D.S. Merezhkovsky. The main motives of creativity. “Life and creative path Merezhkovsky Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky analysis

L.P. Shchennikova

Poetry Dm. Merezhkovsky attracted serious attention from domestic researchers, as evidenced by two collections of his works that were published in 2000 in St. Petersburg: “Merezhkovsky D.S. “Collected Poems” (Series “Eternal Companions”) and Merezhkovsky D.S. “Poems and Poems” with introductory articles by A.V. Uspenskaya and K.A. Kumpan accordingly. They attempt to identify cross-cutting motifs that integrate the poet’s work. So far, everything comes down to a statement of a torn poetic consciousness: the development of creative thought is considered within the limits between the populist preaching of sacrifice and the movement towards a “new religious consciousness”, incorporating “Nietzscheanism”, “Buddhism” and ideas about “new beauty”.

Experiences in considering the entire poetic world of Dm. Merezhkovsky as a whole, in which there is a certain constant mythologem, has not yet been produced, with the exception of a chapter in the dissertation of S.V. Sapozhkov, who saw the unifying thought of Merezhkovsky the poet in justifying the atoning sacrifice of an entire generation, born at the turn of two eras. But this is a look at the poet from the perspective of social history, and Merezhkovsky himself in his first poetry collection “Poems” (1883-1887) (St. Petersburg, 1888) presented his lyrical hero as a philosophizing subject, feeling the need to establish himself not so much in society as in the universe - in relation to the general laws of Existence, to God. The central conflict of all of Merezhkovsky’s lyrics is also the main internal conflict of most of the “clever” poets of the 1880-1890s, who lived in the era of a general religious crisis, about which Merezhkovsky himself said: “Never before have people felt so much in their hearts the need to believe and so not understood with reason the impossibility of believing.”

The hero of the first collection of poems is a rebel-individualist who has lost faith and challenged “heaven”, a protester, like Ivan Karamazov F.M. Dostoevsky, against the world created by God. Researchers have noted some motives that bring them together: the unwillingness to forgive “not a single tear” “for all the greatness of the universe,” the inability to “love one’s neighbor,” and the assertion of the right to spiritual self-will. There is also a fundamental difference between Merezhkovsky’s hero and Ivan Karamazov: the latter does not openly admit his lack of faith, while the former openly declares his discord with the faith of the people:

He is full of holy faith,
And I... neither in God nor in freedom
I don’t believe it with my sad soul...

The rebellion of the early hero Merezhkovsky was at first daringly major: he was intoxicated by the consciousness of himself “one on one” with the world - without an intermediary, without the Divine; They were pleased with the demonstrative rejection of fashionable populist asceticism and the assertion of their rights to all “the dreams of my youth and all my desires.” The words of V. Bryusov are noteworthy: “When the entire “school” of Nadson, following their teacher, considered it their duty to “whine about timelessness and their weakness,” Merezhkovsky spoke about joy and strength.”

However, Merezhkovsky’s lyrical hero soon realized that the absence of a Center that unites the world turns his beauty into an “insensitive, dead and cold” outfit. Another consequence of unbelief was the consciousness of the meaninglessness and purposelessness of man’s stay on earth, moreover, the consciousness of the meaninglessness of the entire Universe, which appeared to the poet as a huge sarcophagus with “extinct worlds.” The hero's spiritual illness is associated with inescapable suffering and despair, but they do not become indicators of the final decline of spirit. Merezhkovsky emphasizes a seemingly paradoxical idea: despair contains within itself a fruitful seed:

Sometimes when despair presses into my chest
And I look at the world with a curse on my lips, -
Crazy joy will ignite in the soul,
Like a flash of lightning in leaden clouds:
So ringing a key, from the depths of underground granite
Suddenly bursting forth, trembling with happiness,
And immediately at this moment bondage is forgotten,
And in wild joy it shines and thunders.

