DEFENSE OF A LITERATURE PROJECT.
Slide 1
The project I worked on is called “Native nature in the lyrics of Sergei Yesenin”
Slide 2
The goal of my project: Understand the poet’s attitude to his native nature using the example of S. Yesenin’s poetry.
Tasks:
Study the biography of the poet
Choose poems about nature
Answer the question: How did the poet feel about his native nature?
The results of my project were:
Expressive reading poems
Computer presentation
Why did I choose this particular topic? Because I like the poetry of S. Yesenin. I also really love nature
When I read the poems for the first time, they simply amazed me. It was as if I saw with my own eyes all of Russian nature. I also wanted to find and read Yesenin’s poems about nature. I found a lot of literature about the poet and his work and prepared this work.
Slide 3
Sergei Yesenin was born on September 21, 1895 in an ordinary peasant family and from the very beginning early years had a subtle and vulnerable soul and temperament. His mother and father lived in the village of Konstantinova, but his maternal grandfather was in charge of raising him. It is he, being prosperous and smart person, who loved books, taught the very young Yesenin to love nature and art, which later became one of the main themes of his creative activity.
Slide 4
Russian village, nature of central Russia, oral folk art, and most importantly, Russian classical literature had a strong influence on the formation young poet, channeled his natural talent.
Yesenin himself at different times names different sources that fed his work: songs, ditties, fairy tales, spiritual poems, poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, Nikitin.
Slide 5
Many wonderful poems by S. Yesenin are dedicated to his native nature. They must be read carefully, trying to understand the main mood, get used to the rhythm, the music of the verse, in order to understand how the words fit into stanzas.
Slide 6
Birch
White birch
Below my window
Covered with snow
Exactly silver.
On fluffy branches
Snow border
The brushes have blossomed
White fringe.
And the birch tree stands
In sleepy silence,
And the snowflakes are burning
In golden fire.
And the dawn is lazy
Walking around
Sprinkles branches
New silver
Slide 7
The poem “Birch” was first published in 1914 in the children’s magazine “Mirok”, although it was written by the author back in 1913. Since then it has become widely known and loved by the reader. The poem is dedicated to the beautiful birch tree. It expresses Yesenin’s love for the nature of his native land.
Slide 8 (video)
The bird cherry tree is pouring snow,
Greenery in bloom and dew.
In the field, leaning towards escape,
Rooks walk in the strip.
Silk herbs will disappear,
Smells like resinous pine.
Oh, meadows and oak groves, -
I'm besotted with spring.
Rainbow secret news
Shine into my soul.
I'm thinking about the bride
I only sing about her.
Rash you, bird cherry, with snow,
Sing, you birds, in the forest.
Unsteady run across the field
I will spread the color with foam.
Slide 9
“The bird cherry is pouring snow...” - a poem dated 1910 and belonging to the early landscape lyrics Yesenina. It reflected the young poet’s fresh look at the beauty of nature. The work is imbued with the joy caused by the coming spring - sometimes renewal, rebirth, love. The lyrical hero is besotted by her.
Slide 10
The themes of homeland and nature in Yesenin’s poetry are closely interrelated. A poet cannot be indifferent to its fields, meadows, and rivers; while describing nature, the poet thereby describes his homeland, since nature is part of the homeland. Great love for Russia gave Sergei Yesenin the right to say:
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name "Rus".
When preparing the project, I listened to many of Sergei Yesenin’s poems performed by famous theater and film artists. I especially liked the poems performed by the artist Sergei Bezrukov. Fascinating poetry reading!!!
Slide 11 (video)
Slide 12
Yesenin's poetry is near and dear to many peoples; his poems are heard in different languages.
The poet's merit is great.
His works touch on topics close to the people.
Yesenin's language is simple and accessible.
Poetry excites the heart and attracts with its originality and poetic beauty.
Yesenin is a lover of life. And he embodies this quality in his poems, reading which, you involuntarily begin to look at life from the other side, treat everything more simply, learn to love your land,
I'm in love with Yesenin's lyrics!!!
Slide 13
While working on the project I found out:
The main theme of Sergei Yesenin’s lyrics is the theme of nature and the Motherland.
Reading Yesenin's poems, I realized that nature has a soul, it is alive.
Every poet enters the temple of nature with
with your “prayer” and your palette.
V. Bazanov
Probably, every person born in Russia has always had such a reverent feeling and perception of nature as, perhaps, no one else in the world. Spring, summer, autumn and especially the Russian “winter-winter”, as they lovingly used to say about it among our simple but great Russian people, took and take for living soul, causing you to experience deep feelings similar to exciting love experiences. And how can we not love all the beauty and charm that surrounds us: white snow, the fresh greenery of vast forests and meadows, the dark depths of lakes and rivers, the red gold of falling leaves, which since childhood have delighted the eye with their multicoloredness, filling the excited heart of any person with seething emotions, but especially the poet and creator of words. Such as the wonderful poet Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin, who in his many-sided creativity, in his soulful lyrics, left a special place for the sometimes harsh, but always beautiful Russian Mother Nature. And this is no wonder.
Born in the village of Konstantinovo, in the center of Russia, Yesenin saw and contemplated around him such indescribable beauty and charm that can only be found in his homeland, whose immensely wide open spaces, whose solemn grandeur inspired already in childhood those thoughts and reflections that he passed on to us later in its inspired and moving lyrics.
The village of Konstantinovo, his native Ryazan region - these places awakened awe and poetic passion for creativity in Sergei Yesenin. It was his native north that was most inspiring for the poet. I think that only there, only in the north of Russia, with its special, strong, but gentle spirit, could one be imbued with the same feelings that Yesenin experienced, giving birth to these magical lines on one of the long winter evenings:
I'm going. Quiet. Rings are heard
Under the hoof in the snow,
Only gray crows
They made noise in the meadow.
