All poems by Russian poets. The best poems of great poets. “I was then with my people”

Pushkin's poems, a list of which is presented in this review, occupy a prominent place in the history of Russian poetry. They had a huge influence on the development of Russian literature of the 19th century century, defining the main themes of works of this genre for several decades to come.

Historical

Pushkin's poems, the list of which should begin with the most famous works, are devoted to various topics. But most of all the author was interested in the plots of the past and topics relevant to his time.

So, the poet paid great attention to the plots of history.

Romantic

Some of Pushkin's poems, the list of which should be continued by mentioning his freedom-loving works, were written under the influence of J. Byron.

In them, the poet portrayed strong natures who valued freedom more than life.

So, Pushkin’s romantic poems are permeated with the pathos of love of freedom.

Other works

The poet's poetic works are distinguished by both an interesting plot and excellent language.

Pushkin's works show the diversity of his interests.

Russian poet Anna Andreevna Akhmatova ( real name Gorenko), a prominent representative of the creative intelligentsia, wife famous poet Nikolai Gumilyov until 1918. After publishing his first poems in 1912, Akhmatova became a cult figure among the intelligentsia and part of the St. Petersburg literary scene. Her second book, Rosaria (1914), was acclaimed by critics, who praised the virtues of conscious, carefully crafted verse, in contrast to the loose style of the Symbolists who dominated Russian literature of the period.

Anna Azhmatova wrote a lot of lyrical poems, piercing love poetry loved by millions of people of different generations. But her sharp attitude in her work towards the outrages of power led to a conflict. At Soviet power there was an unspoken ban on Akhmatova's poetry from 1925 to 1940. During this time, Akhmatova devoted herself literary criticism, in particular, the translation of Pushkin into other languages.

Changes in the political climate finally allowed Akhmatova to be accepted into the Writers' Union, but after World War II, there was an official decree prohibiting the publication of her poetry. Her son, Lev, was arrested in 1949 and spent in prison until 1956. To try to win his release, Akhmatova wrote poetry praising Stalin and the government, but it was to no avail.

Although Akhmatova often faced official government opposition to her work during her life, she was deeply loved and praised by the Russian people, in part because she did not abandon her country during difficult political times. Her most accomplished works, Requiem (which was not published in full in Russia until 1987) and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of Stalin's terror, during which she experienced artistic repression as well as enormous personal loss. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she spent most life, in 1966.

In Pushkin's work, poems occupy the largest place along with lyrics. Pushkin wrote twelve poems (one of them, “Tazit,” remained unfinished), and more than twelve more were preserved in sketches, plans, and initial lines.

At the Lyceum, Pushkin began, but did not finish, a very weak, still quite childish, humorous poem “The Monk” (1813) and a humorous fairy-tale poem “Bova” (1814). In the first, a Christian church legend is parodied in the spirit of Voltairean freethinking, in the second, a popular folk tale.

In these works, young Pushkin is not yet an independent poet, but only an unusually talented student of his predecessors, Russian and French poets (Voltaire, Karamzin, Radishchev). The history of Pushkin’s poem does not begin with these youthful experiences; Yes, they were not published during the author’s lifetime.

In 1817, Pushkin began his greatest poem - “Ruslan and Lyudmila” - and wrote it for three whole years.

These were the years of rising revolutionary sentiment among the noble youth, when secret circles and societies were created that prepared the December uprising of 1825.

Pushkin, although not a member of the Secret Society, was one of the largest figures in this movement. He was the only one in these years (before exile to the south) who wrote revolutionary poems, which were immediately distributed in handwritten copies throughout the country.

But even in legal, printed literature, Pushkin had to fight reactionary ideas. In 1817, Zhukovsky published the fantastic poem "Vadim" - the second part of the large poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" (the first part of it - "Thunderbreaker" - was published back in 1811). Taking a conservative position, Zhukovsky wanted with this work to lead young people away from political actions into the realm of romantic, religiously colored dreams. His hero (to whom the poet did not accidentally give the name Vadim - legendary hero uprising of the Novgorodians against Prince Rurik) is an ideal young man, striving for exploits and at the same time feeling in his soul a mysterious call to something unknown, otherworldly. He eventually overcomes all earthly temptations and, steadily following this call, finds happiness in a mystical union with one of the twelve virgins, whom he awakens from their wonderful sleep. The action of the poem takes place either in Kyiv or Novgorod. Vadim defeats the giant and saves the Kyiv princess, whom her father intends for him to be his wife. This reactionary poem was written with great poetic power, beautiful verses, and Pushkin had every reason to fear its strong influence on the development of young Russian literature. In addition, “Vadim” was at that time the only major work created by a representative of the new literary school, which has just finally won the fight against classicism.

