Painting folk life presented in the poem “ Railway" This poem is preceded by an unusual epigraph: not a literary quotation, not a folk proverb, but a question some boy asked his father, and his father’s answer. It is designed as a miniature play - the characters are indicated, there are author's remarks:
Vanya (in coachman's Armenian jacket)
Dad! who built this road?
Papa (in psmto on a red lining)
Count Pyotr Andreevich Kleinmichel, my dear!
Conversation in the carriage
This kind of epigraph serves as an exposition, an introduction: the author will have a conversation with both Vanya and dad. It’s not hard to guess what it will be about: who actually built the railroad. It, which connected Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1852, was laid for 10 years under the leadership of the chief manager of communications, Count P.A. Kleinmichel. In the fall of 1864, Nekrasov, on a train, having heard or supposedly heard the conversation between father and son cited in the epigraph, considered or supposedly considered it necessary to intervene in this conversation. But first - in the first part of the poem - he talked about how beautiful the moonlit night was, visible from the window of the carriage.
Glorious autumn! Healthy, vigorous
The air invigorates tired forces.
In these sonorous verses (yafenym, bofit) fatigue is overcome and strength is strengthened. Nature is incredibly beautiful. But what about swamps with hummocks, stumps (stumps former trees)? It is hardly customary to admire them. They say: “stupid as a tree stump,” but they call philistinism and stagnation a swamp. But a true poet will find a place for all this in the world of beauty. Nekrasov is genuine.
There is no ugliness in nature! And kochi,
And moss swamps and stumps -
Everything is fine under the moonlight,
Everywhere I recognize my native Rus'...
Beauty is good not only in itself, but also because it is nationally native: Rus'... It is good to travel around Russia, enjoying the newfound comfort of a railway trip, this feeling of pleasure was readily expressed by various poets of Nekrasov’s era, and it is not alien to our author: “ I fly quickly along cast-iron rails, / I think my thoughts...”
Good dad! Why the charm?
Should I keep Vanya the smart one?
You will allow me in the moonlight
Show him the truth.
In our linguistic consciousness, the word “charm” is pleasant. No one will refuse to look like a charming person. But in these poems by Nekrasov, this word has a slightly different connotation of meaning. Charm is something close to delusion, although, however, also pleasant. “He’s under some kind of spell, he doesn’t see anything” (example from “ Explanatory dictionary" Dalia). It seemed that “everything is fine under the moonlight,” however, under the same “moonlight,” a very cruel “truth” will be seen, which will be shown to Vanya:
This work, Vanya, was terribly enormous, -
Not enough for one!
There is a king in the world: this king is merciless,
Hunger is its name.
The line “Can’t do it alone” directly refers to the epigraph, rejecting the answer of the “father” who said that Kleinmichel built the railway. In fact, it was built, as it turns out, by “the masses of the people,” and Tsar Famine inspired them to do this. A grandiose symbolic figure: Hunger rules the world. Like Schiller: “Love and Hunger rule the world” (according to Gorky, “this is the most truthful and appropriate epigraph to the endless history of human suffering”). Forced by the Famine, people were hired to build the railway in inhumanly difficult conditions, and many “found a phobia here”; The “road” is now so beautiful (“narrow embankments, posts, rails, bridges”), built on Russian bones, there are countless of them.
Chu! Menacing exclamations were heard!
Stomping and gnashing of teeth;
A shadow ran across the frosty glass...
What's there? Crowd of the dead!
“Chu!” - an interjection, close in meaning to the call “listen!” Something terrible is about to happen. As in ballads (for example, Zhukovsky, Katenin, Lermontov) - the dead rise from their graves. A kind of balladry has already been discussed in connection with the poem “Yesterday, at about six o’clock...”. People from the graves chase a speeding train; the dead do not just run, but sing a song, which again mentions a moonlit night - the time most suitable for contact of the living with ghosts, which, as usual, should disappear before dawn. They sing about how cold and hungry they were during their lives, how they were sick, how they were offended by foremen, that is, the elders over a group of workers. One of this crowd of the dead - a “tall sick Belarusian”, fair-haired and emaciated with fever - is depicted in especially detail, even the mat in his hair is mentioned (a disease in which the hair on the head sticks together and sticks together; occurs in unsanitary conditions, may be a consequence of infection) .
One significant oddity: it is written that a Belarusian is standing. But the crowd of the dead, of which he is a representative, is running. As if this is a small contradiction (the Belarusian would have to flee along with everyone else), but it came in very handy. A static figure, snatched from the general flow and frozen in one place, is easier to describe in detail. Unlike the dead, who sing their song as they run, the Belarusian is silent. This further separates him from the rest. As a result, you somehow forget that he is dead and begin to treat him as if he were alive. Moreover, the details of his portrait (bloodless lips, drooping eyelids, swollen legs, etc.) can indicate not only death, but also the morbidity of a living person. And further: “It would be a good idea for us to adopt this noble habit of work.” This would sound strange if you remember that the Belarusian is dead: you can’t take labor lessons from a dead man! In addition, the pathos of work is interrupted by ominous motives of death: in the behavior of the Belarusian, the poet sees something dull and mechanical, something similar to an inanimate wound-up doll, monotonously repeating some given movement.
Bless the work of the people
And learn to respect a man.
