From childhood, little Sasha - the future great Russian poet A.S. Pushkin - was brought up under the supervision of his nanny Arina Rodionovna. Parents devoted little time to raising their children, placing all worries on the shoulders of a simple peasant woman. It was the nanny who looked after Sashenka, walked with him, told him stories, sang lullabies, putting him to bed. Thanks to her sayings and legends, Sasha became acquainted with folk art from an early age, which later had a huge influence on his works. It was to her that he dedicated lines of charm and gratitude in his poems.
Full text of the poem to Pushkin's Nanny
Friend of my harsh days,
My decrepit dove!
Alone in the wilderness of pine forests
You've been waiting for me for a long, long time.
You are under the window of your little room
You're grieving like you're on a clock,
And the knitting needles hesitate every minute
In your wrinkled hands.
You look through the forgotten gates
On a black distant path;
Longing, premonitions, worries
They squeeze your chest all the time.
It seems to you. . .
(A.S. Pushkin “Nanny” 1826)
Arina Rodionovna was born in 1758 into a large family of serfs raising seven children. She had to experience a hungry, joyless childhood, the poverty of peasant life. The girl asked to look after the children of her owners. She was taken as a nanny to the Pushkin family for their daughter Olga. After Sasha's birth, she begins to look after both children. She placed all her worries, all the affection and love of a simple peasant heart on the altar of raising children. The nanny is constantly with the children, accompanies them on trips from Mikhailovsky to St. Petersburg, where they spend every winter.
Arina became very attached to the boy and loved him with all her heart. She gave all the tenderness, warmth and generosity to her “angel,” which could not but evoke a reciprocal feeling of gratitude. The nanny became everything for the future poet: a friend, a guardian angel, a muse. Alexander Sergeevich confided his thoughts and dreams to her, shared secrets, sought consolation from her. Everything that he could not get from his parents, he found from his “mother”.
After entering the service, meetings between the matured Alexander and his nanny became rare; the young man could not often visit Mikhailovskoye. Only in 1824, Alexander Sergeevich, having arrived at the estate as an exile, again fell into caring, gentle hands. In the fall of 1824, in his letters to his brother, he shared his impressions of folk songs, fairy tales, and sayings, which the cheerful, kind storyteller-nanny generously gave him. He admits that they make up for the omissions of “his damned upbringing.” “What a delight these fairy tales are! Each one is a poem!” – the poet exclaims with admiration.
Pushkin also shows her special warmth and reverent respect. “Friend of my harsh days, my decrepit Dove!” Behind this slight irony in addressing the nanny lies immense gratitude for the trials we have experienced together and quiet sadness.
Full voiced verse “Nanny”
Subsequently, he lovingly and tenderly reproduces her image in his works: nanny Tatiana in “Eugene Onegin” and Dubrovsky in the story of the same name; prototypes of mother Ksenia from “Boris Godunov” and the princess from “Rusalka”. He does not hide the fact that he was prompted to paint these images by the devotion and wisdom of his nurse, the gentle nanny Arina.
The last time Pushkin saw his nanny was in the fall of 1827, but he did not really have time to communicate. Summer of 1828 his “mother” was gone. Shocked by the death of his nanny, he admits that he has lost his most reliable, fair and tested friend. Alexander treated her with respect and a feeling of immense gratitude.
Friend of my harsh days,
My decrepit dove!
A.S. Pushkin
Since childhood, Pushkin was surrounded by care and affection by Arina Rodionovna, his nanny. She was a Hannibal serf, the grandmother of the poet - Maria Alekseevna, and in the family
Pushkinykh appeared when Alexander was born. Sergei Lvovich and Nadezhda Osipovna Pushkin had eight children, but five died in infancy. They are survived by their daughter Olga, Alexander, the future poet, and their younger brother Leva. Most of all her pupils, the nanny loved curly-haired, smart, very active Sasha. She remembered how they first arrived with the whole family to the estate of grandmother Maria Alekseevna near Moscow - to Zakharovo. Waking up early in the morning, the six-year-old “prankster” ran out of the house and rushed to the pond, which he noticed in the evening when we were driving here. The nanny rushed after him and saw him already sitting on the branch of a tree right above the water. She was stunned: you could drown. And what tales she told! And about the robbers, and about the formidable Chernomor, and about the dead princess; she sang songs of freedom, often sad, about the difficult lot of the peasantry. The boy listened to them with bated breath, and kept asking: “More, more!” He even found a special charm in the intonations of the words spoken by the nanny. They warmed him, attracted him, drawing magical images. This acquaintance with folklore gradually embodied in the poetic, powerful talent of the great poet. No one after Pushkin wrote such beautiful fairy tales in verse as “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” “The Tale of Tsar Saltan,” or the poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila.” Pushkin treated his nanny with love and respect. He dedicated many poems to her. He called her his “friend of his youth,” “a meek, serene angel,” “an invaluable friend.” He trusted her with his thoughts and dreams. Arina Rodionovna often became the first listener to his works:
I am the fruit of my wanderings,
And harmonic articles
I read only to the old nanny -
A friend of my youth.