Pushkin responded to “Vadim” with “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” also a fairy-tale poem from the same era, with a number of similar episodes. But all its ideological content is sharply polemical in relation to the ideas of Zhukovsky. Instead of mysterious and mystical feelings and almost ethereal images, Pushkin’s everything is earthly, material; the entire poem is filled with playful, mischievous eroticism (description of Ruslan’s wedding night, Ratmir’s adventures with twelve maidens, Chernomor’s attempts to take possession of the sleeping Lyudmila, etc., as well as a number of author’s digressions).

The polemical meaning of the poem is fully revealed at the beginning of the fourth canto, where the poet directly points to the object of this polemic - Zhukovsky's poem "The Twelve Sleeping Virgins" - and mockingly parodies it, turning its heroines, mystically minded pure maidens, "nuns of saints", into frivolous inhabitants of a roadside "hotels" that lure travelers to their place.

Pushkin's witty, brilliant, sparkling poem immediately dispelled the mystical fog that surrounded folk fairy-tale motifs and images in Zhukovsky's poem. After “Ruslan and Lyudmila” it became no longer possible to use them to implement reactionary religious ideas.

The good-natured Zhukovsky himself admitted defeat in this literary struggle, giving Pushkin his portrait with the inscription: “To the winning student from the defeated teacher, on that highly solemn day when he finished his poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila.”

This poem put Pushkin in first place among Russian poets. They began to write about him in Western European magazines.

However, being the largest phenomenon in Russian literature and social life, Pushkin’s humorous fairy-tale poem did not yet put Russian literature on a par with the literature of the West, where Goethe in Germany, Byron and Shelley in England, Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant in France, acted in those years, each in their own way resolved the most important issues of our time in their work.

Since 1820, Pushkin has been included in this series, creating one after another his romantic poems, serious and deep in content, modern in subject matter and highly poetic in form. With these poems ("Caucasian Prisoner", "Robber Brothers", "Bakhchisarai Fountain") a new direction enters Russian literature: advanced, revolutionary romanticism - a poetic expression of the feelings and views of the most advanced social stratum, the revolutionary-minded noble youth, the most active of which the Decembrists were part. Sharp dissatisfaction with everything around, with the entire social structure, in which life seems to be a prison, and a person is a prisoner; fiery desire for freedom; freedom as an object of almost religious cult (1) is one side of the worldview of the revolutionary romantics of the 20s. At the same time, their social loneliness, the lack of a living connection with the people, whose suffering they deeply sympathized with, but whose life they knew poorly and understood little - all this gave a tragic and extremely subjective, individualistic character to their worldview. The feelings and tragic experiences of a lonely, proud person standing high above the crowd became the main content of Pushkin’s romantic work. Protest against any oppression weighing on a person in a “civilized” society - political, social, moral, religious oppression - forced him, like all revolutionary romantics of that time, to sympathetically portray his hero as a criminal. a violator of all accepted social norms - religious ones. legal, moral. The favorite image of the romantics is “a criminal and a hero,” who “was worthy of both the horror of people and glory.” Finally, characteristic of the romantics was the desire to take poetry away from the reproduction of everyday reality, which they hated, into the world of the unusual, exotic, geographical or historical. There they found the images they needed of nature - powerful and rebellious (“deserts, edges of pearly waves, and the noise of the sea, and piles of rocks”), and images of people, proud, brave, free, not yet touched by European civilization.

