Alexey Konstantinovich TOLSTOY

About love

Known for his historical dramas in poetry and satirical works, one of the creators of the famous Kozma Prutkov, A.K. Tolstoy was also a soulful lyricist. Songs to his words “If I knew, if I knew”, “My bells, steppe flowers” \u200b\u200bbecame popular.

The love lyrics of A.K. Tolstoy are wholly connected with the name of his wife, Sophia Andreevna Bakhmeteva (Miller in the first marriage). Deep and perennial love appears in this lyrics in a romantically sublime color. The beloved is depicted as an object of delight and worship, as a high ideal. Therefore, in the verses dedicated to her, there are almost no everyday details, episodes by which the true history of their relationship could be restored, as can be done from the poems of Nekrasov, Tyutchev, Ogarev. There is no psychological collision in them. A high, poetic, but almost unchanging feeling of the poet himself appears in them.

Among noisy ball, casually,
In alarm of wordly vanity,
I have seen you, but secret
Your coverlets of line.

Only eyes it is sad looked,
And the voice so marvellously sounded,
As a ring of a remote pipe,
As the seas a playing shaft.

Your camp was pleasant to me thin
And all your thoughtful kind,
And your laughter, both sad and sonorous,
Since then in my heart sounds.

At o "clock lonely nights
I love, tired, to lie down -
I see sad eyes,
I hear cheerful speech;

And I am sad so I fall asleep,
And in dreams unknown I sleep ...
Whether I love you - I do not know,
But it seems to me that I love!

Dmitry Hvorostovsky - Amid the noisy ball

PETER NALICH IN CDA - ROMANCE "AMONG A NOISE BALL ..."

Love at Nekrasov: The theme of love is solved in the lyrics of Nekrasov very peculiarly. It was here that his artistic innovation was fully manifested. Unlike his predecessors, who preferred to portray a love feeling “in beautiful moments”, Nekrasov did not ignore that “prose” that “is inevitable in love” (“You and I are stupid people ...”). However, in the words of the famous necrasologist N. Skatov, he “not only prosezed the poetry of love, but also poetized its prose”.

It is natural to devote the main attention to the “Panaev cycle”. Avdotya Alekseevna Panaeva is the main recipient of Nekrasov’s intimate lyrics. Relations with Panaeva became the theme of many poems by Nekrasov, created over almost ten years. This is a verse novel in which various moments in the life of lyrical heroes are reflected. It is lyrical. Nekrasov himself saw in his poems not just a poetic appeal to a certain woman, but attached much more importance to them. He printed these verses in magazines, which means that he consciously made them the subject of poetry, the common property. We can say that the poems of the cycle are intentionally asocial, devoid of any specific details and hints. In the foreground here is psychological motivation, the image of the feelings and feelings of the heroes, like Tyutchev’s, “a fatal duel”. He is a reflective person, prone to suspiciousness, suspicion, despondency, bitterness. But in the center of the “Panaevsky cycle” is she. And it was in the creation of the character of the heroine that Nekrasov's innovation manifested itself. This character is completely new, and besides, it is “given in development, in various, even unexpected manifestations of it, selfless and cruel, loving and jealous, suffering and causing suffering” (Skatov). motives of a quarrel (“If tormented by rebellious passion ...”, “You and I are stupid people ...”); parting, separation ("So this is a joke? My dear ...", "Farewell") or their forebodings ("I do not like your irony ..."); memoirs ("Yes, our life flowed rebelliously ...", "Long ago - rejected by you ..."); letters (“Burned Letters”) and others. “Panaevsky” verses have a certain pairedness (cf., for example, “A hard year - broke my illness ...” and “A heavy cross went to my lot ...”, “I'm sorry” and “Farewell”).

Thus, the poems of the cycle unite not only a commonality of content, but also artistic features: cross-cutting images and details; “Nervousness” of intonation, transmitting almost “dostoevsky” passions; fragmentation, indicated in writing by the dots that end many poems.

Speaking of the most famous Nekrasov cycle, one cannot do without comparing it with Tyutchev's “Denisian cycle”. Like Tyutchev, Nekrasov’s love is almost never happy. The motives of suffering, the “illegality” of love, and “rebellion” permeate both cycles and thereby unite — in intimate lyrics — two such different poets.

