home For men New Peasant Poetry. As a genre, “peasant poetry” was formed in the middle of the 19th century. Peasant poetry of the 19th century.

New Peasant Poetry. As a genre, “peasant poetry” was formed in the middle of the 19th century. Peasant poetry of the 19th century.

One of the characteristic features of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. - deep interest in myth and national folklore. On the “paths of myth” in the first decade of the century, the creative quests of such dissimilar literary artists as A. A. Blok, A. Bely, V. I. Ivanov, K. D. Balmont, S. M. Gorodetsky, A. M. Remizov and others. Orientation towards folk poetic forms of artistic thinking, the desire to understand the present through the prism of nationally colored “ancient antiquity” is acquiring fundamental importance for Russian culture. The interest of the literary and artistic intelligentsia in ancient Russian art, literature, the poetic world of ancient folk legends, and Slavic mythology became even more acute during the years of the World War. Under these conditions, the work of peasant poets attracts special attention.

Organizationally, peasant writers - N. A. Klyuev, S. L. Yesenin, S. L. Klychkov, A. A. Ganin, A. V. Shiryaevets, P. V. Oreshin and those who entered literature already in the 1920s. P. N. Vasiliev and Ivan Pribludny (Ya. P. Ovcharenko) did not represent a clearly defined literary direction with a strict ideological and theoretical program. They did not make declarations and did not theoretically substantiate their literary and artistic principles, but their group is distinguished by a bright literary originality and social and ideological unity, which makes it possible to distinguish them from the general stream of neo-populist literature of the 20th century. The commonality of literary and human destinies and genetic roots, the similarity of ideological and aesthetic aspirations, the similar formation and similar paths of development of creativity, the system of artistic and expressive means that coincides in many of its features - all this fully allows us to speak about the typological community of creativity of peasant poets.

Thus, S. A. Yesenin, having discovered in the poetry of N. A. Klyuev an already mature expression of a poetic worldview close to him, in April 1915 he addressed Klyuev with a letter: “Vamp and I have a lot in common. I am also a peasant and I write the same way.” , like you, but only in your Ryazan language."

In October-November 1915, the literary and artistic group “Beauty” was created, headed by S. M. Gorodetsky and which included peasant poets. The group members were united by their love for Russian antiquity, oral poetry, folk songs and epic images. However, "Krasa", like the "Strada" that replaced it, did not last long and soon collapsed.

The first books by peasant poets were published in the 1910s. These are poetry collections:

- N. A. Klyuev “Pines Chime” (1911), “Brotherly Dogs” (1912), “Forest Were” (1913), “Worldly Thoughts” (1916), “Copper Whale” (1918);
- With A. Klychkov “Songs” (1911), “The Hidden Garden” (1913), “Dubravna” (1918), “Ring of Lada” (1919);
- S. A. Yesenin “Radunitsa” (1916), published in 1918 his “Dove”, “Transfiguration” and “Rural Book of Hours”.

In general, peasant writers were characterized by a Christian consciousness (cf. S. A. Yesenin: “The light from the pink icon / On my golden eyelashes”), but it was intricately intertwined (especially in the 1910s) with elements of paganism, and N.A. Klyuev - and Khlysty. Indomitable pagan love of life is a distinctive feature of the lyrical hero A. V. Shiryaevets:

The choir praises the almighty ruler. Akathists, canons, troparia, But I hear the cries of Kupala night, And in the altar - the dance of the playful dawn!

("The choir praises the Almighty Lord...")

The political sympathies of the majority of peasant writers during the years of the revolution were on the side of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Praising the peasantry as the main creative force, they saw in the revolution not only a peasant, but also a Christian principle. Their work is eschatological: many of their works are dedicated to the final destinies of the world and man. As R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik rightly noted in the article “Two Russias” (1917), they were “genuine eschatologists, not armchair, but earthly, deep, popular.”

In the works of peasant writers, the influence of the artistic and stylistic searches of contemporary literature of the Silver Age, including modernist trends, is noticeable. The connection between peasant literature and symbolism is undeniable. It is no coincidence that at one time Nikolai Klyuev, undoubtedly the most colorful figure among the new peasants, had such a profound influence on A. A. Blok and the formation of his populist views. The early poetry of S. A. Klychkov is associated with symbolism; his poems were published by the symbolist publishing houses Alcyona and Musaget.

The first collection of N. A. Klyuev is published with a preface by V. Ya. Bryusov, who highly appreciated the poet’s talent. In the printed organ of the Acmeists - the magazine "Apollo" (1912, No. 1) N. S. Gumilev publishes a favorable review of the collection, and in his critical studies "Letters on Russian Poetry" he devotes many pages to the analysis of Klyuev's work, noting the clarity of Klyuev's verse, his fullness and richness of content.

Klyuev is such an expert on the Russian word high level that to analyze his artistic mastery requires extensive erudition, not only literary, but also cultural: in the field of theology, philosophy, Slavic mythology, ethnography; knowledge of Russian history, folk art, icon painting, history of religion and church, and ancient Russian literature is required. He easily “turns over” such layers of culture that Russian literature had never suspected before. “Bookishness” is a distinctive feature of Klyuev’s creativity. The metaphorical nature of his poetry, which he himself is well aware of (“I am the first of a hundred million / The herder of golden-horned words”), is also inexhaustible because his metaphors, as a rule, are not isolated, but, forming a whole metaphorical series, stand in the context like a solid wall. One of the poet's main artistic merits is the use of the experience of Russian icon painting as the quintessence of peasant culture. With this, he, without a doubt, opened a new direction in Russian poetry.

Klyuev learned the ability to “speak eloquently” and write from Zaonezh folk storytellers and was excellent at all forms of folk art: verbal, theatrical, ritual, and musical. In his own words, he learned “his own smart and caustic words, gestures and facial expressions” at fairs from buffoons. He felt himself to be the bearer of a certain theatrical and folklore tradition, a trusted envoy to intellectual circles from the “underground” Russia, deep hidden from view, unknown, unknown: “I am an initiate of the people, / I have a great seal on me.” Klyuev called himself the “burning offspring” of the famous Avvakum, and even if this is only a metaphor, his character really resembles in many ways - fervor, fearlessness, tenacity, uncompromisingness, willingness to go to the end and “suffer” for his beliefs - the character of the archpriest: “Get ready for the fire early!” - / My great-grandfather Habakkuk thundered.”

The literature of the Silver Age was characterized by intense polemics between representatives of different directions. Peasant poets polemicized simultaneously with the Symbolists and Acmeists1. Klyuev’s program poem “You promised us gardens...” (1912), dedicated to K. D. Balmont, is built on the opposition “you - we”: You - Symbolists, preachers of vaguely unrealistic ideals, We - poets from the people.

Your patterned garden flew around, Streams flowed like poison.

For the strangers, we go, finally, unknown, - Our aroma is resinous and pungent, We are the refreshing winter.

The gorges of the subsoil fed us, The sky was watered with rain. We are boulders, gray cedars, forest springs and the ringing of pine trees.

The consciousness of the greatest intrinsic value of the “peasant” perception dictated to peasant writers a sense of their inner superiority over representatives of intellectual circles unfamiliar with the unique world of folk culture.

“The secret culture of the people, which at the height of its learning our so-called educated society does not even suspect,” notes N. A. Klyuev in the article “Gem Precious Blood” (1919), “does not cease to radiate to this hour.”

Klyuev’s peasant costume, which seemed masquerade to many, his speech and demeanor, and above all, of course, his creativity performed the most important function: to attract the attention of the intelligentsia, which had long since “break away” from the people, to peasant Russia, to show how beautiful it is, how well and wise everything is structure, and that only in it is the guarantee of the moral health of the nation. Klyuev doesn’t seem to speak - he shouts to “brothers, educated writers”: where are you going? stop! repent! come to your senses!

The peasant environment itself shaped the peculiarities of the artistic thinking of the new peasants, which was organically close to the folk one. Never before has the world of peasant life, depicted taking into account the local peculiarities of life, dialect, and folklore traditions (Klyuev recreates the ethnographic and linguistic flavor of Zaonezhye, Yesenin - the Ryazan region, Klychkov - the Tver province, Shiryaevets models the Volga region), found such adequate expression in Russian literature. In the works of the new peasants, the worldview of a person close to the earth and nature was fully expressed, the outgoing world of Russian peasant life with its culture and philosophy was reflected, and since the concepts of “peasantry” and “people” were equivalent for them, so was the deep world of Russian national self-awareness . Rustic Rus' is the main source of the poetic worldview of peasant poets. S. A. Yesenin emphasized his original connection with her - the very biographical circumstances of her birth among nature, in a field or in the forest ("Mother walked through the forest to Bathing..."). This theme is continued by S. A. Klychkov in a poem with a folklore song opening “There was a valley above the river...”, in which the animate forces of nature act as the successors and first nannies of a newborn baby. This is where the motif of “returning to the homeland” arises in their work.

“I’ve been missing the city for three whole years now, along the hare paths, the willow doves, and my mother’s miraculous spinning wheel,” admits N. A. Klyuev.

In the poetry of Sergei Antonovich Klychkov (1889-1937) this motive is one of the main ones:

In a foreign land far from my homeland I remember my garden and home. Currants are blooming there now, And under the windows there is bird soda...<...>

This time of spring, early, I meet alone in the distance... Oh, I wish I could snuggle, listen to the breath, Look into the glow of my dear mother - my native land!

("In a foreign land, far from home...")

In the mythopoetics of the new peasants, their holistic mythopoetic model of the world, the myth of the earthly paradise, embodied through biblical imagery, is central. The leitmotifs here are the motifs of the garden (for Klychkov - the “hidden garden”), the helicopter city; symbols associated with the harvest (Klyuev: “We are the reapers of the universal field...”). The mythology of the shepherd, which goes back to the image of the evangelical shepherd, strengthens the creativity of each of them. The new peasants called themselves shepherds (Yesenin: “I am a shepherd, my chambers are / Between the undulating fields”), and their poetic creativity was likened to shepherding (Klyuev: “My goldenrods are deer, / herds of tunes and thoughts”).

