Innokenty Annensky short biography. Origin of the poet, early years

Annensky is generally full of mysteries and paradoxes. From his autobiography you can find out that he was born in 1855 in the city of Omsk, but modern researchers have found that this actually happened in the city of Tomsk in 1856. If Innokenty Annensky did not consider it necessary to remember the exact place and date of his own birth, you might think that this fact itself was unimportant to him. When he was five, he became seriously ill and the result of the illness was a heart defect, which changed his entire future life. Physically very weak, he could not play with his peers and grew up in the world of adults, which is why the inherent desire for loneliness, isolation, and contemplation inherent in him from birth developed greatly in his character.
His illness coincided with the family's move to St. Petersburg, where his father, Fyodor Nikolaevich Annensky, who held a high position in Siberia, hoped to get a good position. The location turned out to be not very good. There were six children in the family: four sisters and two brothers; Innokenty was the youngest of the children. To support his family with dignity, the father took up speculation, but went broke. The case was accompanied by loud scandals with creditors, because of which the management, deciding that such commercial activity was poorly compatible with public service, fired Fyodor Nikolaevich without severance pay. And only the intercession and efforts of his eldest son helped him receive a small pension. To top off all the troubles, Fyodor Nikolaevich suffered from paralysis.
The denouement of family misfortunes came in 1874, when Innokenty Annensky had to take his matriculation exams; it is not surprising that he failed: he did not pass the written exam in mathematics and was not admitted to the next one. In general, he studied at several different gymnasiums in St. Petersburg, but completed his education at home. Innokenty Annensky did not like to remember his childhood. In his youth he wrote poems that have not survived because he destroyed them one day, considering them nonsense.

The following year, 1875, Innocent lived with his older brother, under whose guidance he prepared for the exams much better and received the following grades: the law of God and French - “excellent”, Russian language and mathematics - “good”, and “satisfactory” in all other subjects . He entered St. Petersburg University at the Department of History and Philology. Since childhood, knowing German and French at the university, he mastered fourteen ancient languages, among which, in addition to Greek and Latin, were Hebrew, Sanskrit, as well as a number of Slavic languages. At the university, Innokenty Annensky studied comparative philology and completely abandoned writing poetry. He passed his final exams brilliantly, receiving “excellent” in all subjects, except philosophy and theology, in which he received “good”.

4. Innokenty Annensky

Annensky is still read

Today we will talk about Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky, a symbolist poet who, along with Blok, remains, perhaps, the most read author now and today, in demand by today’s reader. Everyone recognizes the historical merits of the poems of Bryusov or Balmont, but they don’t have very many readers today, but Annensky is still read.

Comparison with Blok

In this case, it is convenient to compare with Annensky Blok according to the principle of contrast. We talked about the fact that for Blok the most important idea is the idea of ​​the path, and, accordingly, his trilogy is three volumes and his books are compiled according to a chronological principle. Annensky composed his books completely differently, and we will talk about this today, it is very important for understanding him. Blok was extremely popular during his lifetime. As you know, his photographs were sold in bookstores as postcards.

Nobody knew Annensky. You can even test yourself now: imagine Annensky’s appearance - I’m not sure you can do it easily. However, I repeat once again, Annensky’s popularity is not comparable to Blok’s popularity, but it may approach it and, moreover, Annensky greatly influenced, perhaps even more than Blok, on the subsequent generation of poets. This is one of his important roles. It was what he did in poetry that turned out to be very important for the next generation.

Akhmatova about Annensky

Anna Akhmatova, a tireless promoter of Annensky’s work, wrote about him this way: “While Balmont and Bryusov themselves completed what they had started (although they continued to confuse provincial graphomaniacs for a long time), Annensky’s work revived with terrible force in the next generation. And, if he had not died so early, he could have seen his downpours lashing on the pages of B. Pasternak’s books, his semi-abstruse “Grandfather Lida got along…” from Khlebnikov, his raeshnik (“Balls”) from Mayakovsky, etc. I don't mean to say that everyone imitated him. But he walked along so many roads at the same time! He carried so much new in himself that all innovators turned out to be akin to him... Boris Leonidovich Pasternak<…>categorically asserted that Annensky played a big role in his work... I spoke with Osip (Akhmatova means Mandelstam, of course) about Annensky several times. And he spoke about Annensky with unfailing reverence. Whether Marina Tsvetaeva knew Annensky, I don’t know. Love and admiration for the Teacher both in Gumilev’s poetry and prose.”

Akhmatova names the names of the main post-symbolist poets, both Acmeist poets or those close to Acmeism: Mandelstam, her own, Gumilyov, and futurists: Khlebnikov, Pasternak and Mayakovsky.

She, who was jealous of Tsvetaeva, accordingly, says that Tsvetaeva may not have read Annensky, but we will still try to see that, in fact, Tsvetaeva read Annensky very carefully.

Accordingly, you and I will try to understand what was unique about Annensky’s poetry. What was in him that in his poetic manner predicted the manner of the Symbolist poets.

Biography

First, let's talk very briefly about his biography. He is older than many of the older Symbolists. He was born in 1855, in Siberia. He spent his childhood in a populist family.

His brother, Nikolai Fedorovich Annensky, was a very famous populist figure. Accordingly, on the one hand, Annensky took from him an interest in these topics, and, say, one of Annensky’s most famous poems “Old Estonian Women” can, among other things, be perceived as a social poem. On the other hand, he, as often happens with younger brothers, was repelled by what his older brother imposed on him, and his social poems are important, but they are isolated.

Initially, the main areas of his activity were two: he was a famous teacher and achieved quite great heights in this field, in particular, in 1895 - 1906 he was the director of the gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo, the same gymnasium where Gumilyov studied, and Akhmatov, when she speaks of Annensky as Gumilyov’s teacher; she means, of course, poetry, but she is also the most literal teacher.

