Apollo Aleksandrovich Grigoriev (1822-64) - Russian literary and theater critic, poet. Creator of the so-called organic criticism: articles about N.V. Gogol, A.N. Ostrovsky, A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov, I.S. Turgenev, N.A. Nekrasov, A.A. Fet and others. Memoirs .
According to his worldview, Apollo Grigoriev is a soil scientist. In the center of Grigoriev’s lyrics are the thoughts and suffering of a romantic personality: the cycle “Struggle” (fully published in 1857), including the poem-romances “Oh, at least talk to me...” and “Gypsy Hungarian”, the cycle “Improvisations of a Wandering Romantic” "(1860). Confessional poem “Up the Volga” (1862). Autobiographical prose.
Pushkin is our everything.
Apollo Grigoriev is one of the most prominent Russian critics. Born in 1822 in Moscow, where his father was secretary of the city magistrate. Having received a good home education, he graduated from Moscow University as the first candidate in the law faculty and immediately received a position as secretary of the university board. However, Grigoriev’s nature was not such as to settle firmly anywhere. Having failed in love, he suddenly left for St. Petersburg, tried to get a job both in the Deanery Council and in the Senate, but, due to a completely artistic attitude towards the service, he quickly lost it.
Around 1845, Apollon Grigoriev established relations with Otechestvennye Zapiski, where he published several poems, and with Repertoire and Pantheon. In the last magazine, he wrote a number of less than remarkable articles in all sorts of literary genres: poetry, critical articles, theatrical reports, translations, etc. In 1846, Grigoriev published his poems as a separate book, which were met with nothing more than condescending criticism. Subsequently, A. Grigoriev wrote little original poetry, but translated a lot: from Shakespeare (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “Romeo and Juliet”), from Byron (“Parisina”, excerpts from “Childe Harold” etc.), Moliere, Delavigne.
Art alone brings something new and organic into the world.
Grigoriev Apollo Alexandrovich
During his entire stay in St. Petersburg, Apollo Grigoriev’s lifestyle was the most stormy, and the unfortunate Russian “weakness,” instilled by student revelry, captured him more and more. In 1847, he moved back to Moscow, became a law teacher at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium, actively collaborated in the Moscow City List and tried to settle down. Marriage to L.F. Korsh, the sister of famous writers, briefly made him human the right image life.
In 1850, Apollon Grigoriev got a job at Moskvityanin and became the head of a wonderful circle known as the “young editorial staff of Moskvityanin.” Without any effort on the part of the representatives of the “old editorial board” - Pogodin and Shevyrev, somehow, by itself, around their magazine, a “young, brave, drunk, but honest and brilliantly talented” friendly circle gathered around their magazine, which included: Ostrovsky, Pisemsky, Boris Almazov, Alexey Potekhin, Pechersky-Melnikov, Edelson, Lev Aleksandrovich May, Nick. Berg, Gorbunov, etc. None of them were Slavophiles of the orthodox persuasion, but all of them were attracted to “The Moskvitian” by the fact that here they could freely substantiate their socio-political worldview on the foundation of Russian reality.
Soil, this is depth folk life, the mysterious side of historical movement.
Grigoriev Apollo Alexandrovich
Grigoriev was the main theoretician and standard-bearer of the circle. In the ensuing struggle with St. Petersburg magazines, the opponents' weapons were most often directed precisely against him. This struggle was waged by Grigoriev on a principled basis, but he was usually answered on the basis of ridicule, both because St. Petersburg criticism, during the period between Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, could not produce people capable of ideological debate, and because Grigoriev, with his exaggerations, and with his oddities he himself gave rise to ridicule. He was particularly mocked by his incongruous admiration for Ostrovsky, who for him was not just a talented writer, but a “herald of the new truth” and whom he commented not only on articles, but also on poems, and very bad ones at that - for example, “elegy - ode - satire": "Art and Truth" (1854), caused by the performance of the comedy "Poverty is not a vice."
We Love Tortsov was seriously proclaimed here as a representative of the “Russian pure soul” and was reproached by “Old Europe” and “Toothless-young America, sick with old age.” Ten years later, Apollo himself recalled his prank with horror and found its only justification in the “sincerity of feeling.” This kind of tactless and extremely harmful to the prestige of the ideas he defended, Grigoriev’s antics were one of the characteristic phenomena of his entire literary activity and one of the reasons for his low popularity.
By Orthodoxy I mean a spontaneous historical beginning, which is destined to live and give new forms of life.
Grigoriev Apollo Alexandrovich
And the more Grigoriev wrote, the more his unpopularity grew. In the 1860s it reached its apogee. With his vaguest and most intricate arguments about the “organic” method, he was so out of place in the era of “seductive clarity” of tasks and aspirations that they stopped laughing at him, they even stopped reading him. A big admirer of Grigoriev’s talent and the editor of Vremya, Dostoevsky, who indignantly noticed that Grigoriev’s articles were not directly cut, friendly suggested that he once sign with a pseudonym and at least in this smuggled way draw attention to his articles. A. Grigoriev wrote in “Moskvityanin” until its termination in 1856, after which he worked in “Russian Conversation”, “Library for Reading”, the original “Russian Word”, where he was for some time one of three editors, in “Russian World” ", "Svetoche", "Son of the Fatherland" by Starchevsky, "Russian Messenger" by Katkov, but he failed to settle firmly anywhere.
In 1861, “Time” of the Dostoevsky brothers appeared, and Grigoriev seemed to have again entered a strong literary harbour. As in “Moskvityanin”, a whole circle of “soil writers” was grouped here - Nikolai Strakhov, Dmitry Averkiev, Fyodor Dostoevsky and others - connected with each other both by a commonality of likes and dislikes, and by personal friendship. They all treated Grigoriev with sincere respect. Soon, however, he sensed in this environment some kind of cold attitude towards his mystical broadcasts, and in the same year he left for Orenburg as a teacher of Russian language and literature in the cadet corps. Not without enthusiasm, Grigoriev took up the matter, but very quickly cooled down, and a year later he returned to St. Petersburg and again lived the chaotic life of literary bohemia, up to and including serving time in a debtor’s prison.
Art alone embodies in its creations what is unknown in the air of the era.
Grigoriev Apollo Alexandrovich
In 1863, "Time" was banned. Apollon Grigoriev moved to the weekly Anchor. He edited a newspaper and wrote theater reviews, which unexpectedly had great success, thanks to the extraordinary animation that Grigoriev brought to the reporter's routine and the dryness of theatrical notes. He analyzed the acting with the same care and with the same passionate pathos with which he treated the phenomena of other arts. At the same time, in addition to his subtle taste, he showed great familiarity with German and French theorists of performing arts. In 1864, “Time” was resurrected in the form of “Epoch.” Grigoriev again takes on the role of “first critic,” but not for long. The binge, which turned directly into a physical, painful illness, broke Grigoriev’s powerful body: on September 25, 1864, he died and was buried at the Mitrofanievsky cemetery, next to the same victim of wine - the poet Mey.
Grigoriev’s articles, scattered across various and mostly little-read journals, were collected in 1876 by N.N. Strakhov in one volume. If the publication was successful, it was planned to release further volumes, but this intention has not yet been realized. Grigoriev's unpopularity with the general public thus continues. But in a close circle of people specially interested in literature, Grigoriev’s importance has increased significantly in comparison with his repression during his lifetime. It is not easy to give any precise formulation of Grigoriev’s critical views for many reasons. Clarity was never part of Grigoriev’s critical talent; it was not without reason that the extreme confusion and darkness of presentation scared the public away from his articles.
A definite understanding of the main features of Grigoriev’s worldview is also hampered by the complete lack of discipline of thought in his articles. With the same carelessness with which he burned physical strength, he wasted his mental wealth, not giving himself the trouble to draw up an accurate outline of the article, not having the strength to resist the temptation to immediately talk about questions that came up along the way. Due to the fact that a significant part of his articles were published in “Moskvityanin”, “Time” and “Epoch”, where either he himself or his friends were at the head of the matter, these articles are simply striking in their discordance and negligence. He himself was well aware of the lyrical disorder of his writings, he himself once characterized them as “careless articles, written wide open,” but he liked this as a guarantee of their complete “sincerity.”
Throughout his entire literary life, Apollo Grigoriev did not intend to clarify his worldview in any definitive way. It was so unclear even to his closest friends and admirers that his last article - “Paradoxes of Organic Criticism” (1864) - as usual, unfinished and treating of a thousand things besides the main subject, is a response to Dostoevsky’s invitation to finally set out the critical profession de foi yours.
