Artistic features of S. Yesenin's poetry
The poet was right when he said that his lyrics are alive with one great love, love for the Motherland. This feeling binds together all of Yesenin’s lyrical works: poems with a clearly expressed socio-political theme, love lyrics, poems about nature, a lyrical cycle of works addressed to relatives - grandfather, mother, sister, lyrics of philosophical reflections. This was the unique integrity of the poet, despite those internal contradictions that did not leave him until the end of his life.
Love for the Motherland, for the national origins of its present day, found expression not only in the content of the works, but also in the nature of the poet’s poetic thinking, in the artistic form of his works. This is primarily revealed in the deep internal connection of his poetry with folk oral poetry.
Yesenin is especially close to the genres of folk poetry. And here we should mainly talk about the principle of psychological parallelism that permeates all Russian folk art. Talentedly and variably developed by the poet, this principle gives his lyrics that unique Yesenin flavor that is discernible in every poetic image.
As in folk art, Yesenin has almost no purely landscape poems, but at the same time there are no poems in which a connection with the natural world is not somehow felt. The poet constantly turns to images of nature in those cases when he expresses the most intimate thoughts about himself, about his place in life, about his past, present and future. Often in his poems, nature merges so much with man that it itself turns out to be a reflection of some human feelings, and man, in turn, appears as a particle of nature. Yesenin’s landscape is not an illustration of the feelings that possess him. For the poet, nature is both a part of his own soul and a friend whose mood coincides with his thoughts and experiences:
Rowan berry brushes will not get burned,
Yellowness will not make the grass disappear.
Like a tree silently shedding its leaves,
So I drop sad words...
The expression of deep human feelings through paintings and images of nature is the most characteristic feature of Yesenin’s lyrics.
Yesenin also borrowed many of the colors of his poetry from Russian nature. It is difficult to name another Russian poet in whom color would play as big a role as in Yesenin’s work. In his poems he is called upon to enhance the visual perception of the image, to make it more prominent and expressive. We especially often encounter blue and light blue colors in Yesenin’s poetry. This is not just the poet’s individual attachment to such colors. Blue and light blue are the colors of the earth’s atmosphere and water; it predominates in nature regardless of the time of year, only the shades change. “Warm blue heights”, “blue bay”, “blue thickets”, “blue groves”, “plain blue”, “village blue”, “the skies are turning blue all around” - these are frequent signs of nature in Yesenin’s poems.
Yesenin is not limited to simply reproducing the colors of nature, he does not copy them, each color has its own meaning and content. For the poet, blue is the color of peace and silence. That is why it is so often found when depicting evening and early morning: “blue evening”, “blue evening light”, “blue dusk”, “Pre-dawn. Blue. Early." The semantic content of this color is entirely transferred by the poet to the internal characteristics of a person. This always means peace of mind, peace, inner peace.
The blue color in Yesenin’s poems is very close in meaning to blue, just as these colors are close in nature itself. Yesenin’s additional nuance is that it gives a joyful feeling of space, breadth, distant horizon: “blue arable land”, “blue field”, “blue water”, “blue doors of the day”, “blue star”, “blue space” , “blue Rus'”... Blue and dark blue in their combination serve to create a romantic mood in the reader. “My blue May! June is blue! the poet exclaims, and we feel that the months of spring and summer are not just named here, there are thoughts about youth and youth. Quite often the poet uses the scarlet color, which has long had its own specific meaning in folk songs (“scarlet cheeks”, “scarlet flower”, “scarlet blush”, etc.). “The color scarlet is dear to the whole world,” says a popular saying. The scarlet color in Yesenin’s poems always symbolizes virgin purity, purity, and spotlessness. Often this is the morning dawn: “The scarlet light of dawn is woven on the lake...”, “There is a joyful melancholy in the scarlet of dawn...”. In his early poems, he wrote: “I pray at the scarlet dawns...”, “I stood like a monk in the scarlet splendor...”
It would seem that the pink color is inexpressive, intermediate, somewhat diluted. And what is even more striking is Yesenin’s ability to use this color and give it unusually expressive power. Thus, one word “pink” creates an unforgettable picture of mood, depicted, for example, in the following stanza:
I have now become more stingy in my desires,
My life, did I dream about you?
As if I were a booming early spring
He rode on a pink horse.
Here, no other adjective to the word “horse” could create such a deep romantic mood.
With scarlet berry juice on the skin,
Tender, beautiful, was
You look like a pink sunset
And, like snow, radiant and light.
Akin to scarlet and pink, red has a special semantic connotation in poetics. This is an alarming, disturbing color, as if one feels the expectation of the unknown. If scarlet is associated with the morning dawn, foreshadowing a bright day, then red speaks of sunset, the onset of the mysterious darkness of the night: “The red wings of sunset are fading ...”, “The day is sinking behind the red hill ...”, “The road is thinking about the red evening ...". Such colors, similar in shades, acquire different semantic connotations in Yesenin.
To depict the inner state of a person, Yesenin skillfully uses a combination of contrasting colors. They act as symbols, as a symbol. These antithetical colors help to show the transition of one feeling to another.
As the poet’s heavy and gloomy mood grows, the color black intrudes more and more into his poems. “The evening raised black eyebrows” - this is how one of his poems begins, in which we find the poet in a state of spiritual decline. “The Black Man” is how Yesenin called his most tragic work.
It was through contrasting colors - white and black - that Yesenin once vividly expressed his thoughts about his life. This was during the period of “Tavern Moscow”, when he painfully felt the contradictions between the environment in which he found himself and the poetic inspiration dictated by the romance of feelings.
