- a poet of the nineteenth century who made a huge contribution to the development of Russian literature. Reading his works, you begin to understand the peculiarity of his work. What are they?

In poems real world idealized, endowed with special features. Thanks to his poems, we can escape from our problems, plunging into the world of beauty and wonder. All of Fet’s works are filled with feelings; he did not just write, but sang the surrounding beauty of love and nature. This is the main feature of Fet’s work. You read the poet’s works and feel the notes of different emotions and moods that evoke wonderful feelings. This is an author who tried to avoid social and political topics; he was a poet of pure art, whose works described nature and love. A subtle poetic mood is intertwined with artistic skill, allowing you to create pure poetry. Basically his works are love and landscape lyrics, and only at the end life path he resorted to philosophical lyrics. Let's take a closer look at the characteristic features of the writer's lyrics.

Features of Fet's love lyrics

Getting to know love lyrics Feta, we can indicate that the writer’s love is a fusion of contradictions in a harmonious unification. The peculiarity of his love lyrics is that there are no notes of drama and tragedy here. His lyrics about love sound musical and subtle with peculiar notes, where there is no love languor, no jealous torment, no passion. Here there is only a description of the beauty of this extraordinary and unearthly feeling of love. His love lyrics are sublimely ideal, pure, youthfully reverent poems, which, strange as it may sound, were written mainly in old age.

Features of landscape lyrics

Nature is what the poet also loved to write about. At the same time, the landscapes in the writer’s work come to life, and nature is always calm and quiet. His paintings seem to freeze, but at the same time everything around is filled with sounds, where a fidgety woodpecker knocks, a Easter cake moans or an owl. The peculiarity of landscape lyrics is that the writer endows landscapes with human properties, where the rose smiles, the stars pray, the pond dreams, and the birches wait. At the same time, the author often uses images of birds that are unusual for us. Thus, swifts, lapwings, owls, and blacklings often appear in his poems. In addition, the author does not endow nature and animals with any symbolic meaning. For him, everything is endowed only with those properties that representatives of the living world of nature possess in reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On November 23, 1820, in the village of Novoselki, located near Mtsensk, the great Russian poet Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet was born into the family of Caroline Charlotte Fet and Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin. His parents got married abroad without an Orthodox ceremony (the poet’s mother was a Lutheran), which is why the marriage, legalized in Germany, was declared invalid in Russia.

Deprivation of a noble title

Later, when the wedding took place according to the Orthodox rite, Afanasy Afanasyevich was already living under his mother’s last name, Fet, being considered her illegitimate child. The boy was deprived, in addition to his father's surname, his title of nobility, Russian citizenship and rights to inheritance. For a young man for many years the most important life goal began to regain the name Shenshin and all the rights associated with it. Only in his old age was he able to achieve this, regaining his hereditary nobility.

Education

The future poet entered the boarding school of Professor Pogodin in Moscow in 1838, and in August of the same year he was enrolled in the literature department at Moscow University. He spent his student years with the family of his classmate and friend. The friendship of young people contributed to the formation of common ideals and views on art.

First attempts at writing

Afanasy Afanasyevich begins to compose poetry, and in 1840 a collection of poetry, published at his own expense, entitled “Lyrical Pantheon”, was published. In these poems, echoes of the poetic work of Evgeniy Baratynsky were clearly heard, and since 1842, Afanasy Afanasyevich has been constantly published in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski. Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky already in 1843 wrote that of all the poets living in Moscow, Fet is “the most talented,” and puts the poems of this author on a par with the works of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov.

Necessity of a military career

Fet strove for literary activity with all his soul, but the instability of his financial and social situation forced the poet to change his destiny. Afanasy Afanasyevich in 1845 entered as a non-commissioned officer in one of the regiments located in the Kherson province in order to be able to receive hereditary nobility (the right to which was given by senior officer rank). Isolated from the literary environment and a hundred personal life he almost stops publishing, also because, due to the fall in demand for poetry, magazines show no interest in his poems.

A tragic event in Fet's personal life

In the Kherson years, a tragic event occurred that predetermined the poet’s personal life: his beloved Maria Lazich, a dowry girl whom he did not dare to marry because of his poverty, died in a fire. After Fet’s refusal, a strange incident happened to her: Maria’s dress caught fire from a candle, she ran into the garden, but could not cope with putting out the clothes and suffocated in the smoke. One could suspect this as an attempt by the girl to commit suicide, and Fet’s poems will echo this tragedy for a long time (for example, the poem “When you read the painful lines...”, 1887).

