Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (1820-1892)
Two Universes A.A. Feta
Fet's poetic activity began in the 1840s. and continues until the early 1890s. Thus, Fet’s work connects both periods of the literary process of the second half of the 19th century century. Fet's lyrics capture the logic of the movement of human consciousness in the second half of the 19th century, despite the fact that the poet never addressed the social problems of the century. Even his own biography remained outside the scope of his work. We can talk about the biography of the spirit. Fet formulated his poetic position at the very beginning of his journey in the verses of 1843, “I came to you with greetings.”
At a time when a new direction of the “natural school” was being formed in literature, calling for depicting the prose of life, Fet defended the poet’s right to “sing what he does not know,” what is only ripening. This vagueness and incompleteness of poetic thought could be supported by supporters of “pure” art and not by “new” poetry. In the 1850s Nekrasov will publish his poetic declarations, where he will formulate the law of the new poet - to preach love “with the hostile word of denial.” Fet would respond to this poetic statement three decades later with the 1887 poem “Muse.” The poem begins with a hidden reminiscence from Nekrasov.
You want to curse, sobbing and groaning,
Seek scourges to the law,
Poet, stop! Don't call me -
Call Tisiphone from the abyss.
It ends with the statement that the essence of poetry is “to heal from torment,” but not from those everyday, social, historical, but from the torment that is sent to a person by his spirit, striving to break free from bodily snares. Fet calls this completely different torment “the joy of suffering.” Poetry is the liberation of the spirit. And this is its only task and goal.
Even earlier, in the 1850s, when a dispute broke out in magazines between “pure” and “tendentious” poetry, Fet had already created his “Muse” (1854), which cannot be fully attributed to “pure” poetry.
Oh no! Under the haze of a jealous veil
Youth showed me a different muse:
Weighed down by a strand of fragrant hair
A wondrous head with a knot of heavy braids;
The last flowers in her hand trembled;
The abrupt speech was full of sadness,
And female whims, and silvery dreams,
Unspoken torment and incomprehensible tears.
We are worried about some kind of languid indolence,
I listened as words were met with a kiss
And for a long time without her my soul was sick
And full of unspeakable desire.
“Unspoken torment”, “incomprehensible tears”, “unspoken” as pain of the soul - this is what becomes the subject of Fetov’s lyrics. It is paradoxical that the subject of the poetic word becomes that which cannot be expressed, before which the word is powerless. Fet has a poem that begins with this paradoxical statement “I won’t tell you anything...” (1885), in which the poet emphasizes that the word is too crude to convey the state of mind that a person wants to throw out of himself. The search for a word adequate to the state of mind occurs before the reader’s eyes both in the early 1843 poem “I came to you with greetings...”, and in the late 1885 “I won’t tell you anything...”. How to convey oneself in a word, how “the song matures”, “how the heart blooms”?
The word Feta loses its applied precision and acquires associative precision. Fet, exploring the sphere of the “inexpressible,” speaks in words the language of music or the language of impressionist painting.
At the same time, his lyrics are structured. It clearly indicates the evolution of the lyrical “I,” which is unlike all existing examples in poetry. In Fet's lyrics, the universal model of human existence is indicated by the poem “The whole world is from beauty...”, written between 1874 and 1886.
The first quatrain is constructed in violation of grammatical norms.
A whole world of beauty
From big to small,
And you search in vain
Find its beginning.
The first two lines are missing a verb, no action. We don't know what happens to the world because of beauty. But the absence of action-movement creates a large-scale picture of the integrity of all things, small and large. And this whole is beauty. These lines can also be read in such a way that beauty is the beginning of the integrity of the world, its source, connecting together the great and the small. Beauty is the basis of the integrity of being.
The third and fourth lines contain the theme of man. Man has been trying to find the beginning of the universe, to unravel the riddle of the universe from the moment of his appearance in the world. And the entire experience of human existence suggests that the universe does not give its secrets to man.
The second quatrain begins with a summary of the person’s search. Man created time, which measures the universe. But beyond human capabilities lies infinity. She is incomprehensible. Before her, all human efforts seem futile. These two lines make human existence meaningless. But the third and fourth ones cross this out and say the opposite.
