It would seem, what new can be said about Pushkin? A huge number of books have been written about him. However, it is precisely in such cases that the saying becomes relevant: “New is well forgotten old”. I want to write about Pushkin. You need to write about Pushkin, because, paradoxically, today's readers know very little about him …
Without thinking to amuse the proud light …
Everyone knows Pushkin. His name sounds everywhere. Streets of Pushkin, monuments to Pushkin, Pushkin libraries, etc. And his works seem to be known to everyone. They are loved by so many people that they have already half gone into folklore.
Because of this, Pushkin is perceived differently from other classics. He initially seems familiar to everyone to such an extent that readers attribute their own thoughts to him and believe that Pushkin said this.
For example, here is a question sent to Boris Grebenshchikov on the site aquarium.ru:
- What do you think, was Pushkin right when he spoke about the inverse proportionality of love for a woman and her love for us?
- "… the easier she likes us."
Promotional video:
Pushkin is always right - but you need to read more carefully.
Lighter does not mean more, so there is no inverse proportion.
Yes, and indeed:
The less we love a woman, The easier she likes us.
Nevertheless, the variant with "more" instead of "lighter" is very popular and is now and then quoted under the guise of Pushkin.
Do you remember how the novel "Eugene Onegin" begins? There is a myth among the people that it begins with the famous: "My uncle has the most honest rules …".
Actually like this:
Not thinking to amuse the proud light, Attention of loving friendship, I would like to introduce you
The pledge is worthy of you
More worthy of a beautiful soul
Holy dream fulfilled
Poetry alive and clear, High thoughts and simplicity;
But so be it - with a biased hand
Take a collection of colorful chapters
Half-funny, half-sad, Common people, ideal, The careless fruit of my amusements
Insomnia, light inspirations, Immature and withered years
Of mind's cold observation
And notice the sorrowful hearts.
The sun of our poetry
Communicating with different people and walking on Internet forums, I have heard more than once: “What kind of phrase is this:“the sun of Russian poetry”? And Lermontov then who? "Moon"?"
Yes, this metaphor can be found, probably, in all textbooks of literature, it is often (and inaccurately) repeated in the lessons of Pushkin. It has long been perceived as a cliche.
The metaphor is brilliant though. These are the words of V. Odoevsky from Pushkin's obituary, from the only message about his death, which appeared in print on January 30, 1837:
“The sun of our poetry has gone down! Pushkin died, died in the prime of life, in the middle of his great career!.. We have no more strength to talk about this, and we don’t need to: every Russian heart knows the full value of this irreversible loss, and every Russian heart will be torn to pieces. Pushkin! our poet! our joy, our people's glory!.. Is it really true that we no longer have Pushkin! you can't get used to this thought! January 29, 2 hours 45 pm.
It was from this publication that Russia learned about the death of Pushkin. Forget the Soviet intonation of textbooks, forget everything you've heard on this topic. Just imagine the frosty winter of 1837, the shock caused by the death of Pushkin, the reaction of his friends, his readers - and these words that expressed universal feelings. An amazingly accurate metaphor!
It is the "sun", everything is conveyed here - and the genius of Pushkin, and the significance, and the joyful lightness, the radiance of his poems - and the shock from his death …
By the way, if you want to learn more about this, watch the film "The Last Road" (Lenfilm, 1986). He perfectly recreates the atmosphere of the then Petersburg. Shows Pushkin's entourage, his home, the circumstances associated with the duel, and most importantly, the entire contradictory attitude towards Pushkin - from love to hatred and contempt. And what a storm of various emotions caused by this short obituary in the newspaper and, in particular, the wording "the sun of our poetry."
Moika, 12
I will never forget my first visit to 12 Moika Street, to the Pushkin Museum-Apartment. Transparent July sky, tame sparrows in the yard (yes, sparrows, not pigeons) and an unusual sense of time. In St. Petersburg, time generally passes according to special laws, sometimes changes, sometimes disappears. In Pushkin's house, I felt it clearly as never before.
When I entered there, there was a surprisingly warm feeling, as if this house had been familiar to me for a long time. Of course, I wanted to wander here alone, without a tour, to listen to the atmosphere. Although we were lucky with a guide.
I stood at the window listening to the story and imagined what this house looked like then, in the 19th century. The rustle of dresses, voices, steps, children's running around … It was not difficult to imagine all this, because nothing reminiscent of our time could be seen from the window. Not a single car, empty street, river, walls of houses.
The guide said:
- A carriage drove up to the house … - and then the clatter of horse hooves was heard in complete silence. A carriage passed under the windows and stopped near the house.
Everyone froze. There was a complete feeling that now some of Pushkin's friends would come in here and say that they wanted to see him.
- Is it specially organized? Someone asked.
The guide threw up her hands.