Grigoriev himself increasingly and more willingly called his criticism “organic”, in contrast to both the camp of “theorists” - Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and from “aesthetic” criticism, which defends the principle of “art for art’s sake”, and from “historical” criticism. , by which he meant Belinsky. Grigoriev rated Belinsky unusually highly. He called him “an immortal fighter of ideas,” “with a great and powerful spirit,” “with a truly brilliant nature.” But Belinsky saw in art only a reflection of life, and his very concept of life was too immediate and “holological.” According to Grigoriev, “life is something mysterious and inexhaustible, an abyss that absorbs every finite mind, an immense expanse in which the logical conclusion of any smart head often disappears, like a wave in the ocean - something even ironic and at the same time full of love , producing from itself worlds after worlds”... In accordance with this, “the organic view recognizes as its starting point the creative, immediate, natural, vitality. In other words: not just the mind, with its logical requirements and the theories they generate, but the mind plus life and its organic manifestations.”
However, Apollo Grigoriev strongly condemned the “snake position: what is is reasonable.” He recognized the mystical admiration of the Slavophiles for the Russian folk spirit as “narrow” and only rated Khomyakov highly, and that was because he “one of the Slavophiles combined the thirst for the ideal in the most amazing way with the belief in the boundlessness of life and therefore did not rest on the ideals” of Konstantin Aksakov and others. In Victor Hugo's book on Shakespeare, Grigoriev saw one of the most complete formulations of the “organic” theory, the followers of which he also considered Joseph Renin, Emerson and Carlyle. And the “original, enormous ore” of organic theory, according to Grigoriev, is “Schelling’s works in all phases of his development.” Grigoriev proudly called himself a student of this “great teacher.” From admiration for the organic power of life in its various manifestations follows Grigoriev’s conviction that abstract, naked truth, in its pure form, is inaccessible to us, that we can only assimilate colored truth, the expression of which can only be national art. Pushkin is great not only because of the size of his artistic talent: he is great because he transformed in himself a whole series of foreign influences into something completely independent. In Pushkin, for the first time, “our Russian physiognomy, the true measure of all our social, moral and artistic sympathies, a complete outline of the type of Russian soul,” became isolated and clearly defined. Therefore, Grigoriev dwelt with special affection on Belkin’s personality, which was hardly commented on by Belinsky at all, on “ The captain's daughter" and "Dubrovsky". With the same love he dwelled on Maxim Maksimych from “A Hero of Our Time” and with special hatred on Pechorin as one of those “predatory” types who are completely alien to the Russian spirit.
Art, by its very essence, is not only national - it is even local. Every talented writer is inevitably “the voice of a certain soil, a locality that has a right in the life of the people as a type, as a color, as an ebb, a shade.” Thus reducing art to almost unconscious creativity, Apollo Grigoriev did not even like to use the words: influence, as something too abstract and little spontaneous, but introduced new term"windfall". Together with Tyutchev, Grigoriev exclaimed that nature “is not a cast, not a soulless face,” that directly and immediately it has a soul, it has freedom, it has love, it has language. True talents are embraced by these organic “trends” and echo them in harmony in their works. But since a truly talented writer is a spontaneous echo of organic forces, he must certainly reflect some still unknown side of the national-organic life of a given people, he must say a “new word.” Therefore, Grigoriev considered each writer primarily in relation to whether he said a “new word.” The most powerful “new word” in modern Russian literature was said by Ostrovsky; he discovered a new, unknown world, which he did not treat negatively, but with deep love.
The true meaning of Grigoriev lies in the beauty of his own spiritual personality, in his deeply sincere striving for a boundless and bright ideal. More powerful than all the confused and foggy reasoning of Apollo Grigoriev is the charm of his moral being, which represents a truly “organic” penetration of the best principles of the high and sublime.
Apollo Aleksandrovich Grigoriev - quotes
Art alone brings something new and organic into the world. 
Ostrovsky, alone in the present literary era, has his own strong, new and at the same time ideal worldview, with a special nuance determined both by the data of the era and, perhaps, by the data of the poet’s own nature. We will call this shade, without any hesitation, the indigenous Russian worldview, healthy and calm, humorous without morbidity, direct without being carried away to one extreme or another, ideal, finally, in the fair sense of idealism, without false grandiosity or equally false sentimentality.
Soil is the depth of people's life, the mysterious side of historical movement.
By Orthodoxy I mean a spontaneous historical beginning, which is destined to live and give new forms of life.
Art alone embodies in its creations what is unknown in the air of the era.
| Vocabulary: Gravilat - Davenant. Source: vol. IXa (1893): Gravilat - Davenant, p. 721-723 ( · index) Other sources: MESBE |
Grigoriev (Apollon Alexandrovich) - one of the outstanding Russian critics. Genus. in 1822 in Moscow, where his father was secretary of the city magistrate. Having received a good home education, he graduated from Moscow University as the first candidate in the law faculty and immediately received a position as secretary of the university board. However, G.’s nature was not such as to settle firmly anywhere. Having failed in love, he suddenly left for St. Petersburg, tried to get a job in both the Deanery Council and the Senate, but due to his completely artistic attitude towards the service, he quickly lost it. Around 1845 he established relations with Otech. zap.”, where he places several poems, and with “Repertoire and Pantheon”. In the last magazine, he wrote a number of less than remarkable articles in all kinds of literary genres: poetry, critical articles, theatrical reports, translations, etc. In 1846, G. published his poems as a separate book, which were met with nothing more than condescending criticism. Subsequently, G. did not write much original poetry, but translated a lot: from Shakespeare (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “Romeo and Juliet”) from Byron (“Parisina”, excerpts from “Childe Harold” etc.), Moliere, Delavigne. During his entire stay in St. Petersburg, G.’s lifestyle was the most stormy, and the unfortunate Russian “weakness,” instilled in student revelry, captured him more and more. In 1847, he moved back to Moscow and became a teacher of law in the 1st Moscow. gymnasium, actively collaborates in “Moscow. city. leaf" and tries to settle down. His marriage to L.F. Korsh, the sister of famous writers, briefly made him a man of the right lifestyle. In 1850, G. got a job at Moskvityanin and became the head of a wonderful circle, known as the “young editorial staff of Moskvityanin.” Without any effort on the part of the representatives of the “old editorial board” - Pogodin and Shevyrev - a friendly circle somehow gathered around their magazine, in G.’s words, “young, brave, drunk, but honest and brilliant with talents,” which included : Ostrovsky, Pisemsky, Almazov, A. Potekhin, Pechersky-Melnikov, Edelson, May, Nick. Berg, Gorbunov, etc. None of them were Slavophiles of the orthodox persuasion, but all of them were attracted to “The Moskvitian” by the fact that here they could freely substantiate their socio-political worldview on the foundation of Russian reality. G. was the main theoretician of the circle and its standard-bearer. In the ensuing struggle with St. Petersburg magazines, the opponents' weapons were most often directed precisely against him. This struggle of G. was carried out on the basis of principle, but he was usually answered on the basis of ridicule - both because St. Petersburg criticism in the period between Belinsky and Chernyshevsky could not produce people capable of ideological debate, and because G., with his exaggerations and oddities, gave rise to ridicule. He was particularly mocked by his incongruous admiration for Ostrovsky, who for him was not just a talented writer, but a “herald of the new truth,” and whom he commented not only on articles, but also on poems, and very bad ones at that—for example, “elegy- ode-satire "Art and Truth" (1854), caused by the performance of the comedy "Poverty is not a vice." We Love Tortsov was seriously proclaimed here as a representative of the “Russian pure soul” and was reproached by “Old Europe” and “Toothless-young America, sick with old age.” Ten years later, G. himself recalled with horror his outburst and found its only justification in “sincerity of feeling.” This kind of tactless and extremely harmful to the prestige of the ideas he defended, G.'s antics were one of the characteristic phenomena of his entire literary activity and one of the reasons for his low popularity. And the more G. wrote, the more his unpopularity grew. In the 60s it reached its apogee. With his vaguest and most confusing arguments about the “organic” method and various other abstractions, he was so out of place in the era of “seductive clarity” of tasks and aspirations that they stopped laughing at him, they even stopped reading him. A big admirer of G.'s talent and the editor of Vremya, Dostoevsky, who indignantly noticed that G.'s articles were not directly cut, friendly suggested that he once sign with a pseudonym and at least in this smuggled way draw attention to his articles.
G. wrote in “Moskvityanin” until its termination in 1856, after which he worked in “Russian Conversation”, “Library for Reading”, the original “Russian Word”, where he was for some time one of three editors, in “Russian World” , “Svetoche”, “Son of the Fatherland.” Starchevsky, “Russian. "Bulletin" Katkov - but he was unable to settle down firmly anywhere. In 1861, the “Time” of the Dostoevsky brothers appeared, and G. seemed to have again entered a strong literary harbour. As in “Moskvityanin”, a whole circle of “soil writers” was grouped here - Strakhov, Averkiev, Dostoevsky, etc. - connected with each other both by a commonality of likes and dislikes, and by personal friendship. They all treated G. with sincere respect. Soon, however, he sensed in this environment some kind of cold attitude towards his mystical broadcasts, and in the same year he left for Orenburg as a Russian teacher. language and literature in the cadet corps. Not without enthusiasm, G. took up the matter, but very quickly cooled down and a year later returned to St. Petersburg and again lived the chaotic life of a literary bohemia, up to and including serving time in a debtor’s prison. In 1863, "Time" was banned. G. migrated to the weekly “Anchor”. He edited a newspaper and wrote theater reviews, which unexpectedly had great success thanks to the extraordinary animation that G. brought to the reporter's routine and the dryness of theatrical notes. He analyzed the acting of actors with the same care and with the same passionate pathos with which he treated the phenomena of other arts. At the same time, in addition to his fine taste, he also showed great acquaintance with German and French theorists of performing arts.
