them in his inner essence. In relation to animals this manifests itself most clearly. His affection and love for his “sisters-bitches” and “brothers-males”- these are feelings for equals. That's why the dog "was my youth Friend".

The poem “Son of a Bitch” reflects the tragedy of the consciousness of the lyrical hero, which arises because in the world of wildlife and animals everything looks unchanged:

That dog died a long time ago,
But in the same suit that has a blue tint,
With a maddened bark
Her young son shot me.

It seems that the “son” genetically received from his mother the love for the lyrical hero. However, the lyrical hero next to this dog especially acutely feels how he has changed externally and internally. For him, returning to his younger self is possible only at the level of feeling and for a moment.

With this pain I feel younger
And at least write notes again.

At the same time, the irrevocability of what has passed is realized.

Another animal that has been “accompanying” a person through life for a very long time,- It's a cat. It embodies home comfort, a warm hearth.

An old cat sneaks up to the makhotka
For fresh milk.
("In the Hut", 1914)

In this poem we also meet other representatives of the animal world, which are also an invariable “attribute” of the peasant hut. These are cockroaches, chickens, roosters.

Having examined the everyday meanings of animal images, we move on to their symbolic meanings. The symbols with which animals are endowed are very widespread in folklore and classical poetry. Each poet has his own symbolism, but basically they all rely on the folk basis of one or another image. Yesenin also uses folk beliefs about animals, but at the same time, many images of animals are reinterpreted by him and receive new significance. Let's return to the image of the horse.

Horse - in Slavic mythology one of the sacred animals, an attribute of the gods, but at the same time a chthonic creature associated with fertility and death, the afterlife, a guide to the “other world”. The horse was endowed with the ability to foretell fate, especially death. A. N. Afanasyev explains the meaning of the horse in the mythology of the ancient Slavs: “As the personification of gusty winds, storms and flying clouds, fairy-tale horses are endowed with wings, which makes them similar to mythological birds... fiery, fire-breathing... the horse serves as a poetic image of either the radiant sun or a cloud shining with lightning..."

In the poem "Dove" (1916), the horse appears in the image of "quiet fate." There are no signs of change and the lyrical hero lives a quiet, measured life, with his everyday worries day after day, just as his ancestors lived.

The day will go out, flashing like a shock of gold,
And in a box of years the work will settle down.

But the revolutionary events of 1917 take place in the history of the country, and the hero’s soul becomes worried about the fate of Russia, his land. He understands that now a lot will change in his life. The lyrical hero recalls with sadness his strong, established way of life, which is now disrupted.

...My horse was taken away...
My horse - my strength and strength.

He knows that now his future depends on the future of his homeland, he tries to escape from the events that are happening

...he beats, rushes,
Pulling a tight lasso...
(“Open to me the guard above the clouds”, 1918)

but he fails to do this, he can only submit to fate. In this work we observe a poetic parallelism between the “behavior” of the horse and his fate and the mental state of the lyrical hero in a “storm-ravaged life.”

In the 1920 poem "Sorokoust" Yesenin introduces the image of a horse as a symbol of the old patriarchal village, which has not yet realized the transition to a new life. The image of this “past,” which is trying with all its might to fight change, is a foal, which appears as part of a generally symbolic situation of “competition” between the “cast-iron horse-train” and the “red-maned colt.”

"Rided on a pink horse"- a symbol of quickly departed, irrevocable youth. Thanks to additional color symbolism, it appears as a “pink horse”- symbol of sunrise, spring, joy of life. But even a real peasant horse at dawn turns pink in the rays of the rising sun. The essence of this poem- a song of gratitude, blessings to all living things. The horse has the same meaning in the poem “Oh, you sleigh...” (1924)

Everything is over. My hair has thinned.
The horse died. That dog died a long time ago,
But in the same color that has a blue tint...
I was met by her young son.

If we turn to other representatives of the animal world, for example, crows, we will see that in Yesenin they have the same symbolism as in folk poetry.

The black crows cawed:
There is wide scope for terrible troubles.
("Rus", 1914)

In this poem, the raven is the harbinger of impending disaster, namely the 1914 war. The poet introduces the image of this bird not only as a folk symbol of misfortune, but also in order to show his negative attitude towards current events and worries about the fate of the Motherland.

Many poets use various types of word transfer to create images, including metaphor. In poetry, metaphor is used primarily in its secondary function, introducing attributive and evaluative meanings into nominal positions. Poetic speech is characterized by a binary metaphor (metaphor-comparison). Thanks to the image, metaphor connects language and myth with a corresponding way of thinking- mythological. Poets create their own epithets, metaphors, comparisons and images. Metaphorization of images- these are traits artistic style poet. S. Yesenin also turns to the help of metaphors in his poems. He creates them according to folklore principles: he takes material for the image from the rural world and from the natural world and seeks to characterize one noun with another.

Here, for example, is the image of the moon:

"The moon, like a yellow bear, tosses and turns in the wet grass."

Yesenin’s nature motif is complemented in a unique way by images of animals. Most often, the names of animals are given in comparisons in which objects and phenomena are compared with animals, often not actually related to them, but united by some associative feature that serves as the basis for its isolation. ( “Like skeletons of skinny cranes, // Plucked willows stand...”; "Blue twilight, like a flock of sheep...").

By color similarity: Sometimes the poet also uses a form of parallelism, characteristic of Russian folk poetry - songs, including negative:

The red color of autumn leaves evokes an association with the “red mare”. But autumn is not only a “red mare” (similarity in color), it “scratches its mane”: the image is revealed through comparison with an animal visibly, in colors, sounds, movements. The tread of autumn is compared to the tread of a horse.

Comparisons of natural phenomena with animals arise: month- "curly lamb", "foal", "golden frog", spring- "squirrel", clouds- "wolves." Objects, for example, a mill, are equated to animals and birds- "log bird", bake- "brick camel". Based on complex associative comparisons, natural phenomena acquire organs characteristic of animals and birds (paws, muzzles, snouts, claws, beaks):

Cleans the month in the thatched roof
Blue-rimmed horns.
(“The red wings of sunset are fading,” 1916)

Waves of white claws
Golden sand scraped.
("Heavenly Drummer", 1918)

Maple and linden in the windows of the rooms
Throwing away the branches with my paws,
They are looking for those they remember.
(“Darling, let’s sit next to each other,” 1923)

The colors of animals also acquire purely symbolic meaning: “red horse”- symbol of the revolution, "pink horse"- image of youth, "black horse"- the harbinger of death.

Imaginative embodiment, clear metaphor, sensitive perception of folklore are the basis of Sergei Yesenin’s artistic research. The metaphorical use of animalistic vocabulary in original comparisons creates the originality of the poet’s style.

Having examined the images of animals in the poetry of S. Yesenin, we can conclude that the poet solves the problem of using animals in his works in different ways.

In one case, he turns to them in order to show with their help some historical events, personal emotional experiences. In others- in order to more accurately and deeply convey the beauty of nature and the native land.

CONCLUSION

To summarize, it should be noted that S. Yesenin’s mythopoetic picture of the world is reflected, first of all, in the cosmism of consciousness. The lyrical hero is constantly turned to the sky, he sees and notes the components of celestial space: the sun, stars, moon-month, dawn.

As in the detail picture outer space, and when recreating earthly realities, S. Yesenin’s poetry goes back to the mythopoetic archetype of the world tree, personifying world harmony. Yesenin's "wood romance" motif- the result of totemistic ideas, which are particularly manifested in the likening of a tree to a person. Drawing numerous trees, the poet does not confine himself to anthropomorphic personifications, but also carries out the reverse process: his lyrical hero feels like a maple, he is withering "bush of hair golden", maple tree at the porch of his native house "He's similar in head."

Totemism is also manifested in animalistic motifs, which occupy a significant place in Yesenin’s poetry. The poet in the literal sense is not an animalist, that is, he does not set a goal to recreate the image of this or that animal. Some of them become a motive, that is, they periodically arise in certain situations, acquiring something new, additional in detail and meaning. So, for example, we can say that the image of a horse, one of the most mythologized animals, has a mythological meaning. In Slavic mythology, the horse was endowed with the ability to foretell fate. He appears in Yesenin's poetry in the form "quiet fate", symbol of the old patriarchal village ("red-maned foal"), "pink horse" - symbol of youth.

Raven in the works of S. Yesenin has the same meaning as in folk poetry. In a poem "Rus"(1914) he is a harbinger of misfortune.

Many animals, for example, a dog, in Yesenin acquire a different meaning than they have in folklore. In mythology, a dog is a guide to the next world, an assistant to the devil, and guards the entrance to the afterlife. In Yesenin's lyrics there is a dog- "friend of youth".

The poet, when drawing animals, most often turns to the principle of anthropomorphism, that is, he endows them with human qualities ("Cow", "Song of the Dog".). But not limiting himself to this, he also makes a reverse comparison, that is, he gives a person the features of an animal. ("I was like a horse driven into soap...").

Totemistic ideas are not widely developed by him, although they also occur. Particularly in the poem "We Now we’re leaving little by little.”(1924) there is a motif of “blood relationship” with the animal world, he calls "beast" "lesser brothers".

The mythological use of animalistic vocabulary in original comparisons creates the originality of the poet’s style. Most often, the names of animals are given in comparisons in which objects and phenomena are compared with them, often not actually related to them, but united by some associative feature that serves as the basis for its identification ("Across the pond as a swan" red // A quiet sunset floats...", "Autumn - chestnut mare - scratching his mane...".