Byron's work, which in many ways was close to the worldview of Russian advanced romantics, played a major role in the poetic embodiment of these feelings and experiences. Pushkin, and after him other poets, used, first of all, the form of the “Byronic poem” successfully found by the English poet, in which the purely lyrical experiences of the poet are clothed in a narrative form with a fictional hero and events far from real events the life of the poet, but perfectly expressing his inner life, his soul. “...He comprehended, created and described a single character (namely his own), - Pushkin wrote in a note about Byron’s dramas. - He created himself a second time, now under the turban of a renegade, now in the cloak of a corsair, now as a giaur dying under the schema... ". So Pushkin, in his romantic poems, tried to “create himself a second time,” either as a prisoner in the Caucasus, or as Aleko, who escaped from the “captivity of stuffy cities.” Pushkin himself more than once pointed out the lyrical, almost autobiographical nature of his romantic heroes.

The external features of Pushkin’s southern poems are also associated with the Byronian tradition: a simple, undeveloped plot, a small number of characters (two, three), fragmentary and sometimes deliberately unclear presentation.

A constant characteristic of Pushkin’s poetic talent is the ability to vigilantly observe reality and the desire to speak about it in precise words. In the poems, this was reflected in the fact that, when creating romantic images of nature and people, Pushkin did not invent them, did not write (like, for example, Byron about Russia or, later, Ryleev about Siberia) about what he himself did not see, but was always based on living personal impressions - the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabian steppes.

Pushkin's poems created and for a long time predetermined the type of romantic poem in Russian literature. They caused numerous imitations by minor poets, and also had a strong influence on the work of such poets as Ryleev, Kozlov, Baratynsky and, finally, Lermontov.

In addition to "The Prisoner of the Caucasus", "The Robber Brothers" and "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai", written before 1824 and soon published, Pushkin also conceived other romantic poems. “I still have poems wandering around in my head,” he wrote to Delvig in March 1821. In his manuscripts there were sketches of several poems, where Pushkin, in different ways, with different plots and in different national environments, thought to develop the same “heroic” or a “criminal” romantic image and show his inevitably tragic fate. Pushkin published an excerpt from one of these poems, where the ataman of the Volga robbers was to become the hero, under the title “The Robber Brothers.” The beginning of the great romantic poem "Vadim" has also been preserved.

During these same years, perhaps under the influence of the enormous success of "Ruslan and Lyudmila", Pushkin also thought about poems of a completely different type - magical fairy tales, with an adventurous plot and historical or mythological characters: about Bova the Prince, about Vladimir's son St. Mstislav and his the fight against the Circassians, about Actaeon and Diana. But these plans, which distracted the poet from his main task - the development and deepening of romantic themes - were never implemented by him.

However, in the spring of 1821, Pushkin wrote a short poem "Gabriiliad", a witty, brilliant anti-religious satire - a response to the intensified political reaction, colored in these years by mysticism and religious hypocrisy.

In 1823, Pushkin experienced a severe crisis in his romantic worldview. Disappointed in the hope of the imminent realization of the victory of the revolution, first in the West, and then in Russia - and Pushkin, full of “careless faith”, was completely convinced of this victory - he soon became disillusioned with all his romantic ideals - freedom, an exalted hero , high purpose poetry, romantic eternal love. At this time he writes a number of gloomy, bitter poems, pouring out his “bile” and “cynicism” (in his words) - “The Sower”, “Demon”, “Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet” (and a little later - “Scene from Faust") and others that remained unfinished in the manuscript. In these verses, he bitterly ridicules all the basic tenets of his romantic worldview.

Among such works is the poem “The Gypsies,” written in 1824. Its content is a critical exposure of the romantic ideal of freedom and the romantic hero. The romantic hero Aleko, who finds himself in a desired environment of complete freedom, the opportunity to do whatever he wants without hindrance, reveals his true essence: he turns out to be an egoist and a rapist. In "Gypsies" the very romantic ideal of unlimited freedom is debunked. Pushkin convincingly shows that complete freedom of action, absence of restrictions and obligations in public life would be feasible only for people who are primitive, idle, lazy, “timid and kind at heart,” but in personal life, in love, it turns out to be a purely animal passion, not associated with any moral experiences. The inability to go beyond the purely romantic, subjective view of life inevitably leads the poet to the deeply gloomy conclusion that happiness on earth is impossible “and there is no protection from fate.” "The Gypsies" - a poem of a turning point, transitional period - is ideologically and artistically a huge step forward compared to previous poems. Despite the completely romantic nature and style of it, and the exotic setting, and heroes, Pushkin here for the first time uses the method of a purely realistic test of the loyalty of his romantic ideals. He does not suggest the speeches and actions of his characters, but simply places them in a given setting and observes how they behave in the circumstances they encounter. In fact, Aleko, a typical romantic hero, well known to us from Pushkin’s poems and lyrics of the early 20s, could not have acted differently in the situation in which he found himself. The double murder he commits out of jealousy is fully consistent with his character and worldview, revealed both in the poem itself and in other romantic works of that era. On the other hand, Zemfira, such as she is shown by Pushkin, also could not do otherwise, could not remain faithful to Aleko forever - after all, she is a gypsy, the daughter of Mariula, and her story only repeats - with the exception of the tragic ending - the story of her mother.

