Peasant poetry of the 20th century. New Peasant Poets
born in 1887 in the village of Koshtuge near Vytegra (Olonets province). His father served as a soldier for seventeen years, lived out his life as a sitter in a state-owned wine shop, his mother was from an Old Believer family - a howler, a writer of epics. Klyuev himself graduated from a parochial school, then a public school in Vytegra. I studied as a paramedic for a year. At the age of sixteen he went to the Solovetsky Monastery to “save himself” and lived in monasteries for some time. In 1906, he was arrested for distributing proclamations of the Peasant Union. He refused military service due to religious beliefs. Later he wrote: “I was in prison for the first time when I was 18 years old, mustacheless, thin, voice with a silver crack. The authorities considered me dangerous and “secret.” When they transported me from the prison to the provincial prison, they shackled me in leg shackles. I cried, looking at my chains. Years later, the memory of them gnaws at my heart... When the turn came to join the soldiers, they took me to St. Petersburg, almost 400 miles, from the recruiting party separately, under the strictest escort. In Saint-Mihiel, there is such a town in Finland, they handed me over to an infantry company. I myself decided not to be a soldier, not to learn to kill, as Christ commanded and as my mother bequeathed to me. I began to refuse food, did not dress or undress myself, and the platoon officers forced me to dress me; I didn’t even pick up a rifle. He was silent at the abuse and beatings under the mikitka, at the muzzles, at the hamstrings with the butt. Only at night I cried on the bare boards of the bunks, since my bed was taken away as punishment. I sat in Saint-Mihiel in a military prison, in former Swedish shops from the times of Peter the Great. It’s painful to remember about this frozen stone hole, where the louse never sleeps and the spirit of the grave... Poor man I am! No one will feel sorry for me... I also sat in the Vyborg fortress. The fortress was built from wild stone, its centuries can be measured. For eleven months in this granite well, I clanged with shackles on my hands and feet... I sat in both the Kharkov convict prison and the Dankovsky prison. I didn’t get a piece of bread and fame as a writer for nothing!.. I am a poor man!..”Having started writing poetry, Klyuev corresponded for several years with Alexander Blok, who supported his poetic endeavors. The first collection of poems, “The Chime of Pines,” was published in the fall of 1911 with a foreword by V. Bryusov. In the same year, the second book “Brotherly Songs” was published. “The autumn gander is more sonorous than Glinka, Verlaine’s sterlet milk is more tender, and grandma’s yarn, stove paths are more radiant than glory and the sky is brighter...”
“Stumpy,” recalled Klyuev’s wife, N.G. Garina. - Below average height. Colorless. With a face that expresses nothing, I would say, even stupid. With long, slicked-back hair, speech with a slow and endlessly intertwined letter “o”, with a clear and strong emphasis on this letter, and a sharply minted letter “g”, which gave his whole speech a specific and original imprint and shade. In winter - in an old sheepskin coat, a shabby fur hat, ungreased boots, in summer - in an irreplaceable, also very worn army jacket and the same ungreased boots. But all four seasons, just as invariably, he himself is all overgrown and overgrown, like his dense Olonets forest...”
The poet G. Ivanov remembered Klyuev somewhat differently: “Arriving in Petrograd, Klyuev immediately fell under the influence of Gorodetsky and firmly adopted the techniques of a peasant travesty. “Well, Nikolai Alekseevich, how have you settled in St. Petersburg” - “Glory to you, Lord, the Intercessor does not abandon us sinners. I found a cell - how much do we need? Come in, son, make me happy. I live around the corner on Morskaya.” - The cell was a Hotel de France room with a solid carpet and a wide Turkish ottoman. Klyuev sat on the ottoman, wearing a collar and tie, and read Heine in the original. “I’m scribbling a little in Basurmansky,” he noticed my surprised look. - I scribble a little. Only the soul does not lie. Our nightingales are loud, oh, loud. Why am I,” he became excited, “as if I were receiving a dear guest.” Sit down, son, sit down, dove. What kind of treat do you want? I don’t drink tea, I don’t smoke, I don’t have any honey gingerbread. Otherwise,” he winked, “if you’re not in a hurry, we’ll have an afternoon meal together. There’s an inn here. The owner is a good man, even though he is French. Here, around the corner. The name is Albert." - I was in no hurry. - “Well, okay, well, that’s wonderful, now I’ll get dressed.” - “Why do you need to change clothes” - “What are you, what are you - is it really possible? The guys will laugh. Wait a minute - I’m in spirit.” - He came out from behind the screen in an undershirt, greased boots and a crimson shirt. “Well, that’s better.” - “But they won’t let you into the restaurant looking like this.” - “We don’t ask for the general one. Where are we, peasants, between the gentlemen? Know, cricket, your sixth. But we are not in general, we are in a small room, separate, that is. We can go there too.”
In the fall of 1917, Klyuev returned to Vytegra.
Possessing a strong natural mind, he carefully observed people and events, and even became a member of the RCP(b). In 1919, Klyuev’s poem about Lenin appeared in the magazine “Znamya Truda” - the first, it seems, artistic depiction of the leader in Soviet poetry. However, Klyuev did not perceive communism, the Commune, as he himself said, at all in the same way as other party members. “I don’t want a Commune without a couch...” - he wrote. Old Russian bookishness, magnificent liturgical rituals, and folklore were surprisingly mixed in his poems with momentary events. In the first post-revolutionary years, he wrote a lot and was often published. In 1919, a large two-volume “Pesnoslov” was published, followed by a collection of poems “The Copper Whale”. In 1920 - “Song of the Sun Bearer”, “Hut Songs”. In 1922 - “Lion Bread”. In 1923 - the poems “The Fourth Rome” and “Mother Saturday”. “Mayakovsky dreams of a whistle blowing over Winter,” wrote Klyuev, “and I dream of a crane flying and a cat on a couch. Should the songwriter care about the cranes...”
