Nekrasov's theme is love for the motherland. The theme of the motherland in Russian literature (according to the works of N.

The poetry of Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov is entirely dedicated to Russia and the Russian people. The great poet developed and strengthened the motives of nationality and citizenship, continuing the traditions of Pushkin. All his life Nekrasov wrote only about Russia, about its great and long-suffering people.

The theme of the Motherland and the theme of the people in Nekrasov’s lyrics are inseparable. The poet creates in his poems terrible but true pictures of the life of a common man in Rus'. The author contrasts People's Russia with the world of cruel feudal landowners and soulless officials. The poem “Motherland” is dedicated to the poet’s native Volga expanses. But Nekrasov’s memories of his childhood disgust the poet. He talks about the life of gentlemen who spent their time in feasts, debauchery and abuse of serfs. Nekrasov says this about the unfortunate common people:

Where is the swarm of depressed and trembling slaves
He envied the lives of the last master's dogs.

The title of this poem emphasizes that such life was characteristic of all feudal Russia. In Nekrasov’s soul, love for the Fatherland and hatred of the injustice reigning in it collide. An example of this is the poem “On the Volga”. The poet speaks of his childhood love for the great Russian river and considers the Volga a “cradle.” Nekrasov would never part with the Volga,

If only, oh Volga! upon you
This howl was not heard!

Before the poet’s eyes there appears a terrible picture, seen in childhood and remaining in his memory for the rest of his life. The Volga barge haulers excited the young soul and made Nekrasov forget about the beauty of his native places. Now he calls the Volga “the river of slavery and melancholy.” This is one of many poems written based on Nekrasov’s personal observations.

The famous poem “Reflections at the Front Entrance” was created in a similar way. Village petitioners at the house of a rich dignitary are the embodiment of the entire humiliated and powerless Russian people. The Russian peasant has no protection anywhere, he cannot find truth and justice. The author directly accuses the owners of “luxury chambers”. The nobles do not care about the fate of ordinary people, and therefore the Russian people only have to moan and endure. Nekrasov shows that the small episode seen by the poet is a reflection of what is happening in Russia:

Motherland!
Name me such an abode,
I've never seen such an angle.
Where is your sower and guardian?
Where would a Russian man not moan?

The poet again recalls the Volga and the barge haulers groaning on its banks. The Russian land is filled with people's grief. Nekrasov is concerned whether the Russian people will be able to change their lives, or whether they are destined to continue to suffer and endure.

A working person is in a slave position; he does not receive happiness from his work. This idea sounds vividly in the poem “Railroad”. Nekrasov shows the true builders of the railway, who were driven to construction by the terrible Tsar Famine. The crowd of dead people outside the carriage windows makes you feel love and respect for the workers and hatred for the oppressors. For the poet, the road builders are his brothers. Nekrasov does not hide his feelings. The author's sympathy and pain are heard in the description of the tall, sick Belarusian. The poet calls:

Bless the people's work
And learn to respect a man.

This poem is imbued with the author's faith in the great future of Russia and its people. The patience and slavish obedience of the common man arouse Nekrasov's anger. But the author is convinced that the Russian people will be able to overcome all troubles and sorrows, will stand and win the fight against their misfortune. Nekrasov calls the future of Russia a wonderful time. People's Rus' will pave a “broad and clear” road to happiness.
The great Russian poet and citizen Nekrasov could rightfully say about himself: “I dedicated the lyre to my people.”

The poet's patriotism, his love for the common people are manifested in every line of Nekrasov's poems. His poetry is an example of service to Russia and the Russian people, to whom the author devoted his entire life, all the strength of his noble and honest soul.

Secondary school No. 28

Motherland and people in the lyrics of N.A. Nekrasova

Completed:

10th grade student "G"

Amekhin A.V.

Checked:

literature teacher

and Russian language

Plotnikova E.V.

Nab. Chelny

2003

Biographical information, main themes of creativity, works of N.A. Nekrasova……………………………………………………3

The theme of the Motherland in Nekrasov’s lyrics………………………………………………………..12

The working people in the works of N.A. Nekrasova………………………..14

Nekrasov the satirist. A brief analysis of the verse “Lullaby”.

……………………………………………………………………………………16

Nekrasov and Belinsky………………………………………………………16

Used literature…………………………………………………………….19

1.Biographical information, main themes of creativity, works of N.A. Nekrasova.

NEKRASOV, Nikolai Alekseevich - poet, prose writer, critic, publisher. Nekrasov's childhood years were spent on the Volga in the village. Greshnevo, Yaroslavl province. In the fall of 1824, having retired with the rank of major, his father, Alexey Sergeevich Nekrasov (1788-1862), settled here with his family on the family estate. In Greshnev, he led the ordinary life of a small nobleman, who had at his disposal only 50 serf souls. A man of harsh disposition and despotic character, Nekrasov’s father did not spare his subjects. The men under his control suffered too much, and his household also suffered with grief, especially the poet’s mother, Elena Andreevna, nee Zakrevskaya (died in 1841), a woman of a kind soul and sensitive heart, intelligent and educated. Fervently loving children, for the sake of their happiness and tranquility, she patiently educated them and meekly endured the arbitrariness that reigned in the house.

Feudal tyranny in those years was an ordinary phenomenon, but from childhood it deeply wounded Nekrasov’s soul, because the victim was not only himself, not only the Greshnev peasants, but also the poet’s beloved, “fair-haired,” blue-eyed mother. “It was a heart that was wounded at the very beginning of his life,” F. M. Dostoevsky wrote about Nekrasov, “and this wound that never healed was the beginning and source of all his passionate, suffering poetry for the rest of his life.” It was from Greshnev that Nekrasov the poet learned exceptional sensitivity to the suffering of others.

From his father, Nekrasov inherited strength of character, fortitude, enviable stubbornness in achieving goals, and from an early age he was infected with a hunting passion, which contributed to his sincere rapprochement with the people. In Greshnev, Nekrasov’s heartfelt affection for the Russian peasant began, which later determined the exceptional nationality of his work. In his autobiography, Nekrasov wrote: “The village of Greshnevo stands on the lower Yaroslavl-Kostroma road... the manor’s house faces the road itself, and everything that walked and drove along it and was known, starting with postal troikas and ending with prisoners shackled in chains, accompanied by guards, was constant food for our childhood curiosity.” The Greshnevskaya road was for Nekrasov the beginning of his knowledge of the noisy and restless people's Russia. The poet recalled this same road with gratitude in “Peasant Children”: “We had a big road: / People of working class scurried / Along it innumerable.” It was not for nothing that A. N. Ostrovsky called the Yaroslavl-Kostroma region “the liveliest, most industrial area of ​​Great Russia,” and N. V. Gogol in “Dead Souls” entrusted the “bird or three” to the “Yaroslavl efficient man.” Since time immemorial, the road has entered the life of the peasant of the Russian Non-Black Earth Region. The harsh northern nature awakened in him special ingenuity in the struggle for existence: labor on the land was supported by associated crafts. Having completed the field suffering, the men rushed to the cities, worked all winter on the foreign side, and in the spring returned to their native villages. As a boy, Nekrasov met a peasant on the Greshnevskaya road, who was not like the patriarchal grain grower, whose horizons were limited to the boundaries of his village. Otkhodnik had traveled far, seen a lot, and on the outside he did not feel everyday oppression from the landowner and manager. He was an independent, proud person, critically assessing his surroundings: “He will amuse you with a fairy tale, and he will tell you a parable.” This type of guy did not become ubiquitous everywhere and not immediately. Only after 1861 “the fall of serfdom shook the entire people, woke them up from a centuries-old sleep, taught them to look for a way out, to fight for complete freedom themselves... In place of the sedentary, downtrodden, rooted to their village, who believed in the priests, who were afraid” bosses" to the serf peasant, a new generation of peasants grew up, who had been in latrine trades, in cities, who had learned something from the bitter experience of a wandering life and hired work."

Since childhood, the spirit of truth-seeking, which has been inherent in his fellow countrymen - Kostroma and Yaroslavl, has been ingrained in the character of Nekrasov himself since childhood. The people's poet also followed the path of the “otkhodnik”, only not in a peasant, but in a nobleman’s being. Early on, Nekrasov began to be burdened by the tyranny of serfdom in his father’s house, and early on he began to declare his disagreement with his father’s way of life. At the Yaroslavl gymnasium, where he entered in 1832, Nikolai Alekseevich devoted himself entirely to the love of literature and theater acquired from his mother. The young man not only read a lot, but also tried his hand at the literary field. By the time of the decisive turn in his fate, the poet had a notebook of his own poems, written in imitation of the then fashionable romantic poets - V. G. Benediktov, V. A. Zhukovsky. A. I. Podolinsky.

On July 20, 1838, sixteen-year-old Nekrasov set off on a long journey with the “cherished notebook.” Contrary to the will of his father, who wanted to see his son at a military educational institution, Nekrasov decided to enter St. Petersburg University. Unsatisfactory preparation at the Yaroslavl gymnasium did not allow him to pass the exams, but the persistent poet became a volunteer student and attended classes at the philological faculty for two years. Having learned about his son’s act, A.S. Nekrasov became furious and sent Nekrasov a letter threatening to deprive him of all material support. But the father's tough character clashed with the son's decisive character. There was a break: Nikolai Alekseevich remained in St. Petersburg without any support or support. This period in Nekrasov’s life is usually called the “Petersburg ordeal.” There were many ordeals: failure in university exams, criticism of the first collection of imitative, student poems “Dreams and Sounds” (1840), half-starved existence, and finally, daily menial work in metropolitan magazines and newspapers for the sake of a piece of bread. But at the same time, a persistent, courageous character was formed: “walking through torment” tempered the poet and opened up to him the life of the lower classes of St. Petersburg. The most important theme of his Muse was the fate of the common man: the Russian peasant woman, the powerless peasant, the urban beggar.

Nekrasov’s literary talent was noticed by the publisher of the theater magazine “Repertoire and Pantheon” F. A. Koni. Not without his support, the poet tries his hand at theatrical criticism, but gains popularity as the author of poetic feuilletons (“Talker”, “Official”) and vaudeville (“Actor”, “Petersburg Moneylender”). His passion for drama does not pass without a trace for Nekrasov’s poetic work: the dramatic element permeates his lyrics, the poems “Russian Women”, “Contemporaries”, “Who Lives Well in Russia”.

In 1843, the poet met with V. G. Belinsky, who was passionate about the ideas of the French utopian socialists, who condemned the social inequality existing in Russia: “What does it matter to me that there is bliss for the elite, when the majority do not suspect its possibility? ". Grief, heavy grief takes possession of me at the sight of barefoot boys playing knucklebones in the street, and ragged beggars, and a drunken cab driver, and a soldier coming from a divorce, and an official running with a briefcase under his arm..." Belinsky’s socialist ideas were found in Nekrasov’s soul. the most direct and heartfelt response: he experienced the bitter lot of the poor man firsthand. It is now that the poet overcomes the romantic hobbies of his youth and takes a new path in poetry, creating deeply realistic poems. The first of them - “On the Road” (1845) - caused an enthusiastic assessment of Belinsky: “Do you know that you are a poet - and a true poet?” The critic wrote that Nekrasov’s poems “are imbued with thought; these are not poems to the virgin and the moon: they contain a lot of smart, practical and modern things.” However, the romantic experience did not pass without a trace for Nekrasov: in “Dreams and Sounds” the three-syllable meters and dactylic rhymes typical for the poet were determined; the combination of lofty romantic formulas with prosaism will help the mature Nekrasov to raise everyday life to the heights of poetry.

