Tyutchev’s significant response to the fateful moments of history was the poem “December 14, 1825,” which we will analyze. It was created in 1826. As the title indicates, the poet dedicated it to the Decembrist uprising.
The position taken by Tyutchev is very indicative of the early period of his work. Let us remember how, in his message to Siberia, Pushkin highly appreciated the feat of prisoners of convict holes, supporting them with his love, friendship and faith in the immortality of their cause. Herzen will speak of the “firstborn of freedom” as a phalanx of heroes who shocked Russia with their feat of self-sacrifice. Tyutchev approached the assessment of the event, which had fatal consequences, in his own way. The poet does not accept the tactics of the Decembrists and assesses their performance as recklessness. He is convinced that members of secret societies became “victims of reckless thoughts,” that they went against the “incorruptible law.” The death of people on December 14, 1825, according to Tyutchev, is pointless; their “meager” blood will not leave its traces. “The people, shunning treachery, // vilify your names,” the poet declares condemningly. “And your memory for posterity, // Like a corpse in the ground, is buried.”
But at the same time with this assessment, the poem characterizes the other side of the historical conflict. The first verse talks about Autocracy, which in the language of that era meant “autocracy.” It was this, according to the poet’s conviction, that with its arbitrariness “corrupted” its citizens, and therefore the Decembrists, and became the culprit of the uprising, provoking it. It brought its sword down on the heads of its victims. Tyutchev also speaks courageously about the fact that Autocracy tried to erase the memory of the Decembrists from posterity, burying it like a corpse in the ground. Even the burial place of the brave men, the poet hints, remained unknown to people.
The condemnation of the authorities becomes even sharper in the second stanza of the analyzed poem. Autocracy is metaphorically defined here as an “eternal pole” that cannot be melted, like a “centuries-old mass of ice,” like an “iron winter.” All these paraphrases emphasize the icy coldness, which is contrasted with the warmth of the steaming blood of the heroes of the work. The epithet “iron” evokes an association with similar definitions in civil poetry of that era, where it was applied to power, its reins, law and age. As we see, the poet’s position is distinguished by its inconsistency, and the poem “December 14, 1825,” the analysis of which interests us, is distinguished by obvious duality and sometimes ambiguity. But it is absolutely clear that a constant monarchist, like Tyutchev, does not accept the idea of a violent overthrow of the autocracy and does not consider the performance of enemies of the throne to be a feat. Probably, feeling the ambiguity and some vagueness of his assessments, Tyutchev did not consider it possible to publish this poem. It will be published only after the poet’s death, in 1881.
It is important that our students understand: a metaphor or comparison is not just a decoration for a poem; only by perceiving and comprehending all the linguistic features of a poetic work will we come closer to understanding it. Now, it seems, no one disputes this. And yet, a famous literary critic can write in his article: “It seems that the main idea of the poem is contained in its first line.” We are talking about one poem by Tyutchev.
Let us use his example to see how tropes can actually influence the meaning of a poetic statement.
Autocracy has corrupted you,
And his sword struck you down,
And in incorruptible impartiality
The law sealed this verdict.
The people, shunning treachery,
Blasphemes your names -
And your memory from posterity,
Like a corpse in the ground, buried.
O victims of reckless thought,
Maybe you hoped
That your blood will become scarce,
To melt the eternal pole.
Barely smoking, she sparkled
On the centuries-old mass of ice,
The iron winter has died -
And there were no traces left.
Tyutchev's poem is addressed to the participants in the uprising of 1825 and was written immediately after the Decembrists were sentenced - in 1826. This is an example of civil lyricism, with a solemn oratorical intonation, with a clearly formulated position. The first line can be understood in different ways: it is unclear how guilty autocracy what happened most likely means that it was lenient towards the conspirators for too long and did not take decisive measures. But otherwise the assessment contained in the first eight-line is obvious: the participants uprisings corrupted their behavior named treachery, they were condemned both by the supreme power and by the law that issued the conclusion in incorruptible impartiality, that is, objectively and fairly, and by the people who vilifies names traitors, recoiled from them. (Note that this poem shows the agreement of three forces, the ideal hierarchy of which is indicated in Pushkin’s ode “Liberty”:
Lords! You have a crown and a throne
The Law gives, not nature.
