There are original faces in Russian literature, from which, however, there seems to be very little left - a house name, two or three lines. At best - some verse without reference to the author. Such is the fate of Ivan Myatlev. Or Ishki Myatlev, as his contemporaries called him.
- Don't woo ple pa -
Don't lie pa.
From poems by Ivan Myatlev
His most famous lines are heard by Turgenev, in a prose poem from the Senilia cycle: "How beautiful, how fresh the roses were...".
Turgenev either really forgot (out of senility), or pretended to forget (for the mood) that Myatlev's elegy "Roses" (1834) begins like this. Rushing through the years, these fresh roses appeared at Igor Severyanin, already in a bitterly tragic context:
... How good, how fresh the roses will be,
Thrown into my grave by my country!
(“Classic Roses”, 1925).
They are also stamped with an epitaph on the Severyanin's grave in Tallinn.
In our time, ungrateful descendants, in defiance of the school Turgenev, scoffed: “How good, how fresh were the faces!” Which, however, would amuse the soul of the yernik Myatlev.
Laugh at everything
A friend of Cricket, Asmodeus and Svetlana, a wealthy gentleman and a cheerful versifier, a secular man, an aristocrat, a favorite of literary salons and persons in authority, he lived a life not too long (1796-1844), but full of events, including historical ones. And a very happy life. Cornet of the Belarusian Hussars, he participated in the war with Napoleon. Demobilized due to illness. In the civil service, he rose to the rank of real state councilor and chamberlain and retired in 1836. Having the means, he went to travel around Europe. He returned to St. Petersburg, wrote in the wake of his travels about Mrs. Kurdyukova, published the last volume of the poem - and died.
As one obituary said, “he put ambition far below the pun, considering the first fun - to live honestly, nobly and first of all laugh harmlessly at everything, starting with himself - finished a merry book and with the last joke threw down his pen and life together, as things from now on are unnecessary ... "
His endless, excitedly nervous wit - there is such a type of always sharp, punning and rhyming people! - would look sickly if he were not so good-natured and (outwardly, at least) ingenuous. Although sometimes the Myatlev tricks could seem overly extravagant. So, at the ball, where Nicholas the First himself was present, the cheerful poet cut the bouquet of his neighbor, the Marquise de Traverse, finely, finely, dressed the salad with flowers and sent the dish to the adjutant of the heir, with whom the Marquise was in love. Or else: in one house, the owner's son fell in love with playing with Myatlev's smart hat. The poet was tired of this, and, not wanting to be confused with his wonderful hat for someone else, he wrote a rhyme inside it: “I am Myatleva Ivana, not yours, idiot. Find yours first! Yours, I'm tea, thinner soup ". Gross, I must say...
The soul of literary salons, an excellent reader and improviser, Myatlev, especially after a glass or two, stringed rhymes masterfully. “... he just spoke poetry, and always spoke by heart, carelessly told in verse, talked in verse; ... He spoke these verses for whole hours, ”a contemporary testifies.
The provincials who arrived in St. Petersburg certainly wanted to get "on Myatlev." He especially often performed where everyone knows each other and makes fun of each other so cutely - that's why almost all of his poems homemade. However, the social status of the participants in these meetings is very high - it was a cabal of noble people. What gave - in a historical perspective - album, home compositions a special charm and scope.
Russian criticism, unlike the visitors of the salons, did not particularly complain about Myatlev. Belinsky, who had just begun to come into his own, was simply annoyed by this trickster: a strict critic sensed in Myatlev's verses the irresponsible fun of an aristocrat. Belinsky received condescending praise only from "The Conversation of the Master with Afonka", which, it should be noted, is also rather frivolous.
For some time (shortly before his death) Myatlev published a Leaflet for Secular People. There was, for example, such a picture. The young officer asks the lady: "Which ear is ringing?" - "In the left", the lady answers. "How do you know?"- the officer is amazed ... Serious people were indignant at such vulgarity. (And I, because of simple tastes, like it.)