The phrase “respect a man” has become commonplace. In the ballad A.K. Tolstoy’s “Stream-Bogatyr” the hero falls from Ancient Rus' V Russia XIX c., and he is strictly asked: “Do you respect the peasant?” - “Which one?” - “In general, a man who is great in humility!” But Potok says: “There is a man and a man. / If he doesn’t drink away the harvest, / Then I respect the man.”
Don’t be shy for your dear fatherland...
I've endured enough Russian people.
In the original version of the text, instead of the word “enough” there was: “Tatarism,” that is, the Mongol-Tatar yoke (1243-1480). The replaced word is surprisingly consonant with the one it replaced. One can guess the reasons for such a replacement: “Tatarism” is a matter of the distant historical past, while the Tatars “from Mother Volga, from the Oka” probably also participated in the construction of the railway, suffering together with the Russians, so why offend them with this word, as thereby promoting national hatred?
At the beginning of the third part, the ballad dead disappear:
At this moment the whistle is deafening
He squealed - the crowd of dead people disappeared.
Here the locomotive whistle played the traditional role of a rooster crow, foreshadowing morning dawn and dispersing ghosts who are now in a hurry to hide from the world of the living. These are the Slavic, and not only Slavic, ideas on this matter. In Shakespeare, this is exactly how the ghost of Hamlet’s father disappears: “He suddenly disappeared at the crow of a rooster” (quoted from the modern Nekrasov translation by A. Kroneberg). It seems to Vanya that he dreamed all this in a dream: thousands of men appeared (he tells his “dad”), and someone - he - said: “Here they are, the builders of our road!..” Maybe this one was also in Vanya’s dream - and talked about the railroad builders and showed them? But no, the boy’s father, who turns out to be a general, perceives the narrator as a real person and enters into an argument with him. He says that he recently visited Rome and Vienna and saw wonderful monuments of ancient architecture. Was it really “the people who created all this” - such beauty? And does the general’s interlocutor, who spoke so eloquently about the needs of low life, place them above the eternal ideals of beauty:
- Or for you Apollo Belvedere
Worse than a stove pot?
This refers to Pushkin’s poem “The Poet and the Crowd,” in which the self-seeking “rabble” is sharply condemned: “...by weight / You value the Belvedere Idol, / You see no benefit, no benefit in it... / The stove pot is more valuable to you. ..” What is more important: beauty or benefit? Shakespeare or boots? Raphael or kerosene? Apollo Belvedere or stove pot? - they argued about this in every possible way in the Nekrasov era, literature and journalism struggled with these “damned” questions. On the one hand, aesthetes, priests of pure art, on the other, utilitarians, materialists. Nekrasov’s general is aesthetically pleasing and despises the black and rude people:
Here are your people - these thermal baths and baths,
A miracle of art - he took everything away!
Exclamation “Here are your people!” entered into oral usage. In Korolenko’s story “Prokhor and the Students,” two students pass by a pitiful, degraded peasant, and, pointing at him, one says to the other: “Here are your people!”, and he wonders: where are the people, because I’m the only one here! Baths - ancient Roman public baths, once luxurious, now ruins, testifying to lost greatness ancient culture. It was destroyed by barbarians, that is, peoples not involved in Roman civilization: Slavs (apparently southern, non-Russian), Germans... destroyers, not creators:
Your Slav, Anglo-Saxon and German
Do not create - destroy the master,
Barbarians! wild bunch of drunkards!..
In the same way, according to the general, Russian barbarian men cannot be considered the creators of the railway: “a wild crowd of drunkards” is not capable of this. But there is also a “bright side” of people’s life! So let the general’s interlocutor show Vanya her too, instead of traumatizing the child with “the spectacle of death and sadness”! And in the fourth part of the poem this “bright side” is shown.
The construction of the railway is completed, the dead are in the ground, the sick are in the dugouts, the workers have gathered at the office: what kind of earnings will there be? But the rogue foremen (in modern terms, foremen) calculated them so daringly that it turned out that the workers not only should not receive anything, but also must pay the arrears (part of the tax not paid on time) to the contractor (here - the rich merchant responsible for this area of work). The situation is bad, but then the contractor himself appears, “congratulates” (congratulates) those gathered and is ready to treat them and generally make them happy: “I’m giving them the arrears!”
The people's reaction was universal jubilation. They shout “hurray!” The foremen, singing, roll the promised barrel of wine. Apparently, in the words of the general - “a wild crowd of drunkards!..” - there is a certain amount of truth. Here is the “bright side” of people’s life - the tortured people are sincerely happy:
The people unharnessed the horses - and the purchase price
Shouting “hurray!” rushed along the road...
It seems difficult to see a more gratifying picture
Shall I draw, general?..
Life for the common people has always been difficult. Especially in Russia with its unbearable climate. Especially before the abolition of serfdom. The country was ruled by ruthless, greedy landowners and kings who drove peasants into their graves to achieve their goals. The fate of the serfs who built the first railway between Moscow and St. Petersburg is tragic. This path is strewn with the bones of thousands of men. Nekrasov (“Railroad”) dedicated his work to tragedy. A summary and analysis of it will reveal to us what the poet wanted to convey to his readers with a heightened sense of civic duty.
The great poet was a truly people's writer. He sang the beauty of Rus', wrote about the plight of peasants, people of the lower classes, and women. It was he who introduced into literature colloquial speech, thereby reviving the images presented in the works.
