The most subjective poet of early Symbolism is K.D. Balmont

1. Characteristics of Balmont's creativity

Balmont began to write very early, at the age of 9, but “the beginning of his literary career was fraught with many torments and failures”. For four or five years no magazine wanted to print it. “The first collection of my poems,” he says, “which I myself published in Yaroslavl (though weak), had, of course, no success. My first translated work (a book by the Norwegian writer Heinrich Jaeger about Heinrich Ibsen) was burned by the censors. Close people with their negative attitude significantly increased the severity of the first failures. " But very soon the name of Balmont, first as Shelley's translator, and from the middle of the 1890s - as one of the most prominent representatives of Russian "decadence", becomes very famous. The brilliance of verse and poetic flight give him access to publications hostile to decadence - Vestnik Evropy, Russkaya Mysl and others. In the 1900s, Balmont's literary activity was especially closely related to the Moscow "decadent" publishing houses: "Scorpion" and "Grif".

The main feature of Balmont's poetry is its desire to abandon the conditions of time and space and completely withdraw into the realm of dreams. During the heyday of his talent, among the many hundreds of his poems, it was almost impossible to find a single one on a Russian theme. In recent years he has become very interested in Russian fairy-tale themes; but for him this is the purest exoticism, in the processing of which he brings his usual detachment from the conditions of place and time. Real people and reality are of little interest to him. He sings mainly the sky, stars, sea, sun, "vastness", "fleetingness", "silence", "transparency", "darkness", "chaos", "eternity", "height", "spheres", lying " beyond the limit. " For the greater personification, he even writes these abstract concepts with a capital letter and treats them as living realities. In this respect, after Tyutchev, he is the most heartfelt pantheist among Russian poets. But actually living, real nature - a tree, grass, the blue of the sky, the splash of a wave - he does not feel at all and hardly tries to describe it.

For a long time, K. Balmont occupied a recognized leading position among the Russian Symbolists, and this position was not achieved along the lines of "fashion" (although at one time Balmont was "fashionable") and the desire to please the crowd. The poet's spiritual work, his searches, reflected the "spirit of the times", searches for the "lost" spirit of Russian "intelligent" thought in general.

Balmont belonged to the generation of older Symbolists and paid tribute to such a trend in art as decadence. Under the influence of hopeless pessimism, the poet matures the moods characteristic of "decadent" poetry: first, complete apathy, then the thirst for solitude and flight from the world. However, his work cannot be attributed to only one literary direction. Associated with the national literary tradition and immersed in the history and culture of other peoples, carried away by fashionable philosophical trends and permeating his work with mythological images, Balmont does not fit into the framework of any direction in literature also because of the completely original approach to poetry, which he assesses nothing but magic. The poet, according to Balmont, is a sorcerer, called upon to disenchant nature, and the world around him is “all-publicized music” and “sculpted verse”.

“Nature gives only the rudiments of being, creates unfinished monsters, - sorcerers by their word and their magical actions improve Nature and give life a beautiful face”. This understanding of the poet's mission determined the nature of all the work of Konstantin Balmont. In his opinion, “our human word, with which we measure the Universe and reign over the elements, is the most magical miracle of all that is valuable in our human life”. The word, which has power over the elements, becomes the very fifth element of the world - the element of the human Voice, which gave this wordless world (from a flower and a bird to the Ocean and Heaven) the opportunity to express itself. In this approach of Balmont one can feel the influence of the philosophy of all-unity of Vl. Solovyov, who called for "to capture and forever ideally fix a single phenomenon ..., to focus on it all the forces of the soul and thereby feel the forces of being in it ..., to see in it the focus of everything, the only source of the absolute." We come across a number of poems in Balmont in which the smallest essence becomes the object of the poet's close attention and is recognized by him as an important link in a single life chain. “Moth”, “Cuckoo”, “Albatross”, “Owl”, “Stone”, “Forest”, “Snowflake”, “Old House”, “Pale Grass, Wave”, “Swamp”, “Lilies of the Valley”, “ Roadside Grasses ”,“ Dandelion ”- all these and many other poems of Balmont draw us in close-up what is stated in the title.

Balmont's poetry is the self-dissolution of the “I” in an immense world in order to become familiar with the eternal secrets of the Cosmos:

I know the mysterious door

From death to life, from darkness to being

There is the truth of the dissolved I.

Balmont's literary debut was unsuccessful; Balmont bought and destroyed the first edition of his own poems. Critics were very skeptical and ironic about Balmont's first poetic attempts. Translation activity at the very beginning of his career also did not bring joy - his first translated book was burned by the censors.

However, further works by Konstantin Balmont, both translated and of his own composition, were a huge success.

This success accompanied the poet until 1905, when the collection Liturgy of Beauty was released. Critics of that time and modern researchers from this very year highlight the beginning of the collapse of the aesthetic system that was characteristic of the poetry of Konstantin Balmont. And the book "The Firebird", published in 1907, was a complete failure. Konstantin Balmont died abroad in Paris, where he managed to leave Soviet Russia. Until his death, he was very homesick, complained that everything around him was empty. Constant sadness and financial turmoil led to the development of a serious illness, from which he died in 1942.

Researchers attribute all of Balmont's work to the decadent-symbolist movement. It should be noted here that at the end of the 19th century a new literary movement came to Russia from France, the followers of which began to be called first decadents, and a little later symbolists. The main postulate of the symbolist decadent creativity was the idea of \u200b\u200bexpressing the inexpressible, the unpronounceable in poetry. They assigned the main role in this process to the word-symbol, the image, which contains in itself fundamentally more than the pair “form” - “meaning”. The meaning of such word-symbols turned out to be much broader than just the lexical meaning of the word.

Balmont found himself within the framework of this literary movement. And this was no coincidence. As his contemporaries note, the poet by the very organization of his spiritual, psychic "I" was as if born to be a Symbolist. Here is how Bannikov VN describes him: “Extremely sensitive and nervous, inquisitive, good-natured, carried away, easy-going, prone to affectation and narcissism, he carried something very spontaneous, tender, childish in his soul”.

Analysis of the story of Vasily Shukshin "Red Kalina"

The village became the cradle with which Shukshin's creative life began, which gave impetus to the development of his amazing creative powers. Memory, reflections on life led him to the village, where it was here that he learned to notice the most acute conflicts ...

Analysis of the works of A.S. Serafimovich and Balmont K.D.

The silence of the spirit, the silence of the universe is too terrible and painful, perhaps Eternity itself is only the horror of silence, there is no return from the heights and icy ridges, and yet the "truth of heaven" is only a vague dream. So, one must live, by all means ...

Biblical motives in the novels of Charles Dickens

The beginning of Dickens's work is the 30s. In his first books, he is still far from generalizations and conclusions of a social nature, but they contain many themes and images of subsequent novels. Novels belonging to the first period of his work ...

Walter Scott and his novel "Rob Roy"

The elegy genre in the works of E. Baratynsky

Summing up all of the above, we can say the following. In the already existing genre of elegy, as we found out, Baratynsky introduced the desire for psychological disclosure of feelings and philosophicality ...

The life and work of Stephen King

The life and work of F. Schiller

Just like his friend Goethe, the great German poet and thinker F. Schiller was undoubtedly "the direct heir of the educational philosophy of the 18th century." In art, he saw a powerful tool for educating a harmoniously developed personality. Like Goethe ...

Shakespeare's riddle

Shakespeare's work absorbed all the most important moments of the Renaissance. At the center of Shakespeare's works is always a person, happy or unhappy, suffering, mistaken, performing feats and crimes ...

Igor Severyanin - poet of the Silver Age

Igor Severyanin (this is how the poet most often signed himself) became the founder of ego-futurism, in addition to just futurism, proclaiming the cult of individualism, towering above the faceless crowd of ordinary people ...

The image of a positive hero in the works of Charles Dickens on the example of the novels "Oliver Twist" and "Dombey and Son"

Charles Dickens is one of those great writers who are the pride of the national English culture; a whole epoch in the development of English literature is associated with his work. Among a remarkable galaxy of critical realists ...

Poetry of Arkady Kutilov

Kutilov's poems are distinguished by increased emotionality, evaluativeness even against the background of the works of other Omsk poets, whose emotional "degree" is noticeably higher than some "average Russian". This is manifested primarily ...

The secret of the success of the works of Paulo Coelho on the example of the story "Alchemist"

Already the first books of Paulo Coelho "The Diary of a Magician" (1987) and "The Alchemist" (1988) made him one of the most famous writers of our time. Then there were "Uzda" (1990), "Valkyries" (1992), "On the bank of the Rio Piedra I sat down and cried" (1996) ...