This is not an ordinary “Coachman Romance”. Both the coachman and the rider are absent; they are replaced by the poet himself. The trip does not evoke any associations for him; he does without the usual road sadness. Everything is extremely simple, as if copied from nature:
Bewitched by the invisible
The forest slumbers under the fairy tale of sleep,
Like a white scarf
The pine tree has tied up.
The simplicity of these lines, the naturalness of the style, contain true genius and skill, expressed by the poet with the help of the mighty Russian language. This skill makes you imagine a blizzard, a winter forest, and the sound of hooves on the snow crust so vividly that you no longer need to see the real picture: the imagination, set free, will immediately complete the picture of the winter forest. Well, how can we not remember Surikov, Shishkin, Savrasov!
Both the painter’s brush and Yesenin’s pen vividly and brightly brought out on white sheets of paper those wonderful paintings for which you didn’t have to go far from home to Spain, France, Germany or anywhere else: they were right here - in the forests Ryazan region, in the white nights of St. Petersburg, in autumn-gilded Konstantinov. Wherever the poet cast his gaze, a feeling of creative inspiration seemed to roll over him, sometimes permeated with sadness and quiet melancholy, like nature itself:
You are my abandoned land,
You are my land, wasteland,
Uncut hayfield
Forest and monastery.
When you read Yesenin’s poems about nature, the full power of the great and mighty Russian word falls on your consciousness, forcing it to appeal to authentic life images, perhaps never truly seen, but so surprisingly real.
Goy, my dear Rus',
Huts - in the robes of the image...
No end in sight -
Only the blue blinds the eyes.
Only the words of such a magnificent master as Sergei Yesenin can create images that cannot be seen except with one’s own eyes. And strength and inspiration, which can rarely be found even in the smell, sounds, color of the life around us, but captured on paper, gush from every Yesenin line - like in the passage below:
Like birds whistling miles
From under the horse's hooves.
And the sun splashes with a handful
Its rain on me.
These short lines contained, without losing their completeness, an amazing image of a wide steppe road, free wind and a bright sunny day. Many words would not be enough for anyone to so accurately, vividly and aptly depict the attractive view of a Russian country road that involuntarily appears before us.
You read and enjoy the simplicity of the poetic mastery of Sergei Yesenin, who is not without reason put in one of the first places among the great Russian poets.
Yesenin claimed that he was “the last poet of the village” in Russia. His poems lovingly describe the small details of village life:
It smells like loose hogweed;
There's kvass in the bowl at the doorstep,
Over chiseled stoves
Cockroaches crawl into the groove.
Soot curls over the damper,
There are threads of Popelitz in the stove,
And on the bench behind the salt shaker -
Raw egg husks.
Every phrase is an artistic detail. And we feel: every detail evokes the poet’s tenderness, all this is dear to him.
He often resorts to personification. His bird cherry “sleeps in a white cape,” the willows “cry,” the poplars “whisper,” “the cloud has tied lace in the grove.”
Sergei Yesenin's nature is multicolored and colorful. The poet’s favorite colors are blue and light blue. These color tones enhance the feeling of the immensity of the blue expanses of Russia (“blue that fell into the river”, “only blue sucks the eyes”, “on a heavenly blue platter”),
And Sergei Yesenin’s descriptions of nature always correlate with the expression of the poet’s moods. No matter how closely his name is associated with the idea of poetic pictures of Russian nature, his lyrics are not landscape in the corresponding sense of the word. Maple, bird cherry, autumn in the poet’s poems are not just signs of his native Russian nature, they are a chain of metaphors with the help of which the poet talks about himself, his moods, and his destiny. The poetry of Sergei Yesenin teaches us to see, feel, think, that is, live.
The theme of nature runs through all of S. Yesenin’s work and is its main component. For example, in the poem “Rus” he speaks very affectionately about Russian nature:
I've become ignorant all around
Grove of spruce and birch trees,
Through the bushes in a green meadow
The flakes of blue dew are clinging...
And how beautifully the poet describes the dawn: “The scarlet light of dawn was woven on the lake...”.
Yesenin’s month is a “curly lamb” that “walks in the blue grass”, “behind a dark strand of woods, in the unshakable blue.”
We can say that the theme of nature is revealed in almost all of S. Yesenin’s poems, and the poet not only describes everything that surrounds him, but also compares natural phenomena with human body: “The heart glows with cornflowers, turquoise burns in it.”
The poet is “stupefied in the spring,” when “the bird cherry trees are showering with snow, greenery is in bloom and dew, and rooks are walking in the field, leaning towards the shoots.” In the poem “Beloved Land! My heart dreams..." S. says:
Favorite region! I dream about my heart
Stacks of sun in the waters of the bosom,
I would like to get lost
In your hundred-ringing greenery...
The poet lovingly describes the nature of his native land, comparing willows with meek nuns.
There is a month above the window. There is wind under the window.
Silver poplar is silvery and light.
In the poems of S. Yesenin, nature is alive, spiritual:
O side of the feather grass forest,
You are close to my heart with evenness,
But there’s something deeper hidden in yours too
Salt marsh melancholy.
She yearns for the pink sky and dove clouds.
But it’s not the cold that makes the mountain ash tremble,
It is not because of the wind that the blue sea boils.
Filled the earth with the joy of snow...
Yesenin’s descriptions of nature are unlike any other: in his “the clouds neigh from the foal like a hundred mares”, “the sky is like an udder”, “like a dog, the dawn barks behind the mountain”, “golden streams of water flow from the green mountains”, “ the clouds bark, the golden-toothed heights roar..."
The poet’s native nature is “a sea of sparrow voices” and “...the golden autumn, in the birch trees diminishing the sap, for all those whom he loved and abandoned, cries with leaves on the sand.”
