1. Nature in the poet’s lyrics.
2. Image of the nature of the native land.
3. List of references.

1. Nature in the poet’s lyrics.

It has long been noted that not a single Yesenin poem can do without pictures of nature. At first these were landscape sketches in which nature obscured and displaced man, and later landscape beginnings and natural images in the poet’s lyrical confession. Yesenin’s nature never ceases to be a kingdom of wonderful transformations and increasingly absorbs the “flood of feelings”: “In the garden there is a fire of red mountain ash burning, But it cannot warm anyone”; “And golden autumn. In the birch trees, decreasing the sap, For everyone he loved and abandoned, Cries into the sand with leaves.”
Yesenin's natural world includes the sky with the moon, sun and stars, dawns and sunsets, winds and snowstorms, dew and fog; it is inhabited by many “inhabitants” - from burdock and nettle to poplar and oak, from mouse and frog to cow and bear, from sparrow to eagle.
Yesenin’s “heavenly” landscapes do not seem monotonous, although they are repeated many times, say, the moon and the month are mentioned and described more than 160 times, the sky and dawn - 90 times, the stars - almost 80. But the poet’s imagination is inexhaustible, and the month sometimes appears as a “red goose” , then “as a sad horseman,” then with his grandfather’s hat, then he “harnessed our sleigh like a foal,” then “the cloud is butted with a horn, bathed in blue dust,” then, “like a yellow raven, circling and hovering above the ground.”
Yesenin’s universe is a cosmic village, a giant peasant farm, where “the calving sky licks the red heifer,” and the blue twilight is like a flock of sheep, where the sun is “a golden bucket lowered into the world” and a two-horned sickle slides across the sky like a yoke, where the blizzard clicks with a whip, and “the rain cleans the willow droppings across the meadows with wet brooms.” And Yesenin’s “earthly” landscapes are mainly Central Russian nature in all its discreet, modest beauty: “gulls... stumps... slopes have saddened the Russian expanse.” Only in “Persian Motifs” and Caucasian poems is the nature southern, exotic (“a host of cypress trees”, “roses burn like lamps”, “the smell of the sea has a smoky-bitter taste”) and in “Poem about 36” the Siberian taiga rustles, “ the gray-haired Barguzin is scalding and “there are six thousand and one snowdrifts to the Yenisei places.”
The diversity of the plant world in Yesenin’s landscapes is striking: more than 20 tree species (birch, poplar, maple, spruce, linden, willow, bird cherry, willow, rowan, aspen, pine, oak, apple, cherry, willow, etc.), about 20 species flowers (rose, cornflower, mignonette, bell, poppy, gillyflower, lily of the valley, chamomile, carnation, jasmine, lily, snowdrop, etc.), different types of herbs and cereals. The poet does not like to talk about plants at all, faceless and abstract - for him, every tree and flower has its own appearance, its own character. “Like a blizzard, the bird cherry is waving its sleeve,” the birch trees drooping to the ground have sticky catkins, “the rose’s petals are splashed,” “wormwood is wafting with a sticky smell,” the maple squatted down to warm itself in front of the fire of dawn, “the rowan berries, having smashed their heads against the fence, are drenched in blood.” .
And yet the main feature of Yesenin’s nature is not diversity and diversity, not humanization and at the same time picturesqueness, but a rustic, peasant appearance. The plow of the sun cuts the blue water of the river, “the sky is like an udder, the stars are like teats,” the clouds neigh like a hundred mares, “under the plow of a storm the earth roars,” “on a branch of a cloud, like a plum, a ripe star is golden,” poplars are like heifers, buried their bare feet under the gate. Over the years, the peasant-everyday coloring of the landscapes will gradually fade, but the rustic coloring will remain forever.
Unlike other Russian poets - Pushkin and Nekrasov, Blok and Mayakovsky - Yesenin does not have city landscapes, except perhaps a mention of the “elm city” and “Moscow curved streets.”
An equally important feature of Yesenin’s “universe” is the universal circulation, universal fluidity and mutual transformations: one turns into another, another is reflected in the third, the third resembles the fourth... “The sun, like a cat, from the heavenly willow touches my hair with its golden paw” - the cosmos is likened to animals and plants and joins man. In turn, people are “fishers of the universe, scooping up the sky with a net of dawn,” and the poet compares himself to a tree, a flower, an animal, a month:
Golden leaves swirled
In the pinkish water of the pond.
Like a light flock of butterflies
Freezingly, he flies towards the star.
Breathe, midnight, moon jug
Scoop up the birch milk!
Give me (road) the dawn for firewood,
A willow branch for a bridle.

Understanding his concept of the world, Yesenin, in the article “The Keys of Mary,” refers to the mythological views of different peoples and recalls the ancient Russian singer Boyan, who imagined the world as “an eternal, unshakable tree, on whose branches the fruits of thoughts and images grow.”
So, on an ancient mythological basis, Sergei Yesenin creates his own poetic myth about space and nature, in which “peace and eternity” are close as a “parental hearth”, the hills are filled with “animal ineffability”, and the poet sees himself as an exponent and defender of this ineffability. For him there was nothing low and ugly in nature. The croaking of frogs seemed like music to him - “to the music of frogs, I raised myself as a poet.” The rats deserved to be sung - "to sing and glorify the rats." And I wanted to “marry a white rose with a black toad... on earth.” In such declarations, notes of defiance and shockingness were sometimes heard, especially during the period (“Moscow Tavern,” when Yesenin was in a state of ideological and spiritual crisis, experienced “desperate hooliganism,” “honored rudeness and screaming in the rake.”
Yesenin’s animal world is also part of nature, living, animate, intelligent. His animals are not fabled allegories, not personifications of human vices and virtues. These are “our little brothers” who have their own thoughts and worries, their own sorrows and joys. Horses are frightened by their own shadow and thoughtfully listen to the shepherd's horn, a cow is fiddling with “straw sadness,” “an abandoned dog is quietly howling,” an old cat sits at the window and catches the moon with its paw, “owls are hiding with fearful cries,” “magpies” are calling for rain.
Among the Yesenin living creatures, the most numerous are birds - over 30 names (cranes and swans, crows and nightingales, rooks, owls, lapwing, sandpiper, etc.), and the most common domestic animals are horses, cows, dogs. The cow, the breadwinner of a peasant family, grows in Yesenin to become a symbol of Russia and the “village cosmos”: “heifer-Rus”, “moo the cow, roar the heifer of thunder”, “there are no more beautiful than your cow eyes”, “your east will calve”, “over clouds, like a cow, the dawn raised its tail,” “the invisible cow god swelled.” The horse is a worker in a peasant farm and is associated with images of unstoppable movement, passing youth: “our skinny and red mare was pulling out root crops with a plow,” “the world is rushing to a new shore with a whirlwind cavalry,” “as if I rode on a pink horse in the echoing early spring.”
Yesenin’s birds and animals behave naturally and authentically, the poet knows their voices, habits, habits: corncrakes whistle, an owl hoots, a tit shades, hens cluck, “the wedding of crows has covered the palisade,” “an old cat sneaks to the makhotka for fresh milk,” “ the little horse wags its skinny tail, looking into the unkind pond,” the fox anxiously raises its head, hearing the “ringing sound,” the dog barely trudges, “licking the sweat from its sides,” the cow sees cow dreams - “she dreams of a white grove and grassy meadows.” And at the same time, these are not soulless creatures. Yes, they are dumb, but they are not sensitive and in the strength of their feelings they are not inferior to humans. Moreover, Yesenin accuses people of heartlessness and cruelty towards the “beast”, which he himself “never hit on the head.” Noteworthy is the collective form (not animals, but beasts), and the comparison with “lesser brothers,” and the singular number of the word “head” is spoken of as a single living being, born, like man, by Mother Nature.
Yesenin treats animals not just tenderly, but respectfully and does not address them all at once, but each one individually - each cow, horse, dog. And we are not talking about patronage, but about mutual treatment, important and necessary for both “interlocutors”: “In the alleys, every dog ​​knows my easy gait” - and “I am ready to give my best tie to every dog ​​here on the neck”; “Every shabby horse nods its head towards me” - and “I wear a top hat not for women. It’s more comfortable in it, reducing your sadness. Give gold oats to the mare” (“I won’t deceive myself”); each cow can read the grass lines mowed by the poet, “giving payment with warm milk” (“I walk through the valley...”). This friendly reciprocity and affection dates back to distant childhood: “From childhood, I understood that males and steppe mares were liked.” And in my mature years - “I am a good friend for animals. Every verse of mine heals the soul of the beast.” And in turn, the poet feels gratitude to his friends and is convinced that “his native Russian mare brought him to glory.” Even the traditional Pegasus ceases to be a poetic convention and turns into a living horse: “Old, kind, worn-out Pegasus, do I need your soft trot?”

