Interesting poems. The best poems of great poets

Russia is a country rich in poets and writers, which has given the world many famous people. The best poems of great poets are those poems that many of us know from school, but there are also many lesser-known, but outstanding works of classical poets. This section of this site contains a selection of poems by Russian classics. Here are such names as Pushkin, Lermontov, Yesenin, Tyutchev, Bunin, Blok, Bryusov, Fet .... and others. The best poems of the classics of various areas of Russian poetry: romanticism and realism of the 19th century, symbolism, futurism and imaginism of Silver Age poetry.

Top Classics

We always remember happiness.
And happiness is everywhere. Maybe it -
This autumn garden behind the barn
And clean air pouring through the window.

In the bottomless sky with a light white edge
Rise, the cloud shines. For a long time
I follow him ... We see little, we know
And happiness is given only to those who know.

I remember a wonderful moment:
You appeared before me
Like a fleeting vision
Like a genius of pure beauty.

In the languor of hopeless sadness
In the anxieties of noisy bustle,

I am sitting behind bars in a damp dungeon.
A young eagle bred in captivity,
My sad comrade, waving his wing,
Bloody food pecks under the window,

Pecks, and throws, and looks out the window,
As if he thought the same thing with me;

Spiritual thirst tormented,
In the gloomy desert I dragged myself
And a six-winged seraph
He appeared to me at a crossroads.
With fingers as light as a dream
He touched my apples:

The last cloud of the scattered storm!
Alone you rush through the clear azure,
You alone cast a sad shadow,
You alone grieve the jubilant day.

You recently circled the sky,
And lightning wrapped around you menacingly;

Not many paintings by old masters
I always wanted to decorate my abode,
So that the visitor marveled at them superstitiously,
Listening to the important judgment of connoisseurs.

In my simple corner, in the midst of slow labors,
One picture I wanted to be forever a spectator,

Poet! do not value the love of the people.
Enthusiastic praise will pass a moment's noise;
Hear the judgment of a fool and the laughter of the cold crowd,
But you remain firm, calm and gloomy.

You are the king: live alone. By the road of the free

Crazy years faded fun
It's hard for me, like a vague hangover.
But, like wine - the sadness of bygone days
In my soul, the older, the stronger.
My path is sad. Promises me labor and sorrow
The coming turbulent sea.

But I don't want, oh friends, to die;
I want to live in order to think and suffer;

The whole room amber gleam
Enlightened. Cheerful crackling
The fired oven crackles.
It's nice to think by the couch.
But you know: do not order to the sled
Ban the brown filly?

The star burns, the ether trembles,
Night lurks in the spans of arches.
How not to love the whole world,
Incredible Your gift?

You gave me five wrong feelings
You gave me time and space

In Pushkin's work, poems occupy the largest place along with lyrics. Pushkin wrote twelve poems (one of them - "Tazit" - remained unfinished), and more than twelve survived in sketches, plans, opening lines.

At the lyceum, Pushkin began, but did not finish, a very weak, still quite childish playful poem "The Monk" (1813) and a playful fairy-tale poem "Bova" (1814). In the first, a Christian church legend is parodied in the spirit of Voltairian free-thinking, in the second, a popular folk tale.

In these works, the young Pushkin is not yet an independent poet, but only an unusually talented student of his predecessors, Russian and French poets (Voltaire, Karamzin, Radishchev). The history of Pushkin's poem does not begin with these youthful experiences; Yes, they were not published during the life of the author.

In 1817, Pushkin began his largest poem - "Ruslan and Lyudmila" - and wrote it for three whole years.

These were the years of the upsurge of revolutionary sentiment among the youth of the nobility, when secret circles and societies were created that prepared the December uprising of 1825.

Pushkin, not being a member of the Secret Society, was one of the leading figures in this movement. He was the only one in these years (before exile to the south) who wrote revolutionary poems, which immediately dispersed in handwritten copies throughout the country.

But even in legal, printed literature, Pushkin had to fight against reactionary ideas. In 1817, Zhukovsky published the fantastic poem "Vadim" - the second part of the long poem "The Twelve Sleeping Maidens" (the first part of it - "Thunderbolt" - was published as early as 1811). Standing on conservative positions, Zhukovsky wanted with this work to lead young people away from political action into the realm of romantic, religiously colored dreams. His hero (whom the poet did not accidentally give the name of Vadim - the legendary hero of the Novgorod uprising against Prince Rurik) - is an ideal young man striving for exploits and at the same time feeling in his soul a mysterious call to something unknown, otherworldly. He eventually overcomes all earthly temptations and, steadily following this call, finds happiness in mystical union with one of the twelve virgins whom he awakens from their wonderful sleep. The action of the poem takes place now in Kyiv, now in Novgorod. Vadim defeats the giant and saves the Kievan princess, whom her father destines for his wife. This reactionary poem was written with great poetic power, beautiful verse, and Pushkin had every reason to fear its strong influence on the development of young Russian literature. In addition, Vadim was at that time the only major work created by a representative of a new literary school that had just finally won the fight against classicism.

Pushkin answered "Vadim" with "Ruslan and Lyudmila", also a fabulous poem from the same era, with a number of similar episodes. But all its ideological content is sharply polemical in relation to the ideas of Zhukovsky. Instead of mysterious-mystical feelings and almost ethereal images, Pushkin has everything earthly, material; the whole poem is filled with playful, mischievous erotica (description of Ruslan's wedding night, Ratmir's adventures with twelve maidens, Chernomor's attempts to take possession of the sleeping Lyudmila, etc., as well as in a number of author's digressions).

