Love lyrics (Tolstoy Lev N.). “If you love, you are so crazy…” (Love lyrics by A.K. Tolstoy in the romances of P.I. Tchaikovsky) And love for Tolstoy

In the early period of his creativity, in the 1840s, Tolstoy’s lyrical poems were filled with a living sense of history, the memory of which permeated the brightly festive pictures of Russian and Ukrainian nature. In the poem “You know the land where everything breathes abundantly...” the poet uses the compositional structure of Goethe’s “Minions,” beloved by Russian and German romantics. The lyrical heroine of the work speaks with inspiration about the mysterious promised land, where lemons bloom, where the sky breathes the bliss of the South, and calls on her lover three times:

There, there, Beloved, we could hide forever.

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

You know the land where everything breathes abundantly, Where rivers flow purer than silver, Where the steppe feather grass is swayed by the breeze, Farmsteads are drowning in cherry groves...

Then the poet folds his wings and lands among Ukrainian villages and gardens, where “the trees bend down, and their heavy fruit hangs to the ground.” A panorama of the surrounding forests, lakes, and fields opens up. And the lines already sound quite Lermontov-like when the poet enters the circle of contemporary folk life:

There, there I strive with all my heart,

To where it was so easy for the heart,

Where Marusya weaves a wreath of flowers,

Blind Gritsko sings about antiquity,

And the lads, circling on the smooth crop, blow up the dust with a cheerful squat!

Next, the poet makes a polemical move in relation to Lermontov’s “Motherland”. Let us remember that the “cherished legends of dark antiquity” did not stir “pleasant dreams” in Lermontov’s soul. But with Tolstoy it’s the other way around: from the concrete realities of the Ukrainian landscape, from the pictures of modern folk life, the poet’s memory rushes into the distance of history:

Among the steppes there is a mound from the time of Batu, In the distance there are herds of grazing oxen, Carts of convoys, carpets of flowering buckwheat And you, forelocks - the remains of the glorious Sich... Both the Ukrainian landscape and people's life are filled with Tolstoy's roar of history, saturated with the “cherished legends” of dark antiquity. The poet spiritualizes nature and folk life with echoes of bygone times:

Do you remember the night over the sleeping Ukraine, When gray-haired steam rose from the swamp, The world was dressed in darkness and mystery, The stozhar shone over the steppe with sparks, And it seemed to us: through the transparent fog Paley and Sagaidachny are rushing again? Tolstoy is faithful here to the basic aesthetic principles of his work: the visible world is pierced by the light of the invisible world, appearing through "transparent fog" of modern times. He doesn’t even paint the image of modern Ukraine “from life.” This is a memory image, seen not directly, but spiritual vision poet. N.V. Gogol drew attention to its characteristic signs, speaking about the landscapes of the blind Russian poet I.I. Kozlov: “Looking at the rainbow colors and colors with which his luxurious pictures of nature boil and shine, you immediately learn with sadness that they have already been lost for him forever: to a sighted person they would never have appeared in such a bright and even exaggerated brilliance. They can only be the property of such a person who has not admired them for a long time, but has faithfully and strongly retained the memory of them, which grew and increased in a fervent imagination and shone even in the darkness inseparable from it.” It is in Tolstoy’s spiritual vision that his beloved Ukrainian nature shines with rainbow colors and colors: “rivers flow purer than silver,” “the scythe rings and shines,” “golden fields are dotted with the azure of cornflowers,” “sunflowers glisten with dew,” and sprinkle “sparks from stozhar.”

Historical memories, at first only breaking through the fiery bright pictures-memories of the life of modern Ukraine, gradually gain strength and are resolved in the climactic lines:

You know the land where the Poles fought with Russia,

Where were so many bodies lying among the fields?

You know the land where there is no time at the chopping block

Mazepa was cursed by the stubborn Kochubey

And in many places glorious blood has been shed

In honor of the ancient rights and Orthodox faith?

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

Do you know the land where the Diet sadly pours between the banks of the orphaned, Above it are the ruined vaults of the palace, The entrance has long been overgrown with thick grass, Above the door is a shield with the hetman’s mace?.. There, there I strive with my soul!

