K d Balmont years of life. Tell me who is your friend

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (June 3, 1867, village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province - December 23, 1942, Noisy-le-Grand, France) - symbolist poet, translator, essayist, one of the most prominent representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age. He published 35 collections of poetry, 20 books of prose, and translated from many languages. Author of autobiographical prose, memoirs, philological treatises, historical and literary studies and critical essays.

Konstantin Balmont was born on June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, the third of seven sons.

It is known that the poet’s grandfather was a naval officer.

Father Dmitry Konstantinovich Balmont (1835-1907) served in the Shuya district court and zemstvo: first as a collegiate registrar, then as a justice of the peace, and finally as chairman of the district zemstvo council.

Mother Vera Nikolaevna, née Lebedeva, came from a colonel’s family, in which they loved literature and studied it professionally. She appeared in the local press, organized literary evenings and amateur performances. She had a strong influence on the worldview of the future poet, introducing him to the world of music, literature, history, and was the first to teach him to comprehend “the beauty of the female soul.”

Vera Nikolaevna knew foreign languages well, read a lot and “was not a stranger to some freethinking”: “unreliable” guests were received in the house. It was from his mother that Balmont, as he himself wrote, inherited “unbridledness and passion” and his entire “mental structure.”

The future poet learned to read on his own at the age of five, watching his mother, who taught her older brother to read and write. The touched father gave Konstantin his first book on this occasion, “something about the savages of the Oceanians.” The mother introduced her son to examples of the best poetry.

When the time came to send the older children to school, the family moved to Shuya. Moving to the city did not mean a break from nature: the Balmonts’ house, surrounded by an extensive garden, stood on the picturesque bank of the Teza River; Father, a lover of hunting, often went to Gumnishchi, and Konstantin accompanied him more often than others.

In 1876, Balmont entered the preparatory class of the Shuya gymnasium, which he later called “a nest of decadence and capitalists, whose factories spoiled the air and water in the river.” At first the boy made progress, but soon he became bored with his studies, and his performance decreased, but the time came for binge reading, and he read French and German works in the original. Impressed by what he read, he began writing poetry himself at the age of ten. “On a bright sunny day they appeared, two poems at once, one about winter, the other about summer”, he recalled. These poetic endeavors, however, were criticized by his mother, and the boy did not attempt to repeat his poetic experiment for six years.

Balmont was forced to leave the seventh grade in 1884 because he belonged to an illegal circle, which consisted of high school students, visiting students and teachers, and was engaged in printing and distributing proclamations of the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya party in Shuya. The poet subsequently explained the background to this early revolutionary mood as follows: “I was happy, and I wanted everyone to feel just as good. It seemed to me that if it was good only for me and a few, it was ugly.”.

Through the efforts of his mother, Balmont was transferred to the gymnasium in the city of Vladimir. But here he had to live in the apartment of a Greek teacher, who zealously performed the duties of a “supervisor.”

At the end of 1885, Balmont's literary debut took place. Three of his poems were published in the popular St. Petersburg magazine “Picturesque Review” (November 2 - December 7). This event was not noticed by anyone except the mentor, who forbade Balmont to publish until he completed his studies at the gymnasium.

The young poet’s acquaintance with V. G. Korolenko dates back to this time. The famous writer, having received a notebook with his poems from Balmont’s comrades at the gymnasium, took them seriously and wrote a detailed letter to the gymnasium student - a favorable mentoring review.

In 1886, Konstantin Balmont entered the law faculty of Moscow University, where he became close to P. F. Nikolaev, a revolutionary of the sixties. But already in 1887, for participating in riots (associated with the introduction of a new university charter, which students considered reactionary), Balmont was expelled, arrested and sent to Butyrka prison for three days, and then deported to Shuya without trial.

In 1889, Balmont returned to the university, but due to severe nervous exhaustion he was unable to study, either there or at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, where he successfully entered. In September 1890, he was expelled from the lyceum and abandoned his attempts to obtain a “government education.”

In 1889, Balmont married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina, daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk merchant. A year later, in Yaroslavl, with his own funds, he published his first "Collection of poems"- some of the youthful works included in the book were published back in 1885. However, the debut collection of 1890 did not arouse interest, close people did not accept it, and soon after its release the poet burned almost the entire small edition.

In March 1890, an incident occurred that left an imprint on Balmont’s entire subsequent life: he tried to commit suicide, jumped out of a third floor window, received serious fractures and spent a year in bed.

It was believed that despair from his family and financial situation pushed him to such an act: his marriage quarreled Balmont with his parents and deprived him of financial support, but the immediate impetus was the “Kreutzer Sonata” he had read shortly before. The year spent in bed, as the poet himself recalled, turned out to be creatively very fruitful and entailed “an unprecedented flowering of mental excitement and cheerfulness”.

It was in this year that he realized himself as a poet and saw his own destiny. In 1923, in his biographical story “The Air Route,” he wrote: “In a long year, when I, lying in bed, no longer expected that I would ever get up, I learned from the early morning chirping of sparrows outside the window and from the moon rays passing through the window into my room, and from all the steps that reached up to my hearing, the great fairy tale of life, understood the sacred inviolability of life. And when I finally got up, my soul became free, like the wind in a field, no one any longer had power over it except a creative dream, and creativity blossomed wildly.”.

For some time after his illness, Balmont, who by this time had separated from his wife, lived in poverty. According to his own recollections, he spent months “I didn’t know what it was to be full, and I went to bakeries to admire the rolls and breads through the glass”.

Moscow University professor N.I. Storozhenko also provided Balmont with enormous assistance.

In 1887-1889, the poet actively translated German and French authors, then in 1892-1894 he began working on the works of Percy Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. It is this period that is considered the time of his creative development.

Professor Storozhenko, in addition, introduced Balmont to the editorial board of Severny Vestnik, around which poets of the new direction were grouped.

On the basis of his translation activities, Balmont became close to the philanthropist, an expert in Western European literature, Prince A. N. Urusov, who greatly contributed to expanding the literary horizons of the young poet. With the help of a patron of the arts, Balmont published two books of translations of Edgar Allan Poe (“Ballads and Fantasies”, “Mysterious Stories”).

In September 1894, in the student “Circle of Lovers of Western European Literature,” Balmont met V. Ya. Bryusov, who later became his closest friend. Bryusov wrote about the “exceptional” impression that the poet’s personality and his “frenzied love for poetry” made on him.

Collection "Under the Northern Sky", published in 1894, is considered to be the starting point of Balmont’s creative path. The book received a wide response, and reviews were mostly positive.