The polemical meaning of the poem is fully revealed at the beginning of the fourth song, where the poet directly points to the object of this controversy - Zhukovsky's poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" - and mockingly parodies it, turning its heroines, mystically minded pure virgins, "nuns of the saints", into frivolous inhabitants of the roadside "hotels" that lure travelers to them.

Witty, brilliant, sparkling with fun, Pushkin's poem immediately dispelled the mystical fog that surrounded folk fairy tale motifs and images in Zhukovsky's poem. After "Ruslan and Lyudmila" it became impossible to use them to embody reactionary religious ideas.

The good-natured Zhukovsky himself admitted his defeat in this literary struggle, presenting Pushkin with his portrait with the inscription: "To the victorious student from the defeated teacher, on that highly solemn day when he finished his poem" Ruslan and Lyudmila ".

This poem put Pushkin in first place among Russian poets. They began to write about him in Western European magazines.

However, being a major phenomenon in Russian literature and public life, Pushkin's playful fairy-tale poem did not yet put Russian literature on a par with the literature of the West, where Goethe acted in Germany in those years, Byron and Shelley in England, Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant in France, each in his own way solving the most important issues of our time in his work.

Since 1820, Pushkin has been included in this series, creating one after another his romantic poems, serious and deep in content, modern in subject matter and highly poetic in form. With these poems ("The Prisoner of the Caucasus", "The Robber Brothers", "The Fountain of Bakhchisaray"), a new direction enters Russian literature: advanced, revolutionary romanticism - a poetic expression of the feelings and views of the most advanced social stratum, the revolutionary-minded noble youth, the most active part of which were the Decembrists. Sharp dissatisfaction with everything around, with the whole social order, in which life seems like a prison, and a person is a prisoner; ardent desire for freedom; freedom as an object of an almost religious cult (1) is one side of the attitude of the revolutionary romantics of the 1920s. At the same time, their social loneliness, the lack of a living connection with the people, whose sufferings they deeply sympathized with, but whose life they knew little and understood little - all this gave a tragic and extremely subjective, individualistic character to their worldview. Feelings and tragic experiences of a lonely, proud person standing high above the crowd became the main content of Pushkin's romantic work. The protest against any oppression that weighs on a person in a "civilized" society - political, social, moral, religious oppression - forced him, like all revolutionary romantics of that time, to sympathetically depict his hero as a criminal. a violator of all accepted in society norms - religious. legal, moral. The favorite image of the romantics is "a criminal and a hero", who "was worthy of both the horror of people and glory." Finally, characteristic of the Romantics was the desire to divert poetry from the reproduction of everyday reality they hated into the world of the unusual, exotic, geographical or historical. There they found the images of nature they needed - mighty and rebellious ("deserts, the waves of the region are pearly, and the noise of the sea, and piles of rocks"), and images of people, proud, courageous, free, not yet affected by European civilization.

A major role in the poetic embodiment of these feelings and experiences was played by Byron's work, which in many respects was close to the worldview of Russian progressive romantics. Pushkin, and after him other poets, used, first of all, the form of the "Byronic poem" successfully found by the English poet, in which the purely lyrical experiences of the poet are clothed in a narrative form with a fictional hero and events that are far from the real events of the poet's life, but perfectly expressing his inner life. life, his soul. "... He comprehended, created and described a single character (namely his own)," Pushkin wrote in a note on Byron's dramas. .". So Pushkin, in his romantic poems, tried to "create himself a second time", either as a prisoner in the Caucasus, or as Aleko, who had fled the "bondage of stuffy cities". Pushkin himself more than once pointed out the lyrical, almost autobiographical nature of his romantic heroes.

The external features of Pushkin's southern poems are also associated with the Byronian tradition: a simple, undeveloped plot, a small number of characters (two, three), fragmentary and sometimes deliberately vague presentation.

The everlasting property of Pushkin's poetic talent is the ability to vigilantly observe reality and the desire to speak about it in precise words. In the poems, this was reflected in the fact that, while creating romantic images of nature and people, Pushkin did not invent them, did not write (as, for example, Byron about Russia or, later, Ryleev about Siberia) about what he himself did not see, but always based on living personal impressions - the Caucasus, the Crimea, the Bessarabian steppes.

Pushkin's poems created and for a long time predetermined the type of romantic poem in Russian literature. They caused numerous imitations of minor poets, and also had a strong influence on the work of such poets as Ryleev, Kozlov, Baratynsky and, finally, Lermontov.

In addition to The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Robber Brothers, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, written before 1824 and soon published, Pushkin also conceived other romantic poems. “I still have poems wandering around in my head,” he wrote to Delvig in March 1821. In his manuscripts, there were sketches of several poems, where Pushkin thought to develop the same “heroic” or "criminal" romantic image and show its inevitably tragic fate. An excerpt from one of these poems, where the ataman of the Volga robbers was to become the hero, Pushkin published under the title "Brothers-Robbers". The beginning of the great romantic poem "Vadim" has also been preserved.

In the same years, perhaps under the influence of the enormous success of "Ruslan and Lyudmila", Pushkin also considered poems of a completely different type - magical and fabulous, with an adventurous plot and historical or mythological characters: about Bova the King, about the son of Vladimir, St. Mstislav and his fight against the Circassians, about Actaeon and Diana. But these plans, which distracted the poet from his main task - the development and deepening of romantic themes - were never realized by him.

However, in the spring of 1821, Pushkin wrote a short poem "Gavriiliada", a witty, brilliant anti-religious satire - a response to the intensified political reaction, colored in these years by mysticism and religious hypocrisy.