In this poem the contours of A.K. Tolstoy’s historical views are already visible. Following Pushkin, he worries about the historical fate of the Russian noble aristocracy, which is losing its leading role in modern times. The masterpieces of the poet’s love lyrics include his poems “Among the Noisy Ball...”, set to music by P. I. Tchaikovsky and which became a classic Russian romance:

In the middle of a noisy ball, by chance,

In the anxiety of worldly vanity,

I saw you, but it's a mystery

Your features covered...

Tolstoy's love lyrics are distinguished by deep psychologism, a subtle penetration into the unsteady, transitional states of the human soul, into the processes of the emergence of feelings, for which it is difficult to find a clear definition that fixes the name. The unfinished process of the maturation of love in the soul of the lyrical hero is poetically captured. The first alarms of this feeling, the first and still vague symptoms of its awakening are noted. The event of the meeting is immersed in the haze of memories of her, memories of anxiety and uncertainty. The female image in poetry is unsteady and elusive, shrouded in a veil of romantic mystery and enigma. It seems that this is a chance meeting, the memories of which should absorb the impressions of a noisy ball, the annoying anxieties of “worldly vanity.” However, the poems, disrupting the usual, long-established course of everyday life, are unexpectedly and paradoxically invaded by an adversarial “but”: “I saw you, But mystery..." The mystery, attractive, yet inexplicable, captivates the lyrical hero, destroys the inertia of a vain secular existence.

He cannot reveal this secret, he cannot solve this riddle. The image of a woman is woven from strokes that are inexplicable in their contrast: cheerful speech, but sad eyes; laughter is sad, but loud; the voice is sometimes “like the sound of a distant pipe”, sometimes “like a playing wave of the sea.” Behind these contradictions lies, of course, the mystery of the woman’s mental appearance, but they also characterize the confusion of the feelings of the lyrical hero, who is in a tense oscillation between detached observation and unexpected surges of feeling that foreshadow love passion. High tide alternates with low tide.

Not only the features of the female image are contrasting - the entire poem is built on oppositions: a noisy ball and quiet hours of the night, the crowded social crowd and night loneliness, the appearance of secrets in everyday life. The very uncertainty of feeling allows the poet to slide on the edge of prose and poetry, decline and rise. In an unstable psychological atmosphere, the stylistic polyphony allowed by the poet is natural and artistically justified. The everyday (“I love to lie down when I’m tired”) is combined with the sublimely poetic (“sad eyes”, “the playing shaft of the sea”), the romantic “unknown dreams” - with the prosaic “sadly I fall asleep like that.” Two stylistic plans here are deeply meaningful; with their help, the poet depicts the process of awakening sublime love in the very prose of life.

The lyrical poems of A.K. Tolstoy are distinguished by improvisation. The poet consciously allows carelessness in rhyming, stylistic freedom and looseness. It is important for him to create the artistic effect of the momentary, miraculous nature of the poetic miniature that poured out from under his pen. In a letter to a friend, Tolstoy said: “I deliberately allow bad rhymes in some poems, where I consider myself entitled to be careless... There is a kind of painting where impeccable correctness of line is required, such are large canvases called historical... There is another type of painting where the most important thing is the color, but the line is almost irrelevant... Some things should be minted, others have the right or should not even be minted, otherwise they will seem cold.” A slight “carelessness” gave Tolstoy’s poems a reverent truthfulness, sincerity and warmth in conveying the emerging feeling, in the depiction of sublime, ideal states of the soul.

In one of his letters to a friend, Tolstoy noted: “When I look at myself from the outside (which is very difficult), it seems that I can characterize my work in poetry as major, which is sharply different from the prevailing minor tone of our Russian poets, with the exception of Pushkin , which is decidedly major.” Indeed, Tolstoy’s favorite image of nature in Tolstoy’s poetry is the “cheerful month of May.” Let us only note that the major tone in his poetry is permeated from within with light sadness, even in such a masterpiece of his sunny lyrics as the poem “That Was in Early Spring...”, set to music by P. I. Tchaikovsky and N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov :

It was early spring

The grass barely grew, the streams flowed, the heat did not soar,

And the greenery of the groves showed through;

Shepherd's trumpet in the morning

She hasn’t sung loudly yet, And in curls she’s still in the forest

There was a thin fern.