2. Image of the nature of the native land.

The depiction of the nature of his native land occupies a significant place in the poet’s poetic heritage. “Sergei was sociable and affectionate,” continues A. Yesenina. - Coming to the village, he gathered his neighbors, talked with them for a long time, and joked. He loved to chat with the poor, and with the crippled, and with any other passers-by. He said more than once that meetings give him a lot as a poet: in conversations he draws new words, new images, and learns genuine folk speech.”
The poet divided his village time between walks, conversations with fellow villagers, fishing and work on poetry. In one of his letters in 1924, he reported: “The weather in the village is not good. It’s impossible to fish because of the wind, so I’m sitting in the hut and finishing the poem. Our nights are wonderful, moonlit and, oddly enough, with autumn approaching, dewless.” In fine weather, the poet spent whole days in the meadows or on the Oka, as happened, for example, in July 1925: he disappeared from home with the fishermen for two days and, returning, wrote:
Bless every work, good luck!
To the fisherman - so that there is a net with fish,
Plowman - so that his plow and nag
They got enough bread to last for years.
They drink water from mugs and glasses,
You can also drink from water lilies -
Where there is a pool of pink mists
The shore will not tire of gilding.
It's good to lie in the green grass
And, plunging into the ghostly surface,
Someone's gaze, jealous and in love,
On myself, tired, to remember.
The poems “Returning to the Homeland”, “The Golden Grove Dissuaded...”, “Low House with Blue Shutters...”, “Son of a Bitch”, “Apparently, it’s been this way forever...” were also written in the village. Many other poems of these years were inspired by village impressions: “Soviet Rus'”, “This sadness cannot be scattered now...”, “I will not return to my father’s house...”, “I see a dream. The road is black...", "The feather grass is sleeping. The plain is dear...", "I am walking through the valley. On the back of the head is a cap...", "Rash, talyanka, ringing, rash, talyanka, boldly...", poetic messages to mother, grandfather, sister.
All these works are permeated with a deep love for the fatherland, carried through all adversities:
The feather grass is sleeping.
Plain dear
And the leaden freshness of wormwood.
No other homeland
It will not pour my warmth into my chest.
Know that we all have such a fate,
And, perhaps, ask everyone -
Rejoicing, raging and suffering,
Life is good in Rus'.
The light of the moon, mysterious and long,
The willows are crying, the poplars are whispering.
But no one listens to the crane's cry
He will not stop loving his father's fields.

In these fields, not everything remains the same: there is what was there from eternity, and what new life brought with it. The poet does not want to see a plow and a shack in the village; he listens with hope to the sounds of engines driving out into the arable field. This clash of the old with the new will later be reflected in Yesenin’s poems, but his attachment to his native land, his love for peasant labor will always remain unchanged.
The author's experiences in these poems are distinguished by amazing tenderness and purity. They express much of what could be considered intimate, personal, homely: filial feeling for the mother, brotherly affection for the sister, the joy of friendship, the melancholy of separation, regret for youth gone early. “He returned to the village and home,” recalls the poet’s friend, artist V. Chernyavsky, “in almost all our conversations until the last year of his life. He spoke about this with a sudden surge of tenderness and dreaminess, as if brushing aside everything that was swirling and tangling around him in the haze of a restless sleep... This was the most basic corner of his personal inner world, the most real point that defines his consciousness.”
Yesenin’s strength lies in the fact that he was able to express the most intimate corner of his inner world in ordinary, discreet words, but permeated with true trepidation of the soul and therefore completely captivating the reader’s heart. Let us remember his “Letter to his Mother,” affectionate and peaceful, full of bitter consciousness of guilt before his mother and hope for the generosity of a mother’s heart:
I'll be back when the branches spread out
Our white garden looks like spring.
Only you have me already at dawn
Don't be like eight years ago.
Don't wake up what was dreamed of
Don't worry about what didn't come true -
Too early loss and fatigue
I have had the opportunity to experience this in my life.
And don’t teach me to pray. No need!
There is no going back to the old ways anymore.
You alone are my help and joy,
You alone are an unspeakable light to me.
Yesenin's natural lyrics are autobiographical in the broadest sense of the word. There are traits of autobiography in the work of any artist; They are strongest in lyrical poetry. But only a few poets have so exposed the connections between the content of the lyrics, its poetic structure and the struggles of the soul through which the poet went through in his life.
“In my poems,” Yesenin warned, “the reader should mainly pay attention to the lyrical feeling and that imagery that showed the way to many, many young poets and fiction writers.” “This figurative structure,” Yesenin continued, “lives in me organically, just like my passions and feelings.”
These feelings and perceptions affect various aspects of the lives of contemporaries. Lyrics are subjective in nature, but universally significant in essence. She is effective, mobile, active. Finding an echo in the reader’s heart, it inspires something in him, calls him somewhere. And Yesenin’s lyrics are not only a poetic monument of the time, but also a living force influencing the consciousness and feelings of people.
First of all, this is the lyricism of nature, enchanting us with its colors, exciting us with its music. From her youthful past, a bright and gentle birch girl returned to Yesenin’s poetry. This image is primarily associated with the poet’s return to his homeland, his meeting with his father’s land:
Tired of hanging around
On other people's borders,
I'm back
To the birthplace.
Green-haired,
In a white skirt
There is a birch tree over the pond.
("My way")

Then this image appears every time the poet turns his memory to his native places:
Birches!
Birch girls!
The only one who can not love them is
Who even in the affectionate teenager
The fetus cannot predict.
("Letter to my sister")
I am forever for fog and dew
I fell in love with the birch tree's camp.
And her golden braids,
And her canvas sundress.
(“You sing me that song from before...”)

Once again, poetic images are lined up in long garlands, spiritualizing nature: the aspen trees, spreading their branches, looked into the pink water, August quietly lay down against the fence, the poplars buried their bare feet in the ditches, the sunset sprinkled liquid gold on the gray fields, a white snowstorm roared under the windows - all this is so it is natural and organic, as in the best poems about nature dating back to the early years; There is no hint of deliberateness here, which was felt in the complicated metaphors of the poems of the Imagist period. Lyrical sketches appeared again, filled with “love for all living things in the world” (M. Gorky), in particular new poems about animals “Son of a Bitch”, “Kachalov’s Dog”).
The art of depicting nature now acquires even more poetic freshness and tenderness and lyricism that captivates the reader. Poems “Low house with blue shutters...”, “Blue May. Glowing warmth...”, “Golden foliage began to spin...”, “I left my dear home...”, “Answer”, distinguished by their extraordinary strength of feeling and “riot” of colors, become one of the masterpieces of Yesenin’s lyrics.
Enjoying nature, getting used to it, the poet rises to philosophical thoughts about the meaning of life, about the laws of existence. Among the examples of philosophical lyricism in our poetry (namely lyricism, and not speculative, scientific-like works on philosophical topics, which is often the case with poetry of this kind), one can without hesitation include Yesenin’s poems “We are now leaving little by little...”, “The golden grove dissuaded us. ..”, “Life is a deception with enchanting melancholy...”, “Flowers”, etc. In this area of ​​creativity Yesenin is as original as in others; Abstract concepts in his work always receive material expression, images do not lose their plasticity, and the author’s voice clearly sounds in his poems. Time as a philosophical category is translated into a subject-metaphorical series (“time - a mill with a wing - lowers the month behind the village with a pendulum into the rye to pour invisible rain for hours”), and we easily grasp the course of the author’s thought.
The poet’s philosophical reflections on life and death, on human fate, on the transitory and eternal in earthly existence are especially significant. In Yesenin's lyrics, pessimistic motives are often highlighted and emphasized. One of the critics of that time, recognizing the indisputable importance of Yesenin as a lyric poet, called him “the singer of the autumn slope... rowan berries, the crimson of autumn, rye fields, sadness and longing for the departing.”
What can you say about this? Of course, Yesenin has many works tinged with sadness, expressing the drama of his ruined fate. But there are also those where the craving for life, for human joy is expressed. “It’s as if I rode on a pink horse in the echoing early morning...” - this image is not accidental in his work. Critics who considered Yesenin a poet of flawed feelings did not notice the great humanistic content of his lyrics and the life-loving emotions expressed in them: what the poet called “boiling water of the heart’s currents” (in the poem “Well, kiss me, kiss ...”, imbued with Bacchanalian motifs ), or what is said at the end of the poem “What a night! I can’t...”: “May my heart forever dream of May...”
We are not at all surprised by the jubilant intonations in the poem “Spring,” where the poet has regained the ability to see the delicate colors of nature: here is a sweet tit, and a beloved maple, and trees dressed in green, and the poet’s final exclamation: “So drink, my breast.” , spring! Get excited about the new poems!” It is not surprising that the industrial landscape is completely unusual for the poet, completely new, but with his usual emotionality and brilliance:
Oil on water
Like a Persian blanket
And evening across the sky
The star sack scattered.
But I'm ready to swear
With a pure heart
What are the lanterns
More beautiful than the stars in Baku.