Folk Christian ideas about the cyclical nature of life and death can be found in the works of each of the new peasants. For Klychkov and his characters, who feel themselves to be a part of a single Mother Nature, who are in a harmonious relationship with her, death is something natural, like the change of seasons or the melting of “frost in the spring,” as Klyuev defined death. According to Klychkov, to die means “to go into the undead, like roots into the ground.” In his work, death is represented not by the literary and traditional image of a disgusting old woman with a stick, but by an attractive working peasant woman:

Tired of the day's troubles, How good is a hollow shirt to wipe away the hardworking sweat, Move closer to the cup...<...>

It's so good to be in the family.

Where the son is the groom and the daughter is the bride,

There's not enough on the bench

Under the old shrine of the place...

Then, having escaped fate like everyone else,

It’s not surprising to meet death in the evening,

Like a reaper in young oats

With a sickle thrown over his shoulders.

("Tired from the day's troubles...")

In 1914-1917 Klyuev creates a cycle of 15 poems, “Hut Songs,” dedicated to the memory of his deceased mother. The plot itself: the death of the mother, her burial, funeral rites, the crying of her son, the mother’s visit to her home, her help to the peasant world - reflects the harmony of the earthly and heavenly. (Cf. Yesenin: “I know: with other eyes / The dead sense the living.”) The cyclical nature of life and death is emphasized compositionally: after the ninth chapter (corresponding to the ninth memorial day), the Easter holiday comes - grief is overcome.

The poetic practice of the new peasants, already at an early stage, made it possible to highlight such common points in their work as the poeticization of peasant labor (Klyuev: “Bow to you, labor and sweat!”) and village life; zoo-, flora- and anthropomorphism (anthropomorphization natural phenomena constitutes one of characteristic features thinking in folklore categories); a sensitive feeling of one’s inextricable connection with the living world:

The cry of a child across the field and the river, The cry of a rooster, like pain, miles away, And the footsteps of a spider, like melancholy, I hear through the scabs.

(I. A. Klyuev, "The cry of a child across the field and the river...")

Peasant poets were the first in Russian literature to elevate village life to a previously unattainable level of philosophical understanding of the national foundations of life, and a simple village hut to the highest degree of beauty and harmony. Izba is likened to the Universe, and its architectural details are associated with the Milky Way:

The conversational hut is a semblance of the universe: In it the sholom is the heavens, the flight is the Milky Way, Where the helmsman's mind, the mournful soul, can delightfully rest under the spindle clergy.

(I. A. Klyuev, "Where there is a smell of red, there are women's gatherings...")

They poeticized her living soul:

The heroic hut, the carved kokoshnik, the window like an eye socket, lined with antimony.

(N. A. Klyuev, "Izba-hero...")

Klyuev’s “hut space” is not something abstract: it is closed in a circle of hourly peasant concerns, where everything is achieved through labor and sweat. The stove-bed is its indispensable attribute, and like all Klyuev’s images, it should not be understood in a simplified and unambiguous way. The stove, like the hut itself, like everything in the hut, is endowed with a soul (the epithet “spirit seer” is not accidental) and is equated, along with Kitovras and Kovriga, to the “golden pillars of Russia” (“At sixteen - curls and gatherings...”) . Klyuev’s image of the hut receives further transformation in the author’s creative polemics with proletarian poets and Lefovites (in particular, with Mayakovsky). Sometimes it is a strange huge beast: “On heavy log paws / My hut danced” (“They are burying me, burying me...”). In other cases, this is no longer just the dwelling of a farmer, but the prophetic Izba is a prophet, an oracle: “Simple, like a lowing, and a cloud in Kazinet trousers / Russia will not become - so says the Izba” (“Mayakovsky dreams of a whistle over the Winter Palace...”) .

Yesenin proclaimed himself the poet of the “golden log hut” (see “The feather grass is sleeping. The dear plain...”). Klychkov poeticizes the peasant hut in “Home Songs.” Klyuev in the cycle “To the Poet Sergei Yesenin” persistently reminds his “younger brother” of his origins: “Izba - a writer of words - / It was not in vain that she raised you...” The only exception here is Pyotr Vasilyevich Oreshin (1887-1938) with his interest in social motives , which continues Nekrasov’s theme of the destitute Russian peasant in peasant poetry (the epigraph from N. A. Nekrasov to his collection “Red Rus'” is not accidental). Oreshin's "huts covered with straw" present a picture of extreme poverty and desolation, while in the works of, for example, Yesenin this image is aestheticized: "Under the straw-riza / The rafters are planed, / The wind sprinkled the gray mold / with the sun" ("The Edge you are my abandoned..."). Almost for the first time in Oreshin’s work, the aestheticized image of a peasant hut is associated with the premonition / accomplishment of the revolution: “Like arrows, the dawns whistle / Above the Sunny Hut.”

For the peasant farmer and the peasant poet, such concepts as mother earth, hut, farm are concepts of the same ethical and aesthetic series, one moral root. Originally folk performances about physical labor as the basis of peasant life are affirmed in the famous poem by S. A. Yesenin “I am walking through the valley...”:

To hell, I'm taking off my English suit. Well, give me the scythe, I’ll show you - Am I not one of your kind, am I not close to you, Do I not value the memory of the village?

For N. A. Klyuev there is:

The joy of seeing the first haystack, the first sheaf from the native land. There is a dinner pie on the border, in the shade of a birch tree...

("The joy of seeing the first haystack...")

The cornerstone of the worldview of the new peasant poets is a view of peasant civilization as the spiritual cosmos of the nation. Having emerged in the Klyuev collection “Forest Were” (1913), strengthened in his book “Worldly Thoughts” (1916) and the cycle “To the Poet Sergei Yesenin” (1916-1917), it appears in its various facets in the two-volume “Pesnoslov” (1919), and subsequently reaches the peak of poignancy and turns into an inconsolable funeral lament for crucified, desecrated Russia in Klyuev’s late work, drawing closer to Remizov’s “The Lay of the Destruction of the Russian Land.” This dominant feature of Klyuev’s creativity is embodied through the motif two worlds: combining, and more often opposing each other, two layers, real And ideal, where the ideal world is patriarchal antiquity, the world of virgin nature, removed from the destructive breath of the city, or the world of Beauty. Peasant poets emphasize their commitment to the ideal of Beauty, rooted in the depths of folk art, in all their landmark works. “Russian joy can be bought not with iron, but with Beauty,” N. A. Klyuev never tires of repeating after F. M. Dostoevsky.

One of the most important features creativity of the new peasants is that the theme of nature in their works carries the most important not only semantic, but also conceptual load, revealing itself through the universal multidimensional antithesis “Nature - Civilization” with its numerous specific oppositions: “people - intelligentsia”, “village - city”, “natural man - city dweller”, “patriarchal past - modernity”, “earth - iron”, “feeling - reason”, etc.

It is noteworthy that there are no city landscapes in Yesenin’s work. Their fragments - “skeletons of houses”, “chilled lantern”, “Moscow curved streets” - are isolated, random and do not add up to a whole picture. The “Moscow mischievous reveler”, who traveled up and down “the entire Tver region”, does not find words to describe the month in the city sky: “And when the moon shines at night, / When it shines... the devil knows how!” (“Yes! Now it’s decided. I was bringing a return...”).

Alexander Shiryaevets (Alexander Vasilyevich Abramov, 1887-1924) appears as a consistent anti-urbanist in his work:

I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!.. I listen to the epic streams!.. Let the best confectioners of the city pour sugar on my Easter cakes -

I will not stay in the stone lair! I feel cold in the heat of his palaces! To the fields! to Bryn! to the cursed tracts! To the tales of our grandfathers - wise simpletons!

(“I’m in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!..”)

In the works of the new peasants the image Cities acquires the qualities of an archetype. In his multi-page treatise “The Stone-Iron Monster” (i.e., the City), completed by 1920 and still not published in full, A. Shiryaevets most fully and comprehensively expressed the goal of the new peasant poetry: to return literature “to the miraculous keys Mother Earth." The treatise begins with an apocryphal legend about the demonic origin of the City, which is then replaced by a fairy tale-allegory about the young Town (then the City), the son of a Stupid Villager and a clever Man, who, to please the devil, strictly fulfills his parent’s dying order to “increase!”, so that the devil “dances and grunts in joy, mocking the desecrated earth." The demonic origin of the City is emphasized by N. A. Klyuev: “The Devil City beat with its hooves, / Frightening us with a stone mouth...” (“From the basements, from the dark corners...”). A. S. Klychkov in the novel “The Sugar German” (1925), continuing the same thought, asserts the dead end, futility of the path that the City follows - there is no place for the Dream in it:

“City, city! Beneath you, even the earth is not like the earth... Satan killed it, compacted it with a cast-iron hoof, rolled it with his iron back, rolling on it like a horse rides in a meadow in the wash...”

Distinct anti-urban motives are also visible in Klyuev’s ideal of Beauty, which originates in folk art, put forward by the poet as a link between the past and the future. In the present, in the realities of the Iron Age, Beauty is trampled and desecrated (“A deadly theft has occurred, / Mother Beauty has been debunked!”), and therefore the links of the past and the future have been unraveled. But faith in the messianic role of Russia permeates all the work of N. A. Klyuev:

In the ninety-ninth summer the cursed castle will creak and the gems will bubble up like a river of dazzling prophetic lines.

The melodious foam of Kholmogorye and Tselebey will overwhelm you, The vein of silver crucian words will be caught with a sieve!

("I know songs will be born...")

It was the new peasant poets at the beginning of the 20th century. loudly proclaimed: nature is in itself the greatest aesthetic value. On a national basis, S. A. Klychkov managed to build a bright metaphorical system of natural balance, organically going into the depths of folk poetic thinking.

“It seems to us that in the world we are the only ones standing on our feet, and everything else either crawls in front of us on its belly, or stands as a dumb pillar, whereas in reality this is not the case at all!..<...>There is only one secret in the world: there is nothing inanimate in it!.. Therefore, love and caress flowers, trees, pity various fish, wild beast and better bypass the poisonous reptile!..” writes S. A. Klychkov in the novel “Chertukhinsky Balakir” (1926).