If the debut in 1894 was not distinguished by originality, then in the second collection "In the Vast"(1895) Balmont began searching for “a new space, a new freedom”, the possibilities of combining the poetic word with melody.

The 1890s were a period of active creative work for Balmont in a wide variety of fields of knowledge. The poet, who had a phenomenal capacity for work, mastered “many languages one after another, reveling in his work like a man possessed... he read entire libraries of books, starting with treatises on his favorite Spanish painting and ending with studies on the Chinese language and Sanskrit.”

He enthusiastically studied the history of Russia, books on natural sciences and folk art. Already in his mature years, addressing aspiring writers with instructions, he wrote that a debutant needs “to be able to sit over a philosophical book and an English dictionary and Spanish grammar on a spring day, when you really want to ride a boat and maybe kiss someone. Be able to read 100, 300, and 3,000 books, including many, many boring ones. To love not only joy, but also pain. Silently cherish within yourself not only happiness, but also the melancholy that pierces your heart.”.

By 1895, Balmont met Jurgis Baltrushaitis, which gradually grew into a friendship that lasted many years, and S. A. Polyakov, an educated Moscow merchant, mathematician and polyglot, translator of Knut Hamsun. It was Polyakov, the publisher of the modernist magazine “Vesy”, who five years later established the symbolist publishing house “Scorpion”, where Balmont’s best books were published.

In 1896, Balmont married translator E. A. Andreeva and went with his wife to Western Europe. Several years spent abroad provided the aspiring writer, who was interested, in addition to his main subject, in history, religion and philosophy, with enormous opportunities. He visited France, Holland, Spain, Italy, spending a lot of time in libraries, improving his knowledge of languages.

In 1899, K. Balmont was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

In 1901, an event occurred that had a significant impact on the life and work of Balmont and made him “a true hero in St. Petersburg.” In March, he took part in a mass student demonstration on the square near the Kazan Cathedral, the main demand of which was the abolition of the decree on sending unreliable students to military service. The demonstration was dispersed by the police and Cossacks, and there were casualties among its participants.

On March 14, Balmont spoke at a literary evening in the hall of the City Duma and read a poem "Little Sultan", which in a veiled form criticized the regime of terror in Russia and its organizer, Nicholas II (“That was in Turkey, where conscience is an empty thing, there reigns a fist, a whip, a scimitar, two or three zeros, four scoundrels and a stupid little sultan”). The poem went around and was going to be published in the Iskra newspaper.

By decision of the “special meeting” the poet was expelled from St. Petersburg, deprived of the right to reside in capital and university cities for three years.

In the summer of 1903, Balmont returned to Moscow, then headed to the Baltic coast, where he began writing poetry, which was included in the collection “Only Love.”

After spending the autumn and winter in Moscow, at the beginning of 1904 Balmont again found himself in Europe (Spain, Switzerland, after returning to Moscow - France), where he often acted as a lecturer.

The poetry circles of the Balmontists that were created during these years tried to imitate the idol not only in poetic self-expression, but also in life.

Already in 1896, Valery Bryusov wrote about the “Balmont school,” including, in particular, Mirra Lokhvitskaya among it.

Many poets (including Lokhvitskaya, Bryusov, Andrei Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, M. A. Voloshin, S. M. Gorodetsky) dedicated poems to him, seeing in him a “spontaneous genius,” the eternally free Arigon, doomed to rise above the world and completely immersed “in the revelations of his bottomless soul.”

In 1906, Balmont wrote the poem “Our Tsar” about Emperor Nicholas II:

Our king is Mukden, our king is Tsushima,
Our king is a bloody stain,
The stench of gunpowder and smoke,
In which the mind is dark...
Our king is a blind misery,
Prison and whip, trial, execution,
The hanged king is twice as low,
What he promised, but didn’t dare give.
He is a coward, he feels with hesitation,
But it will happen, the hour of reckoning awaits.
Who began to reign - Khodynka,
He will end up standing on the scaffold.

Another poem from the same cycle - “To Nicholas the Last” - ended with the words: “You must be killed, you have become a disaster for everyone.”

In 1904-1905, the Scorpion publishing house published a collection of Balmont's poems in two volumes.

In January 1905, the poet took a trip to Mexico, from where he went to California. The poet's travel notes and essays, along with his free adaptations of Indian cosmogonic myths and legends, were later included in “Snake Flowers” (1910). This period of Balmont’s creativity ended with the release of the collection "Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns"(1905), largely inspired by the events of the Russo-Japanese War.

In 1905, Balmont returned to Russia and took an active part in political life. In December, the poet, in his own words, “took some part in the armed uprising of Moscow, mostly through poetry.” Having become close to Maxim Gorky, Balmont began active collaboration with the Social Democratic newspaper “New Life” and the Parisian magazine “Red Banner”, which was published by A. V. Amphiteatrov.

In December, during the days of the Moscow uprising, Balmont often visited the streets, carried a loaded revolver in his pocket, and made speeches to students. He even expected reprisals against himself, as it seemed to him, a complete revolutionary. His passion for the revolution was sincere, although, as the future showed, shallow. Fearing arrest, on the night of 1906 the poet hastily left for Paris.

In 1906, Balmont settled in Paris, considering himself a political emigrant. He settled in the quiet Parisian quarter of Passy, but spent most of his time traveling long distances.

Two collections of 1906-1907 were compiled from works in which K. Balmont directly responded to the events of the first Russian revolution. The book “Poems” (St. Petersburg, 1906) was confiscated by the police. “Songs of the Avenger” (Paris, 1907) was banned for distribution in Russia.

In the spring of 1907, Balmont visited the Balearic Islands, at the end of 1909 he visited Egypt, writing a series of essays that later formed the book “The Land of Osiris” (1914), in 1912 he made a trip to the southern countries, which lasted 11 months, visiting the Canary Islands, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, Ceylon, India. Oceania and communication with the inhabitants of the islands of New Guinea, Samoa, and Tonga made a particularly deep impression on him.

On March 11, 1912, at a meeting of the Neophilological Society at St. Petersburg University on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of literary activity in the presence of more than 1000 people gathered K. D. Balmont was proclaimed a great Russian poet.

In 1913, political emigrants on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov were granted an amnesty, and on May 5, 1913, Balmont returned to Moscow. A solemn public meeting was arranged for him at the Brest railway station in Moscow. The gendarmes forbade the poet to address the public who greeted him with a speech. Instead, according to press reports at the time, he scattered fresh lilies of the valley among the crowd.