But Yesenin says about himself that he is a “random guest” here “on your mountains, earth.” And on earth “the forests and waters are wide, the flap of airy wings is strong, but your centuries and years have been clouded by the flight of the luminaries.”
For the poet, “September knocked on the window with a crimson willow branch” - he says goodbye to his native nature, which he loves to the depths of his soul, because “everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees,” because “we are all, we are all perishable in this world, it flows quietly copper leaves from the maple trees..." And the poet asks: "Don't make noise, aspen, don't dust, road, let the song rush to your sweetheart to the threshold."
Reading the poems of S. Yesenin, you feel that the words in his poems come from the very heart, because only if you really love the nature of your land, your Motherland, can you write the following words:
Black, then smelly howl!
How can I not caress you, not love you?
I'll go out onto the lake into the blue road,
Evening grace clings to the heart...
Describing nature, S. Yesenin selects what seems to be simple words, but they sound like a song:
Swamps and swamps,
Blue board of heaven.
Coniferous gilding
Weighs the forest.
Tit shading
Between the forest curls,
Dark spruce trees dream
The hubbub of mowers..."
And the willows are listening
Wind whistle...
You are my forgotten land,
You are my native land!
We can say that the theme of nature in the works of S. Yesenin is revealed through the soul of nature; he compares it with man, with his feelings. The pictures of nature seen in childhood remained forever in the poet’s memory, which is why he asks his sister: “How does our cow live now, tugging at the sadness of the straw?”, “Has our rowan tree burned out, crumbling under the white window?”
Nature in S. Yesenin’s poems is alive, she thinks, cries, is sad and laughs. In conclusion, let’s say in the words of S. Yesenin:
We need to live easier, we need to live more simply,
All accepting what is in the world.
That's why, stunned, over the grove
The wind whistles, the silver wind.
Sergey Yesenin - the most popular, most read poet in Russia.
The work of S. Yesenin belongs to the best pages not only of Russian, but also. world poetry, which he entered as a subtle, soulful lyricist.
Yesenin's poetry is distinguished by the extraordinary power of sincerity and spontaneity in the expression of feelings, and the intensity of moral searches. His poems are always a frank conversation with the reader and listener. “It seems to me that I write my poems only for my good friends,” the poet himself said.
At the same time, Yesenin is a deep and original thinker. The world of feelings, thoughts and passions of the lyrical hero of his works - a contemporary of an unprecedented era of tragic breakdown - is complex and contradictory. human relations. The poet himself also saw the contradictions of his work and explained them this way: “I sang when my land was sick.”
A faithful and ardent patriot of his Motherland, S. Yesenin was a poet, vitally connected with his native land, with the people, with his poetic creativity.
THE THEME OF NATURE IN YESENIN’S WORK
Nature is the all-encompassing, main element of the poet’s work, and the lyrical hero is connected with it innately and for life:
I was born with songs in a grass blanket.
The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow"
(“Mother walked through the forest in her bathing suit...”, 1912);
"May you be blessed forever,
what came to flourish and die"
(“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”, 1921).
The poetry of S. Yesenin (after N. Nekrasov and A. Blok) is the most significant stage in the formation of the national landscape, which, along with traditional motifs of sadness, desolation, and poverty, includes surprisingly bright, contrasting colors, as if taken from popular prints:
"Blue sky, colored arc,
<...>
My land! Beloved Rus' and Mordva!";
"Swamps and swamps,
Blue board of heaven.
Coniferous gilding
The forest is ringing";
"Oh Rus' - a raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river..."
"blue sucks eyes"; “smells like apple and honey”; “Oh, my Rus', sweet homeland, Sweet rest in the silk of kupirs”; “Ring, ring, golden Rus'...”
This image of a bright and ringing Russia, with sweet smells, silky grasses, blue coolness, was introduced into the self-consciousness of the people by Yesenin.
More often than any other poet, Yesenin uses the very concepts of “land”, “Rus”, “homeland” (“Rus”, 1914; “Go you, Rus', my dear...”, 1914; “Beloved land! To the heart dreaming...", 1914; "The hewn horns began to sing...",<1916>; “Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness...”, 1917; "O land of rain and bad weather...",<1917>).
Yesenin portrays the heavenly and atmospheric phenomena- more picturesque, figurative, using zoomorphic and anthropomorphic comparisons. So, his wind is not cosmic, emerging from the astral heights, like Blok’s, but Living being: “red affectionate donkey”, “youth”, “schemnik”, “thin-lipped”, “dances the trepak”. Month - “foal”, “raven”, “calf”, etc. Of the luminaries, in first place is the image of the moon-month, which is found in approximately every third work of Yesenin (in 41 out of 127 - a very high coefficient; cf. in the “star” Fet, out of 206 works, 29 include images of stars). Moreover, in the early poems up to about 1920, the “month” predominates (18 out of 20), and in the later ones - the moon (16 out of 21). The month emphasizes, first of all, the external form, figure, silhouette, convenient for all kinds of object associations - “horse face”, “lamb”, “horn”, “kolob”, “boat”; the moon is, first of all, light and the mood it evokes - “thin lemon moonlight”, “blue moonlight”, “the moon laughed like a clown”, “uncomfortable liquid lunarness”. A month closer to folklore, this fairy tale character, while the moon introduces elegiac, romance motifs.
Yesenin is the creator of a one-of-a-kind “tree novel”, the lyrical hero of which is a maple, and the heroines are birch and willow. Humanized images of trees are overgrown with “portrait” details: the birch has a “waist”, “hips”, “chest”, “leg”, “hairstyle”, “hem”; the maple has a “leg”, “head” (“You are a maple”) my fallen, icy maple..."; "I'm wandering through the first snow..."; "My path"; "Green hairstyle...", etc.). The birch tree, largely thanks to Yesenin, became the national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, rowan, and bird cherry.
