Ancestor of romanticism. Who is the founder of Russian romanticism

Romanticism- an ideological and artistic direction in European and American culture of the late 18th century - the first half of the 19th century. It is characterized by the assertion of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the image of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, spiritualized and healing nature. It spread to various spheres of human activity. In the 18th century, everything that was strange, picturesque, and existing in books, and not in reality, was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, romanticism became the designation of a new direction, opposite to classicism and the Enlightenment.

Born in Germany. Harbingers of Romanticism - Sturm und Drang and Sentimentalism in Literature.

If the Enlightenment is characterized by the cult of reason and civilization based on its principles, then romanticism affirms the cult of nature, feelings and the natural in man. It was in the era of romanticism that the phenomena of tourism, mountaineering and picnics were formed, designed to restore the unity of man and nature. The image of the “noble savage”, armed with “folk wisdom” and not spoiled by civilization, is in demand.

The genesis of the term "Romanticism" is as follows. In a word, novel (French roman, English romance) in the 16th-18th centuries. called a genre that retained many features of medieval knightly poetics and very little considered the rules of classicism. A characteristic feature of the genre was fantasy, vagueness of images, disregard for plausibility, idealization of heroes and heroines in the spirit of late conditional chivalry, action in an indefinite past or in indefinitely distant countries, an addiction to the mysterious and magical. To denote the features characteristic of the genre, the French adjective arose "romanesque" and English - "romantic". In England, in connection with the awakening of the bourgeois personality and the sharpening of interest in the "life of the heart", this word during the XVIII century. began to acquire new content, attaching to those aspects of the novel style that found the greatest response in the new bourgeois consciousness, extending to other phenomena that classical aesthetics rejected, but which were now beginning to be felt as aesthetically effective. "Romantic" was first of all that, not possessing a clear formal harmony of classicism, "touched the heart", created a mood.

Romanticism as a literary trend originated at the end of the 18th century, but reached its greatest prosperity in the 1830s. From the beginning of the 1850s, the period begins to decline, but its threads stretch through the entire 19th century, giving rise to such trends as symbolism, decadence and neo-romanticism.

Features of romanticism as a literary movement lie in the main ideas and conflicts. The main idea of ​​almost every work is the constant movement of the hero in physical space. This fact, as it were, reflects the confusion of the soul, its continuously ongoing reflections and, at the same time, changes in the world around it. Like many artistic movements, Romanticism has its own conflicts. Here the whole concept is based on the complex relationship of the protagonist with the outside world. He is very egocentric and at the same time rebels against base, vulgar, material objects of reality, which one way or another manifests itself in the actions, thoughts and ideas of the character. The following literary examples of romanticism are most pronounced in this regard: Childe Harold is the main character from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Pechorin from Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. If we summarize all of the above, it turns out that the basis of any such work is the gap between reality and the idealized world, which has very sharp edges.

Romanticism in European Literature

Romanticism first arose in Germany, among the writers and philosophers of the Jena school (W. G. Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, brothers F. and A. Schlegel). The philosophy of romanticism was systematized in the works of F. Schlegel and F. Schelling. In the further development of German romanticism, interest in fairy-tale and mythological motifs was distinguished, which was especially clearly expressed in the work of the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Hoffmann. Heine, starting his work within the framework of romanticism, later subjected him to a critical revision.

At the time of her greatest political insignificance, Germany is revolutionizing European philosophy, European music and European literature. In the field of literature, a powerful movement, reaching its peak in the so-called "Sturm und Drang", using all the conquests of the British and Rousseau, raises them to a higher level, finally breaks with classicism and bourgeois-aristocratic enlightenment and opens a new era in the history of European literature. The innovation of the sturmers is not a formal innovation for the sake of innovation, but a search in a wide variety of directions for an adequate form for a new rich content. Deepening, sharpening and systematizing everything new introduced into literature by pre-romanticism and Rousseau, developing a number of achievements of early bourgeois realism (thus, in Schiller the "philistine drama" that originated in England receives its highest completion), German literature discovers and masters the enormous literary heritage of the Renaissance (formerly all Shakespeare) and folk poetry, approaches ancient antiquity in a new way. Thus, against the literature of classicism, literature is put forward, partly new, partly revived, richer and more interesting for the new consciousness of the emerging bourgeois personality.

German literary movement of the 60-80s. 18th century had a huge impact on the use of the concept of romanticism. Whereas in Germany romanticism is opposed to the "classical" art of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, outside of Germany all German literature, starting with Klopstock and Lessing, is perceived as innovative anti-classical, "romantic". Against the backdrop of the dominance of classical canons, romanticism is perceived purely negatively, as a movement that throws off the oppression of the old authorities, regardless of its positive content. The term "romanticism" received such a sense of anti-classical innovation in France and especially in Russia, where Pushkin aptly dubbed it "Parnassian atheism."

Sprouts of Romanticism in European Literature of the 18th Century. and the first cycle of romanticism. The era of the French Revolution of 1789

The "romantic" features of all this European literature are by no means hostile to the general line of the bourgeois revolution. The unprecedented attention to the "secret life of the heart" reflected one of the most important aspects of the cultural revolution that accompanied the growth of the political revolution: the birth of a personality free from feudal guild bonds and religious authority, which made possible the development of bourgeois relations. But in the development of the bourgeois revolution (in the broadest sense), the self-affirmation of the individual inevitably came into conflict with the real course of history. Of the two processes of "liberation" that Marx speaks of, the subjective liberation of the individual reflected only one process - the political (and ideological) liberation from feudalism. Another process is the economic "liberation" of the small proprietor from

means of production - the emancipating bourgeois personality perceived as alien and hostile. This hostile attitude towards the industrial revolution and towards the capitalist economy shows itself first of all, of course, in England, where it finds a very vivid expression in the first English romantic, William Blake. In the future, it is characteristic of all romantic literature, goes far beyond its limits. Such an attitude towards capitalism can by no means be regarded as necessarily anti-bourgeois. Characteristic of course for the ruined petty bourgeoisie and for the nobility losing stability, it is very common among the bourgeoisie itself. “All good bourgeois,” wrote Marx (in a letter to Annenkov), “desire the impossible, that is, the conditions of bourgeois life without the inevitable consequences of these conditions.”

The "romantic" denial of capitalism can thus have the most diverse class content - from petty-bourgeois economic-reactionary, but politically radical utopianism (Cobbet, Sismondi) to noble reaction and to a purely "Platonic" denial of capitalist reality as a useful but unaesthetic world " prose”, which should be supplemented by “poetry” independent of brute reality. Naturally, such romanticism flourished especially in England, where its main representatives are Walter Scott (in his poems) and Thomas Moore. The most common form of romantic literature is the horror novel. But along with these essentially philistine forms of romanticism, the contradiction between the individual and the ugly "prosaic" reality of the "age hostile to art and poetry" finds a much more significant expression, for example. in Byron's early (pre-exile) poetry.

The second contradiction from which romanticism is born is the contradiction between the dreams of the liberated bourgeois personality and the realities of the class struggle. Initially, the "secret life of the heart" is revealed in close unity with the struggle for the political emancipation of the class. Such unity we find in Rousseau. But in the future, the first develops in inverse proportion to the real possibilities of the second. The late emergence of romanticism in France is explained by the fact that before the French bourgeoisie and bourgeois democracy, in the era of the revolution and under Napoleon, there were too many opportunities for practical action in order to get that hypertrophy of the "inner world" that gives rise to romanticism. The fear of the bourgeoisie before the revolutionary dictatorship of the masses had no romantic consequences, since it was short-lived and the outcome of the revolution was in its favor. The petty bourgeoisie, after the fall of the Jacobins, also remained realistic, since its social program was basically carried out, and the Napoleonic era managed to switch its revolutionary energy to its own interests. Therefore, before the restoration of the Bourbons, we find in France only the reactionary romanticism of the aristocratic emigration (Chateaubriand) or the anti-national romanticism of individual bourgeois groups that oppose the Empire and block with intervention (Mme de Stael).

On the contrary, in Germany and England, personality and revolution came into conflict. The contradiction was twofold: on the one hand, between the dream of a cultural revolution and the impossibility of a political revolution (in Germany due to the underdevelopment of the economy, in England due to the long-standing solution of the purely economic tasks of the bourgeois revolution and the impotence of democracy in the face of the ruling bourgeois-aristocratic bloc), on the other, a contradiction between the dream of revolution and its reality. The German burgher and the English democrat were frightened by two things in the revolution - the revolutionary activity of the masses, which manifested itself so menacingly in 1789-1794, and the "anti-national" character of the revolution, presented in the form of the French conquest. These reasons logically, although not immediately, lead the German oppositional burghers and the British bourgeois democrats to a "patriotic" bloc with their own ruling classes. The moment when the "pre-romantic" German and English intelligentsia departed from the French Revolution, as "terrorist" and nationally hostile, can be considered the moment of the birth of romanticism in the limited sense of the word.

This process unfolded most characteristically in Germany. The German literary movement, which was the first to christen itself with the name of romanticism (for the first time in 1798) and thus had a huge impact on the fate of the term “romanticism”, however, did not itself have a great impact on other European countries (with the exception of Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands). Outside of Germany, Romanticism, insofar as it addressed itself to Germany, focused primarily on pre-romantic German literature, especially on Goethe and Schiller. Goethe is the teacher of European romanticism as the greatest exponent of the revealed “innermost life of the heart” (“Werther”, early lyrics), as the creator of new poetic forms and, finally, as a poet-thinker who opened the way for fiction to master the most estimated and diverse philosophical topics. Of course, Goethe is not a romantic in a specific sense. He is a realist. But like all German culture of his time, Goethe stands under the sign of the squalor of German reality. His realism is divorced from the real practice of his national class, he involuntarily stays "on Olympus". Therefore, stylistically, his realism is clothed in by no means realistic clothes, and this outwardly brings him closer to the romantics. But Goethe is completely alien to the romantic protest against the course of history, just as he is alien to utopianism and escape from reality.