Admission to L Life Guards Uhlan Regiment

In 1853, there was a sharp turn in the poet’s fate: he managed to join the guard, the Ulan Regiment of the Life Guards stationed near St. Petersburg. Now Afanasy Afanasyevich gets the opportunity to visit the capital, resumes his literary activity, begins to regularly publish poems in Sovremennik, Russian Bulletin, Otechestvennye Zapiski, Library for Reading. He becomes close to Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, Vasily Botkin, Alexander Druzhinin - editors of Sovremennik. Fet's name, already half-forgotten by that time, again appears in reviews, articles, magazine chronicles, and since 1854 his poems have been published. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev became the poet’s mentor and even prepared a new edition of his works in 1856.

The fate of the poet in 1856-1877

Fet was unlucky in his service: each time the rules for obtaining hereditary nobility were tightened. In 1856 he left military career, without achieving its main goal. In Paris in 1857, Afanasy Afanasyevich married the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Maria Petrovna Botkina, and acquired an estate in Mtsensk district. At that time he wrote almost no poetry. As a supporter of conservative views, Fet sharply reacted negatively to the abolition of serfdom in Russia and, starting in 1862, began regularly publishing essays in the Russian Bulletin, denouncing the post-reform order from the position of a landowner. In 1867-1877 he served as justice of the peace. In 1873, Afanasy Afanasyevich finally received hereditary nobility.

The fate of Fet in the 1880s

The poet returned to literature only in the 1880s, having moved to Moscow and becoming rich. In 1881, his long-time dream was realized - his translation of his favorite philosopher, “The World as Will and Representation,” was published. In 1883, a translation of all the works of the poet Horace, begun by Fet during his student years, was published. The period from 1883 to 1991 included the publication of four issues of the poetry collection “Evening Lights”.

Fet's lyrics: general characteristics

The poetry of Afanasy Afanasyevich, romantic in its origins, is like a connecting link between the works of Vasily Zhukovsky and Alexander Blok. The poet's later poems gravitated towards the Tyutchev tradition. Fet's main lyrics are love and landscape.

In the 1950-1960s, during the formation of Afanasy Afanasyevich as a poet, the literary environment was almost completely dominated by Nekrasov and his supporters - apologists for poetry glorifying social, civic ideals. Therefore, Afanasy Afanasyevich with his creativity, one might say, came out somewhat untimely. The peculiarities of Fet's lyrics did not allow him to join Nekrasov and his group. After all, according to representatives of civil poetry, poems must necessarily be topical, fulfilling a propaganda and ideological task.

Philosophical motives

Feta permeates all his work, reflected in both landscape and love poetry. Although Afanasy Afanasyevich was even friends with many poets of Nekrasov’s circle, he argued that art should not be interested in anything other than beauty. Only in love, nature and art itself (painting, music, sculpture) did he find lasting harmony. Philosophical lyrics Feta sought to get as far away from reality as possible, contemplating beauty that was not involved in the bustle and bitterness of everyday life. This led to the adoption by Afanasy Afanasyevich of romantic philosophy in the 1940s, and in the 1960s - the so-called theory of pure art.

The prevailing mood in his works is intoxication with nature, beauty, art, memories, and delight. These are the features of Fet's lyrics. The poet often encounters the motif of flying away from the earth following the moonlight or enchanting music.

Metaphors and epithets

Everything that belongs to the category of the sublime and beautiful is endowed with wings, especially the feeling of love and song. Fet's lyrics often use metaphors such as “winged dream”, “winged song”, “winged hour”, “winged word sound”, “inspired by delight”, etc.

Epithets in his works usually describe not the object itself, but the lyrical hero’s impression of what he saw. Therefore, they may be logically inexplicable and unexpected. For example, a violin might be defined as "melting." Typical epithets for Fet are “dead dreams”, “fragrant speeches”, “silver dreams”, “weeping herbs”, “widowed azure”, etc.

Often a picture is drawn using visual associations. The poem "To the Singer" is a vivid example of this. It shows the desire to translate the sensations created by the song’s melody into specific images and sensations, which make up Fet’s lyrics.

These poems are very unusual. So, “the distance rings,” and the smile of love “gently shines,” “the voice burns” and fades away in the distance, like “the dawn beyond the sea,” so that pearls will again splash out in a “loud tide.” Russian poetry did not know such complex, bold images at that time. They established themselves much later, only with the advent of the Symbolists.

Speaking about Fet’s creative style, they also mention impressionism, which is based on the direct recording of impressions of reality.

Nature in the poet's work

Landscape lyrics Feta is a source of divine beauty in eternal renewal and diversity. Many critics have mentioned that nature is described by this author as if from the window of a manor house or from the perspective of a park, as if specifically to arouse admiration. Fet's landscape lyrics are a universal expression of the beauty of the world untouched by man.

For Afanasy Afanasyevich, nature is part of his own “I”, a background for his experiences and feelings, a source of inspiration. Fet's lyrics seem to blur the line between external and inner world. Therefore, human properties in his poems can be attributed to darkness, air, even color.