The poet’s optimistic mood shines through even more clearly through the images of nature in the poetic cycle “Flowers.” “This,” the author warned in a letter to P.I. Chagin, “is a philosophical thing. It should be read like this: drink a little, think about the stars, what you are in space, etc., then it will be understandable.” Once, in a conversation with Vsevolod Ivanov, Yesenin said: “I live so that people can live more fun!” Much in his work, as indicated above, confirms these words.

Bibliography

1. Belskaya L.L. Song word. The poetic mastery of Sergei Yesenin. – M.: Education, 1990.
2. Vereshchagina L.N. Materials for lessons on S. Yesenin’s lyrics // Literature at school. – 1998. - No. 7. – P. 115 – 119.
3. Marchenko A. Yesenin’s poetic world. – M.: Soviet writer, 1989.
4. Naumov E. Sergei Yesenin. – L.: Education, 1960.
5. Lokshina B.S. Poetry of A. Blok and S. Yesenin in school study. – M.: Education, 1978.
6. Prokushev Yu. Sergei Yesenin: image-poems-epoch. – M.: Sovremennik, 1986.
7. Eventov I.S. Sergey Yesenin. – M.: Education, 1987.

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INTRODUCTION

Sergey Yesenin - the most popular, most read poet in Russia.

The work of S. Yesenin belongs to the best pages not only of Russian, but also. world poetry, which he entered as a subtle, soulful lyricist.

Yesenin's poetry is distinguished by the extraordinary power of sincerity and spontaneity in the expression of feelings, and the intensity of moral searches. His poems are always a frank conversation with the reader and listener. “It seems to me that I write my poems only for my good friends,” the poet himself said.

At the same time, Yesenin is a deep and original thinker. The world of feelings, thoughts and passions of the lyrical hero of his works - a contemporary of an unprecedented era of tragic breakdown of human relations - is complex and contradictory. The poet himself also saw the contradictions of his work and explained them this way: “I sang when my land was sick.”

A faithful and ardent patriot of his Motherland, S. Yesenin was a poet, vitally connected with his native land, with the people, with his poetic creativity.

THE THEME OF NATURE IN YESENIN’S WORK

Nature is the all-encompassing, main element of the poet’s work, and the lyrical hero is connected with it innately and for life:

I was born with songs in a grass blanket.

The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow"

(“Mother walked through the forest in her bathing suit...”, 1912);

"May you be blessed forever,

what came to flourish and die"

(“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”, 1921).

The poetry of S. Yesenin (after N. Nekrasov and A. Blok) is the most significant stage in the formation of the national landscape, which, along with traditional motifs of sadness, desolation, and poverty, includes surprisingly bright, contrasting colors, as if taken from popular prints:

"Blue sky, colored arc,

<...>

My land! Beloved Rus' and Mordva!";

"Swamps and swamps,

Blue board of heaven.

Coniferous gilding

The forest is ringing";

"Oh Rus' - a raspberry field

And the blue that fell into the river..."

"blue sucks eyes"; “smells like apple and honey”; “Oh, my Rus', sweet homeland, Sweet rest in the silk of kupirs”; “Ring, ring, golden Rus'...”

This image of a bright and ringing Russia, with sweet smells, silky grasses, blue coolness, was introduced into the self-consciousness of the people by Yesenin.

More often than any other poet, Yesenin uses the very concepts of “land”, “Rus”, “homeland” (“Rus”, 1914; “Go you, Rus', my dear...”, 1914; “Beloved land! To the heart dreaming...", 1914; "The hewn horns began to sing...",<1916>; “Oh, I believe, I believe, there is happiness...”, 1917; "O land of rain and bad weather...",<1917>).

Yesenin depicts celestial and atmospheric phenomena in a new way - more picturesquely, graphically, using zoomorphic and anthropomorphic comparisons. So, his wind is not cosmic, floating out of the astral heights, like Blok’s, but a living being: “a red, affectionate donkey,” “a youth,” “a schema-monk,” “thin-lipped,” “a trepak dances.” Month - “foal”, “raven”, “calf”, etc. Of the luminaries, in first place is the image of the moon-month, which is found in approximately every third work of Yesenin (in 41 out of 127 - a very high coefficient; cf. in the “star” Fet, out of 206 works, 29 include images of stars). Moreover, in the early poems up to about 1920, the “month” predominates (18 out of 20), and in the later ones - the moon (16 out of 21). The month emphasizes, first of all, the external form, figure, silhouette, convenient for all kinds of object associations - “horse face”, “lamb”, “horn”, “kolob”, “boat”; the moon is, first of all, light and the mood it evokes - “thin lemon moonlight”, “blue moonlight”, “the moon laughed like a clown”, “uncomfortable liquid lunarness”. The month is closer to folklore; it is a fairy-tale character, while the moon introduces elegiac, romance motifs.

Yesenin is the creator of a one-of-a-kind “tree novel”, the lyrical hero of which is a maple, and the heroines are birch and willow. Humanized images of trees are overgrown with “portrait” details: the birch has a “waist”, “hips”, “chest”, “leg”, “hairstyle”, “hem”; the maple has a “leg”, “head” (“You are a maple”) my fallen, icy maple..."; "I'm wandering through the first snow..."; "My path"; "Green hairstyle...", etc.). The birch tree, largely thanks to Yesenin, became the national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, rowan, and bird cherry.

More sympathetically and soulfully than in previous poetry, the images of animals are revealed, which become independent subjects of tragically colored experiences and with which the lyrical hero has a blood-related affinity, as with “lesser brothers” (“Song of the Dog”, “Kachalov’s Dog”, “Fox”, “Cow”, “Son of a bitch”, “I won’t deceive myself...”, etc.).

Yesenin’s landscape motifs are closely connected not only with the circulation of time in nature, but also with the age-related flow of human life - the feeling of aging and fading, sadness about past youth (“This sadness cannot be scattered now...”, 1924; “The golden grove dissuaded me. ..”, 1924; “What a night! I can’t...”, 1925). A favorite motif, renewed by Yesenin almost for the first time after E. Baratynsky, is separation from his father’s home and return to his “small homeland”: images of nature are colored with a feeling of nostalgia, refracted through the prism of memories (“I left my home...”, 1918 ; "Confession of a Hooligan", 1920; "This street is familiar to me...",<1923>; "Low house with blue shutters...",<1924>; “I’m walking through the valley. On the back of my head is a cap...”, 1925; "Anna Snegina", 1925).