It was early spring

It was in the shade of the birches, when with a smile in front of me

You lowered your eyes.

That's in response to my love

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

O youth! oh hopes!

And I cried in front of you,

Looking at your dear face, -

It was early spring, It was in the shade of birches!

That was on the morning of our years -

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

O fresh spirit of birch!

Sending this poem to a friend, Tolstoy called it “a little pastoral translated from Goethe.” He had in mind “The May Song,” inspired by the German poet’s love for Friederike Brion, the daughter of a village pastor. Goethe’s entire work is built on exclamations expressing the jubilation of the lyrical hero:

How everyone rejoices, sings, rings! The valley is in bloom, the zenith is on fire!

The final lines of Tolstoy's poems, consisting of only exclamations - “Oh happiness! oh tears! / O forest! oh life! O light of the sun!”, - they really remind of Goethe’s lines: “O Erc1, o Zoppe, o S-ShsZh, o biz!;!” But Tolstoy does not go further than this similarity. The poems of the “May Song” were only the impetus for him to create an original poem, far from Goethe’s pastoral motifs. The German poet glorifies the jubilant happiness of love in unity with the rural blooming nature. For Tolstoy, it’s in the foreground memory about the distant, irretrievably gone moments of the first youthful love. And therefore, the theme of the rapid passage of time runs through the entire poem: "That was early spring" "That was in the morning of our years", "Among the birches that was." The Russian poet’s joy is permeated with a feeling of sadness, a feeling of loss - inexorable, irrevocable. The May morning merges with the “morning of our years” - and life itself turns into a unique and fleeting moment. Everything is in the past, but "memory of the heart" keeps it. The brightness of spring colors here is not only not weakened, but enhanced, sharpened by the spiritual vision of a Christian poet, remembering death, the fragility of earthly happiness, the fragility of earthly joys, the fleetingness of beautiful moments.

Lecture 34 A.K. Tolstoy. Life and art. The main themes, motives and images of poetry.

Russian literature gave the world three writers with the surname Tolstoy:

ü If we talk about the work of A.K. Tolstoy, then most likely the vast majority of residents of our country will not remember a single work of this great man (and this, of course, is very sad).

But A.K. - great Russian poet, writer, playwright, corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In the 20th century, 11 feature films were made based on his works in Russia, Italy, Poland, and Spain. His theatrical plays were successfully performed not only in Russia, but also in Europe. More than 70 musical works were created based on his poems at different times. Music for Tolstoy's poems was written by such outstanding Russian composers as Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, as well as the Hungarian composer F. Liszt. None of the poets can boast of such an achievement.

Half a century after the death of the great poet, the last classic of Russian literature, I. Bunin, wrote: “Gr. A.K. Tolstoy is one of the most remarkable Russian people and writers, even to this day under-appreciated, under-understood and already forgotten.”

Tolstoy Alexey Konstantinovich

(1817-1875)

Main themes, genres and images in the works of A.K. Tolstoy

Love theme

Love theme occupied a large place in Tolstoy’s work. Tolstoy saw love as the main beginning of life. Love awakens creative energy in a person. The most valuable thing in love is the kinship of souls, spiritual closeness, which distance cannot weaken. Through all the poet's love lyrics runs image of a loving, spiritually rich woman.

Main genre Tolstoy's love lyrics romance type poems

Since 1851, all the poems were dedicated to one woman, Sofya Andreevna Miller, who later became his wife, she was A. Tolstoy’s only lifelong love, his muse and first strict critic. All of A. Tolstoy’s love lyrics since 1851 are dedicated to her.

The poem "Among the Noisy Ball", thanks to Tchaikovsky's music, turned into a famous romance, which was very popular in both the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nature theme

Many of A.K. Tolstoy’s works are based on descriptions of his native places, his Motherland, which nurtured and raised the poet. He has a very strong love for everything “earthly”, for the surrounding nature, he subtly senses its beauty. Tolstoy's lyrics are dominated by landscape-type poems.