Having examined the temporal characteristics of the model of the world in Yesenin’s works, one can see that his lyrics reflect a worldview formed on the basis of folk mythological ideas about the world, which were enshrined in peasant agricultural and calendar rituals and holidays. As a result, time, reflecting the annual circle, appears as cyclical and is indicated by an indication of a series of holidays and the change of seasons or time of day.

Turning to the spatial characteristics of S. Yesenin’s picture of the world, we can say that when describing space, the author also relies on the rich experience of folk and classical poetry. Space appears in his “mosaic form,” that is, it gradually expands from one poem to another and generally creates a picture of the author’s worldview.

Having traced the movement of the lyrical hero in this space, we can say that the path of Yesenin’s lyrical hero in its structure resembles the path of the hero in the plot fairy tale: a peasant son leaves home on a journey in order to get something or return something lost and achieves this goal. Yesenin's hero, leaving the friendly space of his home in search of the poet's glory, finally reaches the city he has long dreamed of getting to. The "conquest" of a city is analogous to hostile space in fairy tales. The “conquest” of this space was interpreted as the assertion of oneself as a poet:

They say I will soon become a famous Russian poet.

Creative affirmation has taken place, and as a result, a perception of the city arises as a space added to its own, friendly.

It is interesting to note that the comprehension of political and social realities is accomplished through a system of spatial archetypes. So, after the October Revolution, during civil war the city that the hero loved ("I love this elm city..."), gradually receives a negative characterization. First, its space narrows to a tavern ("The noise and din in this terrible lair..."), the environment is seen as "rabble", with whom the hero is in conflict ("If before they hit me in the face, now the soul is all in blood..."). The space of the city thus acquires the features of an anti-home; it is hostile towards the lyrical hero, and their hostility is mutual.

Subsequently, the lyrical hero’s attention focuses on the opposition “city- village". The space of the city is perceived as hostile not only to the hero, but also to his native "space", his beloved home and region. The city is actively hostile towards the village, in contrast to the fairy-tale "Thirtieth Kingdom", as a rapist and destroyer (“pulling fingers to…the plains”, “the stone hands of the highway squeezed the neck of the village”).

When the lyrical hero returns to his home, he is gone, he is destroyed, like the entire material and spiritual structure of rural Russia: in the space of the hut there are no icons, their "my sisters threw me out yesterday", but a book appeared - “Capital” by Marx, replacing the Bible. Even the musical culture has been destroyed: Komsomol members sing "Poor Demyan's propaganda."

We see that, unlike the end of the fairy tale, Yesenin’s returning hero does not find the friendly space that was at the beginning of the journey. Space is not being restored, and chaos reigns everywhere.

LIST OF REFERENCES USED.

1.
2. Literary encyclopedic dictionary. / Ed. M. V. Kozhevnikov and P. A. Nikolaev. M., 1987.
3. Literature and art: Universal encyclopedia for schoolchildren./ Comp. A. A. Vorotnikov. Minsk, 1995.
4. Myths of the peoples of the world. Encyclopedia in 2 volumes. M., 1987.
5. Rudnev V.P. Dictionary of culture of the 20th century. M., 1997.
6. Dictionary of literary terms. /Ed. L. I. Timofeeva and M. P. Vengrova. M., 1963.
7. Soviet encyclopedic dictionary / Ch. ed. A. M. Prokhorov. M., 1987.
8. Dictionary of Russian literature. / Ed. M. G. Urtmintseva. N. Novgorod, 1997.
9. Slavic mythology. encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1995.

MAIN MOTIVES OF S. A. ESENINA’S LYRICS

The beginning of the 20th century in Russian literature was marked by the emergence of a whole galaxy of various movements, trends, and poetic schools. The most outstanding movements that left a significant mark in the history of literature were symbolism (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, A. Bely), acmeism (A. Akhmatova, N. Gumilyov, O. Mandelstam), futurism (I. Severyanin, V. Mayakovsky , D. Burliuk), imagism (Kusikov, Shershenevich, Mariengof). The work of these poets is rightly called lyrics Silver Age, that is, the second most important period of the heyday of Russian poetry. However, along with the above authors, the history of art of that time included others who did not belong to any particular school, original and bright poets, and first of all, Sergei Yesenin, whose work stands apart in the motley and diverse world of poetry at the beginning of the century.

The complex and interesting fate of the poet, many travels, changes in places and lifestyles, combined with a creative approach to understanding reality, determined the richness and variety of themes and motifs in Yesenin’s lyrics. His childhood and youth were spent in the village of Konstantinov, on the banks of the Oka, in a peasant family; main theme early lyrics Yesenin naturally becomes a description of nature, native paintings, landscapes imbued with warmth, loved ones from childhood, acquaintances, loved ones. At the same time, the poet personifies many natural phenomena, sees in them a living, intelligent principle, and attributes animal qualities to plants:

Where the cabbage beds are
The sunrise pours red water,
Little maple baby to the uterus
The green udder sucks.

Such imagery, the brightness of metaphors and comparisons will be characteristic of Yesenin’s subsequent work, but in the early lyrics it has a fresh, joyful, innovative character, which gives the poems a special touching and expressiveness. For the poet, native nature is an eternal source of admiration and inspiration; the description of the simplest and most everyday scenes in his perception becomes magical, fabulous, alluring (“Birch”, “Powder”). Just as touching as he treats landscapes in general, Yesenin treats each specific element of his native life, be it a tree branch looking through the window, household utensils or even an animal: many of Yesenin’s poems are dedicated specifically to animals (“Cow”, “Fox”, “Bitch” son"). The poet’s youthful perception of life is bright, joyful; in the early poems the theme of love also appears (“The scarlet color of dawn was woven on the lake...”), perceived with the same cheerfulness and freshness. Love for Yesenin in this period is some kind of romantic, fragile state of mind, his beloved is not a girl, but a vision, a symbol: the lyrical hero describes mainly not her, but his feelings and experiences, and in a youthfully romantic and touching way:

With a sheaf of your oat hair
You belong to me forever.

It is characteristic that love and nature in Yesenin’s early lyrics are interconnected and inseparable. All the variety of motives for describing nature (landscape sketches, poems about animals, everyday scenes) develop into one, global theme that is important for understanding all of Yesenin’s lyrics - the theme of the Motherland; One of the first in the poet’s understanding of it was the poem “Go, my dear Rus'!” The poet confesses his love to his Motherland and actually puts it above paradise, above heavenly life:

If the holy army shouts:
“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”
I will say: “There is no need for heaven,
Give me my homeland."

Religious and Christian motifs appear in the poem, mainly associated with church paraphernalia. (“The huts are in the robes of the image”, “Your meek Savior smells of apple and honey in the churches.”) The poet imagines Rus' as only Christian, this motif is developed in the poem “The hewn horns began to sing” (1916):

And on the limestone bell towers
The hand involuntarily crosses itself.

In the same poem, the poet uses characteristic color painting:

About Rus' - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river...

When describing his native village, Yesenin usually uses blue, blue, green colors (the poet himself said: “...Russia! Dew and strength and something blue...”).

Moving to Moscow, a scandalous life, somewhat feigned behavior, shocking determined the divergence and duality of Yesenin’s themes: on the one hand, it was the shocking lyrics (“I’m deliberately walking unkempt...”), on the other, memories of his native village, life in it as about the brightest period. The theme of the Motherland is developed in the poems “Letter to Mother”, “Soviet Rus'”, “Leaving Rus'”, “Return to the Motherland”. The poet perceives the revolutionary transformations that took place in the village with a degree of tragedy; after all, bygone times are irrevocable, and so is a bright, carefree life; Yesenin feels the loss of connection with his native land, where now “Poor Demyan’s agitations are sung”:

The language of my fellow citizens has become like a foreign language to me,

The people do not perceive Yesenin as a poet, but Yesenin calls himself “the last poet of the village.” The author enhances the feeling of tragedy with direct comparisons emphasizing the change in ideals:

Sunday villagers
They gathered at the volost, as if they were going to church...

(“Soviet Rus'”)

And now my sister is cheatingHaving opened the pot-bellied “Capital” like the Bible...

("Homecoming")

The motive of poetic creativity appears, its meaning, and acquires the same tragic sound:

My poetry is no longer needed here.
And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either.

The theme of the poet and poetry here is closely related to the theme of the Motherland: Yesenin perceives his work as a possible means of spiritual connection with the people. Changes in the village transformed both it and the people, making it different from the native land close to the poet, but the memory of his youth and Russia of those years remains bright and pure in Yesenin’s memory. In “Persian Motifs”, in the poem “You are my Shagane, Shagane...” Yesenin writes:

Because I'm from the north, or something,
That the moon is a hundred times bigger there,
No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,
But no better than the Ryazan expanses.

The theme of the Motherland is again connected with the theme of love and develops almost in parallel. The lyrics of the Moscow period and the last years of the poet’s life mainly describe unhappy love, doomed to separation. (“I remember, my love, I remember...”, “Letter to a Woman.”) A riotous, scandalous life cannot be combined with sincere love; In a number of poems, Yesenin writes about renouncing a crazy lifestyle in the name of love:

For the first time I sang about love,
For the first time I refuse to make a scandal.

(“A blue fire began to sweep...”)

I never lie with my heart,And therefore to the voice of swagger
I can confidently say
That I say goodbye to hooliganism.

(“Let you be drunk by others...”)

But still, hooligan bravado turns out to be stronger than feelings, the motive of separation appears (“Son of a Bitch”, “Letter to a Woman”). Both the lyrical hero and his beloved suffer from separation, but their lives turn out to be separated by the storm of life, the “fate of events.” And yet, in some poems there is an aching tenderness, touching; in the poem “To Kachalov’s Dog,” the poet writes (addressing the dog):

She will come, I give you my guarantee.
And without me, in her staring gaze,
For me, lick her hand gently
For everything I was and wasn’t guilty of.