In 1823, Pushkin experienced a severe crisis in his romantic worldview. Disappointed in the hope of the imminent realization of the victory of the revolution, first in the West, and then in Russia - and in this victory Pushkin, full of "careless faith", was completely convinced - he soon became disillusioned with all his romantic ideals - freedom, the sublime hero , high-end poetry, romantic eternal love. At that time he wrote a number of gloomy, bitter poems, pouring out his "biliousness" and "cynicism" (in his words) into them - "The Sower", "Demon", "A Bookseller's Conversation with a Poet" (and a little later - "A Scene from Faust") and others that remained unfinished in the manuscript. In these verses, he bitterly ridicules all the main points of his romantic worldview.

Among such works is the poem "Gypsies", written in 1824. Its content is a critical exposure of the romantic ideal of freedom and the romantic hero. The romantic hero Aleko, who finds himself in the environment he desires of complete freedom, the opportunity to freely do whatever he wants, discovers his true essence: he turns out to be an egoist and a rapist. In "Gypsies" the very romantic ideal of unlimited freedom is debunked. Pushkin convincingly shows that complete freedom of action, the absence of restrictions and obligations in public life would be feasible only for primitive, idle, lazy, "timid and kind-hearted" people, but in personal life, in love, it turns out to be a purely animal passion, not bound by with no moral concerns. The inability to go beyond a purely romantic, subjective view of life inevitably leads the poet to a deeply gloomy conclusion that happiness on earth is impossible "and there is no protection from fate." "Gypsies" - a poem of a turning point, a transitional period - is, ideologically and artistically, a huge step forward compared to previous poems. Despite the completely romantic character and style of her, and the exotic setting, and the characters, Pushkin here for the first time uses the method of purely realistic verification of the fidelity of his romantic ideals. He does not suggest speeches and actions to his characters, but simply places them in a given setting and traces how they perform in the circumstances they encounter. In fact, Aleko, a typical romantic hero, well known to us from the poems and lyrics of Pushkin in the early 1920s, could not have acted differently in the position in which he found himself. The double murder committed by him out of jealousy is fully consistent with his character and worldview, revealed both in the poem itself and in other romantic works of that era. On the other hand, Zemfira, as shown by Pushkin, could not do otherwise, could not remain faithful to Aleko forever - after all, she is a gypsy, the daughter of Mariula, and her story only repeats - with the exception of the tragic ending - the story of her mother.

This "objective" position of the author of "Gypsies" in relation to the actions and feelings of his heroes was also reflected in the form itself: most of the episodes of the poem are given in the form of dialogues, in a dramatic form, where the author's voice is absent, and the characters themselves speak and act.

"Gypsies" - a work in which the crisis of the worldview of Pushkin the romantic was most profoundly reflected; at the same time, according to the method of developing the theme, it opened up new paths in Pushkin's work - the path to realism.

In the summer of 1824, Pushkin was expelled from Odessa to Mikhailovskoye, without the right to leave. Constant and close contact with the peasants, with the people, apparently more than anything else, contributed to overcoming the severe crisis in the poet's worldview. He became convinced of the unfairness of his bitter reproaches to the people for their unwillingness to fight for their freedom (2), he realized that "freedom" is not some abstract moral and philosophical concept, but a concrete historical one, always associated with social life, and for such freedom - political, economic - the people have always fought tirelessly (constant peasant revolts against the landlords, not to mention the uprisings of Pugachev, Razin or the era of the "Time of Troubles"). He had to see that all his disappointments in his former romantic ideals were the result of insufficient knowledge of reality itself, its objective laws, and little poetic interest in reality itself. In 1825, a sharp turn took place in Pushkin's work. Having finally broken with romanticism, Pushkin emerges from his crisis. His poetry acquires a clear and generally bright, optimistic character. The former task of his poetry - the expression of his own feelings and suffering, a poetic response to the imperfections of life, contrary to the subjective, albeit noble requirements of the romantic, the embodiment of romantic ideals in images of the unusual - exotic, idealized nature and extraordinary heroes - is replaced by a new one. Pushkin consciously makes his poetry a means of cognizing the ordinary reality that he had previously rejected, he strives to penetrate into it by an act of poetic creativity, to understand its typical phenomena, objective laws. The desire to correctly explain human psychology inevitably leads him to the study and artistic embodiment of social life, to the depiction in various plot forms of social conflicts, the reflection of which is human psychology.

The same desire to know reality, modernity pushes him to study the past, to reproduce important moments in history.

In connection with these new creative tasks, both the nature of the depicted objects in Pushkin and the very style of the image change: instead of exotic, unusual - everyday life, nature, people; instead of a poetically sublime, abstract, metaphorical style - a simple, close to colloquial, but nevertheless highly poetic style.

Pushkin creates a new trend in literature - realism, which later (from the 40s) became the leading trend in Russian literature.

The main, predominant embodiment of this new, realistic trend, these new tasks of a true knowledge of reality and its laws, Pushkin gives at this time not so much in poems as in other genres: in drama ("Boris Godunov", "little tragedies"), in prose stories ("Tales of Belkin", "The Captain's Daughter", etc.), in a poetic novel - "Eugene Onegin". In these genres, it was easier for Pushkin to implement new principles and develop new methods of realistic creativity.

The historical folk tragedy "Boris Godunov" (1825) and the central chapters of "Eugene Onegin" (3) (1825-1826) were a kind of manifesto of this new trend in Russian literature.