In 1864, “Time” was resurrected in the form of “Epoch.” G. again takes on the role of “first critic,” but not for long. The binge, which turned directly into a physical, painful illness, broke G.’s powerful body: on September 25, 1864, he died and was buried at the Mitrofanievsky cemetery next to the same victim of wine - the poet Mey. G.'s articles, scattered across various and mostly little-read journals, were collected in 1876 by N. N. Strakhov into one volume. If the publication was successful, it was planned to release further volumes, but this intention has not yet been realized. G.'s unpopularity among the general public thus continues. But in a close circle of people specially interested in literature, G.’s importance has increased significantly in comparison with his repression during his lifetime.
Giving any precise formulation of G.'s critical views is not easy for many reasons. Clarity was never part of G.'s critical talent; It was not without reason that the extreme confusion and darkness of the presentation scared the public away from his articles. A definite understanding of the main features of G.’s worldview is also hampered by the complete lack of discipline of thought in his articles. With the same carelessness with which he burned through his physical strength, he squandered his mental wealth, not giving himself the trouble to draw up an accurate outline of the article and not having the strength to resist the temptation to immediately talk about questions encountered along the way. Due to the fact that a significant part of his articles were published in “Moskvityanin”, “Time” and “Epoch”, where either he himself or his friends were at the head of the matter, these articles are simply striking in their discordance and negligence. He himself was well aware of the lyrical disorder of his writings, he himself once characterized them as “careless articles, written wide open,” but he liked this as a guarantee of their complete “sincerity.” Throughout his entire literary life, he did not intend to clarify his worldview in any definitive way. It was so unclear even to his closest friends and admirers that last His article - “Paradoxes of Organic Criticism” (1864) - as usual, unfinished and treating of a thousand things besides the main subject - is a response to Dostoevsky’s invitation to finally present his critical profession de foi.
G. himself most often and most willingly called his criticism “organic” in contrast to both the camp of “theorists” - Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and from “aesthetic” criticism, which defends the principle of “art for art’s sake,” and from “historical” criticism. , by which he meant Belinsky. G. rated Belinsky unusually highly. He called him an “immortal fighter of ideas” “with a great and powerful spirit”, with a “truly brilliant nature.” But Belinsky saw in art only a reflection of life, and his very concept of life was too immediate and “holological.” According to G., "life there is something mysterious and inexhaustible, an abyss that swallows every finite mind, an immense expanse in which the logical conclusion of any intelligent head often disappears, like a wave in the ocean - something even ironic and at the same time full of love, producing worlds from itself behind the worlds”... Accordingly, “the organic view recognizes creative, immediate, natural, vital forces as its starting point. In other words: not just the mind with its logical requirements and the theories they generate, but the mind plus life and its organic manifestations.” However, the “snake position: what is - that's reasonable" G. strongly condemned. He recognized the mystical admiration of the Slavophiles for the Russian folk spirit as “narrow” and only rated Khomyakov very highly, and that was because he “one of the Slavophiles combined the thirst for the ideal in the most amazing way with the belief in the boundlessness of life and therefore did not rest on idealists" Const. Aksakova and others. In the book Vikt. Hugo on Shakespeare G. saw one of the most complete formulations of the “organic” theory, the followers of which he also considered Renan, Emerson and Carlyle. And the “original, enormous ore” of organic theory, according to Grigoriev, is “op. Schelling in all phases of his development." G. proudly called himself a student of this “great teacher.” Out of admiration for the organic power of life in its various manifestations, G.’s conviction follows that abstract, naked truth in its pure form is inaccessible to us, that we can only assimilate truth colored, the expression of which can only be national art. Pushkin is great not only because of the size of his artistic talent: he is great because turned into itself a whole series of foreign influences into something completely independent. In Pushkin, for the first time, “our Russian physiognomy, the true measure of all our social, moral and artistic sympathies, a complete outline of the type of Russian soul,” became isolated and clearly defined. Therefore, with special love, G. dwelled on the personality of Belkin, almost not commented on by Belinsky, on “The Captain’s Daughter” and “Dubrovsky”. With the same love he dwelled on Maxim Maksimych from “A Hero of Our Time” and with special hatred on Pechorin as one of those “predatory” types who are completely alien to the Russian spirit.
Art, by its very essence, is not only national - it is even local. Every talented writer is inevitably “the voice of a certain soil, a locality that has the right to its citizenship, to its own response and voice in the life of the people, as a type, as a color, as an ebb, a shade.” Thus reducing art to almost unconscious creativity, G. did not even like to use the word influence, as something too abstract and not very spontaneous, but introduced the new term “trend.” Together with Tyutchev, G. exclaimed that nature “is not a cast, not a soulless face,” which is direct and immediate
True talents are embraced by these organic “trends” and echo them in harmony in their works. But since a truly talented writer is a spontaneous echo of organic forces, he must certainly reflect some still unknown side of the national-organic life of a given people, he must say a “new word.” Therefore, G. considered each writer primarily in relation to whether he said a “new word.” The most powerful “new word” in modern Russian. Ostrovsky said to literature; he discovered a new, unknown world, which he did not treat negatively, but with deep love. The true meaning of G. is in the beauty of his own spiritual personality, in the deeply sincere striving for a boundless and bright ideal. The charm of his moral being, which represents a truly “organic” penetration of the best principles of the high and sublime, is stronger than all of G.’s confused and foggy reasoning. Wed. about him “The Epoch” (1864 No. 8 and 1865 No. 2).
Apollo Aleksandrovich Grigoriev, a Russian poet, writer, translator, theorist of Slavophilism, one of the most original literary and theater critics of the second, was born on July 28 (16 in Old Style) July 1822. half of the 19th century century, author of famous Russian romances.When mentioning the name of the now almost forgotten Apollo Grigoriev, the well-known words of the “Gypsy Hungarian” most often come to mind:
Paradoxically, the simple text of the drinking song is all that remains in the memory of contemporaries and descendants from the literary heritage of this original and once very famous author. Moreover, the revelation about Pushkin, familiar to everyone from school, whom Grigoriev first named “our everything”...
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Meanwhile, in the second half of the 19th century, when such pillars of Russian literature as I.S. lived and worked. Turgenev, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, the name of Apollo Grigoriev was so popular that it became a household name. His critical articles and publications in thick magazines caused heated controversy in the literary circles of that time, and the drunken brawls and chaotic lifestyle that the writer led only added to his scandalous reputation as a “marginalist” in the eyes of educated society. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Grigoriev was a bright personality, a man fanatically devoted to art, tireless in moral and mental quests, but, as often happens with spiritually gifted people, in everyday affairs he showed extreme disorder and helplessness. He failed, like many less talented but more successful fellow writers, to pave his way to fame, pushing aside spiteful critics and competitors with his elbows; I couldn’t adapt, live “like everyone else,” somehow regulating my reckless lifestyle. According to researchers, some features of Grigoriev’s real biography were reflected in “The Noble Nest” by I. S. Turgenev (G.’s family history), psychological type personalities and everyday appearance - in the images of Mitya Karamazov (“the romantic unrestrained” hero of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”), Fedya Protasov (“The Living Corpse” by L. N. Tolstoy).
His contemporaries - rational realists-Westerners and Slavophiles who sensitively listened to the groans of the “sower and preserver” - tried to answer the eternal Russian question: what to do? They sought to grasp cause-and-effect relationships, logic and meaning in everything, and to oppose Western progress with saving patriarchy and nationalism. Against this background, Grigoriev’s subjective-idealistic, semi-mystical “providences” seemed incomprehensible, confused nonsense, and his search for a “new style” and romantic calls for complete “organic” sincerity in art caused outright ridicule.
Many literary scholars recognize that the views of A. Grigoriev, set out in his critical articles, had a major influence on the work of F.M. Dostoevsky, who was well acquainted with Apollo Alexandrovich and even helped him more than once in difficult moments of his life. His ideas also influenced religious philosophy N.N. Strakhov and N.Ya. Danilevsky, and the poetics of tavern revelry and “gypsyism” were later reflected in the lyrics of A. Blok and S. Yesenin.
Grigoriev, being a major national thinker, was ahead of his time by more than half a century. During his lifetime, he was not accepted, understood, or even heard by the majority of his contemporaries. His aesthetic romanticism, tavern revelry and constant existence “on the edge” established standards and decency in art would have come to court in the era of decadence of the early 20th century, but first the liberal-democratic paradigm of thinking had to change. The Nekrasovs, Tolstoys, and Korolenks had to be replaced by Merezhkovsky, Bryusov, Balmont, and Blok, so that A. A. Grigoriev would take his rightful place in the history of Russian critical thought and be recognized as the forerunner of new literary and philosophical movements.