Another relationship between romanticism and Schiller. Schiller and the German Romantics were sworn enemies, but from a European perspective

Schiller, of course, must be recognized as a romantic. Moving away from revolutionary dreams even before the revolution, politically Schiller became a banal bourgeois reformist. But this sober practice was combined in him with a completely romantic utopia about the creation of a new ennobled humanity, regardless of the course of history, by re-educating it with beauty. It was in Schiller that the voluntaristic "beautiful soul" that arose from the contradiction between the "ideal" of the liberated bourgeois personality and the "reality" of the era of the bourgeois revolution, which takes what is desired for the future, was especially clearly expressed. "Schillerian" features play a huge role in all later liberal and democratic romanticism, beginning with Shelley.

The three stages that German Romanticism went through can be extended to other European literatures of the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, remembering, however, that they are dialectical stages, not chronological divisions. At the first stage, romanticism is still a definitely democratic movement and retains a politically radical character, but its revolutionary nature is already purely abstract and starts from concrete forms of revolution, from the Jacobin dictatorship and from the popular revolution in general. It finds its clearest expression in Germany in Fichte's system of subjective idealism, which is nothing but the philosophy of an "ideal" democratic revolution that takes place only in the head of a bourgeois-democratic idealist. Parallel to this in England are the works of William Blake, especially his Songs of experience (1794) and Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), and the early works of the future "lake" poets - Wordsworth , Coleridge and Southey.

At the second stage, finally disillusioned with the real revolution, romanticism seeks ways to realize the ideal outside of politics and finds them primarily in the activity of free creative fantasy. The concept of the artist as a creator, who spontaneously creates a new reality from his fantasy, which played a huge role in bourgeois aesthetics, arises. This stage, representing the maximum sharpening of the specifics of romanticism, was especially pronounced in Germany. As the first stage is associated with Fichte, so the second is associated with Schelling, who owns the philosophical development of the idea of ​​the artist-creator. In England, this stage, while not representing the philosophical wealth that we find in Germany, is in a much more naked form an escape from reality into the realm of free fantasy.

Along with frankly fantastic and arbitrary "creativity", romanticism at the second stage seeks an ideal in the other world that seems to it to be objectively existing. From the purely emotional experience of intimate communion with "nature", which already plays a huge role in Rousseau, a metaphysically conscious romantic pantheism arises. With the later transition of the Romantics to reaction, this pantheism strives for a compromise, and then for submission to church orthodoxy. But at first, for example, in the verses of Wordsworth, it is still sharply opposed to Christianity, and in the next generation it is assimilated by the democratic romantic Shelley without significant changes, but under the characteristic name of "atheism." Parallel to pantheism, romantic mysticism also develops, also at a certain stage retaining sharply anti-Christian features (Blake's "prophetic books").

The third stage is the final transition of romanticism to a reactionary position. Disappointed in the real revolution, weighed down by the fantasticness and futility of his solitary "creativity", the romantic person seeks support in superpersonal forces - nationality and religion. Translated into the language of real relations, this means that the burghers, in the person of their democratic intelligentsia, go to the national bloc with the ruling classes, accepting their hegemony, but bringing them a new, modernized ideology, in which loyalty to the king and the church is justified not by authority and not by fear, but the needs of the senses and the dictates of the heart. Ultimately, at this stage, romanticism comes to its own opposite, i.e., to the rejection of individualism and to complete submission to feudal power, only superficially embellished with romantic phraseology. In terms of literature, such a self-negation of romanticism is the soothed canonized romanticism of La Motte-Fouquet, Uhland, etc., in terms of politics - the “romantic politics” that raged in Germany after 1815.

At this stage, the old genetic connection of romanticism with the feudal Middle Ages acquires new significance. The Middle Ages, as the age of chivalry and Catholicism, becomes an essential element of the reactionary-romantic ideal. It is interpreted as an age of free submission to God and lord ("Heroismus der Unterwerfung" by Hegel).

The medieval world of chivalry and Catholicism is also the world of autonomous guilds; its culture is much more "popular" than the later monarchical and bourgeois. This opens up great opportunities for romantic demagoguery, for that "reverse democracy" which consists in replacing the interests of the people with the existing (or dying) views of the people.

It is at this stage that romanticism does a lot for the revival and study of folklore, especially folk songs. And it cannot be denied that, despite its reactionary aims, the work of Romanticism in this field has considerable and enduring value. Romanticism did much to study the authentic life of the masses, preserved under the yoke of feudalism and early capitalism.

The real connection of romanticism at this stage with the feudal-Christian Middle Ages was strongly reflected in the bourgeois theory of romanticism. The concept of romanticism arises as a Christian and medieval style, as opposed to the "classics" of the ancient world. This view received its fullest expression in the aesthetics of Hegel, but it was widely disseminated in much less philosophically finished forms. The awareness of the profound opposition between the "romantic" worldview of the Middle Ages and the romantic subjectivism of modern times led Belinsky to the theory of two romanticisms: "romanticism of the Middle Ages" - the romance of voluntary submission and resignation, and "recent romanticism" - progressive and liberating.

The second cycle of romanticism. The era of the second round of bourgeois revolutions

Reactionary Romanticism ends the first cycle of Romanticism, generated by the French Revolution. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the upsurge that prepares the second round of bourgeois revolutions, a new cycle of romanticism begins, significantly different from the first. This difference is primarily a consequence of the different nature of the revolutionary movement. The French Revolution of 1789-1793 is replaced by many "small" revolutions, which either end in compromise (the revolutionary crisis in England 1815-1832), or occur without the participation of the masses (Belgium, Spain, Naples), or the people, appearing for a short time, dutifully gives way to the bourgeoisie immediately after the victory (the July Revolution in France). At the same time, no country claims to be an international fighter for the revolution. These circumstances contribute to the disappearance of fear of revolution, while the frenzied revelry of reaction after 1815 strengthens the oppositional mood. The ugliness and vulgarity of the bourgeois system are revealed with unprecedented obviousness, and the first awakening of the proletariat, which has not yet embarked on the path of revolutionary struggle (even Chartism respects bourgeois legality), arouses sympathy in bourgeois democracy for "the poorest and most numerous of the classes." All this makes the romanticism of this era largely liberal-democratic.

A new type of romantic politics is emerging - liberal-bourgeois politics, which with ringing phrases arouses in the masses faith in the imminent realization of a (rather obscure) ideal, thereby restraining them from revolutionary action, and utopian petty-bourgeois politics, dreaming of a kingdom of freedom and justice without capitalism, but not without capitalism. private property (Lamennet, Carlyle).

Although the Romanticism of 1815-1848 (outside Germany) is colored in the predominant liberal-democratic color, it can in no way be identified with liberalism or democracy. The main thing in romanticism is the discord between the ideal and reality. Romanticism continues to either reject the latter or voluntaristically "transform". This allows romanticism to serve as a means of expression for the purely reactionary aristocratic longing for the past and noble defeatism (Vigny). In the romanticism of 1815-1848 it is not so easy to outline the stages as in the previous period, especially since now romanticism is spreading to countries at very different stages of historical development (Spain, Norway, Poland, Russia, Georgia). It is much easier to distinguish three main currents within romanticism, of which the three great English poets of the post-Napoleonic decade, Byron, Shelley and Keats, can be recognized.

Byron's romanticism is the most vivid expression of that self-affirmation of the bourgeois personality, which began in the era of Rousseau. Vividly anti-feudal and anti-Christian, it is at the same time anti-bourgeois in the sense of denying all the positive content of bourgeois culture in contrast to its negative anti-feudal nature. Byron was finally convinced of the complete gap between the bourgeois liberation ideal and bourgeois reality. His poetry is the self-affirmation of the individual, poisoned by the consciousness of the futility and futility of this self-affirmation. Byron's "world sorrow" easily becomes an expression of the most diverse forms of individualism that does not find application for itself - either because its roots are in a defeated class (Vigny), or because it is surrounded by an environment immature for action (Lermontov, Baratashvili).

Shelley's romanticism is a voluntaristic assertion of utopian ways of transforming reality. This romanticism is organically connected with democracy. But he is anti-revolutionary because he puts "eternal values" above the needs of struggle (negation of violence) and considers political "revolution" (without violence) as a kind of detail in the cosmic process that should start a "golden age" ("Unchained Prometheus" and the final choir "Hellas"). The representative of this type of romanticism (with great individual differences from Shelley) was the last of the Mohicans of romanticism in general, the old man Hugo, who carried his banner to the eve of the era of imperialism.

Finally, Keats can be regarded as the founder of purely aesthetic romanticism, which sets itself the task of creating a world of beauty in which one could escape from ugly and vulgar reality. For Keats himself, aestheticism is closely connected with the “Schillerian” dream of the aesthetic re-education of mankind and the real-coming world of beauty. But what was taken from him was not this dream, but a purely practical concern for the creation of a concrete world of beauty here and now. From Keats come the English aesthetes of the second half of the century, who can no longer be counted among the romantics, since they are already completely satisfied with what really exists.

Aesthetism of the same essence arises even earlier in France, where Mérimée and Gauthier, from "Parnassian atheists" and participants in romantic battles, very soon turn into purely bourgeois, politically indifferent aesthetes (i.e., philistine conservatives) and free from any romantic anxiety.

Second quarter of the 19th century - the time of the widest spread of romanticism in different countries of Europe (and America). In England, which produced three of the greatest poets of the "second cycle", Romanticism did not take shape in a school and began to retreat early in the face of the forces characteristic of the next stage of capitalism. In Germany, the struggle against reaction was to a large extent also a struggle against romanticism. The greatest revolutionary poet of the era - Heine - came out of romanticism, and a romantic "soul" lived in him to the end, but unlike Byron, Shelley and Hugo, in Heine, the leftist politician and the romantic did not merge, but fought.

Romanticism flourished most magnificently in France, where it was especially complex and contradictory, uniting representatives of very different class interests under one literary sign. In French romanticism, it is especially clear how romanticism could be an expression of the most diverse divergence from reality - from the impotent longing of a nobleman (but a nobleman who absorbed all bourgeois subjectivism) for the feudal past (Vigny) to voluntaristic optimism, replacing a genuine understanding of reality with more or less sincere illusions (Lamartine, Hugo), and to the purely commercial production of "poetry" and "beauty" for the bored bourgeois in the world of capitalist "prose" (Dumas père).

In the countries of the nationally oppressed, romanticism is closely associated with national liberation movements, but mainly with periods of their defeat and impotence. And here romanticism is the expression of very diverse social forces. Thus, Georgian romanticism is associated with the nationalist nobility, a completely feudal class, but in the struggle against Russian tsarism, which sought support from the bourgeoisie for ideology.

