The whole horizon is on fire, and the appearance is near,
But I'm scared - you will change your appearance
You, And audacious arouse suspicion,
Replacing the usual features at the end.
The name of Blok, in our mind, is associated, first of all, with the image of a romantic poet who sings in his poems of the ideal beloved, the embodiment of perfect femininity and beauty. The appearance of this motif (rather, even the leitmotif of the author's early work) is associated with the aesthetics of symbolism and with the philosophy and poetry of Vl. Solovyov. The latter's teaching about the World Soul or Eternal Femininity, called upon to renew and revive the world, passed through the prism of Blok's poetic talent. At the same time, “Poems about the Beautiful Lady” are largely autobiographical, as far as this word can be applied to a poetic work. Blok embodied in them the intimate and lyrical experiences of his youth. The beloved girl becomes in his poems the Holy, Most Pure Virgin, a symbol of femininity and beauty.
The entire cycle of poems about the Beautiful Lady is permeated with the pathos of chaste love for a woman, chivalrous service to her and admiration for him as the personification of the ideal of spiritual beauty, a symbol of everything sublimely beautiful. The heroine of Blok's poetry is seen by the hero not as an earthly woman, but as a deity. She has several names: Beautiful Lady, Eternally Young, Holy Virgin, Lady of the Universe. She is heavenly, mysterious, inaccessible, estranged from earthly troubles:
Transparent, unknown shadows
They swim to you, and with them
You are swimming
In the arms of azure dreams,
Incomprehensible to us -
You give yourself.
It is inaccessible to the hero, because he is only a man, earthly, sinful, mortal:
And here, below, in the dust, in humiliation,
Seeing for a moment immortal features,
Unknown slave, filled with inspiration,
Sings you. You don't know him...
The lyrical hero of the cycle, the double of the poet -
Sometimes a servant, sometimes a sweetheart, And forever a slave.
A knight, a kneeling monk, a slave, he performs his service to the beautiful queen, the Blessed Virgin:
I enter dark temples
I perform a poor rite
There I am waiting for the Beautiful Lady
In the flickering of red lamps.
In everything the hero seems to have her presence - in the bottomless azure of the sky, in the spring wind, in the song of the violin:
Since then, that neither night nor day,
Above me is your white shadow,
The smell of white flowers among the gardens,
Rustle, light steps by the ponds...
At the same time, the heroine is almost ethereal, incorporeal, her image does not imply anything concrete, “tangible”, because everything earthly is alien to her:
Here's a face emerging from lace,
A face emerges from the lace...
Here float her blizzard trills,
The stars are bright with a train dragging ...
“I can’t hear any sighs or speech,” says the hero.
To describe the object of his worship, the author uses epithets such as “radiant”, “mysterious”, “ineffable”, “illumined”, “pleasant”. But in some verses about the Beautiful Lady, her image takes on more concrete, earthly features, devoid of a touch of mysticism:
I'll get up in the foggy morning,
The sun hits your face.
Are you a desirable friend?
Are you coming up to my porch?
Before us is no longer an abstract image, but an earthly woman; it should be noted that when speaking about it, the poet refuses capital letters.
In the poems that followed the cycle of the Beautiful Lady, one can trace the further development of her image. The heroine of the cycle remained a celestial who did not condescend to the hero and his love. In later poems, the figure of a new heroine appears, who also in her own way embodies the ideal of beauty and light. Heavenly angel, Star Maiden unexpectedly falls to the ground:
You flowed like a bloody star
I measured your path in sorrow
When you started to fall
The metaphysical fall of the Virgin disturbs and saddens
A hero, but then he understands when he finds his beloved
On the unconsecrated ground, in the "unlit gate" that
And this look is no less bright,
Than was in the misty heights.
Having descended from "heaven", the heroine has not lost her beauty, charm, charm. This is how the Stranger is born - an angel who descended to earth, a “genius of pure beauty”, in the words of A. S. Pushkin. In the poem “A Train Spattered with Stars”, the heroine is compared to a comet falling down, connecting heaven and earth with this fall:
A train splattered with stars
Blue, blue, blue eyes.
Between earth and heaven
Whirlwind raised fire.