More sympathetically and soulfully than in previous poetry, the images of animals are revealed, which become independent subjects of tragically colored experiences and with which the lyrical hero has a blood-related affinity, as with “lesser brothers” (“Song of the Dog”, “Kachalov’s Dog”, “Fox”, “Cow”, “Son of a bitch”, “I won’t deceive myself...”, etc.).
Yesenin’s landscape motifs are closely connected not only with the circulation of time in nature, but also with the passage of age human life- a feeling of aging and fading, sadness about past youth (“This sadness cannot be scattered now...”, 1924; “The golden grove dissuaded...”, 1924; “What a night! I can’t...”, 1925). A favorite motif, renewed by Yesenin almost for the first time after E. Baratynsky, is separation from his father’s home and return to his “small homeland”: images of nature are colored with a feeling of nostalgia, refracted through the prism of memories (“I left my home…”, 1918 ; "Confession of a Hooligan", 1920; "This street is familiar to me...",<1923>; "Low house with blue shutters...",<1924>; “I’m walking through the valley. On the back of my head is a cap...”, 1925; "Anna Snegina", 1925).
For the first time with such acuteness - and again after Baratynsky - Yesenin posed the problem of the painful relationship between nature and the victorious civilization: “the steel chariot defeated the living horses”; "...they squeezed the village by the neck // Stone hands of the highway"; “like in a straitjacket, we take nature into concrete” (“Sorokoust”, 1920; “I am the last poet of the village...”, 1920; “The world is mysterious, my ancient world...”, 1921). However, in the later poems the poet seems to force himself to fall in love with “stone and steel”, to stop loving the “poverty of the fields” (“Uncomfortable liquid moonlight”,<1925>).
A significant place in Yesenin’s work is occupied by fantastic and cosmic landscapes, designed in the style Bible prophecies, but acquiring a human-divine and god-fighting meaning:
"Now on the peaks of the stars
I’m shaking up the earth for you!”;
"Then I'll rattle my wheels
The sun and moon are like thunder..."
Yesenin’s poetry of nature, which expressed “love for all living things in the world and mercy” (M. Gorky), is also remarkable in that for the first time it consistently pursues the principle of likening nature to nature, revealing from within the wealth of its figurative possibilities: “The moon is like a golden frog // Spread out on calm water..."; “rye does not ring with a swan’s neck”; “Curly-haired lamb - month // Walking in the blue grass”, etc.
FOLK MOTIVES IN THE WORK OF S. YESENIN
Love for his native peasant land, for the Russian village, for nature with its forests and fields permeates all of Yesenin’s work. For the poet, the image of Russia is inseparable from the national element; big cities with their factories, scientific and technological progress, social and cultural life do not evoke a response in Yesenin’s soul. This, of course, does not mean that the poet was not at all concerned about the problems of our time or that he looks at life through rose-colored glasses. He sees all the ills of civilization in isolation from the land, from the origins of people's life. “Revived Rus'” is rural Rus'; The attributes of life for Yesenin are the “edge of bread” and the “shepherd’s horn”. It is no coincidence that the author so often turns to the form of folk songs, epics, ditties, riddles, and spells.
It is significant that in Yesenin’s poetry a person - organic part nature, he is dissolved in it, he is joyfully and recklessly ready to surrender to the power of the elements: “I would like to get lost in your hundred-ringed greenery,” “the spring dawns entwined me in a rainbow.”
Many images borrowed from Russian folklore begin to live their own lives in his poems. Natural phenomena appear in his images in the form of animals, bearing the features of everyday village life. This animation of nature makes his poetry similar to the pagan worldview of the ancient Slavs. The poet compares autumn with a “red mare” who “scratches her mane”; his month is a sickle; Describing such an ordinary phenomenon as the light of the sun, the poet writes: “the oil of the sun is pouring on the green hills.” The tree, one of the central symbols of pagan mythology, becomes a favorite image of his poetry.
Yesenin's poetry, even clothed in traditional images of the Christian religion, does not cease to be pagan in its essence.
I’ll go in the bench, bright monk,
Steppe path to the monasteries.
This is how the poem begins and ends with the words:
With a smile of joyful happiness
I'm going to other shores,
Having tasted the ethereal sacrament
INTRODUCTION
Sergei Yesenin is the most popular and most widely read poet in Russia. The work of S. Yesenin belongs to the best pages not only of Russian, but also. world poetry, which he entered as a subtle, soulful lyricist.Yesenin's poetry is distinguished by the extraordinary power of sincerity and spontaneity in the expression of feelings, and the intensity of moral searches. His poems are always a frank conversation with the reader and listener. “It seems to me that I write my poems only for my good friends,” the poet himself said.
At the same time, Yesenin is a deep and original thinker. The world of feelings, thoughts and passions of the lyrical hero of his works - a contemporary of an unprecedented era of tragic breakdown of human relations - is complex and contradictory. The poet himself also saw the contradictions of his work and explained them this way: “I sang when my land was sick.”
A faithful and ardent patriot of his Motherland, S. Yesenin was a poet, vitally connected with his native land, with the people, with his poetic creativity.
THE THEME OF NATURE IN YESENIN’S WORK
Nature is the all-encompassing, main element of the poet’s work, and the lyrical hero is connected with it innately and for life:
I was born with songs in a grass blanket.
The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow"
(“Mother walked through the forest in her bathing suit...”, 1912);
"May you be blessed forever,
what came to flourish and die"
(“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”, 1921).
The poetry of S. Yesenin (after N. Nekrasov and A. Blok) is the most significant stage in the formation of the national landscape, which, along with traditional motifs of sadness, desolation, and poverty, includes surprisingly bright, contrasting colors, as if taken from popular prints:
"Blue sky, colored arc,
<...>
My land! Beloved Rus' and Mordva!";
"Swamps and swamps,
Blue board of heaven.
