RUSSIAN DISSIDENT POETRY
XIX - XX CENTURIES

Adam Michnik:: There is no revolt against the authorities in your work. You have never been a dissident.

Joseph Brodsky: You're wrong, Adam. This, of course, means that I never fell so low as to shout "Down with Soviet power."

From an interview, 1995

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Separate anthologies have been collected from the once forbidden poems of the experiments of the last century. It is, so to speak. official protest poetry. The only thing that could compete with them in the monotony of voices and intonations is only collections of really official poetry, if they exist. I would not like to explain this internal similarity by the same quality of both talents, because this is more the area of ​​a private view than a criterion. It seems to me that both the poems forbidden by the authorities and the poems welcomed by it are indistinguishable in their environment, primarily because their authors are good professionals and only lastly because they are bad poets. Here, for example, is evidence of the completely professional work of two Decembrists, a "propaganda song":

How was the blacksmith
Yes, from the forge.
Glory!
Nes blacksmith
Three knives.
Glory!
First knife
To the boyars, to the nobles
Glory!
Second knife
On the priests, on the saints.
Glory!
And making a prayer
The third knife on the king.
Glory!
1824

It seems that this is not the only kind of stylization by Ryleev and Bestuzhev. In this case, all their other compositions can be recognized as propaganda songs for an enlightened public - and stylizations already under its language: the approaches and metaphors are exactly the same:

I'll be at the fateful time
To dishonor a san citizen
And imitate you, pampered tribe
Reborn Slavs?
No, I'm incapable in the arms of voluptuousness,
In shameful idleness to drag out your youthful age
And languish with a boiling soul
Under the heavy yoke of autocracy, and so on.

The convenience of any professionalism is that a professional does not notice any “failures” in himself, or rather, he simply does not single out “successful” or “unsuccessful” fragments in his activity, thus gradually getting rid of both of them. Such a property would be, at the very least, slovenliness for a poet - but it is extremely important for a revolutionary, since he must transfer all personal energy from observing his own successes to observing the political landscape about which he will write, and to the greatest Russian conditions caution. In other words, good poetry and good revolution are hardly compatible - and by the "conclusion" I hope to say why. We know that this simple law was quickly assimilated. If one of the five hanged in 1826 considered himself a poet, then Lenin's circle already composed exclusively prose.

All this, of course, can be objected to. Most likely, there will be better examples than those I have cited: in Russia, dissent is especially inseparable following poetry (after all, writing poetry is “thinking differently”), but this is not the point. There are always significantly more dissidents than poets, so what is of interest to us is not the poet as a dissident, but, on the contrary, the dissident in a poetic situation. This situation is attractive to the dissident in that it is always preferable to express disagreement in verse. But, understanding this, he rarely understands that he refers to a very absurd art, which has absurd demands and absurd servants - this is the tragedy of the situation. From it, as we have seen, professionalism helps a lot.

The dissident's appeal to poetic form is an indispensable preparation for a researcher, since almost the entire generation that found 1825 at the age of 17-20 periodically experienced divine inspirations, being at the same time a hotbed of potential dissidents. It is amazing that hundreds of unfeigned revelations and moments of tragic despair were expressed in heavy and unexpectedly poor verses. The traditional noble idleness, of course, disposed to boredom, but did it dispose to bad taste and stupidity? (Soviet science claims that yes, but we will see exactly the same vices in active Soviet dissidents.) I rather agree to explain the emerging effect by some properties poetic form, that is, a mechanism that we can observe. The following poem has been preserved in the legacy of the Decembrist Alexander Odoevsky:

Answer to Pushkin's message
Strings of prophetic fiery sounds
We have reached our ears,
Our hands rushed to the swords,
But only fetters found.
But rest easy, bard: with chains,
We are proud of our destiny
And behind the gates of the prison
In our hearts we laugh at kings.
Our mournful labor will not be wasted;
A spark will ignite a flame, -
And our enlightened people
Gather under the holy banner.
We forge swords from chains
Let's light the fire of freedom again:
She will attack the kings, -
And people will sigh with joy.
1827

First of all, we should not forget that we have before us the fruit of artificial inspiration, half-forced poetry. The conditions of hard labor were insulting to the nobleman, but still bearable: all the exiled retained the rule of responding to messages. Thus, both the tone of the poem and its metaphorical tools are largely dictated by Pushkin's text, which allows us to speak of a certain relationship between the original and response messages. But this is not the dependence of the answer on the question, since Pushkin does not ask any questions and his tone is narrative. This dependency is a dependency between two versions of the same message. What is Pushkin's version?