The writing

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was born in 1867 in the Vladimir province, the village of Gumnishchi. His father was a landowner and chairman of the zemstvo council. Mother, however, devoted a lot of time to the dissemination of cultural ideas in the provinces, staged amateur performances.

The ancestors of the famous poet on his father's side were Scottish sailors, since the Balmont surname is very common in Scotland. His grandfather was a naval officer, a participant in the Russian-Turkish war. The poet's mother's ancestors were Tatars, from whom Balmont may have inherited the passion inherent in his nature. His arrival in literature was accompanied by a number of setbacks. For a long time, namely for four to five years, not a single magazine agreed to publish his works. The first collection of poems was published in Yaroslavl, but was not successful, as it was very weak in content. At the same time, Balmont is engaged in translations. His first translated book was the book by G. Neirao Heinrich Ibsen, which could not be approved by the censorship of that time and was destroyed. The poet's blieg also did not contribute to his advancement into the literary environment. Later, the popularity of Ba / * mont was brought by translations of poems by Percy Biche Shelley, stories by Edgar Poe.

Balmont's life was full of events and experiences. Here is what he himself wrote about “I find it difficult to mark as more“ significant ”any events from my personal life. However, I will try to list. For the first time, flashing, to mystical conviction, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe possibility and inevitability of world happiness (seventeen years old, when one day in Vladimir, on a bright winter day, from the mountain I saw a long blackening long peasant wagon train). Reading "Crime and Punishment" (16 years old) and especially "The Brothers Karamazov" (17 years old). This latest book gave mm more than any book in the world. First marriage (21 years old, divorced 5 years later). Second marriage (28 years old). The suicide of several of my friends during my youth. My attempt to kill by sowing (22 years old), throwing myself through the window on the stones from the height of the third floor (various fractures, years of lying in bed and then an unprecedented flowering of mental excitement and cheerfulness). Writing poetry (first at age 9, then 17.21). Numerous travels in Europe (especially England, Spain and Italy). "

Having gained fame, Balmont became one of the most popular poets of his time, one of the most widely read. He has a myriad of fans and female fans. Its popularity peaked in the 1890s. Balmont's talent is being revealed more and more, besides, he already occupies a prominent place among the so-called senior Symbolists. On account of his collections: "Under the northern sky", "In the vastness", "Silence". Critics began to note that the poet discovered new possibilities of Russian verse. The work of Balmont the Symbolist can be roughly divided into two stages. The first stage of his work is full of "transcendent", "otherworldly" motives. In his works, there is a lot of unreal, unearthly.
When the moon sparkles in the darkness of the night with His sickle, brilliant and gentle. My soul strives for another world, Captured by all the distant, all the boundless.
To the forests, to the mountains, to the snow-white peaks I rush in dreams; as if a sick spirit, I stay awake over the serene world, And cry sweetly, and breathe the moon.
I drink in this pale glow, Like an elf, swinging in a grid of rays, I listen to the silence speaks. My relatives are far from suffering, The whole earth is alien to me with its struggle, I am a cloud, I am a breath of breeze. Later, in the collections "Let's Be Like the Sun", "Tblko Love", "Seven-flowered" motifs of fire, light, striving forward appear. -
I went into this world to see the Sun And the blue horizon.
I came to this world to see the Sun And the heights of the mountains.

By 1905, a turning point was outlined in Balmont's work. The collections Liturgy of Beauty: Spontaneous Hymns, Round Dance of Times. Omnipotence ”, etc. In addition, the poet publishes several theoretical works.

Balmont's poetry is unlike anything else. Valery Bryusov called it the poetry of "captured moments". Moment, transience determine the philosophical principle of Balmont's poems. The moment is a symbol of eternity, that's what the poet tells us. And he, having snatched this moment from eternity, forever imprints it in the word:
I dreamed of catching the outgoing shadows, The outgoing shadows of an extinct day, I climbed the tower, and the steps trembled, And the steps trembled under my foot. And the higher I went, the clearer they were, The clearer the outlines were drawn in the distance, And some sounds were heard in the distance, Around me were heard from Heaven and Earth.

And below me, night had already come, Night had already come for the sleeping Earth, For me the daylight was shining, The fire light was burning out in the distance ...

In the poem, the rapture of the lyrical hero sounds. The work is filled with images-symbols: dreams and shadows. But, perhaps, the main symbol in Balmont's poetry is the image of the Sun. He sings it in his poems, writes hymns to him, gives a prayer: Life giver, Light creator, Sun, I sing you! Let make it even unhappy, but passionate, Hot and domineering my Soul!

The sun for the poet is a symbol of life, its source, its essence. The poet is powerless before the sun and admits it. He also admits that he is not able to convey all the beauty of the daylight. I sing to you, oh bright, hot Sun, But even though I know that I sing beautifully and tenderly, And even though the strings of the poet are ringing with a golden ducat, I am not able to exhaust all the power, all your spell.

Balmont's poems are distinguished by melodiousness, slowness and musicality.

And the poet himself, according to V. Bryusov, “experiences life as ... only poets can experience it, as given to them alone: \u200b\u200bfinding in every minute the fullness of life. Therefore, it cannot be measured by a common yardstick. " In 1926 the poet died, but his sun will always shine for us, because he came into this world "to see the Sun":
I came to this world to see the Sun, And if the day is extinguished, I will sing ... I will sing about the sun In the hour of death!

Balmont's creativity(1867-1942)

• Childhood and adolescence of Balmont
• The beginning of Balmont's work
• Poetry of Balmont early XX century
• The image of beauty in the lyrics of Balmont
• Balmont and the 1905 revolution
• Nature in Balmont's lyrics
• Features of Balmont's poetry
• Balmont as a translator
• Balmont and the October Revolution
• Balmont in exile
• Balmont's prose
• The last years of Balmont's life

In the constellation of poetic talents of the Silver Age, one of the first places belongs to KD Balmont. V. Bryusov wrote back in 1912: "There were no equal to Balmont in the art of verse in Russian literature ... where others saw the limit, Balmont discovered infinity."

However, the fate of this poet's creative heritage was not easy. For decades it was not republished in our country, and in solid literary works and textbooks it was invariably certified as a decadent. And only the collections of his selected poems that have appeared in recent years re-open to the modern reader the subtle and deep lyrics, the magician of verse, who possessed a unique sense of word and rhythm.

Throughout almost the entire life of Balmont, various legends, myths and speculations arose around his name. The poet himself was involved in the appearance of some of them. One of these myths is related to his ancestry.

1. Childhood and youth of Balmont.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was born on June 4 (16), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, into a poor noble family. The poet himself named people from Scotland and Lithuania among his ancestors. In fact, as evidenced by archival documents, the roots of his family tree are primordially Russian. His great-great-grandfather, by the name of Balamut, was a sergeant of one of the Life Hussar regiments during the time of Catherine 11, and his great-grandfather was a Kherson landowner.

For the first time, the grandfather of the future poet Konstantin Ivanovich, later a naval officer, began to bear the name Balmont. When he was signed up for military service as a boy, the surname Balamut, dissonant for a nobleman, was converted to Balmont. The singer himself emphatically pronounced his surname in the French manner, that is, with an emphasis on the last syllable. However, at the end of his life, he reported: “My father pronounced our surname - Balmont, I began to pronounce it because of the whim of one woman - Balmont. Correct, I think, the first ”(letter to V. V. Obolyaninov dated June 30, 1937).

In childhood, Balmont was greatly influenced by his mother, a well-educated woman. It was she who introduced him, according to him, into the "world of music, literature, history, linguistics." Reading became the boy's favorite pastime. He was brought up on the works of Russian classics. “The first poets I read,” he said in his autobiography, “were folk songs, Nikitin, Koltsov, Nekrasov and Pushkin. Of all the poems in the world, I love Lermontov's Mountain Peaks the most.

After graduating from the Vladimir gymnasium, Balmont entered the law faculty of Moscow University, but he had to study there for only a year: in 1887 he was expelled for participating in student unrest and exiled to Shuya. An attempt to continue his studies at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum was also unsuccessful. To gain systematic knowledge, Balmont has long and persistently engaged in self-education, especially in the field of literature, history and linguistics, having perfectly learned 16 foreign languages.

Thanks to tireless work, thirst for knowledge and great curiosity, Balmont became one of the educated people of his time. It is no accident that already in 1897 he was invited to England, where he lectures on Russian poetry at the famous Oxford University.

A painful episode in Balmont's life was his marriage to L. Gorelina. Balmont would later tell about the difficult and internally tense relationship with this woman, who drove her husband to a frenzy with jealousy, in his stories "The White Bride" and "March 13". The day indicated in the title of the last work was the date of a failed suicide attempt: on March 13, 1890, K. Balmont jumped out of the window of the third floor of the hotel and was taken to the hospital with many fractures. The year of staying in a hospital bed did not pass without leaving a trace for the future poet: Balmont felt the value of life, and all his subsequent work would be imbued with this mood.