“Crazy fun” at the moment of despair “lights up” from the resulting feeling of emancipation; giving birth to another thing that is important for the hero - a heuristic anticipation of the discovery of something new in the world; the relaxed spirit at this moment helps to break out from the depths of the subconscious of a new, free thought, which is an individual discovery of the world. This is how a poetic rethinking of the concept of “despair” begins, which traditionally meant only extreme loss of spirit - a rethinking that will receive special development later, at a new stage in the lyricist’s path - in the third collection of poems. This interpretation of despair is close to the thought of S. Kierkegaard: “ .. “despair is a completely free mental act that leads a person to the knowledge of the absolute,” “...he who decides on despair decides, therefore, on... knowledge of himself as a person, in other words, the consciousness of his eternal significance.”

It is this idea that permeates the poet’s second collection of poems, “Symbols” (St. Petersburg, 1892), which expressed the expectation of a general religious transformation. Its main part consists of works of large lyric-epic genres: “Death”. "Petersburg Poem"; "Faith". "A Tale in Verse"; legend “Francis of Assisi”, “End of the Century. Essays on modern Paris”, etc. The pathos of the book is best expressed by the opening poem “God”:

I thirsted for God - and did not know;
I didn’t believe it yet, but, lovingly,
While I denied with my mind -
I felt You in my heart.
And You revealed yourself to me: You are the world.
You are everything. You are sky and water...

The work declares the traditional theological idea of ​​synergism, according to which the purpose of human life is to unite with God, arising from the deep inner need of the individual. God also “goes” to meet the person who seeks Him, illuminating with His Grace, since God’s Economy cannot be fully realized without human will.

But in the third collection of poetry - “New Poems” (1892-1895) (St. Petersburg, 1896) - the idea of ​​synergy will be expressed differently, not in a theological way. In it, the old antithesis of rebellion and despair is spelled out in a new way: now despair “enters” into a state of “quiet rebellion.” In two works with the same title “Calmness” (“We set out on the road light...”, 1893, and “We are close to the eternal end...”, 1896), initially not included in the collection, the idea of ​​man’s doom to be chained suffering ending in death is presented as the result of a fruitless search for God. And this is not only a personal conclusion: the author speaks on behalf of an entire generation of people who have suffered the right (“suffering has conquered faith”!) to renounce their trust in the Christian God. Merezhkovsky argues that the historical mission of courageous dissident people turns out to be not only mournful, but also ascetic, since they have to endure reproaches for “heresy”, for “Nietzscheanism” and “Buddhism”:

There is joy in making people hate
Good was considered evil
And they walked by and didn’t see your tears,
Calling you an enemy...

Merezhkovsky was primarily a “singer” of Nietzscheanism, Buddhism and eroticism in the eyes of those who assessed his poetry from an orthodox Christian or radical populist position. But even in our time these reproaches are repeated. “Decadentism”, “Nietzscheanism” and other “flaws” of Merezhkovsky the poet are derived, as a rule, from a few poetic formulas and bright, memorable phrases: “... in beauty, great and cold, to live aimlessly, to die aimlessly”; or: “If you want, go and sin, / But let your sin be fearless, like a feat”; or: “...and do not be ashamed of nakedness”; or: “to love boundless sorrow,” etc. But the same poetic fragments lose their “decadent” meaning in the context of the entire work, and even more so in the context of the entire structure. consciousness of the lyrical hero.

Let us turn to the poem “Nirvana,” which supposedly affirms the poet’s “Buddhist dispassion.” Let's quote it in full:

And again, as on the first day of creation,
The azure of heaven is quiet,
As if there is no suffering in the world,
As if there is no sin in the heart.
I don't need love and fame:
In the silence of the morning fields
I breathe like these grasses breathe...
Neither past nor future days
I don't want to torture and count.
I just feel again
What happiness - not to think,
What bliss - not to desire!