Pushkin's friends - Delvig, Pushchin, Yazykov - also treated her with respect. Ivan Ivanovich Pushchin recalled his last meeting with Pushkin in Mikhailovsky, where the poet was in exile under home supervision. Hearing the ringing of the bells of the approaching sleigh in the frosty morning, Pushkin jumped out onto the porch barefoot, wearing only a shirt, joyful, with his hands raised in greeting. The nanny found them in each other’s arms, “in the same form as we got into the house,” Pushchin wrote: “one was almost naked, the other was covered in snow... a tear broke out...” Arina Rodionovna “I don’t know who she took me for, but, without asking anything, she rushed to hug him... his kind nanny, praised by him so many times, almost strangled her in his arms.”
She attracted people with her spiritual attachment to Pushkin and her maternal care for him. Pushkin's friends loved to listen to her stories about life, about her past youth. The poet Nikolai Mikhailovich Yazykov recalled:
We feasted. I didn't shy away
You are our share - and sometimes
I was transported to my spring
A heated dream.
Being separated from his “tender friend,” as Pushkin often called Arina Rodionovna, he wrote:
Friend of my harsh days,
My decrepit dove!
Alone in the wilderness of pine forests
You've been waiting for me for a long, long time.
You are under the window of your little room
You're grieving like you're on a clock,
And the knitting needles hesitate every minute
In your wrinkled hands.
You look through the forgotten gates
On the black distant path:
Longing, premonitions, worries
They squeeze your chest all the time.
A.S. Pushkin called this poem his name: “To the Nanny.” Arina Rodionovna was originally from Suida and had four children. One of the daughters, Nadezhda Fedorovna, was married to Nikita Timofeevich Kozlov, the “uncle”, Pushkin’s servant, who passionately, unforgettably loved him and looked after him like a child. Arina Rodionovna died on July 31, 1828. Pushkin experienced her death as one of the sad losses of his life. He often drew profile portraits of his beloved nanny in the margins of the pages of his essays. Even ten years later, having visited the village of Mikhailovskoye, he will write:
...I visited again
That corner of the earth where I spent
An exile for two years unnoticed.
Ten years have passed since then - and a lot
Changed my life (...)
...but here again
The past embraces me vividly (...)
Here is the disgraced house
Where I lived with my poor nanny.
The old lady is no longer there - already behind the wall
I don’t hear her heavy steps,
Not her painstaking watch...
For a long time it was believed that her grave was lost. But one day in one of the broadcasts of the Mayak radio station there was information that the director 
State Museum-Reserve of A.S. Pushkin in Mikhailovsky Semyon Stepanovich Geichenko received a letter from a certain Tikhonova. She wrote that “in a cemetery near Berlin, in the Spandauwest district, I saw a grave with a cast-iron cross and an inscription on an iron tablet: “Arina Rodionovna, nanny of A.S. Pushkin.” Anything is possible. Arina Rodionovna in 1828 moved from Mikhailovsky to St. Petersburg to A.S. Pushkin’s sister, Olga Sergeevna Pavlishcheva. In the same year, Arina Rodionovna, apparently, was in Germany with her family, where she died. Pushkin dedicated the poem “Winter Evening” to his nanny:
The storm covers the sky with darkness,
Whirling snow whirlwinds;
The way she howls like a beast,
Then he will cry like a child,
Then on the dilapidated roof
Suddenly the straw will rustle,
Like a belated traveler
There will be a knock on our window.
Our dilapidated shack
And sad and dark.