Gumilyov has a wonderful poem in memory of Annensky, where he remembers how he comes to Annensky’s office. In this very office he sees a bust of Euripides. And this is also no coincidence, since Annensky was one of the most famous translators of ancient authors, and his main feat was the translation of the entire Euripides. Until now, we read Euripides mainly in the translations of Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky.

He began writing poetry quite early, but at the same time they were not published. He published his first book of independent poems shortly before his death. It was called in a characteristic way - “Quiet Songs”. It was issued in 1904 and was signed by a pseudonym, a somewhat pretentious pseudonym. He signed it Nick. That.– Nikolai Timoshenko, let’s assume.

This pseudonym seemed funny and pretentious to reviewers, among whom were Blok and Bryusov. It is characteristic that they wrote about Annensky (they did not know who the author of this book was) as about a talented aspiring poet, clapped him on the shoulder, meanwhile, Annensky was older than both.

It must be said right away, this will be important in the future, that, on the one hand, this pseudonym seems self-deprecating - Nobody - on the other hand, the “antique” Annensky, of course, remembered that Nobody - that’s what Ulysses calls himself, that’s what Odysseus calls himself in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. Accordingly, it was humiliation rather than pride. On the one hand, I am a nobody, you don’t know me and are unlikely to recognize me, on the other hand, Odysseus, as we know, is one of the main Greek heroes.

I have already said that Annensky was the director of the gymnasium until 1906. Why did he stop being one? Because he was sympathetic to those students who took part in the revolution of 1905 (here perhaps his populist roots are again reflected). Then he will have all sorts of troubles, and he will cease to be the director of the gymnasium.

And he was brought into the wide world, into the white literary light of St. Petersburg, partly with the participation of Gumilyov in 1909, when the magazine “Apollo” was created, which opposed symbolist publications, which opposed itself to symbolist publications, and one of the important people in it who determined policy This magazine became Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov. Gumilev invited Annensky to participate in Apollo. Annensky published a large article there and published several of his poems. It seemed that a new period of his creativity was beginning. He was recognized, he argued, polemicized with the main theorists of symbolism, with such, for example, as Vyacheslav Ivanov.

But, suddenly, Annensky died, a symbolic death, so to speak, on the steps of the station, waiting for the train that was traveling to Tsarskoe Selo. For some time the body could not be identified; it had no documents. Why did I say that this death is symbolic? Because tragedy, the meaninglessness of life, the complexity of life, the incomprehensibility of life - this is perhaps Annensky’s main theme.

Formula of creativity

If you try, as we are doing and will continue to do, to look for some short formula in order to define Annensky’s poetry, then I would propose a formula - the poetry of painful couplings. Like few poets of his generation, he felt that all the objects around us, all phenomena, were connected by some incomprehensible ominous connection. The theme of couplings, the image of a web and other similar motifs arise all the time. It is unclear who organized this connection, who arranged human life this way. A person or an object, because objects in Annensky’s poems play the same role as people, can only flounder in this web, in the chain of these connections.

The second book, the main book of Innokenty Annensky, published posthumously, was called “The Cypress Casket.” It was published in 1910, almost a year after his death. His son prepared it. It seems to represent a model of Annensky’s worldview.

A book of poems as a special category of modernist poetry

It must be said that such a category as a book of poetry was very important for modernists. Baratynsky, one of the main predecessors of the Symbolists, was one of the first to compose his book in such a way that it represented a complex unity; it was called “Twilight.”

Next, Bryusov and his colleagues introduced into the consciousness of the Russian reader the idea of ​​the book as the main genre, a super-genre of Russian poetry, so important that a book of poems in this era becomes a more significant genre than a poem, not to mention a novel in verse. The reputations of poets, in many ways, were questioned or strengthened after the release of another poetry book. Symbolists looked at the book as a model of the world.

"Cypress Casket"

Annensky arranged his book “The Cypress Casket” in a complex way. Its name is enigmatic and mysterious. This is a name with the key dropped. Its meaning can be fully understood by those who know (this is again a subject name) - Annensky kept his manuscripts and his poems in a cypress casket. Let us remember that in ancient tradition the cypress is the tree of death, so the ominous shade is also important here. The book is organized as follows. It consists of three sections:

1. "Shamrocks". The poems are grouped under general titles in groups of three, like leaves in a trefoil.
2. “Fold it.” Poems are grouped in twos.
3. "Scattered sheets." Annensky combined a wide variety of his poems into this section.

Each motif, each word existed in some context of the poem and existed in some context of the “shamrock” or “folding”. In addition, the “shamrocks” were also connected by motifs. This section itself, in turn, was connected by motivic echoes with the section “Folding” or with the section “Scattered sheets”. If we try to draw these connections, we will see that the book is an endless interweaving of various motifs. This reflected Annensky’s worldview and attitude.

The poems were divided into “trefoils”, “foldings” or were included in the “Scattered sheets” section, not chronologically. Unlike Blok, Annensky did not arrange his poems chronologically. The idea of ​​his poetic path was not important to him. It was important to show how thematically complex his texts are intertwined. This became very important for subsequent poets.

No one else composed his books as revolutionary as Annensky, but the whimsical arrangement of books is also characteristic of the younger generation. In addition, the role that Annensky plays with objects, things, in many ways predicted the searches of younger poets: Acmeists, for whom the thing and the subject were very important. Or Pasternak, whose world is full of objects and things. This, in many ways, came from Annensky.

Psychologism and the influence of French symbolists

Another important property of Annensky’s poetics was psychologism. It should be noted here that Annensky almost never called himself a symbolist. If he was oriented towards the Symbolists, then it was not the Russian, but the French Symbolists. When we talk about older Symbolists, we, of course, remember Western Symbolists. When we talked about Bryusov, we remembered Verlaine and Baudelaire. When we talk about Annensky, we need to remember one of the most enigmatic and mysterious symbolists - Mallarm. It is his poetic systems, it is his mystery and his psychologism, manifested through objects, that turn out to be essential for Annensky, who translated him.