In conclusion, let us once again return to the question of the innovation of Nekrasov’s love lyrics. It consists not only in the novelty of the content (“prose of life”), but also in the fact that the poet finds the appropriate artistic form for the depiction of “non-poetic” phenomena: colloquial speech, prose, innovative versification.

The main motives and genre originality of the lyrics of A.K. Tolstoy.

His ideas about poetry, its place in human life, purpose, nature of poetic creativity developed under the influence of idealistic ideas. For T., love was the highest manifestation of the beauty of life.

One of the manifestations of the highest love is earthly love, love for a woman. A significant place in T.'s poetic heritage is occupied by love lyrics, poem cycles associated with the image of S.A. Miller (Tolstoy). These are such works as “In the midst of a noisy ball”, “The sea is swaying”, “Do not trust me friend”, “when the forest is silent around”, etc.

For T., not only the world of human feelings is full of beauty, but also the world of nature. A hymn to earthly beauty sounds in the poem "John of Damascus." Recreating the beauty of nature, the world, the poet resorts to sound, visual. tactile impressions. Often, especially in early works, the paintings of nature in T.'s poetry were accompanied by historical and philosophical considerations. So in the famous poem "My Bells" the poetic picture of nature is replaced by the thoughts of the lyrical hero about the fate of the Slavic peoples. Landscape sketches often merge in T.'s works with ballad motifs. In the poem “The pine forest stands alone in the country,” the nature of the landscape has ballad features — a night forest immersed in fog, the whisper of a night stream, the obscure light of the month, etc.

In his poetry, the world of beauty is contrasted with the world of secular prejudices, vices, the world of everyday life, with which T., as a warrior, but with a good sword, enters the battle. Motives of open opposition to the evil of the world are heard in the poems “I recognized you holy convictions”, “Heart, flaring up more strongly from year to year”, etc.

The poet had a bright humorous and satirical gift. One of the significant successes in humor was the image of Kozma Prutkov created by him (“Letter from Corinth”, “To my portrait”, “Ancient plastic Greek”). He subjected to ridicule all that from his position violated the laws of naturalness, freedom, beauty and love. Therefore, some works were

directed against the so-called democratic camp, others against official government circles.

Significant place in the poetic heritage of T. occupy historical balladsand epics. The poet idealizes the pre-Mongol period of the history of the Fatherland, sees in it an expression of the valor of the people, a manifestation of moral freedom, a democratic, fair state system ("Song of Harald and Yaroslavna").

A.K. Tolstoy invariably laughed at nihilism - in the poem Sometimes Happy May ... (The Ballad with a Trend), the poet ridiculed "false liberalism" with his desire to "humiliate the high": a flowering garden should be planted with turnips, nightingales should be destroyed for uselessness, a shady shelter should be to spoil for being fresh and clean in it.

It is love that raises a person above the mediocrity of everyday life, freeing his soul ("Me, in darkness and dust ..."). Love, like creativity, transforms a person and the world, introduces the hero to the harmony of the world. We find the same motives in the dramatic poem Don Giovanni, where spirits speak of love:

The artist - and just a man - in A.K. Tolstoy is distinguished by a desire for ideal, a constant sense of his presence in the world. This motive is easy to notice in the poem "Darkness and fog obscure my path ...":

A noticeable motive of the lyrics of A.K. Tolstoy is a memory. As a rule, this motif sounds traditionally elegiac and is associated with “lost days” (“Do you remember, Maria ...”), “bitter regrets” (“Silence descends on the yellow fields ...”), past happiness (“Do you remember the evening how the sea was noisy ... "), loneliness (" I’m sitting on a steep cliff by the sea ... ")," in the morning of our years "(" That was in early spring ... ").

Hence another motive in the poetry of A.K. Tolstoy is a motive for the desolation, destruction and decline of homestead life, dear and invariably valuable to our poet. (Empty house)

About the same poem, “Noisy in the courtyard of bad weather ...”, “Greetings to you, a devastated house ...”, and in the poems “Our path is hard, your poor mule ...” and “Where is the light key, going down ...” the destruction motif is complicated by the traditional general the theme of the death of entire civilizations (the last three poems are included in the cycle "Crimean essays").

26. "Denisievsky cycle" in the work of F.I. Tyutcheva innovation of poetic principles. Features of the figurative system.