About your origin and early years Grigoriev himself reports life in sufficient detail in his begun but unfinished autobiographical notes.
Grigoriev’s grandfather, Ivan Grigorievich Grigoriev, came from “chief officer children.” In 1777, he came to Moscow from a remote province wearing a sheepskin coat to “make his fortune.” And already in the early 1790s, Ivan Grigoriev bought a house in Moscow, and by 1803, for hard work in various bureaucratic positions, he was promoted to court adviser, and was honored to receive a snuff box and a third-class medal from His Imperial Majesty, and later - hereditary nobility. Father A.A. was born in Moscow. Grigorieva, Alexander Ivanovich (1788-1863) - a student of the university noble boarding school, “fellow in education of V.A. Zhukovsky and the Turgenev brothers.”
The birth of Apollo Grigoriev himself was accompanied by dramatic circumstances that left an imprint on his entire future life. His father passionately fell in love with the daughter of a serf coachman, Tatyana Andreeva. Apollo was born a year before, overcoming the resistance of his relatives, the young people got married. From birth, the illegitimate boy was under the threat of being considered a serf, so his frightened parents immediately sent him to the Imperial Moscow Orphanage, the oldest charitable institution founded by Catherine the Great. Everyone who got there was automatically enrolled in the philistinism. The boy did not stay in the orphanage for long: immediately after the wedding of his parents he was returned home, but Apollo remained a tradesman until he received personal nobility in 1850, based on his length of service. The stigma of being a commoner and a “bastard” haunted Grigoriev throughout his youth.
On November 25, 1823, the Grigorievs had a second son, Nikolai, who died less than a month later, and their daughter Maria, born in January 1827, lived only thirteen weeks. After the death of their daughter, the Grigorievs moved to Zamoskvorechye (“a secluded and strange corner of the world,” according to A. Grigoriev), which “nourished” and “nourished” him. Alexander Ivanovich entered the service of the Moscow Magistrate, and although he held an insignificant position, the family lived comfortably. But, as you can see, the shocks experienced were not in vain, at least for the mother. About once a month she fell into a nervous state: “her eyes became dull and wild, yellow spots appeared on her delicate face, and an ominous smile appeared on her thin lips.” A few days later Tatyana Andreevna came to her senses. She loved her son somehow fiercely, caressed and groomed him, combed his hair with her own hands, and wrapped him up. In a word, Poloshenka grew up - that was Apollo’s home name - a real barchuk, the maid Lukerya dressed and put on his shoes until he became a thirteen-year-old undergrowth. Until he was seventeen, he was not allowed to leave the house alone.
From an early age, Apollo's main character trait was excessive sensitivity and impressionability. He lived neither by reason nor common sense- Grigoriev made all his judgments on the basis of subjective acceptance or rejection, never relying on logic and objectivity. It is this total subjectivity that is the reason for the misunderstanding of Grigoriev by both his contemporaries and descendants.
Apollo's parents, who belonged to different social strata, obviously were not spiritually close people. Frequent quarrels, misunderstandings in the family, the indifference of the father, his lazy instructions to his son and causeless outbursts of rage; petty, picky, relentless guardianship of an illiterate mother - this is the atmosphere of Grigoriev’s house. The boy's stay next to his parents was accompanied by constant tugging and reproaches for pranks done and undone. It turned out that the only son of “seven nannies” turned out to be “without an eye.” According to Grigoriev himself, apart from a good home education and material care, his parents gave him nothing spiritually, instilling in addition an inferiority complex that Apollo subconsciously felt throughout his short life.
Feeling deprived of parental warmth, the boy instinctively sought the protective support of other adults. This role was performed by the courtyard servants. At every opportunity, Apollo ran into the barn or the kitchen, where he could sit endlessly, listening to stories, watching work, and feeling that here he could be himself. As a child, he was surrounded and nourished by the superstitions and legends of courtyards. The boy had long been impressed by the stories of his old grandfather, a distant relative living in the mezzanine of their house in Zamoskvorechye, who did nothing but read sacred books and tell stories about the dead and sorcerers with complete faith. That’s why Apollo was attracted to Hoffmann early on. This fantastic mood was the most precious in his entire life. He always strived to experience again and again “a sweet, peaceful, painfully teasing mood, this sensitivity to the fantastic, this closeness to another strange world.”
In the human life, the barchuk listened not only to fairy tales and songs, but also to cynical conversations with foul language, and witnessed the carelessness and drunkenness of the servants. The coachman Vasily used to get so drunk that Father Grigoriev was forced to drive the carriage himself, and even hold the drunken man so that he would not fall off the box. The servant Ivan was not inferior to the coachman. The French tutor hired for Poloshenka took a long time to get strong, and even he started drinking and once fell down the stairs after counting all the steps. Father Grigoriev commented on this incident in a comically solemn tone: “Thou hast descended into the underworld of the earth.”
The future poet often listened to his father read ancient novels aloud to his illiterate wife. This is how Apollo Grigoriev became familiar with literature. Soon he himself read prose and poetry, in Russian and French, and tried to translate and compose. In addition, he learned to play the piano and later mastered the guitar. After several visits to the theater with his father, Apollo developed a lifelong love for the stage and became a deep connoisseur of dramatic art. Despite the unnatural state of the “philistine in the nobility”, the exaltation of the mother and the ugly home life, the boy’s childhood, in comparison with his future life, passed peacefully.
In August 1838, bypassing the gymnasium, Apollon Grigoriev successfully passed the entrance exam and was accepted as a student at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University. Of course, he wanted to study literature, but his practical father insisted that his son enter the law faculty. Studying was the only way for Apollo to stand out, to get rid of his inferiority complex in front of his peers. Some surpassed him in talent, like A.A. Fet or Ya.P. Polonsky, which made him despair. Others - by origin. They had “noble honor” before him, a representative of the tax-paying class, not a student, but a simple listener who had no right to an officer’s rank.
On the other hand, Apollo believed that by becoming a scientist, he would fulfill his filial duty, justifying the hopes of his parents. Thus, he would gain independence from their authority, in particular, from the moral teachings of his father, appealing to his boarding school education. To be successful in science meant for Grigoriev to be on the path to happiness and freedom.
Already in his first year, he wrote a research paper in French. The teachers didn't even believe it was independent work. The university trustee himself, Count S.G. Stroganov summoned Grigoriev to his place and personally examined him. Convinced of the listener’s knowledge, the count remarked: “You force people to talk too much about themselves, you need to hide.” Grigoriev’s natural talent manifests itself so clearly at the university that it has an overwhelming effect on other students and disrupts the normal course of the educational process. Young Grigoriev showed very great promise.
At the university, a close relationship began with A.A. Fetom, Ya.P. Polonsky, S.M. Solovyov and other outstanding young people who subsequently played a significant role in Russian culture. Students gathered in the Grigorievsky house on Malaya Polyanka, where A.A. also lived from the beginning of 1839. Fet, read and discussed the works of German philosophers. In his memoirs, Fet called A. Grigoriev the center of the circle. It must be said that these meetings could end badly - tragic fates The philosopher Chaadaev, the poet Polezhaev, the Petrashevites and many other dissidents were on everyone’s lips in the Nicholas era. Moreover, the young men sometimes distracted themselves from philosophy and composed poems together, which were not at all harmless. But God had mercy, the meetings of the Grigoriev circle remained a secret for the authorities and the III Department.
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In 1842, Apollon Grigoriev was invited to the house of Doctor Fyodor Adamovich Korsh. There Apollo saw his daughter Antonina Korsh and fell passionately in love with her. She was nineteen years old, she was very pretty: dark brunette with blue eyes. Antonina received a good education at home, read a lot, and played music. Grigoriev's poems of those years are a frank diary of his love. He then became confident in Antonina’s mutual feelings and his power over her (“Over you, I secret power given..."), he even suspected a carefully hidden passion in her ("But as long as suffering and passion / We are madly embraced..."), then he suddenly realized that she did not understand him, that he was a stranger to her. In the large Korsh family, everyone except his beloved irritated him, and yet he came to this house every evening. He often became withdrawn and constrained, and he himself admitted: “Every day I’m getting stupider and stupider to the point of unbearability...”
Many promising young people came to the Korsh house. And among them appeared a young nobleman, Konstantin Kavelin, also a lawyer, in the future one of the leaders of Russian liberalism. Reasonable and somewhat cold, he behaved freely and naturally; in a word, he was a man of the world. Apollo saw that Antonina preferred Kavelin, and his torment was intensified by furious jealousy.
In June 1842 A.A. Grigoriev graduated from the university as the best student of the law faculty. He received a candidate's degree; the diploma excluded him from the bourgeois class. Moreover, the brilliant graduate was offered a position as a librarian, and from December 1842 to August 1843 he was in charge of the university library, and in August 1843, by a majority vote, he was elected secretary of the Council of Moscow University through a competition. But very soon it became clear that Apollo Grigoriev was completely incapable of either scientific or methodological work. To put it simply, he was characterized by typical Russian sloppiness. In the library field, he blithely distributed books to numerous friends and his beloved, of course, forgetting to register them, so then he did not know who to look for them from and how to return them. At his secretarial post, he did not keep minutes and hated paperwork and bureaucratic work. In addition, the impractical poet had already accumulated debts. In a word, I got stuck, confused both in my personal life and in the service.
