One of the characteristic features of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. - deep interest in myth and national folklore. On the "paths of myth" in the first decade of the century, the creative searches of such dissimilar artists of the word as A. A. Blok, A. Bely, V. I. Ivanov, K. D. Balmont, S. M. Gorodetsky, A. M. Remizov et al. Orientation towards folk poetic forms of artistic thinking, the desire to know the present through the prism of the nationally colored "old times" is of fundamental importance for Russian culture. The interest of the literary and artistic intelligentsia in ancient Russian art, literature, the poetic world of the ancient folk tales, Slavic mythology is even more aggravated during the World War. Under these conditions, the work of peasant poets attracts special attention.
Organizational peasant writers - N. A. Klyuev, S. L. Yesenin, S. L. Klychkov, A. A. Ganin, A. V. Shiryaevets, P. V. Oreshin and who entered literature already in the 1920s. P. N. Vasiliev and Ivan Pribludny (Ya. P. Ovcharenko) did not represent a clearly defined literary trend with a strict ideological and theoretical program. They did not make declarations and did not theoretically substantiate their literary and artistic principles, however, their group is distinguished by a bright literary originality and social and ideological unity, which makes it possible to distinguish them from the general stream of neo-populist literature of the 20th century. The commonality of literary and human destinies and genetic roots, the closeness of ideological and aesthetic aspirations, a similar formation and similar ways of developing creativity, a system of artistic and expressive means that coincide in many of its features - all this fully allows us to talk about the typological commonality of the work of peasant poets.
So, S. A. Yesenin, having discovered in the poetry of N. A. Klyuev an already mature expression of a poetic attitude close to him, in April 1915 he addressed Klyuev with a letter: “We have a lot in common with Vamp. I am also a peasant and write the same like you, but only in your Ryazan language".
In October-November 1915, a literary and artistic group "Krasa" was created, headed by S. M. Gorodetsky and which included peasant poets. The members of the group were united by their love for Russian antiquity, oral poetry, folk song and epic images. However, "Krasa", like the "Strada" that came to replace it, did not last long and soon disintegrated.
The first books of peasant poets were published in the 1910s. These are poetry collections:
- - N. A. Klyueva "Pine chimes" (1911), "Brotherly dogs" (1912), "Forest were" (1913), "Worldly thoughts" (1916), "Copper whale" (1918);
- - With A. Klychkov "Songs" (1911), "The Secret Garden" (1913), "Dubravna" (1918), "Ring of Lada" (1919);
- - S. A. Yesenin "Radunitsa" (1916), published in 1918 by his "Dove", "Transfiguration" and "Rural Hours".
In general, peasant writers were characterized by a Christian consciousness (cf. S. A. Yesenin: "Light from a pink icon / On my golden eyelashes"), however, it was intricately intertwined (especially in the 1910s) with elements of paganism, and N. A. Klyuev also had Khlystism. Indomitable pagan love of life is a distinctive feature of the lyrical hero of A. V. Shiryaevts:
The choir praises the Almighty Lord. Akathists, canons, troparia, But I hear the exclamations of the Kupala night, And in the altar - the dance of the playful dawn!
("The choir praises the almighty ruler...")
The political sympathies of the majority of peasant writers during the years of the revolution were on the side of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Singing the peasantry as the main creative force, they saw in the revolution not only the peasant, but also the Christian principle. Their work is eschatological: many of their works are dedicated to the last destinies of the world and man. As R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik rightly noted in the article "Two Russias" (1917), they were "genuine eschatologists, not armchair, but earthy, deep, folk."
In the work of peasant writers, the influence of the artistic and stylistic quests of contemporary Silver Age literature, including modernist trends, is noticeable. The connection between peasant literature and symbolism is undeniable. It is no coincidence that Nikolai Klyuev, undoubtedly the most colorful figure among the new peasants, had such a profound influence on A. A. Blok, the formation of his populist views at one time. The early poetry of S. A. Klychkov is associated with symbolism, his poems were published by the symbolist publishing houses "Alcyone" and "Musaget".
The first collection of N. A. Klyuev comes out with a preface by V. Ya. Bryusov, who highly appreciated the talent of the poet. In the printed organ of the acmeists - the Apollo magazine (1912, No. 1) N. S. Gumilyov publishes a favorable review of the collection, and in his critical studies "Letters on Russian Poetry" devotes many pages to the analysis of Klyuev's work, noting the clarity of Klyuev's verse, his fullness and richness of content.
Klyuev is a connoisseur of the Russian word of such a high level that to analyze his artistic skills, extensive erudition is needed, not only literary, but also cultural: in the field of theology, philosophy, Slavic mythology, ethnography; knowledge of Russian history, folk art, icon painting, history of religion and church, ancient Russian literature is required. He easily "turns" with such layers of culture, which Russian literature did not suspect before. "Bookishness" is a distinctive feature of Klyuev's creativity. The metaphorical character of his poetry, which he himself is well aware of ("I am the first of a hundred million / The maker of golden-horned words"), is also inexhaustible because his metaphors, as a rule, are not isolated, but, forming a whole metaphorical series, stand in the context of a solid wall. One of the main artistic merits of the poet is the use of the experience of Russian icon painting as the quintessence of peasant culture. By this, he, no doubt, opened a new direction in Russian poetry.
Klyuev learned the ability to "speak red" and write from Zaonezhsky folk narrators and was excellent at all forms of folklore art: verbal, theatrical and ritual, musical. In his own words, "selfish and caustic word, gestures and facial expressions" I learned at fairs from buffoons. He felt himself to be the bearer of a certain theatrical and folklore tradition, a trusted envoy to intellectual circles from the "subterranean" Russia deep hidden from the eyes, unknown, unknown: "I am initiated from the people, / I have a great seal." Klyuev called himself the "burning offspring" of the famous Avvakum, and even if this is just a metaphor, his character really resembles in many ways - zealousness, fearlessness, perseverance, uncompromisingness, readiness to go to the end and "suffer" for his convictions - the character of the archpriest: "Get ready for the fire early in the morning!" - / Thundered my great-grandfather Avvakum.
The literature of the Silver Age was distinguished by sharp controversy between representatives of various trends. Peasant poets argued simultaneously with the Symbolists and Acmeists. Klyuev's program poem "You promised us gardens ..." (1912), dedicated to K. D. Balmont, is built on the opposition of "you - we": you - symbolists, preachers of vaguely unrealizable ideals, we - poets from the people.
Your patterned garden flew around, Streams flowed like poison.
After the aliens in the end We go unknown We, - Our aroma is resinous and eater, We are a refreshing winter.
The gorges of the subsoil fed us, The sky filled with rains. We are boulders, gray cedars, Forest springs and pines ringing.
The consciousness of the greatest intrinsic value of "peasant" perception dictated to peasant writers a sense of their inner superiority over representatives of intellectual circles, unfamiliar with the unique world of folk culture.
“The secret culture of the people, which, at the height of its learning, our so-called educated society does not even suspect,” notes N. A. Klyuev in the article “Gem Blood” (1919), “does not cease to radiate to this hour.”
Klyuev's peasant costume, which seemed masquerade to many, speech and demeanor, and above all, of course, creativity, performed the most important function: to draw the attention of the intelligentsia, which had long "break away" from the people, to peasant Russia, to show how beautiful it is, how everything in it is fine and wise arranged, and that only in it is the guarantee of the moral health of the nation. Klyuev does not seem to speak, he shouts to the "brothers of educated writers": where are you going? stop! repent! change your mind!
The peasant environment itself shaped the features of the artistic thinking of the new peasants, organically close to the folk one. Never before has the world of peasant life, depicted taking into account local features of life, dialect, folklore traditions (Klyuev recreates the ethnographic and linguistic flavor of Zaonezhye, Yesenin - Ryazan region, Klychkov - Tver province, Shiryaevets models the Volga region), did not find such an adequate expression in Russian literature. In the work of the new peasants, the worldview of a person close to the earth and nature was fully expressed, the outgoing world of Russian peasant life with its culture and philosophy was reflected, and since the concepts of "peasantry" and "people" were equivalent for them, then the deep world of Russian national identity . Rural Russia is the main source of the poetic worldview of peasant poets. S. A. Yesenin emphasized his initial connection with her - the very biographical circumstances of her birth among nature, in a field or in a forest ("Mother went to the bathing suit through the forest ..."). This theme is continued by S. A. Klychkov in a poem with a folklore-song opening "There was a valley above the river ...", in which the animated forces of nature act as successors and first nannies of a newborn baby. Hence, the motive of "returning to their homeland" arises in their work.
"I've been longing in the city, for three whole years now, along the hare paths, along the doves, willows, and my mother's miraculous spinning wheel," admits N. A. Klyuev.
In the poetry of Sergei Antonovich Klychkov (1889-1937), this motive is one of the main ones:
In a foreign land, far from my homeland, I remember my garden and home. Currants are blooming there now And under the windows - bird sodom ...<...>
I meet this early spring time Lonely in the distance... Ah, I would snuggle up, listen to the breath, Look into the glowing radiance of Dear mother - native land!
("In a foreign land far from home...")
In the mythopoetics of the new peasants, their holistic mythopoetic model of the world, the myth of an earthly paradise, embodied through biblical imagery, is central. The leitmotifs here are the motives of the garden (according to Klychkov - "secret garden"), the garden; symbols associated with the harvest, harvesting (Klyuev: "We are the reapers of the universal field ..."). The mythologeme of the shepherd, which goes back to the image of the gospel shepherd, holds together the creativity of each of them. The new peasants called themselves shepherds (Yesenin: "I am a shepherd, my chambers are / Between unsteady fields"), and poetic creativity was likened to shepherds (Klyuev: "My golden deer, / herds of tunes and thoughts").
Folk-Christian ideas about the cyclical nature of life and death can be found in the work of each of the new peasants. For Klychkov and his characters, who feel like a particle of a single Mother Nature, who are in a harmonious relationship with her, death is something natural, like the change of seasons or the melting of "hoarfrost in the spring," as Klyuev defined death. According to Klychkov, to die means "to go into the undead, like roots into the ground." In his work, death is presented not in the literary-traditional image of a disgusting old woman with a stick, but an attractive peasant worker:
Tired of the day's troubles, How good is a hollow shirt To brush off hardworking sweat, Move closer to the cup ...<...>
It's good to be in a family.
Where the son is the groom, and the daughter is the bride,
Not enough on the bench
Under the old goddess of the place...
Then, having overcome fate, like everyone else,
It is not surprising to meet death in the evening,
Like a reaper in a young oat
With a sickle slung over his shoulders.
("Tired of the day's troubles...")
In 1914-1917. Klyuev creates a cycle of 15 poems "Khut Songs" dedicated to the memory of his dead mother. The plot itself: the death of the mother, her burial, funeral rites, the crying of her son, the mother's visit to her home, her help to the peasant world - reflects the harmony of the earthly and heavenly. (Compare with Yesenin: "I know: with other eyes / The dead smell the living.") The cyclicity of life and death is also emphasized in composition: after the ninth chapter (corresponding to the ninth memorial day), the Easter holiday comes - sorrow is overcome.
The poetic practice of the new peasants already at an early stage made it possible to single out such common moments in their work as the poeticization of peasant labor (Klyuev: "Bow to you, work and sweat!") And village life; zoo-, floro- and anthropomorphism (anthropomorphization natural phenomena is one of the characteristic features of thinking in folklore categories); a keen sense of one's inseparable connection with the living world:
The cry of a child across the field and the river, The cry of a rooster, like pain, for miles, And the gait of spiders, like longing, I hear through the growths of the scab.
(I. A. Klyuev, "The cry of a child across the field and the river...")
Peasant poets were the first in Russian literature to elevate rural life to a previously unattainable level of philosophical understanding of the national foundations of being, and a simple village hut to the highest degree of beauty and harmony. Izba likened to the Universe, and its architectural details are associated with the Milky Way:
The conversational hut is a semblance of the universe: In it sholom is the heavens, the floor is the Milky Way, Where the helmsman's mind, the lamentable soul Under the spindle clergy can have a delightful rest.
(I. A. Klyuev, "Where it smells of kumach - there are women's gatherings ...")
They poetized her living soul:
The hero's hut, The carved kokoshnik, The window, like an eye-socket, Summed up with antimony.
(N. A. Klyuev, "Hut-bogatyr...")
Klyuevsky's "hut space" is not something abstract: he is closed in the circle of hourly peasant worries, where everything is achieved by labor and sweat. The stove bench is its indispensable attribute, and like all Klyuev images, it should not be understood unambiguously in a simplified way. The stove, like the hut itself, like everything else in the hut, is endowed with a soul (the epithet "spirit seer" is not accidental) and equated, along with Kitovras and the rug, with the "golden pillars of Russia" ("At sixteen - curls and gatherings ...") . Klyuevsky's image of the hut receives further transformation in the author's creative polemics with proletarian poets and Lefites (in particular, with Mayakovsky). Sometimes it is an outlandish huge beast: "On heavy log legs / My hut danced" ("They bury me, they bury ..."). In other cases, this is no longer just a dwelling of a tiller, but a prophetic Izba - a prophet, an oracle: "Simple, like a lowing, and a cloud in the trousers of the case / Russia will not become - this is how the Izba broadcasts" ("Mayakovsky dreams of a whistle over the Winter ... ") .
