Zabolotsky Nikolay Alekseevich
Born: April 24 (May 7), 1903.
Died: October 14, 1958 (55 years old).
Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky (Zabolotsky) (April 24, 1903, Kizicheskaya settlement, Kaimar volost, Kazan district, Kazan province - October 14, 1958, Moscow) - Russian Soviet poet, translator.
He was born near Kazan - on the farm of the Kazan provincial zemstvo, located in close proximity to the Kizichesky settlement, where his father Alexey Agafonovich Zabolotsky (1864-1929) - an agronomist - worked as a manager, and his mother Lidia Andreevna (nee Dyakonova) (1882(?) - 1926) - a rural teacher. Baptized on April 25 (May 8), 1903 in the Varvarinsky Church in the city of Kazan. He spent his childhood in the Kizicheskaya settlement near Kazan and in the village of Sernur, Urzhum district, Vyatka province (now the Mari El Republic). In the third grade of a rural school, Nikolai “published” his own handwritten journal and published his own poems there. From 1913 to 1920 he lived in Urzhum, where he studied at a real school and was interested in history, chemistry, and drawing.
The poet’s early poems mixed the memories and experiences of a boy from the village, organically connected with peasant labor and native nature, impressions of student life and colorful book influences, including the dominant pre-revolutionary poetry - symbolism, acmeism: at that time Zabolotsky singled out Blok’s work for himself.
In 1920, after graduating from a real school in Urzhum, he came to Moscow and entered the medical and historical-philological faculties of the university. Very soon, however, he ended up in Petrograd, where he studied at the department of language and literature at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, which he graduated in 1925, having, by his own definition, “a voluminous notebook of bad poetry.” The following year he was called up for military service.
He served in Leningrad, on the Vyborg side, and already in 1927 he retired to the reserve. Despite the short-term and almost optional nature of army service, the collision with the “inside out” world of the barracks played the role of a kind of creative catalyst in Zabolotsky’s fate: it was in 1926-1927 that he wrote his first real poetic works, finding his own voice, unlike anyone else , at the same time he participated in the creation literary group OBERIU. Upon completion of his service, he received a place in the children's book department of the Leningrad OGIZ, which was headed by S. Marshak.
Zabolotsky was fond of painting Filonova , Chagall , Bruegel. The ability to see the world through the eyes of an artist remained with the poet throughout his life.
After leaving the army, the poet found himself in the situation of the last years of the New Economic Policy, satirical image which became the theme of the poems of the early period that made up his first book of poetry - “Columns”. In 1929, it was published in Leningrad and immediately caused a literary scandal and mocking reviews in the press. Assessed as a “hostile attack,” it did not, however, cause any direct “organizational conclusions” or orders against the author, and he (with the help of Nikolai Tikhonov) managed to establish a special relationship with the Zvezda magazine, where about ten poems were published, which replenished Stolbtsy in second (unpublished) edition of the collection.
Zabolotsky managed to create surprisingly multi-dimensional poems - and their first dimension, immediately noticeable, is a sharp grotesque and satire on the theme of bourgeois life and everyday life, which dissolves personality. Another facet of Stolbtsy, their aesthetic perception, requires some special preparedness of the reader, because for those in the know, Zabolotsky has woven another artistic and intellectual fabric, a parody. In his early lyrics, the very function of parody changes, its satirical and polemical components disappear, and it loses its role as a weapon of intraliterary struggle.
In “Disciplina Clericalis” (1926) there is a parody of Balmont’s tautological eloquence, ending with Zoshchenko’s intonations; in the poem “On the Stairs” (1928), Vladimir Benediktov’s “Waltz” suddenly appears through the kitchen, already Zoshchenko world; “The Ivanovs” (1928) reveals its parody-literary meaning, evoking (hereinafter in the text) the key images of Dostoevsky with his Sonechka Marmeladova and her old man; lines from the poem “Wandering Musicians” (1928) refer to Pasternak etc.
With the poem “The signs of the zodiac are fading,” the mystery of the origin of the main theme, the “nerve” of Zabolotsky’s creative search begins - the Tragedy of Reason is heard for the first time. The “nerve” of this search will in the future force its owner to devote much more lines to philosophical lyrics. Through all his poems runs the path of the most intense adaptation of individual consciousness into mysterious world of being, which is immeasurably wider and richer than the rational constructs created by people. On this path, the poet-philosopher undergoes a significant evolution, during which 3 dialectical stages can be distinguished: 1926-1933; 1932-1945 and 1946-1958
Zabolotsky read a lot and with enthusiasm: not only after the publication of “Columns”, but also before he read the works of Engels, Grigory Skovoroda, the works of Kliment Timiryazev on plants, Yuri Filipchenko on evolutionary idea in biology, Vernadsky about bio- and noospheres, covering all living and intelligent things on the planet and extolling both as great transformative forces; read Einstein's theory of relativity, which became widely popular in the 1920s; “Philosophy of the Common Cause” by Nikolai Fedorov.
By the time “Columns” was published, its author already had his own natural philosophical concept. It was based on the idea of the universe as unified system, uniting living and nonliving forms of matter that are in eternal interaction and mutual transformation. The development of this complex organism of nature proceeds from primitive chaos to the harmonious order of all its elements, and the main role here is played by the consciousness inherent in nature, which, in the words of the same Timiryazev, “smolders dully in lower beings and only flares up as a bright spark in the human mind.” Therefore, it is Man who is called upon to take care of the transformation of nature, but in his activity he must see in nature not only a student, but also a teacher, for this imperfect and suffering “eternal winepress” contains within itself the beautiful world of the future and those wise laws that should be guided by the person.