What is a day or an age?
Before what is infinite?
Although man is not eternal,
What is eternal is human.
Eternity, which has conquered man, exists only because man exists, for without him no one would know that it exists. The Universe, with all the objectivity of its existence, is impossible without man. Without him she is only an endless void.
The picture of a universe empty without man is created in the poem “Never” (1879). Its plot is based on the return of a person to the world after death. The reverse movement from death to life proves that with the departure of a person the world dies, deprived of its life-giving principle.
Where to go, where there is no one to hug,
Where time is lost in space?
Come back, death, hurry up to accept
Last life fatal burden.
And you, frozen corpse of the earth, fly,
Carrying my corpse along the eternal path!
In such a structure of the world there is no place for God and there is no immortality. With the death of a person, the universe is destroyed, eternity loses its meaning. But at the same time, Fet’s poetry is devoid of pessimism and notes of despair. On the contrary, even in later poems, such as “I still love, I still languish...” (1890), “How difficult it is to repeat living beauty..." (1888) the outcome of life is presented as the last joy of existence.
I still love, I still yearn
Before the world's beauty
And I will never deny
From the caresses sent by you.
In Fet's poetry there are two equal-sized universes: the universe and man.
Two worlds have ruled for centuries,
Two equal beings:
One envelops a man,
The other is my soul and thought.
(“Good and Evil”, 1884)
The first exists as beauty that only humans can perceive. It, like a “barely noticeable dewdrop,” reflects the “face of the sun.” The drama of human existence in Fet’s lyrics is associated with the feeling that he is unable to overcome eternity, to understand the mystery of existence: “to be a deity without thoughts.” But this drama is experienced without strain, without despair. A person cannot be oppressed by his “involuntary anxieties,” because in the universe of his spirit he “soars, all-seeing and all-powerful,” without stooping to earthly prose. In the title of the poem “Good and Evil,” the poet brings out the problem that worried the person initially. Fet's contemporaries viewed it differently. For example, for Chernyshevsky, good and evil are only social categories, they are outside of morality. For Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, good and evil belong to the realm of the spirit. Without their permission, the historical existence of man is impossible. They are the essence of drama in a person’s life. For Fet, the drama of man is not in the struggle between good and evil in man, but in something completely different.
Already in Fet’s early lyrics, his two universes are indicated in small landscape sketches “A Wonderful Picture...” (1842) and “A Wavy Cloud...” (1843). In the first poem, a picture of universal peace is created. A person’s gaze slides from the earth (“white plain”) to the sky (“ full moon") and vice versa: “the light of the high heavens” - “brilliant snow.” The integrity, the completeness of the world is in its incompleteness, in the flow of heaven to earth, earth to sky. This universe exists objectively and “encompasses man.” But immediately an image of the one created by man is created. He feels the integrity and completeness of the objective world - “ wonderful picture! How dear you are to me,” but the ties with this homeland are fragile, ready to break, and then the miracle will disappear. The lonely running of a sleigh destroys the picture of universal peace, as in Lermontov’s 1841 poem “I go out alone on the road...” the flinty path ahead of man disrupts the idyll of the universe.
The same picture is created in the poem “By a wavy cloud...”. But the loneliness of a person sounds more dramatic in it.
My friend, distant friend,
Remember me!
But the drama of being in the universe has not yet been fully comprehended by the man of Fet’s early lyrics. The titles of poems from the 1840s - 1850s, for example, “The Bay of the Sea,” “On a Boat,” “Mountain Gorge,” “Foggy Morning,” “Lonely Oak,” speak for themselves. Their hero feels himself in the lap of nature. This world exists for him. He is in it, “like the first inhabitant of paradise.” And he is the center of the universe.
The earth is like a vague, silent dream,
She flew away unknown
And I, as the first inhabitant of paradise,
One saw the night in the face.
Was I rushing towards the midnight abyss,
Or were hosts of stars rushing towards me?
