The explosion of the war could not but be reflected in Russian literature and, above all, in poetry. Perhaps the most famous lines related to the outbreak of the First World War belong to Anna Akhmatova: “And along the legendary embankment. It was not a calendar one that was approaching, the Present twentieth century … . There is a feeling of anxiety, and a retrospective look from a historical distance, from another era, after another war.
War is a huge event in the history of any nation, and it is not surprising that artistic comprehension of heroic deeds of battle has become the foundation of world culture. After all, it all begins with an epic … Suffice it to recall Homer or "The Song of Roland"; if we turn to the East, we will find similar examples there.
Military heroism pulsates in the history of Russian literature with bright flashes. First - "The Lay of Igor's Regiment" and "Zadonshchina", epics, and from the time of Peter the Great - odes, poems. How sincerely, in a full voice, Derzhavin and Petrov glorified the victories of Catherine's times! An entire anthology was composed of poems dedicated to the Napoleonic wars and, above all, the campaign of 1812. Among the authors of that time were both participants in the battles and their younger contemporaries - the Pushkin generation.
Several magnificent examples of heroism were left behind by the Crimean War. Tyutchev, an adamant and thoughtful patriot, became the singer of that tragedy.
But here the glorification of the heroes of Sevastopol was combined with gloomy reflections: for the first time, the empire of Peter the Great suffered a painful defeat. But since the 1860s, the spirit of heroism in Russian poetry has weakened. Why? Between the official ideology and the hobbies of an educated society, there was a crack that turned into an abyss. Representatives of the new trends in literature were not the successors of Derzhavin, Pushkin, or Tyutchev's line in terms of their attitude to the victories of the empire. Of course, there were plenty of skeptics in the old days. Suffice it to recall PA Vyazemsky, who in his youth constantly challenged Pushkin for "chauvinism." But the same Vyazemsky in 1812 rushed to defend the Fatherland! He simply disliked the patriotic phrase and loved to be an opponent of autocracy in his youth. It is curious that since the 1850s, the aged Prince Vyazemsky looked with horror at the nihilism of the new era, and he himself switched to conservative positions, turned into the guardian of the empire. In any case, the anti-imperial positions of the young Vyazemsky in the Nikolaev times were perceived as exotic. The voices of patriots sounded loudly - not careerists, but honest sons of the Fatherland …
And the poets of the "Silver Age" by their nature were far from the traditions of statist citizenship. In their worlds, filled with "three main elements of new art: mystical content, symbols and the expansion of artistic impressionability" (DS Merezhkovsky) there was no place for "low" truths of patriotism.
Influenced the general attitude and eccentric conflict with traditional Orthodoxy. The Franco-like image of the "damned poets" also obliged me to a lot. Vladimir Solovyov, a recognized ideologist, almost a prophet of modern times, wrote: "For a pure lyricist, the whole history of mankind is just an accident, a number of anecdotes, and he considers patriotic and civic tasks as alien to poetry as the vanity of everyday life." How far from Lomonosov's or Derzhavin's credo!
For poets of the populist trend and writers who were part of the circle of A. M. Gorky, the wars of the Russian Empire were also not presented in the form of a heroic epic. Their credo is sympathy for the peasantry and the proletariat, that is, for the people who endured the hardships of wartime. Many of them sympathized with the revolutionary parties and did not want to identify themselves with the country that they considered the "gendarme of Europe."
For Gorky, the First World War was a deep disappointment: he believed so much in progress, in the victorious tread of the Enlightenment, but it turned out that governments and armies were ready for bloodshed - just like in barbaric ages. Yes, and on an unprecedented scale!
“The catastrophe, never before experienced by the world, shocks and destroys the life of precisely those tribes of Europe, whose spiritual energy most fruitfully strove and strives to free the individual from the dark legacy of the outlived, oppressing the mind and will of the fantasies of the ancient East - from mystic superstitions, pessimism and anarchism which inevitably arises on the basis of a hopeless attitude towards life,”Gorky wrote with horror. The war for the interests of the bourgeoisie and aristocratic ambition - this was the only way Gorky perceived the First World War. And we shouldn't dismiss this opinion: there is a fair amount of truth here. An inconvenient truth.
Merezhkovsky and Gorky are two poles of the literature of that time. And both did not promise the appearance of examples of traditional heroics. But the first days of the war dramatically changed the consciousness of even the most sophisticated and far from the "royal service" of the capital's bohemia. Several masters of thoughts turned out to be war correspondents at once - and they rushed into this storm at the call of their souls. Valery Bryusov, a poet who has studied history, who has long prophesied "the coming Huns", became a correspondent for Russkiye Vedomosti. In the poems of the first year of the war, Bryusov sometimes speaks in the language of symbols, then (very timidly!) Turns to the trench reality. As a Symbolist, he greeted the war with loud incantations:
Under the stomp of armies, thunder of guns, The buzzing flight underneath the Newports, All that we talk about, like a miracle, Dreamed, maybe gets up.