Here we see paint symbols. It is very typical for the romantic poet to use color not so much in its direct application (blue skies, blue lake), but rather in its conditional meaning. That’s why Yesenin’s colors often seem so bold and unexpected: in the wind, the dense foliage of the trees sways like “green fire”; the sunset floats across the lake like a “red swan”; On an early spring morning, a “pink horse” rushes by.
In Yesenin's work, colors form the integral essence of poetry. Their multifaceted use can be defined as the color expression of thoughts and feelings. This exceptional quality of the poet’s lyrics distinguishes him not only in Soviet, but throughout world literature.
The revelation of his own experiences through images of his native nature led Yesenin to the humanization of nature itself, which made it possible to more deeply convey the subtle and tender feeling of love for all living things. Folk art has captured this quality of the Russian person in an exceptionally diverse way (“What, nightingale, are you sad?”, “the river spoke, answered,” “violent winds, take the news to your friend,” and much more). Yesenin’s poetic images are formed on this basis and acquire a unique flavor: “The golden grove dissuaded with Birch’s cheerful language,” “The bird cherry tree is sleeping in a white cape,” “Somewhere in the clearing a maple tree is dancing drunk.”
Relying on folk poetic symbolism (oak - longevity, pine - straightforwardness, aspen - grief, birch - maiden purity, etc.), Yesenin often develops and, as it were, concretizes such images into metaphors full of great lyrical power. He especially often turned to the image of a birch tree. He has a birch tree - “girl”, “bride”. The poet speaks about her as one can only speak about a person, endowing her with specific human signs: “A green-haired birch tree in a white skirt stands over the pond.”
In folk art we also encounter the opposite: the transference of certain natural phenomena to humans. And this feature is very noticeable in Yesenin’s poetry and also acquires a peculiar expression. “We are all apple trees and cherry trees of the blue garden,” Yesenin says about people. That is why the words that “his beloved will fade from the bird cherry blossoms” sound so natural in his poems, that his girlfriend has “autumn fatigue in her eyes.” But this poetic device sounds especially powerful where the poet speaks about himself. “Ah, the bush of my head has withered,” he writes about his lost youth, and soon returns to a similar comparison: “my head is a yellow leaf.” “I was all like a neglected garden,” he regrets the past. Varying this technique, he deepens it more and more, creates a series of images that are internally interconnected: “I would like to stand like a tree, Along the road on one leg,” “Like a tree quietly drops its leaves, So I drop sad words.” And finally, without even mentioning the word “tree,” he evokes this image with the words: “Soon I will feel cold without leaves.” This is how the feature characteristic of oral folk poetry receives its development in Yesenin’s work.
The poet's artistic thinking turns out to be organically close to the people's, and this gives his poetry a deeply national character.
The lyricism, emotionality of Yesenin’s verse, the rich range of moods and feelings in his works were also reflected in the poet’s peculiar use of the aphoristic style of Russian speech. The formula of feeling - this is how you can define Yesenin’s aphorisms, so inherent in his lyrics. They hold the verse together, making it easy to remember, giving it great power. They are always meaningful and easy to understand: “So few roads have been traveled, So many mistakes have been made”, “If there are no flowers in the middle of winter, There is no need to be sad about them”, “After all, you cannot stop loving, Just like you failed to love”, “He who has loved cannot love; he who has burned cannot be set on fire,” etc.
In such formulas of feelings in Yesenin, of course, there is no need to look for direct parallels with folk sayings and proverbs. We are talking about the fundamental similarity of structures and intonations. But quite often one can detect similarity in meaning. We are unlikely to be mistaken in noticing that the basis of Yesenin’s lines such as “In the garden there is a red rowan fire burning, but it cannot warm anyone” is the expression “It shines but does not warm.” And Yesenin is very frankly close to the riddle “It flaps its wings, but cannot fly away” in the following lines: “So a mill, flapping its wing, cannot fly away from the earth.”
Sergei Yesenin is one of the great Russian poets who developed the wonderful and unique tradition of Russian verse - melodiousness. His poetry surprisingly and originally merged folk song and literary traditions, enriched with the unique lyrical voice of the “singer of Ryazan expanses.” Yesenin's lyrics are entirely permeated with the element of song. “I was sucked into song captivity,” the poet wrote about himself. “Songs, songs, what are you shouting about?” - he asked, referring to his own poems. “And I sang when my land was sick,” he said about himself. “The poet called his work steppe singing. It is no coincidence that many of his poems are set to music.
(According to P.S. Vykhodtsev)
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Yesenin's poetry lives because in
in it the reader finds those close to him
pictures of native nature and dear to the heart
feelings of great, selfless and
enduring love for your great Motherland."
I.S. Events
Sergei Yesenin lived only thirty years, but his creative legacy contains great ideological and artistic wealth. It reflected the contradictions, quests, and complex psychology of a person in a transitional time. Everything dark and painful that visited the poet was ultimately connected with yesterday, with what was disappearing into the twilight of history. Everything bright and pure in his poetry, all his hopes and joys had their source in the bright morning of revolutionary Russia - the first page of the new history of mankind,
Ksenin's poetry is rooted in deep folk soil. This was clearly reflected in the artistic features of his poetry, which are closely related to folk poetry.