Poem “Black Spring” (“Melts”)

Let's try to move on to the analysis of a specific poem, to the analysis of a specific text. This will be the poem “Black Spring” (“Melts”). Dated March 29, 1906, Totma (this is a small town near Vologda), where Annensky was sent with an inspection after he ceased to be the director of the gymnasium. This poem was included in the “spring trefoil”, that is, there were three poems, the first of which was “Black Spring”. First, let's remember the text:

Black Spring (Melts)

Under the rumble of copper - a grave-like transference was taking place, And, terribly raised, the wax nose looked out from the coffin.

Did he want to breathe there, into his empty chest?.. The last snow was dark white, And the loose path was hard,

And only the drizzle, cloudy, poured down on the decay, and the dull black spring looked into the jelly of the eyes -

From shabby roofs, from brown holes, from green faces. And there, across the dead fields, From the swollen wings of birds...

O people! Life's trail is heavy along rutted paths, But there is nothing sadder, Like the meeting of two deaths.

Analysis of the poem “Black Spring” (“Melts”)

The theme of this poem can be perfectly formulated with a quote from Annensky himself, which Lidia Yakovlevna Ginzburg (another wonderful philologist) remembered when she wrote about Annensky.

Annensky, however, says this not about himself, but about Konstantin Balmont, and he says this: “I am among nature, mystically close to him and somehow painfully and aimlessly linked to his existence.” This is how Annensky defines Balmont’s poetic world, but this applies more to his own world.

In the poem that we just read and began to analyze, this is precisely what is described I among nature, painfully linked with it. Annensky's demise of a person rhymes with the demise of winter. Individual death is projected into the objective environment, it “spreads”, “dissolves” in the death of winter, in the death of nature.

The striking similarity of the poem with Annensky’s formula, which he applied to Balmont’s work, clearly indicates the semantic complex of motives that this poem carefully avoids. Let me remind you that in the quote - “I am among nature, mystically close to him and somehow painfully and aimlessly linked to his existence” - this is very important for the quote. However, in his poem Annensky consciously does not say a word about this someone, about God.

At the same time, his poem begins promisingly, with the lines: “Under the rumble of grave-like brass // The transfer was taking place...” - we are, of course, talking about church bells. In Totma, indeed, there were a lot of churches. It would seem that from this we should move on to a conversation about the place of God in this meeting of man and nature, a dead man and a dying winter. Moreover, March 29 (the poem dates from this day) is a day falling during Lent, and the reader of Annensky should remember this. The Jewish Passover also fell on March 29, but this was not very important; Annensky might not have known about it.

Poem "Palm Week"

A year after the “Black Spring,” on April 14, 1907, Annensky will write a poem called “Palm Week.” Already from its name it is clear that it will be associated with the theme of Lent. This poem will briefly mention one of the brightest events of Great Lent - how Christ raised Lazarus. We remember that this motif was used many times in literature.

We remember that in Crime and Punishment one of the main scenes is Sonya reading a fragment about the resurrection of Lazarus to Raskolnikov. And Annensky also wrote about this poem. Let's see what kind of poem this is and how he describes this event:

Palm Week

In the yellow twilight of dead April, Saying goodbye to the starry desert, Palm Week sailed away On the last, on a dead snow floe;

She floated away in fragrant smoke, in the fading of funeral bells, from icons with deep eyes, and from Lazaruses, forgotten in a black pit.

The white moon became high on the decline, And for all whose lives are irrevocable, Hot tears floated down the willow tree On the rosy cheeks of the cherub.

Comparison of the poems “Palm Week” and “Black Spring”

We see that the key motifs of this poem resonate so clearly and so clearly that these poems could be called, as Mandelstam later said, “double poems.” Both that poem and this one depict the death of winter. In both this and this, it is represented, as usual in Annensky, by an objective motif. In this poem: “On the last, on the dead snow floe.” Again, this death is accompanied by funeral church bells: “In the fading of the funeral bells.” In the previous poem: “Under the rumble of copper - a grave.” Once again, this death is linked with the death of a person, only now it is not anonymous and someone unknown, as in that poem, but Lazarus, “forgotten in a black pit” (in the previous poem there is also a pit motif: “from brown pits”). And the life of this Lazarus turns out to be irreversible.

That is, reading the poem “Palm Week”, we can assume why religious motives were removed and eliminated from the poem “Black Spring”. If Lazarus was not resurrected, then the connection between man and nature turns out to be truly pointless. Consequently, even at the meeting of two deaths, even if it took place during Lent, this someone, God, is superfluous.

“It is not the resurrection, but the decayed corpse of Lazarus that Annensky sees in the faces of spring” - this is a quote, as Maximilian Voloshin, already mentioned by us, wrote about the poem “Palm Week”. However, Annensky does not treat the resurrection too favorably in his poems. Let us recall that already in the article “Balmont the Lyricist” cited above, it is said with bitterness: “I am in a nightmare of returns” - that is, constant returns of the Self, constant returns of the Self.

And one of the most famous poems, “That Was on Wallen-Koski,” talks about the “resurrection” of a doll, which, for entertainment, for the amusement of tourists, is methodically caught from a waterfall and then thrown into it again: “Her salvation is invariable for new and new torments."

The cycle of endless dying in “Spring Trefoil”

Now is the time to pay attention to the unemphasized, but very significant difference between the death of winter and the death of man, depicted in the “spring trefoil”. In the first poem that we have now analyzed - “Black Spring”, the death of a person and the death of winter are described, and then, in the poem “Ghosts” the death of spring is described:

The green ghost of the lilac bush clung to the window... Go away, shadows, leave the shadows, alone with me... She is motionless, she is mute, With traces of tears, With two tassels of May lilacs In the twists of her braids...

These May braids show that spring is dying, and then summer will die, and then autumn, and then winter again. A tragic ring, a cycle of endless dying - this is how Annensky describes the change of seasons.