Era types
Ladies, inspiring him to poetry, Myatlev affectionately called his "Parnassian stable". Among the "horses" were Sofya Karamzina, Natalya Pushkina and the femme fatale of Russian Parnassus - Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset. With the latter, Myatlev was associated with especially warm, but exceptionally friendly relations.
She was a woman of sorts. Prince Vyazemsky, a big bawdy and cynical wit with a caustic mind, admired: “Usually, women poorly understand flatness and vulgarity; she understood them and rejoiced in them, of course, when they were not flat and flat and not vulgar. The moralist Ivan Aksakov, on the contrary, complained: “... I still have not seen in her the warmth of an aesthetic sensation, no heartfelt movement ... Among the “Overcoat”, in the most wonderful places, she will suddenly remember some stupid verses of Myatlev about some quarter and say or sing: "Drunk like a canal, drunk"... - etc., always with special pleasure. (By the way, from these two characteristics of one and the same person, two main channels can be deduced along which our aesthetic and ideological development proceeded.)
Smirnova-Rosset was a female version of that most characteristic type of the era, which Myatlev himself embodied in its purest form, as well as his famous peers - Prince Vyazemsky, Pushkin, Griboyedov, etc. This type will soon disappear, and already the younger Vyazemsky will write, not without didacticism and moralism: “For our generation, brought up in the reign of Nikolai Pavlovich, Pushkin's antics already seemed wild. Pushkin and his friends, brought up during the Napoleonic wars, under the influence of heroic revelry" saw in all this aesthetic and behavioral dashing "the last manifestations of the original life buried alive."
Pushkin dedicated a famous poem to Myatlev: “Swat Ivan, how will we drink ...” (1833). But he was especially close with Myatlev, Prince Vyazemsky fiddled with him and with his poems, thus satisfying his passion (increased by Irish blood) for stupid jokes. This trinity - Pushkin, Vyazemsky and Myatlev - belongs to the famous collective "It is necessary to remember, certainly necessary"(1833) - a work as absurdly insane in its bad infinity as funny. With slightly changing refrain: “We must remember, we must certainly remember ...”
Vyazemsky, sending this wild rhyme to Zhukovsky, wrote that Myatlev "in this case was notre chef d'ecole" (translated: "our mentor").
Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, in turn, recalls how Gogol “taught Pushkin and Myatlev to proofread in Invalid when they were writing memos. They already had a rather long race:
Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky
And the post-director Yeromolansky,
Apraksin Stepan,
Big boob
and Prince Vyazemsky Peter,
Almost drunk in the morning.
They have long been looking for rhymes for Yusupov. Myatlev ran in early in the morning with delight: “I found it, I found it: Prince Boris Yusupov / And Colonel Arapupov"(then Dmitry Minaev's roof will go to the roof on the rhyming of proper names).
Poems for occasion
Myatlev's favorite genre is occasional poetry. He could easily devote an absolutely empty fantasy to General Yermolov "on the day of the coming year one thousand eight hundred and four", sustained in a playful and meaningless spirit:
If Madame Hester passes
Le cancan de la Chaulière -
The theater is full of people...
Happy New Year!
("New 1944. Fantasy")
Inconsistency of a poetic trifle with the status of the addressee - His Excellency- Myatlev was not embarrassed at all. However, all this was quite consistent with the norms and the spirit of the times.
The poet enjoyed the favor of the kings. Once, after reading the poems of Jacob Grot “Beware; swampy land, hail is full of poison ... ", the heir, the future Tsar Alexander II, asked Myatlev to protect Petersburg. The result is a poem: “Do you really believe the slander woven by the Finns against us?”(1841). Like Grot's poem, Myatlev's answer was dedicated to the same Marquise de Traverse, with whose bouquet the poet treated so cruelly ...