In honor of the poet’s return, ceremonial receptions were held at the Society of Free Aesthetics and the Literary and Artistic Circle.

In 1914, the publication of Balmont's complete collection of poems in ten volumes was completed, which lasted seven years. At the same time he published a collection of poetry "White architect. The Mystery of the Four Lamps"- your impressions of Oceania.

At the beginning of 1914, the poet returned to Paris, then in April he went to Georgia, where he received a magnificent reception (in particular, a greeting from Akaki Tsereteli, the patriarch of Georgian literature) and gave a course of lectures that had great success. The poet began to study the Georgian language and took up translation Shota Rustaveli's poem "The Knight in the Skin of a Tiger".

From Georgia, Balmont returned to France, where the outbreak of the First World War found him. Only at the end of May 1915, by a roundabout route - through England, Norway and Sweden - did the poet return to Russia. At the end of September, Balmont went on a two-month trip to the cities of Russia with lectures, and a year later he repeated the tour, which turned out to be longer and ended in the Far East, from where he briefly left for Japan in May 1916.

In 1915, Balmont’s theoretical sketch was published "Poetry as Magic"- a kind of continuation of the 1900 declaration “Elementary words on symbolic poetry.” In this treatise on the essence and purpose of lyric poetry, the poet attributed to the word “incantatory magical power” and even “physical power.”

Balmont welcomed the February Revolution, began collaborating in the Society of Proletarian Arts, but soon became disillusioned with the new government and joined the Cadet Party, which demanded the continuation of the war to a victorious end.

Having received, at the request of Jurgis Baltrushaitis, from A.V. Lunacharsky permission to temporarily go abroad on a business trip, together with his wife, daughter and distant relative A.N. Ivanova, Balmont left Russia forever on May 25, 1920 and reached Paris through Revel.

In Paris, Balmont and his family settled in a small furnished apartment.

The poet immediately found himself between two fires. On the one hand, the emigrant community suspected him of being a Soviet sympathizer.

On the other hand, the Soviet press began to “brand him as a crafty deceiver” who “at the cost of lies” achieved freedom for himself and abused the trust of the Soviet government, which generously released him to the West “to study the revolutionary creativity of the masses.”

Soon Balmont left Paris and settled in the town of Capbreton in the province of Brittany, where he spent 1921-1922.

In 1924 he lived in the Lower Charente (Chateleyon), in 1925 in the Vendée (Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie), and until the late autumn of 1926 in the Gironde (Lacano-Océan).

At the beginning of November 1926, after leaving Lacanau, Balmont and his wife went to Bordeaux. Balmont often rented a villa in Capbreton, where he communicated with many Russians and lived intermittently until the end of 1931, spending here not only the summer but also the winter months.

Balmont unambiguously stated his attitude towards Soviet Russia soon after he left the country.

“The Russian people are truly tired of their misfortunes and, most importantly, of the unscrupulous, endless lies of merciless, evil rulers,” he wrote in 1921.

In the article "Bloody Liars" the poet spoke about the ups and downs of his life in Moscow in 1917-1920. In emigrant periodicals of the early 1920s, his poetic lines about “the actors of Satan”, about the “blood-drunk” Russian land, about the “days of humiliation of Russia”, about the “red drops” that went into the Russian land regularly appeared. A number of these poems were included in the collection "Haze"(Paris, 1922) - the poet’s first emigrant book.

In 1923, K. D. Balmont, simultaneously with M. Gorky and I. A. Bunin, was nominated by R. Rolland for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1927, in a journalistic article "A Little Zoology for Little Red Riding Hood" Balmont reacted to the scandalous speech of the Soviet plenipotentiary representative in Poland D.V. Bogomolov, who at the reception stated that Adam Mickiewicz in his famous poem “To Muscovite Friends” (the generally accepted translation of the title is “Russian Friends”) was supposedly addressing the future - to modern Bolshevik Russia. In the same year, an anonymous appeal “To the Writers of the World” was published in Paris, signed “Group of Russian Writers. Russia, May 1927."

Unlike his friend, who gravitated towards the “right” direction, Balmont generally adhered to “left”, liberal-democratic views, was critical of ideas, did not accept “conciliatory” tendencies (smenovekhism, Eurasianism, and so on), radical political movements (fascism). At the same time, he shunned the former socialists - A.F. Kerensky, I.I. Fondaminsky and watched with horror the “leftward movement” of Western Europe in the 1920-1930s.

Balmont was outraged by the indifference of Western European writers to what was happening in the USSR, and this feeling was superimposed on the general disappointment with the entire Western way of life.

It was generally accepted that emigration was a sign of decline for Balmont. This opinion, shared by many Russian emigrant poets, was subsequently disputed more than once. In different countries during these years, Balmont published books of poems “Gift to the Earth”, “Bright Hour” (1921), “Haze” (1922), “Mine is for her. Poems about Russia" (1923), "In the widening distance" (1929), "Northern Lights" (1933), "Blue Horseshoe", "Light Service" (1937).

In 1923, he published books of autobiographical prose, “Under the New Sickle” and “Air Route,” and in 1924 he published a book of memoirs, “Where is My Home?” (Prague, 1924), wrote documentary essays “Torch in the Night” and “White Dream” about his experiences in the winter of 1919 in revolutionary Russia. Balmont made long lecture tours in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, in the summer of 1930 he made a trip to Lithuania, while simultaneously translating West Slavic poetry, but the main theme of Balmont’s works during these years remained Russia: memories of it and longing for what was lost.

In 1932, it became clear that the poet was suffering from a serious mental illness. From August 1932 to May 1935, the Balmonts lived in Clamart near Paris, in poverty. In the spring of 1935, Balmont was admitted to the clinic.

In April 1936, Parisian Russian writers celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Balmont's writing activity with a creative evening designed to raise funds to help the sick poet. The committee for organizing the evening entitled “Writers for Poets” included famous figures of Russian culture: I. S. Shmelev, M. Aldanov, I. A. Bunin, B. K. Zaitsev, A. N. Benois, A. T. Grechaninov, P. N. Milyukov, S. V. Rachmaninov.

At the end of 1936, Balmont and Tsvetkovskaya moved to Noisy-le-Grand near Paris. The last years of his life, the poet alternately stayed in a charity home for Russians, which was maintained by M. Kuzmina-Karavaeva, and in a cheap furnished apartment. In hours of enlightenment, when mental illness subsided, Balmont, according to the recollections of those who knew him, with a feeling of happiness opened the volume of “War and Peace” or re-read his old books; He had not been able to write for a long time.