Contrary to the title, which manifests detachment from the world, the content of the work does not express the dead peace of indifference and indifference to the environment, but a joyful feeling of being a part of Nature, as if immersed in the silence of the azure sky. The hero feels a harmonious participation in both the silence of the morning fields and the breath of the grass. The work captures the mysterious process of approaching Being, freeing a person from thoughts about his “finitude”, from the torture of returning consciousness to the past or running ahead. “Nirvana” echoes the poem “Spring Feeling” - one of the most major - they are brought together by the blessing of life, its childish joyful acceptance.

In the first book of poems, nature with its sensual beauty seemed to the hero an unattainable example. In the latest collection of poetry, another thought becomes the conceptual one: the “wonderful temple of nature” is radically different from the majestic cathedral by its closeness and kinship to man. In the eternal “temple” of forests and fields, those who are there reverently recognize

Your unity with nature, -
There are connections with her of ancient kinship...

Religious unbelief is opposed by the hero’s complete trust in the natural world. If a rational approach does not provide a full opportunity to understand it as a living eternity, then the instinctively direct perception of the beauty of nature as a particle of the native world gives rise to a feeling of the living integrity of the Universe. Communicating with nature intuitively and sensually achieves what the hero cannot comprehend either by reason or by religious feeling:

Consciousness whispers to me so proudly:
"You are the sound of the universal chord,
You are a link in the chains of life...”

Here there is a kinship with the ideas of Russian cosmism, with the comprehension of the truth contained in the following: “... living things are connected with all of nature by millions of invisible, elusive connections.” These ideas among Russian natural philosophers appeared parallel to the religious concepts of the metaphysical unity of the world by Vl.S. Solovyova, N.F. Fedorova, S.N. Bulgakov and sometimes in direct contact with them as a religious and philosophical form of Russian cosmism.

In the light of the process under consideration - man’s acquisition of harmony in natural Being - some of the poet’s “decadent” formulas in poems such as “Laughter”, “Song of the Bacchantes”, “Evening Song”, etc., receive a different meaning in a poetic context. Thus, the “Sermon” of sin and fearlessness before sinfulness in the poem “Laughter” is directed against the theological thought about the inevitable enmity and struggle between the “fallen nature” of man and the gospel commandments. The poet, distancing himself from them and wanting complete emancipation, writes his own:

There is only one eternal commandment - to live
In beauty, in beauty no matter what...

In “Evensong” - the apotheosis of an easy, joyful acceptance of death - the organizing thought is the affirmation of the eternity of instant human joys:

For a moment - love, for a moment and happiness,
But this moment is eternity to the heart...

Merezhkovsky the poet, in search of a centering idea that unites the world, never completely renounced the Divine, but over the years he wrote more and more insistently about self-deification:

You yourself are your own God, you are your own neighbor,
Oh, be your own Creator.
Be the upper abyss, the lower abyss,
Your beginning and your end.

It is noteworthy, however, that the cult of the man-god turns out to be combined with the cult of the God-man, Christ: in a number of poems (“Oh, if only the soul were full of love...”, “Children’s heart”), the poet states, turning to Christ: “My soul and You - We are alone with You,” “I loved God and myself as one.”

The inseparability of the man-god from the God-man, from an orthodox Christian point of view, is blasphemous. This is no longer theological synergy. Such a combination can be understood from the standpoint of a philosophical understanding of synergy as the interaction of the polar principles of the world and the modern understanding of a synergistically thinking person seeking integrity in various seemingly absolutely incompatible phenomena and processes.

This desire for the rapprochement of polarities was also manifested in the thirst for combining the Christian God with pagan idols. Merezhkovsky expressed the desire for a broad cultural synthesis capable of satisfying the ineradicable need for unanimity in his second collection of poems, in the 1891 poem “Future Rome”:

Now we are wandering in the ruins of the ancients, full of sorrow.
Oh, can’t we really find such faith that again
Unite all tribes and peoples on earth?
Where are you, unknown God, where are you, O future Rome?