“In 1919, Klyuev became one of the main employees of the local newspaper Zvezda Vytegra,” wrote K. Azadovsky, a researcher of his work. - He constantly publishes his poems and prose works in it. But already in 1920, his participation in the affairs of the newspaper was declining. The fact is that in March 1920, the Third District Conference of the RCP (b) in Vytegra discussed the possibility of Klyuev’s continued stay in the ranks of the party. The poet’s religious beliefs, his visit to church and veneration of icons naturally caused discontent among the Vytegra communists. Speaking to the audience, Klyuev made a speech “The Face of a Communist.” “With his characteristic imagery and strength,” the Vytegra Star reported a few days later, “the speaker revealed the integral noble type of the ideal communard, in whom all the best precepts of humanity and universal humanity are embodied.” At the same time, Klyuev tried to prove to the meeting that “one cannot mock religious feelings, because there are too many points of contact in the teachings of the commune with the people’s faith in the triumph of the best principles of the human soul.” Klyuev’s report was listened to “in eerie silence” and made a deep impression. By a majority vote, the conference, “struck by Klyuev’s arguments, by the dazzling red light splashing from every word of the poet, fraternally spoke out for the poet’s value for the party.” However, the Petrozavodsk provincial committee did not support the decision of the district conference. Klyuev was expelled from the Bolshevik party...” Moreover, in mid-1923, the poet was arrested and transported to Petrograd. The arrest, however, did not last long, but, having been freed, Klyuev did not return to Vytegra. Being a member of the All-Russian Union of Poets, he renewed old acquaintances and devoted himself entirely to literary work. He wrote a lot, but a lot had changed in the country; now Klyuev’s poems were frankly annoying. The exaggerated attraction to patriarchal life caused resistance and misunderstanding; the poet was accused of promoting kulak life. This is despite the fact that it was precisely in those years that Klyuev created, perhaps, his best works - “The Lament for Yesenin” and the poems “Pogorelshchina” and “Village”.
“I love gypsy camps, the light of a fire and the neighing of foals. Under the moon, the trees are like ghosts and the iron leaves fall at night... I love the uninhabited, frightening comfort of the cemetery guardhouse, the distant ringing and cross-studded spoons, in whose carvings spells live... The silence of dawn, the harmonica in the darkness, the smoke of the barn, hemp in the dew. Distant descendants will marvel at my boundless “love”... As for them, Smiling eyes catch fairy tales with those rays. I love the forest, the magpie edge, near and far, the grove and the stream...”
For life in a harsh country, turned upside down by the revolution, this love was no longer enough.
“In response to a request for self-criticism of my latest works and about my public behavior, I bring to the attention of the Union the following,” Klyuev wrote in January 1932 to the Board of the All-Russian Union of Soviet Writers. - My last poem is the poem “Village”. It was published in one of the most prominent magazines of the republic (Zvezda) and, having gone through an extremely strict analysis of several editions, gave rise to accusations of reactionary preaching and kulak sentiments. We can talk about this endlessly, but I, admitting that in this work there is a well-calculated vagueness and remoteness of images by me as an artist, necessary to generate in the reader many comparisons and assumptions, I sincerely assure that the poem “Village”, without rattling victorious brass , to the last depth is permeated with the pain of the pipes, sobbing in the Russian red wind, in the eternal cry to the sun of our fields and black forests. The pipes and complaints of the “Village” were condensed by me consciously and were born from reasons that I will talk about below, and from the confidence that not only a continuous “hurray” can convince the enemies of the working people of their truth and right, but also their recognition of their greatest victims and countless ulcers endured for the salvation of the world body of working humanity from the power of the yellow devil - capital. So a valiant warrior is not ashamed of his wounds and holes in his shield - his eagle eyes see through blood and bile “cherry huts on the Don, cedar boats in Siberia”...
The inappropriate heightened tone of the poems of “The Village” will become clear if the Board of the Union takes into account the following, with swollen legs, literally shedding tears, on the day of the creation of the ill-fated poem, for the first time in my life I went out into the street with my hand outstretched for alms. Trying not to catch the eye of my countless acquaintances, writers, famous actors, painters and scientists, on the outskirts of the Sitny market, softening my pain with images of a lost hut paradise, I composed my “Village”. My being a hungry dog at that time also determined the corresponding consciousness. Currently I am seriously ill, I do not leave my corner for months, and my public behavior, if by this we mean non-participation in meetings, public speaking, etc., is explained by my severe painful condition, sudden fainting and often cruel dependence on someone else's food. a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. I have reached the last degree of despair and I know that I am sinking to the bottom of the Sieve markets and the terrible world of flophouses, but this is not my social behavior, but only illness and poverty. I attach the attached document from the Bureau of Medical Examination and earnestly ask the Union (without trying to pity anyone) not to deprive me of the last joy of dying in unity with my fellow artists, a member of the All-Russian Union of Soviet Writers...”
The poet Pavel Vasiliev, brother-in-law of the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, the famous communist I.M., played not the best role in the fate of Klyuev. Gronsky. His words about some details of Klyuev’s personal life outraged Gronsky so much that on the same day he called the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Genrikh Yagoda with a categorical demand to remove the “holy fool” from Moscow within twenty-four hours. “He (Yagoda) asked me: “Arrest” - “No, just deport.” After this, I informed I.V. Stalin about his order, and he authorized it...” On February 2, 1934, Klyuev was arrested. The court sentenced him to five years of deportation to Siberia.
“I’m in the village of Kolpashevo in Narym,” Klyuev wrote to his longtime friend, singer N.F. Khristoforova. - This is a hillock of clay, dotted with huts blackened by bad weather and disasters. A slanting, half-blind sun, perforated eternal clouds, an eternal wind and sudden rains coming from the thousand-mile surrounding swamps. The muddy peat river Ob with low, rusty banks that have been flooded for millennia. The population is 80% exiled - Chinese, Sarts, exotic Caucasians, Ukrainians, city punks, former officers, students and impersonal people from different parts of our country - all strangers to each other and even, and most often, hostile, all in search of food, which no, because Kolpashev became a gnawed bone a long time ago. Here it is - the famous Narym! - I think. And here I am destined to spend five brutal dark years without my beloved and soul-refreshing nature, without greetings and dear people, breathing in the fumes of crime and hatred! And if not for the depths of the holy constellations and streams of tears, then a pitiful, twisted corpse would have been added to the black bottomless pits of the nearby swamp. Today, under an ugly hollow pine tree, I found the first Narym flowers - some kind of bluish and deep yellow - I rushed to them with a sob, pressed them to my eyes, to my heart, as the only ones close and not cruel. But the orphanhood and homelessness, hunger and fierce poverty that I already feel behind my shoulders are immense. Rubbish, terrifying visions of human suffering and death do not touch anyone here. All this is an everyday matter and too common. I would like to be the most despicable creature among creatures than the exile in Kolpashevo. No wonder the Ostyaks say that the swamp devil gave birth to Narym with a hernia. But most of all, people scare me, some kind of half-dogs, fiercely hungry, graceless and crazy from misfortune. How to stick to these humanoids so as not to die...”
But even in such conditions, Klyuev tried to work, wrote down individual stanzas, memorized them, then destroyed the notes. Unfortunately, the great poem “Narym”, on which, according to some evidence, he was working then, has not reached us.
“The sky is in tatters, slanting rains, a non-silent wind - this is called summer here, then a fierce 50-degree winter, and I’m naked. I don’t have any outerwear, I don’t have a hat, gloves or coat. I’m wearing a blue cotton shirt without a belt, thin paper trousers, already shabby. The rest was all stolen by the shalmans in the cell, which housed up to a hundred people, arriving and leaving day and night. When I was traveling from Tomsk to Narym, someone, apparently recognizing me, sent me through a guard a short cotton jacket and yellow boots that hurt my legs, but for that I am deeply grateful...”
