Poetry of age -related restrictions

Conversation about the unobvious sense of the novel "Eugene Onegin"

In February, the 200th anniversary of the release of the first chapter of Evgeny Onegin turned 200 years old. Over the years, the romance has generated a huge number of transformations, continuations, parodies and all kinds of fan fictions. Some of them were collected by the famous literary critic Mikhail Stroganov in the book “Variations on the themes of“ Onegin ”. The poetic novel by A. S. Pushkin in the imitations of his contemporaries ”(2024). Nobody reached Pushkin’s relics and depths. Pavel Rybkin asked Mikhail Stroganov why it happened. It turns out that no one saw the main plot collision of the novel: the hero becomes the victim of his inability to live and love according to age.

Starting from February 24, 2022, we were all in the face of the advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editorial office of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that the world remains in the world and fiction.

- In the preface to the “Variations ...” you write: “Pushkin showed that it was so much and opened the doors. And the crowd fell into these open doors! " So - how exactly? Is this an appeal to the prose of everyday life, the opportunity to surrender in verses of the most unbridled household? The uncertainty of heroes? “Voster” of letters, all these gaps of stanzas and outfits? Non-Finito style-"from the unfinished"?

Who knows what fame is!
At what cost he bought the right
Opportunity or grace
Above everything is so wise and sly
Joke, mysteriously silent
And call your leg to the leg? ..

Mine is from this poem. Everything came together for me : an appeal to the prose of everyday life, and the opportunity to surrender to the verses of the most unbridled household, and the uncertainty of the heroes, and the “voidness” of the letter, and the Non-Finito style, and much more. The main thing is not what, the main thing is how. So , as it did not work out before him, as, probably, after him did not work. All the others were loaded with meanings, and in Pushkin everything seemed easy and simple. And contemporaries were bought. But they did not see the poet’s drafts and did not know how much he bought the right, the opportunity or grace ”to write this way ... So they also began to write easily and simply. But there was nothing behind their lightness and simplicity. As a result, it turned out so .

- Why? After all, imitation is the mirror of the original, often crooked. Does the epigones simply not bring to extreme those features of the novel that, for example, Pisarev, who was critically noted, himself sincerely amazed by the fact that it was possible?

-I would share imitators into contemporaries and, I ask you to forgive for a not quite successful definition, users-storage users. The descendants were never particularly interested in me, but contemporaries, on the contrary, were very hotly interested in, because they still tried to imitate actually, that is, to reproduce everything as Pushkin’s. They were struck by the novelty and external accessibility of the form. They imitated the not yet frozen form, transmitting all her bends and flickering. Contemporaries hoped to repeat success, walked along a tino path, and in this sense, of course, we can say that their texts were a mirror of the original. The descendants reproduced a cooled, hardened shape under which there was no longer a living fire. She was set in advance and could not hit. But Pushkin could be, for example, shaken by new authorities, the same Pisarev. Say, Dmitry Minaev in his Eugene Onegin of our time (1865) almost literally reproduces the comments of criticism, in particular, when the hero, already tailored along Turgenevo-Bazarovsky patterns, is still reading a letter to Pushkinskaya Tatyana:

At first I wanted to be silent
(It would be not good to be silent!),
When would I have hope
At least once a week to meet you,
To just listen to your speeches ...
(Here is a curious feature:
I did not open my mouth before her
From the first to the last meeting.)
Why did you visit us?
(Oh, my creator! Is it trouble?)
I never knew you
And, not overwhelmed with a new feeling,
Was it over time - who knows? -
(So what could I interfere?
Or I have understood everything tight! ..)
And an excellent spouse
And a virtuous mother.

The origin of passages in brackets in italics is easy to trace under the article by Pisarev “ Pushkin and Belinsky ”, which came out in the same 1865 as Roman Minaev, - the poetic response was instant. But it is clear that the author, as later the other creators of all sorts of “Onegin of our days”, pursued completely different goals than simply reproducing the original. Perhaps I would like to reprint Minaev, but precisely because he is interesting in itself, without any attitude to Pushkin.

- Minaev, by the way, has his own plot, not Pushkin. Tatyana seems to have poisoned her husband. Onegin spoke in court a prosecutor, and the surviving Lensky as a lawyer. His defense was confused, but with ardent, and Tatyana was justified. This is a full -fledged story, unlike most epigonial variations, where the plot either crumbles or is extremely poor. But aren't they valuable that reproduce the same poverty of the plot in Pushkin? Does he also keep on naked symmetry of parts there either? Or is it on some concept?

- The plot never holds: neither on symmetry, naked or dressed, nor on the concept. The plot is some kind of makar organized plot, somehow told life material. These are some Makar and the image depend on how the author sees the world. But the authors never write about what he is now, this very world. They write about how it should be. Pushkin believed that the world should be brought into harmony. And he built “Onegin” harmoniously. But the romance or textbook of life built harmoniously does not mean at all that life itself is harmonious. All the same, “Life without sense, and Roman without end” turned out - I don’t know if Belinsky understood the whole depth of what he said, because this is pure existentialism!