The image of muse poetry.

The cycle has been forming since the early 1850s. Lear heroine - Elena Alexandrovna Denisieva.

Fatal love, sweeping away all obstacles and prohibitions.

Love is a fatal duel (Predestination). The tragic grotesque. Predestination

In the cycle, the image of double being is created, this is the through moment in T.'s work

E.A.Denisyeva Tyutchev became interested in 1850. This late, last passion continued until 1864, when the poet's girlfriend died of consumption. For the sake of the beloved woman, Tyutchev almost breaks up with his family, neglects the displeasure of the court, and forever ruins his very successful career. However, the main burden of public condemnation fell on Denisyev: her father denied her, her aunt was forced to leave her place as the inspector of the Smolny Institute, where Tyutchev’s two daughters studied.

These circumstances explain why most of the verses of the Denisyevsky Cycle are marked by a tragic sound, such as:

Oh how deadly we love

Like in the violent blindness of passions

We’re ruining it all,

What a dear to our hearts!

In the poem "Predestination" (1851), love is understood as a "fatal duel" in the unequal struggle of the "two hearts", and in Gemini (1852) - as a fatal temptation related to the temptation of death:

And who is in abundance of sensations,

When the blood boils and freezes

Did not know your temptations -

Suicide and Love!

Tjutchev until the end of his days retained the ability to reverence for the "unsolved mystery" of female charms - in one of his later love poems, he writes:

Earthly charm in her,

Or unearthly grace?

The soul would like to pray to her,

And the heart is eager to adore ...

"Denisievsky cycle" is an artistic expression of emotional drama. In it, love appears in various forms: as a spiritual feeling that elevates a person, as a powerful, blind passion, as a secret feeling, a certain night element reminiscent of ancient chaos. Therefore, the theme of love sounds in Tyutchev either as "the union of the soul with the soul of his own," as anxiety, then as a warning, then as a sad confession.

Burning with love, the poet suffered, condemning to suffering and beloved. At that time, the cohabitation of an unmarried couple was scandalous. Father disowned Elena; her aunt lost her post at the Smolny Institute. The stigma of "illegality" fell on their children. Unable to protect his beloved woman from the “court of men,” the poet turned to himself a bitter rebuke:

Of fate a terrible sentence Your love was for her, And an undeserved shame On her life she lay down.

Elena generally did not like poetry, even written by Tyutchev. She liked only those of them where his love for her was expressed. Tyutchev with extreme frankness defined his role in the life of a beloved woman. Tyutchev's understanding of love in these years is sad. He sees the inexorable law operating in human relations: the law of suffering, evil and destruction:

Union of soul with native soul - Their combination, combination,

AND their fatal merger

AND fatal duel ...

Passions are blind, they have a dark element, chaos that the poet saw everywhere. But not only love itself is destructive. It is also ruined by those who condemn, and thereby defile the “lawless” feeling. These guardians of legalized morality trample in the mud the feelings of the woman beloved by Tyutchev. And he can’t fight it, blames, reproaches himself, but remains powerless before the prosecutors. She, on the other hand, fights and wins the battle with the crowd, having managed to preserve her love. Tyutchev never ceases to be amazed at the strength of her love and devotion. He writes about it again and again.

Oh, how on the slope of our years Tender we love and superstitious ...

Shine, shine, the farewell light of the Last Love, dawn of the evening! .. Let the blood flow in your veins.

But tenderness does not fade in the heart ...

Oh you, last love!

You are both bliss and hopelessness.

Finally, the “fatal” outcome of events is approaching, which Tyutchev had foreseen before, not yet knowing what could happen to them. Comes the death of a beloved woman, experienced twice - first in reality, and then in verse. Death is painted with frightening realism. There are so many small, clearly drawn details in the poem that the room where the dying woman lies, and the shadows running down her face, and the summer rain, noisy outside the window, clearly appear in front of her eyes. A woman who loves life infinitely, is dying away, but life is indifferent and dispassionate, she continues to boil, nothing will change with a person leaving the world. The poet is at the bedside of a dying man, "killed, but alive." He, who had idolized her so much, his last love, who had suffered so many years from human misunderstanding, was so proud and surprised at his beloved, now he can do nothing, not have the strength to return her. He is not yet fully aware of the pain of loss, he has to go through all this.