The dead man's straight path

As for the life and posthumous path of a person, it, at least in “Black Spring,” is described not as cyclical, but as linear. Apparently, this was very important for Annensky, because in the first four stanzas of his poem and up to the final maxim, the final fifth stanza, the direct, not cyclical, but direct path of the deceased from the steps of the church to the cemetery is reproduced by various means.

The theme of linear movement began already in the second line of “Black Spring”, it began with the word “transfer”: “Under the rumble of copper - a grave transfer was happening.” The theme of transfer is syntactically supported in the poem by enjambment: “under the rumble of copper - grave” - this is in one line, and “transfer” is the beginning of the next line. And then, from stanza to stanza, Annensky also moves with the help of transference-riddles.

Why is the nose emphasized in the appearance of a deceased person? - This is the riddle of the last line of the first stanza. Because it is naturally associated with the terrible theme of breathing, which an already dead person lacks - this is how the first two lines of the second stanza answer. Transition - a question at the end of one stanza, an answer at the beginning of another stanza.

Why does the third line of the second stanza mention snow, which was dark white? Then,” answers the second line of the third stanza, “that this prepares the image of the meeting between the decay of man and the decay of winter, embodied precisely in the line about the last dark-white snow. Dark white snow around and the decay of a person rhymes, aligns itself in this way.

And finally, at the junction of the third and fourth stanzas, the transference technique is simply laid bare. Where did the black spring look into the jelly eyes of the dead man? – The reader asks himself in the final two lines of the third stanza. From everywhere! – The entire fourth stanza answers, or more precisely:

From shabby roofs, from brown holes, from green faces. And there, across the dead fields, From the swollen wings of birds...

This transfer technique, or one can call it the “pickup” technique, allows the reader to almost visually observe the direct and steady movement of a person and a person’s body towards the cemetery along a predetermined path laid more than once. This is where “along the rutted paths” comes from. More than once a person moves along it, but every person moves along this path, and even the wheels have made potholes in it. At one of the points on this path, a person who dies once meets the season of the year that endlessly dies and is resurrected for new and new torment.

Annensky’s “Mentatory Keyboard”: F.I. Tyutchev

A careful reading of this poem allows us not only to talk about the basic principles of Annensky’s poetics, about how Annensky sees the world around him, but also to briefly go through, as Mandelstam said, Annensky’s “reference keyboard,” that is, to talk about those main Russian writers and poets who which were significant for Annensky.

The first of the names that we remember is the name of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev. Annensky uses a stable topos in his poem, an ancient topos: spring is the time of dawn, winter is the time of death, but it seems that any high school student at that time, any schoolchild in our time, cannot help but remember Tyutchev’s famous poem of 1836:

It’s not for nothing that winter is angry, Its time has passed – Spring is knocking on the window And driving you out of the yard.

And everything began to fuss, Everything forced Winter out - And the larks in the sky Already started ringing the bell.

Winter is still busy and grumbling about Spring. She laughs in her eyes and only makes more noise...

The evil witch went berserk and, grabbing the snow, let it run away into a beautiful child...

Spring and grief are not enough: I washed myself in the snow And only became blush In defiance of the enemy.

We see how Annensky changes one pole to another. If Tyutchev has a blush, then Annensky has green faces, from which spring looks into the eyes of the dead man.

If Tyutchev has larks in the sky, Annensky has birds with swollen wings, either crows or rooks in dead fields. In this case, an association arises with the cemetery and the scavenger birds that feed on it.

The main difference between the two poems is this: in Tyutchev’s, winter ends badly, but it still runs away, in Annensky’s, winter dies.

Another Tyutchev text that comes to mind when reading Annensky’s “Black Spring” is the poet’s poem, the first stanza of which depicts the lowering of a dead man’s body into a grave:

And the coffin was already lowered into the grave, And everyone crowded around... They jostle, breathe through force, The corruptive spirit constricts their chest...

We see the word “pernicious”, which is very important for Annensky’s poem. It will arise again in the final stanza of Tyutchev’s poem, it will appear in a completely different sense than in Annensky. In Annensky, human life and the life of nature are connected, and the death of man and the death of nature are united.

Tyutchev, in the finale of his poem, quite traditionally contrasts the momentary rapid existence of man with the eternal existence of nature:

And the sky is so imperishable and pure, So boundless above the earth... And the birds soar loudly In the blue abyss of air...

Let's pay attention - there are birds again, but not like Annensky, below, in the fields, but in the sky.

Annensky’s “Mentatory Keyboard”: N.V. Gogol

Another great Russian writer of the 19th century, whom you probably already remembered when I read the poem “Black Spring,” is Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, whose story “The Nose” was analyzed in detail by Annensky in the article opening Annensky’s “Book of Reflections.”

At the beginning of his article, Annensky names the exact date when Major Kovalev’s nose ran away from his face, this is March 25, that is, four days before March 29, which is the date of Annensky’s poem. Perhaps the proximity of these two dates provokes the poet to revive and animate the nose of the deceased in his poem. First this nose looks out of the coffin, then it wants to breathe into the empty chest of the deceased.

Perhaps in such an extravagant way, Annensky reminded the reader of the famous legend that accompanied Gogol, that Gogol was buried alive, in a lethargic sleep. The nose is not mentioned here by chance, perhaps because the metonymy of Gogol’s appearance is precisely the nose. Why did Annensky need Gogol’s motifs in the poem “Black Spring”? Annensky himself answers this question when he writes about Gogol. He says that Gogol is characterized by “the cruel humor of his creation, which is no longer accessible to us.” He speaks of Gogol’s “cruel humor of creation,” meaning, of course, “Portrait,” “The Nose,” and “Dead Souls.”

This is also typical for Annensky himself. Of course, we will never call the poem “Black Spring” a funny poem. We don't laugh when we read it. But Annensky’s grotesque: “And, terribly raised, the waxen nose looked out from the coffin” is balancing on the verge of the tragic and the comic, balancing on the verge of the terrible and the comic, and that is why he perhaps needed Gogol.