This “objective” position of the author of “Gypsy” in relation to the actions and feelings of his characters was reflected in the form itself: most of the episodes of the poem are given in the form of dialogues, in a dramatic form, where the author’s voice is absent, and the characters themselves speak and act.

"Gypsies" is a work in which the crisis of the worldview of Pushkin the romantic was most deeply reflected; at the same time, in terms of the method of developing the theme, it opened up new paths in Pushkin’s work - the path to realism.

In the summer of 1824, Pushkin was expelled from Odessa to Mikhailovskoye, without the right to leave there. Constant and close communication with the peasants and the people, apparently more than anything else, helped to overcome the grave crisis in the poet’s worldview. He became convinced of the injustice of his bitter reproaches to the people for their reluctance to fight for their freedom (2), he realized that “freedom” is not some abstract moral and philosophical concept, but a concrete historical one, always connected with social life, and for such freedom - political, economic - the people have always tirelessly fought (constant peasant revolts against the landowners, not to mention the uprisings of Pugachev, Razin or the era of the “Time of Troubles”). He had to see that all his disappointments in previous romantic ideals were the result of insufficient knowledge of reality itself, its objective laws and little poetic interest in it itself. In 1825, a sharp turn occurred in Pushkin’s work. Having finally broken with romanticism, Pushkin emerges from his crisis. His poetry takes on a clear and generally bright, optimistic character. The former task of his poetry - the expression of his own feelings and suffering, a poetic response to the imperfections of life, contrary to the subjective, albeit noble demands of the romantic, the embodiment of romantic ideals in the images of the unusual - exotic, idealized nature and extraordinary heroes - is replaced by a new one. Pushkin consciously makes his poetry a means of understanding the ordinary reality that he previously rejected, strives to penetrate into it through an act of poetic creativity, to understand its typical phenomena, objective laws. The desire to correctly explain human psychology inevitably leads him to the study and artistic embodiment of social life, to depiction in certain plot forms social conflicts, the reflection of which is human psychology.

The same desire to understand reality and modernity pushes him to study the past, to reproduce important moments in history.

In connection with these new creative tasks, both the nature of the objects depicted in Pushkin and the very style of depiction change: instead of the exotic, unusual - everyday life, nature, people; instead of a poetically sublime, abstract, metaphorical style - a simple, close to colloquial, but nevertheless highly poetic style.

Pushkin creates a new direction in literature - realism, which later (from the 40s) became the leading direction of Russian literature.

Pushkin gives the main, primary embodiment of this new, realistic direction, these new tasks of correct knowledge of reality and its laws not so much in poems as in other genres: in drama ("Boris Godunov", "little tragedies"), in prose stories ("Belkin's Tales", " Captain's daughter", etc.), in the poetic novel "Eugene Onegin". In these genres, it was easier for Pushkin to implement new principles and develop new methods of realistic creativity.

A kind of manifesto of this new direction in Russian literature were the historical folk tragedy "Boris Godunov" (1825) and the central chapters of "Eugene Onegin" (3) (1825-1826).