A characteristic feature of Russian folklore is the principle of psychological parallelism: the surrounding nature is closely connected with the thoughts and feelings of a person, it seems to share joy and sorrow with him, sympathizes with him, warns him, instills hope in him, cries over his unfulfilled dreams. This historically established feature of Russian folk poetry underlies all of Yesenin’s lyrics. The poet constantly turns to Russian nature when he expresses his most intimate thoughts about himself, about his place in life, about his past, about the present, about the future. “Soon I will feel cold without leaves,” “The bad weather will lick the path I have lived with its tongue,” he said in an hour of bitter reflection. The depiction of her own experiences through pictures of her native nature led to her humanization: “The golden grove talked with a cheerful birch tongue”, “A bird cherry tree is sleeping in a white cape”, “Somewhere in a clearing a maple tree is dancing drunk”, “A green-haired birch tree in a white skirt stands over a pond ...” This principle of depiction brings nature unusually closer to man and makes us fall in love with it especially ardently.
Yesenin also borrowed many of the colors of his poetry from Russian nature. He doesn’t just copy them, each paint has its own meaning and content, resulting in a color reflection of feelings.
Blue and cyan - these colors are most often found in Russian nature, this is the color of the atmosphere and water. In Yesenin's poetry, the color blue symbolizes peace and quiet, peace of mind; person: “Unspeakable, blue, tender...”, My land is quiet after storms, after thunderstorms...” The blue color conveys a joyful feeling of space and freedom: “blue field”, “blue doors of the day”, “blue star”, “blue Rus'...”
“The scarlet color is dear to the whole world,” says a popular saying. This favorite color of Yesenin always signifies in his poetry virgin purity, spotlessness, purity of feeling (“The scarlet color of dawn was woven on the lake...”). The color pink symbolizes youth and “fresh rosy cheeks”, “thoughts of rosy days...”. Unforgettable “pink horse” by Yesenin.
These paint-symbols are very characteristic of the romantic poet, who uses colors not so much in a direct, but in a conventional meaning. One of the reasons for the strong emotional impact of Yesenin’s lyrics lies in the color display of thoughts and feelings.
The connection of his poetics with folk art is most noticeable in the use of riddles, proverbs, and sayings.
At the heart of a folk riddle there is always the grain of an image. Yesenin felt this well and widely used the metaphorical structure of folk riddles.
Yesenin did not just repeat riddles, he developed the metaphorical principle that is inherent in them, and subjected them to original poetic processing. There is a well-known riddle about the sun: “A white cat climbs through the window.” We find Yesenin using it directly: “Now the sun is like a cat...” But at the same time, based on this comparison, he creates a derivative poetic image that conveys a picture of the evening dawn: “In a quiet hour, when the dawn is on the roof, like a kitten , washes his mouth with his paw...” There is no doubt that the “dawn-kitten” traces its ancestry to the “sun-cat”.
There is no doubt that Yesenin is connected with folk proverbs and sayings, which reflect one of the most striking features of Russian folklore - the aphoristic nature of the language.
More than one generation of Russian writers was brought up on this rich artistic material, starting with Griboyedov, Pushkin and especially Nekrasov. Each of the writers mastered this great heritage in their own way. In Yesenin’s work it is easy to notice a direct adherence to proverbs and sayings. Thus, the basis of his lines “The red rowan fire burns in the garden, but it cannot warm anyone” undoubtedly lies in the saying: “It shines, but does not warm.” But the poet did not stop at such periphrases.
The lyricism and emotionality of Yesenin’s poetry entailed a peculiar use of the aphoristic structure of Russian speech, so brilliantly reflected in proverbs and sayings. Formulas of feeling - this is how you can call the aphorisms of Yesenin, a soulful lyricist. These formulas hold his verse together, giving it enormous artistic impact, making it especially memorable: “So few roads have been traveled, so many mistakes have been made,” “Whoever loved cannot love, whoever is burned, you cannot set him on fire,” “If If there are no flowers in the middle of winter, then there is no need to regret them...”
What brings Yesenin’s poetry closer to folk poetry is the naivety of his lyrics. It is no coincidence that many of his poems are set to music.
“My lyrics are alive with one great love, love for the Motherland. The feeling of the Motherland is fundamental in my work,” said Yesenin. This love and these feelings were clearly imprinted not only in the content of his lyrics, but also in his very poetics, organically connected with the poetics of the people.
Yesenin's poetry, with great romantic depth, embodied the world of human feelings caused by the unprecedented disruption of the social life of Russia; it captured the complex, difficult, contradictory process of formation of the consciousness of the broad masses involved in the revolutionary reorganization of reality. Interest in the inner world of a person, in his thoughts, feelings, psychology, changing in the course of building a new life, as well as the constant inescapable desire to express this sincerely, truthfully, each time pushed the poet to select more and more new stylistic means.
Overcoming numerous influences and contradictions, Yesenin asserted with his later work such artistic and aesthetic principles of depicting life that were established and developed in the literature of socialist realism.
Yesenin's poetry is an integral part of national artistic creativity. It emotionally and psychologically reflects the most difficult era of social life. These are the general conclusions about Yesenin’s poetry that can be drawn by reading some of his works. Despite the complexity of Yesenin’s life quest, he still found his way, following the path of revolution, along the path of radical transformations of Russia. He realized the beauty of the new Russia, replacing his, Yesenin’s Russia. Yesenin is a poet standing at the crossroads between the old and the new, despite this, his lyrics touch our hearts with their sincerity, love for the Motherland, depth of feelings.