For the first time with such acuteness - and again after Baratynsky - Yesenin posed the problem of the painful relationship between nature and the victorious civilization: “the steel chariot defeated the living horses”; "...they squeezed the village by the neck // Stone hands of the highway"; “like in a straitjacket, we take nature into concrete” (“Sorokoust”, 1920; “I am the last poet of the village...”, 1920; “The world is mysterious, my ancient world...”, 1921). However, in the later poems the poet seems to force himself to fall in love with “stone and steel”, to stop loving the “poverty of the fields” (“Uncomfortable liquid moonlight”,<1925>).

A significant place in Yesenin’s work is occupied by fantastic and cosmic landscapes, designed in the style of biblical prophecies, but acquiring a human-divine and anti-God meaning:

"Now on the peaks of the stars

I'm shaking up the earth for you!";

"Then I'll rattle my wheels

The sun and moon are like thunder..."

Yesenin’s poetry of nature, which expressed “love for all living things in the world and mercy” (M. Gorky), is also remarkable in that for the first time it consistently pursues the principle of likening nature to nature, revealing from within the wealth of its figurative possibilities: “The moon is like a golden frog // Spread out on calm water..."; “rye does not ring with a swan’s neck”; “Curly-haired lamb - month // Walking in the blue grass”, etc.

FOLK MOTIVES IN THE WORK OF S. YESENIN

Love for his native peasant land, for the Russian village, for nature with its forests and fields permeates all of Yesenin’s work. For the poet, the image of Russia is inseparable from the national element; big cities with their factories, scientific and technological progress, social and cultural life do not evoke a response in Yesenin’s soul. This, of course, does not mean that the poet was not at all concerned about the problems of our time or that he looks at life through rose-colored glasses. He sees all the ills of civilization in isolation from the land, from the origins of people's life. “Revived Rus'” is rural Rus'; The attributes of life for Yesenin are the “edge of bread” and the “shepherd’s horn”. It is no coincidence that the author so often turns to the form of folk songs, epics, ditties, riddles, and spells.

It is significant that in Yesenin’s poetry, man is an organic part of nature, he is dissolved in it, he is joyfully and recklessly ready to surrender to the power of the elements: “I would like to get lost in your hundred-ringed greenery,” “the spring dawns entwined me in a rainbow.”

Many images borrowed from Russian folklore begin to live their own lives in his poems. Natural phenomena appear in his images in the form of animals, bearing the features of everyday village life. This animation of nature makes his poetry similar to the pagan worldview of the ancient Slavs. The poet compares autumn with a “red mare” who “scratches her mane”; his month is a sickle; Describing such an ordinary phenomenon as the light of the sun, the poet writes: “the oil of the sun is pouring on the green hills.” The tree, one of the central symbols of pagan mythology, becomes a favorite image of his poetry.

Yesenin's poetry, even clothed in traditional images of the Christian religion, does not cease to be pagan in its essence.

I’ll go in the bench, bright monk,

Steppe path to the monasteries.

This is how the poem begins and ends with the words:

With a smile of joyful happiness

I'm going to other shores,

Having tasted the ethereal sacrament

Praying on the haystacks and haystacks.

Here it is, Yesenin’s religion. Peasant labor and nature replace Christ for the poet:

I pray for the red dawns,

I take communion by the stream.

If the Lord appears in his poem, it is most often as a metaphor for some natural phenomenon (“The schema-monk-wind, with a cautious step/ Crushes leaves along the ledges of the road, / And kisses on the rowan bush/ Red sores of the invisible Christ”) or in the image of a simple man:

The Lord came to torture people in love.

He went out to the village as a beggar,

An old grandfather on a dry stump in an oak grove,

He chewed a stale crumpet with his gums.

The Lord approached, hiding sorrow and torment:

Apparently, they say, you can’t wake up their hearts...

And the old man said, holding out his hand:

“Here, chew it... you’ll be a little stronger.”

If his heroes pray to God, then their requests are quite specific and have a distinctly earthly character:

We also pray, brothers, for faith,

So that God will irrigate our fields.

And here are purely pagan images:

Calving sky

Licks a red chick.

This is a metaphor for the harvest, bread, which is deified by the poet. Yesenin's world is a village, human vocation is peasant labor. The peasant's pantheon is mother earth, cow, harvest. Another contemporary of Yesenin, poet and writer V. Khodasevich, said that Yesenin’s Christianity is “not content, but form, and the use of Christian terminology is approaching a literary device.”

Turning to folklore, Yesenin understands that leaving nature, one’s roots, is tragic. As a truly Russian poet, he believes in his prophetic mission, in the fact that his “fed mignonette and mint” poems will help modern man return to the Kingdom of the ideal, which for Yesenin is the “peasant paradise.”

Images of animals and “woody motifs” in Yesenin’s lyrics

"Wood motifs" lyrics by S. Yesenin

Many of S. Yesenin’s early poems are imbued with a feeling of an inextricable connection with the life of nature (“ Mother in the Bathing Suit …", "I do not regret, do not call, do not cry..."). The poet constantly turns to nature when he expresses the most intimate thoughts about himself, about his past, present and future. In his poems, she lives a rich poetic life. Like a person, she is born, grows and dies, sings and whispers, is sad and rejoices.

The image of nature is built on associations from rural peasant life, and the human world is usually revealed through associations with the life of nature.

Spiritualization and humanization of nature is characteristic of folk poetry. “Ancient man had almost no knowledge of inanimate objects,” notes A. Afanasyev, “he found reason, feeling and will everywhere. In the noise of the forests, in the rustling of leaves, he heard those mysterious conversations that trees conduct among themselves.”

From childhood, the poet absorbed this popular worldview; one might say that it formed his poetic individuality.

“Everything is from the tree - this is the religion of thought of our people... The tree is life. Wiping their faces on a canvas with a picture of a tree, our people silently say that they have not forgotten the secret of the ancient fathers of wiping themselves with leaves, that they remember themselves as the seed of a supermundane tree and, running under the cover of its branches, plunging their faces into a towel, they seem to want imprint on your cheeks at least a small branch of it, so that, like a tree, it can shed the cones of words and thoughts and stream from the branches of your hands the shadow of virtue,” wrote S. Yesenin in his poetic and philosophical treatise “The Keys of Mary.”

For Yesenin, the likening of man to a tree is more than a “religion of thought”: he not only believed in the existence of a nodal connection between man and the natural world, he felt himself to be a part of this nature.

Yesenin’s “tree romance” motif, highlighted by M. Epstein, goes back to the traditional motive of assimilating man to nature. Based on the traditional “man-plant” trope, Yesenin creates a “tree novel” whose heroes are maple, birch and willow.

The humanized images of trees are overgrown with “portrait” details: the birch has “a waist, hips, breasts, legs, hairstyle, hem, braids,” and the maple has “a leg, head.”

I just want to close my hands

Over the tree hips of the willows.

("I'm wandering through the first snow...", 1917),

Green hairstyle,

Girlish breasts,

O thin birch tree,

Why did you look into the pond?

("Green Hairstyle.", 1918)

I won't be back soon, not soon!

The blizzard will sing and ring for a long time.

Guards blue Rus'

Old maple on one leg.

(“I left my home…”, 1918)

According to M. Epstein, “the birch tree, largely thanks to Yesenin, became the national poetic symbol of Russia. Other favorite plants are linden, rowan, and bird cherry.”

The most plot-length, the most significant in Yesenin’s poetry are still birches and maples.

The birch tree in Russian folk and classical poetry is a national symbol of Russia. This is one of the most revered trees among the Slavs. In ancient pagan rituals, the birch often served as a “Maypole,” a symbol of spring.

Yesenin, when describing folk spring holidays, mentions the birch tree in the meaning of this symbol in the poems “Trinity Morning...” (1914) and “The reeds rustled over the backwater...” (1914)

Trinity morning, morning canon,

In the grove, the birch trees are ringing white.

The poem “The reeds rustled over the backwater” talks about an important and fascinating event of Semitic-Trinity week - fortune-telling with wreaths.

The beautiful girl told fortunes at seven o'clock.

A wave unraveled a wreath of dodder.