But if in the poems of the Klyuev collection "Lion's Bread" the advance of "iron" wildlife- a premonition, a premonition that has not yet become a terrible reality ("I would be blind from hearing / About the iron ns-restlessness!"), then in the images of his "Village", "Pogorelshchina", "Songs about the Great Mother" - this is already tragic for peasant poets reality. In the approach to this topic, the differentiation of the creativity of the new peasants is clearly visible. S. L. Yesenin and P. V. Oreshin, although difficult, painful, through pain and blood, were ready to see the future of Russia, in Yesenin’s words, “through stone and steel.” For II. A. Klyuev, A. S. Klychkov, A. Shiryaevets, who were in the grip of the concept of “peasant paradise”, the idea of the future was fully embodied by the patriarchal past, the Russian hoary antiquity with its fairy tales, legends, and beliefs.

“I don’t like accursed modernity, which destroys fairy tales,” admitted A. Shiryaevets in a letter to V.F. Khodasevich (1917), “and without fairy tales, what kind of life is there in the world?”

For N. A. Klyuev, the destruction of a fairy tale, legend, the destruction of a host of mythological characters is an irreparable loss:

Like a squirrel, a handkerchief across the eyebrow, There, where the forest darkness is, The fairy tale silently left the headboards of the shelves. Brownies, undead, Mavkas - Just rubbish, crusty dust...

("Village")

The new peasant poets defended their spiritual values, the ideal of primordial harmony with the natural world in polemics with the proletcult theories of technization and mechanization of the world. The industrial landscapes of “stately nightingales,” in which, according to Klyuev, “fire is replaced by folding and consonance by a factory whistle,” contrasted sharply with the lyricism of nature created by peasant poets.

“It’s difficult for the concrete and turbine ones to understand me, they get stuck in my straw, they are sick of my hut, porridge and carpet worlds,” wrote N. S. Klyuev in a letter to S. M. Gorodetsky in 1920.

Representatives of the Iron Age rejected everything “old”: “Old Rus' was hanged, / And we are its executioners...” (V.D. Aleksandrovsky); “We are peddlers of a new faith, / setting an iron tone for beauty. / So that the frail natures do not defile the public gardens, / we throw reinforced concrete into the heavens” (V.V. Mayakovsky). For their part, the New Christians who saw main reason evil, in isolation from natural roots, popular worldview, national culture, stood up to defend this “old”. Proletarian poets, defending the collective, denied the individual human, everything that makes a person unique; ridiculed categories such as soul, heart; declared: “We will take everything, we will know everything, / We will penetrate the depths to the bottom...” (M. P. Gerasimov, “We”). Peasant poets argued the opposite: “To know everything, to take nothing / A poet came to this world” (S. A. Yesenin, “Mare’s Ships”). The conflict between “nature” and “iron” ended in the victory of the latter. In the final poem “A Field Strewn with Bones...” from the collection “Lion’s Bread,” N. A. Klyuev gives a terrible, truly apocalyptic panorama of the “Iron Age,” repeatedly defining it through the epithet “faceless”: “Over the dead steppe, a faceless something- then / gave birth to madness, darkness, emptiness...” Dreaming of a time in which “the hammer, the invisible flywheel will not be carried with a hammer” (“A caravan with saffron will come...”), Klyuev expressed his innermost, prophetic: “It will strike hour, and proletarian children will fall to the peasant’s lyre.”

By the beginning of the 20th century. Russia has become a country of peasant agriculture, based on more than a thousand years of traditional culture, polished in its spiritual and moral content to perfection. In the 1920s The way of Russian peasant life, endlessly dear to peasant poets, began to collapse before their eyes. The letters of S. A. Yesenin dating back to this time are permeated with pain for the dwindling origins of life, a careful reading of which is yet to be done by researchers; works by N. A. Klyuev, novels by S. A. Klychkov. The tragic attitude characteristic of the early lyrics of this “singer of unprecedented sadness” (“The carpet fields are turning golden…”), which intensified by the 1920s, reaches its peak in his latest novels- “Sugar German”, “Chertukhinsky Balakir”, “Prince of Peace”. These works, which show the absolute uniqueness of human existence, are called existential by many researchers.

The revolution promised to fulfill the centuries-old dream of the peasants: to give them land. The peasant community, in which poets saw the basis of the foundations of harmonious existence, a short time was reanimated, peasant gatherings were noisy in the villages:

Here I see: Sunday villagers gathered near the volost, as if they were going to church. With clumsy, unwashed speeches They discuss their “live.”

(S. A. Yesenin, "Soviet Rus'")

However, already in the summer of 1918, the systematic destruction of the foundations of the peasant community began, food detachments were sent to the villages, and from the beginning of 1919 a food appropriation system was introduced. Millions of peasants die as a result of war, famine and epidemics. Direct terror against the peasantry begins - a policy of de-peasantization, which over time brought terrible results: the age-old foundations of Russian peasant farming were destroyed. The peasants fiercely rebelled against exorbitant taxes: the Tambov (Antonov) uprising, the Veshensky uprising on the Don, the uprising of Voronezh peasants, hundreds of similar, but smaller-scale peasant uprisings - the country was going through another tragic period in its history. Spiritual and moral ideals, accumulated by hundreds of generations of ancestors and which seemed unshakable, were undermined. Back in 1920, at the congress of teachers in Vytegra, Klyuev spoke with hope about folk art:

“We must be more attentive to all these values, and then it will become clear that in Soviet Rus', where truth should become a fact of life, we must recognize the great importance of culture generated by a craving for heaven...” (“A Word to Teachers on the Values of Folk Art” , 1920).

However, by 1922 the illusions were dispelled. Convinced that the poetry of the people, embodied in the work of peasant poets, “under democracy should occupy the most honorable place,” he sees with bitterness that everything turns out differently:

“By breaking with us, the Soviet power is breaking with the most tender, with the deepest among the people. You and I need to take this as a sign - for the Lion and the Dove will not forgive the power of its sin,” wrote N. L. Klyuev to S. L. Yesenin in 1922

As a result of social experiments, in front of the eyes of peasant poets involved in a tragic conflict with the era, an unprecedented collapse of what was most dear to them began - traditional peasant culture, folk foundations life and national consciousness. Writers receive the label “kulak,” while one of the main slogans in the life of the country becomes the slogan “Liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” Slandered and slandered, the resistance poets continue to work, and it is no coincidence that one of Klyuev’s central poems of 1932 with its transparent metaphorical symbolism, addressed to the leaders of the country’s literary life, is called “Slanderers of Art”:

I am angry with you and scold you bitterly,

What a singing horse is ten years old

Diamond bridle, gold hoofs,

The blanket is embroidered with harmonies,

You didn't give me even a handful of oats

And they weren’t allowed into the meadow, where the drunken dew

I wish I could refresh the swan's broken wings...

In the coming millennium, we are destined to read in a new way the works of the new peasant writers, for they reflect the spiritual, moral, philosophical, social aspects of the national consciousness of the first half of the 20th century. They contain true spiritual values and truly high morality; in them there is a breath of the spirit of high freedom - from power, from dogma. They state careful attitude to the human personality, the connection with national origins and folk art is defended as the only fruitful path of the artist’s creative evolution.

The concept of “peasant poetry”, which has entered the historical and literary circles, unites poets conventionally and reflects only some common features, inherent in their worldview and poetic manner. They did not form a single creative school with a single ideological and poetic program. Surikov shaped “peasant poetry” as a genre. They wrote about the work and life of the peasant, about the dramatic and tragic conflicts of his life. Their work reflected both the joy of the merging of workers with the natural world, and the feeling of hostility to the life of a stuffy, noisy city alien to living nature. The most famous peasant poets of the Silver Age were: Spiridon Drozhzhin, Nikolai Klyuev, Pyotr Oreshin, Sergei Klychkov. Sergei Yesenin also joined this trend.

Imagism

Imagism (from the Latin imago - image) is a literary movement in Russian poetry of the 20th century, whose representatives stated that the goal of creativity is to create an image. The main expressive means of imagists is metaphor, often metaphorical chains that compare various elements two images - direct and figurative. The creative practice of Imagists is characterized by shocking and anarchic motives.

Imagism as a poetic movement arose in 1918, when the “Order of Imagists” was founded in Moscow. The creators of the “Order” were Anatoly Mariengof, who came from Penza, former futurist Vadim Shershenevich, and Sergei Yesenin, who was previously part of the group of new peasant poets. Features of a characteristic metaphorical style were also contained in more early work Shershenevich and Yesenin, and Mariengof organized a literary group of imagists back in hometown. The Imagist "Declaration", published on January 30, 1919 in the Voronezh magazine "Sirena" (and on February 10 also in the newspaper "Soviet Country", on the editorial board of which Yesenin was a member), was also signed by the poet Rurik Ivnev and the artists Boris Erdman and Georgy Yakulov. On January 29, 1919, the first literary evening of the Imagists took place at the Union of Poets. Poets Ivan Gruzinov, Matvey Roizman, Alexander Kusikov, Nikolai Erdman, Lev Monoszon also joined imagism.

In 1919-1925 Imagism was the most organized poetic movement in Moscow; they organized popular creative evenings in artistic cafes, published many author’s and collective collections, the magazine “Hotel for Travelers in Beauty” (1922-1924, 4 issues were published), for which the publishing houses “Imaginists”, “Pleiad”, “Chikhi- Pihi" and "Sandro" (the last two were led by A. Kusikov). In 1919, the Imagists entered the literary section of the Literary Train named after. A. Lunacharsky, which gave them the opportunity to travel and perform throughout the country and largely contributed to the growth of their popularity. In September 1919, Yesenin and Mariengof developed and registered with the Moscow Council the charter of the “Association of Freethinkers” - the official structure of the “Order of Imagists”. The charter was signed by other members of the group and approved by the People's Commissar of Education A. Lunacharsky. On February 20, 1920, Yesenin was elected chairman of the Association.

In addition to Moscow (the “Order of Imagists” and the “Association of Freethinkers”), centers of imagism existed in the provinces (for example, in Kazan, Saransk, in the Ukrainian city of Alexandria, where the poet Leonid Chernov created an imagist group), as well as in Petrograd-Leningrad. The emergence of the Petrograd "Order of Militant Imagists" was announced in 1922 in the "Manifesto of Innovators", signed by Alexei Zolotnitsky, Semyon Polotsky, Grigory Shmerelson and Vlad. Korolevich. Then, instead of the departed Zolotnitsky and Korolevich, Ivan Afanasyev-Soloviev and Vladimir Richiotti joined the Petrograd Imagists, and in 1924 Wolf Ehrlich.