In August 1843, A. Grigoriev made his debut as a poet in the famous Moscow magazine “Moskvityanin”. Under the pseudonym A. Trismegistov, his poem “ Good night! During this period, as already mentioned, Grigoriev experiences a deep infatuation with Antonina Fedorovna Korsh, suffers and is jealous of everyone. Finally, Kavelin informed Grigoriev that he would marry Antonina. “Our view of family life is the same,” the happy chosen one confessed. “And I,” Grigoriev wrote at the same time, “I know that I would torture her with love and jealousy...”
Unhappy love was reflected in Grigoriev’s lyrics of the 1840s, as well as in the romantic stories of that period (“Comet”, “You were born to torment me”, “Two destinies”, “Forgive”, “Prayer”, etc.). In 1843-1845, A. Grigoriev wrote especially a lot. The love drama also explains the themes of the poet's lyrics - fatal passion, unbridledness, spontaneity of feelings, love-struggle, love-suffering. Characteristic of this period is the poem “Comet”, in which the chaos of love experiences is compared with cosmic processes. Grigoriev’s first prose work in the form of a diary, “Leaves from the Manuscript of a Wandering Sophist” (1844, published in 1917), also tells about these feelings.
Having failed in love and being burdened by the petty care of parents, mentally devastated, burdened with debts, in an effort to start new life, Grigoriev in February 1844 secretly fled from his parental home to St. Petersburg, where he had neither relatives nor acquaintances. With this departure, Grigoriev’s wandering life began. It is not for nothing that he called his autobiographical notes, unfortunately unfinished, “My Literary and Moral Wanderings.”
In St. Petersburg, Grigoriev worked first in the Deanery Office (June-December 1844), and then in the Senate department (December 1844-July 1845) - and left both: he endured any strict routine very painfully. He was best either in bed or in a tavern. Grigoriev sought solace either in Freemasonry or in Fourierism, thought about taking up literary activity, entering the Westernizing circle of Otechestvennye Zapiski, and even tried to pass the exam for a Master of Law. But all this activity could not drown out the feeling of the meaninglessness of what was happening. Grigoriev was depressed and embarrassed, his pride was severely wounded.
In the end, Grigoriev found shelter with V.S. Mezhevich, editor of the theater magazine "Repertoire and Pantheon". He was a kind and compassionate man. In August 1845, he settled Grigoriev with him, literally pulling the young man out of the drunken stupor of cheap taverns. From then until the end of 1846, Grigoriev was published in a theater magazine. In addition to inexpressive articles about theatrical life (“On the elements of drama in a provincial theater” - 1845, “Robert the Devil”, “Hamlet in a provincial theater” - 1846), Apollo published several stories in the “Repertoire and Pantheon”, consistent with the traditions of Byron - the sorrow and loneliness of a gifted personality (“Man of the Future”, “My Acquaintance with Vitalin”, “One of Many”, “Ophelia”). In 1846, he published the only collection of poems during his lifetime. The works included in it fully reflected the chaos in which the poet’s soul was. There were Masonic lyrics (“Hymns”), social satire (“City”), and revolutionary sentiments (“When the bells ring solemnly,” “No, I was not born to beat my forehead”).
Mezhevich also turned out to be a good psychotherapist. Over long conversations in the evenings, he managed to convince the young man that he should abandon his previous ideals and ambitions, since they absolutely did not correspond to his nature. He needs to surrender to the will of God and wait where the river of life will take him.
In 1847, Grigoriev returned to Moscow with the firm intention of living his life quietly and modestly. He got a job as a law teacher at the Alexandria Orphan Institute, but soon committed a very strange act: he came to the Korsha house and proposed to Antonina’s younger sister, Lydia, then married her. Lydia could not compare with Antonina in beauty, intelligence, or erudition. She squinted a little, stuttered slightly, in general, according to one of the family friends, she was “the worst of all the sisters - stupid, pretentious and a stutterer.” This marriage made her unhappy, and Grigoriev even more unhappy than before. But, apparently, the poet inexplicably needed this new suffering, as if he wanted to “wedge with wedge” to knock out the old pain from his heart. Discord in the young family began almost immediately. Lidia Feodorovna did not know how to run a household and was not created for family life, and my husband even more so. Subsequently, Apollo Grigoriev accused his wife of drunkenness and debauchery, alas, not without reason. But he himself was not an example of virtue: he went on sprees for months at a time. However, husbands were forgiven such liberties, but wives were not. When children appeared, two sons, Grigoriev suspected that they were “not his.” In the end, Grigoriev left his family, sometimes sending money, but not often, because he himself was always in debt. Once the couple reunited and lived together for several years, but then separated again, forever. Grigoriev again found himself in a period of disappointment and mental anguish. At this time, he created the poetic cycle “Diary of Love and Prayer” - poems about unrequited love for a beautiful stranger.
In 1848-1857 A.A. Grigoriev taught law at various educational institutions, never abandoning his creativity and collaboration with magazines. He actively collaborated in the Moscow City Leaflet, thanks to his acquaintance with A.D. Galakhov established relations with the magazine Otechestvennye zapiski, in which he acted as a theater and literary critic.
At the end of 1850, Apollo, by chance, met young A.N. Ostrovsky and his company. These were the youth of the taverns, cheerful, reckless, good-natured and sincere. It was that world, those relationships and that spirit that was strongly associated with the best memories of childhood, with the time that Apollo spent among his father’s courtyard people. The circle participants were B.A. Almazov, E.N. Edelson and T.I. Filippov. They almost all belonged to the petty nobility, which their fathers and grandfathers had served. Their upbringing did not accustom them to social swagger: in “decent society” they were shy and awkward, but in the circle of loved ones they became talkative, witty and interesting. “A special touching simplicity,” they recalled about A.N.’s mug. Ostrovsky, “dominated here in full force in mutual relations.” In this society, Grigoriev found himself and later, in his letters, called this life a life “to his liking.”
“There were,” as a contemporary wrote, “provincial actors, merchants, and petty officials with swollen faces - and all this small rabble, together with the writers, indulged in colossal, monstrous drunkenness... Drunkenness united everyone, they flaunted their drunkenness and were proud.” Ostrovsky's friends themselves viewed their lifestyle as a conscious opposition to the formality and coldness of relations in aristocratic society. They understood perfectly well that this was n’est pas comme il faut - and this was all their pathos, their civic position. Their role is intellectual hooliganism, that is, everything “that is called youth, love, madness and ugliness.” Monologues from Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller were interspersed with obscene ditties, readings of Ostrovsky's plays, and then arguments began to the point of a fight about Pushkin and Gogol (who, after all, is the first luminary of Russian literature?).
“Do you remember the two anniversaries of this day, one - when “Poverty is not a vice” was read and you vomited upstairs, and when “Don’t live the way you want” was read and you vomited downstairs in the office?..”
When they couldn’t sit at home, they went straight to the tavern, where “dead drunk, but pure in heart, they kissed and drank with the factory workers.”
So, of course, the members of the circle found themselves in the camp of Slavophiles, reproaching the West for lack of spirituality and extolling the Russian national character. But this was not the noble Slavophilism of A.S. Khomyakova, I.V. Kireevsky and K.S. Aksakov, but miscellaneous. The older Slavophiles contrasted the secular culture with the peasant imbued with Orthodoxy. Grigoriev considered the peasants to be downtrodden and limited creatures, and official Orthodoxy as dogmatic and overly strict.
The comrades made an attempt to convey their views to the general public in the journal of Moscow University professor M.P. Pogodin "Moskvitian". In 1851, they formed the so-called “young editorial staff” in the magazine under the auspices of Grigoriev himself, which dealt with literature. The old editorial board, headed by M.P. Pogodin, was engaged in science and politics.
Grigoriev became the main theoretician of the Moskvitian. In the ensuing struggle with St. Petersburg magazines, the opponents' weapons were most often directed precisely against him. From the very first issues, Grigoriev begins a campaign against the Byronic ideal of secular behavior. In his view, people " good manners“too smug, calculating and rational: personal gain and humiliation of one’s neighbor is the usual form of their communication. Their relationship is a lie to society and to themselves. Grigoriev contrasts lies with spontaneity, like following the voice of one’s heart (it doesn’t know how to lie), and self-satisfaction with democracy, that is, absolute tolerance towards people.