In the Roman Pantheon, the poet is acutely aware of the dramatic clash of pagan faith in the "Olympian holy shadows" with the Christian faith in the crucified God-man. He feels awe before Christ, who accepted torture and death for people, and at the same time delight in the earthly beauty and love of life of the pagan gods. These “combined-bifurcated” predilections represent a lyrical prolegomena to the realization of the possibility of a synthesis of paganism and Christianity, which Merezhkovsky would later prescribe in his novels and philosophical and critical works.

We have come to the most important feature of the structure of the consciousness of Merezhkovsky’s hero - the uniqueness of his duality. He not only clearly understands his duality, but manifests it, makes it a special “subject” of comprehension. Very often the hero expresses immediately, one after another, mutually exclusive thoughts that conceptualize different attitudes to the world. In his mind, all contradictions exist immanently: the fight against God, and the “unquenchable heat of mystical delirium,” and the thirst for renewed spirituality, and the addiction to carnal beauty. The compositional contrast is noteworthy, expressed in the paradoxical completion of the thought that constructs the work. The poem “Laughter,” which asserts that there is nothing wiser and more beautiful than jubilant laughter, seems to end with an unexpected conclusion:

Having understood the horror of the world as no one else understood,
To love boundless sorrow.

And the poem “Spring Feeling,” which, from our point of view, is the apotheosis of the immediate joy of Being, unexpectedly ends with the lines:

Let it be equally sweet to live and to die.

A logical-compositional “breakdown” can also occur in the middle of a work, when a stanza that is integral in thought comes to an end:

But the soul does not want reconciliation,
And he doesn’t know what fear is;
There is great contempt for people in it,
And love, love in my eyes...

This “unmotivated” expression of love after a fearless outburst of contempt for the world is shocking and surprising.

The style of contrasts (not only logical-compositional, but also lexical-semantic, such as “dispassionate laughter”, “the darkness of the icon”, “the beauty of evil”, etc.) expresses the poet’s original ideological postulate: the conviction in the interconnection and interdependence of the polar principles of the world and their desire for conjugation and acquisition. The poet’s contrasts, dissonances and paradoxes are imbued with the energy of “poetic synergy” and gravitate towards a certain systematicity.

At the same time, Merezhkovsky’s poetry reveals both the shocking nature of the reader and the unplanned consequences of the “mind game.” They sometimes express involuntary fantasies, born in the depths of an element of an intellectual nature, which turns out to be as uncontrollable and unsystematic as, for example, uninhibited emotional confession. In a number of works: “Dark Angel”, “Blue Sky”, “Autumn Leaves”, “Mediterranean Sea”, etc. - the author finds himself captive of fantastic dreams. The mental images created in them represent variations on the theme of the “spell of death”: “My heart charms death to me.” The embodiment of these enchantments becomes either the “dark angel of loneliness”, or the “dispassionate” blue sky, or the “dispassionate” sea, or the beauty of falling leaves. These mental images capture the poet’s consciousness so much that it is not he who owns the thought that struck him, but it, with its internal logic, leads the hero’s thoughts to a “charming” dead end.

Despite these “flaws”, the lyrics of Dm. Merezhkovsky expressed, in our opinion, not the chaos of experiences and “fractured consciousness,” but the poet’s need for an ideal - for a spiritual center that connects the world:

Do I care - Madonna or Venus -
But faith in the ideal is the only faith
What is left to us from the common destruction,
She is the last God, she is the last temple!..

In the paradoxical synergy of Dm. Merezhkovsky spelled out the generally significant cultural needs of the “transitional era”: the desire to find a non-catastrophic way out of the seemingly catastrophic situation of the total spiritual crisis of the 1880s.

L-ra: Philological sciences. – 2002. – No. 6. – P. 3-11.

The poem "Native" by Dmitry Merezhkovsky shows the reader a sad landscape that demonstrates the state of souls. The author is helped to achieve this effect by such means of artistic expression as: epithets (sad silence, monotonous pine trees, constant hum, etc.). Moreover, each epithet personifies nature, making its description much more vivid and closer to the reader. You get the feeling that you are there yourself, along with the author.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky's poem uses metaphors such as: "the world is being lost."