What are you doing, my old lady?
Silent at the window?
Or howling storms
You, my friend, are tired,
Or dozing under the buzzing
Your spindle?
Let's have a drink, good friend
My poor youth
Let's drink from grief; where is the mug?
The heart will be happier.
Sing me a song like a tit
She lived quietly across the sea;
Sing me a song like a maiden
I went to fetch water in the morning...
Pushkin’s lyceum friend Mikhail Yakovlev wrote music for this poem. As if in a memorial wreath to the beloved nanny, Arina Rodionovna, Pushkin’s poems were intertwined, becoming a romance (
"Nanny" Alexander Pushkin
Friend of my harsh days,
My decrepit dove!
Alone in the wilderness of pine forests
You've been waiting for me for a long, long time.
You are under the window of your little room
You're grieving like you're on a clock,
And the knitting needles hesitate every minute
In your wrinkled hands.
You look through the forgotten gates
On a black distant path;
Longing, premonitions, worries
They squeeze your chest all the time.
It seems to you. . . .
Analysis of Pushkin's poem "Nanny"
In the old days, raising children in noble Russian families was carried out not by tutors, but by nannies, who were usually selected from serfs. It was on their shoulders that the daily worries of the lordly children fell, whom their parents saw no more than a few minutes a day. This is exactly how the childhood of the poet Alexander Pushkin proceeded, who almost immediately after his birth was transferred to the care of the serf peasant Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva. This amazing woman subsequently played a very important role in the life and work of the poet. Thanks to her, the future classic of Russian literature was able to get acquainted with folk tales and legends, which were subsequently reflected in his works. Moreover, as he grew older, Pushkin trusted his nanny with all his secrets, considering her his spiritual confidante, who could console, encourage, and give wise advice.
Arina Yakovleva was assigned not to a specific estate, but to the Pushkin family. Therefore, when the poet’s parents sold one of their estates, in which a peasant woman lived, they took her with them to Mikhailovskoye. It was here that she lived almost her entire life, occasionally traveling with her children to St. Petersburg, where they spent time from autumn to spring. When Alexander Pushkin graduated from the Lyceum and entered the service, his meetings with Arina Rodionovna became rare, since the poet practically never visited Mikhailovsky. But in 1824 he was exiled to the family estate, where he spent almost two years. And Arina Rodionovna during this difficult period of the poet’s life was his most faithful and devoted friend.
In 1826, Pushkin wrote the poem “Nanny,” in which he expressed his gratitude to this wise and patient woman for everything that they had experienced together. Therefore, it is not surprising that from the first lines of the work the poet addresses this woman quite familiarly, but at the same time, very respectfully, calling her “a friend of my harsh days” and “decrepit dove.” Behind these slightly ironic phrases lies the enormous tenderness that Pushkin feels for his nanny.. He knows that this woman is spiritually much closer to him than his own mother, and understands that Arina Rodionovna is worried about her pupil, in whom she dotes.
“Alone in the wilderness of the pine forests, you have been waiting for me for a long, long time,” the poet notes sadly, realizing that this woman is still worried about how his fate will turn out. Using simple and succinct phrases, the poet paints the image of an elderly woman, whose main concern in life is still the well-being of the “young master,” whom she still considers a child. Therefore, Pushkin notes: “Melancholy, premonitions, worries press on your chest all the time.” The poet understands that his “old lady” spends every day at the window, waiting for a mail carriage to appear on the road in which he will arrive at the family estate. “And the knitting needles hesitate every minute in your wrinkled hands,” the poet notes.
But at the same time, Pushkin understands that now he has a completely different life, and he is not able to visit Mikhailovsky as often as his old nanny would like. Therefore, trying to protect her from constant worries and worries, the poet notes: “It seems to you…”. His last meeting with Arina Rodionovna took place in the fall of 1827, when Pushkin was passing through Mikhailovskoye and did not even have time to really talk with his nurse. In the summer of the following year, she died in the house of the poet’s sister Olga Pavlishcheva, and her death greatly shocked the poet, who later admitted that he had lost his most faithful and devoted friend. Arina Yakovleva is buried in St. Petersburg at the Smolensk cemetery, but her grave is considered lost.
Friend of my harsh days,
My decrepit dove!
Alone in the wilderness of pine forests
You've been waiting for me for a long, long time.
