Alexander Pushkin - The darkness of the night lies on the hills of Georgia: Verse. Pushkin in Tbilisi

“EVERYTHING IS QUIET - A GLOSS IS COMING TO THE CAUCASUS ... »

The darkness of night lies on the hills of Georgia;
Aragva makes noise in front of me.

I feel sad and light; my sadness is light;
My sadness is full of you,

By you, by you alone ... my despondency
Nothing torments, nothing worries,

That it cannot help but love.

Everyone knows this wonderful poem well, one of Pushkin’s best poems. But not everyone knows or remembers that these poems, published for the first time by Pushkin himself, were entitled “Excerpt” by him. Having published them twice under this title, the poet definitely pointed out their compositional incompleteness, the fact that they either remained unfinished, or represented an extract, an excerpt from a larger written or unwritten work. Pushkin specialists, as well as his attentive readers, also know that the poems “On the Hills of Georgia” are indeed part of a larger whole, that in the manuscript they (in addition to a number of variants) have a continuation. Individual, scattered lines of this continuation were cited several times by commentators on Pushkin; Valery Bryusov, in his edition of Pushkin in 1920, published them, as he put it, “in a coherent form”:

I have only memories
Gone forgotten ... days of many years.
Where are you, my friends, priceless creatures?

Some are far away, others are no longer in the world.
I'm still yours, I love you again
And without hopes and without desires,
Without dark jealousy ... My love is pure
And the tenderness of virgin dreams.

As we can see, there is no great “coherence” in these verses. Although in individual lines something Pushkin shines, but in general the rhyme is not observed (“I love” rhymes with “love”), and there is no obligatory alternation of long six-foot verses with short tetrameter ones, and the meaning is not perfect everywhere (“days many years").

However, until now it was unknown that in fact Pushkin completed this continuation, that in the same draft manuscript from which incoherent passages are extracted, upon careful reading one can read, in addition to the eight verses printed by Pushkin, two more stanzas - eight verses, completely completed and complete. For publication, Pushkin took only half of these four stanzas - an “excerpt”.

The draft of this poem was written in a large bound notebook (or rather, a book), filled mainly with material from 1829-30. (PD, No. 841) . This is a typical Pushkin draft - a precious document in which all stages of the creative process are recorded, its entire sequence, all gradual layers are preserved, just as a cut of a tree trunk preserves the entire history of the growth of a tree.

This feature of Pushkin’s manuscripts, reflecting the originality of the poet’s work on poetry, has already been drawn attention more than once. Rarely did he sit down at the table to write down poems that had already been invented, at least in general terms, formed in his head, like most poets. For the most part, Pushkin created with a pen in his hands; he wrote down on paper almost all the moments of his creative work: a whole verse, parts of a verse, individual words, sometimes in complete disorder, hastily, in excitement, crossing out one thing and replacing it with another, returning again to the first, crossing it out again and restoring it again ... What another poet does not reach on paper - an unclear thought, a word that will probably be rejected - Pushkin scribbled on paper, immediately crossing out, sometimes without even having time to write the words to the end.

In his draft, sometimes we find a clearly and firmly written verse, two or three verses - this is a recording of what has already been invented, formed in the mind. This is where Pushkin’s work usually begins; this is the first thing written down on a piece of paper. And then there is a feverish, rapid recording of the images that appear in the head, snatches of poetry, epithets ... The pen clearly cannot keep up with the thought, the words cannot

are added, the verse is not finished, the line replaces the taken-for-granted word. Very often, Pushkin writes only the beginning and end of a verse, leaving empty space for the middle, which he will come up with later, and now he is in a hurry to record the new thoughts, words, rhythms, images that are flowing in:

Where is the capricious tyranny
Changed the conversations too
Stories, songs of the naughty

Then the second verse turned out:

Changed bottles, conversations.

(“Are you burning, our lamp”)

Adeji gathered noisily
To the old man's sakla.

("Tazit")

She's wearing a golden trireme
Sometimes it floats

In final form:

Young Cyprida floats.

(“We spent the evening at the dacha”)

Sometimes only one word is outlined in a verse - rhyme, and the rest is filled in later.

In luxurious peace
golden

Such a sketch, after processing, turns into poetry:

In luxurious gloomy peace
Among seductive wonders
Under the shadow of purple veils
The golden bed shines.

("Egyptian Nights")

Piling up word upon word, crossing out, making insertions, writing between the lines, and at random, and on the side, Pushkin makes from his draft a whole network of lines that are difficult to understand, a web in which the reader of his manuscripts becomes entangled, and at the same time creates a most precious document, - if we know how to decipher it correctly and accurately.

The most important thing to look for in such a draft is the sequence in which it was written - which words and phrases came first, which ones after, what was crossed out and replaced with, etc.

If we can find this sequence, we can accurately trace all the stages of the process of creating a poem, the changes of thoughts, the flow of associations, etc.

But Pushkin’s drafts make it possible to go further: they reflect the pace of work, its changes, and to a certain extent even the state of mind of the creator. Nervous, quick scribbling of words - unfinished, illegible, with missing letters, with typos, when the hand does not keep up with the thought - this is on the one hand, and on the other - stops, delays are clearly visible - the poet, thoughtfully, traces the outlines of the letters with a pen a second time , corrects the loops at “v”, the tails at “s” and “b”, draws in the margins of the draft ...

These drawings, which are dotted with Pushkin's manuscripts, if studied in connection with the text surrounding them, serve as excellent illustrations - not of one or another of Pushkin's works, but of the process of creating these works. Sometimes these drawings really illustrate the text, sometimes they apparently have nothing to do with it and excite us with mysterious associations ... Sometimes these drawings have a special, original character: in the draft of the unfinished poem “When the Lord of Assyria” (“Judith”), writing the verses:

The Satrap flowed to the mountain gorges
And he sees their narrow gates
Locked by the rebellious:
A thunderstorm threatens the heights,

Pushkin corrects the last verse; instead he writes:

A wall, like a patterned belt.
The height is girded

And then he draws something like a wriggling wide ribbon on the side, as if using a drawing to check the accuracy of his comparison.

And the drawings in the margins, and the type of manuscript, and the nature of the handwriting (sometimes extremely expressive) - all this provides excellent material for studying the deepest, intimate aspects of “creative history,” if only we could always understand it properly.

Meanwhile, this study is not only interesting for an inquisitive reader, not only instructive for a novice poet, but also has serious scientific significance. Here lies the key to understanding, to a scientific explanation of that special state characteristic of the poet at the moment of creativity, which Pushkin called “inspiration.”

It must be borne in mind that in the mouth of Pushkin this word was not at all a mystical concept, nor an allegorical or metaphorical expression like “muse”, “Phoebus”, “lyre” ... No, Pushkin gives the word “inspiration” a very precise, almost physiological meaning. This is a special state that comes over the poet from time to time: “the disposition of the soul towards the lively acceptance of impressions and the understanding of concepts, and consequently the explanation of them” (“ Excerpts from letters, thoughts, and comments»);

“a blessed state of mind when dreams are clearly depicted before you, and you find living, unexpected words to embody your visions, when poems fall easily under your pen, and sonorous rhymes run towards a harmonious thought ... » (« Egyptian nights»).

... And the thoughts in my head are agitated in courage,
And light rhymes run towards them,
And fingers ask for pen, pen for paper,
A minute - and the poems will flow freely ...

("Autumn")

This state, as described by Pushkin, is accompanied by a number of purely external, physiological manifestations, and is preceded by a special painless sensation - embarrassment, anxiety, excitement ...

... And a serious fiery illness
My head was full.
Wonderful dreams were born in her ...

(“Conversation between a bookseller and a poet”)

And poetry awakens in me:

The soul is embarrassed by lyrical excitement,
It trembles and sounds and searches, as in a dream,
To finally pour out with free manifestation ...

("Autumn")

“So, for you there is no,” Charsky asks the improviser, “neither labor, nor cooling, nor this anxiety that precedes inspiration.” ... » (« Egyptian nights").

The same “Egyptian Nights” vividly depicts the appearance of a man overwhelmed by inspiration: “His face turned terribly pale, he trembled as if in a fever, his eyes sparkled with a wonderful fire, he raised his black hair with his hand, wiped his high brow, covered with drops of sweat. ... " Pushkin was already familiar with this state in his early youth:

When visions change
In front of you in the magical darkness
And a quick chill of inspiration
Vlasa rises on his forehead.

(“To Zhukovsky”, 1818)

The description of this phenomenon, made so many times and so accurately, of course, could not be just a literary device: here, undoubtedly, is a genuine fact, evidence of a real experience, extremely interesting for physiologists and psychologists. And a careful study of the poet’s scribbled and crossed out drafts (carefully preserved by Pushkin) could greatly help the understanding of this phenomenon, the understanding of the very “mechanics of inspiration” - in Pushkin’s expression.

We do not yet know how to decipher them with all scientific completeness; we are only looking for new (always interesting) options in them. The most we can do is to arrange these options in time, to establish the sequence of creation of the work. And looking at Pushkin’s draft, we not so much understand as vaguely feel in it, as in motionless, frozen lava, traces of a violent creative eruption. Reading the illegible words and lines, following consistently in the footsteps of the poet’s work, we involuntarily become infected with his excitement. Those who worked on Pushkin’s drafts (directly or from photographs) are well aware of this excitement, this special kind of pleasure - “following the thoughts of a great man ... ».

The work of a textual critic is often presented as some kind of dry pedantry, pettiness (truth, for some it takes on such a character!), but in essence this work is the farthest from pettiness and dryness: in it the researcher tries to penetrate into the workshop of a genius, to spy on his creative work.

Analyzing Pushkin's manuscript, we cannot always understand the motives for all the changes in the text, all this not only creative, but also mercilessly destructive work of the poet, who in the process of creation destroyed the most beautiful, from our point of view, places - individual words, poems and even whole large pieces . To look for these motives, to justify the changes made by the poet, considering each new version to be unconditionally better than the previous one - and to try to prove this (as researchers often do) - would be wrong and even more unconvincing since Pushkin himself very often returned to old, previously rejected options. Every time we must note the changes that a new version brings to the semantic content, composition, rhythm, sound harmony of the poem - and only in some cases can we, with all caution, guess what exactly prompted the poet to choose this one from several excellent possibilities.

Let us now return to the poem we are examining, “Everything is quiet - the darkness of the night is coming to the Caucasus” (this is how it begins in the manuscript).

Above the verses in the autograph there is a hasty inscription - the date of their writing is “May 15”. This is undoubtedly May 15, 1829.