At the end of the 50-60s, enthusiastic folk song motifs appeared in the poet’s works. A distinctive feature of Tolstoy's lyrics is folklore.

Spring time, blossoming and reviving fields, meadows, and forests, are especially attractive to Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s favorite image of nature in Tolstoy’s poetry is the “cheerful month of May.” The spring revival of nature heals the poet from contradictions, mental anguish and gives his voice a note of optimism:

In the poem “You are my land, my native land,” the poet associates his homeland with the greatness of the steppe horses, with their crazy jumps in the fields. The harmonious fusion of these majestic animals with the surrounding nature creates in the reader images of boundless freedom and vast expanses of their native land.

In nature, Tolstoy sees not only undying beauty and a force that heals the tormented spirit of modern man, but also the image of the long-suffering Motherland. Landscape poems easily include thoughts about the native land, about the battles for the country's independence, about the unity of the Slavic world. (“Oh haystacks, haystacks”)

Main genre: landscape (including philosophical reflections

Main images: the spring month of May, the image of the long-suffering Motherland, images of boundless freedom and vast expanses of the native land.

Peculiarity: folklore, nationality of Tolstoy's poetry (poems in the style of folk songs).

Many lyrical poems, in which the poet glorified nature, were set to music by great composers. Tchaikovsky highly valued the poet's simple but deeply moving works and considered them unusually musical.

Satire and humor

Humor and satire have always been part of A.K.'s nature. Tolstoy. The funny pranks, jokes, and antics of young Tolstoy and his cousins ​​Alexei and Vladimir Zhemchuzhnikov were known throughout St. Petersburg. High-ranking government officials were especially hard hit. Complaints.

Later Tolstoy became one of the creators of the image Kozma Prutkova- a smug, stupid official, completely devoid of literary talent. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikovs compiled a biography of the fictitious would-be writer, invented a place of work, familiar artists painted a portrait of Prutkov.

On behalf of Kozma Prutkov, they wrote poems, plays, aphorisms, and historical anecdotes, ridiculing in them the phenomena of the surrounding reality and literature. Many believed that such a writer really existed.

Prutkov's aphorisms went to the people.

His satirical poems enjoyed great success. A.K. Tolstoy’s favorite satirical genres were: parodies, messages, epigrams.

Tolstoy’s satire was striking in its courage and mischief. He directed his satirical arrows both at nihilists (“Message to M.N. Longinov on Darwinism”, the ballad “Sometimes Merry May...”, etc.) and at the state order (“Popov’s Dream” ), and on censorship, and the obscurantism of officials, and even on Russian history itself (“History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev”).

The most famous work on this topic is the satirical review “The History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev” (1868). The entire history of Russia (1000 years) from the calling of the Varangians to the reign of Alexander II is outlined in 83 quatrains. A.K. gives apt characteristics of Russian princes and tsars, describing their attempts to improve life in Rus'. And each period ends with the words:

Our land is rich

There is no order again.

Theme of Russian history

Main genres: ballads, epics, poems, tragedies. These works unfold a whole poetic concept of Russian history.

Tolstoy divided the history of Russia into two periods: pre-Mongol (Kievan Rus) and post-Mongol (Moscow Rus).

He idealized the first period. In his opinion, in ancient times Rus' was close to knightly Europe and embodied the highest type of culture, reasonable social structure and free manifestation of a worthy personality. There was no slavery in Rus', there was democracy in the form of a veche, there was no despotism and cruelty in governing the country, the princes respected the personal dignity and freedom of citizens, the Russian people were distinguished by high morality and religiosity. The international prestige of Rus' was also high.

Tolstoy's ballads and poems, depicting images of Ancient Rus', are imbued with lyricism; they convey the poet's passionate dream of spiritual independence, admiration for the integral heroic natures captured in folk epic poetry. In the ballads “Ilya Muromets”, “Matchmaking”, “Alyosha Popovich”, “Borivoy”, images of legendary heroes and historical subjects illustrate the author’s thoughts and embody his ideal ideas about Rus'.