You are under the window of your little room
You're grieving like you're on a clock,
And the knitting needles hesitate every minute
In your wrinkled hands.
You look through the forgotten gates
On a black distant path;
Longing, premonitions, worries
They squeeze your chest all the time.
Yakovleva Arina Rodionovna was born on April 10 (21), 1758 in the village of Lampovo, St. Petersburg province. Her parents were serfs and had six more children. Her real name was Irina, but her family used to call her Arina. She received her surname from her father Yakovlev, later it became Matveev after her husband. Pushkin never called her by name; “nanny” was closer to him. From the memoirs of Maria Osipova, “an extremely respectable old lady - with a plump face, all gray-haired, who passionately loved her pet...”
In 1759, Lampovo and the surrounding villages were bought by A.P. Hannibal, Pushkin's great-grandfather. In 1792, Pushkin’s grandmother Maria Alekseevna took Arina Rodionovna as a nanny for her nephew Alexei. For good service in 1795, Maria Alekseevna gave her nanny a house in the village. And in December 1797, a girl was born into the Hannibal family, who was named Olga (the poet’s older sister). And Arina Rodionovna is taken into the Pushkin family as a wet nurse.
Soon after this, Pushkin's father, Sergei Lvovich, moved to Moscow. Arina was taken with them as a wet nurse and nanny.
On May 26, 1799, a boy named Alexander appears in the family. Maria Alekseevna also decides to move to Moscow. She sells her estate, but Arina’s house was not sold, but remained for her and her children.
Pushkin’s sister Olga Sergeevna Pavlishcheva claimed that Maria Hannibal wanted to give Arina and her husband, along with their four children, freedom, but she refused her. All her life, Arina considered herself a “faithful slave,” as Pushkin himself called her in Dubrovsky. All her life she was a serf: first Apraksin, then Hannibal, then the Pushkins. At the same time, Arina was in a special position; she was trusted, as defined by V.V. Nabokov, she was a "housekeeper".
In addition to Olga, Arina Rodionovna was the nanny of Alexander and Lev, but only Olga was the nurse. Arina Rodionovna's four children remained to live in her husband's village - Kobrin, and she herself lived first in Moscow, and then in Zakharovo. A few years later she moved to the village of Mikhailovskoye.
Rich families hired not only wet nurses and nannies for the master's children. For boys there was also an "uncle". For Pushkin, for example, Nikita Kozlov was such an “uncle”, who was next to the poet until his death. But, nevertheless, the nanny was closer to Pushkin. Here is what Veresaev wrote about this: “How strange! The man, apparently, was ardently devoted to Pushkin, loved him, cared for him, perhaps no less than the nanny Arina Rodionovna, accompanied him throughout his entire independent life, but is not mentioned anywhere : neither in Pushkin’s letters, nor in the letters of his loved ones. Not a word about him - neither good nor bad." But it was Kozlov who brought the wounded poet into the house in his arms; he, together with Alexander Turgenev, lowered the coffin with Pushkin’s body into the grave.
In 1824-26, Arina Rodionovna lived with Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye. This was the time when young Alexander greedily absorbed his nanny’s fairy tales, songs, and folk epics. Pushkin writes to his brother: “Do you know my activities? Before lunch I write notes, I have lunch late; after lunch I ride horseback, in the evening I listen to fairy tales - and thereby compensate for the shortcomings of my damned upbringing. What a delight these fairy tales are! Each one is a poem!” It is interesting that Pushkin himself said that Arina Rodionovna served as the prototype for Tatyana’s nanny in Eugene Onegin, as well as Dubrovsky’s nanny. It is believed that Arina was the basis for the image of Ksenia’s mother in “Boris Godunov”.
Our dilapidated shack
Both sad and dark.
What are you doing, my old lady?
Silent at the window?
Or howling storms
You, my friend, are tired,
Or dozing under the buzzing
Your spindle?
Let's have a drink, good friend,
My poor youth
Let's drink from grief; where is the mug?
The heart will be happier.
Sing me a song like a tit
She lived quietly across the sea;
Sing me a song like a maiden
I went to get water in the morning.
The storm covers the sky with darkness,
Whirling snow whirlwinds;
The way she howls like a beast,
She will cry like a child.
Let's have a drink, good friend
My poor youth
Let's drink from grief; where is the mug?