The system of values in S. Yesenin’s poetry is single and indivisible, all its components are interconnected and, interacting, form a single, holistic picture of the lyrical work. To convey the state of mind of the lyrical hero, his character, to describe pictures of the nature of his beloved Motherland, as well as to convey his feelings and thoughts, the poet uses the visual, expressive, aesthetic possibilities of the artistic style.
Yesenin's first collection of poems was published when the poet was only 20 years old. In the early poems of S. Yesenin we come across many such sketches, which can be called small lyrical sketches or pictures of village life. The strength of Yesenin’s lyrics lies in the fact that in it the feeling of love for the Motherland is expressed not abstractly and rhetorically, but specifically, in visible images, in pictures of native nature. Often the landscape is not inspiring. The poet exclaims with pain:
You are my abandoned land,
You are my land, wasteland.
But Yesenin saw not only a sad landscape, joyless pictures; he saw another Motherland: in joyful spring decoration, with fragrant flowers and herbs, with the bottomless blue of the sky. Already in Yesenin’s early poems there are declarations of love for Russia. So, one of his most famous works is Goy You, My Dear Rus'. One of Yesenin’s earliest stylistic primaries was writing poetry in a language that gravitated toward Old Russian speech (for example, the Song of Evpatiy Kolovrat). The poet uses ancient Russian names to construct images; he uses such ancient words as a pictorial means. Another group of Yesenin’s stylistic primas is associated with the orientation towards the romanization of rural life and with the desire to express the beauty of strong lyrical feeling (for example, feelings of admiration for nature, falling in love with a woman, love for to man, to life), the beauty of being in general.
Yesenin's poetry lives because in
in it the reader finds those close to him
pictures of native nature and dear to the heart
feelings of great, selfless and
enduring love for your great Motherland."
I.S. Events
Sergei Yesenin lived only thirty years, but his creative legacy contains great ideological and artistic wealth. It reflected the contradictions, quests, and complex psychology of a person in a transitional time. Everything dark and painful that visited the poet was ultimately connected with yesterday, with what was disappearing into the twilight of history. Everything bright and pure in his poetry, all his hopes and joys had their source in the bright morning of revolutionary Russia - the first page of the new history of mankind,
Ksenin's poetry is rooted in deep folk soil. This was clearly reflected in the artistic features of his poetry, which are closely related to folk poetry.
A characteristic feature of Russian folklore is the principle of psychological parallelism: the surrounding nature is closely connected with the thoughts and feelings of a person, it seems to share joy and sorrow with him, sympathizes with him, warns him, instills hope in him, cries over his unfulfilled dreams. This historically established feature of Russian folk poetry underlies all of Yesenin’s lyrics. The poet constantly turns to Russian nature when he expresses his most intimate thoughts about himself, about his place in life, about his past, about the present, about the future. “Soon I will feel cold without leaves,” “The bad weather will lick the path I have lived with its tongue,” he said in an hour of bitter reflection. The depiction of her own experiences through pictures of her native nature led to her humanization: “The golden grove talked with a cheerful birch tongue”, “A bird cherry tree is sleeping in a white cape”, “Somewhere in a clearing a maple tree is dancing drunk”, “A green-haired birch tree in a white skirt stands over a pond ...” This principle of depiction brings nature unusually closer to man and makes us fall in love with it especially ardently.
Yesenin also borrowed many of the colors of his poetry from Russian nature. He doesn’t just copy them, each paint has its own meaning and content, resulting in a color reflection of feelings.
Blue and cyan - these colors are most often found in Russian nature, this is the color of the atmosphere and water. In Yesenin's poetry, the color blue symbolizes peace and quiet, peace of mind; person: “Unspeakable, blue, tender...”, My land is quiet after storms, after thunderstorms...” The blue color conveys a joyful feeling of space and freedom: “blue field”, “blue doors of the day”, “blue star”, “blue Rus'...”
“The scarlet color is dear to the whole world,” says a popular saying. This favorite color of Yesenin always signifies in his poetry virgin purity, spotlessness, purity of feeling (“The scarlet color of dawn was woven on the lake...”). The color pink symbolizes youth and “fresh rosy cheeks”, “thoughts of rosy days...”. Unforgettable “pink horse” by Yesenin.
These paint-symbols are very characteristic of the romantic poet, who uses colors not so much in a direct, but in a conventional meaning. One of the reasons for the strong emotional impact of Yesenin’s lyrics lies in the color display of thoughts and feelings.
The connection of his poetics with folk art is most noticeable in the use of riddles, proverbs, and sayings.
At the heart of a folk riddle there is always the grain of an image. Yesenin felt this well and widely used the metaphorical structure of folk riddles.
Yesenin did not just repeat riddles, he developed the metaphorical principle that is inherent in them, and subjected them to original poetic processing. There is a well-known riddle about the sun: “A white cat climbs through the window.” We find Yesenin using it directly: “Now the sun is like a cat...” But at the same time, based on this comparison, he creates a derivative poetic image that conveys a picture of the evening dawn: “In a quiet hour, when the dawn is on the roof, like a kitten , washes his mouth with his paw...” There is no doubt that the “dawn-kitten” traces its ancestry to the “sun-cat”.
There is no doubt that Yesenin is connected with folk proverbs and sayings, which reflect one of the most striking features of Russian folklore - the aphoristic nature of the language.
More than one generation of Russian writers was brought up on this rich artistic material, starting with Griboyedov, Pushkin and especially Nekrasov. Each of the writers mastered this great heritage in their own way. In Yesenin’s work it is easy to notice a direct adherence to proverbs and sayings. Thus, the basis of his lines “The red rowan fire burns in the garden, but it cannot warm anyone” undoubtedly lies in the saying: “It shines, but does not warm.” But the poet did not stop at such periphrases.