Yesenin proclaimed himself a poet of the "golden log hut" (see "The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain ..."). Poeticizes a peasant hut in "Home Songs" by Klychkov. Klyuev in the cycle "To the Poet Sergei Yesenin" persistently reminds his "younger brother" of his origins: "The hut - the writer of words - / She raised you not in vain ..." The only exception here is Pyotr Vasilyevich Oreshin (1887-1938) with his interest in social motives , continuing the Nekrasov theme of the destitute Russian peasant in peasant poetry (the epigraph from N. A. Nekrasov to his collection "Red Russia" is not accidental). Oreshinsky "huts covered with straw" are a picture of extreme poverty and desolation, while in the work of Yesenin, for example, this image is also aestheticized: you are my abandoned..."). Almost for the first time, the aestheticized image of a peasant hut, appearing in Oreshin's work, is associated with a premonition / accomplishment of the revolution: "Like arrows, the dawns whistle / Above the Solar Hut."
For the peasant farmer and the peasant poet, such concepts as the mother of the land, the hut, the economy are the concepts of one ethical and aesthetic series, one moral root. Originally folk ideas about physical labor as the basis of the foundations of peasant life are affirmed in the famous poem by S. A. Yesenin "I'm going through the valley ...":
To hell, I'm taking off my English suit. Well, give me a scythe, I'll show you - Am I not your own, am I not close to you, Am I not cherishing the memory of the village?
For N. A. Klyuev there is:
Joy to see the first stack, The first sheaf from the native strip. There is a pudding cake Pa mezhe, in the shade of a birch ...
("Joy to see the first haystack...")
The cornerstone of the worldview of the new peasant poets is their view of peasant civilization as the spiritual cosmos of the nation. Having been outlined in Klyuev's collection "Forest were" (1913), strengthened in his book "Worldly Thoughts" (1916) and the cycle "To the Poet Sergei Yesenin" (1916-1917), he appears with his various facets in the two-volume "Songs" (1919), and subsequently reaches the peak of sharpness and turns into an inconsolable funeral lament for the crucified, desecrated Russia in Klyuev's late work, approaching Remizov's "Word about the destruction of the Russian land." This dominant of Klyuev's creativity is embodied through the motif dual world: combination, and more often opposition to each other, two layers, real and perfect, where the ideal world is patriarchal antiquity, the world of virgin nature, remote from the destructive breath of the city, or the world of Beauty. Commitment to the ideal of Beauty, rooted in the depths of folk art, peasant poets emphasize in all their milestone works. "Not with iron, but with Beauty, Russian joy will be bought" - N. A. Klyuev does not get tired of repeating after F. M. Dostoevsky.
One of the most important features of the work of the new peasants is that the theme of nature in their works carries the most important not only semantic, but conceptual load, revealing itself through the universal multifaceted antithesis "Nature - Civilization" with its numerous specific oppositions: "people - intelligentsia", "village - city", " natural man- city dweller", "patriarchal past - modernity", "earth - iron", "feeling - reason", etc.
It is noteworthy that in Esenin's work there are no urban landscapes. Their fragments - "skeletons of houses", "a chilled lantern", "curved Moscow streets" - are single, random and do not add up to a whole picture. "Moscow's mischievous reveler", running up and down "the entire Tver neighborhood", does not find words to describe the month in the city sky: "And when the moon shines at night, / When it shines ... the devil knows how!" ("Yes! Now it's decided. No return...").
Alexander Shiryaevets (Alexander Vasilyevich Abramov, 1887-1924) acts as a consistent aptiurbanist in his work:
I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra! .. I listen to epic streams! .. Let the city's best confectioners pour Easter cakes in sugar -
I will not stay in a stone lair! I'm cold in the heat of his palaces! To the fields! to Bryn! to the cursed tracts! To the legends of grandfathers - wise simpletons!
("I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra! ..")
In the work of the new peasants, the image Cities acquires the qualities of an archetype. In his multi-page treatise "The Stone-Iron Monster" (i.e. City), completed by 1920 and still not fully published, A. Shiryaevets most fully and comprehensively expressed the target setting of the new peasant poetry: to return literature "to miraculous keys Mother Earth." The treatise begins with an apocryphal legend about the demonic origin of the City, then replaced by a fairy tale-allegory about the young Town (then - the City), the son of the Silly Villager and the ventilated Man, who, in order to please the devil, strictly fulfills the parent's dying order "multiply!", so that the devil "dances and grunts in joy, mocking the defiled earth. The demonic origin of the City is emphasized by N. A. Klyuev: "The city-devil beat with its hooves, / Terrifying us with a stone mouth ..." ("From cellars, from dark corners ..."). A. S. Klychkov in the novel "Sugar German" (1925), continuing the same idea, affirms the dead end, the futility of the path that the City is following - there is no place for the Dream in it:
"City, city! Beneath you, the earth does not look like earth ... Satan killed, rammed it with a cast-iron hoof, rolled it with an iron back, rolling on it, like a horse rides in a meadow in myta ..."
Distinct anti-urban motifs are also visible in Klyuev's ideal of Beauty, which originates in folk art, put forward by the poet as a link between the past and the future. In the present, in the realities of the Iron Age, Beauty is trampled and desecrated ("A deadly theft has been accomplished, / Mother Beauty has been debunked!"), and therefore the links of the past and the future have been unraveled. But faith in the messianic role of Russia pervades all the work of N. A. Klyuev:
In the ninety-ninth summer The cursed castle will creak And the gems of dazzling prophetic lines will churn in the river.
The melodious foam will overwhelm Kholmogorye and Tselebey, The vein of silver words-crucians will be caught with a sieve!
("I know songs will be born...")
It was the new peasant poets at the beginning of the 20th century. loudly proclaimed: nature is in itself the greatest aesthetic value. On a national basis, S. A. Klychkov managed to build a vivid metaphorical system of natural balance, organically going into the depths of folk poetic thinking.
It seems to us that in the world we are the only ones standing on our feet, and everything else is either crawling in front of us on our belly, or standing like a dumb pillar, while in reality it’s not at all like that! ..<...>There is only one secret in the world: there is nothing inanimate in it! .. Therefore, love and caress flowers, trees, different fish, feel sorry for the wild beast and better get around the poisonous reptile! .. "- writes S. A. Klychkov in the novel" Chertukhinsky balakir" (1926).
But if in the poems of the Klyuev collection "Lion's Bread" the offensive of "iron" pa wildlife- a foreboding, a premonition that has not yet become a terrible reality ("I would be afraid of hearsay / About the iron ns-lug!"), then in the images of his "Village", "Pogorelshchina", "Songs about the Great Mother" - this is already tragic for peasant poets reality. In the approach to this topic, the differentiation of the creativity of the new peasants is clearly visible. S. L. Yesenin and P. V. Oreshin, although not easy, painfully, through the pain of II blood, were ready to see the future of Russia, in Yesenin's words, "through stone and steel." For II. A. Klyuev, A. S. Klychkov, A. Shiryaevts, who were dominated by the concept of "peasant's paradise", the idea of the future was fully embodied by the patriarchal past, Russian gray antiquity with its fairy tales, legends, beliefs.
“I don’t like the accursed modernity, destroying the fairy tale,” A. Shiryaevets admitted in a letter to V. F. Khodasevich (1917), “and without a fairy tale, what is life in the world?”
For N. A. Klyuev, the destruction of a fairy tale, a legend, the destruction of a host of mythological characters is an irreparable loss:
Like a squirrel, a handkerchief on the eyebrow, Where there is a forest darkness, From the headboards of the bench The fairy tale has gone inaudibly. Brownies, undead, mavki - Only rubbish, hardened dust ...
("Village")
New peasant poets defended their spiritual values, the ideal of primordial harmony with the natural world in polemics with proletarian theories of technization and mechanization of the world. The industrial landscapes of "stated nightingales", in which, according to Klyuev, "fire is replaced by folding and consonance - by a factory whistle", contrasted sharply with the lyrics of nature created by peasant poets.
“Concrete and turbine-driven people find it hard to understand me, they get stuck in my straw, they feel ugly from my hut, porridge and carpet worlds,” wrote N. S. Klyuev in a letter to S. M. Gorodetsky in 1920.
Representatives of the Iron Age rejected everything "old": "Old Russia is hanged, / And we are its executioners ..." (V. D. Aleksandrovsky); "We are the pedlars of a new faith, / beauty setting an iron tone. / So that the squares are not defiled by frail nature, / we shy reinforced concrete into the sky" (V. V. Mayakovsky). For their part, the new Christians, who saw the main cause of evil in isolation from natural roots, the people's worldview, and national culture, stood up in defense of this "old" one. Proletarian poets, while defending the collective, denied the individual human, everything that makes a person unique; ridiculed such categories as soul, heart; declared: "We will take everything, we will know everything, / We will penetrate the depth to the bottom ..." (MP Gerasimov, "We"). Peasant poets argued the opposite: "To know everything, to take nothing / A poet came into this world" (S. A. Yesenin, "Mare Ships"). The conflict between "nature" and "hardware" ended in victory for the latter. In the final poem "A Field Sown with Bones..." from the collection "Lion's Bread" N. A. Klyuev gives a terrible, truly apocalyptic panorama of the "Iron Age", repeatedly defining it through the epithet "faceless": "Over the dead steppe, a faceless something then / gave birth to madness, darkness, emptiness ... " Dreaming of a time in which "it will not be carried with a hammer, about an unseeing flywheel" ("A caravan with saffron will come ..."), Klyuev expressed his secret, prophetic: "It will strike hour, and to the peasant lyre / Proletarian children will fall.
By the beginning of the XX century. Russia approached the country of peasant agriculture, based on more than a thousand years of traditional culture, polished in its spiritual and moral content to perfection. In the 1920s the way of Russian peasant life, infinitely dear to peasant poets, began to crumble before their eyes. Pain for the waning origins of life is permeated with the letters of S. A. Yesenin related to this time, a careful reading of which is still to be done by researchers; works by N. A. Klyuev, novels by S. A. Klychkov. The tragic worldview, characteristic of the early lyrics of this "singer of unprecedented sadness" ("The carpet fields are golden ..."), which intensified by the 1920s, reaches its peak in his last novels - "Sugar German", "Chertukhinsky Balakir", "Prince of Peace ". These works, which show the absolute uniqueness of human existence, are called existential by many researchers.
The revolution promised to fulfill the age-old dream of the peasants: to give them land. The peasant community, in which the poets saw the basis of the foundations of harmonious existence, was reanimated for a short time, peasant gatherings roared through the villages:
Here I see: Sunday villagers At the volost, as in a church, gathered. With clumsy, unwashed speeches, they discuss their "zhis".
(S. A. Yesenin, "Soviet Russia")
However, already in the summer of 1918, the systematic destruction of the foundations of the peasant community began, food detachments were sent to the village, and from the beginning of 1919 a system of surplus appropriations was introduced. Millions of peasants perish as a result of hostilities, famine and epidemics. Direct terror against the peasantry begins - a policy of depeasantization, which eventually brought terrible results: the age-old foundations of Russian peasant management were destroyed. The peasants violently rebelled against exorbitant exactions: the Tambov (Antonov) uprising, Veshenskoye on the Don, the uprising of the Voronezh peasants, hundreds of similar, but smaller peasant uprisings - the country was going through another tragic period in its history. Spiritual and moral ideals, accumulated by hundreds of generations of ancestors and seemed unshakable, were undermined. Back in 1920, at a teachers' congress in Vytegra, Klyuev spoke hopefully about folk art:
"We must be more attentive to all these values, and then it will become clear that in Soviet Russia, where the truth must become a fact of life, they must recognize the great importance of culture generated by the craving for heaven ..." ("A Word to Teachers on the Values of Folk Art" , 1920).
However, by 1922 the illusions were dispelled. Convinced that the poetry of the people, embodied in the work of peasant poets, “under democracy should occupy the most honorable place,” he sees with bitterness that everything turns out differently:
“Breaking with us, the Soviet government breaks the most tender, with the deepest among the people. You and I need to take this as a sign - for the Lion and the Dove will not forgive the power of its sin,” N. L. Klyuev wrote to S. L. Yesenin in 1922
As a result of social experiments, in the eyes of peasant poets involved in a tragic conflict with the era, an unprecedented collapse of the most dear to them began - traditional peasant culture, folk foundations of life and national consciousness. Writers receive the label "kulak", while one of the main slogans of the life of the country becomes the slogan "Liquidation of the kulaks as a class." Slandered and slandered, the resistance poets continue to work, and it is no coincidence that one of Klyuev's central poems of 1932, with its transparent metaphorical symbolism, addressed to the leaders of the country's literary life, is called "Slanderers of Art":
I am angry with you and scold you bitterly,
What is ten years old for a melodious horse,
A diamond bridle, hooves made of gold,
The blanket is embroidered with consonances,
You didn't even give me a handful of oats
And they were not allowed into the meadow, where the drunken dew
I would freshen the broken wings of a swan ...
In the coming millennium, we are destined to read the works of the new peasant writers in a new way, because they reflect the spiritual, moral, philosophical, and social aspects of the national consciousness of the first half of the 20th century. They contain true spiritual values and truly high morality; in them there is a breath of the spirit of high freedom - from power, from dogma. They affirm a careful attitude to the human person, defend the connection with national origins, folk art as the only fruitful path of the artist's creative evolution.
The concept of "peasant poetry", which has become part of historical and literary use, unites poets conditionally and reflects only some common features inherent in their worldview and poetic manner. They did not form a single creative school with a single ideological and poetic program. As a genre, "peasant poetry" was formed in the middle of the 19th century. Its largest representatives were Alexey Vasilievich Koltsov, Ivan Savvich Nikitin and Ivan Zakharovich Surikov. They wrote about the work and life of the peasant, about the dramatic and tragic collisions of his life. Their work reflected both the joy of merging workers with the natural world, and a feeling of dislike for the life of a stuffy, noisy city alien to wildlife.
Peasant poetry has always been a success with the reading public. When publishing a poem, the origin of the authors was usually indicated. And the surge of interest in folk life immediately responded with a search for nuggets. Actually, this word, "nugget", was introduced into literary use as if to justify poets from the people, who were also called "self-taught poets."