- No…
Fall
Everyone knows that of the seasons, Pushkin loved autumn most of all. He admired her, wrote a lot about her, and in the fall he wrote better. But I have seen surprise on this occasion more than once. Most people don't like autumn, and the poet's love for this time of year is usually attributed to the strangeness of genius.
And some believe that it is easier for a poet to write poetry in autumn, because autumn is sad, and poetry too … but not Pushkin's! By the way, in the autumn days, which bring dejection to many, Belkin's Tales, The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda, Little House in Kolomna and many other things that cannot be called dreary and sad were written.
As if in response to this surprise, Pushkin wrote:
The days of late autumn are usually scolded, But she is sweet to me, dear reader, With quiet beauty, shining humbly.
So unloved child in the family
I am attracted to myself. To tell you frankly
From annual times I'm glad only to her alone, There is a lot of good in it; the lover is not vain
I found something in her a wayward dream.
How can this be explained? I like her, How likely you are a consumptive maiden
Sometimes I like it. Condemned to death
The poor thing bends down without murmur, without anger.
The smile on the lips of the faded is visible;
She does not hear the mouth of the grave abyss;
The crimson color still plays on the face.
She is still alive today, not tomorrow.
It's a sad time! charm of the eyes!
Your farewell beauty is pleasant to me -
I love the lush wilting of nature, Crimson and gold-clad forests, There is noise and fresh breath in their canopy, And the heavens are covered with a wavy mist, And a rare sunbeam, and the first frosts, And distant gray winters are threats.
Still, the reason for the love of autumn is not named here, but only indicated by a metaphor. “I found something in her a wayward dream” … But what?
I really love autumn. For me, autumn as such, and the autumn of Pushkin's poems are always associated with his other lines, from "Feast during the Plague" (by the way, also written in the fall):
Everything, everything that threatens with death, For the heart of a mortal conceals
Inexplicable pleasures -
Immortality, maybe a pledge!
And happy is he who is in the midst of excitement
He could acquire and know them.
Look - they are deeply in tune with his poems about late autumn.
The dying, extinction of nature, the approach of winter cold by each person is involuntarily perceived as a metaphor for his own life, and in general of everything temporary.
This is a reminder that sooner or later everything ends and leaves, no matter how warm and beautiful it is. Hence the traditional autumn sadness. But autumn brought Pushkin joy, the deepest joy that he did not find in other seasons! Why?
Because only temporary can leave, disappear, stop. And only when the temporary passes away, when everything superfluous disappears, does the highest ascent of the spirit become possible. It is at this time that it is easiest to see and embody that which is beyond the control of time.
If you look only at the dying nature in autumn, you will not feel anything but longing. And if you see behind this a light that is higher than time, then autumn will cause completely different feelings and a surge of inspiration. "Immortality, maybe a pledge", a reminder of our true nature, of the purpose that we often forget in the flow of time.
Here it is, this "wayward dream" - the dream of immortality. And a firm belief in immortality - after all, if this belief did not exist, then autumn would catch up with hopeless melancholy, like any unrealizable hope.
Therefore, Pushkin's poems about autumn have such an amazing magnetism. There is no despondency in them, on the contrary, a deep inner joy shimmers in them.
The sky was breathing in autumn
Less often the sun shone
The day was getting shorter
Mysterious forest canopy
With a sad noise she was naked, Fog fell on the fields, A noisy caravan geese
Stretched towards the south: approaching
Quite a boring time;
It was November already at the yard.
The dawn rises in the cold haze;
In the fields, the noise of work ceased;
With her hungry wolf
A wolf comes out on the road;
Sensing him, the road horse
Snores - and a careful traveler
Rushing up the mountain at full speed;
At dawn the shepherd
Doesn't drive the cows out of the barn,
And at noon in a circle
His horn does not call them;
Singing in the hut, maiden
Spins, and, winter friend of the nights, A splinter crackles in front of her.
Little-known facts about Pushkin
Pushkin remembered himself from the age of 4. He talked several times about how once while walking he noticed the earth swaying and the columns tremble, and the last earthquake in Moscow was recorded just in 1803.
And, by the way, at about the same time, the first meeting between Pushkin and the emperor took place - little Sasha almost fell under the hooves of the horse Alexander I, who also went for a walk. Thank God, Alexander managed to hold the horse, the child was not hurt, and the only one who got scared in earnest was the nanny.
And it turns out that he entered the famous Lyceum Pushkin through pull. The Lyceum was founded by Minister Speransky himself, the enrollment was small - only 30 people, but Pushkin had an uncle - a very famous and talented poet Vasily Lvovich Pushkin, who was personally acquainted with Speransky.
I don’t know how my uncle felt afterwards, but in the list of successful students, which was prepared for the prom, Pushkin was the second from the end.
But at the Lyceum, Pushkin fell in love for the first time. It is very curious to read not even the list of his victories, but the reviews of different people about him.