In the depths of Siberian ores
Keep proud patience
your mournful work will not be lost
And doom high aspiration.
Unfortunately faithful sister,
Hope in the dark dungeon
Wake up cheerfulness and fun,
The desired time will come:
Love and friendship up to you
They will reach through the gloomy gates,
Like in your hard labor holes
My free voice is coming.
Heavy chains will fall
The dungeons will collapse - and freedom
You will be gladly received at the entrance,
And the brothers will give you the sword.
1827

To put it bluntly, "liberation will come as a result of your patience and hope, thus proceeding from yourselves." What should Odoevsky oppose to this? He took over from Pushkin both meter and clarified speech, but he is more of a dissident, and a dissident in a narrower sense than Pushkin, and therefore turning to a poem for him is more a matter of professional duty than inspiration. And as a professional, he sees only the task facing him, but he is not free in the text itself - and the four-line form he has chosen begins to dictate to him. First, it is clear that by the last quatrain he must certainly get to the pictures of an ideal society, and start with the actual state of things. The best (for a professional) way to do this is the refrain in the first and fourth stanzas with a change of sign from "minus" to "plus". (Odoevsky's refrain was made with the help of a "sword" and "chains".) Thus, the author has only two stanzas at his disposal for the logical transition from a negative landscape to its opposite, not to mention how the general view of the poem suffers from such a distribution of gravity . And since the final note of the message was set initially (not to a small extent by Pushkin), this very transition is simply mechanically assembled by Odoevsky from the material at hand and adjusted to a two-stanza volume. This, of course, is again a necessary measure, because even with the sincerity of intentions, an author who is not free in his own text cannot provide his thoughts with any worthy path from the first line to the last. By the way, for the same reason of lack of freedom, Odoevsky is forced to use the concept of liberation (central in two epistles) in its objective sense of a legal act, while Pushkin perceived it subjectively - as the result of the patience of several people. And Odoevsky's final version looks like this: "people's freedom will be achieved by our actions or by the actions of our like-minded people, although now we are divided. Here are two approximate transcriptions. Of course, I'm not talking about the difference between the gifts of Pushkin and Odoevsky; I'm talking about the difference between the common dissidence of the 19th century with a look at the subject of Odoevsky and a look unusual for him - Pushkin's, while recognizing that both messages equally belong to dissident poetry.

Russian literary protest - like Russian tyranny - has excellent traditions and a wonderful ability to generate them; this may be the only thing that equalizes their forces. All dissidence 19th century held by the fact that remained faithful to the uprising and the expulsion of the Decembrists. Something that diverged lists in the 70s. She spoke in the intonations of the 25th (because everything was talking about the same thing) - with the addition of perhaps some fatigue. This weariness (or rather, habit) relieved the dissident verse of bad taste. And the energy of funeral lamentation, exhausted already before the death of Nicholas I, was transformed into the energy of self-irony, and a lot of voices were already heard from abroad. Even with the latest reforms, Ogarev, for example, was in the order of things and diverged well:

"What is sweet to your mind?"
You ask me. - "Russia?
We, unfortunately,
Have not coped with the times of Batu. "-
I will also say in this darkness,
As he said in the darkness of the past.
"Yes! But then the king-father lived,
And this one is kind and well done...
Do you believe that the young king
Is there a liberator, so to speak?
The man who was a slave was of old,
Bonded became the payer
And beggar, as he was during the bar,
And the king, the savior of the fatherland,
Sniffing the peasant's blood,
He himself leaned on the nobles again, and so on.
1867

Epigrams (like verses that are easiest to unsubscribe from) became a popular method among practicing dissidents, but for the most part they were already flat:

Our king, young musician,
Trumpets on the trombone
His royal talent
He doesn't like the "D" note.
A little the minister will present
new reform,
"Re" he instantly crosses out
And leave the "form" -

because they testified rather to the inner weakness of underground poetry than to a real desire to laugh. In general, poetic dissent by the end of the 19th century takes the form of painful satire, which allows it to be distributed among the corresponding journals. From national troubles, poetry turned to its own (there are so many "auto-epitaphs" among epigrams!), and the main misfortune was that it had practically nothing to say about thanks to the grandiose phenomena of prose. The successes of prose art against the backdrop of the quiet disaster of poetry can be abstractly explained. By late XIX century Russia has accumulated at least two huge historical "decouplings" - the epic of Napoleon and the liberation of the peasants. Since domestic thought, which is always under supervision, has developed a psychological habit of explaining any accomplished fact by deep and invisible processes, these events prompted writing, first of all, to search for world patterns and historical rules. The difference between prose and poetry, it seems to me, lies in the difference in metaphysical distances between the author and the described subject: if, for example, Leo Tolstoy observes a certain battle, standing on a distant hill, and thus sees it surrounded by the universe, then Pushkin or Tyutchev are in the thick of things, which allows them to be participants in that very universe, and not only observe, but also physically feel its movement. It is clear that in order to describe history as a process, the maximum objective view, and the position of prose at the same time seemed more convenient - this is how the novel "War and Peace" appeared. But the reality of literary relations is such that what is added to prose is taken away from poetry, and vice versa. And if disagreement in Russia pushed the writer's hand first of all to poetry, then it was precisely to disagree in late XIX century, there was nothing: prose explained too much. This led to the humiliation of the best, and the flower of professional dissident poetry was composed by the worst. Dissent could only be revived by a completely new source of dissent.