This struggle was carried out by Grigoriev on a principled basis, but he was usually answered on the basis of ridicule, both because St. Petersburg criticism, in the period between Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, could not produce people capable of ideological debate, and because Grigoriev himself, with his exaggerations and oddities, gave rise to ridicule. He was especially mocked by his incongruous admiration for Ostrovsky, who was for him not just a talented writer, but a “herald of the new truth” and whom he commented on not only with articles, but also with poems, and deliberately bad ones at that. With his vaguest and most intricate arguments about the “organic” method and other abstractions, he was so out of place in the era of “seductive clarity” of tasks and aspirations that they stopped laughing at him, they even stopped reading him. A big fan of F.M. Grigoriev’s talent. Dostoevsky, who indignantly noticed that Grigoriev’s articles were not directly cut, friendly suggested that he sign with a pseudonym in order to attract the attention of readers in such a smuggled way.
During his five years of work in Moskvityanin from 1851 to 1856, Grigoriev wrote more than 80 articles (among them “Russian literature in 1851”, “Modern lyricists, novelists and playwrights”, 1852; “Russian fine literature in 1852”, 1853 ; “Prosper Merimee”, “Art and Truth”, 1854; “On Ostrovsky’s comedies and their significance in literature and on stage”, “Notes on the attitude of modern criticism to art”, 1855; “On truth and sincerity in art”, 1856 and etc.). But the ideas of the “young editors” remained virtually unnoticed in society. In addition, M.P. Pogodin was extremely stingy with his fees. Because of money, the editorial board collapsed in 1856, and the magazine ceased to exist.
May 24, 1850 A.A. Grigoriev is appointed as a teacher of law at the Moscow Orphanage, in the same charitable institution where his parents placed him immediately after birth. How did Apollo Alexandrovich manage to combine his tavern sprees with pedagogical activity- a mystery for all his biographers. Nevertheless, he was respected among his colleagues at the Orphanage and was warmly received into the family of the guard and teacher French Yakov Ivanovich Wizard. Due to his position, Yakov Ivanovich was entitled to a government apartment at the Orphanage, where teachers often came. In addition, the Wizard's wife held private boarding in a rented house on Bolshaya Ordynka. Friends and relatives often gathered there. Soon Apollo Grigoriev became a regular guest on Ordynka. There he met his new love- very young Leonida Wizard. I fell in love passionately and recklessly.
Unfortunately, no portraits of Leonida Yakovlevna have survived, but her younger sister described her in some detail: “Leonida was remarkably graceful, pretty, very smart, talented, an excellent musician. Beautiful hair with a bluish tint, like a gypsy’s, and blue, large, beautiful eyes...”
It is not surprising that Grigoriev, although he was 15 years older, was carried away by her, but it is surprising that he did not try to hide his adoration. His love was as ideal as his love for Antonina Korsch had once been. He even behaved similarly. “In her company, he was always sober and portrayed himself as an intelligent, somewhat disappointed young man, and in a male company he appeared in his real form - a carousing student,” recalled one of Grigoriev’s contemporaries.
Leonida's mind was very lively, but his character was reserved and cautious. Apollo, of course, did not reciprocate. It is unlikely that his beloved suspected what feelings she inspired in him, but Grigoriev was constantly tormented. He understood that due to his marital status he had no chance, and, nevertheless, he could not strangle this bitter love. And then, like 10 years ago, a rival appeared again - a retired officer, nobleman, Penza landowner Mikhail Vladykin. A theater regular and amateur playwright, he spent the winter in Moscow, and here he met Leonida Yakovlevna. The young people fell in love and soon became engaged. Apollo Grigoriev was furiously jealous and for a long time could not believe that it was all over. And when I believed it, I threw myself into work. The poet collected new poems, added to them slightly modified poems from the “Korshev” period and composed a large cycle of 18 poems called “Struggle”. The culmination of the "Struggle" was everyone famous poems“Oh, at least talk to me...” and “Gypsy Hungarian,” which A.A. Blok called “the pearls of Russian lyrics.”
When Grigoriev read “The Gypsy Hungarian” to his friend, composer Ivan Vasiliev, he immediately imbued with the poet’s feelings. He arranged the melody and composed the famous guitar variations. So Grigoriev’s “Hungarian” became a song. Very soon gypsy choirs began to perform it. The second part of the song included stanzas from the poem “Oh, at least talk to me...” Someone completed the chorus “Eh, once again!..”, which was not in Grigoriev’s poems. On the basis of Grigoriev’s “Hungarian”, a gypsy dance arose, which we simply call “Gypsy”. And in the 20th century, many versions of this song were created, the most famous being “Two Guitars” by Charles Aznavour and “My Gypsy” by Vladimir Vysotsky:
Grigoriev became famous during his lifetime not only for the “Gypsy Hungarian”. His article “On Ostrovsky’s comedies and their significance in literature and on stage” for the first time announced to his contemporaries the birth of the national Russian theater. His other famous article, “A Look at Russian Literature after the Death of Pushkin,” for the first time defined the significance of a national genius not only in the past tense, but also in the present and in the future. As a poet, Grigoriev stands in the literature of that period on a par with his friends Polonsky, Ogarev and Fet. His lyrical cycle “Struggle” is comparable to the works of Tyutchev, and in artistic terms it is far superior to Nekrasov’s lyrics:
So, Grigoriev suffered another fiasco in love. Leonida Yakovlevna Vladykina-Wizard subsequently received her Doctor of Medicine degree in Switzerland and was one of the first female doctors in Russia. Grigoriev's legal wife Lydia Fedorovna was supported by the Korsha family, the education of her sons was paid for by Konstantin Kavelin, that same happy rival... Lydia Fedorovna herself was forced to become a governess. And once, unfortunately, while drunk, she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and did not wake up. The poet’s heart was never warmed by reciprocal love...
The closure of Moskvityanin was a serious trauma for Grigoriev. Not finding a worthy occupation in his homeland, in July 1857 he left for Florence, getting a job as a teacher for the young Count I.Yu. Trubetskoy.
The trip through Europe made a tremendous impression on the writer. Grigoriev himself wrote:
“I laughed hysterically at the vulgarity of Berlin and the Germans in general, at their affected naivety and naive affectation, honest stupidity and stupid honesty; cried on the Prague Bridge in view of the Prague Kremlin, spat on Vienna and the Austrians, cursing them with various shameful curses and at every step, out of some stupid daring, exposing himself to the danger of being heard by their spies; I became stupefied (literally stupefied) in Venice, two days in which still seem to me like some kind of magical, fantastic dream...”
For the first time in his life, this man had the opportunity to look at European art in person, and not on black and white lithographs in albums and magazines. Grigoriev was shocked. Perhaps he didn’t live in the Florentine galleries – the Uffizzi and the Pitti.
However, a year later the poet had a new attack of depression. He suffered from melancholy, disappointment, loneliness. “The breakdown of my nerves,” he said about the winter carnival in Florence (1858), “reached me to the point that I was ready to cry. When two or three carriages with masks appeared in Piazza Santa Croce, and a crowd of boys ran with a frantic scream behind some harlequin, when then entire streets were covered with masks and carriages right up to the Cathedral - it all seemed to me somehow paltry and not at all poetic . I pictured our Maslenitsa - our kind, intelligent and broad people with sprees, drinking bouts, colossal debauchery... In all this terrible ugliness of a talented and powerful, fresh tribe - there is much more living and captivating than in the last convulsions of an obsolete life (the West). I imagined the summer monastic holidays of my great, poetic and at the same time simple-minded Moscow, its religious processions and everything to which I have always given myself with all the passion of my peasant heart. I went deep into those streets where there was no one, and walked for a long time with my treasures, with my memories. When I returned to my lonely, cold, marble room, when I felt my terrible loneliness, I sobbed for an hour, like a woman, to the point of hysteria.”
In Europe, Apollo began drinking again. Once in Paris, he got completely indecently drunk at a dinner party, which Princess Trubetskoy could not forgive and gave him a settlement. Grigoriev went on a long binge. Ya. Polonsky, who met him in Paris, said that Grigoriev told him that he wanted to get drunk “to hell’s maiden.” At the beginning of October, Apollo arrived in Berlin without money and without warm clothes. Having sold the last thing - a box of books and engravings collected in Italy, he hangs around in the capital of Prussia for some time. “I experienced Cain’s melancholy of loneliness,” he recalled. To drown it out, I burned cognac and drank until the morning, I drank alone and couldn’t get drunk!” And only at the end of October 1858, thanks to the help of Count G.A. Kushelev-Bezborodko, publisher of the magazine “Russian Word”, the failed educator was able to return to his homeland.
The count offered Grigoriev cooperation, and throughout 1859 the critic wrote in the Russian Word, trying to convey to the public the innermost thoughts and images he acquired during his stay abroad. A total of 22 articles were written (the main ones being “A look at Russian literature since the death of Pushkin”, “Turgenev and his activities regarding the novel “The Nest of Nobles””, “A few words about the laws and terms of organic criticism”). Of course, all of them were about Beauty - a mysterious force capable of turning the world upside down. But at a time when the abolition of serfdom was being prepared, society had nothing to do with discussions about aesthetics. Grigoriev's articles were heavily edited by editors who knew nothing about literature and art, and he left the magazine. In the 1860s, Grigoriev wrote in various publications, and even edited the useless Dramatic Collection.