At this time, Pushkin, who had just proposed to Natalya Nikolaevna Goncharova and received an indefinite answer from her mother - half refusal, half agreement - was making his “trip to Arzrum”. On May 15 he was in Georgievsk. E. G. Veidenbaum successfully juxtaposed the poem

Everything is quiet, the darkness of the night is falling over the Caucasus.
The stars are rising above me

with that place in “Travel to Arzrum”, where Pushkin talks about his trip from Georgievsk to Hot Waters (May 15). “Here I found a big change,” says Pushkin and describes the landscaped boulevard, clean paths, green benches, regular flower beds, etc. “I felt sorry for their former, wild state; I felt sorry for the steep stone paths, bushes and unfenced abysses over which I used to climb. I sadly left the water and went back to Georgievsk. It was soon night. The clear sky was dotted with millions of stars. I was driving along the shore of Podkumka. A.R. used to sit here with me.<аевский), прислушиваясь к мелодии вод. Величавый Бешту чернее и чернее рисовался в отдалении, окруженный горами, своими вассалами и, наконец, исчез во мраке... »

Full of these impressions, memories of his life in the Caucasus nine years ago, Pushkin on the same day writes a poem in which the same motive of memories of the former love that flared up again in him sounds (see the crossed out words of the draft: “I am young again and your ... »).

Let's try, looking at the manuscript, to restore in general terms the sequence of creation of this poem. Judging by the appearance of the autograph, the first stanza (four verses) had already been invented; it is written down in a finished form in a firm, clear hand:

“Everything is quiet - the shadow of the night has fallen on the Caucasus

The stars twinkle above me -
I feel sad and light - my sadness is light

Then Pushkin changed the first two verses: in the first, “the shadow of the night has fallen” was first replaced with the words “the darkness of the night has descended”, and then corrected - “the darkness of the night is coming”; in the second, instead of “flickering,” it says “rising.”

Here is the transcription of this stanza:

The last two verses remained unchanged, and in the same form they were included in the greatly changed printed edition.

In their contrasting construction: “I’m sad - and easy ... » « ... my sadness is bright” - Pushkin found a laconic poetic formula that gives the main lyrical theme, developed in the subsequent lines of the poem.

The second stanza (like everything else) was composed entirely during writing. In the autograph she looks completely exhausted. Here is its transcription:

[favorite] [many]

[And a lot] [in the world] [has changed]

Where are you, [familiar] creatures?
priceless
Others [and how many]

[Others] far [many] [no] -

There are no others in the world -

This stanza apparently began like this:

Many days have passed, many are gone
And a lot in the world has changed

With the word “many” repeated three times.

“Many days” were replaced by the words “long days,” but in the second verse, instead of “And much in the world has changed,” it was written “And much, much has changed.”

Then, restoring again "Many days have passed ... ”, Pushkin completely remade the rest:

I have only memories

Gone forgotten ... days of many years
etc.

Meanwhile, it is easy to see that this verse represents the missing fourth verse of the unfinished third stanza. Although Pushkin crossed it out, he apparently later returned to it and added to it. Indeed, putting it in its place, we get a completely complete quatrain:

Days passed by. Hidden away for many years.
Where are you, priceless creatures?

Some are far away, others are no longer in the world ...
I have only memories.

So, the disassembled draft gives us not scattered and unfinished “sketches of a continuation,” but traces of a great work that culminated in the creation of four completely completed and completed stanzas, of which the third has been crossed out. I'll list them in a row:

Everything is quiet. Night darkness is coming to the Caucasus.
The stars are rising above me.

I feel sad and light. My sadness is light;
My sadness is full of you.

By you, by you alone. my despondency
Nothing torments, nothing worries,

And the heart burns and loves again - that’s why
That it cannot help but love,

[Days passed by. Hidden away for many years.
Where are you, priceless creatures?

Some are far away, there are no others in the world -
I have only memories.]

I am still yours, I love you again.
And without hopes and without desires,

Like a sacrificial flame, my love is pure
And the tenderness of virgin dreams.

Can these four stanzas be considered a whole, complete poem? I think not. It was not for nothing that Pushkin crossed out the third stanza, and the transition from it to the fourth sounds somewhat forced. It may be more correct to consider these stanzas as a kind of “blank”, material for the poem. Of these, as stated above, Pushkin published the first two under the title “Excerpt”. One can make a rather probable, as it seems to me, assumption about why he did not print the ending of the poem. The groom-Pushkin, who had just won Natalya Nikolaevna’s hand, probably did not want to publish poems written at the height of his matchmaking and talking about love for some other woman (“I am yours as before, I love you again”). In the printed first two stanzas, this motif - a new return of the old feeling (“And the heart burns and loves again”) - is so unnoticeable that commentators who did not know the “continuation of the passage” (and Pushkin’s contemporaries, his acquaintances) often attributed these verses to to Goncharova herself.

It is also possible that the same considerations (fears of some specific applications) forced Pushkin to change the first two verses and move the scene of action to Georgia -

The darkness of night lies on the hills of Georgia.
Aragva makes noise in front of me ...

However, we will not insist on this - it is possible that Pushkin’s motives for these changes were purely artistic.

Carefully examining the manuscript being analyzed, you can notice new amendments on it, made later in pencil. These amendments are only three lines: two horizontal and one

vertical - indicate Pushkin’s desire to extract from the four stanzas a completely different version of the poem, more intimate, perhaps, than the printed one, and sharply different from it. These amendments - small, but radical - are as follows: Pushkin crossed out “the stars are rising” in the second verse and emphasized (i.e., restored what was previously crossed out) “the stars are twinkling.” And then - and this is the main thing - he completely crossed out the second stanza, that is, the one that he later published - “By you, by you alone ... " Thus, after this amendment, only the first and fourth stanzas remained uncrossed out (the third had been crossed out in ink even earlier, and although after that Pushkin added the last verse to it, there is no trace in the manuscript that he restored the entire stanza).

If we had not had the printed text by Pushkin himself and his two white autographs, then the only, final edition of this poem would have been the eight verses resulting from combining the first and fourth stanzas of the draft. And now these poems, without, of course, canceling the well-known printed edition, represent a new version of the famous poem given by Pushkin himself (and not at all arbitrarily arranged by the editor), a completely finished version, significantly different from the poem “On the Hills of Georgia” and, perhaps, not inferior to him in artistic terms:

Everything is quiet - the darkness of the night is falling on the Caucasus.
The stars twinkle above me.

I feel sad and light, my sadness is light.
My sadness is full of you.

I'm still yours, I love you again -
And without hopes and without desires,

On the previous sheet of the same notebook (fol. 103) Pushkin wrote down a sketch:

And I feel this soul
(nrzb.) hour
Worthy of your love
*[Why not always]*

Clean, sad and calm

It has been suggested that this sketch is a continuation of the poem “On the Hills of Georgia ... "This is very likely. So the passage should look like this:

And I feel the soul in this ( nrzb.) hour
Your love, I deserve you
Why not always
Purely sad and calm ...

V. V. Vinogradov in his book “On the Language of Fiction”<М., 1959, с. 338-339) привел это место из «Новых страниц Пушкина» для иллюстрации своего положения о том, что вопрос о текстологической ценности автографов, рукописей по сравнению с прижизненным печатным текстом у нас мало «освещен с разных сторон в широкой исторической перспективе». При этом он пишет: «Вникая в эти стихи, С. М. Бонди приходит к выводу, что Пушкин после напечатания «Отрывка» создал новую редакцию этого произведения». Это - недоразумение. Я, очевидно, неясно выразился, и В. В. Виноградов неправильно понял мои слова. Я, конечно, имел в виду, что этот новый текст создан был Пушкиным еще до напечатания стихотворения «На холмах Грузии», что он вовсе не является «последней волей автора» и, как сказано у меня, «не отменяет известной печатной редакции».

Text of the evening about A.S. Pushkin

Now it was 1863. Natalya Nikolaevna was 51 years old. And she was dying. The children gathered in the next room. Four adult children of Pushkin. And three daughters from Lansky. There was still life in her. I held on to the memories. I couldn’t let go of the thought that she hadn’t done everything yet, hadn’t figured everything out yet...

And she remembered...

Their first meeting took place in December 1828.

16-year-old Natalya had just begun to be taken out into the world. Immediately her divine beauty made a stunning impression. She was surrounded by a crowd of fans. But the fans were in no hurry to propose to the young beauty, knowing about the difficult financial situation of the Goncharovs, and the mother did not see a worthy contender for the hand of her youngest daughter.

At that Moscow ball at Yogel's, Natalya was wearing a gold hoop on her head. She amazed Pushkin with her spiritual and harmonious beauty.

Pushkin immediately forgot his previous hobbies. “For the first time in my life I was timid,” he later admitted. Finally, he turned to his old acquaintance Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy to introduce him to the Goncharovs’ house. At the end of April 1829, Pushkin, through Count Tolstoy, proposed to Natalya Nikolaevna. Natalya's mother hoped to find the best husband for her daughter. In addition, Pushkin’s financial situation and unreliability filled her with fear. Pushkin then received an indefinite answer: Natalya, they say, is still young, we must wait. This answer left hope. He wrote to his future mother-in-law: “This answer is not a refusal: You allow me to hope; and if I still grumble, if sadness and bitterness are still mixed with the feeling of happiness, do not accuse me of ingratitude. I understand the mother's caution and tenderness. But forgive the impatience of a heart that is sick and (intoxicated) with happiness. “I’m leaving now and taking away in the depths of my soul the image of a heavenly being who owes his life to you.” He was going to the Caucasus, where he had been planning for a long time, where the Russian army was fighting heavy battles with the Turkish army. The road to Tiflis has just arrived.

In the North Caucasus he writes his famous lines:

The darkness of night lies on the hills of Georgia;

Aragva makes noise in front of me.

I feel sad and light; my sadness is light;

My sadness is full of you,

By you, by you alone... My despondency

Nothing torments, nothing worries,

And the heart burns and loves again - because

That it cannot help but love.

Returning from the Caucasus to Moscow, Pushkin immediately hurried to the Goncharovs, but received a rather cold reception from them. Having heard about the political and religious views of the candidate for her daughter's hand, Natalya's deeply religious mother became convinced that Pushkin was not a good match for her beautiful daughter. At that time, Natalya really did not have any tender feelings for Pushkin. Pushkin then left for Mikhailovskoye, and then to St. Petersburg. In the poem “Let’s go, I’m ready...” he writes about his readiness to go anywhere, “running away arrogantly” - to Paris, to Italy, to China.

Tell me: will my passion die while traveling?

Will I forget the proud, tormented maiden

Or at her feet, her youthful anger,

As a usual tribute, will I bring love?

However, the government rejected his request to travel abroad (Pushkin forever remained a poet banned from traveling abroad).