In 1931, Zabolotsky became acquainted with the works of Tsiolkovsky, which made an indelible impression on him. Tsiolkovsky defended the idea of diversity of life forms in the Universe and was the first theorist and promoter of human exploration of outer space. In a letter to him, Zabolotsky wrote: “...Your thoughts about the future of the Earth, humanity, animals and plants deeply concern me, and they are very close to me. In my unpublished poems and poems, I resolved them as best I could.”
Collection “Poems. 1926-1932", already typed in the printing house, was not signed for printing. The publication of a new poem, “The Triumph of Agriculture,” written to some extent under the influence of Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Ladomir” (1933), caused a new wave of persecution against Zabolotsky. Threatening political accusations in critical articles increasingly convinced the poet that he would not be allowed to establish himself in poetry with his own, original direction. This gave rise to his disappointment and creative decline in the second half of 1933, 1934, 1935. This is where the poet’s life principle came in handy: “We must work and fight for ourselves. How many failures are still ahead, how many disappointments and doubts! But if at such moments a person hesitates, his song is finished. Faith and perseverance. Work and honesty...” And Nikolai Alekseevich continued to work. His livelihood came from working in children's literature - in the 30s he collaborated with the magazines "Hedgehog" and "Chizh", which were supervised by Samuil Marshak, wrote poetry and prose for children (including retelling "Gargantua and Pantagruel" by Francois for children Rabelais (1936))
Gradually, Zabolotsky’s position in the literary circles of Leningrad strengthened. Many of his poems from this period received favorable reviews, and in 1937 his book was published, including seventeen poems (The Second Book). On Zabolotsky’s desk lay the beginnings of a poetic adaptation of the ancient Russian poem “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and his own poem “The Siege of Kozelsk,” poems and translations from Georgian. But the prosperity that followed was deceptive.
On March 19, 1938, Zabolotsky was arrested and then convicted in the case of anti-Soviet propaganda. The incriminating material in his case included malicious critical articles and a slanderous review “review” that tendentiously distorted the essence and ideological orientation of his work. He was saved from the death penalty by the fact that, despite being tortured [source not specified for 115 days] during interrogations, he did not admit the charges of creating a counter-revolutionary organization, which supposedly included Nikolai Tikhonov, Boris Kornilov and others. At the request of the NKVD, critic Nikolai Lesyuchevsky wrote a review of Zabolotsky’s poetry, where he indicated that ““creativity” Zabolotsky is an active counter-revolutionary struggle against the Soviet system, against Soviet people, against socialism."
“The first days they didn’t beat me, trying to break me down mentally and physically. They didn't give me food. They weren't allowed to sleep. The investigators replaced each other, but I sat motionless on a chair in front of the investigator’s table - day after day. Behind the wall, in the next office, someone's frantic screams could be heard from time to time. My feet began to swell, and on the third day I had to tear off my shoes because I could not bear the pain in my feet. My consciousness began to become foggy, and I strained all my strength in order to answer reasonably and not allow any injustice in relation to those people about whom I was asked...” These are lines from Zabolotsky from the memoirs “The History of My Imprisonment” (published abroad on English language in 1981, in last years Soviet power published in the USSR in 1988).
He served his sentence from February 1939 to May 1943 in the Vostoklag system in the Komsomolsk-on-Amur region; then in the Altailaga system in the Kulunda steppes; A partial idea of his camp life is given by the selection he prepared, “One Hundred Letters 1938-1944” - excerpts from letters to his wife and children.
Since March 1944, after liberation from the camp, he lived in Karaganda. There he completed the arrangement of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (begun in 1937), which became the best among the experiments of many Russian poets. This helped in 1946 to obtain permission to live in Moscow. He rented housing in the writer's village of Peredelkino from V.P. Ilyenkov.
In 1946, N.A. Zabolotsky was reinstated in the Writers' Union. A new, Moscow period of his work began. Despite the blows of fate, he managed to return to his unfulfilled plans.
The period of returning to poetry was not only joyful, but also difficult. In the poems “Blind” and “Thunderstorm” written then, the theme of creativity and inspiration sounds. Most of the poems of 1946-1948 have been highly appreciated by today's literary historians. It was during this period that “In this birch grove” was written. Outwardly built on a simple and expressive contrast of a picture of a peaceful birch grove, singing orioles of life and universal death, it carries sadness, an echo of what has been experienced, a hint of personal fate and a tragic premonition of common troubles. In 1948, the third collection of the poet's poems was published.
In 1949-1952, the years of extreme tightening of ideological oppression, the creative upsurge that manifested itself in the first years after the return was replaced by a creative decline and an almost complete switch to literary translations. Fearing that his words would be used against him again, Zabolotsky restrained himself and did not write. The situation changed only after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, with the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw, which marked the weakening of ideological censorship in literature and art.
He responded to new trends in the life of the country with the poems “Somewhere in a field near Magadan”, “Confrontation of Mars”, “Kazbek”. Over the last three years of his life, Zabolotsky created about half of all works of the Moscow period. Some of them appeared in print. In 1957, the fourth, most complete collection of his lifetime poems was published.
Cycle of lyric poems " last love“was published in 1957, “the only one in Zabolotsky’s work, one of the most painful and painful in Russian poetry.” It is in this collection that the poem “Confession” is placed, dedicated to N.A. Roskina, later revised by the St. Petersburg bard Alexander Lobanovsky (Enchanted, bewitched / Once married to the wind in the field / All of you seem to be shackled / You are my precious woman...).