His brother, for example, said that Pushkin was bad in himself, small in stature, but for some reason women liked him. This is confirmed by an enthusiastic letter from Vera Alexandrovna Nashchokina, with whom Pushkin was also in love: "Pushkin was brown-haired with strongly curly hair, blue eyes and extraordinary attractiveness."
However, the same brother of Pushkin admitted that when Pushkin was interested in someone, he became very tempting. On the other hand, when Pushkin was not interested, his conversation was sluggish, boring and simply unbearable. The number of Pushkin's victories on the love front is 113!
Pushkin's first duel happened at the Lyceum, but in general he was called to a duel more than 90 times. Pushkin himself suggested shooting more than one and a half hundred times. The reason might not be worth a damn - for example, in an ordinary dispute about trifles, Pushkin could suddenly call someone a scoundrel, and, of course, it ended with shooting.
Pushkin also had gambling debts, and quite serious ones. True, he almost always found means to cover them, but when there were some delays, he wrote evil epigrams to his creditors and drew caricatures of them in notebooks. Once such a sheet was found, and there was a big scandal.
Yes, but what foreigners write about Pushkin. It turns out that Eugene Onegin is generally the first Russian novel (albeit in verse). This is what it says in the 1961 Encyclopedia Britannica. It also says that before Pushkin the Russian language was generally not suitable for fiction.
By the way, in Russia in 1912 and 1914, collections of Pushkin's poems were published, which have now become a bibliographic rarity: a certain V. Lenin was the compiler of the collections, and A. Ulyanov wrote the preface. Lenin was the pseudonym of the publisher Sytin (his daughter's name was Elena), and the literary critic Ulyanov was just a namesake.
Pushkin had four children: two daughters and two sons. None of them was engaged in literature. Only the youngest son Grigory Alexandrovich sometimes shared his memories of his father. True, in the year when Pushkin was killed, Grigory was only 2 years old.
'My family is multiplying, growing, making noise around me. Now, it seems, there is nothing to murmur about life, and there is nothing to be afraid of old age. ' A. S. Pushkin to P. V. Nashchokin. 1836
N. I. Frizenhof. Children of A. S. Pushkin. 1839
Currently, the number of Pushkin's descendants in the world exceeds two hundred people. Pushkin's descendants live not only in Russia, but also in many other countries of the world.
There is a Pushkin House in St. Petersburg. This is not the place where the poet lived, but the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Initially, it was created as a center for collecting, storing and studying manuscripts and relics that relate to the life and work of A. S. Pushkin and writers of the Pushkin era. In addition, materials on Russian literature and culture of various historical periods, from antiquity to the present, flocked to the Pushkin House, and in 1930 it was transformed into the Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences, while retaining the historical name as the second name.
The Russian Center in Ust-Kamenogorsk (Kazakhstan) is preparing a series of publications in the wake of A. S. Pushkin's Don Juan list. It should be noted that a book on this topic was first published in a small print run back in 1923 by P. K. Guber. It was a small edition of seven chapters.
The updated version, called "Before the Powerful Power of Beauty," is planned to be released in nine volumes. The books debunk the myth about the relationship between A. S. Pushkin and E. K. Vorontsova; presents the original concept of A. S. Pushkin's relationship to Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna, wife of Alexander I, and Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, wife of Nicholas I, and others.
In "Journey to Arzrum" Pushkin recorded his meeting with the Georgians, who were transporting the body of the late AS Griboyedov from Tehran to Tiflis. The real meeting took place on June 11, 1829 on the road from Tiflis to Kars near the pass over the Bezobdal ridge.
Pushkin and Griboyedov met periodically in 1817, when Pushkin, after graduating from the Lyceum, lived in St. Petersburg, and also in 1828, when Griboyedov was in the capital for some time in connection with the conclusion of the Turkmanchay Treaty, but their last meeting turned out to be tragic.
Previously, at the university entrance exams, the question was: "Where and under what circumstances did Pushkin and Griboyedov meet?" - was one of the most frequently asked questions by applicants.
For six years, Pushkin was preparing the preface to Boris Godunov (the text of the drama was completed in 1825, but published only in 1831). Moreover, even after the publication of the tragedy, the author added new comments to his innovative drama, tried to explain as easily as possible certain points that arouse criticism from the public and critics.
Initially, the novel "Eugene Onegin" Pushkin began to write as "Onegin's Album" in the first person. Then he realized that he did not really like the complete rapprochement of the author with the hero, and he divided the two hypostases: he brought himself among the characters as the Author, and Onegin as the hero. The canonical text contains traces of the Album: the passage “My uncle of the most honest rules …” is taken from the first version. Pushkin only added a line: "This is what the young rake thought, flying in the dust on the post office …" - and quoted a remark.
And - finally - probably the most amusing fact, which, however, has nothing to do with, in fact, Pushkin's biography. In Ethiopia a few years ago, a monument to Pushkin was erected in this way. The words “To our poet” are carved on a beautiful marble pedestal.