The poet's last poems are again tragic, they contain the motif of unrequited, unhappy, unrequited love.

Love is one of the necessary conditions for human happiness, and a person’s understanding of the essence of happiness usually changes with age, as does the understanding of love. If in his early poems Yesenin describes happiness as the state of the soul of a person who sees his home, his beloved girl and mother:

This is stupid happiness
With white windows to the garden!
Along the pond as a red swan
A quiet sunset floats.

(1918)

...my quiet joy - Loving everything, wishing for nothing.

(At the same time.)

However, over time, the poet comes to a deeper, philosophical understanding of the essence of happiness and the meaning of human life. Appear in the lyrics philosophical motives. Poems recent years reflect Yesenin’s thoughts about his life (probably the poet had a presentiment of his end): he does not regret the past times, accepts with philosophical calm and wisdom the fact that “We are all, all of us in this world are perishable.” Yesenin’s true masterpieces are the poems “The golden grove dissuaded...” and “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” Their meaning and main ideas are similar:

The golden grove dissuaded
Birch, cheerful language...

Withered in gold,
I won't be young anymore.

The similarity even appears in the images; the poet feels that youth is irretrievably gone, there is no way to the past, and every person will someday leave this world, as he once came into it. Yesenin again conveys this harmonious, calm perception of life through images of nature, symbolic ones at that: “the grove” is the hero’s whole life, his fate; youth is always associated with blue or lilac flowers (“lilac blossoms of the soul”), old age with rowan brushes, and all life is conveyed through figurative comparison:

As if I were a booming early spring
He rode on a pink horse.

And the last, dying poem of the poet also belongs to philosophical lyrics; it, as it were, completes, puts an end to the end of a short but stormy creative path:

Dying is nothing new in this life,
But life, of course, is not newer.

(“Goodbye, my friend, goodbye”)

Indeed, Yesenin did not live long, but very bright life, in many ways tragic; The poets who worked after the revolution faced difficult trials, first of all, the oppressive problem of choice, which was very difficult for many to solve. And Yesenin, who called himself “the last poet of the village,” found it extremely difficult to continue creating under conditions of censorship, surveillance, and mistrust. But even for this short term the poet managed to understand, comprehend and express so much in poetic form that the literary legacy left by him, multifaceted, combining many motifs, images, themes, ideas, remains a monument to the talent of the Russian peasant poet, “the last poet of the village,” Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenina.

LYRICAL HERO OF S. A. ESENINA

The decade and a half that S. Yesenin worked was one of the most difficult and unpredictable eras in Russian history. The turbulent events that took place in the country affected the life of every person, and especially strongly on the fate of geniuses endowed with hypersensitivity. Along with the change in the environment, Yesenin’s worldview changed. All this was reflected in the poet’s lyrics, and therefore influenced the image of the lyrical hero, who went through a difficult path of evolution.

Young Yesenin professed Christian morality, but Christ for him is not God, but, above all, an ideal person. Jesus, like many saints, can be found walking along with “kalikas” and “mantises” along the roads of holy Peasant Rus', depicted in the poet’s poems. The lyrical hero of early Yesenin is unusually harmonious. He is a wanderer, a “wandering pilgrim” (“Go you, Rus', my dear...”), going to “Skufiye as a humble monk” (“I will go to Skufia as a humble monk...”). His shrines are in the Russian land itself: “I pray at the red dawns, I take communion by the stream” (“I am a shepherd; my chambers...”); his temple was created by Russian nature: “At the farewell mass of the birch trees censing with leaves” (“I am the last poet of the village...”); one of his main feelings is love for his homeland:

But not to love you, not to believe
I can't learn.

(“The hewn horns began to sing...")

Already during these years Yesenin writes:

I came to this earth
To leave her quickly.

(“Beloved land! My heart dreams...”)

The awareness of the frailty of all things also reveals the harmony of the lyrical hero, who is completely reconciled with the natural cycle of life.

But in 1915, the image of a sinner and a fighter against God bursts into this calm world:

Don't look for me in God.
Don't call me to love and live...
I'll go down that road
I'll lay my head down

(“Our faith has not been extinguished..”)

This theme develops in early lyrics (“The Robber”, 1917) and throughout Yesenin’s work.

The only period of open opposition of the lyrical hero to God occurred during the 1917 revolution. In 1918, Yesenin wrote a cycle of ten short poems. In the most famous of them, “Inonia,” the lyrical hero proclaims himself a prophet and describes “another country,” “where the deity of the living lives.” He exclaims, renouncing Christianity: “The body, the body of Christ, I spit out of my mouth.” But soon Yesenin, and with him his lyrical hero, returns to traditional peasant philosophy, imbued, according to the poet, with the idea of ​​​​the connection between man and the cosmos. The moon is directly involved in the fate of the hero:

And the moon clock is wooden
They will wheeze my twelfth hour.

(“I am the last poet of the village...”)

The same poem conveys the idea that peasant culture is dying resignedly, Russia the temple is perishing. The lyrical hero realizes the inevitability of what is happening in his homeland. The path from youth to “fading” is also logical and natural. In the poem “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” the idea of ​​the frailty of life is developed: “...Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees,” the lyrical hero is reconciled with the existing order and is grateful for the fact that “I had to flourish and die." The enormous emotional tension of this poem is achieved through the use of appeals (“heart”, “vagrant spirit”), lexical repetitions(“less often, less often”, “all of us, all of us”), inversions (“Fades covered in gold...”), questions (“My life? Or did I dream about you?”), unique color painting (white, gold, pink ). The unexpected, vivid images of the poem made it one of the most famous in Yesenin’s work.

Bitterness over the disappearance of Peasant Rus' leads the poet to a tragic feeling of his loneliness, uselessness in his new life. The lyrical hero hides his tender, vulnerable soul under the mask of outrageousness. Most clearly, the duality of the hero, the poet’s relationship with the outside world, aggravated to the limit, was reflected in the cycle “Moscow Tavern”. In “Confession of a Hooligan,” behind the feigned bravado (“I purposely walk unkempt, with my head like a kerosene lamp on my shoulders.”), one senses loyalty to the true values ​​(“I love my homeland. I love my homeland very much!”) of the character created by the lyricist.

The only way to achieve harmony is pure love(cycle “Love of a Hooligan”: “For the first time I sang about love, For the first time I refuse to make a scandal”) and memories of my native village and the world of maternal care, contrasted with sinful life in the city (“Letter to a Mother”). Sometimes animals become the closest people to the lyrical hero:

I have no friendship among people...
It's on everyone's neck here
I'm ready to give away my best tie.

(“I will not deceive myself...”)

The same idea is heard in the poem “Kachalov’s Dog,” where the poet confides his most secret thoughts to Jim, and not to his owner or guests.

The author makes an active attempt to overcome the ideological crisis during the creation of the “Persian Motifs” cycle. The lyrical hero strives to find peace of mind in love for a beautiful Persian woman. He manages to forget his loneliness for a while in poems such as “You said that Saadi...”, which focus solely on “sweet Shagane.” But most of the works are imbued with nostalgia. In “You are my Shagane, Shagane!..” the author cannot help but think “about the wavy rye under the moon”, about the “Ryazan expanse”. Even Shagane herself is not able to outshine the northern girl.

The brief period of relative harmony during the southern trip ends. The feeling of loneliness and uselessness returns new Russia. In “Soviet Rus'” the lyrical hero exclaims: “...In my own country I am like a foreigner.” The only thing close to him is nature, which, like the poet, does not accept innovation: “the maples wrinkle” when the Red Army soldier tells his story. Here the duality of the lyrical hero is again manifested, who is ready to give “his whole soul to October and May” for freedom of creativity (“... I will not give up my dear lyre”). This is a continuation of a newly expressed struggle with his second self, which ended with the victory of the lyrical hero over the dark side of the soul in the poem “The Black Man” of 1925.

Before this victory, Yesenin made an attempt to take new system values. In the poem “Letter to a Woman,” he proclaims “praise and glory to the helmsman,” perhaps referring to Lenin. In the work “Uncomfortable Liquid Lunarity...” the lyrical hero “through stone and steel” sees “the power... of his native side.” He tries to come to terms with the victory of the locomotive over the foal from “Sorokoust,” but remarks: “Maybe I’m not fit for a new life...” Finally, in the poem “The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain...” the author clearly speaks through the lips of the lyrical hero, so that he remains the poet of the “golden log hut.”

The world of the village, close to Yesenin, was leaving. And the poet himself increasingly thought about death. These thoughts sound especially vivid in the poem “The golden grove dissuaded...”. Its author was ready to die; he realized the irrevocability of the years he had lived. The lyrical hero passing through his life path, is compared in this poem with both the grove and the cranes, and his young soul with the “lilac flower.” Here again the motive of the connection between man and the cosmos arises:

The hemp plant dreams of all those who have passed away
With a wide moon over the blue pond.

The tragedy of death is smoothed over by the affirmation that life does not end with death:

Rowan berry brushes will not get burned,
Yellowness will not make the grass disappear.

A special milestone in the development of the lyrical hero Yesenin was the creation of the poem “Anna Snegina” (1925).

Sergei is both the main and lyrical hero, the author, and the narrator. But many assessments of what was happening, experiences, reactions to certain events could belong to the poet himself. This work is very optimistic: Yesenin found something that helps a person survive. The means of salvation from all adversity is a pure feeling of youthful love, carried throughout life.