The girls wove wreaths and threw them into the river. By the wreath that floated far away, washed up on the shore, stopped or sank, they judged the fate that awaited them (distant or nearby marriage, girlhood, death of the betrothed).

Oh, a girl won’t marry in the spring,

He intimidated her with forest signs.

The joyful welcome of spring is overshadowed by the premonition of approaching death, “the bark of the birch tree has been eaten away.” A tree without bark dies, and here the association is “birch tree - girl”. The motive of misfortune is reinforced by the use of such images as “mice”, “spruce”, “shroud”.

In the poem "Green Hairstyle". (1918) the humanization of the appearance of the birch tree in Yesenin’s work reaches full development. The birch tree becomes like a woman.

Green hairstyle,

Girlish breasts,

O thin birch tree,

Why did you look into the pond?

The reader will never know who this poem is about - a birch tree or a girl. Because here man is likened to a tree, and the tree to man.

In poems such as “I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...” (1921) and “The golden grove dissuaded...” (1924), the lyrical hero reflects on his life and his youth:

I do not regret, do not call, do not cry,

Everything will pass like smoke from white apple trees.

Withered in gold,

I won't be young anymore.

...And the country of birch chintz

It won't tempt you to wander around barefoot.

“Apple tree smoke” – the blossoming of trees in the spring, when everything around is reborn to new life. “Apple tree”, “apples” - in folk poetry this is a symbol of youth - “rejuvenating apples”, and “smoke” is a symbol of fragility, fleetingness, illusoryness. In combination, they mean the fleeting nature of happiness and youth. Birch, a symbol of spring, also has this meaning. “The country of birch chintz” is the “country” of childhood, the time of the most beautiful things. It is not for nothing that Yesenin writes “to wander around barefoot,” a parallel can be drawn with the expression “barefoot childhood.”

All of us, all of us in this world are perishable,

Copper quietly pours from the maple leaves...

May you be blessed forever,

What has come to flourish and die.

Before us is a symbol of the transience of human life. The symbol is based on the trope: “life is the time of flowering”, withering is the approach of death. In nature, everything inevitably returns, repeats itself and blooms again. Man, unlike nature, is one-time, and his cycle, coinciding with the natural, is already unique.

The theme of the Motherland is closely intertwined with the image of the birch. Each Yesenin line is warmed by a feeling of boundless love for Russia. The strength of the poet’s lyrics lies in the fact that in it the feeling of love for the Motherland is expressed not in the abstract, but concretely, in visible images, through pictures of the native landscape.

This can be seen in poems such as "White Birch". (1913), “Return to the Homeland” (1924), “Uncomfortable Liquid Moon” (1925).

Maple, unlike other trees, it does not have such a definite, formed figurative core in Russian poetry. In folklore traditions associated with ancient pagan rituals, it did not play a significant role. Poetic views on it in Russian classical literature mainly took shape in the 20th century and therefore have not yet acquired clear outlines.

The image of the maple is most formed in the poetry of S. Yesenin, where he appears as a kind of lyrical hero of a “tree novel”. Maple is a daring, slightly rollicking guy, with a lush head of unkempt hair, as he has a round crown, similar to a head of hair or a hat. Hence the motive of likening, the primary similarity from which the image of the lyrical hero developed.

Because that old maple

The head looks like me.

(“I left my home…”, 1918)

In the poem “Son of a Bitch” (1824), the lyrical hero is sad about his lost youth, which “has faded away”

Like a maple tree rotting under the windows.

In folk poetry, a rotten or dried tree is a symbol of grief, the loss of something dear that cannot be returned.

The hero remembers his youthful love. The symbol of love here is the viburnum, with its “bitter” semantics; it is also combined with the “yellow pond”. In popular superstitions, the color yellow is a symbol of separation and grief. Therefore, we can say that parting with the girl he loved was already destined by fate itself.

In the ethnological legends of the Slavs, maple or sycamore is a tree into which a person is turned ("sworn"). S. Yesenin also anthropomorphizes the maple tree; it appears as a person with all his inherent mental states and periods of life. In the poem “You are my fallen maple...” (1925), the lyrical hero is like a maple with his daring, he draws a parallel between himself and the maple:

And, like a drunken watchman, going out onto the road,

He drowned in a snowdrift and froze his leg.

Oh, and I myself have become somewhat unstable these days,

I won’t make it home from a friendly drinking party.

It’s not even always clear who this poem is talking about - a person or a tree.

There I met a willow, there I noticed a pine tree,

I sang songs to them during the snowstorm about summer.

I seemed to myself to be the same maple...

Reminiscent of a maple with its “carefree curly head”, poplar at the same time aristocratically “slim and straight.” This slenderness and upward striving is a distinctive feature of the poplar, right down to the poetry of our days.

In the poem “Village” (1914), S. Yesenin compares poplar leaves with silk:

In silk poplar leaves.

This comparison was made possible by the fact that poplar leaves have a double structure: on the outside the leaves are shiny green, as if polished, on the inside they are matte silver. Silk fabric also has a double color: the right side is shiny and smooth, and the left side is matte and expressionless. When silk shimmers, the shades of color can change, just as the leaves of poplar shimmer in the wind with a greenish-silver color.

Poplars grow along roads and are therefore sometimes associated with barefoot wanderers. This theme of wandering is reflected in the poem “Without a hat, with a bast knapsack...” (1916).

The lyrical hero - the wanderer "wanders" "under the quiet rustle of poplars." Here the human wanderer and the tree wanderer echo each other and complement each other to achieve greater subtlety in revealing the theme.

In Yesenin’s works, poplars are also a sign of the Motherland, like birch.

Saying goodbye to home, leaving for foreign lands, the hero is sad that

They will no longer be winged leaves

I need the poplars to ring.

(“Yes! Now it’s decided...”, 1922)

Yiwu called "crying". The image of the willow tree is more unambiguous and has the semantics of melancholicity.

In Russian folk poetry, the willow is a symbol not only of love, but also of any separation, the grief of mothers parting with their sons.

In the poetry of S. Yesenin, the image of the willow is traditionally associated with sadness, loneliness, and separation. This sadness for past youth, for the loss of a loved one, for parting with one’s homeland.

For example, in the poem “Night and the Field, and the Cry of Roosters...” (1917)

Everything here is the same as it was then,

The same rivers and the same herds.

Only willows over the red hillock

They shake the dilapidated hem.

“The dilapidated hem of the willows” is the past, the old time, something that is very dear, but something that will never return. The destroyed, distorted life of the people, the country.

The same poem also mentions aspen. It emphasizes bitterness and loneliness, since in folk poetry it is always a symbol of sadness.

In other poems, the willow, like the birch, is a heroine, a girl.

And they call to the rosary

Willows are meek nuns.

("Beloved Land...", 1914)

I just want to close my hands

Over the tree hips of the willows.

(“I’m wandering through the first snow…”, 1917)

The lyrical hero, remembering his youth and feeling sad about it, also turns to the image of a willow tree.

And he knocked on my window

September with a crimson willow branch,

So that I am ready and meet

His arrival is unpretentious.

(“Let you be drunk by others...” 1923)

September is autumn, and the autumn of life is the imminent arrival of winter - old age. The hero meets this “age of autumn” calmly, although with a little sadness about “mischievous and rebellious courage,” because by this time he has acquired life experience and looks at the world around him from the height of his past years.

Everything that makes a tree stand out among other forms of vegetation (strength of the trunk, powerful crown) sets it apart oak among other trees, making him, as it were, the king of the tree kingdom. He personifies the highest degree of firmness, courage, strength, and greatness.

Tall, mighty, blooming - these are the characteristic epithets of the oak, which poets use as an image of vital power.

In the poetry of S. Yesenin, the oak is not such a constant hero as the birch and maple. The oak is mentioned in only three poems ("The Heroic Whistle", 1914; "Oktoich" 1917; "Unspeakable, blue, tender..." 1925)

The poem "Octoechos" mentions the Mauritius oak. Yesenin subsequently explained the meaning of this image in his treatise “The Keys of Mary” (1918)

"... that symbolic tree that means "family", it does not matter at all that in Judea this tree bore the name of the Mauritius oak..."