The Mongol-Tatar invasion turned the tide of history back. Since the 14th century, the liberties, universal consent and openness of Kievan Rus and Veliky Novgorod have been replaced by servility, tyranny and national isolation of Muscovite Russia, explained by the painful legacy of the Tatar yoke. Slavery in the form of serfdom is established, democracy and guarantees of freedom and honor are destroyed, autocracy and despotism, cruelty, and moral decay of the population arise.

He attributed all these processes primarily to the period of the reign of Ivan III, Ivan the Terrible, and Peter the Great.

Tolstoy perceived the 19th century as a direct continuation of the shameful “Moscow period” of our history. Therefore, modern Russian orders were also criticized by the poet.

Basic images of poetry

Images of folk heroes (Ilya Muromets, Borivoy, Alyosha Popovich) and rulers (Prince Vladimir, Ivan the Terrible, Peter I)

Favorite genre there was a poet ballad

Most common literary in Tolstoy's works the image is the image of Ivan the Terrible(in many works - the ballads “Vasily Shibanov”, “Prince Mikhailo Repnin”, the novel “Prince Silver”, the tragedy “The Death of Ivan the Terrible”). The era of the reign of this tsar is a vivid example of “Muscovism”: the execution of undesirables, senseless cruelty, the ruin of the country by the tsar’s guardsmen, the enslavement of the peasants. The blood runs cold when you read the lines from the ballad “Vasily Shibanov” about how the servant of Prince Kurbsky, who fled to Lithuania, brings Ivan the Terrible a message from his master.

A. Tolstoy was characterized by personal independence, honesty, incorruptibility, and nobility. Careerism, opportunism and the expression of thoughts contrary to his convictions were alien to him. The poet always spoke honestly to the king's face. He condemned the sovereign course of the Russian bureaucracy and looked for an ideal in the origins of Russian democracy in ancient Novgorod. In addition, he resolutely did not accept the Russian radicalism of the revolutionary democrats, being outside both camps.

Retrograde, monarchist, reactionary - such epithets were awarded to Tolstoy by supporters of the revolutionary path: Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chernyshevsky. And in Soviet times, the great poet was relegated to the position of a minor poet (he was little published and was not studied in the course of literature). But no matter how hard they tried to consign the name of Tolstoy to oblivion, the influence of his work on the development of Russian culture turned out to be enormous (literature - became the forerunner of Russian symbolism, cinema - 11 films, theater - tragedies glorified Russian drama, music - 70 works, painting - paintings, philosophy - views Tolstoy became the basis for the philosophical concept of V. Solovyov).

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

It seems to me that often, having grasped a small hair of this ancient creativity, we clumsily tug, and in our hand we are left with something torn or mutilated or ugly, and then we tug again, piece by piece, and then try to glue them together or what what is missing, we replace it with our own inventions, correct what we ourselves have spoiled with our clumsiness, and hence our uncertainty and our shortcomings, which offend the artistic instinct...

In order not to spoil or destroy what we want to bring into our world, we need either a very keen eye, or completely complete detachment from external influences, great silence around ourselves and concentrated attention, or love, similar to mine, but free from sorrow and anxiety." These views were expressed in poetic form by A.K. Tolstoy in his programmatic poem “It’s in vain, artist, you imagine that you are the creator of your creations...”:

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

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

But only those who know how to see and hear will convey them,

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

The whole with him draws the creature into our world in surprise.

Presenting an overview of the poet’s work in the article “Poetry gr. A.K. Tolstoy", Vl. Soloviev noted the main idea of ​​the poem: “The true source of poetry, like all art, is not in external phenomena and also not in the subjective mind of the artist, but in the original world of eternal ideas or prototypes.”

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

We catch a glimpse of eternal beauty:

The forest sounds joyful to us with news about her,

About her the stream thunders like a cold stream,

And they say, swaying, flowers.