So! for too long we stagnated
And Belshazzar's feast continued!
Let, let from the fiery font
The world will be transformed!
Let the bloody fall
The shaky structure of centuries, In the wrong illumination of glory
The world to come be new!
Let the old vaults collapse
Let the pillars fall with a roar, -
The beginning of peace and freedom
Let there be a terrible year of struggle!
Fedor Sologub unexpectedly became an active commentator on military events. In verse, he pompously called for punishing Germany, protecting the Slavic peoples and returning Constantinople to the Orthodox …
He accused the Germans of treachery, of unleashing war ("On a beginner, God! His fist is in iron armor, But he will break over the abyss On our unshakable palace"). In journalism, Sologub turned into a sage, no stranger to doubts. I tried to comprehend the mysterious modern war - a war not only of armies, but also of technologies, industries, secret strategies.
“It is not the armies that fight, - the armed peoples have met, and mutually test each other. While testing the enemy, they simultaneously test themselves by comparison. Experiencing people and order, the structure of life and the makeup of their own and others' characters and mores. The question of who they are raises the question of who we are,”- this is said about the First World War.
Half a century before 1914, what a natural feeling patriotism seemed to be … In the twentieth century, everything became incredibly complicated: “But our patriotism is not easy for us. Love for the fatherland in Russia is something difficult, almost heroic. She has to overcome too much in our life, which is still so absurd and terrible."
It is significant that Sologub's article on patriotism is called “With cockroaches”: “But cockroaches feel good, at ease. Any evil spirits and abominations are at ease with us, in the vast expanses of our dear homeland. Is it really going to be so? Well, we will defeat Germany, crushing her with the superiority of forces - well, and then what? Germany will remain, albeit defeated, still a country of honest people, hard work, accurate knowledge and an orderly life, and we'll all be with cockroaches? It would be better to remove all the cockroaches ahead of time, they would not have done us trouble. A very difficult and responsible time will begin after the war. It is harmful for us to fondle ourselves with the hope that this is the last war and that, therefore, then it will be possible to bloom and feed the cockroaches dear to our hearts with crumbs from our abundant table."
The reasoning, of course, is far from jingoistic and not straightforward: it is also relevant in the turmoil of our time. And such articles by Sologub were published in “Exchange Vedomosti” almost weekly.
At the beginning of the war, Sologub hoped for a quick and convincing victory. He foresaw the Russian army in Berlin. Not only poetry and articles, he (in other situations - a bilious skeptic) tried to help the Russian army. With a patriotic lecture "Russia in dreams and expectations" Sologub traveled all over the empire and also visited the front-line areas.
Nikolai Gumilyov, a cavalry officer, was a real front-line soldier in the First World War. His most famous battle poem was written in the first weeks of his stay in the army. It is called "Offensive".
The country that could be paradise
Became a lair of fire
We are coming on the fourth day, We haven't eaten for four days.
But you don't need earthly food
In this terrible and bright hour, Because the Lord's word
Nourishes us better than bread.
And bloody weeks
Dazzling and light
Shrapnel torn above me
Birds take off the blades faster.
I scream and my voice is wild
This copper strikes copper
I, the bearer of great thoughts, I can’t, I can’t die.
Oh, how white are the wings of victory!
How mad are her eyes!
Oh, how wise are her conversations, Cleansing Thunderstorm!
Like thunder hammers
Or waters of angry seas
Golden heart of Russia
Beats rhythmically in my chest.
And it's so sweet to dress up Victory, Like a girl in pearls
Walking on a smoky trail
The retreating enemy.
Perhaps this poem contains more dreams of victory than personal experience that came a little later. And it turned out to be bitter. It is curious that even during these years Gumilyov the poet was interested not only in war. And the nerve of the battles was preserved mainly in the poet's prose, in the "Notes of a cavalryman".
In a word, during the first year and a half of the war, patriotic sentiments prevailed - almost in the classical spirit: “Orthodoxy! Autocracy! Nationality!"
Alas, by and large it turned out to be a short-term impulse - until the first disappointments. Very soon, under the influence of aesthetic criticism and panicky news from the front, the public noticeably moderated the "hurray-patriotic" moods, and poets (the most striking example here can be considered Sergei Gorodetsky) began to ridicule for "chauvinistic" motives - almost like Yanov-Vityaz, who composed brisk propaganda verses:
The German pigs are trapped
Stumbled painfully on a Russian fist, Howled from pain and anger, They buried their muzzles in the manure …
Here we see satirical developments that will come in handy a quarter of a century later, during a new war. Yanov-Vityaz perceived the events in the spirit of the Union of the Russian People - and his poems in the first year of the war sounded both at the front and in the rear. But already in 1916, their popularity fell sharply.
Now they wrote about the war only in a tragic, satirical or pacifistic vein. Dreams of Constantinople were again perceived as an anachronism. Of course, there were exceptions, but they did not receive national (and generally wide readership) fame.