Coniferous gilding
The forest is ringing";
"Oh Rus' - a raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river..."
"blue sucks eyes"; “smells like apple and honey”; “Oh, my Rus', sweet homeland, Sweet rest in the silk of kupirs”; “Ring, ring, golden Rus'...”
This image of a bright and ringing Russia, with sweet smells, silky grasses, blue coolness, was introduced into the self-consciousness of the people by Yesenin.
More often than any other poet, Yesenin uses the very concepts of “land”, “Rus”, “homeland” (“Rus”, 1914; “Go you, Rus', my dear...”, 1914; “Beloved land! To the heart I dream...", 1914; "The hewn horns began to sing...", ; "Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness...", 1917; "Oh, the land of rain and bad weather...",).
Yesenin depicts celestial and atmospheric phenomena in a new way - more picturesquely, graphically, using zoomorphic and anthropomorphic comparisons. So, his wind is not cosmic, floating out of the astral heights, like Blok’s, but a living being: “a red, affectionate donkey,” “a youth,” “a schema-monk,” “thin-lipped,” “dancing trepak.” Month - “foal”, “raven”, “calf”, etc. Of the luminaries, in first place is the image of the moon-month, which is found in approximately every third work of Yesenin (in 41 out of 127 - a very high coefficient; cf. in the “star” Fet, out of 206 works, 29 include images of stars). Moreover, in the early poems up to about 1920, the “month” predominates (18 out of 20), and in the later ones - the moon (16 out of 21). The month emphasizes, first of all, the external form, figure, silhouette, convenient for all kinds of object associations - “horse face”, “lamb”, “horn”, “kolob”, “boat”; the moon is, first of all, light and the mood it evokes - “thin lemon moonlight”, “blue moonlight”, “the moon laughed like a clown”, “uncomfortable liquid lunarness”. The month is closer to folklore; it is a fairy-tale character, while the moon introduces elegiac, romance motifs.
Yesenin is the creator of a one-of-a-kind “tree novel”, the lyrical hero of which is a maple, and the heroines are birch and willow. Humanized images of trees are overgrown with “portrait” details: the birch has a “waist”, “hips”, “chest”, “leg”, “hairstyle”, “hem”; the maple has a “leg”, “head” (“You are a maple”) my fallen, icy maple..."; "I'm wandering through the first snow..."; "My path"; "Green hairstyle...", etc.). The birch tree, largely thanks to Yesenin, became the national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, rowan, and bird cherry.
More sympathetically and soulfully than in previous poetry, the images of animals are revealed, which become independent subjects of tragically colored experiences and with which the lyrical hero has a blood-related affinity, as with “lesser brothers” (“Song of the Dog”, “Kachalov’s Dog”, “Fox”, “Cow”, “Son of a bitch”, “I won’t deceive myself...”, etc.).
Yesenin’s landscape motifs are closely connected not only with the circulation of time in nature, but also with the age-related flow of human life - the feeling of aging and fading, sadness about past youth (“This sadness cannot be scattered now...”, 1924; “The golden grove dissuaded me. ..”, 1924; “What a night! I can’t...”, 1925). A favorite motif, renewed by Yesenin almost for the first time after E. Baratynsky, is separation from his father’s home and return to his “small homeland”: images of nature are colored with a feeling of nostalgia, refracted through the prism of memories (“I left my home...”, 1918 ; "Confession of a Hooligan", 1920; "This street is familiar to me...", ; "A low house with blue shutters...", ; "I am walking through a valley. On the back of my head...", 1925; "Anna Snegina" , 1925).
For the first time with such acuteness - and again after Baratynsky - Yesenin posed the problem of the painful relationship between nature and the victorious civilization: “the steel chariot defeated the living horses”; "...they squeezed the village by the neck // Stone hands of the highway"; “like in a straitjacket, we take nature into concrete” (“Sorokoust”, 1920; “I am the last poet of the village...”, 1920; “The world is mysterious, my ancient world...”, 1921). However, in the later poems the poet seems to force himself to fall in love with “stone and steel”, to stop loving the “poverty of the fields” (“Uncomfortable liquid moonlight”).
A significant place in Yesenin’s work is occupied by fantastic and cosmic landscapes, designed in the style of biblical prophecies, but acquiring a human-divine and godless meaning:
"Now on the peaks of the stars
I’m shaking up the earth for you!”;
"Then I'll rattle my wheels
The sun and moon are like thunder..."
Yesenin’s poetry of nature, which expressed “love for all living things in the world and mercy” (M. Gorky), is also remarkable in that for the first time it consistently pursues the principle of likening nature to nature, revealing from within the wealth of its figurative possibilities:
“Like a golden frog, the moon // Spread out on the still water...”; “rye does not ring with a swan’s neck”; “Curly-haired lamb - month // Walking in the blue grass”, etc.
FOLK MOTIVES IN THE WORK OF S. YESENIN
Love for his native peasant land, for the Russian village, for nature with its forests and fields permeates all of Yesenin’s work. For the poet, the image of Russia is inseparable from the national element; big cities with their factories, scientific and technological progress, social and cultural life do not evoke a response in Yesenin’s soul. This, of course, does not mean that the poet was not at all concerned about the problems of our time or that he looks at life through rose-colored glasses. He sees all the ills of civilization in isolation from the land, from the origins of people's life. “Revived Rus'” is rural Rus'; The attributes of life for Yesenin are the “edge of bread” and the “shepherd’s horn”. It is no coincidence that the author so often turns to the form of folk songs, epics, ditties, riddles, and spells.