II

The twentieth century is closer and more disgusting to us than the rest. New information about the prisoners and the dead will only increase over the years, but the direction of this addition is already known to us: towards the worse. At the news, for example, of a forgotten poet, our first thought is: is he not dead? And only the second: didn't you sit? All this is known even without me. It is also clear that the flourishing of dissidence is a sign of relative well-being in society or, on Russian soil, of relative tolerance of the situation. No matter how sinful it sounds, but if a dissident poem appears, it first of all means that a person has free time, there is a place free from the observation of outsiders, there is, finally. Paper and pen and he does not starve. The thought is also inevitable that writing and distributing dissident poems is a certain luxury, and not everyone and not in every era can afford them (let's not forget that the same Decembrists were nobles and had no special occupations).

The catastrophe occurred in 1917, famine and disorder lasted for another five years, after which regular destruction really began (previously - only glimpsed) - we know that. This destruction was, first of all, the destruction of those who were created by the abundant beginning of the 20th century and " silver Age"poetry - thin, bilingual and powerless people who lived practically in one society (which made their murder easier). And almost all of them wrote poetry - until the day when either they themselves or the people closest to them disappeared: from that day, convulsions before death or senseless walking and letters began - depending on who exactly was taken away. This relates to my topic in such a way that it was then that the concept of dissidence began to regenerate in Russia. In theory, ten times from the time of Stalin should have been preserved more underground poems than, say, from the time of Nicholas I - but this did not happen. It turned out that the value of the classical dissident text (as we know it from Ogarev or Polezhaev) has fallen extremely: the protest as such turned out to be almost shallow. simplest and human, that is, living - it was just a fierce dissent, and Mandelstam's poem

Quite a bite! Let's put the papers on the table!
I am now obsessed with a glorious demon,
As if in the root of the head with shampoo
I was washed by the hairdresser Francois, -

will seem to us no less dissident than any propaganda song by Ryleyev, whether for soldiers or for the capital. It is interesting that these and similar works by Mandelstam - quite trustworthy - nevertheless tried not to be published. Here is one review: “Are these verses Soviet? Yes, of course. But only in “Poems about Stalin” this is felt without a hitch, but in the rest of the verses we can guess about Soviet. If the question was put before me - should these verses be printed, - I would answer - no, it should not. P. Pavlenko. By the way, "Poems about Stalin" is traditionally considered the fall of Mandelstam (the same is true of Akhmatova, Pasternak). But here are Brodsky's curious words about them (interview). Solomon Volkov:...Stalin "personally" perceived his relationship with the poets. They disappointed Stalin in his best expectations. Joseph Brodsky: Yes, I think that Mandelstam, for example, also greatly disappointed him with his ode. His poem about Stalin is brilliant. Perhaps this ode to Joseph Vissarionovich is the most amazing poem that Mandelstam wrote. I think that Stalin realized what was the matter. Stalin suddenly realized that it was not Mandelstam, his namesake, but he, Stalin, Mandelstam's namesake. Volkov: I understood who is whose contemporary. Brodsky: Yes, I think that's exactly what suddenly came to Stalin. And it caused the death of Mandelstam. Iosif Vissarionovich, apparently, felt that someone had come too close to him. ", 1983. Brodsky had some experience of communicating with the authorities and would not dissemble in this direction - like Mandelstam. I (maybe also to surprise) I consider the poem ("Ode") the pinnacle of Russian dissidence of the 20th century - the pinnacle of its strangeness and its tragedy:

When I took coal for the highest praise -
For the joy of the immutable drawing, -
I would draw the air into tricky corners
Both cautious and anxious.
So that the present responds in features,
In art bordering on insolence,
I would talk about who moved the world's axis,
One hundred and forty peoples honoring the custom.
I would raise my eyebrows a small corner
And he raised it again and resolved otherwise:
To know that Prometheus inflated his coal, -
Look, Aeschylus, how I cry while drawing! (...)
1937