In 1940-1942, Balmont did not leave Noisy-le-Grand. Here, in the Russian House shelter, he died on the night of December 23, 1942 from pneumonia. He was buried in the local Catholic cemetery, under a gray stone tombstone with the inscription: “Constantin Balmont, poète russe” (“Konstantin Balmont, Russian poet”).

Several people came from Paris to say goodbye to the poet: B.K. Zaitsev and his wife, the widow of Yu. Baltrushaitis, two or three acquaintances and daughter Mirra.

The French public learned about the poet's death from an article in the pro-Hitler Parisian Messenger, which gave, as was then customary, a thorough reprimand to the late poet for the fact that at one time he supported the revolutionaries.

Since the late 1960s. Balmont's poems began to be published in anthologies in the USSR. In 1984, a large collection of selected works was published.

Personal life of Konstantin Balmont

Balmont said in his autobiography that he began to fall in love very early: “The first passionate thought about a woman was at the age of five, the first real love was at the age of nine, the first passion was at the age of fourteen.”

“Wandering through countless cities, I am always delighted with one thing - love,” the poet admitted in one of his poems.

In 1889, Konstantin Balmont married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina, the daughter of a Shuya manufacturer, “a beautiful young lady of the Botticelli type.” The mother, who facilitated the acquaintance, sharply opposed the marriage, but the young man was adamant in his decision and decided to break with his family.

“I was not yet twenty-two years old when I... married a beautiful girl, and we left in early spring, or rather at the end of winter, to the Caucasus, to the Kabardian region, and from there along the Georgian Military Road to blessed Tiflis and Transcaucasia,” - he wrote later.

But the honeymoon trip did not become a prologue to a happy family life.

Researchers often write about Garelina as a neurasthenic nature, who showed love to Balmont “in a demonic face, even a devilish one,” and tormented him with jealousy. It is generally accepted that it was she who turned him to wine, as evidenced by the poet’s confessional poem “Forest Fire.”

The wife did not sympathize with either the literary aspirations or the revolutionary sentiments of her husband and was prone to quarrels. In many ways, it was the painful relationship with Garelina that pushed Balmont to attempt suicide on the morning of March 13, 1890. Soon after his recovery, which was only partial - the lameness remained with him for the rest of his life - Balmont broke up with L. Garelina.

The first child born in this marriage died, the second - son Nikolai - subsequently suffered from a nervous disorder.

Having separated from the poet, Larisa Mikhailovna married the journalist and literary historian N.A. Engelhardt and lived peacefully with him for many years. Her daughter from this marriage, Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, became the second wife of Nikolai Gumilyov.

The poet's second wife Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva-Balmont(1867-1952), a relative of the famous Moscow publishers Sabashnikovs, came from a wealthy merchant family (the Andreevs owned colonial goods shops) and was distinguished by rare education.

Contemporaries also noted the external attractiveness of this tall and slender young woman “with beautiful black eyes.” For a long time she was unrequitedly in love with A.I. Urusov. Balmont, as Andreeva recalled, quickly became interested in her, but did not reciprocate for a long time. When the latter arose, it turned out that the poet was married: then the parents forbade their daughter to meet her lover. However, Ekaterina Alekseevna, enlightened in the “newest spirit,” looked at the rituals as a formality and soon moved in with the poet.

The divorce proceedings, allowing Garelina to enter into a second marriage, forbade her husband to marry forever, but, having found an old document where the groom was listed as unmarried, the lovers got married on September 27, 1896, and the next day they went abroad to France.

Balmont and E. A. Andreeva were united by a common literary interest; the couple carried out many joint translations, in particular of Gerhart Hauptmann and Odd Nansen.

In 1901, their daughter Ninika was born - Nina Konstantinovna Balmont-Bruni (died in Moscow in 1989), to whom the poet dedicated the collection “Fairy Tales”.

In the early 1900s in Paris, Balmont met Elena Konstantinovna Tsvetkovskaya(1880-1943), daughter of General K. G. Tsvetkovsky, then a student at the Faculty of Mathematics at the Sorbonne and a passionate admirer of his poetry. Balmont, judging by some of his letters, was not in love with Tsvetkovskaya, but soon began to feel the need for her as a truly faithful, devoted friend.

Gradually, the “spheres of influence” divided: Balmont either lived with his family or left with Elena. For example, in 1905 they went to Mexico for three months.

The poet's family life became completely confused after E.K. Tsvetkovskaya gave birth to a daughter in December 1907, who was named Mirra - in memory of Mirra Lokhvitskaya, a poetess with whom he had complex and deep feelings. The appearance of the child finally tied Balmont to Elena Konstantinovna, but at the same time he did not want to leave Ekaterina Alekseevna.

Mental anguish led to a breakdown: in 1909, Balmont made a new suicide attempt, again jumped out of the window and again survived. Until 1917, Balmont lived in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra, coming from time to time to Moscow to visit Andreeva and his daughter Nina.

Balmont emigrated from Russia with his third (civil-law) wife E.K. Tsvetkovskaya and daughter Mirra.

However, he did not break off friendly relations with Andreeva. Only in 1934, when Soviet citizens were prohibited from corresponding with relatives and friends living abroad, was this connection interrupted.

Unlike E. A. Andreeva, Elena Konstantinovna was “helpless in everyday life and could not organize her life in any way.” She considered it her duty to follow Balmont everywhere: eyewitnesses recalled how she, “having abandoned her child at home, followed her husband somewhere to a tavern and could not get him out of there for 24 hours.”

E.K. Tsvetkovskaya turned out to be not the poet’s last love. In Paris, he resumed his acquaintance with the princess, which began in March 1919. Dagmar Shakhovskoy(1893-1967). “One of my dear ones, half-Swedish, half-Polish, Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya, nee Baroness Lilienfeld, Russified, more than once sang Estonian songs to me,” - this is how Balmont characterized his beloved in one of his letters.

Shakhovskaya gave birth to Balmont two children - Georgy (Georges) (1922-1943) and Svetlana (b. 1925).

The poet could not leave his family; meeting Shakhovskaya only occasionally, he wrote to her often, almost daily, declaring his love over and over again, talking about his impressions and plans. 858 of his letters and postcards have survived.

Balmont's feelings were reflected in many of his later poems and the novel “Under the New Sickle” (1923). Be that as it may, it was not D. Shakhovskaya, but E. Tsvetkovskaya who spent the last, most disastrous years of his life with Balmont. She died in 1943, a year after the poet's death.

Mirra Konstantinovna Balmont (in her marriage - Boychenko, in her second marriage - Autina) wrote poetry and published in the 1920s under the pseudonym Aglaya Gamayun. She died in Noisy-le-Grand in 1970.