So the image of the mystical “Eternal Femininity” is replaced in the poetic world of Blok by the romantic image of the Stranger living on the earth. And then there is another conflict:
In the midst of this mysterious vulgarity,
Tell me what to do with you -
unattainable and unique
How is the evening smoky blue?
The heroine is doomed to stay in a world of vulgarity and dirt. How is it possible for the coexistence of the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the mundane? Blok tries to answer this question in his poem “The Stranger”. It is built on the opposition of two worlds. In the first part, the poet gives a picture of the ugly everyday reality (stuffiness of the streets, boredom, dust, crying, screeching). Ordinary, familiarity of what is happening is emphasized by the repeated use of the combination “and every evening”. And at the same time -
At the appointed time
(Is it just my dream?)
Maiden's camp, seized by silks,
In the foggy window moves.
The image of the Stranger cannot be interpreted unambiguously. Is this just a vision dreamed up by the hero sitting over a glass of wine? Is this a real woman, endowed with the attributes of a romantic lover - again, not without the influence of alcohol? An heir to romanticism, Blok does not avoid ambiguity and irony. One thing seems certain: dream and reality are incompatible, there is no place for the ideal in the world of everyday life. The last lines look like a sarcastic conclusion:
You're right, drunk monster!
I know: the truth is in wine.
But - how to know? Maybe it's the wine of poetry? Romantic in nature: the image of the Beautiful Lady gives a tragic sound to Blok's works. The ideal beloved is far away, inaccessible, lifeless, she is only a symbol. Over time, her image is filled with vital content: the poet is looking for his heroine in this world. But the meeting cannot bring him either joy or peace, since the impossibility of its existence on earth is obvious. This is how the image of the Beautiful Lady - the Eternal Femininity of the desired friend - the fallen angel - the Stranger, develops and finds its end in Blok's poetry.
The work of Alexander Blok falls on the beginning of the 20th century. This period was marked for the whole of Russia as a turning point in its history and was reflected in many works of the great poet. Many of Blok's poems and poems, dedicated to the political situation in the country, evoke opposite opinions from readers. Some admire them, others don't. But it can be said for sure that everyone reads works related to Blok's early lyrics with great pleasure. Undoubtedly, these are masterpieces of love lyrics. Blok created them inspired by his young wife, the daughter of the great Russian scientist Mendeleev. Her beauty served as a source of Blok's thoughts, which, having formed into beautiful verses, made the hearts of many of his admirers worry. In the works of Blok there is no image of a specific woman. His Muse appears in the form of eternal femininity, tenderness, purity. The beautiful Lady of Blok personifies an ordinary earthly woman, something sublime, combining the best female features:
Oh, Holy One, how gentle are the candles,
How pleasing are Your features!
I hear neither sighs nor speeches,
But I believe: Honey - You.
Blok presents himself as a servant of the Beautiful Lady, as her knight:
I enter dark temples
I perform a poor ritual.
There I am waiting for the Beautiful Lady
In the flickering of red lamps.
In his poems, Blok is based on his experiences, feelings, he opens his soul, appears before us as an ardent dreamy young man. For him, as if there is no reality, he is completely devoted to his dreams of the Beautiful Lady:
Discordantly excited by the noisy life,
Whispering, screaming embarrassed,
White dream motionless chained
To the shore of late times.
White You, in the depths of nesmutina,
In life - strict and angry.
Secretly anxious and secretly loved
Virgo, Dawn, Kupina.
But gradually there is a crisis of his youthful reverie, it gives way to an awareness of reality. His Beautiful Lady acquires certain features, becomes more earthly. In The Stranger, Blok describes his new Muse. Blok transfers her from the sublime environment to the usual, characteristic of every simple woman:
In the evenings above the restaurants
Hot air is wild and deaf
And rules drunken shouts
Spring and pernicious spirit.
She is still beautiful, proud, rises above the monotony and vulgarity. However, there have been some changes:
And slowly, passing among the drunk,
Always without companions, alone,
Breathing in spirits and mists,
She sits by the window.
And breathe ancient beliefs
Her elastic silks
And a hat with mourning feathers
And in the rings a narrow hand.