National-revolutionary romanticism received particular development in Poland. If on the eve of the November Revolution in Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod he receives a truly revolutionary accent, after its defeat his specific essence flourishes especially magnificently: the contradiction between the dream of national liberation and the inability of the progressive gentry to unleash a peasant revolution. In general, it can be said that in the nationally oppressed countries the romanticism of the revolutionary-minded groups is inversely proportional to the genuine democracy, their organic connection with the peasantry. The greatest poet of the national revolutions of 1848, Petőfi is completely alien to romanticism.

Each of the above countries has made its own, special contribution to the development of the aforementioned cultural phenomenon.

In France, romantic literary works had a more political tinge, and writers were hostile to the new bourgeoisie. This society, according to French leaders, ruined the integrity of the individual, her beauty and freedom of spirit.

In English legends, romanticism has existed for a long time, but until the end of the 18th century it did not stand out as a separate literary movement. English works, unlike French ones, are filled with Gothic, religion, national folklore, the culture of peasant and working societies (including spiritual ones). In addition, English prose and lyrics are filled with travel to distant lands and exploration of foreign lands.

In Germany, romanticism as a literary trend was formed under the influence of idealistic philosophy. The basis was the individuality and freedom of man, oppressed by feudalism, as well as the perception of the universe as a single living system. Almost every German work is permeated with reflections on the existence of man and the life of his spirit.

The following literary works are considered the most notable European works in the spirit of romanticism:

• - the treatise "The Genius of Christianity", the stories "Atala" and "Rene" by Chateaubriand;
• - novels "Delphine", "Corinne, or Italy" by Germaine de Stael;
• - the novel "Adolf" by Benjamin Constant; - the novel "Confession of the son of the century" by Musset;
• - the novel "Saint-Mar" by Vigny;
• - the manifesto "Preface" to the work "Cromwell", the novel "Notre Dame Cathedral" by Hugo;
• - drama "Henry III and his court", a series of novels about musketeers, "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "Queen Margot" by Dumas;
• - the novels "Indiana", "The Wandering Apprentice", "Horas", "Consuelo" by George Sand;
• - Manifesto "Racine and Shakespeare" by Stendhal; - the poems "The Old Sailor" and "Christabel" by Coleridge;
• - "Oriental Poems" and "Manfred" Byron;
• - collected works of Balzac;
• - novel "Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott;
• - the fairy tale "Hyacinth and the Rose", the novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" by Novalis;
• - collections of short stories, fairy tales and novels by Hoffmann.

Romanticism in Russia

Russian romanticism does not introduce fundamentally new moments into the general history of romanticism, being secondary in relation to Western European. Russian romanticism is most authentic after the defeat of the Decembrists. The collapse of hopes, the oppression of the Nikolaev reality create the most suitable environment for the development of romantic moods, for exacerbating the contradiction between the ideal and reality. We then observe almost the entire gamut of shades of romanticism - apolitical, closing in metaphysics and aesthetics, but not yet reactionary Schellingism; the "romantic politics" of the Slavophiles; the historical romance of Lazhechnikov, Zagoskin and others; socially colored romantic protest of the advanced bourgeoisie (N. Polevoy); withdrawal into fantasy and "free" creativity (Veltman, some of Gogol's works); finally, the romantic revolt of Lermontov, who was strongly influenced by Byron, but who also echoed the German sturmers. However, even in this most romantic period of Russian literature, romanticism is not the leading trend. Pushkin and Gogol in their main line stand outside romanticism and lay the foundations for realism. The liquidation of romanticism occurs almost simultaneously in Russia and in the West.

It is usually believed that in Russia romanticism appears in the poetry of V. A. Zhukovsky (although some Russian poetic works of the 1790-1800s are often attributed to the pre-romantic movement that developed from sentimentalism). In Russian romanticism, freedom from classical conventions appears, a ballad, a romantic drama, is created. A new idea of ​​the essence and meaning of poetry is affirmed, which is recognized as an independent sphere of life, an expression of the highest, ideal aspirations of man; the old view, according to which poetry was an empty pastime, something completely serviceable, is no longer possible. The romanticism of Russian literature shows the suffering and loneliness of the protagonist.

In the literature of that time, two directions are distinguished: psychological and civil. The first was based on the description and analysis of feelings and experiences, the second - on the propaganda of the fight against modern society. The general and main idea of ​​all novelists was that the poet or writer had to behave according to the ideals that he described in his works.

The most striking examples of romanticism in Russian literature of the 19th century are:

• - "The Night Before Christmas" by Gogol
• - "Hero of our time" Lermontov.

Romanticism (fr. romantisme) is a phenomenon of European culture in the 18th-19th centuries, which is a reaction to the Enlightenment and the scientific and technological progress stimulated by it; ideological and artistic direction in European and American culture of the late 18th century - the first half of the 19th century. It is characterized by the assertion of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the image of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, spiritualized and healing nature. It spread to various spheres of human activity. In the 18th century, everything that was strange, fantastic, picturesque, and existing in books, and not in reality, was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, romanticism became the designation of a new direction, opposite to classicism and the Enlightenment.

Romanticism in literature

Romanticism first arose in Germany, among the writers and philosophers of the Jena school (W. G. Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, the brothers F. and A. Schlegel). The philosophy of romanticism was systematized in the works of F. Schlegel and F. Schelling. In the further development of German romanticism, interest in fairy-tale and mythological motifs was distinguished, which was especially clearly expressed in the work of the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Hoffmann. Heine, starting his work within the framework of romanticism, later subjected him to a critical revision.

Theodore Géricault Plot "Medusas" (1817), Louvre

England is largely due to German influence. In England, its first representatives are the poets of the Lake School, Wordsworth and Coleridge. They established the theoretical foundations of their direction, having familiarized themselves with the philosophy of Schelling and the views of the first German romantics during a trip to Germany. English romanticism is characterized by an interest in social problems: they oppose to modern bourgeois society the old, pre-bourgeois relations, the glorification of nature, simple, natural feelings.

A prominent representative of English romanticism is Byron, who, in the words of Pushkin, "clothed in dull romanticism and hopeless egoism." His work is imbued with the pathos of struggle and protest against the modern world, the glorification of freedom and individualism.

Also, English romanticism includes the work of Shelley, John Keats, William Blake.

Romanticism also spread in other European countries, for example, in France (Chateaubriand, J. Stael, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Prosper Merimee, George Sand), Italy (N. W. Foscolo, A. Manzoni, Leopardi) , Poland (Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian Norwid) and in the USA (Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, W. K. Bryant, Edgar Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Longfellow, Herman Melville).

Stendhal also considered himself a French romantic, but he meant by romanticism something different than most of his contemporaries. In the epigraph of the novel "Red and Black", he took the words "True, bitter truth", emphasizing his vocation for a realistic study of human characters and actions. The writer was addicted to romantic outstanding natures, for which he recognized the right to "go hunting for happiness." He sincerely believed that it depends only on the way of society whether a person can realize his eternal craving for well-being, given by nature itself.

Romanticism in Russian literature

It is usually believed that in Russia romanticism appears in the poetry of V. A. Zhukovsky (although some Russian poetic works of the 1790-1800s are often attributed to the pre-romantic movement that developed from sentimentalism). In Russian romanticism, freedom from classical conventions appears, a ballad, a romantic drama, is created. A new idea of ​​the essence and meaning of poetry is affirmed, which is recognized as an independent sphere of life, an expression of the highest, ideal aspirations of man; the old view, according to which poetry was an empty pastime, something completely serviceable, is no longer possible.

The early poetry of A. S. Pushkin also developed within the framework of romanticism. The poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov, the “Russian Byron”, can be considered the pinnacle of Russian romanticism. The philosophical lyrics of F. I. Tyutchev are both the completion and the overcoming of romanticism in Russia.

The emergence of romanticism in Russia

In the 19th century, Russia was in a certain cultural isolation. Romanticism arose seven years later than in Europe. You can talk about his some imitation. In Russian culture, there was no opposition of man to the world and God. Zhukovsky appears, who remakes the German ballads in a Russian way: "Svetlana" and "Lyudmila". Byron's variant of romanticism was lived and felt in his work first in Russian culture by Pushkin, then by Lermontov.

Russian romanticism, starting with Zhukovsky, flourished in the work of many other writers: K. Batyushkov, A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, E. Baratynsky, F. Tyutchev, V. Odoevsky, V. Garshin, A. Kuprin, A. Blok, A. Green, K. Paustovsky and many others.

ADDITIONALLY.

Romanticism (from the French Romantisme) is an ideological and artistic trend that arises at the end of the 18th century in European and American culture and continues until the 40s of the 19th century. Reflecting disappointment in the results of the Great French Revolution, in the ideology of the Enlightenment and bourgeois progress, romanticism opposed utilitarianism and the leveling of the individual with the aspiration for unlimited freedom and the “infinite”, the thirst for perfection and renewal, the pathos of the individual and civil independence.

The painful disintegration of the ideal and social reality is the basis of the romantic worldview and art. The affirmation of the inherent value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the image of strong passions, spiritualized and healing nature, is adjacent to the motifs of "world sorrow", "world evil", the "night" side of the soul. Interest in the national past (often - its idealization), the traditions of folklore and culture of one's own and other peoples, the desire to publish a universal picture of the world (primarily history and literature) found expression in the ideology and practice of Romanticism.

Romanticism is observed in literature, fine arts, architecture, behavior, clothing and psychology of people.

REASONS FOR THE ORIGIN OF ROMANTICISM.

The immediate cause that caused the emergence of romanticism was the Great French bourgeois revolution. How did this become possible?

Before the revolution, the world was ordered, there was a clear hierarchy in it, each person took his place. The revolution overturned the "pyramid" of society, a new one has not yet been created, so the individual has a feeling of loneliness. Life is a flow, life is a game in which some are lucky and some are not. In literature, images of players appear - people who play with fate. One can recall such works by European writers as Hoffmann's "The Gambler", Stendhal's "Red and Black" (and red and black are the colors of roulette!), And in Russian literature these are Pushkin's "Queen of Spades", Gogol's "Gamblers", "Masquerade" Lermontov.