There is a share of optimism in Yesenin’s very last poem. The lyrical hero believes that the life of the soul does not end with the death of the body:

Destined separation
Promises a meeting ahead

he wrote in a farewell message to a friend...

“LOVE FOR THE NATIVE LAND” IN THE LYRICS OF S. A. ESENINA

But most of all

Love for the native land

I was tormented

Tormented and burned.

S. Yesenin

The theme of the Motherland in Russian literature is one of the most favorite themes of Russian writers and poets. There is not a single creator I know who would not touch on this topic in his works. Some of them only briefly touched upon it, others dedicated all their creations to the Motherland, putting love and feelings into them, proving that the Motherland is not unimportant, and sometimes the most main part their lives and works. This attitude towards their native land burst into their works with a stormy flow of emotions, during which there was admiration for the Russian land and immense love for the Motherland.

“The theme of the Motherland, Russia, is the main one in all my poems...” - Yesenin often mentioned. Yes, it was precisely his ardent love for Russia, for the corner of the globe where he was born, that was the force that inspired him to create new works.

Face to face
You can't see the face.
Big things can be seen from a distance...

This is how one can characterize in the words of the poet himself his gaze turned to Russia from “beautiful distance.” Creating the cycle “Persian Motifs,” Yesenin, having never been to Persia, gives a wonderful image of the Motherland. Even being in a fertile land, he cannot forget that

The moon is a hundred times bigger there,
No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,
It is no better than the Ryazan expanses,
Because I'm from the north, or what?

Sharing with Russia the tragic turns of its fate, he often refers to it as to a loved one, looking for sympathy and answers to bitter insoluble questions.

Ah, homeland!
How funny I have become.
A dry blush flies onto the sunken cheeks.
I'm like a foreigner in my own country.

This is how he perceives revolutionary events, this is how he sees himself in the new Russia. During the years of the revolution, he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, “with a peasant bias.” Through the mouths of the peasants, Yesenin expresses his attitude towards the actions of the new masters of Russia:

Yesterday the icons were thrown off the shelf,
The commissioner removed the cross from the church...

But, regretting “the passing Rus',” Yesenin does not want to lag behind the “coming Rus'”:

But I'm still happy.
In a host of storms
I had a unique experience.
The whirlwind has dressed up my destiny
In golden bloom.

With all his love for patriarchal Russia, Yesenin is offended by its backwardness and wretchedness, he exclaims in his heart:

Field Russia! Enough
Dragging the plow across the fields!
It hurts to see your poverty
And birches and poplars.

But no matter what adversity tormented Russia, its beauty still remained unchanged, thanks to its marvelous nature. The charming simplicity of Yesenin’s paintings cannot but captivate readers. Already in one “Blue Fog. Snowy expanse, subtle lemon moonlight,” you can fall in love with the poet’s Russia. Every leaf, every blade of grass lives and breathes in Yesenin’s poems, and behind them is the breath of his native land. Yesenin humanizes nature, even his maple tree looks like a person:

And, like a drunken watchman, stepping out onto the road
He drowned in a snowdrift and froze his leg.

Behind the apparent simplicity of the images there is great skill, and it is the master’s word that conveys to the reader a feeling of deep love and devotion to his native land.

But Rus' is unthinkable without a sense of respect and understanding of the complex nature of the Russian people. Sergei Yesenin, experiencing a deep feeling of love for the Motherland, could not help but bow to his people, their strength, power and endurance, a people who managed to survive both famine and devastation.

Ah, my fields, dear furrows,
You are good in your sadness!
I love these frail huts
Waiting for gray-haired mothers.
I will fall to the birch bark little shoes,
Peace be with you, rake, scythe and plow!

But it is impossible to clearly formulate why exactly the Motherland is loved. Lermontov also spoke about his strange love for Russia and the insubordination of this feeling to reason:

I love the Fatherland, but with a strange love...

Yesenin will echo almost a century later:

But I love you, gentle Motherland!
And I can’t figure out why.

“THE FEELING OF MOTHERLAND IS THE MAIN THING IN MY CREATIVITY” (S. Yesenin)

Characterizing his lyrics, Yesenin said: “My lyrics are alive with one great love, love for my homeland. The feeling of homeland is fundamental in my work.”

Indeed, every line of Yesenin’s poems is imbued with ardent love for the homeland, and for him the homeland is inseparable from Russian nature and the countryside. This fusion of the homeland, the Russian landscape, the village and the personal fate of the poet is the originality of S. Yesenin’s lyrics.

In the poet’s pre-revolutionary poems, there is pain for his poor homeland, for this “abandoned land.” In the poems: “The hewn horns began to sing...”, “Go you, my dear Rus',” the poet says that he loves the “lake melancholy” of his homeland to the point of “joy and pain.” “But I can’t learn not to love you!” - he exclaims, turning to Rus'. The poet’s love for his homeland gave birth to such heartfelt lines:

If the holy army shouts:
“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”
I will say: “There is no need for heaven,
Give me my homeland.”

Yesenin greeted the Great October Socialist Revolution joyfully, but with certain doubts and hesitations; as he himself said: “He took everything in his own way with a peasant bias.”

Not knowing the Marxist-Leninist theory, Yesenin imagined socialism as a kind of peasant paradise, unknown by whom and how, created in his beloved, poor and wretched, illiterate and downtrodden peasant Russia. He believed that since the revolution had occurred, then give everyone a “new hut, covered with cypress planks,” give everyone, at their first request, a “golden ladle with mash.”

And in the country the fire of civil war did not go out, the interventionists tormented the homeland, devastation and hunger did their job. The poet saw empty villages, unsown fields, black cobwebs of cracks on the drought-scorched land, and his heart sank with pain.

And then it was necessary to heal the wounds, break the old way of village life, and put the peasantry on the “iron horse.” Seeing all this, Yesenin exclaimed bitterly:

Russia! Dear land to the heart!
The soul shrinks from pain!

Experiencing acute disappointment, Yesenin begins to curse the “iron horse” - the city with its industry, which brings death to the village dear to the poet’s heart, and begins to mourn the old, departing Rus'.

The anxious thoughts of the poet, who thought that the revolution had brought ruin to his lovely village, were reflected in the poem “Sorokoust”.

The break with the past was painful for Yesenin. It took him a while to understand the new things that were entering the life of the country. This was the heavy spiritual drama that the poet wrote about in the poem “Leaving Rus'.”

The old village was living out its last days. Yesenin felt this, understood it, and sometimes it began to seem to him that he, too, was living out his term together with her.

The trip abroad forced the poet to look at his country with new eyes, to re-evaluate everything that happens in it. He, in his words, “fell even more in love with communist construction.”

Having visited his native Konstantinov in 1924, after returning from abroad, Yesenin saw what changes had taken place there. He writes about this in the poem “Soviet Rus'”.

The poet returned to the country of his childhood and hardly recognized it. It seemed to him that death was coming to the village, life was ending, but he saw something completely different there: the men were discussing their “life.” It turns out that life is not over, it has turned in a different direction, and it is already difficult to catch up with it. Instead of the old desperate groans, instead of the mournful funeral service, new motives are born. And although he, the poet, does not find a place for himself in this life, and he is very sad at this thought. He accepts this life and glorifies the new one.

The poet, of course, is offended that his songs are not sung in the new village. He feels a bitter feeling of resentment for the fact that in his native place he is like a foreigner, but this resentment is already against himself. It’s his own fault that he didn’t sing new songs, it’s his own fault that in the village they don’t accept him as one of their own.

However, Yesenin’s greatness lies in the fact that he was able to rise above his personal fate and did not lose the prospect of development.

The poet feels that new people have a different life and still blesses it, regardless of his personal fate.

The poem ends with bright lines addressed to young people, to the future of their native country.

Yesenin declares his new views even more definitely in the poem “Uncomfortable Liquid Moon”. It is no longer the passing Rus', but the Soviet Rus' that the poet wants to glorify.

Now he is no longer fond of “shacks”, “songs of the taiga”, “hearth fire”, because all this is connected with our Russia, with the “poverty of the fields”. He wants to see Rus' “steel”, he already foresees the power of his native country.

Yesenin sang his song about Russia; he could not imagine life or creativity without his people.

Courageous, selfless love for his homeland helped Yesenin find his way to the great truth of the century.

THE THEME OF THE MOTHERLAND IN THE WORK OF S. A. ESENIN (I version)

In Yesenin’s poetry, he is struck by the aching feeling of his native land. The poet wrote that throughout his entire life he carried one great love. This is love for the Motherland. And indeed, every poem, every line in Yesenin’s lyrics is filled with warm filial love for the Fatherland.

Yesenin was born and raised in the outback, among the vast Russian expanses, among fields and meadows. Therefore, the theme of the Motherland in the poet’s work is inseparably linked with the theme of nature.

Yesenin wrote the poem “The bird cherry tree is pouring snow” at the age of fifteen. But how subtly the poet feels the inner life of nature, what interesting epithets and comparisons he gives to the spring landscape! The author sees how the bird cherry tree sprinkles not petals, but snow, how “silk grass is drooping,” feels the smell of “resinous pine”; hears the singing of “birds”.

In the later poem “Beloved Land, My Heart Dreams...” we feel that the poet is merging with nature: “I would like to get lost in the greenery of your hundred-ringing rings.” Everything about the poet is beautiful: the mignonette, the cassock robe, the evocative willows, the swamp, and even the “smoldering fire in the heavenly rocker.” These beauties are dreams of the heart. The poet meets and accepts everything in Russian nature; he is happy to merge in harmony with the world around him.