2. The beginning of Balmont's work.

Balmont began to write in his gymnasium years .. Acquaintance with V. G. Korolenko, and then with V. Bryusov, joining the group of senior Symbolists extraordinarily intensified his creative energy. Collections of his poems are published one after another. (In total, the poet wrote 35 books of poetry). The name of Balmont becomes famous, his books are readily published and sold out.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Balmont was a recognized poet, about whose work a lot was written and argued, from whom younger contemporaries were learning his skills. A. Blok and A. Bely considered him one of their teachers. And it is no coincidence. The ability to generously and simply enjoy life, to tell brightly, uncommonly, elegantly and beautifully about what he experienced and what he saw, which is characteristic of Balmont's best poems, created for him in the first decade of the 20th century a huge, truly All-Russian glory. “The thoughts of everyone who really loved poetry was possessed by Balmont and fell in love with his sonorous, melodious verse,” the same V. Bryusov testified.

The talent of the young poet was noticed by such a strict connoisseur of beauty as A.P. Chekhov. In 1902, he wrote to Balmont: “You know, I love your talent, and each of your books gives me a lot of pleasure and excitement” 3.

The range of Balmont's lyrical experiences is wide and changeable. In the poems of the early collections "Under the Northern Sky" (1894), "In Boundlessness" (1895), "Silence" (1898), a contemplative mood prevails, withdrawal into the world of self-purpose Beauty: "Far from the restless and hazy earth // Within the boundless dumb purity // I built an airy castle // Airy radiant Palace of Beauty. The general tone of the subsequent books changes and becomes life-affirming, capacious in content and meaning.

Among the Symbolists, Balmont had his own position associated with a broader understanding of the symbol, which, in addition to its specific meaning, has a hidden content, expressed through hints, mood, musical sound. Of all the Symbolists, he most consistently developed impressionism - the poetry of impressions.

Balmont outlined his creative program in the preface to the book of poems he translated by E. Poe and in the collection of critical articles Mountain Peaks: “I call symbolic poetry that kind of poetry where, in addition to concrete content, there is also a hidden content that is organically combined with it and intertwined with him with the most delicate threads.

The task of the poet, Balmont argued, is to penetrate into the secret meaning of phenomena with the help of hints, omissions, associations, to create a special mood through the extensive use of sound writing, to recreate the flow of instant impressions and thoughts.

At the turn of the century, the subject changed and new forms were searched not only in literature, but also in art in general. I. Repin believed that the main principle of new poetry is "the manifestation of individual sensations of the human soul, sensations sometimes so strange, subtle and deep, which only a poet can dream of."

Published in 1900, another collection of poems by Balmont "Burning Buildings" can serve as an excellent illustration of these words. In it, the poet reveals the souls of people of different eras and nationalities: temperamental Spaniards ("Like a Spaniard"), courageous, warlike Scythians ("Scythians"), Galician prince Dmitry the Red ("Death of Dmitry the Red"), Tsar Ivan the Terrible and his guardsmen (" Guardsmen "), Lermontov (" To Lermontov "), tells about the mysterious and unpredictable female soul (" Castle Jan Valmore ").

Explaining the concept of his collection, the author wrote: “This book is not in vain called the lyrics of the modern soul. Never creating in my soul an artificial love for what is now modernity and that has been repeated in other forms more than once, I have never closed my hearing to voices from the past and the inevitable future ... In this book I speak not only for myself, but and for many others. "

Naturally, the central place in the gallery of images created by the poet is taken by the image of the lyrical hero: a sensitive, attentive, open to all the joys of the world, whose soul does not tolerate rest:

I want to break the azure

Quiet dreams.

I want buildings on fire

I want screaming storms! -

these lines from the poem "Dagger Words" define the general tone of the collection.

Considering the indispensable quality of the human soul its variability and diversity ("There is everything in souls"), Balmont paints diverse manifestations of the human character. In his work, he paid tribute to individualism ("I hate humanity // I am running from it in a hurry // My single fatherland // My desert soul"). However, this was nothing more than shocking and, to a certain extent, a fleeting tribute to fashion, for all his work, with such rare exceptions, is imbued with the ideas of kindness, attention to man and the world around him.

3. Poetry of Balmont of the early XX century.

In his best works included in the collections Let's Be Like the Sun (1903), Only Love. Seven-flower "(1903)," Slav's Svirel "(1907)," Kissing Words "(1909)," Ash "(1916)," Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon "(1917) and others Balmont appeared as an outstanding poet and lyricist. The diverse shades of nature recreated in his works, the ability to feel and capture "moments", musicality and melodiousness, whimsical impressionistic sketches give his poems a subtle grace and depth.

Creativity of the mature Balmont is imbued and illuminated by the sublime romantic dream of the Sun, Beauty, the greatness of the World. He seeks to oppose the soulless civilization of the "Iron Age" with an integral, perfect and beautiful "solar" principle. Balmont made an attempt in his work to build a cosmogonic picture of the world, in the center of which, the supreme deity is the Sun, the source of light and joy of being. In the poem that opens the collection Let's Be Like the Sun (1903), he writes:

I came to this world to see the Sun.

And if the day is out

I will sing. I will sing about the sun.

In the hour of death!

These cheerful notes color the poetry of Balmont of the early 20th century. The theme of the Sun in his victory over Darkness runs through all of his work. In his 1904 notebook, the poet notes: "Fire, Earth, Water and Air are the four regal elements with which my soul invariably lives in joyful and secret contact." Fire is Balmont's favorite element, which in his poetic consciousness is conjugated with the ideal of Beauty, Harmony and Creativity.

Another natural element - Water - is firmly connected with the mysterious power of love for a woman. Therefore, the lyrical hero of Balmont - "eternally young, eternally free" - is ready again and again, each time anew, to experience "her delight - rapture", recklessly surrender to the "hop of passions." At the same time, his feeling is warmed by attention to his beloved, worship of her physical and mental beauty (“I will wait”, “Tender of all”, “In my garden”, “No day” so that I don’t think about you ”,“ Separated ”,“ Katerina "and others). Only in one poem - "I Want" (1902) - the poet paid tribute to eroticism.

Balmont's lyrics are hymns to the elements, earth and space, the life of nature, love and passion, a dream that draws forward, the creative self-affirmation of a person. Lavishly using the colors of the impressionistic palette, he creates life-affirming, multi-colored and polyphonic poetry. It contains a feast of sensations, a jubilant enjoyment of the wealth of nature, a motley change of the finest perceptions and unsteady states of mind.

The highest life value in Balmont's poetry is the moment of merging with the beauty of the world. The alternation of these beautiful moments is, according to the poet, the main content of the human personality. The lyrical hero of his poems is looking for consonances, internal connections with nature, feels a spiritual need for unity with her:

I asked the free wind

What should I do to be young?

The playing wind answered me:

"Be airy, like the wind, like smoke!"

When in contact with the unclouded beauty of nature, the lyrical hero is seized by a joyful harmonious calm, he feels all the undivided fullness of life. The rapture of happiness for him is a communion with eternity, for the immortality of man, the poet is convinced, is inherent in the immortality of an eternally living and always beautiful nature:

But, dear brother, both me and you -

We are only dreams of Beauty

Of colorless flowers

Enduring gardens.

This lyric-philosophical meditation clearly reflects the meaning of the poet's perception of the world.

He likens man to the natural elements, changeable and powerful. The state of his soul, according to Balmont, is burning, fire of passions and feelings, quick, often almost imperceptibly replacing each other. The poetic world of Balmont is the world of the finest fleeting observations, childishly fragile "feelings". In the program poem "I do not know wisdom ..." (1902), he states:

I do not know wisdom suitable for others, I put only fleetingness into verse. In every fleetingness I see worlds, Full of a changeable, rainbow game.

Balmont elevated transience into a philosophical principle. The fullness of human existence is revealed in every moment of his life. To be able to catch this moment, to enjoy it, to appreciate life - this, according to Balmont, is the meaning of human existence, the wise "covenant of being." This was the poet himself. “He lived for a moment and was content with it, not being embarrassed by a motley succession of moments, just to express them more fully and more beautifully,” testifies Balmont's second wife EA Andreeva-Balmont.

His works expressed the eternal aspiration of man into the future, the restlessness of the soul, the passionate search for truth, the craving for the beautiful, "the inexhaustible dream":

Moments of tender beauty

I have woven into a star round dance.

But the inexhaustible dream

Calls me - go ahead.

("Check-in round dance")

4. The image of beauty in the lyrics of Balmont.

One of the central images of Balmont is the image of Beauty. He sees beauty as the goal, symbol, and pathos of life. His lyrical hero is aspiring to her with all his being and is confident in finding her:

We will rush into a wonderful world

To the unknown Beauty.