N. considered his communication with Belinsky to be a decisive, turning point in his destiny. Subsequently, the poet paid a generous tribute of love and gratitude to his Teacher in the poem “In Memory of Belinsky” (1853), the poem “V. G. Belinsky” (1855), in “Scenes from the lyrical comedy “Bear Hunt” (1867): “You taught us to think humanely, / You were hardly the first to remember the people, / You were almost the first to talk / About equality, about brotherhood, about freedom..." (III, 19). Belinsky valued in Nekrasov a sharp critical mind, poetic talent, deep knowledge of folk life, and the efficiency and enterprise typical of Yaroslavl residents. Thanks to these qualities, Nikolai Alekseevich becomes a skilled organizer of literary affairs. He collects and publishes in the mid-40s. two almanacs - “Physiology of St. Petersburg” (1845) and “Petersburg Collection” (1846). They publish essays, stories and stories about the life of the capital's poor, small and middle strata of society, friends of Belinsky and N., writers of the “natural school”, supporters of Gogol, the critical direction of Russian realism - V. G. Belinsky, A. I. Herzen, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky, D. V. Grigorovich, V. I. Dal, I. I. Panaev and others.

During these years, Nekrasov himself, along with poetry, tried his hand at prose. Particularly notable is his unfinished novel “The Life and Adventures of Tikhon Trostnikov” (1843-1848) - a largely autobiographical work associated with the “St. Petersburg ordeals.” Nekrasov would then develop individual plots and thematic motifs of this novel in poetry: “The Unhappy” (1856), “On the Street” (1850), “About the Weather” (1858), “Vanka” (1850), “The Cabman” (1855) and etc.

Since 1847, the Sovremennik magazine, founded by A. S. Pushkin, faded after his death under the editorship of P. A. Pletnev and has now been revived, passed into the hands of the poet and Panaev. The editorial talent of Nekrasov flourished in Sovremennik, who rallied the best literary forces of the 40-60s around the magazine. I. S. Turgenev publishes here “Notes of a Hunter”, I. A. Goncharov - the novel “Ordinary History”, D. V. Grigorovich - the story “Anton the Miserable”, V. G. Belinsky - late critical articles, A. I. Herzen - stories “The Thieving Magpie” and “Doctor Krupov”.

Nekrasov saved the high reputation of Sovremennik even during the years of the “dark seven years” (1848-1855), when the censors’ quibbles reached the point of absurdity and even in cookbooks the phrase “free spirit” was crossed out. It happened that before the publication of Sovremennik, censorship banned a good third of the material, and Nekrasov had to show incredible ingenuity to save the magazine from disaster. It was during this period that Nikolai Alekseevich, together with his common-law wife A. Ya. Panaeva, wrote two voluminous novels, “Three Countries of the World” (1848-1849) and “Dead Lake” (1851), designed to fill the pages of the magazine prohibited by censorship. In harsh conditions, Nekrasov’s skills as an editor are honed, his ability to deftly circumvent censorship obstacles. Weekly dinners are held at the poet’s apartment, in which, along with the magazine’s employees, censors take part, willy-nilly softening their temper in an intimate setting. Nekrasov also uses his acquaintances with high-ranking people as a member of the English Club and a skilled card player. After Belinsky's death in 1848, Nekrasov joined the work in the literary critical section of the magazine. He is the author of a number of brilliant critical articles, among which the essay “Russian minor poets” (1850) stands out, restoring the shaky in the 40s. reputation of poetry. The merit of Nekrasov the editor to Russian literature lies in the fact that, possessing a rare aesthetic sense, he acted as a pioneer of new literary talents. Thanks to Nikolai Alekseevich, the first works of L. N. Tolstoy “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth” and “Sevastopol Stories” appeared on the pages of Sovremennik. In 1854, at the invitation of Nekrasov, the outstanding ideologist of Russian revolutionary democracy N. G. Chernyshevsky, and then the literary critic N. A. Dobrolyubov, became a permanent contributor to Sovremennik. When, after 1859, the historically inevitable break between democratic revolutionaries and liberals occurs and many talented writers of a liberal way of thinking leave Sovremennik, Nekrasov the editor will find new writing talents among democratic fiction writers and the works of N.V. will be published in the literary department of the magazine. Uspensky, F. M. Reshetnikov, N. G. Pomyalovsky, V. A. Sleptsov, P. I. Yakushkin, G. I. Uspensky and others.

In 1862, after the St. Petersburg fires, another wave of persecution of progressive social thought arose. By government order, Sovremennik was suspended for eight months (June - December 1862). In July 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested. In these dramatic conditions, Nekrasov made energetic attempts to save the magazine, and after official permission in 1863, he published on the pages of Sovremennik the programmatic work of Russian revolutionary democracy, Chernyshevsky’s novel “What is to be done?” In June 1866, after D.V. Karakozov shot Alexander II, Sovremennik was banned forever. Risking his reputation in the name of saving the magazine, Nekrasov decides to make the “wrong sound”: he reads an ode in honor of M. N. Muravyov, the “hangman,” and recites poems at the English Club dedicated to O. I. Komissarov, officially declared the Tsar’s savior from assassination attempt Karakozova. But all these attempts were unsuccessful and were the subject of painful memories and repentance.

Only a year and a half later, Nekrasov rented Otechestvennye zapiski from A.A. Kraevsky and from 1868 until his death he remained the editor of this magazine, uniting progressive literary forces. Nikolai Alekseevich invites M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and G. Z. Eliseev to the editorial office of “Domestic Notes”. Shchedrin, A. N. Ostrovsky, S. V. Maksimov, G. I. Uspensky, A. I. Levitov and others are published in the fiction department. The criticism department is headed by D. I. Pisarev, later by A. M. Skabichevsky, N. K. Mikhailovsky. The journalism department is led by G. Z. Eliseev, S. N. Krivenko. The activities of Nekrasov as editor are among the brightest pages in the history of Russian journalism.

The publication of a new poetry collection of mature realistic works by Nekrasov is decided under special conditions. In 1855, after the ingloriously lost Crimean War, a social upsurge began in the country, a new historical force confidently entered Russian life - revolutionary democracy, about which V. I. Lenin wrote: “The circle of fighters has become wider, their connection with the people is closer.” . The second, revolutionary-democratic stage of the liberation movement in Russia began. The collection “Poems of N. Nekrasov” was published on October 15, 1856, and already on November 5 Chernyshevsky informed the poet, who was undergoing treatment abroad: “General delight. Hardly Pushkin’s first poems, hardly “The Inspector General” or “Dead Souls” had such success as your book.” “And Nekrasov’s poems, collected into one focus, are burned,” Turgenev noted.

In preparing the book for publication, Nekrasov really did a lot of creative work, collecting poems “in one focus,” into a single whole, reminiscent of a mosaic artistic canvas. Such, for example, is the poetic cycle “On the Street”: one street drama collides with another, another is replaced by a third, until the final formula: “I see drama everywhere.” The artistic connection of the scenes with each other gives the poems a generalized meaning: we are no longer talking about private episodes of city life, but about the criminal state of the world, in which existence is possible only under humiliating conditions. Nekrasov introduces a plot-narrative principle into the lyrics, using the experience of the prose of the “natural school”, but with the help of the cyclization of plot motifs he achieves a high degree of poetic generalization. In the street scenes of Nekrasov, Dostoevsky is anticipated, the images and plot motifs of the future novel “Crime and Punishment” are anticipated. In the same way, in “The Forgotten Village” (1855), individual episodes from folk life, poetically “mating” with each other, create a holistic image of peasant Russia. Here, too, the prosaic plot is melted into a synthesizing poetic generalization.

The composition of the entire poetic book is deeply thought out and artistically organized. The collection opened with the poem “The Poet and the Citizen” (1855-1856), which revealed the dramatic relationship between citizenship and art. Then there were four sections: in the first - poems about the life of the people, in the second - a satire on the people's enemies, in the third - a poem about the true and false friends of the people, in the fourth - poems about friendship and love, intimate lyrics.

The verses within each section were arranged in strict sequence. The first, for example, resembled a poem about the people, about their present and future destinies. The “poem” opened with the poem “On the Road” and ended with the life-affirming “Schoolboy” (1856). These poems, framing the first section, echoed each other: they were united by the image of a Russian country road, the conversations of the master with the coachman, with the peasant boy. The poet sympathizes with the driver's mistrust of the gentlemen who killed his wife, the unfortunate Grusha. But sympathy collided with the deep ignorance of the peasant: he also distrusted enlightenment, seeing in it a master’s whim: “Indeed, the fear of me, hear me, aches, / That she will destroy her son too: / Teaches literacy, washes, cuts hair.” But by the end of the first section, a beneficial turn is noticed in the popular consciousness: “I see a book in my knapsack. / So, you’re going to study. I know: the father spent his last penny on his son” (I, 34). The road stretches on, and before our eyes peasant Russia is changing, brightening, rushing towards knowledge, towards the university. The poetic image of the road that permeates the verses enhances the feeling of changes in the spiritual world of the peasantry and acquires a metaphorical meaning. Nekrasovskaya Rus' is always on the road. Nekrasov the poet is sensitive to the changes taking place in the people's environment. Therefore, the life of the peasantry in his poems is depicted in a new way. Thus, based on N.’s chosen plot “On the Road”, there were many works about “daring troikas”, about “bells under the arc”, about “long songs of the coachman”. At the beginning, N. reminds the reader of exactly this, and then decisively breaks off the traditional poetic course. It is not the song, but the driver’s speech, rich in dialecticisms, that invades the poetry. If a folk song reproduces the events and characters of a national sound directly and directly, then N. is interested in something else: how national joys and sorrows are refracted in the fate of a private person from the people, this coachman: the poet makes his way to the general through the individual, unique. Nikolai Alekseevich saw his contribution to Russian poetry in the fact that he “increased the material processed by poetry, the personalities of the peasants.” None of Nekrasov’s contemporaries dared to get so close to the man on the pages of a poetic work. Nekrasov's artistic audacity was the source of the special dramatism of his poetic worldview. Excessive closeness to the popular consciousness destroyed many of the illusions by which his contemporaries lived. Peasant life was analyzed - the source of faith and hope of different directions and parties of Russian society.