They create a kind of “fabulousness” of everything that happens.

Cross rhyme in the poem “native” by Dmitry Merezhkovsky is practically not felt, and thanks to this it adds the intonation of a prose text, the feeling of a spiritual story. And it makes the poem freer, easier to understand, and easier to remember.

All the means of artistic expression together create a picture of the true: calm and peaceful nature. And true feelings, incredibly unusual, very fabulous and deep.

Parca is the goddess of Fate in ancient Roman mythology.

Poem. written in 1892. The poet compares all the goddesses of Fate with decrepit old women who spin human destinies on a spindle, so different, complex and confusing. They, these Parks, are bored, tired of thinking about mortals, because they still have one end - they will all die.

Even beauty and youth do not captivate them. Parks tell them with their faded lips the truth about the finitude of life.

People are doomed in their lives and communication to intertwine truth with lies: before a person has time to open his mouth, he is sure to lie somewhere, and a person is not able to cut this knot of constant lies. He lies in the name of truth, lies in order to survive, and for this he despises, hates and yearns for himself.

In the last stanza, the poet asks the goddess Parka to finally stop this lie in him with a single swing of the spinner's scissors.

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Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky is a prominent representative of symbolism in Russian culture. This trend has many talented followers in the future. Many admirers of Merezhkovsky's work call him the prophet of his time and prescribe to him the ability to guess further events. In fact, the poet was an intelligent, educated person who knew how to sense the surrounding atmosphere and predict where the wind of change would blow from.

An analysis of the poem “Children of the Night” by Merezhkovsky shows how accurately the author felt future changes in society. In the work, Dmitry Sergeevich described events that would happen two decades later, because the poem was written in 1895, and the revolution occurred in 1917. At the time of writing the poem, no one had any idea about the imminent revolution, but the poet already understood that the people needed a shake-up . He grasped the general mood of the crowd, realized that people had lost all the pure and bright feelings that could protect them from worldly vanity and dirt.

An analysis of the poem “Children of the Night” by Merezhkovsky indicates that the author did not know absolutely exactly about the future of his people. He understood that people were tired of crawling on their knees, seeing no further prospects for a better life. Dmitry Sergeevich calls his generation “children of the night” because they wander in the dark in search of a way out and wait for the “prophet”. Only even the poet had no idea that a ruthless and treacherous messiah would come to power. Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote poetry with the understanding that society is on the threshold of the twentieth century, and it is so mired in dirt and sins that it needs a strong shake-up.

The writer does not realize that very little time will pass, and people will kill each other for their beliefs, and the revolution will claim tens of thousands of lives. An analysis of the poem “Children of the Night” by Merezhkovsky makes it possible to understand that the author excludes the divine origin of man and hints at the need for purification. At the same time, the poet suggests that light can be destructive for people. Dmitry Sergeevich also considers himself one of the “children of the night” and understands that he will not be able to avoid their fate. The author does not know how exactly the people will be cleansed of their sins.

When Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote “Children of the Night,” he did not know that very little time would pass and he himself would suffer from the long-awaited shake-up. The poet is firmly convinced that every person needs to ascend his own Golgotha ​​in order to cleanse himself of dirt and start a new life or perish. An analysis of the poem “Children of the Night” by Merezhkovsky shows that the author wanted a revolution because he dreamed of a better life for his people.

In reality, everything turned out to be much more prosaic. In 1919, Dmitry Sergeevich had to leave St. Petersburg forever, where “The Beast” settled. Until his death, the poet lived in Paris and believed that he fully deserved such a fate. Until the end of his days, Merezhkovsky reproached himself for his indecision and for the fact that at the right moment he did not try to snatch his country out of the revolutionary abyss, although he foresaw future battles between light and dark forces.