Let's look at the same review by Pavlenko: “There are good lines in “Poems about Stalin”, a poem imbued with a great feeling that distinguishes it from the rest. On the whole, this poem is worse than its individual stanzas. Stalin: "How soberly he felt it - about the "great feeling" and "the poem as a whole!" The question is what kind of feeling it was and why exactly the poem in general view failed. I am sure that Osip Mandelstam achieved an intonation that was unprecedented and murderous for himself: everyone sees in him (Ode) exactly what he wants to see in her - every word from it can be absolutely equally perceived as both praise and destruction! I will add here that Pavlenko's review was practically a denunciation and was attached to the written request of the First Secretary of the Union of Writers Stavsky for the arrest of Mandelstam - as an argument. Pavlenko simply had a more subtle instinct than anyone.

During interrogation in 1938, Mandelstam was forced to write down another of his poems about Stalin. The dissident poetry of the 19th century tradition also existed, of course, in the 20th. The real unusualness of the poetic dissent of the 1930s is confirmed by the fact that the traditional dissident experiments of, say, Akhmatova and Mandelstam are not best poems they have. But even so, the excess of the implied, the inexpressible, raises them to a terrible height - at least at the time of reading. The era, due to the fact that it destroyed them, added extra meaning to their poems.

Osip Mandelstam:

We live, not feeling the country under us,
Our speeches are not heard for ten steps,
And where is enough for half a conversation,
They will remember the Kremlin mountaineer there.
His thick fingers, like worms, are fat,
And the words, like pood weights, are true,
Cockroaches laughing eyes
And his bootlegs shine.
And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,
He plays with the services of demihumans.
Who whistles, who meows, who whimpers,
He only babachet and pokes.
Like a horseshoe, gives a decree for a decree -
Who in the groin, who in the forehead, who in the eyebrow, who in the eye.
Whatever his punishment is raspberry
And the broad chest of an Ossetian.
1933

Anna Akhmatova:

I've been screaming for seventeen months
I'm calling you home
I threw myself at the feet of the executioner,
You are my son and my horror.
Everything is messed up,
And I can't make out
Now who is the beast, who is the man,
And how long to wait for the execution.
And only lush flowers,
And the ringing of the censer, and traces
Somewhere to nowhere
And looks straight into my eyes
And threatened with imminent death
Huge star.
1939

Stalin made clear what I only suspected when speaking about the 19th century: every genuine poem is dissent, every poet is a dissident (“All poets are Jews,” the words of Marina Tsvetaeva; the meaning is precisely this). We have learned to evaluate the poem, correlating with the year under its last line, mentally putting an equal sign between the text and what it could bring to its author. In addition, we are used to listening, highlighting the most insignificant - this is the tradition of encryption repeated in us. How to understand, for example, Zabolotsky?

... Sing to me, aunt Mariuli,
The song is light as a dream!
All the animals are asleep
The moon has been taken to the sky.
Ugly, freckled,
Like fat cherubs
Dozing Uncle Volokhaty
in front of your house.
Everything is quiet. Evening with us!
Only on the deaf street
Hear: beats underfoot
My muffled voice.
1930

Reading the poem, we do not know exactly what to see in this and what fate to feel behind it - the age is full of the most vile paradoxes. Mandelstam died, having received a "child term" of five years - while the Decembrists were returning after thirty years of hard labor. But, again, the conditions of Nikolaev penal servitude moved into the free life of the 30s, and only God knows what was beyond it. The protest became so equivalent to the personality, so merged with it, that it almost did not require expression. The dissident poetry of Stalin's time, with the exception of what I have named, is largely mute, unpronounced, or a variant of it - poetry that existed in the camps, composed more of our assumptions than of texts. In other words, there is no complete measure of what we could definitely designate as "the dissident poetry of the twenties and fifties," that is, there is no material for the anthology from which we know the dissent of the 19th century. Another thing is that this imaginary empty space gave the poets, caught in the era of Stalin, a quality that is unique in Russian literature - saints.

After 1953, relative prosperity gradually returned to Russia and, as an indispensable companion, dissidence in its traditional version. At the same time, what I described for the 19th century also returned to dissent: the professionalism of authors, the specialization in disagreement and their consequences, albeit in modified forms. If we imagine this time as a flow, then it certainly was a distance from Stalin: even in the 60s, the landmark remained the same. Those who were born at the turn of the century and left the 50s as old people made up a very protected and tragic society in the capitals, in whose affairs they did not interfere, since it was clear that these were the survivors. I think that nevertheless the days of calm have come, even oblivion of power; in any case, the tension changed its addressee: an atomic strike was expected.