And now Pushkin is back in Moscow. He again visits the Goncharovs’ house on Bolshaya Nikitskaya. This time he persistently decides to get the final answer. His fate was decided; on April 6, he made another proposal to Natalya Nikolaevna. This time it was accepted. The day before, he writes to the bride’s mother a letter rare in its frankness and insight: “Habit and long intimacy alone could help me earn the favor of your daughter; I can hope to bind her to me over a long time - but there is nothing about me that she could like. If she agrees to give me her hand, I will see in this only proof of the calm indifference of her heart. But being surrounded by admiration, worship, temptations, how long will she maintain this calm? ...Won't she regret it? Will they look at me as a nuisance, as an insidious kidnapper? Will she feel disgust towards me? God is my witness that I am ready to die for her - but to die just to leave her as a brilliant widow, free to choose a new husband for herself tomorrow - this is the thought of hell for me.” That's what Pushkin thought. However, he was wrong. It was Natalya who persuaded her mother to this marriage. It was she who tried to refute the rumors defaming Pushkin: “I learned with regret the bad opinions that are instilled in you about him,” she writes to her grandfather, “and I beg you, out of your love for me, not to believe them, because they are nothing more than like low slander. In the hope, dear grandfather, that all your doubts will disappear... and that you will agree to make my happiness...” Natalya Nikolaevna persuaded her mother not to oppose her marriage. She also began to understand that there was hardly a better groom for her daughter. She became more affectionate and finally agreed. After re-matchmaking and the consent of the bride's mother, a month later his engagement to Natalya Goncharova was officially announced. However, the wedding was still far away. Relations with the future mother-in-law remained difficult.

Leaving for Boldino, he writes to his bride: “... for a moment I believed that happiness was created for me... I assure you with my word of honor that I will belong only to you, or I will never marry.” Then in Boldino he writes the poem “Elegy”:

Crazy years of faded fun

It's hard for me, like a vague hangover.

But, like wine, the sadness of days gone by

In my soul, the older, the stronger.

My path is sad. Promises me work and grief

The troubled sea of ​​the future.

But I don’t want, O friends, to die;

I want to live so that I can think and suffer;

And I know I will have pleasures

Between sorrows, worries and worries:

Sometimes I’ll get drunk again with harmony,

I will shed tears over the fiction,

And maybe - at my sad sunset

Love will flash with a farewell smile.

The day after writing these lines, he receives a letter from Natalie, which dispelled all his fears. Natalya Nikolaevna showed determination and activity towards her mother and thanks to her great efforts the wedding took place.

This letter not only calmed Pushkin, but caused an unprecedented creative surge in him. It was in this “Boldino autumn” that he wrote “Belkin’s Stories”, “The History of the Village of Goryukhin”, “House in Kolomna”, “Little Tragedies”, the last chapters of “Eugene Onegin”, many poems, literary critical articles. But inspired work cannot keep Pushkin in Boldino. He strives to Moscow, to his bride. And only the cholera epidemic and quarantine force him to stay in the village. Only letters connect them, and in these letters there is so much love, tenderness, anxiety, dreams...

Pushkin then managed to overcome all obstacles, including financial ones. The mother did not want to give her daughter away without a dowry, which she did not have, and Alexander Sergeevich loaned her 11 thousand rubles for the dowry (for which she then called him a greedy and despicable usurer). On the eve of the wedding, Pushkin was sad. He wrote to his friend Krivtsov: “Married - or almost... My youth was noisy and fruitless. Until now I have lived differently from how people usually live. I was not happy. … I am 30 years old. ...I will marry without rapture, without childish charm. The future appears to me not in roses, but in all its nakedness. Sorrows do not surprise me: they are included in my household calculations. Every joy will be a surprise to me.”

Moscow, blizzard February 1831, Church of the Great Ascension on Nikitskaya Street. She is wearing a wedding dress with a long train; a transparent veil falls from the head, decorated with white flowers, slides over open shoulders, falls onto the back. You can feel how good she is from the admiring glances of her family and friends. And Pushkin doesn’t notice anyone except her. Natalya Nikolaevna meets her gaze with burning blue eyes and reads in them love and boundless happiness. And Natalya Nikolaevna’s heart skips a beat with happiness and some vague fear of the future. She loves Pushkin. She is proud that he, the famous poet, chose her as his life friend.

They exchange rings. Pushkin's ring falls and rolls across the carpet. He hastily bends down to pick it up, and the candle in his left hand goes out, and the cross and the Gospel fall from the lectern that he touched. Natalya Nikolaevna sees how his face becomes deathly pale. The same pallor, she thinks, as on the very last day...

Eighteen-year-old Natalya Pushkina, yesterday still Goncharova, woke up after yesterday's wedding, her eyes met the enthusiastic eyes of her husband. He was kneeling next to the bed, “obviously, he stood there all night,” she thought with exciting bewilderment and smiled at him...

Until mid-May 1831, the young people lived in Moscow. Pushkin’s unsuccessful relationship with his mother-in-law forced him not to stay here.

The Pushkins came to St. Petersburg for a short time, and then went to Tsarskoe Selo, where he rented a dacha. The beauty of Natalya Nikolaevna made a great impression on secular St. Petersburg. Pushkin’s close friend Daria Fikelmon wrote: “Pushkin came from Moscow and brought his young wife... she is a very young and beautiful person, thin, slender, tall - Madonna’s face, extremely pale, with a meek, shy and melancholy expression - greenish-brown eyes , light and transparent, - the look is not exactly sideways, but vague, delicate features, beautiful black hair. He's very much in love with her." Pushkin sometimes jokingly called his wife: “my sideways Madonna.”

The young wife cried bitterly in the first days of the honeymoon because Pushkin, having hastily kissed her, spent time talking with friends from morning to evening. Once he spent the whole night arguing about literary topics, and begging for forgiveness, said that he had completely forgotten that he was married. Only then did Natalya realize that Pushkin was not like everyone else and prepared for her difficult fate as the wife of the poet Pushkin.

The summer of 1831 was the happiest in his family life. It seemed that all the failures and troubles were a thing of the past. In Tsarskoye Selo, Pushkin wrote his fairy tales, constantly asking his wife’s opinion. She rewrote his works. She will remain the same assistant to him throughout their entire life together.

In the morning, Pushkin wrote, locked in his office. She realized that in these sacred moments he could not be disturbed. He loved to write while lying on the couch, and the covered sheets of writing would fall straight to the floor. Near the couch there was a table littered with books, papers, feathers... There were no curtains on the windows. He loved the sun and the heat, and said that he got it from his ancestors... It created silence for him. And slowly, from her husband, she composed poems for him and sent them in letters. In one of his response letters, he humorously asked his “wife” to switch to prose.

Relatives and friends also felt that this marriage was happy: “Great friendship and harmony reign between them; Tasha adores her husband, who loves her just as much,” Natalya’s brother wrote to his family. And Zhukovsky wrote to Vyazemsky: “His wife is a very sweet creation. And I really like him with her. I am more and more happy for him that he is married. And the soul, and life, and poetry benefit.”

The family life of the Pushkins was not painted only in light or dark colors. It combined all the colors. He loved his wife very much, but sometimes he envied his friends whose wives were not beautiful. Natalya was taller than Pushkin, and he jokingly said that it was “humiliating” for him to be next to his wife.

At first, Pushkin was pleased with his wife’s success in society. He only asked: “My angel, please don’t flirt.” In turn, Natalya Nikolaevna did not cease to torment him with jealous suspicions. In his letters he only fought back and made excuses. Pushkin was a poet, and in his words, he had a “pretty heart.”

In 1833, in Boldin, Pushkin grew a beard while writing the brilliant work “The Bronze Horseman”. On the way back, he didn’t even stop in Moscow so that Natasha, whom he missed, would be the first to see him with a beard. In general, he was very simple-minded in his foppishness: when he wrote “Gypsy,” he wore a red shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, and came from Crimea wearing a skullcap.

He was like a child, but he was a king of spirit. One day he wandered in without prior agreement to one of his friends, didn’t find them, and was left waiting. When they arrived, they found Pushkin in the company of their little son. The king of the spirit and the little one sat on the floor and spat at each other to see who was more accurate. And at the same time they both laughed.

But if it occurred to someone to pat him on the shoulder in a friendly manner, then a challenge to a duel could follow.

Pushkin often read his poems to his wife. He sat on a chair, crossed his legs, and his movement and this pose were aristocratically refined, not deliberate. This was given to him from birth. He read with enthusiasm and loudly. Blue eyes sparkled with a soulful brilliance, seeing something that no one had ever seen.

Pushkin more than once gave 25 rubles to a beggar when there was money in the house. Natalya Nikolaevna was silent. But when he gave away literary plots (and Gogol himself recalled that the plot of “The Inspector General” and “Dead Souls” belonged to Pushkin), she was worried and reproached her husband. “Oh, my cheapskate! - Pushkin once said contentedly, hugging her, - Yes, I have here, - he touched his head with well-groomed hands, - there are a great many of these stories. Enough for my share!”

She rarely called him by his pet name. He was Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich or simply Pushkin. Since her unmarried youth, she had always felt his superiority over the people around her. She knew all his letters by heart. They were like works of art, and she bequeathed them for posterity. Studying these letters, only from them alone can one restore the image of the one whose soul Pushkin loved more than her beautiful face, and remove the accusations of high society and unkind descendants from her... Just take it and believe Pushkin...

Pushkin wrote a letter to his mother-in-law on Angel’s Day: “My wife is lovely, and the longer I live with her, the more I love this sweet, pure, kind creature, whom I have done nothing to deserve before God.”

As a child, Natasha was called “modest” and “silent.” She was silent even in her youth. When she got married and appeared in high society at the dawn of her amazing beauty and charm, she did not lose this property. Her silence was assessed differently: some considered it a lack of intelligence, others thought it was out of pride.

Natalie herself later explains herself this way: “... sometimes such melancholy overcomes me that I feel the need for prayer... Then I again find peace of mind, which was previously mistaken for coldness and I was reproached for it. What can you do? The heart has its own modesty. Allowing one to read one's feelings seems profanation to me. Only God and a chosen few have the key to my heart.”

A well-known fortune teller at that time, Kutuzov’s granddaughter, Daria Fedorovna Fikelmon, very correctly predicted the fate of Natalya Nikolaevna: “The poetic beauty of Mrs. Pushkina penetrates to the very heart. There is something airy and touching in her whole appearance - this woman will not be happy, I am sure of that! Now everyone is smiling at her, she is completely happy, life is opening up before her, brilliant and joyful, and yet her head is bowed and her whole appearance seems to say: “I am suffering.” But what a difficult fate she faces - to be the wife of a poet, a poet like Pushkin.”

Pushkin's fate was also predicted for him in his youth by a fortune teller. And he believed in this prediction. She told fortunes on cards, and then looked at his hand with completely unusual lines, thought about something for a long time, and then said: “You will become famous throughout the fatherland. You will be loved by the people even after death. Forced loneliness awaits you twice, it seems like imprisonment, but not a prison. And you will live a long time if in the 37th year you do not die from a white horse or from the hand of a white man. You should be especially wary of them. So far, everything that the fortune teller predicted has come true.

When the Pushkins returned to St. Petersburg in October 1831, Natalya Nikolaevna became the decoration of social balls. Around this time, an event occurred that quarreled him with the all-powerful Mrs. Nesselrode, the wife of the Russian Foreign Minister. Countess Nesselrode, without Pushkin’s knowledge, took his wife and took him to the Anichkovsky evening, because... The Empress really liked Pushkin. But Pushkin himself was enraged by this, spoke rudely to the countess and, among other things, said: “I don’t want my wife to go where I don’t go.” We were talking about intimate balls in the imperial palace. Such an invitation to a wife without a husband was insulting to Pushkin.

The writer Vladimir Sallogub wrote: “I fell madly in love with her the first time; I must say that at that time there was almost not a single young man in St. Petersburg who did not secretly sigh for Pushkina; her radiant beauty next to this magical name turned everyone’s heads.”

Natalya Nikolaevna continued to shine in the world until the most tragic days of January 1837. As the Empress's maid of honor, she could attend two balls every day. I often had dinner at eight o’clock in the evening and returned home at 4-5 o’clock in the morning. At first, Pushkin did not object to such a life. He was proud that his wife had conquered secular Petersburg. But soon the social entertainments and balls to which he had to accompany his wife began to irritate him. ...The first child is born - a girl, Maria. Natalya Nikolaevna will never forget how Pushkin cried during her birth, seeing her suffering. In six years of marriage - four children.

The winter balls of 1834 cost Pushkin his unborn child.

This year of 1834 was difficult for Pushkin. Against his will, he became a chamber cadet. “The court wanted Natalya Nikolaevna to dance in Anichkovo,” he explained the reason for the royal favor. This year was difficult for him financially as well; he had to take out a loan from the government. The police opened one of his letters to his wife, and for an unflattering review of his chamber cadet he received a reprimand from the emperor. His attempts to resign ended in failure. Pushkin shares his sad thoughts with his wife in a letter: “Okay, if I live another 25 years; and if I turn up before ten, I don’t know what you will do, and what Mashka, and especially Sashka, will say. There will be little consolation for them in the fact that their daddy was buried like a buffoon, and that their mother was so terribly sweet at the Anichkov balls.”

In the same year, 1834, Pushkin wrote a poem:

It's time, my friend, it's time! the heart asks for peace, -

Days fly by, and every hour carries away

A piece of existence, and you and I together

We assume to live, and lo and behold, we’ll just die.

There is no happiness in the world, but there is peace and will.

I have long dreamed of an enviable share -

Long ago, a tired slave, I planned to escape

To the distant monastery of labors and pure bliss.

Pushkin valued freedom as an internal element he needed to breathe. Once, in his youth, he wrote: “I am tired of submitting to the good or bad digestion of this or that boss; I’m tired of seeing that in my homeland I’m treated less respectfully than any English dunce who comes to show us his vulgarity, his incomprehensibility, his muttering.”

Pushkin came to the Goncharovs' estate at the Linen Factory and lived here with his family for two weeks, walked, rode horseback, and studied in the Goncharovs' magnificent library.

Leaving the Linen Factory, Natalya Nikolaevna begged her husband to take his older sisters with him to the capital. Pushkin was dissatisfied with this, but, loving her, he gave in to her requests.

Pushkin has a prophetic letter on this matter:

“But do you take both sisters to you? hey wifey! look... My opinion: the family should be one under one roof: husband, wife, children - still small; parents when they are already elderly. Otherwise there will be trouble and there will be no family peace.”

But Natalya Nikolaevna felt very sorry for the sisters. She wanted to introduce them to St. Petersburg social life, and, to be honest, get them married... The sisters received a good comprehensive education and were good riders. Even before Natalya Nikolaevna’s marriage, all three sisters were ardent admirers of Pushkin’s talent. They read his poems, copied them into albums, and quoted them. They were very friendly.

What could he do? Pushkin just rented a more spacious apartment for his expanded family.

In the world they were paid attention only to the sisters of the beautiful Mrs. Pushkina. They succeeded in enlisting Sister Catherine as a lady-in-waiting of the Empress.

Managing the house was difficult. Four children, sisters. Constant shortages of money tormented us and debts oppressed us. In addition to housekeeping and maternal responsibilities, Natalya had to attend balls, receptions, and accompany the empress during her trips. But she coped with everything.

Pushkin wrote: “It seems to me that you are fighting at home without me... Oh, wow, woman! what’s good is good!” And another letter: “...I’m not going to you on business, because I’m printing Pugachev, and I’m mortgaging estates, and I’m busy and busy - but your letter upset me, and at the same time made me happy; if you cried without receiving a letter from me, it means that you still love me, wife. For that I kiss your hands and feet.”

She also remembered this letter by heart: “Thank you for your sweet and very sweet letter. Of course, my friend, there is no consolation in my life except you - and living with you apart is as stupid as it is difficult.”

She often helped her husband. In 1836, leaving for Moscow, he even entrusted his wife with managing many of the affairs of his Sovremennik magazine.” She got paper for him, ran other errands, and was successful in everything.

On Kamenny Island, where she came with her older sister Ekaterina (who would later become the wife of Dantes, her husband’s killer), an orchestra was playing in the park. Here, at the end of the park, Natalya Nikolaevna takes medicinal baths every other day. Women leave the park, and a noisy crowd of young cavalry guards surrounds them. They spout funny, but not very smart, one-liners and jokes. One of them, Dantes, is a handsome man with a bold look in his bright eyes, blond hair and the arrogant manners of a man aware of his irresistibility. He says to Natalya Nikolaevna, showing off, deliberately emphasizing his excitement and amazement:

I never thought that such unearthly creatures existed on earth! Rumors about your beauty are spreading throughout St. Petersburg. I'm happy that I saw you. - Crossing his arms over his chest, he bows low. - But, alas, blame yourself, I won’t be able to forget you now. From now on I will be next to you at balls, evenings, at the theater... Alas, this is my lot.

Without answering anything, Natalya Nikolaevna, in annoyance, walks straight towards the cavalry guards, and they make way for her, and her sister hurries after her with a slight flirtatious smile.

This incident is immediately forgotten - she is already tired of daily compliments. Sometimes she wants to become invisible.

But soon, at the Karamzins’ ball, he no longer leaves her side, does not take his loving gaze off her.

Baron Dantes appeared in the world recently. He came to Russia in 1833 with the goal of making a career. In France he failed. He brought with him to Russia a recommendation from Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, brother-in-law of Tsar Nicholas 1, and despite the fact that he did not know the Russian language at all, he was immediately accepted as a cornet into the cavalry regiment. Dantes was handsome, quite smart and cunning, knew how to please, especially women, and in St. Petersburg secular society he soon became one of the most fashionable young people.

And so, day after day, month after month, he follows Natalya Nikolaevna everywhere, writes desperate letters to her, whispers hot words during dances at balls, lies in wait everywhere... In front of the eyes of the whole world, he demonstrated that he had lost his head from love, and the world I watched with curiosity and slander what would happen next.

At first, Natalya Nikolaevna is intrigued by Dantes' courtship, then irritated. Then she begins to be surprised at his constancy and feel sorry for him. And then... then she becomes necessary for her at balls, on visits, on walks. She tells Alexander Sergeevich everything, without hiding anything and without feeling guilty before her husband.

I have more fun when he’s around me,” she laughs. - But I love only you. And you know the strength of my feelings and duty to you, to the children and to myself.

Pushkin, reluctantly, tolerates this constant presence of Dantes near his wife. Dantes often visits them as a friend. Pushkin expects that the frivolous young man will get tired of fruitless sighs and fall in love with another woman. But a year passed, a second began - everything remained the same.

The atmosphere thickened. The ring of intrigue tightened around Pushkin and his wife, who, due to her youth, did not understand much. I didn’t understand... I didn’t understand...

But Pushkin’s good friend Maria Volkonskaya at her age, without hesitation, went to Siberia for her Decembrist husband...

The year 1836 was ending. The Pushkins experienced great financial difficulties...

Pushkin's need reached the point that he pawned his wife's shawls to moneylenders, owed money to a small shop, borrowed from house porters, while the tsar forcibly kept him at court in the form of a special decoration (as jesters were kept in the old days).

On the eve of the duel, one person observes Pushkin at the book stall, sees his bald spot and a dangling button on the strap of his shabby frock coat, and he feels sorry for the poet. The painter Bryullov, nicknamed “The European,” condescendingly pities Pushkin, who has never visited Europe, and also for the fact that he divorced so many children and was so mired.

On November 4, 1836, Pushkin received a letter by mail - “Diploma of the Most Serene Order of Cuckolds”; the letter hinted at Natalya Nikolaevna’s connection with Tsar Nicholas I. Nicholas’s interest in his wife is visible to everyone. It turns out that he, knowing about his wife’s connection with the emperor, does not hesitate to enjoy various benefits from him... And he quickly sat down at the table and wrote about his desire to immediately return the money he owed to the treasury. “What about Natasha? It’s not her fault that she’s young and beautiful, which everyone, including scoundrels, likes...”

Around the hunted Pushkin, everyone was having fun, laughing, joking, spying, winking, whispering, and being mean. “Well, have fun...” This had to be ended somehow at once. Did Pushkin seek death? Yes and no. “I don’t want to live,” he told his second Danzas.

But he was also full of creative plans. Work on “Peter the Great” was in full swing. Plans for novels, stories, new issues of Sovremennik. A new Pushkin was born in him, whom we do not know and, alas, will never know.

In 1835, Nadezhda Osipovna became seriously ill, and Pushkin looked after his mother with such tenderness and care that everyone was amazed, knowing their very reserved relationship. A filial feeling, unknown to that time, suddenly awakened in him. And the mother, dying, asked her son for forgiveness for that. that all my life I couldn’t appreciate him. She died. Pushkin buried her in Mikhailovskoye, near the church. He bought a place for himself next to her.

Saying goodbye to his sister Olga for the last time, he burst into tears, saying:

“We’ll hardly see you again in this world; but by the way, I’m tired of life; You won’t believe how tired I am! Melancholy, melancholy! everything is the same, I don’t want to write anymore, I can’t put my hands to anything, but... I feel: I won’t be staggering on earth for long.”

And I read my life with disgust,

And I shed tears...

But I don’t wash away the sad lines.

In 1831 - a terrible loss for Pushkin - Delvig left.

And it seems like it’s my turn,

My dear Delvig is calling me,

A living comrade of youth,

Comrade of sad youth,

Companion of young songs,

Feasts and pure thoughts,

There, to the land of shadows of relatives

A genius that has escaped us forever...

They said that Pushkin broke down, tears came, and he could not finish reading. In 16 days the duel story will begin, and after 102 days Pushkin will die.

Every year, every year

I'm used to accompanying thoughts,

Coming death anniversary

Trying to guess between them.

And a little earlier, he created the requiem itself - “Monument” - solemnly majestic and seemingly unearthly sounds, rolling towards us from an incredible height, from the unattainable peaks of eternity.

No, all of me will not die -

Soul in the treasured lyre

My ashes will survive

And decay will flee...

The clouds were gathering over Pushkin...

He challenges Dantes to a duel. Here a comedy with a wedding played out: Dantes proposed to Natalya Nikolaevna’s sister Ekaterina Nikolaevna (she is madly in love with Dantes), and lives right there in the Pushkin’s house.

There is now a pre-wedding bustle in their house, Pushkin tries not to be at home. The wedding took place. Natalya Nikolaevna was at the wedding, but the Pushkins were not at the wedding dinner.

After the wedding, Dantes resumed his courtship of Natalya Nikolaevna, he became bolder and, as a relative, began to pursue her with new assertiveness, saying that he married out of despair and in order to be able to see her more often. “Pathetic, pitiful fate of Catherine,” Natalya Nikolaevna thinks now in her declining days.

Now that so many years have passed, it’s too late to say that we should have left everything and gone to the village. This is what Pushkin wanted, and she did not object. But circumstances, as if on purpose, always turned out differently: Mikhailovskoye was being sold; Boldino was in a deplorable state, and there was no money for repairs.

For Poletika, life is a game; she has no difficulties. And she arranges a meeting at her apartment for Natalya Nikolaevna and Dantes for explanations. Natalya does not agree. Then Idalia simply invites her to her place. Natalya arrives and, instead of Poletika, meets Dantes in the living room. Georges at her feet. He wrings his hands and talks about unhappy love. Natalya is shocked: he is the husband of her sister... she is Pushkin’s wife and mother of four children. When will this madman calm down? She calls the hostess and hastily says goodbye: she sees him for the last time. So he will remain in her memory, confused with his trembling hand gracefully outstretched. And at the door is the beautiful Idalia with the sly smile of a predator.

She often wondered if Dantes loved her. At first there was passion, and then some kind of intrigue between him and Baron Heeckeren, incomprehensible to her understanding, and maybe it was necessary to take it higher. All this was directed against Pushkin, Pushkin knew everything and took the secret to his grave.

Here is what one Pushkin scholar subsequently wrote about her: “She was too noticeable, both as the wife of a brilliant poet, and as one of the most beautiful women. The slightest mistake or wrong step was invariably noticed, and admiration was replaced by envious condemnation, harsh and unfair.”

And Pushkin complained to his friend Osipova: “In this sad situation, I still see with grief that my poor Natalya has become a target for the hatred of the world.” Many reproached Natalya Nikolaevna for ruining her husband with her outfits, meanwhile these gossips and gossips knew very well that the ballgown for her was bought for her by her aunt E.I., who loved her and patronized her. Zagryazhskaya. All this worried Pushkin very much. But all the rumors and gossip were nothing compared to the avalanche of abomination that fell on the Pushkin family during Dantes’s brazen courtship. Needless to say, with what pleasure the world discussed this topic. Everyone watched more than once how the silent, pale and threatening Pushkin looked at the cavalry guard who was complimenting his wife.

At one ball, Dantes compromised Mrs. Pushkin so much with his views and hints that everyone was horrified, and Pushkin’s decision (about the duel) has since been made finally. The cup overflowed; there was no way to stop the misfortune.”

Some people write about his wife with poorly concealed disdain.

But we will spare the poet’s intimate feelings if we do not know how to bow to them. Pushkin loved his wife. That says it all. He loved generously, jealously, royally. Natalya Nikolaevna’s beauty also contained some kind of royal mystery that attracted the eyes and hearts of the St. Petersburg society. Nicholas I himself sighed for Natalie, but understood well whose wife she was. He, perhaps, would have sent a duel challenge to Nikolai if he had dared to offend his honor.

The poet’s sister recalled: “My brother confessed to me that during every ball he becomes a martyr, and then spends sleepless nights from the oppressive thoughts that oppress him.” “Having witnessed the brilliant successes of Natalya Nikolaevna at the evenings of great society, seeing her surrounded by a crowd of high-society gentlemen of all kinds lavishing compliments on her, (he) walked around the ballrooms, from corner to corner, stepping on ladies’ dresses, men’s feet, and did other things similar awkwardness; he was thrown into heat and cold. (Pushkin was watched by his ill-wishers, although he hid this unworthy feeling, jealousy caught their eye, thus they discovered a weak string, a weak point of defense.

The poet breaks out of this oppressive atmosphere and asks to go abroad, even to China. They refuse him. Moreover, Benckendorff rudely reprimands even for a short absence to Moscow. They do not stand on ceremony with the poet, they treat him like a serf of His Imperial Majesty.

“Now they look at me as a slave with whom they can do as they please. Disgrace is lighter than contempt! I, like Lomonosov, do not want to be a buffoon below the Lord God.”

Natalya Nikolaevna closes her eyes, and the face of Tsar Nicholas I appears in her memory. It is very changeable. When he is talking with someone or silently surveying his subjects, his right hand casually clasped behind a wide belt and fingering the buttons of his uniform with his left, his somewhat bulging eyes look without any expression, his face is not inspired by either thought or feeling; it is dead and, despite its regular features, is unpleasant and closed. When he talks to Natalya Nikolaevna, his face shines with friendliness. His movements represent nobility, power, strength. He is tall and has a good figure.

A century after the death of Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva branded Tsar Nicholas I for the death of her beloved poet.

So majestic

In gold barm.

Pushkin glory

Manuscript - cut.

Polish region

Brutal butcher.

Take a closer look!

Don't forget:

Singerkiller

Tsar Nicholas

Pushkin had heart disease; surgery should have been done. He begged for mercy to be allowed to go abroad. He was refused, leaving him to be treated by V. Vsevolodov - “very skilled in veterinary medicine and known in the scientific world for his book on the treatment of horses,” notes Pushkin. Get treatment for an aneurysm at the vet!

He dreams of salvation, now of the smallest thing: to run away to the village and write poetry. Get away from “swine Petersburg” at all costs.

But that was not the case. And this little thing is denied him. A feeling of imminent personal catastrophe is brewing within him.

Pushkin has recently had many personal attacks and libels against influential people. One of them created the hidden cause of the hostile action that led the poet to the final disaster. This is the famous poem “For the recovery of Lucullus,” very bright, strong in form, but in meaning it represented only gross personal slander about the then Minister of Public Education Uvarov, who was also in charge of the censorship department. Haunted by the government and critics (Bulgarin ominously croaked about him as “a luminary that went out at noon,” and Belinsky echoed him), the poet becomes painfully vulnerable. In the year before his death in 1836, he sent three challenges to a duel for completely insignificant reasons. All the more pleasure did his enemies take in teasing him and fanning the “slightly hidden fire.”

And here, just in time, is the story of Dantes and Natalya Nikolaevna. The noble pack perked up; the spectacle promised to be exciting. Now there was something for everyone to do: pimp, intrigue, slander, spread gossip, make fun of this “mad jealous” husband, who is really so funny in his impotent rage. And he could be even more funny in the role of a cuckold.

“Pushkin’s wife, completely innocent, had the imprudence to inform her husband about everything and only infuriated him,” their friends recall.

Natalya Nikolaevna extinguished the pachytoska in a crystal ashtray... She recently started smoking... And again the memories...

Pushkin did not tell anyone about the upcoming fight. At 11 o'clock he had a quiet dinner with his family. Then he left the house for a short time to meet with his second K.K. Danzas. Danzas went to get pistols, and Pushkin returned to his place. At about 12 noon, librarian F.F. came to the apartment on the Moika. Tsvetaev. He spoke with the poet about a new edition of his works.

Now we will visit this apartment.

Before us is the sixth St. Petersburg apartment of the Pushkins. They are used to wandering. That fall, Pushkin worked a lot and made plans. I was finishing “The Captain’s Daughter”, 31 notebooks of “The History of Peter” were lying in the office... Many works had begun... The poet was at the pinnacle of fame, in the prime of his creative genius. He had already written “Poltava”, “Boris Godunov”, “Eugene Onegin”, conceived new works, and began historical research. Everything seemed to be ahead...

Pushkin's office is the most important room in the apartment. The chair was comfortable for work - with a book stand and a pull-out footstool. Pushkin liked to work reclining, with his hands behind his head out of youthful habit, then sit down and write. And the written sheets fell to the floor...

Pushkin considered books to be his real friends.

A man of average height, with fiery eyes on a yellowish, nervous face, he was well known in the famous bookstores of St. Petersburg and in simpler shops.

It immediately catches your eye: Pushkin was a highly educated man. The books in the library are published in 16 languages! Excellent knowledge of many languages ​​gave him the opportunity to read the best works of world literature in original. The shelves are crowded with chronicles, dictionaries, textbooks, memoirs, philosophical and medical works, works of historians, ethnographers, and economists. The great poet was interested in astronomy, travel, songs and customs of many peoples, the theory of chess, and the origin of words. Pushkin was a man of the most versatile knowledge and enormous erudition, as his contemporaries claimed. Belinsky called Pushkin a “world-encompassing genius.”

That day, the gray, gray St. Petersburg morning, with wind and sleet, a gray, threatening sky hanging over the darkened houses, gave way to a clear, cold day. Natalya Nikolaevna went to pick up the older children who were with Princess Meshcherskaya, a close friend of the Pushkins. Usually, Natalya Nikolaevna’s prophetic heart did not sense trouble that day. She also did not notice how, having turned slightly to the side, her sleigh was missed by the oncoming ones, in which Pushkin and Dantes were riding, going to shoot at the Black River...

The family gathered for dinner, late in the capital. The clock struck six times and candles were brought into the room. In winter it is completely dark by six.

Alexander Sergeevich was expected for dinner, but he was late. The table had already been set for a long time. From the nursery came the soft hits of the ball, the roar of falling toys, the voice of the nanny, in a word, the usual evening bustle of a large family waiting for the head of this family to come home... Natalya Nikolaevna’s sister Alexandra, who also lived with them, recalled with a laugh how Natalya Nikolaevna was at the ball yesterday at Countess Razumovskaya's, she beat a self-confident foreigner, a master of chess, at chess. When he lost, Countess Razumovskaya, laughing, said to the guest: “This is what our Russian women are like!” And again the prophetic heart fell silent... Yesterday at the ball it was fun. Pushkin danced several times. This surprised Natalya Nikolaevna and made her happy. Lately he had not danced at balls and was gloomy... He always behaved at balls as if he was serving a duty, as if he was completely out of his league. In a large company of close friends, there was no one more fun, witty, or interesting than him.

But attendance at the balls was mandatory.

Only after a long time did she find out that, while engaged in business conversations and dancing with the ladies, he was also secretly looking for a second for tomorrow's duel...

Natalya Nikolaevna, tired at the ball, was fast asleep and did not hear how Dantes’ second D’Archiac came to Pushkin at night and handed over a challenge to a duel. Pushkin accepted the challenge.

An hour before going to shoot, Pushkin wrote a letter, the tone of the letter was calm, the handwriting was clear, fluid and precise as always.

In the confectionery shop of Wolf and Béranger, the poet was last seen healthy and unharmed... Here he met his second, his lyceum friend Danzas, and the sleigh took them along Nevsky Prospect, Palace Square, across the Neva and further to the Black River.

Pushkin chose Konstantin Danzas as his second. If Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, Ivan Pushchin and Ivan Malinovsky - Pushkin’s closest and dearest lyceum friends - were in St. Petersburg, perhaps he would have chosen one of them. But then the duel might not have taken place. The Decembrist Pushchin wrote to Malinovsky from his prison cell: “... if I were in Danzas’ place, the fatal bullet would have met my chest, I would have found a way to save my poet-comrade, the heritage of Russia.”

But it was Danzas who found himself with Pushkin in his terrible hour...

When they were going to the duel, on Palace Embankment they met Mrs. Pushkina in the carriage. Danzas recognized her, hope flashed in him, this meeting could fix everything. But Pushkin's wife was nearsighted, and Pushkin looked in the other direction.

The day was clear. St. Petersburg high society went on a roller coaster ride, and at that time some were already returning from there. Acquaintances bowed to Pushkin and Danzas and no one seemed to guess where they were going. Prince Golitsyn shouted to them, “Why are you leaving so late, everyone is leaving already?!”

Both opponents arrived almost simultaneously. Pushkin got out of the sleigh. The snow was knee-deep. He lay down on the snow and began to whistle. Dantes deftly helped the seconds trample down the path.

The participants in the duel, seconds Danzas and d’Archiac (Dantès’s second), recall:

“We arrived at the meeting place at half past four. A very strong wind was blowing, which forced us to seek shelter in a small pine grove.”

“The frost was 15 degrees. Wrapped in a bear fur coat, Pushkin was silent, apparently as calm as he had been during the journey, but he expressed strong impatience to get down to business as soon as possible...

Having measured their steps, Danzas and d'Archiac marked the barrier with their greatcoats and began to load their pistols. It was all over. The opponents were stationed, pistols were given to them, and at the signal given by Danzas, waving his hat, they began to converge.

Pushkin was a real athlete: he jumped, took ice baths, and shot well. He carried an iron cane and trained his hand so that it wouldn’t shake when shooting. He had every chance to kill Dantes. Fate decreed otherwise.

But it was Pushkin who set the bloodiest conditions for the duel. They shot from ten paces; it was difficult for even a wounded man to miss. In case of such a mistake on both sides, the fight was resumed. Pushkin was an excellent shooter, he trained his hand all the time and could have shot without missing even before approaching the barrier, but he never shot first and, having quickly walked his ten steps, stopped, waiting for Dantes’ shot.

Dantes, before reaching the barrier, shot first. Mortally wounded, Pushkin fell.

I think my hip is shattered.

He fell onto his greatcoat, which served as a barrier, and remained motionless, face to the ground.

When Pushkin fell, his pistol fell into the snow, and therefore Danzas gave him another. Having risen a little and leaning on his left hand, Pushkin fired.

Dantes fell, but only a severe concussion knocked him down; the bullet pierced the fleshy parts of his right arm, with which he covered his chest and, being weakened, hit a button... this button saved Dantes. Pushkin, seeing him falling, threw his pistol up and shouted “Bravo!” Meanwhile, blood poured from the wound.

When Pushkin found out that he had not killed Dantes, he said: “If we get better, we’ll start again.”

Pushkin was wounded in the right side of the abdomen; the bullet, shattering the bone of the upper leg at the junction with the groin, entered deeply into the abdomen and stopped there.

Pushkin lost consciousness and, lying in the snow, was bleeding.

There was no doctor at the scene of the duel. Danzas did not care about this. It was impossible to carry a seriously wounded person in a sleigh. And Danzas was forced to use Dantes’ carriage. She slowly drove the poet back along the same road...

So dinner was getting cold...

Natalya Nikolaevna went to the window and, recognizing Dantes’s carriage stopping near their house, exclaimed indignantly: “How dare he come here again?!”

The door opened without warning, and Konstantin Karlovich Danzas, who appeared in its opening, wearing his outerwear unbuttoned, said in an excited voice:

Natalya Nikolaevna! Don't worry. Everything will be fine. Alexander Sergeevich is slightly wounded...

She rushes into the hallway, her legs can’t support her. He leans against the wall and through the veil of fading consciousness sees how the valet Nikita carries Pushkin into the office, hugging him to himself like a child. And the open, sliding fur coat drags along the floor. “It’s hard for you to carry me,” Pushkin says in a weak voice...

Be calm. You are not guilty of anything. “Everything will be fine,” he tells her with just his lips and tries to smile.

She was then told that he was wounded in the leg. He suddenly shouted in a firm and strong voice so that his wife should not enter the office where they had put him. The extraordinary presence of mind did not leave the patient. Only from time to time he complained of pain in his stomach, and forgot himself for a short time.

One after another, friends began to come to Pushkin. They did not leave his house until his death and only left for a short time.

The usual appearance of the apartment has changed. In the living room, near the door leading to the office where Pushkin lay, they placed a couch for Natalya Nikolaevna. Pushkin spared his wife and asked her not to come to him - at first the truth about his mortal wound was hidden from her. Natalya Nikolaevna remained in the living room to hear what was happening in the office and wait for him to call her. It took a long time to find doctors. After examining the wound, the royal doctor Arendt told the patient: there was no hope for recovery. For two days the wounded man lay with the feeling of being sentenced to death. He endured the excruciating pain with extraordinary firmness. He rubbed ice on his temples and applied poultices to his stomach. Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, and Dal were constantly next to him. Relatives came to say goodbye.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal is a close friend of Pushkin, a doctor, and the author of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language.

Dahl was hopelessly with the dying poet. Pushkin always loved him. In the last hours I said “you” to him for the first time. “I answered him the same and fraternized with him not for this world,” he later said bitterly. Pushkin spent his last night alone with Dahl. Zhukovsky, Vilyegorsky and Vyazemsky were resting in the next room. The doctors left, trusting Dahl's healing experience. Dahl gave Pushkin cold water from a spoon, held a bowl of ice, and Pushkin himself rubbed his temples with ice, saying: “That’s wonderful!”

Not just anyone, but his, Dal’s, hand was held by Pushkin in his cold hand; not just anyone’s, but his, Dal’s, he called, while dying, brother. Not just anyone, but Dahl was with him in his last dreams: “Well, lift me up, let’s go, higher, higher! ... I dreamed that I was climbing with you up these books and shelves, high, and my head started spinning. - And again Pushkin weakly squeezed Dahl’s hand with his now completely cold fingers. “Let’s go, please, together!”

Natalya Nikolaevna did not know that these days people crowded not only in the hallway, but also in the yard, near the house and on the street. I didn’t know that St. Petersburgers hired cab drivers, giving them the address: “To Pushkin!” And Zhukovsky hung a bulletin on the health status of Alexander Sergeevich on the doors.

Natalya Nikolaevna cried for the first time when they brought the children, frightenedly huddling together, not understanding what happened to their father, mother, why there were so many people, what was happening around.

After all, Mashenka, like two peas in a pod and with curly hair and blue eyes, is only four, Sashenka, Pushkin’s blond favorite, is only three: thick-cheeked, curly-haired Grishenka is not even two yet, and eight-month-old Tasha, white and like an angel, holding Alexandra, Natalya Nikolaevna’s sister, in her arms.

Dying, he asked for a list of debts and signed them. He asked Danzas to burn some paper in front of him. He took the rings from the box given to him and distributed them to his friends. Danzas - with turquoise, the one that his best friend Nashchokin once gave him, gave it with meaning (It was charmed from violent death); Zhukovsky - a ring with carnelian...

She did not know that in the evening he became worse. As the night continued, Pushkin's suffering intensified to such an extent that he decided to shoot himself. Calling the man, he ordered one of the desk drawers to be given to him; the man carried out his will, but, remembering that there were pistols in this box, he warned Danzas. Danzas approached Pushkin and took the pistols from him, which he had already hidden under the blanket; giving them to Danzas, Pushkin admitted that he wanted to shoot himself because his suffering was unbearable...

He did not want his wife to see his suffering, which he overcame with amazing courage, and when she entered, he asked to take her away. At two o'clock in the afternoon on January 29, Pushkin had three-quarters of an hour left to live. He opened his eyes and asked for pickled cloudberries. He asked to call his wife so that she could feed him. Natalya Nikolaevna knelt down at the head of her deathbed, brought him a spoon, then another, and pressed her face to the brow of her departing husband. Pushkin stroked her head and said:

Well, well, nothing, thank God, everything is fine.

Then there were nights and days, but she didn’t know when.

Sometimes, when I regained consciousness, I saw the changing faces of Pushkin’s friends bending over the bed.

She also did not realize her insane cry “Pushkin! You will live!” But I remembered his face - majestic, calm and beautiful, such as she had not known in his previous life.

Friends and neighbors were silent, arms folded, surrounding the head of the departing man. At his request, he was raised higher on the pillows. He suddenly, as if waking up, quickly opened his eyes, his face cleared up and he said:

Life is over. It’s hard to breathe, it’s oppressive.

These were his last words.

Another weak, barely noticeable sigh - an immense, immeasurable abyss separated the living from the dead. He died so quietly that those present did not notice his death.

On Pushkin's desk there is an inkwell with a figurine of a little black man leaning on an anchor - a New Year's gift from Nashchokin's friend. Little Arab is an allusion to Hannibal, a native of Abyssinia, who was brought as a gift to Peter the Great. Most of all, Pushkin valued independence and dignity in dealing with kings in his great-grandfather.

He has grown diligent, incorruptible,

The king is a breastfeeder, not a slave.

This clock stopped at the moment of the poet's death at 14:45. Both arrows form one horizontal line, dividing the circle in half, as if drawing a line...

They say that when his comrade and second Danzas, wanting to find out in what feelings he was dying for Dantes, asked him if he would entrust him with something in the event of death regarding Dantes, he answered: “I demand that you not avenge my death: I forgive him and want to die a Christian.”

Describing the first minutes after death, Zhukovsky writes: “When everyone left, I sat down in front of him and looked into his face for a long time. Never on this face have I seen anything similar to what was on him in that first minute of death... What was expressed on his face, I cannot say in words. It was so new to me and at the same time so familiar. It was neither sleep nor peace; there was no expression of mind so previously characteristic of this face; there was also no poetic expression. No! some important, amazing thought developed on it, something like a vision, some kind of complete, deeply satisfying knowledge. Peering at him, I kept wanting to ask: what do you see, friend?”

Now I stand like a sculptor

In his great workshop.

Before me - like giants,

Unfinished dreams!

Like marble, they wait for one

For a life of creative streak...

Sorry, lush dreams!

I couldn’t realize you!..

Oh, I'm dying like a god

In the midst of the beginning of the universe!

45 minutes after Pushkin’s death, gendarmes came to the house on the Moika with a search. They looked through and numbered his manuscripts in red ink, and sealed all the papers.

During the search, Zhukovsky managed to hide Pushkin’s letters given to him by Natalya Nikolaevna. Pushkin's body was taken out and secretly taken to the Konyushennaya Church.

And a few days later, lists of M.Yu. Lermontov’s poem “The Death of a Poet” were distributed throughout St. Petersburg.

The Poet is dead! - slave of honor -

Fell, slandered by rumors...

The wondrous genius has faded away like a torch,

The ceremonial wreath has faded.

The funeral service took place on February 1. The small church could barely accommodate relatives, friends, and comrades from the Lyceum. Huge crowds of people gathered in the square and nearby streets to say goodbye to Pushkin. Contemporaries recalled that St. Petersburg had not seen such an incredible crowd of people since the Decembrist uprising. There was no one from high circles...

On the night of February 3, the box with the coffin, wrapped in dark matting, was placed on a simple sleigh. Pushkin’s old uncle, Nikita Timofeevich Kozlov, perched in them.

The coffin was accompanied by two wagons: Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev was traveling in one, and the gendarmerie officer Rakeev was in the other.

The ashes of the great poet were secretly taken out of the capital... It was bitterly cold. The moon was shining. Snow dust flew into Nikita Timofeevich's eyes and melted into tears - the old man leaned his head against the coffin, and froze to the very spot... The coffin was upholstered in red velvet. Turgenev later told Natalya Nikolaevna that Nikita did not eat, did not drink, did not leave his master’s coffin...

The Svyatogorsk Monastery is the final resting place of the poet, who tragically died in January 1837, and is the Hannibal-Pushkin family cemetery. Here lie the ashes of his grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, and Alexander Sergeevich’s little brother, Plato.

As you know, the Tsar did not allow Pushkin to be buried in St. Petersburg. He remembered the poet’s desire to be buried in Svyatogorye, in the family cemetery.

And where will fate send me death?

Is it in battle, on a journey, in the waves?

Or the neighboring valley

Will my cold ashes take me?

And even to an insensitive body

Equally decay everywhere,

But closer to the cute limit

I would still like to rest.

And let at the tomb entrance

The young one will play with life,

And indifferent nature

Shine with eternal beauty.

Here his body was buried on February 18. At the top of the burial hill, among the frequent trunks of centuries-old oaks and lindens, there is a platform surrounded by a white marble balustrade. Nearby is the ancient Assumption Cathedral, like a hero on guard. Here lies the heart of Pushkin.

After the death of her husband, Natalya Nikolaevna and her children went to the Linen Factory to visit her relatives. Then she returned to St. Petersburg. I dreamed of buying Mikhailovskoye. As for the ruinous debts, the king took them upon himself.

And finally, with Mikhailovsky, everything was decided in favor of the Pushkin family. And they go to the village that Pushkin loved so much, in which he did a lot, and where, by his will, he was buried.

Natalya Nikolaevna came to her husband’s grave for the first time, four years after his death. The famous St. Petersburg master Permagorov made Pushkin’s tombstone. She liked it for its grace, simplicity and significance. She had to install it. She came for the first time on her own, accompanied only by her uncle Nikita Timofeevich. She was on her knees, clasping her hands on a turf-lined mound with a wooden cross, shaking in sobs. Nikita Timofeevich also cried, holding a crumpled cap in his hands.

The spirit of Pushkin reigned supreme in Mikhailovskoye; he lived everywhere here. And Natalya Nikolaevna felt his dear presence every minute. This increased the grief and instilled some incomprehensible strength.

When Natalya Nikolaevna cried out all the living pain, she brought the children to their father’s grave. They collected flowers, decorating the monument with them.

Above the grave is a white marble obelisk, erected four years after Pushkin’s death. Under the obelisk there is an urn with a blanket thrown over it, on the granite base there is the inscription:

ALEXANDER SERGEEVICH PUSHKIN

Now Natalya Nikolaevna was dying. The children gathered in the next room. Four adult children of Pushkin. And three daughters from Lansky, whom she married seven years after Pushkin’s death. There was still life in her. I held on to the memories. I couldn’t let go of the thought that she hadn’t done everything yet, hadn’t figured everything out yet...

She remembered her older sister Catherine, who became the wife of the killer of her first husband. Natalya Nikolaevna believed that her sister knew about the duel and did not prevent it. All her life she did not want to know anything about her sister, and only now, on her deathbed, pity for her was overwhelmed by the established alienation. And although her sister had already left this world, she told her: “I forgive you everything...”

Catherine died in France. The killer of the great poet did not live to see Pushkin’s 100th birthday only 4 years. He died in the city of Sulz in 1895 at the age of 83. One of his daughters, Leonia-Charlotte, was an extraordinary girl. Without seeing or knowing Russians, she studied the Russian language. Leonia adored Russia and more than anything else, Pushkin! One day, during an outburst of anger, she called her father a murderer and never spoke to him again. In her room, in place of the icon, Leonia hung a portrait of Pushkin. Love for Pushkin and hatred for her father led her to a nervous illness and she died very young.

The earthly life of the beautiful Natalie Goncharova, Natalya Nikolaevna Pushkina, was coming to an end. The last thing she heard in her dreams was her own insane cry: “You will live, Pushkin!”, and she realized that she was already dying. The soul that Pushkin loved so much slowly left this beautiful human form.

In St. Petersburg, at the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, there is a tombstone with the inscription “Natalia Nikolaevna Lanskaya. 1812-1863.” But maybe the hand of some descendant will add “- Pushkin” to the Lanskaya surname, in human and historical justice?

The poem “On the Hills of Georgia...” was written in 1829, it was at this time that Pushkin traveled to the Caucasus. It is not entirely known to whom the poem was dedicated, because some believe that it was to the poet’s future wife, Natalya Goncharova, and some that it was to another woman whom Pushkin met in the Caucasus.

The peculiarity of the poem was a special expression of the feeling of love that suddenly flared up in the poet’s heart. The main theme is the connection between the poet and the surrounding world, as well as the connection with society. This work belongs to the period of Pushkin’s love poetry. The first lines open before the reader a landscape where the Aragva River flows and the hills are shrouded in the darkness of the night. The so-called culprit of all the poet’s feelings can be called his beloved; just by thinking about her, Pushkin immediately changes, his mood and emotions change.

The work ends with lines that carry an important meaning, and it lies in Pushkin’s understanding of the concept of “love.”

Analysis of the poem by A.S. Pushkin "The darkness of the night lies on the hills of Georgia"

The poem “The darkness of night lies on the hills of Georgia. "was written by Pushkin in 1829 during the poet’s trip to Transcaucasia. Then Pushkin was hopelessly in love with Natalya Goncharova, not even hoping to marry her. Genre- elegy.

The poem is dedicated topic love. The description of nature serves the author as a way of expressing the feelings of the lyrical hero, reflections on topic love. The first two verses (lines) give a landscape picture:

The darkness of night lies on the hills of Georgia;

Aragva makes noise in front of me.

The landscape contains a hidden opposition of two principles. The first verse depicts hills - hills raised to the sky. The second is the deep river lying at the poet’s feet. The third and fourth verses characterize the internal state of the lyrical hero. It is in harmony with the surrounding landscape. The feelings experienced by the hero-author are contradictory: “sad and easy” are not only different, but also difficult to compatible feelings. Their explanation is given in the following lines:

I feel sad and light; my sadness is light;

My sadness is full of you.

The poetic “you” introduced into the poem (the image of an unnamed lover) becomes a source of light. This is what sadness is full of, and this makes sadness light. The next four verses change in tone. The calmly sad narrative intonation of the first quatrain becomes more intense:

By you, by you alone. my despondency

Nothing torments, nothing worries,

That it cannot help but love.

The last lines are especially important for understanding the poem and Pushkin’s concept of love: the very need to love is eternal, love arises in the poet’s heart as an echo of feminine beauty and harmony.

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Analysis of Pushkin’s poem “On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night...”

The poem “On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night...” - an ode to all-consuming love

A.S. Pushkin created the poem “On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night...” while in the Caucasus in 1829. At that time, the poet unrequitedly loved Natalya Goncharova. Pushkin never dreamed of marrying a beautiful woman, but the poet’s soul, heart and thoughts were occupied only with her. The genre of the work is love elegy. But this poem is not about strong affection, but about enormous love, about love that subjugates the mind and emotions.

The poet, in order to convey his feelings, calls on nature for help. In the first lines the author paints a landscape:

The darkness of night lies on the hills of Georgia;
Aragva makes noise in front of me.

The beautiful hills of Georgia contrast with the waters of Aragva. Against the backdrop of this wonderful view, the poet shares his feelings and torment. Nature helps the hero express his difficult state of mind. The author compares his inner world with the landscapes of Georgia. The author’s contradictory thoughts are like the sound of a river framed by mountains, like a quiet southern night:

I feel sad and light; my sadness is light;
My sadness is full of you...

Another heroine of the work, whom the poet addresses as “you,” is apparently the woman he loves. It is she who makes the hero sad and tormented by unrequited love. Further in the poem a different rhythm is felt, the tension increases:

By you, by you alone... My despondency
Nothing torments, nothing worries,
And the heart burns and loves again - because
That it cannot help but love.

The final lines are an epigraph to Pushkin’s entire love work. To live without love, not to love - this is impossible for a poet.

The poem “On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night...” is a simple story by the author about his human feelings, emotions are kept to a minimum. This ingenious simplicity helps any reader understand the poet and feel his sincerity. But an analysis of the draft of the work shows that the lightness of the verse was not immediately given to the poet. A lot of crossed out phrases, corrected words - all this is a huge work of the author, and, as a result, all the lines are in their place, there is nothing superfluous. Each word is capacious, in such a small poem there is a very deep meaning.

Analysis of the poem by A.S. Pushkin “On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night...”

Pushkin wrote the poem “On the Hills of Georgia...” in 1829 during a trip to Arzrum, when he was hopelessly in love with Natalya Goncharova. He hoped to marry her, but no one could forbid him to love her, admire her, and dedicate poetry to her.

Main thought (idea)

This poem is about all-consuming love, subjugating all other feelings.

The genre of the poem is elegy. It refers to intimate lyrics.

The poem is written in alternating iambic hexameter and iambic tetrameter. Long and short poems follow each other symmetrically.

Pushkin achieves “naked simplicity” in this poem, trying to make it extremely sincere and clear. There is only one metaphor in the poem - “the heart is on fire”, but it is so trivial and familiar that it is not even perceived as a metaphor.

The poem alternates between descriptions of nature and lines expressing the emotional state of the lyrical hero. There is no logical connection between the description of nature and the expression of feelings. But both descriptions are inextricably linked. The connection here is not logical, but emotional: the landscape creates a lyrical mood.

In the description of nature there is a hidden opposition between two principles: the first line depicts hills raised to the sky. The second depicts a deep river flowing in a crevice. The first lines give rise to images of height and depth by association.

The image of the “darkness of the night” is also important. It contains two images at once - night and moonlight, which by association carry a feeling of peace and tranquility, “light sadness”.

The internal state of the lyrical hero is in agreement with the surrounding landscape. The feelings he experiences are contradictory: “sad and light” - and at the same time they are connected, like the depth and height of the landscape around him, like night and moonlight. The oxymoron “my sadness is light” also turns out to be logical: just as the darkness of the night, permeated with moonlight, is not terrible, so sadness is permeated with light, because “my sadness is full of you.”

The image of the unnamed lover becomes a source of light.

The impersonal constructions “I’m sad”, “I’m easy” create the feeling of events happening organically, without the efforts of the hero himself - this is a state, not an action.

The parallelism of the landscape and the spiritual world is supported by a system of sound repetitions: “By you, by you alone...”.

But the verbs describing the “work” of the heart become energetic: “burns”, “loves”.

The last line sounds doomed:

And the heart burns and loves again - because

That it cannot help but love.

But in this inevitability there is more light and joy, fullness of feeling, than despondency. The love that the poet talks about in this poem is sacrificial, tender, generous.

Analysis of Pushkin’s poem “On the Hills of Georgia”

The poem “On the Hills of Georgia” is one of the few lyrical works that Alexander Pushkin dedicated to his future wife, the first beauty of Moscow, Natalya Goncharova. It was written in the summer of 1829, after the poet’s unsuccessful matchmaking. Realizing that he might be refused, Pushkin conveyed his marriage proposal to the parents of Natalya Goncharova through his friend, Fyodor Tolstoy the American, who was a member of the family of the poet’s chosen one. Having received a very vague answer, more like a refusal, which the bride’s parents argued that Natalya was still too young to get married, Pushkin decided to go to the active army in the Caucasus.

His friends, not wanting to put the poet’s life in danger, nevertheless persuaded Pushkin to stay for several months in Tiflis, where a short, sensual and very romantic poem “On the Hills of Georgia” was created.

This work begins with the poet standing on the banks of the deep Aragva River, but his thoughts are still turned to distant and cold Moscow, where he left the one who managed to win his heart with just one glance. The poet admits that his soul is filled with light sadness, he is “sad and at ease.” Such contradictory feelings are, of course, caused by a veiled refusal to marry, but the poet still does not lose hope of being reunited with his beloved. “Nothing torments or disturbs my despondency” - this phrase of the poem should be interpreted in such a way that, yearning for Natalya Goncharova, Pushkin feels that sooner or later he will still win her hand. Therefore, the poet perceives refusal and separation as temporary circumstances that do not allow him to get married. One of the obstacles, by the way, is the rather modest financial situation of the poet, who is reputed to be a very gambler and spends almost all of his salary on cards.

Later, having returned from the Caucasus, Pushkin will try to improve his financial situation by giving up playing cards and visiting expensive drinking establishments. However, at the time of writing the poem “On the Hills of Georgia,” which in its beauty and grace resembles an elegy, the poet’s thoughts are very far from everyday concerns. He doesn’t even care about the fact that Natalya Goncharova, with whom the poet managed to exchange only a few empty phrases during his short acquaintance, is unlikely to have tender feelings for him. For Pushkin, what he himself experiences in relation to the young girl is much more important. “And the heart burns and loves again - because it cannot help but love,” the poet writes, thereby emphasizing that for a happy marriage, his own feelings are enough for him, which, he believes, are more than enough to build a strong family.

It is noteworthy that Pushkin’s premonitions were not deceived, since in 1830 he made a second proposal to Natalya Goncharova and received consent. However, after the wedding, he did not devote a single lyric poem to his wife. Perhaps the whole point is that the young beauty, endlessly respecting her husband, was never able to truly understand and love him. It is also worth noting that after the Pushkin couple settled in St. Petersburg, Natalya Nikolaevna was presented to the court and, thanks to her beauty, became one of the empress’s favorites. Such favor obliged Pushkin’s wife to lead an active social life and appear at all balls without exception. It is quite understandable that this caused the poet to have attacks of uncontrollable jealousy, but in his letters to numerous friends he wrote that he was infinitely happy and recalled his short trip to the Caucasus, during which, in essence, his fate was decided. Pushkin noted that during the period of writing the poem “On the Hills of Georgia” he had a desire to abandon the idea of ​​getting married and never return to Moscow. However, feelings for Natalya Goncharova turned out to be stronger than the arguments of reason.

“On the Hills of Georgia,” analysis of Pushkin’s poem

"On the Hills of Georgia"- one of the most famous works of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. It is dedicated, like many other poems of the poet, theme of love. namely, according to some literary researchers, the artist’s hopeless love for Natalya Goncharova. At that time she was a lovely seventeen-year-old girl. On the eve of writing, in April 1829, Pushkin asked for the hand and heart of his beloved, but to no avail, receiving neither consent nor refusal. However, there is another version: the work is dedicated to that beautiful muse to whom the poet was partial in the Caucasus. The bright, wonderful charm that permeates the nature of Georgia evoked memories of long-forgotten feelings.

Who is this stranger muse that Pushkin wrote about? Presumably, she was the daughter of Nikolai Nikolaevich Raevsky, Maria. Alexander Sergeevich was in love with her in his youth. Later, Raevskaya married the Decembrist, Major General Sergei Grigorievich Volkonsky. When the poem was published (in 1829), the Volkonsky couple were in hard labor, in Siberian exile. Maria Nikolaevna, to whom Princess Vera Feodorovna Vyazemskaya sent Pushkin’s work, was sure that the poem was addressed specifically to her.

History of creation

The work was written during Alexander Sergeevich’s second trip to the Caucasus. Pushkin conceived it two years before the trip, in 1827, and reported this in a letter to his brother Lev. In 1828, the poet wanted to join the army operating in the Caucasus, but he was refused. Many of Pushkin’s acquaintances recalled him at that time as apathetic, gloomy and absent-minded, “they did not recognize the old Pushkin.” At that time, according to Shaduri, Pushkin suffered from loneliness away from his Decembrist friends, brothers, and close comrades. Pushkin was drawn to the Caucasus not only out of love for that place, but also out of concern for the fate of the Decembrists exiled by Nicholas I. In 1829, the desperate poet went to the Caucasus without permission.

Theme, composition, genre

The poem refers to the love lyrics of Alexander Pushkin. Clear and succinct, the first lines depict in the imagination a landscape where the Aragva River rustles in front of the lyrical hero, where the darkness of the night lies on the hills. Poetic landscape sketches serve as a means of expressing the poet’s feelings. They conceal the opposition of two contrasting principles. The hills symbolize elevation, aspiration to the sky, and the stormy river flow symbolizes the depth lying at the feet of the narrator. The artist's feelings are contradictory. “Sad and easy” are not opposite, but completely different, difficult to combine. The poet's sadness is bright, full of memories of the muse.

The source of Pushkin’s bright feeling is an unnamed beloved. When mentioning her, the poet changes in his mood, becoming more tense and passionate. The lines that conclude the work carry a deep meaning, an important sign. They contain one of the components of Pushkin’s understanding of love: the need to love is eternal. The lyrical hero, with a secret, but bright, tender sadness and surprise, feels the echo of a love feeling for a distant muse in his burning heart:

And the heart burns and loves again - because
That it cannot help but love.

Pushkin's work can be divided into two parts. The first is contemplative, where the night landscape is described, and the second is sensual, where the main character talks about the feeling that excites his soul. The image of quiet, bright sadness echoes a heart burning with love. The genre of the poem is elegy with elements of philosophical meditation and landscape. The poetic meters - iambic hexameter and iambic tetrameter - alternate. The work is written using cross rhyme. Means of artistic expression are used in small quantities. Alliteration adds special warmth and melody.

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“On the Hills of Georgia” Alexander Pushkin

The darkness of night lies on the hills of Georgia; Aragva makes noise in front of me. I feel sad and light; my sadness is light; My sadness is full of you, you, you alone... Nothing torments or disturbs my despondency, And my heart burns and loves again - because it cannot help but love.

Analysis of Pushkin’s poem “On the Hills of Georgia”

The poem “On the Hills of Georgia” is one of the few lyrical works that Alexander Pushkin dedicated to his future wife, the first beauty of Moscow, Natalya Goncharova. It was written in the summer of 1829, after the poet’s unsuccessful matchmaking. Realizing that he might be refused, Pushkin conveyed his marriage proposal to the parents of Natalya Goncharova through his friend, Fyodor Tolstoy the American, who was a member of the family of the poet’s chosen one. Having received a very vague answer, more like a refusal, which the bride’s parents argued that Natalya was still too young to get married, Pushkin decided to go to the active army in the Caucasus.

His friends, not wanting to put the poet’s life in danger, nevertheless persuaded Pushkin to stay for several months in Tiflis, where a short, sensual and very romantic poem “On the Hills of Georgia” was created.

This work begins with the poet standing on the banks of the deep Aragva River, but his thoughts are still turned to distant and cold Moscow, where he left the one who managed to win his heart with just one glance. The poet admits that his soul is filled with light sadness, he is “sad and at ease.” Such contradictory feelings are, of course, caused by a veiled refusal to marry, but the poet still does not lose hope of being reunited with his beloved. “Nothing torments or disturbs my despondency” - this phrase of the poem should be interpreted in such a way that, yearning for Natalya Goncharova, Pushkin feels that sooner or later he will still win her hand. Therefore, the poet perceives refusal and separation as temporary circumstances that do not allow him to get married. One of the obstacles, by the way, is the rather modest financial situation of the poet, who is reputed to be a very gambler and spends almost all of his salary on cards.

Later, having returned from the Caucasus, Pushkin will try to improve his financial situation by giving up playing cards and visiting expensive drinking establishments. However, at the time of writing the poem “On the Hills of Georgia,” which in its beauty and grace resembles an elegy, the poet’s thoughts are very far from everyday concerns. He doesn’t even care about the fact that Natalya Goncharova, with whom the poet managed to exchange only a few empty phrases during his short acquaintance, is unlikely to have tender feelings for him. For Pushkin, what he himself experiences in relation to the young girl is much more important. “And the heart burns and loves again - because it cannot help but love,” the poet writes, thereby emphasizing that for a happy marriage, his own feelings are enough for him, which, he believes, are more than enough to build a strong family.

It is noteworthy that Pushkin’s premonitions were not deceived, since in 1830 he made a second proposal to Natalya Goncharova and received consent. However, after the wedding, he did not devote a single lyric poem to his wife. Perhaps the whole point is that the young beauty, endlessly respecting her husband, was never able to truly understand and love him. It is also worth noting that after the Pushkin couple settled in St. Petersburg, Natalya Nikolaevna was presented to the court and, thanks to her beauty, became one of the empress’s favorites. Such favor obliged Pushkin’s wife to lead an active social life and appear at all balls without exception. It is quite understandable that this caused the poet to have attacks of uncontrollable jealousy, but in his letters to numerous friends he wrote that he was infinitely happy and recalled his short trip to the Caucasus, during which, in essence, his fate was decided. Pushkin noted that during the period of writing the poem “On the Hills of Georgia” he had a desire to abandon the idea of ​​getting married and never return to Moscow. However, feelings for Natalya Goncharova turned out to be stronger than the arguments of reason.