At the same time (in December 1825) Pushkin also wrote the first realistic poem - the playful, cloudless and cheerful "Count Nulin". In it, on a simple, almost anecdotal plot, a lot of beautiful paintings, landscapes, conversations of the most ordinary, "prosaic", everyday content, turned into genuine poetry, are strung. Almost all those images are found here, with which Pushkin characterizes his new realistic style in a half-serious-half-joking stanza from Onegin's Journey, as opposed to the romantic "heaps of rocks", "the sound of the sea", "deserts", the image of the "proud maiden" (4) : here is a slope, and a fence, and gray clouds in the sky, and a rainy season, and a backyard, and ducks, and even a "hostess" (albeit a bad one) as the heroine of the poem ...

The defeat of the December uprising in 1825 and the political and social reaction that followed, a temporary halt in the development of the Russian revolutionary movement changed the character of Russian literature: the theme of the struggle for freedom left it for several years. Pushkin, returned by Nicholas I from exile, having received the opportunity to communicate with friends, enjoying enormous popularity among the public, nevertheless did not feel happy.

The stifling social atmosphere after the defeat of the Decembrists, the reactionary, cowardly, philistine moods supported by the new reactionary journalism, which reigned in society and infected many of his friends - all this caused Pushkin from time to time to attacks of complete despair, expressed in such poems as "The gift in vain, an accidental gift, life, why have you been given to me?" or "In the worldly steppe, sad and boundless ..." ("The last key is the cold key of oblivion, it will quench the heat of the heart most sweetly").

The idea that death is preferable to life, Pushkin thought to put in the basis of the gloomy poem he began in 1826 about the hero of the gospel legend - Ahasuerus ("Eternal Jew"), punished for his crime against God by immortality. However, these gloomy themes remained a temporary episode in Pushkin's work. He managed to overcome his heavy mood, and the poem about Ahasuerus was left at the very beginning.

During these years of social decline, Pushkin's creative work does not stop, but at this time he develops themes that are not directly related to the theme of the liberation movement. The subject of the poet's close attention is the human psyche, characters, "passions", their influence on the human soul (the central chapters of "Eugene Onegin", "little tragedies", sketches of prose stories).

Among Pushkin's works of 1826-1830, inspired by the "psychological" theme, we do not find a single poem. (True, in the poems "Poltava" and "Tazit" the development of the psychology of heroes occupies a large place, but it is not the main task of these purely political works.) A more suitable form for the artistic analysis of human psychology was a novel in verse, a dramatic sketch, a prose story, or story.

In the same years, Pushkin also wrote a number of major works of political content, but of a different nature. In his work of this time, the theme of the Russian state, the fate of Russia in the struggle with the West for its independence, is embodied - an echo of Pushkin's youthful memories of the events of 1812-1815. In parallel with this, he poetically develops the most important theme of the multinationality of the Russian state, writes about the historical regularity of the unification of many different peoples into one state whole. In the poem "Poltava" these themes are developed on the basis of the historical material of the struggle of Russia at the beginning of the 18th century. with the then strongest military state - Sweden. Here, Pushkin poetically reveals his assessment of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. In another, unfinished, poem "Tazit", based on Pushkin's impressions of his second Caucasian journey (1829). and reflections on the complexity and difficulty of the issue of ending the enmity of the peoples of the Caucasus with the Russians, the same national-political theme develops.

In the 30s. Pushkin's work is again almost entirely devoted to the development of social issues. The people, the serfs, their life, their poetry, their struggle for their liberation - become one of the main themes of Pushkin the artist and historian, as he is becoming in these years. The life of a fortress village is shown in the unfinished "History of the village of Goryukhin", in "Dubrovsky"; in the fairy tales and drama "Mermaid" the motifs of folk poetry are reproduced and artistically processed. Pushkin first shows the struggle of the peasants against the landlords in the form of "robbery" (in "Dubrovsky"), and these are no longer romantic "robber brothers", but living, real types of peasants and courtyards. Pushkin devotes two great works to the real peasant war, "Pugachevism" - the story "The Captain's Daughter" and the historical study "The History of Pugachev". The popular uprising against the feudal knights and the participation of representatives of the bourgeois class in it constitute the volume of the unfinished drama "Scenes from Knightly Times".

During these years, Pushkin introduces a new hero into literature - a suffering, oppressed "little man", a victim of an unfair social order - in the story "The Stationmaster", in the novel "Ezersky" he had begun, in the poem "The Bronze Horseman".

Pushkin sharply reacts to the changes taking place before his eyes in the class composition of the intelligentsia, in particular the writers' environment. Previously, "only the nobles were engaged in literature in our country," as Pushkin repeated more than once, seeing this as the reason for the writer's independent behavior in relation to the authorities. to the government, now representatives of the raznochintsy, bourgeois intelligentsia are beginning to play an ever greater and greater role in literature. In those years, this new democracy was not yet a "revolutionary democracy", on the contrary, most of its leaders, fighting with representatives of the ruling noble, landlord class for their place in life, did not show any opposition to the government, to the tsar.

Pushkin considered the only force capable of opposing its independence to governmental arbitrariness, of being a "powerful defender" of the people, of the nobility from which the Decembrists came, an impoverished nobility, but "with education", "with hatred against the aristocracy" (5) . “There is no such terrible element of riots in Europe either,” Pushkin wrote in his diary. “Who were on the square on December 14? Only nobles.

These thoughts about the role of the old nobility in the liberation movement (in the past and in the future), the condemnation of its representatives, who do not understand their historical mission and kowtow before the authorities, before the "new nobility", the royal servants - Pushkin embodied not only in journalistic notes, but and in works of art, in particular, they constitute the main, main content of the first stanzas of "Yezersky" written by Pushkin.