An example with the poetry of the Rybinsk teacher Alexander Bode is noteworthy:
Get up, the country is huge
Get up to fight to the death
With a dark German power, With the Teutonic Horde.
Apparently, he wrote these lines in 1916. But they turned out to be unclaimed - to be resurrected in the summer of 1941, when they were edited by Lebedev-Kumach. And in the First World War, Russia did not find the "Holy War".
Young Mayakovsky could not stay away from the war. Both in poetry and in journalism of that time, he argues as a contradictory maximalist. At first, like this:
“I don’t know if the Germans started a war for robbery or murder? Perhaps it is only this thought that guides them consciously. But every violence in history is a step towards perfection, a step towards an ideal state. Woe to him who, after the war, will not be able to do anything but cut human flesh. So that there are no such people at all, today I want to call for ordinary "civilian" heroism. As a Russian, every effort of a soldier to tear out a piece of enemy land is sacred to me, but as a man of art, I must think that maybe the whole war was invented only for someone to write one good poem."
For all the harshness of the style, the position is almost traditional: a war has begun, which means battle hymns are needed, which means that literary heroics are needed. Just like in 1812!
Soon, Mayakovsky chided his senior colleagues for sluggish poetry about the war: “All the poets writing about the war now think that it is enough to be in Lvov to become modern. It is enough to introduce the words "machine gun", "cannon" into the memorized dimensions, and you will go down in history as the bard of today!
Revised all the poems published recently. Here:
Again, our native people
We became brothers, and now
That our common freedom
Like a phoenix, it rules its flight.
Dawn looked at me for a long time, Her bloody ray did not go out;
Our Petersburg became Petrograd
In that unforgettable hour.
Boil, terrible element, In war, let all the poison boil away, -
When Russia speaks, Then the thunders of the sky speak.
Do you think this is one poem? No. Four lines by Bryusov, Balmont, Gorodetsky. You can select the same lines, the same as the steering wheel, from twenty poets. Where is the creator behind the stencil? " This is how Mayakovsky laughed at the "obsolete forms", which, according to his time, are inappropriate when it comes to the events of the twentieth century. The war of machines, the war of millions, it seemed, requires some unprecedented rhythm and language!
Mayakovsky himself wrote about the battles of the First World War from different ideological positions: from the state, patriotic to defeatist. But every time I was looking for words and rhythms that would correspond to the tragic breakdown of the tenth years of the twentieth century. It was impossible to write about a new war either in Derzhavin's language, or in the manner of Pushkin's "Poltava", or in a symbolistic spirit. Mayakovsky's torn lines sounded nervously, belligerently, plaintively:
What do you, Mother?
White, white, like gawking on a coffin.
Leave!
This is about him, about the killed, telegram.
Oh, close, close your eyes to newspapers!"
("Mom and the Evening Killed by the Germans", 1914)
He failed to fight. But even then Mayakovsky wanted "to equate the pen with the bayonet." Soon the war was refracted in his poetry in a sharply satirical key - just such a truth was expected by his young audience.
And the opponents were outraged by the rudeness and radicalism:
To you, living behind an orgy, an orgy, having a bathroom and a warm closet!
Shame on those presented to George
read from the columns of newspapers ?!
Here is the main contradiction of the war. After all, there were gentlemen who were comfortable even in the days of the defeat of the Russian army, and many were enriched in the war.
When this became obvious, the position of official patriotism was shaken even in the midst of the people, even in the soldiery. This is a lesson for the authorities and elites for all time.
Even before the war, Alexander Blok turned to patriotic heroism (“On the Kulikovo Field”). He was not interested in writing directly about machine guns and trenches. Unlike Mayakovsky, he wrote about the war in a melodic tone:
Centuries go by, the war is rustling, There is a mutiny, villages are burning, And you are still the same, my country, In tear-stained and ancient beauty.
How long does the mother grieve?
How long does the kite circle?
In 1915, the Bloc's collection "Poems about Russia" was published - lyric-epic stanzas of different years. "The best of everything that has been created in this field since Tyutchev's time," said the critic Nikolsky about this book, picking up the opinion of many readers. And Blok will turn to a direct presentation of events after the fall of 1917, when the street will enter his poems, and the formulas will acquire aphoristic coinage. The First World War prepared him for such a turn.
The history of poetry is not a history textbook. And yet, without poetic anthologies and anthologies, we will not get an idea of the era.
It is enough to turn over the poems of 1914-1917 in chronological order to notice how the mood changed in society, in the army; not only in Russia, but also in Europe.
Fighting for so many years turned out to be unbearable - either for the Russians or for the Germans. And the offensive moods of the first year of the war were replaced by confusion or caustic satire, penitential or anti-war sentiments, requiem motives or revolutionary hymns. Each position has its own truth.
Did the poets manage to help the army and the rear, to help the empire during the days of military overstrain? There can be no single answer. A vague, agitated and heroic time is reflected in the mirror of literature.