Some of the Imagist poets presented theoretical treatises ("The Keys of Mary" by Yesenin, "Buyan Island" by Mariengof, "2x2=5" by Shershenevich, "The Basics of Imagism" by Gruzinov). The Imagists also became notorious for their shocking antics, such as “renaming” Moscow streets, “trials” of literature, and painting the walls of the Strastnoy Monastery with anti-religious inscriptions.

Imagism actually collapsed in 1925: Alexander Kusikov emigrated in 1922, Sergei Yesenin and Ivan Gruzinov announced the dissolution of the Order in 1924, other imagists were forced to move away from poetry, turning to prose, drama, and cinema, largely for the sake of making money. Imagism was criticized in the Soviet press. Yesenin was found dead in the Angleterre Hotel, Nikolai Erdman was repressed.

The activities of the Order of Militant Imagists ceased in 1926, and in the summer of 1927 the liquidation of the Order of Imagists was announced. The relationships and actions of the Imagists were then described in detail in the memoirs of Mariengof, Shershenevich, and Roizman.

For the literary process of the beginning of the 20th century. characterized by a tendency towards democratization - the creative self-affirmation of the masses. Simultaneously with the activities of professional writers, the proletarian muse makes itself known, and a new type of peasant poetry emerges. Its decisive revival, and most importantly, its internal growth, was facilitated by the arrival in literature of talented people from different regions of peasant Russia: from Zaonezhye - Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev (1884–1937), from the Tver region - Sergei Antonovich Klychkov (Leshenkov) (1889–1941), with Ryazan Meshchera - Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin (1895–1925), from the Lower Volga region - Alexander Vasilyevich Shiryaevets (Abramov) (1887–1924) and Pyotr Vasilievich Oreshin (1887–1943). Together they formed a galaxy of so-called new peasant poets. The nature of their poetry is complex. Rooted in the depths of the folk - pagan and Christian - poetic worldview, it at the same time turned out to be in tune with the spiritual quest of the first decades of the new century.

The next wave of populist passions among the intelligentsia of this period was dictated, as before, by “those altruistic sentiments that were then experienced by our progressive youth, who put “service to the people” on their banner”, the desire to “merge with the working masses of the people, disenfranchised and oppressed, but which in the eyes of young people was the bearer of bright moral ideals.” At the same time, the persistent temptation of the creative intelligentsia to come into contact with the deep experiences of the national spirit was also determined by other significant motives: firstly, the premonition of inevitably approaching historical cataclysms, and secondly, the awareness of the exhaustion of Western aesthetic trends and the limited resources of “book” culture. Because of this, the course of the new populism is radically changing: they are no longer going to the people with the goal of enlightening the dark and downtrodden peasant, but, on the contrary, to join their harmonious, as it seemed, worldview. Noting the “sterile weaving of verbal patterns” at a meeting of the Religious and Philosophical Society, R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik wrote: “And at the same time - a terrible thirst for soil, earth, living blood, the spirit of life.” And further: “The people are, of course, the true Word of life, but only when they come close to it.” The problem of the intelligentsia and the people becomes fundamental in A. Blok’s spiritual quest; he also tries to unravel the deep world of folk magic and spells, which turns out to be for him “the ore where the gold of genuine poetry glitters; that gold that provides book “paper” poetry - right up to the present day.”

After the appearance of collections of poems by Klyuev, Klychkov, Yesenin, Shiryaevets and somewhat later P. Oreshin These poets were talked about as a fresh, highly artistic and universally significant phenomenon. Bryusov, who wrote the preface to Klyuev’s first collection “Pine Chime,” noted: “Among genuine debutants, the first place belongs to Mr. N. Klyuev.”

Blok’s interest in Klyuev deserves special attention. In the peasant poet he saw his personified dream of the unity of two Russias: mystical patriarchal and peasant rebellious; his diaries 1907–1912 are full of references to Klyuev.

No less attention was paid to the appearance of Yesenin. Blok called him a talented peasant poet-nugget, and his poems “fresh, pure, vociferous.” One of the magazines discovered in his poems “some kind of ‘saidness’ of words, a fusion of sound and meaning”; P. Sakulin emphasized the “wonderful colors” - as a consequence of the deepest feeling of native nature.

With the active assistance of S. Gorodetsky, I. Yasinsky, Klyuev and Yesenin were involved in the activities of the literary and artistic society “Krasa” (1915) in St. Petersburg, and then “Strada” (1915–1917), which aimed to help identify talents from the people who dreamed about “the unity of the intelligentsia and the people on the paths of their assimilation of “true Christian ideas”.” I. Yasinsky subsequently saw the main merit of the society in the fact that it nominated Klyuev, “with his Trans-Onezh majestic Russian, vigorous poetic sorceries,” and contributed to the development of Yesenin’s talent. - “this brilliant young man.”

The fundamental influence of Klyuev in this early period of the ascent of the new peasant galaxy was indisputable. Shiryaevets and Yesenin conduct confessional correspondence with him, who in 1917 wrote about this time:

Then in a cheerful noise

Playful thoughts and forces

Tender Apostle Klyuev

He carried us in his arms.

Later, Oreshin defended the Olonets poet from the attacks of the Imagists:

Klyuev is painfully disgusting to you,

For me, he is higher than you,

And his songs about the Russian field

They'll drink again and again!

He immensely appreciated his younger brother Yesenin and Klyuev. They had complex personal relationships.

The new peasant poets preferred to trace their poetic ancestry along the family line, pointing first to their mother, then to their grandmother, then to their grandfather, seeing in them the bearers of the peasant worldview, as if directly introducing them to the hidden depths of the people’s “singing testaments.” Klyuev recalls the “snot” of his grandfather, which “pity” in his songs, “hounds” in his heart, “dreams and harmonies.” The poet’s mother, an “epic writer” and a “song writer,” also had a huge influence on the poet’s spiritual upbringing, to whose memory he dedicated “Hut Songs” (1914–1916). S. Klychkov also writes that “I owe my language to the forest grandmother Avdotya, the eloquent mother Fekla Alekseevna...”.

Awareness of the deep kinship with the creative spirit of the people contributed to the fact that it was in the “peasant” appearance of the “songs” they created that poets saw their advantage over intellectual, “civilized” poetry. Instead of the miserable complaints characteristic of their predecessors, the self-taught poets, they have a motive of belief in their social superiority. Klyuev is not flattered, as he wrote in one of his letters, that his “beggar songs” are read by bored satin ladies, and gentlemen with cleaned nails and impeccable partings write (about them - A.M.) choking articles in newspapers.” Yesenin treated the salon hype about his “village” poems and charming appearance with irony. In contrast to the arrogant noble genealogy, Klyuev extracts his own heraldry from the “mist of centuries”: “My family tree was obscured by its roots in the times of Tsar Alexei, curled by a branch in the wonderful Stroganov letters...”; “My fathers are commemorated for ancient Orthodoxy in the book Russian Grapes for two centuries.”

Proof of the organic kinship of the new peasant poets with the working people is the fact of their participation in social protest. One of his contemporaries writes about Klychkov’s social views during the years of the first Russian revolution: “People, labor, creativity, equality, freedom were concepts of the same order for him. He treated the socialist revolution sympathetically, as a historical right, as a great breakthrough into the people’s future.” For participation in the revolutionary movement in the same 1905, Shiryaevets was fired from his job, and he was forced to leave his native Volga. Yesenin, as unreliable, was placed under police surveillance in Moscow in 1913. The most active forms of social protest were shown by young Klyuev. In 1905, he became a propagandist for the revolutionary-minded Bureau of Promotion of the Peasant Union and was soon recruited to distribute revolutionary proclamations. In 1906, Klyuev agitated peasants not to pay taxes, not to obey their superiors, and this entailed six months of imprisonment. During the search, Marx's "Capital" and his "handwritten" works of "outrageous content" are confiscated. After serving his sentence (in August 1906), Klyuev maintained contact with the Bolsheviks and advocated for assistance to political exiles and prisoners.

Klyuev’s journalistic speeches in defense of the peasantry are also known. In 1908, through Blok, he tried to convey to V. S. Mirolyubov, the former editor of the “Magazine for Everyone” (1898–1906), his article “From the Native Shore,” which testifies to the ineradicable rebellion of the spirit in the depths of the peasant masses. Emphasizing the difficult social and financial situation of the Olonets village, the author draws attention to the independent character of the northern peasant, who dares to put forward his “peasant program”: “... so that there are no taxes and bosses, so that the food products are ours.” In the peasant, Klyuev sees not only a powerful force, but also the highest moral authority, for “his spiritual scales, a kind of purgatory, where everything false dies, but everything just becomes immortal.” And therefore, retribution is inevitable for all his “jailers.” In the same year, Klyuev’s article “On Black Days” was published anonymously in Our Journal. (From a letter from a peasant),” which cost the magazine its existence. Objecting to those who, like the publicist M.A. Engelhardt, argued that the people “remained indifferent to the sacrifices of the revolutionary intelligentsia on the cross,” Klyuev proves the “innate revolutionary nature of the depths of the peasantry.” In both articles, the aspiring poet’s desire to talk not just about the peasantry is palpable,<…>spirit” which he is well familiar with, but also on behalf of the peasantry itself.

And yet, the motive of social protest did not become dominant in the work of the new peasant poets. It is completely absent from Klychkov’s lyrics and is almost imperceptible in the poetry of early Yesenin. In Shiryaevets it is extremely blurred by the romantic “Volga” stream. This motif appears most realistically only in Oreshin’s “songs” with their poor peasant theme.

The motif of protest in Klyuev’s poetry developed in an extremely complex and bizarre manner. The poems of 1905–1906 are undoubtedly revolutionary, but they were not included in the poet’s first collection. And yet, the entire “Pine Chime” is imbued with the spirit of the tragic events of the first Russian revolution; Much of it is inspired by the memory of those executed, expelled, and condemned. Here even “The pines whisper about darkness and prison, About the twinkling of stars behind bars.”