You stand above the people,
But the Eternal Law is above you.)
Except for the words autocracy And law, which can be perceived as personifications or metonymies traditional for political lyrics of this era (autocracy as a method of government = king, law = statesmen, lawyers), there are only two tropes in the eight-line. This is a familiar metaphor for state punishment the sword... struck and the final comparison: descendants will not know about the rebels, the memory of them, buried like a corpse in the ground.
At a quick glance, the second eight-line repeats what was said in the first. No new heroes and events appeared - in the center of the second part is the power and those to whom the poem is addressed, the unconditional victory of the power is shown. You can write the correspondences:
you - you, victims of reckless thoughts;
autocracy is the eternal pole, the age-old mass of ice, the iron winter;
his sword<самовластья>struck - the iron winter died;
memory... like a corpse in the ground, buried - there are no traces left.
It turns out that the entire poem ends with the same thought as the first part. Why was the second written, what is new in it? The answer is revealed by the same table of correspondences: the same thing is said differently, which means something else is said.
Only the first lines are written in the usual manner - addressing with a solemn “O”, abstract vocabulary. But already here we are talking about the feelings of the conspirators - they hoped that is, they hoped, - and the word sounded victims, whose emotional strength will be supported by words blood. They were ready to shed their blood to achieve their goal. And then the unequal duel between victims and power is conveyed by a grandiose metaphor of confrontation: on the one hand, something huge, cold ( eternal pole, perhaps reminiscent of permafrost), existing for centuries and unshakable, and in the penultimate line it is also monstrous, fantastic ( iron winter), scary, capable die and destroy, on the other hand, small ( meager blood), warm, steaming, light ( sparkled), probably bright, red. There is no direct assessment in the second part, except for the epithet reckless.
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F.I. Tyutchev. Unknown artist.
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Reason, indeed, should have stopped the hopeless enterprise. Impartiality and objectivity, calm and measuredness (two lines each about power, law, people and memory, two equal-sized compound sentences) reign in the first half of the poem. But is it natural for a person to always be on the side of sober reason and condemn those who enter into an unequal and hopeless battle?
In the second part, the same story is told as if from the inside - we learn about the hopes and sacrifices of the conspirators, and the last quatrain contains not a logical conclusion, but a very vivid visual image that contradicts what was said in the first part: it evokes strong emotions and makes the reader experience what is described as a tragedy. At the end of the poem, shock and grief sound, and not the triumph of justice. This is exactly how the poem is perceived, despite the fact that the political views of F.I. Tyutchev would be more accurately expressed if it consisted only of the first eight lines.
However, the presence of comparisons, metaphors, and metonymies is not at all necessary for a real poem. Here are the poems of our contemporary Igor Kholin.
Today is Saturday,
Today's salary
They'll get drunk today
The guys are in the barracks.
Today is Saturday,
Today, however,
Guys don't drink
They don't hang out in the barracks.
The guys are making noise
At the gates of the plant -
Today again
Salaries were delayed.
This poem is written without a single trope, and only in unpoetic, demonstratively “prosaic” words, moreover, these words are few, the same ones are repeated several times. The poem has 12 lines, 2 significant words in each, a total of 23 (“however” we will not count), and at the same time the time of action is indicated 6 times – “today”, 2 times – “Saturday”, the characters are called “guys” three times, the barracks are mentioned twice; there is not a single evaluative or emotional word, not a single adjective - there is an obvious poverty of vocabulary. And this unusual poverty itself becomes a very strong poetic device - it allows you to feel the hopelessness of the wretched life of the “guys”, flowing between the barracks and the plant - a life, the main event of which is the weekly salary followed by revelry or discontent, “clamor” when this salary is delayed . The feeling of monotony is reinforced by the sound - in all rhyming words there is a stressed [a] and one or two more unstressed ones: salary, guys, however, in the barracks, plant, salary; let's also note the words they're making noise And again.