In his works, Yesenin spiritualizes nature, merges with it, gets used to its world, speaks its language. He not only gives it the feelings and sensations of a person, but often compares human dramas with the experiences of animals. The theme of “our little brothers” has always been present in Yesenin’s work. He depicted animals, caressed and offended, domesticated and destitute. The poet sympathizes with a decrepit cow dreaming of a heifer (“Cow”), feels the pain of a whelping dog (“Song of a Dog”), empathizes with a wounded fox (“Fox”).

A characteristic feature of Yesenin’s poetry of this period is that, together with nature, he glorifies patriarchal and religious Rus'. In the poem “Go away, my dear Rus',” huts, low outskirts, and churches appear before the poet’s gaze. Yesenin connected the life and customs of the Russian village with these poetic images. He is happy to hear girlish laughter, ringing like earrings, and to contemplate the merry dance in the meadows. Therefore, to the cry of the holy army - “Throw away Rus', live in paradise!” - the poet can only answer this way:

I will say: “There is no need for heaven,
Give me my homeland.”

Similar motives are heard in the poem “The Hewn Horns Sang.” The feelings of “warm sadness” and “cold sorrow” are as contradictory as the landscape of the Russian village.

On the one hand, there are chapels and memorial crosses along the road, and on the other, poetic and “prayerful” feather grass rings.

The year 1917 became a definite milestone in Yesenin’s understanding of the theme of the Motherland. The poet becomes painfully aware of his duality and attachment to the old patriarchal Rus'. We find such experiences in the poems “Leaving Rus'”, “Letter to Mother”, “Hooligan”, “I am the last poet of the village”. In the work “Letter to a Woman,” the poet feels himself “in a life torn apart by a storm.” He is tormented because he will not understand “where the fate of events is taking us.” In the poem “The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain...” the poet pronounces confessional words. If someone “rejoices, rages and suffers, lives well in Rus',” then Yesenin, lost in the new life, preserves his own “I”.

And now, when the new light
And my life was touched by fate,
I still remain a poet
Golden log hut.

Old rituals and traditions are becoming a thing of the past. Festive haymaking is replaced by the “iron guest”. In the poems “Sorokoust”, “Return to the Motherland”, “Soviet Rus'” the poet tries to penetrate the Soviet style of life, tries to understand “Rus reared up by the Commune”.

But the new light of a different generation still does not warm up. Yesenin feels like a gloomy pilgrim. His words sound annoyed and sad...

Ah, homeland! How funny I have become.
A dry blush flies onto sunken cheeks,
The language of my fellow citizens has become like a foreign language to me,
I'm like a foreigner in my own country.

With the image of the Motherland, Yesenin personifies maternal affection. The poems “Letter to Mother”, “Letter from Mother”, “Answer” are written in the form of a message in which Yesenin opens his soul to the closest person - his mother. The poet connects the image of the Motherland with the spring floods of rivers; he calls spring “the great revolution.” Despite the despair sounding in this poem, the poet believes in Pushkin’s style: “she will come, the desired time!”

And this time came for Yesenin at the end of his life. He glorifies Soviet Rus' in the lyrical-epic works “The Ballad of Twenty-Six” and “Anna Snegina”. The author strives to understand his new native Fatherland, to become a real son of the “great states of the USSR.” After all, even in “Persian Motifs” Yesenin remains a singer of the Ryazan expanses, contrasting them with the “saffron land”.

Thus, the theme of the Motherland runs through the poet’s entire work. Despite all the doubts and disappointments in Soviet Russia, Yesenin’s heart remained with his Motherland and its beauty.

In our minds, the poet will forever be remembered as a singer of the Russian expanses.

THE THEME OF THE MOTHERLAND IN THE WORK OF S. A. ESENIN (II version)

I love my homeland very much...

(“Confession of a Hooligan”)

“Genius is always popular,” said Alexander Blok. Perhaps these words can be applied to any writer whose works are commonly called world classics. And we are talking here not only about the “accessibility” of works to the widest circle of readers or about topics that literally concern the people. Blok very accurately grasped the relationship that exists between talent and a special feeling for the Motherland. Everyone, to one degree or another, feels their connection with the people, and therefore with the Motherland, because these two concepts are inseparable. A truly great person, capable of “rising” above modernity and looking “from above,” must especially feel this connection, feel that he belongs to the galaxy of faithful sons of his fatherland. At the same time, a specific time period and a specific country do not matter - after all, the concepts of “people” and “genius” are eternal.

Speaking about the theme of the Motherland in Russian literature, one cannot help but recall Sergei Yesenin and his role in the poetry of the early 20th century. The era called classical has ended, but eternal themes were developed in the works of new writers, who eventually also became classics.

Yesenin's earliest poems (1913-1914) are landscape sketches of amazing beauty, in which the Motherland is, first of all, the corner of the world where the poet was born and raised. Yesenin makes nature animated in order to reflect as clearly as possible the beauty of the surrounding world, its living essence. Everything around lives its own life: “the cabbage beds are watered with red water by the sunrise,” “the birch trees stand like big candles.” Even “the nettle was dressed in bright mother-of-pearl” in the poem “Good Morning.”

The identification of the Motherland with the native village is also characteristic of Yesenin’s later lyrics. The village is conceptualized as a kind of microcosm. In the poem “Go you, Rus', my dear...” and “The hewn horns began to sing...” the theme of the holiness of the Russian land begins to sound latently:

And on the lime with a bell
The hand involuntarily crosses itself.

(“The hewn horns began to sing...")

Like a visiting pilgrimI'm looking at your fields.

(“Go away, Rus', my dear...”)

Christian motives are not accidental - we are talking about the highest value. However, the poet paints a landscape full of piercing, ringing melancholy, the image of “funeral crosses”, the theme of “cold grief” arises. But at the same time, Yesenin speaks of an all-consuming love for the Motherland, love “to the point of joy and pain.” Such love, which every truly Russian probably experiences, cannot exist without “lake melancholy”, without a drop of bitterness... “I will not give up these chains,” says Yesenin about that unaccountable melancholy that mixes with love and makes it the feeling is truly deep and eternal. “Chains” are familiar to the lyrical hero, and there is sweetness in their heaviness.

This theme, which runs through Yesenin’s work, finds its logical continuation in the “Rus” cycle. Here the image of the people appears, which, together with nature, is inseparable for the poet from the concept of “Rus”. Yesenin introduces pictures of folk life (“And how the guys bark with a talyanka, the girls come out to dance around the fires”), as well as folklore images: here are “forest evil spirits” and sorcerers.

In the third part of the cycle, social motives are heard, but they are developed in the light of the author’s previous perception of the topic. Yesenin describes a “time of adversity”: a militia is gathering, the peaceful course of life is disrupted. The landscape takes on a cosmic scope.

The described event - recruitment in the village - goes beyond the ordinary, turning into a universal catastrophe:

Thunder struck, the cup of the sky was split...
The lamps of heaven began to sway.

The heroes of the cycle, “Peaceful Ploughmen,” are also symbolic. The basis of the life of the Russian people, in Yesenin’s understanding, is peaceful peasant labor, “a rake, a plow and a scythe.” It is not for nothing that this is a “meek homeland,” so after the battle the soldiers dream of “a cheerful mowing above the rays.” Yesenin strives to explore the national character, understand the secret of the Russian soul, and comprehend the logic of the development of this mysterious country. It was the feeling of a deep spiritual connection with the people that prompted Yesenin to turn to the historical past of Russia. Some of his first major works were the poems “Marfa Posadnitsa” and “Song of Evpatiy Kolovrat”, and later “Pugachev”. The characters in these poems are heroes whose names are preserved in the people's memory, epic, almost epic heroes. The main antithesis of all Yesenin’s works on historical subjects is “will - captivity.” Freedom for the Russian people has always been the highest value, for which it is not scary to enter into battle with the Antichrist himself. Novgorod liberty is the ideal of the poet, which will subsequently lead him to the adoption of a revolutionary idea.

Thinking about the past of the Motherland, Yesenin could not help but try to look into its future. His dreams, premonitions, desires were reflected in his poems in 1917. Yesenin says that he accepted the October Revolution “in his own way, with a peasant bias.” He perceived the “Bright Future” as the arrival of a “peasant paradise,” that is, a society based on the peaceful labor of peasants, universal equality and justice. Yesenin called this utopian “welfare state” Inonia. He sees the revolution as a reorganization of the Universe, a protest against everything old and outdated:

Long live the revolution.
On earth and in heaven!..
If it's the sun
In conspiracy with them,
We are his whole army
Let's raise our pants.

(“Heavenly Drummer”)

The lyrical hero of the poems of the revolutionary cycle stands at the head of the fighters paving the way to a bright paradise. Having abandoned the old God, he takes his place, creating his own universe:

New ascension
I'll leave footprints on the ground...
Today I have an elastic hand
Ready to turn the world around.

("Irony")

The heroes of “The Heavenly Drummer,” the creators of a new paradise, are not afraid to encroach on the sacred. The heavens are becoming within reach, and it is the “swarthy army, the friendly army”, led by the heavenly drummer, who marches across them so fearlessly and swiftly. Blasphemous images appear: “icon saliva”, “barking bells”.

Yesenin understands that in order to create a “peasant paradise” it is necessary to sacrifice his former homeland - a way of life dear to his heart; “in the robes of the image” and “merry dancing in the meadows” should become a thing of the past. But he agrees to this sacrifice in order to finally find the “meadow Jordan,” where they believe in a new god, “without a cross and flies,” and where the Apostle Andrew and the Mother of God descend to earth.