Under the Mauritian oak

My red-haired grandfather is sitting...

The introduction of the image of the Mauritius oak into this poem is not accidental, since it talks about the homeland:

O homeland, happy

And it’s an unstoppable hour!

about relatives -

"my red-haired grandfather."

This oak tree seems to summarize everything that the poet wanted to write about in this work, that family is the most important thing a person can have.

The image of the “family” here is given in a broader sense: it is the “father’s land”, and “native graves”, and “the father’s house”, that is, everything that connects a person with this land.

In the poem “The Heroic Whistle,” Yesenin introduces the image of an oak tree to show the power and strength of Russia and its people. This work can be put on a par with Russian epics about heroes. Ilya Muromets and other heroes, jokingly, playfully felled oak trees. In this poem the man also “whistles”, and from his whistle

the hundred-year-old oak trees trembled,

The leaves on the oak trees are falling from the whistling sound.

Coniferous trees convey a different mood and carry a different meaning than deciduous ones: not joy and sadness, not various emotional outbursts, but rather mysterious silence, numbness, self-absorption.

Pines and spruce trees are part of a gloomy, harsh landscape; wilderness, darkness, and silence reign around them. Permanent greenery evokes associations of coniferous trees with eternal peace, deep sleep, over which time and the cycle of nature have no power.

These trees are mentioned in such poems of 1914 as “It is not the winds that shower the forests…”, “The melted clay is drying up”, “I smell God’s rainbow…”, “Us”, “A cloud has tied lace in the grove.” (1915).

In Yesenin’s poem “Powder” (1914), the main character, the pine tree, appears as an “old woman”:

Like a white scarf

The pine tree has tied up.

Bent over like an old lady

Leaned on a stick...

The forest where the heroine lives is fabulous, magical, also alive, just like her.

Bewitched by the invisible

The forest slumbers under the fairy tale of sleep...

We meet another fairy-tale, magical forest in the poem “The Witch” (1915). But this forest is no longer bright and joyful, but rather formidable (“The grove threatens with spruce peaks”), gloomy, harsh.

The spruces and pines here personify an evil, unfriendly space, an evil spirit living in this wilderness. The landscape is painted in dark colors:

The dark night is silently afraid,

The moon is covered with shawls of clouds.

The wind is a singer with a howl of whoops...

Having examined the poems where images of trees are found, we see that S. Yesenin’s poems are imbued with a feeling of an inextricable connection with the life of nature. It is inseparable from a person, from his thoughts and feelings. The image of a tree in Yesenin’s poetry appears in the same meaning as in folk poetry. The author's motif of the "tree novel" goes back to the traditional motif of likening man to nature and is based on the traditional trope of "man - plant".

Drawing nature, the poet introduces into the story a description of human life, holidays that are in one way or another connected with the animal and plant world. Yesenin seems to intertwine these two worlds, creating one harmonious and interpenetrating world. He often resorts to personification. Nature is not a frozen landscape background: it reacts passionately to the destinies of people and the events of history. She is the poet's favorite hero.

Images of animals in the lyrics of S. Yesenin.

Images of animals in literature are a kind of mirror of humanistic self-consciousness. Just as the self-determination of a person is impossible outside of his relationship to another person, so the self-determination of the entire human race cannot be accomplished outside of its relationship to the animal kingdom."

The cult of animals has existed for a very long time. In a distant era, when the main occupation of the Slavs was hunting, and not agriculture, they believed that wild animals and humans had common ancestors. Each tribe had its own totem, that is, a sacred animal that the tribe worshiped, believing that it was their blood relative.

In the literature of different times, images of animals have always been present. They served as material for the emergence of Aesopian language in fairy tales about animals, and later in fables. In the literature of “modern times,” in epic and lyric poetry, animals acquire equal rights with humans, becoming the object or subject of the narrative. Often a person is “tested for humanity” by his attitude towards an animal.

The poetry of the 19th century is dominated by images of domestic and farm animals tamed by man, sharing his life and work. After Pushkin, the everyday genre becomes predominant in animalistic poetry. All living things are placed within the framework of household equipment or a household yard (Pushkin, Nekrasov, Fet). In the poetry of the 20th century, images of wild animals became widespread (Bunin, Gumilyov, Mayakovsky). The reverence for the beast has disappeared. But the “new peasant poets” reintroduce the motif of “brotherhood of man and animal.” Their poetic work is dominated by domestic animals - cow, horse, dog, cat. Relationships reveal features of a family structure.

Sergei Yesenin’s poetry also contains the motif of “blood relationship” with the animal world; he calls them “lesser brothers.”

I'm happy that I kissed women,

Crushed flowers, lying on the grass

And animals, like our smaller brothers

Never hit me on the head.

(“We are now leaving little by little.”, 1924)

Along with domestic animals, we find images of representatives of wild nature. Of the 339 poems examined, 123 mention animals, birds, insects, and fish.

Horse (13), cow (8), raven, dog, nightingale (6), calves, cat, dove, crane (5), sheep, mare, dog (4), foal, swan, rooster, owl (3), sparrow, wolf, capercaillie, cuckoo, horse, frog, fox, mouse, tit (2), stork, ram, butterfly, camel, rook, goose, gorilla, toad, snake, oriole, sandpiper, chickens, corncrake, donkey, parrot , magpies, catfish, pig, cockroaches, lapwing, bumblebee, pike, lamb (1).

S. Yesenin most often turns to the image of a horse or cow. He introduces these animals into the narrative of peasant life as an integral part of the life of the Russian peasant. Since ancient times, a horse, a cow, a dog and a cat have accompanied a person in his hard work, sharing both joys and troubles with him.

The horse was an assistant when working in the field, in transporting goods, and in military combat. The dog brought prey and guarded the house. The cow was the waterer and wet nurse in a peasant family, and the cat caught mice and simply personified home comfort.

The image of a horse, as an integral part of everyday life, is found in the poems “Herd” (1915), “Farewell, dear forest...” (1916), “This sadness cannot be scattered now...” (1924). Pictures of village life change in connection with events taking place in the country. And if in the first poem we see "in the hills green herds of horses", then in subsequent ones:

A mowed hut,

The cry of a sheep, and in the distance in the wind

The little horse wags his skinny tail,

Looking into the unkind pond.

(“This sadness cannot now be scattered…”, 1924)

The village fell into decay and the proud and majestic horse “turned” into a “little horse,” which personifies the plight of the peasantry in those years.

The innovation and originality of S. Yesenin, the poet, was manifested in the fact that when drawing or mentioning animals in everyday space (field, river, village, yard, house, etc.), he is not an animalist, that is, he does not set the goal of recreating the image of one or another animal. Animals, being part of everyday space and environment, appear in his poetry as a source and means of artistic and philosophical understanding of the surrounding world, allowing one to reveal the content of a person’s spiritual life.

In the poem "Cow" (1915) S. Yesenin uses the principle of anthropomorphism, endowing the animal with human thoughts and feelings. The author describes a specific everyday and life situation - the animal’s old age

decrepit, teeth have fallen out,

scroll of years on the horns...

and his further fate, "soon... they will tie a noose around her neck // and will be taken to slaughter", he identifies the old animal and the old man.

Thinks a sad thought...

If we turn to those works in which the image of a dog is found, for example, in the poem “Song of the Dog” (1915). “Song” (an emphatically “high” genre) is a kind of hymnography, made possible due to the fact that the subject of “chanting” is the sacred feeling of motherhood, characteristic of a dog to the same extent as a woman - a mother. The animal is worried about the death of its cubs, which the “gloomy owner” drowned in an ice hole.

Introducing the image of a dog into poems, the poet writes about the long-standing friendship of this animal with man. The lyrical hero of S. Yesenin is also a peasant by birth, and in childhood and youth he was a rural resident. Loving his fellow villagers, he at the same time is completely different from them in his inner essence. In relation to animals this manifests itself most clearly. His affection and love for his “sisters - bitches” and “brothers - males” are feelings for equals. That's why the dog "was my youth Friend".