-Nevertheless, according to your point of view set forth both in the preface to the book and in separate articles, there is a real conflict, and therefore meaning and the end, there is still in the novel. This is a tragic clash of types of behavior due to the experience of the general cyclic time and linear time, individual. Please explain your point of view.

- If we agree that the most entertaining science for humans is a person himself, then in this case the most entertaining work for the literary critic is the study of how literature depicts a person and, in particular, his age. Gender, nationality, bodily are more complicated for description. But most importantly, age exists in a continuous change. A modern person can, of course, change both gender and body, but only by violently. The age changes by itself and at the same time imperiously changes our behavior.

Writers have always had two possibilities to depict age -related changes: to compare the development of a person with the daily or one -year temporal cycles or with the linear movement of the water flow. The cyclic concept of time is the most ancient, it arose in the Neolithic. The linear is clearly formulated, probably in the books that made up the Bible, first in the Old, and then in the New Testament. These two concepts always compete with each other in the Middle Ages and in the new time, as they set different types of behavior. The cyclic type is associated with nature, with “all”, a crowd, and linear, biographical - with individuality, with “one”, with a hero.

Pushkin focused on the well -known ideas about the age of human life. The biblical patriarchs lived up to 70 years and were considered deep elders. 70 years were the limit of human life. Take a household correspondence of Pushkin’s time: "He was a peppy old man for 50 years." For a woman, the threshold is even less. The mother of Rodion Raskolnikov, for example, in her 45-the old woman is already simply because the widow, and also has a son-student and a daughter for outrage. Everything, shot.

The age standards of behavior have exceptional power and power over a person, because they are initially inherent in him and express his own, and not imposed by someone from outside of aspiration. Of course, a real hero is a person, at least not like others. But, violating the norms of age -related behavior, he puts himself in the most tragic position that can be imagined - deprives himself of simple human happiness.

- Excuse me, but does it not turn out that in this case the whole essence of the novel comes down to the famous “Blessed, who was young, // Blessed, who matured in time”? That is, indeed, “mediocrity is one // We are not strange on the shoulder”?

-It is clear that the word blessed sounds here bitter-irony. Such bliss really reaches mainly mediocrity. Nevertheless, it is the cyclic time of generations that determines the life -acceptable nature of Pushkin's worldview. The tragedy of each individual life is removed by the general course of the lives of all people, and not by the progressive-straightinated, but in a circular one: the life of the fathers is repeated in the life of their children. On the contrary, life contrary to the laws of cyclic time can be realized as tragic. This is the life of Onegin, who was not young in his youth, but at thirty years old he experienced real passion. The essence of the novel, perhaps, lies in other, no less famous words, and, by the way, from the same eighth chapter, only closer to the finale, Stanza XXIX, not X: not X: not X:

Love all ages are submissive;
But young, virgin hearts
Her impulses are beneficial,
Like storms of spring fields:
In the rain of passions, they will fresh
And they are updated and ripen -
And the mighty life gives
And a magnificent color and a sweet fruit.
But in age late and barren,
At the turn of our years,
The dead trace is sad:
So the storms of autumn is cold
A meadow is turned into a swamp
And expose the forest around.

“At the age of thirty people usually marry,” Pushkin thought and followed his beliefs. Onegin lives with him, “languishing in the inaction of leisure, // Without service, without a wife, without deed ...” Fate brutally avenged him for this. But, of course, life, along with a “decisive crowd”, for a long time, could not have arranged for order. One path threatens with loss of personality, the other - a tragedy. Pushkin does not yet know where it is better.

In Eugene Onegin, he, in fact, proposed a new solution to the person’s age behavior, but not in relation to one of years, but in relation to how this issue was resolved earlier. The poet showed that a person at each individual stage of his life does not understand what he should do. Children want to be adults, old people-to catch up with the past youth, which is why they are buried for 18-year-old girls. Then Marshak wrote about this about this-although, in my opinion, he was a re-story of the English Nursery Rhymes:

My boy! I give you this song.
Calculate your strength.
And, if you say, you do not know how to "dick-ox"-
Screech, not embarrassed: "I-and!"

In a number of works of the 1830s, Pushkin passes quite successfully between the scillage of the cyclic and charibade of linear time. And although he still does not know how I just said which path is better, but is still inclined to life "like everyone else." If previously linear biographical time has invariably characterized a positive hero and was perceived as the embodiment of individuality, now it embodies individualism, the beginning of a negative, certain selfish force, which violates human foundations. “Hero, be a person before” - these words were preserved only in the drafts of “Eugene Onegin” and were not included in the final text. However, we remember what words the poem “Hero” of 1830 crown the poem: “Leave the hero to the hero! What // He will be without him? Tyrant".

-You build the genealogy of Evgeny Onegin even from the lyceum plan of the fairy tale novel “Fatam, or human mind” (1813). In an amazingly way, he anticipates the “mysterious story of Benjamin Batton” by Fitzgerald. Are violations of age behavior norms of age -based behavior, too?