But soon the fervor of a reckless, almost fanatical passion for revolutionary ideas passes. “...What is happening is not the kind of socialism that I thought about,” says Yesenin. He expresses his new understanding in the poem “Letter to a Woman,” where he compares Russia to a ship in a rocking motion. This poem is consonant with the earlier poem “Sorokoust”, where the lyrical hero comes to complete disappointment and despair: ..

Blows, blows the death horn
What should we do, what should we do now?..

Already without youthful romance, from the position of a mature person, Yesenin looks at what is happening and draws real pictures of people's life. In the poem “Anna Snegina” he shows how the “struggle for Inonia” ended for the Russian village. People like the Ogloblin brothers, Pron and Labutya, came to power: “They should be sent to prison after prison...” The heavenly drummer’s campaign led to a dead end:

There are now thousands of them
I hate to create in freedom.
Race is gone, gone...
The nurse Rus died...

But this is his homeland, and the lyrical hero is not able to renounce it, no matter what happens. Last period Yesenin’s creativity (20s) can be called “return to the homeland,” in consonance with the poem of 1924.

The lyrical hero of these years acquires the facial features of a tragic one. Returning after many years of tossing and searching for himself to his parents’ house, he is bitterly convinced that “you cannot step into the same river twice.” Everything has changed: youth has gone, and with it dreams of heroism and glory; the old, familiar way of life was destroyed... The former Motherland is gone forever. Life is a stormy sea, but now another generation is on the crest of the wave (“Here is the life of sisters, sisters, not mine”). The lyrical hero turns out to be a stranger in his native land, like “a gloomy pilgrim from God knows from what distant side.” The only thing he has left is “Dear Lyre” and the old, timeless love for the Motherland. Even if this “orphaned land” is no longer what it used to be (“Bell tower without a cross”, “Capital” instead of the Bible), and in Soviet Rus' there is little left of that departed “meek motherland”. The lyrical hero is still inextricably linked with the Motherland, and neither time, nor trials, nor “the thick of storms and blizzards” could break the “chains” that Yesenin wrote about at the very beginning of his journey.

The poet turned out to be able to capture the contradictory soul of the Russian person with its thirst for rebellion and an ingenuous dream of peace. This attitude towards paradox leads to the choice of contrasting epithets that define the word “Motherland”: it is “meek” and “violent” at the same time.

Yesenin writes with pain about the bloody path of Russia, about the dead end into which the revolution led the country. He is not looking for the direct culprits of the Russian tragedy:

It's a pity that someone was able to scatter us
And no one’s fault is clear

The poet only prays to some higher power, hopes for a miracle:

Protect me, gentle moisture,
May is my blue, June is blue...

Temporary guidelines and ideas appear and go, but the eternal always remains eternal. Yesenin said about this in one of his later poems “Soviet Rus'”:

But then,
When in the whole planet.
The tribal feud will pass.
Lies and sadness will disappear,
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.

NATURE AND HOMELAND IN THE WORK OF S. A. ESENINA

Yesenin's poetry... A wonderful, beautiful, unique world! A world that is close and understandable to everyone. Yesenin is a true poet of Russia; a poet who rose to the heights of his skill from the depths of folk life. His homeland - the Ryazan land - nurtured and nourished him, taught him to love and understand what surrounds us all. Here, on Ryazan soil, Sergei Yesenin first saw all the beauty of Russian nature, which he sang in his poems. From the first days of his life, the poet was surrounded by the world of folk songs and legends:

I was born with songs in a grass blanket.
The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow.

In the spiritual appearance in Yesenin’s poetry, the features of the people were clearly revealed - its “restless, daring strength”, scope, cordiality, spiritual restlessness, deep humanity. Yesenin’s whole life is closely connected with the people. Maybe that's why the main characters of all his poems are simple people, in every line one can feel the close connection of the poet and man - Yesenin with the Russian peasants, which has not weakened over the years.

Sergei Yesenin was born into a peasant family. “As a child, I grew up breathing the atmosphere of folk life,” the poet recalled. Already by his contemporaries Yesenin was perceived as a poet of “great song power.” His poems are similar to smooth, calm folk songs. And the splash of the waves, and the silvery moon, and the rustle of the reeds, and the immense blue of the sky, and the blue surface of the lakes - all the beauty of the native land has been embodied over the years in poems full of love for the Russian land and its people:

O Rus' - the raspberry field And the blue that fell into the river, - I love Your lake melancholy to the point of joy and pain... “My lyrics are alive with one great love,” said Yesenin, “love for the homeland. The feeling of homeland is fundamental in my work.” In Yesenin’s poems, not only “Rus' shines,” not only does the poet’s quiet declaration of love for her sound, but also faith in man, in his great deeds, in the great future of his native people is expressed. The poet warms every line of the poem with a feeling of boundless love for the Motherland:

I became indifferent to the shacks.
And the hearth fire is not dear to me,
Even the apple trees are in the spring blizzard
Now I like something else...
And in the consumptive light of the moon
Through stone and steel
I see the power of my native side.

With amazing skill, Yesenin reveals to us pictures of his native nature. What a rich palette of colors, what precise, sometimes unexpected comparisons, what a sense of unity between the poet and nature! In his poetry, according to A. Tolstoy, one can hear “the melodious gift of the Slavic soul, dreamy, carefree, mysteriously excited by the voices of nature.” Everything about Yesenin is multicolored and multicolored. The poet eagerly peers at the pictures of the world renewed in spring and feels like a part of it, tremblingly awaits the sunrise and stares for a long time at the brilliant colors of the morning and evening dawn, at the sky covered with thunderclouds, at old forests, at fields flaunting flowers and greenery. With deep sympathy Yesenin writes about animals - “our smaller brothers.” In M. Gorky’s memoirs about one of his meetings with Yesenin and his poem “Song of the Dog” the following words were heard: “... and when he said the last lines:

The dog's eyes rolled
Golden stars in the snow

Tears also sparkled in his eyes.”

After these poems, I couldn’t help but think that S. Yesenin is not so much a person as an organ created by nature exclusively for poetry, to express the inexhaustible “sadness of the fields, love for all living things in the world and mercy, which - more than anything else - is deserved by man.”

Yesenin’s nature is not a frozen landscape background: it lives, acts, and reacts passionately to the destinies of people and the events of history. She is the poet's favorite hero. She always attracts Yesenin to her. The poet is not captivated by the beauty of eastern nature, the gentle wind; and in the Caucasus thoughts about the homeland do not leave:

No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,
It is no better than the expanses of Ryazan.

Yesenin, without turning aside, walks the same road together with his Motherland, with his people. The poet anticipates great changes in the life of Russia:

Come down and appear to us, red horse!
Harness yourself to the earth's shafts...
We give you a rainbow - an arc.
The Arctic Circle is on the harness.
Oh, take out our globe
On a different track.

In his autobiography, Yesenin writes: “During the years of the revolution he was entirely on the side of October, but he accepted everything in his own way, with a peasant bias.” He accepted the revolution with indescribable delight:

Long live the revolution
On earth and in heaven!

New features appear in Yesenin’s poetry, born of revolutionary reality. Yesenin's poems reflect all the contradictions of the early period of the formation of the Soviets in the country. The violent revolutionary fervor of the early 1920s, when the New Economic Policy was being implemented, gave way to pessimistic moods, which were reflected in the cycle “Moscow Tavern”. The poet cannot determine his place in life, feels confusion and bewilderment, suffers from the consciousness of spiritual duality:

Russia! Dear land to the heart!

The soul shrinks from pain.
The field has not heard for many years
Cocks crowing, dogs barking.
How many years has our quiet life
Lost peaceful verbs.
Like smallpox, hoof pits
Pastures and valleys are dug up.

What pain is felt in the poet’s tragic song about the internecine discord that is tearing “the native country apart,” anxiety for the future of Russia. The question painfully arises before him: “Where is the fate of events taking us?” It was not easy to answer this question; it was then that a breakdown occurred in the poet’s spiritual perception of the revolution, his utopian plans collapsed. Yesenin thinks and suffers about the doomed village:

Only for me, as a psalm-reader, to sing
Hallelujah over our native country.

The passage of time is tireless, and Yesenin feels it; lines full of mental confusion and anxiety appear more and more often:

I am the last poet of the village,
The plank bridge is modest in its songs.
At the farewell mass I stand
Birch trees burning with leaves.

Yesenin's inconsistency is most dramatically reflected in his thoughts about the future of the village. The poet's commitment to the peasantry is becoming more and more evident. In Yesenin’s poems one can hear a longing for nature, which civilization will lose. Unforgettable Yesenin’s “red-maned foal”: Dear, dear, funny fool.

Well, where is he, where is he going?
Doesn't he really know that live horses
Did the steel cavalry win?

In Yesenin, the opposition between city and countryside takes on a particularly acute character. After a trip abroad, Yesenin acts as a critic of bourgeois reality. The poet sees the harmful impact of the capitalist system on the souls and hearts of people, and acutely feels the spiritual squalor of bourgeois civilization. But the trip abroad had an impact on Yesenin’s work. He again remembers the “melancholy of endless plains”, familiar to him from his youth, but now, however, he is no longer pleased with the “cart song of wheels”:

I became indifferent to the shacks,
And the hearth fire is not dear to me,
Even the apple trees are in the spring blizzard
Because of the poverty of the fields, I stopped loving them.

Pictures of the past evoke a passionate thirst for the renewal of one’s native village:

Field Russia! Enough
Dragging the plow across the fields!
It hurts to see your poverty
And birches and poplars.
I don't know what will happen to me.
Maybe I'm not fit for a new life,
But I still want steel
See poor, beggarly Rus'.