Works by Konstantin Balmont

“Collection of poems” (Yaroslavl, 1890)
“Under the northern sky (elegy, stanzas, sonnets)” (St. Petersburg, 1894)
“In the vastness of darkness” (Moscow, 1895 and 1896)
"Silence. Lyrical poems" (St. Petersburg, 1898)
“Burning buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul" (Moscow, 1900)
“We will be like the sun. Book of Symbols" (Moscow, 1903)
"Only love. Seven-flowered" (M., "Grif", 1903)
"Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns" (M., "Grif", 1905)
“Fairy Tales (Children's Songs)” (M., “Grif”, 1905)
"Collected Poems" M., 1905; 2nd ed. M., 1908.
“Evil Spells (Book of Spells)” (M., “Golden Fleece”, 1906)
"Poems" (1906)
“The Firebird (Slavic Pipe)” (M., “Scorpio”, 1907)
"Liturgy of Beauty (Spontaneous Hymns)" (1907)
"Songs of the Avenger" (1907)
“Three Flowerings (Theater of Youth and Beauty)” (1907)
"Only love". 2nd ed.(1908)
“Round Dance of the Times (Vseglasnost)” (M., 1909)
"Birds in the Air (Singing Lines)" (1908)
“Green Vertograd (Kissing Words)” (St. Petersburg, “Rosehip”, 1909)
“Links. Selected Poems. 1890-1912" (M.: Scorpion, 1913)
“The White Architect (The Mystery of the Four Lamps)” (1914)
“Ash (Vision of a tree)” (Moscow, ed. Nekrasov, 1916)
"Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon" (1917; Berlin, 1921)
“Collected lyrics” (Books 1-2, 4-6. M., 1917-1918)
“Ring” (M., 1920)
“Seven Poems” (M., “Zadruga”, 1920)
"Selected Poems" (New York, 1920)
“Solar yarn. Izbornik" (1890-1918) (M., published by Sabashnikov, 1921)
"Gamajun" (Stockholm, "Northern Lights", 1921)
“Gift to the Earth” (Paris, “Russian Land”, 1921)
"Bright Hour" (Paris, 1921)
“Song of the Working Hammer” (M., 1922)
"Haze" (Paris, 1922)
“Under the New Sickle” (Berlin, Slovo, 1923)
“Mine - Her (Russia)” (Prague, “Flame”, 1924)
“In the widening distance (Poem about Russia)” (Belgrade, 1929)
"Complicity of Souls" (1930)
“Northern Lights” (Poems about Lithuania and Rus') (Paris, 1931)
"Blue Horseshoe" (Poems about Siberia) (1937)
"Light Service" (Harbin, 1937)

Collections of articles and essays by Konstantin Balmont

“Mountain Peaks” (Moscow, 1904; book one)
“Calls of Antiquity. Hymns, songs and plans of the ancients" (Pb., 1908, Berlin, 1923)
“Snake Flowers” (“Travel Letters from Mexico”, M., Scorpio, 1910)
"Sea Glow" (1910)
“Glow of Dawn” (1912)
"The Land of Osiris" Egyptian essays. (M., 1914)
“Poetry as magic” (M., Scorpio, 1915)
“Light and sound in nature and Scriabin’s light symphony” (1917)
"Where is my house?" (Paris, 1924)

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867-1942) - Russian poet, prose writer, critic, translator.

Konstantin Balmont was born on June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, in the family of a zemstvo leader. Like hundreds of boys of his generation, Balmont became carried away by revolutionary and rebellious sentiments. In 1884 he was even expelled from the gymnasium for participating in a “revolutionary circle.” Balmont completed his gymnasium course in 1886 in Vladimir and entered the law faculty of Moscow University. A year later, he was also expelled from the university - for participating in student riots. After a short exile to his native Shuya, Balmont was reinstated at the university. But Balmont never completed the full course: in 1889 he quit his studies to study literature. In March 1890, he experienced an acute nervous disorder for the first time and tried to commit suicide.

In 1885, Balmont made his debut as a poet in the magazine "Picturesque Review", in 1887-1889. actively translated German and French authors, and in 1890 in Yaroslavl he published the first collection of poems at his own expense. The book turned out to be frankly weak and, stung by the negligence of readers, Balmont destroyed almost its entire circulation.

In 1892, Balmont traveled to Scandinavia, where he became acquainted with the literature of the “end of the century” and was enthusiastically imbued with its “atmosphere.” He began translating the works of “fashionable” authors: G. Ibsen, G. Brandes and others. He also translated works on the history of Scandinavian (1894) and Italian (1895-1897) literature. In 1895 he published two volumes of translations from Edgar Allan Poe. Thus began Balmont’s activity as the largest Russian poet-translator of the turn of the century. Possessing the unique abilities of a polyglot, over half a century of his literary activity he left translations from 30 languages, including Baltic, Slavic, Indian, Sanskrit (the poem by the ancient Indian author Asvagoshi “The Life of Buddha”, published in 1913; “Upanishads”, Vedic hymns, dramas of Kalidasa ), Georgian (Sh. Rustaveli's poem "The Knight in the Tiger's Skin"). Most of all, Balmont worked with Spanish and English poetry. Back in 1893, he translated and published the complete works of the English romantic poet P.-B. Shelley. However, his translations are very subjective and free. K. Chukovsky even called Balmont, Shelley’s translator, “Shelmont.”

In 1894, the collection of poems “Under the Northern Sky” appeared, with which Balmont truly entered Russian poetry. In this book, as well as in the collections that were close in time, “In the Boundless” (1895) and “Silence” (1898), Balmont, an established poet and exponent of the life-feeling of a turning point, still gives off “Nadsonian”, Eighties tones: his hero he languishes “in the kingdom of dead, powerless silence,” he is tired of “waiting in vain for spring,” he is afraid of the quagmire of the everyday, which “will lure, squeeze, suck in.” But all these familiar experiences are given here with a new force of intensity and tension. As a result, a new quality arises: the syndrome of decline, decadence (from the French decadence - decline), one of the first and most prominent exponents of which in Russia was Balmont.

Along with A. Fet, Balmont is the most striking impressionist of Russian poetry. Even the titles of his poems and cycles carry a deliberate watercolor blur of colors: “Moonlight”, “We walked in a golden fog”, “In a soft golden haze”, “Airy white”. The world of Balmont's poems, as in the paintings of artists of this style, is blurred and disobjectified. It is not people, not things, or even feelings that dominate here, but ethereal qualities, formed from adjectives, nouns with the abstract suffix “ost”: fleetingness, vastness, etc.