“My conviction is,” noted A.K. Tolstoy, “that the purpose of a poet is not to bring people any direct benefit or benefit, but to raise their moral level, instilling a love of beauty, which will find its own use without any propaganda.” Tolstoy expressed this idea already at the end of his days, in 1874, when the results of his life were summed up, but starting from the 1840s, the poet did not accept the pragmatic understanding of art that began to take root in literature. Many Russian writers and thinkers spoke about the primitively understood benefits, including art, - F.M. Dostoevsky, I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov and others. In 1871, Tolstoy will write a “ballad with trends” “Sometimes Merry May”, in which in a bright satirical form (a dialogue between a naive bride and a pragmatic groom) he presents the “useful” views of the new time:

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

Me, in the darkness and dust

Who has been dragging his chains until now,

Love's wings have risen,

To the homeland of flame and words;

And my dark gaze brightened,

And the invisible world became visible to me.

And the ear hears from now on,

What is elusive to others

And from the highest heights I came down,

Full of its rays,

And to the troubled valley,

I look with new eyes.

And I hear a conversation

Everywhere the silent sound is heard,

Like the stone heart of the mountains,

Beats with love in the dark depths,

With love in the blue firmament,

Slow clouds are swirling,

And under the tree bark,

In spring fresh and fragrant,

With love, living juice into the leaves,

The stream rises melodiously.

And with my prophetic heart I understood

That everything born of the Word

Rays of love are all around,

She longs to return to him again.

And every stream of life,

Love obedient to the law,

Strives with the power of being

Irrepressibly towards God's bosom.

And everywhere there is sound, and everywhere there is light,

And all the worlds have one beginning,

And there is nothing in nature

So that love does not breathe.

(“Me in the darkness and dust”, 1851, 1852)

As in Pushkin’s “Prophet”, which is close in imagery to the poem by A.K. Tolstoy, the work paints a picture of the rebirth of an ordinary person into a prophet, a poet under the influence of the powerful Divine power of love. For Tolstoy, love is a comprehensive, supreme concept, the basis on which life is built. One of the manifestations of the highest love is earthly love, love for a woman. It is natural that even at the beginning of his work A.K. Tolstoy turns to the eternal plot of Don Juan in world literature. His dramatic poem “Don Juan” depicts the main character as a true knight of love, and it is love that reveals “the wonderful system of the laws of existence, the hidden beginning of all phenomena.”

A significant place in the poetic heritage of A.K. Tolstoy is interested in love lyrics, cycles of poems associated with the image of S.A. Miller (Tolstoy). These are works such as “Among the noisy ball”, “The sea sways”, “Don’t trust me, friend”, “When the forest is silent all around”, “Why did you bow your head”, “Sleep, sad friend”, “Not the wind, blowing with heights”, “Passion has passed”, “A tear trembles” and others. The feeling of love is expressed by Tolstoy psychologically concretely, precisely and simply, sometimes even naively, but at the same time refined. Tolstoy varied in the forms of expression of lyrical feelings. Researcher of creativity A.K. Tolstoy I.G. Yampolsky noted that the words sadness, melancholy, grief, despondency are most often used by the poet when defining his own love experiences and the experiences of the poet’s beloved (“And I sadly remembered the previous years,” “And it’s so sad to think about it,” “And I’m so sad.” I’m falling asleep”, etc.). In poems stylized as folk songs, the intonation, as a rule, is different - daring, passionate, in them the spontaneous feeling of freedom, independence, recklessness is inextricably linked with the feeling of love (the poems “Don’t ask, don’t ask”, “If you love, so without reason”, etc.).

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

I bless you, forests,

Valleys, fields, mountains, waters!

I bless freedom

And blue skies!

And I bless my staff,

And this poor sum

And the steppe from edge to edge,

And the light of the sun and the darkness of the night,

And a lonely path

Which way, beggar, am I going,

And in the field every blade of grass,

And every star in the sky!

Recreating the beauty of nature and the world, the poet resorts to sound, visual, and tactile impressions. Tactile impressions are important for the poet. He himself admitted: “The fresh smell of mushrooms awakens a whole series of memories in me. ...And then all the other forest aromas appear, for example, the smell of moss, tree bark, the smell of the forest during intense heat, the smell of the forest after rain... and so many others..., not counting the smell of flowers in the forest.” In the ballad “Ilya Muromets” he writes:

The wild will blows again,

There's room for him,

And resin and strawberries,

It smells like dark forest.