The poem “Son of a Bitch” reflects the tragedy of the consciousness of the lyrical hero, which arises because in the world of wildlife and animals everything looks unchanged:

That dog died a long time ago,

But in the same suit that has a blue tint,

With barking livisto - crazy

Her young son shot me.

It seems that the “son” genetically received from his mother the love for the lyrical hero. However, the lyrical hero next to this dog especially acutely feels how he has changed externally and internally. For him, returning to his younger self is possible only at the level of feeling and for a moment.

With this pain I feel younger

And at least write notes again .

At the same time, the irrevocability of what has passed is realized.

Another animal that has been “accompanying” a person through life for a very long time is the cat. It embodies home comfort, a warm hearth.

An old cat sneaks up to the makhotka

For fresh milk.

("In the hut.", 1914)

In this poem we also meet other representatives of the animal world, which are also an invariable “attribute” of the peasant hut. These are cockroaches, chickens, roosters.

Having examined the everyday meanings of animal images, we move on to their symbolic meanings. The symbols with which animals are endowed are very widespread in folklore and classical poetry. Each poet has his own symbolism, but basically they all rely on the folk basis of one or another image. Yesenin also uses folk beliefs about animals, but at the same time, many images of animals are reinterpreted by him and receive new significance. Let's return to the image of the horse.

The horse is one of the sacred animals in Slavic mythology, an attribute of the gods, but at the same time it is also a chthonic creature associated with fertility and death, the afterlife, and a guide to the “other world.” The horse was endowed with the ability to foretell fate, especially death. A. N. Afanasyev explains the meaning of the horse in the mythology of the ancient Slavs: “As the personification of gusty winds, storms and flying clouds, fairy-tale horses are endowed with wings, which makes them similar to mythological birds... fiery, fire-breathing... the horse serves as a poetic image of either the luminous sun or a cloud shining with lightning..."

In the poem "Dove" (1916), the horse appears in the image of "quiet fate". There are no signs of change and the lyrical hero lives a quiet, measured life, with his everyday worries day after day, just as his ancestors lived.

The day will go out, flashing like a shock of gold,

And in a box of years the work will settle down.

But the revolutionary events of 1917 take place in the history of the country, and the hero’s soul becomes worried about the fate of Russia, his land. He understands that now a lot will change in his life. The lyrical hero recalls with sadness his strong, established way of life, which is now disrupted.

...My horse was taken away...

My horse is my strength and strength.

He knows that now his future depends on the future of his homeland, he tries to escape from the events that are happening.

...he beats, rushes,

Pulling a tight lasso...

(“Open to me the guardian above the clouds.”, 1918),

but he fails to do this, he can only submit to fate. In this work we observe a poetic parallelism between the “behavior” of the horse and his fate and the mental state of the lyrical hero in a “storm-ravaged life.”

In the 1920 poem "Sorokoust" Yesenin introduces the image of a horse as a symbol of the old patriarchal village, which has not yet realized the transition to a new life. The image of this “past,” which is trying with all its might to fight change, is a foal, which appears as part of a generally symbolic situation of “competition” between the “cast-iron horse-train” and the “red-maned foal.”

Dear, dear, funny fool,

Well, where is he, where is he going?

Doesn't he really know that live horses

Did the steel cavalry win?

The village's struggle for survival is lost, and more and more preference is given to the city.

In other works, the horse becomes a symbol of past youth, a symbol of what a person cannot return; it remains only in memories.

I have now become more stingy in my desires,

My life? or did I dream about you?

As if I were a booming early spring

He rode on a pink horse.

(“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”, 1921)

“Rided on a pink horse” is a symbol of quickly departed, irrevocable youth. Thanks to the additional symbolism of color, it appears as a “pink horse” - a symbol of sunrise, spring, and the joy of life. But even a real peasant horse at dawn turns pink in the rays of the rising sun. The essence of this poem is a song of gratitude, blessings of all living things. The horse has the same meaning in the poem “Oh, you sleigh...” (1924)

Everything is over. My hair has thinned.

The horse died.

Remembering his youth, the lyrical hero also turns to the image of a dog.

I remembered a dog today,

What was the friend of my youth

("Son of a bitch". 1924)

In this poem, the poet recalls his youth, his first love, which is gone, but lives in memories. However, the old love is replaced by a new one, the older generation is replaced by the young, that is, nothing in this life returns, but at the same time the life cycle is continuous.

That dog died a long time ago,

But in the same color that has a blue tint...

I was shot by her young son .

If we turn to other representatives of the animal world, for example, crows, we will see that in Yesenin they have the same symbolism as in folk poetry.

The black crows cawed:

There is wide scope for terrible troubles.

("Rus"., 1914)

In this poem, the raven is the harbinger of impending disaster, namely the 1914 war. The poet introduces the image of this bird not only as a folk symbol of misfortune, but also in order to show his negative attitude towards current events and worries about the fate of the Motherland.

Many poets use various types of word transfer to create images, including metaphor. In poetry, metaphor is used primarily in its secondary function, introducing attributive and evaluative meanings into nominal positions. Poetic speech is characterized by a binary metaphor (metaphor - comparison). Thanks to the image, metaphor connects language and myth with the corresponding way of thinking - mythological. Poets create their own epithets, metaphors, comparisons and images. Metaphorization of images are features of the poet’s artistic style. S. Yesenin also turns to the help of metaphors in his poems. He creates them according to folklore principles: he takes material for the image from the rural world and from the natural world and seeks to characterize one noun with another.

Here, for example, is the image of the moon:

"The moon, like a yellow bear, tosses and turns in the wet grass."

Yesenin’s nature motif is complemented in a unique way by images of animals. Most often, the names of animals are given in comparisons in which objects and phenomena are compared with animals, often not actually related to them, but united by some associative feature that serves as the basis for its isolation.( “Like skeletons of skinny cranes, // Plucked willows stand...”; "Blue twilight, like a flock of sheep...").

By color similarity:

Along the pond as a red swan

A quiet sunset floats.

(“This is stupid happiness…”, 1918) ;

by proximity and similarity of functions:

Miles whistle like birds

From under the horse's hooves...

(“Oh arable lands, arable lands, arable lands...”, 1917-1918) ;

according to some associative, sometimes subjectively identified feature:

I was like a horse driven into soap,

Spurred by a brave rider.

("Letter to a Woman", 1924)

Sometimes the poet also uses a form of parallelism, characteristic of Russian folk poetry - songs, including negative:

It’s not the cuckoos who are sad – Tanya’s relatives are crying.

("Tanyusha was good...", 1911)

In the works of S. Yesenin, an animalistic (depiction of animals) comparison or zoomorphic metaphor often develops into an expanded image:

Autumn - a red mare - scratches her mane.

("Autumn", 1914 - 1916)

The red color of autumn leaves evokes an association with the “red mare”. But autumn is not only a “red mare” (similarity in color), it “scratches its mane”: the image is revealed through comparison with an animal visibly, in colors, sounds, movements. The tread of autumn is compared to the tread of a horse.

Comparisons of natural phenomena with animals arise: month - " curly lamb", "foal", " golden frog", spring - " squirrel", clouds - " wolves." Objects are equated to animals and birds, for example, a mill - "log bird", bake - "brick camel". Based on complex associative comparisons, natural phenomena acquire organs characteristic of animals and birds (paws, muzzles, snouts, claws, beaks):

Cleans the month in the thatched roof

Blue-rimmed horns.

(“The red wings of sunset are fading.”, 1916)

Waves of white claws

Golden sand scraped.

("Heavenly Drummer.", 1918)

Maple and linden in the windows of the rooms

Throwing away the branches with my paws,

They are looking for those who are remembered.

(“Darling, let’s sit next to each other.”, 1923)

The colors of animals also acquire purely symbolic meaning: “red horse” is a symbol of revolution, “pink horse” is an image of youth, “black horse” is a harbinger of death.

Imaginative embodiment, clear metaphor, sensitive perception of folklore are the basis of Sergei Yesenin’s artistic research. The metaphorical use of animalistic vocabulary in original comparisons creates the originality of the poet’s style.

Having examined the images of animals in the poetry of S. Yesenin, we can conclude that the poet solves the problem of using animals in his works in different ways.