It seemed as if in a powerful hand
I hung over this abyss.
(“On a haystack at night in the south…”, 1857)
A man plays with the abyss, it takes his breath away, and he only has a presentiment that the game can become fatal. In his late poem of 1890, “On the Swing,” he fully comprehends her fatal character.
The movement from heaven to earth and from earth to sky, which determined the space of the early poems, is not yet drama, but only its premonition. It will become dramatic in the finale life path. The “terrible” proximity of earth and sky, gratifying in youth, in the finale is perceived as fate, the inevitability of which makes one swing more and more recklessly on the board of life, or play with life.
The game of life in the early poems is not perceived as a game. This is the natural state of a living being in a beautiful world. The universe of the Fetov man does not yet allow anything that interferes with the manifestation of delight in beauty. In the poem “I'm Waiting...The Nightingale Echo” (1842), the joy of experiencing this delight is not disturbed by anything. No alarming notes have yet crept into the changing states of the natural world and the human world.
I'm waiting... There's a breeze from the south;
It’s warm for me to stand and walk;
The star rolled to the west...
Sorry, golden one, sorry!
But in the poem of 1886, repeating the plot of the poem of 1842 “I am waiting, overwhelmed with anxiety...”, the state of the human universe is exactly the opposite. If in the early poem “the nightingale’s echo”, “grass in diamonds”, the sky in the stars, man - all this together exudes the joy of being, then in the later the shadow of disappearance lies on everything. The song of a mosquito is a cry. A falling leaf, the flight of a beetle, broken like a string, anxiety in a person’s heart from anticipation of a meeting that may not happen.
Quiet under the forest canopy
Young bushes are sleeping...
Oh, how it smelled like spring!..
It's probably you!
The moving motif of all of Fet's lyrics, the motif of fire, acquires dramatic content in his late work. Man is like a star and, like a star, he burns out in the universe. His life is a “fiery book.”
Let you rush like me, submissive to the moment,
Slaves like me are my natural number...
("Among the Stars" (1876)
It is not measured by the dates of death and birth, although he is a slave to these “innate numbers” that do not depend on him, like stars, which also have their own term. True life lies in the “flight of the heart,” in the inner fire that makes a person admire beauty and create. But over the course of life, a person feels how this fire fades away, how his connection with the universe becomes thinner, how the “fiery book” he wrote goes out.
It’s not a pity for life with languid breathing,
What is life and death? What a pity about that fire
That shone over the whole universe,
And he goes into the night and cries as he leaves.
(A.L. Brzheskoy “Distant friend, understand my sobs...”, 1879)
All the drama of the poet’s later lyrics is in the exclamation “I don’t want to believe!” in the fact that a person is burning, that the inspiring beauty of the universe is mercilessly burning him, that “the flight of the poor heart ends with one powerless languor.”
I don't want to believe it! When in the steppe, how wonderful it is,
In the midnight darkness, untimely grief,
In the distance in front of you is transparent and beautiful
The dawn suddenly rose
And my gaze was involuntarily drawn to this beauty,
Into that majestic brilliance beyond the entire dark limit, -
Did nothing really whisper to you at that time:
There's a man burned out there!
(“When you read the painful lines...”, 1887)
Fet’s poetry, it would seem, did not in any way touch on the historical problems of the era, for which he was more than once reproached by such venerable contemporaries as, for example, F.M. Dostoevsky. Fet's personal life with its tragic ups and downs was not directly reflected in any of his poetic creations. But nevertheless, we can say that Fet’s poetry fully reflects the existence of a person in the 19th century, just like the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Fet captures the dialectic of the spirit, just like Dostoevsky the dialectic of consciousness, and Tolstoy the dialectic of the soul. Fet, like all the classics of the second half of the 19th century, is immersed in the problems of personal self-determination. His person is embodied not in doing social good, not in “resolving thoughts,” but in pure creativity, in the flight of the spirit. And, like other heroes literature of the 19th century centuries, in its existence experiences the eternal path of humanity.
Fet A.A. Smile of beauty / A.A. Fet. – M., 1995.