Annensky’s “Mentatory Keyboard”: L.N. Tolstoy and N.A. Nekrasov

There are two more names that we must definitely mention in connection with this poem. One of them is the name of the author of perhaps the most terrible story about the death of a person, at least written in the 19th century, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.

In his story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the deceased main character is described as follows: “The dead man lay, as dead men always lie,<…>and exhibited, as the dead always exhibit, his yellow waxen forehead<…>and a protruding nose, as if pressing on the upper lip.” Note that Annensky wrote about Tolstoy as about Gogol “from whom the romance was burned out.”

Another name that needs to be mentioned is the name of Nikolai Nekrasov, in the thirteenth chapter of whose poem (the textbook famous poem “Frost, Red Nose”) motifs arise that echo the key motifs of our poem. These are two funeral blows, and Daria’s pale face, and a mention of the dark days awaiting her.

When we talk about Tolstoy and Nekrasov, we must remember that perhaps here we are not talking about borrowings, but about a commonality of motives that arises from a commonality of situations. Both Nekrasov, Tolstoy, and Annensky describe death and funerals.

Roll call with post-symbolists: B.L. Parsnip

Now about the roll call with post-symbolists. What we talked about at the beginning of the lecture. I hope that someone has already remembered the first poem that will be discussed now, because this is the famous programmatic poem by Boris Pasternak “February. Get some ink and cry!”, in which there are many similarities with Annensky’s poem: fields, path, birds. Finally, the title of Annensky’s poem, “Black Spring,” is found in Pasternak’s poem: “While the thundering slush burns in the black spring” is an almost direct quotation.

It is important that Pasternak polemicizes with Annensky. On the one hand, he continues it, on the other hand, he polemicizes with it, because the topos that Annensky destroys: spring is the time of ecstatic joy, spring is the time of birth, Pasternak again restores his rights.

But at the same time, he also takes into account the tragic turn of the topic, which is proposed in “Black Spring”. Let us show this using the example of only one motive. Tyutchev says: “larks in the sky,” the larks took off. Annensky: “And there, across the dead fields, from the swollen wings of birds...”, that is, the birds below. What does Pasternak have? In Pasternak, the rooks simultaneously fly up and, at the same time, reflected in the puddles, end up below:

Where, like charred pears, thousands of rooks will fall from the trees into puddles and bring down dry sadness to the bottom of your eyes.

This is an important motif, an important symbol, because birds mean joy or tragedy. In Annensky they are at the bottom, in Tyutchev they are at the top, in Pasternak they bifurcate.

In the same way, Pasternak, as he often does, has the tears with which his lyrical hero cries: “To write sobbingly about February” - the reader still does not fully understand whether these are tears of joy or tears of grief. He deliberately chooses an image of tears that works both ways.

Roll call with post-symbolists: M.I. Tsvetaeva

Another poem, apparently, accidentally echoes Pasternak’s “February”, where the rhyme “spring - winter” and “tears - wheels” is also found, like in Pasternak, and, it seems, goes back to “Black Spring” and “Palm Week” Annensky, this poem “The Ice Rink Has Melted” by Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva.

I began the lecture with a quote from Akhmatova, who jealously writes that Tsvetaeva may not have read Annensky. Now we will make sure that, most likely, she read it. Here is the text of this poem with an epigraph:

The skating rink has melted... Not a delight Behind the winter silence is the sound of wheels. The soul does not need the spring, And I feel sorry for the winter to the point of tears. In winter, the sadness was one... Suddenly a new image will arise... Whose? The human soul is the same ice floe And it also melts from the rays. Let there be a hillock in the yellow buttercups! Let the snowflake sweep away the petal! - Strangely dear to the capricious soul Like a melted skating rink in a dream...

We see that Tsvetaeva writes on the same topic as Annensky: winter is dying, winter is leaving, we feel sorry for it, and there is no need for spring, “the soul does not need spring and feels sorry for winter to the point of tears,” she writes.

However, Tsvetaeva, she is already solving her own problems, which we will definitely talk about in our lectures; the early Tsvetaeva presents Annensky’s theme in a childish, infantile, almost “lisp” key. It is difficult for us to cry, we do not need to cry when we read this poem, because the tragedy is removed by the fact that it is a child looking at it.

Therefore, the poem begins with an epigraph from a private letter. Therefore, at the end of the poem there appears, almost impossible for a great poet: “Let there be a hillock in the yellow buttercups!” And then even stronger, as if sentimental, taken from a children's book of that time: “Let the snowflake sweep away the petal!” And we already cease to be frightened as we were frightened in Annensky’s poem when we read it.

Note that the very abundance of objects in this poem, the very fact that Tsvetaeva solves this theme, relying precisely on objective motifs, using so densely objective motifs: yellow buttercups, a hillock, a snowflake, a petal, and, finally, the central image of the skating rink itself in in this poem, also an objective motif, seems to indicate that both Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva and other Russian symbolists read Annensky very, very carefully.

Akhmatova A., Rosary: ​​Anno Domini; A poem without a hero. – Publisher: OLMA Media Group.

Wallen-Koski (Vallinkoski, Finnish Vallinkoski) is a waterfall on the Vuokse River in Finland.

Franz. enjambement, from enjamber - to step over, jump over.

The fate of the poet Inokenty Fedorovich Annensky (1855-1909) is unique in its kind. He published his first poetry collection (and only one during his lifetime) at the age of 49 under the pseudonym Nick. That.

The poet was initially going to title the book “From the Cave of Polyphemus” and choose the pseudonym Utis, which means “nobody” in Greek (this is how Odysseus introduced himself to the Cyclops Polyphemus). Later the collection was called "Quiet Songs". Alexander Blok, who did not know who the author of the book was, considered such anonymity questionable. He wrote that the poet seemed to be burying his face under a mask, which made him get lost among many books. Perhaps, in this modest confusion we should look for an overly “painful tear”?