As much as ladies, kings and Prince Vyazemsky, Lermontov fell in love with Myatlev: “Here is Lady Kurdyukova, / Her story is so sweet, / From word to word / I would have hardened it ...” To which Myatlev replied, perhaps not too gracefully, but, undoubtedly, with a sincere verse “Madame Kurdyukov to Lermontov”: “Monsieur Lermontov, you are a warbler, / A singing bird, vreman! Tu in ver son si sharman…”(translation: “Truly! All your poems are so beautiful…”)
Lermontov was familiar: “I love your paradoxes / And ha-ha-ha, and hee-hee-hee, / S[mirnova’s] little thing, S[asha’s] farce / And Ishka M[yatlev’s] poems…” So after all, to think: well, what kind of Myatlev is “Ishka” for him, with an age difference of almost 20 years - Ivan Petrovich! .. But, apparently, there was something eternally teenage in Myatlev.
Travel blog of Mrs. Kurdyukova
It seems that Myatlev's poetic ambition (if he had any at all) was completely satisfied with such cute trifles and the love of those around him. The first two collections of his poems were published without the name of the author, accompanied by a pretty-innocent notice: "I was persuaded to release" (1834 and 1835), which corresponded to reality.
However, almost nation-wide ha ha ha And hee hee hee after the publication of “Sensations and remarks of Mrs. Kurdyukova abroad, given to l’étrange” with caricatures by Vasily Timm (1840-1844). The place of publication was jokingly listed as Tambov, where Mrs. Kurdyukova lived.
Here Myatlev gave full rein to his passion for macaronic verse, which infuriated language purists. "Sensations and remarks ..." was preceded by a snarky epigraph: "De bon tambour de basque / Derrier le montagnier" with an explanation: “Russian folk proverb” (translation: “Glorious are the tambourines beyond the mountains”). But after all, the poet lived in the era of linguistic diffusion, in the times of “bilingual culture” (Yuri Lotman).
Infinitely long conjugating Russian words with foreign words, he created an amusing, although somewhat, perhaps, drawn-out (about 400 pages) joke. In a wild dance rhythm:
But for me, it's pretty stupid.
This bronze Saturno
Presented here; he is a villain
own their own children
Eating like it's hot
What is Saturno?
Time is simple, se le tan,
Ki devoré sez enfan…
(translation: "This is the time that devours its children")
Sometimes the poet suddenly changes his tone and speaks seriously and sternly about the triumph of the “Russian Orthodox faith”, about the picture he saw in the Vatican depicting the Savior on Tabor. For all his frivolity, Myatlev was a deeply religious person.
“Sensations and remarks of Mrs. Kurdyukova…” were taken by criticism without humor. As the emblem of the Russian province, which the capitals laugh at. But they decided that "Kurdyukova's face is a wonderful face: it belongs to Shakespeare's clowns or jesters, to Ivanushkas, Emelyushki-fools of our folk tales." They were surprised at the propensity for obscenity, which "reaches in Mrs. Kurdyukova to some kind of invincible passion." But there was nothing surprising in this: after all, Myatlev wrote off Mrs. Kurdyukova mainly from himself and partly from his girlfriend Smirnova-Rosset. And critics also noted that Kurdyukova was "too smart" and educated - and, therefore, this is not a Tambov landowner, but Myatlev himself. But it seems that the writer was convicted not so much by the mind and education of Kurdyukova, but by her constant and interested attention to female charms. (Unless she's a lesbian, of course.)
Illustrating the poem, Vasily Timm portrayed this tourist as similar to Myatlev. Or so: Myatlev is in front of the mirror, and Mrs. Kurdyukova is in the mirror.
Meanwhile
Yes, of course, jokes, trifles, whims of the gentleman, art for art's sake ... Meanwhile, he was truly poetic in ordinary speech: “She wrapped herself in a piece of heaven, and looks like an angel…”- in verse it came out a little worse (see: “What I saw yesterday”, 1840).
Flashlights-sudariki,
Tell me
What they saw, what they heard
In the silence of the night you ...