Research
Bukhshtab, B.Ya. A.A. Fet. Essays on life and creativity / B.Ya. Accounting headquarters. – L., 1990.
Skatov N.N. Nekrasov and Fet / N.N. Skatov. // Skatov N.N. Nekrasov. Contemporaries and successors. – M., 1986. – P. 151-197.
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AFANASY AFANASIEVICH FET
A.A. Fet came to literature in the 1840s - a tragic time for Russian poetry.
In 1837, Pushkin died; in 1839 - Denis Davydov; in 1840 - I. Kozlova; in 1841 Lermontov died in a duel; 1844 - Boratynsky died suddenly in Italy; Yazykov died in 1846. Decembrist poets are excluded from literature, many of them die in the army and in exile (A. Odoevsky, A. Bestuzhev, etc.). F.I. Tyutchev, whose poems appeared in the latest issues of Pushkin’s Sovremennik, is abroad and is not published in Russia. Alive V.A. Zhukovsky, but he is also outside the main literary process.
The formula “Fet is a poet of pure art” has become so firmly entrenched in the values of the Soviet literary average person, so firmly rooted in school and university textbooks
according to Russian literature, that it took intense efforts of literary scholars to erase from this stamp the ideological evaluative meaning inherent in it even in the revolutionary
democratic criticism of the turn of the 1850s-1860s, and present art world this poetry in its true form. But here's the paradox. Even today, when Fet is called “one of the finest lyricists of world literature”1, and in his talent they see either “Beethovenian features” or “a kind of Mozartianism” close to the genius of Pushkin2, in a number of works one can find
accusations of Fet either of “aesthetic sectarianism”3, or of “militant aestheticism”4, or even of the “cynical-chauvinistic pathos” of individual poems.
It becomes obvious that an entire generation of poets has left Russian literature, while a new one was just beginning to take shape and find its voice. Among those who were looking for their own poetic language at this time was A. A. Fet.
In 1840, Fet published his first book of poems - "Lyrical Pantheon". It contained ballads, idylls, elegies, epitaphs. Responses to the book were varied, mostly favorable. Professor of Moscow University P.N. Kudryavtsev, the author of the review in Otechestvennye zapiski, managed to discern talent in the aspiring poet, V.G. Belinsky in a letter to V.P. Botkin noted that Fet “promises a lot.” Perhaps only O. Senkovsky gave a derogatory review of the poet’s first collection, and a reviewer for the Moskvityanin magazine called some of the poems “completely colorless.”
Soon, Fet’s works begin to be included in anthologies (for example, A.D. Galakhov places Fet’s poems in his “Complete Russian Reader,” published in 1843)
At the beginning of 1850, the second collection of Fet’s poems was published, and in 1856 - the third, in which I.S. made major editorial changes. Turgenev (as the poet later noted, “the edition edited by Turgenev came out as cleaned up as it was mutilated”). Turgenev's edits were directed against the “incomprehensibility” and “accidentality” of Fetov’s images. So, for example, Turgenev excluded from the poem “I came to you with greetings...” the last stanza, and it is precisely this that contains Fet’s programmatic statement about the unintentionality, naturalness, and improvisational nature of lyrical creativity:
Tell me that from everywhere
It blows over me with joy,
That I don’t know myself that I will
Sing - but only the song is ripening.
In a poem “Like midges I will dawn...” Turgenev corrects the lines: “Former aspiration // Far away, like an evening shot...” - corrects as follows: “... like an evening glow...”, verse “Forget-me-not heart! Take it easy..." from “Lullaby” he completely deleted it, as well as “Rotten grief // Asleep in the chest...” (“Prisoner”), since these images seemed “pretentious” to him.
In 1863, after Fet left military service and got married, they published a two-volume collection of poems. The changed life circumstances affected his creativity: he moved away from literature and became immersed in household concerns. I.S. Turgenev spoke about this change in life guidelines as follows: Fet “drove the Muse away.”