The lyricism and emotionality of Yesenin’s poetry entailed a peculiar use of the aphoristic structure of Russian speech, so brilliantly reflected in proverbs and sayings. Formulas of feeling - this is how you can call the aphorisms of Yesenin, a soulful lyricist. These formulas hold his verse together, giving it enormous artistic impact, making it especially memorable: “So few roads have been traveled, so many mistakes have been made,” “Whoever loved cannot love, whoever is burned, you cannot set him on fire,” “If If there are no flowers in the middle of winter, then there is no need to regret them...”
What brings Yesenin’s poetry closer to folk poetry is the naivety of his lyrics. It is no coincidence that many of his poems are set to music.
“My lyrics are alive with one great love, love for the Motherland. The feeling of the Motherland is fundamental in my work,” said Yesenin. This love and these feelings were clearly imprinted not only in the content of his lyrics, but also in his very poetics, organically connected with the poetics of the people.
Yesenin's poetry, with great romantic depth, embodied the world of human feelings caused by the unprecedented disruption of the social life of Russia; it captured the complex, difficult, contradictory process of formation of the consciousness of the broad masses involved in the revolutionary reorganization of reality. Interest in the inner world of a person, in his thoughts, feelings, psychology, changing in the course of building a new life, as well as the constant inescapable desire to express this sincerely, truthfully, each time pushed the poet to select more and more new stylistic means.
Overcoming numerous influences and contradictions, Yesenin asserted with his later work such artistic and aesthetic principles of depicting life that were established and developed in the literature of socialist realism.
Yesenin's poetry is an integral part of national artistic creativity. It emotionally and psychologically reflects the most difficult era of social life. These are the general conclusions about Yesenin’s poetry that can be drawn by reading some of his works. Despite the complexity of Yesenin’s life quest, he still found his way, following the path of revolution, along the path of radical transformations of Russia. He realized the beauty of the new Russia, replacing his, Yesenin’s Russia. Yesenin is a poet standing at the crossroads between the old and the new, despite this, his lyrics touch our hearts with their sincerity, love for the Motherland, depth of feelings.
The originality of S. Yesenin's poetics.
The beauty and richness of Yesenin's lyrics.
Features of the artistic style.
Yesenin's lyrics are very beautiful and rich. The poet uses various artistic means and techniques. Epithets, comparisons, repetitions, and metaphors occupy a large place in Yesenin’s work. They are used as a means of painting, they convey the variety of shades of nature, the richness of its colors, the external portrait features of the heroes (“fragrant bird cherry”, “the red moon was harnessed to our sleigh like a foal”, “in the darkness the damp moon, like a yellow raven... hovering above the ground "). Repetitions play an important role in Yesenin’s poetry, as in folk songs. They are used to convey a person’s state of mind and to create a rhythmic pattern. Yesenin uses repetitions with rearrangement of words:
Trouble has befallen my soul,
Trouble befell my soul.
Yesenin’s poetry is full of appeals, often these are appeals to nature:
Lovely birch thickets!
Using the stylistic features of folk lyrics, Yesenin seems to pass them through literary traditions and through his poetic worldview.
More often he wrote about rural nature, which always looked his is simple and uncomplicated. This happened because Yesenin found epithets, comparisons, metaphors in popular speech:
Sparrows are playful,
Like lonely children.
Just like the people, Yesenin is characterized by animating nature, attributing human feelings to it, i.e., the technique of personification:
You are my fallen maple,
icy maple,
Why are you standing bent over?
under a white snowstorm?
Or what did you see?
Or what did you hear?
Yesenin’s moods and feelings, like those of the people, are in tune with nature, the poet seeks salvation and tranquility from her. Nature is compared with human experiences:
My ring was not found.
Out of sadness, I went to the meadow.
The river laughed after me:
"Cutie has a new friend."
Features of metaphor in Yesenin's poetry.
Metaphor (from the Greek metaphora - transfer) is a figurative meaning of a word, when one phenomenon or object is likened to another, and both similarity and contrast can be used.
Metaphor is the most common means of creating new meanings.
Yesenin's poetics are distinguished by a tendency not to abstractions, hints, vague symbols of ambiguity, but to materiality and concreteness. The poet creates his own epithets, metaphors, comparisons and images. But he creates them according to the folklore principle: he takes material for the image from the same rural world and from the natural world and seeks to characterize one phenomenon or object with another. Epithets, comparisons, metaphors in Yesenin’s lyrics do not exist on their own, for the sake of a beautiful form, but in order to more fully and deeply express their worldview.
Hence the desire for universal harmony, for the unity of all things on earth. Therefore, one of the basic laws of Yesenin’s world is universal metaphorism. People, animals, plants, elements and objects - all of these, according to Sergei Alexandrovich, are children of one mother - nature.
The structure of comparisons, images, metaphors, all verbal means is taken from peasant life, native and understandable.
I reach for the warmth, inhale the softness of the bread
And mentally biting the cucumbers with a crunch,
Behind the smooth surface the trembling sky
Leads the cloud out of the stall by the bridle.
Here even the mill is a log bird
With only one wing, he stands with his eyes closed.
Poetic vocabulary.