In the 30s. Pushkin had to wage a fierce literary struggle. His opponents were reactionary, cowardly, unscrupulous journalists and critics who had taken possession of almost the entire readership, indulging the narrow-minded tastes of readers from small landowners and officials, who did not disdain political denunciations of their literary enemies. They persecuted Pushkin for everything new that he introduces into literature - a realistic direction, simplicity of expression, unwillingness to moralize ... The polemic with modern journalism about the tasks of literature was included by Pushkin in the initial stanzas of "Yezersky", this same polemic is the main content of the whole poem - "House in Kolomna".

A long series of poems written from 1820 to 1833, Pushkin completed "The Bronze Horseman" - a poem about the conflict between the happiness of an individual and the good of the state - his best work, remarkable both for the extraordinary depth and courage of thought, the sharpness of the historical and social problem posed by the poet and the perfection of artistic expression. This work still causes controversy and various interpretations.

Pushkin used many genres in his work, but the poem has always remained a favorite form for expressing his "mind of cold observations and heart of sorrowful remarks." Pushkin celebrated almost every stage of his development with a poem, almost every one of the life problems that confronted him found expression in a poem. The enormous distance between the light, brilliant poem of the twenty-year-old Pushkin - "Ruslan and Lyudmila" - and the deeply philosophical poem "The Bronze Horseman", written by the thirty-four-year-old sage poet, clearly shows the swiftness of Pushkin's path, the steepness of the peak, which Pushkin climbed, and with him and all Russian literature.

(1) Freedom! he was looking for you alone in the desert world... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And with faith, with a fiery plea, Your proud idol embraced. ("Prisoner of the Caucasus".) (2) Graze, peaceful peoples! The cry of honor will not awaken you. Why do the herds need the gifts of freedom? They must be cut or sheared. Their legacy from generation to generation is Yarmo with rattles and a scourge. ("The desert sower of freedom...", 1823) (3) The original idea (1823) and the first chapters of the novel date back to the period of Pushkin's crisis. Realistic images in them are given polemically, with the aim of mocking everyday reduction of traditional romantic images and situations. "... I am writing a new poem, "Eugene Onegin", where I choke on bile" (letter to A. I. Turgenev dated December 1, 1823); "... do not believe N. Raevsky, who scolds him ("Eugene Onegin." - S. B.) - he expected romanticism from me, found satire and cynicism and decently did not catch on "(letter to brother dated January-February 1824 G.). (4) I need other pictures: I love a sandy hillside, Two rowan trees in front of the hut, A gate, a broken fence, Gray clouds in the sky, Heaps of straw in front of the threshing floor, Yes, a pond under the canopy of dense willows, Expanse of young ducks. My ideal now is the hostess... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sometimes on a rainy day the other day I turned into the barnyard... (Excerpts from "Onegin's Journey", 1829) (5) That is, the ruling elite.

CM. Bondy. Poems of Pushkin.

Pushkin's poems, a list of which is presented in this review, occupy a prominent place in the history of Russian poetry. They had a huge impact on the development of Russian literature of the 19th century, defining the main themes of the works of this genre for several decades to come.

historical

Pushkin's poems, the list of which should begin with the most famous works, are devoted to various topics. But most of all the author was interested in the plots of the past and topics relevant to his time.

So, the poet paid great attention to the plots of history.

romantic

Some of Pushkin's poems, the list of which should be continued by mentioning his freedom-loving works, were written under the influence of J. Byron.

In them, the poet portrayed strong natures, who value freedom more than life.

So, Pushkin's romantic poems are permeated with the pathos of love of freedom.

Other works

Poetic works of the poet are distinguished by both an interesting plot and magnificent language.

Pushkin's works show the diversity of his interests.

Russian poet Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (real name Gorenko), a bright representative of the creative intelligentsia, wife of the famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov until 1918. After publishing his first poems in 1912, Akhmatova became a cult figure among the intelligentsia and part of the St. Petersburg literary scene. Her second book, Rosary (1914), was critically acclaimed, who praised the virtues of deliberate, carefully crafted verse, in contrast to the vague style of the Symbolists that dominated Russian literature of the period.

Anna Azhmatova wrote a lot of lyric poetry, piercing love poetry is loved by millions of people of different generations. But her sharp attitude in her work to the excesses of power led to a conflict. Under Soviet rule, there was an unspoken ban on Akhmatova's poetry from 1925 to 1940. During this time, Akhmatova devoted herself to literary criticism, in particular the translation of Pushkin into other languages.

Changes in the political climate finally allowed Akhmatova to be accepted into the Writers' Union, but after World War II, there was an official decree banning the publication of her poetry. Her son, Lev, was arrested in 1949 and spent in prison until 1956. To try and win his release, Akhmatova wrote poetry praising Stalin and the government, but it was to no avail.

Although Akhmatova often faced official government opposition to her work during her lifetime, she was deeply loved and praised by the Russian people, in part because she did not leave her country during difficult political times. Her most accomplished works, Requiem (which was not published in full in Russia until 1987) and Poem Without a Hero, are a reaction to the horror of the Stalinist terror, during which she experienced artistic repression as well as tremendous personal loss. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she spent most of her life, in 1966.

The attraction to the epic, noticeable in the lyrics of Nekrasov, was especially fully expressed in his poems - the lyrical-epic genre. Two poems are thematically combined: "Grandfather" and "Russian Women"; the latter is a cycle consisting of two parts.

It was no coincidence that the poem "Grandfather" (1870) appeared in the poetry collection of 1856: in 1855, after the death of Nicholas I, an amnesty was declared for the Decembrists. Nekrasov immediately responded to this event with his poem, just like L. N. Tolstoy, who began the story of the Decembrist in 1856, although his work dragged on for many years and grew into the idea of ​​the novel War and Peace.