THE MAIN CONFLICT OF ROMANTISM

The main one is the conflict of man with the world. There is a psychology of a rebellious personality, which Lord Byron most deeply reflected in Childe Harold's Journey. The popularity of this work was so great that a whole phenomenon arose - "Byronism", and whole generations of young people tried to imitate him (such, for example, Pechorin in Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time").

Romantic heroes are united by a sense of their own exclusivity. "I" - is realized as the highest value, hence the egocentrism of the romantic hero. But focusing on oneself, a person comes into conflict with reality.

REALITY - the world is strange, fantastic, unusual, as in Hoffmann's fairy tale "The Nutcracker", or ugly, as in his fairy tale "Little Tsakhes". Strange events take place in these tales, objects come to life and enter into lengthy conversations, the main theme of which is a deep gap between ideals and reality. And this gap becomes the main THEME of the lyrics of romanticism.

THE ERA OF ROMANTISM

Before the writers of the early 19th century, whose work took shape after the French Revolution, life set different tasks than before their predecessors. They were to discover and artistically form a new continent for the first time.

The thinking and feeling man of the new century had a long and instructive experience of previous generations behind him, he was endowed with a deep and complex inner world, before his eyes hovered the images of the heroes of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the national liberation movements, the images of the poetry of Goethe and Byron. In Russia, the Patriotic War of 1812 played the role of an important historical milestone in the spiritual and moral development of society, profoundly changing the cultural and historical image of Russian society. In terms of its significance for national culture, it can be compared with the period of the 18th century revolution in the West.

And in this era of revolutionary storms, military upheavals and national liberation movements, the question arises whether, on the basis of a new historical reality, a new literature can arise that is not inferior in its artistic perfection to the greatest phenomena of the literature of the ancient world and the Renaissance? And can its further development be based on “modern man”, a man from the people? But a man of the people who participated in the French Revolution or on whose shoulders the burden of the struggle with Napoleon fell could not be described in literature by means of the novelists and poets of the previous century - he demanded other methods for his poetic embodiment.

PUSHKIN - ROMANTIC PROGRAVER

Only Pushkin, the first in Russian literature of the 19th century, was able to find in both poetry and prose adequate means to embody the versatile spiritual world, the historical appearance and behavior of that new, deeply thinking and feeling hero of Russian life, who occupied a central place in it after 1812 and in features after the Decembrist uprising.

In the lyceum poems, Pushkin still could not, and did not dare to make the hero of his lyrics a real person of the new generation with all the internal psychological complexity inherent in him. Pushkin's poem represented, as it were, the resultant of two forces: the poet's personal experience and the conditional, "ready-made", traditional poetic formula-scheme, according to the internal laws of which this experience was shaped and developed.

However, gradually the poet is freed from the power of the canons and in his poems we are no longer presented with a young “philosopher”-Epicurean, an inhabitant of a conditional “town”, but a man of the new century, with his rich and intense intellectual and emotional inner life.

A similar process takes place in Pushkin's work in any genre, where the conventional images of characters, already consecrated by tradition, give way to the figures of living people with their complex, diverse actions and psychological motives. At first, this is a somewhat more abstract Prisoner or Aleko. But soon they are replaced by the very real Onegin, Lensky, the young Dubrovsky, German, Charsky. And, finally, the most complete expression of the new type of personality will be Pushkin's lyrical "I", the poet himself, whose spiritual world is the most profound, rich and complex expression of the burning moral and intellectual issues of the time.

One of the conditions for the historical revolution that Pushkin made in the development of Russian poetry, dramaturgy and narrative prose was the fundamental break he made with the educational-rationalistic, ahistorical idea of ​​the "nature" of man, the laws of human thinking and feeling.

The complex and contradictory soul of the “young man” of the early 19th century in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “Gypsies”, “Eugene Onegin” became for Pushkin an object of artistic and psychological observation and study in its special, specific and unique historical quality. Putting his hero every time in certain conditions, depicting him in various circumstances, in new relationships with people, exploring his psychology from different angles and using for this each time a new system of artistic "mirrors", Pushkin in his lyrics, southern poems and Onegin ” strives from various sides to approach the understanding of his soul, and through it - further to the understanding of the laws of contemporary socio-historical life reflected in this soul.

The historical understanding of man and human psychology began to emerge in Pushkin in the late 1810s and early 1820s. We meet the first distinct expression of it in the historical elegies of this time (“The daylight went out ...” (1820), “To Ovid” (1821), etc.) and in the poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, the main character of which was conceived by Pushkin, by the poet's own admission, as a bearer of feelings and moods characteristic of the youth of the 19th century with its "indifference to life" and "premature old age of the soul" (from a letter to V.P. Gorchakov, October-November 1822)

32. The main themes and motifs of A.S. Pushkin’s philosophical lyrics of the 1830s (“Elegy”, “Demons”, “Autumn”, “When outside the city ...”, Kamennoostrovsky cycle, etc.). Genre-style searches.

Reflections about life, its meaning, its purpose, about death and immortality become the leading philosophical motifs of Pushkin's lyrics at the stage of completion of the "celebration of life". Among the poems of this period, the most notable is “Do I wander along the noisy streets ...” The motif of death, its inevitability, persistently sounds in it. The problem of death is solved by the poet not only as an inevitability, but also as a natural completion of earthly existence:

I say the years go by

And how many of us are not visible here,

We will all descend under the eternal vaults -

And someone's hour is near.

The poems amaze with the amazing generosity of Pushkin's heart, which is able to welcome life even when there is no more room left for it.

And let at the coffin entrance

Young will play life

And indifferent nature

Shine with eternal beauty -

The poet writes, completing the poem.

In "Road Complaints" A.S. Pushkin writes about the disorder of his personal life, about what he lacked from childhood. Moreover, the poet perceives his own fate in a general Russian context: Russian off-road has both direct and figurative meaning in the poem, the historical wandering of the country in search of the right path of development is embedded in the meaning of this word.

Off road problem. But already different. Spiritual, properties appear in A.S. Pushkin's poem "Demons". It tells about the loss of a person in the whirlwinds of historical events. The motif of spiritual impassibility was suffered by the poet, who thinks a lot about the events of 1825, about his own miraculous deliverance from the fate that befell the participants in the popular uprising of 1825, about the actual miraculous deliverance from the fate that befell the participants in the uprising on Senate Square. In Pushkin's poems, the problem of being chosen, understanding the lofty mission entrusted by God to him as a poet, arises. It is this problem that becomes the leading one in the poem "Arion".

Continues the philosophical lyrics of the thirties, the so-called Kamennoostrovsky cycle, the core of which is the poems "The Hermit Fathers and Immaculate Wives ...", "Imitation of Italian", "Worldly Power", "From Pindemonti". This cycle brings together reflections on the problem of poetic knowledge of the world and man. From the pen of A.S. Pushkin comes a poem, an arrangement of the Lenten prayer by Yefim the Sirin. Reflections on religion, on its great strengthening moral power, become the leading motive of this poem.

Pushkin the philosopher experienced a real heyday in the Boldin autumn of 1833. Among the major works about the role of fate in human life, about the role of personality in history, the poetic masterpiece "Autumn" attracts. The motive of man's connection with the cycle of natural life and the motive of creativity are the leading ones in this poem. Russian nature, life merged with it, obeying its laws, seems to the author of the poem to be the greatest value, without it there is no inspiration, and therefore no creativity. “And every autumn I bloom again ...” - the poet writes about himself.

Peering into the artistic fabric of the poem "... Again I visited ...", the reader easily discovers a whole range of themes and motifs of Pushkin's lyrics, expressing ideas about man and nature, about time, about memory and fate. It is against their background that the main philosophical problem of this poem sounds - the problem of generational change. Nature awakens in man the memory of the past, although she herself has no memory. It is updated, repeating itself in each of its updates. Therefore, the noise of new pine trees of the “young tribe”, which descendants will someday hear, will be the same as now, and it will touch those strings in their souls that will make them remember the deceased ancestor, who also lived in this repeating world. This is what allows the author of the poem "... Again I visited ..." to exclaim: "Hello, young tribe, unfamiliar!"

The path of the great poet through the "cruel age" was long and thorny. He led to immortality. The motive of poetic immortality is the leading one in the poem “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands ...”, which became a kind of testament to A.S. Pushkin.

Thus, philosophical motives were inherent in Pushkin's lyrics throughout his entire work. They arose in connection with the poet's appeal to the problems of death and immortality, faith and unbelief, generational change, creativity, the meaning of being. All the philosophical lyrics of A.S. Pushkin can be subjected to periodization, which will correspond to the life stages of the great poet, at each of which she thought about some very specific problems. However, at any stage of his work, A.S. Pushkin spoke in his poems only about what is generally significant for mankind. This is probably why “the folk path will not grow” to this Russian poet.

ADDITIONALLY.

Analysis of the poem "When out of town, thoughtfully I wander"

“... When outside the city, thoughtful, I wander ...”. So Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

begins a poem of the same name.

Reading this poem, it becomes clear his attitude to all feasts

and luxury of urban and metropolitan life.

Conventionally, this poem can be divided into two parts: the first is about the capital's cemetery,

the other is about agriculture. In the transition from one to another, and changes accordingly

mood of the poet, but, highlighting the role of the first line in the poem, I think it would be

it is a mistake to take the first line of the first part as defining the whole mood of the verse, because

lines: “But how delightful it is for me In the autumn sometimes, in the evening silence, In the village to visit

a family cemetery…” Cardinally change the direction of the poet's thoughts.

In this poem, the conflict is expressed in the form of opposition to the urban

cemeteries, where: “Grates, columns, ornate tombs. Under which all the dead rot

capitals In a swamp, somehow cramped in a row ... ”and a rural, closer to the poet’s heart,

cemeteries: “Where the dead slumber in solemn rest, there are undecorated graves

space ... ”But, again, comparing these two parts of the poem, one cannot forget about

the last lines, which, it seems to me, reflect the whole attitude of the author to these two

completely different places:

1. “What evil finds despondency in me, Though spit and run ...”

2. “An oak tree stands wide over important coffins, hesitating and making noise…” Two parts

one poem compared as day and night, moon and sun. Author through

comparison of the true purpose of those who come to these cemeteries and those who lie underground

shows us how different the same concepts can be.