At the beginning of the 20th century, "peasant poets" united in the Surikov literary and musical circle, which published collections and almanacs. An important role in it was played by Spiridon Dmitrievich Drozhzhin, Philip Stepanovich Shkulev, and Yegor Efimovich Nechaev. In the 1910s, a new generation of peasant poets entered literature. Collections of Sergei Antonovich Klychkov (Leshenkov), Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev, the first works of Alexander Vasilyevich Shiryaevtsev (Abramov) and Pyotr Vasilyevich Oreshin appear in print. In 1916, Yesenin's collection of poems "Radunitsa" was published.
In that era, the “Russian peasant” was perhaps a restaurant exotic or an artistic pose. She was proudly accepted by Klyuev, who cursed the "noble ubiquity" in his letters to Blok; it was tried on by a dandy young Yesenin, disguised as a shepherdess, in a blue silk shirt with a silver belt, velvet trousers and high morocco boots. But they were sympathetically received by critics as messengers to the literature of the Russian countryside, spokesmen for its poetic self-awareness. Subsequently, Soviet criticism branded "peasant poetry" as "kulak poetry".
The traditional view of later criticism of “peasant poetry” is well illustrated by the characterization given by the “Literary Encyclopedia” to the most prominent representative of this trend - Yesenin: “A representative of the declassing groups of the rural prosperous peasantry, the kulaks ... Yesenin comes from the real concreteness of the natural economy on the basis of which he grew up, from anthropomorphism and zoomorphism of primitive peasant psychology. The religiosity that colors many of his works is also close to the primitive concrete religiosity of the prosperous peasantry.
"Peasant poetry" came to Russian literature at the turn of the century. It was a time of foreboding social disintegration and complete anarchy of meanings in art, so a certain dualism can be observed in the work of "peasant poets". This painful desire to pass into another life, to become what was not born, always feeling wounded by it. So they all suffered, so they fled from their beloved villages to the cities they hated. But knowledge of peasant life, oral poetic creativity of the people, a deeply national feeling of closeness to native nature made up the strong side of the lyrics of the "peasant poets".
Democratic writers gave a huge
material for the knowledge of economic
life ... psychological characteristics
people ... depicted his manners, customs,
his moods and desires.
M. Gorky
In the 60s of the XIX century, the formation of realism as a complex and diverse phenomenon is associated with the deepening of literature in the coverage of peasant everyday life, in the inner world of the individual, in the spiritual life of the people. The literary process of realism is an expression of various facets of life and, at the same time, a desire for a new harmonic synthesis, a merger with the poetic element of folk art. The artistic world of Russia with its original, highly spiritual, primordially national art of folk poetry has constantly aroused the close interest of literature. The writers turned to the artistic understanding of folk moral and poetic culture, the aesthetic essence and poetics of folk art, as well as folklore as an integral folk worldview.
It was the folk principles that were the exceptional factor determining, to some extent, the development of Russian literature in the second half of the 19th century, and especially Russian democratic prose. Folklore and ethnography in the literary process of time become the phenomenon that determines the aesthetic character of many works of the 1840-1860s.
The theme of the peasantry pervades all Russian literature of the 19th century. Literature delves into the coverage of peasant life, into the inner world and the national character of the people. In the works of V.I. Dahl, D.V. Grigorovich, in the "Notes of a Hunter" by I.S. Turgenev, in "Essays from Peasant Life" by A.F. Pisemsky, in the stories of P.I. Melnikov-Pechersky, N.S. Leskov, early L.N. Tolstoy, P.I. Yakushkina, S.V. Maksimov, in Russian democratic prose of the 60s and in general in Russian realism of the second half of the 19th century, the desire to recreate pictures of folk life was imprinted.
Already in the 1830s and 1840s, the first works on the proper ethnographic study of the Russian people appeared: collections of songs, fairy tales, proverbs, legends, descriptions of the manners and customs of antiquity, folk art. A lot of song and other folklore and ethnographic material appears in magazines. At this time, ethnographic research, as noted by the well-known literary critic and critic of the XIX century A.N. Pypin, proceed from a conscious intention to study the true character of the people in its true expressions in the content of folk life and the legends of antiquity.
The collection of ethnographic materials in the following 50s "took on truly grandiose proportions." This was facilitated by the influence of the Russian Geographical Society, the Moscow Society of History and Antiquities, a number of scientific, including literary, expeditions of the 50s, as well as a new organ of folk studies that arose in the 60s - the Moscow Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography.
The role of the outstanding folklorist-collector P.V. Kireevsky. Already in the 30s of the 19th century, he managed to create a kind of collecting center and attract his outstanding contemporaries to the study and collection of folklore - up to A.S. Pushkin and N.V. Gogol included. Songs, epics and spiritual poems published by Kireevsky were the first monumental collection of Russian folklore.
In the collection of songs, Kireevsky wrote: “Whoever has not heard a Russian song over his cradle and whom its sounds have not accompanied in all the transitions of life, of course, his heart will not tremble at her sounds: she is not like those sounds on which her soul has grown up, or she will be incomprehensible to him as an echo of the coarse mob, with whom he feels nothing in common; or, if it has a special musical talent, she will be curious to him as something original and strange…” 1 . The attitude to the folk song, which embodied both personal inclinations and ideological convictions, led to his appeal to practical work over the collection of Russian songs.
Love for the Russian song will subsequently unite the members of the “young editorial board” of the Moskvityanin magazine, and S.V. Maksimov, P.I. Yakushkin, F.D. Nefedov, the song genre of folk poetry will organically enter their literary work.
The Moskvityanin published songs, fairy tales, descriptions of individual rituals, correspondence, articles about folklore and folk life.
M.P. Pogodin, the editor of the journal, a writer and a prominent public figure, with exceptional perseverance put forward the task of collecting monuments of folk art and folk life, intensively recruited collectors from different strata of society, attracted them to participate in the journal. He also contributed to the first steps in this field of P.I. Yakushkin.
A special role in the development of the ethnographic interests of writers was played by the “young editors” of the Moskvityanin magazine, headed by A.N. Ostrovsky. The composition of the "young edition" at different times included: A.A. Grigoriev, E. Endelson, B. Almazov, M. Stakhovich, T. Filippov, A.F. Pisemsky and P.I. Melnikov-Pechersky.
Already in the 1940s and early 1950s, Russian literature turned more deeply to the peasant theme. The natural school occupies a leading place in the literary process of the time.
NATURAL SCHOOL - the designation of the type that existed in the 40-50s of the XIX century Russian realism(according to the definition of Yu.V. Mann), successively associated with the work of N.V. Gogol and developed his artistic principles. The natural school includes the early works of I.A. Goncharova, N.A. Nekrasov, I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoevsky, A.I. Herzen, D.V. Grigorovich, V.I. Dahl, A.N. Ostrovsky, I.I. Panaeva, Ya.P. Butkova and others. The main ideologist of the natural school was V.G. Belinsky, the development of its theoretical principles was also promoted by V.N. Maykov, A.N. Pleshcheev and others. Representatives were grouped around the journals Otechestvennye Zapiski and later Sovremennik. The collections "Physiology of Petersburg" (parts 1-2, 1845) and "Petersburg Collection" (1846) became the program for the natural school. In connection with the latest edition, the name itself arose.
F.V. Bulgarin (Northern Bee, 1846, No. 22) used it to discredit the writers of the new trend; Belinsky, Maikov and others took this definition, filling it with positive content. Most clearly, the novelty of the artistic principles of the natural school was expressed in "physiological essays" - works that aim at the most accurate fixation of certain social types ("physiology" of the landowner, peasant, official), their specific differences ("physiology" of the St. Petersburg official, Moscow official), social, professional and everyday features, habits, sights, etc. By striving for documentary, accurate detail, the use of statistical and ethnographic data, and sometimes the introduction of biological accents into the typology of characters, the "physiological essay" expressed the tendency of a certain convergence of figurative and scientific consciousness at that time and ... contributed to the expansion of the positions of realism. At the same time, it is unlawful to reduce the natural school to "physiology", since other genres towered above them - novel, short story 3 .
The writers of the natural school - N.A. Nekrasov, N.V. Gogol, I.S. Turgenev, A.I. Herzen, F.M. Dostoevsky - known to students. However, speaking about this literary phenomenon, one should also consider such writers who remain outside the literary education of schoolchildren, such as V.I. Dahl, D.V. Grigorovich, A.F. Pisemsky, P.I. Melnikov-Pechersky, with whose work the students are not familiar, and in their works the peasant theme is developed, being the beginning of literature from peasant life, continued and developed by writers of the sixties. Acquaintance with the work of these writers seems necessary and deepens the knowledge of schoolchildren about the literary process.
In the 1860s, the peasant element most widely penetrated into the cultural process of the era. In the literature, the “folk direction” is affirmed (the term of A.N. Pypin). Peasant types and the folk way of life are completely included in Russian literature.
Russian democratic prose, represented in the literary process by the work of N.G. Pomyalovsky 4 , V.A. Sleptsova, N.V. Uspensky, A.I. Levitova, F.M. Reshetnikova, P.I. Yakushkina, S.V. Maksimov. Having entered the literary process during the revolutionary situation in Russia and in the post-reform era, it reflected a new approach to the image of the people, highlighted the real pictures of their life, became "sign of the times", recreated the peasant world in Russian literature at a turning point in history, capturing various trends in the development of realism 5 .
The emergence of democratic prose was caused by changing historical and social circumstances, the socio-political conditions of life in Russia in the second half of the 19th century, the arrival of writers in literature, for whom “the study of folk life has become a need” (A.N. Pypin) 6 . Democratic writers reflected the spirit of the era, its aspirations and hopes in an original way. They, as A.M. Gorky, "provided a huge amount of material for the knowledge of the economic life, the psychological characteristics of the people ... portrayed his manners, customs, his mood and desires" 7 .
The sixties drew their impressions from the depths of people's life, from direct contact with the Russian peasant. The peasantry, as the main social force in Russia, which at that time determined the concept of the people, became the main theme of their work. Democratic writers created in their essays and stories a generalized image of people's Russia. They created in Russian literature their own special social world, their own epic of folk life. “All hungry and downtrodden Russia, sedentary and wandering, devastated by feudal predation and ruined by bourgeois, post-reform predation, was reflected, as in a mirror, in the democratic essay literature of the 60s ...” 8 .
The works of the sixties are characterized by a range of related themes and problems, commonality of genres and structural and compositional unity. At the same time, each of them is a creative individuality, each one can notice his own special style. Gorky called them "variably and sweepingly talented people."
Democrat writers in essays and stories recreated the artistic epic of the life of peasant Russia, approaching and individually separating in their work in depicting the folk theme.
Their works reflected the very essence of the most important processes that made up the content of Russian life in the 60s. It is known that the measure of the historical progressiveness of each writer is measured by the degree of his conscious or spontaneous approach to democratic ideology, which reflects the interests of the Russian people. However, democratic fiction reflects not only the ideological and social phenomena of the era, it definitely and widely goes beyond the ideological and ideological trends. The prose of the sixties is included in the literary process of the time, continuing the traditions of the natural school, correlating with the artistic experience of Turgenev, Grigorovich, which reflected the original artistic coverage of the people's world by democratic writers, including an ethnographically accurate description of life.
Democratic fiction with its ethnographic orientation, which stood out from the general stream of development of Russian prose, took a certain place in the process of the formation of domestic realism. She enriched him with a number of artistic discoveries, confirmed the need for the writer to use new aesthetic principles in the selection and coverage of life phenomena in the revolutionary situation of the 1860s, which posed the problem of the people in literature in a new way.
The description of folk life with authentic accuracy of an ethnographic nature was noticed by revolutionary-democratic criticism and was expressed in the requirements for literature to write about the people "the truth without any embellishment", as well as "in the faithful transmission of real facts", "in paying attention to all aspects of the life of the lower classes ". Realistic everyday life was closely connected with elements of ethnography. Literature took a fresh look at the life of the peasants and the existing conditions of their life. According to N.A. Dobrolyubov, the explanation of this matter has become no longer a toy, not a literary whim, but an urgent need of the time. The writers of the sixties reflected the spirit of the era, its aspirations and hopes in an original way. Their work clearly recorded the changes in Russian prose, its democratic nature, ethnographic orientation, ideological and artistic originality and genre expression.
In the works of the sixties, a general circle of related themes and problems, a commonality of genres and structural and compositional unity stand out. At the same time, each of them is a creative individuality, each one can notice his own individual style. N.V. Uspensky, V.A. Sleptsov, A.I. Levitov, F.M. Reshetnikov, G.I. Ouspensky brought their understanding of peasant life into literature, each in his own way captured folk paintings.
The Sixties showed a deep ethnological interest. Democratic literature aspired to ethnography and folklorism, to the development of people's life, merged with it, penetrated into the people's consciousness. The works of the sixties were an expression of everyday personal experience of studying Russia and the life of the people. They created in Russian literature their own special social world, their own epic of folk life. The life of Russian society in the pre-reform and post-reform era, and, above all, the peasant world, is the main theme of their work.
In the 60s, the search for new principles for the artistic depiction of the people continued. Democratic prose provided samples of the truth of life, which is the ultimate for art, and confirmed the need for new aesthetic principles in the selection and illumination of life phenomena. The harsh, "idealless" depiction of everyday life led to a change in the nature of prose, its ideological and artistic originality and genre expression 9 .
Democratic writers were artists-researchers, writers of everyday life; in their work, artistic prose came into close contact with the economy, with ethnography, with folklore 10 in the broad sense of the word, operated with facts and figures, was strictly documentary, time for artistic study of Russia. The writers of the sixties were not only observers and registrars of facts, they tried to understand and reflect the social causes that gave rise to them. Genesis contributed to their works a tangible concreteness, vitality, authenticity.