Isn’t it this truth of feelings that burns the heart and soul that is especially dear to us in Yesenin’s poems? Isn’t this the true greatness of the poet?

S. Yesenin deeply knew the peasant life of Russia, and this contributed to the fact that he was able to become a truly people's poet.

No matter what Yesenin writes about: about the revolution, about the peasant way of life, he still returns to the theme of his homeland. For him, his homeland is something bright and writing about it is the meaning of his whole life:

I love my homeland
I love my homeland very much!..

The homeland both worries and calms the poet. In his lyrical works sounds boundless devotion to the Motherland, admiration for it:

But even then.
When in the whole planet
The tribal feud will pass.
Lies and sadness will disappear,
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.

From Yesenin’s poems emerges the image of a poet-thinker, vitally connected with his country. He was a worthy singer and a citizen of his homeland. In a good way, he envied those “who spent their lives in battle, who defended a great idea,” and wrote with sincere pain “about days wasted in vain”:

After all, I could give
Not what he gave.
What was given to me for the sake of a joke.

Yesenin was a bright individual personality. According to R. Rozhdestvensky, he possessed “that rare human quality that is usually called the vague and indefinite word “charm” ... “Any interlocutor found in Yesenin something of his own, familiar and beloved - and this is the secret of such a powerful influence of his poems."

How many people warmed their souls around the miraculous fire of Yesenin’s poetry, how many enjoyed the sounds of his lyre. And how often they were inattentive to Yesenin the Man. Maybe this was what ruined him. “We have lost a great Russian poet...” wrote M. Gorky, shocked by the tragic news.

S. A. ESENIN - A TRUE PEOPLE'S POET

I cherish my love only for you.

S. Yesenin

The village of Konstantinovo, where the famous Russian poet S. Yesenin spent his childhood, is located along the right hilly bank of the Oka. From here, an immense expanse of flooded meadows, buried in flowers, the smooth surface of meadow lakes, and copses running into the distance opens up.

Yesenin grew up among the expanse of nature, which taught him “to love in this world everything that puts the soul into flesh,” therefore the theme of his first lyrical poems is the theme of his native nature. All the beauties of his native land: the fire of dawn, and the splash of waves, and the silvery moon, and the immense blue of the sky, and the blue surface of the lakes - everything was reflected in his poems, full of love for the Russian land:

About Rus' - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river -
I love you to the point of joy and pain
Your lake melancholy...

We are infinitely close to both the road and the “green-haired, white-skirted” Yesenin birch tree - the poet’s favorite image, and his old maple tree, symbolizing “blue Rus'”:

I am weaving a wreath for you alone.
I sprinkle flowers on the gray stitch.
O Rus', a peaceful corner.
I love you, I believe in you.

In depicting nature, Yesenin uses the rich experience of folk poetry, epithets, comparisons, metaphors, and personification. His bird cherry “sleeps in a white cape,” the willows cry, the poplars whisper, “the sleepy earth smiled at the sun.” Yesenin's nature is multicolored and colorful. The poet's favorite colors are blue and light blue. They seem to enhance the feeling of the vastness of the expanses of Russia, expressing a feeling of tenderness and love.

His nature is always alive, it reacts ardently to the fate of people and the events of history. The mood of nature is always in tune with the mood of man:

The golden grove dissuaded
Birch's cheerful tongue,
And the cranes, sadly flying,
They don’t regret anyone anymore.

Yesenin rose to the heights of poetry from the depths of people's life. “My father is a peasant, and I am a peasant’s son,” the poet wrote. Sergei Yesenin was flesh and blood of rural Russia, that “blue Rus'” that he sang in his poems:

Goy, Rus', my dear.
The huts are in the robes of the image...
No end in sight
Only blue sucks his eyes.

And in short joyful moments, and in long years of grief and sadness, the poet is with the people. The poem “Rus” is a significant milestone in everything pre-October creativity Yesenina. In it, the poet talks about the difficult trials that Russia was going through. The people do not need war, because without it there is a lot of grief, - here the main idea Yesenin's “Rus”. The war was a severe disaster for the peasantry. The poet’s story about the Motherland in times of military adversity is stern, sad, and truthful:

The village drowned in potholes,
The huts of the forest were obscured.
Only visible on the bumps and depressions,

How blue the skies are all around.
The villages were empty, the huts were orphaned.
Occasionally soldiers' news came to the village: .
They believed in these scribbles
Bred with hard work,
And they cried with happiness and joy,
Like the first rain in a drought.

It is difficult to find another poem where the poet would reveal with such force the feeling of love for the Motherland:

Oh, my gentle Rus', my homeland,
I cherish my love only for you.
Your joy is short-lived.
With a loud song in the spring in the meadow.

The main thing in Yesenin’s poetry is service to the Motherland. His words have long become popular:

If the holy army shouts:
“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”
I will say: “There is no need for heaven.
Give me my homeland.”

Love for the Motherland cannot exist without love for the mother. His mother, endowed with intelligence, amazing beauty, and a wonderful gift of song, had a great influence on the poet. Tatyana Fedorovna possessed rare skill in performing Russian folk songs. Sergei Yesenin and his sisters, whose constant companions were their mother’s songs, imperceptibly themselves became familiar with the “song word”.

Yesenin retained and carried his love for his mother throughout his life. IN difficult moments he addressed his mother as his most faithful friend:

I'm still as gentle
And I only dream about that.
So that rather from rebellious melancholy
Return to our low house.

In Yesenin’s works one can feel the unity of man with nature, with everything living on earth. In one of his meetings with Yesenin, A. M. Gorky said: “... that he is the first in Russian literature to write about animals so skillfully and with such sincere love.” “Yes, I really love all kinds of animals,” answered Yesenin.

Yesenin's time is a time of dramatic revolutions in the history of Russia. From field Rus', patriarchal to Russia, transformed by the revolution, Soviet Russia - such is the historical path traversed by the poet, together with his Motherland, with his people. Everything that happened in Russia during the days of October was unusual and unique. Yesenin greeted the revolution with joy and warm sympathy; he took its side without hesitation. The revolution gave Yesenin the opportunity to feel his connection with the people, with the Motherland in a new way; it gave him a new social theme. The main thing in Yesenin’s new works is the awareness of one’s strength, the freedom that October brought to both the poet and peasant Rus'. He exclaims:

Long live the revolution
On earth and in heaven!

Revolutionary reality gave birth to new features of the artistic style. In those days, clear, intense rhythms burst into his poems from his turbulent life:

The sky is like a bell.
Month - language, .
My mother is my homeland.
I am a Bolshevik.

The life of revolutionary Rus' became more and more intense: the fire of the civil war did not go out, the interventionists tormented the country, devastation and hunger did their dirty work. It was during this period of class battles that Yesenin’s “peasant deviation” manifested itself most noticeably. Deep pain is heard in the poems of the “last poet of the village” about the irrevocable, historically doomed old village.

A trip abroad helped Yesenin understand the need for industrialization, to understand that Russia needs to catch up with Europe. Upon returning to his homeland, he writes:

I don't know what will happen to me...
Maybe I’m not fit for the new one,
But I still want steel.
See poor, beggarly Rus'.

As if the result of the change in his views was the poem “Soviet Rus'”, imbued with love and pride for the Soviet homeland, the Soviet people:

But even then
When in the whole planet
The tribal feud will pass,
Lies and sadness will disappear,
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.

The multifaceted image of the Motherland in the works of S. Yesenin is historically specific and filled with great social content. Here is a critical look at Russia’s past, faith in its present and future.

Yesenin's poetry is near and dear to all the peoples of our planet. She is immortal. The strength and brightness of his verse speaks for itself. His poems cannot grow old. In their veins flows the ever-young blood of ever-living poetry.

Introduction

Creativity of S.A. Yesenin

The theme of the homeland and nature in the lyrics of S.A. Yesenin

Cosmic motives in poetry p. Yesenina

"Woody motifs" lyrics p. Yesenina

Images of animals in lyrics p. Yesenina.

Conclusion

List of used literature

INTRODUCTION

Yesenin lived only thirty years, but the mark he left on poetry is indelible. The Russian land is rich in talents. Yesenin was born in Konstantinov, where he spent his childhood and then his youth; here he wrote his first poems. Sergei Yesenin rose to the heights of poetry from the depths of people's life. The world of folk poetic images surrounded him from childhood. Over the years, all the beauty of the native land was depicted in poems full of love for the Russian land:

O Rus' - raspberry field,

And the blue that fell into the river,

I love you to the point of joy and pain

Your lake melancholy.

The pains and hardships of peasant Rus', its joys and hopes - all this was reflected in the poetry of Sergei Yesenin. “My lyrics,” Yesenin said, not without pride, “are alive with one great love, love for the Motherland. The feeling of the Motherland is the main thing in my work.” Favorite region! The heart dreams of stacks of sun in the waters of the bosom, I would like to get lost in your hundred-ringed greenery, the poet wrote. Such lines, in my opinion, can only be born in the soul of a true artist, for whom the Motherland is life. Yesenin’s grandfather, “a bright personality, a broad nature,” according to the poet, had an excellent memory and knew by heart many folk songs and ditties. Yesenin himself knew Russian folklore perfectly, which he studied not from books. Yesenin’s mother knew many songs, which Yesenin recalled more than once. Yesenin knew songs as few people knew them, he loved them - sad and cheerful, ancient and modern. Songs, legends, sayings - this is what Sergei Yesenin was brought up on. About four thousand miniature masterpieces were recorded in his notebooks.