All day she lay in oblivion, And all her shadows covered,

It poured warm, summer rain - its jets sounded merrily along the leaves,

AND she slowly came to her senses

AND started to listen to the noise ...

“Oh, how I loved all this!”

On August 7, 1864, Elena Denisieva, who died on August 4 from consumption, was buried. In Tyutchev, a revolt against death was bubbling. “The Two Greatest Sorrows,” he called the death of his first wife, Eleanor, and the death of Elena Denisieva.

You loved, and as you love,

No, no one has succeeded yet!

Oh Lord! .. and survive it ...

And my heart did not break to shreds ...

The outstanding Russian lyric poet Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy has an unusually subtle sense of the beauty of his native nature. He was able to catch the most characteristic in the forms and colors of nature, its sounds and smells. The poem “Autumn. Our whole poor garden is sprinkled ”(1858). The poet speaks of “yellow leaves” that fly in the wind, and of bright red tassels on the fading mountain ash. It is these lines that easily fit into the memory, and the picture, colorfully depicted by the poet, rises before the mind's eye. The most catchy signs of the autumn season are indicated. The second half of the poem - about sad love and autumn sadness - is understandable only to an adult.

Many works of A. K. Tolstoy gained wide popularity among the people and became songs. Such are “My bells, flowers of the steppe ...”, “Oh, as long as Mother Volga ran back and forth ...”, “The sun goes down over the steppes ...”, etc. In these and other poems, a penetrating lyrical feeling, a sense of homeland was expressed.

A.K. Tolstoy is a poet with a distinct originality. His ideas about poetry, its place in human life, purpose, nature of poetic creativity developed under the influence of idealistic ideas. In one of the letters to his wife, S.A. Tolstoy, the poet defined the nature of creativity in such a way: “... you know what I told you about poems in the air, and that it’s enough to grab them by one hair to draw them from the primitive world to our world ... It seems to me that also applies to music, sculpture, painting.

It seems to me that often, grabbing the small hair of this ancient creation, we embarrassingly jerk, and we have something torn or mutilated or ugly in our hand, and then we jerk again scrap after scrap, and then try to glue them together or what lacking, we are replacing it with our own inventions, we are correcting what we ourselves spoiled with our awkwardness, and from here - our insecurity and our shortcomings that offend the artistic instinct ...

In order not to spoil and ruin what we want to bring into our world, we need either a very keen look, or a completely complete detachment from external influences, a great silence around us and focused attention, or a love similar to mine, but free from sorrow and anxieties. " In poetic form, these views were expressed by A.K. Tolstoy in the program poem "In vain, artist, do you think that you are the creator of your creations ...":

In vain, artist, do you think that you are the creator of your creations!

They always rushed over the earth, invisible to the eye.

But only those who can see and hear will give them

Who, having caught only a drawing, a line, only a consonance, only a word,

The whole with him involves creation in our world surprised.

Presenting an overview of the poet’s work in the article “Poetry c. A.K. Tolstoy, Vl. Soloviev noted the main idea of \u200b\u200bthe poem: "The true source of poetry, like any art, is not in external phenomena and also not in the subjective mind of the artist, but in the distinctive world of eternal ideas or primitives."

A.K. Tolstoy called himself “a singer holding a banner in the name of beauty”. In the poem "John of Damascus," he wrote:

We catch a glimpse of eternal beauty:

The forest sounds good to us about it,

A stream thunders about her, a cold stream,

And they say, swinging, flowers.

“My conviction is,” A.K. Tolstoy - that the poet’s purpose is not to bring people any direct benefit or benefit, but to raise their moral level, inspiring love for the beautiful, which itself will find use without any propaganda. " Tolstoy expressed this idea already at the end of his days, in 1874, when life was summed up, but since the 1840s, the poet has not accepted the pragmatic understanding of art that began to take root in literature. On the primitively understood benefits, including art, many Russian writer-thinkers - F.M. Dostoevsky, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov et al. In 1871, Tolstoy would write a “ballad with trends”, “Sometimes a Merry May,” in which he would present “useful” views of the new era in a bright satirical form (dialogue between a naive bride and a pragmatic groom):

The highest manifestation of the beauty of life was for A.K. Tolstoy love. It is love that reveals to man the essence of the world:

Me in the darkness and dust

The halt of the shackles

Wings of love have lifted

To the homeland of flame and words;

And my dark eyes brightened

And the invisible world became visible to me.