The thought of atonement for the suffering and torment of the people who heroically, but in vain fought for freedom, does not leave the poet in the next collection (“Brotherly Songs”). Based on the gospel idea of access to eternal joy and immortality only through torment and death, Klyuev likens the revolutionaries to the first Christians - the martyrs of the Colosseum. The poetic form that embodies this idea in images is the “songs” of schismatic sects, which could also oppose their persecutors only with unbending firmness of spirit and strength of conviction. In “Evensong,” the heroes perceive their doom in a world of persecution and evil as future incorruptibility in an ideal world of goodness and justice, where they will have

Behind my back are six passenger wings,

On the curls there are crowns of evening stars.

Klyuev’s appeal to “sectarian” poetics is not accidental. Everyone who studied the Russian religious schism invariably emphasized the fact of the natural transition of social protest in the deep strata of the masses into a protest against the state church, social quests into quests of a religious-utopian nature. A. S. Prugavin wrote about the brightly democratic nature of the schism, becoming “the religion of the enslaved and dispossessed masses.” Investigating the movement of the so-called “defaulters,” he emphasized that “they openly called the king the Antichrist, and the officials, all those “who wore bright buttons,” the servants of the Antichrist, his messengers.” He explained this seemingly socio-religious paradox by the fact that “the more conscious part of the people does not separate religion from life, since in the eyes of these people religion is both morality, philosophy, ethics, and sociology.” Bolshevik Vl., who studied the Doukhobor movement in Russia well. Bonch-Bruevich put a sign of identity between the “mystical” and “free-thinking” sects of Russia.

Classifying Klyuev as precisely this type of people’s truth-seekers, V.G. Bazanov rightly writes about his special religiosity, “like a peasant,” combining “patriarchal remnants and hatred of official Orthodoxy.” The names of the most famous schism teachers run through the entire centuries-old thickness of the Russian religious movement. Klyuev’s attraction to the spiritual authority of one of them, Archpriest Avvakum, is undeniable. V. G. Bazanov traces the commonality of these two original figures of Russian culture, separated by centuries, saying that both of them, having a sharply negative attitude towards the official church, inspiredly “opposed the destruction of those aesthetic and spiritual values that were created in the era of Ancient Rus' by the people themselves.” . This also determines some similarity between their poetic systems, based on “a peculiar folklore rethinking of Christian symbolism and the language of ancient Russian literature.” The early biography of Klyuev is characteristic. By origin (his mother was from a schismatic family), he belonged to people of “strong moral character” (P. Sakulin). At the age of sixteen, having put on chains, he goes to “save himself” in Solovki, then labors as the psalmist David in the schismatic “Ship,” where he composes spiritual songs and prayers that are very popular among believers. Later, Klyuev would call Archpriest Avvakum his “great-grandfather.” His heroic and tragic image will take its place in the Klyuev lyrics of the 1920s, intensely rich in historical associations. (“Lion’s Bread”, 1922). The traditions of Old Believer culture left a certain imprint on Yesenin’s childhood, who was brought up in the house of his schismatic grandfather.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the entire worldview of these poets turned out to be saturated with religious symbolism. They also perceived the image of Russia in the aura of Christian martyrdom. They came to him from apocrypha and utopias, the national essence of which, unusually boldly for his time, was summarized by Tyutchev in the image of the “king of heaven” who proceeded to bless his native land. In Yesenin, the peasant intercessor “the almsman Mikola” blesses her, passing “past the villages and villages”; in Oreshin, Christ watches the fate of the Russian plowman “from the shaggy clouds”, and at a certain hour the “bright shadows” of angels walk around the dark peasant hut. Such images are absent from Klychkov; in him their place is occupied by characters from pagan mythology (“Leshy”, “Lada”, “Kupava”). Klyuev’s poetry is especially rich in apocryphal characters. He moved the entire synclite of saints and martyrs from the icons and church icons into it, adding pagan patrons to them. However, this should not be seen as emphasizing the religiosity of the poets. Church images were intended to illuminate the utopian ideal of Russia, although the image of the latter appeared to them not only in a mystical light.

The poetry of Klyuev, Yesenin and other poets of the peasant galaxy fully reproduces the living and colorful features of rural life. The use of such familiar attributes of peasant wretchedness as “sermyaga”, “bast”, “bast shoes”, etc., acquired an unusual aesthetic sound in their poetry. Klyuev’s “Dawn in the motley and bast The willow branches shoot out”; “The moon will shine like a splinter, the snow will creak under the bast shoes.” Yesenin admires the manifestation of the harmonious completeness of village life (poem “Bazaar”). The bazaar was poeticized by almost all Russian artists, as that festive period in the break between hard peasant work, when everything fun and cheerful in the folk life. Yesenin’s poem is to some extent reminiscent of B. Kustodiev’s painting “Fair” (1906), in the foreground of which the shirts of men, sundresses, scarves and ribbons of women and girls splash with their cheerful, ringing multicolor, and the eyes of children are captivated by the painted world of toys. The whitewashed and painted walls and roofs of churches and bell towers enhance this impression. And in the distance behind them, behind the gray roofs of the huts, the forest frowned and hid as the embodiment of long weeks and months of harsh peasant labor. The joyful imagery of the foreground is only a short happy moment, and the artist does not spare his bright colors for it. With all its temperament and artistic structure, Yesenin’s poem also strives to capture a moment of peasant leisure and joy. And although the contrasting Kustodiev background is completely absent here, the short duration of the fun is noticeable both in the rapid rhythm of the lines and in the hasty change of visual and auditory impressions. The same generous, vibrant nature harmonizes with the colorful assortment of the market. In the last stanza, the lyrical intensity reaches its limit: here both delight in the merry people of Russia and the hidden joy of happy love merge together.

Are you, Rus', on your way?

Did you sweep away your outfit?

Do not judge with strict prayer

A heart-filled look!

No less significant is the poem “Recruits,” also dedicated to an everyday phenomenon: recruits leaving for the army. In it, the poet decisively deviates from the lamentations and “laments” common in folklore and peasant poetry. Only one motive is taken here - the farewell of the peasant boys to the “rest” of the days of their village life. The poet’s entire attention is focused on establishing the connection between the recruits leaving the village and the peasant region that raised them. They are surrounded by the world of their native village, forever embedded in their memory, with its “crooked path”, “blue summer evening”, “stumps” in the neighboring “dark grove”, green hillocks and fields. The poem is aimed at identifying the feeling of homeland that recruits will take with them and which will help them endure the rigors of military service.

Early Yesenin is characterized by a harmonious vision of the rural world. It is no coincidence that in the epithets that embody him, the poet uses a palette of clean, cheerful and somehow ringing colors:

Brighter than a pink shirt

The spring dawns are burning.

Gold plated plaques

They speak with bells.

Nature also responds to this ringing everyday color painting: “The forest rings with pine gilding”; “The twilight is licking the gold of the sun, In the distant groves the ringing echoes...”

The rustic Rus' of “Radunitsy” (its first section is called “Rus”) glows with the joy of agricultural labor and splashes with the joy of festive leisure with round dances, talyankas and ringing choruses of “crafty girls”. The poet notices the “streaks of grief”, the loneliness of the huts nestled among the willows; in his poems one can sometimes hear the exclamations of the “miserable” folk muse, which have already become truisms: “You are my abandoned land, you are my wasteland!” However, they do not contain a social motive; they are rather complaints about the original peasant poverty, the contemplation of which causes inevitable sadness. It is no coincidence that, emphasizing this, the poet uses the oxymoronic structure of the image: aspen trees are skinny, but the leaves roll from them like apples; the poplars are withering away - “loudly”, etc.

In the works of the new peasant poets, peasant labor is deeply poeticized, and first of all, its bearers are simple rural workers. At the same time, Klyuev likes to emphasize the elementary, simple-minded side of peasant labor. He is touched by the bast knitting machine, whose “polished birch bark” creaks under his hand, by the grandfather who prepares his firewood “for the joyful frosts” - “like Noah’s ark.” Klychkov develops the philosophical and poetic apology of the toiler-grandfather in the cycle “The Ring of Lada”. Here a picture of the creative unity of human and natural forces unfolds: nature is represented by a mysterious, life-giving essence, and human activity is represented by a clearly defined calendar circle of agricultural concerns and affairs.

The idealization of rural life by the new peasant poets was that each of them acted in his work as a child of the people and saw in it what the peasant himself was accustomed to seeing. They were characterized by the desire to depict not so much historical reality itself, but rather the popular ideal of a harmonious and happy life. This showed the special romanticism of their work.

A. Shiryaevets should be recognized as the most complete romanticist on a folklore basis. His Rus' is Rus', already captured in folk song. Songs and his heroes: desperate girls, barge haulers, robbers, Cossacks with a strong character, Stenka Razin with his nakedness. The landscape matches them, just as lush, attracting into the distance, to another life: these are high steeps, river distances, waves, dark nights and thunderstorms. None of the new peasant poets endowed the landscape with historical features as much as Shiryaevets. Its sunset first resembles the Zaporozhye Sich with its colorful variegation, and then a messenger penetrating the fabulously rich Constantinople under the cover of darkness (“Sunset”). The Volga, with the fury of its waves, wants to speak about the treasures sunk in it, to splash them onto the shore (“Storm”). Multicolor and patterning are represented by objects of the past (weapons, cups, carpets, tents, clothing). The rhythm of his “singles” is patterned and developed mainly on the richness of dance motifs.

In the intermountain lies -

Our village is in Zhiguli.

In the life of a modern village, Shiryaevets is attracted mainly by those aspects in which everything talented and sweeping seems to spill out, which for the time being is hidden in the depths of the people (“Maslenitsa”, “Trinity”, “Dance Pattern”).