The first section of the collection of 1856 determined not only the ways of growing national self-awareness, but also different forms of depicting folk life in Nekrasov’s works. The poem “On the Road” is the initial stage: here the poet’s lyrical “I” is still removed from the coachman’s consciousness, the hero’s voice sounds independently and independently of the author’s voice. Nekrasov wrote many of his poems in the form of such “role lyricism” - “In the Village”, “Wine”, “Drunkard”, etc. But as high moral content is revealed in people’s life, “role lyricism” is replaced by a more refined form of poetic “polyphony”: lyrical disunity disappears, and the poet’s voice merges with the voice of the people: “I know: the father spent his last penny on his little son.” This is what his village neighbor could say about the schoolboy’s father. But Nekrasov says here: he accepted folk intonations, the very speech pattern of the folk language, into his soul. In 1880, Dostoevsky, in a speech about Pushkin, spoke of the “worldwide responsiveness” of the national poet, who knew how to feel someone else’s as if he were his own, and to be imbued with the spirit of other national cultures. Nikolai Alekseevich inherited a lot from Pushkin: his muse is surprisingly responsive to other people's joy and other people's pain. The people's worldview, the people's view of things organically enter into Nekrasov's lyrical consciousness, giving his poetry a special stylistic symphony. This manifested itself in its own way even in his satirical works. Among Nekrasov’s predecessors, satire was predominantly punitive: the poet rose high above his hero and from ideal heights hurled lightning bolts of accusatory, withering words at him (cf. “To the Temporary Worker” by Ryleev). In “Modern Ode” (1845), Nikolai Alekseevich tries, on the contrary, to get as close as possible to the denounced hero, to imbue him with his outlook on life, to adapt to his self-esteem: “You are adorned with virtues, / Which others are far from, / And I take heaven as a witness - / I respect you deeply...” (T. I. - P. 31). Very often, N.’s satire is a monologue on behalf of the denounced hero - “A Moral Man” (1847), “Excerpts from the Travel Notes of Count Garansky” (1853). At the same time, Nekrasov deliberately sharpens the way of thoughts and feelings hostile to him, dives deeply into the psychology of satirical characters: the most hidden corners of their petty, petty souls turn out to be obvious. The poet later widely uses these discoveries in “Reflections at the Main Entrance” (an ironic praise of a nobleman), in “The Railway” (a self-exposing monologue of a general), and in the satirical poem “Contemporaries.” Like a talented actor, Nekrasov transforms himself, puts on various satirical masks, but remains himself in any role, carrying out a satirical exposure from the inside.

The poet often uses a satirical “rehash”, which should not be confused with parody. In “Lullaby. Imitation of Lermontov" (1845) the rhythmic and intonation structure of Lermontov's "Cossack Lullaby" is reproduced, and its high poetic vocabulary is partially borrowed, but not in the name of parody, but so that against the background of the high element of motherhood resurrected in the reader's mind, the baseness of those relationships is more sharply emphasized , which are discussed by Nekrasov. Parodic use (“rehash”) is a means of enhancing the satirical effect here.

In the third section of the poetry collection of 1856, Nekrasov published the poem “Sasha” (1855) - one of the first experiments in the field of poetic epic. It was created at a happy time of the rise of the social movement, in anticipation of people with strong characters and revolutionary convictions. Their appearance was expected from social strata that stood close to the people - small landed nobility, clergy, and urban philistinism. In the poem “Sasha,” Nikolai Alekseevich wanted to show how these “new people” are born and how they differ from the previous “heroes of the time,” “superfluous people” from among the cultural nobility.

According to Nekrasov, a person’s spiritual strength is nourished by his blood ties with his homeland, “small” and “big”. The deeper this connection, the more significant the person turns out to be and vice versa. Deprived of roots in his native land, the cultured nobleman Agarin is likened in the poem to the steppe grass tumbleweed. He is an intelligent, gifted and educated person, but his character lacks firmness and faith: “What the last book tells him, / That’s in his soul

and will fall on top of him: / Believe it or not, it doesn’t matter to him, / As long as it’s proven cleverly!” (T, IV.- P. 25). Agarin is contrasted with the daughter of small landed nobles, young Sasha. The joys and sorrows of a simple rural childhood are accessible to her: she perceives nature in a folk way, admiring the festive aspects of peasant labor in the wet-nurse field. In the story of Sasha and Agarin, Nekrasov weaves the gospel parable about the sower and the soil, beloved by the peasantry. The peasant farmer likened enlightenment to sowing, and its results to the fruits of the earth growing from seeds in a labor field. Agarin plays the role of “sower of knowledge in the people’s field” in the poem, and the soul of the young heroine turns out to be fertile soil. The socialist ideas that Agarin introduces to Sasha fall into the fertile soil of the people’s soul and promise “lush fruit” in the future. Heroes of “words” will soon be replaced by heroes of “deeds”.

Nekrasov also appeared as an original poet in the final, fourth section of the poetry collection of 1856: he began to write about love in a new way. The poet's predecessors preferred to depict this feeling in beautiful moments. N., poeticizing the ups and downs of love, did not ignore that “prose” that is “inevitable in love” (“You and I are stupid people,” 1851). In his poems, next to the loving hero, the image of an independent heroine appeared, sometimes wayward and unyielding ( “I don’t like your irony...”, 1859). And therefore, the relationship between lovers has become more complex: spiritual intimacy is replaced by disagreement and quarrel, the heroes often do not understand each other, and this misunderstanding darkens their love (“Yes, our life flowed rebelliously”, 1850). Sometimes their personal dramas are a continuation of social dramas: for example, in the poem “Am I Driving Down a Dark Street at Night” (1847) the conflicts characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” are largely anticipated.

On the eve of the reform of 1861, the question of the people and their historical capabilities with all its severity and contradictions arose before people of the revolutionary-democratic way of thinking. In 1857 N. created the poem “Silence.” Peasant Russia in it appears in a single collective image of a heroic people, a great ascetic of national history. But when will the people wake up to consciously fight for their interests? There is no definite answer to this question in Silence. It is also not present in N.’s subsequent poems, from “Reflections at the Front Entrance” to “Song to Eremushka” (1859), which became the anthem of several generations of Russian revolutionary youth. In this poem, two songs collide and argue with each other: one is sung by the nanny, the other by a “passing city passerby.” The nanny’s song affirms servile, lackey morality, while the song of the “passer-by” sounds a call for revolutionary struggle under the slogans of “brotherhood, equality, freedom.” It is difficult to judge which path Eremushka will take in the future: the poem opens and ends with the nanny’s song about patience and humility. The question addressed to the people at the end of “Reflections at the Front Entrance” sounds equally unresolved. In the poem “The Unfortunate” (1856), the personality of the exiled revolutionary is surrounded by an aura of sacrifice and asceticism. Such an interpretation of the “people's defender” does not completely coincide with the ethics of “reasonable egoism” of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. Religious motifs in Nekrasov’s work, most clearly heard in the poem “Silence,” as well as in poems and epic works dedicated to the image of the revolutionary, do not agree with it. In relation to the great people of the century (Belinsky, for example), Nekrasov more than once breaks through feelings close to religious veneration. A characteristic motif is the chosenness, exclusivity of great people who rush by as a “falling star,” but without whom “the field of life would die out.” At the same time, Nikolai Alekseevich by no means breaks with democratic ideology. His hero resembles not a “superman”, but a Christian ascetic (Mole in the poem “The Unfortunate”; the exiled Decembrist in the poem “Grandfather”, 1870; the hero of the poem “Prophet”, 1874: “He was sent by the God of Wrath and Sorrow / To remind the slaves of the earth of Christ "(III, 154). The Christian aura surrounding Nekrasov's heroes is partly associated with the ideas of utopian socialism, assimilated by Nekrasov from his youth. The future society of equality and fraternity was considered by French and Russian utopian socialists as a “new Christianity”, as a continuation and development of some moral commandments bequeathed by Christ. Belinsky called the Orthodox Church “the support and servant of despotism,” but he considered Christ the forerunner of modern socialism: “He was the first to announce to people the teachings of freedom, equality and brotherhood, and through martyrdom he sealed and established the truth of his teaching.” Many contemporaries went even further. Bringing the socialist ideal closer to Christian morality, they explained this rapprochement by the fact that at the time of its emergence Christianity was the religion of the oppressed and contained the primordial dream of peoples about future brotherhood. Unlike Belinsky, Herzen and Nekrasov were more tolerant of the religiosity of the Russian peasant and saw it as one of the forms of the common man’s natural craving for socialism. This “secularization” of religion did not contradict in any way; on the contrary, it completely coincided with the fundamental features of peasant religiosity. The Russian peasant least of all relied on the afterlife in his beliefs, but preferred to look for the “promised land” in this world. Peasant culture has left us many legends about the existence of lands where people live in “contentment and justice.” They are widely reflected in Nekrasov’s poetry, right up to the peasant epic “Who Lives Well in Russia,” in which seven truth-seekers search across Russia for “an unworn province, an ungutted volost, an abundant village.” The ascetic appearance of Nekrasov’s people’s intercessors reveals their deep democracy and organic connection with folk culture. In the worldview of the Russian peasant, the difficult Russian history has fostered increased sensitivity to those who suffer for the truth, and special trust in them. N. finds many such truth-seeking martyrs among the peasants. He is attracted by the ascetic image of Vlag (“Vlas”, 1855), capable of high moral feats, and the stern image of the plowman in the poem “Silence”, who “lives without pleasure, dies without regret.” The fate of Dobrolyubov, an outstanding historical figure, in Nekrasov’s light turns out to be akin to the fate of such a plowman: “You taught to live for glory, for freedom, / But you taught more to die. / You consciously rejected worldly pleasures...” (Vol. II.- P. 173). If Chernyshevsky, until 1863, with the instinct of a politician realized the real possibility of a revolutionary explosion, then N., already in 1857, with the instinct of a people's poet, felt the truly tragic situation, as a result of which the revolutionary movement of the sixties turned out to be “weak to the point of insignificance,” and “the revolutionaries of the 61st remained alone for years...” Chernyshevsky’s ethics of “reasonable egoism,” which rejected sacrifice, was based on the feeling of the proximity of revolution. The ethics of asceticism and the poeticization of sacrifice among N. were generated by the consciousness of the impossibility of a quick awakening of the people. Nekrasov’s ideal of a revolutionary fighter inevitably merged with the ideal of a people’s ascetic.

Nekrasov spent the first post-reform summer of 1861, as usual, in Greshnev, in the circle of his friends, Kostroma and Yaroslavl peasants. In the fall, the poet returned to St. Petersburg with a whole “heap of poems.” His friends were interested in the mood of the post-reform village: what would the people’s dissatisfaction with the predatory reform lead to, is there any hope for a revolutionary explosion? The poet answered these questions with the poem “Peddlers” (1861). In it, Nekrasov the poet took a new road. His previous work was addressed mainly to readers from educated circles of society. In “Peddlers” he boldly expanded the intended circle of his readers, directly addressed the people, starting with an unusual dedication: “To a friend Gavrila Yakovlevich (peasant of the village of Shoda, Kostroma province).” The poet also takes a second unprecedented step: at his own expense, he publishes the poem in the “Red Books” series and distributes it among the people through the village ofen - merchants of small goods. “Peddlers” is a travel poem: village traders - old Tikhonych and his young assistant Vanka - wander through the rural expanses. Before their inquisitive gaze, motley pictures of life in the anxious pre-reform times pass one after another. Everything that happens in the poem is perceived through the eyes of the people; everything is given a peasant verdict. The true nationality of the poem is also evidenced by the fact that its first chapter, in which the art of Nekrasov’s “polyphony” triumphs, soon became a folk song. The main critics and judges in the poem are not patriarchal men, but “experienced” men who have seen a lot in their wandering life and have their own judgment about everything. Living types of “mental” peasants, village philosophers and politicians are being created who are interested in discussing modern orders. In Russia, which is being judged by men, “everything has turned upside down”: the old foundations are being destroyed, the new is in a state of ferment and chaos. The picture of the collapse of feudal Russia begins with the trial of the “tops,” with the priest-tsar himself. Faith in his mercy was stable in the peasant psychology, but the Crimean War shook this faith for many. “The Tsar is making a fool - the people are in trouble!” - Tikhonych declares in the poem. Then follows a trial of the idle lives of gentlemen who squander people's money in Paris. The story of Titushka the Weaver completes the picture of decomposition. A strong, hardworking peasant, by the will of all-Russian lawlessness, turned into a “wretched wanderer” - “he went on his way without a road.” His drawn-out, mournful song, absorbing the groan of Russian villages and hamlets, the whistle of cold winds on meager fields and meadows, prepares a tragic denouement in the poem. In the deep Kostroma forest, peddlers die at the hands of a forester, reminiscent of “grief, belted with a sash.” This murder is a spontaneous rebellion of a desperate person who has lost faith in the life of a person. Why does Nekrasov end the poem this way? Probably because he remains faithful to the truth of life: it is known that both before and after the reform “the people, who had been enslaved by the landowners for hundreds of years, were not able to rise to a broad, open, conscious struggle for freedom.” The tragic denouement in the poem is complicated inner experiences of peddlers. Tikhonych and Vanka are ashamed of their trade. Across their path, based on the principle “if you don’t deceive, you won’t sell,” stands the pure love of Vanka’s bride, Katerinushka, who prefers a “turquoise ring” - a symbol of holy maiden love - to all the peddler’s generous gifts. In the labors of the peasants, from morning until late at night, Katerinushka drowns her longing for her betrothed. The entire fifth part of the poem, glorifying the selfless peasant labor on the land and selfless love, is a reproach to the merchant occupation of peddlers, which separates them from working life and folk morality. It is no coincidence that in “Peasant Children” (1861), created simultaneously with “Peddlers,” Nekrasov glorifies the harsh prose and lofty poetry of peasant childhood and calls for preserving the eternal moral values ​​born of labor on the land, the very “centuries-old inheritance” that the poet considers the source Russian national culture.