Balmont's poeticization of the beauty and eternity of being has a sacred character, conditioned by his religious consciousness, faith in the Creator, who is present in every moment, in every manifestation of living life. In the poem "Prayer", the lyrical hero, reflecting at the hour of sunset about who is in charge of the development and movement of life, comes to the conclusion that the human personality is forever united with the Creator:

He who is near and far

Before whom is your whole life,

Like a rainbow of a stream, -

Only That is eternally - me.

Like Pushkin and Lermontov, Balmont glorifies the Creator for the beauty and grandeur of the universe:

I love the gaps of the mountain haze, Where hungry eagles scream ... But in the world, the most precious thing to me is Joy to sing your praises, Merciful God.

Singing to the beauty and unique moments of life, the poet calls to remember and love the Creator. In the poem "The Bridge", he claims that nature is the eternal mediator between God and man, through her the Creator reveals His greatness and love.

5. Balmont and the 1905 revolution.

The civic sentiments of the time also penetrated into the poetry of Balmont. He warmly responded to the approach of the revolution of 1905-1907, creating a number of popular poems: "The Little Sultan" (1906), "Cleanliness", "Land and Freedom", "Russian Worker" (1906) and others, in which he criticizes the authorities and expresses faith in the creative forces of the Russian proletariat ("Worker, only for you, // Hope for all Russia").

For publicly reading the poem "Little Sultan" at a charity evening, the poet was forbidden to live in capitals, metropolitan provinces and university cities for two years, and after the defeat of the revolution, persecution by the authorities forced him to leave Russia for several years, where he returned again only after the 1913 amnesty.

6. Nature in the lyrics of Balmont.

However, social issues were not his element. The mature Balmont is predominantly a singer of the human soul, love and nature. Nature for him is as rich in shades of its states and charming with discreet beauty as the human soul:

There is a tired tenderness in Russian nature,

The silent pain of a hidden sadness

Hopelessness of grief, voicelessness,

vastness,

Cold heights, far away, -

he writes in the poem "Verbalism" (1900).

The ability to peer vigilantly into the rich world of nature, to convey the varied shades of its states and movements in close correlation with the inner world of the lyric hero or heroine is characteristic of many of Balmont's poems: "Birch", "Autumn", "Butterfly", "Zamarashka," , "Voice of Sunset", "Cherkeshenka", "First Winter" and others.

In 1907, in his article "On Lyrics" A. Blok wrote: "When you listen to Balmont, you always listen to spring." It's right. With all the variety of themes and motives of his work, Balmont, for the most part, is a poet of spring, the awakening of nature and the human soul, a poet of the flowering of life, spirituality. These moods determined the special spirituality, impressionism, flowery and melodiousness of his verse.

7. Peculiarities of Balmont's poetry.

The problem of artistic skill is one of the important problems of Balmont's work. Understanding creative talent as a gift sent from above (“among people, you are the deity's governor”), he stands up for the writer's increased demands on himself. For him, this is an integral condition for the "vitality" of the poetic soul, the guarantee of its creativity, burning and improving skill:

So that your dreams do not shine forever,

So that your soul is always alive

Scatter gold over steel in tunes

Pour frozen fire into sonorous words, -

balmont addresses his fellow writers in the poem "Sin mideo". The poet, as the creator and singer of Beauty, should, according to Balmont, become like a luminary, "radiate reasonable, good, eternal." The work of Balmont himself is a vivid illustration of these requirements. “Poetry is inner music, externally expressed by measured speech,” Balmont believed. Assessing his own work, the poet, not without pride (and some self-admiration), noted as one of his greatest merits filigree work on the word and musicality of the verse.

In the poem "I am the refinement of Russian slow speech ..." (1901) he wrote:

I am the sophistication of Russian slow speech,

Before me are other poets - forerunners,

I first discovered in this speech biases,

Re-singing, angry, tender ringing.

The musicality of Balmont's verse is given by the internal rhymes he readily used. For example, in the poem "Fantasy" (1893), inner rhymes hold together the hemistichs and the following line:

Like living statues, in sparks of moonlight,

The outlines of pines, firs and birches tremble a little.

The poem that opens the collection "In the Boundlessness" (1894) is built on the hooks of the previous hemistichs and essentially also on internal rhymes:

I was dreaming of catching shadows leaving

Fading shadows of a faded day

I climbed the tower, and the steps trembled,

And the steps trembled under my foot.

Internal rhymes were often found in Russian poetry in the first half of the 19th century. They are found in Zhukovsky's ballads, in the poems of Pushkin and the poets of his galaxy. But by the end of the 19th century, they fell out of use, and Balmont deserves the credit for their actualization.

Along with internal rhymes, Balmont widely resorted to other forms of musicality - to assonances and alliterations, that is, to the consonance of vowels and consonants. For Russian poetry, this was not a discovery either, but, starting with Balmont, all this turned out to be the focus of attention. For example, the poem "Moisture" (1899) is entirely built on the internal consonance of the consonant "l":

An oar slid off the boat

The coolness melts affectionately.

"Nice! My dear!" - Light,

Sweet from a quick glance.

The magic of sounds is the element of Balmont. He strove to create a poetry that, without resorting to the means of subject-logical influence, like music, would reveal a certain state of mind. And he did it brilliantly. Annensky, Blok, Bryusov, Bely, Shmelev, Gorky fell under the charm of his melodious verse more than once, not to mention the general readership.

Balmont's lyrics are very rich in color. “Perhaps all nature is a mosaic of flowers,” the poet argued and tried to show this in his work. His poem "Fata Morgana", consisting of 21 poems, is a song to the glory of multicolor. Each poem is dedicated to a color or combination of colors.

Many of Balmont's works are characterized by synesthesia - a solid image of color, smell and sound. The renewal of poetic speech in his work follows the path of merging verbal images with picturesque and musical ones. This is the genre specificity of his landscape lyrics, in which poetry, painting, and music are closely related, reflecting the richness of the surrounding world and involving the reader in the color, sound and musical flow of impressions and experiences.

Balmont surprised his contemporaries with the boldness and unexpectedness of metaphors. For him, for example, it cost nothing to say: "the scent of the sun", "the sound of a dawn, blue flute." Metaphor in Balmont, like in other Symbolists, was the main artistic method of transforming the phenomena of the world into a symbol. Balmont's poetic vocabulary is rich and original. He is distinguished by the refinement and virtuosity of comparisons and especially epithets.

Balmont, who was not in vain called the "poet of adjectives", significantly increased the role of an epithet in Russian lyrics at the beginning of the 20th century. He forges a lot of definitions to the defined word ("Over water, over a river without a word. Wordless, voiceless, weary ..."), reinforces the epithet with repetitions, an internal rhyme ("If I were a ringing, brilliant, free wave ..."), resorts to compound epithets ("Colors are sad-rich") and to epithets-neologisms.

These features of Balmont's poetics are also inherent in his poems for children, which made up the cycle "Fairy Tales". They depict a living and uniquely bright world of real and fantastic creatures: the kind mistress of the natural kingdom of the fairies, mischievous mermaids, butterflies, wagtails, etc. The poet showed an excellent ability to penetrate the psychology of the child reader, show him freshly and colorfully everything with which he is closely related to the birth itself.

Balmont's poems are bright and unique. He was just as bright and lively. In the memoirs of B. Zaytsev, I. Shmelev, M. Tsvetaeva, Y. Terapiano, G. Grebenshchikov, the image of a mentally rich, sensitive, easily injured person who possessed amazing psychological vigilance, for whom the concept of honor and responsibility in the performance of his main life duty - service to art - were holy.

The role of Balmont in the history of Russian poetic culture can hardly be overestimated. He was not only a virtuoso of verse (his contemporaries called him “Paganini of Russian Verse”), but also a man of enormous philological culture in general, of living universal knowledge.

8. Balmont as a translator.

He was one of the first Russian poets of the early 20th century to introduce the Russian reader to many wonderful works of world poetry. Russian Symbolists considered translation as an indispensable, almost an obligatory part of their own poetic creativity. People of the highest education and broad literary interests, proficient in many foreign languages, they were free to navigate the processes of development of contemporary European literatures.

Poetic translation was a natural necessity for them, a creative phenomenon first of all. Excellent translators were Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Annensky, Bely, Blok, Voloshin, Bunin and others. But even among them Balmont stands out for his erudition and the scale of his poetic interests. Thanks to his translations, the Russian reader has received a whole world of poetry library. He translated a lot and willingly Byron, Shelley, Wilde, Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire, Calderon, Tumanyan, Rustaveli, Bulgarian, Polish and Spanish folk tales and songs, Mayan and Aztec folklore.