And hears an ear from now on

What is elusive to others

And I descended from the heights

Penetrated by all its rays

And on a worrying dol,

I look with new eyes.

And I hear the conversation

Everywhere silent is heard,

Like a heart of stone mountains

With love in the dark bowels beats

With love in the firmament of blue

Slow clouds swirl

And under the tree bark

Spring is fresh and fragrant,

With love in leaves the juice is alive,

The jet rises singing.

And with a thing heart I realized

That everything born of the Word

Rays of love circle liya

He wants to return to him again.

And every stream of life

Love obedient to the law

Seeks by the power of being

Unstoppable to God's bosom.

And everywhere sound, and everywhere light

And all the worlds have one beginning

And there’s nothing in nature

To not breathe love.

("Me in darkness and dust", 1851, 1852)

As in Pushkin’s “Prophet,” which is close to the poem of A.K. Tolstoy, the painting depicts the degeneration of an ordinary person into a prophet, a poet, under the influence of the powerful Divine power of love. Love for Tolstoy is a comprehensive, higher concept, the foundation on which life is built. One of the manifestations of the highest love is earthly love, love for a woman. It is logical that even at the beginning of his work A.K. Tolstoy refers to the eternal story in world literature about Don Juan. His dramatic poem Don Giovanni portrays the protagonist as a true knight of love, and it is love that opens the "wonderful system of laws of life, the phenomena of all the hidden principle."

A significant place in the poetic heritage of A.K. Tolstoy takes love lyrics, cycles of poems associated with the image of S.A. Miller (Tolstoy). These are such works as “In the middle of a noisy ball”, “The sea is swaying”, “Do not trust me friend”, “When the forest is silent around”, “What you bowed your head”, “Sleep, sad friend”, “Not the wind, blowing with heights, Passion, Tear Trembles, and others. The love feeling expressed by Tolstoy is psychologically concrete, precise and simple, sometimes even naive, but at the same time sophisticated. Tolstoy is diverse in the forms of expressing lyrical feelings. Researcher A.K. Tolstoy I.G. Yampolsky noted that the words sadness, longing, sadness, despondency are most often used by the poet when defining his own love experiences and the feelings of his beloved poet (“And I remembered sad years about the past,” “And I think about it so sadly,” “And so sad I am I fall asleep ”, etc.). In poems stylized as folk songs, the intonation, as a rule, is different - distant, passionate, in them the elemental sense of freedom, independence, recklessness is inextricably linked with the feeling of love (poems “Don’t ask, don’t spray”, “If you love, without reason ”, etc.).

Beauty for A.K. Tolstoy is not only full of the world of human feelings, but also the world of nature. A hymn to earthly beauty sounds in the poem "John of Damascus":

Bless you forest

Valleys, cornfields, mountains, waters!

I bless the freedom

And blue skies!

And I bless my staff

And this poor bag

And the steppe from edge to edge,

And the sun is light and nights are darkness

And the lonely path

For no reason, beggar, I walk

And in the field every blade of grass

And every star in the sky!

Recreating the beauty of nature, the world, the poet resorts to sound, visual, tactile impressions. Important for the poet tactile impressions. He himself admitted: “The fresh smell of mushrooms excites a number of memories in me. ... And then there are all the other forest scents, for example, the smell of moss, tree bark, the smell in the forest during intense heat, the smell of the forest after rain ... and so many others ... apart from the smell of flowers in the forest. " In the ballad Ilya Muromets, he writes:

Wild will blows again

There is room for it

And with tar and strawberries,

It smells of dark wood.

Often, especially in the early works (mainly in the 1840-1850s), paintings of nature in the poetry of A.K. Tolstoy was accompanied by historical and philosophical reflections. So in the famous poem "My Bells" the poetic picture of nature is replaced by the thoughts of the lyrical hero about the fate of the Slavic peoples:

The bells are louder

The harp is heard

The guests sat around the tables,

Honey and mash pour

The noise flies to the far south

To the Turk and to the Hungarian -

And buckets of Slavic sound,

Germans do not like!