Origin of the poet, early years

The future poet was born in Omsk. His parents (see photo below) soon moved to St. Petersburg. Innokenty Annensky reported in his autobiography that he spent his childhood in an environment in which landowner and bureaucratic elements were combined. From a young age, he loved to study literature and history, and felt antipathy to everything banal, clear and elementary.

First poems

Innokenty Annensky began writing poetry quite early. Since the concept of "symbolism" was still unknown to him in the 1870s, he considered himself a mystic. Annensky was attracted to the “religious genre” of B. E. Murillo, a 17th-century Spanish artist. He tried to “formulate this genre in words.”

The young poet, following the advice of his older brother, who was a famous publicist and economist (N.F. Annensky), decided that he should not publish before the age of 30. Therefore, his poetic experiments were not intended for publication. Innokenty Annensky wrote poems in order to hone his skills and declare himself as a mature poet.

University studies

The study of antiquity and ancient languages ​​during university years replaced writing for a time. As Innokenty Annensky admitted, during these years he wrote nothing but dissertations. “Pedagogical-administrative” activities began after university. According to fellow antique scholars, she distracted Innokenty Fedorovich from his scientific studies. And those who sympathized with his poetry believed that it interfered with creativity.

Debut as a critic

Innokenty Annensky made his debut in print as a critic. He published a number of articles in the 1880-1890s, mainly devoted to Russian literature of the 19th century. The first “Book of Reflections” appeared in 1906, and the second in 1909. This is a collection of criticism, which is distinguished by impressionistic perception, Wildean subjectivism and associative-figurative moods. Innokenty Fedorovich emphasized that he was only a reader, and not a critic at all.

Translations of French poets

Annensky the poet considered the French symbolists to be his forerunners, whom he willingly and widely translated. In addition to enriching the language, he also saw their merit in increasing aesthetic sensitivity, in the fact that they increased the scale of artistic sensations. A significant section of Annensky's first collection of poems consisted of translations of French poets. Of the Russians, the closest to Innokenty Fedorovich was K. D. Balmont, who aroused awe in the author of “Quiet Songs.” Annensky highly valued the musicality and “new flexibility” of his poetic language.

Publications in the symbolist press

Innokenty Annensky led a rather secluded literary life. During the period of onslaught and storm, he did not defend the right to the existence of “new” art. Annensky did not participate in further intra-Symbolist disputes.

The first publications of Innokenty Fedorovich in the symbolist press date back to 1906 (the magazine "Pereval"). In fact, his entry into the Symbolist environment took place only in the last year of his life.

Recent years

The critic and poet Innokenty Annensky gave lectures at the Poetry Academy. He was also a member of the "Society of Admirers of the Artistic Word", which operated under the magazine "Apollo". On the pages of this magazine, Annensky published an article that can be called programmatic - “On modern lyricism.”

Posthumous cult, "Cypress Casket"

His sudden death caused a wide resonance in Symbolist circles. Innokenty Annensky died near the Tsarskoye Selo station. His biography ended, but his creative destiny after death received further development. Among young poets close to “Apollo” (mostly of an Acmeist orientation, who reproached the Symbolists for not paying attention to Annensky), his posthumous cult began to take shape. 4 months after the death of Innokenty Fedorovich, the second collection of his poems was published. The poet's son, V.I. Annensky-Krivich, who became his biographer, commentator and editor, completed the preparation of the "Cypress Casket" (the collection was so named because Annensky's manuscripts were kept in a cypress box). There is reason to believe that he did not always follow his father’s author’s will punctually.

Innokenty Annensky, whose poems were not very popular during his lifetime, gained well-deserved fame with the release of The Cypress Casket. Blok wrote that this book penetrates deep into the heart and explains to him a lot about himself. Bryusov, who had previously paid attention to the “freshness” of the phrases, comparisons, epithets and even just words that were chosen in the collection “Quiet Songs”, noted as an undoubted advantage the impossibility of guessing Innokenty Fedorovich’s next two stanzas from the first two verses and the end works at its beginning. In 1923, Krivich published the remaining texts of the poet in a collection entitled “Posthumous Poems of In. Annensky”.

Originality

His lyrical hero is a man who solves the “hateful puzzle of existence.” Annensky thoroughly analyzes the “I” of a person, which would like to be the whole world, to spread out, to dissolve in it, and which is tormented by the consciousness of the inevitable end, hopeless loneliness and aimless existence.

“Cunning irony” gives Annensky’s poems a unique uniqueness. According to V. Bryusov, she became the second person of Innokenty Fedorovich as a poet. The writing style of the author of "The Cypress Casket" and "Quiet Songs" is sharply impressionistic. Annensky called it associative symbolism; he believed that poetry does not depict. It only hints to the reader what cannot be expressed in words.

Today, the work of Inokenty Fedorovich has received well-deserved fame. The school curriculum includes such a poet as Innokenty Annensky. “Among the Worlds,” which schoolchildren are asked to analyze, is perhaps his most famous poem. Let us also note that in addition to poetry, he wrote four plays in the spirit of Euripides based on the plots of his lost tragedies.