For some time, Klyuev still fought for himself. He wrote to Moscow to the Political Red Cross, to Gorky, to the Organizing Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, to old friends who were still free, to the poet Sergei Klychkov. Some of the appeals apparently worked; at the end of 1934, Klyuev was allowed to serve his remaining sentence in Tomsk. At the same time, they were sent to Tomsk not in a convoy, but in a special convoy; in the official telegram received from Novosibirsk, it was indicated - to deliver the poet Klyuev to Tomsk.
“On the very holiday of the Intercession, I was transferred from Kolpashev to Tomsk,” wrote Klyuev, “this is a thousand miles closer to Moscow. Such a transition should be accepted as mercy and condescension, but, leaving the ship on a stormy and cold morning, I found myself in exile for the second time without a corner and a piece of bread. Despondently, I wandered with my bundle through the immeasurably dusty streets of Tomsk. Here and there he sat down on a random bench at the gate, then on some kind of approach; wet to the bone, hungry and cold, I knocked on the first door of a lopsided old house on the remote outskirts of the city - in the hope of asking for a place to stay for the night for Christ's sake. To my surprise, I was greeted by a middle-aged, pale, curly-haired man with the same goatee - the greeting “Providence is sending us a guest!” Come in, take off your clothes, you’re probably tired.” At these words, the man began to undress me, pulled up a chair, knelt down and pulled off my boots, thickly caked with mud, from my feet. Then he brought warm felt boots, a bed with a pillow, and quickly set up a place for me to sleep in the corner of the room...”
However, life in Tomsk turned out to be little easier than in Kolpashevo. “It’s deep winter in Tomsk,” the poet wrote, “the frost is 40 degrees. I don’t have felt boots, and on market days I rarely manage to go out for alms. They serve potatoes, very rarely bread. In money - from two to three rubles - for almost the whole day - from 6 am to 4 pm, when the market leaves. But it’s not every Sunday when I go out for food. From the food I sometimes cook it into a stew, into which I put all the bread crumbs, wild garlic, potatoes, rutabaga, even a little clover hay if it ends up in the peasant carts. I drink boiling water with lingonberries, but there is little bread, sugar is a great rarity. There are frosts ahead of up to 60 degrees, I’m afraid to die on the street. Oh, if only I were warm by the stove!.. Where is my heart, where are my songs...”
In 1936, already in Tomsk, Klyuev was again arrested in the case of the counter-revolutionary, church (as stated in the documents) “Union for the Salvation of Russia,” provoked by the NKVD. For some time he was released from custody only because of illness - “paralysis of the left half of the body and senile dementia.” But this was only a temporary reprieve.
“I want to talk with dear friends,” the poet Khristoforova wrote in despair, “to listen to genuine music! Behind the board fence from my closet there is a modern symphony going on day and night - a drinking party... A fight, curses - the roar of a woman and a child, and all this is blocked by the valiant radio... I, poor one, endure everything. On February 2nd I will be three years ineligible for membership in the new society! Woe to me, the insatiable wolf!..”
The forebodings soon came true. At a meeting of leading officials of the West Siberian Territory, the then head of the NKVD Directorate S.N. Mironov, speaking about the processes already planned and developed by the security officers, quite definitely demanded “Klyuev must be dragged along the line of the monarchist-fascist type, and not the right-wing Trotskyists, to reach an organization of the union type through this counter-revolutionary organization.” It was said on a grand scale, indicating the importance of the work being done.
“Meeting of senior officials,” wrote Professor L.F. Pichurin (“The Last Days of Nikolai Klyuev”, Tomsk, 1995), - took place on March 25, 1937. And already in May, Klyuev was taken into custody again. Of course, interrogations of the “accomplices” very soon provided full confirmation of all the investigators’ conjectures. For example, the arrested Golov testified: “The ideological inspirers and leaders of the organization are the poet Klyuev and the former princess Volkonskaya... Klyuev is a pious person, for the Tsar. Now he writes poetry and a long poem about the atrocities and tyranny of the Bolsheviks. He has extensive connections and many like-minded people...” A few days later, the same Golov added to what had been said, “Klyuev and Volkonskaya are great authorities among monarchical elements in Russia and even abroad... In the person of Klyuev, we acquired a great ideological and authoritative leader who at the right moment he will raise the banner of active struggle against the tyranny of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Klyuev is very interested in which of the scientific workers of Tomsk universities has connections with foreign countries...” And even this: “Klyuev is serving exile in Tomsk for selling his works directed against the Soviet regime to one of the capitalist states. Klyuev’s works were published abroad and he was sent 10 thousand rubles for them...” As a result, a quick investigation did indeed come to the conclusion that “Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev is the leader and ideological inspirer of the counter-revolutionary, monarchist organization “Union of Salvation” existing in Tomsk Russia”, in which he took an active part, grouping around himself a counter-revolutionary-minded element repressed by the Soviet government.”
It’s amazing, Pichurin noted, that the protocol of Klyuev’s interrogation, apart from identifying data, contains practically nothing, except the following question and answer “Gorbenko (investigator) “Tell me why you were arrested in Moscow
and sentenced to exile to Western Siberia” Klyuev “While living in Poltava, I wrote the poem “Pogorelshchina,” which was later recognized as kulak. I distributed it in literary circles in Leningrad and Moscow. Essentially, this poem had a reactionary anti-Soviet direction and reflected kulak ideology.”
In October, a meeting of the troika of the NKVD Directorate of the Novosibirsk Region decided to “shoot Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev. Personally owned property will be confiscated.” On October 23-25, 1937 (as indicated in the extract from the case), the troika’s resolution was carried out.
“New Peasant” poetry can rightfully be considered an integral part of the creative heritage of the Russian Silver Age. It is significant that the peasant spiritual field turned out to be much more fruitful than the proletarian ideological soil for bright creative personalities.
The term “new peasant” in modern literary criticism is used to separate representatives of the new formation - modernists who updated Russian poetry, relying on folk art - from traditionalists, imitators and epigones of the poetry of Nikitin, Koltsov, Nekrasov, who churned out poetic sketches of village landscapes in lubochka -patriarchal style.
Poets who belonged to this category developed the traditions of peasant poetry, and did not isolate themselves in them. The poeticization of rural life, simple peasant crafts and rural nature were the main themes of their poems.
The main features of new peasant poetry:
Love for the “small Motherland”;
. following age-old folk customs and moral traditions;
. the use of religious symbols, Christian motifs, pagan beliefs;
. turning to folklore subjects and images, introducing folk songs and ditties into poetic use;
. denial of the “vicious” urban culture, resistance to the cult of machines and iron.