Nekrasov showed the tragic fate of serf men in his poetry. "Railway", summary which we will present is a short poem. In it, the author was able to convey the injustice, deprivation and monstrous exploitation to which the peasants were subjected.
The work begins with an epigraph. In it, the boy Vanya asks the general who built the railway. He answers: Count Kleinmichel. Thus, Nekrasov began his poem with sarcasm.
Next, readers are immersed in a description of Russian autumn. She's nice, fresh air, beautiful landscapes. The author flies along the rails, plunging into his thoughts.
Having heard that the road was built by Count Kleinmichel, he says that there is no need to hide the truth from the boy, and begins to talk about the construction of the railway.
The boy heard as if a crowd of dead people were running towards the windows of the train. They tell him that people built this road in any weather, lived in dugouts, were hungry, and were sick. They were robbed and flogged. Now others are reaping the fruits of their labor, and the builders are rotting in the ground. “Are they remembered kindly,” ask the dead, “or have people forgotten about them?”
The author tells Vanya that there is no need to be afraid of the singing of these dead men. Points to someone who is exhausted from hard work, stands bent over, and plows the ground. It’s so hard for people to earn their bread. Their work must be respected, he says. The author is confident that the people will endure everything and eventually pave the way for themselves.
Vanya fell asleep and woke up from a whistle. He told his father-general his dream. In it they showed him 5 thousand men and said that these were the road builders. Hearing this, he burst out laughing. He said that men are drunkards, barbarians and destroyers, that they can only build their mansions. The general asked not to tell the child about terrible sights, but to show the bright sides.
This is how Nekrasov described the construction of the road in his poem “The Railway”. A summary (“briefly” is what it’s called in English) cannot, of course, convey all the author’s pain for a simple deceived person. To feel all the sarcasm and bitterness of injustice, it is worth reading this poem in the original.
The poetry is a conversation between the author and fellow traveler with the boy Vanya. The author wanted people to remember how we receive benefits and who is behind it. He also told readers about the greed of their superiors and their inhumanity. About peasant peasants who receive nothing for their labor.
Nekrasov showed all the injustice and tragedy of the life of serfs in his work. “The Railway,” a brief summary of which we have reviewed, is one of the few works of the 19th century from social orientation, telling about the lives of ordinary people with empathy.
In his poem, the poet notes that the creators of everything great in Rus' are simple men. However, all the laurels go to the landowners, counts, and contractors who shamelessly exploit the workers and deceive them.
Nekrasov ends his work with a picture of slavish glee and submission. The “railroad” (a brief summary tells about this) was built, the peasants were fooled. But they are so timid and submissive that they rejoice at the crumbs given to them. In the final lines, Nekrasov makes it clear that he is not happy about this submission and hopes that the time will come when the peasants will straighten their backs and throw off those who sit on them.
Analysis of the poem
1. The history of the creation of the work.
2. Characteristics of a work of lyrical genre (type of lyrics, artistic method, genre).
3. Analysis of the content of the work (analysis of the plot, characteristics of the lyrical hero, motives and tonality).
4. Features of the composition of the work.
5. Analysis of means of artistic expression and versification (presence of tropes and stylistic figures, rhythm, meter, rhyme, stanza).
6. The meaning of the poem for the poet’s entire work.
The poem “Railway” (sometimes researchers call the work a poem) was written by N.A. Nekrasov in 1864. The work is based on historical facts. It talks about construction in 1846–1851. Nikolaevskaya railway, connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg. This work was led by the manager of communications and public buildings, Count P.A. Kleinmichel. People worked in the most difficult conditions: thousands died of hunger and disease, they did not have the necessary clothing, and they were cruelly punished with whips for the slightest disobedience. While working on the work, Nekrasov studied essays and journalistic materials: an article by N.A. Dobrolyubov “The Experience of Weaning People from Food” (1860) and an article by V.A. Sleptsov “Vladimirka and Klyazma” (1861). The poem was first published in 1865 in the Sovremennik magazine. It had the subtitle: “Dedicated to children.” This publication caused discontent among official circles, after which a second warning followed about the closure of the Sovremennik magazine. The censor found in this poem “a terrible slander that cannot be read without shuddering.” The censorship defined the direction of the magazine as follows: “Opposition to the government, extreme political and moral opinions, democratic aspirations, and finally, religious denial and materialism.”
We can classify the poem as civil poetry. Its genre and compositional structure is complex. It is constructed in the form of a conversation between passengers, whose conditional companion is the author himself. The main theme is thinking about the difficult, tragic fate Russian people. Some researchers call “The Railway” a poem that synthesizes elements of various genre forms: drama, satire, songs and ballads.
“The Railway” opens with an epigraph – a conversation between Vanya and his father about who built the railway along which they are traveling. To the boy’s question, the general answers: “Count Kleinmichel.” Then the author comes into action, who initially acts as a passenger-observer. And in the first part we see pictures of Russia, a beautiful autumn landscape:
Glorious autumn! Healthy, vigorous
The air invigorates tired forces;
Fragile ice on the icy river
It lies like melting sugar;
Near the forest, like in a soft bed,
You can get a good night's sleep - peace and space! -
The leaves have not yet had time to fade,
Yellow and fresh, they lie like a carpet.