After 1861, the country's social movement began to decline, the leaders of revolutionary democracy were arrested, and progressive thought was beheaded. In the autumn of 1862, in a difficult mood, Nekrasov visited his native place, visited Greshnev and the neighboring village of Abakumtsevo at his mother’s grave. The result of these events was the lyrical poem “A Knight for an Hour” (1862) - one of Nekrasov’s most heartfelt works about filial love for his mother, developing into love for the Motherland, about the drama of a Russian man, endowed with a burning conscience, yearning for support for a revolutionary feat. Nekrasov loved this poem very much and always read it “with tears in his voice.” There is a memory that Chernyshevsky, who returned from exile, while reading “A Knight for an Hour,” “could not stand it and burst into tears.”

The Polish uprising of 1863, brutally suppressed by Russian government troops, pushed court circles to reaction. During this period, some of the revolutionary intelligentsia lost faith in the people and in their creative capabilities. Articles began to appear on the pages of the democratic magazine “Russian Word” in which the people were accused of rudeness, stupidity and ignorance. Later, Chernyshevsky, in the “Prologue,” through the lips of Volgin, uttered bitter words about the “pathetic nation” - “from top to bottom, everyone is completely slaves.” In 1863-1864. N. is working on the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” filled with bright faith and good hope. The central event of “Frost” is the death of a peasant, and the action in the poem does not extend beyond the boundaries of one peasant family, but its meaning is national. The peasant family in the poem is a cell of the all-Russian world: the thought of Daria, as it deepens, turns into the thought of the “majestic Slav”; the deceased Proclus is like the peasant hero Mikula Selyaninovich. And the event that happened in a peasant family that lost its breadwinner brings into focus not even centuries-old, but millennia-old troubles of a Russian woman-mother, a long-suffering Slav. Daria's grief is defined in the poem as “the great grief of a widow and mother of small orphans.” Nekrasov turns the event, at first glance far from epoch-making conflicts, in such a way that the general appears in the particular, and centuries-old national existence shines through the peasant life. Nekrasov's epic thought develops here in a fairly stable direction, and in the middle of the 19th century. an extremely living literary tradition. Poeticizing the “family thought,” Nekrasov does not dwell on it. “Centuries passed - everything strived for happiness, / Everything in the world changed several times, - / Only God forgot to change / The harsh lot of the peasant woman...” (IV, 79). In N.'s poem this is not a simple poetic declaration. With all the content, all the metaphorical structure of the poem, N. brings momentary events to the centuries-old flow of Russian history, peasant life - to national existence. Thus, the eyes of the crying Daria dissolve in the gray, cloudy sky of Russia, crying with stormy rain, or are compared to a grain field flowing with overripe grains-tears, and sometimes these tears hang like icicles on the eyelashes, like on the eaves of native village huts. The figurative system of “Frost” rests on these awakened metaphors, which bring the everyday facts of the poem to a nationwide and all-natural existence. In the poem, nature is responsive to the grief of the peasant family: like a living being, it responds to current events, echoes the peasant cries with the harsh howl of a blizzard, and accompanies Daria’s dreams with the witchcraft spells of Frost. The death of a peasant shakes the entire cosmos of peasant life and sets in motion the spiritual forces hidden within him. Nekrasova sees the greatness of the Russian national character in the energy of compassionate love. In a difficult situation, household members least of all think about themselves, least of all worry about their grief. And grief recedes before the all-consuming feeling of pity and compassion for the departed person, up to the desire to resurrect him with an affectionate word: “Splash, darling, with your hands, / Look with a hawk’s eye, / Shake your silken curls, / Dissolve sugary lips!” (IV, 86). The widowed Daria also faces misfortune. She does not care about herself, but, “full of thoughts about her husband, she calls him and speaks to him.” Even in the future, she cannot imagine herself being lonely. Dreaming of her son’s wedding, she anticipates not only her own happiness, but the happiness of her beloved Proclus, turns to her deceased husband, and rejoices at his joy. The same warm, kindred love extends to those “distant” - to a deceased schema monastic, for example, accidentally met in a monastery: “I looked into that face for a long time: / You are younger, smarter, cuter than everyone else, / You are like a white dove among the sisters / Between the gray, simple pigeons” (IV, 101). And Daria overcomes her own death with the power of love, spreading to children, to Proclus, to all of nature, to the earth-nurse,

to the grain field. “A person is thrown into life as a mystery to himself, every day he is brought closer to destruction - there is a lot of terrible and offensive things in this! This alone can drive you crazy,” N. wrote to Lev Tolstoy. “But then you notice that someone else or others need you - and life suddenly gains meaning, and a person no longer feels that lonely, offensive uselessness, and so mutual responsibility ... Man was created to be a support for others, because he himself needs support. Consider yourself as a unit and you will despair.” N.'s moral philosophy grew out of the deep nationality of his worldview and creativity. In the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” N. poetically transforms folk lamentations, fairy-tale-mythological images, symbolism of ritual and everyday lyrics, folk beliefs, omens, fortune-telling, stories about prophetic dreams, meetings, and omens. The poetics of fairy tales, epics, and lyrical songs helps N. reveal folk life from the inside and give a high poetic meaning to the “prosaic” realities of everyday peasant life. In “Frost,” the poet touched on the hidden layers of moral culture, an inexhaustible source of endurance and strength of the people’s spirit, which saved Russia so many times in times of national upheaval.

It was this deep faith in the people that N. acquired that helped the poet subject people’s life to harsh and strict analysis, as, for example, in the finale of the poem “The Railway” (1864). The poet was never mistaken about the immediate prospects for revolutionary peasant liberation, but he also never fell into despair: “The Russian people have endured enough, / They have endured this railway road, / They will endure everything that God sends. / He will endure everything - and he will pave a wide, clear / chest path for himself. / It’s only a pity that we won’t have to live in this wonderful time / neither for me nor for you” (I, 120).

So, in an atmosphere of cruel reaction, when the faith in the people of their very intercessors was shaken, N. retained confidence in the courage, spiritual fortitude and moral beauty of the Russian peasant. After the death of his father in 1862, N. did not break his ties with his native Yaroslavl-Kostroma region; near Yaroslavl, he acquired the Karabikha estate in May 1862 and came here every summer, spending time on hunting trips with friends from the people. Following “Frost,” “Orina, the Soldier’s Mother” (1863) appeared - a poem glorifying maternal and filial love, which triumphs not only over the horrors of the Nikolaev soldiery, but also over death itself. “Green Noise” (1862-1863) appeared - a poem about the spring feeling of renewal: nature, which had slept in winter, is reborn to life and the human heart, frozen in evil thoughts, thaws. The faith in the renewing power of nature, of which man is a part, born of peasant labor on the land, saved N. and his readers from complete disappointment during the difficult years of the triumph in state-owned Russia of “drums, chains, an ax” (“The heart is breaking from torment,” 1863).

At the same time, N. began to create “Poems dedicated to Russian children” (1867-1873). Turning to the world of childhood was refreshing and encouraging, cleansing the soul from the bitter impressions of reality. The main advantage of Nekrasov’s poems for children is genuine democracy: peasant humor and compassionate love for the small and weak, addressed not only to man, but also to nature, triumph in them. The good companion of our childhood was the mocking, slyly good-natured grandfather Mazai, the clumsy general Toptygin and the caretaker fawning around him, the compassionate grandfather Yakov, who gave the primer to the peasant girl.

The end of the 60s turned out to be especially difficult for Nekrasov: the moral compromise he made in the name of saving the magazine aroused reproaches from all sides: the reactionary public accused the poet of self-interest, and spiritual like-minded people of apostasy. N.’s difficult experiences were reflected in the cycle of so-called “repentant” poems: “The enemy rejoices...” (1866), “I will soon die...” (1867), “Why are you tearing me apart...” (1867) . However, these poems do not fit into the unambiguous definition of “repentant”: they contain the courageous voice of the poet, filled with a complex internal struggle, not absolving himself of accusations, but branding with shame the society in which an honest person receives the right to life at the cost of humiliating moral compromises.

The invariability of the poet’s civic convictions during these dramatic years is evidenced by his poems “It’s stuffy! without happiness and will..." (1868). Then, at the end of the 60s. N.'s satirical talent blossomed (completion of the cycle “About the Weather,” 1865; creation of “Songs about Free Speech,” 1865-1866, poetic satires “Ballet,” 1866, and “Recent Time,” 1871). Using sophisticated techniques of satirical exposure, the poet boldly combines satire with high lyricism within one work; he widely uses polymetric compositions - a combination of different meters within one poem. The pinnacle and result of N.’s satirical creativity is the poem “Contemporaries” (1865), in which the poet exposes new phenomena in Russian life associated with the rapid development of capitalist relations. In the first part, “Anniversaries and Triumphants,” the motley and contradictory picture of anniversary celebrations in the corrupted bureaucratic elites is satirically recreated; in the second, “Heroes of Time,” robbers-plutocrats, assorted predators born of the age of iron roads, find their voice. N. shrewdly notices not only the predatory, anti-people essence, but also the inferior, cowardly traits in the characters of the rising Russian bourgeoisie, who do not fit into the classical type of European bourgeoisie.