A truly new time for dissent came with the loss of old geniuses. Boris Pasternak died in 1960, and Anna Akhmatova died in 1966. By the time of his death, Pasternak, who lived in Moscow and Peredelkino, managed to single out and introduce Voznesensky into the literary environment, and Akhmatova, who lived in Leningrad and Komarovo, included a friendly quartet in her circle, which she called the "magic choir": Evgeny Rein, Dmitry Bobyshev, Anatoly Naiman and Joseph Brodsky. All this had a deadly symbolic meaning. The Moscow party, geographically closer to power and undoubtedly more professional (three graduated from the Literary Institute) - Voznesensky, Yevtushenko, Rozhdestvensky and Akhmadulina (poetically, however, was somewhat further away) moderately used dissident notes as part of the mechanism of their own popularity and, of course, while being printed. Here's what it looked like, as read from the stage:

What construction sites, satellites in the country!
But we lost on an uneven path
And twenty million in the war
And millions are at war with the people.
Forget about it, cutting off the memory?
But where is the ax that the memory will cut off at once?
No one, like Russians, saved others like that,
No one, like the Russians, destroys himself like that.
(But now)
That there are enough bastards, it does not matter.
There is no Lenin - this is very hard.
1965, Yevtushenko

This was the only thing that did not lend itself to change among the entire community and, having largely ruined the extraordinary talent of Andrei Voznesensky, was preserved in Russian dissent as a phenomenon of shame. From Leningrad, among other things, came the tradition of an appropriate attitude towards Moscow. Here are the stanzas from Brodsky's message to Alexander Kushner, which appeared on the occasion of the latter's birthday.

So let's get started. However, speech
Such a thing, which, Sasha,
If not for this poverty of ours,
We would rather ignore.
We'd rather bring
Montaigne's pen, Vovsi's scalpel,
The scalp of Voznesensky, but not at all
I don't, God forgive me.
1970

Apart from the fact that this was a completely justified disgust of one sect towards another (later, as we know, Brodsky returned his title of American academician upon the news that Yevtushenko had received the same title), it was also one of the faces of poetic dissidence 60 -X. In the poems of the Leningraders it never showed itself in the word - it came from the 30s, from Akhmatova - but these poems continued not to be printed in the same magical way, and even on the contrary: in 1964 Brodsky went into exile in a wagon, to field work. Undoubtedly, this action was a failure of the authorities. Even if new writings had not been regularly sent to Akhmatova's address from the village of Norenskaya, this village would have become an elegant Moscow of Russian dissent. But the verses (in them, by the way, there is not a word about any tyranny) went by mail, a record of the trial was carried under the floor, and the trial itself was mentioned by Solzhenitsyn from the seventh part of The Gulag Archipelago. Subsequently, this expulsion will provide Brodsky with an instant meeting with Isaiah Berlin, a British literary fetish, an acquaintance of Akhmatova, immediately upon arrival in the West, and not least she - Nobel Prize. The power he ignored seemed to be counting on the fact that in another time, no doubt, would have killed him.

"Adam Michnik: This power has never been a problem for you. You didn't care. Joseph Brodsky: Holy truth. But this is precisely this, perhaps, the biggest challenge thrown to the authorities. "This is an excerpt from the same interview as the epigraph. Obviously, this is the position (or posture?) of the dissent elite, that is, an elite that has sufficient strength and prosperous enough to keep relations with the empire within her - or not to start them at all. heavenly people Vysotsky remained in Russia. It seems to me more and more that the victory of the authorities lies in wresting the curse from a private pen: the tenth thing that will follow. Most of the dissident poetry of the late twentieth century was occupied by the defeated, deserving of our mercy and in need of it much more than the giants who live without regard to them. I place here a poem by Inna Lisnyanskaya - weak, of course, but illustrating too numerous and too sad to finish it in the spirit of realism:

I can hardly be in the system
Whatever it is
I can hardly dismember my time
Lost-gained.
Unfortunate memory - and the same torn apart
For truth and fiction
And I remember more than I ever knew
When they threw me away
Ark into that chaos, where Christ and the Lubyanka,
And a tribute to superstition
Where a gypsy is rudely extorting a piece,
And cattle - an empire,
Where the sky is so clear and so crazy
Where am I addicted
From every bird that lives free
As it was intended.
1970