This landscape was created in line with the Pushkin tradition:
October has already arrived - the grove is already shaking off
The last leaves from their naked branches;
The autumn chill has blown in - the road is freezing.
The stream still runs babbling behind the mill,
But the pond was already frozen; my neighbor is in a hurry
To the departing fields with my desire...
These sketches perform the function of exposition in the plot of the work. Nekrasov’s lyrical hero admires the beauty of the modest Russian nature, where everything is so good: “frosty nights”, and “clear, quiet days”, and “moss swamps”, and “stumps”. And as if in passing he remarks: “There is no ugliness in nature!” This prepares the antitheses on which the entire poem is built. So, beautiful nature, where everything is reasonable and harmonious, the author contrasts the outrages that are happening in human society.
And we have this opposition already in the second part, in the speech of the lyrical hero addressed to Vanya:
This work, Vanya, was terribly enormous -
Not enough for one!
There is a king in the world: this king is merciless,
Hunger is its name.
Opposing the general, he reveals to the boy the truth about the construction of the railway. Here we see the beginning and development of the action. The lyrical hero says that many workers were doomed to death during this construction. Next we see a fantastic picture:
Chu! menacing exclamations were heard!
Stomping and gnashing of teeth;
A shadow ran across the frosty glass...
What's there? Crowd of the dead!
As noted by T.P. Buslakov, “the reminiscent source of this picture is the dance scene of “quiet shadows” in the ballad of V.A. Zhukovsky “Lyudmila” (1808):
“Chu! a leaf shook in the forest.
Chu! a whistle was heard in the wilderness.
They hear the rustling of quiet shadows:
At the hour of midnight visions,
There are clouds in the house, in a crowd,
Leaving the ashes at the grave
With the late month sunrise
A light, bright round dance
They are entwined in an aerial chain...
In terms of meaning, two close… episodes are polemical. Nekrasov’s artistic goal becomes the desire not only to present evidence, unlike Zhukovsky, of the “terrifying” truth, but to awaken the reader’s conscience.” Next, the image of the people is concretized by Nekrasov. From the bitter song of the dead we learn about their unfortunate fate:
We struggled under the heat, under the cold,
With an ever-bent back,
They lived in dugouts, fought hunger,
They were cold and wet and suffered from scurvy.
The literate foremen robbed us,
The authorities flogged me, the need was pressing...
We, God's warriors, have endured everything,
Peaceful children of labor!
...Russian hair,
You see, he’s standing exhausted with fever,
Tall, sick Belarusian:
Bloodless lips, drooping eyelids,
Ulcers on skinny arms
Always standing in knee-deep water
The legs are swollen; tangles in hair;
I'm digging into my chest, which I diligently put on the spade
I worked hard all day every day...
Take a closer look at him, Vanya:
Man earned his bread with difficulty!
Here the lyrical hero indicates his position. In his appeal addressed to Vanya, he reveals his attitude towards the people. Great respect for the workers, “brothers”, for their feat is heard in the following lines:
This noble habit of work
It would be a good idea for us to share with you...
Bless the work of the people
And learn to respect a man.
And the second part ends on an optimistic note: the lyrical hero believes in the strength of the Russian people, in their special destiny, in a bright future:
Don’t be shy for your dear fatherland...
The Russian people have endured enough
He also took out this railway -
He will endure whatever God sends!
Will bear everything - and a wide, clear
He will pave the way for himself with his chest.
These lines are the culmination of the development lyrical plot. The image of the road here takes on a metaphorical meaning: this is the special path of the Russian people, the special path of Russia.
The third part of the poem is contrasted with the second. Here Vanya's father, the general, expresses his views. In his opinion, the Russian people are “barbarians,” “a wild bunch of drunkards.” Unlike the lyrical hero, he is skeptical. The antithesis is also present in the content of the third part itself. Here we encounter a reminiscence from Pushkin: “Or is Apollo Belvedere Worse than a stove pot for you?” The general here paraphrases Pushkin’s lines from the poem “The Poet and the Crowd”:
You would benefit from everything - worth it's weight
Idol you value Belvedere.
You don’t see any benefit or benefit in it.
But this marble is God!.. so what?
The stove pot is more valuable to you:
You cook your food in it.
However, “the author himself enters into polemics with Pushkin. For him, poetry, the content of which is “sweet sounds and prayers”..., and the role of the poet-priest are unacceptable. He is ready to “Give... bold lessons,” to rush into battle for the sake of the people’s “good.”
The fourth part is an everyday sketch. This is a kind of denouement in the development of the topic. With bitter irony, the satirically lyrical hero paints here a picture of the end of his labors. The workers do not receive anything, because everyone “owes something to the contractor.” And when he forgives them the arrears, this causes wild rejoicing among the people:
Someone shouted “hurray”. Picked up
Louder, friendlier, longer... Lo and behold:
The foremen rolled the barrel singing...
Even the lazy man could not resist!
The people unharnessed the horses - and the merchant property
With a shout of “Hurray!” rushed along the road...
It seems difficult to see a more gratifying picture
Shall I draw, General?
There is also an antithesis in this part. The contractor, the “venerable meadow farmer,” and the foremen are contrasted here with the deceived, patient people.