The beginning of the 70s was the era of another social upsurge associated with the activities of the revolutionary populists. N. immediately caught the first symptoms of this awakening. In 1869, he came up with the idea for the poem “Grandfather,” which was created for a young reader. The events of the poem date back to 1856, but the time of action in it is quite arbitrary. It is clear that we are also talking about modernity, that the expectations of the Decembrist grandfather - “they will soon give them freedom” - are aimed at the future and are not connected with peasant reform. For censorship reasons, the story about the Decembrist uprising sounds muted. But N. artistically motivates this subduedness by the fact that the grandfather’s character is revealed to his grandson Sasha gradually, as the boy grows up. Gradually, the young hero is imbued with the beauty and nobility of his grandfather’s people-loving ideals. The idea for which the Decembrist hero gave his entire life is so lofty and sacred that serving it makes complaints about one’s personal fate inappropriate. This is exactly how the hero’s words should be understood: “Today I have come to terms with everything that I have suffered forever!” A symbol of his vitality is an iron cross made of shackles - “the image of a crucified god” - solemnly removed from his neck by his grandfather upon his return from exile. Christian motifs coloring the personality of the Decembrist are intended to emphasize the folk character of his ideals. The central role in the poem is played by the grandfather's story about the migrant peasants in the Siberian settlement of Tarbagatai, about the enterprise of the peasant world, about the creative nature of people's communal self-government. As soon as the authorities left the people alone and gave the peasants “land and freedom,” the artel of free cultivators turned into a society of free and friendly labor and achieved material abundance. The poet surrounded the story about Tarbagatai with motifs of peasant legends about the “free lands”. The poet was convinced that socialist aspirations live in the soul of every poor man.

The next stage in the development of the Decembrist theme was N.’s appeal to the feat of the wives of the Decembrists, who followed their husbands to hard labor in distant Siberia. In the poems “Princess Trubetskaya” (1871) and “Princess Volkonskaya” (1872), N. discovers in the best women of the noble circle the same qualities of national character that he found in the peasant women of the poems “Peddlers” and “Frost, Red Nose.”

N.'s works about the Decembrists became facts not only of literary, but also of social life. They inspired revolutionary youth to fight for people's freedom. Honorary academician and poet, famous revolutionary populist N. A. Morozov argued that “the general movement of student youth into the people did not arise under the influence of Western socialism, but that its main lever was the populist poetry of Nekrasov, which everyone read in their adolescence, giving the most powerful impressions."

In the lyrical works of N. 70. significant changes are taking place. The number of poetic declarations is increasing, and the position of the civic poet is being sharply dramatized. The internal integrity of the individual, in the conditions of the bourgeois double-mindedness approaching Russia, is defended at the cost of more severe asceticism. Even now, N. gives preference, only more decisively, to the poet-fighter. More and more often N. speaks of him as a “persecuted priest” of civil art, protecting in his soul “the throne of truth, love and beauty.” The idea of ​​the unity of citizenship and art has to be stubbornly defended and defended, right up to its consecration by the traditions of the high romantic culture of the era of the 20s. This opens up the prospect of N. turning to the work of the young romantic Pushkin. “Elegy” (1874) is saturated, for example, with the pathetic intonations of Pushkin’s “Village”. N. overshadows his poems about the essence of poetic creativity with the authority of Schiller - “To the Poet” and “In Memory of Schiller” (1874). In his later work, Nekrasov the lyricist turns out to be a much more traditional, literary poet than in the 60s, for now he is looking for aesthetic and ethical support not so much by directly accessing the life of the people, but by turning to the poetic tradition of his great predecessors. Lyrical hero N. 70 more focused on his feelings, the democratic element of “polyphony” is often replaced by introspection, painful reflection, and with it Lermontov’s intonations. The image of the world as a peasant way of life is replaced by the image of the world as a general world order. The scale of understanding life is becoming more global. In a number of poems, such as “Morning” (1872-1873), “A Terrible Year” (1872-1874), N. foreshadows Blok with his theme of a terrible world. The poetic imagery of Nekrasov's lyrics is renewed, and a unique symbolization of artistic details occurs. Thus, in the poem “To Friends” (1876), a detail from peasant life - “wide folk bast shoes” - acquires symbolic ambiguity as the personification of all working, peasant Russia. Old themes and images are rethought and given new life. The poet compresses the living picture unfolded in the poem “Muse” (1848) into a capacious poetic symbol: “Not a Russian will look without love / At this pale, bloody, / Muse cut with a whip” (Vol. III. - P. 218). This striving for synthesis, for a conclusion, for a capacious and aphoristic artistic image was completed in the lyrical cycle “Last Songs” (1877). A worthy finale to N.’s epic work was the epic “Who Lives Well in Rus'” (1865-1877). The composition of this work is built according to the laws of the classical epic: it consists of separate, relatively autonomous parts and chapters - “Prologue. Part One,” “Peasant Woman,” “Last One,” “Feast for the Whole World.” Outwardly, these parts are connected by the theme of the road: seven truth-seekers wander through the expanses of Russia, trying to resolve the question that haunts them: “Who can live well in Russia?” The “Prologue” also outlines the initial outline of the journey - meetings with a priest, a landowner, a merchant, an official, a minister and a tsar. However, the epic is devoid of plot purpose. N. does not force the action, is in no hurry to bring it to an all-resolving result. As an epic artist, he reveals all the diversity of folk characters, all the indirectness of their life paths. The fairy-tale motifs introduced into the epic allow N. to freely and easily deal with time and space, and easily transfer the action from one end of Russia to the other. What unites the epic is not an external, but an internal plot: step by step, it clarifies the contradictory, but irreversible growth of national self-awareness, which has not yet come to a conclusion, still in difficult quests. In this sense, the looseness of the plot, the “unfinishedness” of the work, is not accidental, but deeply meaningful; it expresses in its own way the diversity and diversity of people’s lives, which think about themselves in different ways, evaluate their place in the world and their destiny in different ways. For the same purpose, N. uses all the diversity of oral folk art: the fairy-tale motifs of the prologue are replaced by epic epics, then lyrical songs and, finally, songs by Grisha Dobrosklonov, striving to become popular and already partially accepted and understood by the people. In the development of the artistic thought of the epic, the original formula of the dispute, based on a proprietary understanding of happiness, including “peace, wealth, honor,” is questioned. With the appearance of Yakim Nagogo, the criterion of wealth is called into question: during a fire, Yakim saves pictures, forgetting about the rubles accumulated throughout his difficult life. The same hero proves that noble honor has nothing in common with peasant labor honor. Yermil Girin throughout his life refutes the initial ideas of wanderers about the essence of human happiness. It would seem that Girin has everything he needs for happiness: “peace, money, and honor.” But at a critical moment in his life, he sacrifices this “happiness” for the sake of the people’s truth. Gradually, in the consciousness of the peasantry, a still vague ideal of an ascetic, a fighter for the people's interests, is born. At the same time, a certain turn is planned in the plot movement of the epic. Forgetting about the rich and noble, the men turn to the people's world in search of happiness, and he reveals to them a new hero - Savely, the hero of the Holy Russian. This is already a spontaneous popular rebel, capable of uttering the decisive word “naddai” in a critical situation, under which the peasants bury the hated German manager alive. Savely justifies his rebellion with peasant philosophy: “To not endure is an abyss, to endure is an abyss.” But Savely’s formidable heroic power is not without contradictions. It is no coincidence that he is compared with Svyatogor - the strongest, but also the most motionless hero of the epic epic, and Matryona Timofeevna ironically declares: “Such and such a mighty hero, the mice will eat tea.” Unlike Savely, Matryona does not tolerate and responds to any injustice with immediate action: she seeks and finds ways out of the most dramatic situations, proudly speaking about herself: “I have a bowed head, I carry an angry heart.” In N.’s work, not only individual heroes from Yakim Nagogo to Savely and Matryona are in motion and development, but also the mass, collective image of the people. After the reform, the peasants of the village of Bolshie Vakhlaki are playing the “gum” of subordination to the out-of-mind Prince Utyatin, seduced by the promises of his heirs-sons. In “The Last One,” N. gives a capacious satirical image of serfdom relations, all the more modern and multi-valued because even after the half-hearted reform, the peasantry remained virtually dependent on the masters for many decades. But there is a limit to peasant patience: Agap Petrov rebels against the master. The story with Agap gives rise to a feeling of shame among the Vakhlaks for their position, the game of “gum” comes to an end and ends with the death of the “last child”. In “A Feast for the Whole World,” the people celebrate a “wake for the support.” Everyone is involved in the festive action: folk songs of liberation are heard. These songs at the spiritual feast of the people are far from unambiguous, contradictory and colorful. Sometimes they are contrasting in relation to each other, such as, for example, the story “About the exemplary slave - Yakov the Faithful” and the legend “About two great sinners”. Here the poem resembles an all-Russian peasant gathering, a worldly dialogue. The diverse chorus of popular voices organically includes the songs of Grisha Dobrosklonov, an intellectual revolutionary who knows that happiness can be achieved as a result of a nationwide struggle for common interests. The men listen to Grisha, sometimes nod their heads in agreement, but Grisha has not yet had time to sing the last song “Rus” to the Vakhlaks. That’s why the ending of the poem is open to the future, unresolved: “Our wanderers would be under their own roof, / If they could know what was happening to Grisha” (T. V.-S. 235). But the wanderers did not hear the song “Rus” and did not understand what the “embodiment of the people’s happiness” was: “They got up - untroubled, / Came out - uninvited, / Lived grain by grain / Mountains were destroyed! / The army is rising - / Countless. / The strength in her will be / Indestructible! (V, 234).

At the beginning of 1875 N. became seriously ill. Neither the famous Viennese surgeon Billroth nor the painful operation could stop the fatal cancer. .The news about her caused a flow of letters, telegrams, greetings and addresses from all over Russia. Popular support strengthened the poet’s strength, and in a painful illness he created “Last Songs.” The time has come to "sum up the results. N. understands that with his work he was paving new paths in the art of poetry. Only he decided on stylistic audacity that was unacceptable at the previous stage of the development of Russian poetry, on a bold combination of elegiac, lyrical and satirical motifs within one poem. He made a significant update of the traditional genres of Russian poetry: he introduced civic motives into the elegy ("Elegy"), political invective into the romance ("Another Troika", 1867), social problems into the ballad ("Secret. Experience of a modern ballad", 1855). N. expanded the possibilities of the poetic language, including in the lyrics the plot-narrative beginning ("On the Road"), elements of the feuilleton ("Official", 1844), the traditions of the physiological essay ("The Drunkard", 1845).N. creatively mastered, introducing him to modern poetry, Russian folklore: a penchant for song rhythms and intonations, the use of anaphors, parallelisms, repetitions, “stringy” trisyllabic meters (dactyl, anapest) with verbal rhymes, the use of folk hyperbole. In “Who Lives Well in Rus',” N. poetically plays on proverbs, widely uses constant epithets, but, most importantly, he creatively reworks folklore texts, revealing the potentially revolutionary, liberating meaning contained in them. N. unusually expanded the stylistic range of Russian poetry, using colloquial speech, folk phraseology, dialectisms, boldly including different speech styles in the work - from everyday to journalistic, from popular vernacular to folk-poetic vocabulary, from oratorical-pathetic to parody-satirical style .

But the main question that tormented N. throughout his creative work was not the formal problems of “mastery.” It was a question-doubt about how much his poetry could change the life around him and receive a welcome response among the peasantry. The motives of disappointment, sometimes despair and melancholy are replaced in “Last Songs” by life-affirming notes. The selfless helper of the dying N. is Zina (F.N. Viktorova), the poet’s wife, to whom his best poems are addressed. N. still retains the hagiographic holiness of the maternal image. In the poem “Bayushki-Bayu”, through the lips of the mother, the Motherland addresses the poet with the last song of consolation: “Do not be afraid of bitter oblivion: / I already hold in my hand / the crown of love, the crown of forgiveness, / the gift of your meek homeland...” (III, 204).