I'm talking about the fact that a widow or a widower will come to the city cemeteries only for the sake of

in order to create an impression of grief and sorrow, although it is not always correct. Those who

lies under “inscriptions and prose and in verse” during life they cared only “On the virtues,

about service and ranks".

On the contrary, if we talk about the rural cemetery. People go there to

pour out your soul and talk to those who are no longer there.

It seems to me that it is not by chance that Alexander Sergeevich wrote such a poem for

year before his death. He was afraid, as I think, that he would be buried in the same city,

capital cemetery and he will have the same grave as those whose tombstones he contemplated.

“Thieves from the pillars unscrewed the urns

Slimy graves, which are also here,

Yawning, they are waiting for the tenants to their place in the morning.

Analysis of A.S. Pushkin's poem "Elegy"

Crazy years faded fun

It's hard for me, like a vague hangover.

But, like wine - the sadness of bygone days

In my soul, the older, the stronger.

My path is sad. Promises me labor and sorrow

The coming turbulent sea.

But I don't want, oh friends, to die;

And I know I will enjoy

Amid sorrows, worries and anxieties:

Sometimes I'll get drunk again with harmony,

I will shed tears over fiction,

A. S. Pushkin wrote this elegy in 1830. It belongs to philosophical poetry. Pushkin turned to this genre as an already middle-aged poet, wise in life and experience. This poem is deeply personal. Two stanzas make up a semantic contrast: the first one discusses the drama of the life path, the second sounds like an apotheosis of creative self-realization, the high purpose of the poet. We can easily identify the lyrical hero with the author himself. In the first lines (“Insane years, the fun that has faded / it’s hard for me, like a vague hangover.”) The poet says that he is no longer young. Looking back, he sees behind him the path traveled, which is far from perfect: the past fun, from which heaviness in the soul. However, at the same time, longing for the bygone days fills the soul, it is intensified by a sense of anxiety and uncertainty about the future, in which “work and grief” are seen. But it also means movement and a fulfilling creative life. "Work and Sorrow" is perceived by an ordinary person as hard rock, but for a poet it is ups and downs. Work is creativity, grief is impressions, events that are bright in significance and bring inspiration. And the poet, despite the years that have passed, believes and waits for the “coming turbulent sea.”

After lines that are rather gloomy in meaning, which seem to beat out the rhythm of a funeral march, suddenly a light flight of a wounded bird:

But I don't want, oh friends, to die;

I want to live in order to think and suffer;

The poet will die when he stops thinking, even if blood runs through the body and the heart beats. The movement of thought is true life, development, which means striving for perfection. Thought is responsible for the mind, and suffering for feelings. “Suffering” is also the capacity for compassion.

A tired person is weary of the past and sees the future in a fog. But the poet, the creator confidently predicts that "there will be pleasures between sorrows, worries and anxieties." What will these earthly joys of the poet lead to? They give new creative fruits:

Sometimes I'll get drunk again with harmony,

I will shed tears over fiction ...

Harmony is probably the integrity of Pushkin's works, their impeccable form. Either this is the very moment of creation of works, the moment of all-consuming inspiration... The fiction and tears of the poet are the result of inspiration, this is the work itself.

And maybe my sunset is sad

Love will shine with a farewell smile.

When the muse of inspiration comes to him, perhaps (the poet doubts, but hopes) he will fall in love again and be loved. One of the main aspirations of the poet, the crown of his work is love, which, like the muse, is a life partner. And this love is the last. "Elegy" in the form of a monologue. It is addressed to "friends" - to those who understand and share the thoughts of the lyrical hero.

The poem is a lyrical meditation. It is written in the classical genre of elegy, and the tone and intonation correspond to this: elegy in Greek means “plaintive song”. This genre has been widespread in Russian poetry since the 18th century: Sumarokov, Zhukovsky, later Lermontov, Nekrasov turned to it. But Nekrasov's elegy is civil, Pushkin's is philosophical. In classicism, this genre, one of the "high", obliged the use of grandiloquent words and old Slavonicisms.

Pushkin, in turn, did not neglect this tradition, and used Old Slavonic words, forms and turns in the work, and the abundance of such vocabulary does not in the least deprive the poem of lightness, grace and clarity.

1.Romanticism(fr. romantisme) - a phenomenon of European culture in the XVIII-XIX centuries, which is a reaction to the Enlightenment and the scientific and technological progress stimulated by it; ideological and artistic direction in European and American culture of the late 18th century - the first half of the 19th century. It is characterized by the assertion of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the image of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, spiritualized and healing nature. It spread to various spheres of human activity. In the 18th century, everything that was strange, fantastic, picturesque, and existing in books, and not in reality, was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, romanticism became the designation of a new direction, opposite to classicism and the Enlightenment. Romanticism replaces the Age of Enlightenment and coincides with the industrial revolution, marked by the appearance of the steam engine, the steam locomotive, the steamboat, photography and the factory outskirts. If the Enlightenment is characterized by the cult of reason and civilization based on its principles, then romanticism affirms the cult of nature, feelings and the natural in man. It was in the era of romanticism that the phenomena of tourism, mountaineering and picnics were formed, designed to restore the unity of man and nature. The image of the "noble savage", armed with "folk wisdom" and not spoiled by civilization, is in demand. Interest in folklore, history and ethnography is awakening, which is politically projected in nationalism. At the center of the world of Romanticism is the personality of a person, striving for complete inner freedom, perfection and renewal. A free romantic person perceived life as a performance of a role, a theatrical performance on the stage of world history. Romanticism was permeated with the pathos of personal and civic independence; the idea of ​​freedom and renewal also nourished the desire for heroic protest, including the national liberation and revolutionary struggle. Instead of the "imitation of nature" proclaimed by the classicists, the romantics put creative activity, transforming and creating the world, at the basis of life and art. The world of classicism is predetermined - the world of romanticism is continuously being created. The basis of Romanticism was the concept of duality (the world of dreams and the real world). The discord between these worlds - the starting motive of Romanticism from the rejection of the existing real world - was an escape from the enlightened world - to the dark ages of the past, to distant exotic countries, to fantasy. Escapism, flight into "unenlightened" eras and styles, nourished the principle of historicism in romantic art and life behavior. Romanticism discovered self-worth all cultural epochs and types. Accordingly, theorists of Romanticism at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries put forward historicism as the main principle of artistic creativity. In countries less affected by the Enlightenment, a romantic man, realizing the equivalence of cultures, rushed to search for national foundations, the historical roots of his culture, to its sources, contrasting them with the dry universal principles of the enlightened universe. Therefore, Romanticism gave rise to ethnophilism, which is characterized by an exceptional interest in history, in the national past, and folklore. In each country, Romanticism acquired a pronounced national coloring. In art, this manifested itself in the crisis of academicism and the creation of national-romantic historical styles.

Romanticism in Literature. Romanticism first arose in Germany, among the writers and philosophers of the Jena school (W.G. Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, brothers F. and A. Schlegel). The philosophy of romanticism was systematized in the works of F. Schlegel and F. Schelling. In the further development of German romanticism, interest in fairy-tale and mythological motifs was distinguished, which was especially clearly expressed in the work of the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Hoffmann. Heine, starting his work within the framework of romanticism, later subjected him to a critical revision.

England is largely due to German influence. In England, its first representatives are the poets of the Lake School, Wordsworth and Coleridge. They established the theoretical foundations of their direction, having familiarized themselves with the philosophy of Schelling and the views of the first German romantics during a trip to Germany. English romanticism is characterized by an interest in social problems: they oppose to modern bourgeois society the old, pre-bourgeois relations, the glorification of nature, simple, natural feelings. A prominent representative of English romanticism is Byron, who, in the words of Pushkin, "clothed in dull romanticism and hopeless egoism." His work is imbued with the pathos of struggle and protest against the modern world, the glorification of freedom and individualism. Also, English romanticism includes the work of Shelley, John Keats, William Blake. Romanticism also spread in other European countries, for example, in France (Chateaubriand, J. Stael, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Prosper Merimee, George Sand), Italy (N.U. Foscolo, A. Manzoni, Leopardi) , Poland (Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian Norwid) and in the USA (Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, W.C. Bryant, Edgar Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Longfellow, Herman Melville).

Romanticism in Russian Literature. It is usually believed that in Russia romanticism appears in the poetry of V.A. Zhukovsky (although some Russian poetic works of the 1790-1800s are often attributed to the pre-romantic movement that developed from sentimentalism). In Russian romanticism, freedom from classical conventions appears, a ballad, a romantic drama, is created. A new idea of ​​the essence and meaning of poetry is affirmed, which is recognized as an independent sphere of life, an expression of the highest, ideal aspirations of man; the old view, according to which poetry was an empty pastime, something completely serviceable, is no longer possible. Early poetry of A.S. Pushkin also developed within the framework of romanticism (the end is considered to be the poem "To the Sea"). The pinnacle of Russian romanticism can be called the poetry of M.Yu. Lermontov, "Russian Byron". Philosophical lyrics F.I. Tyutchev is both the completion and the overcoming of romanticism in Russia.

2. Byron (1788-1824) - the great English poet, the founder of the Byronic movement named after him in European literature of the 19th century. Byron's first major work was the first two songs of the poem "Childe Harold", which appeared in print in 1812. These were travel impressions from Byron's journey through the European East, united in a purely external way around the personality of Childe Harold. The main features of this image were later repeated in the central figures of all Byron's works, developed and complicated, reflecting the evolution of the spiritual life of the poet himself, and in general created the image of the bearer of world sorrow, the "Byronic" hero, which dominated European literature for the first three decades of the 19th century. . The essence of this character, as well as of all European romanticism, is the protest of the human person, ascending to Rousseau, against the social system that constrains it. Byron is separated from Rousseau by three decades filled with the greatest events of modern history. During this time, European society, along with the French Revolution, experienced an era of grandiose plans and ardent hopes, and a period of the most bitter disappointments. Ruling England a hundred years ago, as now, stood at the head of political and social reaction, and English "society" demanded from each of its members unconditional external submission to an officially recognized code of moral and secular rules. All this, in connection with the unbridled and passionate nature of the poet himself, contributed to the fact that in Byron Rousseau's protest turned into an open challenge, an uncompromising war with society and imparted to his heroes the features of deep bitterness and disappointment. In the works that appeared immediately after the first songs of Childe Harold and also reflected the impressions of the East, the images of the heroes are becoming more and more gloomy. They are weighed down by a mysterious criminal past that lies heavily on their conscience, and they confess revenge on people and fate. In the spirit of this "robber romance" the characters of "Gyaura", "Corsair" and "Lara" are written.