Compositionally, the work is divided into four parts. It is written in dactyl tetrameter, quatrains, and cross rhymes. The poet uses various means artistic expressiveness: epithets (“vigorous air”, “in a beautiful time”), metaphor (“He will endure everything - and pave a wide, clear path for himself with his chest...”), comparison (“The fragile ice on the icy river lies like melting sugar”) , anaphora (“A contractor is traveling along the line on a holiday, He is going to see his work”), inversion “This noble habit of work”). Researchers have noted the variety of lyrical intonations (narrative, colloquial, declamatory) in the poem. However, they are all colored by a song tone. The scene with the image of the dead brings “The Railroad” closer to the ballad genre. The first part reminds us of a landscape miniature. The vocabulary and syntax of the work are neutral. Analyzing phonetic system works, we note the presence of alliteration (“The leaves have not yet had time to fade”) and assonance (“Everywhere I recognize my native Rus'...”).
The poem “Railroad” was very popular among the poet’s contemporaries. One of the reasons for this is the sincerity and fervor of the lyrical hero’s feelings. As K. Chukovsky noted, “Nekrasov... in “The Railway” has anger, sarcasm, tenderness, melancholy, hope, and every feeling is enormous, each one is brought to the limit...”
Nekrasov’s work is poetic not only because of the brightness of the paintings and the charm of the landscapes; it is poetic, first of all, because poetry, which is, so to speak, the nervous system of verse, is an internal measure by which everything in verse is measured and evaluated.
Glorious autumn! Healthy, vigorous
The air invigorates tired forces;
Fragile ice on the icy river
It lies like melting sugar;
Near the forest, like in a soft bed,
You can get a good night's sleep - peace and space! —
The leaves have not yet had time to fade,
Yellow and fresh, they lie like a carpet.
Glorious autumn! Frosty nights
Clear, quiet days...
There is no ugliness in nature! And kochi,
And moss swamps and stumps -
Everything is fine under the moonlight,
Everywhere I recognize my native Rus'...
I fly quickly on cast iron rails,
I think my thoughts...
Nekrasov's landscape is poetic, but it is poetry of a special kind. The time of year is named - autumn, and immediately it rolls out - vigorous, “vigorous air” - a daring statement that seems to break off any connection with the poetic tradition of describing, conveying the feeling of autumn in Russian poetry. What is it worth when nature calls you to sleep, not to sleep, but to get enough sleep? A tired man like a man wants to go into nature, to rest, not in order to “find bliss in the truth,” but simply... to get some sleep.
But the sphere of the poetic not only does not disappear, it has expanded. In nature itself, everything that is traditionally unpoeticized is poeticized: stumps and moss mounds, ice, like melting sugar. Nekrasov's verse opens into nature. We are not only in the carriage, but also outside it, we took a breath of air - “the air invigorates tired forces.” “Near the forest, as in a soft bed, you can sleep well” - here an almost physical feeling of communion with nature is conveyed, not in the lofty philosophical, Tyutchevsky sense, but in also in its own lofty, but most immediate sense. Nekrasov does not proseize the poetic, but poetizes the prosaic. The two words at the end of this part - “darling Rus'” (“I recognize my native Rus' everywhere”) - seem to suddenly bring everything together, absorb it into themselves and immediately, even somewhat unexpectedly, give the verse a high sound. Like a musician with one note, so a great poet with one word can determine the character and height of our perception. After all, Pushkin’s “Winter Morning” is not an idyll by the fireplace, not just a winter landscape, it is a moment in the development of a powerful spirit, expressed in the form of a truly Beethovenian sonata: the struggle of two principles and the allowing release into the light, into the harmony of the finale. And already in the first Pushkin chords
Towards the north. Aurors, appear as the Star of the North!
this height, this scale is given, by which, willingly or unwillingly, we will determine the entire development of the theme.
This is also Nekrasov’s “native Rus'” in the last line of the first part, which in no way exhausts, of course, the significance of the work, but which sets up for such significance. In the introduction there are intonations and motives of the folk song: “Rus” - “darling”, and “river” - “icy”. The people who will appear immediately later have already appeared here. In the poet and through the poet he declared himself, and declared himself poetically.
The first and second parts of Nekrasov’s work are internally unified, and this is not a unity of contrasts. Both are poetic. The picture of the amazing dream that Vanya saw is, first of all, a poetic picture. A liberating convention - a dream that makes it possible to see a lot that you cannot see in ordinary life - is a motif that was widely used in Russian literature even before Nekrasov. It is enough to recall Radishchev and Chernyshevsky, if we talk about the tradition close to Nekrasov. For Nekrasov, sleep ceases to be just a conditional motive. The dream in Nekrasov’s poem is a striking phenomenon, in which realistic images are boldly and unusually combined with a kind of poetic impressionism. A dream does not serve to reveal vague subconscious states of the soul, but it does not cease to be such a subconscious state, and what happens happens precisely in a dream, or rather, not even in a dream, but in an atmosphere of strange half-asleep. The narrator is always telling something, something is being seen by a disturbed child’s imagination, and what Vanya saw is much more than what he was told. The interlocutor spoke about the bones, and they came to life, as in a romantic fairy tale, about the hard life of people, and they sang their terrible song to Vanya. And where was the dream, where was reality - the story, the awakened, come to his senses boy cannot understand:
Suddenly they appeared - and He he told me:
“These are the builders of our road!”