Son - Nikita Nikolaevich Zabolotsky (1932-2014), candidate of biological sciences, author of biographical and memoir works about his father, compiler of several collections of his works. Daughter - Natalya Nikolaevna Zabolotskaya (born 1937), since 1962 the wife of virologist Nikolai Veniaminovich Kaverin (1933-2014), academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, son of the writer Veniamin Kaverin.
Although before his death the poet managed to receive both widespread readership and material wealth, this could not compensate for the weakness of his health, undermined by prison and camp. According to N. Chukovsky, who knew Zabolotsky closely, the final, fatal role was played by family problems (the departure of his wife, her return). In 1955, Zabolotsky had his first heart attack, in 1958 - the second, and on October 14, 1958 he died.
The poet was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
Columns / Region M. Kirnarsky. - L.: Publishing house of writers in Leningrad, 1929. - 72 p. - 1,200 copies.
Mysterious city. - M.-L.: GIZ, 1931 (under the pseudonym Y. Miller)
Second book: Poems / Trans. and the title of S. M. Pozharsky. - L.: Goslitizdat, 1937. - 48 p., 5,300 copies.
Poems / Ed. A. Tarasenkov; thin V. Reznikov. - M.: Sov. writer, 1948. - 92 p. - 7,000 copies.
Poems. - M.: Goslitizdat, 1957. - 200 pp., 25,000 copies.
Poems. - M.: Goslitizdat, 1959. - 200 pp., 10,000 copies. - (B-ka of Soviet poetry).
Favorites. - M.: Sov. writer, 1960. - 240 pp., 10,000 copies.
Poems / Under the general editorship of Gleb Struve and B. A. Filippov. Introductory articles by Alexis Rannit, Boris Filippov, and Emmanuel Rice. Washington, D.C.; New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1965.
Poems and poems. - M.; L.: Sov.pisatel, 1965. - 504 pp., 25,000 copies. (B-poet. Large series).
Poems. - M.: Fiction, 1967
Favorites. - M.: Children's literature, 1970
Snake apple. - L.: Children's literature, 1972
Selected works: In 2 volumes - M.: Khudozh. literature, 1972.
Favorites. - Kemerovo, 1974
Favorites. - Ufa, 1975
Poems and poems. - M.: Sovremennik, 1981
Poems. - Gorky, 1983
Collected works: In 3 volumes - M., Khudozh. lit., 1983-1984., 50,000 copies.
Poems. - M.: Soviet Russia, 1985
Poems and poems. - M.: Pravda, 1985
Poems and poems. - Yoshkar-Ola, 1985
Poems. Poems. - Perm, 1986
Poems and poems. - Sverdlovsk, 1986
Laboratory of Spring Days: Poems (1926-1937) / Engravings by Yu. Kosmynin. - M.: Young Guard, 1987. - 175 p. - 100,000 copies. (In my younger years).
How mice fought with cats / Fig. S. F. Bobyleva. - Stavropol: Stavropol book. publishing house, 1988. - 12 p.
Cranes / Art. V. Yurlov. - M.: Sov. Russia, 1989. - 16 p.
Poems. Poems. - Tula, 1989
Columns and poems: Poems / Design by B. Trzhemetsky. - M.: Arts. Lit-ra, 1989. - 352 pp., 1,000,000 copies. - (Classics and contemporaries: Poetic book).
Columns: Poems. Poems. - L.: Lenizdat, 1990. - 366 pp., 50,000 copies.
Selected works. Poems, poems, prose and letters of the poet / Comp., intro. article, note N. N. Zabolotsky. - M.: Arts. Lit-ra, 1991. - 431 p. - 100,000 copies. (Fuck classics).
The story of my imprisonment. - M.: Pravda, 1991. - 47 pp., 90,000 copies. - (B-ka "Ogonyok"; No. 18).
How the mice fought with the cat: Poems / Art. N. Shevarev. - M.: Malysh, 1992. - 12 p.
Columns. - St. Petersburg, North-West, 1993
Fire flickering in a vessel...: Poems and poems. Letters and articles. Biography. Memoirs of contemporaries. Analysis of creativity. - M. Pedagogy-Press, 1995. - 944 p.
Columns and poems. - M.: Russian book, 1996
Zodiac signs are fading: Poems. Poems. Prose. - M.: Eksmo-Press, 1998. - 480 p. - (Home poetry library).
Poetic translations: In 3 volumes - M.: Terra-Book Club, 2004. - T. 1: Georgian classical poetry. - 448 pp.; T. 2: Georgian classical poetry. - 464 s.; T. 3: Slavic epic. Georgian folk poetry. Georgian poetry of the twentieth century. European poetry. Eastern poetry. - 384 p. - (Translation Masters).
Poems. - M.: Progress-Pleiada, 2004. - 355 p.
Don't let your soul be lazy: Poems and poems. - M.: Eksmo, 2007. - 384 p. - (Golden Series of Poetry).
Lyrics. - M.: AST, 2008. - 428 p.
Poems about love. - M. Eksmo, 2008. - 192 p. - (Poems about love).
I was raised by harsh nature. - M.: Eksmo, 2008. - 558 p.
Poems and poems. - M.: De Agostini, 2014. - (Masterpieces of world literature in miniature).