The romantic aspirations of the new peasant poets are evidenced by their frequent appeal to heroic images national history and folklore. The images of Stenka Razin and Kudeyar by Shiryaevets, Evpatiy Kolovrat and Marfa Posadnitsa by Yesenin, the plow guide and the robbers by Klyuev are connected, on the one hand, with the motives of the struggle for national independence, and on the other - with social protest, both in both cases highly romanticized . Klychkov was attracted to a more psychological type of national, mainly fairy-tale hero. He created cycles dedicated to Sadko and Bova. He shared his idea of writing a book of “songs” about old Russian epic heroes in 1911 in a letter to P. A. Zhurov: “And my second<книга>- heroic songs, songs about Russian heroes, about Ilya, Churil, Mikul, Bova, Sadko and Alyosha! Listen: Bova is love! Churilo is the sun, his white youthful face, which he covers with a sunflower so as not to tan, Mikula is the earth, spring plowing, Alyosha is a wild, autumn field and causeless, secret sweetness and sadness.”

The attitude of the new peasant poets to nature is imbued with a reverent feeling. Klyuevskaya poetry is replete with realistic images of northern nature, in which the spring, summer, and autumn “reality of Obonezhye” is revealed in all its pristine freshness. It fascinates with its sunset sleeping behind the spruce trees, clouded swaths, haymaking dawns, spring flood waters, during which “thoughts are clear as dawns.” But at the same time, it is rich in a touch of church imagery: “The dawn, having blown out its lights, Dims with the icon’s aureole”; “The currant shed a tear, listening to the herbal psalm.” The poet imagines white willows in the spring “in incense smoke,” and in the “pale” autumn air one can smell “incense fumes.” The influence of religious imagery is also noticeable in Yesenin’s early lyrics (“I smell God’s rainbow…”, etc.).

An intimate connection with nature is established differently in Klychkov’s lyrics, in which church imagery does not play any role. The poet is looking, first of all, for its bewitching influence, detaching it from the everyday bustle: something from which the body feels healing, beneficial power, the soul - peace, and thoughts - the ability to rush to the sublime and eternal (“Garden”, “Childhood”, etc.). Many paintings of the Klychkovo landscape breathe the depth of their fantastic otherness: spring twilight is ready to thicken into the unsteady image of Leshy, who is no longer there - dissolved in the colors and sounds of forest charm. The forest approaching the porch of his parents’ hut turns the life of a village boy into a fairy tale and then becomes his “secret garden.” peace of mind. The intertwined branches of trees lost in the wilderness of the forest seem to the shepherd boy who ran there along the “paths of no return” as the thoughts of his “former ancestors,” and in the rustling of their leaves he hears “the whisper of human lips.”

In the depiction of nature by the new peasant poets, what attracts attention is not so much its “rusticism”, but rather the fact that it was perceived precisely by the peasant, through the “magic crystal” of rural life.

Oh, and I myself am in the ringing thicket

I saw this in the fog yesterday:

Red moon as a foal

He harnessed himself to our sleigh.

Such an intimate vision of nature contributed to the emergence of an original figurative system, based on metaphor, as if domesticating the world. The poet seems to bring everything incomprehensible and distant from man in the universe that can inspire him with “fear of stars”, warming him with his “parental hearth”, “baptizing the air with the names of objects close to us” (Yesenin). This perception of the world is palpable in Klyuev’s desire to present the entire cosmos as nothing more than a peasant farmstead with all the land adjacent to it, as if covered with a homely spirit. Everything is close, everything is ours, everything is blessed: “Like a woman, I wove a gray river in a row in a day.” Following in his footsteps is Yesenin, who tries to substantiate such a vision of the world and imagery theoretically in the aesthetic treatise “The Keys of Mary” (1918, published in 1920).

Klyuev’s skill in conveying the extraordinary physicality of images of nature sometimes reached the point of sophistication. His metaphorical epithet is extremely rich and rich. Klyuevskaya color painting seemed to emerge from the thickly foaming patriarchal life and northern nature. In his poetry “The sunset goes into the piebald depths”; “The yard is an owl’s wing, All covered in big-eyed patterns”; “In the hut the wall was glazed, Like a robe with pockmarked gilding”; “The ice on the river swelled and thawed, became piebald, rusty-gold.” Rarely have any Russian poets used a color or tactile epithet to achieve such sensual power (“the barley nakedness of Adam,” “the palm skin of a girl’s elbows,” “grainy light”). The poet’s ear is no less sophisticated, subtly recognizing the sound of life, from the “drowsy splashes of the evening bell” to the “clanging of straws” or the “rustle of the baptismal fee” secretly heard in the straw. Klyuev himself considered himself one of those rare, but still sought after people “with a spiritual ear” who can hear “like grain of life.”<…>strives to break through to the sun from his dear cell.” “He who does not have ears from an oak bucket can smell a stream as he sings a song in his flowing tongue.” Klyuev’s gustatory and olfactory epithets are also richly saturated: “It smelled like tar honey from the birch fronds”; “And in every sheaf the aroma of an infant apple heel.” The colorfulness and richness of Klyuev’s palette was immediately noted by the poet’s first critics: “Bright, golden colors burn like heat, like a golden dome in the sun,” wrote P. Sakulin. “This is the Russian “golden flower” that our people like so much.”

Klychkov's poetry of nature is imbued with a folklore and peasant attitude. Her whole world seems to be seen in a popular print dimension, placing heterogeneous phenomena in one row.

The meadow is dressed in fog,

A month was born in the sky

And he lay down with a sickle at the boundary...

All of the poet’s early lyrics are permeated with images of such a naive worldview. Here even space appears in a homely way:

Low month! The sun is low!

And reddens at the window,

And blushes at the gate...

This not always obvious presence of the folklore element explains the well-known charm of Klychkov’s lyrics, as if reconstructing the poetic thinking of the patriarchal peasantry. “If you want to hear how Rus' of the sixteenth century speaks, listen to him,” with these words he introduced Sergei Klychkov to K. Zelinsky in the 20s. A. Voronsky.

The motif of the unity of man and nature is dominant for all of Klychkov’s lyrics. For this purpose, he not only turns to pagan folklore, where this motif lies, one might say, on the surface, but tries to find the same thing in book images. Thus, in the “Bova” cycle, what fascinates the poet most of all is that after the death of the hero, “a wide wave” of his curls “lies in the valleys between the grass”, “an oak grew from the heart...”.

Rhythmically, especially Klychkov’s first two collections follow the folklore tradition. Their cycles are richly decorated, interspersed with incantatory appeals to the elements, which have long become children’s sayings (“Rainbow-Vereya, Golden patterns! Point across the meadow, guide through the forest, Where to get there sooner, Where can I find a friend!”), round dance exclamations (“Oh , beauty, wait!..”), ritual sayings. As for the development of figurative thought, Klychkov follows the path of subtle stylization, striving to achieve aesthetic contact with the past in contemporary art. The condensation of figurative meaning, close to a symbol, here aims to show the unity of the human and natural principles. Thus, according to the plot, the poem “The Bride” is an image of a seemingly ordinary village wedding:

The carts will sing at the feast

Through a dense birch forest...

The ellipsis of the last verse ends the picture of the expected wedding feast, being absorbed by the landscape. It is said about the guests that they will “come in large numbers” “without a path, without a road - in reality.” Further, their image dissolves even more in nature. They “throw away” their “caftans” and “sermyags”

That one is hollow on the ravines,

And the other through the forest, through the moss...

The groom himself is named by the month.

Don't be sad, Honeymoon,

My bride's groom!

In folk poetic symbolism, the month most often acts as an idealizing metaphor for the goodness of the young man, the groom. Using this poetic representation, Klychkov rearranges the components of the symbol, making the image of the month primary, and bringing the “groom” to it only as an appendix. But in this case, the picture of the wedding can be read in a completely different way - as an image of autumn, when a new month is born with a snowy start. But autumn is the time of weddings, and therefore the month is the groom.

In an effort to reveal the versatility of the folklore motif, Klychkov sometimes falls into stylization. Such, for example, is the appearance of the sea princess, as if merging with the image of the wave itself.

The princess's shoulders are covered in foam,

White knees in foam,

Her waves became slimmer,

And the fog floats behind her...

This is how the artist’s stencil vignette of the early 20th century looks like. The impression of stylization is further enhanced by the static nature of most of Klychkov’s folklore images. Often, one or another episode from the life of a fairy-tale hero turns into a landscape picture and freezes in it. Similarly, I. Ya. Bilibin turned the events of a Russian fairy tale into a series of frozen ornamented drawings. In general, in Klychkov’s first collections, the folklore world appears as if filtered through the poet’s dream of the ideal world of the utopian past, the world of a fairy-tale, “ghostly Rus',” into which, as if into a “secret garden,” he tries to penetrate through “folklore” paths.

Cover me, honey,

A shroud of blue.

I love your humming hum

And your princess!..

With the exception of such fairy-tale and other semi-mythical characters, Klychkov’s early lyrics are deserted. Yes, the poet does not long to meet people in his bright solitude in the middle of nature, where it is easy for him to wander along the road “with a bag over his shoulders, with his lonely thought...” and it is not difficult to find shelter “among a family of talkative aspens.” The sophisticated, impressively detached poet of dreams, the “enchanted wanderer,” Lel, during this period knew only novels with mermaids, sea princesses and frets, happily protecting him in the bosom of nature from the mistakes and disappointments of real life.

With all the material, rustic concreteness of the images of nature and everyday life, the lyrics of the new peasant poets were directed towards some ineffable secret of human existence. Not only the first reviewers of Klyuev spoke about “a string of vague pre-dawn sensations, prophecies, promises, hopes,” but this is also noted by the modern researcher of his poetry V. G. Bazanov. The title of Klychkov’s collection “The Hidden Garden” was perceived as a symbol of all new peasant poetry: “They are constantly trying to show the “secret garden” of their dreams behind the visible green garden,” wrote V. Lvov-Rogachevsky.

The lyrical subject of the early lyrics of the new peasant poets often appears in the image of a shepherd, with whom almost all of them identify themselves. “I am a shepherd, my chambers are between undulating fields,” says Yesenin (“Shepherd”); Klychkov imagines his “songs” as a flock of sheep, which the poet-shepherd grazes “in the early fog by the river” (“I keep singing - after all, I’m a singer...”). Yesenin explains this desire of poets for the symbolic image of a shepherd: “In ancient times, no one had time as freely as shepherds. They were the first thinkers and poets, as evidenced by the Bible and the Apocrypha<…>The entire pagan belief in the transmigration of souls, music, song and the lace-thin philosophy of life on earth is the fruit of transparent shepherd’s thoughts.”