Balmont's experiments were appreciated and accepted by great Russian poetry. At the same time, by the end of the 1900s they gave birth to an unimaginable number of epigones, nicknamed “Balmontists” and taking their teacher’s magnificent decorativeness to the limit of vulgarity.

Balmont's work reached its zenith in the collections of the early 1900s "Burning Buildings" (1900), "Let's Be Like the Sun" (1903), "Only Love" (1903), "Liturgy of Beauty" (1905). At the center of Balmont's poetry of these years are images of the elements: light, fire, sun. The poet shocks the audience with his demonic pose and “burning buildings.” The author sings “hymns” to vice, fraternizes through the centuries with the villainous Roman emperor Nero. Most of his fellow writers (I. Annensky, V. Bryusov, M. Gorky and others) considered the “superhuman” claims of these collections, alien to the “feminine nature” of the “poet of tenderness and meekness,” to be masquerade.

In 1907-1913 Balmont lived in France, considering himself a political emigrant. He traveled a lot around the world: he circumnavigated the world, visited America, Egypt, Australia, the islands of Oceania, and Japan. During these years, criticism writes more and more about its “decline”: the factor of novelty of Balmont’s style ceased to work, they got used to it. The poet's technique remained the same and, according to many, degenerated into a stamp. However, Balmont of these years opens up new thematic horizons for himself, turning to myth and folklore. For the first time, Slavic antiquity was heard in the collection “Evil Spells” (1906). The subsequent books “Firebird”, “Slavic Pipe” (1907) and “Green Vertograd”, “Kissing Words” (1909) contain processing of folklore stories and texts, translations of “epic” Rus' into a “modern” way. Moreover, the author pays main attention to all kinds of sorcerer’s spells and Khlyst zeal, which, from his point of view, reflects the “people's mind.” These attempts were unanimously assessed by critics as clearly unsuccessful and false stylizations, reminiscent of the toy “neo-Russian style” in the painting and architecture of the era.

Balmont greeted the February Revolution of 1917 with enthusiasm, but the October Revolution made him horrified by the “chaos” and “hurricane of madness” of the “troubled times” and reconsider his former “revolutionism.” In the 1918 journalistic book “Am I a Revolutionary or Not?” he presented the Bolsheviks as carriers of destructive principles, suppressing “personality.” Having received permission to temporarily go abroad on a business trip, together with his wife and daughter in June 1920, he left Russia forever and reached Paris through Revel.

In France, he acutely felt the pain of isolation from other Russian emigration, and this feeling was aggravated by self-exile: he settled in the small town of Capbreton on the coast of the province of Brittany. For two decades, Balmont the emigrant’s only joy was the opportunity to remember, dream and “sing” about Russia. The title of one of the books dedicated to the Motherland, “Mine is Hers” (1924), is the poet’s last creative motto.

Until the mid-1930s, Balmont's creative energy did not weaken. Of the 50 volumes of his works, 22 were published in exile (the last collection, “Light Service,” was published in 1937). But this did not bring either a new reader or relief from need. Among the new motives in Balmont's poetry of these years is the religious enlightenment of experiences. Since the mid-1930s, signs of mental illness, which darkened the last years of the poet’s life, have become increasingly clear.

Balmont died on December 24, 1942 in Noisy-le-Grand in France, listening to the reading of his poems, in an almshouse near Paris, established by Mother Mary (E. Yu. Kuzmina-Karavaeva).

Biography and episodes of life Konstantin Balmont. When born and died Konstantin Balmont, memorable places and dates of important events in his life. Poet quotes, images and videos.

Years of life of Konstantin Balmont:

born June 3, 1867, died December 23, 1942

Epitaph

“The sky is in the depths of my soul,
There, far away, barely visible, at the bottom.
It’s wonderful and creepy to go into the beyond,
I'm afraid to look into the abyss of my soul,
It's scary to drown in your depths.
Everything in her merged into infinite wholeness,
I only sing prayers to my soul,
Only one I love is infinity,
My soul!
From the poem by K. Balmont “Souls have everything”

Biography

The star of Russian poetry, Konstantin Balmont, did not achieve fame and recognition immediately. In his creative life there were failures, mental anguish, and severe crises. The young man, full of romantic ideals, saw himself as a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, an ascetic, but not a poet. Meanwhile, it was his name that gained fame and deserved admiration throughout Russia as the main Russian symbolist poet.

Balmont's work fully reflected his character. Most of all he was attracted by beauty, music, and the aesthetics of poetry. Many reproached him for being “decorative” and for having a shallow view of the world. But Balmont wrote as he saw it - impetuously, sometimes excessively ornate, enthusiastic and even pathetic; but at the same time - melodiously, brilliantly and always from the very depths of the soul.

The poet, indeed, throughout his life sincerely sympathized with the oppressed position of the Russian people and considered himself one of the revolutionaries. He did not participate in truly revolutionary activities, but more than once attracted close attention with his rebellious antics. Balmont strongly approved of the overthrow of the tsarist regime and even considered it necessary to leave the country for political exile after participating in an anti-government rally.

But when the October Revolution took place, Balmont was horrified. The bloody terror shocked him when he returned to his homeland. The poet could not stay in such Russia and emigrated a second time. Life far from his homeland turned out to be very difficult for him: few domestic emigrants experienced separation from their beloved country so hard. Moreover, the attitude towards Balmont among the emigrants was ambiguous: his past “revolutionary” performances had not yet been forgotten.

In the last years of his life, Balmont and his family were in desperate need. The poet, who by nature was prone to exaltation and violent impulses, began to develop mental illness. Konstantin Balmont died of pneumonia. Only a few people attended his funeral.

Life line

June 3, 1867 Date of birth of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont.
1884 Leaving the 7th grade of the gymnasium due to participation in an illegal club. Transfer to the Vladimir gymnasium.
1885 The first publication of K. Balmont’s poems in the St. Petersburg magazine “Picturesque Review”.
1886 Admission to the Faculty of Law of Moscow University.
1887 Expulsion from the university, arrest, deportation to Shuya.
1889 Marriage to L. Garelina.
1890 Publication of the first collection of poems at his own expense. Suicide attempt.
1892-1894 Work on translations of P. Shelley and E. A. Poe.
1894 Publication of the poetry collection “Under the Northern Sky”.
1895 Publication of the collection “In the Vast”.
1896 Marriage to E. Andreeva. Euro-trip.
1900 Publication of the collection “Burning Buildings,” which made the poet famous in Russia.
1901 Participation in a mass student demonstration in St. Petersburg. Expulsion from the capital.
1906-1913 The first political emigration.
1920 Second emigration.
1923 Nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1935 Balmont ends up in a clinic with a serious mental illness.
December 23, 1942 Date of death of Konstantin Balmont.