At N.'s funeral a spontaneous demonstration arose. Several thousand people accompanied his coffin to the Novodevichy cemetery. And at the civil memorial service, a historical dispute broke out: Dostoevsky, in his speech, carefully compared N. with Pushkin. Loud voices were heard from the crowd of revolutionary youth: “Higher! Higher!" Among Dostoevsky’s opponents, the most energetic position on this matter was taken by N. G. V. Plekhanov, who was present at the funeral.

2.Theme of the Motherland in Nekrasov’s lyrics

The theme of the homeland occupies one of the leading places in Nekrasov’s work. In works devoted to this topic, the poet touches on the most pressing problems of his time. For Nekrasov, the problem of slavery was relevant. However, he viewed it from a slightly different aspect. The poet is primarily concerned with the slavish obedience of the peasants. This is explained by the fact that the poet saw in the peasantry a genuine force capable of renewing and reviving contemporary Russia. In the poem “The Railway,” the author shows that the ideas of slavish humility are very strong among the people, even hard work and poverty cannot change their worldview:

The literate foremen robbed us,

The authorities flogged me, the need was pressing

We, God's warriors, have endured everything,

Peaceful children of labor!

The image of the people in the poem is tragic and large-scale. The author speaks with sincere sympathy about the plight of the builders. Sometimes the narrative takes on the character of documentary evidence:

You see, he’s standing there, exhausted by fever,

A tall, sick Belarusian;

Bloodless lips, drooping eyelids,

Ulcers on skinny arms

Always standing in knee-deep water

My legs are swollen, my hair is tangled.

The poet ends his description of the people’s misfortunes with the exclamation:

He also took out this railway -

He will endure whatever the Lord sends!

Will bear everything - and a wide, clear

With his breast he will pave the way for himself...

However, these optimistic lines end with the poet’s bitter verdict:

It’s just a pity to live in this wonderful time

You won't have to - neither me nor you.

The poet does not hope that the situation of the people will improve in the near future, primarily because the people themselves have resigned themselves to their fate. Emphasizing this, Nekrasov ends the poem with an ugly scene, which once again proves that the psychology of peasant builders is the psychology of slaves:

The people unharnessed the horses - and the purchase price

With a shout of hurray! rushed along the road...

The image of Russia, “possessed by a servile illness,” also appears in the poem “Reflections at the Main Entrance.” The poet goes from depicting urban scenes to describing peasant Russia. We see images of peasant walkers:

The Armenian boy is thin on his shoulders,

On a knapsack on their bent backs,

A cross on my neck and blood on my feet...

The cross is a symbol of the martyrdom that the peasant is destined to bear. But the poet not only talks about the plight of the peasantry. He strives to show the depth of suffering of the entire people of Russia. A generalized image of suffering Rus' appears in the song-moan of the men:

Motherland!

Name me such an abode,

I've never seen such an angle

Where would your sower and guardian be?

Wherever a Russian man moans...

In this part of the poem, Nekrasov uses the traditions of Russian song. The poet often uses repetitions characteristic of folk poetry:

He moans across the fields, along the roads,

He groans in prisons, in prisons,

In the mines, on the iron chain,

He groans under the barn, under the haystack,

Under a cart, spending the night in the steppe...

Sympathizing with the people's grief, Nekrasov at the same time asserts that only the peasants themselves can save themselves from suffering. At the end of the poem, the poet asks the Russian people:

What does your endless groan mean? Will you wake up full of strength?..

Nekrasov believes in the awakening of the people; it is not for nothing that in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” he draws with great expressiveness the images of peasant fighters. With sincere sympathy, Ermil Girin, Yakim Nagoy, Savely, the Holy Russian hero, are shown in the poem.

Nekrasov also widely used folk art techniques in his works. This is, first of all, reflected in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” Already the first lines of the poem introduce us to the world of folk tales:

In what year - calculate

In what land - guess

On the sidewalk

Seven men came together...

The poet was able to convey the living speech of the people, their songs, sayings and sayings, which absorbed age-old wisdom, sly humor, sadness and joy.

Nekrasov considers people's Russia to be his homeland. He devoted all his work to serving the interests of the people, as he saw this as the main task of poetry. Nekrasov in his work affirms the principle of citizenship in poetry. In the poem “The Poet and the Citizen” he says:

You may not be a poet, but you must be a citizen!

This does not mean at all: don’t be a poet, but be a citizen. For Nekrasov, a true poet is a “worthy son of the fatherland.” Summing up his work, Nekrasov admitted:

I dedicated the lyre to my people.

Perhaps I will die unknown to him,

But I served him - and my heart is calm...

Thus, the poet saw the meaning of his work precisely in serving the fatherland, therefore the theme of the homeland occupies one of the leading places in their poetry.

3. The working people in the works of N.A. Nekrasova

…In our country, the role of a writer is first and foremost a role... intercessor for the voiceless and humiliated.

N. A. Nekrasov.

Since childhood, each of us has been familiar with the heartfelt poems and poems of Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov. Creating his immortal works, the poet looked at life through the eyes of the people and spoke about it in their language. With love, sympathy and understanding, with deep insight into the very essence of life, Nekrasov painted the common man. He noticed in him a lively mind, intelligence, talent, great human dignity, and a desire to work.

In the work of N. A. Nekrasov, labor took one of the most honorable places. The poet in his poems truthfully told about how the Russian people live and work, showed them as a true builder and creator of life, a “sower and guardian” of the country’s wealth, “whose rough hands work.”

Work is the basis of life, and only he can rightfully consider himself a person who works, only he who will see heavenly blessings in the future life, who spends time on earth not in idleness, but in righteous labors. Therefore, every positive character in Nekrasov’s poetry is, first of all, a good and skillful worker.

Lyricist Nekrasov seems to always be among people; their lives, their needs, their fate deeply concern him. And his poetry is always social.

In the sixties, the poet wrote one of his most significant works - the famous “Railroad”. This great song of the dead, the builders of the railway, reveals the unscrupulous exploitation of the labor of Russian peasants by entrepreneurs. The poet managed to paint a vivid picture of the hard life and lack of rights of workers:

We struggled under the heat, under the cold,

With an ever-bent back,

They lived in dugouts, fought hunger,

They were cold and wet and suffered from scurvy.

Railway builders do not point out unbearable and inhumane conditions in order to complain about the hardships they endured. These hardships strengthen the consciousness of the high significance of the work they did, for the men worked for the common good. They served God with selfless labor, and not personal goals, so on this moonlit night they admire the work of their hands and rejoice that in the name of God they endured great torment and suffering.

Do you hear singing?.. “On this moonlit night

We love to see our work...

We, God's warriors, have endured everything,

Peaceful children of labor!

In the final part, Nekrasov moves from images of destitute, groaning men to a broad, generalized image - groaning Rus', overflowing with the great sorrow of the people.

The poet believes that the Russian people will achieve liberation from the exploiters:

Don’t be shy for your dear fatherland...

The Russian people have endured enough

He took out this railway too -

He will endure whatever God sends!

Will endure everything - and a wide, clear

He will pave the way for himself with his chest.

Among Russian poets, Nekrasov most deeply felt and painted tragically beautiful images of eternal workers and sufferers - barge haulers. He saw their life since childhood, as a child he heard their songs and moans, what he saw and heard was indelibly etched in the poet’s memory. Nekrasov realized early on that

There is a king in the world: this king is merciless,

Hunger is its name.

The merciless tsar-hunger drives people to the banks of the Volga and forces them to pull an unbearable burden. In his autobiographical poem “On the Volga,” the poet described something that he “could not forget” all his life:

Almost bending my head

To feet entwined with twine,

Shod in bast shoes, along the river

The barge haulers crawled in a crowd...

The work of barge haulers was so hard that death seemed to them a welcome deliverer. Nekrasovsky barge hauler says:

Whenever the shoulder heals,

I would pull the strap like a bear,

And if you die by morning -

It would be even better that way.

Everywhere, along with showing the hopeless severity of the peasant lot, Nekrasov paints powerful, strong, bright images of people from the people, warmed by the author's love. This is Ivanushka - a heroic build, a hefty kid, Savvushka - tall, with an arm like iron, shoulders - an oblique fathom.

“Truda” is a characteristic feature of the poet’s folk heroes. The man is attracted by hard work, reminiscent of a heroic deed; in his dreams and thoughts, he sees himself as nothing other than a hero: he plows loose sands, cuts down dense forests. Proclus in the poem “Frost, Red Nose” is likened to a heroic worker revered by the peasantry:

Large, calloused hands,

Those who put up a lot of work,

Beautiful, alien to torment

Face - and beard down to the arms...

Proclus's whole life is spent in hard work. At the funeral of a peasant, “vocal” relatives remember his love of work as one of the main virtues of a breadwinner:

You were an adviser to parents,

You were a worker in the field...

This same theme is picked up in “Who Lives Well in Rus'” by Savely, who, addressing Matryona Timofeevna, says:

Do you think, Matryonushka,

Is the man not a hero?

And his life is not a military one,

And death is not written for him

In battle - what a hero!

There is not a single aspect of peasant life that Nekrasov would ignore. The thought of the lack of rights and suffering of the people is inseparable in the poet’s work from another thought - about his imperceptible but true greatness, about the inexhaustible forces dormant within him.

The theme of a woman’s difficult fate runs through many of Nikolai Alekseevich’s works. In the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” the author draws the image of a “majestic Slavic woman.” Nekrasov talks about the tragic fate of Daria, who took on all the men's work and dies as a result. The poet's admiration for the beauty of the peasant woman inextricably merges with admiration for her dexterity and strength in work.

N. Chernyshevsky wrote that for a woman who “works a lot”, a sign of beauty will be “extraordinary freshness, a blush all over her cheek.” It is this ideal that Nekrasov describes, seeing in the peasant woman a combination of external attractiveness and internal, moral wealth, and mental fortitude.

Beauty, the world is amazing,

Blush, slim, tall,

She is beautiful in any clothes,

He is dexterous in any work.

Daria's fate is perceived as a typical fate of a Russian woman of the people. The poet repeatedly notes this in his poems:

Fate had three hard parts,

And the first part: to marry a slave,

The second is to be the mother of a slave's son,

And the third is to submit to the slave until the grave,

And all these formidable shares fell

To a woman of Russian soil.

Speaking about the painful fate of women, Nekrasov never ceases to glorify the amazing spiritual qualities of his heroines, their enormous willpower, self-esteem, pride, not crushed by difficult living conditions.

With enormous poetic power, the poet shows the bitter fate of children. “Care and need” drove them from home; exhausting, backbreaking work awaited them at the factory. Children died, “dried up” in factory captivity. Nekrasov dedicated the poem “The Cry of Children” to these little convicts who did not know rest and happiness. The poet conveys the severity of work that kills the living soul of a child, the monotony of his life with the monotonous rhythm of the poem, the repetition of words:

All day at the wheel factories

We twirl - twirl - twirl!

It's no use crying and praying,

The wheel does not hear, does not spare:

Even if you die, the damn thing is spinning,

Even if you die - buzzing - buzzing - buzzing!

The complaints of children doomed to die slowly at the factory machine remain unanswered. The poem “The Cry of Children” is a passionate voice in defense of little workers, given over by hunger and need to capitalist slavery.