Ostensibly He - the narrator, and this, as Mayakovsky later joked in a similar case, “eliminates all suspicions about the author’s belief in all nonsense beyond the grave.” But for Vanya there was not only a story, there was a dream, strange and fantastic. He Nekrasov’s text is in italics:
AND He he told me.
He no longer just the narrator, but someone or something elusive. Like a number of other elements of Nekrasov’s verse, such He, perhaps it came from romantic poetry, and, apparently, directly from Zhukovsky’s poems, where it is often found, for example, in the “Ballad” translated by Zhukovsky from Southie, which describes how one old woman rode on a black horse together and who sat in front:
No one saw how he raced with her He...
Only a terrible trace was found on the ashes;
Only, listening to the cry, all night through a heavy sleep
The babies shuddered in fear.
However, what Zhukovsky looks like, although not real, is an easily identifiable element (He- just an evil spirit), Nekrasov appears as a real, but difficult to define psychological state. It's not real, but it's definitely and rough; here it is vague and subtle, but real.
Vanya’s dream is partly prepared by the landscape of the introduction, a picture of a moonlit night. An element of this landscape appears in the second part. Introduction verse
Everything is fine under moonlight
will repeat exactly, anticipating the dream picture:
Will you allow me at moonlight
Show him the truth.
Nekrasov the poet does not allow Nekrasov the painter to add a single extra color, striving for an almost hypnotic concentration of the poems.
Together with Vanya, we are immersed in an atmosphere of half sleep, half doze. The story is told as a story about the truth, but also as a fairy tale addressed to a boy. From here
amazing artlessness and fabulous scale of the very first images:
This work, Vanya, was terribly enormous -
Not enough for one! There is a king in the world; this
The king is merciless, Famine is his name.”
No sleep yet. The story goes on, the train goes on, the road goes on, the boy dozes, and the poet, who has parted ways with the narrator for the first and only time, interrupts the story and gives another dose of poetic anesthesia. He connects the soothing rhythm of the road to the rhythm of the story:
The path is straight: the embankments are narrow,
Columns, rails, bridges.
And the story continues again:
And on the sides all the bones are Russian...
How many of them! Vanechka, do you know?
Aren't we put to sleep along with Vanya? And Vanya’s dream began;
Chu! Menacing exclamations were heard!
Stomping and gnashing of teeth;
A shadow ran across the frosty glass...
What's there? Crowd of the dead!
Then they overtake the cast-iron road,
They run in different directions.
Do you hear singing?.. “On this moonlit night
We love to see our work!..”
The dream began like a ballad. The moon, the dead with gnashing teeth, their strange song - the characteristic accessories of ballad poetics are condensed in the first stanzas and enhance the feeling of sleep. The balladry is emphasized, as if the tradition, romantic and lofty, within the framework of which the story about the people will be told, is declared. But the story about the people does not remain a ballad, but turns into
In Nekrasov’s work there are two peoples and two different attitudes towards them. There is indignation, but, if you like, there is also tenderness. There is the people in their poetic and moral essence, worthy of poetic definition, and the people in their slavish passivity, causing bitter irony.
The image of the people, as they appeared in a dream, is a tragic and unusually large-scale image. Appeared as if
all “native Rus'”. Originally Nekrasov's line
From the Neman, from Mother Volga, from the Oka
replaced by another
From Volkhov, from Mother Volga, from Oka
not only because, it’s true, it’s very successful, Volkhov phonetically connected by an internal rhyme with the Volga." | Geography becomes more national both in its present and even in its focus on the past.
The people of this part are highly poetic; there can be no talk of any denunciation. Sometimes suddenly the story becomes restrained, almost dry: not a single “image”, not a single lyrical note. The narration takes on the character and force of documentary evidence, as in the song of the men:
We struggled under the heat, under the cold,
With an ever-bent back,
They lived in dugouts, fought hunger,
They were cold and wet and suffered from scurvy.
The literate foremen robbed us,
The authorities flogged me, the need was pressing...
And suddenly an explosion, a sob bursting into the story:
We, God's warriors, have endured everything,
Peaceful children of labor!
Brothers! You are reaping our benefits!
This sob could not obey the strophic division of the verses and begin with a new stanza. It burst in where, as they say, it came to the throat. The same is in the description of the Belarusian, already the author’s:
You see, he’s standing there, exhausted by fever,
Tall, sick Belarusian:
Bloodless lips, drooping eyelids,
Ulcers on skinny arms.
Always standing in knee-deep water
The legs are swollen; tangle in hair...
The story acquired the dispassionate dryness of a protocol testimony, but it contains both the premise and justification for a new explosion, high lyrical pathos. The story about the Belarusian ends with the words:
I didn’t straighten my hunchbacked back
He is still: stupidly silent
And mechanically with a rusty shovel
It's hammering the frozen ground!
And these words are replaced by a call?
It would be a good idea for us to adopt this noble habit of work...
Dull silence, mechanical chiseling of the earth is called a habit of work noble. However, what may seem like a logical inconsistency, being isolated, drowns in the general flow of lyrical inspiration by the people and people’s labor, and we allowed us to point out it in order to emphasize how far Nekrasov goes in this inspiration and how little can be said here about any There was no reproof, at least not about the reproof of the people.
Only by understanding and showing the people in their lofty poetic essence could the poet exclaim:
Don’t be shy for your dear fatherland...