But not everything is so poor in the poem. The intonations are rich and varied - in the first stanza with expressive anaphora (triple “today”) - either a festive expectation, or a dejected statement of the inevitable; in the second stanza there is an intriguing change: exactly in the middle of the poem there is “however”, and only in the last line of the third stanza does an explanation appear. The two halves of the poem are also contrasted rhythmically. In the first half, complete balance reigns - in each line there are two three-syllable words with the emphasis on the second; every word is an amphibrachic foot. In the second, as if emphasizing the violation of the order of the children’s lives, the rhythmic order is also disrupted, a regular shift appears: odd lines end with a stressed syllable ( drinking, making noise, again), and an unstressed syllable is added to the beginnings of even numbers.
Let's continue observing the rhythm. Since only odd lines rhyme, the quatrains can be perceived by ear as couplets written in amphibrach tetrameter. This meter evokes memories of a ballad, a poem with a plot and mystery (let us recall, for example, Goethe’s “The Forest King” in Zhukovsky’s translation: Who gallops, who rushes under the cold mist?// A belated rider, with him a young son– or Ryleev’s Duma “Ivan Susanin”: “Where have you taken us? You can’t see a thing!”) (“The meter of a poem,” wrote M.L. Gasparov, “carries... a semantic load bequeathed by other poems of other poets and eras”).
It turns out that the rhythm and intonation set the expectation of something significant and mysterious, but insignificant content is embedded in this form. “This is what intrigue, mystery, poetry is for people from the barracks...” these either funny or hopelessly bitter poems seem to tell us.
As we have seen, attention to poetic meter plays an important role in understanding a poem.
The article was published with the support of the Internet project “Your own lawyer.” By visiting the website of the Internet project “Your Own Lawyer,” which is located at www.SamSebeYurist.Ru, you will find answers to various legal questions, you can download the codes of the Russian Federation, get free legal advice and familiarize yourself with examples of statements of claim. The convenient site rubricator “Your own lawyer” will help you quickly find materials on the desired topic.
To practice distinguishing poetic meters and moving from one to another, we use couplets composed specifically for this occasion. Let students check whether each of them is actually written in the size it says, and correct “mistakes” by adding, replacing or subtracting words. There are four options for the task here.
Find couplets with errors in meter and correct them.
If only everyone wrote iambics,
There would be fewer holes in the garden.
I am writing in amphibrachium. Scary.
Anapest can be very different:
Who studies geography?
Who composes amphibrachs?
Dactyls spin in a waltz,
The songs touch the soul.
I'll write a letter in trochee,
May it arrive sooner.
If only everyone would write iambics,
I write in amphibrachium. Scary.
But I rush into hand-to-hand combat.
Anapest can be very different:
Either sad or somehow impudent.
One to study geography,
Others can compose amphibrachs.
Dactyls spin in a waltz,
The songs touch the soul.
I'll write a letter in trochee,
May it arrive sooner.
If only everyone would write iambics,
There would be fewer holes in the garden.
I am writing in amphibrachium. Scary.
I rush into hand-to-hand combat.
Who studies geography?
Who composes amphibrachs?
Dactyls spin in a waltz,
The songs touch the soul.
I will write a letter in trochee,
Then it will arrive sooner.
If only everyone wrote iambics,
There would be fewer holes in the garden.
I am writing in amphibrachium. Scary.
I rush into hand-to-hand combat.
Yes, anapest can be very different:
Either he is sad or somehow impudent.
Who studies geography?
Who composes amphibrachs?
And the dactyls are spinning in a waltz
And the song fills the soul.
I'll write a letter in trochee,
May it arrive sooner.
N.A. SHAPIRO,
Moscow
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev
Autocracy has corrupted you,
And his sword struck you down,
And in incorruptible impartiality
This sentence was sealed by the Law.
The people, shunning treachery,
Blasphemes your names -
And your memory for posterity,
Like a corpse in the ground, buried.
O victims of reckless thought,
Maybe you hoped
That your blood will become scarce,
To melt the eternal pole!
Barely, smoking, she sparkled
On the centuries-old mass of ice,
The iron winter has died -
And there were no traces left.
Decembrist uprising
A poetic response to the December uprising appeared in 1826, but was first published 55 years after it was written. Being an example of civil lyricism, the poem reflects the political beliefs of the author. Monarchy and Orthodoxy, according to Tyutchev, are the basis of Russian statehood, the guarantor of its development and prosperity. The poet considered the revolution to be a product of Western tradition, destructive for the Fatherland. Under the influence of foreign ideas, the personality of an individual changes for the worse: he may not withstand the temptation and put his opinion above the law and historical traditions. Associated with such a transformation is the category of autocracy, interpreted as a combination of lust for power and pride. Tyutchev's interpretation of autocracy has nothing to do with the characteristics of the Russian monarchy.