At the beginning of 1859, Apollon Grigoriev became close to M.F. Dubrovskaya, in his own words, “priestess of love”, taken from a brothel. Later she became his common-law wife, but Grigoriev never found happiness in his life. A woman with a crippled soul and a man with a wounded heart - who knows why they got together? Wanderings and financial difficulties continued. In his life, Grigoriev seemed to experience all the hypostases of the human personality: he was a mystic and an atheist, a Freemason and a Slavophile, a good comrade and an irreconcilable polemicist enemy, a moral person and a binge drunkard. All these extremes eventually broke him. In January 1861, in St. Petersburg, he spent almost a month in a debtor's prison. After leaving it, Grigoriev takes an episodic part in A.P.’s magazine. Milyukov "Svetoch", but at the end of March he quits this job and makes a last attempt to change his life. He asks for a position as a teacher of Russian language and literature in the Orenburg Cadet Corps. To Orenburg A.A. Grigoriev arrived on June 9, 1861 together with M.F. Dubrovskoy set to work with enthusiasm, but quickly cooled down and did not stay in the new place. This trip only aggravated the poet’s difficult mental state, especially since there was another break with his wife, M.F. Dubrovskaya. Grigoriev conducted his financial affairs so carelessly that there was sometimes nothing to eat in the house, no firewood or other necessary things. When the couple had a child, it was cold in the room, and the mother lost milk. The baby died. The father had to endure, as he later said, “Nekrasov’s night” (remember the plot of the poem “Am I Driving Down a Dark Street at Night...”)
“Wanderings”, “wanderings” are key concepts in the fate and work of Apollo Grigoriev. Some kind of fatal restlessness was his eternal companion. In Moscow, in St. Petersburg, in Italy, in Siberia - he did not take root anywhere, he wandered around rented apartments, running away from troubles and creditors. But they overtook him. Grigoriev either squandered his money like a swashbuckling merchant, or sat in a hole of debt. Sometimes I drank, and drank a lot. And he didn’t hide it himself:
In January 1861, Grigoriev began working in the Dostoevsky brothers’ magazine “Time”. The publication’s participants called themselves pochvenniks—representatives of heterogeneous conservatism.
They criticized rationalist philosophy, opposed Westernized liberalism and left-wing heterogeneous radicalism, advocated for Russia’s original historical path, and believed that social reforms could only begin when the nobility, educated by Western standards, could understand and accept the worldview of the common people. The Pochvenniki completely rejected any violent methods of ensuring progress and fought for Christian ideals.In the editorial office of Vremya, Grigoriev found people who did not dismiss him as a cerebral drunkard and a loser. Mikhail and Fyodor Dostoevsky accepted him as an equal and allowed him to write as he was written. The main critical articles published in the magazine: “Westernism in Russian literature”, “Phenomena modern literature, missed by criticism”, “Belinsky and the negative view in literature” - were noticed and caused heated discussions in the educated community. Apollo Grigoriev, albeit briefly, became the generator of ideas and the soul of the magazine. It was he who planted two defining ideas in the soul of Fyodor Mikhailovich - that “beauty will save the world,” and that neither Westerners nor Slavophiles could understand the essence of the Russian people. The people are not stupid (“Westerners”), but they are not holy either (“Slavophiles” and “Tolstoyites”), they do not need to be led by force along the road of Western progress, but they also do not need to be touched by its patriarchal remnants.
The Russian people are two-united (“all-reconciling” according to Dostoevsky) - they can accept Western culture without renouncing their own - this was the firm conviction of Apollo Grigoriev, a conviction confirmed personal experience. And there was another person who confirmed in the eyes of Grigoriev the correctness of this thought - this is Pushkin. It had all the best from the West and all the best from Russia. That is why “Pushkin is our everything.” And Dostoevsky will say about this in his famous “Pushkin Speech” in 1880.After the banning of the magazine “Time”, Grigoriev, on behalf of the publisher F.T. Stellovsky, edits the weekly magazine “Anchor”. He edited a newspaper and wrote theater reviews, which unexpectedly had great success, thanks to the animation that Grigoriev brought to the reporter's routine and the dryness of theatrical notes. He analyzed the acting of actors with the same care and with the same passionate pathos with which he treated the phenomena of other arts. At the same time, in addition to his subtle taste, he showed great familiarity with German and French theorists of performing arts.
Since January 1864, Apollo Grigoriev has again collaborated with the Dostoevsky brothers - in their new magazine "Epoch". But everywhere Grigoriev works intermittently, avoiding being in any literary party, striving to serve only art as “the first organ of expression of thought.” Grigoriev the critic and Grigoriev the poet are characterized by deep idealistic romanticism and a complete lack of desire to defend an idea that has already been picked up and carried by the “crowd”. An idea that turns into a theory or doctrine is something unbearable for a true romantic.
And his break with the Dostoevskys happened precisely on this basis: Mikhail and Fyodor Mikhailovich tried to fight, oppose, preach, and create a doctrine on the pages of the magazine. Grigoriev was only a generator of ideas, the rationale for which he sometimes abandoned mid-sentence - because he got bored...
Unfortunately, the main everyday problem of Apollo Grigoriev all his life was his unbridled love for extravagance and gypsy chants with a chronic lack of money. His entire fortune had long been squandered; his literary activities and fragmentary service (here and there) did not bring in any income. As befits a true poet, Grigoriev presciently foresaw his fate, making appropriate entries in his diary: “My work is going badly - and strange! The worse things get, the more I indulge in insane carelessness... My debts are growing terribly and hopelessly.” Another entry read: “Debts grow and grow and grow... I look at all this with the carelessness of a fatalist.” People who knew him noted that in last years Grigoriev became somehow lost and indifferent: he was a broken person, always under the influence of alcohol. True, at the end of his life he began to write interesting memoirs, but he only managed to talk about his childhood.
In June 1864, in St. Petersburg, Apollo Grigoriev was imprisoned for a month for the second time. In a letter to his release, he complained that he could not work: “Not to mention the intolerable food and shortages of tobacco and tea - with debt all around, is it possible to think anything?..” At the end of August, history repeated itself again. On September 21, he was bought out by the rich general’s wife A.I. Bibikova, a mediocre writer, whom Grigoriev promised to edit some of her works. Completely devastated by mental torment, Apollon Grigoriev lived in freedom for only four days. On September 25 (October 7), 1864, at the age of forty-two, he died of apoplexy (as a stroke was then called). Death came instantly, overnight, he died literally with a guitar in his hands, not having time to strike the next chord.
Apollo Grigoriev was buried on September 28 at the Mitrofanevskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg. At the send-off were F.M. Dostoevsky, N.N. Strakhov, and several other familiar writers and artists. And a large group of strange strangers in rags - Grigoriev's neighbors in the debtor's prison. On August 23, 1934, when the memorial cemetery was being created, the ashes of Apollo Grigoriev were transferred to the Literary Bridges of the Volkovsky Cemetery.
The posthumous memory of Apollo Grigoriev in the 19th century was very weakly consolidated.
Grigoriev's widow M.F. Dubrovskaya tried to speculate on his name for some time, asking for money from N. Strakhov and F. M. Dostoevsky. The fates of the sons from his first marriage, whom Apollo Alexandrovich himself did not consider his own, also turned out tragically: the eldest Peter became an alcoholic and died at a fairly early age, junior Alexander, thanks to the participation of K.D. Kavelin (aunt’s husband), graduated from high school, served in the Ministry of Finance, and was engaged in literary activities. But this occupation did not bring him fame: nature fully “rested” on Grigoriev’s children. The level of Alexander's writings was more than third-rate. He eventually went mad and died in hospital in 1898, before his fiftieth birthday.
Of Apollon Grigoriev’s many friends, only N.N. Strakhov wrote short essays and comments on his friend’s published letters. None of the university friends, as well as members of the “young editorial staff” of Moskvityanin, left memoirs. It’s especially annoying that he didn’t write anything about A.N. Grigoriev. Ostrovsky. He only complained in a private conversation (recorded by M.I. Semevsky dated November 17, 1879) that the appearance of his comrade was so little covered in the press: “What good things have we said about Apollo Grigoriev? And this man was very wonderful. If anyone knew him perfectly and could say a completely true word about him, it would be me. Read, for example, Strakhov. Well, what did he write about Apollo Grigoriev? Not the slightest understanding of this man’s instincts.”
Alas! Even after such statements, the great playwright did not bother to put down on paper the “true word” about his friend and contemporary.
Strakhov knew Grigoriev, of course, not as well as Ostrovsky, but he was the first to publish his friend’s letters, left his memories, and most importantly, began publishing a 4-volume collected works. He only had enough personal funds to publish the first volume (St. Petersburg, 1876). Strakhov hoped that the proceeds from the sale of the book would allow him to continue printing, but these were forgettable and anxious times. In the era of Narodnaya Volya terror and the dominance of radical revolutionary ideas in literature, there was no time for Apollo Grigoriev. Strakhov had to give up hope of completing the publication. Subsequently, he gave all his materials to some large publisher (possibly A.S. Suvorin), who then allegedly lost them, and to the writer’s grandson - V.A. Grigoriev, who wished to continue the publication, stated that he had not received any materials at all. Perhaps he was disingenuous, hoping to hold onto the prepared volumes and publish them after 1914 (according to the rules of that time, the heirs had the right to receive royalties for 50 posthumous years for the publication of the works of their late relative, and then were deprived of this right).