At the same time (December 1825) Pushkin wrote his first realistic poem - the playful, cloudlessly cheerful "Count Nulin". In it, on a simple, almost anecdotal plot, many beautiful paintings, landscapes, and conversations of the most ordinary, “prosaic,” everyday content, turned into true poetry, are strung together. Here you can find almost all the images with which Pushkin, in a half-serious and half-joking stanza from “Onegin’s Travels,” characterizes his new realistic style, as opposed to the romantic “piles of rocks,” “the sound of the sea,” “deserts,” and the image of a “proud maiden” (4) : here is a slope, and a fence, and gray clouds in the sky, and rainy season, and a backyard, and ducks, and even a “housewife” (albeit a bad one) as the heroine of the poem...

The defeat of the December uprising of 1825 and the subsequent political and social reaction, a temporary stop in the development of the Russian revolutionary movement, changed the nature of Russian literature: the theme of the struggle for freedom disappeared from it for several years. Pushkin, returned from exile by Nicholas I, given the opportunity to communicate with friends, enjoying enormous popularity among the public, nevertheless did not feel happy.

The stuffy social atmosphere after the defeat of the Decembrists, the reactionary, cowardly, philistine sentiments, supported by the new reactionary journalism, which reigned in society and infected many of his friends - all this at times caused Pushkin to have attacks of complete despair, expressed in such poems as “A gift in vain, a random gift, life, why were you given to me?” or “In the worldly steppe, sad and boundless...” (“The last key is the cold key of oblivion, it will quench the heat of the heart sweetest of all”).

The idea that death is preferable to life, Pushkin thought to form the basis of a gloomy poem he began in 1826 about the hero of the gospel legend - Ahasfer ("The Eternal Jew"), punished for his crime before God with immortality. However, these dark themes remained a temporary episode in Pushkin’s work. He managed to overcome his difficult mood, and the poem about Agasphere was left at the very beginning.

During these years of social decline creative work Pushkin’s work does not stop, but at this time he is developing themes that are not directly related to the theme of the liberation movement. The subject of the poet's close attention is human psyche, characters, “passions”, their influence on the human soul (central chapters of “Eugene Onegin”, “little tragedies”, sketches of prose stories).

Among Pushkin's works of 1826-1830, inspired by a “psychological” theme, we do not find a single poem. (True, in the poems “Poltava” and “Tazit” the development of the psychology of the heroes occupies a large place, but it is not the main task of these purely political works.) A more suitable form for the artistic analysis of human psychology was a novel in verse, a dramatic sketch, a prose story or story.

During these same years, Pushkin also wrote a number of major works of political content, but of a different nature. In his work of this time, the theme of the Russian state, the fate of Russia in the struggle with the West for its independence is embodied - an echo of Pushkin’s youthful memories of the events of 1812-1815. In parallel with this, he poetically develops the most important theme of the multinationality of the Russian state, writes about the historical pattern of the unification of many different peoples into one state whole. In the poem "Poltava" these themes are developed on the historical material of the struggle of Russia at the beginning of the 18th century. with the then strongest military state - Sweden. Here Pushkin poetically reveals his assessment of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. In another, unfinished poem, "Tazit", based on Pushkin's impressions from his second Caucasian trip (1829). and reflections on the complexity and difficulty of the issue of ending the enmity of the peoples of the Caucasus with the Russians, the same national-political theme develops.

In the 30s Pushkin's work is again almost entirely devoted to the development of social issues. The people, the serf peasantry, their life, their poetry, their struggle for their liberation - becomes one of the main themes of Pushkin the artist and historian, as he became in these years. The life of a fortress village is shown in the unfinished “History of the Village of Goryukhin”, in “Dubrovsky”; in fairy tales and drama "Rusalka" motifs are reproduced and artistically processed folk poetry. Pushkin first shows the struggle of the peasants against the landowners in the form of “robbery” (in “Dubrovsky”), and these are no longer romantic “robber brothers”, but living, real types of peasants and servants. This peasant war, "Pugachevism" Pushkin devotes two large works - the story "The Captain's Daughter" and the historical study "The History of Pugachev." The popular uprising against the feudal knights and the participation in it of representatives of the bourgeois class constitute the volume of the unfinished drama "Scenes from the Times of Knights."

During these years, Pushkin introduced a new hero into literature - the suffering, oppressed " little man", a victim of an unfair social structure - in the story" Stationmaster", in the begun novel "Yezersky", in the poem "The Bronze Horseman".