This description leads us to think about her aristocratic, noble origin. Her face is covered with a veil, which symbolizes some kind of mystery. We still don’t know everything about the new Beautiful Lady, it seems that there is something unknown behind her wonderful appearance:
And chained by a strange closeness,
I look behind the dark veil
And I see the enchanted shore
And the enchanted distance.
Deaf secrets are entrusted to me,
Someone's sun has been handed to me,
And all the souls of my bend
The tart wine pierced.
Perhaps it was this secret that formed the basis of the title of the poem "The Stranger". Time passed, and Blok's opinion about his Muse changed more and more and moved further from the image of the Beautiful Lady and the Stranger. During this period, Blok dedicated most of his creations to the Motherland. Many poets represented the Motherland in their works as a mother. Blok spoke of her as a wife, as a lover:
Oh, my Russia! My wife! To pain
We have a long way to go!
This is how Blok writes about Russia in the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field”. In the poem "Autumn Day" Blok again presents his homeland as his wife:
Oh my poor country
What do you mean to the heart?
Oh my poor wife
What are you crying about?
Thus, Blok was constantly changing, and with him the image of his Muse was constantly changing. These poems, filled with great love for femininity, the Motherland, can be liked by people of any age, men and women, people who are fond of politics and far from it, because they are about love, an eternal feeling close to any person. Blok's early poems are always relevant, just as love is always relevant.
Born into a family of noble intellectuals, Alexander Blok spent his childhood years in an atmosphere of literary interests, which led him to poetic creativity. Five-year-old Sasha was already rhyming. Seriously, he turned to poetry in his gymnasium years. Diverse in terms of themes and means of expression, Blok's unique lyrics are a single whole, a reflection of the path that was traveled by the poet and representatives of his generation. Three volumes contain truly lyrical diary entries, descriptions of events, feelings, […]
Alexander Blok is one of the most talented poets in Russian classical poetry. His work is unusually elegant and mysterious. Particularly striking are the "Poems about the Beautiful Lady", which embodies the search for the manifestation of the "Women's Soul". Perhaps his fascination with the philosophical teachings of Vladimir Solovyov was revealed in verses in which everything is saturated with symbolism. In this collection, he addressed a woman with whom he was passionately in love, and, subsequently, became her husband. A woman, in the poet's verses, appears as a sublime and unattainable being. The poet represented her as "Princess" and "Star". “Sunset, Mysterious Maiden,” writes the poet. The image of the Beautiful Lady in Blok's poems exists in an aura of mystery and incomprehensibility. It is like a fog and an elusive haze permeates everything and everything.
Considering the theme of the "Beautiful Lady" in Blok's work, one can notice some transformation of his visions. It is quite possible that these changes are connected with dramatic events in Blok's personal life. But, nevertheless, the woman remains for him something divine and ephemeral. In the poem “The Stranger”, the theme of hopelessness and despair: “... And the spring and pernicious spirit rules the drunken shouts”, intertwined with the theme of reflections on the beautiful Stranger:
And I see the enchanted shore
And the enchanted distance.
In this poem, the poet in a rather concentrated form describes all the insignificance and vulgarity of big cities, with each line reinforcing the idea of the doom of the world around him. And suddenly, "breathing in spirits and mists", the Stranger appears. Here you can see all the contrast and dissonance of the surrounding atmosphere. The Beautiful Stranger is a symbol of beauty and purity, she brings harmony with her. Interestingly, the light image appears only for a moment, then it disappears like a mist.
In general, in his lyrics, the poet contrasts the sublime face of the “Beautiful Lady” with material, devoid of harmony, things. But the world has changed, and with it the image of a woman. The years of revolutions and change of power in Russia left a characteristic imprint on Blok's work itself. In the poem "The Twelve", with the seeming simplicity of the ditty verse, "Ladies" appear in a completely different way:
Oh, you, Katya, my Katya,
Fat-faced…
The image of a woman is expressed in such an obscene way in the hope of rebirth and the transition from chaos and darkness to a “bright” future.
Time changes, and images appear in a different form. But Blok's "Beautiful Lady" is one of the most extraordinary images in Russian classical love poetry. Immersion in the secrets of the nature of femininity will always attract the outstanding poet Alexander Blok to the work.