Innokenty Annensky (1855-1909)

Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky was born on August 20 (September 1), 1855 in the city of Omsk into the family of an official Fedor Nikolaevich Annensky, who at that time held the post of head of a department of the Main Directorate of Western Siberia. Soon the Annenskys moved to Tomsk (father was appointed to the post of chairman of the Provincial Administration), and in 1860 they returned to St. Petersburg. Initially, life in the capital was going well, except for the serious illness of five-year-old Innocent, as a result of which Annensky had a complication that affected his heart. Fyodor Nikolaevich took the post of official of special assignments in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but that was where his career ended. Wanting to get rich, he allowed himself to be drawn into dubious financial enterprises, but failed: Fyodor Nikolaevich went bankrupt, was dismissed in 1874, and soon suffered from apoplexy. Need came to the family of the ruined official. Apparently, it was poverty that was the reason that Innokenty Fedorovich was forced to interrupt his studies at the gymnasium. In 1875, Annensky passed the matriculation exams. During these difficult years for the family, his elder brother took care of Innocent. Nikolai Fedorovich Annensky, a Russian intellectual - publicist, scientist, public figure, and his wife Alexandra Nikitichna, teacher and children's writer, professed the ideals of populism of the “generation of the sixties”; The same ideals were to some extent adopted by the younger Annensky. According to Innokenty Fedorovich himself, he was “entirely indebted for his intelligent existence” to them (his elder brother and his wife). Annensky entered the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, from which he successfully graduated in 1879. In the same year, he married a young woman, Nadezhda (Dina) Valentinovna Khmara-Barshchevskaya, who was several years older than him and had two sons from his first marriage.

Already while studying at the university, Annensky began to write poetry, but his unusually strict strictness towards his own work led to many years of “silence” of this extremely gifted poet. Only in the forty-eighth year of his life did Annensky decide to bring his poetic works to the attention of readers, and even then he hid under a pseudonym mask and, like Odysseus once in the cave of Polyphemus, called himself the name Nobody. Collection of poems “Quiet Songs” was published in 1904. By this time, Annensky was well known in Russian literary circles as a teacher, critic and translator.

After graduating from the university, Annensky taught ancient languages, ancient literature, the Russian language, as well as the theory of literature in gymnasiums and at the Higher Women's Courses. In 1896, he was appointed director of the Nikolaev Gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo. He worked at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium until 1906, when he was fired from the post of director in connection with his intercession for high school students who took part in political protests in 1905. Annensky was transferred to the position of inspector of the St. Petersburg educational district. His new responsibilities included regular inspection of educational institutions located in the district cities of the St. Petersburg province. Frequent and tiring trips for Annensky, then already an elderly man with a heart condition, had an adverse effect on his already poor health. In the fall of 1908, Annensky was able to return to teaching: he was invited to lecture on the history of ancient Greek literature at the Higher Historical and Literary Courses of N.P. Raev. Now Annensky constantly traveled from Tsarskoye Selo, which he did not want to part with, to St. Petersburg. Finally, in October 1909, Annensky resigned, which was accepted on November 20. But on the evening of November 30, 1909, at the station (Vitebsk station in St. Petersburg), Annensky died suddenly (para-lich of the heart). His funeral took place on December 4 in Tsarskoe Selo. Many of his followers in literature, students and friends came to see off the teacher and poet on his final journey. How the young Nikolai Gumilyov perceived Annensky’s death as a personal grief.

Expert in ancient and Western European poetry of the 18th - 19th centuries, Annensky in the 1880-1890s. often gave critical reviews and articles, many of them rather resembled original impressionistic sketches or essays (“Book of Reflections”, Vol. 1-2, 1906-1909). At the same time, he translated the tragedies of Euripides, German and French poets: Goethe, Heine, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle.

In the early 1900s. Annensky's own poems appear in print for the first time. In addition to “Silent Songs,” he publishes plays: tragedies based on ancient mythology - “Melanippe the Philosopher” (1901), “King Ixion” (1902) and “Laodamia” (1906); the fourth - “Famira-kifared” - was published posthumously in 1913. in 1916 staged. In Annensky’s biography, much happened “posthumously”: the publication of his poems was posthumous, and his recognition as a poet was also posthumous.

All of Annensky’s work, according to A. A. Blok, bore “the stamp of fragile subtlety and real poetic flair.” In his poetic works, Annensky tried to capture and show the nature of the internal discord of the individual, the possibility of the disintegration of human consciousness under the pressure of the “incomprehensible” and “comprehensible” (real city at the turn of the era) reality. A master of impressionistic sketches, portraits, and landscapes, Annensky knew how to create artistic images in poetry that were close to Gogol and Dostoevsky - realistic and phantasmagoric at the same time, sometimes somewhat reminiscent of either the delirium of a madman or a terrible dream. But the restrained tone accompanying the event, the simple and clear, sometimes everyday syllable of the verse, the absence of false pathos gave Annensky’s poetry amazing authenticity, “an incredible closeness of experience.” Trying to characterize the distinctive features of Annensky’s poetic gift, Nikolai Gumilyov, who repeatedly turned to the creative heritage of his teacher and older friend, wrote: “ I. Annensky... is powerful not so much in Male power as in Human power. For him, it is not a feeling that gives birth to a thought, as is generally the case with poets, but the thought itself grows so strong that it becomes a feeling, alive to the point of pain.».

Dramaturgy

Translations

Literary influence

(August 20 (September 1), 1855, Omsk, Russian Empire - November 30 (December 13), 1909, St. Petersburg, Russian Empire) - Russian poet, playwright, translator. Brother of N.F. Annensky.

Biography

Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky was born on August 20 (September 1), 1855 in Omsk in the family of government official Fyodor Nikolaevich Annensky (died March 27, 1880) and Natalia Petrovna Annenskaya (died October 25, 1889). His father was the head of a department of the Main Directorate of Western Siberia. When Innocent was about five years old, his father received a position as an official on special assignments in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the family from Siberia returned to St. Petersburg, which they had previously left in 1849.

In poor health, Annensky studied at a private school, then at the 2nd St. Petersburg Progymnasium (1865-1868). Since 1869, he studied for two and a half years at the private gymnasium of V. I. Behrens. Before entering the university, in 1875, he lived with his older brother Nikolai, an encyclopedic educated man, an economist, a populist, who helped his younger brother prepare for the exam and had a great influence on Innocent.