Byron's political freethinking and the freedom of his religious and moral views provoked real persecution against him by the entire English society, which took advantage of the history of his unsuccessful marriage to brand him as an unheard of sinner. Byron, with a curse, breaks all ties with his old life and fatherland and sets off on a new journey through Switzerland. Here he created the third song of Childe Harold and "Manfred". The fourth and last song of this poem was written by Byron already in Italy. It recreated his wanderings among the ruins of ancient Italy and was imbued with such an ardent appeal for the liberation of the Italian people that it appeared in the eyes of the reactionary governments of Italy as a dangerous revolutionary act. In Italy, Byron joined the Carbonari movement, which aspired in the 20s of the XIX century. to the liberation of Italy from Austrian rule and the tyranny of its own governments, and to national unification. He soon became the head of one of the most active carbonarian sections and founded an organ in London to spread the ideas of carbonarism and support the pan-European liberal movement. During these years, Byron created the remaining unfinished poem "Don Juan", a brilliant satire on the entire civilized society. In 1823, supporters of the liberation of Greece offered Byron to become the head of the insurgent Greece. Byron followed this call, gathered a volunteer detachment and went to Greece. Among the works on the organization of the Greek army, he fell ill and died in Missolungi in 1824. Byron's poetry had a great influence on the poetic work of Pushkin and especially Lermontov. George Gordon Byron was born in London on January 22, 1788. On the line of his father, guards officer John Byron, Byron came from the highest aristocratic nobility. The marriage of the parents failed, and shortly after the birth of Gordon, the mother took her little son to Scotland in the city of Aberdeen.

3. Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Amadeus Hoffmann (January 24, 1776, Königsberg - June 25, 1822, Berlin) - German writer, composer, artist of the romantic direction. The pseudonym as a composer is Johann Kreisler (German: Johannes Kreisler). Hoffmann was born into the family of a Prussian royal lawyer, but when the boy was three years old, his parents separated, and he was brought up in the house of his maternal grandmother under the influence of his uncle, a lawyer, an intelligent and talented man, but prone to fantasy and mysticism. Hoffmann early showed remarkable abilities for music and drawing. But, not without the influence of his uncle, Hoffmann chose for himself the path of jurisprudence, from which he tried to break out all his subsequent life and earn money with the arts. The work of Hoffmann in the development of German romanticism represents a stage of a more acute and tragic understanding of reality, the rejection of a number of illusions of the Jena romantics, and a revision of the relationship between the ideal and reality. Hoffmann's hero tries to escape from the shackles of the world around him by means of irony, but, realizing the impotence of the romantic confrontation with real life, the writer himself laughs at his hero. Hoffmann's romantic irony changes its direction; unlike the Jensen, it never creates the illusion of absolute freedom. Hoffmann focuses close attention on the personality of the artist, believing that he is the most free from selfish motives and petty worries.

Romanticism

In literature, the word "romanticism" has several meanings.

In the modern science of literature, romanticism is considered mainly from two points of view: as a certain artistic method, based on the creative transformation of reality in art, and how literary direction, historically natural and limited in time. More general is the concept of the romantic method; on it and dwell in more detail.

The artistic method implies a certain way of comprehending the world in art, that is, the basic principles of selection, depiction and evaluation of the phenomena of reality. The originality of the romantic method as a whole can be defined as artistic maximalism, which, being the basis of the romantic worldview, is found at all levels of the work - from the problematics and the system of images to style.

The romantic picture of the world is hierarchical; the material in it is subordinated to the spiritual. The struggle (and tragic unity) of these opposites can take on different guises: divine - diabolical, sublime - base, heavenly - earthly, true - false, free - dependent, internal - external, eternal - transient, regular - accidental, desired - real, exclusive - ordinary. The romantic ideal, in contrast to the ideal of the classicists, concrete and available for implementation, is absolute and, therefore, is in eternal contradiction with transient reality. The artistic worldview of romance, therefore, is built on the contrast, clash and merging of mutually exclusive concepts - it, according to the researcher A. V. Mikhailov, "is the bearer of crises, something transitional, internally in many respects terribly unstable, unbalanced." The world is perfect as an idea - the world is imperfect as an embodiment. Is it possible to reconcile the irreconcilable?

This is how a dual world arises, a conditional model of the romantic universe, in which reality is far from ideal, and the dream seems unrealizable. Often the link between these worlds is the inner world of romance, in which lives the desire from the dull "HERE" to the beautiful "THEHER". When their conflict is unresolvable, the motive of flight sounds: the escape from imperfect reality into otherness is conceived as salvation. Belief in the possibility of a miracle still lives in the 20th century: in A. S. Green's story "Scarlet Sails", in A. de Saint-Exupery's philosophical tale "The Little Prince" and in many other works.

The events that make up a romantic plot are usually bright and unusual; they are a kind of "tops" on which the narrative is built (entertainment in the era of romanticism becomes one of the important artistic criteria). At the event level of the work, the desire of the romantics to “throw off the chains” of classic plausibility is clearly traced, opposing it with the absolute freedom of the author, including in plot construction, and this construction can leave the reader with a feeling of incompleteness, fragmentation, as if calling for self-completion of “white spots” ". The external motivation for the extraordinary nature of what is happening in romantic works can be a special place and time of action (for example, exotic countries, the distant past or future), as well as folk superstitions and legends. The depiction of "exceptional circumstances" is aimed primarily at revealing the "exceptional personality" acting in these circumstances. The character as the engine of the plot and the plot as a way of "realizing" the character are closely related, therefore, each eventful moment is a kind of external expression of the struggle between good and evil that takes place in the soul of a romantic hero.

One of the artistic achievements of romanticism is the discovery of the value and inexhaustible complexity of the human personality. Man is perceived by romantics in a tragic contradiction - as the crown of creation, "the proud master of fate" and as a weak-willed toy in the hands of forces unknown to him, and sometimes his own passions. The freedom of the individual implies its responsibility: having made the wrong choice, one must be prepared for the inevitable consequences. Thus, the ideal of freedom (both in political and philosophical aspects), which is an important component in the romantic hierarchy of values, should not be understood as preaching and poetizing self-will, the danger of which was repeatedly revealed in romantic works.

The image of the hero is often inseparable from the lyrical element of the author's "I", turning out to be either consonant with him or alien. In any case, the author-narrator in a romantic work takes an active position; the narrative tends to be subjective, which can also be manifested at the compositional level - in the use of the “story within a story” technique. However, subjectivity as a general quality of romantic narration does not presuppose the author's arbitrariness and does not cancel the "system of moral coordinates". It is from a moral position that the exclusivity of a romantic hero is assessed, which can be both evidence of his greatness and a signal of his inferiority.

The “strangeness” (mysteriousness, dissimilarity to others) of the character is emphasized by the author, first of all, with the help of a portrait: spiritualized beauty, painful pallor, expressive look - these signs have long become stable, almost clichés, which is why comparisons and reminiscences in descriptions are so frequent, as if "quoting" previous samples. Here is a typical example of such an associative portrait (N. A. Polevoy “The Bliss of Madness”): “I don’t know how to describe Adelgeyda to you: she was likened to Beethoven’s wild symphony and the Valkyrie maidens, about whom the Scandinavian skalds sang ... her face ... was thoughtfully charming, like the face of the Madonnas of Albrecht Dürer ... Adelgeide seemed to be the spirit of the poetry that inspired Schiller when he described his Tekla, and Goethe when he portrayed his Mignon.

The behavior of a romantic hero is also evidence of his exclusivity (and sometimes - "excluded" from society); often it "does not fit" into generally accepted norms and violates the conventional "rules of the game" by which all other characters live.

Society in romantic works is a certain stereotype of collective existence, a set of rituals that does not depend on the personal will of each, so the hero here is “like a lawless comet in a circle of calculated luminaries.” It is formed as if "against the environment", although its protest, sarcasm or skepticism are born precisely by the conflict with others, that is, to some extent, are conditioned by society. The hypocrisy and deadness of the "secular mob" in the romantic depiction often correlates with the devilish, vile beginning, trying to gain power over the hero's soul. The human in the crowd becomes indistinguishable: instead of faces - masks (masquerade motif - E. A. Po. "Mask of the Red Death", V. N. Olin. "Strange Ball", M. Yu. Lermontov. "Masquerade",

Antithesis, as a favorite structural device of romanticism, is especially evident in the confrontation between the hero and the crowd (and, more broadly, between the hero and the world). This external conflict can take many forms, depending on the type of romantic personality the author has created. Let us turn to the most characteristic of these types.

The hero is a naive eccentric, who believes in the possibility of realizing ideals, is often comical and absurd in the eyes of “sane people”. However, he favorably differs from them in his moral integrity, childish desire for truth, ability to love and inability to adapt, that is, to lie. The heroine of A. S. Green's story "Scarlet Sails" Assol was also awarded the happiness of a dream come true, who knew how to believe in a miracle and wait for its appearance, despite the bullying and ridicule of "adults".

For romantics, the childish is generally a synonym for the authentic - not burdened by conventions and not killed by hypocrisy. The discovery of this topic is recognized by many scientists as one of the main merits of romanticism. “The 18th century saw in the child only a small adult.

The hero is a tragic loner and dreamer, rejected by society and aware of his alienation to the world, is capable of open conflict with others. They seem to him limited and vulgar, living exclusively for material interests and therefore personifying some kind of world evil, powerful and destructive for the spiritual aspirations of the romantic. H

The opposition "personality - society" acquires the sharpest character in the "marginal" version hero - romantic vagabond or robber who takes revenge on the world for his desecrated ideals. Examples include characters from the following works: “Les Miserables” by V. Hugo, “Jean Sbogar” by C. Nodier, “Corsair” by D. Byron.