One of the most underrated poetsThe Silver Age waspoet Nikolai Zabolotsky. Everyone knows that Akhmatova is a genius, but not everyone can quote her poems. The same applies to Blok or Tsvetaeva. But almost everyone knows Zabolotsky’s work - but many have no idea that it is Zabolotsky. “Kissed, bewitched, with the wind in the field...”, “The soul must work...” and even “Kitten, kitten, cat...”. All this - Zabolotsky Nikolai Alekseevich. His poems went among the people, became songs and children's lullabies, and the author's name became an unnecessary formality. On the one hand, the most sincere declaration of love of all possible. On the other hand, it is a blatant injustice towards the author. He was too much of a poet for a scientist, too much of a philistine for a poet, too much of a dreamer for a philistine.
Spirit of ZabolotskWowdidn't fit his body at all. Blond of average height, chubby and inclined to be overweight, Zabolotsky gave the impression of a solid and sedate man. A respectable young man with a very prosaic appearance did not in any way correspond to the idea of a true poet - sensitive, vulnerable and restless. And only people who knew Zabolotsky closely understood that under this external fake importance was hidden an amazingly sensitive, sincere and cheerful person.
Open up, thought!
Become music, word,
Hit the hearts
May the world triumph!
The literary circle in which Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky found himself was “wrong”. The Oberiuts - shameless, funny, paradoxical, seemed the most unsuitable company for serious young man. Meanwhile, Zabolotsky was very friendly with Kharms, and with Oleinikov, and with Vvedensky.
Another paradox of inconsistency is Zabolotsky’s literary preferences. Famous Soviet poets left him indifferent. He also did not like Akhmatova, who was highly valued by the literary community. But the restless, restless, ghostly and surreal Khlebnikov seemed to Zabolotsky to be a great and profound poet. This man's worldview contrasted painfully with his appearance, his lifestyle and even his origin.
In 1930, Nikolai Zabolotsky married Ekaterina Klykova. Oberiut friends spoke extremely warmly about her. Even the sarcastic Kharms and Oleinikov were fascinated by the fragile, silent girl. Zabolotsky's life and work were closely connected with this amazing woman. Zabolotsky was never rich. Moreover, he was poor, sometimes simply destitute. The translator's meager earnings barely allowed him to support his family. And all these years, Ekaterina Klykova did not just support the poet. She completely handed over the reins of the family to him, never arguing with him or reproaching him for anything.
Family friends were amazed at the woman’s devotion, noting that there was something not entirely natural in such dedication. The way of the house, economic decisions - all this was determined only by Zabolotsky.
When the poet was arrested in 1938, Klykova’s life collapsed. She spent all five years of her husband’s imprisonment in Urzhum, in extreme poverty. Zabolotsky was accused of anti-Soviet activities. Despite long, grueling interrogations and torture, he did not sign the indictments, did not admit the existence of the anti-Soviet organization and did not name any of its alleged members. Perhaps this is what saved his life. The sentence was camp imprisonment, and Zabolotsky spent five years in Vostoklag, located in the Komsomolsk-on-Amur region. There, in inhuman conditions, Zabolotsky was engaged in a poetic transcription of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” As the poet later explained, in order to preserve oneself as an individual, not to descend to a state in which it is no longer possible to create.
In 1944, the term was interrupted, and Zabolotsky received the status of an exile. He lived for a year in Altai, where his wife and children came, then moved to Kazakhstan. These were difficult times for the family. Lack of work, money, eternal uncertainty about the future and fear. They were afraid of arrest, they were afraid that they would be kicked out of their temporary housing, they were afraid of everything.
In 1946 Zabolotsky returned to Moscow. He lives with friends, earns money by translating, and life slowly begins to improve. And then another tragedy happens. The wife, an infinitely faithful devoted wife, who courageously endured all the hardships and hardships, suddenly leaves for another. He does not betray out of fear for his life or the lives of his children, and does not run away from poverty and adversity. It’s just that at forty-nine years old this woman leaves for another man. This broke Zabolotsky. The proud, proud poet was painfully worried about the collapse of his family life.
Is the old oak whispering with the pine tree,
Or a rowan tree creaked in the distance,
Or the goldfinch ocarina began to sing,
Or a robin, little friend,
Did she suddenly answer me at sunset?
Who responded to me in the thicket of the forest?
Are you the one who is in the spring again?
I remembered our past years,
Our worries and our troubles,
Our wanderings in a distant land,—
You, who scorched my soul?
Who responded to me in the thicket of the forest?
Morning and evening, in cold and heat,
I always hear an indistinct echo,
Like the breath of immense love,
For the sake of which my reverent verse
I was rushing to you from my palms...
Zabolotsky's life took a turn. He rushed about, frantically looking for a way out, trying to create at least the appearance of a normal existence. He proposed his hand and heart to an essentially unfamiliar woman, and, according to the recollections of friends, not even in person, but over the phone. He got married hastily, spent some time with his new wife and broke up with her, simply erasing his second wife from his life. It was to her, and not to her wife, that the poem “My Precious Woman” was dedicated. Zabolotsky went to work. He translated a lot and fruitfully, he had orders and finally began to earn decent money.
On the Sunset
When, exhausted from work,
The fire of my soul has dried up,
Yesterday I went out reluctantly
Into a devastated birch forest.
On a smooth silk platform,
Whose tone was green and purple,
Stood in orderly disorder
Rows of silver trunks.
Through short distances
Between the trunks, through the foliage,
Heaven's evening glow
It cast shadows on the grass.
It was that tired hour of sunset,
The hour of dying when
Our saddest loss is
Unfinished work.
Man has two worlds:
The one he created
Another one that we have been since forever
We create to the best of our ability.