III

The dissident eras of the 19th and 20th centuries are very difficult to compare. It's not even so much that the second opposed what the first dreamed of: this is not the most important thing. Throughout the analysis of any written dissent, we inevitably come across the fact that we are examining, it turns out, not a feeling or even a position, but only some intention or cautious wish (and in the most radical verses!), which practical implementation scary, like death, because after the fulfillment, the wish does not exist. So, having no consistent series of events in itself, dissidence becomes chaotic, and, analyzing, we inevitably slide into the abyss of stylistic features, or into the chronology and history of this or that literary movement. And in the event that we compare the poetic dissent of the 19th and 20th centuries, we are practically comparing two poetry (more or less successful), two styles, two series of surnames: there is no stone left unturned from the political content of texts (explicit or secret), that is, for the sake of which, in theory, there is a written protest. Perhaps these are errors of bad analysis, side effects. But most likely this is a pattern, it is a sign of how poetry deals (in time) with what seems frankly superfluous to it. About the following "topical" madrigal:

Big confusion of Russian affairs
Tolstoy wanted to fix it.
As assistants to his government
He took Zaika, Plehve, Durnovo.
Well? And with him Russia does not get fat,
And he stutters, spits and becomes silly, -

we don't want to know anything except that these are very bad poems. In the first chapter, I got this funny formula: good poetry and good revolution are hardly compatible. Why is it so? Why do we define revolution as the force of destruction, and poetry as the force of creation? Because the poem, in its ideal, is unambiguous, completely unique and thus cannot arouse protest, and revolutions live and support each other by the fact that after one another is inevitable, which will replace the system established by the first, and after it - the third. Ultimately, this is my position: poetry is one person and he is self-sufficient; Revolution is a community of people, and in order to suppress contradictions in itself, it requires private deaths, the deaths of poetry.

In the dissident poet (I am talking, of course, about the specialist who does not think of himself without protest), two passions are combined: one of them gravitates towards poetry, and the second towards revolution. Given that the revolution in this combination - as an aggressive principle - prevails, such a person, it seems to me, simply does not exist for poetry, and poetry in this case is only a victim of aggression, a tool captured from the enemy. For this reason (and not because of my own slovenliness) I have described here, perhaps, something that does not have a direct bearing on the orthodox-dissident verses, or touched upon such orthodoxy too casually. Here is my attempt to justify in myself what might seem like rudeness or inattention to fact.

Kazan liars

Among the poetic works of Ryleev, a special place is occupied by "campaign songs" written jointly with A.A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. They were written based on widely famous songs and romances, which ensured their particular popularity. Let us turn to one of them - the alteration of the romance by Yu.A. Neledinsky-Meletsky "Ah, I'm sick of it."

Keeping the poetic size of the sentimental romance, Ryleev fills his song with new content ("sickening and in his native side").

To the lyrical heroine of Neledinsky-Meletsky and her yearning for a "dear friend" Ryleev opposes all the ugly aspects of Russian reality. The nobility, the nobility, zemstvo courts, parish priests, the financial system, taverns - all that serfs (who are compared with "junk" have to deal with. According to " explanatory dictionary" IN AND. Dahl "junk - good, belongings, belongings"):

Two skins are pulled from us

We sow, they reap.

And the truth is nowhere

Do not look, man, in court,

No cyanosis

Judges are deaf

Without guilt, you are guilty.

But Ryleev makes the peasants see the injustice that descends from the very top:

The king exacted us

Dried up like a cracker:

That roads

That taxes

They ruined us completely.

Creating his poem in the spirit of a folk song, Ryleev deliberately avoids archaic vocabulary, as well as the common folk rudeness of the language. The last five lines are composed of proverbs and sayings:

And high to God

Far from the king

Yes, we ourselves

After all, with a mustache

So shake your mouth.

In this poem there is no call for rebellion (as in the song "How the blacksmith goes from the forge, glory!"). There is also faith in the forces lurking in the people, in a better future that will certainly come.

Read also other articles about the life and work of K.F. Ryleeva.

SUPER SONGS

Kondraty Ryleev and Alexander Bestuzhev

So that her truth does not change,
Her first friends never grow old
Their sabers, daggers do not rust,
Their good horses do not pamper.
Glory to God in heaven, and freedom on this earth!
Yes, and it will be given to the Orthodox. Glory!

How is the man from Novgorod A,
That peasant has a shaved beard;
He is neither a rogue nor a thief; he has an ax behind his back;
And to whom he comes, he will tear off his head.
To whom it will be taken out, it will come true;

Along the Fontanka River quartered regiments
They are taught, they are tormented, no light, no dawn!
That neither light nor dawn, for the amusement of the king.
Don't they have hands to get rid of torment?
Aren't there no bayonets for the golyak princelings?
Yes, the Semenovsky regiment will show them a lot.
And who will come true, will not pass. Glory!

This, Masha, martyr, bake pies:
You will have guests, enemies to the tyrant,
Not with icons, not with bows,
And with iron yes with laws.
What we sang does not escape him,
And in last time will shout: “To be according to this!”