It is significant that in Yesenin’s poetry, man is an organic part of nature, he is dissolved in it, he is joyfully and recklessly ready to surrender to the power of the elements: “I would like to get lost in your hundred-ringed greenery,” “the spring dawns entwined me in a rainbow.”
Many images borrowed from Russian folklore begin to live their own lives in his poems. Natural phenomena appear in his images in the form of animals, bearing the features of everyday village life. This animation of nature makes his poetry similar to the pagan worldview of the ancient Slavs. The poet compares autumn with a “red mare” who “scratches her mane”; his month is a sickle; Describing such an ordinary phenomenon as the light of the sun, the poet writes: “the oil of the sun is pouring on the green hills.” The tree, one of the central symbols of pagan mythology, becomes a favorite image of his poetry.
Yesenin's poetry, even clothed in traditional images of the Christian religion, does not cease to be pagan in its essence.
I’ll go in the bench, bright monk,
Steppe path to the monasteries.
This is how the poem begins and ends with the words:
With a smile of joyful happiness
I'm going to other shores,
Having tasted the ethereal sacrament
Praying on the haystacks and haystacks.
Here it is, Yesenin’s religion. Peasant labor and nature replace Christ for the poet:
I pray for the red dawns,
I take communion by the stream.
If the Lord appears in his poem, it is most often as a metaphor for some natural phenomenon (“The schema-monk-wind, with a cautious step/ Crushes leaves along the ledges of the road, / And kisses on the rowan bush/ Red sores of the invisible Christ”) or in the image of a simple man:
The Lord came to torture people in love.
He went out to the village as a beggar,
An old grandfather on a dry stump in an oak grove,
He chewed a stale crumpet with his gums.
The Lord approached, hiding sorrow and torment:
Apparently, they say, you can’t wake up their hearts...
And the old man said, holding out his hand:
“Here, chew it... you’ll be a little stronger.”
If his heroes pray to God, then their requests are quite specific and have a distinctly earthly character:
We also pray, brothers, for faith,
So that God will irrigate our fields.
And here are purely pagan images:
Calving sky
Licks a red chick.
This is a metaphor for the harvest, bread, which is deified by the poet. Yesenin's world is a village, human vocation is peasant labor. The peasant's pantheon is mother earth, cow, harvest. Another contemporary of Yesenin, poet and writer V. Khodasevich, said that Yesenin’s Christianity is “not content, but form, and the use of Christian terminology is approaching a literary device.”
Turning to folklore, Yesenin understands that leaving nature, one’s roots, is tragic. He, as a truly Russian poet, believes in his prophetic mission, in the fact that his poems “fed with mignonette and mint” will help to modern man return to the Kingdom of the ideal, which for Yesenin is the “peasant paradise”.
"Woody motifs" lyrics by S. Yesenin
Many of S. Yesenin’s early poems are imbued with a feeling of an inextricable connection with the life of nature (“Mother in the Bathing Suit...”, “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”). The poet constantly turns to nature when he expresses his innermost thoughts about himself, about his past, present and future. In his poems she lives a rich poetic life. Like a person, she is born, grows and dies, sings and whispers, is sad and rejoices.
The image of nature is built on associations from rural peasant life, and the human world is usually revealed through associations with the life of nature.
Spiritualization and humanization of nature is characteristic of folk poetry. " Ancient man“He almost didn’t know inanimate objects,” notes A. Afanasyev, “he found reason, feeling and will everywhere. In the noise of the forests, in the rustling of leaves, he heard those mysterious conversations that trees conduct among themselves.”
From childhood, the poet absorbed this popular worldview; one might say that it formed his poetic individuality.
“Everything is from the tree - this is the religion of thought of our people... The tree is life. Wiping their faces on a canvas with a picture of a tree, our people silently say that they have not forgotten the secret of the ancient fathers of wiping themselves with leaves, that they remember themselves as the seed of a supermundane tree and, running under the cover of its branches, plunging their faces into a towel, they seem to want imprint on your cheeks at least a small branch of it, so that, like a tree, it can shed the cones of words and thoughts and stream from the branches of your hands the shadow of virtue,” wrote S. Yesenin in his poetic and philosophical treatise “The Keys of Mary.”
For Yesenin, the likening of man to a tree is more than a “religion of thought”: he not only believed in the existence of a nodal connection between man and the natural world, he felt himself to be a part of this nature.
Yesenin’s “tree romance” motif, highlighted by M. Epstein, goes back to the traditional motive of assimilating man to nature. Relying on the traditional trope of “man-plant”, Yesenin creates a “woody novel”, the heroes of which are maple, birch and willow.
The humanized images of trees are overgrown with “portrait” details: the birch has “the waist, hips, breasts, legs, hairstyle, hem, braids,” and the maple has “the leg, the head.”
I just want to close my hands
Over the tree hips of the willows.
(“I’m wandering through the first snow…”, 1917),
Green hairstyle,
Girlish breasts,
O thin birch tree,
Why did you look into the pond?
("Green Hairstyle", 1918)
I won't be back soon, not soon!
The blizzard will sing and ring for a long time.
Guards blue Rus'
Old maple on one leg.
(“I left my home…”, 1918)
According to M. Epstein, “the birch tree, largely thanks to Yesenin, became the national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, rowan, and bird cherry.”
The most plot-length, the most significant in Yesenin’s poetry are still birches and maples.
The birch tree in Russian folk and classical poetry is a national symbol of Russia. This is one of the most revered trees among the Slavs. In ancient pagan rituals, the birch often served as a “Maypole,” a symbol of spring.
Yesenin, when describing folk spring holidays, mentions the birch tree in the meaning of this symbol in the poems “Trinity Morning ...” (1914) and “The reeds rustled over the backwater ...” (1914)
Trinity morning, morning canon,
In the grove, the birch trees are ringing white.
In the poem "The reeds rustled over the backwater" we're talking about about the important and fascinating event of the Semitic-Trinity week - fortune telling with wreaths.