After graduating from the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University in 1879, he served as a teacher of ancient languages ​​and Russian literature. He was the director of the Galagan College in Kyiv, then the VIII Gymnasium in St. Petersburg and the Gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo. The excessive softness he showed, in the opinion of his superiors, during the troubled times of 1905-1906 was the reason for his removal from this position. In 1906 he was transferred to St. Petersburg as a district inspector and remained in this position until 1909, when he retired shortly before his death. He lectured on ancient Greek literature at the Higher Women's Courses. Since the early 1880s, he has published scientific reviews, critical articles, and articles on pedagogical issues. From the beginning of the 1890s, he began studying Greek tragedians; Over the course of a number of years, he completed a huge amount of work translating into Russian and commenting on the entire theater of Euripides. At the same time, he wrote several original tragedies based on Euripidean plots and the “Bacchanalian drama” “Famira-kifared” (run in the 1916-1917 season on the stage of the Chamber Theater). He translated French symbolist poets (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Corbières, A. de Regnier, F. Jamme, etc.).

On November 30 (December 13), 1909, Annensky died suddenly on the steps of the Tsarskoye Selo station in St. Petersburg.

Annensky's son, philologist and poet Valentin Annensky-Krivich, published his “Posthumous Poems” (1923).

Poetry

Annensky is most significant as a poet. He began writing poetry since childhood, but published them for the first time in 1904. Annensky, in his own words, was entirely indebted for his “intelligent being” to the influence of his older brother, the famous publicist-populist N.F. Annensky, and his wife, the sister of the revolutionary Tkachev. In his poetry, Annensky, as he himself says, sought to express the “urban, partly stony, museum soul” that was “tortured by Dostoevsky,” the “sick and sensitive soul of our days.” The world of the “sick soul” is the main element of Annensky’s creativity. According to fair criticism, “nothing succeeded in Annensky’s poems so vividly, so convincingly, as the description of nightmares and insomnia”; “He found thousands of shades to express the painful decline of spirit. He exhausted the curves of his neurasthenia in every possible way.” The hopeless melancholy of life and the horror of “liberating” death, the simultaneous “desire to be destroyed and the fear of dying,” rejection of reality, the desire to escape from it into the “sweet hashish” of delirium, into the “binge” of labor, into the “poison” of poetry and at the same time “ a mysterious" attachment to "everyday life", to everyday life, to the "hopeless ruin of one's vulgar world" - such is the complex and contradictory "worldview and worldview" that Annensky seeks to "instill" in his poems.

Approaching this “worldview” of all his contemporaries most of all to Fyodor Sologub, in the forms of verse Annensky is closest to the young Bryusov of the “Russian Symbolists” period. However, the exaggerated “decadence” of Bryusov’s first poems, in which there was a lot of deliberate, invented with the special purpose of attracting attention and “shocking” the reader, is of a deeply organic nature for Annensky, who did not publish his poems. Bryusov soon moved away from his early student experiences. Annensky remained faithful to “decadence” throughout his life, “frozen in his modernism at a certain point in the early 90s,” but he brought it to perfect artistic expression. Annensky's style is brightly impressionistic, often distinguished by sophistication, standing on the verge of pretentiousness and lush rhetoric of décadence.

Like the young Bryusov, Annensky’s poetic teachers were French poets of the second half of the 19th century - the Parnassians and the “damned”: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé. From the Parnassians Annensky inherited their cult of poetic form, love of the word as such; Verlaine was followed in his desire for musicality, for the transformation of poetry into a “melodic rain of symbols”; following Baudelaire, he intricately intertwined in his dictionary “lofty,” “poetic” sayings with scientific terms, with ordinary, emphatically “everyday” words borrowed from the vernacular; finally, following Mallarmé, he built the main effect of his rebus poems on a deliberate obfuscation of meaning. Annensky is distinguished from the “passionate” French Parnassians by a special piercing note of pity, sounding through all his poetry. This pity is directed not at the social suffering of humanity, not even at man in general, but at nature, at the inanimate world of those suffering and tormented by “evil insults” of offended things (a watch, a doll, a barrel organ, etc.), with the images of which the poet masks his own pain and flour. And the smaller, the more insignificant, the more insignificant the “suffering” thing, the more hysterical, aching self-pity it evokes in him.

Very different from Annensky’s other poems is his poem “Old Estonians” (From the Poems of a Nightmarish Conscience) - a response to the shooting of a demonstration in Revel (Tallinn) on October 16, 1905. It differs in its poetic power and from many poems written by other poets, poems that were inspired by the events of the first Russian revolution.

The peculiar literary fate of Annensky is reminiscent of the fate of Tyutchev. Like the latter, Annensky is a typical “poet for poets.” He published his only lifetime book of poetry under the characteristic pseudonym “Nick. That". And indeed, throughout almost his entire life, Annensky remained a “nobody” in literature. Only shortly before his death, his poetry gained fame in the circle of St. Petersburg poets grouped around the Apollo magazine. Annensky's death was noted by a number of articles and obituaries, but after that his name again disappeared from the printed columns for a long time. In the 4th book of poems by Nikolai Gumilyov “Quiver” the poem “In Memory of Annensky” was published.

Dramaturgy

Annensky wrote four plays - "Melanippe the Philosopher", "King Ixion", "Laodamia" and "Thamira the Cyfared" - in the ancient Greek spirit, based on the plots of the lost plays of Euripides and in imitation of his style.

Translations

Annensky translated into Russian the complete collection of plays by the great Greek playwright Euripides. He also performed poetic translations of works by Horace, Goethe, Müller, Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Rainier.

Literary influence

Annensky's literary influence on the movements of Russian poetry that emerged after symbolism (Acmeism, Futurism) is very great. Annensky's poem "Bells" can rightfully be called the first Russian futuristic poem in time of writing. Annensky's influence greatly affects Pasternak and his school and many others. In his literary critical articles, partially collected in two “Books of Reflections,” Annensky provides brilliant examples of Russian impressionistic criticism, striving to interpret a work of art through the conscious continuation of the author’s creativity. It should be noted that already in his critical-pedagogical articles of the 1880s, Annensky, long before the formalists, called for a systematic study of the form of works of art in school.