The poet dreamed of a time when work would become joyful and free for a person. In the poem “Grandfather” he showed what miracles people are capable of when their work is free. “A handful of Russians,” exiled to the “terrible wilderness,” made the barren land fertile, miraculously cultivated the fields, and raised fat herds. The hero of the poem, an old Decembrist, talking about this miracle, adds:

Will and labor of man

Wonderful divas create!

The theme of the suffering people and the theme of the working people determines the face of Nekrasov’s poetry and constitutes its essence. Throughout the poet’s entire work runs the idea of ​​the physical and mental beauty of a person from the people, in which N. A. Nekrasov saw the guarantee of a bright future.

4. Nekrasov the satirist.

A brief analysis of the poem “Lullaby”.

The poem “Lullaby Song” was written by Nekrasov in 1845. Through the author's narration, through his instructions, hidden criticism, the baby's warning is shown, which consists in comparing his future life with the life of his father. But the warning is not a special case, it is addressed to all humanity. Comparing the author’s immortal love for the Motherland, his compassion, and pain for suffering Russia, we can conclude that Nekrasov is dissatisfied with the existing system, which destroys the entire essence of Russian existence, incinerating, exhausting the simple toiling people. Between the lines you can trace the theme of the difficult fate of the peasants and the bureaucracy that has captured the whole of Russia, which lives at the expense of bribery, at the expense of someone’s lives, at the expense of someone’s unvalued labor. Russian officials have never been distinguished by good morals and philanthropy, but they have always had respect among people. The common people, fearing for their existence, were forced to obediently worship, fulfill all demands, neglecting their opinions. The author describes the blessings of “human life,” but does it with disgust, thereby revealing his true feelings, his cruel point of view:

You will be an official in appearance,

And a scoundrel at heart.

I'll go out to see you off -

And I’ll wave my hand!

The author is an ardent opponent of ill-gotten wealth; he shows us the essence of a free, rich life. Nekrasov explains to us that a creature that controls people like cattle, making money at their expense, at the expense of their suffering, does not have the proud name of “man.” The poet opposes injustice and dishonor. Calling the baby “harmless”, “naive”, he speaks of the spiritual purity of the people, their “incorruptibility”. The originality of artistic means once again emphasizes the author’s skill, which so clearly and intelligently conveys to the reader the foundations of injustice. The epithets used by the author once again prove to us the main goal of the work - to show people the consequences of the stratification of society, which leaves such a cruel imprint on the history of society. Correlating the time of evolution and the time of writing the poem, we can say that history was “reversing”, while destroying all the increased development potentials.

To summarize, we can say that Nekrasov was a true patriot who so ardently defended his Motherland. For Nekrasov, all the injustice that roamed around “sick” Russia coincides in one concept - bureaucracy. And Nekrasov was right, because even now it is this factor, unfortunately, that is finishing off Russia...

5. Nekrasov and Belinsky.

The critical activity of the young Nekrasov was part of the struggle for a realistic and social principle in literature that Belinsky and the writers of the natural school waged. Therefore, it is natural that his newspaper articles and reviews soon attracted the attention of Belinsky - even before they met. Their opinions often coincided; sometimes Nekrasov was even ahead of Belinsky in his assessments, since he was published in the “thick” monthly (“Otechestvennye zapiski”). Belinsky, undoubtedly, was satisfied when he encountered reviews in which the young writer sarcastically ridiculed the pseudo-historical stories of K. Masalsky and M. Zagoskin, the pompous romantic poems of now forgotten authors and - what is even more important - the official-monarchist works of N. Polevoy and F. Bulgarin, who claimed first place in literature and journalism.

Belinsky remembered Nekrasov’s feuilleton for a long time. A few years later, in 1847, he noted in one of his letters: “...Nekrasov is a talent, and what a talent! I remember, it seems, in 1942 or 1943, he wrote in Otechestvennye zapiski an analysis of some Bulgarin product with such anger, poisonousness, and such skill that it was a pleasure and surprise to read.”

This was high praise from Belinsky.

In mid-1842, Belinsky and Nekrasov met. Belinsky immediately liked Nekrasov. Acquaintance soon turned into friendship. In the circle that gathered around the critic, there were many talented people, they were connected by quite friendly relations, but only in Nekrasov Belinsky saw a representative of the new raznochinsky intelligentsia, to which he himself belonged.

It was not difficult for Belinsky to guess Nekrasov’s true calling. According to I. I. Panaev, he fell in love with him for his “sharp, somewhat bitter mind, for the suffering that he experienced so early, seeking a piece of daily bread, and for that bold practical look beyond his years that he brought out of his toiling and a suffering life and which Belinsky was always painfully envious of.” Belinsky began to enthusiastically work on the development of Nekrasov, on expanding his horizons; he tried to instill in him those truths and that direction of thought that seemed to him the only fair ones.

What were their conversations about? Of course, about literature, about new books, about magazines, but, above all, about what especially worried the critic at that time: with enthusiasm he developed in front of his friends the idea of ​​​​socialism, the idea of ​​​​the need for freedom for the majority. Nekrasov was a grateful and attentive listener. Often, having stayed at Belinsky's until two in the morning, he would then wander for a long time through the deserted streets in an excited mood - there was so much new and unusual in what he heard. In his later poems, Nekrasov indicated those subjects that Belinsky most often touched on:

You taught us to think humanely,

Almost the first to remember the people

You were hardly the first to speak

About equality, about brotherhood, about freedom...

("Bear Hunt", 1867)

The slogans of the Great French Revolution named here show that Belinsky expressed his most cherished beliefs in the circle with complete frankness. Nekrasov understood and appreciated this. According to Dostoevsky, he was in awe of Belinsky. From now on, all of Nekrasov’s main literary plans and his publishing endeavors took shape under the influence of Belinsky’s ideas and tastes. It was he who convinced the young writer to finally abandon minor literary work, believing that the time had already come for him to take on a major work. Nekrasov did just that. Drawing on the entire accumulated stock of St. Petersburg impressions, he began in 1843 to write a novel entitled “The Life and Adventures of Tikhon Trostnikov,” which was published only in 1931.

There are many facts about how Belinsky liked Nekrasov’s poems. So one day, when Nekrasov was reading the poem “On the Road” in Belinsky’s circle, Belinsky said to him almost with tears in his eyes:

Do you know that you are a poet - and a true poet?

It is also known that Belinsky was so captivated by the poem “Motherland” that he learned it by heart, rewrote it and sent it to his friends in Moscow.

But Nekrasov did not always find mutual understanding with Belinsky. There is a well-known conflict, which the critic himself defined as an “internal break” with Nekrasov, which did not last long, however, and concerned the issue of Belinsky’s position in the magazine and his earnings.

Nekrasov said that for him the meeting with Belinsky was “salvation.” “I owe him everything,” he declared. Indeed, in the formation of the worldview, in the perception of revolutionary ideals by Nekrasov, Belinsky’s role was exceptionally great. Remembering the era of the 40s already in 1867, the poet wrote:

To rise above the level of that time

It was difficult; it may very well happen

That I would go along the mountain path,

But happiness did not sleep over me;

Through one such dreamer

By chance I came across another one.

He spoke loudly for himself.

Who watched him, who was personally close to him,

He may not have done miracles,

But none of them have been low yet...

I became friends with him almost as a child.

During the period of censorship bans, the Third Department began to show increased interest in Belinsky, and only death (May 26, 1848) saved him from major troubles. Nekrasov later wrote about this in a poem dedicated to the critic:

It's a sad time

And an honest sower of goodness

He was marked as an enemy of the fatherland;

He was followed and imprisoned

His enemies prophesied for him...

But here the grave helpfully

She opened her arms to him:

Tortured by working life

And constant poverty

He died... Remember with a seal

I didn’t dare him...

The name of Belinsky became forbidden for a long time, and the first who finally decided to mention him was Nekrasov.

Nekrasov published another poem about Belinsky in 1855. It was called first “In Memory of a Friend”, and then “In Memory of Belinsky”.

In this poem, Nekrasov glorified Belinsky for his “beautiful thoughts” and “high goal”, spoke about his great significance for the entire subsequent development of Russian social thought:

And from an unknown tree fruit

Careless and careless we eat.

We don't care who raised him,

Who devoted both work and time to him...

Nekrasov wrote the poem “V.G. Belinsky" (1855), capturing the courageous image of a critic-tribune. This poem lovingly depicts the nature of the activities of the “frantic Vissarion.” Bowing to the memory of his teacher, Nekrasov talks about the life and sad fate of Belinsky:

He honestly served the truth,

He was bolder and purer in spirit,

But I laid it out earlier

Make your way to the cemetery.

All the best that the imagination of a revolutionary poet could draw,

Nekrasov attributes it to Belinsky. He is a teacher for Nekrasov in the highest sense of the word, he is a harbinger of a happy life and the fight against oppression:

ABOUT! How many free souls are there?

Sons from my homeland,

Generous, noble

And incorruptibly faithful to her,

Who sees a brother in a man,

Who stigmatizes and hates evil,

Whose mind is bright and eyes clear,

Whose reason is not oppressed

Legends rusty shackles, -

Aren't they ready to admit everything?

His teacher?...

And in the 60s, under the influence of memories dear to the poet, Nekrasov again wrote about Belinsky, highly appreciating his personality and revolutionary role. The poet admitted:

I got the best pearl from the bottom of my soul,

My purest memory!

Repeatedly in his works, Nekrasov expressed grief that Belinsky’s name was being consigned to oblivion, that his grave was lost:

Those who knew him cannot forget,

Longing for him stings and gnaws,

And often the thought flies there,

Where the proud martyr is buried.

How much Nekrasov valued the memory of Belinsky, how ardently and sincerely he strove to resurrect him in the consciousness of society, his letter to the censor Beketov shows. The censor crossed out several pages in the Sovremennik article that talked about Belinsky. Then Nekrasov turned to the censor with the following pleading letter: “Most respectable Vladimir Nikolaevich, for God’s sake restore the pages you erased about Belinsky... Be a friend, it’s better to ban my “Princess”, ban ten of my poems in a row, I give my word of honor: I won’t even complain to myself "

Belinsky, with his characteristic insight, was the first to predict that Nekrasov would be of great importance in literature.

Nekrasov took an outstanding place in the literary world because his talent was fueled by the advanced ideas of the 40s. And in that dark era, he decisively and to the end defended the vital interests of the Russian people. It was Nekrasov, largely thanks to the influence of Belinsky, who turned out to be ideologically and theoretically prepared for that great role in literature, which he fully managed to play later, ten years later, in an atmosphere of great social upsurge, with the support of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov.

6. Literature used:

A.V. Papaev “Nekrasov Satirist”, Moscow, 1973.

School library, N.A. Nekrasov “Favorites”, Moscow, 1983.

School library, N.A. Nekrasov “Selected Lyrics”, Moscow, 1986.

Bibliographic Dictionary “Russian Writers” (M-Ya), volume 2, Moscow, 1990.