The beautiful girl told fortunes at seven o'clock.
A wave unraveled a wreath of dodder.
The girls wove wreaths and threw them into the river. By the wreath that floated far away, washed up on the shore, stopped or sank, they judged the fate that awaited them (distant or nearby marriage, girlhood, death of the betrothed).
Oh, a girl won’t marry in the spring,
He intimidated her with forest signs.
The joyful meeting of spring is overshadowed by the premonition of approaching death, “the bark of the birch tree has been eaten away.” A tree without bark dies, and here the association is “birch tree - girl”. The motive of misfortune is reinforced by the use of such images as “mice”, “spruce”, “shroud”.
In the poem "Green Hairstyle". (1918) the humanization of the appearance of the birch tree in Yesenin’s work reaches full development. The birch tree becomes like a woman.
Green hairstyle,
Girlish breasts,
O thin birch tree,
Why did you look into the pond?
The reader will never know who this poem is about - a birch tree or a girl. Because here man is likened to a tree, and the tree to man.
In poems such as “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” (1921) and “The golden grove dissuaded...” (1924), the lyrical hero reflects on his life and his youth:
I do not regret, do not call, do not cry,
Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees.
Withered in gold,
I won't be young anymore.
...And the country of birch chintz
It won't tempt you to wander around barefoot.
“Apple tree smoke” - the blossoming of trees in the spring, when everything around is reborn to new life. "Apple tree", "apples" - in folk poetry this is a symbol of youth - " rejuvenating apples", and "smoke" is a symbol of instability, transience, illusoryness. In combination, they mean the fleetingness of happiness, youth. The birch tree is also associated with this meaning - a symbol of spring. "The country of birch chintz" is the "country" of childhood, the time of the most beautiful things. It’s not for nothing that Yesenin writes “to wander around barefoot,” a parallel can be drawn with the expression “barefoot childhood.”
All of us, all of us in this world are perishable,
Copper quietly pours from the maple leaves...
May you be blessed forever,
What has come to flourish and die.
Before us is a symbol of the transience of human life. The symbol is based on the trope: “life is the time of flowering”, withering is the approach of death. In nature, everything inevitably returns, repeats itself and blooms again. Man, unlike nature, is one-time, and his cycle, coinciding with the natural, is already unique.
The theme of the Motherland is closely intertwined with the image of the birch. Each Yesenin line is warmed by a feeling of boundless love for Russia. The strength of the poet's lyrics lies in the fact that in it the feeling of love for the Motherland is expressed not in the abstract, but concretely, in visible images, through pictures of the native landscape.
This can be seen in poems such as "White Birch". (1913), “Return to the Motherland” (1924), “Uncomfortable Liquid Moon” (1925).
Maple, unlike other trees, does not have such a definite, formed figurative core in Russian poetry. In folklore traditions associated with ancient pagan rituals, it did not play a significant role. Poetic views on it in Russian classical literature mainly took shape in the 20th century and therefore have not yet acquired clear outlines.
The image of the maple is most formed in the poetry of S. Yesenin, where he appears as a kind of lyrical hero of a “tree novel”. Maple is a daring, slightly rollicking guy, with a lush head of unkempt hair, as he has a round crown, similar to a head of hair or a hat.
Hence the motive of likening, the primary similarity from which the image of the lyrical hero developed.
Because that old maple
The head looks like me.
(“I left my home…”, 1918)
In the poem "Son of a Bitch" (1824), the lyrical hero is sad about his lost youth, which has “faded its noise”
Like a maple tree rotting under the windows.
In folk poetry, a rotten or dried tree is a symbol of grief, the loss of something dear that cannot be returned.
The hero remembers his youthful love. The symbol of love here is the viburnum, with its “bitter” semantics; it is also combined with the “yellow pond”. Yellow in the superstitions of the people it is a symbol of separation and grief. Therefore, we can say that parting with the girl he loved was already destined by fate itself.
In the ethnological legends of the Slavs, maple or sycamore is a tree into which a person is turned ("sworn"). S. Yesenin also anthropomorphizes the maple tree; it appears as a person with all his inherent mental states and periods of life. In the poem “You are my fallen maple...” (1925), the lyrical hero is like a maple with his daring, he draws a parallel between himself and the maple:
And, like a drunken watchman, going out onto the road,
He drowned in a snowdrift and froze his leg.
Oh, and I myself have become somewhat unstable these days,
I won’t make it home from a friendly drinking party.
It’s not even always clear who this poem is talking about - a person or a tree. There I met a willow, there I noticed a pine tree, I sang songs to them during the snowstorm about summer. I seemed to myself to be the same maple...
Resembling a maple with its “carefree curly head,” the poplar is at the same time aristocratically “slim and straight.” This harmony, upward striving is distinctive feature poplars, right up to the poetry of our days.
In the poem “Village” (1914), S. Yesenin compares poplar leaves with silk:
In silk poplar leaves.
This comparison was made possible by the fact that poplar leaves have a double structure: on the outside the leaves are shiny green, as if polished, on the inside they are matte silver. Silk fabric also has double colors: Right side shiny, smooth, and the left one is matte and expressionless. When silk shimmers, the shades of color can change, just as the leaves of poplar shimmer in the wind with a greenish-silver color.
Poplars grow along roads and are therefore sometimes associated with barefoot wanderers. This theme of wandering is reflected in the poem “Without a hat, with a bast knapsack...” (1916).
The lyrical hero - the wanderer "wanders" "under the quiet rustle of poplars." Here the human wanderer and the tree wanderer echo each other and complement each other to achieve greater subtlety in revealing the theme.
In Yesenin’s works, poplars are also a sign of the Motherland, like birch.