The poem becomes modern, coupled with the thoughts of the Russian intelligentsia about the unity of the Slavic peoples. In a later period of creativity, the landscape in the poetry of A.K. Tolstoy will be an independent and valuable painting, devoid of decorative brightness, unpretentious, real, modest. Everyday, everyday, Pushkin's poetically transformed A.K. Tolstoy:

Through the glow of a darkening heaven

And small before me is drawn a pattern,

In the spring leaves a barely dressed forest,

On a swampy meadow going down a slope.

And the wilderness and silence. Only sleepy thrushes

How reluctantly they finish the song;

Steam rises from the meadow ...

("On the traction")

Landscape sketches often come together in the works of A.K. Tolstoy with ballad motifs. In the poem “The pine forest stands alone in the country,” the nature of the landscape has ballad features - a night forest, immersed in fog, the whisper of a night stream, the obscure light of the month, etc. the development of the plot, which, however, does not occur.

For the poetry of A.K. Tolstoy is characterized by a moment of understatement, understatement. “It’s good not to finish thinking in poetry, allowing everyone to replenish it in their own way,” the poet noted in a letter to S.A. 1854. Miller. Such innuendo, inexhaustibility of thought, feelings can be noted in the poems “Rowing Rugged and Shaking”, “The Earth Bloomed”, etc. In the ballad “Alyosha Popovich” the poet writes:

Who understands the song?

Who will understand her in words?

But from the sounds the heart dies

And dizzy.

Not only the world of beauty becomes the subject of the image in the work of A.K. Tolstoy. In his poetry, the world of beauty is contrasted with the world of secular prejudices, vices, the world of everyday life, with which Tolstoy, like a warrior, but with a “good sword” enters the battle. It is no accident that in the poet’s works images with military attributes often appear:

Two camps are not a fighter, but only a random guest,

For the truth, I would be happy to raise my good sword.

The Lord was preparing me for battle

Love and anger put in my chest

And my holy right hand

He pointed the true path ...

The motives of open opposition to the evils of the surrounding world are heard in the poems “I recognized you holy convictions”, “Heart, burning more strongly from year to year” and others. The most strongly, clearly, polemically these motives sound in the poem of 1867 “Against the current”:

The truth is the same!

Amid the gloom of the rainy

Believe the wonderful star of inspiration

Row in the name of beauty

Against the stream!

In a harsh form, the motives for rejecting everything that is contrary to beauty, inner freedom sound in humorous and satirical poems by A.K. Tolstoy.

In the early period of creativity, in the 1840s, Tolstoy’s lyric poems are filled with a lively sense of history, the memory of which is filled with brightly festive paintings of Russian and Ukrainian nature. In the poem “You Know the Land where Everything Abounds in Abundance ...” the poet uses the compositional construction of Goethe, beloved by Russian and German romantics. The lyrical heroine of the work speaks with inspiration about the mysterious promised land, where lemons bloom, where the negro of the South breathes the horizon, and calls his lover three times:

There, there, Beloved, we should hide forever.

Tolstoy, repeating the compositional scheme of Goethe's poems, seeks to fill it with not mysterious, romantic, but realistic content, using the experience of Lermontov’s “Homeland”. The landscape of Ukraine is first given by a general plan, as from a bird's eye view:

You know the land where everything breathes in abundance, Where rivers flow purer than silver, Where the breeze of the steppe feathers sways, In the cherry groves drown the farm ...

Then the poet folds his wings, lands among Ukrainian villages and gardens, where "the trees bend down, and their fruit is heavy to the ground." A panorama of the surrounding forests, lakes, fields opens. And the lines already sound quite Lermontovly when the poet enters the circle of contemporary people's life:

There, with all my heart I strive

Where the heart was so easy

Where from the flowers a wreath weaves Maroussia,

Blind Gritsko sings about antiquity,

And the little couple, spinning on the reaper smooth, Blow up the dust with a fun squat!