Very often nature in Fet’s lyrics is night landscape, since it is at night, when the bustle of the day calms down, that it is easiest to enjoy the all-encompassing, indestructible beauty. At this time of day, the poet has no glimpses of the chaos that fascinated and frightened Tyutchev. A majestic harmony hidden during the day reigns. It is not the wind and darkness, but the stars and the moon that come first. According to the stars, Fet reads the “fiery book” of eternity (the poem “Among the Stars”).

The themes of Fet's lyrics are not limited to descriptions of nature. A special section of his work is poetry dedicated to love.

Fet's love lyrics

Love for a poet is a whole sea of ​​feelings: timid languor, and the pleasure of spiritual intimacy, and the apotheosis of passion, and the happiness of two souls. The poetic memory of this author knew no bounds, which allowed him to write poems dedicated to his first love even in his declining years, as if he were still under the impression of a much-desired recent date.

Most often, the poet described the birth of a feeling, its most enlightened, romantic and reverent moments: the first touch of hands, long glances, the first evening walk in the garden, the contemplation of the beauty of nature that gives rise to spiritual intimacy. Lyrical hero says that no less than happiness itself, he values ​​the steps to it.

Fet's landscape and love lyrics form an inseparable unity. A heightened perception of nature is often caused by love experiences. A striking example of this is the miniature “Whisper, Timid Breathing...” (1850). The fact that there are no verbs in the poem is not only an original technique, but also a whole philosophy. There is no action because what is actually being described is only one moment or a whole series of moments, motionless and self-sufficient. The image of the beloved, described through detail, seems to dissolve in the general range of the poet’s feelings. There is no complete portrait of the heroine here - it must be supplemented and recreated by the reader’s imagination.

Love in Fet's lyrics is often complemented by other motives. Thus, in the poem “The night was shining. The garden was full of the moon...” three feelings are united in a single impulse: admiration for the music, the intoxicating night and inspired singing, which develops into love for the singer. The poet’s entire soul dissolves in music and at the same time in the soul of the singing heroine, who is the living embodiment of this feeling.

It is difficult to classify this poem unambiguously as love lyrics or poems about art. It would be more accurate to define it as a hymn to beauty, combining the liveliness of experience, its charm with deep philosophical overtones. This worldview is called aestheticism.

Afanasy Afanasyevich, carried away on the wings of inspiration beyond the boundaries of earthly existence, feels like a ruler, equal to the gods, overcoming the limitations of human capabilities with the power of his poetic genius.

Conclusion

The whole life and work of this poet is a search for beauty in love, nature, even death. Was he able to find her? Only those who truly understood the creative heritage of this author can answer this question: heard the music of his works, saw landscape paintings, felt the beauty of poetic lines and learned to find harmony in the world around them.

We examined the main motives of Fet's lyrics, characteristic features the work of this great writer. So, for example, like any poet, Afanasy Afanasyevich writes about eternal theme life and death. He is not equally frightened by either death or life (“Poems about Death”). The poet experiences only cold indifference to physical death, and Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet justifies his earthly existence only by creative fire, commensurate in his view with the “entire universe.” The poems contain both ancient motifs (for example, “Diana”) and Christian ones (“Ave Maria”, “Madonna”).

More detailed information about Fet's work can be found in school textbooks on Russian literature, in which the lyrics of Afanasy Afanasyevich are discussed in some detail.

An analysis of the innovation of Fet's poetry should begin with identifying the features of his poetic worldview. Despite the similarity of Fet’s poetry with the romantic lyrics of the beginning of the century (the predominance of the emotional element over the rational, the desire to express the “inexpressible,” the striving for the ideal, etc.) there is a fundamental difference. If for the romantic tradition the most important concept is duality, discord, disharmony (dream and reality, man and nature, lover and beloved, etc.), then for Fet’s poetry the fundamental concept is unity, fusion, harmony.

Analysis of the poem " Another May night“convinces that Fet sees man as the center of the universe, the favorite and chosen one of nature, for whom everything in it trembles joyfully and shines with beauty. A grateful song in response is all that nature expects from a poet. For Fet, nature is not a sphinx or an indifferent goddess with a metallic voice. He does not need to assure himself that in her “there is a soul... freedom... love and language.” Fet hears this voice every minute in the alarming song of the nightingale, sees this soul in the gentle gaze of the stars, feels this love in the shy trembling of birch foliage. For Fet, nature is alive and spiritual. But the poet himself is extremely open to all natural elements. His soul is so perfect musical instrument, attuned to the harmony of the universe. The poet is literally permeated with these currents, ripples, and sounds.