Option 2
Alexander Blok appears to us as a romantic poet of the Silver Age, a representative of symbolism, who glorifies the image of an ideal woman. His work was influenced by the philosophy of V. Solovyov about Sophia, Eternal Femininity. Blok's lyrics are saturated with the image of the expected, eternal, impossible and feasible meeting. She surprises with the beauty of the style, the richness of metaphors, and the deep content. A distinctive feature is the combination of the mystical and everyday, detached and everyday, everything contradicts everything.
The plot of Blok's lyrics revolves around the image of the Beautiful Lady, a meeting with which is both desirable and impossible. “Poems about the Beautiful Lady”, a cycle written between 1897 and 1904, can be considered as a biography of the poet, since at that time he was acutely experiencing a stormy and intense romance with Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva. He turns his feelings and emotional excitement into a poetic form and conveys it to the reader.
The works of this cycle are imbued with platonic love, noble admiration for the ideal. The heroine is a god. Blok, through the mouth of his hero, calls her the Beautiful Lady, Eternally Young, the Queen. But the goddess is inaccessible, and the hero is only a man. He sees himself living "in the dust, in humiliation" as an obscure slave. And with the advent of the heroine, the world around the hero seems to begin to change, flash and be painted with different colors - gold, azure, blue, dazzling white.
However, in some verses, the image of the Lady is more concrete, she takes on an earthly appearance, without elements of the supernatural. The hero calls her a desirable friend. The image of the beloved is both a symbol of a certain Soul of the world, that same Eternal Femininity, and the image of a real girl.
The hero is anxiously aware that he will not reach the Virgin - she has remained a phantom. In subsequent verses, a new heroine appears. She is also an ideal, but different, comparable to a star falling from heaven to sinful earth. The Beautiful Lady - a symbol with an infinite number of meanings, is replaced in the lyrical world of Blok by the figure of the Stranger.
The romantic image of the beloved appears tragic in Blok's poetry. The ideal is not available - it is a symbol. The poet is looking for his Lady in the real world. However, neither delight nor peace, the achievement of the goal does not bring, because the attainment of the ideal is impossible. In the works, the development of the image of the Beautiful Lady is traced - from the desired, impossible, unattainable goddess to a real woman.
For abstract, message, report.
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The theme of the path is one of the main lyrical themes of the Silver Age poets and especially the symbolist poets. Their poems are an accurate fixation of the path of the lyrical hero and his generation. Three volumes of A. Blok's lyrics are his diary, a consistent description of all emotional experiences, events that took place in his life. “This is my path, and I am firmly convinced that all my poems are a trilogy of incarnation. From a moment of too bright light through a swampy forest to retribution and to the birth of a public person, an artist, ”said the poet himself.
The first volume of A. Blok's lyrics is permeated with the expectation of the Beautiful Lady. The first cycle - "Ante lucem" - is filled with a premonition of the coming into the world of great femininity, hence the motives of darkness, then the coming harmony. A. Blok cultivates the poetics of limits, extremes, and at the same time creates a world permeated with blue and purple colors, woven from highlights, filled with an amazing melody of verse: “I loved, I love to love tirelessly ...” The motive of renewal is connected with the appearance of the Beautiful Lady. The keywords of the second cycle of the first volume of lyrics - "" - light and flame. The poet finds harmony, finds the ideal of eternal femininity and is only afraid of being unworthy of this ideal.
The third cycle of poems included in the first volume of lyrics, "Crossroads", takes on a tragic sound. The poet feels how harmony is gradually slipping away from him, how he is gradually moving away from the ideal. Sleep, oblivion - these are the main motives of this cycle. The images are dominated by gray color, blurry halftones, and the elements of the farce burst into the world. In the soul of a lyrical hero, high and low, high tragedy and farce are intertwined. The transition to the world of clowns, masks and booths is tragic, and "coffin steps" lead to this world:
I celebrated a bright death
Touching the wax hand
The rest is a bottomless expanse
Buried in the blue mist.