How n A two rainbows in the sky
And at good people two joys:
Truth in court and freedom everywhere, -
Yes, and they will be given to the Russians. Glory!

Already you wind the ropes on the master's heads;
You prepare knives for noble princes;
And hang kings instead of lanterns.
Then it will be warm, and smart, and light. Glory!

As the blacksmith walks from the forge, glory!
What is the blacksmith carrying? Yes, three knives:
Here is the first knife for villainous nobles,
And another knife - on judges on rogues,
And having created a prayer, - the third knife on the king!

Who will come true, will not pass. Glory!

1824 or 1825

"Literary Newspaper". 1950, Dec 26 and "The Decembrists and Their Time: Materials and Messages". M.; L., 1951 (according to the TsGALI list from the architect P. A. Vyazemsky). The song "How the blacksmith goes ..." was published earlier: "Russian Hidden Literature of the 19th Century." Section one. Poems. Part 1. / Foreword. N. P. Ogareva. London, 1861; "Free Russian Songs". Bern, 1863; "Lute: Collected. free Russian songs and poems” / Ed. E. L. Kasprovic. Leipzig, 1869; "Lute: Collected. free Russian songs and poems. 5th ed. E. L. Kasprovic. Leipzig, 1879; "Free Songbook". Issue. 1. Geneva, 1869; Songwriter. Geneva, 1873 - in all ed. stanzas 1-5 and everywhere, except for "Free Russian Songs", where the text is not signed, - signature: Ryleev.

Free Russian poetry of the XVIII-XIX centuries. Enter. article, comp., entry. notes, preparation text and notes. S. A. Reiser. L., Sov. writer, 1988 (Poet's library. Large series)

In 1822-1825, the Decembrists Kondraty Ryleev and Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, probably also with the participation of other people, wrote several propaganda songs, including this cycle of subservient songs (see below). "Oh, where are those islands..." , "You say, say..." , "Oh, I'm sick of..." , "Our Tsar is a Russian German..." , "I took a walk..." , "Subscribe Songs").

In folklore, songs associated with New Year fortune-telling; to find out what awaits a person in the next year, they put rings and other jewelry on the dish, filled them with water, covered the dish with a scarf; to the songs, they were randomly taken out of the dish according to the subject; words referred to the owner of the removed thing.

Notes

The author of the cycle of subservient songs, apparently, is mainly A. A. Bestuzhev, see his testimony on May 10, 1826 (“The Decembrist Revolt”, M., 1925. T. 1. S. 457); it is highly probable, however, that Ryleyev was also involved. On February 6, 1826, S. I. Muravyov-Apostol very carefully and presumably named Ryleev as the author (“The Decembrist Revolt”. M., 1927. Vol. 4. P. 289). N. A. Bestuzhev considered Ryleev and A. A. Bestuzhev to be the authors of the songs (“Memoirs of the Bestuzhevs”. M .; L., 1951. S. 27), and E. P. Obolensky described them on May 9, 1826 as the fruit of a collective creativity - "members and non-members of society<...>each couplet had its own author” (“Rebellion of the Decembrists”. M., 1925. Vol. 1. S. 267). The dating was established by M.A. Briskman in the title. above Sat. Decembrists and their time. Seven songs have come down to us, the text of the eighth - "On the pavement street ..." - remains unknown.

1. Written to the tune of a folk song, which was later quoted by A. A. Bestuzhev in the story “Terrible Fortune-telling” published in 1831 (see: Bazanov V. G. Essays on Decembrist Literature. M., 1953. P. 195):

Thank God in heaven
Sovereign on this earth!
For the truth to be
Brighter than the sun;
Treasury of gold
The age is full!
So that his horses do not ride out,
His colored dresses do not wear out,
His faithful nobles do not grow old!

2. The song refers to military settlements. Written to the motive of a folk song, available in the recording of A. A. Bestuzhev:

The pike came from Novgorod
The tail was carried from Bela Lake;
The pike has a silver head,
The back of the pike is woven with pearls,
And instead of eyes - an expensive diamond.

3 . It was distributed in lists with various completeness and variant, see: "The Decembrist Revolt". M., 1951. T. 9, Art. 1-4 (in the testimony of M. I. Muravyov-Apostol); " literary heritage". 1954. Vol. 59, art. 1, 3, 5, after Art. 5 one more article: “Is there no lead for a scoundrel tyrant” (in the testimony of D. Tyurin, a member of the circle of brothers of Crete); ibid., st. 2-5, after Art. 5 the same variant as in the previous text (in the testimony of another member of the same circle - P. M. Palmina); there is also a summary text based on the TsGALI list from arch. Vyazemsky and other lists in the article by L. A. Mandrykina “Agitational song “Along the Fontanka River” and the participation of A. I. Polezhaev in its distribution.” This song, which existed both as part of the cycle and separately (see: “The Decembrist Revolt”. M., 1925. T. 1. S. 210), written by Bestuzhev, possibly with the participation of Ryleev.