The Russian people have endured enough
He took out this railway too -
He will endure whatever God sends!
Will endure everything - and a wide, clear
He will pave the way for himself with his chest.
Even at the end of the 50s, there was more question than confidence in addressing the people:
Or, fate obeying the law,
You have already done everything you could,—
Created a song like a groan
And spiritually rested forever?..
This was recorded in 1858 during an increasingly growing social upsurge, and at a time of decline in popular and social movement the poet suddenly had a strong confidence in the future happiness of the people's destinies. Why? Note that it was during these years that Nekrasov’s most ingenious, perhaps the only work of astonishing completeness, “Frost, Red Nose” (1863), was created, and work began on the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” (1863-1864). Such works are not written simply out of a speculative desire to show, or, as they say, reflect, people's life. For Nekrasov, they provided a way out of that
the state of internal crisis into which advanced revolutionary circles were plunged, when the people seemed to have so cruelly deceived their hopes in 1861-1862.
The poet never ceased to be a revolutionary, and his poetic work was a search for an objective basis on which alone faith in the future could exist, without remaining an idle dream. Once again, and in many ways anew, the research undertaken by the brilliant poet in the 60s discovered for him the colossal aesthetic and, therefore, human potential of folk life. The revolutionary did not cease to be a poet, and for the poet this was an objective factor that made it possible, in the darkest times, to draw conclusions that many advanced politicians and sociologists had not reached.
However, while becoming optimistic, the tragedy did not cease to be a tragedy. It is also present in the calm but eerie sentence of Nekrasov’s poem:
It’s just a pity - neither I nor you will have to live in this beautiful time.
This is also a confident, sober and calm “not for you” - it’s just scary.
In the first part of the poem there was reality, in the second there was a dream, but there was something that united them. There was poetry: the poetry of nature, popularly perceived, the poetry of popular suffering and feat, precisely a feat worthy of high pathos: the road builders are “God’s warriors,” “peaceful children of labor,” who brought the barren wilds back to life and found a coffin.
In the third part, come true again. The transition is abrupt, the awakening is unexpected. There is no mention of him. We are simply awakened by verse and verse, sounds, a deafening whistle that “squealed.” The dream is disturbed, but the poetry of the dream and what was dreamed in the dream has not yet been destroyed. And Vanya says about this:
“Dad, I saw an amazing dream,”
Vanya said: - five thousand men,
Representatives of Russian tribes and breeds
Suddenly they appeared - and He he told me: -
Here they are, the builders of our road!..”
The general laughed!
The whistle destroyed the dream, the general's laughter destroyed poetry. The general was not introduced to the world of poetry.
The author was there, Vanya was there, we were there. Let us note how just one word, precisely found, becomes an image of enormous fulfillment. In the system of dream images, the boy’s very name became an image. Vanya - the poet could not call him anything else.
The general laughed and was introduced into the verse with sharp emphasis. The tetrameter dactyl loses an entire foot, and the last of the remaining ones is truncated. This short line turned out to be highlighted even graphically. The very flow of the verse was disrupted and stumbled.
This entire third part in nekrasovedeniya is usually interpreted as an argument between the narrator and the general.
In reality, there is no such dispute here. After a delicate remark: “I am speaking not for you, but for Vanya,” the narrator retreats before the general’s pressure, leaving the battlefield, so to speak, and the general rages alone. The insidious author gives him complete freedom of action and is in no hurry to enter into an argument. The general refutes himself. He defends himself and advances in a role somewhat unusual for generals - a defender of aesthetic values. However, the defender of beauty, poetry, has already entered into verse itself as his destroyer.
The general appears fully armed with an aesthetic program. Examples are classic: the Colosseum, the Vatican and, of course, the Apollo Belvedere. But in the general’s mouth they have no value. After all, the charm of the Venus de Milo is determined in G. Uspensky’s story “Straightened” by how she is described and what she evokes in a person. In Nekrasov's poems there is neither one nor the other. The works of art are only named. They are devalued aesthetically in a dry and unceremonious general enumeration. The Colosseum, St. Stephen, Apollo Belvedere are interspersed with curses: “barbarians”, “a wild crowd of drunkards” - all this quickly and immediately flies out of the same mouth. Turning to Pushkin’s poems, the general cannot, in principle cannot, accurately quote these verses in Nekrasov’s work, because Pushkin’s poems are irrespective aesthetic value, the general is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. He can defend himself with Pushkin’s poems, only conveying them tongue-tiedly; Nekrasov’s Pushkin is parodied. Instead of
The stove pot is dearer to you,
You cook your food in it.
Appeared
Or for you Apollo Velvedere
Worse than a stove pot?
Pushkin’s iambic verse, so to speak, was translated by dactyl, and this unexpectedly gave him a reduced conversational intonation, and the replacement of just the word “more expensive” with “worse” became a demonstration of primitiveness and the crudest utilitarianism. And this parody of Pushkin’s btikhs is put into the mouth of his uninvited defender.