In Nekrasov’s lyrics, two concepts merged: people and homeland. They were inseparable for the poet, and this is understandable if we recall his biography. Nekrasov spent his childhood on the banks of the Volga, near Yaroslavl, on his father’s estate. From an early age, he saw the life of peasants, their joys and sorrows, their hard work and rare holidays. Even then the poet learned to love his people, his homeland. But his love for his homeland was not simple: he could, following Lermontov, say that he loved it with “passionate love.” For Nekrasov, there were, as it were, two Russias: the Russia of feudal landowners, officials indifferent to the troubles of the people, mediocre rulers, and the other Russia - the people's Russia, close and understandable to the poet. Nekrasov hated the first Russia and loved the second with all his heart.
The poet hated serfdom and serf owners, especially those as cruel and capricious as his father. The poet was an involuntary witness to the moral and physical torment of the serfs, these powerless and silent slaves. In the poem "Motherland" Nekrasov painted his father's estate, but in it the peasants endured unbearable suffering, there "a swarm of depressed and trembling slaves envied the life of the last master's dogs." The same picture could be observed in any corner of Russia; and it was then, in childhood, that Nekrasov learned to “tolerate and hate”: to endure pain at the sight of the torment of the Russian people and to hate those who caused this torment.
It is no coincidence that much later in the poem “Elegy” the poet wrote: “I dedicated the lyre to my people...” He identified the main theme of his work - “the suffering of the people.” While the people were in captivity, the poet's lyre must serve the people.
Nekrasov was bitter to see how the labor of the peasants served not their own good, but the prosperity of the landowner. In the poem “In the Motherland,” the poet writes:
Ah, strange, I was created by heaven,
This is my fate
Like the bread of fields cultivated by slaves,
No use for me!
Nekrasov wrote about the people’s own situation and the complete indifference of the authorities to their troubles in the poem “Reflections at the Front Entrance.” The reason for its writing was a street scene common at that time: peasant walkers, who came from afar to St. Petersburg “for the truth, are driven away from the entrance to the house of an official-nobleman. The poet clearly depicts with sympathy these peasants, who, apparently, extreme need forced them to set out on a long journey. But they were not even allowed onto the threshold of this house, because its owner, the minister, “does not like ragged rabble,” at this time he was sleeping soundly in his luxurious chambers and did not want to know anything about the people’s needs. In the poem, Nekrasov painted a picture of people’s suffering that is stunning in its power and truthfulness:
…Motherland!
Name me such an abode,
I've never seen such an angle
Where would your sower and guardian be?
Where would a Russian man not moan?
The poor Russian peasant groans “through the fields, along the roads... through prisons, through prisons...” And even the famous song of barge haulers heard over the Volga is also a groan:
We call this groan a song,
The barge haulers are moving along the towline!
At the end of the poem, Nekrasov asked with hope, addressing the people: “Will you wake up, full of strength?” The poet believed in the strength of the Russian people, in their future. It is no coincidence that in the poem “Railway” Nekrasov wrote:
Don’t be shy for your dear fatherland...
The Russian people have endured enough
He took out this railway too -
He will endure whatever God sends!
Will bear everything - and a wide, clear
With his breast he will pave the way for himself...
These lines of the poet contained his faith in his homeland and a clear understanding that Russia and the Russian people are great and inseparable concepts. The poet believed, like A.S. Pushkin, that “Russia will awaken from sleep” and the “star of captivating happiness” - the star of freedom - will rise above it. And for this, Nekrasov lived and worked.

A special understanding of the people and the Motherland in the poet’s work

The theme of the Motherland is uniquely presented in the works of N.A. Nekrasov. The concept of “Motherland” is equated to the concept of “people”, that is, the peasantry. Nekrasov did not stop talking about the tragic situation of the people, their suffering, their grief. The word “Motherland” evokes in the poet not pride, not memories of greatness and glory, but bitterness and shame.

The Volga as a symbol of the Motherland in Nekrasov’s poems

In the poem “Motherland,” the lyrical hero, telling about the places of his childhood, cannot remember anything bright; he associates them only with the aimless life of generations of nobles, serfdom and the consciousness that

“I was once a landowner.”

The poet's native places are connected with the great Russian river Volga.

In many poems, the Volga becomes a symbol of the Motherland and people's grief.

Volga! Volga!.. In spring, full of water

You're not flooding the fields like that,

Like the great sorrow of the people

Our land is overflowing...

The poet addresses to the Russian people with a question:

“Will you wake up full of strength? Or, in obedience to the law of fate, have you already accomplished everything you could—created a song like a groan, and rested spiritually forever?”

Love for the Russian people

Speaking about the people's suffering, Nekrasov never tires of talking about the talent of the Russian people and their patience. In the poem “Railroad,” the poet paints a picture of the people’s labor put into the construction of this road, embezzlement and oppression. But at the same time he claims that the Russian people

“he will endure everything - and pave a wide, clear path for himself.”

Nekrasov combines love for the people with hatred of their oppressors. The poem “Reflections at the Front Entrance” describes with disgust the life of an important official, and the owner of the house himself does not appear in the poem; the personification of his soullessness is the front entrance, to which ordinary Russian people come, but they are not even allowed on the threshold.

The poet writes about the long-suffering of his Motherland in the poem “The Forgotten Village.” To some extent, the concept of a “forgotten village” can be considered a symbol of all of Russia. The amazing quality of the Russian people - long-suffering - is also expressed in the hope for a kind master who will come and judge. But the old master is brought only dead, and after him comes a new master, who, like the old one, does not care about the fate of the people.

Russian woman in Nekrasov's poetry

A special place in the poet’s work, and in particular in the theme of the Motherland and the people, is occupied by the image of a Russian woman, mainly a Russian peasant woman. The life of a Russian peasant is hard, but the life of a Russian peasant woman is even harder. In the poem “To a Russian Woman,” Nekrasov creates an image of inimitable strength and beauty that can overcome all difficulties:

“He will stop a galloping horse and enter a burning hut.”

The poems “Frost, Red Nose” (the image of Daria, the widow of the peasant Proclus), “Orina, the soldier’s mother” (the image of an old mother who lost her breadwinner son) are dedicated to the tragic fates of Russian peasant women. No less tragic is the image of Nekrasov’s own mother, humiliated and tortured by her tyrant husband.

The poet compares love for the Motherland not with love for a mother, which is traditional, but with love for a woman.

“As a woman, you loved your homeland”

- he writes in the poem “In Memory of Dobrolyubov.” The poet considers service to the Motherland and people to be the highest moral goal. Creating an image, Nekrasov talks about the ideal of a human citizen who

“works, hopes, thoughts - I gave everything”

Homeland. If there were no such people in Russia,

The field of life would die out.”

Civic motives in lyrics

Nekrasov also demands service to the Motherland and the people from the poet, who is obliged to be a citizen:

The son cannot look calmly

On my mother's grief.

A worthy citizen cannot

I have a cold heart for the Fatherland.

The homeland is not only hated, but also dear to the poet. In 1857, returning from abroad, he enthusiastically says:

Thank you, dear side,

For your healing space!

The poet's homeland and chief judge. In the poems created after the ode in honor of Muravyov the hangman, which Nekrasov wrote in an attempt to save his brainchild, the Sovremennik magazine, from closure, the poet never tires of repeating:

“For a drop of blood shared with the people, forgive me, O Motherland, forgive me!..”

Much that Nekrasov said about the Motherland and the people found a lively response in the hearts of the Russian intelligentsia. Many of the poet’s poems were read and memorized by families. Much has survived to this day. And now we ask ourselves:

“Who can live well in Rus'?”

And now we are waiting:

“The master will come, the master will judge us.”

The position of Russian women has not changed in many ways. No wonder the 20th century poet Naum Korzhavin, paraphrasing Nekrasov, wrote:

“And the horses are still galloping and galloping, and the huts are burning and burning.”

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THE THEME OF THE FATE OF THE MOTHERLAND AND THE PEOPLE. This journey began with the poem “On the Road”, and ended with the poem about the wanderings of truth-seekers across Russia. And all this time, throughout his entire creative life, the poet explored the “noisy” and restless people’s Russia, tried to comprehend its amazing, complex and interesting world:

We had a long road:

People of working class scurried about

There are no numbers on it...

It happened that whole days flew by here -

Like a new passerby, there’s a new story...

The lyrics of N. A. Nekrasov were a completely new stage - he entered the history of literature as a truly national poet.

“The spectacle of national disasters” began to excite the future poet even in his early years. He spent most of his life in close proximity to the common people, so he learned in every detail all the hardships of the life of a serf. “...The heart, bleeding, hurts with someone else’s sorrow...” - he said in his poems and called his Muse “the sad companion of the sad poor, born for labor, suffering and fetters.”

“A deep love for the soil resounds in Nekrasov’s works, and the poet himself sincerely recognizes this love...,” confirms A. Grigoriev. “He loves this soil equally when he speaks about it with sincere lyricism, and when he paints gloomy or sad pictures.” Nekrasov looked at the world through the eyes of the people. In the poem “Motherland,” he mourns the bleakness and bleakness of peasant life, which all consists of “the dull eternal hum of suppressed suffering”:

And looking around with disgust,

With joy I see that the dark forest has been cut down -

In the sweltering summer heat, protection and coolness.

A powerless existence destroys the fresh forces of the people, and the poet understands with bitterness that the people themselves cannot choose the right path of struggle and liberation from shackles. Therefore, in his works he strives to point out all the hardships and injustices of everyday life and the life of the Russian peasant and to direct the development of popular thought in the right direction.

The heroes of Nekrasov's poems and poems live unique and rich lives. They live, work, rejoice, despite the hardships and hardships prepared for them by cruel fate. In Nekrasov’s poetry, no matter the man, he is an extraordinary personality, a one-of-a-kind character. Having become closer in soul to the people, the poet was able not only to write about the people, but also to “speak with the people.” The life of workers and peasants on the pages of his works appears incredibly bright, multi-colored and varied. The peasant world appears open to us, in all its frankness and spontaneity. The poet even speaks on behalf of the people themselves and in words, in the language of the people themselves. And in this speech all the diversity of Russian characters merges:

That the sea is blue

Silences, rises

Popular rumor.

And yet, in this bright, polyphonic world, Nekrasov was able to consider individual bright images of peasants, as in “Sasha”, “Eremushka’s Song”, “The Railway” and many other works. And in each work one is surprised by the incredible strength of the characters of the Russian people he depicts, their optimism, their vital energy. How easily Nekrasov’s heroes cope with any difficulties, how stubbornly they continue to believe in a bright future!

Reading Nekrasov’s poems and imbued with deep respect for their heroes - ordinary people from the people, peasant workers, we understand that a person’s spiritual strength is always based on a close connection with his homeland. The deeper and stronger this connection, the more significant the person. And it is love for the homeland and faith in its bright future that gives people the strength to live and survive in difficult conditions (hunger, oppression, suffering). Nekrasov is sure that in the soul of every man there lives a desire for liberation “from shackles,” but the poet is also concerned about the question of whether people will be able to rise to this difficult struggle for their happiness. And he believes that they can:

When above serene Russia

The silent creaking of the cart arose.

Sad as a people's groan!

Rus' has risen from all sides,

I gave everything I had

And sent for protection

From all the country roads

Your obedient sons.

The poet sees and reveals to us the suffering of his native land, the tears of mothers and wives, the death of working men from hunger, cold, disease, and the death of children. But at the same time, he sees the Russia of the future - rebelled, freed from oppression, from centuries of slavery and humiliation:

Nailed to the ground by tears

Recruit wives and mothers

The dust is no longer standing in pillars

Over my poor homeland.

Nekrasov believes in the forces of the people, in the ability of the Russian peasant to be a hero of national history. Therefore, he imagines and even clearly sees the happy fate of the Russian people and their homeland - the great, mighty Russia.