Nekrasov got acquainted with Herzen's publications - "Polar Star" and "The Bell", used the memoirs of the Decembrist Baron Rosen, with whom he was familiar, "Notes of M. N. Volkonskaya." The key idea of ​​the poems was expressed already in "Grandfather":

The spectacle of the disasters of the people

Unbearable, my friend;

Happiness of noble minds -

See contentment around.

Both in the poem "Grandfather" and in "Russian Women" Nekrasov develops a special type of lyrical-epic narrative, which can be called mosaic. There is no plot, as they sometimes say, "stretched into a thread", a consistent chain of events, but there are a number of scenes, individual episodes, landscapes, dialogues that make up a kind of artistic unity.

This principle was especially clearly reflected in the first of the poems about Russian women - in "Princess Trubetskoy", the text of which consists of two parts.

The first part describes farewell to the father, departure and travel through Siberia; real pictures, interspersed with memories of the serene youth and youth of a brilliant secular beauty, about a trip to Italy with her husband, about experienced happiness, and again road trip impressions, already in Siberia. This whole part is built on an internal contrast: half-asleep-half-awake, struggling with reality, bright pictures of the serene past, interspersed with the terrible reality of the present - a journey into the depths of Siberia.

Each such episode is closed in itself and resembles a lyrical extended poem. For example, the second fragment of the description of the path - the most detailed in this part of the poem - opens and ends with the motive of a swift, persistent movement and a contrasting feeling of the experienced:

Forward! Soul full of sadness

The road is getting harder

But dreams are peaceful and easy -

She dreamed of her youth ...

In the finale, the princess is awakened from oblivion by a shackle ringing: a party of exiles is walking along the same path that her husband went:

And do not drive away her thoughts,

Don't forget sleep!

"And that party was here ...

Yes, there is no other way...

But the blizzard covered their trail.

Hurry, coachman, hurry! .. "

With mean hints, the poet draws the image of Prince Trubetskoy. In one of the episodes of the return from Italy to Russia, the key to the fate of many Decembrists is hidden: a handsome young man, fabulously rich, a man of great light, ready to give anything for a decent life in his homeland. Many of Nekrasov's earlier works, including The Poet and the Citizen, serve as a pretext for this fragment.

Gone are the rainbow dreams.

In front of her are a number of paintings.

Godforsaken side:

Severe lord

And a miserable worker-man

With a bowed head...

As the first to rule,

How slaves the second!

She dreams of groups of poor people

In the fields, in the meadows,

She dreams of the groans of barge haulers

On the banks of the Volga...

Full of naive horror

She doesn't eat, she doesn't sleep

Fall asleep satellite she

Questions in a hurry:

"Tell me, is the whole region like this?

There is no shadow contentment? .. "

“You are in the kingdom of beggars and slaves!” -

The short answer was...

The second part of the poem is a conversation between the princess and the governor. The poet draws a clash of two characters: an old campaigner who is ordered to detain this woman at all costs, and her will, her perseverance and her victory. The stubbornness of the governor-general is broken by the nobility, strength of feeling, loyalty to the duty of a young woman. She goes on her way, he is shocked at how she has withstood all the temptations, all the trials and all the threats.

Poem "Princess Volkonskaya" has a subtitle: "Grandmother's Notes". The fact is that Nekrasov, while working on the poem, took advantage of the memories of M. N. Volkonskaya, which were not published at that time and were kept in the archive of her son. In its construction, the poem is more complex than the previous one. It is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is arranged in such a way as if the good-natured grandmother-princess writes notes for her grandchildren, bequeathing to them an iron bracelet, once forged by her husband, their grandfather, from the convict's own chain. This chapter contains the story of her father, General Raevsky, the illustrious hero of the Patriotic War of 1812. Nekrasov used not only Volkonskaya's memoirs, but also historical works dedicated to that time, Zhukovsky's poetic testimonies (his poem "A Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors"), Pushkin's memoirs about old general (in one of the letters to his brother). The second chapter is filled with a sense of misfortune. The heroine leaves her father's estate for St. Petersburg and here learns about her husband's participation in the conspiracy, in the uprising, and about the sentence passed on him. The decision is made immediately:

Let the trouble be great.

I have not lost everything in the world.

Siberia is so terrible

Siberia is far away

But people live in Siberia too!..

Chapter three is reminiscent of the second part of "Princess Trubetskoy": it describes the struggle that one has to endure for the right to go to her husband in Siberia. But here, a young woman who has decided on a difficult path and a life full of hardships is already struggling with close people who love her endlessly, mainly with her father, who cannot come to terms with the misfortunes to which she dooms herself. The poem complements "Princess Trubetskoy" in the sense that it clearly, in laconic, but expressive details, completes the image of Tsar Nicholas I. In the answer to the princess, written in French, the emperor first frightens her with the horrors of the land where she wished to go, and then hints at that the return in this case for her will no longer be possible. In other words, the threats of the tormentor of her predecessor, Princess Trubetskoy, are repeated not as their own improvisation, but from other people's words, from the words of the tsar. It was indeed a serious warning. However, the princess neglects this ominous "parting word".