We are no longer just talking about road builders (the authors of the commentary to the second volume of Nekrasov’s Complete Works and Letters (1948-1953) wrote: “Nekrasov’s poem is based on true facts relating to the construction of the Nikolaevskaya (now Oktyabrskaya) railway between St. Petersburg and Moscow "(II, 680), The conversation is on the biggest, world scale. “There is a king in the world...” the poet began the story. “Your Slav, Anglo-Saxon and German”... - the general picked up here. The topic that was outlined at the beginning of the work, then seemed to go away and suddenly unexpectedly and accurately appeared again, already enriched. In general, the entire poem is based on such internal correspondences, roll calls, correlations, which in harmony determine the true musicality of the work. One can, of course, point to successful combinations certain sounds, but, as Gorky said, “phonetics is not music yet” 1 .
In Nekrasov’s poem, the fact that the general from -. appears as anti-aesthetic, already revealed in its poetry, while the general himself appears as an ugly beginning. It was impossible to think of anything more deadly for the guardians of pure art. The defender of “pure art” is not a poet or a critic, not even a professor, but “a dad in a red-lined coat,” a general. Theories that reconcile with life, calling for a brighter view of it, are elevated to their final authority. Everything is naked to the limit.
The general, of course, has a positive program, which boils down to the demand to glorify life and show its bright side. The poet meets the wishes of the
accuracy. The verse of the last line of the general's speech in the third part:
Would you show the child now?
The bright side...—
ends already in the first line of the fourth part, in the author’s speech:
Glad to show you!
The proposal was picked up literally on the fly.
What follows is a story about the terrible work of people. There is no obvious irony. It is only in the initial definition new painting how bright. There is again an emphatically objective, almost dry story about what is hidden behind the curtain of the final result:
Fatal works
It’s over - the German is already laying the rails.
The dead are buried in the ground; sick
Hidden in dugouts...
Then the picture becomes brighter and brighter,
and the lighter it becomes, according to the general
sky wish and understanding, especially internal
It causes bitterness, the more ironic the author is. And the external
the pathos of the story grows: a barrel of wine appears, the sound
cliques and finally the apotheosis comes:
The people unharnessed the horses - and the purchase price
With a shout of hurray! rushed along the road...
There would hardly be more bitterness if the people had rushed Count Pyotr Andreevich Kleinmichel himself. No, here is an animal in animal form with his “...something... well done! Well done..." and "congratulations!" - "a triumphant pig ("Hats off - when I say"). This “triumphant pig” is carried by the people, and the work concludes with a bitter ironic nod to such a joyful picture. The “brightest” picture turned out to be the ugliest in the work.
The irony that completes the poems is natural in its own way and can safely be considered one of the most authoritative evidence in favor of the opinion that the poem was written precisely in the 60s.
The dream ended with high pathos, the reality - with irony, but both there is sadness, there is a tragic feeling, on which the pathetic exclamations of one part and the ironic question of the other unexpectedly converged, and which
in many ways turned out to be the end result of the work.
As we have already noted, inattention to poetry as the internal measure of this poem has often forced researchers to consider it as an illustration.
Only mastering Nekrasov's poetry in its organic poetic essence will allow us to turn to this poetry, like any phenomenon of great art, endlessly.
/ / / The history of the creation of Nekrasov’s poem “Railroad”
The first railway in Russia was built under Nicholas I; it connected Moscow with St. Petersburg. The Tsar did not foresee any difficulties or obstacles, but simply drew a line under the ruler. big map road layout, which naturally affected forests and swamps, and as a result, the construction of this road claimed many lives ordinary people.
The process was led by Count Kleinmichel, who went down in history as a man of incredible toughness. He really wanted to finish the construction as early as possible, so he brought the peasants to an ugly state, forcing them to work until they died.
Somewhat later, when Alexander II began to reign, the construction of railways gained momentum. And in 1864, a new line was built, and this time the victims of this construction were peasants freed from serfdom in 1861.
Such situations made a very strong impression on Nekrasov, and the poet could not help but create a poem dedicated to the terrible treatment of ordinary people, because throughout his entire work one can trace his incredible love for the peasant class, and in general for the simple, humiliated and undeserving to people.
Over the years of working on the work, N.A. Nekrasov became acquainted with the works of many famous personalities, the poet himself considered V.A.’s article to be particularly strong journalistic sources. Sleptsov “Vladimirka and Klyazma”, written in 1861, as well as an article by N.A. Dobrolyubov “The Experience of Weaning People from Food,” written in 1860.
Dobrolyubov in his article expresses a very important idea that runs through Nekrasov’s entire poem: even such a huge step in the history of Russia as the construction of the railway did not mean getting rid of a huge number of people in power and only thirsting for profit. They were not at all worried about the fate of ordinary workers, who had no choice but to follow orders, otherwise, for the slightest disobedience, they were threatened with confiscation of the last piece of bread, and sometimes even death.
The first edition of the poem was published in the then popular magazine Sovremennik; it had a rather controversial subtitle - “Dedicated to children.” Naturally, the publication caused a lot of unrest in high circles, who once again threatened to close the magazine. The censor called this poem by Nekrasov “slander.”
Although this conclusion was fundamentally incorrect, because the poet presented very real arguments and evidence in his work, so rather the ruling circles were not “slandered”, but exposed.
Thus, the poem by N.A. Nekrasov's "Railway" has a very interesting story a creation in which there were difficulties, censorship and controversy, because the author in the work touches on such a complex and painful topic for Russia - the suffering of ordinary people who were attacked by the authorities. The poet nevertheless managed to secretly defend the right to his amazing work, and in our time it is considered one of the greatest poems of that time.