At the end of the 19th century, no major poets emerged from among the peasants. However, the authors who came to literature at that time largely prepared the ground for the creativity of their especially gifted followers. The ideas of old peasant lyrics were revived at a different, higher artistic level. The theme of love for native nature, attention to folk life and national character determined the style and direction of the poetry of modern times, and reflections on the meaning of human existence through images of folk life became leading in this poetry.
Following the folk poetic tradition was inherent in all the new peasant poets. But each of them also had a particularly keen feeling for their small homeland in its poignant, unique specificity. Awareness of her own role in her destiny helped her find her way to reproduce the poetic spirit of the nation.
The formation of the new peasant school of poetry was greatly influenced by the work of the Symbolists, primarily Blok and Andrei Bely, which contributed to the development in the poetry of Klyuev, Yesenin and Klychkov of romantic motifs and literary techniques characteristic of the poetry of the modernists.
The entry of the new peasant poets into great literature became a notable event in the pre-revolutionary period. The core of the new movement was made up of the most talented people from the arboreal hinterland - N. Klyuev, S. Yesenin, S. Kychkov, P. Oreshin. Soon they were joined by A. Shiryaevets and A. Ganin.
In the fall of 1915, largely thanks to the efforts of S. Gorodetsky and the writer A. Remizov, who patronized young poets, the literary group “Beauty” was created; On October 25, a literary and artistic evening took place in the concert hall of the Tenishevsky School in Petrograd, where, as Gorodetsky later wrote, “Yesenin read his poems, and in addition, sang ditties with an accordion and together with Klyuev - suffering...”. It was also announced there that the publishing house of the same name was being organized (it ceased to exist after the release of the first collection).
However, it would be unlawful to talk about any collective status of the new peasant poets. And although the listed authors were part of the “Beauty” group, and then the literary and artistic society “Strada” (1915-1917), which became the first association of poets (as defined by Yesenin) of the “peasant merchant”, and even though some of them participated in “ Scythians" (almanac of the left Socialist Revolutionary movement, 1917-1918), but at the same time, for the majority of the "new peasants" the very word "collective" was just a hated cliche, a verbal cliché. They were more connected by personal communication, correspondence and common poetic actions.
Therefore, about the new peasant poets, as S. Semenova points out in her study, “it would be more correct to speak of a whole poetic galaxy, which, taking into account individual worldviews, expressed a different vision of the structure of national life, its highest values and ideals than that of the proletarian poets - a different feeling and understanding of the Russian idea."
All poetic movements of the early 20th century had one thing in common: their formation and development took place in conditions of struggle and competition, as if the presence of an object of controversy was a prerequisite for the existence of the movement itself. This cup has not passed over the poets of the “peasant merchant.” Their ideological opponents were the so-called “proletarian poets.”
Having become the organizer of the literary process after the revolution, the Bolshevik Party strove to ensure that the work of poets was as close as possible to the masses. The most important condition for the formation of new literary works, which was put forward and supported by the party, was the principle of “spiritualization” of the revolutionary struggle. “The poets of the revolution are inexorable critics of everything old and call forward to the struggle for a bright future... They vigilantly notice all the characteristic phenomena of modernity and paint with sweeping but deeply truthful colors... In their creations, much has not yet been fully polished... but a certain bright mood is clearly expressed with deep feeling and peculiar energy.”
The severity of social conflicts, the inevitability of a clash of opposing class forces became the main themes of proletarian poetry, finding expression in the decisive opposition of two hostile camps, two worlds: “the obsolete world of evil and untruth” and “the rising young Rus'.” Menacing denunciations developed into passionate romantic appeals, exclamatory intonations dominated in many poems (“Rage, tyrants!..”, “On the street!”, etc.). A specific feature of proletarian poetry (core motives of labor, struggle, urbanism, collectivism) was the reflection in poetry of the current struggle, combat and political tasks of the proletariat.
Proletarian poets, defending the collective, denied everything individually human, everything that makes a person unique, ridiculed categories such as the soul, etc. Peasant poets, in contrast to them, saw the main cause of evil in isolation from natural roots, from people's worldview, reflected in everyday life, the very way of peasant life, folklore, folk traditions, and national culture.
A deep interest in myth and national folklore is becoming one of the most characteristic features of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century. On the “paths of myth” in the first decade of the century, the creative quests of such dissimilar literary artists as A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, K. Balmont, intersected.
S. Gorodetsky. Symbolist A. Dobrolyubov records folk songs and tales of the Olonets region, A. Remizov in the collection “Posolon” (1907) masterfully reproduces the folk-epic form of storytelling, leading his story “posolon”: spring, summer, autumn, winter. In October 1906, Blok wrote for the first volume (“Folk Literature”) of the “History of Russian Literature” edited by Anichkov and Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, a large article “Poetry of Folk Charms and Spells,” providing it with an extensive bibliography, which includes the scientific works of A.N. Afanasyev, I.P. Sakharov, A.N. Veselovsky, E.V. Anichkov, A.A. Potebni and others.
Orientation towards folk-poetic forms of artistic thinking, the desire to understand the present through the prism of nationally colored “ancient antiquity” acquires fundamental importance for Russian symbolism. The immediate keen interest of the younger Symbolists in folklore was noted by Anichkov, who indicated in one of his works that “the development of the lower arts forms the very basis of new trends.” Blok emphasized the same thing in his article: “The entire area of folk traditions and rituals turned out to be the ore where the gold of genuine poetry shines; the gold that provides book “paper” poetry - right up to the present day.” The fact that interest in myths and folklore was a general, pronounced trend in Russian art and literature at the beginning of the century is evidenced by the fact that S.A. Vengerov, who edited the multi-volume edition of “Russian Literature of the 20th Century” at that time, intended to include a separate chapter in the third volume “Artistic folklorism and proximity to the soil”, dedicated to the work of Klyuev, Remizov, Gorodetsky and others. And although the plan did not come true, it itself is very indicative.
During the First World War, 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. Under these conditions, the creativity of the new peasants attracted the attention of Sergei Gorodetsky, by that time the author of the books “Yar” (1906), “Perun” (1907), “Wild Will” (1908), “Rus” (1910), “Willow” (1913) ). In “Yari” Gorodetsky tried to revive the world of ancient Slavic mythology, building his own mythopoetic picture of the world. He supplements a number of well-known Slavic pagan deities and characters of folk demonology (Yarila, Kupalo, Baryba, Udras, etc.) with new ones, invented by him, filling the mythological images with tangibly carnal, concrete-sensual content. Gorodetsky dedicated the poem “Glorify Yarila” to N. Roerich, whose artistic quests were consonant with the ancient Russian flavor of “Yari”.