Saying goodbye to home, leaving for foreign lands, the hero is sad that
They will no longer be winged leaves
I need the poplars to ring.
(“Yes! Now it’s decided...”, 1922)
The willow is called "weeping". The image of the willow tree is more unambiguous and has the semantics of melancholy.
In Russian folk poetry, the willow is a symbol not only of love, but also of any separation, the grief of mothers parting with their sons.
In the poetry of S. Yesenin, the image of the willow is traditionally associated with sadness, loneliness, and separation. This sadness for past youth, for the loss of a loved one, for parting with one’s homeland.
For example, in the poem “Night and the Field, and the Cry of Roosters...” (1917)
Everything here is the same as it was then,
The same rivers and the same herds.
Only willows over the red hillock
They shake the dilapidated hem.
“The dilapidated hem of the willows” is the past, the old time, something that is very dear, but something that will never return. The destroyed, distorted life of the people, the country.
The same poem also mentions aspen. It emphasizes bitterness and loneliness, since in folk poetry it is always a symbol of sadness.
In other poems, the willow, like the birch, is a heroine, a girl.
And they call to the rosary
Willows are meek nuns.
("Beloved Land...", 1914)
I just want to close my hands
Over the tree hips of the willows.
(“I’m wandering through the first snow…”, 1917)
The lyrical hero, remembering his youth and feeling sad about it, also turns to the image of a willow tree.
And he knocked on my window
September with a crimson willow branch,
So that I am ready and meet
His arrival is unpretentious.
(“Let you be drunk by others...” 1923)
September is autumn, and the autumn of life is the imminent arrival of winter - old age. The hero meets this “age of autumn” calmly, although with a little sadness about “mischievous and rebellious courage”, because by this time he had acquired life experience and looks at the world around him from the heights of his years.
Everything that makes a tree stand out among other forms of vegetation (strength of the trunk, powerful crown) sets the oak apart from other trees, making it, as it were, the king of the tree kingdom. He personifies highest degree firmness, courage, strength, greatness.
Tall, mighty, blooming - these are the characteristic epithets of the oak, which poets use as an image of vital power.
In the poetry of S. Yesenin, the oak is not such a constant hero as the birch and maple. The oak is mentioned in only three poems ("The Heroic Whistle", 1914; "Oktoich" 1917; "Unspeakable, blue, tender..." 1925)
The poem "Octoechos" mentions the Mauritius oak. Yesenin subsequently explained the meaning of this image in his treatise “The Keys of Mary” (1918) “... that symbolic tree that means “family” is not at all important that in Judea this tree bore the name of the Mauritius oak...”
Under the Mauritian oak
My red-haired grandfather is sitting...
The introduction of the image of the Mauritius oak into this poem is not accidental, since it talks about the homeland:
O homeland, happy
And it’s an unstoppable hour!
about relatives -
"my red-haired grandfather."
This oak tree seems to summarize everything that the poet wanted to write about in this work, that family is the most important thing a person can have.
The image of the “family” here is given in a broader sense: it is the “father’s land”, and “native graves”, and “the father’s house”, that is, everything that connects a person with this land.
In the poem “The Heroic Whistle,” Yesenin introduces the image of an oak tree to show the power and strength of Russia and its people. This work can be put on a par with Russian epics about heroes. Ilya Muromets and other heroes, jokingly, playfully felled oak trees. In this poem the man also “whistles”, and from his whistle
the hundred-year-old oak trees trembled,
The leaves on the oak trees are falling from the whistling sound.
Coniferous trees convey a different mood and carry a different meaning than deciduous trees: not joy and sadness, not various emotional outbursts, but rather mysterious silence, numbness, self-absorption.
Pines and spruce trees are part of a gloomy, harsh landscape; wilderness, darkness, and silence reign around them. Permanent greenery evokes associations coniferous trees with eternal peace, deep sleep, over which time and the cycle of nature have no power.
These trees are mentioned in such poems of 1914 as “It is not the winds that shower the forests…”, “The melted clay is drying up”, “I smell God’s rainbow…”, “Us”, “A cloud has tied lace in the grove”. (1915).
In Yesenin’s poem “Porosha” (1914) main character- the pine acts as an “old lady”:
Like a white scarf
The pine tree has tied up.
Bent over like an old lady
Leaned on a stick...
The forest where the heroine lives is fabulous, magical, also alive, just like her.
Bewitched by the invisible
The forest slumbers under the fairy tale of sleep...
We meet another fairy-tale, magical forest in the poem “The Witch” (1915). But this forest is no longer bright and joyful, but rather formidable (“The grove threatens with spruce peaks”), gloomy, harsh.
The spruces and pines here personify an evil, unfriendly space, an evil spirit living in this wilderness. The landscape is painted in dark colors:
The dark night is silently afraid,
The moon is covered with shawls of clouds.
The wind is a singer with a howl of whoops...
Having examined the poems where images of trees are found, we see that S. Yesenin’s poems are imbued with a feeling of an inextricable connection with the life of nature. It is inseparable from a person, from his thoughts and feelings. The image of a tree in Yesenin’s poetry appears in the same meaning as in folk poetry. The author's motive of the "tree novel" goes back to the traditional motive of assimilating man to nature, and is based on the traditional trope of "man - plant".
Drawing nature, the poet introduces into the story a description of human life, holidays that are in one way or another connected with animals and flora. Yesenin seems to intertwine these two worlds, creating one harmonious and interpenetrating world. He often resorts to personification. Nature is not a frozen landscape background: it reacts passionately to the destinies of people and the events of history. She is the poet's favorite hero.
Bibliography:
1. Koshechkin S. P. “In the echoing early morning...” - M., 1984.
2. Marchenko A. M. Yesenin’s poetic world. - M., 1972.
3. Prokushen Yu. L. Sergei Yesenin "Image, poems, era. - M., 1979.