Memorable places

1. Village of Gumnishchi (Ivanovo region), where Konstantin Balmont was born.
2. Shuya, where K. Balmont lived as a child.
3. Vladimir Gymnasium (now the Vladimir Linguistic Gymnasium), where K. Balmont studied.
4. Moscow University, where Balmont studied.
5. Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences (now Yaroslavl State University), where Balmont studied.
6. Oxford University, where Balmont lectured on Russian poetry in 1897.
7. Paris, where Balmont moved in 1906, and then again in 1920.
8. Noisy-le-Grand, where Konstantin Balmont died and was buried.

Episodes of life

The poet got the rare surname Balmont, as he himself believed, either from Scandinavian or Scottish sailor ancestors.

Konstantin Balmont traveled a lot, seeing a huge number of countries and cities in different parts of the world, including Europe, Mexico, California, Egypt, South Africa, India, Australia, New Guinea.

Balmont's bohemian appearance and somewhat languid, romantic manners often created the wrong impression of him in the eyes of others. Few people knew how hard he worked and how persistently he was engaged in self-education; how carefully he proofreads his own manuscripts, bringing them to perfection.

Program about Konstantin Balmont from the series “Poets of Russia XX century”

Testaments

“He who wants to stand on top must be free from weaknesses... To rise to heights means to be above oneself.”

“My best teachers in poetry were the estate, the garden, streams, swamp lakes, the rustle of leaves, butterflies, birds and dawns.”

Condolences

“Russia was precisely in love with Balmont... He was read, recited and sung from the stage. Gentlemen whispered his words to their ladies, schoolgirls copied them into notebooks.”
Teffi, writer

“He failed to combine in himself all the riches that nature had endowed him with. He is an eternal spender of spiritual treasures... He will receive and squander, he will receive and squander. He gives them to us."
Andrey Bely, writer, poet

“He experiences life like a poet, and only poets can experience it, as it was given to them alone: finding at every point the fullness of life.”
Valery Bryusov, poet

“He lived in the moment and was content with it, not embarrassed by the colorful change of moments, if only he could express them more fully and beautifully. He either sang of Evil, then of Good, then leaned towards paganism, then bowed to Christianity.”
E. Andreeva, the poet’s wife

“If I were allowed to define Balmont in one word, I would, without hesitation, say: Poet... I would not say this about Yesenin, nor about Mandelstam, nor about Mayakovsky, nor about Gumilyov, nor even about Blok, for all of them have there was something else besides the poet in them... On Balmont - in his every gesture, step, word - the mark - the seal - the poet’s star.”
Marina Tsvetaeva, poetess

Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich (1867-1942)

Russian poet. Born in the village of Gumnishche, Vladimir province, into a noble family. He studied at the gymnasium in Shuya. In 1886 he entered the Faculty of Law at Moscow University, but was expelled for participating in the student movement.

Balmont's first collection of poems was published in Yaroslavl in 1890, the second - “Under the Northern Sky” - in 1894. The motives of civil sorrow predominate in them. Soon Balmont emerged as one of the founders of symbolism.

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. the poet released the collections “In the Vastness”, “Silence”, “Let’s Be Like the Sun”. In 1895-1905 Balmont was perhaps the most famous among Russian poets; later his popularity declines. His poetry is characterized by emphasized exoticism, a certain mannerism and narcissism.

Balmont made several trips around the world, describing them in essay prose books. He was captured by the revolutionary events of 1905, and spoke with poems glorifying the workers (the book “Songs of the Avenger”).

From the end of that year, due to the repressions of the autocracy, he lived abroad and was able to return to his homeland under an amnesty only in 1913. He translated a lot from the poetry of the West and the East. He was the first to translate into Russian the poem “The Knight in the Skin of the Tiger” by the classic of Georgian literature Shota Rustaveli.

In 1921 he emigrated and lived in great need in France. There he created a cycle of vivid poems, full of longing for Russia.

He died in the town of Noisy-le-Grand near Paris.

Konstantin Balmont is a Russian poet, translator, prose writer, critic, essayist. A bright representative of the Silver Age. He published 35 collections of poetry and 20 books of prose. Translated a large number of works by foreign writers. Konstantin Dmitrievich is the author of literary studies, philological treatises, and critical essays. His poems “Snowflake”, “Reeds”, “Autumn”, “Towards Winter”, “Fairy” and many others are included in the school curriculum.

Childhood and youth

Konstantin Balmont was born and lived until he was 10 years old in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, in a poor but noble family. His father Dmitry Konstantinovich first worked as a judge, and later took the post of head of the zemstvo government. Mother Vera Nikolaevna came from a family where they loved and were passionate about literature. The woman organized literary evenings, staged plays and was published in the local newspaper.

Vera Nikolaevna knew several foreign languages, and she had a share of “freethinking”; “undesirable” people often visited their house. He later wrote that his mother not only instilled in him a love of literature, but from her he inherited his “mental structure.” In addition to Konstantin, the family had seven sons. He was third. Watching his mother teach his older brothers to read, the boy learned to read on his own at the age of 5.

A family lived in a house that stood on the river bank, surrounded by gardens. Therefore, when the time came to send their children to school, they moved to Shuya. Thus, they had to break away from nature. The boy wrote his first poems at the age of 10. But his mother did not approve of these endeavors, and he did not write anything for the next 6 years.

In 1876, Balmont was enrolled in the Shuya gymnasium. At first, Kostya showed himself to be a diligent student, but soon he got bored with it all. He became interested in reading, and he read some books in German and French in the original. He was expelled from the gymnasium for poor teaching and revolutionary sentiments. Even then, he was a member of an illegal circle that distributed leaflets for the Narodnaya Volya party.

Konstantin moved to Vladimir and studied there until 1886. While still studying at the gymnasium, his poems were published in the capital’s magazine “Picturesque Review”, but this event went unnoticed. Afterwards he entered Moscow University at the Faculty of Law. But he didn’t stay long here either.

He became close to Pyotr Nikolaev, who was a revolutionary in the sixties. Therefore, it is not surprising that after 2 years he was expelled for participating in a student riot. Immediately after this incident he was expelled from Moscow to Shuya.