Further, the poet makes a polemic move with respect to Lermontov’s “Homeland”. Recall that "dark antiquity treasured legends" did not stir the "rejoicing dream" in the soul of Lermontov. And with Tolstoy, on the contrary: from the concrete realities of the Ukrainian landscape, from paintings of modern folk life, the poet’s memory rushes into the distance of history:

Among the steppes there is a mound from the times of Batu, In the distance herds of grazing oxen, Obozovo is hidden, carpets of blooming buckwheat And you, forelocks are the remains of the glorious Sich ... Both the Ukrainian landscape and the people’s life are filled with the buzz of history, saturated with “treasured legends” of dark antiquity. The poet spiritualizes nature and folk life with echoes of bygone times:

Do you remember the night over the sleeping Ukraine, When the gray-haired man got up from the swamp, The world was dressed in dusk and mystery, A stozhar sparkled over the steppe, And we imagined: through the transparent fog Paley and Sagaidachny are rushing again? Tolstoy is faithful here to the basic aesthetic precepts of his work: the visible world is penetrated by the light of the invisible world, visible through "transparentfog ”of our time. Even the image of modern Ukraine is not written by him “from nature”. This image is a memory seen not directly, but spiritual visionthe poet. N. Gogol drew attention to his characteristic signs, speaking of the landscapes of the blind Russian poet I. I. Kozlov: “Looking at the rainbow colors and paints with which his magnificent paintings of nature boil and shine, you will immediately learn with sadness that they have already been lost for him forever: to the sighted they would never have seemed in such a bright and even exaggerated brilliance. They can be the property of only such a person who had not admired them for a long time, but faithfully and strongly preserved the memory of them, which grew and grew in a hot imagination and shone even in inseparable darkness with him. " It is in Tolstoy’s spiritual vision that his beloved Ukrainian nature shines with rainbow colors and colors: “rivers flow purer than silver”, “braids ring and shine”, “golden cornfields are covered with blue cornflowers”, “sunflower glistens with dew” and streams with “sparks of fire”.

Historical memories, at first only breaking through fiery-vivid pictures-memories of the life of modern Ukraine, are gradually gaining strength and resolving in climax lines:

You know the land where the Poles fought with Russia,

Where so many bodies lay in the middle of the fields?

You know the land where once there was a chopping block

Mazepu cursed stubborn Kochubey

And a lot of glorious blood has been shed

In honor of ancient rights and the Orthodox faith?

And then, according to the romantic tradition, there is a sharp decline - the contrast between the heroism of the times past and the sad prose of modernity:

Do you know the land where the Diet sadly pours water Between the shores of the orphaned, Above the palace are ruined arches, Long overgrown entrance with thick grass, A shield with a hetman's mace over the door? .. There, I strive there with my soul!

In this poem, the outlines of the historical views of A.K. Tolstoy are already appearing. Following Pushkin, he worries about the historical fate of the Russian noble aristocracy, which is losing its leading role in modern times. The poetry’s masterpieces of love poetry include his verses “Amid a Noisy Ball ...”, put to music by P. I. Tchaikovsky and become a classic Russian romance:

Amid a noisy ball, by chance

In alarm of worldly fuss,

I saw you, but the secret

Your features covered ...

Tolstoy’s love lyrics are distinguished by deep psychologism, a subtle penetration into the unsteady, transitional states of the human soul, into the processes of the generation of feelings, which are difficult to find a clear definition, fixing the name. The incomplete process of maturing of love in the soul of the lyrical hero is poetically captured. The first anxieties of this feeling, the first and still vague symptoms of its awakening, were noted. The event of the meeting is immersed in a haze of memories of her, memories of the alarming and uncertain. The female image in verses is unsteady and elusive, shrouded in a cover of romantic mystery and mystery. It seems to be a chance meeting, memories of which should absorb the impression of a noisy ball, the bothersome worries of "worldly fuss." However, in verses, violating the usual, long-established course of everyday life, the opposing “but” unexpectedly and paradoxically invades: “I saw you, butmystery ... ”The mystery, attractive, yet inexplicable, captivates the lyrical hero, destroys the inertia of the vain secular existence.

He cannot solve this mystery; he cannot solve this riddle. The image of a woman is woven from inexplicable in its opposite strokes: cheerful speech, but sad eyes; laughter is sad but sonorous; the voice is “like the sound of a distant pipe”, then “like a playing shaft of the sea”. Behind these contradictions, of course, is the mystery of the woman’s spiritual appearance, but they also characterize the confusion of the feelings of the lyrical hero, who is in a tense hesitation between detached observation and unexpected tides of feeling portending a love passion. The tide alternates with the ebb.