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

The bells are ringing louder,

The harp sounds

The guests sat around the tables,

Honey and mash are flowing,

The noise flies to the far south,

To the Turk and to the Hungarian -

And the sound of Slavic ladles,

The Germans don't like it!

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

It shines through the glow of the darkening skies,

And a small pattern is drawn in front of me,

The forest is barely dressed in spring leaves,

A slope descends into a swampy meadow.

And wilderness and silence. Just sleepy blackbirds

How reluctantly they finish their singing;

Steam rises from the meadow...

("On the pull")

Landscape sketches are often combined in the works of A.K. Tolstoy with ballad motifs. In the poem “A pine forest stands in a lonely country,” the character of the landscape has ballad features - a night forest immersed in fog, the whisper of a night stream, the unclear light of the moon, etc. The line “I love to remember the old days in that forest” evokes the idea of ​​further ballad unfolding of the plot, which, however, does not happen.

For the poetry of A.K. Tolstoy is characterized by a moment of reticence, understatement. “It is good in poetry not to finish a thought, allowing everyone to complete it in their own way,” the poet noted in a letter of 1854 to S.A. Miller. Such understatement, the inexhaustibility of thoughts and feelings can be noted in the poems “On an uneven and shaking rowing”, “The Earth was in bloom”, etc. In the ballad “Alyosha Popovich” the poet writes:

Who can understand the song?

Who will understand it in words?

But the sounds make my heart melt,

And my head is spinning.

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

Two stans is not a fighter, but only a random guest,

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

The Lord prepared me for battle,

He put love and anger in my chest,

And by my holy right hand,

He showed the true path...

The motives of open opposition to the evil of the surrounding world are heard in the poems “I recognized you as holy convictions”, “The heart, flaring up more strongly from year to year”, etc. These motives sound most powerfully, clearly, and polemically in the poem of 1867 “Against the Current”:

The truth is still the same!

In the midst of stormy darkness,

Believe in the wonderful star of inspiration,

Row together in the name of beauty,

Against the stream!

In a sharp form, the motives of rejection of everything that is contrary to beauty and inner freedom are heard in the humorous and satirical poems of A.K. Tolstoy.

Alexey Konstantinovich TOLSTOY

About love

Known for his historical dramas in verse and satirical works, one of the creators of the famous Kozma Prutkov, A.K. Tolstoy was also a soulful lyricist. Songs based on his words “If only I knew, if only I knew”, “My bells, steppe flowers” ​​became popular.

The love lyrics of A.K. Tolstoy are entirely connected with the name of his wife - Sofia Andreevna Bakhmeteva (in her first marriage - Miller). Deep and long-term love appears in these lyrics in a romantically sublime coloring. The beloved is depicted as an object of admiration and worship, as a high ideal. Therefore, in the poems dedicated to her, there are almost no everyday details, episodes from which one could reconstruct the true history of their relationship, as can be done from the poems of Nekrasov, Tyutchev, Ogarev. There are no psychological conflicts in them either. They represent the high, poetic, but almost unchanged feeling of the poet himself.

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

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

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

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

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

Dmitry Hvorostovsky - Among the noisy ball

PETER NALCH IN THE CDA - ROMANCE "AMID A NOISY BALL..."

Composition

The outstanding Russian lyricist and poet Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy is characterized by an unusually subtle sense of the beauty of his native nature. He knew how to capture the most characteristic things in the forms and colors of nature, its sounds and smells. The poem “Autumn” is no exception. Our whole poor garden is crumbling" (1858). The poet speaks of the “yellowed leaves” that fly in the wind, and of the bright red tassels on the withering rowan trees. It is these lines that easily fit into the memory, and the picture, colorfully depicted by the poet, appears before the mind’s eye. The most striking signs of the autumn season are indicated. The second half of the poem - about sad love and autumn sadness - is understandable only to an adult.

Many works of A.K. Tolstoy gained wide popularity among the people and became songs. These are “My bells, steppe flowers...”, “Oh, if only Mother Volga would run back...”, “The sun is descending over the steppes...”, etc. These and other poems expressed a heartfelt lyrical feeling, a feeling of the homeland.