The discrepancies are huge
And, despite the interest,
Birch forest Kolomna
Don't repeat my miracles.
The soul wandered in the invisible,
Full of your fairy tales,
With a blind gaze I followed
She has a natural appearance.
So, probably, the thought is naked,
Once abandoned in the wilderness,
Exhausted within myself,
Doesn't feel my soul.
1958
Zabolotsky was able to survive the breakup with his wife - but could not survive her return. When Ekaterina Klykova returned, he had a breakdown heart attack. One and a half monthsZabolotskyI fell ill, but during this time I managed to put all my affairs in order: I sorted my poems and wrote my will. He was a thorough man in death as well as in life. By the end of his life, the poet had money, popularity, and reader attention. But this could no longer change anything. Zabolotsky's health was undermined by the camps and years of poverty, and the elderly man's heart could not withstand the stress caused by his experiences. Zabolotsky's death occurred on October 14, 1958. He died on his way to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Doctors forbade Zabolotsky to get up, but he was always a neat person and even a little pedantic in everyday life.
And they will complete the structure of nature, -
Let my poor ashes be covered by these waters,
Let this green forest shelter me.
I won't die, my friend...
Life and work Zabolotsky N.A.
ZABOLOTSKY, NIKOLAI ALEXEEVICH (1903-1958), Russian poet, translator. Born on April 24 (May 7), 1903 near Kazan. His paternal grandfather, having served the required quarter of a century as a soldier under Nicholas I, signed up as a Urzhum tradesman and worked as a forestry inspector. One of his two sons, the father of the poet, received a government scholarship and studied to be an agronomist. He married late and took as his wife a city teacher, “sympathetic to revolutionary ideas.” The family lived in the village of Sernur; the son, the first of six children, studied away from home, at a real school in Urzhum. After graduating from college in 1920, Zabolotsky went to Moscow, where he simultaneously entered the philological and medical faculties of Moscow University, but soon moved to Petrograd and entered the Pedagogical Institute. He participated in the literary circle “Word Workshop”, was not selected to join the proletarian literary avant-garde, but found mutual language with poets who considered themselves the “left flank” of the Leningrad branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets (soon abolished).
In 1926-1927 Zabolotsky served in the army, then received a position in the children's book department of the State Publishing House. The department was headed by S. Marshak, E. Shvarts, L. Chukovskaya, N. Oleinikov worked in the department. The department published not only books, but also two children's magazines - "Chizh" and "Hedgehog". Like-minded poets of Zabolotsky, D. Kharms and A. Vvedensky, were involved in the work, and a poetry group with its own program was formed. At the end of 1927 it began to be called the Association of Real Art (first OBERIO, then OBERIU), its adherents - Oberiuts. The Oberiut manifesto appeared at the beginning of 1928 in the Posters of the House of Press, the section “Poetry of the Oberiuts” was written by Zabolotsky. In the spirit of the then cult of innovation, it was stated: “We are the creators of not only a new poetic language, but also the creators of a new sense of life and its objects.” At the same time, he called himself “a poet of naked concrete figures moved close to the viewer’s eyes.” By this time, several poems by Zabolotsky had been published randomly, more or less confirming this declaration (Evening Bar, Football, Snowball Fight, etc.). They went unnoticed, but published in an edition of 1200 copies. the collection Stolbtsy (1929), which included 22 poems, “caused quite a scandal in literature,” as Zabolotsky told a friend, adding: “... and I was numbered among the wicked.” An article in the magazine “Print and Revolution” (1930, No. 4) was called the System of Girls, in the magazine “Stroyka” (1930, No. 1) - The Decay of Consciousness. The book was assessed as a “hostile attack”, but no direct orders were given to Zabolotsky and he (through N. Tikhonov) managed to establish a special relationship with the magazine “Zvezda”, where about ten poems were published, which replenished Stolbtsy in the second (unpublished) edition of the collection (in the final edition, first reproduced in the 1965 edition, the section Columns and Poems contains 46 poems).