- Yes, already “veils” contains Onegin's grain. And on the novel Fitzgerald is really very similar. Following the retelling of Pavel Annenkov from the book “A. S. Pushkin. Materials for his biography and evaluation of works ”(1873), the plot“ Fatama ”is as follows. Two old men pray to the sky to give them a son - and this, of course, is against age -related norms of behavior. A kind fairy is and says that their son will be born and will immediately reach matureness, honors, wealth and glory. But after this, he will lose these benefits, moving back, from maturity to youth, adolescence, infancy and so until he becomes a helpless child. That's just “Fatam” is a philosophical fairy tale, there, by definition, everything is conditional, it is, as it were, about everyone. “Onegin” is a novel about modern life, about one of the many, a certain individual story.

It is interesting, however, that in a letter to Peter Vyazemsky in June 1824, Pushkin wrote about the deceased Byron: “He was created all over; There was no gradualness in him, he suddenly matured and matured - sang and fell silent; And his first sounds no longer returned to him-after the 4th song of the Child-Harold Byron we did not hear, but some other poet with high human talent wrote. ”

It is important not the adequacy of the interpretation of Byron's work, but the fact that the emphasis is placed precisely on violation of the norms of age behavior. In a similar way in the Onegin, “Feelings early <...> cooled down,” and Tatyana did not pick up dolls in her hands, because “she liked the novels early,” and Lensky “sang the color fading life // Not even at the age of eve”. This conflict of two types of time and behavior permeates the whole novel. So powerfully, like Pushkin, the epigones because they could not write that they did not understand this clash, did not understand his main thought.

1/3

2/3

3/3

- I suspect that they realized her even in the opposite way and saw a romantic hero rather in Onegin, even more than that, a poet. In fact, why cannot he distinguish Yamba from Pushkin from Khorey, and in imitation, on the contrary, writes poetry? Evgeny Velsky was the poets at Mikhail Voskresensky, Boris Ulin at Alexander Karamzin, Leander at Pavel Kukolnik ... In the end, not fictional, but real poets will write their memoirs, sometimes completely monumental, recall the poem without an object (1976) Valery Perelevin. What is the matter?

- If you answer the question why Onegin is not a poet, but the heroes of imitations are poets, it is simple. We have already said. Pushkin showed that it is possible. The crowd broke. The crowd did not really understand that “Onegin” is not just a novel, but “Romance in Verses is a devilish difference.” And what the words “novel requires chatter” mean, they also did not understand much. Well, if Lermontov compared Pushkin with Lensky, then what to expect from everyone else?

As for the “Poem without an object” Valery Pereleshin, then, as I understand it, it was written not in imitation of Pushkin, but in the imitation of Akhmatova, that is, not even Akhmatova as such, but what was expressed in the “poem without a hero”: the death of this very hero, the death of the author - all postmodern things. Another thing is that in the time of the mage, that is, in fact, in our times when writing poetry has become easier, we should learn tongue -tied up, if you are not ready to shut up.

“But doesn’t the transformation of Onegin into the poet reflect not only the perception of the figure of the main character, but also the literature of the novel?” Alexander Dolinin believes that he turned out to be "more than an encyclopedia of Russian and European literature than an encyclopedia of Russian life." And Lotman believed that the growing of “literature” in the novel was connected precisely by the author’s desire to approach living life. What is the matter?

- I do not see a big difference between the points of view of Dolinin and Lotman. They write about one. I agree with Yuri Mikhailovich that literature does not contradict “vitality”. And I agree with Alexander Alekseevich: literary criticism easily copes with the “literature” of the Pushkin novel, but therefore often silent about its “content”. But meaningfully-for example, as I (I recognize it modestly)-no one wrote about Onegin. Even Belinsky. He, of course, has great formulas, but it is formulas, not expanded into analysis, like the already mentioned "life without meaning, but a novel without end."

- Then let me again about the “content”, that is, about age. Onegin’s Pushkin’s characteristic of the gentle passion, which was for him “Issue and labor, and flour, and reward”, some imitators read literally. The same Evgeny Velsky writes about his almost infant feats in love. Is it possible in this case “Onegin” to put in one genealogical series with the “Palisandry” Sasha Sokolov, where Palisandra is what an implication covers the Kremlin wives? And after that and on one row with the “Lolita”, because “Palinderia” is her inverted version?

- I do not think that Nabokov and Sokolov lead their genealogy from Pushkin. That is, maybe from Pushkin, but Nabokov - after a couple of generations, Sokolov - probably after four even. This is first. And secondly, time has changed. “Lolita” was written on the eve of the sexual revolution, this is the time of Brigitte Bardo, and for the first time the novel came out just in Paris. Roman Sokolov was written after the sexual revolution - with all the ensuing consequences. The exploits of Velsky should be compared with the exploits of Pushkin himself, who in his youth loved to talk about them so much. Voskresensky did not read much from young Pushkin. But it doesn’t matter. It's just that all the youths are happy to talk about it. And this is just within the boundaries of the norms of age behavior.