Balmont traveled a lot around the world and saw a lot. He made three trips around the world, having visited the most exotic, even by today's standards, countries and having seen many parts of the world. The poet's heart and soul were widely open to the world, his culture, and each new country left its own noticeable mark in his work.

That is why Balmont first told a Russian reader about many things, generously sharing his findings with him. “Balmont knew many languages \u200b\u200bbesides European,” wrote his daughter N. K. Balmont-Bruni in her memoirs, “and being captivated by some work, translating it into Russian, he could not be satisfied with European interlinear translations: he was always enthusiastically engaged in something new for him language, trying to penetrate as deeply as possible into the secrets of his beauty. "

9. Balmont and the October Revolution.

Balmont did not accept the October Revolution, regarding it as violence against the Russian people. Here is one stroke from ~ his memoirs, which is important for characterizing his personality: “When I, due to some false denunciation, that I was praising Denikin in poetry somewhere published, was invited politely to the Cheka and, by the way, the lady investigator asked me: "Which political party do you belong to?" - I answered briefly - "Poet".

Having gone through the years of the civil war, he applied for a business trip abroad. In 1921, Balmont left his homeland forever. Arriving in Paris and settling with his family in a modest apartment, the poet, drowning out his acute nostalgic melancholy, works hard and hard. But all his thoughts and works are about Russia. He devotes to this theme all the poetry collections published abroad "Gift to the Land" (1921), "Mine - to her. Russia "(1923)," In a Far Away "(1929)," Northern Lights "(1931)," Blue Horseshoe "(1935), a book of essays" Where is my home? "

Glory to life. There are breakthroughs of the evil

Long pages of blindness.

But you cannot renounce your family.

Shine for me, Russia, only you, -

he writes in the poem "Reconciliation" (1921).

10. Balmont in exile.

In the poems of the émigré years, the poet revives in his memory the beauty of Russian nature ("Night rain", "On the shoots", "September", "Taiga"), appeals to the dear to his heart images of relatives and friends ("Mother", "Father") glorifies the native word, rich and colorful Russian speech:

Language, our magnificent language.

River and steppe expanse in it,

In it the cries of an eagle and a wolf's roar

Chant, and ringing, and incense of worship.

In it is the cooing of a dove in the spring,

The lark takes off towards the sun - higher, higher.

Birch Grove. The light is through.

Heavenly rain sprinkled on the roof.

The murmur of an underground spring.

Spring ray playing on the door.

In it is the One who did not take a swing of the sword,

And seven swords in a visionary heart ...

("Russian language")

All these works could be epigraphized with the words of the poet himself: "My mourning is not designated for months, it will last for many strange years." In 1933, in an article dedicated to I. Shmelev, he wrote: "With all our life, with all our thoughts, with all our creativity, with all our memories and all our hope, we are in Russia, with Russia, wherever we are."

An important place in Balmont's poetic work of these years is occupied by his poems dedicated to fellow writers - emigrant writers Kuprin, Grebenshchikov, Shmelev, whom he greatly appreciated and with whom he was tied by bonds of close friendship. In these works, not only an assessment of the writers' work is expressed, but constantly sounds, varying, the main theme, now explicit, then deeply hidden - longing for the motherland. Here is one of the first published poems about Shmelev, to whom he dedicated about 30 poetic messages, not counting the poetic fragments in letters:

You filled your bins

They contain rye and barley and wheat,

And native July darkness

That lightning is embroidered into brocade.

You filled your hearing spirit

Russian speech, nap and mint,

You know exactly what the shepherd will say

With a little cow, thieving.

You know exactly what the blacksmith thinks

Throwing your hammer to the anvil,

You know the power that the thistle has,

In a vegetable garden that is not a canvas for a long time.

You drank those words as a child

What's in the stories now - like ubruses,

Godflower, unfading grass,

Fresh yellow buttercups beads.

Together with the woodpecker, you are the wisdom of the sciences

Preempted, accustomed to stubbornly

Know that the right beat or sound

Assigned to the sacraments of the Temple.

And when you laugh, oh brother,

I admire your crafty look,

Joking, you're immediately glad

Fly away for all-star glory.

And when, having exchanged longing,

We dream - in unforgotten places,

I'm with you - happy, different,

Where the wind in rakit remembers us.

("Bins")

It has already become a tradition to regard Balmont's work of the emigre years as a gradual fading away. Fortunately, this is far from the case. Balmont's poems of recent years, such as "Night Rain", "River", "Russian Language", "First Winter", "Bins", "Winter Hour", "Spill into Summer", "Poems about Russia" and many others can be a full reason to call them masterpieces - they are so lyrical, musical, deep and perfect in content and artistic form.

These and other works of the late Balmont reveal to us new facets of his poetic talent. Many of them organically combine lyric poetry and epos associated with the depiction of the life and life of old Russia.

The poet often introduces dialogue into his works, draws characteristic signs of everyday life, a lively spoken folk speech replete with dialectisms with its phraseological units, lexical "flaws" that convey the character, level of culture, mood of the speaker ("Poems about Russia", etc.).

For the first time in his work, Balmont appears as a tragic poet. His hero does not want to come to terms with the fate of an exile living "among the ghosts of the soulless," but speaks of his mental pain with restraint and at the same time confidentially, hoping for mutual understanding:

Who will swing the curtain of thunder

Approaching, he will open my eyes.

I am not dead. No. I'm alive. Yearning

Listening to the storm rushing ...

("Who?")

11. Prose of Balmont.

K. Balmont is the author of several prose books. In his prose, as in poetry, Balmont is primarily a lyricist. He worked in various prose genres - he wrote dozens of short stories, the novel Under a New Sickle, acted as a critic, publicist, memoirist, but most fully expressed himself in the essay genre, which Balmont mastered before the revolution.

During this period, 6 collections of his essays were published. The first of them - Mountain Peaks (1904) attracted, perhaps, the greatest attention of critics. A. Blok spoke of this book as "a series of bright, varied paintings, woven by the power of a very complete worldview." Mountain Peaks is not only an essay about Calderon, Hamlet, Blake, but also a noticeable step towards self-knowledge of Russian symbolism.

Four years later, White Lightnings, essays about Goethe's versatile and greedy soul, Walt Whitman, the singer of personality and life, O. Wilde, who is in love with pleasure and fading in sorrow, are perceived as a continuation of Mountain Peaks. about the poetics of folk beliefs.

A year later, "Sea Glow" was written - a book of reflections and impressionistic sketches - "melodious fictions" that arose as instant subjective responses to events in literature and life. Special attention is paid here to Slavic culture, a theme to which Balmont will return in the 1920s and 1930s.

The next book - "Snake Flowers" (1910) - essays on the culture of ancient America, travel letters, translations. This was followed by a book of essays "The Land of Osiris", and a year later (1916) - "Poetry as Magic" - a small book about the meaning and image of verse, an excellent commentary on the poetry of Balmont himself.

In France, Balmont also published the book "Air Way", collecting stories previously published in periodicals, and adding to them several things written in exile. The second émigré collection, The Rustle of Horror, was never published. The pictorial side is strong in "Airway", especially in episodes where feelings are difficult to verbal expression. This is the description of the mysterious "music of the spheres" heard by the hero of the "Lunar Guest".

Balmont's prose is not psychological, but he finds his own lyrical way of conveying a refined emotional experience. All of Airway's stories are autobiographical. Such is the book "Under a New Sickle" - the only novel in Balmont's work. The narrative element in it is subordinated to the pictorial one, but the novel is interesting for the pictures of old Russia, the provincial courtyard life, animated by lyrical intonations and the description of the fate of a boy “with a quiet disposition and contemplative mind, colored with artistry.

As in the pre-revolutionary period, the essay remained the main genre of Balmont the prose writer in emigration. But now the subject of Balmont the essayist is fundamentally changing: he writes about literature, but more about his everyday life, which is given significance by some ordinary incident, a flash of memory. Snow in Paris, the memory of the cold and hungry winter in the Moscow region in 1919, the anniversary of separation from Moscow, the comparison of a thunderstorm with a revolution that came up - all these become the themes of the essay. Written in 1920-1923, they were collected by Balmont in the book "Where is my home?", Which he later called "sketches about enslaved Russia."

The last book of prose published during Balmont's lifetime was "The Complicity of Souls" (Sofia, 1930). It brings together 18 small lyrical essays on the topic of contemporary and folklore poetry of the Slavs and Lithuania. The book includes translations of Balmont's poems and prose from Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and other languages. Some of the essays are among the finest in the legacy of Balmont the essayist.

12. The last years of Balmont's life.

In 1927 the poet moved from “His Petrol Majesty of the City of Paris” to the small village of Capbreton on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Lives hard, always in need.