In 1889, Balmont decided to return to the university, but due to a nervous disorder he was again unable to complete his studies. The same fate befell him at the Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, where he entered later. After this attempt, he decided to abandon the idea of getting a “government” education.

Literature

Balmont wrote his first collection of poems while he was bedridden after an unsuccessful suicide. The book was published in Yaroslavl in 1890, but later the poet himself personally destroyed the bulk of the circulation.

Nevertheless, the starting point in the poet’s work is considered to be the collection “Under the Northern Sky.” It was greeted by the public with admiration, as were his subsequent works - “In the Vastness of Darkness” and “Silence”. They began to willingly publish him in modern magazines, Balmont became popular, he was considered the most promising of the “decadents.”

In the mid-1890s, he began to communicate closely with,. Soon Balmont becomes the most popular symbolist poet in Russia. In his poems he admires the phenomena of the world, and in some collections he openly touches on “demonic” themes. This is noticeable in Evil Spells, the circulation of which was confiscated by the authorities for censorship reasons.

Balmont travels a lot, so his work is permeated with images of exotic countries and multiculturalism. This attracts and delights readers. The poet adheres to spontaneous improvisation - he never made changes to the texts, he believed that the first creative impulse is the most correct.

Contemporaries highly appreciated “Fairy Tales,” written by Balmont in 1905. The poet dedicated this collection of fairy-tale songs to his daughter Nina.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was a revolutionary in spirit and in life. Expulsion from high school and university did not stop the poet. Once he publicly read the verse “Little Sultan”, in which everyone saw a parallel with. For this he was expelled from St. Petersburg and banned from living in university cities for 2 years.

He was an opponent of tsarism, so his participation in the First Russian Revolution was expected. At that time, he became friends with and wrote poems that were more like rhyming leaflets.

During the December Moscow uprising of 1905, Balmont speaks to students. But, fearing arrest, he was forced to leave Russia. From 1906 to 1913 he lived in France as a political emigrant. While in a kind of exile, he continues to write, but critics increasingly began to talk about the decline of Balmont’s work. In his latest works they noticed a certain pattern and self-repetition.

The poet himself considered his best book “Burning Buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul." If before this collection his lyrics were filled with melancholy and melancholy, then “Burning Buildings” revealed a different side to Balmont - “sunny” and cheerful notes appeared in his work.

Returning to Russia in 1913, he published a 10-volume complete collection of works. He works on translations and gives lectures around the country. Balmont received the February revolution enthusiastically, like the entire Russian intelligentsia. But he soon became horrified by the anarchy that was happening in the country.

When the October Revolution began, he was in St. Petersburg; in his words, it was a “hurricane of madness” and “chaos.” In 1920, the poet moved to Moscow, but soon, due to the poor health of his wife and daughter, he moved with them to France. He never returned to Russia.

In 1923, Balmont published two autobiographies - “Under the New Sickle” and “Air Route”. Until the first half of the 1930s, he traveled all over Europe, and his performances were a success among the public. But he no longer enjoyed recognition among the Russian diaspora.

The decline of his work came in 1937, when he published his last collection of poems, “Light Service.”

Personal life

In 1889, Konstantin Balmont married the daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk merchant, Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina. Their mother introduced them, but when he announced his intention to marry, she spoke out against this marriage. Konstantin showed his inflexibility and even broke with his family for the sake of his beloved.

Konstantin Balmont and his first wife Larisa Garelina

As it turned out, his young wife was prone to unjustified jealousy. They always quarreled; the woman did not support him in either his literary or revolutionary endeavors. Some researchers note that it was she who introduced Balmont to wine.

On March 13, 1890, the poet decided to commit suicide - he threw himself onto the pavement from the third floor of his own apartment. But the attempt failed - he spent a year in bed, and his injuries left him lame for the rest of his life.

Married to Larisa, they had two children. Their first child died in infancy, the second - son Nikolai - was sick with a nervous disorder. As a result, Konstantin and Larisa separated, she married the journalist and writer Engelhardt.

In 1896, Balmont married for the second time. His wife was Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva. The girl was from a wealthy family - smart, educated and beautiful. Immediately after the wedding, the lovers left for France. In 1901, their daughter Nina was born. In many ways, they were united by literary activity; together they worked on translations.

Konstantin Balmont and his third wife Elena Tsvetkovskaya

Ekaterina Alekseevna was not a powerful person, but she dictated the lifestyle of the spouses. And everything would have been fine if Balmont had not met Elena Konstantinovna Tsvetkovskaya in Paris. The girl was fascinated by the poet, looked at him as if he were a god. From now on, he either lived with his family or went on trips abroad with Catherine for a couple of months.

His family life became completely confused when Tsvetkovskaya gave birth to her daughter Mirra. This event finally tied Konstantin to Elena, but at the same time he did not want to separate from Andreeva. Mental anguish again led Balmont to suicide. He jumped out of the window, but, like last time, he survived.

As a result, he began to live in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra and occasionally visited Andreeva and his daughter Nina in Moscow. They later immigrated to France. There Balmont began dating Dagmar Shakhovskaya. He did not leave the family, but met with the woman regularly and wrote letters to her daily. As a result, she bore him two children - a son, Georges, and a daughter, Svetlana.

But in the most difficult years of his life, Tsvetkovskaya was still with him. She was so devoted to him that she did not even live a year after his death, she left after him.

Death

Having moved to France, he missed Russia. But his health was deteriorating, there were financial problems, so there was no talk of returning. He lived in a cheap apartment with a broken window.

In 1937, the poet was diagnosed with mental illness. From that moment on, he no longer wrote poetry.

On December 23, 1942, he died in the Russian House shelter, near Paris, in Noisy-le-Grand. The cause of his death was pneumonia. The poet died in poverty and oblivion.

Bibliography

1894 – “Under the northern sky (elegy, stanzas, sonnets)”
1895 – “In the vastness of darkness”
1898 – “Silence. Lyrical poems"
1900 – “Burning buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul"
1903 – “We will be like the sun. Book of Symbols"
1903 – “Only love. Seven-flowered"
1905 – “Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns"
1905 – “Fairy Tales (Children's Songs)”
1906 – “Evil Spells (Book of Spells)”
1906 – “Poems”
1907 – “Songs of the Avenger”
1908 – “Birds in the Air (Singing Lines)”
1909 – “Green Vertograd (Kissing Words)”
1917 – “Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon”
1920 – “Ring”
1920 – “Seven Poems”
1922 – “Song of the Working Hammer”
1929 – “In the widening distance (Poem about Russia)”
1930 – “Complicity of Souls”
1937 – “Light Service”