Flashlights-sudariki
They burn, they burn
Have you seen, haven't you seen -
They don't say that...
“Under the name of lanterns, the writer meant officials in the public service,” one of the copies of the poem read. Well, yes, officials and dignitaries who do not care about "human sorrows". As a Soviet researcher writes, "Lanterns" is "a deeply satirical, although artistically veiled image ... of the bureaucratic system of the Nikolaev era." One way or another, but "Lanterns" fell into collections of underground poetry. And even, it seems, Herzen liked it.
Myatlev is also the author of the lapidary colloquial "New Year" (1844), which is based mainly on rhythm: “All the people / Says, New Year, / Says, / What he brought, / Says, / Nothing, sir, / Says, / To whom the cross, / Says, / To whom the pestle, / Says, / To whom the rank, / Says, / To whom damn, / Says ... "
An intriguing literary plot is associated with Myatlev's "Fantastic Saying" (1833), she is also "Cockroach":
Cockroach
Like in a glass
Will fall -
will be lost,
On glass
Hard
Won't crawl.
So do I:
My life
faded,
Departed…
On the one hand, "Cockroach" parodies Polezhaev's "Evening Dawn". And on the other hand, it becomes a Castal key for the incomparable captain Lebyadkin: “There lived a cockroach in the world, / A cockroach from childhood, / And then he got into a glass, / Full of fly-eating ...” Then the cockroach will naturally crawl to Nikolai Oleinikov, then it will appear somewhere in the vicinity of Victor Pelevin's Life of Insects.
And Kozma Prutkov, and Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, and Timur Kibirov, and other writers caught (and caught) the rays flying from the verses of this careless jester of Russian literature. And his unthinkable ha ha ha And hee hee hee…
"If you don't like it, don't read it", - so the epigraph is translated.
CLASSIC ROSES
Music by Alexander Vertinsky
Words by Igor Severyanin
In the days when dreams swarm
My beautiful, blue country.
Summers have passed and tears are pouring everywhere,
How good, how fresh were the roses
Memories of the past day.
But the days go by, the storms are already subsiding,
Return to the house Russia is looking for trails.
How good, how fresh the roses will be,
Thrown into my grave by my country!
From the repertoire of Alexander Vertinsky. Recorded on a plate - Parlofon, Germany, 1930-1931, 79140.
Black eyes: Old Russian romance. - M .: Eksmo Publishing House, 2004.
From the website "Sad Dogs of A.N. Vertinsky"
The poem was written in 1925 in Estonia, inspired by Ivan Myatlev's poem "Roses" (How good, how fresh the roses were ...,<1834>, there is a melody recitation by B. Sadovskaya, 1910) and a poem in prose by Ivan Turgenev "How good, how fresh were the roses ..." (1879, there are melody recitations by L. Lisovsky, 1890, A. Taskin, 1898, A. Arensky, 1904). Vertinsky's romance was created in 1930, its text is slightly different from the author's text by Severyanin.
Zhanna Bichevskaya performs this romance to the music of Gennady Ponomarev (approximately 1990s), with the author's text by Severyanin, changing only one word in Art. 7: sings "How good, how fresh were the roses" instead of "How good, how fresh roses are now". See Zhanna Bichevskaya, album “Love, brothers, love…”, Zeko Records, 1996.
The phrase "How good, how fresh the roses will be, By my country thrown into my coffin!" carved on the tombstone of Severyanin. He died at the end of 1941 in Tallinn from starvation.
classic roses
Igor Severyanin
How beautiful, how beautiful were the roses
In my garden! How they deceived my eyes!
How I prayed for spring frosts
Do not touch them with a cold hand!
Myatlev, 1843
In those days when dreams swarmed
In the hearts of people, transparent and clear,
How good, how fresh were the roses
My love, and glory, and spring!
Summers have passed, and tears are pouring everywhere ...
There is no country, nor those who lived in the country.