But still, despite all the frequent bouts of depression, he writes and translates a lot. Balmont constantly talks about his longing for his homeland, about his desire to look at her again at least out of the corner of his eye: in poetry, when meeting with I. Shmelev, who came to Capbreton every summer to work, in letters. “I always want to go to Moscow. I think about the great joy of hearing the Russian language that I am Russian, and not a citizen of the Universe, and least of all a citizen of an old, boring, gray Europe, "he admits to E. Andreeva-Balmont

Balmont titled his last book of poems “Light Service (1937). In it, he kind of sums up the passionate worship of the Sun, Love, Beauty, "Poetry as magic."

On our site) wrote a lot. But most of what he wrote can be safely dismissed as insignificant, including all the poems after 1905, most of his numerous translations (Shelley's full metric translation is especially bad; Edgar Poeon the contrary, it is quite acceptable) and all prose without exception is rather sluggish and pompous. In the pantheon of genuine poets, he will remain six collections of poetry, published from 1894 to 1904. Even in these books, Balmont is very uneven, because although he had a real gift for singing at that time, he never knew how to work on poetry, but only sang like a bird. But he had a keen sense of form, which plays an important role in his poems, because the main thing in them is sound and melody.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont, photo of the 1880s

In the 1890s and early 1900s. readers were amazed at the richness of its rhythms and vocal pattern, which seemed even superfluous, embarrassing, and to the ear of radical Puritans - immoral. In Russian poetry, such a feast of sound was an innovation; elements of it were borrowed (without slavish imitation) from Edgar Poe and Shelley, the author The clouds, Indian serenade and By the night... But Balmont is less accurate and less mathematical than Poe, and infinitely less subtle than Shelley. Success rushed to his head, and the collection Let's be like the sun full of exclamations like: "I am the sophistication of Russian slow speech." Such immodesty is not entirely unfounded, since Balmont really surpassed all Russian poets in sound. But his poems lack precisely sophistication. They are surprisingly devoid of shades and finishes.

Balmont had a fairly wide range of feelings: from the bold fortissimo the most characteristic verses from Let's be like the sun to gentle, muted tones Epic and Sleepy stupor, but every time the feeling turns out to be simple, monotonous, monotonous. Another serious shortcoming of Balmont's poetry, which is also inherent in Bryusov, is the complete lack of a sense of the Russian language, which is apparently explained by the Westernizing nature of his poetry. His poems sound like translations from a foreign language.

Poets of Russia XX century. Constantin Balmont. Lecture by Vladimir Smirnov

You can get a complete picture of Balmont's style from his well-known poem Reeds.

Midnight sometimes in the wilderness
Barely audible, noiselessly, the reeds rustle.

What are they whispering about? What are they talking about?
Why are the lights burning between them?

They flash, flash - and again they are not.
And again the wandering light dawned.

At midnight, the reeds rustle at times.
Toads nest in them, snakes whistle in them.

A dying face trembles in the swamp.
That crimson month sadly wilted.

And the smell of ooze. And the dampness creeps.
The quagmire will lure, squeeze, suck.

“Whom? For what? - the reeds say -
Why are the lights burning between us? "

But the sad month silently wilted.
Does not know. Bends all the lower its face.

And, repeating a sigh of the lost soul,
Sadly, silently, the reeds rustle.

For a more detailed analysis of the poet's work, see the brilliant article Poems by Balmont, penned by the outstanding literary critic J. Eichenwald.

Balmont became the first representative of symbolism in poetry to gain all-Russian fame. It was noted, however, that his work as a whole was not purely symbolist; neither was the poet a "decadent" in the full sense of the word: decadence for him "... served not only and not so much as a form of aesthetic attitude to life, but as a convenient shell for creating an image of the creator of new art." The first collections of Balmont, with all the abundance of decadent-symbolist signs in them, were attributed by literary scholars to Impressionism, a trend in art that aimed to convey fleeting, unsteady impressions. Basically, these were "purely romantic poems, as if opposing heaven and earth, calling to the distant, unearthly", saturated with motives consonant with the work of A. N. Plescheev or S. Ya. Nadson. It was noted that the mood of "sadness, some kind of loneliness, homelessness" prevailing in Balmont's early poems, were echoes of the former "thoughts of the sick, tired generation of the intelligentsia." The poet himself noticed that his work began "with sadness, oppression and twilight", "under the northern sky." The lyrical hero of Balmont's early works is "a meek and docile youth, imbued with the most well-meaning and moderate feelings."

"Let's be like the sun"
A Journal for All, November 1902.

The collections "In the Boundlessness" and "Silence. Lyric Poems "were marked by an active search for" new space, new freedom. " The main ideas for these books were the ideas of the fleetingness of life and the mutability of the world. The author paid increased attention to the technique of verse, demonstrating a clear passion for sound writing and musicality. Symbolism in his understanding was primarily a means of searching for "new combinations of thoughts, colors and sounds", a method of building "from sounds, syllables and words of his native speech, a cherished chapel, where everything is full of deep meaning and penetration." Symbolic poetry "speaks its own special language, and this language is rich in intonations, like music and painting, it excites a complex mood in the soul, more than any other kind of poetry, it touches our sound and visual impressions," Balmont wrote in his book Mountain Peaks. ... The poet also shared the idea, which was part of the general system of symbolist views, that the sound matter of a word is endowed with a high meaning; like any materiality, it “represents from the spiritual substance”.

The critics noted the presence of new, "Nietzschean" motives and heroes already in the collection "Silence". Silence is believed to be the best of Balmont's first three books. “It seemed to me that the collection bears the imprint of an increasingly stronger style. Your own, Balmont style and color, ”wrote Prince Urusov to the poet in 1898. The impressions of the travels of 1896-1897, which occupied a significant place in the book, were not simple descriptions, but expressed the desire to get used to the spirit of a foreign civilization or a past civilization, a foreign country, to identify oneself “either with a novice of Brahma, or with some priest from the country of the Aztecs. ". “I merge with everyone every moment,” Balmont declared. “A poet is an element. He likes to take on the most diverse faces, and in each face he is self-identical. He clings lovingly to everything, and everything enters his soul, like the sun, moisture and air enter a plant ... The poet is open to the world ... ", - he wrote.

At the turn of the century, the general tone of Balmont's poetry changed dramatically: moods of despondency and hopelessness gave way to bright colors, imagery, full of "frenzied joy, the pressure of violent forces." Beginning in 1900, Balmont's “elegiac” hero turned into his own opposite: an active personality, “with an almost orgiastic passion affirming in this very world the aspiration for the Sun, fire, and light”; a special place in the Balmont hierarchy of images was occupied by Fire as a manifestation of cosmic forces. Being for some time the leader of the “new poetry”, Balmont willingly formulated its principles: the symbolist poets, in his words, “are fanned with breaths coming from the realm of the beyond”; his mysteries. "

The collections "Burning Buildings" and "Let's Be Like the Sun", as well as the book "Only Love" are considered the strongest in Balmont's literary heritage. Researchers noted the presence of prophetic notes here, interpreting the image of "burning buildings" as a symbol of "anxiety in the air, a sign of impulse, movement." The main motives here were "sunshine", the desire for constant renewal, the thirst "to stop the moment." “When you listen to Balmont, you always listen to spring,” wrote A. Blok. An essentially new factor in Russian poetry was Balmont's eroticism. The poems "She gave herself up without reproach ..." and "I want to be impudent ..." became his most popular works; they were used to teach “if not to love, then, in any case, to write about love in a“ new ”spirit." And yet, recognizing in Balmont the leader of symbolism, the researchers noted: the mask of a spontaneous genius adopted by him, egocentrism that reached narcissism, on the one hand, and eternal sun worship, fidelity to a dream, the search for the beautiful and perfect, on the other, allow us to speak of him as about the poet of the neo-romantic warehouse ”. After "Burning Buildings" both criticism and readers began to perceive Balmont as an innovator who opened new possibilities of Russian poetry, expanded its depiction. Many drew attention to the shocking component of his work: almost frenzied expressions of determination and energy, a craving for the use of "dagger words." Prince A. I. Urusov called the Burning Buildings a "psychiatric document." EV Anichkov regarded Balmont's program collections as "a moral, artistic and simply physical liberation from the former mournful school of Russian poetry, which ties poetry to the hardships of the native public." It was noted that "proud optimism, life-affirming pathos of Balmont's lyrics, striving for freedom from the shackles imposed by society, and a return to the fundamental principles of being" were perceived by the readers "not just as an aesthetic phenomenon, but as a new attitude."