The fourth chapter is the beginning of a long journey. In it, the Moscow high society and the color of the Moscow intelligentsia appear in the salon of the heroine's relative by husband, Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya. The most vivid impression of this last evening, spent among sympathetic people who admired her (Nekrasov recalls musicians, famous writers Vyazemsky, Odoevsky), is left by the meeting of the heroine with Pushkin, who stopped by to say goodbye to her. They return to the time spent together, when sent by another tsar, Alexander I, to the southern exile, the poet made part of the way with the family of General Raevsky. This final chapter, the most detailed in it, and in the whole poem, the fragment testifies: Nekrasov knew to the smallest detail the life of Pushkin, who was the object of his closest observations and thoughts. The lines dedicated to Pushkin in "The Poet and the Citizen" were not an accident. N. A. Nekrasov again, now in a poem, returns to reflections on the motives for the work of a true artist and gives them his own interpretation. A. S. Pushkin is the undisputed idol of Nekrasov, who recalls, using the memoirs of Raevskaya, a 20-year-old poet (in 1826, to which the narrative relates, he was already 27 years old), draws the image of a direct, lively, sincere and, however, , immersed in his poetic world, busy with the process of creativity. Then Pushkin was an admirer and translator of Byron, fascinated by observations of nature, paintings that would give him impulses for future romantic poems, now he is busy with The History of Pugachev. N. A. Nekrasov confuses the dates: the idea of ​​​​historical work on Pugachev dates back to a much later time, it arose only at the beginning of 1833, like the trip to the places of the Pugachev uprising, which took place in the fall of 1833. A. S. Pushkin could not speak about this with Volkonskaya. N. A. Nekrasov, displacing real facts, gives free rein to his fiction, draws a vivid image of Pushkin, an open people whom he loved, but living in the world of his artistic ideas. The heroine catches herself thinking:

But I don't think he loved anyone

Then, except for the Muse: hardly

No more love occupied him

Her worries and sorrows...

A. S. Pushkin in the poem most fully and vividly defines the essence of the deed of the Decembrists, referring to M. N. Volkonskaya:

Go, go! You are strong in spirit

You are rich in bold patience,

May your fateful path be peacefully accomplished,

Don't be put off by loss!

Believe me, such spiritual purity

This hateful world is not worth it!

Blessed is he who changes his bustle

To the feat of selfless love!

Chapter Five - pictures of a desert, harsh region, the way into the December cold and snowstorms along the Siberian highways. Some incidents could cost the heroine her life (blizzard in the open steppe), and the news could sow confusion and chaos in the soul (false rumor that Princess Trubetskaya was returned from the road). Self-satisfied scoundrels in uniform, loyal to "the king and the fatherland", cause despair, but ordinary people always find a kind word for Volkonskaya in their hearts. She also had to endure the “Irkutsk test”, similar to what happened to Trubetskoy, as well as a terrible journey no longer on a sleigh, but in a shaking cart along the snowy Siberian impassability, and, finally, the final happy episode: an unexpected meeting with Ekaterina Trubetskoy! Volkonskaya, stronger in spirit, supports her in a moment of spiritual fatigue:

What have we lost? think sister!

Vanity toys... Not much!

Now we have a good road ahead of us,

The road of the chosen ones of God!

The sixth final chapter is the last stage made by women together, until Blagodatsky mine, where the Decembrists are kept in hard labor.

Thus, the two poems are not just thematically united ("Russian Women"), but also plotted by Nekrasov into one narrative, glorifying the feat of female self-sacrifice. The last episode, the meeting with the Decembrist convicts and with her husband in the mine, is one of the stunning Nekrasov pictures of human sorrow and joy. It includes a thought that gives it special meaning and strength - the thought of the riches of the people's soul, always, in any circumstances of life, giving its echo to someone else's pain and grief. Here is the famous passage included in the stanza of the sixth chapter:

I want to say

Thank you Russian people!

On the road, in exile, wherever I have been,

All hard hard labor time,

People! I carried with you more cheerfully

My unbearable burden.

May many sorrows fall on your part,

You share other people's sorrows

And where my tears are ready to fall

Yours have already fallen there! ..

You love the unfortunate, Russian people!

Suffering made us...

"The law itself will not save you in hard labor!" -

At home they told me;

But I met good people there too,

At the last step of the fall,

They were able to express to us in their own way

Criminals tribute;

Me and my inseparable Katya

Were greeted with a smile:

"You are our angels!"

For our husbands

They did the lessons.

Accept my low bow, poor people!

Thank you all send!

Thank you!... They considered their work to be nothing

For us, these people are simple.

But no one poured bitterness into the cup,

Nobody - from the people, relatives!

Nekrasov later said that the poem was met with such success, "which none of the previous writings had." To a large extent, this was due to the poetic form that he happily found for the lyric-epic genre. If in the poet's lyrical verses, as already mentioned, the breath of the epic is felt, then in epic works - the strongest influence of the lyrical element and even lyrical structures. The same principle of fragmentation of detailed poetic compositions, which so clearly makes itself felt in the cycle "Russian Women", determines the poems "Sasha", "Frost, Red Nose", "Pedlars", and in particular his last brilliant creation - the poem "To whom in Russia it is good to live". This work will forever remain a mystery, some great mystery. N. A. Nekrasov began to work on the poem already in the 1860s. (in 1866 the "Prologue" was published), but never completed it, the work was interrupted by death. However, if the poem does not have a complete implementation of the plan and one can only guess about it, then by some miracle the finale appeared, where all the plot and ideological lines were perfectly brought together.

Until now, the composition of the entire work remains unclear - and will never be clarified. Disputes about the sequence of parts continue to this day. There are indeed many oddities here: there are two "Prologues" in the poem (in the beginning and in the "Peasant Woman"); belated introduction, moreover, before the last part; some chapters have names, others are simply numbered ("Last Child"). Now the text of the poem is printed like this: "Prologue"; "The Last"; "Peasant"; "A feast for the whole world." However, this is not an entirely accurate reflection of the lifetime edition. After all, even then Nekrasov did not hide the fact that he was talking about fragments of an unfinished work. In the last collection of "Poems by N. A. Nekrasov" (1873–1874), the poem was published in the following sequence: "Prologue"; part one (1865); "Last Child" (from the second part of "Who Lives Well in Russia") (1872); "Peasant woman" (from the third part of "To whom it is good to live in Russia") (1873).