E. S. Rogover, in one of his articles, argued that every poet has his own “calling card,” as it were: either this is a feature of poetic technique, or it is the richness and beauty of the lyrics, or the originality of the vocabulary. All of the above, of course, applies to Yesenin, but I would like to note the peculiarities of the poet’s vocabulary. [Ibid., p. 198.]
The specificity and clarity of the poetic vision is expressed by the most everyday everyday vocabulary; the dictionary is simple, it does not contain bookish or even more abstract words and expressions. This language was used by fellow villagers and fellow countrymen, and in it, without any religious overtones, there are religious words that the poet uses to express his purely secular ideas.
In the poem “The Smoke Floods...” the haystacks are compared to churches, and the mournful singing of the wood grouse with a call to the all-night vigil.
And yet one should not see the poet’s religiosity in this. He is far from her and paints a picture of his native land, forgotten and abandoned, flooded with floods, cut off from the big world, left alone with the dull yellow moon, the dim light of which illuminates the haystacks, and they, like churches, surround the village at the spinning wheels. But, unlike churches, the stacks are silent, and for them the wood grouse, with mournful and sad singing, calls for an all-night vigil in the silence of the swamps.
A grove is also visible, which “covers the bare forest with blue darkness.” That’s all the low-key, joyless picture created by the poet, all that he saw in his native land, flooded and covered with blue darkness, devoid of the joy of people for whom, truly, it would not be a sin to pray.
And this motive of regret about the poverty and deprivation of his native land will pass through the early work of the poet, and the ways of expressing this deep social motive in pictures of nature, seemingly neutral to the social aspects of life, will be increasingly improved in parallel with the development of the poet’s vocabulary.
In the poems “Imitation of a Song”, “Under the Wreath of a Forest Daisy”, “Tanyusha Was Good...”, “Play, Play, Little Talian...”, the poet’s attraction to the form and motifs of oral folk art is especially noticeable. Therefore, they contain a lot of traditional folklore expressions such as: “licious separation”, like “treacherous mother-in-law”, “I’ll fall in love with you if I look at you”, “in the dark mansion”, scythe - “gas chamber-snake”, “blue-eyed guy”.
Poetic technique of S. Yesenin.
Sergei Yesenin’s lyrical talent is also noticeable in the design of lines, stanzas and individual poems, in the so-called poetic technique. Let us first note the poet’s verbal originality: he expresses joy and grief, riot and sadness that fill his poems verbosely, achieving expressiveness in every word, in every line. Therefore, the usual size of his best lyric poems rarely exceeds twenty lines, which is enough for him to embody sometimes complex and deep experiences or create a complete and vivid picture.
Some examples:
They didn't give the mother a son,
The first joy is not for future use.
And on a stake under the aspen
The breeze ruffled the skin.
The last two lines not only explain the first, the metonymic simile they contain contains a whole picture characteristic of rural life. The skin on the stake is a sign of the murder committed, which remains outside the scope of the poem.
The poet is also sensitive to the colors contained in the word itself or in a series of words. His cows speak “in a nodding language,” and his cabbage is “wavy.” In the words one can hear the roll call of nod - liv, vol - nov, vo - va.
The sounds seem to pick up and support each other, preserving the given sound design of the line, its melody. This is especially noticeable in the harmony of vowels: your lake melancholy; the tower is dark, the forest is green.
The poet's stanza is usually four-line, in which each line is syntactically complete; hyphenation, which interferes with melodiousness, is an exception. Four- and two-line stanzas do not require a complex rhyme system and do not provide its variety. In terms of their grammatical composition, Yesenin’s rhymes are not the same, but the poet’s attraction to precise rhyme is noticeable, giving a special smoothness and sonority to the verse.[. P.F. Yushin. Poetry of Sergei Yesenin 1910-1923. M., 1966.- 317 p..]
The moon butts the cloud with its horn,
Bathed in blue dust.
And he nodded for a month behind the mound,
Bathed in blue dust.
The moon in Yesenin's poetry.
Yesenin is perhaps the most lunar poet in Russian literature. The most common image of poetic attributes is the moon and month, which are mentioned in 351 of his works more than 140 times.
Yesenin's lunar spectrum is very diverse and can be divided into two groups.
First: white, silver, pearl, pale. The traditional colors of the moon are collected here, although poetry is precisely where the traditional is transformed into the unusual.
The second group, in addition to yellow, includes: scarlet, red, red, gold, lemon, amber, blue.
Most often, Yesenin’s moon or month is yellow. Then come: gold, white, red, silver, lemon, amber, scarlet, red, pale, blue. Pearl color is used only once:
Not the sister of the month from the dark swamp
In pearls, she threw the kokoshnik into the sky, -
Oh, how Martha walked out of the gate...
A very characteristic technique for Yesenin - in the sense of its uncharacteristicness: the poet uses pure, natural colors, traditional for ancient Russian painting.
Yesenin has no red moon at all. Maybe only in “Poem about 36”:
The month is wide and al...
The Yesenin moon is always on the move. This is not a lime ball ascended into the sky and casting a sleepy stupor over the world, but necessarily living, spiritual:
The road is pretty good
Nice chill ringing.
Moon with golden powder
Scattered the distance of villages.
Complex metaphors, which Yesenin does not avoid, cannot be attributed to some kind of poetic exoticism. “Our speech is the sand in which a little pearl is lost,” wrote Yesenin in the article “The Father’s Word.”
Yesenin's diverse moon turns out to be strictly subordinated to traditional folklore imagery, on which it is just as dependent as its celestial counterpart is on the Earth. But at the same time: just as the real moon controls the tides of the earth’s seas and oceans, the study of Yesenin’s lunar metaphors allows us to see in the apparent repetition of folk images a concentrate of “very long and complex definitions of thought” (Yesenin).