On the other hand, the poetry of Gorodetsky himself, Vyach. Ivanov, the prose of A. Remizov, the philosophy and painting of N. Roerich could not help but attract the attention of the new peasants with their appeal to ancient Russian antiquity, knowledge of Slavic pagan mythology, a sense of the Russian folk language, and heightened patriotism. “That place is holy - holy and strong Rus'” - the refrain of Remizov’s book “Strengthened” (1916). “There was an interesting contact between Klyuev, on the one hand,” noted literature professor P. Sakulin in a review with the remarkable title “The People's Golden Flower,” and “Blok, Balmont, Gorodetsky, Bryusov,” on the other. Beauty has many faces, but is one.”
In October-November 1915, the literary and artistic group “Beauty” was created, headed by 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, “Beauty” did not last long: peasant poets and, above all, the most experienced and wise of them, Klyuev, already then saw the inequality of their relationships with salon aesthetes. The poetic cafe of the Acmeists “Stray Dog”, which Klyuev visited several times back in 1912-1913, from the first visit will forever become for him a symbol of everything hostile to the peasant poet.
The group of new peasant poets that emerged during the years of clear differentiation in literature did not represent a clearly defined literary movement with a strict ideological and theoretical program, which were the numerous literary groups - their predecessors and contemporaries: peasant poets did not issue poetic declarations and did not theoretically substantiate their literary and artistic works. principles. However, there is no doubt that their group is precisely distinguished by its bright literary originality and socio-ideological unity, which makes it possible to distinguish it from the general stream of neo-populist literature of the 20th century. 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 local features of life, dialect, folklore traditions (Nikolai Klyuev recreates the ethnographic and linguistic flavor of Zaonezhye, Sergei Yesenin - Ryazan region, Sergei Klychkov - Tver province, Alexander Shiryaevets models the Volga region), found such adequate expression in Russian literature: in the works of the new peasants, all the signs of this peasant world are recreated with scrupulous, carefully verified ethnographic accuracy.
Rustic Rus' is the main source of the poetic worldview of peasant poets. Yesenin emphasized his initial connection with her - the very biographical circumstances of his birth among nature, in a field or in the forest ("Mother walked through the forest in the Bathing suit..."), this theme is continued by Klychkov in a poem with a folklore song opening "Was over river valley...", in which the animate forces of nature act as the successors and first nannies of the newborn baby:
There was a valley above the river, in a dense forest near the village, -
In the evening, picking raspberries,
My mother gave birth to me on it...
The poets associated their own character traits with the circumstances of their birth (which, however, were quite common for peasant children). Hence, the motif of “returning to the homeland” became stronger in the works of the new peasants. “I’ve been missing the city for three whole years now, along the hare paths, the willow pigeons, and my mother’s miraculous spinning wheel,” admits Klyuev. In Klychkov’s work, this motif is one of the central 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.
I meet this early spring time alone in the distance.
Oh, I wish I could cuddle, listen to the breath, Look into the glow of my dear mother - my native land!
(Klychkov, In a foreign land far from home...)
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 (“Bow to you, labor and sweat!”) and village life, zoo- and anthropomorphism (anthropomorphization of natural phenomena is one of the characteristic features of thinking in folklore categories), a sensitive sense of one’s inextricable connection with the living world:
A child's cry across the field and river,
The crow of a cock is like pain, miles away,
And a spider's step, like melancholy,
I can hear it through the scabs.
(Klyuev, Cry of a child across the field and river...)
The question of the moral and religious quest of the new peasants is very complex and, to date, far from studied. The “fire of religious consciousness” that fuels Klyuev’s work was noted by Bryusov in the preface to the poet’s first collection, “The Chime of Pines.” A huge influence on the formation of Klyuev’s creativity was exerted by Khlystyism, in whose religious rituals there is a complex fusion of elements of the Christian religion, elements of pre-Christian Russian paganism and the Dionysian beginning of ancient paganism with elements of secret, unstudied beliefs.
As for Yesenin’s attitude to religion, although he recalls in his autobiography (1923): “I had little faith in God, I didn’t like going to church” and admits in another version (October, 1025): “From many of my religious poems and I would gladly refuse poems...” - undoubtedly, the traditions of Orthodox Christian culture had a certain influence on the formation of his youthful worldview.
As the poet’s friend V. Chernyavsky testifies, the Bible was Yesenin’s reference book, carefully read by him again and again, dotted with pencil marks, worn out from constant use of it - it was remembered and described in their memoirs by many of those who met closely with the poet . Among the many highlighted passages in Yesenin’s copy of the Bible was the first paragraph of the fifth chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, marked with a vertical pencil line: “Do not be hasty with your tongue, and let not your heart be in a hurry to utter a word before God; because God is in heaven and you are on earth; therefore let your words be few. For just as dreams come from many worries, so the voice of a fool is known from many words.”
During the years of the revolution and the first post-revolutionary years, reconsidering his attitude towards religion (“I shout to you: “To hell with the old!” / Disobedient, robber son” - “Pantocrator”), Yesenin deduced the features of the function that religious symbolism performed in his creativity, not so much from the Christian, but from the ancient Slavic pagan religion.
Yesenin - especially at the time of his belonging to the “Order of Imagists” - would exclaim more than once in the heat of controversy: “Better is a foxtrot with a healthy and clean body than the eternal soul-tearing song of dirty sick and crippled people about “Lazarus” on Russian fields.” Get the hell out of your God and your churches. Better build toilets out of them...” However, a piercing longing for what was lost (“Something is forever lost by everyone...”) will begin to break through more and more often in him:
I'm ashamed that I believed in God
It’s sad for me that I don’t believe it now.
(I have one more fun left...)
Recreating in his works the color of everyday and ritual symbols of peasant Rus', Yesenin, on the one hand, as a Christian -
I believed from birth in the Protection of the Virgin Mary (I smell God's Rainbow...)
Light from a pink icon on my golden eyelashes (Silver-bellied bell...) feels longing for the highest meaning of existence, for the “beautiful, but otherworldly / Unsolved land” (“The winds did not blow in vain ...”), his eyes “are in love with another land” (“Again spread out in a pattern ...”), and “ the soul is sad about heaven, / She is a dweller in otherworldly fields” (poem of the same name). On the other hand, in the works of Yesenin and other new peasants, pagan motifs clearly appeared, which can be explained by the fact that the ethical, aesthetic, religious and folklore-mythological ideas of the Russian peasant, enclosed in a single harmonious system, had two different sources: in addition to the Christian religion, and ancient Slavic paganism, dating back several thousand years.
Indomitable pagan love of life is a distinctive feature of the lyrical hero Shiryaevets:
The choir praises the Almighty Lord,
Akathists, canons, troparia,
But I hear all the clicks of Kupala night,
And in the altar - the dance of the playful dawn!
(The choir praises the Almighty Lord...)