Balmont's Aphorisms, 1910

Highly appreciated by contemporaries "Fairy Tales" - a collection of children's fairy-tale songs-stylizations, dedicated to their daughter Nina. “In Fairy Tales, the spring of Balmont's creativity again glows with a stream of clear, crystal, melodious. In these "children's songs" everything that is most valuable in his poetry, what was given to her as a heavenly gift, what is her best eternal glory, came to life. These songs are gentle, airy, creating their own music. They resemble the silver ringing of pensive bells, "narrow-bottomed, multi-colored on the stamen under the window," wrote Valery Bryusov.

Among the best "foreign" poems, the critic noted the cycle of poems about Egypt "Extinct Volcanoes", "Memories of an Evening in Amsterdam" noted by Maxim Gorky, "Quiet" and "Iceland", which Bryusov highly valued. Being in constant search for "new combinations of thoughts, colors and sounds" and the approval of "striking" images, the poet believed that he was creating "the lyrics of the modern soul," a soul that has "many faces." Transferring heroes in time and space, over many eras, he affirmed the image of a "spontaneous genius", "superman".

One of the fundamental principles of Balmont's philosophy in the years of his creative heyday was the assertion of the equality of the sublime and the low, the beautiful and the ugly, characteristic of the decadent worldview as a whole. An essential place in the poet's work was occupied by the "reality of conscience", in which a kind of war against integrity, polarization of opposing forces, their "justification" took place. Balmont could admire a scorpion with its "pride and desire for freedom", bless cripples, "crooked cacti", "snakes and lizards outcast births." At the same time, the sincerity of Balmont's "demonism", expressed in demonstrative submission to the elements of passions, was not questioned. According to Balmont, the poet is an "inspired demigod", "a genius of a singing dream."

Balmont's poetry was spontaneous and subordinated to the dictates of the moment. In the miniature "How I write poetry" he admitted: "... I do not reflect on the verse and, really, never compose." Once he had written, he never again ruled, did not edit, believing that the first impulse was the most faithful, but he wrote continuously, and a lot. The poet believed that only a moment, always the one and only, reveals the truth, makes it possible to “see the distant distance”. Balmont's wife E. Andreeva also wrote about this: “He lived for the moment and was content with it, not embarrassed by the motley succession of moments, just to express them more fully and more beautifully. He then sang Evil, then Good, then inclined to paganism, then bowed to Christianity. " She told how one day, noticing a cart of hay driving down the street from the window of an apartment, Balmont immediately created a poem "In the capital"; how the sound of raindrops falling from the roof suddenly gave rise to complete stanzas in him. Self-characteristic: "I am a cloud, I am a breeze breath," given in the book "Under the Northern Sky", Balmont tried to correspond to the end of his life.

Portrait of Balmont by Nikolai Ulyanov
Despite the fact that Soviet literary criticism avoided Balmont's work, the figure of the poet intrigued many. Thus, Balmont and his younger brother Mikhail, the Omsk magistrate, became the heroes of Leonid Martynov's poem Poetry as Magic. The poem is based on the historical fact of the writer's arrival in Omsk in 1916.

Many found the melodic repetition technique developed by Balmont unusually effective. It was noted that Balmont was able to "repeat a single word so that a bewitching power awakened in him." Balmont developed his own style of colorful epithet, introduced into widespread use such nouns as "light", "dusk", "smoke", "bottomlessness", "fleetingness", continued, following the traditions of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Gnedich, an experiment with splicing individual epithets in bunches. Not everyone accepted these innovations, but Innokenty Annensky, opposing Balmont's critics, argued that his “sophistication ... is far from pretentiousness. A rare poet so freely and easily solves the most complex rhythmic problems and, avoiding banality, is so alien to artificiality as Balmont, "equally alien to provincialism and German lack of style of Fet." According to the critic, it was this poet who "brought out of the numbness of singular forms" a number of abstractions, which in his interpretation "glowed and became more airy."

Everyone, even skeptics, as an undoubted merit of his poems, noted the rare musicality that sounded in sharp contrast to the "anemic journal poetry" of the end of the previous century. As if rediscovering before the reader the beauty and intrinsic value of the word, its, in the words of Annensky, “musical potency”, Balmont largely corresponded to the motto proclaimed by Paul Verlaine: “Music is first of all”. Valery Bryusov, who was under the strong influence of Balmont in the first years, wrote that Balmont fell in love with all lovers of poetry "with his sonorous melodious verse", that "there were no equal to Balmont in the art of verse in Russian literature." “I have a calm conviction that before me, in general, they did not know how to write sonorous poetry in Russia,” such was the poet's brief assessment of his own contribution to literature, made in those years.

Along with the merits, contemporary critics found Balmont in his work and many shortcomings. Y. I. Eichenwald called the work of Balmont uneven, who, along with poems “which are captivating with the musical flexibility of their size, the richness of their psychological scale,” found in the poet “such stanzas that are verbose and unpleasantly noisy, even dissonant, which are far from poetry and they reveal breakthroughs and failures in rational, rhetorical prose. " According to Dmitry Mirsky, "most of what he wrote can be safely discarded as unnecessary, including all poetry after 1905, and all prose without exception - the most sluggish, pompous and meaningless in Russian literature." Although “in sound Balmont really surpassed all Russian poets,” he is also distinguished by “a complete absence of a sense of the Russian language, which is apparently explained by the Westernizing nature of his poetry. His poems sound like foreign ones. Even the best ones sound like translations. "

The researchers noted that Balmont's poetry, built on spectacular verbal and musical accords, conveyed the atmosphere and mood well, but at the same time the drawing suffered, the plasticity of the images, the outlines of the depicted object were fogged and blurred. It was noted that the novelty of the poetic means, which Balmont was proud of, was only relative. “Balmont's verse is a verse of our past, improved, refined, but essentially the same,” wrote Valery Bryusov in 1912. The declared "striving to get used to the spirit of a foreign civilization or a past civilization, a foreign country" was interpreted by some as a claim to universality; it was believed that the latter is a consequence of the absence of "a single creative core in the soul, the lack of integrity, which many and many Symbolists suffered from." Andrei Bely spoke of "the pettiness of his" daring "," the ugliness of his "freedom", the tendency to "constantly lie to himself, which has already become the truth for his soul." Later, Vladimir Mayakovsky called Balmont and Igor Severyanin "molasses manufacturers".

Innokenty Annensky about Balmont

The poet's defiantly narcissistic revelations shocked the literary community; he was reproached for arrogance and self-admiration. Among those who defended him was one of the ideologues of symbolism, Innokenty Annensky, who reproached criticism for bias, believing that it "may seem like a delusion of greatness unless to those people who do not want to see this form of insanity behind the banality of romantic formulas." Annensky suggested that "Mr. Balmont's" I "is not personal and not collective, but first of all our I, only conscious and expressed by Balmont." “The verse is not the creation of the poet, it even, if you like, does not belong to the poet. The verse is inseparable from the lyrical self, it is its connection with the world, its place in nature; maybe his justification, "the critic explained, adding:" The new verse is strong in its love for oneself and others, and narcissism is here, as it were, replacing the classical pride of poets with their merits. " Asserting that “Balmont's self, besides the strength of my aesthetic love, lives with two absurdities - the absurdity of wholeness and the absurdity of justification”, Annensky cited the poem “To the Distant Familiar” as an example, noting the presence of an internal polemic in him, which “in itself decomposes the integrity of perception ".

According to Annensky, it was Balmont who was one of the first in Russian poetry to begin the study of the dark world of the unconscious, which was first pointed out in the last century by the “great visionary” Edgar Poe. To the widespread reproach against Balmont, concerning the "immorality" of his lyrical hero, Annensky remarked: "... Balmont wants to be both daring and courageous, to hate, to admire the crime, to combine the executioner with the victim ..." because "tenderness and femininity are the basic and, so to speak, defining properties of his poetry. " These "properties" explained the critic and the "all-roundness" of the poet's worldview: Mazda, and the Scottish saga, and folk psychology, and Nietzsche, and Nietzscheism. And at the same time, the poet always lives integrally in what he writes, what his verse is in love with at the present moment, which is equally untrue to anything. "

Creativity 1905-1909

The pre-revolutionary period of Balmont's work ended with the publication of the collection Liturgy of Beauty. Spontaneous hymns ”, the main motives of which were the challenge and reproach of modernity,“ a curse to people ”who fell away, according to the poet's conviction,“ from the fundamental principles of Being ”, Nature and the Sun, who lost their original integrity. Balmont's poems of 1905-1907, presented in two collections banned in Russia "Poems" and "Songs of the Avenger", denounced the "beast of autocracy", "fake-cultured" philistinism, glorified "conscious brave workers" and in general were distinguished by extreme radicalism. Poets-contemporaries, as well as later researchers of creativity, this "political period" in the work of Balmont was not highly appreciated. “At what unfortunate hour it occurred to Balmont that he could be a singer of social and political relations, a civil singer of modern Russia! .. The three-penny book published by the association“ Knowledge ”gives a painful impression. There is not a penny in poetry here, ”wrote Valery Bryusov.