Naturally, the democratic writers were guided by folk culture, by the traditions of folklore. In their work there was an enrichment and deepening of Russian realism. The theme of democracy has expanded, literature has been enriched with new facts, new observations, features of the way of life and mores of people's life, mainly peasant life. The writers, with all the brightness of their creative individualities, were close in expressing their ideological and artistic tendencies, they were united by ideological closeness, artistic principles, the search for new themes and heroes, the development of new genres, and common typological features.
The sixties created their own art forms - genres. Their prose was predominantly narrative-essay. Essays and stories of writers appeared as a result of their observation and study of the life of the people, their social status, way of life and customs. Numerous meetings at inns, taverns, at post stations, in train cars, on the way, on the steppe road determined the peculiar specificity of the style of their works: the predominance of dialogue over description, the abundance of skillfully conveyed folk speech, the narrator's contact with the reader, concreteness and factuality, ethnographic accuracy, appeal to the aesthetics of oral folk art, the introduction of abundant folklore inclusions. In the artistic system of the sixties, there was an inclination towards everyday life, concreteness of life, strict documentaryism, objective fixation of sketches and observations, originality of composition (split of the plot into separate episodes, scenes, sketches), publicism, orientation towards folk culture and traditions of folklore.
Narrative-essay democratic prose was a natural phenomenon in the literary process of the 60s. According to M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, the sixties did not claim to create complete, artistically complete paintings. They were limited to "excerpts, essays, sketches, sometimes remaining at the level of facts, but they paved the way for new literary forms, more widely covering the diversity of life around" 11 . At the same time, in the democratic fiction itself, integral pictures of peasant life were already indicated, achieved by the idea of an artistic connection of essays, the desire for epic cycles (“Steppe essays” by A. Levitov, F. Reshetnikov’s cycles “Good people”, “Forgotten people”, “From travel memories” and others, the contours of the novel from folk life were visible (F.M. Reshetnikov), the ideological and artistic concept of the people was formed.
The short story-sketchy democratic prose of the sixties organically merged into the literary process. The very trend of depicting folk life turned out to be very promising. The traditions of the sixties were developed by domestic literature of subsequent periods: populist fiction, essays and stories by D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak, V.G. Korolenko, A.M. Gorky.
The term "new peasant" in modern literary criticism is used in order to separate the representatives of a new formation - modernists, who updated Russian poetry, relying on folk art - from traditionalists, imitators and epigones of the poetry of Nikitin, Koltsov, Nekrasov, stamping poetic sketches of rural landscapes in popular prints. -patriarchal style.
The poets belonging to this category developed the traditions of peasant poetry, and did not become isolated in them. The poeticization of rural life, simple peasant crafts and rural nature were the main themes of their poems.
The main features of the new peasant poetry:
Love for the “small Motherland”;
Following age-old folk customs and moral traditions;
The use of religious symbols, Christian motifs, pagan beliefs;
Appeal to folklore plots and images, introduction to poetic use of folk songs and ditties;
Rejection of the “vicious” urban culture, resistance to the cult of machines and iron.
At the end of the 19th century, no major poets emerged from among the peasants. However, the authors who then came to literature in many ways paved the way for the creativity of their especially gifted followers. The ideas of the old peasant lyrics were revived at a different, higher artistic level. The theme of love for native nature, attention to folk life and national character determined the style and direction of the poetry of the new time, and reflections on the meaning of human existence through the images of folk life became leading in this lyrics.
Following the folk poetic tradition was inherent in all the new peasant poets. But each of them also had a particularly keen feeling for their small homeland in its poignant, unique concreteness. Awareness of her own role in her fate helped her find her way to reproducing the poetic spirit of the nation.
The formation of the new peasant poetic school was greatly influenced by the work of the Symbolists, and primarily by Blok and Andrei Bely, which contributed to the development in the poetry of Klyuev, Yesenin and Klychkov of romantic motifs and literary devices characteristic of modernist poetry.
The entry of new peasant poets into great literature became a notable event in the pre-revolutionary period. The core of the new trend was made up of the most talented natives of the rural hinterland - N. Klyuev, S. Yesenin, S. Klychkov, P. Oreshin. Soon they were joined by A. Shiryaevets and A. Ganin.
In the autumn of 1915, largely thanks to the efforts of S. Gorodetsky and the writer A. Remizov, who took care of young poets, the literary group “Krasa” was created; On October 25, a literary and artistic evening was held in the concert hall of the Tenishevsky School in Petrograd, where, as Gorodetsky later wrote, “Yesenin read his poems, and in addition, he sang ditties to the harmonica and, together with Klyuev, suffering ...”. The organization of the publishing house of the same name was also announced there (it ceased to exist after the release of the first collection).
However, it would be wrong to talk about some kind of collective status of the new peasant poets. And although the listed authors were part of the Krasa group, and then the Strada literary and artistic society (1915-1917), which became the first association of poets (by Yesenin’s definition) of the “peasant merchant”, and let some of them participate in “ Scythians” (an almanac of the Left SR direction, 1917–1918), but at the same time, for the majority of the “new peasants”, the very word “collective” was only a hated cliché, a verbal cliché. They were more connected by personal communication, correspondence and common poetic actions.
Therefore, about the new peasant poets, as S. Semenova points out in her study, “it would be more correct to speak of a whole poetic galaxy that expressed, taking into account individual worldviews, a different vision than that of proletarian poets, a vision of the structure of national life, its highest values and ideals - a different feeling and understanding of the Russian idea”.
All poetic currents of the early 20th century had one thing in common: their formation and development took place in conditions of struggle and rivalry, as if the presence of an object of controversy was a prerequisite for the existence of the current itself. This cup has not passed and the poets of the “peasant merchant”. Their ideological opponents were the so-called "proletarian poets".
Having become the organizer of the literary process after the revolution, the Bolshevik Party sought to ensure that the work of poets was as close as possible to the masses. The most important condition for the formation of new literary works, which was put forward and supported by the party press, was the principle of "spiritualization" of the revolutionary struggle. “The poets of the revolution are inexorable critics of everything old and call forward, to the struggle for a brighter future They vigilantly notice all the characteristic phenomena of modernity and paint with sweeping, but deeply truthful colors In their creations, much has not yet been polished to the end, ... but a certain bright mood is clearly expressed with deep feeling and peculiar energy”.
The severity of social conflicts, the inevitability of a clash of opposing class forces became the main themes of proletarian poetry, finding expression in the decisive opposition of two hostile camps, two worlds: “the obsolete world of evil and untruth” and “rising young Russia”. Terrible denunciations grew into passionate romantic appeals, exclamatory intonations dominated many verses (“Rage, tyrants! ..”, “Out on the street!”, etc.). A specific feature of proletarian poetry (the core motives of labor, struggle, urbanism, collectivism) was the reflection in the poems of the current struggle, the combat and political tasks of the proletariat.
Proletarian poets, defending the collective, denied everything individual and human, everything that makes a person unique, ridiculed such categories as the soul, etc. Peasant poets, in contrast to them, saw the main cause of evil in isolation from natural roots, from people's worldview, which is reflected in everyday life, the very way of peasant life, folklore, folk traditions, national culture.
The acceptance of the revolution by the new peasant poets emotionally came from their folk roots, direct involvement in the people's fate; they felt themselves as spokesmen for the pain and hopes of “the poor, the hungry, the martyrs, the age-old shackles, the gray, wretched cattle” (Klyuev), the grassroots, crushed by the age-old oppression of Russia. And in the revolution, they saw, first of all, the beginning of the realization of the aspirations embodied in the images of “Kitezh-grad”, “peasant's paradise”.
At first, both Pimen Karpov and Nikolai Klyuev, who after October even became a member of the RCP (b), believed in the paradise on earth promised by the revolutionaries.
It is also a fact that in 1918, the apogee of revolutionary-messianic illusions, peasant writers and proletarian writers tried to bring them closer together, when an attempt was made to create a section of peasant writers in Moscow under the Proletkult.
But even in this relatively short historical period of time (1917–1919), when it seemed that one revolutionary whirlwind, one universal aspiration, one “boiling” pathos burst into the work of both proletarian and peasant poets, a significant worldview difference was nevertheless felt. In the verses of the “new peasants” there were quite a few revolutionary messianic furies, motives for the storming of heaven, titanic human activity; but along with rage and hatred for the enemy, the idea of a God-bearing people and a new religious revelation of their highest goal was preserved: “The Unseen God / My people will see,” wrote Pyotr Oreshin in his collection of poems “Red Russia” (1918). Here is a somewhat rhetorical, but accurate in thought expression of what, by and large, bred the proletarian and peasant poets (for all their "hooligan" atheistic breakdowns, as in Yesenin's "Inonia").
The announcement in the post-revolutionary period of proletarian poetry as the most advanced put peasant poetry in a position of secondary importance. And the implementation of the policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class made the peasant poets “superfluous”. Therefore, the group of new peasant poets from the beginning of the 1920s was the object of constant attacks, poisonous “revelations” from critics and ideologists who claimed to express the “advanced”, proletarian position.
Thus, illusions collapsed, the faith of peasant poets in the Bolshevik transformations disappeared, anxious thoughts about the fate of their native village accumulated. And then, in their poems, the motives sounded not just of the tragedy of the revolutionary crucifixion of Russia, but also of the guilt of her unlucky, reckless son, who succumbed to the substitutions and temptations of the diabolical machinations of her own people, who trampled on her. There was a hell of a juggling as the bright dreams of the people slipped into a dark, violent alliance with diabolical power.
N. Solntseva in her book "The Peacock of Kitezh" comes to the conclusion that it was the peasant poets in the post-October years that "took the cross of the opposition." However, not everything is so clear.
In a review of the aforementioned book, L. Voronin noted that “the creative and life destinies of N. Klyuev, A. Shiryaevts. A. Ganina, P. Karpova, S. Klychkova, in general, fit into this concept. However, there are other new peasant poets nearby: Pyotr Oreshin with his anthems of the new, Soviet Russia, the studies of N. Solntseva who remained “behind the scenes”, quite loyal Pavel Radimov, Semyon Fomin, Pavel Druzhinin. Yes, and with the “seditious” Sergei Yesenin, everything is not so simple. After all, in the same years when he wrote “The Country of Scoundrels”, his poems “Lenin”, “Song of the Great Campaign”, “Ballad of Twenty-Six” appeared.
According to A. Mikhailov, “the social disharmony, to which the revolution led, was a reflection of a whole tangle of contradictions: ideological, social, economic and others. However, the task of the Soviet ideologists was to present a new state structure as the only correct one, so they tried at all costs to recode the mechanism of national memory. In order to consign the past to oblivion, the carriers of tribal memory were destroyed. All the new peasant poets, the keepers of national shrines, perished.” Only A. Shiryaevets, who died early (1924), and S. Yesenin did not live up to the time of mass repressions that swallowed up their like-minded people.
A. Ganin was the first to suffer this fate. In the autumn of 1924, he was arrested among a group of young people on charges of belonging to the “Order of Russian Fascists”. Ganin’s theses “Peace and free labor for the peoples” found during a search are accepted as evidence, containing frank statements against the existing regime. An attempt to pass off the text of the theses as a fragment of a conceived novel (thus writing off the crime at the expense of a negative hero - a “class enemy”) failed. Ganin was shot in the Butyrka prison among the seven people who make up the “order” group, as its head.
In April 1920 N. Klyuev was expelled from the party “for religious views”. And after the publication of the poem "The Village" (1927), he was sharply criticized for longing for a ruined rural "paradise" and was declared a "kulak poet." This was followed by a link to Tomsk, where Klyuev was dying of hunger, selling his things, asking for alms. He wrote to M. Gorky and begged for help with "a piece of bread." In the autumn of 1937 the poet was shot in the Tomsk prison.
In the midst of mass repressions, S. Klychkov died, whose poetry escaped both the intoxication of October and a sharp, frankly disappointed reaction. Nevertheless, since the late 1920s, critics have brought him into the category of "singers of the kulak village", and in 1937 Klychkov was arrested and disappeared without a trace.
Even P. Oreshin, one of the new peasant poets, who, in the words of S. Semenova, “one of all, as if sincerely, forcing his voice from the heart, could not escape the fate of his brothers in the literary workshop, ran after the Komsomol, and after the party, and behind a tractor, quite mechanically joining the poetry of his native nature (which he never refused) and the “new beauty” of the collective farm village, not disdaining production propaganda in the form of tales in verse. His last collection, Under a Happy Sky (1937), consisted of prepared, smoothed poems of his previous books But even such a “happy” coincidence with the requirements of the era did not take away the right hand of terror from the poet, who once acted in unison in one “peasant merchant's house”. “Under the Happy Sky” of 1937, he was arrested and shot.”
Of the new peasant poets, only P. Karpov survived this meat grinder, who lived until 1963 and died in complete obscurity. True, it can be attributed to this trend only with a large degree of conventionality.
New peasant poetry can rightfully be considered an integral part of creative heritage Russian Silver Age. It is significant that the peasant spiritual field turned out to be much more fruitful than the proletarian ideological soil for bright creative personalities. S. Semenova draws attention to “the striking difference in the creative result: if proletarian poetry did not put forward truly great masters of the word, then peasant (revealed) Klychkov’s first-class talent as a poet and prose writer, the remarkable talent of Oreshin and Shiryaevts, Ganin and Karpov And two poets - Klyuev and Yesenin, being the spiritual and creative leaders of the “peasant merchant” and expressing her aspirations more accurately and more perfectly than their brothers, stood among the classics of Russian literature” (Ibid.).
I will add that among the proletarian poets, one can only recall Demyan Bedny, whose agitational and journalistic poetry during the years of the revolution and the civil war was very popular with the masses. But this is explained not so much by its quality as by the presence, as it is now fashionable to say, of the Bolshevik “administrative resource”, that is, simply propaganda.