Along the Fontanka River quartered regiments. In the area of ​​the Fontanka River in St. Petersburg there were barracks of the Life Guards of the Izmailovsky and Moscow regiments, and not far from them - the barracks of the Life Guards of the Semenovsky regiment. Golyak princes. Obviously, an allusion to the Grand Dukes Nikolai and Mikhail Pavlovich, at that time the commanders of the 1st and 2nd guards divisions. Yes, the Semenovsky regiment will show them a lot. A hint at the uprising of the Semenovsky regiment, the oldest in Russia, the Life Guards Regiment in 1820. The soldiers of the 1st company, outraged by the unheard of cruelty in the treatment of their commander, Colonel F.E. Schwartz, on October 17 refused to go on guard. The company, and after it the entire regiment that supported it, were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. On November 2, the regiment was disbanded, the instigators were put on trial and severely punished.

4. It is based on a folk song that begins with the words: "Oh, you, mother, martyr, bake pies ...". With iron, that is, with shackles. "So be it!" - the formula of the royal affirmative resolution.

5. It is based on folk songs that begin with the words: “There are two rainbows in the sky, A rich groom has two joys ...” or (as recorded by A. A. Bestuzhev) “Two rainbows bloomed in the sky, The red maiden has two joys. ..".

7. In this song (it existed as part of the cycle and separately), Ryleev's co-authorship is possible: see E. I. Yakushkin's instruction (“XIX century”. M., 1872. Book 1. P. 354). I. I. Pushchin, during interrogation on May 6, 1826, testified that he remembers only two stanzas of the song and that “subsequently in question about knives for the authorities. Who wrote it, I don’t know” (“Rebellion of the Decembrists”. M., 1926. Vol. 2. S. 226). The basis of the poem is the folk song "A blacksmith comes from the forge ...". In N. A. Kotlyarevsky’s book “Ryleev” (St. Petersburg, 1908, p. 226), it is suggested that Adam Mickiewicz’s story about the “cruel” songs that terrified the exiled Poles who listened to them at meetings of Russian conspirators refers to this song ( Mickiewicz, A. Les slaves, Paris, 1849, v. 3, p. 289).

In the folk song about the blacksmith (see. "And we sing this song to bread ...") the blacksmith carries three hammers - to forge wedding accessories (crown, ring and pin).

VARIANTS (other editions of songs)

Along the Fontanka River...

Along the Fontanka River
Shelves quarters
Glory!
Shelves quarters
All guards.
Glory!
They are taught<их>and torment
Neither light nor dawn.
Glory!
What neither light nor dawn,
For the amusement of the king.
Glory!
Don't they have hands?
To get rid of pain?
Glory!
Don't they have bayonets
On brat princes?
Glory!
Don't they have lead?
On a scoundrel tyrant?
Glory!
Yes Semyonovsky regiment
Show them a sense!
Glory!
To whom it will come out, it will come true,
And who will come true, will not pass.
Glory!

Near the Fontanka River...

Near the Fontanka River
The shelves were assembled
Glory!
What neither light nor dawn
For the amusement of the king.
Glory!
Don't you have bayonets
On princes of fools?
Glory!
Don't you have lead
On a scoundrel tyrant?
Glory!

"Poetry of the Decembrists", L., 1950

How is the blacksmith going...

How goes the blacksmith
Yes, from the forge.
Glory!

What is the blacksmith carrying?
Yes, three knives.
Glory!

Here is the first knife -
On villainous nobles.
Glory!

And another knife
On the priests, on the saints.
Glory!

And making a prayer -
The third knife on the king.
Glory!

Who will take out
That will come true.
Glory!

Who will come true
Doesn't pass.
Glory!

Free Russian poetry of the XVIII-XIX centuries. Preparation of the text, composition, entry. article and note. S. A. Reiser. M., artist. lit., 1975

How did the blacksmith go...

How was the blacksmith
Yes, from the forge -
Glory!
Nes blacksmith
Three knives -
Glory!
First knife
To the boyars, to the nobles -
Glory!
Second knife
On the priests, on the saints -
Glory!
And making a prayer
The third knife on the king -
Glory!

"Russian Hidden Literature of the 19th Century", London, 1861

Russian songs. Comp. prof. Iv. N. Rozanov. M., Goslitizdat, 1952