The work is written in the form of an appeal, the addressees of which are the Decembrists. The hero declares that the lyrical “you” has “corrupted” the reckless desire for power, supported by insolence and self-confidence. The fairness of the impartial verdict, under the impression of which the poetic text was created, is affirmed.
The decision revealed by law is supported by the people. The lyrical subject denies the addressee the right to historical memory: he predicts imminent oblivion, comparing the memories of the uprising on Senate Square with a “corpse” forever buried in the ground.
At the beginning of the second eight-line, the formula “victims of reckless thought” appears, which interprets the rebels as people who suffered from their own delusions. The image of the sword placed in the opening is endowed with the same meaning: the heroes are punished for unjustified aplomb and arrogance.
In the finale, an extended metaphor appears, in an allegorical form representing the meaninglessness of the confrontation between the oppositionists and the state system. The latter is symbolized by images with the semantics of immortality, burning cold and greatness. The outcome of the confrontation between the fantastic ice giant and the “scarce blood” of the revolutionaries is a foregone conclusion. The sacrifice is in vain: traces of the defeated side’s fruitless attempts are erased with one exhalation of the cold colossus.
“The autocratic genius” of Napoleon from Tyutchev’s poem of the same name has common features with the images of the Decembrists. The author calls the French emperor the “son of the Revolution”: he was endowed with inspiration and “daring violence”, but deprived of the “divine flame” of true faith.
Autocracy has corrupted you,
And his sword struck you, -
And in incorruptible impartiality
This sentence was sealed by the Law.
The people, shunning treachery,
Blasphemes your names -
And your memory for posterity,
Like a corpse in the ground, buried.O victims of reckless thought,
Maybe you hoped
That your blood will become scarce,
To melt the eternal pole!
Barely, smoking, she sparkled
On the centuries-old mass of ice,
The iron winter has died -
And there were no traces left.
Analysis of Tyutchev’s poem “December 14, 1825”
A poetic response to the December uprising appeared in 1826, but was first published 55 years after it was written. Being an example of civil lyricism, the poem reflects the political beliefs of the author. Monarchy and Orthodoxy, according to Tyutchev, are the basis of Russian statehood, the guarantor of its development and prosperity. The poet considered the revolution to be a product of Western tradition, destructive for the Fatherland. Under the influence of foreign ideas, the personality of an individual changes for the worse: he may not withstand the temptation and put his opinion above the law and historical traditions. Associated with such a transformation is the category of autocracy, interpreted as a combination of lust for power and pride. Tyutchev's interpretation of autocracy has nothing to do with the characteristics of the Russian monarchy.
The work is written in the form of an appeal, the addressees of which are the Decembrists. The hero declares that the lyrical “you” has “corrupted” the reckless desire for power, supported by insolence and self-confidence. The fairness of the impartial verdict, under the impression of which the poetic text was created, is affirmed.
The decision revealed by law is supported by the people. The lyrical subject denies the addressee the right to historical memory: he predicts imminent oblivion, comparing the memories of the uprising on Senate Square with a “corpse” forever buried in the ground.
At the beginning of the second eight-line, the formula “victims of reckless thought” appears, which interprets the rebels as people who suffered from their own delusions. The image of the sword placed in the opening is endowed with the same meaning: the heroes are punished for unjustified aplomb and arrogance.
In the finale, an extended metaphor appears, in an allegorical form representing the meaninglessness of the confrontation between the oppositionists and the state system. The latter is symbolized by images with the semantics of immortality, burning cold and greatness. The outcome of the confrontation between the fantastic ice giant and the “scarce blood” of the revolutionaries is a foregone conclusion. The sacrifice is in vain: traces of the defeated side’s fruitless attempts are erased with one exhalation of the cold colossus.
“The autocratic genius” of Napoleon from Tyutchev’s poem of the same name has common features with the images of the Decembrists. The author calls the French emperor the “son of the Revolution”: he was endowed with inspiration and “daring violence”, but deprived of the “divine flame” of true faith.