Nikolai Klyuev
Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev, who acted as the ideologist of the new peasant trend in Russian poetry, was the largest and most influential, and perhaps the most gifted representative of it. His childhood was spent on the river. Vytegra in the Olonetsky region (now the Vologda region), where the poet's mother, a well-known storyteller, introduced her son to local folklore, and so on. "renounced" - schismatic literature. In his early poems, which had a bright religious coloring, one could feel the influence of the “civil lyrics” of the populists. The poet draws many images from parish life. The language of his works is full of local words and archaisms. Later, in Klyuev's poems, a desire appeared for a poetic reflection of village life, the poeticization of patriarchal antiquity, which put him among the new peasant poets.
Klyuev accepted the revolution and even became a member of the RCP (b), in 1917-1919. worked in the Bolshevik newspaper Vytegra. But in 1920 for "religious views" he was expelled from the party, and after the publication of the poems "The Village" and "Mother Saturday" he was declared a "kulak poet". In 1934, Klyuev was expelled from Moscow, and in 1937 he was arrested and shot in the Tomsk prison.
Let me in sandals
Let me in bast shoes, in a gray sermyag, In a coarse, mottled shirt, But I live with deep faith To another life, to another lot! Ages of violence and adversity, Omnipotence of evil executioners An ardent desire for freedom They will not kill me in my chest! Against the law of the century That blocked the path to the light, Think of yourself as a person I didn't forget! I didn't forget!
You are more private and stricter, Unfathomable to the eye... Oh, who, merciful God, Is it your fault? And ashen braids are smoother, The sooner you tighten A deaf mother sits at the yarn - On funeral canvases. She comprehended the otherworldly, How are you, prayerfully strict ... Sun needles are wandering On the wheel from the hearth. Winters are embraced by a premonition, Pine trees are crying in the forest; Again deaf casemates You will dream in the evening. Only the twilight will turn blue Fog covers the river Father, with a rope around his neck, He will come and sit by the fire. The groom with a shot in the chest, Sister who died in battle - All in the evening desert They will go to your hut. And Death will remain outside the door, Like night, mysteriously dark. And before dawn superstition You will be blindly betrayed. And you won’t believe the sighted, When solemn in the night You - for the pain, for the feat of crying - The keys of eternity will be handed over.
From the cycle "To Alexander Blok"
I am sick with a sweet disease - Autumn, reddening melancholy. Indissoluble semicircle The sky closed over me. She's everywhere, elusive Trembles, breathes and lives: In a fishing song, in scrolls of smoke, In the buzzing of wasps and the glitter of the waters. In the rustle of herbs - her gait, In the mountain echo - bursts of hands, And casemate lattice - Only a symbol of death and separation. Are her cosmos resinous, Like the wind, laughter, an instant glance ... Oh, who are you: Woman? Russia? In the black year brother! Tell me: secret doubt What penalty to atone for So that for a single moment To capture your beautiful face?
In the golden days of September The edge of the forest edge is crumpled. Pine trees pray, smoking incense, Over your empty hut. Wind watchman traces of antiquity Sweeps rustling foliage, Open up the patterned pines, Flash behind the birch thicket! I recognize the kerchief border, A voice with a light gait... Pines whisper about darkness and prison, About the twinkling of stars behind bars, About a bell in a cruel way, About the gray-haired Buryat distances ... Peace to you, pines, you are my thoughts, Like a mother, they figured it out! On the memorial days of September You know the filial secret And about the one that died loving, Pass it on to heaven and earth.
I pass through the night village There is no fire in the dark huts, Reality fabulous, ancient Pulled on me. In the present, disbelieving The ancient is full of strength, I famously opened the feryaz, He broke his sable hat. Whistled, slammed by the road In the remote hand And, like a whirlwind, sonorous A horse soared under me. Jumped up. oak beast The horse snores, beats with a hoof, - Before me is a patterned tower, There is no guard at the gate. He tied the bay to the tyn; It will be famously ali good, I throw a silk belt On chiseled silk. Painted shutters creak... “What, raslapushka, are you not sleeping? Not without reason the rake-guy They know the Kama and the Irtysh! Our plows walked Until Khvalynshchina sometimes, - Do not run out with a friend Turquoise and canifas…” The huts cleared up River in the morning smoke. Gusli-morok, vlipnuv loudly, Sparks have sunk into darkness. But in the soul, like hops, flows Prophetic sounds silver - of the departed firebird Gem pen.
I was told that you died Along with golden leaf fall And now, radiantly bright, You rule the mountainous, unknown city. I'm ready to forget myself, You always seemed fabulous And the crimson of autumn leaves Not once admired me. They say that you are gone But love runs out of jets: Isn't dawn your caress, And the rays are not your kisses?
Called silence deafness, Outraged the white "shut up", At the cross with a simple tribute Did not put a sweet candle. In coniferous incense he breathed a cigarette And spitting forget-me-not burned, - Pleso charged with tears, Moss covered with gray hair. Bright lad - forest silence, Praying on the weeping cross, Rolled into a deaf wandering To holy, unsullied places. Bird cherry twisted her hands, An ermine confuses a trace to a mink ... Son of iron and stone boredom Trampling birch bark paradise.
Christmas hut
From curly shavings smells of tar, Dukhovit, like a beehive, a white frame. A large-chested carpenter amuses stakes, Words are slow and stingy. The groove was warm, the captors of the kokora, Krutolob tesovy sholomok. Valances will be rippled And the horse is speckled with ludyanka. On the wall, like a grain, notches will pass: Sucrest, paws, netting, rows, So that the young hut in a red coat Reality and sleep seemed to be easy. Strong-chested builder-mystery, In front of him are chips like letters: The carved pava will sing from the porches, Yarn splashes from the window trim. And when the hair curled Smoke flutters over the hut - The tale will be about the red tree maker Through the forests, to the west and east.
From the cycle "To the poet Sergei Yesenin"
The hut is the sanctuary of the earth, With a baking secret and paradise, In the spirit of dew hemp We will know the secret. On the bed of brooms, rows - The soul of green-mouthed birches ... From the stars to the onion patch All in a prophetic whisper and crunches. Earth, like an old fisherman, Weaves cloud networks To catch the afterlife darkness Deaf-mute millennia. I foresee: as in the top of the catfish, The fog will splash in the peasant's hand, - Zolotobrevny, Father's house Sunshine in the meadow. giant wheat ear The yard will be overshadowed by a healing shadow... Are you not my brother, fiance and son, Will you show me the way to transformation? In your eyes, the smoke from the huts, Deep sleep of river silt, Ryazan poppy sunset - Your melodious ink. The hut is a feeder of words I raised you not in vain: For Russian villages and cities You will become the Red Rainbow. So don't forget the baking paradise Where it's good to love and cry! On your way, to eternal May, I weave a verse - seasoned bast shoes.
Sergei Klychkov
Poet, prose writer and translator Sergei Antonovich Klychkov (real name Leshenkov) comes from the Tver province. Studied at Moscow University. Already in the early poetry collections "Songs" (1911) and "Secret Garden" (1913) he declared himself as a poet of the new peasant direction. Reviving the genre of folk songs in Russian lyrics, developing the motives of Russian legend and fairy tales, Klychkov rethought them in a romantic-symbolist way. With the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted into the army. In 1921 he returned to Moscow, worked for the Krasnaya Nov magazine and the Krug publishing house.
Klychkov met the revolution with enthusiasm, continuing to develop his folklore and romantic direction. But then fabulousness and melodiousness leave his work, eternal, philosophical themes appear, motives of farewell and anxiety for the safety of the natural world. From the mid 1920s. the poet turns to prose (6 novels were written). The campaign against “kulak literature” did not pass Klychkov either. His last book of poems, Visiting the Cranes (1930), was angrily received by critics. Klychkov was forced to do translations. In the 1930s, his transcriptions of the epic works of the peoples of the USSR were published. In July 1937, Klychkov was arrested and soon shot.
Behind the misty veil On the river at the edge He grazes his night Playing on the horn. He sits cross-legged Let the sedge pray... There are many, many stars in the sky High, high. - Ay-lyuli! Ay-lyuli! Covered in silver dust The moon fell on feather grass! - Ay-lyuli! Yes, hey! The goblin dozed off in the sedge - Elderly old man... And maples are burning in the forest From a hundred-year-old baldness ... And in the fog over the meadows The herd huddled together And the bull butts the cloud Red horns.
There was a valley above the river, In the dense forest near the village, In the evening, picking raspberries, On it my mother gave birth to me ... In the forest silence and majesty I was swaddled by twilight, The singing of birds lulled, Running stream under the ravine… On ripe berries and hops, Wide open eyes I listened to how the fir-trees were noisy, As the clouds called the storm ... I saw more mansions, Flashed in the dawn of the tower, And the rumble of distant thunder He walked me home. Oh right, that's why I'm wild That's why my songs - Like a body of wild strawberries Between berries with a needle of needles ...
Lel decorated the whole field with flowers, Removed all trees. I heard how yesterday he was spinning Behind the village played for a long time ... He played on silver tsevne, And in the aspen the goldfinches fell silent, The chickens in the village did not cackle, Only the dawn blazed out of the mist ... In Dubna, the cranes did not cry, The owl did not hoot over the thicket of the forest, And Dubravna stood in sorrow At the edge of an old pine tree... Every year in the blue spring He swims like an unknown fisherman And over our side of the forest Darkness hangs - fogs and darkness ... Rarely does the sun come out of a cloud, Rarely do stars peep through the night, And no one saw and no one sees On a patterned brocade caftan ... Unaware and cheerful young woman, What drives the cows in the morning Whose sail is whitening on the boat, Whose voice can be heard in the wind? .. He swims and plays the bow An early beam of a golden arrow, But grandchildren will not remember great-grandfathers, They will not remember the joys of the past ... Only pines and spruces do not stir, The tops of the birches do not sway, And they only see Lelya, Surrounding the shore...
Carpet fields are golden And the clods turn black on the arable land ... Why did the willows think As if they feel sorry for their native land? .. As in olden days, the month leads the clouds, Like an ancient army hero, And as the years go by Disappearing into the unknown. The same Russia without end and without edge, And blue smoke above her - Well, I don’t sing, but I cry Over people, over yourself, over fate? And it seems to me: there is a flame in the morning Before the trouble warmed the distance, And thickened the fog over the fields Unprecedented sadness in the world ...
Over the silver riverSong
On the golden sand...
Lada swims in the backwater, In enchanted silence... Fishermen on the river And a wall of reeds... And in the backwater, as in the suleya, Like in a bowl among the fields, Lada is more beautiful, more fun, More cheerful and whiter ... Lada plunged into the river, Looked into the blue I remembered something - I felt sad, What didn't come true... Like throwing stones Lada looks into the river And the bare foot slides Again in the river on the sand ... Lada sat down to the willow, And above it between the branches The foggy swell hung, The nightingale sang sadly ... And wave after wave whispered And the pearls rolled Where did she bathe at dawn On the edge of the bocha. And all around her are mermaids Rising with the fogs from the waters, They played tag in the bushes And they led a round dance ...
My soul is like a bird Lives in the wilderness And no more will be born To the light of such a soul. Crack and rattle through the forest: At our village Under the feet of spruce cuts Iron snake-saw. They will burn them in heavy forges, Like sinners they will be thrown into hell And how many spacious You can set up a hut! Forgive me through My entire forest And I don't know myself How did you get here I look into the crazy flame And I kiss your ashes For warming the stone For chasing fear! And here I often dream The same dream Thick fir-svetlitsa, Coniferous ringing in the light, Bright in the light of the canopy, And the spirit was warm from resins, Forest slope - steps, Porch - river valley, The moss is spread out with sackcloth, And night and day merge And sat in the red corner At the refectory table - a stump ... Guessing the night-gypsy, On the stars frowning eyebrow: Where is the self-assembly tablecloth, Luck and love? But she doesn't know either. What is hidden in the lines of stars! .. And only nods from the hill With a dry hand, the churchyard ...
And lost milestones of stars... They float from year to year And they don't change places! Our path is the railroad, And there are no paths, no roads, Where would a man meet God And man is God! We fly like birds now Having attached wings to the carts, And the beast is afraid to look there, Where is the man! And let us be more obedient every day Water, and air, and fire: Let him neigh on a leash in the stable Ilya's thunder horse! Let earthly armor-mountains We melt in a fiery furnace - But we forge constipation for the world, And we need keys! The blue canopy is thrown tightly, And we, interfering with reality and delirium, We follow in heavy visions Just comet tails!
I'm tired of blasphemy and deceit Head pounding in delirium Soon I will be in the dammed kingdom, I'm leaving without telling anyone... I already dream in the night without a voice, In lonely sleepless silence That I go down from the bank of the reach, I move the reeds with my hand ... It doesn't matter that without mud And Dubna is shallow now: I know that by the old dam, The dam has a secret door! As before autumn, the edge is through, And anyone could look into it, But even then, I know, What a heavy lock in breakdowns! That the deadlines are set by fate, Suddenly the abyss and blue would not gush, Where from the blue depths to the blue The crescent floats like a line... Here it is, that so long in sorrow Everything was thrown into heat and chills: Or a fishing boat on the pier, Or a damask coffin! Here are the stars, like perches in a flock, Here is a lily, like a candle ... But the dam piles are good, And I did not find the key in the sand ... Know before the deadline to me again and again Call, and cry, and wait by the river: I haven't spoken a word yet What, like a hammer, knocks down shackles And like a key, it unlocks locks.
Stripped me naked And they were reliable. Horns attached to the forehead And the tail was nailed ... The fluff from the pillow was shaken And rolled in the tar, And I suddenly grew Indeed, the claws... And here I am with a couple of claws Now I don't believe in devils Knowing that a person is scarier And more angry than any animal ...