Not only the features of the female image are contrasting - the whole poem is built on oppositions: a noisy ball and quiet hours of the night, crowded secular crowds and night loneliness, the appearance of mystery in everyday life. The very uncertainty of feeling allows the poet to slip on the verge of prose and poetry, decline and rise. In a shaky psychological atmosphere, the stylistic polyphony allowed by the poet is legitimately and artistically justified. Everyday life (“I love to lie down tired”) is combined with exalted poetic (“sad eyes”, “seas playing shaft”), romantic “unknown dreams” - with prosaic “I’m so sad to fall asleep”. Two stylistic plans are deeply meaningful here, with their help the poet depicts the process of awakening sublime love in the very prose of life.

Lyric poems by A.K. Tolstoy are distinguished by improvisation. The poet consciously admits negligence of rhyming, stylistic freedom and looseness. It is important for him to create the artistic effect of the momentary, non-creative creativity of a poetic miniature spilled out from under his pen. In a letter to a friend, Tolstoy said: “I deliberately admit bad rhymes in some poems, where I consider myself entitled to be careless ... There is a kind of painting where impeccable correctness of the line is required, such are large canvases called historical ... There is another painting where the most important thing is color, but there is almost nothing to do with the line ... Some things must be hammered, others have the right or should not even be hammered, otherwise they will seem cold. ”Light “negligence” gave Tolstoy’s verses trembling truthfulness, sincerity and warmth in transmitting the born feeling, in the image of elevated, ideal states of the soul.

In a letter to a friend, Tolstoy remarked: “When I look at myself from the side (which is very difficult), it seems that I can characterize my work in poetry as major, which is very different from the prevailing minor tone of our Russian poets, with the exception of Pushkin which is decidedly major. " Indeed, Tolstoy’s favorite image of nature is the “May Happy Month”. We only note that the major tone in his poetry is permeated with light sorrow from within even in such a masterpiece of his solar lyrics as the poem “That was in the early spring ...” put to music by P. I. Tchaikovsky and N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov :

That was in the early spring

The grass barely sprouted, Streams flowed, no heat soared,

And the green groves penetrated;

Shepherd's pipe in the morning

I still haven’t sung loudly, And in curls still in the pine forest

There was a thin fern.

That was in the early spring

In the shadow of birches it was, When with a smile in front of me

You lowered your eyes.

That is in response to my love

You lowered your hopes - Oh life! oh forest! Oh sunshine!

Oh youth! about hope!

And I cried in front of you

Looking at your face dear, -

That was in early spring, In the shade of birches it was!

That was in the morning of our years -

Oh happiness! oh tears! Oh forest! oh life! Oh sunshine!

Oh fresh birch spirit!

Sending this poem to a friend, Tolstoy called it "a little pastoral translated from Goethe." He had in mind the Song of May, inspired by the love of a German poet for Fried Eric Brion, daughter of a village pastor. Goethe's entire work is based on exclamations expressing the glee of the lyrical hero:

How everything rejoices, Sings, rings! In the color of the valley, On fire zenith!

The final lines of Tolstoy’s poems, consisting of exclamations alone - “Oh happiness! oh tears! / Oh forest! oh life! light about the sun! ”, the Goethean lines really remind:“ Oh Egs1, about Zoppa, about S-SHSZH, about Liz!;! ” But Tolstoy does not go beyond this similarity. The poems of the May Song were only an impetus for him to create an original poem far from Goethe's pastoral motives. The German poet praises the jubilant happiness of love in unity with the rustic flowering nature. Tolstoy, in the foreground memoryabout the distant, irrevocably departed moments of the first youthful love. And therefore, through the whole poem, the theme of the rapid run of time passes through the leitmotif: “That wasin the early spring, " “That wasin the morning of our years ”,“ Among the birches it was. ”The joy of the Russian poet is permeated with a sense of sadness, a sense of loss - inexorable, irrevocable. May morning merges with “the morning of our years” - and life itself turns into a unique and elusive moment. All in the past but "Memory of the heart"keeps it. The brightness of spring colors here is not only not diminished, but enhanced, sharpened by the spiritual vision of a Christian poet who remembers death, the fragility of earthly happiness, the fragility of earthly joys, and the fleeting moment of beautiful moments.