How good, how fresh roses are now
Memories of the past day!
But the days go by - the thunderstorms are already subsiding.
In my garden! How they deceived my eyes!
How I prayed for spring frosts
Do not touch them with a cold hand!
1843 Myatlev
In those days when dreams swarmed
In the hearts of people, transparent and clear,
How good, how fresh were the roses
My love, and glory, and spring!
Summers have passed, and tears are pouring everywhere ...
There is neither a country, nor those who lived in the country ...
How good, how fresh roses are now
Memories of the past day!
But the days go by - the thunderstorms are already subsiding.
Back to home Russia is looking for paths…
How good, how fresh the roses will be,
Thrown into my grave by my country!
Analysis of the poem "Classic Roses" by Severyanin
Nostalgia is the leitmotif of Igor Severyanin's Classical Roses. It becomes a symbol of continuity in Russian literature, linking together the 19th and 20th centuries.
The poem was written in 1925. Its author is 38 years old, since 1918 he and his family found themselves in unexpected emigration in Estonia. Rest turned into exile. He did not return to Soviet Russia. Performances in poetry concerts began, work on translations, he managed to publish his books. By genre - elegy, by size - iambic with cross rhyming, 3 stanzas. Only one rhyme is closed. The poem is preceded by an epigraph from I. Myatlev, whose line about roses becomes the refrain and semantic center of I. Severyanin's work. However, at one time the same line inspired I. Turgenev to write a poem in prose, where the old man recalls the life that passed like a dream. Finally, Grand Duke K. Romanov is another poet who was fascinated by this phrase. The vocabulary is sublime and neutral. The name is a reference to the literary classic of the 19th century, when the original source of I. Myatlev was created, which inspired several poets. The composition is three-part. The lyrical hero is the author himself.
In the first quatrain, the poet recalls not just past years, but "times", a vanished era, which now seems legendary. Only 8 years have passed, and "neither the country", nor the people who lived in it, are no more. This is another world where there is no more love - neither for him, nor for him and his work, where it is hard to believe that there was glory, that spring came when one could be careless. “How fresh roses are today”: the most expensive commodity now is memories. Memory is a source of inspiration. "Return to the House": The hope of returning has not yet died. “Russia is looking for paths”: he identifies himself with all homeless Russia. During these years, part of the emigrants returned to their homeland. “Thrown into my coffin by the country”: the two final lines are carved on the tombstone of the poet. “There will be roses”: the principle of three times (“there were”, “now”, “will be”) is an involuntary borrowing from a poem by K. Romanov. Simple, almost helpless, rhymes, understandable, almost feminine, emotions. All this creates a touching, melancholic intonation. It is quite possible that the author himself, and some of his readers, shed tears over these lines for their own fate. Three exclamations sum up each stanza. Epithets: transparent and clear, good, fresh. Personifications: swarmed. Inversion: the summers have passed. Metaphors: roses of my love, looking for paths.
The king of poets of the turn of the century, I. Severyanin spent more than 20 years of his life in a foreign land, where he died. "Classic Roses" is one of his calling cards in the world of creativity.
(2)
Igor Severyanin used the lines of Myatlev to write a piercing poem about the difficult fate of Russia after the October events of 1917:
How good, how fresh the roses will be,
Thrown into my coffin by my country.
It is these two lines that are engraved on the tombstone of Igor Severyanin in Tallinn, where he is buried.
Why does the poet use allusion? What is its role?
The first quatrain of "Classical Roses" is an exact quote from the beginning of Myatlev's poem, an allusion in the second stanza of Severyanin's poem is already from Turgenev:
In those days when dreams swarmed
In the hearts of people, transparent and clear,
How good, how fresh were the roses
My love, and glory, and spring!
“Those times” here is pre-revolutionary Russia, the image of which is given with such love by Turgenev.
The third stanza, with the word "remembrance", also refers us to Turgenev's poem:
Summers have passed, and tears are shed everywhere ...