The half-forgotten name of Grigoriev was revived only by the 20th century. The 50th anniversary of his death was marked by an abundance of biographical and literary articles. In 1915-1916 V.F. Savodnik published 14 books “Collected Works of Apollo Grigoriev”. These were, of course, not thick books, but actually brochures, each containing one article or a series of articles by Grigoriev. Editorial " Universal Library“Published stories and memoirs in mass editions (also in 1915-1916). Alexander Blok, who for many years studied the work of Apollo Grigoriev not only as a poet who loved him, but also as a first-class literary critic, published a volume of “Poems” (almost their complete collection) in 1916.
In the revolutionary year of 1917, V.N. Knyazhnin published a wonderful book “Apollo Alexandrovich Grigoriev. Materials for a biography”, where for the first time he published - according to the possibilities of that time - all the writer’s letters known to the compiler. Then B.C. Spiridonov began preparing the fundamental “Collected Works and Letters” of A. A. Grigoriev in 12 (!) volumes. But, like Strakhov, he managed to publish only the first volume in 1918: conditions Civil War and the subsequent devastation did not contribute in any way to continuation. Strengthened Soviet authority I also didn’t like the idealist and the conservative. By some miracle, the Socialist Revolutionary and culturologist R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, in the short interval between arrests, prepared and published in 1930 a volume of “Memoirs” - of Apollo Grigoriev himself and about him.
IN Small series“Libraries of the Poet” published Grigoriev’s selected poetic works twice, in 1937 and 1966. During the Khrushchev thaw P.P. Gromov and B.O. Kostelianets published “Selected Works” in the Great Series (1959) - this is an almost complete collection poetic texts writer.
The situation was much more difficult with prose and criticism. It took the researcher of A. Grigoriev’s work, philologist B.F. Egorov, about 10 years of painful “breaking through” in the publishing house “ Fiction" volume "Literary Criticism", which was finally published in 1967. Then “Memoirs” were published in the academic series “Literary Monuments” (1980), the collection “Aesthetics and Criticism” in the series “History of Aesthetics in Monuments and Documents” (1980), and “Theater Criticism” (1985). During the era of “perestroika,” poems, poems, and critical works by A. Grigoriev began to be actively republished; in the “ZhZL” section a book was published by a specialist in 19th century V.F. Egorova, entirely dedicated to the biography of Apollo Alexandrovich.
Today, the great historical and literary significance of A. Grigoriev’s work is unanimously recognized by both Russian and foreign literary scholars and historians. His letters and literary critical articles are actively studied, read, and quoted, dissertations about him have become more frequent, there have been several popular television programs about his life and work, a group of Moscow critics recently established a literary prize named after Apollo Grigoriev.
And rightly so. Researchers and literary historians are forced to admit that we, people of the early 21st century, are looking at Russian classical literature of the 19th century centuries through his eyes! And our perception of this increasingly receding era continues to evolve in the direction of Apollo Grigoriev. Modern literary criticism, despite all its successes and failures, is still trying to grow to the level that was set in his works by a man who died a century and a half ago.
Apollo Aleksandrovich Grigoriev was born in 1822 in Moscow, in the very heart of the merchant district - in that part of the city where the superficial varnish of Western refined civilization was barely noticeable and where the Russian character was preserved and more or less freely developed.
When the time came, Grigoriev entered the university, and soon became completely saturated with the romantic and idealistic spirit of his era. Schiller, Byron, Lermontov, but above all the theater with Shakespeare and the Shakespearean actor Mochalov - this was the air he breathed.
Apollo Grigoriev: guest from the future
After graduating from university, Grigoriev devoted himself to literature. In 1846, he published a volume of poetry, which went almost unnoticed. At this time, Grigoriev, who left his parents’ home, adopted the free and careless customs of romantic bohemia. His life turned into a series of passionate and ideal novels, equally passionate and selfless carousing and constant lack of money - a direct consequence of his irresponsible and unpredictable behavior. But despite everything, he did not lose his high ideals. He has not lost his enormous capacity for work. He worked in fits and starts, but frantically, feverishly, whether it was day work for some publisher who had driven him, or a translation from his favorite Shakespeare and Byron, or one of his endless articles, so incoherent and so rich in thoughts.
In 1847, he became friends with gifted young people grouped around Ostrovsky. This had a decisive influence on Grigoriev. The new friends were united by boundless ebullient admiration for Russian identity and the Russian people. Under their influence, Grigoriev's early, vaguely noble, broad romanticism took shape in the cult of Russian character and Russian spirit. Ostrovsky made a special impression on him - with his integrity, common sense and the new, purely Russian spirit of his dramatic works. From then on, Grigoriev became a prophet and herald of Ostrovsky.
In 1851, Grigoriev managed to convince Pogodin to hand over the publication of the magazine to him Moskvitian. Grigoriev, Ostrovsky and their friends became known as the “young editorial staff” Moskvitian. But Pogodin’s short-sighted stinginess gradually forced the best writers from the “young editorial staff” to move to Westernizing magazines in St. Petersburg. Finally in 1856 Moskvitian closed, and Grigoriev found himself broke again. Connections with the “young editors” further strengthened his bohemian inclinations. The main activities in this circle were feasts, songs, and the main type of folklore that they patronized was gypsy choirs. People like Ostrovsky were so strong, physically and mentally, that they could withstand the wildest excesses, but Grigoriev was more fragile and less resilient, and this lifestyle, especially the complete lack of self-discipline to which it contributed, undermined his health.
After closing Moskvitian Grigoriev again moved to St. Petersburg in search of work. But to most editors he was unacceptable as a journalist because they did not approve of his nationalist enthusiasm. He fell into poverty and began to look for any non-literary work. He got it perfect place- a trip abroad as a teacher of the young scion of an aristocratic family, but his relationship with this family ended in a noisy scandal. His Orenburg adventure turned out to be just as unsuccessful, where he taught for a year and suddenly disappeared without telling anyone anything.
In 1861 he became friends with the Dostoevsky brothers and Insurance and began to publish in their magazine Time. He met with them spiritual closeness and sympathetic understanding, but he could no longer organize his life - he had gone too far. He spent a lot of his remaining years in debtor's prison. In 1864, when Time(closed in 1863) reopened under the name era, The Dostoevskys invited him as their chief critic. In the few months that he had left to live, Grigoriev wrote his main prose works - My literary and moral wanderings And Paradoxes of organic criticism. But his days were numbered. In the summer of 1864 he again ended up in debtor's prison. Thanks to the generosity of one of his friends, he was released from there, but the next day he died.
) - Russian poet, literary and theater critic, ideologist of pochvennichestvo. Mason. Master of Pathological Speech.
Having received a good home education, Grigoriev graduated from Moscow University as the first candidate in the Faculty of Law ().
There were provincial actors, merchants, and petty officials with swollen faces - and all this small rabble, together with the writers, indulged in colossal, monstrous drunkenness... Drunkenness united everyone, they flaunted their drunkenness and were proud of it.
Grigoriev was the main theoretician of the circle. During these years, Grigoriev put forward the theory of “organic criticism,” according to which art, including literary art, should grow organically from national soil. Such are Ostrovsky and his predecessor Pushkin with his “meek people” depicted in “The Captain's Daughter”. Completely alien to the Russian character, according to Grigoriev, is the Byronic “predatory type”, most clearly represented in Russian literature by Pechorin.
Grigoriev commented on Ostrovsky not only with articles, but also with poems: for example, the “elegy-ode-satire” “Art and Truth” (), caused by the performance of the comedy “Poverty is not a vice.” Lyubim Tortsov was proclaimed here as a representative of the “Russian pure soul” and was reproached by “Old Europe” and “Toothless-young America, sick with old age.” Ten years later, Grigoriev himself recalled his outburst with horror and found its only justification in “sincerity of feeling.”
Grigoriev wrote in “Moskvityanin” until its termination in , after which he worked in “Russian Conversation”, “Library for Reading”, the original “Russian Word”, where he was for some time one of three editors, in “Russian World”, “Svetoche” , “Son of the Fatherland” by A. V. Starchevsky, “Russian Bulletin” by M. N. Katkov.
S wrote in the magazine “Time” of the Dostoevsky brothers. A whole circle of “soilist” writers grouped here - Nikolai Strakhov, Dmitry Averkiev, the Dostoevskys. In the magazines “Time” and “Epoch” Grigoriev published literary critical articles and reviews, memoirs, and ran the “Russian Theater” column.
V went to Orenburg as a teacher of Russian language and literature in the cadet corps. A year later he returned to St. Petersburg. Grigoriev edited the magazine "Anchor".
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