Abundantly using religious symbolism and archaic lecaju in their works, the new peasant poets, on the path of their ideological and aesthetic searches, came closer to certain artistic searches in Russian art of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. First of all, this is the work of V.M. Vasnetsov, who for the first time in Russian art made an attempt to find pictorial equivalents of traditional folk poetic images of epic tales. These are paintings by V.I. Surikov, resurrecting the legendary heroic pages of national history, especially his work of the last period, when it merges with the line in Russian art that goes back to Vasnetsov’s paintings, when plots and images are drawn not directly from actual history, but from history already revised, poetically decorated with folk fantasy. This is “Nester’s” theme, not specified in historical time - monastic Rus', which seemed to the artist as a timeless ideal of the original unity of human existence with the life of nature - pristine, virgin nature, not suffocating under the yoke of civilization, removed from the destructive breath of the modern "iron" city.
The New 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 the simple village hut to the highest degree of beauty and harmony:
The conversation hut is a semblance of the Universe:
In it Sholom is the heavens, and in it is the Milky Way,
Where can the helmsman's mind, his much-weeping soul, rest sweetly under the spindle clergy?
(Where there is a smell of red, there are women's gatherings...) poeticized her living soul:
Izba-hero,
Carved kokoshnik,
The window is like an eye socket,
Lined with antimony.
(Klyuev, Izba-Bogatyritsa...)
Yesenin proclaimed himself the poet of the “golden log hut” (“The feather grass is sleeping. The dear plain...”). Klychkov poeticizes the peasant hut in his “Home Songs.” Klyuev in the cycle “To the Poet Sergei Yesenin” persistently reminds his “younger brother” of his origins: “The hut is a nourisher of words - / It was not in vain that it raised you...”.
For a peasant farmer and a peasant poet, such concepts as mother earth, a hut, and a farm are concepts of the same ethical and aesthetic series, one moral root, and the highest moral value of life is physical labor, the unhurried, natural flow of simple village life. In the poem “Grandfather's Plowing,” Klychkov, in accordance with the norms of folk morality, argues that many diseases stem from idleness and laziness, and that a healthy lifestyle is closely related to physical labor. Klychkovsky grandfather after forced winter idleness -
I prayed, shone my clothes,
He unwound the onuchi from his feet.
He became sad, lying down for the winter,
My lower back hurt.
Primordial folk ideas about physical labor as the basis of peasant life are affirmed in Yesenin’s famous poem “I am walking through the valley...”:
To hell, I'm taking off my English suit.
Well, give me the braid, I'll show you -
Am I not one of you, am I not close to you,
Don’t I value the memory of the village?
For Klyuev:
The joy of seeing the first haystack,
The first sheaf from the native strip,
There is a fattening pie On the boundary, in the shade of a birch tree...
(Klyuev, The joy of seeing the first haystack...)
For Klychkov and his characters, who feel themselves to be a part of a single Mother Nature, being in a harmonious relationship with her, death is something completely not scary and natural, like the change, for example, of the seasons or the melting of “frost in the spring,” as Klyuev defined death. To die, according to Klychkov, means “to go into the undead, like roots into the ground,” and death in his work 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 it is for a hollow shirt to wipe away the hard-working sweat,
Move closer to the cup
Chew a piece with seriousness,
Pull the prison with a big spoon,
Calmly listening to the bass of the storm gathering for the night...
It's so good when in the family,
Where is the son the groom, and the daughter the bride,
There's not enough space on the bench under the old shrine...
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 her shoulders.
(Klychkov, Tired of the day's troubles...)
The typological commonality of the philosophical and aesthetic concept of the world of the new peasant poets is manifested in their solution to the theme of nature. One of the most important features of their work is that the theme of nature in their works carries the most important not only semantic but 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. “A mischievous Moscow reveler” who traveled up and down “the entire Tver neighborhood,” Yesenin doesn’t even 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. No return...").
Shiryaevets is a consistent anti-urbanist in his work:
I am in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!
I'm listening to epic streams!
May the cities have the best confectioners
They 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!
(Shiryaevets, I - in Zhiguli, in Mordovia, on Vytegra!..)
In his multi-page treatise “The Stone-Iron Monster” (i.e., the City), completed by 1920 and still not published, Shiryaevets most fully and comprehensively expressed the goal of the new peasant poetry: to return literature “to the miraculous keys of Mother Earth " The treatise begins with an apocryphal legend about the demonic origin of the City, which is then replaced by an allegory tale about the young Town (then the City), the son of a Stupid Villager and a clever Man, who, to please the devil, strictly fulfills the dying order of his parent “increase!”, so that the devil “dances and grunts in joy, mocking the desecrated earth.”
The demonic origin of the City is emphasized by Klyuev: The Devil City beat with its hooves,
Frightening us with a stone mouth...
(From basements, from dark corners...), and Klychkov in the novel “The Sugar German,” continuing the same thought, asserts the dead end, futility of the path that the City is taking - there is no place for the Dream in it:
“City, city!
Beneath you, the earth doesn’t even look like earth... Satan killed it, compacted it with a cast-iron hoof, rolled it with his iron back, rolling on it like a horse rolls through a meadow in the wash...
That is why stone ships grew up on it... that is why the stone ships laid down their iron sails, red, green, silver-white roofs, and now, when the transparent autumn is pouring cold and azure on them, from a distance they look like an endless sea of \u200b\u200bhanging in the air folded wings, as migratory birds fold them to fall to the ground...
Don't flap these wings from the ground!...
These birds cannot rise from the ground!..”
There are clear anti-urban motives 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 after a period of time, Klyuev prophetically points out, Russia will be reborn: it will not only regain the lost national memory, but the eyes of the West will also turn to it with hope:
In the ninety-ninth summer the cursed castle will creak,
And the gems of the dazzling prophetic lines will bubble up like a river.
Kholmogorye and Tselebey will be overwhelmed by the singing foam,
The sieve will catch a vein of silver crucian words.
(I know songs will be born...)
It was the new peasant poets who loudly proclaimed at the beginning of the 20th century: nature itself is the greatest aesthetic value. And if in the poems of the Klyuev collection “Lion’s Bread” the attack of “iron” on living nature is a premonition, a premonition that has not yet become a terrible reality (“I wish I could stop hearing / About the iron restlessness!”), then in the images of “Village”, “Pogorelytsina” ", "Songs about the Great Mother" is already a tragic reality for peasant poets. However, the differentiation of their creativity is clearly visible in their approach to this topic. Yesenin and Oreshin, although not easy, painfully, through pain and blood, are ready to see the future of Russia, in Yesenin’s words, “through stone and steel.” For Klyuev, Klychkov, Shiryaevets, who were in the grip of the ideas of a “peasant paradise,” its idea was fully realized by the patriarchal past, the hoary Russian antiquity with its fairy tales, legends, and beliefs. “I don’t like accursed modernity, which destroys fairy tales,” Shiryaevets admitted in a letter to Khodasevich (1917), “and without fairy tales, what kind of life is there in the world?” For Klyuev, the destruction of a fairy tale, a legend, the destruction of a host of mythological characters is an irreparable loss: Like a squirrel, a scarf across the eyebrow,
Where the forest darkness is,
From the headboards of the shelves, the tale of Unta is inaudible.