The image of a wanderer, a tramp, a pilgrim, a monk became even more widespread in this poetry. The very image of “distance” became a symbol of wandering in her (“Look into the leafy wandering distance” - Klyuev; “In my eyes there are distant lands, In my hands there is a birch tree...” - Klychkov; “The faces are dusty, tanned, The eyelids have gnawed at the distance...” - Yesenin) .

All these images testify to the aspiration of individual poets to a certain “unearthly”, “unsolved land”, which at first impression (for example, in Yesenin’s lyrics) seems to be something akin to Plato’s ancestral home of the soul. There, “into the silent darkness of eternity,” into his timeless “starry” element, the poet himself leaves earthly reality, where he is an “accidental guest.” But then it turns out that he still cannot renounce this reality; He needs to become a particle of eternity, its “unsunset eyes” in order to eagerly look down at the same earth (“Where the secret always slumbers...”). Trusting his “ghost star”, the poet leaves for the “unknown”, but does he “leave” if the same “mowers”, “apples of dawn”, “furrows ringing with rye” accompany him on the way? Communicating the highest grace (“with a smile of joyful happiness”), he prays to the same “stacks and haystacks” of his native peasant land.

The “hidden” world of the new peasant poets turns out to be nothing more than the same rural Russia with all its peasant attributes, but only as if raised to an immeasurable spiritual height. This is Rus', identified with the fate of the legendary Kitezh city, Rus', becoming a “hut India”, a “hut” cosmos. At this highest stage of development of the image of peasant Rus', its everyday realities are already beginning to shine with an “imperishable”, ideal light: “So that the calloused bast shoe, the grimy pot, Brighten the eyes - a living light” (“White India” by Klyuev); “And in the nook of the plow with the harrow They also dream - they shine in the corner” (“Wonderful Guest” by Klychkov).

The main material for the embodiment of this patterned-deep world, similar to the fabulous Kitezh, was the original, living peasant and semi-precious archaic word. Such material was not available to self-taught writers. Their poems about Russian nature are replete with obvious borrowings from someone else’s vocabulary: “The yellow tunics were taken off the birch trees from the shoulders” (S. Fomin); “I dreamed of a fragrant garden, a grotto under a curly linden tree” (G. Deev-Khomyakovsky). At the same time, the specific expressiveness of the poetic image of the new peasant poets, their living folk word does not create the impression of ethnography, which requires special decoding. The dialecticisms of Klyuev, Yesenin, and less commonly Klychkov and Shiryaevets, pulsate with emotional and figurative energy, not to mention their nationwide root transparency. These are poetic dialecticisms, regardless of whether they are taken from the verbal repertoire of village old women or were composed by the poets themselves. From Klyuev: “The dawn has gone out”; “A little light sprinkled into the eyes of the little one”; “he will regret forever”; from Klychkov: “in a dark cloud in the evening”; from Yesenin: “dawn and midday by the bush”; “an ignorant wanderer”, “from timid noise”; “in the whooping of foamy streams”, “whirling freedom”,

Cows talk to me

In nodding language.

Spiritual oak trees

They call with branches to the river.

It seemed that the poet was introducing the reader into a hidden cache of poetic images still unknown to him. And since the words-images themselves definitely correlated with the elements of peasant speech and worldview, the world revealed by the lyrics of these poets, with all its freshness, seemed primordial, although half-forgotten. Trying to determine this deep connection of the poetic word with the folk worldview, A. Bely, in an article devoted to the poetics of Klyuev, wrote: “The root folk power of the serpentine sound is transparent to the poet, whose roots have been infused with this folk wisdom.”

Another integral generic feature of new peasant poetry is the songfulness that naturally flows into it from folklore sources. Close to folk love lyrics many of Yesenin’s “songs”, filled with intoxicating young feelings (“Play, play, little girl...”, “The scarlet light of dawn has woven over the lake...”). The prowess of the Volga freemen emanates from Shiryaevets’ “songs”. Klychkov’s early poetry is all songs. However, the degree of folklore of these “songs” is not the same even in the work of the same poet. Thus, in Klyuev’s “Songs from Zaonezhye,” the folklore material is barely touched by the poet’s creative individuality, but as for “Hut Songs,” here Klyuev, based on the folklore basis, reaches the pinnacle of its poetic interpretation.

The cycle of these “songs” dedicated to the death of his mother, in its genre aspiration, is based on the funeral lament recorded in the last century by E. V. Barsov from I. A. Fedosova precisely in the poet’s homeland, in the Olonets province. According to the collector, Fedosova was not just a prisoner, but an interpreter of other people's grief. The fellow countryman of the famous folk poetess pursues a different goal. If usually all eight consecutive episodes of funeral lament are aimed at the utmost dramatization of experience, psychophysiologically resolved by catharsis, then Klyuev, in his “cry” for his mother, enters into a poetic combat with death. Relying on mystical intuition and even more on the miraculous gift of poetic embodiment, he tries to “resurrect” the deceased, or rather, convince her of her transition from real life to another spiritual existence. The entire cycle can be considered as a poetic suite of reincarnation in the death of a peasant woman, whose whole life was organically fused with her native nature, and the entire “hut” world around her, even after the death of its mistress, continues to preserve the warmth of her soul, the high harmony and harmony of her concerns and business It is significant that from the very first lines of the image of the funeral rite, the theme of everyday life begins to develop, on the one hand, and on the other, nature, which in conclusion will have to intersect and merge into one: “Four widows came to the deceased... Screaming cranes plowed the azure...”.

The mother died, but everything around her is filled with her immortal essence.

Like a spruce under a saw, the hut sighed,

A crowd of shadows whispered in the corner,

A fat heifer was martyred in a barn,

And a scarf swelled like a sail in the garden bed...

A similar metamorphosis occurs in the last stanza with nature: the “sunset-goldener” silently enters the glowing window, bestowing the deceased with a farewell light (“For thoughts at dawn, for a story in the evening”), then “dusk” and “robin” join the ritual. and “star granddaughter.” The second poem (“The bed is waiting for the cat...”) is entirely dedicated to the “hut” world, which seems to bear the stamp of the deceased. At the same time, the “hut creature” does not uniformly and passively imprint on itself the memory of its owner. She is possessed by a complex range of moods - from hopeless despondency to hope and joy that is about to be resurrected.

From the middle of the poem, the poet introduces into his “cry” the world of nature, which further affirms the triumph of life over death. However, it is still not easy to be consoled. Let the magpies distract you from sorrowful thoughts, let the bullfinches and returning cranes please you - the crosses on the churchyard and the “scowling” hut are right in their own way. A person who has suffered an irreparable loss will inevitably have to drink the cup of bitter truth. The third poem of the suite is dedicated to her (““Mom Died” - two rustling words...”). The poet tries here to torture the mystery of death in the same way as the mystery of life: “Who is she?” The answer and a picture of an even greater triumph of life over death unfold in the next poem (“A pole is to a cat what a barn is to a priest…”). The “hut creature”, which had betrayed itself with the departure of its mistress, returns to the cycle of its usual affairs: “The mother-stove has one thing on her mind: To save the warmth, and to snore in the semi-darkness...”. True to her unstoppable everyday life, she draws the desperate poet into the familiar circle of life’s balance: “It’s not without reason that in a remote, glowing hut, like a sail in a bucket, you are drowsy.” A turning point occurs in his soul; in reconciliation with what happened, a new source of consolation opens up: “In the beaten paradise and in the calm of the threshing floor, Weep with honey that “she” will be.” That's how it happens. In a dream or in a poetic dream, a picture of the mystical transformation of the hut is revealed to him, which at the sacred hour is visited by the spirit of the mother who has returned “from across the seas.” Her blessing is accompanied by images of natural generosity and healing power. Now that the consciousness has become sufficiently accustomed to the loss, the poet dares to take a more sober look at his surroundings (“It’s a good evening by the lamp…”). And an unknitted stocking, and a sleeping tub, and a quiet broom - alas, cannot help in any way except a mean and dispassionate reminder of the departed person. And therefore the poem ends with a deep sigh: “Oh, God - Tomorrow a year, like a loved one in a coffin!”

In a number of subsequent poems, as if reproducing an unstoppable series of natural phenomena and household, peasant chores and affairs, the image of the mother gradually recedes, only occasionally flashing with the “amber needle” of a dying ray, or reminding of herself with the “crosses of the blessed peaks” of the forest surrounding the hut. The mighty, healing expanse of a dense forest region emanates from the last verses of the “suite”, in which “From dusk to the stars and from the stars to dawn, the white birch bark, the ripple of pine needles and the resin of amber.” The lines are imbued with a settled peace and tranquility, indicating that the life of the peasant hut still continues its unstoppable course.

With its originality and deep connection with the national spirit, the creativity of the new peasant galaxy was unanimously opposed to criticism of “bookish”, intelligentsia artistic production. A. Bely contrasts Klyuev’s intuitive mastery of the secrets of the poetic craft with the school of aesthetes, where “metaphors are artificially brewed and equipped with the salt of artificial sounds.” B. Sadovskoy, in turn, writes: “After the soulless false poetry of the aesthetes from Apollo (meaning the Acmeists - A.M.) and the brazen orgy of futurism, you rest your soul on the pure, like forest dawns, inspirations of folk poets.” Klyuev picks up the idea of contrasting his poetry as the direct voice of nature, as a revelation of the people's soul, with the artisanal verses of urban scholars. In the cycle “To the Poet Sergei Yesenin” (1916–1917) he denounces the superficial and artisanal attitude towards poetry (this is “paper hell”, “line-by-line flame”, “cigarette hearts”) and, on the contrary, the images of his and Yesenin’s poetry are entirely connected with nature by the elements (“That’s why I ask in my eyes, That I am the son of the Great Lakes”, “I began to gurgle with forest streams and the forest streams sang”).

There is smoke from the huts in your eyes,

The deep sleep of river silt,

Ryazan, poppy sunset, -

Your singing ink.