Over time, Yesenin's talent gained strength. Blok, whom he admired, helped Yesenin enter the literary world. He (Blok) wrote a letter to his friend Gorodetsky asking him to help the young talent. In his diary, Blok wrote: “The poems are fresh, clear, vociferous. I have not experienced such pleasure for a long time.” Later, metropolitan magazines began to publish Sergei Yesenin’s poems: A rural dreamer - I am in the capital I have become a first-class poet. One of the reviewers said about the poet’s early poems: “A tired, jaded city dweller, reading Yesenin’s poems, becomes familiar with the forgotten aroma of the fields, something joyful emanates from his poetry.”

The First World War began. With all his heart, with all his soul, the poet is devoted to his homeland and his people in these long years of grief and sadness: Oh, you, Rus', my meek homeland, I cherish my love only for you. The poem "Rus" is a wonderful and widely famous work, it is the artistic credo of the poet. In terms of mood, “Rus” somehow echoes Blok’s mournful thoughts about the Motherland:

Russia, poor Russia,

I want your gray huts,

Your wind sands to me,

Like the first tears of love!

The time of Yesenin’s creativity is a time of sharp turns in the history of Russia. He wrote in his autobiography: “I accepted the revolution, but with a peasant bias.” It couldn't have been any other way. Yesenin is not just a lyricist, he is a poet of great intelligence and deep philosophical reflection. The drama of his worldview, his intense search for truth, mistakes and weaknesses - all these are facets of enormous talent, but, studying his creative path, we can safely say that Yesenin was always true to himself in the main thing - in the desire to comprehend the difficult fate of his people. The year and a half the poet spent abroad was an exceptional period in his life: he did not write poetry, nothing inspired the poet far from his native land. It was there that the idea for the tragic poem “The Black Man” arose. This is Yesenin's last poetic work. Only abroad did he understand what tremendous changes were taking place in his homeland. He notes in his diary that perhaps the Russian revolution will save the world from hopeless philistinism. After returning from abroad, Yesenin visits his native land. He is sad, it seems to him that the people do not remember him, that huge changes have taken place in the village, but in what direction, he could not determine. The poet writes: This is the country!

Why the hell am I

He shouted that I was friendly with the people.

My poetry is no longer needed here,

And I myself am not needed here one bit.

The Kresmyansk Komsomol is coming from the mountain,

Playing the accordion zealously,

The propaganda of Poor Demyan is singing,

Announcing the valley with a cheerful cry.

For many years at school they studied the poetry of Demyan Bedny, Lebedev-Kumach, but the youth did not know Khodasevich, who was talented from God, Yesenin’s lyrics were not included in school textbooks, falsely accusing him of lack of ideas, the best poets were erased from literature. But they are alive, their poems are read, loved, and believed. Yesenin wrote his poems “with the blood of feelings.” By giving himself away, he burned himself out early; his poetry is his destiny. Even earlier, in the poem “I’m tired of living in my native land,” he predicts his future:

I'm tired of living in my native land

Longing for the buckwheat expanses,

I will leave my hut, I will go as a vagabond and a thief...

And the month will float and float, dropping oars across the lakes,

And Rus' will still live, dance and cry at the fence.

In the poetry of subsequent years, the motif of sadness and regret for wasted strength is increasingly heard; his poetry emanates a kind of hopelessness. In “The Black Man” he writes tragic lines: “My friend, I am very, very sick, I don’t know where this pain came from, either the wind is rustling in an open field, or alcohol is burning my brains like a grove in September.” This is not a momentary weakness of the poet, this is a clear understanding that his life is coming to an end. Recently, a message appeared in our press that Yesenin did not commit suicide, that he was killed because he had a great influence on the minds of the Russian people. The question is controversial, but the lines (“in this life, dying is not new, but life, of course, is not new”) indicate that he is tired of fighting the surrounding reality. I would like to end my essay with lines from his poem “We are now leaving little by little.” His words are a tribute to the Motherland, to his descendants: I thought through many thoughts in silence, composed many songs to myself, and on this gloomy land I am happy that I breathed and lived.

WORK OF S. A. ESENINA.

The work of Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin, uniquely bright and deep, has now firmly entered our literature and enjoys enormous success among numerous Soviet and foreign readers. The poet's poems are full of heartfelt warmth and sincerity, passionate love for the boundless expanses of his native fields, the “inexhaustible sadness” of which he was able to convey so emotionally and so loudly.

Sergei Yesenin entered our literature as an outstanding lyricist. It is in the lyrics that everything that makes up the soul of Yesenin’s creativity is expressed. It contains the full-blooded, sparkling joy of a young man who is rediscovering an amazing world, subtly feeling the fullness of earthly charm, and the deep tragedy of a man who has remained for too long in the “narrow gap” of old feelings and views. And if in the best poems of Sergei Yesenin there is a “flood” of the most secret, most intimate human feelings, they are filled to the brim with the freshness of pictures of native nature, then in his other works there is despair, decay, hopeless sadness. Sergei Yesenin is, first of all, a singer of Rus', and in his poems, sincere and frank in Russian, we feel the beating of a restless, tender heart. They have a “Russian spirit”, they “smell of Russia”. They absorbed the great traditions of national poetry, the traditions of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Blok. Even in Yesenin’s love lyrics, the theme of love merges with the theme of the Motherland. The author of "Persian Motifs" is convinced of the fragility of serene happiness far from his native land. And the main character of the cycle becomes distant Russia: “No matter how beautiful Shiraz is, it is no better than the expanses of Ryazan.” Yesenin greeted the October Revolution with joy and warm sympathy. Together with Blok and Mayakovsky, he took her side without hesitation. The works written by Yesenin at that time ("Transfiguration", "Inonia", "Heavenly Drummer") are imbued with rebellious sentiments. The poet is captured by the storm of the revolution, its greatness and strives for something new, for the future. In one of his works, Yesenin exclaimed: “My motherland, I am a Bolshevik!” But Yesenin, as he himself wrote, perceived the revolution in his own way, “with a peasant bias,” “more spontaneously than consciously.” This left a special imprint on the poet’s work and largely predetermined his future path. The poet's ideas about the purpose of the revolution, about the future, about socialism were characteristic. In the poem "Inonia" he depicts the future as a kind of idyllic kingdom of peasant prosperity; socialism seems to him a blissful "peasant paradise." Such ideas were also reflected in Yesenin’s other works of that time:

I see you, green fields,

With a herd of dun horses.

With a shepherd's pipe in the willows

Apostle Andrew wanders.

Name the themes and motives of Yesenin’s early lyrics. What was the innovation of his poetry?

Yesenin's aesthetic innovation was manifested in many features of his poetic creativity. Yesenin's poet's voice is to a large extent the voice of a peasant working on the land and living in close unity with nature, a Christian walking the difficult path of spiritual search. The poet introduced such a point of view into literature more definitely than anyone before him.

The life of his native land, its nature, love, worries and affairs of people - all this becomes the subject of Yesenin’s early poetry. Despite the fact that dramatic turns of fate and anxious moods are included in Yesenin’s poems already early stage, yet a light, life-affirming tonality prevails.

O Rus', the raspberry field and the blue that fell into the river,

I love Your lake melancholy to the point of joy and pain.

(“The hewn horns began to sing…”)

Folk art, along with the classics, was the most important source of Yesenin’s poetry. Even Yesenin’s poems, thematically close to the classical ones, are based on a very original system of figurative expressiveness. For example, the poem “Do not wander, do not crush in the crimson bushes...” is thematically close to Pushkin’s “I loved you: love is still, perhaps...”.

Yesenin’s poem sounds, like Pushkin’s, as a sad, enlightened farewell to his beloved. Yesenin’s figurative palette is completely unique:

...With a sheaf of your oat hair, you will belong to me forever.

With scarlet berry juice on the skin,

Tender, beautiful, you looked like a pink sunset and, like snow, radiant and light.

The grains of your eyes have fallen off and withered,

The subtle name melted away like a sound.

But the smell of honey from innocent hands remained in the folds of the crumpled shawl.

In a quiet hour, when the dawn is on the roof,

Like a kitten, it washes its mouth with its paw,

I hear a gentle conversation about you, Water honeycombs singing with the wind.

The image is so complete, the writing is so dense, that it seems very difficult to selectively quote the above passage without the danger of destroying a single living impression. Yesenin embodies the very principle of a person’s worldview, for whom the connection with the living life of the earth is organic, like breathing - not tangible, not controlled, but nevertheless life-giving.

S. Yesenin, with his poems, expressed the need of the people's spirit for creativity and established creativity as the main content of the people's existence. The ideas of most of his works are accessible without condescension, the imagery is usually bright without pretentiousness. The poet's moral position is most consistent with the healthy people's point of view.

The early Yesenin wrote many poems based on religious aesthetics and imagery. But with all its flights and aspirations, the “spirit” in Yesenin’s poetry is based on the tangible dominant of the national-historical “firmament”:

If the holy army shouts:

“Throw away Rus', live in paradise!”

I will say: “There is no need for heaven,

Give me my homeland."

(“Go away, Rus', my dear...”)

The poet carefully records the details of rural household life (the poem “In the Hut”), his poems about animals are imbued with a feeling of love and compassion for “our smaller brothers”: “Cow”, “Fox”, “Song of the Dog”. The nature of the native land in all its infinite diversity is the poet’s palette, giving him colors, sounds, smells, an object of creative admiration, an interlocutor in reasoning

about life and people. These features of Yesenin’s poetry were already established in his early work and became decisive throughout its entire length.