Pushkin reacts sharply to the changes taking place before his eyes in the class composition of the intelligentsia, in particular the literary community. Previously, “only nobles were engaged in literature,” as Pushkin repeated more than once, seeing this as the reason for the writer’s independent behavior in relation to the authorities. to the government, then now representatives of the common, bourgeois intelligentsia are beginning to play an increasingly larger role in literature. In those years, this new democracy was not yet a “revolutionary democracy”; on the contrary, most of its leaders, fighting with representatives of the ruling noble, landowner class for their place in life, did not reveal any oppositional sentiments towards the government or the tsar.

Pushkin considered the only force capable of opposing its independence to government arbitrariness, to be a “powerful defender” of the people, the nobility from which the Decembrists emerged, an impoverished nobility, but “with education”, “with hatred against the aristocracy” (5). “There is no such terrible element of rebellion in Europe either,” Pushkin wrote in his diary. “Who were on the square on December 14? Only nobles. How many of them will there be at the first new indignation? I don’t know, but it seems like a lot.”

These thoughts about the role of the ancient nobility in liberation movement(in the past and in the future), the condemnation of its representatives who do not understand their historical mission and grovel before the authorities, before the “new nobility”, the tsar’s servants - Pushkin embodied not only in his journalistic notes, but also in works of art, in particular, they constitute the main, main content of the first stanzas of “Yezersky” written by Pushkin.

In the 30s Pushkin had to wage a fierce literary struggle. His opponents were reactionary, cowardly, unscrupulous journalists and critics who had captured almost the entire mass of readers, pandering to the philistine tastes of readers from small landowners and officials, who did not disdain political denunciations against their literary enemies. They persecuted Pushkin for everything new that he introduced into literature - the realistic direction, simplicity of expression, reluctance to moralize... Pushkin included polemics with modern journalism about the tasks of literature in the initial stanzas of "Yezersky", this same polemic constitutes the main content of the entire poem - "House in Kolomna."

Pushkin completed a long series of poems written from 1820 to 1833 with “The Bronze Horseman” - a poem about the conflict between the happiness of an individual and the good of the state - his best work, remarkable both for the extraordinary depth and courage of thought, the acuteness of the poet’s historical and social problem, and in the perfection of artistic expression. This work still causes controversy and different interpretations.

Pushkin used many genres in his work, but the poem always remained his favorite form for expressing his “mind of cold observations and heart of sorrowful notes.” Pushkin celebrated almost every stage of his development with a poem, almost every one that stood before him life problems found expression in the poem. The enormous distance between the light, brilliant poem of the twenty-year-old Pushkin - "Ruslan and Lyudmila" - and the deeply philosophical poem "The Bronze Horseman", written by the thirty-four-year-old sage poet - clearly shows the swiftness of Pushkin's path, the steepness of the peak to which Pushkin, and with him, climbed and all Russian literature.

(1) Freedom! He was still looking for you alone in the desert world... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And with faith, fiery prayer, Your proud idol embraced. (“Caucasian captive.”) (2) Graze, peaceful peoples! A cry of honor will not awaken you. Why do the herds need the gifts of freedom? They should be cut or trimmed. Their inheritance from generation to generation is a yoke with rattles and a whip. (“The Desert Sower of Freedom...”, 1823) (3) The original plan (1823) and the first chapters of the novel date back to the period of the Pushkin crisis. Realistic images in them are presented polemically, with the aim of mocking everyday reduction of traditional romantic images and situations. “...I am writing a new poem, “Eugene Onegin,” in which I am choking on bile” (letter to A.I. Turgenev dated December 1, 1823); “...don’t trust N. Raevsky, who scolds him (“Eugene Onegin.” - S.B.) - he expected romanticism from me, found satire and cynicism and did not lose heart” (letter to his brother dated January-February 1824 G.). (4) I need other pictures: I love a sandy slope, In front of a hut there are two rowan trees, A gate, a broken fence, Gray clouds in the sky, In front of a threshing floor there are heaps of straw and a pond under the canopy of thick willows, The expanse of young ducks. My ideal now is a hostess... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sometimes on a rainy day I turned into a barnyard... (Excerpts from Onegin's Travels, 1829) (5) That is, the ruling elite.

CM. Bondi. Poems by Pushkin.