Surat Biography of Pushkin

And the sounds and confusion are full, on the shores of desert waves, it is customary to see in these verses a declaration of the “double being” of the poet as opposed to the “poet of the Schelingsians, priest and seer, for a moment that does not part with his divine mission”. And this image marks, supposedly, the sober, realistic view of the artist and artist that has developed in Pushkin: “This is the nature of the poet, imperfect, as the nature of every person” and the problem of “like double being”, his personal, depressing his bifurcation, which he did not consider the artist’s existence “the real place of the writer, has arisen”-“Voltaire”, and “Voltaire”, and “ Which he tried to overcome by all his might, especially in recent years.

In August, he goes to a recently abandoned prison, from where he sends the poem “Poet” in a letter to M. Pogodin with a comment: “I ran into the village, feeling rhyme” a letter of the second half of August. In this context, the poem is perceived not as a declaration of a view of the poet’s nature, but as a sad sigh of how little the poet belongs to himself and his art, a sigh of his personal fate, about his entrance, “the concerns of vain light”, which in recent years has flown for him into a fatal tragedy.

Actually, P. Annenkov understood this poem, who wrote that it “represents both the general poetic image and the private image of his moral state at that time”, it must also be taken into account what P. Bartenev called “the fraternity of the poet” 50 and that Pushkin himself described in the “Egyptian nights”, in the image of the Charsky, the poet, who, closing from the claims and attention of the public, He was forced to “pretend” to the insignificant of people, to live “squeezing and pretending”.

Pushkin was never expressed in the spirit that, de, the genius is all allowed; From large artists, he expected not villainy or baseness, on the contrary - moral height, conformity to the gift, and only with bitterness admitted that “a genius has its weaknesses that console mediocrity, but grieve noble hearts” “Voltaire”. But at the same time, he understood that the great man, and the artist, in particular, lives his life in such a special way that he is also in a special attitude to the generally accepted norms of morality.

In a well -known letter to Vyazemsky regarding the notes of Byron, the second half of November Pushkin wrote: “The crowd eagerly reads confession, notes by etc. At the opening of any abomination, she is in admiration. He is small, like us, he is vile, like us! How is it different? In what sense? Good and evil for everyone is one, and a large person is no less sensitive to him, but more than others.

On the one hand, V. But on the other hand, the weakness and even the “abominations” of genius is the dust on gold, which remains dust and yet on a scale of a great person is perceived differently than just dust. These are the very “random features” that do not determine the moral being of the genius and which he himself must erase and erases his life and creative labor.

To Pushkin, the consciousness of moral responsibility for the gift came during the Mikhailovsky solitude - years. This insight was primarily the result of internal development and at the same time occurred not without external influence. One of these external factors was the influence of the older friend of V. Zhukovsky, who literally bombarded the disgraced poet with enlightening letters: “You were born to be a great poet; Be worthy of this.

In this phrase, all your morality was a very funny epigram, but it should be an elevated poem ”; And even: “Talent is nothing. The main thing: the greatness is moral. Pushkin undoubtedly reached the “greatness of moral” and without this could he take the central place in our national and cultural and historical consciousness? So how else did the ingenious poet Alexander Pushkin live his life?

The biography is the only type of research that could give a thorough answer to this historical, psychological, philosophical, religious and simply humanly interesting question-to give an answer to it, if not the final one, because what finality can be in such matters, then at least to some extent corresponding to the modern level of intellectual and philosophical development of problems of creativity and creating personality.

For example: “He is doomed to death, but his“ hopes and dreams, and tears, and love ”are recorded and preserved in a word; His life does not leave with him, does not disappear without a trace, because it was doubled with verse and now it will remain on paper. Life is enclosed in poems, the soul - in Lira, one way or another, poetry for Pushkin is nothing more than the life of the poet, which he has converted into aesthetic creatures.

For him, as well as for other poets of different eras, there was no doubt that the poet can be composed only by the experienced we are talking about the lyrics proper, not taking into account the form of a verbal game that always existed next to poetry and similar in the form of a verbal game. In the already quoted letter of the Vyazemsky year, he wrote about Byron: "He confessed in his verses, involuntarily, passionate about the enthusiasm of poetry."The nature of the lyrics is that a person in it is “involuntarily” confessed, the whole is pronounced, and, as Blok wrote, “the stronger the lyrical poet, the more fully his fate is reflected in the verses” such nature and Pushkin’s lyricism were, with which many Pushkin sciences cannot agree with his lyrics only as an aesthetic object, but that writers are recognized as out of their own experience.

How to granted. Gogol spoke of Pushkin’s poetry that “everything there is the story of himself there” Herzen wrote about Pushkin: “His lyrical poems are the phases of his life, the biography of his soul; In them you find traces of everything that excited this fiery soul: truth and misconception, fleeting hobby and deep, unchanging sympathies ”Akhmatov in conversations with L.

Chukovskaya claimed that “Pushkin, about whom he wrote about, always talks about himself,” referring not only to the lyrics, but even the articles and prose of Pushkin’s poetry, of course, is not an impeccably accurate and sufficient source for the external biography of the poet, to whom Pushkinoists were mostly interested in; Otherwise, it would be necessary to deny no more and no less, as the presence of poetic creativity in Pushkin.