At the end of the 1860s, he returned to creativity again, however, the next book of poems would be published only twenty years later - in 1883. Fet called this last collection of poetry “Evening Lights.” In 1885,1888 and 1891 Three more issues of “Evening Lights” will be released. Fet prepared the fifth, but did not have time to publish it.
Idea of beauty
What is the secret of Fet's lyrics? Why exactly does she give birth, according to K.I. Chukovsky, feeling “happiness that can fill the whole person to the brim »?
Fet is addressed to eternal, universal principles. The main theme of his lyrics is beauty. The poet himself said: “I could never understand that art was interested in anything other than beauty.”
Fet's poetic manifesto is called the following lines:
A whole world of beauty
From big to small,
And you search in vain
Find its beginning.
What is a day or an age?
Before what is infinite?
Although man is not eternal,
What is eternal is human.
Nature is eternal, human feelings, art. And that’s why Fet is addressed to them. Fet conveys the beauty of the world around him. Already in the first collections this perception was reflected. The beauty of the snowy expanses, the leisurely movement of a calm village manor life, fortune telling, quiet, leisurely winter evenings...
Fet develops a special aesthetic perception of Russian nature and Russian life. Russian winter, snow for him is not a disharmonious, soul-numbing phenomenon, but harmoniously beautiful, living, infinitely changeable. Even the loneliness of a person in his native world is not tragic.
In a poem from 1842:
Wonderful picture
How dear you are to me:
White Plain.
Full moon.
The light of the high heavens,
And shining snow
And distant sleighs, lonely running -
The spatial and temporal signs traditional for Russian literature are recreated: Russian winter, boundless snow-covered plain, moonlit night. Man is connected with the natural world, and this internal connection determines the main lyrical emotion: the lyrical hero feels his involvement in existence, and therefore is in harmony with the world around him.
The first two lines set the mood; they contain the idea of the beauty of the world and the feeling of kinship with it. Then, through a series of objective realities, the “wonderful picture” that the poet contemplates is recreated, therefore the second part of the poem is structured as a listing of signs of a winter night landscape (this determines the verblessness).
First (3-4 lines) one detail follows another (plain, moon). The gaze of the lyrical hero covers two boundless spaces, this is a look from the bottom up, from the earth (plain) to the heavens (moon). The subsequent (5-6) lines do not introduce any new ideas, the enumeration itself seems to “slow down”, because the same realities are mentioned (sky, plain), but this is the opposite direction of the view - from heaven to earth.
The overall picture (ordinary, ordinary, recognizable, since it recreates the features of the national landscape, which suggests that beauty lies in the everyday, ordinary, familiar, you just need to catch this moment) is filled with light, and at the same time with internal movement. The moon is shining, the heavens are shining, the “brilliant” snow itself reflects the light of the heavens. And the Fetov night ceases to be a sign of non-existence, chaos, it does not plunge the earth into darkness. And at night the world turns out to be bright, alive, changing, which is also emphasized by the movement of the sleigh. Thus, at the end of the poem, the gaze is focused on one moving point in boundless space, and the winter landscape becomes not deserted, but “humanized”: someone is driving there, in a boundless snowy plain, someone’s gaze catches this point, mentally follows it. Thus, in Fet’s work, man, nature, and space are connected by some invisible bonds.
The first part of Fet’s poem is full of evaluative vocabulary (“wonderful”, “native”), in the second part there is nothing that would express the author’s attitude. Therefore, it plays an important role color symbolism, which also serves to express the idea of harmonious unity of man with the world. There is no darkness in the poem, because it reigns White color, which here is a symbol of harmony, purity, enlightenment.
According to Fet, the focus and at the same time the “guardian” of beauty is art. A number of Fet’s poems are like “come to life” paintings ("Golden age"), sculptures ("Diana").
A work of art receives new life: when the viewer’s gaze is directed at him, then his external statics seem to be overcome, the internal energy that the artist expressed “breaks through.” The beauty embodied in creation fills the world: it is reflected in the soul of the person contemplating it, and is reflected in nature itself.