But with all their deep orientation towards folklore sources, towards the original peasant word, Klyuev, Klychkov, Yesenin were still not alien to the influence of symbolist poetry, which attracted them with its high culture. The most noticeable was the influence of Blok, whose images and intonations were often found in early Klyuev: “In the snowy blue nights...”, “Joy<…>With a thin hand the Dawn will light the everlasting flame.” This is not contradicted by Klyuev’s admission that not everything in Blok’s poems is dear to him, but only “some lark-like tremors.” Undoubtedly, both Klyuev and Yesenin developed Blok’s theme of Russia in their own way, but Blok himself, it seems, moved towards his Russia not without the influence of Klyuev.

It should be noted that, while mastering the high poetic culture of the Symbolists, the new peasant poets did not abandon unpretentious traditional verse and completely followed the rut of folk and classical versification, diversifying it to the extent only with new rhythmic moves that came into wide use, for example, dolniks.

New peasant poets created their own image of peasant Rus', which, for all its aesthetic and philosophical richness, was ahistorical. The timelessness of this shining “ghostly Rus'” was emphasized by the poets themselves. “My tear, my sigh for my dear Kitezh,” Klyuev wrote about his “mother Rus'.” For Klychkov, this is a “secret garden” lost in a protected region, where there is no longer “a way for a friend, nor a way for an enemy.” For Yesenin, this is the “Russian region”, through which either the peasant intercessor Nikola the Merciful or “with a shepherd’s pipe” the Apostle Andrei roam, blessing it. Most noticeable in this image were the features of a patriarchal village, in its mythical or very recent past, the village about which V.I. Lenin wrote in the article “Leo Tolstoy, as a mirror of the Russian revolution”: “The old foundations of peasant farming and peasant life , the foundations that had really held for centuries were broken down with extraordinary speed.” It is precisely because of this that the ideal image of peasant Rus' was accompanied by the named poets with two tragic motives: longing for the past (“I pass through a village at night” by Klyuev, “On Troika” by Shiryaevets) and rejection of urban civilization. In the latter, with its automation of life and the spiritual impersonality of man, the new peasant poets saw a real threat to the aesthetically original, humanly fragile world of the village.

It should be especially noted that the new peasant poets have an extremely one-sided view of the city. They saw neither revolutionary, proletarian forces, nor spiritual progress in him, focusing their attention only on bourgeois immorality and the costs of technical progress. “There’s nowhere else to run. In the Pushcha a sawmill is chugging, in the gorges the telegraph wire is singing and the green eye of the semaphore is beating,” Klyuev wrote to Bryusov in the early 1910s. This is not so much a real city as a symbol of capitalist evil. In a letter to Shiryaevets, the same Klyuev conjures: “How hateful and black the entire so-called civilized world seems, and what would he give, what cross, what Golgotha would he bear, so that America does not approach the gray dawn, the chapel in the forest, the hare at the haystack, at the fairy-tale hut...” Many poems by Klyuev and Shiryaevets are permeated with a complaint about the destructive influence of the city. In contrast to Blok (“New America”), the new peasant poets think of the future of Russia only as the future of a peasant utopian paradise, the expanse of which will not be covered by the soot of industrial skies. In Klyuev’s impressionistic sketch “Old and New” (1911) this is expressed in two symbolic sketches: the urban present and the agricultural future. The first is characterized by such signs as the “sharp clank of a tram, reminiscent of the ringing of shackles,” curbstones and signs on which the “seal of the Antichrist” is indelibly blackened. About the second it is said: “Millennia have passed. Our fields are fragrant and dewy<…>Do you remember? here was what people called the City<…>The ears of corn are full of honey and the seraphim brothers are walking around the human bushes.” “Iron skyscraper, factory chimney, Is it yours, oh homeland, secret destiny!” - the poet exclaimed, addressing Russia at the beginning of 1917.

The image of a city dweller is also conventional in Klyuev’s poems. This is a kind of “jacket man” devoid of a sense of beauty and reverence for nature, calloused in his lack of spirituality, who, having appeared in the “birch bark paradise,” “breathed a cigarette into the pine incense and burned a forget-me-not with spit.”

The bird cherry wrung its hands,

An ermine confuses the trail to the mink...

Son of iron and stone boredom

Tramples the birch bark paradise.

A soulless attitude towards nature, a severance of life-giving ties with it, is put forward by the poets of the new peasant galaxy as the main sign of human spiritual impoverishment. Intensively developing by the end of the 1910s. The motive of dissonance between man and nature inevitably introduces people into Klychkov’s “deserted” poetry. The image of her lyrical hero seems to be brought to life from the captivity of folklore melody and mythological dreams, which betrothed him to the unsteady images of mermaids and frets, as a result of which the poet’s dream of a “secret garden” of “ghostly Rus'” was born. Distracting even for a moment from his intoxication with nature, he becomes interested in: how do those around him feel about it? The observations are disappointing:

Today in your village

They fight, swear, drink -

You can't hear the birds like the princess

They sing in the village forest.

If in Klychkov’s first two collections the harmoniously bright, spiritual world of nature reigns supreme, then the subsequent ones are overshadowed by the thought of man’s tragic discord with it. A motive is outlined for the “departure” of rural Rus', which no longer has a place in the urbanizing reality, where soon “the bagpipes of the shepherd will fall silent, the factory whistle will sound,” into its mythical past. The poet perceives her death as his own: “Grow, soul, before separation, into your native expanse, into your native distance!..”. And nature itself seems to be heading towards its own destruction. “Farewell radiance”, “Premonition” - these are the sections of the collection “Dubravna”. For some reason, “the willows began to think,” the birch trees gathered for an unknown long journey, “And the fog thickened over the fields, a sadness unprecedented in the world...”.

The October Revolution was enthusiastically received by the new peasant poets, because it seemed to them that “golden lever of the universe” that would “turn to the sun of truth” (Klyuev, “From the Native Shore”), which the peasantry had long dreamed of. Klyuev even joined the RCP (b) in 1918. “I am a communist, a red man, an igniter, a flag bearer, machine-gun eyes,” - this is how he assures himself and others of his revolutionary nature. His performances as an agitator and poet impress with their pathos and imaginative power. His poem “Open Open, Eagle Wings” is becoming textbook famous. In the poems of the first revolutionary years, Klyuev, indeed, conveys the general pathos of the revolution as a national resurrection: “We<…>Let us raise the red sun with millions of hands over the World of sorrow and torment.” Yesenin greets the revolution with no less joyful pathos and also as a celebration of some kind of universal renewal. On a cosmic scale, although with a greater emphasis on the social aspect, the revolution was also perceived by Oreshin in the 1918 poems “I, Lord” and “Way of the Cross”.

Since 1918, creative differences between the poets of the new peasant “kupnitsa” began. Having accepted the revolution, Klyuev continues to cling to his ideal of patriarchal Rus'; Yesenin decisively departs from following it. This leads to significant disagreement between poets. Oreshin goes even further, who, trying to renounce “patriarchalism,” sometimes even falls into the sin of prolet-cult hobbies. Klychkov moves from the lyricism of nature to more complex everyday and philosophical motifs. The poetry of Shiryaevets is saturated with the epic. The particularly dramatic relationship between these poets and the revolutionary new movement was accompanied by a crisis in the initial foundations of their early poetic work.

The concept of “peasant poetry,” which has entered historical and literary usage, unites poets conventionally and reflects only some common features inherent in their worldview and poetic manner. They did not form a single creative school with a single ideological and poetic program. As a genre, “peasant poetry” was formed in the middle of the 19th century. Its largest representatives were Alexey Vasilyevich Koltsov, Ivan Savvich Nikitin and Ivan Zakharovich Surikov. They wrote about the work and life of the peasant, about the dramatic and tragic conflicts of his life. Their work reflected both the joy of the merging of workers with the natural world, and the feeling of hostility to the life of a stuffy, noisy city alien to living nature.
Peasant poetry has always been a success among the reading public. When publishing a poem, the origin of the authors was usually indicated. And the surge of interest in folk life immediately responded with a search for nuggets. Actually, this word, “nugget,” was introduced into literary use as if to justify poets from the people, who were also called “self-taught poets.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, “peasant poets” united in the Surikov literary and musical circle, which published collections and almanacs. An important role in it was played by Spiridon Dmitrievich Drozhzhin, Philip Stepanovich Shkulev, and Egor Efimovich Nechaev. In the 1910s, a new generation of poets from the peasant environment entered literature. Collections by Sergei Antonovich Klychkov (Leshenkov), Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev, and the first works of Alexander Vasilyevich Shiryaevtsev (Abramov) and Pyotr Vasilyevich Oreshin appear in print. In 1916, a collection of Yesenin’s poems “Radunitsa” was published.
In that era, the “Russian peasant” was nothing more than an exotic restaurant or an artistic pose. She was proudly received by Klyuev, who cursed the “omnipresence of the nobility” in his letters to Blok; It was tried on dandy by young Yesenin, dressed as a shepherdess, in an untucked blue silk shirt, with a silver belt, velvet pants and high morocco boots. But they were sympathetically received by critics as envoys to the literature of the Russian village, exponents of its poetic self-awareness. Subsequently, Soviet criticism branded “peasant poetry” as “kulak”.
The traditional view of later criticism on “peasant poetry” is well illustrated by the description given by the “Literary Encyclopedia” to the most prominent representative of this trend, Yesenin: “A representative of the declassing groups of the rural wealthy peasantry, the kulaks... Yesenin comes from the material concreteness of the natural economy on the soil of which he grew up, from the anthropomorphism and zoomorphism of primitive peasant psychology. The religiosity that colors many of his works is also close to the primitive concrete religiosity of the wealthy peasantry.”
“Peasant poetry” came to Russian literature at the turn of the century. It was a time of premonition of social collapse and complete anarchy of meaning in art, so a certain dualism can be observed in the work of “peasant poets”. This is a painful desire to move into another life, to become someone who was not born, forever feeling therefore wounded. So they all suffered, so they fled from their beloved villages to cities that they hated. But knowledge of peasant life, oral poetic creativity of the people, a deeply national feeling of closeness to native nature constituted strong point lyrics of "peasant poets".

Diagnostics and diseases. Medicines from A to Z

New Peasant Poetry. As a genre, “peasant poetry” was formed in the middle of the 19th century. Peasant poetry of the 19th century.

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