All this prepared that tragic turning point in the perception of the world, which was realized in the second volume of A. Blok's lyrics. “She will never come,” the poet says about the Beautiful Lady. The ideals of the lyrical hero A. Blok are destroyed, he surrenders to the elements, and his world is filled with swamp imps (cycle "Bubbles of the Earth"). In the lyrics of the second book of poems, there is a transition from unearthly harmony to earthly, chaotic, a stable motif of a booth and "hellish retinue" appears. In the City cycle, the poet shows how two realities coexist in the world. Unearthly harmony and trying to get along with the inhumanity of the city of Petra, his devilish laughter, ugly dwarfs:
And a couple flickered after a couple ...
I was waiting for a bright angel to us,
So that here, in the glee of the sidewalk,
He attached one to heaven...
And above - on a dangerous ledge -
Quietly cringing, the dwarf crouched,
And it seemed to us a red banner
In the city, the lyrical hero of Alexander Blok finds the ghostly ideal of the Stranger - an ideal that exists only in the soul of the poet:
There is a treasure in my soul
And the key is entrusted only to me!
The stranger and the "drunkards with the eyes of rabbits" are the two realities that are combined in the soul of the lyrical hero.
With surprising constancy, the motif of death appears in the verses of this cycle. Life is compared to a wax doll, the hero lives in a constant premonition of the cessation of life, the coming of the power of chaos. The poet feels “the approaching rumble of a distant uprising”, expects a breakthrough of the elements.
The "Snow Mask" cycle is divided into two equally important sub-cycles: "Snows" and "Masks". Snow is the personification of a whirlwind, elements, unlimitedness, chaos. The mask appears because in the world whirlpool a person gradually loses his face:
Give me back, mask, soul,
Woe is my light!
In the Faina cycle, the lyrical hero of A. Blok receives a new worldview. “A dark veil has fallen…”, and the hero turns to life again. The motive of meeting with life, fate becomes the leading one in the verses of this cycle. But life is already perceived differently, it is an amazing fusion of contradictions (“Autumn Love”). A. Blok rethinks the understanding of poetry, now he sees that it is always less than life, and the poet "loves heaven and earth" less "than rhymed and unrhymed speeches about earth and sky." This feeling of the narrowness of poetry is also connected with the appearance in the Faina cycle of poems written in free verse - free verse.
So the main idea gradually matures, which was embodied in the third book of A. Blok's poems - the world is imperfect, but it is impossible to remake it, it is only necessary to try to understand it by any means. “The plan for the third book of my poems is the inevitable dramatic sequence of life,” the poet writes in 1908. In the last book of lyrics, Alexander Alexandrovich explores the human soul, the motive of a double appears in the verses - a man who tells the truth about the life of a lyrical hero.
Before the appearance of the Stranger, tragic notes clearly sound in the poem, the theme of the “terrible world”, “the impenetrable horror of life”.
The poet describes evening life: restaurants, where "hot air" is wild and deaf, alleys. The line "and every evening" is repeated periodically. That is, the real world is revealed to the author only in the evening, when the disk “pointlessly curves” in the sky.
When reading a poem, you can hear many different sounds, for example, “baby crying”, the creaking of oarlocks, “female screeching”, the cry of drunkards “with rabbit eyes”.
The image of the "terrible world" expresses not only gray everyday life, from which the lyrical hero sees no way out, but also the emptiness of his inner world, which he feels with no less tragedy. There is no harmony in the real world. The author is looking for what will bring him a sense of harmony. Changes in the soul of the lyrical hero occur with the advent of the Stranger, who "every evening, at the appointed hour ... A window will move in the foggy." The question arises before the lyrical hero: “Is this a dream of mine?” A stranger appears when "all the souls ... bends Pierced tart wine"
Block writes:
There is a treasure in my soul
And the key is entrusted only to me!
With these lines, the author shows that love and beauty are in the soul of a person, and not in the surrounding “terrible world”. The fate of love is determined by the person himself. To use the "key" to the "treasure", the lyrical hero gets drunk, and understands that for him "truth is in wine." And he sees not only the beautiful Stranger, but also "the enchanted shore." And there is no longer that “terrible world”, the sight of which makes you shudder, but there is a wonderful feeling of love and an endless “enchanted distance”.