In a poem "Diana"(1847) Fet connects the static and the dynamic. He places a motionless statue in a world filled with movement: this is the movement of the wind, leaves, and the swaying of the water surface. But the static object itself is filled with internal movement: “sensitive and stone maiden” (Fet uses antonyms like homogeneous definitions) “attended”; nudity "brilliant"; “immovable marble” whitens with “incomprehensible beauty.”
Over time, Fet’s ideas about what constitutes service to beauty change. In the 70s and 80s he begins to perceive it as a heavy duty. Beauty is no longer so bright; it has to be obtained through suffering. This change in Fet’s worldview was felt by L.N. Tolstoy.
In 1873, the poet responded to the poem “In the Invisible Haze...” that was sent to him: “ Your tiny poem is beautiful. This new, never before captured feeling of pain from beauty is expressed charmingly.”
The poet's artistic position in the context of the era.
Fet's position in defending his view of the essence of art did not coincide with the general trend, and he was well aware of this. Here is one of the later, 1884, poems:
The day will wake up - and human speech
They will boil with an irritated wave,
And the elements will rush, spilling
Everything that is caused by greedy need.
And my chants will murmur, -
But in the shifting currents you will find
Is it a tender thought of excitement,
Are hearts trembling in vain?
Such demonstrative defense of the poet’s right to glorify beauty led to a break with representatives of the democratic trend in literature. Dostoevsky presented Fet’s position very wittily in his 1861 article “G.-Bov and the Question of Art” (Dobrolyubov signed his articles with this pseudonym). He suggested imagining a hypothetical situation: the day after the devastating Lisbon earthquake in the newspaper, “in the most prominent place on the page, something like the following catches everyone’s eye:
Whisper, timid breathing.
The trill of a nightingale...<...>
“I don’t know for sure how the people of Lisbon would have received their “Mercury,” but it seems to me that they would have immediately publicly executed their famous poet, in the square, and not at all because he wrote a poem without a verb, but because instead of the trills of the nightingale the day before, such trills were heard underground, and the swaying of the stream appeared at the moment of such swaying of the whole city that the poor Lisbonians not only had no desire to watch.
Purple roses in smoky clouds
The reflection of amber
but even the act of a poet singing such funny things at such a moment in their life seemed too offensive and unbrotherly.”
Fet turns a person to the world of his soul even when this is not recognized by society as an urgent need. In a poem "Good and evil"(1884) Fet denotes two entities:
Two worlds have ruled for centuries,
Two equal beings:
One envelops a man,
The other is my soul and thought.
And like a little dewdrop, barely noticeable
You will recognize the whole face of the sun,
So united in the depths of the cherished
You will find the entire universe.
Fet comprehends the cherished, the deep. It expresses reflected external existence perceived by consciousness: not a thing, but the perception of a thing, not an object, but a feeling, associations born from contact with it. And in this sense he depicts the world human soul, the movement of feelings (i.e. the subjective sphere), and not just “pictures” of the objective world.
Fet almost does not respond in poetry to the events of his life, and there were many events (primarily tragic ones): the loss of all noble privileges and the surname received at birth, eleven years of military service...
Even if an event is outlined in a poem, it cannot be read literally. Rather, it conveys a once experienced sensation or impression. And since the feeling is alive, the present tense appears in the poem. It was this - the present tense - that gave rise to misunderstanding. So, for example, V. Burenin, who repeatedly attacked Fet, sneered at the poem “On the Swing”,
which the poet wrote at the age of 70.
And again in the half-light of the night
Among the ropes stretched tight,
On this shaky board together
We stand and abandon each other." —
the critic commented as follows: “Imagine a seventy-year-old old man and his “dear”, “throwing each other” on a shaky board... How can one not worry about the fact that their game may actually turn out to be fatal and end unfavorably for the old men playing out!” Fet, dejected by the lack of understanding, complains in a letter to Ya. Polonsky: “Forty years ago I was swinging on a swing with a girl, standing on a board, and her dress was flapping in the wind, and forty years later she ended up in a poem, and the clowns reproach me, Why am I rocking with Maria Petrovna?”