But at the same time, it is a completely authentic evidence of the content of his spiritual life at the heart of artistic creativity lies, however, the creator’s personal empirical experience lies, but still he is always him. In this deeper and broadest sense, autobiographism, in particular, Pushkin’s poetry is not subject to the slightest doubt. Joining these long -standing statements of Frank, we must raise the question in the aspect of our topic: so what to do to a biographer with artistic texts?

Pushkin, going to write along with Boratynsky and Pletnev "Life of Delvig", Comrade Pletnev around February 16. So he meant precisely the internal biography, the need for which so many faithful and felt words were said to Pushkin himself. At the beginning of the century, one of the most talented researchers of Pushkin’s biography P. Schegorelev dreamed of such a biography of the poet, which will not be the actual history of the external events of his life, but by the history of the movements of his soul, its life ”Annenkov was most preoccupied with the internal biography, the authors of the subsequent life -descriptions of the poet, about the need for such biography, were mostly formed in methodological articles D.

Good60 The urgency of this task is as obvious as the only way, prompted by Pushkin, is also obvious - “Assigning his opinions” and “analysis of his poems”. This is the only way to enter the “sphere of spiritual experience”, where “the life that the biographer wants to comprehend, we talked about the study of life in the aspect of creativity, are going on, we are now talking about studying creativity in the aspect of personal life - for the biographer between these two approaches there should be no border, as there is no border between life and creativity in the artist’s being.

The most difficult thing is to find the path of reconstruction of inner life and the method of its correct description, compatible with the presentation of documentary facts. The poet’s actions, the recorded features of his behavior, letters and motives of his artistic works synchronous as a rule, as a rule, to a single generating center in the depths of his inner life. By detailed comparison of texts with facts, the researcher can reach the very internal events from which the true life of the artist consists of.

Of course, not to write a biography on poetry, articles and prose, overturning creative creatures in reality and thereby ignoring the act of creativity, but to read artistic works as authentic evidence of the internal life of their creator - such, in our opinion, is an indispensable component of biographical research. The way of describing inner life cannot be predicted - it depends entirely on the talent of the biographer, on its writer's flair.

And this relativity applies not only to inner life. One of their main sources of our knowledge about the hero of the biography are memoirs - but how relative, inaccurate, incomplete, how they contradict each other, how many personal preferences are mixed in them! Nevertheless, we can and must rely on this source by performing a difficult research operation over it to isolate the truth.

So with artistic texts - the biographer can see the inner truth of the personality of their author in them, but this requires a qualified research effort based on a great comparable work. And this is a philological problem, the problem of hermeneutics of the text. It is only necessary to understand which aspects of philological study are important for building a biography.

First of all, this is a genetic aspect, this is an approach to a work in terms of its origin, plan, its origin in the soul and in the mind of the artist. With this approach, not only the text is in the field of view of the philologist, but also the flowing generating connections between the creation and life of the Creator - and here the philologist becomes a biographer, studies literature and life at the same time.Another aspect of a philological study related to the biography is the functional aspect, the study of the life of a work of art after the author released it.

If some moments of existence of artistic creations were experienced, meaningful and somehow reflected in his life and consciousness, then they become the fact of his personal biography. What measure of completeness has stuck such a type of biography, what do we call here a complete scientific biography? This question is far from as simple as it may seem at first glance.

On the one hand, where, if not in such a biography, all available materials and facts of the hero’s life should be concentrated. On the other hand, it is not clear to the specialist that their selection is completely inevitable. The biographer, obliged to own all the material, physically cannot accommodate it entirely in his narrative. It cannot and should not, since not all concerning Pushkin is a biographical fact.

Kyavlovsky, composing his famous “Chronicle of the life and work of A. Pushkin”, note the chronicle, not a biography, included events from the life of numerous relatives and acquaintances of Pushkin and almost all the historical events of Pushkin’s time. In his biography, Lotman gave expressive portraits of many persons from the Pushkin’s environment, and also told, for example, the story of how Nicholas I offended the hunchbacked gymnasium student, a story that “exclusively draws Nikolai I” is not justified by the tasks of the biography and even the annals, since it is not a fact of Pushkin’s personal life, but is a background of his life.

This background is endless, like life itself, the biography is finite because at least that it does not reflect life, but explores it. As L. Gudkov witnessedly, “you can’t make a map of England the size of England itself”, what are the principles and criteria for selecting biographical facts? Vinokur considered the experience of this criterion: “The historical fact of the event, etc.

This criterion can be supplemented: not only experience as a psychological concept, but also the plot of living as a philosophical and religious concept should lead the researcher when selecting and organizing biographical material. This plot is not the “research structure” of L. Gudkov, but the internal logic and teleology of the hero’s life, predetermined by the calling and revealed by the biographer in the process of research.

At the same time, the hero should be presented in the whole biography-neither the “moral principles” nor the “research structure” give the biographer the right to cut off some aspects of his life, to ignore them when creating a biography. Pushkin showed lively interest in all the details of the life of the great and not very great writers. Sending the Vyazemsky copy of Sumarokov’s Donation to Lomonosov, he called this document “jewel” and asked Vyazemsky to “concoct from this article” - to publish his letter to the second half of March of the year.

What caused his personal interest and belief in the general interest of the "denunciation"? In the article “Voltaire” he wrote: “Every line of the great writer becomes precious to offspring.