Until words burst into flames And the blood does not break on its hind legs, I am between idleness and business I wander like a martyr of fate! .. Then fun does not rejoice, And things get out of hand And only barely audible To me the heart of a dormant knock! .. Dashing years will stretch In a deaf and voiceless haze, Like smoke in autumn weather Nailed to the ground by rain! .. And in harsh speechlessness, In the wordless silence of the heart It makes me happy to think That this world went from the word ...
Sergey Yesenin
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was born in the village of Konstantinov in the Ryazan region. From here originate the origins of his work, in which the poet considered “lyrical feeling” and “imagery” to be the main ones. He saw the source of figurative thinking in folklore, folk language. Yesenin's entire metaphor is built on the relationship between man and nature, which, in his opinion, was preserved only in the way of peasant life. His best poems vividly captured the spiritual beauty of the Russian people. The subtlest lyric poet, the magician of the Russian landscape, Yesenin was surprisingly sensitive to earthly colors, sounds and smells. His capacious and stunningly fresh images were almost always a real artistic discovery.
Yesenin's first poem was published in the Mirok magazine (1914, No. 1), and the first book of poems, Radunitsa, was published in 1916. Urban life significantly influenced not only the creative "I" of the poet himself, but also the appearance of his lyrical hero. After the revolution, in the touching and tender Yesenin's lyrics, which had previously been influenced by Klyuev and Blok, new “robbery and riotous” features appeared that brought him closer to the Imagists. The fate of the poet was tragic. In a state of depression, he committed suicide.
Weaved out on the lake the scarlet light of dawn. Capercaillie are crying in the forest with bells. An oriole is crying somewhere, hiding in a hollow. Only I don’t cry - my heart is light. I know that in the evening you will go beyond the ring of roads, Let's sit in fresh shocks under the neighboring haystack. I'll kiss you when I'm drunk, I'll crush you like a flower, There is no gossip to the intoxicated with joy. You yourself, under the caresses, will throw off the silk of the veil, I'll take the drunk until the morning into the bushes. And let the capercaillie cry with bells, There is a merry melancholy in the alost of the dawn.
Go th you, Russia, my dear, Huts - in the robes of the image ... See no end and edge - Only blue sucks eyes. Like a wandering pilgrim, I watch your fields. And at the low outskirts The poplars are languishing. Smells like apple and honey In the churches, your meek Savior. And buzzes behind the bark There is a cheerful dance in the meadows. I'll run along the wrinkled stitch To the freedom of the green lekh, Meet me like earrings A girlish laugh will ring out. If the holy army shouts: “Throw Russia, live in paradise!” I will say: “There is no need for paradise, Give me my country."
I'm tired of living in native land In longing for buckwheat expanses, Leave my hut I will leave as a vagabond and a thief. I'll walk through the white curls of the day Look for poor housing. And my beloved friend He sharpens a knife for the bootleg. Spring and sunshine on the meadow entwined yellow road And the one whose name I keep I will be driven from the threshold. And I will return to my father's house again, I will be comforted by someone else's joy, In the green evening under the window I will hang myself on my sleeve. Gray willows at the wattle fence Gently bow their heads. And unwashed me Under the barking of a dog will be buried. And the month will swim and swim, Dropping oars across the lakes... And Russia will still live, Dance and cry at the fence.
Song of the dog
In the morning in a rye nook, Where the bast mats are golden in a row, Seven puppies bitch Red seven puppies. Until the evening she caressed them, combing the tongue, And the snow was falling Under her warm belly. And in the evening when the chickens They sit around the sixth The owner came out gloomy, He put all seven in a bag. She ran through the snowdrifts, Running after him... And so long, long trembling Unfrozen waters. And when I trudged back a little, Licking sweat from the sides A month appeared to her over the hut One of her puppies. In the blue heights loudly She looked, whining, And the moon slid thin And disappeared behind the hill in the fields. And deaf, as from a handout, When they throw a stone at her in laughter, The eyes of a dog rolled Golden stars in the snow.
Hewn drogs sang, Plains and bushes run. Again chapels on the road And memorial crosses. Again I am sick with warm sadness From the oatmeal breeze. And on the lime of the bell towers Involuntarily, the hand is baptized. Oh Russia, crimson field And the blue that fell into the river I love to joy and pain Your lake longing. Cold grief cannot be measured, You are on a foggy shore. But not to love you, not to believe - I can't learn. And I will not give these chains And I will not part with a long sleep, When native steppes ring Prayer feather grass.
I do not regret, do not call, do not cry, Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees. Withering gold embraced, I won't be young anymore. Now you won't fight so much Cold touched heart And the country of birch chintz Not tempted to wander around barefoot. Wandering spirit! you are less and less You stir the flame of your mouth. O my lost freshness, A riot of eyes and a flood of feelings. Now I have become more stingy in desires, My life! did you dream of me? Like I'm a spring echoing early Ride on a pink horse. All of us, all of us in this world are perishable, Quietly pouring copper from maple leaves ... May you be blessed forever That came to flourish and die.
A blue fire swept Forgotten relatives gave. I was all - like a neglected garden, He was greedy for women and potion. Enjoyed drinking and dancing And lose your life without looking back. I would just look at you To see the eye of a golden-brown whirlpool, And so that, not loving the past, You couldn't leave for someone else. Tread gentle, light camp, If you knew with a stubborn heart, How does a bully know how to love, How can he be humble. I would forever forget taverns And I would give up writing poetry, Just to gently touch the hand And your hair color in autumn. I would follow you forever At least in their own, even in others they gave ... For the first time I sang about love, For the first time I refuse to scandal.
Let you be drunk by others But I'm left, I'm left Your hair is glassy smoke And eye autumn fatigue. Oh, the age of autumn! He me Dearer than youth and summer. You began to like doubly Poet's imagination. My heart never lies And therefore, to the voice of swagger I can safely say That I say goodbye to hooliganism. It's time to part with the mischievous And relentless courage. Another heart has already drunk, Sobering blood. And knocked on my window September with a crimson willow branch, So that I was ready and met His arrival is unpretentious. Now I put up with a lot No compulsion, no loss. Russia seems different to me, Other cemeteries and huts. Transparently I look around And I see whether there, here, somewhere, That you are alone, sister and friend, Could be a poet's companion. That I could only you Growing up in perseverance Sing about the twilight of the roads And outgoing hooliganism.
The evening furrowed black eyebrows. Someone's horses are standing in the yard. Was it not yesterday that I drank away my youth? Did I fall out of love with you not yesterday? Don't snore, belated trio! Our lives have gone by without a trace. Maybe tomorrow a hospital bed Will put me at ease forever. Maybe tomorrow will be different I'll leave healed forever Listen to the songs of rain and bird cherry, How does a healthy person live? I will forget the dark forces That tormented me, ruining. Sweet look! Cute face! Only one I will not forget you. Let me love another But with her, with her beloved, on the other, I'll tell you about you dear That once I called dear. I'll tell you how the past flowed Our life that was not the former ... Are you my daring head What have you brought me to?
mother's letter
Are you still alive, my old lady? I'm alive too. Hello you, hello! Let it flow over your hut That evening unspeakable light. They write to me that you, concealing anxiety, She was very sad about me, What do you often go to the road In an old-fashioned ramshackle. And you in the evening blue darkness We often see the same thing: Like someone is in a tavern fight for me He put a Finnish knife under the heart. Nothing, dear! Take it easy. It's just painful bullshit. I'm not such a bitter drunkard, To die without seeing you. I'm still just as gentle And I only dream about So that rather from rebellious longing Return to our low house. I'll be back when the branches spread In spring, our white garden. Only you me already at dawn Don't wake up like eight years ago. Don't wake up what you dreamed Don't worry about what didn't come true - Too early loss and fatigue I have experienced in my life. And don't teach me to pray. No need! There is no return to the old. You are my only help and joy, You are my only inexpressible light. So forget your worries Don't be so sad about me. Don't go to the road so often In an old-fashioned ramshackle.
We are now leaving little by little In the country where peace and grace. Maybe soon I will be on my way To collect mortal belongings. Lovely birch thickets! You earth! And you, plains sands! Before this host of departing I can't hide my anguish. I loved too much in this world Everything that envelops the soul in flesh. Peace to the aspens, which, spreading its branches, Look into the pink water! I thought a lot of thoughts in silence, I composed many songs about myself, And on this gloomy earth Happy that I breathed and lived. Happy that I kissed women Crumpled flowers, rolled on the grass And the beast, like our smaller brothers, Never hit on the head. I know that thickets do not bloom there, Rye does not ring with a swan's neck. That is why before the host of the departing I always get trembling. I know that in that country there will be no These fields, golden in the mist. That's why people are dear to me that live with me on earth.
The golden grove dissuaded Birch cheerful language, And the cranes, sadly flying, No more regrets for anyone. Whom to pity? After all, every wanderer in the world - Pass, enter and leave the house again. Hemp dreams about all the departed With a wide moon over the blue pond. I stand alone among the naked plain, And the cranes are carried by the wind into the distance, I'm full of thoughts about a cheerful youth, But I don't regret anything in the past. I do not regret the years wasted in vain, Do not feel sorry for the soul of a lilac flower. In the garden, a fire of red rowan is burning, But he cannot warm anyone. Rowan brushes will not burn, Grass will not disappear from yellowness, Like a tree sheds its leaves, So I drop sad words. And if time, sweeping by the wind, Rake them all into one unnecessary lump ... Say so ... that the grove is golden She answered in a sweet way.
From the cycle “Persian motifs”
I have never been to the Bosphorus You don't ask me about him. I saw the sea in your eyes Blazing blue fire. I did not go to Baghdad with a caravan, I did not take silk and henna there. Bend over with your beautiful figure, Let me rest on my knees. Or again, no matter how much I ask, There is no business for you forever What is in the distant name - Russia - I am a famous, recognized poet. Talyanka rings in my soul, In the moonlight, I hear a dog barking. Don't you want, Persian, To see the distant, blue edge? I didn't come here out of boredom. You called me, invisible. And me your swan hands Wrapped around like two wings. I've been looking for peace in fate for a long time, And although I do not curse my past life, Tell me something About your funny country. Drown in your soul the anguish of talyanka, Drink the breath of fresh spells, So that I'm talking about a far northerner I didn’t sigh, I didn’t think, I didn’t get bored. And although I have not been to the Bosphorus - I'll think of it for you. Anyway - your eyes are like the sea, Blue swaying fire.
You are my fallen maple, icy maple, Why are you standing bending under a white blizzard? Or what did you see? Or what did you hear? As if you went out for a walk in the village. And, like a drunken watchman, going out onto the road, He drowned in a snowdrift, froze his leg. Oh, and now I myself have become somewhat unstable, I won't get home from a friendly drinking party. There he met a willow, there he noticed a pine tree, He sang songs to them under a blizzard about summer. To myself I seemed to be the same maple, Only not fallen, but with might and main green. And, having lost modesty, having become foolish on the board, Like someone else's wife, he hugged a birch.
You don't love me, don't pity me Am I a little handsome? Without looking in the face, you are thrilled with passion, Putting my hands on my shoulders. Young, with a sensual grin, I am not gentle with you and not rude. Tell me how many have you caressed? How many hands do you remember? How many lips? I know they passed like shadows Without touching your fire To many you sat on your knees, And now you're sitting here with me. May your eyes be half closed And you think of someone else I myself do not love you very much, Drowning in a distant road. Don't call this ardor fate Frivolous quick-tempered connection, - How by chance I met you I smile and calmly disperse. Yes, and you will go your own way Spread the gloomy days Just don't touch the unkissed Only unburned do not mani. And when with another down the lane You will pass, talking about love, Maybe I'll go for a walk And we will meet with you again. Turning your shoulders closer to the other And leaning down a little You will tell me quietly: "Good evening ..." I will answer: "Good evening, miss." And nothing will disturb the soul And nothing will make her shiver, - Who loved, he cannot love, Who is burned, you will not set fire to.
Goodbye my friend, goodbye. My dear, you are in my chest. Destined parting Promises to meet in the future. Goodbye, my friend, without a hand, without a word. Do not be sad and do not sadness of the eyebrows, - In this life, dying is not new, But to live, of course, is not newer.
A deep interest in myth and national folklore becomes one of the most characteristic features of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. On the "paths of myth" in the first decade of the century, the creative searches of such dissimilar artists of the word as A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, K. Balmont,
S. Gorodetsky. The symbolist A. Dobrolyubov writes down folk songs and tales of the Olonets region, A. Remizov in the collection "Salting" (1907) masterfully reproduces the folk-epic folk epic form of narration, leading his story "salting": spring, summer, autumn, winter. In October 1906, Blok wrote for the first volume (“Folk Literature”) of the “History of Russian Literature” edited by Anichkov and Ovsyaniko-Kulikovskiy, a large article “The Poetry of Folk Conspiracies and Spells”, providing it with an extensive bibliography, which includes the scientific works of A.N. .Afanasiev, I.P. Sakharov, A.N. Veselovsky, E.V. Anichkov, A.A. Potebni and others.
Orientation to the folk - poetic forms of artistic thinking, the desire to know the present through the prism of the nationally colored "old times" is of fundamental importance for Russian symbolism. The immediate keen interest of the younger symbolists in folklore was noted by Anichkov, who pointed out in one of his works that "the development of the lower arts is the very basis of new trends." Blok emphasized the same thing in his article: “The whole area of folk rituals and rituals turned out to be the ore where the gold of genuine poetry shines; the gold that provides book "paper" poetry - right up to our days. The fact that interest in myths and folklore was a common and pronounced trend in Russian art and literature at the beginning of the century is evidenced by the fact that S.A. "Artistic Folklorism and Proximity to the Soil", dedicated to the work of Klyuev, Remizov, Gorodetsky and others. And although the plan did not materialize, it itself is very indicative.