Ways to develop a lyrical plot
One of Fet’s favorite techniques is a double repetition: And an event occurring in the present gives rise to a memory of a similar event in the past. In the poem “The night was shining. The garden was full of the moon...” a connection between the past and the present arises, as the feeling is resurrected. At the same time, it is important that in the soul of the lyrical hero what is born is precisely the memory of a feeling, an experience, a general atmosphere of spiritual unity, experienced once many years ago, and not a memory of the event as such. Such a combination of past and present reveals that the human soul is not determined by either age or the burden of life circumstances.
Fet captures the subtlest shades of mental life and interweaves them with descriptions of nature. For Fet, the world of feelings and the world of nature are always interconnected. They usually say that Fet uses the technique of parallelism, but the poet often does not separate one from the other. Yes, in the poem “Whisper, timid breathing...”(another example of verbless lyrics) we should talk not so much about parallelism, but about the interweaving, interpenetration of two worlds. It is no coincidence that natural and human manifestations are presented in it as a continuous stream of enumerations.
Fet's lyrical plot often unfolds as a stream of associations. An example of a poem, where the development of the theme is entirely determined by the subjective associations of the poet, is perceived
poem “I’m falling back on the chair, looking at the ceiling...”(1890). The shadow on the ceiling from a tin mug suspended above a hanging kerosene lamp, rotating with difficulty due to the influx of air, gives rise to a memory: an autumn dawn, a flock of rooks circling over the garden, separation from a loved one who was leaving at the moment when the rooks were circling over the garden. The chain of associations determines the movement of the poetic theme.
Fet’s lyrical plot also develops on the basis of a metaphorical transformation of verbal meanings (the poem “The mirror moon floats across the azure desert...”).
Throughout his work, Fet felt the impossibility of conveying all the depth and richness through verbal means alone. inner world a person, his “musically elusive” feelings, impressions, experiences: "Not by us /The powerlessness of words to express desires ...»; “What cannot be expressed in words - / Bring sound into the soul”; “People’s words are so rude, / It’s a shame to even whisper them!”; "How our language is poor! — I want to and I can’t. — /Can’t convey this to either friend or enemy, / What rages in the chest like a transparent wave...” - these are just some of Fet’s lines in which this thought is expressed. Therefore, he uses the musical possibilities of verse, “plays” with rhythms, and combines meters. P.I. Tchaikovsky said that Fet “is not just a poet, but rather a poet-musician, as if avoiding even such topics that can easily be expressed in words.”
The lyrical hero strives to express a feeling, an experience, not only verbally, but also, for example, with the help of the scent of flowers:
Even though I can’t speak, even though my gaze is drooping,
The breath of flowers has a clear language:
If the night took away many dreams, many tears,
Then I will be surrounded by the bitter sweetness of roses!
If it’s quiet here and there’s no storm,
I will silently hint about this with mignonette;
If my mother caressed me tenderly,
In the morning I will already be breathing violets;
If my father says, “Don’t be sad, I’m ready,”
I will enter with the incense of orange flowers.
The aroma of flowers becomes the same sign of a state of mind, as in other poems an object, a situation, etc. Fet believed that “fighting sparrows could inspire him with a masterful work,” but it would not be a “painting from life,” not the subject of the image, but evidence of a certain state of mind. “Poetry is only the smell of things, and Not the very things"— Fet writes in a letter to S.V. Engelhardt dated October 19, 1860
Meanwhile, there is every reason to believe that Fet was the creator of his own, completely original aesthetic system. This system is based on a very specific tradition of romantic poetry and finds support not only in the poet’s articles, but also in the so-called poetic manifestos, and above all those that develop a circle of motives going back to the flow of “suggestive” poetry (“poetry of allusions”). Among these motifs, the palm undoubtedly belongs to the motif of the “inexpressible”:
How poor is our language! - I want to, but I can’t. —
This cannot be conveyed to either friend or enemy,
What rages in the chest like a transparent wave.
In vain is the eternal languor of hearts,
f And the venerable sage bows his head
Before this fatal lie.