Brownies, undead, Mavkas -
Just rubbish, crusty dust...
(Village)
Shiryaevets’s rejection of his contemporary reality was manifested with particular force in two poems from 1920: “Steel birds do not fly over me...” and “Volga.” In the first, Shiryaevets again and again emphasizes his commitment to patriarchal antiquity:
Steel birds are not flying above me,
The tits from Izborsk are miles away!..
I’m in reality, yes, I’m not dreaming! -
I sail on the silks of scarlet ships.
There are no train stations!.. Iron, hoarse roars!
No black locomotives! - I'm not yours!
There is a spring noise in the shining oak trees,
Sadko's chant, the clinking of heroic bowls!
in the second, it contrasts modernity with the past in its most environmentally unsightly manifestations.
Klychkov speaks in his books about the fact that the predatory destruction of nature leads to the spiritual impoverishment of man and the loss of irreplaceable moral values: “It’s not for the world’s sake when a man strangles all the animals in the forest, kills the fish out of the river, and kills the birds in the air.” he will catch all the trees and make them kiss his feet - he will cut them with a saw. Then God will turn away from the desolate earth and from the desolate soul of man, and the iron devil, who is just waiting for this and cannot wait, will screw some gear or nut from a machine in the place of a person’s soul, because the devil is in spiritual matters a decent mechanic... With this nut instead of a soul, a person, without noticing it and not bothering at all, will live and live until the end of time...” (“Chertukhinsky Balakir”).
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. At a time when representatives of the Iron Age in literature rejected everything “old” (“We are the peddlers of the 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”), the new peasants, who saw the main reason evil in isolation from folk roots, from the people's worldview, which is reflected in everyday life, the very way of peasant life, folklore, folk traditions, national cultures" ("siryutinki" in Klyuev's poem "At the memorial of the Olonets women..." simple-mindedly the poets who “forgot their father’s house” were pitifully named) stood up in defense of this “old”.
If the proletariat poets declared in the poem “We”: “We will take everything, we will know everything, / We will reduce the depth to the bottom ...”, the peasant poets argued the opposite: “To know everything, to take nothing / A poet came to this world” (Yesenin , "Mare's ships"). If the “peddlers of the new faith,” defending the collective, denied the individual human, everything that makes a person unique, they ridiculed such categories as
“soul”, “heart” - all that without which it is impossible to imagine the work of the new peasants - the latter were firmly convinced that the future lay with their poetry. In modern times, the conflict between “nature” and “iron” ended with the victory of “iron”: in the final poem “Field strewn with bones...” of the collection “Lion’s Bread”, Klyuev gives a terrible, truly apocalyptic panorama of the “Iron Age”, repeatedly defining it through the epithet "faceless". The “blue fields” of Russia, sung by peasant poets, are now strewn with “...bones, / Skulls with toothless yawns,” and above them, “... rattling with flywheels, / A nameless and faceless someone”: Above the dead steppe, a faceless something It gave birth to madness, darkness, emptiness...
Dreaming of a time when “there will be no songs about the hammer, about the unseeing flywheel” and the “horn of extinguished hell will become a worldly burning field,” Klyuev expressed his innermost, prophetic:
The hour will strike, and the proletarian children will fall to the peasant's lyre.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Russia had 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 20s, the way of Russian peasant life, endlessly dear to peasant poets, began to collapse before their eyes. Those written in the 20s and 30s ooze with pain for the dwindling origins of life. Klychkov’s novels, Klyuev’s works, Yesenin’s letters, a careful reading of which is yet to be done by researchers.
The revolution promised to fulfill the centuries-old dream of the peasants: to give them land. The peasant community, in which the poets saw the basis of the foundations of harmonious existence, was reanimated for a short time, 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.”
(Yesenin, Soviet Rus'.)
However, already in the summer of 1918, a systematic offensive began to destroy the foundations of the peasant community, food detachments were sent to the village, and from the beginning of 1919, a food appropriation system was introduced. Millions and 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 furiously rebelled against exorbitant taxes - the Veshensky uprising on the Don, the uprising of Tambov and Voronezh peasants, hundreds of similar, but smaller-scale peasant uprisings. The country was going through another tragic period in its history, and Yesenin’s letters from this time are permeated with a painful, intense search for the meaning of the present, what is happening before our eyes. If earlier, in 1918, the poet wrote: “We believe that a miraculous healing will now give birth in the village to an even more enlightened feeling of new life,” then in a letter from E. Livshits dated June 8, 1920, the exact opposite impression of what is happening in “ new” village: “I really didn’t like it at home, despite the fact that I hadn’t been there for three years, there are a lot of reasons, but it’s inconvenient to talk about them in letters.” “It’s not like that now. Horror, how unlike,” he conveys to G. Benislavskaya in a letter dated July 15, 1924, his impression of visiting his native village. A small foal running in a race with a train, seen in August 1920 from the window of the Kislovodsk-Baku train and then sung in Sorokoust, for Yesenin becomes “a dear, dying image of the village.”
M. Babenchikov, who met with Elenin in the early 20s, notes his “hidden anxiety”: “Some persistent thought drilled Yesenin’s brain..., forcing him to constantly return to the same topic: “- Village, village. .. The village is life, and the city...” And, suddenly cutting off his thought: “This conversation is hard for me. He’s crushing me.” The same memoirist cites a significant episode in the winter of 1922 in the mansion of A. Duncan on Prechistenka, when “Elenin, sitting on his haunches, absentmindedly stirred the brands that were burning out with difficulty, and then, gloomily resting his sightless eyes on one point, quietly began: “ I was in the village. Everything is collapsing... You have to be there yourself to understand... It’s the end of everything.”
“The end of everything” - that is, all hopes for a renewal of life, dreams of a happy future for the Russian peasant. Is it not this gullibility of the Russian peasant that G.I. Uspensky, highly valued by Yesenin, wrote with bitterness and pain, warning about the inevitable tragic and terrible disappointment in the next “magic fairy tale”? “With a broken trough,” the writer recalled, “...from time immemorial, every Russian fairy tale begins and ends; beginning in melancholy and suffering, continuing with dreams of a bright, free life, it, after a whole series of countless torments endured by the freedom seeker, leads him again to grief and suffering, and before him ... “again a broken trough.”
As a result of social experiments, before 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 of life and national consciousness.
Peasant poets 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, made of gold spear,
The blanket is embroidered with harmonies,
You didn’t give me even a handful of oats, And you didn’t let me into the meadow, where the drunken dew Would have refreshed the swan’s broken wings...