The hero is a disappointed, "extra" person, who did not have the opportunity and no longer wants to realize his talents for the benefit of society, has lost his former dreams and faith in people. He turned into an observer and analyst, pronouncing a sentence on imperfect reality, but not trying to change it or change himself (for example, Octave in A. Musset's Confession of the Son of the Century, Lermontov's Pechorin). The fine line between pride and selfishness, consciousness of one's own exclusivity and disregard for people can explain why the cult of a lonely hero so often merges with his debunking in romanticism: Aleko in A. S. Pushkin's poem "Gypsies" and Larra in M. Gorky's story "The Old Woman Izergil" were punished with loneliness precisely for their inhuman pride.

Hero - demonic personality, challenging not only society, but also the Creator, is doomed to a tragic discord with reality and with oneself. His protest and despair are organically linked, since the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty he rejects have power over his soul. According to V. I. Korovin, a researcher of Lermontov’s work, “... a hero who is inclined to choose demonism as a moral position, thereby abandons the idea of ​​good, since evil does not give birth to good, but only evil. But this is a "high evil", since it is dictated by the thirst for good." The rebelliousness and cruelty of the nature of such a hero often become a source of suffering for others and do not bring joy to him. Acting as the "viceroy" of the devil, tempter and punisher, he himself is sometimes humanly vulnerable, because he is passionate. It is no coincidence that in romantic literature the motif of the “demons in love”, named after the story of the same name by J. Kazot, became widespread. "Echoes" of this motive sound in Lermontov's "Demon", and in "Secluded house on Vasilyevsky" by V.P. Titov, and in N.A. Melgunov's story "Who is he?"

Hero - patriot and citizen, ready to give his life for the good of the Fatherland, most often does not meet with the understanding and approval of his contemporaries. In this image, pride, traditional for romance, is paradoxically combined with the ideal of selflessness - the voluntary atonement of collective sin by a lonely hero (in the literal, non-literary sense of the word). The theme of sacrifice as a feat is especially characteristic of the "civil romanticism" of the Decembrists.

Ivan Susanin from the Ryleev Duma of the same name, and Gorky Danko from the story "Old Woman Izergil" can say the same about themselves. In the work of M. Yu. Lermontov, this type is also common, which, according to V. I. Korovin, “... became the starting point for Lermontov in his dispute with the century. But it is no longer the concept of only the public good, which is quite rationalistic among the Decembrists, and it is not civic feelings that inspire a person to heroic behavior, but her entire inner world.

Another of the common types of hero can be called autobiographical, as it represents the comprehension of the tragic fate of a man of art, who is forced to live, as it were, on the border of two worlds: the sublime world of creativity and the ordinary world of creaturehood. In the romantic frame of reference, a life devoid of the craving for the impossible becomes an animalistic existence. It is this existence, aimed at achieving the achievable, that is the basis of a pragmatic bourgeois civilization, which the romantics actively do not accept.

Only the naturalness of nature can save us from the artificiality of civilization - and in this romanticism is consonant with sentimentalism, which discovered its ethical and aesthetic significance (“mood landscape”). For a romantic, inanimate nature does not exist - it is all spiritualized, sometimes even humanized:

It has a soul, it has freedom, it has love, it has a language.

(F. I. Tyutchev)

On the other hand, the closeness of a person to nature means his “self-identity”, that is, reunification with his own “nature”, which is the key to his moral purity (here, the influence of the concept of “natural man” belonging to J. J. Rousseau is noticeable).

Nevertheless, the traditional romantic landscape is very different from the sentimentalist one: instead of idyllic rural expanses - groves, oak forests, fields (horizontal) - mountains and sea appear - height and depth, eternally warring "wave and stone". According to the literary critic, "... nature is recreated in romantic art as a free element, a free and beautiful world, not subject to human arbitrariness" (N. P. Kubareva). A storm and a thunderstorm set the romantic landscape in motion, emphasizing the inner conflict of the universe. This corresponds to the passionate nature of the romantic hero:

Oh I'm like a brother

I would be happy to embrace the storm!

With the eyes of the clouds I followed

I caught lightning with my hand ...

(M. Yu. Lermontov. "Mtsyri")

Romanticism, like sentimentalism, opposes the classic cult of reason, believing that "there is much in the world, friend Horatio, which our wise men never dreamed of." But if the sentimentalist considers feeling to be the main antidote to intellectual limitations, then the romantic maximalist goes further. Feeling is replaced by passion - not so much human as superhuman, uncontrollable and spontaneous. She elevates the hero above the ordinary and connects him with the universe; it reveals to the reader the motives of his actions, and often becomes an excuse for his crimes.

Romantic psychologism is based on the desire to show the inner regularity of the words and deeds of the hero, at first glance, inexplicable and strange. Their conditionality is revealed not so much through the social conditions of character formation (as it will be in realism), but through the clash of the supermundane forces of good and evil, the battlefield of which is the human heart (this idea sounds in the novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann “Elixirs Satan"). .

Romantic historicism is based on understanding the history of the Fatherland as the history of the family; the genetic memory of a nation lives in each of its representatives and explains a lot in his character. Thus, history and modernity are closely connected - for the majority of romantics, turning to the past becomes one of the ways of national self-determination and self-knowledge. But unlike the classicists, for whom time is nothing more than a convention, the romantics try to correlate the psychology of historical characters with the customs of the past, to recreate the “local flavor” and the “zeitgeist” not as a masquerade, but as a motivation for events and people's actions. In other words, "immersion in the era" must take place, which is impossible without a thorough study of documents and sources. "Facts colored by the imagination" - this is the basic principle of romantic historicism.

As for historical figures, in romantic works they rarely correspond to their real (documentary) appearance, being idealized depending on the author's position and their artistic function - to set an example or warn. It is characteristic that in his warning novel "The Silver Prince" A. K. Tolstoy shows Ivan the Terrible only as a tyrant, not taking into account the inconsistency and complexity of the king's personality, and Richard the Lionheart in reality was not at all like the exalted image of the king-knight , as shown by W. Scott in the novel "Ivanhoe".

In this sense, the past is more convenient than the present for creating an ideal (and at the same time, as it were, real in the past) model of national existence, opposing the wingless modernity and degraded compatriots. The emotion that Lermontov expressed in the poem "Borodino" -

Yes, there were people in our time,

Mighty, dashing tribe:

Bogatyrs - not you, -

characteristic of many romantic works. Belinsky, speaking of Lermontov's "Song about ... the merchant Kalashnikov", emphasized that it "... testifies to the state of mind of the poet, dissatisfied with modern reality and transported from it into the distant past, in order to look for life there, which he does not see in present."

Romantic genres

romantic poem characterized by the so-called peak composition, when the action is built around one event, in which the character of the protagonist is most clearly manifested and his further - most often tragic - fate is determined. This happens in some of the "eastern" poems of the English romantic D. G. Byron ("Gyaur", "Corsair"), and in the "southern" poems of A. S. Pushkin ("Prisoner of the Caucasus", "Gypsies"), and in Lermontov's "Mtsyri", "Song about ... the merchant Kalashnikov", "Demon".

romantic drama seeks to overcome classic conventions (in particular, the unity of place and time); she does not know the speech individualization of the characters: her characters speak "the same language". It is extremely conflicting, and most often this conflict is associated with an irreconcilable confrontation between the hero (internally close to the author) and society. Due to the inequality of forces, the collision rarely ends in a happy ending; the tragic ending can also be associated with contradictions in the soul of the main character, his internal struggle. Lermontov's "Masquerade", Byron's "Sardanapal", Hugo's "Cromwell" can be named as characteristic examples of romantic dramaturgy.

One of the most popular genres in the era of romanticism was the story (most often the romantics themselves called this word a story or short story), which existed in several thematic varieties. The plot of a secular story is based on the discrepancy between sincerity and hypocrisy, deep feelings and social conventions (E. P. Rostopchina. "Duel"). The everyday story is subordinated to moralistic tasks, depicting the life of people who are somewhat different from the rest (M.P. Pogodin. “Black sickness”). In the philosophical story, the basis of the problem is the “damned questions of being”, the answers to which are offered by the characters and the author (M. Yu. Lermontov. “Fatalist”), satirical tale is aimed at debunking the triumphant vulgarity, which in various guises poses the main threat to the spiritual essence of man (V. F. Odoevsky. “The Tale of a Dead Body Belonging to No One Knows Who”). Finally, the fantastic story is built on the penetration of supernatural characters and events into the plot, inexplicable from the point of view of everyday logic, but natural from the point of view of the higher laws of being, having a moral nature. Most often, the very real actions of the character: careless words, sinful deeds become the cause of a miraculous retribution, reminiscent of a person’s responsibility for everything that he does (A. S. Pushkin. “The Queen of Spades”, N. V. Gogol. “Portrait”).

A new life of romance was breathed into the folklore genre by fairy tales, not only contributing to the publication and study of monuments of oral folk art, but also creating their own original works; we can recall the brothers Grimm, W. Gauf, A. S. Pushkin, P. P. Ershov and others. Moreover, the fairy tale was understood and used quite widely - from the way of recreating the folk (children's) view of the world in stories with the so-called folk fantasy (for example , “Kikimora” by O. M. Somov) or in works addressed to children (for example, “Town in a Snuffbox” by V. F. Odoevsky), to the general property of truly romantic creativity, the universal “canon of poetry”: “Everything poetic should be fabulous,” Novalis claimed.

The originality of the romantic artistic world is also manifested at the linguistic level. The romantic style, of course, heterogeneous, appearing in many individual varieties, has some common features. It is rhetorical and monologue: the heroes of the works are the "linguistic twins" of the author. The word is valuable for him for its emotional and expressive possibilities - in romantic art it always means immeasurably more than in everyday communication. Associativity, saturation with epithets, comparisons and metaphors becomes especially evident in portrait and landscape descriptions, where the main role is played by similes, as if replacing (obscuring) the specific appearance of a person or a picture of nature. Romantic symbolism is based on the endless "expansion" of the literal meaning of certain words: the sea and the wind become symbols of freedom; morning dawn - hopes and aspirations; blue flower (Novalis) - an unattainable ideal; night - the mysterious essence of the universe and the human soul, etc.

The history of Russian romanticism began in the second half of the 18th century. Classicism, excluding the national as a source of inspiration and subject of depiction, opposed high examples of artistry to the “rough” common people, which could not but lead to “monotony, limitation, conventionality” (A. S. Pushkin) of literature. Therefore, gradually the imitation of ancient and European writers gave way to the desire to focus on the best examples of national creativity, including folk.