Only you, poet, have a winged sound
Grabs on the fly and fastens suddenly
And the dark delirium of the soul, and the unclear smell of herbs;
So, for the boundless, leaving the meager valley
An eagle flies beyond the clouds of Jupiter,
Carrying an instant sheaf of lightning in faithful paws.
This late poem by Fet (1887), having been examined
in the context of the domestic romantic tradition, very
transparently correlates with its two famous predecessors.
We mean first of all “The Unspeakable” by V.A. Zhukovsky
(1819) and "Silentium" F.I. Tyutchev (1829-1830). Program
text Feta enters into a rather tense relationship with them
creative dialogue-argument.
Fet's aesthetics does not know the category of the inexpressible. The inexpressible is only the theme of Fet’s poetry, but not a property of its style2. Style is aimed, first of all, precisely at capturing this “inexpressible” as rationally and specifically as possible, in clear and distinct details of the setting, portrait, landscape, etc. In the programmatic article “On the Poems of F. Tyutchev” (1859), Fet specifically focuses on the issue of the poetic vigilance of the artist of the word, wittingly or unwittingly polemicizing with the principles of Zhukovsky’s suggestive style. It is not enough for the poet to unconsciously be under the spell of the sense of beauty of the surrounding world. “As long as his eye does not see its clear, albeit subtle-sounding forms, he is not yet a poet”3. “The more detached, objective (stronger) this vigilance is, even despite his very subjectivity, the stronger the poet and the more eternal his creations.” Accordingly, “the further the poet pushes<...>from himself” his feelings, “the purer his ideal will appear,” and, conversely, “the more the feeling itself will corrode
contemplative power, the weaker and vaguer the ideal and the more perishable its expression.”1 It is this ability to objectify one’s experiences of beauty, to merge them completely with a materially saturated environment, and allows, with a certain degree of convention, to define Fet’s creative method as “aesthetic realism.”
“The whole world is full of beauty...” Afanasy Fet
A whole world of beauty
From big to small,
And you search in vain
Find its beginning.What is a day or an age?
Before what is infinite?
Although man is not eternal,
What is eternal is human.
In 1859, in the St. Petersburg monthly magazine “ Russian word» Fet published an article “On the poems of F. Tyutchev.” Before moving on to an analysis of the work of his contemporary, the poet sets out his philosophical and aesthetic views. Over time, much of his perception has changed. The concept of beauty remains the same. Fet considered it a really existing element of the world around people. A creative person must have a special gift of clairvoyance. A certain angle of vision helps him see even the most banal object from a new perspective. In the external world, the artist captures beauty, which is his ideal, and embodies it in art. Fet's philosophical and aesthetic views are expressed not only in theory, but also in practice. Some of them are expressed in the poem “The whole world is from beauty...”. The exact date of its writing still remains unclear. Literary scholars indicate the interval between 1874 and 1886.
In the poem, thoughts are given in the same order as in the article. In the first quatrain, Fet talks about the place of beauty in the world. The second is about the relationship between humanity and beauty. The concept of clairvoyance, which is described in detail in the work “On the Poems of F. Tyutchev”, in the work “The Whole World of Beauty...” is expressed in the last two lines, distinguished by conciseness, accuracy and aphorism: “Although man is not eternal, that which is eternal, - humanely." The coincidence between prose and lyrics is also observed at the intonation level. Both the article and the poem are characterized by increased emotionality.
Fet's contemporary critics often did not accept his poetry and ridiculed it. The heyday of Afanasy Afanasievich’s creativity occurred in the sixties of the nineteenth century - in Russian Empire this is the time of Bazarov and nihilism. People tried to understand the world through science, to explain things the nature of which previously seemed an insoluble mystery. Fet's lyrics did not fit into such concepts. His poems are a recording of a fleeting sensation, and a purely individual one. He did not depict objects, but his personal view of them. Afanasy Afanasievich’s approach to creativity was partly due to the small number of verbs in his poems. This can be seen in the work “The Whole World of Beauty...”. In the eight-line, only two verbs are used, and they are almost identical in meaning - “you are looking” and “to find.”