Columns and the adjacent poems of 1926-1932 were experiments in verbal plasticity, focused on everyday everyday speech and bringing poetry closer to modern painting. Stolbtsov’s still lifes, genre scenes and sketches were motivated “in the Oberiut way”: “Look at the object with your bare eyes and you will see it for the first time cleared of shabby literary gilding... We expand the meaning of the object, word and action.” This “expansion of meaning” gradually alienated Zabolotsky from other Oberiuts and was clearly reflected in the poem The Triumph of Agriculture, written in 1929-1930 and fully published in the magazine “Zvezda” in 1933: it was a kind of “mystery-bouffe”, glorifying collectivization as the beginning of the universal landscaping. His complete loyalty is evidenced by a poem on the death of Kirov (1934), unthinkable in the context of the work of other Oberiuts. At the same time, in the poem The Triumph of Agriculture, as in the subsequent ones - The Mad Wolf (1931) and Trees (1933), the influence of V. Khlebnikov was felt. Like other left-wing poets, Khlebnikov was a cult figure for Zabolotsky; the aspiration of Khlebnikov’s poetic thought towards the creation of a utopia, the “institution” of world harmony, was especially close to him. It was time to become acquainted with the works of K.E. Tsiolkovsky, in which Zabolotsky saw confirmation of Khlebnikov’s visionary dreams. The publication of The Triumph of Agriculture entailed the withdrawal of the issue of “Stars” with the text of the poem from circulation, the assessment of the author in the organ of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) “Pravda” (in the article by V. Ermilov, Foolish Poetry and the Poetry of Millions) and defamation in other periodicals. The book Poems 1926-1932, prepared for publication, could not be published; an attempt to publish poems and poems from 1926-1936 was in vain. Seventeen new poems by Zabolotsky, mostly published in the newspaper Izvestia and as close as possible to the average level of Soviet intellectual (“thinking”) poetry of the 1930s, made up the collection Second Book (1937), which, apparently, was supposed to indicate a complete “reforging” of the author of Columns and the Triumph of Agriculture. Zabolochky also published translations and retellings for children and youth of Gargantua and Pantagruel by F. Rabelais, one of Gulliver's Travels by J. Swift, Till Eulenspiegel by S. de Coster, as well as a poetic adaptation of Shota Rustaveli's poem The Knight in the Skin of a Tiger. Nevertheless, in 1938 he was arrested and convicted as a member of a fictitious terrorist organization of Leningrad writers. His “case”, the investigation with torture and the camp ordeals are briefly described in his memoirs, The Story of My Imprisonment (magazine “Daugava”, 1988, No. 3). The Kolyma term was interrupted, and already in 1943 Zabolotsky received the status of an exiled settler, first in Altai, then in Kazakhstan. In 1946 he moved to Moscow, in 1948 he published a collection of Poems, in which works of Georgian themes predominate, among them the Gori Symphony, an akathist to Stalin, written back in 1936 and republished for the leader’s seventieth birthday. Zabolotsky was asked to turn his 1930s retelling of Shota Rustaveli's poem into a complete translation. Like the poetic transcription of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign commissioned from him, this was one of the most prestigious and profitable translation works of the Soviet era. No lyrics from the camp-exile period have survived, and there is no evidence of its existence; new poems begin to appear in 1946. They represent the result of creative evolution, which was determined back in 1934-1937. Zabolotsky uses the poetics of cruel romance; it is also typical for poems with a tragic sound (In this birch grove, An old fairy tale, A memory, Somewhere in a field near Magadan, etc.). Meanwhile, the poem The last poppies are flying around contains a direct and open author’s confession: “There is no sadder betrayal in the world than betrayal of oneself.” Both the lifetime collection of Poems (1957) and the posthumous Selections (1960) give a deliberately distorted idea of Zabolotsky’s lyrics, including only a little more than half of his works from 1936-1958 and completely cutting off poems and poems of the early period that contradicted the splendid image of the Soviet poet. Zabolotsky himself from his early creativity did not renounce and did not abandon hope for the publication of a more or less complete collection. He compiled it twice - in 1952 and 1958; anticipating the obligatory claims of stylistic censorship, he tried without much success to smooth out the texts of 1926-1936, contrary to the then programmatic “beauty of clumsiness” (Battle of the Elephants, 1931): “The whole world of clumsiness is full of meaning!” For the first time, Zabolotsky’s poetry was presented to the reader with sufficient completeness in 1965 (Large series “Poet’s Library”). A number of early poems and the poem Birds (1933) remained unpublished until 1972. original form Columns and poems from the 1930s were republished in the book Spring Days Laboratory (1987). Zabolotsky died in Moscow on October 14, 1958.
The artistic techniques highlighted in the late lyrics of N. Zabolotsky are not too numerous and varied. The author, as a rule, tries to avoid excessive hyperbolization; multifaceted metaphors, etc. are not often used. At first glance, the poet's mature work tends to be somewhat primitive. However, it is precisely the simplicity and clarity of Zabolotsky’s poems that are his individual literary qualities. Great importance the poet pays attention to the semantic side of language. He is interested in the word as such, and specifically in the imagery of its meanings, its semantic content. An important role in Zabolotsky’s work is played by such an artistic device as antithesis. Indeed, the poet’s poems often contain the acuteness of confrontations between natural phenomena and phenomena of human existence, philosophical concepts and worldviews. N. Zabolotsky is a searching and questioning creator, in whose hands poetic material experiences constant metamorphoses.
For example, the poem “On Beauty human faces"consists of two opposite parts. The first part is monumental and ponderous. Under the guise of some immovable block, the author veils poverty human soul. The lack of spiritual and emotional movement makes people “frosted”, unable to think, feel and sympathize:
Other cold, dead faces
Closed with bars, like a dungeon.
Others are like towers in which for a long time
Nobody lives and looks out the window.
In the second part, on the contrary, the “small hut”, which is “unpretentious, not rich,” symbolizes the inner content of a person. The “window” of this hut sends “spring breath” into the world. So it is with a person: if he is full inside, then light and beauty emanate from him. Such epithets as “spring day”, “jubilant songs”, “shining notes” change the mood of the poem, it becomes joyful, radiating goodness.
Thus, the antithesis of big (even huge) and small is the artistic device on which the entire poem is based. However, this does not mean that Zabolotsky does not use other techniques in it. On the contrary, the poem “On the Beauty of Human Faces” is very allegorical and allegorical. After all, every “tower”, “shack”, “hut” is an indication of this or that person, his character and inner world.
N. Zabolotsky uses apt comparisons. In the poem “On the Beauty of Human Faces” they can be observed in sufficient quantities: “like pitiful hovels”, “like lush portals”, “like a dungeon”, “like towers”, “like songs”. It is also unusual that the work is not divided into stanzas: the poem is one stanza of four quatrains. This is probably due to the fact that the entire poem is entirely concentrated on one main thought, it is based on one main idea.