During the First World War, the interest of the literary and artistic intelligentsia in ancient Russian art, literature, the poetic world of ancient folk legends, and Slavic mythology became even more acute. Under these conditions, the work of the new peasants attracted the attention of Sergei Gorodetsky, by that time the author of the books "Yar" (1906), "Perun" (1907), "Wild Will" (1908), "Rus" (1910), "Willow" (1913 ). In "Yari" Gorodetsky tried to revive the world of ancient Slavic mythology, building his own mythopoetic picture of the world. He supplements a number of well-known Slavic pagan deities and characters of folk demonology (Yarila, Kupalo, Baryba, Udras, etc.) with new ones, invented by himself, filling the mythological images with a tangibly carnal, concrete-sensual content. Gorodetsky dedicated the poem “Glorify Yarila” to N. Roerich, whose artistic searches were consonant with the ancient Russian coloring of “Yari”.
On the other hand, the poetry of Gorodetsky himself, Vyach. Ivanov, the prose of A. Remizov, the philosophy and painting of N. Roerich could not fail to attract the attention of the new peasants with their appeal to ancient Russian antiquity, knowledge of Slavic pagan mythology, a sense of the folk Russian language, heightened patriotism. "That place is holy - holy and strong Russia" - the refrain of Remizov's book "Fortified" (1916). “Between Klyuev, on the one hand,” noted professor of literature P. Sakulin in a review with the remarkable title “People's Golden Flower”, - Blok, Balmont, Gorodetsky, Bryusov, on the other hand, turned out to be an interesting contact. Beauty is many-sided, but one.
In October-November 1915, a literary and artistic group "Krasa" was created, headed by Gorodetsky and which included peasant poets. The members of the group were united by their love for Russian antiquity, oral poetry, folk song and epic images. However, "Beauty" did not last long: peasant poets, and, above all, the most experienced and wise of them - Klyuev, even then saw the inequality of their relationship with salon aesthetes. The poetic cafe of the acmeists "The Stray Dog", which Klyuev visited several times back in 1912-1913, from the first visit will forever become for him a symbol of everything hostile to the peasant poet.
The group of new peasant poets that developed during the years of distinct differentiation in literature did not represent a clearly defined literary trend with a strict ideological and theoretical program, which were numerous literary groups - their predecessors and contemporaries: peasant poets did not issue poetic declarations and did not theoretically substantiate their literary and artistic principles. However, there is no doubt that their group is distinguished by a bright literary originality and social and ideological unity, which makes it possible to distinguish it from the general stream of neo-populist literature of the 20th century. The peasant environment itself shaped the features of the artistic thinking of the new peasants, organically close to the folk one. Never before has the world of peasant life, depicted taking into account local features of life, dialect, folklore traditions (Nikolai Klyuev recreates the ethnographic and linguistic flavor of Zaonezhie, Sergei Yesenin - Ryazan region, Sergey Klychkov - Tver province, Alexander Shiryaevets models the Volga region), did not find such an adequate expression in Russian literature: in the work of the new peasants, with scrupulous, carefully verified ethnographic accuracy, all the signs of this peasant world are recreated.
Rural Russia is the main source of the poetic worldview of peasant poets. Yesenin emphasized his initial connection with her - the very biographical circumstances of his birth among nature, in a field or in a forest (“Mother went to the bathhouse through the forest ...”), this theme is continued by Klychkov in a poem with a folklore-song beginning “I was over the river valley ... ", in which the animated forces of nature act as successors and first nannies of a newborn baby:
There was a valley above the river In the dense forest near the village, -
In the evening, picking raspberries,
On it my mother gave birth to me ...
With the circumstances of birth (however, quite ordinary for peasant children), poets also associated the features of their character. Hence, the motive of "returning to their homeland" has become stronger in the work of the new peasants. “I’ve been longing in the city, for three whole years now, along the hare paths, along the doves, willows, and my mother’s miraculous spinning wheel,” Klyuev admits. In the work of Klychkov, this motive is one of the central ones:
In a foreign land, far from my homeland, I remember my garden and home.
Currants are blooming there now And under the windows - bird sodom.
This time of spring, early Lonely I meet in the distance.
Oh, to snuggle up, listen to the breath, Look into the glowing glow of the dear mother - the native land!
(Klychkov, In a foreign land far from home ...)
The poetic practice of the new peasants already at an early stage made it possible to highlight such common moments in their work as the poeticization of peasant labor (“Bow to you, work and sweat!”) And village life, zoo- and anthropomorphism (anthropomorphization of natural phenomena is one of the characteristic features of folklore thinking categories), a keen sense of one’s inextricable connection with the living world:
The cry of a child across the field and the river,
Cock crow, like pain, miles away,
And the spider's tread, like melancholy,
I hear through the growths of the scab.
(Klyuev, The cry of a child through the field and the river...)
The question of the moral and religious quests of the new peasants is a very complex and by now far from being studied. "The fire of religious consciousness", which feeds Klyuev's work, was noted by Bryusov in the preface to the first collection of the poet "Pine Chimes". A huge influence on the formation of Klyuyev's creativity was exerted by Khlystism, in whose religious rites there is a complex alloy of elements of the Christian religion, elements of pre-Christian Russian paganism and the Dionysian beginning of ancient paganism with elements of secret, unexplored beliefs.
As for Yesenin’s attitude to religion, although he recalls in his autobiography (1923): “I believed little in God, I didn’t like to go to church” and admits in another version of it (October, 1025): “From many of my religious poems and poems, I would gladly refuse ... ”, - undoubtedly, the traditions of Orthodox Christian culture had a certain influence on the formation of his youthful worldview.
As a friend of the poet V. Chernyavsky testifies, the Bible was table book Yesenin, carefully read again and again by him, dotted with pencil marks, shabby from constant contact with her - she was remembered and described in her memoirs by many of those who met closely with the poet. Among the many highlighted places in Yesenin's copy of the Bible was the first paragraph of the fifth chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, crossed out with a vertical pencil line: because God is in heaven and you are on earth; therefore let your words be few. For as dreams come with many worries, so the voice of a fool is known with many words.
During the years of the revolution and the first post-revolutionary years, revising his attitude to religion (“I shout to you: “To hell with the old!”, / Recalcitrant, robber son” - “Pantocrator”), Yesenin deduced the features of the function that religious symbols performed in his creativity, not so much from the Christian, so much from the ancient Slavic pagan religion.
Yesenin - especially at the time of his belonging to the “Order of the Imaginists” - will exclaim more than once in the heat of controversy: “Better is a foxtrot with a healthy and clean body than the eternal song of dirty sick and crippled people about Lazarus that tears the soul in Russian fields. Get the hell out of here with your God and your churches. Build toilets better of them ... ". However, a piercing longing for the lost (“Something is lost forever by everyone ...”) will begin to break through more and more often:
I'm ashamed that I believed in God
I'm sorry that I don't believe it now.
(I have one fun left...)
Recreating in his works the color of everyday and ritual symbols of peasant Russia, Yesenin, on the one hand, as a Christian -
I believed from birth In the protection of the Mother of God (I feel the Rainbow of God...)
Light from a pink icon on my golden eyelashes (Silver-zoon bell...) he yearns for the highest meaning of being, for the “beautiful, but unearthly / Unsolved land” (“The winds did not blow in vain ...”), his eyes “are in love with another land” (“He spread out patterned again ...”), and “ the soul is sad about heaven, / She is a tenant of unearthly fields ”(poem of the same name). On the other hand, pagan motives clearly appeared in the work of Yesenin and other new peasants, which can be explained by the fact that the ethical, aesthetic, religious and folklore-mythological ideas of the Russian peasant, enclosed in a single coherent system, had two different sources: in addition to the Christian religion, and ancient Slavic paganism, numbering several millennia.
Indomitable pagan love of life is a distinctive feature of the lyrical hero Shiryaevets:
The choir praises the Almighty Lord,
Akathists, canons, troparia,
But I hear Kupala night sun cliques,
And in the altar - the dance of the playful dawn!
(The choir praises the Almighty Lord...)
Abundantly using religious symbolism and archaic lechaeus in their works, the new peasant poets, on the path of their ideological and aesthetic searches, approached certain artistic searches in Russian art of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. First of all, this is the work of V.M. Vasnetsov, who for the first time in Russian art made an attempt to find pictorial equivalents to the traditional folk-poetic images of the epic tale. These are the canvases of V.I. Surikov, resurrecting the legendary and heroic pages of national history, especially his work of the last period, when it merges with the line in Russian art dating back to Vasnetsov’s canvases, when plots and images are drawn not directly from real history, but from the history already processed, poetically decorated with folk fantasy. This is a "Nesterov" theme, not concretized in historical time - monastic Russia, which seemed to the artist a timeless ideal of the original fusion of human existence with the life of nature - pristine virgin nature, not suffocating under the yoke of civilization, removed from the destructive breath of the modern "iron" city.
New peasant poets were the first in Russian literature to elevate rural life to a previously unattainable level of philosophical understanding of the national foundations of being, and a simple village hut to the highest degree of beauty and harmony:
Conversation hut - a semblance of the universe:
In it, sholom - heaven, half - the Milky Way,
Where the helmsman's mind, the mournful soul Under the spindle clergy can rest sweetly.
(Where it smells of kumach - there are women's gatherings ...) poetized her living soul:
Hut-hero,
carved kokoshnik,
Window like an eye socket
Summed up with antimony.
(Klyuev, Izba-bogatyrsa...)
Yesenin proclaimed himself the poet of the “golden log hut” (“The feather grass is sleeping. The plain is dear ...”). Klychkov poetizes the peasant hut in his "Home Songs". Klyuev in the cycle “To the Poet Sergei Yesenin” persistently reminds his “younger brother” of his origins: “The hut is a feeder of words - / It didn’t raise you in vain ...”.
For the peasant farmer and the peasant poet, such concepts as the mother of the land, the hut, the economy are the concepts of one ethical and aesthetic series, one moral root, and the highest moral value of life is physical labor, the unhurried, natural course of a simple village life. In the poem "Grandfather's Plowing", Klychkov, in accordance with the norms of folk morality, argues that many diseases also stem from idleness, laziness, that a healthy lifestyle is closely related to physical labor. Klychkovsky grandfather after forced winter idleness -
I prayed, shone my clothes,
Unwound onuchi from his feet.
He was embittered, lying down the winter,
Loin sick.
The original folk ideas about physical labor as the basis of the foundations of peasant life are affirmed in Yesenin's famous poem "I'm going through the valley ...":
To hell, I'm taking off my English suit.
Well, give me a scythe, I'll show you -
Am I not your own, am I not close to you,
Do I not value the memory of the village?
For Klyuev:
The joy of seeing the first stack,
The first sheaf from the native strip,
There is a pudding cake On the border, in the shade of a birch ...
(Klyuev, The joy of seeing the first haystack...)
For Klychkov and his characters, who feel like a particle of a single Mother Nature, who are in a harmonious relationship with her, death is something absolutely not terrible and natural, like a change, for example, of the seasons or the melting of “hoarfrost in the spring”, as Klyuev defined death. To die, according to Klychkov, means "to go into the undead, like roots into the ground", and death in his work is presented not in the literary and traditional image of a disgusting old woman with a stick, but an attractive peasant worker:
Tired of the daily chores
How good is a hollow shirt to brush off the hardworking sweat
Move closer to the cup
Chew with seriousness a piece,
Pull the prison with a big spoon,
Calmly listening to the bass of the storm Gathering for the night ...
How good it is when in the family,
Where is the son of the groom, and the daughter of the bride,
Already there is not enough place on the bench Under the old goddess of place ...
Then, having overcome fate, like everyone else,
It is not surprising to meet death in the evening,
Like a reaper in young oats With a sickle thrown over her shoulders.
(Klychkov, Tired of the daily chores...)
The typological commonality of the philosophical and aesthetic concept of the world of the new peasant poets is manifested in their solution of the theme of nature. One of the most important features of their work is that the theme of nature in their works carries the most important not only semantic, but conceptual load, revealing itself through the universal multifaceted antithesis "nature-civilization" with its numerous specific oppositions: "people - intelligentsia", "village - city", "natural man - city dweller", "patriarchal past - modernity", "earth - iron", "feeling - reason", etc.
It is noteworthy that in Esenin's work there are no urban landscapes. Their fragments - "skeletons of houses", "a chilled lantern", "curved Moscow streets" - are single, random and do not add up to a whole picture. “The Moscow mischievous reveler”, who went up and down the “entire Tver district”, Yesenin does not even find words to describe the month in the city sky: “And when the moon shines at night, / When it shines ... the devil knows how!” ("Yes! Now it's decided. No return...").
Shiryaevets acts as a consistent anti-urbanist in his work:
I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!
I listen to epic streams!
Let the cities have the best confectioners
Easter cakes are poured into me in sugar -
I will not stay in a stone lair!
I'm cold in the heat of his palaces!
To the fields! to Bryn! to the cursed tracts!
To the legends of grandfathers - wise simpletons!
(Shiryaevets, I - in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!..)
In his multi-page treatise "The Stone-Iron Monster" (i.e. City), completed by 1920 and still unpublished, Shiryaevets most fully and comprehensively expressed the goal setting of the new peasant poetry: to return literature "to the miraculous keys of Mother Earth ". The treatise begins with an apocryphal legend about the demonic origin of the City, then replaced by a fairy tale-allegory about the young Town (then - the City), the son of the Silly Villager and the ventilated Man, who, in order to please the devil, strictly fulfills the parent’s dying order “multiply!”, so that the devil “dances and grunts in joy, mocking the defiled earth.
The demonic origin of the City is emphasized by Klyuev:
Frightening us with a stone throat ...