But only from a month
Silver light will splash
Something else turns blue to me,
Something else appears in the fog.
Yesenin often uses words with diminutive suffixes. He also uses old Russian words and fairy-tale names: howl, svei, etc.
Yesenin’s color scheme is also interesting. He most often uses three colors: blue, gold and red. And these colors are also symbolic.
Blue - the desire for the sky, for the impossible, for the beautiful:
In the blue evening, in the moonlit evening
I was once handsome and young.
Gold is the original color from which everything appeared and in which everything disappears: “Ring, ring, golden Rus'.”
Red is the color of love, passion:
Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness!
The sun hasn't gone out yet.
Dawn with a red prayer book
Prophesies good news...
Often Yesenin, using the rich experience of folk poetry, resorts to the technique of personification:
His bird cherry tree is “sleeping in a white cape,” the willows are crying, the poplars are whispering, “the spruce girls are sad,” “it’s like a pine tree is tied with a white scarf,” “the blizzard is crying like a gypsy violin,” etc.
Images of animals in the poetry of S. Yesenin.
Yesenin's poetry is figurative. But his images are also simple: “Autumn is a red mare.” These images are again borrowed from folklore, for example, a lamb is an image of an innocent victim.
In the literature of different times, images of animals have always been present. They served as material for the emergence of Aesopian language in fairy tales about animals, and later in fables. In the literature of “modern times,” in epic and lyric poetry, animals acquire equal rights with humans, becoming the object or subject of the narrative. Often a person is “tested for humanity” by his attitude towards an animal.
Sergei Yesenin’s poetry also contains the motif of “blood relationship” with the animal world; he calls them “lesser brothers.”
I'm happy that I kissed women,
Crushed flowers, lying on the grass
And animals, like our smaller brothers
Never hit me on the head. (“Now we are leaving little by little.”, 1924)
Along with domestic animals, we find images of representatives of wild nature.
Of the 339 poems examined, 123 mention animals, birds, insects, and fish. Horse (13), cow (8), raven, dog, nightingale (6), calves, cat, dove, crane (5), sheep, mare, dog (4), foal, swan, rooster, owl (3), sparrow, wolf, capercaillie, cuckoo, horse, frog, fox, mouse, tit (2), stork, ram, butterfly, camel, rook, goose, gorilla, toad, snake, oriole, sandpiper, chickens, corncrake, donkey, parrot , magpies, catfish, pig, cockroaches, lapwing, bumblebee, pike, lamb (1).
S. Yesenin most often turns to the image of a horse or cow. He introduces these animals into the narrative of peasant life as an integral part of the life of the Russian peasant. Since ancient times, a horse, a cow, a dog and a cat have accompanied a person in his hard work, sharing both joys and troubles with him.
The horse was an assistant when working in the field, in transporting goods, and in military combat. The dog brought prey and guarded the house. The cow was the breadwinner in a peasant family, and the cat caught mice and simply personified home comfort. The image of a horse, as an integral part of everyday life, is found in the poems “The Herd” (1915), “Farewell, dear Pushcha...” (1916), “This sadness cannot be scattered now...” (1924). Pictures of village life change in connection with events taking place in the country. And if in the first poem we see “herds of horses in the green hills,” then in the subsequent ones:
A mowed hut,
The cry of a sheep, and in the distance in the wind
The little horse wags his skinny tail,
Looking into the unkind pond.
(“This sadness cannot now be scattered…”, 1924)
The village fell into decay and the proud and majestic horse “turned” into a “little horse,” which personifies the plight of the peasantry in those years.
The innovation and originality of S. Yesenin, the poet, was manifested in the fact that when drawing or mentioning animals in everyday space (field, river, village, yard, house, etc.), he is not an animalist, that is, he does not set the goal of recreating the image of one or another animal. Animals, being part of everyday space and environment, appear in his poetry as a source and means of artistic and philosophical understanding of the surrounding world, allowing one to reveal the content of a person’s spiritual life.
Leading themes of poetry.
Whatever Yesenin writes about, he thinks in images taken from the natural world. Each of his poems, written on any topic, is always unusually colorful, close and understandable to everyone.
Village theme.
At the heart of Yesenin’s early poetry is love for his native land. It is to the native land of the peasant land, and not to Russia with its cities, plants, factories, universities, theaters, political and social life. He essentially did not know Russia in the sense that we understand it. For him, his homeland is his own village and those fields and forests in which it is lost. Russia - Rus', Rus' - village.
Very often Yesenin turns to Rus' in his works. At first, he glorifies the patriarchal principles in the life of his native village: he draws “huts in the robes of an image,” likens the Motherland to a “black nun” who “reads psalms for her sons,” idealizes joyful and happy “good fellows.” These are the poems “Go you, my dear Rus'...”, “You are my abandoned land...”, “Dove”, “Rus”. True, sometimes the poet feels “warm sadness” and “cold sorrow” when he encounters peasant poverty and sees the abandonment of his native land. But this only deepens and strengthens his boundless love for the yearning, lonely land.
About Rus' - raspberry field
And the blue that fell into the river -
I love you to the point of joy and pain
Your lake melancholy.