The heart will be happier.
Pushkin A.S. 1825.
The last time Pushkin saw Arina Rodionovna was in Mikhailovskoye on September 14, 1827. The nanny died when she was seventy years old, on July 29, 1828 in St. Petersburg. For a long time, nothing was known about the day or place of the nanny’s burial. Neither Alexander nor Olga were present at her funeral. Olga’s husband Nikolai Pavlishchev buried her, leaving the grave unmarked. And she soon got lost. Back in 1830, they tried to find the grave of Pushkin’s nanny, but they did not find it. It was believed that she was buried in the Svyatogorsk Monastery, near the poet’s grave; there were those who were sure that Arina Rodionovna was buried in her homeland in Suida; as well as at the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery in St. Petersburg, where at one time there was even a slab with the inscription “Pushkin’s Nanny”. Only in 1940 did they find in the archives that the nanny’s funeral was held in the Vladimir Church. There they found a record dated July 31, 1828, “5th class official Sergei Pushkin serf woman Irina Rodionova 76 old age priest Alexey Narbekov.” It also turned out that she was buried in the Smolensk cemetery. At the entrance to it you can still find a memorial plaque. It was installed in 1977: “Arina Rodionovna, the nanny of A.S. Pushkin 1758-1828, is buried in this cemetery
"Friend of my harsh days,
My decrepit dove"
Confidant of magical antiquity,
Friend of playful and sad fictions,
I knew you in the days of my spring,
In the days of initial joys and dreams;
I was waiting for you. In the evening silence
You were a cheerful old lady
And she sat above me in the shushun
With big glasses and a frisky rattle.
You, rocking the baby's cradle,
My young ears were captivated by the melodies
And between the shrouds she left a pipe,
Which she herself fascinated.
Friend of my harsh days,
My decrepit dove!
Alone in the wilderness of pine forests
You've been waiting for me for a long, long time.
You are under the window of your little room
You're grieving like you're on a clock,
And the knitting needles hesitate every minute
In your wrinkled hands.
You look through the forgotten gates
On the black distant path:
Longing, premonitions, worries
They squeeze your chest all the time.
It seems to you...
Analysis of the poem “Nanny” by Pushkin
Thanks to the great poet, the name of a simple peasant woman, Arina Rodionovna, became famous and even a household name. She was the first teacher of the young poet and introduced him to the wonderful world of national legends and tales. Thanks to his nanny, Pushkin for the first time felt all the charm and living power of the Russian folk language, its richness and diversity. Studying at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum and the subsequent stormy life alienated the poet from his first teacher. He could only visit her occasionally. The poet's link in the village. Mikhailovskoye, which lasted about two years, again allowed Pushkin to constantly communicate with Arina Rodionovna. He trusted her with his most cherished dreams and poetic ideas. In 1826, the poet created the poem “Nanny,” dedicated to the woman most devoted to him.
Pushkin treated Arina Rodionovna not only as a teacher, he felt respectful love and respect for her. From the first lines, he addresses the nanny with the words “friend” and “dove.” This is not just familiarity with the peasant woman, this is how the poet expresses the tenderness of his feelings. There were many people in Pushkin’s life who radically changed their attitude towards him after the tsar’s disgrace. Arina Rodionovna was one of the few who remained faithful to the poet to the end. In the wilderness of the village, she faithfully waited for her beloved pupil.
Tired of the endless ridicule of high society and the persecution of censorship, Pushkin could always turn in his memories to the image of his beloved old woman. He imagines her sitting by the window, always knitting. Vague “longing” and “premonitions” are associated with worries about the fate of the poet, who forever remained a little boy for her.
Pushkin noted that exile to Mikhailovskoye became for him not only a punishment, but also a break from the noisy bustle of the city. Modest village life became a fresh source of inspiration for the poet. Arina Rodionovna played an important role in this. Pushkin spent all his evenings in her company, returning to his childhood. The poet recalled that it was only thanks to his nanny that he was never bored.
The poem creates the feeling of the beginning of some kind of fairy tale or legend. The image of a nanny sitting by the window was exactly repeated by Pushkin later in.
The work remained unfinished. It suddenly ends with the words “it seems to you...”. One can only guess what the poet wanted to say next. There is no doubt that further lines would be imbued with the same tender and bright feeling.