There is no country, nor those who lived in the country ...
How good, how fresh roses are now
Memories of the past day!
For Turgenev, the “past day” is the abandoned Motherland and the memories of youth associated with it. For Severyanin, this is pre-revolutionary Russia) which no longer exists.
In the third stanza, changes are made to the quote, which refers us already to K.R.’s technique: the word “were” is changed to the word “now” (in K.R. “now”), which clearly correlates with time.
The fourth stanza is first read as an allusion to the lines of K.R. “And after a gloomy winter / again ... / Joys and dreams will return, / How good then, How fresh the roses will be!”:
But the days go by - the storms are already subsiding.
Return to the house Russia is looking for trails.
How beautiful, how fresh the roses will be.
The last line hits the heart:
... My country threw me in a coffin.
And again, roses and death are intertwined into one, like in Myatlev and Turgenev.
1825 The Civil War is over, the past is destroyed. Fate threw Severyanin to Estonia. Only memories remain. The poet believes that the Motherland will overcome all adversity, and then, someday, hastily, remember him - bring flowers. But you can read these lines in another way: I will be remembered only after death.
1925 is the time of the New Economic Policy, the time when many returned to Russia (to their death): “Russia is looking for paths to return to the house.” But he won't come back.
How much one line of one poem revealed to us! How the reception of allusive inclusions expands the semantic and figurative space of the work! How this technique reveals the idea of continuity in Russian literature!
When I was little, still a very young restorer, I often worked on the installation of exhibitions - I glued "paws" on graphics and documents. And she was friends with the caretakers - they were bored and they came to talk to me. Elderly ladies, and in my young opinion, they are simply ancient, they didn’t tell me anything! I should have recorded it, sorry. One, for example, fought in the same partisan detachment with Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. And the other one collected... mourning wreaths. Those that were assigned to the Eternal Flame.
No, not the wreaths themselves, of course! But every day she passed by the Eternal Flame, examined, memorized, and then told me: what ribbons and flowers, from whom ...
And I remembered this today, while I was typing the protocol of the restoration council on mourning wreaths, stored in the former museum of V.I. Lenin, and now - in the stock department of the Historical Museum. Some kind of exhibition is conceived about the leaders, and there - wreaths.
Such descriptions! For example:
The composition of the wreath - all kinds of details and parts of rapid-fire, automatic guns, steam control valves, cartridges, trihedral bayonets, ramrods. All these details are attached to stylized palm leaves carved from roofing iron...
Or this one:
| Funeral wreath laid at the Mausoleum of V.I. Lenin and I.V. Stalin in 1953. From Antipov G.D.
The wreath is a small circle of plywood framed around the circumference with woven wheat ears mixed with mogar ears. A black and red satin ribbon is woven into the wreath of ears of corn, tied at the bottom with a bow. In the middle of the circle there is a text written in black paint: “To the great leaders V.I. Lenin and I.V. Stalin from G.D. - 69 years old. Gus-Khrustalny. November 1953". The wreath was made by Antipov G.D. in Gus-Khrustalny. The workers of the Reinforcing Plant helped him. The wreath was sent to Moscow by mail. Attached to the wreath was a letter from G.D. Antipov. Mogar - this is what it turns out to be: |
But I especially like this one:
Attached above the star is a metal ribbon painted red with an inscription made in black paint: “To the immortal leader comrade I.V. Stalin."
A wreath on the coffin - immortal!
Amazing
Igor Severyanin
CLASSIC ROSES
In my garden! How they deceived my eyes!
How I prayed for spring frosts
Do not touch them with a cold hand!
1843 Myatlev
In those days when dreams swarmed
In the hearts of people, transparent and clear,
How good, how fresh were the roses
My love, and glory, and spring!
Summers have passed, and tears are pouring everywhere ...
There is neither a country nor those who lived in the country...
How good, how fresh were the roses
Memories of the past day!
But the days go by - thunderstorms are already subsiding