Yesenin knows how to feel gaiety in the very melancholy of his native land, in dormant Rus' - the accumulation of heroic forces. His heart responds to girls’ laughter, to dancing around the fires, to the boys’ dancing. You can, of course, stare at the “potholes”, “bumps and depressions” of your native village, or you can see “how the skies turn blue all around.” Yesenin adopts a bright, optimistic view of the fate of his Fatherland. That is why his poems so often contain lyrical confessions addressed to Rus':
But I love you, gentle motherland!
And I can’t figure out why.
…………………………….
Oh, my Rus', dear homeland,
Sweet rest in the crack of the kupira.
……………………………..
I'm here again, in my own family,
My land, thoughtful and gentle!
For an inhabitant of this Rus', the entire feat of life is peasant labor. The peasant is downtrodden, poor, goalless. His land is just as poor:
The willows are listening
Wind whistle...
You are my forgotten land,
You are my native land.
Based on Yesenin’s poems, it is possible to reconstruct his early peasant-religious tendencies. It turns out that the peasant’s mission is divine, for the peasant is, as it were, involved in God’s creativity. God is the father. Earth is mother. The son is the harvest.
Russia for Yesenin is Rus', that fertile land, the homeland on which his great-grandfathers worked and where his grandfather and father work now. Hence the simplest identification: if the earth is a cow, then the signs of this concept can be transferred to the concept of homeland. [V.F. Khodasevich. Necropolis: Memoirs.- M.: Soviet writer, 1991.- 192 p..]
It is impossible to imagine the image of Yesenin’s country without such familiar signs as “blue cloth of heaven”, “salt melancholy”, “lime of bell towers” and “birch - candle”, and in mature years - “bonfire of red rowan” and “low house” , “in the rollicking steppe acceleration, the bell laughs to the point of tears.” It is difficult to imagine Yesenin’s Russia without such a picture:
Blue sky, colored arc.
Quietly the steppe banks flow,
Smoke stretches near the crimson villages
The wedding of crows covered the palisade.
The theme of the homeland in Yesenin's lyrics.
Yesenin was an inspired singer of Russia. All his most sublime ideas and innermost feelings were connected with her. “My lyrics are alive with one great love - love for the Motherland,” the poet admitted. “The feeling of the Motherland is the main thing in my work.”
The poeticization of the native nature of central Russia, so constant in Yesenin’s poetry, was an expression of a feeling of love for his native land. When you read such early poems as “The bird cherry tree is pouring snow...”, “Beloved land! The heart dreams…”, when in reality you see the fields with their “crimson expanse”, the blue of lakes and rivers, the lulling “shaggy forest” with its “ringing pine forest”, the “path of villages” with “roadside grasses”, tender Russian birches with their joyful hello, involuntarily the heart, like the author’s, “glows like cornflowers,” and “turquoise burns in it.” You begin to love this “native land”, “the country of birch chintz” in a special way.
In turbulent revolutionary times, the poet already speaks of “revived Rus',” a formidable country. Yesenin now sees her as a huge bird, preparing for further flight (“O Rus', flap your wings”), acquiring “different strength,” clearing off the old black tar. The image of Christ that appears in the poet symbolizes both the image of insight and, at the same time, new torment and suffering. Yesenin writes with despair: “After all, the socialism that is coming is completely different from what I thought.” And the poet painfully experiences the collapse of his illusions. However, in “Confessions of a Hooligan” he repeats again:
I love my homeland.
I love my Motherland very much!
In the poem “Departing Rus',” Yesenin already definitely speaks of that old thing that is dying and inevitably remains in the past. The poet sees people who believe in the future. Albeit timidly and apprehensively, but “they are talking about a new life.” The author peers into the boiling of a changed life, into the “new light” that burns “of another generation near the huts.” The poet is not only surprised, but also wants to absorb this newness into his heart. True, even now he adds a disclaimer to his poems:
I accept everything.
I take everything as is.
Ready to follow the beaten tracks.
I will give my whole soul to October and May,
But I won’t give the lyre to my dear one.
And yet Yesenin extends his hand to a new generation, a young, unfamiliar tribe. The idea of the inseparability of one’s fate from the fate of Russia is expressed by the poet in the poem “The feather grass is sleeping. Dear plain...” and “Unspeakable, blue, tender...”
Theme of love.
Yesenin began writing about love in the late period of his work (before that time he rarely wrote on this topic). Yesenin's love lyrics are very emotional, expressive, melodic, in the center of it are the complex vicissitudes of love relationships and the unforgettable image of a woman. The poet managed to overcome the touch of naturalism and bohemianism that was characteristic of him during the Imagist period, freed himself from vulgarisms and abusive language, which sometimes sounded dissonant in his poems about love, and sharply reduced the gap between rough reality and the ideal that was felt in individual lyrical works.
Yesenin’s outstanding creation in the field of love lyrics was the cycle “Persian Motifs,” which the poet himself considered the best of all that he had created.
The poems included in this cycle largely contradict those lines about love that sounded in the collection “Moscow Tavern”. This is evidenced by the first poem of this cycle - “My former wound has subsided.” “Persian Motifs” depicts an ideal world of beauty and harmony, which, despite all its obvious patriarchy, is devoid of rough prose and catastrophism. Therefore, to reflect this beautiful kingdom of dreams, peace and love, the lyrical hero of this cycle is touching and soft.
Conclusion.
A. N. Tolstoy.
The words of A. N. Tolstoy about Yesenin can be used as an epigraph to the work of the outstanding Russian poet of the twentieth century. And Yesenin himself admitted that he would like to “throw out his whole soul into words.” The “flood of feelings” that flooded his poetry cannot but evoke emotional excitement and empathy in response.