The final part, "A Feast for the Whole World", was not here yet: it will be published only in 1876. However, the author's note to it at the time of its appearance was as follows: the whole world "should complete the whole poem, it also contains epilogue, associated with the image of Grisha Dobrosklonov.

In other words, in modern editions it is allowed to change the author's text or its layout on the basis of a critical reading of the entire poem. This often happens in the work of textual critics: either errors are possible due to the carelessness or haste of the author, or a change in the very idea in the process of work.

However, textual criticism is of no further help here. Perhaps only more distinct comments, which, unfortunately, are most often absent. It is not possible to answer the most fundamental question about the author's "last will" for the simple reason that it does not exist.

For example, "Peasant Woman" in one of the manuscripts referred to the second part ("From the second part"), which does not correspond to the content of the plot movement in the poem:

We already told the priest

They brought the landlord

Yes, straight to you!

At the same time, "A Feast for the Whole World", as already mentioned, had a note: "The present chapter follows the chapter "Last Child", i.e. there is an obvious confusion in the author's proposals themselves (in the lifetime edition, we recall, the "Last Child" was followed by "Peasant Woman"),

As a complete artistic whole, the poem does not exist, the work continued, and the alternation of parts could well have changed, like the text itself. After all, the sequence of Belkin's Tales changed, and in a significant way, when Pushkin assembled a cycle from them; the same thing happened with Lermontov's Hero of Our Time, and later with Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter. The composition of the poem "To whom it is good to live in Russia" was never completed.

Mosaic principle, i.e. discreteness, isolation of individual fragments of the text, can be traced in the entire construction of the poem (in its division into parts), and in the individual parts themselves, breaking up into chapters:

Ch. I. Pop; ch. II. Rural fair; ch. III. drunken night; ch. IV. Happy; ch. V. Landowner.

Last

(consists of three chapters, but they are not named, but only numbered)

peasant woman

Prologue; ch. I. Before marriage; ch. II. Songs; ch. III. Saveliy, Holy Russian hero; ch. IV. Demushka; ch. V. She-wolf; ch. VI. Difficult year; ch. VII. Governor; ch. VIII. Grandma's story.

Feast - for the whole world

Introduction; ch. I. Bitter time - bitter songs (subtitles: Merry, Corvee, About the exemplary serf - Jacob the faithful); ch. II. Wanderers and pilgrims (the ending is highlighted in a separate fragment: "About two great sinners"); ch. III. Both old and new (subheadings: Peasant's sin, Hungry, Soldier's); ch. IV. Good time - good songs (subtitles: Salty, Burlak, Rus); ch. V has no title, in terms of its compositional functions it is an epilogue.

The feast scenes, like the feast itself, end at dawn. The ending sounds symbolic. Wanderers and pilgrims fall asleep, and the seven seekers of truth also fall asleep. And at this very time, a happy man - Grisha Dobrosklonov (N. A. Dobrolyubov was his prototype for Nekrasov) - returns home, singing his song:

The share of the people

his happiness,

Light and freedom

Primarily!

The poet will repeat this stanza twice: Grisha's "song" opens and ends with it, but this is the central motif of all Nekrasov's work.

The "Feast for the Whole World" concludes with a song symbolically called "Rus". Its initial and final stanzas are a ring frame, consisting of invariant (identical) and variable lines:

You are poor too.

You are abundant

You are beaten

You and the almighty

Mother Russia!

You are poor

You are abundant.

You are powerful

You are powerless

Mother Russia!

Once again, a great master of verse appears before us, who operates with the most complex constructions, translates sublime rhetoric, pathos into the finest associative connections, speaking in his own, figurative, poetic language, which is subject only to poetic forms. Indeed, in this rearrangement of the former artistic thought in the reverse flow of ideas, the hope that lives in the soul of the poet about a future happy Russia is expressed, no matter how hard its present is!

You and mighty,

You and powerless

You and stuffed,

You and all-powerful

The poem ends with an untitled text (marked by the Roman numeral V) - the shortest in the last part, and in the entire poem, a subchapter, which is a compressed epilogue works. Once again, Grisha Dobrosklonov is before the readers, thinking in verse even in his sleep, like a true poet. The last six-verse is the final, generalized, central idea of ​​the poem and at the same time the denouement of the plot, turning us back to the "Prologue" with its painful questions:

To be our wanderers under the native roof.

If only they could know what happened to Grisha.

He heard immense strength in his chest,

Gracious sounds delighted his ears,

Radiant sounds of the noble hymn -

He sang the embodiment of the happiness of the people! ..

The striking phenomenon of Nekrasov's ingenious poem - the feeling of completeness, completeness of the work that did not have the "last mint", did not receive the final edition of the author who was dying at that moment - lies in the fact that it turned out to be permeated with through flows of ideas that are receiving organic and intensive development, in order to in order to return to their roots in the finale. This is another example of the amazing sense of form that lives in the mind of a great artist, because the narrative spaces of the poem are very large, this is the most detailed of the works left by Nekrasov.

But this is not just the result of the poem, in itself remarkable for its inner integrity, it is also the result of the entire creative and life fate of the poet. From his first steps, he really knew "only one thought power, one, but a fiery passion." Best of all and most accurately, it was expressed by him himself and also at the end of the path, in anticipation of the inevitable approaching death:

I was called to sing of your suffering,

Patience amazing people!

And throw at least a single ray of consciousness

On the path that God leads you...

I will die soon. A sad legacy...