In one case, he turns to them in order to show with their help some historical events, personal emotional experiences. In others, in order to more accurately and more deeply convey the beauty of nature and the native land.

Bibliography:

1. Koshechkin S.P. “In the echoing early morning...” - M., 1984.

2. Marchenko A. M. Yesenin’s poetic world. - M., 1972.

3. Prokushen Yu. L. Sergei Yesenin "Image, poems, era. - M., 1979.

(315 words) Sergei Yesenin is a man with a primordially Russian soul. He was born into a simple peasant family, in the small but picturesque village of Konstantinovo, where his boundless love for the Motherland was formed. Many of Yesenin’s poems are the result of the indestructible union of the poet and Russian nature as a living creature. Therefore, the inner world of the lyrical hero almost always resonates with her essence, her multifaceted soul. It is reflected in the eyes of a person contemplating all the incomprehensible beauty of Rus', and sounds like an intoxicating voice in his heart. Let us also plunge into this bewitching symphony created by the poetic genius of Yesenin.

Let's move to the Ryazan region, where the village of Konstantinovo stands on the right bank of the Oka. Evening. Here droplets of dew sparkle on the grass, somewhere far away you can hear the song of a nightingale - as if he is saying goodbye to the passing day. Moonlight pours onto the roof of the house, near which there are birch trees that look like “big candles”, this makes it warm and cozy. And somewhere across the river, a watchman with a “dead mallet” guards the peace of this serene region. This is how we see Konstantinovo through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old poet, who captured his native village in the poem “It’s already evening. Dew…”, and just two years after writing it, Yesenin actually leaves his father’s house forever. The work “Winter Sings and Calls...” dates back to the same period. The bright landscape of the coldest and most merciless time of the year comes to life in simple lines, giving birth to wonderful images in the head. We can even observe the struggle between the evil and harsh winter and the beautiful and smiling spring, which, in the end, invariably wins. Already, while in Moscow, Yesenin will write “I left my native home,” but now here the feeling of calm is replaced by boundless melancholy. The poet will never again find his “blue Rus'” the way it was in childhood. In this poem, the lyrical hero perceives the world around him and people through the prism of natural forms and phenomena. In addition, a comparative image appears here, reflecting the poet himself: “...Because that old maple / Head looks like me.”

It is easy to notice that the theme of nature in Yesenin’s lyrics is inextricably linked with the theme of his native land, which is the embodiment of all peasant Rus', painfully beloved by the poet.

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Our time is a time of severe trials for man and humanity. It became clear that the confrontation between man and nature is fraught with mortal danger for both of them. Yesenin's poems, imbued with a love of nature, help a person find a place in it.

Already in the early period of S. Yesenin’s work, the strongest side of his poetic talent became obvious - the ability to draw pictures of Russian nature. Yesenin’s landscapes are not deserted paintings; in them, as Gorky put it, there is always “a person interspersed” - the poet himself, in love with his native land. The natural world surrounds him from birth.

I was born with songs in a grass blanket,
The spring dawns twisted me into a rainbow.
I grew to maturity, grandson of the Kupala night,
The dark witch prophesies happiness for me.

You are my fallen maple, icy maple,
Why are you standing, bent over, under a white snowstorm?
Or what did you see? Or what did you hear?
It’s as if you went out for a walk outside the village.

His bird cherry “sleeps in a white cape,” the willows are crying, the poplars are whispering, “a cloud has tied the lace in the grove,” “the spruce girls are sad,” “the sleepy earth smiled at the sun,” etc. He looked at the children of one mother Earth. he is on humanity, on nature, on animals. The tragedy of the dog-mother becomes very close to the human heart, emphasizing the feeling of human kinship with all life on earth. The poet speaks about them, about our smaller brothers, with great love very often. When you read “Kachalov’s Dog,” you are amazed at his ability to talk to the animal respectfully, in a friendly way, as equals. It’s obvious that he really likes everything about the dog: “...to touch your velvety fur,” “I’ve never seen such a paw in my life.” You can talk to Jim about anything: love, joy, sadness, even life. The poet has the same feeling about an ordinary mongrel:

And you, my love,
Some faithful dog?

With what love does the poet address the galloping foal in “Sorokoust”: “Dear, dear funny fool.” In his most difficult moments, Yesenin always remains human:

Laying down the gilded matting poems, I want to say something tender to you.

Who is this “you” for? To people, to humanity. The poem “Now we are leaving little by little” is about life, love and how dear people are to the poet:

That's why people are dear to me,
That they live with me on earth.

There is something in Yesenin’s poetry that makes the reader not only understand the complexity of the world and the drama of the events taking place in it, but also believe in a better future for man. It will, of course, come, and there will be no place in it for indifference, cruelty, or violence.

The creative heritage of S. Yesenin is very close to our current ideas about the world, where man is only a particle of living nature. Having penetrated into the world of S. Yesenin’s poetic images, we begin to feel like brothers of a lonely birch, an old maple, a rowan bush. These feelings should help preserve humanity, and therefore humanity.

At the beginning of the 20th century, an amazing poet came to Russian literature, for whom the theme of nature became the main theme of his work - Yesenin. It is often said that Yesenin, when depicting nature, resorted to the technique of personification - this is fundamentally incorrect. The originality of Yesenin’s approach to nature lay in the fact that the animation of nature in his poems, the likening of it to man, was not an artistic device, but was an expression of Yesenin’s unique worldview. He had no need to humanize nature - he already saw it as humanized, possessing the same soul as a person. The following images, for example, are not accidental in Yesenin’s poems: “After all, straw is also flesh” or “The field is freezing in long-eyed melancholy, / Choking on telegraph poles.” For the poet, all living things were essentially the same - a person, a dog, a cow, grass, trees, the sun, a month... That’s why Yesenin’s metaphors and comparisons are so natural, not deliberate, with the help of which he depicts nature: “As a tree quietly drops its leaves, / So I drop sad words”, “And outside the window the lingering wind is crying, / As if sensing the proximity of a funeral”, “The willows are crying, the poplars are whispering”, etc. Yesenin’s “Song of a Dog” has become a classic, in which, perhaps for the first time, the poet managed to convey a dog’s melancholy so simply and deeply - and all because for Yesenin this melancholy is essentially no different from human melancholy, and he doesn’t even need special efforts, to penetrate into the psychology of the beast. “Sergei Yesenin is not so much a person as an organ created by nature exclusively for poetry, to express the inexhaustible sadness of the fields, love for all living things in the world,” M. Gorky wrote about the poet. “And the beast, like our smaller brothers, / Never hit you on the head,” Yesenin himself will say about himself.

And, of course, Yesenin’s nature is deeply national, it is the nature of the homeland, Russia, and these concepts - nature and homeland - are practically not shared by Yesenin. Even in the cycle “Persian Motifs,” the poet constantly recalls his native Russian nature: “No matter how beautiful Shiraz is, / It is no better than the expanses of Ryazan.” How many poets, starting with Pushkin and Lermontov, wrote about the Russian birch, and birches in the minds of the Russian reader are still “Yesenin’s”... Because no one, neither before nor after, was able to say about Russian nature such simple, understandable and sincere words. Because Yesenin did not “observe” nature, did not “contemplate” it, one cannot even truly say that he loved it - he lived by it, he himself was a part of nature. This determines the harmonious and peaceful structure that distinguishes Yesenin’s lyrics dedicated to nature.

However, in the post-revolutionary years, disharmonious motifs associated with the attack of the city on the countryside and, in particular, on nature, more and more persistently burst into Yesenin’s landscape lyrics. Yesenin perceived this conflict as a conflict between the living and the dead, wood and steel, and the fact that in this struggle the living must give in gave rise to the tragic pathos of such poems as “Sorokoust”, “I am the last poet of the village...”, “Song of Bread” and etc. The poem “Sorokoust” gives the most powerful and vivid image of the confrontation between nature and civilization - the opposition of the doomed “red-maned foal” to the triumphant iron, cast-iron train. Thus, complex problems and tragic motives invade the artistic world of such a harmonious poet as Yesenin.

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