New peasant literature is the only direction in Russian literature of the 20th century, all of whose representatives, without exception, fearlessly entered into a mortal struggle with the “Iron Age” in their works and were destroyed in this unequal struggle. In the period from 1924 to 1938, all of them - directly or indirectly - became victims of the System: in 1924 - Alexander Shiryaevets, in 1925 - Sergei Yesenin and Alexey Ganin, in 1937 - Nikolai Klyuev and young poets Ivan Pribludny and Pavel Vasiliev, in 1938 - Sergei Klychkov and Pyotr Oreshin.
At the end of the 20th century, it is destined to read anew into the works of the new peasant writers - continuing the traditions of Russian literature of the Silver Age, they are opposed to the Iron Age: they contain true spiritual values and truly high morality, they contain the breath of the spirit of high freedom - from power, from dogma, they affirm a caring attitude towards the human person, defend a connection with national origins and folk art as the only fruitful path for the creative evolution of the artist.
ANNOTATED REFERENCES
Ponomareva T. A. New peasant prose of the 1920s: In 2 parts. Cherepovets, 2005. Part 1. Philosophical and artistic research by N. Klyuev, A. Ganin, P. Karpov. Part 2. “Round World” by Sergei Klychkov.
The monograph is devoted to the prose of N. Klyuev, S. Klychkov, P. Karpov, A. Ganin of the 1920s, but broadly represents the origins of the work of peasant writers in the literature of the Silver Age. New peasant literature is comprehended in historical, national and religious-philosophical aspects. The work of new peasant writers is considered in relation to mythopoetics, folklore, ancient Russian literature and literature of the first third of the 20th century.
Savchenko I K. Yesenin and Russian literature of the 20th century. Influences. Mutual influences. Literary and creative connections. M.: Russki m1r, 2014.
The book is devoted to the problem of “Yesenin and Russian literature of the 20th century” and is the first monographic study of this kind; Some archival documents and materials are being introduced into literary circulation for the first time. In particular, Yesenin’s literary and creative connections with peasant writers are examined in detail: in the chapters ““No one attracted Yesenin so spiritually”: Sergei Yesenin and Alexander Shiryaevets” and ““This one is madly gifted!”: Sergei Yesenin and Maxim Gorky.” The topic “Gorky and the new peasant writers in their relation to “hut Rus'”” is explored in detail.
Solntseva N. M. The Kitezh peacock: Philological prose. Documentation. Data. Versions. M.: Skifs, 1992.
The book contains essays on philological prose dedicated to the work of peasant writers. The work of S. Klychkov, N. Klyuev, P. Karpov, P. Vasiliev is analyzed in particular detail. The extensive use of documentary materials gives the study a deeply scientific character, and the genre of philological prose, in the traditions of which the book is written, gives the character of fascinating reading. The author offers the reader not only literary facts, but also his own versions and hypotheses related to the work of the new peasant writers.
- Obviously, internal polemics with the Acmeist “Workshop of Poets” dictated and exaggerated the stylized form - in the form of a humble petition - of Klyuev’s gift inscription to N. Gumilyov on the collection “Forest Were”: “To Nikolai light for Stepanovich Gumilyov from the great Novgorod of the Obonezhsky Pyatina of the Friday Paraskovia churchyard at the garden of Solovyovagor the singer Nikol Ashka after the pouring of Klyuyev, he sings glory, thoughtfully bows, pays tribute to the Lenten day, the memory of the holy prophet Joel, the summer of the birth of Bogoslov, one thousand nine hundred and thirteen.”
- In this regard, the nature of the literary pseudonym chosen by one of the proletarian poets - Bezymensky - is also not accidental.
She had to survive in new conditions, in the turn to the new culture of the proletariat. Representatives: Nikolay Klyuev, Sergey Klychkov, Sergey Yesenin, Pyotr Oreshin.
They are beginning to be supplanted by Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, Trotsky.
Nikolay Klyuev At first he firmly believed in the idea of renewing the world. Then - arrests. He ends his life far from St. Petersburg, in the dungeons of the NKVD. Refers to the genre of the poem.
1919 - a two-volume book of poems “Pesnoslov”, then - “The Copper Whale”, 1920 - “Hut Songs”.
He believed in communism, but not in the communism of the Bolsheviks, but in communism as a special state of the peasant spirit. 1928 - the last collection “Izba and Kolya”. Religious and patriarchal motives, appeal to folklore. V. Mayakovsky: he remained entirely in the pre-revolutionary past. The main theme is the theme of the death of the peasant world (one of the poems is “Pogorelschina”). There are also prophetic lines and lines that the sacrifices made by the revolution turned out to be fruitless.
The internecine massacre (World War I) migrates into the modern world: a field strewn with bones and skulls. The motive of the force that destroys all living things, everything earthly. And the ideal is nature, the familiar landscape of peasant life.
The poem “Pogorelschina” is a picture of the death of Rus', the death of great forces, the world of Russia.
The image of a hut.
A parallel from the second half of the twentieth century is Nikolai Rubtsov.
“The Christmas of the Hut” is a reflection of the creative consciousness of the peasant poet. The image of a village house in artistic and philosophical understanding is a certain model of the universe. Christmas hut is a sacred act, a sacrament. The builder is a priest, a seer who can read writing on wood chips.
Homelessness is a terrible misfortune, a sign of a failed fate.
Peasant Soviet poetry (new trends in peasant poetry): Mikhail Isakovsky. Alexander Tvardovsky, Alexey Surkov, Nikolay Rolenkov, Alexander Prokopyev, Alexander Shchipachev and others. They reflect the life of the village. A new look (from the perspective of new times): the revival of the village. His lyrical voice also brought him closer to his predecessors.
Mikhail Vasilievich Isakovsky(1900-1972). Born into a poor peasant family in Smolensk. The first poems were in 1914-1915. After October, he joined the Bolshevik Party and edited the Smolensk newspaper Rabochiy Put. 4 books of poems. He himself believes that this is not poetry yet, but associates the beginning of an independent poetic path with the collection of 1927 (“Wires in the Straw”). Changes for the better: electricity, reading room, educational program. He spoke with his comrades against the simplification of Komsomol poetry (schematism). We must learn from the classics; we cannot exclude the personal element from life.
He studies from Yesenin, but conducts polemics with him, not accepting decadent sentiments. He often names poems in the same way as Yesenin, but gives a different picture (“Letter to Mother”, etc.).
The poem “Four Desires” (the mediocre, unhappy farm laborer Stepan Timofeevich. Tvardovsky’s “Country of Ant” (the farm laborers are also looking for a happy life). Almost according to Nekrasov.
Formation of concepts small And big homeland.
Consolidation of the genre. V. Mayakovsky “Good”, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”, S. Yesenin “Anna Snegina”, “Song of the Great March”, B. Pasternak “1905”, “Lieutenant Schmidt”, N. Aseev “Semyon Rodov”.
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, the oral poetry of the people, a deeply national feeling of closeness to native nature constituted the strong side of the lyrics of the “peasant poets.”