The same unity is characteristic of those who love. They may be separated by unspoken words, years of separation, even death, but the merging of souls knows no limits or obstacles. The fragrant night, the fire of the fireplace, the maple leaf, the sobbing sounds of the piano speak for the people.

It is precisely this feature of Fet’s worldview that holds the key to his poetics. Hence the poet’s apparent “isolation” on himself, his attentiveness to the subtlest overflows of his own experiences. Hence the reluctance to express oneself in complete syntactic constructions, to develop a consistent thought, to “explain.” Emotional resonance is the action that the poet strives for and to which all specific techniques of his lyrics are subordinated (to which they are conditioned). So, for example, turning to the poem “ This morning, this joy...", we can identify some features of its form:

Simplicity of the composition: without any introduction, signs are strung together, signs are listed, and the last line sums it up: “This is all spring.”

Uniformity of repeated syntactic constructions (combinations of the demonstrative pronoun this all with new nouns) and against the background of their repetition, which sets the fast, volatile rhythm of the poem, lines stand out intonationally, where the uniformity is broken each time in a different way (either by the definition: “this blue vault”, then by the addition: “this talk of waters”, then a special sign that gives a different meaning to the line: “these drops are these tears” (instead of listing - an explanation with a touch of opposition), then a negative turn “this fluff is not a leaf”). This achieves a sense of diversity in unity, movement in a seemingly static image.

The verblessness of poetic speech is Fet’s favorite technique, violating the usual ideas about the possibilities of language.

Another of his favorite techniques is mixing rhythms and variety of stanzas. In this case, the general trochaic pattern is diversified by the rather complex structure of each stanza, in which tetrameters rhymed in pairs are interrupted by shortened 3rd and 6th lines that rhyme with each other, and in the 1st-2nd and 4th-5th verses the rhyme is female , and in the 3rd-6th - male.

The dynamics are also contained in the movement of the lyrical plot from morning to daylight, to the evening dawn and darkness of the night with nightingale trills.

In the string of spring signs, images of nature (flocks, willows, birches, midges, bees) and symbols of human states (joy, tears) are mixed, given in a single stream.

Also paradoxically mixed are simply the names of objects, phenomena that in themselves are not associated specifically with spring (willows, birches, mountains, valleys), and metaphors, personifications (the power of light, the sound of waters, drops - tears) depicting the features of spring. Thanks to this, a feeling is created that the mountains and valleys have re-emerged, just born along with spring.

Reticence, non-manifestation of images (this voice and whistle, this sigh of the night village, this darkness and heat of the bed), allowing for multiple meanings.

As a result, all the features of the poem are subordinated to one goal: to create a unique feeling of spring choking joy, deafened by sounds, overflowing with unclear but powerful feelings. Let us note once again that Fet is far from carefully recreating spring paintings. The instantaneousness of the impression is conveyed by the breakdown of the completed (formulated) image into picturesque details (willows - birches - drops - tears - fluff - leaf). If you try to “restore” the completeness of the image in an “academic manner”, you will get something like “on the leaves of willows and birches, tender as green fluff, drops glisten like tears.” After Fet’s impressionistic brushstrokes, such an image seems old-fashioned, ponderous and too rationalistic. Of course, Fet's lyrics are not limited to these airy visions, weightless images. It also contains the embodiment of a very real life experience, and thoughts about human destiny, and specific signs of the times. However, it is precisely the poetry of elusive moments that constitutes its innovative feature and is therefore at the center of our attention.

Innovation of poetic language was not an end in itself for Fet; it was not poetic experimentation. The originality of the lyrics was due to the special spiritual appearance of the poet, as if he left everything “material”, rationally mundane, to his double Shenshin and, as a result, achieved inhuman subtlety and sensitivity in poetry.

Book materials used: Yu.V. Lebedev, A.N. Romanova. Literature. 10th grade. Lesson-based developments. - M.: 2014

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

Peculiarities of the themes of A. Fet's poetry

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

I came to you with greetings

Tell me that the sun has risen

What is it with hot light

The sheets began to flutter;

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

Impressionism in the lyrics of A. Fet

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

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

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

Whisper, timid breathing,

The trill of a nightingale,

Silver and sway

Sleepy stream,

Night light, night shadows,

Endless shadows

A series of magical changes

Sweet face

In the smoky dots there is a purple rose,

The reflection of amber

And kisses and tears,

And dawn, dawn!..

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

Musicality of A. Fet's poetry

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

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

Rays at our feet in a living room without lights.

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

Just like our hearts are for your song.

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

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

Drive away a living boat with one push

From sands smoothed by the tides,

Rise in one wave into another life,

Feel the wind from the flowering shores...

Features of the creative path

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

I am among the crying Shenshin,

And Fet I am only among the singers...

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

Lyrics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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