Here it is worth remembering “ Ugly girl"Zabolotsky, in particular, a vivid comparison - “reminiscent of a frog.” In this poem, as in many others, one can distinguish a subtle allegory, a deep psychological analysis: “pure flame” as an image of the soul, a comparison of spiritual filling with a “vessel in which there is emptiness” or with “fire flickering in a vessel”:
I want to believe that this flame is pure,
Which burns in its depths,
He will overcome all his pain alone
And will melt the heaviest stone!
And even if her features are not good
And there is nothing to seduce her imagination, -
Infant grace of the soul
It already shows through in any of her movements.
Zabolotsky's characters and images become as deep as possible. They are more clearly expressed and clearly outlined by the poet compared to his early lyrics.
Parallelism as an artistic device is also characteristic of the late lyrics of N. Zabolotsky. For example, in the poem “The Thunderstorm is Coming” (1957) we see a vivid parallelism of natural phenomena with the state of mind and thoughts of the author himself.
The image of a cloud is peculiar and unique in the poem:
A frowning cloud is moving,
Covering half the sky in the distance,
Moving, huge and viscous,
With a lantern in a raised hand.
In these lines, the cloud is endowed with some special meaning; we can say that it becomes animated. The cloud moves like a searching or lost wanderer, like a formidable arbiter of destinies. In this context, this image is read not just as a natural phenomenon, but as something more.
The above-mentioned work is characterized by a special metaphorical nature:
Here it is - a cedar tree near our balcony.
Split in two by thunder,
He stands and the dead crown
Supports the dark sky.
Such high level metaphorization, undoubtedly, once again allows us to highlight the late lyrics of N. Zabolotsky as a special and unique phenomenon: the “dead crown” supporting the “dark horizon”.
In conclusion, the poet draws a parallelism between a tree split in two and his own state of mind. However, this is not only parallelism, it is also an allegorical statement of the author, expressing the duality of his worldview:
Sing me a song, tree of sorrows!
I, like you, burst into heights,
But only lightning greeted me
And they were burned with fire on the fly.
Why is it split in two,
I, like you, did not die at the porch,
And in my soul there is still the same fierce hunger,
And love and songs to the end!
Of particular importance for the work of N. Zabolotsky is the philosophical understanding of nature, the close relationship between nature and man, as well as their mutual alienation. In the poem “I am not looking for harmony in nature...” (1947), the poet sees nature as a huge “world of contradictions” filled with “fruitless play” and “useless” hard work.
The poem is filled with personifying metaphors: “blind night”, “the wind will fall silent”, “in the anxious half-sleep of exhaustion”, “the darkened water will calm down”. Here there is such an artistic device as comparison. The author compares nature with a “crazy but loving” mother who does not see herself in this world without her son, who is not complete without him:
So, falling asleep on my bed,
Crazy but loving mother
Concealed within itself high world children,
To see the sun with my son.
In this work one can distinguish an implicit antithesis, the opposition of good and evil:
And at this hour sad nature
Lying around, sighing heavily,
And she doesn’t like wild freedom,
Where evil is inseparable from good.
When tired of the violent movement,
From useless hard work,
In an anxious half-sleep of exhaustion
When huge world contradictions
Satiated with fruitless play, -
Like a prototype of human pain
From the abyss of waters rises before me.
The poet's lyrics are distinguished by the contrast of the images depicted. For example, in the poem “Somewhere in a field near Magadan...” (1956) an unbearable feeling of sadness and depression is created from the terrible contrast of a frozen, windy, inhospitable land and a huge, endless bright sky. The stars in this poem symbolize not only freedom, but also the process of liberation itself. While old people are not yet separated from reality, from their earthly affairs, the stars do not look at them. But in death they unite with nature, with the whole world, gaining freedom:
The guards will no longer catch up with them,
The camp convoy will not overtake,
Only some constellations of Magadan
They will sparkle, standing above your head.
The camp theme, closely intertwined with the theme of human suffering, is reflected in this poem. The grief of two “unhappy Russian” old men, whose souls “burned out,” is depicted against the backdrop of the “wonderful mystery of the universe.”
The cycle “Last Love” as a “great work” consisting of individual parts, each of which complements and determines the next one, has an inherent epic beginning. Here we can note the author’s desire to reproduce the “fluid” process of reality. A consistent sequence of events in the story of “last love” and the presence of a common frame are outlined.
The poem “The Juniper Bush” (1957) is distinguished by a special melody formed by a certain sound set:
Juniper bush, juniper bush,
The cooling babble of changeable lips,
Light babbling, barely giving off resin,
Pierced me with a deadly needle!
This stanza is also notable for the presence of epithets in it: “changeable lips”, “light babble”, “deadly needle”. They create a feeling of a certain dynamics: anxious, uncertain and, at the same time, impetuous and decisive.
From the very beginning of the poem, the reader expects some kind of misfortune, which is facilitated by a very original epithet - “metallic crunch”, creating a tone of internal discord and external omen:
I saw a juniper bush in a dream,
I heard a metallic crunch in the distance,
I heard the ringing of amethyst berries,
And in my sleep, in silence, I liked him.
The constant play of sibilant and hard consonants with soft and sonorous consonants creates a feeling of duality in the poem. The reader is immersed together with the lyrical hero in a strange phantasmagoria, bordering between sleep and reality. And, as Zablotsky often uses in his work, the main idea concluded by the author in the last stanza. And here the dynamics give way to contemplation and, ultimately, forgiveness and letting go:
In the golden skies outside my window
The clouds float by one after another,
My garden, which has flown around, is lifeless and empty...
May God forgive you, juniper bush!