During these years, a national theme also appeared in the poet's work, revealing itself from a peculiar angle of view: Balmont opened the "epic" Russia to the reader, the legends and tales of which he tried to shift into his own, modern way. The poet's passion for Slavic antiquity was reflected in the poetry collection "Evil Charms", books "The Firebird. Slav's pipe "and" Green Helicopter Plant. Kissing Words ", which presented poetically processed folklore plots and texts, including sectarian songs, magic spells and Khlyst" zeal ", as well as the collection" Calls of Antiquity "with its samples of" primordial creation "of non-Slavic peoples, ritual-magic and priestly poetry. The poet's folklore experiments, who undertook to shift epics and folk tales into a "decadent" way, met with mostly negative criticism and were regarded as "clearly unsuccessful and false stylizations, reminiscent of a toy neo-Russian style" in painting and architecture of that time. Already in 1905, Alexander Blok wrote about the "excessive spice" of Balmont's poems, Bryusov emphasized that Balmont's epic heroes were "ridiculous and pitiful" in the "decadent coat". Blok wrote about his new poems in 1909: “This is almost exclusively ridiculous nonsense ... At best, it looks like some kind of nonsense, in which, with great effort, one can grasp a shaky lyrical meaning ... there is a wonderful Russian poet Balmont, and a new poet Balmont is no more. "

In the collections “Birds in the Air. Singing lines "and" Round dance of times. Omnipotence ”criticism noted the monotony of themes, images and techniques; Balmont was reproached for remaining in captivity of the old, symbolist canons. The so-called "balmontisms" in the new cultural and social atmosphere caused bewilderment and irritation. Subsequently, it was recognized that objectively the poet's work was in decline and it lost the meaning that it had at the beginning of the century.

Late Balmont

K. D. Balmont. Drawing by M. A. Voloshin. 1900s

Balmont's work of 1910-1914 was largely marked by the impressions of numerous and long trips - in particular, to Egypt, as well as to the islands of Oceania, where, as it seemed to the poet, he found really happy people who did not lose their spontaneity and "purity". Balmont popularized oral traditions, tales and legends of the peoples of Oceania in Russian for a long time, in particular, in the collection “The White Architect. The Mystery of the Four Lamps ”. During these years, criticism mainly wrote about his creative "decline"; the factor of novelty of Balmont's style ceased to operate, the technique remained the same and, in the opinion of many, degenerated into a cliché. The books "Zarevo dawn" and "Ash-tree" were recognized as somewhat more solid and refined. A vision of a tree ”, but they also noted“ tiresome monotony, lethargy, banal beauty - a sign of all Balmont's later lyrics ”.

Balmont's work in emigration received mixed assessments. The poet's contemporaries considered this period decadent: “... The Balmont verse that deceived us with a new melodiousness seems to us unstable,” VV Nabokov wrote about him. Later researchers noted that in books published after 1917, Balmont showed new, strong sides of his talent. “Balmont's later poems are more naked, simpler, more human and more accessible than what he wrote earlier. They are most often about Russia, and in them that Balmont “Slavic gilding”, which Innokenty Annensky once mentioned, appears more clearly, ”wrote the poet Nikolai Bannikov. He also noted that "Balmont's peculiarity - to throw, as it were, carelessly some inspired, rarely beautiful individual lines" - manifested itself in the emigre art more than ever before. The critic calls such poems as "Dune Pines" and "Russian Language" "small masterpieces". It was noted that a representative of the “older” generation of Russian Symbolists, “buried alive by many as a poet”, Balmont sounded in a new way in those years: “In his poems… there are no longer“ fleeting ”, but genuine, deep feelings: anger, bitterness, despair. The capricious "whimsicality" characteristic of his work are supplanted by a feeling of great universal misfortune, the pretentious "beauty" - by the severity and clarity of expression. "

Evolution of worldview

Balmont's early work in an ideological and philosophical respect was considered in many respects secondary: his enthusiasm for the ideas of "brotherhood, honor, freedom" was a tribute to the general mood of the poetic community. The main themes of his work were the Christian feeling of compassion, admiration for the beauty of religious shrines. It is believed that, having become a professional translator, Balmont fell under the influence of the literature he translated. Gradually, “Christian-democratic” dreams of a bright future began to seem outdated to him, Christianity lost its former attractiveness, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the works of Henrik Ibsen with their vivid imagery found a warm response in the soul. Valery Bryusov, whom Balmont met in 1894, wrote in his diary that Balmont "called Christ a lackey, a philosopher for the poor." The essence of his new worldview Balmont outlined in the essay "On Top", published in 1895:

Balmont's poetry began to be dominated by "demonic" ideas and moods, which gradually took possession of him in real life. Having become close to SA Polyakov, the poet received considerable funds at his disposal and embarked on a spree, an important part of which were romantic "victories", which had a somewhat ominous, pagan connotation. N. Petrovskaya, who fell into the zone of attraction of Balmont's "charms", but soon emerged from it under the influence of Bryusov's "fields", recalled: "... It was necessary ... or to become a companion of his" crazy nights ", throwing her whole being into these monstrous fires, up to health, or go to the staff of his "myrrh-bearing wives", humbly following on the heels of the triumphal chariot, speaking in chorus only about him, breathing only the incense of his glory and even abandoned their hearths, lovers and husbands for this great mission ... "

Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron about Balmont
"Demonic" moods in Balmont's poetry were characterized by contemporary criticism:
Before the dumbfounded reader, a whole collection of witches, incubus devils and succubus devils, vampires crawling out of the coffins of the dead, monstrous toads, chimeras, etc. defiles. The poet is in close communication with all this venerable company; believe him, because he himself is a real monster. He not only "fell in love with his dissipation", he not only consists entirely of "tiger passions", "serpentine feelings and thoughts" - he is a direct worshiper of the devil:
If somewhere, beyond the world
Someone wise rules the world
Why is my spirit, a vampire,
Satan sings and praises.
The tastes and sympathies of a devil worshiper are the most satanic. He fell in love with the albatross, this "sea and air robber", for the "shamelessness of pirate impulses", he glorifies the scorpion, he feels a spiritual affinity with the "burned Rome" Nero ... he loves red because it is the color of blood ...

How Balmont himself perceived his own life in those years can be judged by his correspondence with Bryusov. One of the constant themes of these letters was the proclamation of their own uniqueness, elevation above the world. But the poet also felt horror at what was happening: “Valery, dear, write to me, do not leave me, I am so tormented. If only I could speak about the power of the Devil, about the exultant horror that I bring into my life! Do not want anymore. I play with Madness and Madness plays with me. " In a letter dated July 26, 1903, the poet described his next meeting with his new beloved, E. Tsvetkovskaya, as follows: “... Elena came to St. Petersburg. I saw her, but fled to a brothel. I like brothels. Then I was lying on the floor, in a fit of hysterical stubbornness. Then I again fled to another temple of the Sabbath, where many virgins sang songs to me ... E. came for me and took me, completely distraught, to Merrekul, where for several days and nights I was in a hell of nightmares and waking dreams, such that my eyes frightened those looking ... ".

Traveling around the world in many ways strengthened Balmont in his rejection of Christianity. “Cursed be the Conquerors who do not spare the stone. I am not sorry for the mutilated bodies, I am not sorry for those killed. But to see a vile Christian cathedral on the site of an ancient temple where they prayed to the Sun, but to know that it stands on the monuments of mysterious art buried in the ground, ”he wrote from Mexico to Bryusov. It is believed that the extreme point of "the poet's fall into the abyss" was marked by the collection "Evil Charm": after that, a gradual return to the "bright beginning" began in his spiritual development. Boris Zaitsev, characterizing the poet's worldview, wrote: "Of course, self-admiration, lack of a sense of God and littleness in front of Him, but some kind of sunshine lived in him, light and natural musicality." Zaitsev considered the poet "a pagan, but a worshiper of light", noting: "... there were real Russian features in him ... and he himself was touching."

The shocks of 1917-1920 led to radical changes in the poet's worldview. The first evidence of this appeared already in the collection Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and the Moon, where the new Balmont appeared before the reader: “there is still a lot of pretentiousness in him, but still there is more emotional balance, which harmoniously merges into the perfect form of the sonnet, and most importantly - that the poet is no longer torn into the abyss - he gropes for the path to God. " The poet's inner reincarnation was also facilitated by his friendship with I.S.Shmelev, which arose in emigration. As Zaitsev wrote, Balmont, always "paganically worshiping life, its joys and splendor", confessing before his death, made a deep impression on the priest with sincerity and the power of repentance: he "considered himself an incorrigible sinner who could not be forgiven."

31-10-2014

Rate: