“Here it is, stupid happiness...” Sergei Yesenin
This is stupid happiness
With white windows to the garden!
Along the pond as a red swan
The sunset floats quietly.Hello, golden calm,
With the shadow of a birch tree in the water!
A flock of jackdaws on the roof
Serves the evening star.Somewhere beyond the garden timidly,
Where viburnum blooms
Tender girl in white
Sings a tender song.Spreads with a blue cassock
The night chill from the field...
Silly, sweet happiness,
Fresh rosy cheeks!
Analysis of Yesenin’s poem “Here it is, stupid happiness...”
Sergei Yesenin dreamed that he could become famous poet. However, he did not imagine that he would have to pay too much for it high price. Life in Moscow, which by that time had become the capital of Russian poetry, turned out to be too difficult and dull for Yesenin. Therefore, he often dreamed of returning to his native village, although he understood that this would never happen. Nevertheless, rural life seemed to Yesenin something infinitely happy and beautiful. Of course, he was happy in his own way in Moscow when he received invitations to read his poems in front of eminent citizens. However, the poet failed to combine the luxury of metropolitan life and the simplicity of rural life.
In 1918, Yesenin published a poem entitled “Here it is, stupid happiness...”, in which he nostalgically recalls how free and carefree he was in his youth. The poet calls this state of quiet euphoria stupid happiness, realizing that for a person who strives in life for something more than just contemplation of how “a sunset quietly swims across a pond like a red swan,” this is clearly not enough. But even without ordinary rural joys, Yesenin can no longer imagine his existence.
“Hello, golden calm, with the shadow of a birch tree in the water!” the poet greets an ordinary rural pond, like an old friend. He remembers the outline of every tree and every stone on a village street and takes great pleasure in mentally transporting himself back in time. Images emerge in the subconscious by themselves, and now “where the viburnum blooms, a gentle girl in white sings a gentle song.”
These memories are very dear to the poet. And not only because they keep fragments of real happiness, which seemed so accessible and natural. For Yesenin, meeting the past is a kind of excursion into youth, to which there will never be a return. “Silly, sweet happiness, fresh rosy cheeks,” is how the author characterizes this bright and very romantic period of his life. He does not regret that his fate has developed in such a way that now meetings with his native village are becoming increasingly rare. However, somewhere deep in his soul the poet understands that he would gladly exchange the prosperity of the capital for an unsettled rural life just in order to find that amazing purity of thoughts and feeling peace of mind. But these dreams are not destined to come true, since Yesenin’s village, which he depicts with such tenderness in many works, has already become different, and the poet simply has no place in it.
Read by R. Kleiner
("Here it is, stupid happiness")
This is stupid happiness
With white windows to the garden!
Along the pond as a red swan
A quiet sunset floats.
Hello, golden calm,
With the shadow of a birch tree in the water!
A flock of jackdaws on the roof
Serves the evening star.
Somewhere beyond the garden timidly,
Where the viburnum blooms,
Tender girl in white
Sings a tender song.
Spreads with a blue cassock
The night chill from the field...
Silly, sweet happiness,
Fresh rosy cheeks!
Read by R. Kleiner
Rafael Aleksandrovich Kleiner (born June 1, 1939, village of Rubezhnoye, Lugansk region, Ukrainian SSR, USSR) - Russian theater director, People's Artist of Russia (1995).
From 1967 to 1970 he was an actor at the Moscow Taganka Drama and Comedy Theater.
Currently director and screenwriter of the Moscow Philharmonic
Yesenin Sergei Alexandrovich (1895-1925)
Yesenin was born into a peasant family. From 1904 to 1912 he studied at the Konstantinovsky Zemstvo School and at the Spas-Klepikovsky School. During this time, he wrote more than 30 poems and compiled a handwritten collection “Sick Thoughts” (1912), which he tried to publish in Ryazan. Russian village, nature middle zone Russia, oral folk art, and most importantly - Russian classical literature provided strong influence for the formation young poet, channeled his natural talent. Yesenin himself different times called different sources, which fed his creativity: songs, ditties, fairy tales, spiritual poems, “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign”, poetry of Lermontov, Koltsov, Nikitin and Nadson. Later he was influenced by Blok, Klyuev, Bely, Gogol, Pushkin.
From Yesenin's letters of 1911 - 1913 emerges difficult life poet. All this was reflected in the poetic world of his lyrics from 1910 to 1913, when he wrote more than 60 poems and poems. This expresses his love for all living things, for life, for his homeland (“Weaved on the lake scarlet light dawn...”, “Flood with smoke...”, “Birch”, “ Spring evening”, “Night”, “Sunrise”, “Winter sings - echoes...”, “Stars”, “Dark night, can’t sleep...”, etc.)
The most significant works of Yesenin, which brought him fame as one of best poets, created in the 1920s.
Like everyone great poet Yesenin is not a thoughtless singer of his feelings and experiences, but a poet and philosopher. Like all poetry, his lyrics are philosophical. Philosophical lyrics- these are poems in which the poet talks about eternal problems human existence, conducts a poetic dialogue with man, nature, earth, and the Universe. An example of the complete interpenetration of nature and man is the poem “Green Hairstyle” (1918). One develops in two planes: the birch tree - the girl. The reader will never know who this poem is about - a birch tree or a girl. Because the person here is likened to a tree - the beauty of the Russian forest, and she is like a person. The birch tree in Russian poetry is a symbol of beauty, harmony, and youth; she is bright and chaste.
The poetry of nature and the mythology of the ancient Slavs permeate such poems of 1918 as “The Silver Road...”, “Songs, songs, what are you shouting about?”, “I left home...”, “The golden foliage began to spin...”, etc.
Yesenin's poetry of the last, most tragic years (1922 - 1925) is marked by a desire for a harmonious worldview. Most often, in the lyrics one can feel a deep understanding of oneself and the Universe (“I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry...”, “The golden grove dissuaded...”, “Now we are leaving little by little...”, etc.)
The poem of values in Yesenin’s poetry is one and indivisible; everything in it is interconnected, everything forms a single picture of the “beloved homeland” in all the variety of its shades. This is the highest ideal of the poet.
Having passed away at the age of 30, Yesenin left us a wonderful poetic legacy, and as long as the earth lives, Yesenin the poet is destined to live with us and “sing with all his being in the poet the sixth part of the earth with the short name “Rus”.
IV. Analysis of S. Yesenin’s poem “Here it is, stupid happiness...”
Reading a poem by S. Yesenin, from the very first lines you feel the extraordinary richness and depth of the poetic world that opens up in this small lyrical work. And immediately a whole series of associations arise that enhance the expressiveness of the images created in it.
This is stupid happiness
With white windows to the garden!
Along the pond as a red swan
A quiet sunset floats.
...And Blok’s lines ring in my memory:
The tower is high, and the dawn has frozen.
The red secret lay at the entrance.
Roll call on thematic level – evening dawn, sunset, the image of a beloved - is reinforced by the coincidence of color epithets: “red swan”, “blue cassock” in Yesenin, and in Blok – “red flame”, “blue windows”, “azure heights”. Of course, the style of the poems is different, and the emotional range does not coincide at all, but at the same time, their vivid imagery and high energy verse... And I also remember Yesenin’s lines about a girl in a white cape “at that gate over there” and a sad confession: I stopped loving the girl in white - “... And now I love in blue”... But this is ahead, but for now the experiences of youth - pure, naive , touching.
The poem was written in 1918.
Here we find features characteristic of Yesenin’s poetics, which were noted back in early lyrics: metaphorical nature, inherited from folk poetic traditions (“a quiet sunset floats like a red swan”); biblical images, “turned” into an oral system poetic speech(“A flock of jackdaws on the roof / Serves the evening star”, “A blue robe spreads / From the field the night chill”). Finally, let us note the special Yesenin color painting with its inherent major clarity. The colors are catchy, “sounding” with the almost elegiac tone of the poem. And at the same time, we hear the voice of a creatively mature poet, a person recreating the image of the tender joy that is born in him when he sees the beauty of nature around him, experiencing a feeling that has received such an unexpected definition - “stupid happiness.”
Human happiness can be different: difficult, hard-won, long-awaited, quiet, bitter... What is filled with the epithet “stupid”? Perhaps simple, unpretentious, not based on self-interest and calculation, such as is characteristic of naive youth? And the color epithet “white” in the next line is not accidental:
This is stupid happiness
With white windows to the garden!
It does not mean, of course, the color of the windows at all, but the purity of sensations. White among the Slavs, and even in Christian mythology, it is the color of purity, sinlessness. “Stupid happiness” is the happiness of naivety, innocence, ignorance, the happiness of carelessness, not yet burdened by those thoughts that a mature person cannot avoid.
The first stanza ends with a metaphor that conveys the beauty of the quiet summer evening. Mood lyrical hero, conquered by this beauty, is developed in the second stanza.
Hello, golden calm,
With the shadow of a birch tree in the water!
A flock of jackdaws on the roof
Serves the evening star.
The picture of a flock of jackdaws on the roof is also metaphorical. She, supporting the already drawn image of the evening in the first stanza - “quiet sunset” - brings new colors to it and enriches the semantic and figurative series. Thus, the word “vespers” combines evening and church service, which in solemn silence is addressed to the first star that lit up over the “golden calm, / With the shadow of a birch tree in the water”... And jackdaws in the context of these lines evoke unusual associations not - not loud , a noisy flock, and black nuns gathered for prayer. Here, in this stanza, the melody of the poem arises, which will sound more and more clearly in the next quatrain:
Somewhere beyond the garden timidly,
Where the viburnum blooms,
Tender girl in white
Sings a tender song.
The twice repeated epithet “tender” fully reveals the origins of “ stupid happiness", which filled the soul of the lyrical hero. The epithet “in white,” echoing “white windows” and viburnum flowers, emphasizes the integrity of the poem, the completeness of the image of the world as God’s grace.
The ring composition of the poem also works to create such an image:
Spreads with a blue cassock
The night chill from the field...
Silly, sweet happiness,
Fresh rosy cheeks!
In the final stanza special role punctuation marks play. The first two lines complete the landscape sketch itself, and they still sound full force the main tonality of the poem: the melody of the joy of life, the intoxication of beauty natural world, the solemn sound of church chants. The ellipsis at the end of the second line dramatically changes the mood of the last couplet. A new melody appears - a wonderful love experience, the unbridled happiness of youth, chaste and naive, with notes of sadness and regret of the onset of maturity already discernible in it, emphasized exclamation point at the end. And this melody of Yesenin’s beautiful “watercolor” world resonates with the reader for a long time even after reading the poem!
On November 16, 1880, in St. Petersburg, Alexandra Andreevna, having separated from her husband forever, gave birth to a son, Alexander Blok. From birth he was surrounded by his grandmother, great-grandmother, mother, aunts, and nanny. Boundless, excessive adoration, almost a cult!
In the summer of 1912, Meyerhold and his troupe gave several performances in Terijoki, a small Finnish water resort two hours away railway from St. Petersburg. The artists rented a spacious room for the whole summer country house, surrounded by a huge park. It is here that Blok comes to his wife almost every week. They play Strindberg, Goldoni, Moliere, Bernard Shaw. Lyubov Dmitrievna has been assigned responsible roles, she is delighted. She loves society, fun, traveling, opera, Wagner, Isadora Duncan dance parties, all life and movement. Her happiness pleases Blok. He is honored in Teriok, but he feels increasingly tired.
In his memoirs, Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky cites a conversation about “The Twelve” between Blok and Gorky. Gorky said that “The Twelve” is an evil satire. "Satire? - Blok asked and thought about it. - Is it really satire? Hardly. I think not. I don't know". He really didn't know, his lyrics were wiser than him. Simple-minded people often turned to him for explanations of what he wanted to say in his “Twelve,” and he, no matter how much he wanted, could not answer them.