Zabolotsky, as mentioned above, is a master in the field of comparisons and allegory. In the last stanza we see a “flying garden” that has lost any life in its depths. The soul of the lyrical hero, just like this garden, is empty, and the juniper bush is to blame for it all - read ambiguously and the brightest image of this poem.
The poem “Old Age” (1956) concludes the cycle “Last Love”. This is a kind of story, a kind of epic narrative in verse. It is in him that the maturity and the calmness to which the author has come is so keenly felt. Contemplation and comprehension are what come to the fore in comparison with his early lyrics:
Simple, quiet, gray-haired,
He is with a stick, she is with an umbrella, -
They have golden leaves
They look, walking until dark.
Their speech is already laconic,
Every look is clear without words,
But their souls are bright and even
They talk about a lot.
In the vague darkness of existence
Their destiny was not noticeable,
And the life-giving light of suffering
It burned slowly above them.
Most of all, these lines highlight the contrast between the “vague darkness of existence” and the “life-giving light.” In this regard, we can also talk about the so-called “cosmic” parallelism, which to one degree or another permeates the author’s late lyrics. In a short poem, Zabolotsky manages to combine an all-encompassing, panoramic vision of the world with a given, one might say private, situation.
Thus, we see that the late lyrics of N. Zabolotsky, on the one hand, are an incredibly deep phenomenon from a philosophical point of view, on the other hand, they are quite simple in terms of their artistic essence, or rather, in terms of diversity artistic techniques and methods. The poet uses numerous epithets; the frequency of use of simile epithets and similes is high; metaphors are a little less common. It can be noted that Zabolotsky’s poems often contain appeals and questions (usually rhetorical), which bring the author’s vision closer to the reader’s perception. In general, Zabolotsky’s poetry avoids anything complex and confusing; he practically does not exaggerate what is depicted, and does not engage in the so-called “weaving of words.” The poet's punctuation is quite expressive. Zabolotsky often brings the main idea of the work to the very end, concluding it in the last stanza, thus summing up the above. It should be noted that Zabolotsky’s poetics was and remains unique, and continues to influence the creativity and thinking of many poets and people associated, in one way or another, with the word.
Zabolotsky Nikolai Alekseevich (1903 - 1958) - Soviet poet, translator. He wrote a lot for children and translated foreign authors.
Nikolai Zabolotsky was born near Kazan on April 24 (May 7), 1903. The boy's father was an agronomist, his mother was a teacher. Impressions from childhood spent in a village atmosphere were clearly reflected in the poems that Zabolotsky began writing from the first grades of school.
At the Urzhum School, the boy was actively involved in history, painting, chemical experiments, got acquainted with the work of A. Blok. After entering the historical, philological and medical departments in Moscow, Nikolai moved to Petrograd and graduated from the Faculty of Language and Literature at the Institute. Herzen.
After graduating from university, the poet served in the army for two years near Leningrad, and is one of the journalists for the local wall newspaper. Impressions from barracks life, encounters with different characters and situations become the starting point in finding one’s own literary style.
After military service Zabolotsky starts working in the children's book department of the State Publishing House under the leadership of S. Marshak. Then to children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh". The poet writes a lot for children, adapting the translation of “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Rabelais for perception by young readers.
His first collection of poems was published in 1929 under the title “Columns” and caused a scandal in the literary society. The poems in the collection clearly showed a mockery of everyday life and philistinism. Prepared readers also noticed subtle parodies of the poetic styles of Balmont, Pasternak, and the images of Zoshchenko and Dostoevsky.
The next collection was published in 1937 and is called “The Second Book”.
On charges of anti-Soviet propaganda, which was fabricated from critics' reviews and denunciations that had little to do with the true themes of the poet's work, the poet was arrested in 1938. Attempts to pin the organization of a conspiracy association on him and sentence him to death did not yield results; despite the torture, the poet did not agree to sign false accusations. The events of this period are told by the poet in “The History of My Imprisonment” (the memoirs were published abroad in 1981, and in the USSR in 1988).
Zabolotsky spent 5 years in camps on Far East, then two years (1944-46) in Karaganda. There the poetic translation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was completed.
The 40s became a turning point not only in the life, but also in the work of the poet. From avant-garde works of the early period, full of sarcasm, irony, and various allusions, he moves on to classical poetry with simple and understandable images and situations.
In 1946, with permission from the authorities, Zabolotsky returned to the capital and his status as a member of the Writers' Union was returned to him. The third collection “Poems” was published in 1948.
After the creative upsurge of the first years of liberation, a period of calm began. Zabolotsky almost does not write, fearing ideological persecution and a repetition of the arrest story. To top it all off, in 1955 the poet suffered his first heart attack, which significantly undermined his health. The reason for it, K. Chukovsky, a close friend of Zabolotsky, called the temporary departure of the poet’s wife Catherine for another man.
By this time, there were many translations of the works of Georgian poets Rustaveli, Chavchavadze, Pshavela A. Tsereteli and others, who helped the poet keep himself and his family afloat.
A new creative upsurge begins after the debunking of the cult of Stalin and the beginning of the Thaw in 1956. This stage in the history of the country is reflected in the poems “Somewhere in a field near Magadan”, “Kazbek”. Three years before his death in 1958, Zabolotsky created most of the works included in last period creativity.
In 1957, the last collection of poetry was published - the cycle “Last Love”. These are the poet's lyrical poems, including famous poem"Kissed, bewitched."
On October 14, 1958, Nikolai Zabolotsky had a second heart attack, which became fatal. The poet was buried in Moscow.