The formation and formation of Russian romanticism is closely connected with the most important historical event of the 19th century - the victory in the Patriotic War of 1812. The rise of national self-consciousness, faith in the great purpose of Russia and its people stimulate interest in what previously remained outside the boundaries of belles-lettres. Folklore, domestic legends are beginning to be perceived as a source of originality, independence of literature, which has not yet completely freed itself from the student imitation of classicism, but has already taken the first step in this direction: if you learn, then from your ancestors. Here is how O. M. Somov formulates this task: “... The Russian people, glorious in military and civil virtues, formidable in strength and magnanimous in victories, inhabiting the kingdom, the largest in the world, rich in nature and memories, must have their own folk poetry, inimitable and independent of alien legends.

From this point of view, the main merit of V. A. Zhukovsky is not in “discovering the America of Romanticism” and not in introducing Russian readers to the best Western European examples, but in a deeply national understanding of world experience, in connecting it with the Orthodox worldview, which affirms:

Our best friend in this life is Faith in Providence, the Blessing of the Creator of the law ...

("Svetlana")

The romanticism of the Decembrists K. F. Ryleev, A. A. Bestuzhev, V. K. Kuchelbeker in the science of literature is often called “civil”, since the pathos of serving the Fatherland is fundamental in their aesthetics and work. Appeals to the historical past are called upon, according to the authors, "to excite the valor of fellow citizens with the exploits of their ancestors" (A. Bestuzhev's words about K. Ryleev), that is, to contribute to a real change in reality, which is far from ideal. It was in the poetics of the Decembrists that such common features of Russian romanticism as anti-individualism, rationalism and citizenship were clearly manifested - features that indicate that in Russia romanticism is rather the heir to the ideas of the Enlightenment than their destroyer.

After the tragedy of December 14, 1825, the romantic movement enters a new era - civic optimistic pathos is replaced by a philosophical orientation, self-deepening, attempts to learn the general laws that govern the world and man. Russian romantics-wisers (D. V. Venevitinov, I. V. Kireevsky, A. S. Khomyakov, S. V. Shevyrev, V. F. Odoevsky) turn to German idealist philosophy and strive to “graft” it onto their native soil. The second half of the 20s - 30s - the time of passion for the miraculous and the supernatural. A. A. Pogorelsky, O. M. Somov, V. F. Odoevsky, O. I. Senkovsky, A. F. Veltman turned to the genre of fantasy story.

In the general direction from romanticism to realism, the work of the great classics of the 19th century - A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, N. V. Gogol develops, and one should not talk about overcoming the romantic beginning in their works, but about transforming and enriching it realistic method of understanding life in art. It is on the example of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol that one can see that romanticism and realism, as the most important and deeply national phenomena in Russian culture of the 19th century, do not oppose each other, they are not mutually exclusive, but complementary, and only in their combination is born the unique image of our classical literature. . A spiritualized romantic view of the world, the correlation of reality with the highest ideal, the cult of love as an element and the cult of poetry as insight can be found in the work of the wonderful Russian poets F. I. Tyutchev, A. A. Fet, A. K. Tolstoy. Intense attention to the mysterious sphere of being, the irrational and the fantastic, is characteristic of Turgenev's late work, which develops the traditions of romanticism.

In Russian literature at the turn of the century and at the beginning of the 20th century, romantic tendencies are associated with the tragic worldview of a person of the “transitional era” and with his dream of transforming the world. The concept of the symbol, developed by the romantics, was developed and artistically embodied in the work of Russian symbolists (D. Merezhkovsky, A. Blok, A. Bely); love for the exotic of distant wanderings was reflected in the so-called neo-romanticism (N. Gumilyov); the maximalism of artistic aspirations, the contrast of the worldview, the desire to overcome the imperfection of the world and man are integral components of M. Gorky's early romantic work.

In science, the question of chronological boundaries, which put a limit to the existence of romanticism as an artistic movement, still remains open. The 40s of the 19th century are traditionally called, but more and more often in modern studies these boundaries are proposed to be pushed back - sometimes significantly, until the end of the 19th or even the beginning of the 20th century. One thing is indisputable: if romanticism as a trend left the stage, giving way to realism, then romanticism as an artistic method, that is, as a way of understanding the world in art, retains its viability to this day.

Thus, romanticism in the broadest sense of the word is not a historically limited phenomenon left in the past: it is eternal and still represents something more than a literary phenomenon. “Wherever a person is, there is romanticism ... His sphere ... is the whole inner, intimate life of a person, that mysterious soil of the soul and heart, from where all indefinite aspirations for the better and the sublime rise, striving to find satisfaction in the ideals created by fantasy” . “Genuine romanticism is by no means only a literary trend. He strove to become and became ... a new form of feeling, a new way of experiencing life ... Romanticism is nothing more than a way to arrange, organize a person, a bearer of culture, into a new connection with the elements ... Romanticism is a spirit that strives under any solidifying form and eventually explodes it ... "These statements by V. G. Belinsky and A. A. Blok, pushing the boundaries of the familiar concept, show its inexhaustibility and explain its immortality: as long as a person remains a person, romanticism will exist both in art as well as in everyday life.

Representatives of romanticism

Representatives of Romanticism in Russia.

Currents 1. Subjective-lyrical romanticism, or ethical and psychological (includes the problems of good and evil, crime and punishment, the meaning of life, friendship and love, moral duty, conscience, retribution, happiness): V. A. Zhukovsky (ballads "Lyudmila", "Svetlana", "The Twelve Sleeping Maidens", "The Forest King", "Aeolian Harp"; elegies, songs, romances, messages; poems "Abbadon", "Ondine", "Nal and Damayanti"), K. N. Batyushkov (messages, elegies, poetry).

2. Public-civil romanticism: K. F. Ryleev (lyrical poems, “Thoughts”: “Dmitry Donskoy”, “Bogdan Khmelnitsky”, “Death of Yermak”, “Ivan Susanin”; poems “Voinarovsky”, “Nalivaiko”),

A. A. Bestuzhev (pseudonym - Marlinsky) (poems, stories "Frigate" Nadezhda "", "Sailor Nikitin", "Ammalat-Bek", "Terrible fortune-telling", "Andrey Pereyaslavsky"),

B. F. Raevsky (civil lyrics),

A. I. Odoevsky (elegies, historical poem Vasilko, response to Pushkin's Message to Siberia),

D. V. Davydov (civil lyrics),

V. K. Küchelbecker (civil lyrics, drama "Izhora"),

3. "Byronic" romanticism: A. S. Pushkin(the poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila", civil lyrics, a cycle of southern poems: "Prisoner of the Caucasus", "Robber Brothers", "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai", "Gypsies"),

M. Yu. Lermontov (civil lyrics, poems “Izmail-Bey”, “Hadji Abrek”, “The Fugitive”, “Demon”, “Mtsyri”, drama “Spaniards”, historical novel “Vadim”),

I. I. Kozlov (poem "Chernets").

4. Philosophical romanticism: D. V. Venevitinov (civil and philosophical lyrics),

V. F. Odoevsky (collection of short stories and philosophical conversations "Russian Nights", romantic stories "Beethoven's Last Quartet", "Sebastian Bach"; fantastic stories "Igosha", "Sylphide", "Salamander"),

F. N. Glinka (songs, poems),

V. G. Benediktov (philosophical lyrics),

F. I. Tyutchev (philosophical lyrics),

E. A. Baratynsky (civil and philosophical lyrics).

5. Folk-historical romanticism: M. N. Zagoskin (historical novels "Yuri Miloslavsky, or Russians in 1612", "Roslavlev, or Russians in 1812", "Askold's Grave"),

I. I. Lazhechnikov (historical novels "Ice House", "Last Novik", "Basurman").

Features of Russian romanticism. The subjective romantic image contained an objective content, expressed in the reflection of the public mood of the Russian people in the first third of the 19th century - disappointment, anticipation of change, rejection of both the Western European bourgeoisie and Russian arbitrarily autocratic, feudal foundations.

Striving for the nation. It seemed to the Russian romantics that, by comprehending the spirit of the people, they were joining the ideal principles of life. At the same time, the understanding of the “folk soul” and the content of the very principle of nationality among representatives of various trends in Russian romanticism was different. So, for Zhukovsky, nationality meant a humane attitude towards the peasantry and, in general, towards poor people; he found it in the poetry of folk rituals, lyrical songs, folk signs, superstitions, and legends. In the works of the Romantic Decembrists, the folk character is not just positive, but heroic, nationally distinctive, which is rooted in the historical traditions of the people. They found such a character in historical, robber songs, epics, heroic tales.

- an amazing writer who could easily create a lyrical landscape, depicting us not an objective image of nature, but a romantic mood of the soul. Zhukovsky is a representative of romanticism. For his works, his unsurpassed poetry, he chose the world of the soul, the world of human feelings, thereby making a great contribution to the development of Russian literature.

Romanticism Zhukovsky

Zhukovsky is considered the founder of Russian romanticism. Even during his lifetime, he was called the father of romanticism, and for good reason. This direction in the writer's work is visible to the naked eye. Zhukovsky in his works developed a sensitivity that originated in sentimentalism. We see romanticism in the poet's lyrics, where feelings are depicted in each work, and even more. Art reveals the soul of a person. As Belinsky said, thanks to the romantic elements that Zhukovsky used in his works, poetry in Russian literature became inspired and more accessible to people and society. The writer gave Russian poetry the opportunity to develop in a new direction.

Features of Zhukovsky's romanticism

What is the peculiarity of Zhukovsky's romanticism? Romanticism is presented to us as fleeting, slightly perceptible, and perhaps even elusive, experiences. Zhukovsky's poetry is a small story of the author's soul, an image of his thoughts, dreams, which were displayed and found their life in poems, ballads, elegies. The writer showed us the inner world that a person is filled with, personifying spiritual dreams and experiences. At the same time, in order to describe the feelings with which the human heart is overflowing, to describe feelings that do not have size and shape, the author resorts to comparing feelings with nature.

The merit of Zhukovsky, as a romantic poet, is that he showed not only his inner world, but also discovered the means of depicting the human soul in general, making it possible for other writers to develop romanticism, such as