(From cellars, from dark corners...), and Klychkov in the novel "Sugar German", continuing the same idea, affirms the dead end, the futility of the path that the City is following - there is no place for the Dream in it:
"City, city!
Under you, the earth does not even look like earth ... Satan killed, rammed it with an iron hoof, rolled it with an iron back, rolling on it, like a horse riding in a meadow in a wash ...
That is why stone ships grew on it ... that is why stone ships laid down their iron sails, red, green, silver-white roofs, and now, when the transparent autumn is pouring frost and azure on them, they look from afar like an endless sea hanging in the air folded wings, how to fold them migratory birds to fall to the ground...
Do not flap these wings from the ground!...
Do not rise from the ground to these birds! .. "
Distinct anti-urban motifs - and in Klyuev's ideal of Beauty, originating in folk art, put forward by the poet as a link between the Past and the Future. In the present, in the realities of the Iron Age, Beauty is trampled down and desecrated (“A deadly theft has been accomplished, / Mother Beauty has been debunked!”), and therefore the links of the Past and the Future have been broken. But after a period of time, Klyuev prophetically points out, Russia will be reborn: it will not only regain the memory of the people that was lost, but the eyes of the West will turn to it with hope:
In the ninety-ninth summer, the cursed castle will creak,
And the gems of dazzling prophetic lines will bubble up like a river.
The melodious foam will overwhelm Kholmogorye and Celebey,
A sieve will catch the Vein of the Silvery words-crucians.
(I know songs will be born...)
It was the new peasant poets who at the beginning of the 20th century loudly proclaimed: nature in itself is the greatest aesthetic value. And if in the poems of the Klyuev collection "Lion's Bread" the attack of "iron" on wildlife is a premonition, a premonition that has not yet become a terrible reality ("I would shy away from hearsay / About the iron restlessness!"), Then in the images of "Village", "Pogorelytsina ”, “Songs about the Great Mother” - a reality that is already tragic for peasant poets. However, in the approach to this topic, the differentiation of their work is clearly visible. Yesenin and Oreshin, although not easy, painful, through pain and blood, are ready to see the future of Russia, in Yesenin's words, "through stone and steel." For Klyuev, Klychkov, Shiryaevets, who were in the grip of the ideas of a "peasant's paradise", his idea was fully realized by the patriarchal past, the Russian gray-haired antiquity with its fairy tales, legends, beliefs. “I don’t like the accursed modernity, destroying the fairy tale,” Shiryaevets admitted in a letter to Khodasevich (1917), “and without a fairy tale, what is life in the world?” For Klyuev, the destruction of a fairy tale, a legend, the destruction of a host of mythological characters is an irreparable loss:
Where the forest darkness
From the headboards the unta fairy tale is inaudible.
Brownies, undead, mavki -
Only rubbish, hardened dust...
(Village)
Shiryaevets’s rejection of contemporary reality was manifested with particular force in two poems of 1920: “Steel birds do not fly over me ...” and “Volga”. In the first, Shiryaevets again and again emphasizes his commitment to patriarchal antiquity:
Steel birds do not fly over me,
Titmouse from Izborsk is a mile flight for me! ..
I'm awake, yes, I'm not dreaming! -
I swim in the silks of scarlet ships.
There are no railway stations!.. Iron, hoarse roars!
No black locomotives! - I'm not yours!
There is a spring noise in the shining oak trees,
Singing Sadko, ringing heroic bowls!
in the second, he contrasts the past with modernity in its most ecologically unsightly manifestations.
The fact that the predatory extermination of nature leads to the spiritual impoverishment of a person, has lost “irreplaceable moral values” by him, Klychkov 1fedu1feeds in his books: “It’s not for a bitter pori, when a person in the forest strangles all the animals, from the river” he will die out the fish, birds in the air he will catch and make all the trees kiss his feet - he will cut with a saw-spring. Then God will turn away from the desolate earth and from the desolate human soul, and the iron devil, who is only waiting for this and cannot wait, will screw a gear or a nut from the machine in place of the soul, because the devil is in spiritual matters. a decent locksmith... With this nut instead of a soul, a person, without noticing it and not bothering in the least, will live and live until the end of time...” (“Chertukhinsky Balakir”).
New peasant poets defended their spiritual values, the ideal of primordial harmony with the natural world in polemics with proletarian theories of technization and mechanization of the world. At a time when the representatives of the Iron Age in literature rejected everything “old” (“We are the peddlers of the new faith, / Beauty sets the iron tone. / So that the frail nature does not defile the squares, / We caricature reinforced concrete into heaven”), the new peasants, who saw the main reason evil in isolation from natural roots, from the people's worldview, which is reflected in everyday life, the very way of peasant life, folklore, folk traditions, national cultures "("syryutinki" in Klyuev's poem "In memory of the Olonets women ..." simple-heartedly- pityingly named poets, "forgotten their father's house"), - stood up for this "old".
If the proletarian poets declared in the poem “We”: “We will take everything, we will know everything, / We will plunge deep to the bottom ...”, the peasant poets asserted the opposite: “To know everything, take nothing / A poet came into this world” (Yesenin , "Mare Ships"). If the “peddlers of the new faith”, while defending the collective, denied the individual-human, everything that makes a person unique, ridiculed such categories as
"soul", "heart", - all that without which it is impossible to imagine the work of the new peasants - the latter were firmly convinced that the future was in their poetry. In modern times, the conflict between "nature" and "iron" ended in the victory of "iron": in the final poem "A Field Sown with Bones ..." in the collection "Lion's Bread" Klyuev gives a terrible, truly apocalyptic panorama of the "Iron Age", repeatedly defining it through the epithet "faceless". The “blue fields” of Russia, glorified by peasant poets, are now dotted with “... bones, / Skulls with a toothless yawn”, and above them, “... rattling flywheels, / Nameless and faceless someone”: Above the dead steppe, a faceless something It gave birth to madness, darkness, emptiness...
Dreaming of a time when "there will be no songs about the hammer, about the invisible flywheel" and it will become "the horn of an extinct hell - a worldly field of fire", Klyuev expressed his secret, prophetic:
The hour will strike, and proletarian children will fall to the peasant lyre.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Russia approached the country of peasant agriculture, based on more than a thousand years of traditional culture, polished in its spiritual and moral content to perfection. In the 1920s, the way of Russian peasant life, infinitely dear to peasant poets, began to collapse before their eyes. Pain for the waning origins of life oozes written in the 20-30s. Klychkov's novels, Klyuev's works, Yesenin's letters, which researchers still have to read carefully.
The revolution promised to fulfill the age-old dream of the peasants: to give them land. The peasant community, in which the poets saw the basis of the foundations of harmonious existence, was reanimated for a short time, peasant gatherings roared through the villages:
Here I see: Sunday villagers At the volost, as in a church, gathered. With clumsy, unwashed speeches, they discuss their "zhis".
(Yesenin, Soviet Russia.)
However, already in the summer of 1918, a systematic offensive began to destroy the foundations of the peasant community, food detachments were sent to the village, and from the beginning of 1919, a system of food requisitions was introduced. Millions and millions of peasants perish as a result of hostilities, famine and epidemics. Direct terror against the peasantry begins - a policy of depeasantization, which eventually brought terrible results: the age-old foundations of Russian peasant management were destroyed. The peasants violently rebelled against the exorbitant exactions - the Veshensky uprising on the Don, the uprising of the Tambov and Voronezh peasants, hundreds of peasant uprisings similar to them, but on a smaller scale. The country was going through another tragic phase of its history, and Yesenin's letters of this time are permeated with painful, intense searches for the meaning of the present, which is happening before our eyes. If earlier, in 1918, the poet wrote: “We believe that miraculous healing will now give birth to an even more enlightened feeling of new life in the village,” then in a letter to E. Livshits dated June 8, 1920, there is a directly opposite impression of what is happening in “ new village: “Despite the fact that I had not been there for three years, I didn’t like it very much, there are a lot of reasons, but it’s inconvenient to talk about them in letters.” “Because it’s not like that now. Horror, how unlike, - he conveys to G. Benislavskaya in a letter dated July 15, 1924, the impression of visiting his native village. A small foal running a race with a train, seen in August 1920 from the window of the Kislovodsk-Baku train and then sung in Sorokoust, for Yesenin becomes "an expensive endangered image of the village."
M. Babenchikov, who met with Yelenin in the early 1920s, notes his “hidden anxiety”: “Some kind of relentless thought drilled Yesenin’s brain .., forcing him to constantly return to the same topic: “- Village, village. .. The village is life, but the city...”. And, suddenly breaking off his thought: “This conversation is hard for me. He crushes me." The same memoirist cites a significant episode in the winter of 1922 in the mansion of A. Duncan on Prechistenka, when “Elenin, squatting, absentmindedly moved the burning firebrands with difficulty, and then, sullenly resting his unseeing eyes on one point, quietly began:“ Was in the village. Everything is collapsing... You have to be there yourself to understand... The end of everything.”
"The end of everything" - that is, all hopes for the renewal of life, dreams of a happy future for the Russian peasant. Is it not about this gullibility of the Russian peasant with bitterness and pain that G.I. Uspensky, highly valued by Yesenin, wrote, warning about the inevitable tragic and terrible disappointment in the next “fairy tale”? “With a broken trough,” the writer reminded, “... from time immemorial, every Russian fairy tale; starting in anguish and suffering, continuing with dreams of a bright free life, after a whole series of countless torments endured by the seeker of freedom, it leads him again to grief and suffering, and in front of him ... "again a broken trough."
As a result of social experiments, in front of the eyes of peasant poets involved in a tragic conflict with the era, an unprecedented collapse of the most precious thing for them began - traditional peasant culture, folk foundations of life and national consciousness.
Peasant poets receive the label "kulak", while one of the main slogans of the life of the country is the slogan "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." Slandered and slandered, the resistance poets continue to work, and it is no coincidence that one of Klyuev's central poems of 1932, with its transparent metaphorical symbolism, addressed to the leaders of the country's literary life, is called "Slanderers of Art":
I am angry with you and scold you bitterly,
What is ten years old for a melodious horse,
A diamond bridle, made of gold,
The blanket is embroidered with consonances,
You didn't give even a handful of oats And didn't let you into the meadow, where the drunken dew Freshened the broken wings of a swan...
New peasant literature is the only trend in Russian literature of the 20th century, all of whose representatives, without exception, fearlessly entered into a mortal struggle with the Iron Age in their works and were destroyed in this unequal struggle. In the period from 1924 to 1938, all of them - directly or indirectly - become victims of the System: in 1924 - Alexander Shiryaevets, in 1925 - Sergei Yesenin and Alexei Ganin, in 1937 - Nikolai Klyuev and young poets Ivan Pribludny and Pavel Vasilyev, in 1938 - Sergey Klychkov and Petr Oreshin.
At the end of the 20th century, it is destined to read in a new way into the works of new peasant writers - continuing the traditions of Russian literature of the Silver Age, they oppose the Iron Age: they contain true spiritual values and truly high morality, they carry the spirit of high freedom - from power, from dogma, they affirm a careful attitude to the human person, defend the connection with national origins, folk art as the only fruitful path of the artist's creative evolution.
ANNOTATED REFERENCES
Ponomareva T. A. New peasant prose of the 1920s: At 2 o'clock. Cherepovets, 2005. Part 1. Philosophical and artistic research by N. Klyuev, A. Ganin, P. Karpov. Part 2. "Round World" by Sergei Klychkov.
The monograph is devoted to the prose of N. Klyuev, S. Klychkov, P. Karpov, A. Ganin of the 1920s, but broadly presents the origins of the work of peasant writers in the literature of the Silver Age. New peasant literature is comprehended in historical, national and religious-philosophical aspects. The work of new peasant writers is considered in relation to mythopoetics, folklore, ancient Russian literature and literature of the first third of the 20th century.
Savchenko I K. Yesenin and Russian literature of the XX century. Influences. Mutual influences. Literary and creative connections. M.: Russki m1r, 2014.
The book is devoted to the problem of "Yesenin and Russian literature of the XX century" and is the first monographic study of this kind; some archival documents and materials are introduced into literary circulation for the first time. In particular, Yesenin’s literary and creative ties with peasant writers are studied in detail: in the chapters ““ No one attracted Yesenin spiritually so much ”: Sergey Yesenin and Alexander Shiryaevets ”and“ This one is wildly gifted! ”: Sergey Yesenin and Maxim Gorky. The topic "Gorky and the New Peasant Writers in their attitude to the 'hack Russia'" is studied in detail.
Solntseva N. M. Kitezh Peacock: Philological Prose. Documentation. Facts. Versions. M. : Scythians, 1992.
The book contains essays on philological prose dedicated to the work of peasant writers. The work of S. Klychkov, N. Klyuev, P. Karpov, P. Vasiliev is analyzed in particular detail. The wide use of documentary materials gives the study a deeply scientific character, and the genre of philological prose, in the tradition of which the book is written, gives the character of fascinating reading. The author offers the reader not only literary facts, but also his own versions and hypotheses related to the work of new peasant writers.
- Obviously, the internal controversy with the Acmeist "Workshop of Poets" dictated and exaggerated the stylized form - in the form of a humble petition - donating Klyuev's inscription to N. Gumilyov on the collection "Forests were": "To Nicholas the light of Stepanovich Gumilyov from the great Novogorod Obonezhsky patch of the graveyard of Friday Paraskovia near the garden of Solovyovgora, the songwriter Nikolashka on the liqueur, Klyuev sings glory, bowing respectfully, pays the Lenten day to the memory of the holy prophet Joel, one thousand nine hundred and thirteenth year from the birth of the Bogoslov.
- In terms of the atom, the character of the literary pseudonym chosen by one of the proletarian poets, Bezymensky, is also not accidental.
