What words create the image of a beautiful lady. The Beautiful Lady in the early lyrics of A.A.

Every person, to one degree or another, has a sense of beauty, a desire for beauty. At all times, the personification of this was a woman, as we can judge from ancient myths and legends. A special cult of women, ladies, developed in the Middle Ages, during the era of chivalry. Let us remember Don Quixote, who, in the name of his Dulcinea, committed a variety of, sometimes fantastic and absurd, acts. The great Dante and Petrarch immortalized the images of their beloved Beatrice and Laura in sublime, enthusiastic verses.

In Russian poetry of the Silver Age, the cult of women was embodied primarily in the poetry and philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov. In his mind, a woman personified the image of the World Soul, the Eternal Wife, Sophia the Wise, and was a symbol of harmony, reason, love and beauty. The Cult of Eternal Femininity was further developed in the work of Alexander Blok, for whom Vladimir Solovyov became a spiritual teacher. It was Blok who wrote the unusually lyrical and tender poems about the Beautiful Lady.

Alexander Blok made his debut in poetry as a traditional romantic, and his early poems contained corresponding motifs: alienation from the crowd, disappointment in life, disbelief in happiness. And suddenly, in the darkness of unbelief and blindness, She appears - “clear”, “radiant”, “illuminated”, “golden”. Blok describes her in the same way as icon painters usually depict the Mother of God surrounded by radiance. At the same time, the prototype of the Beautiful Lady was a real, completely earthly woman - Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva.

At first glance, there is nothing in common between the “heavenly” Mother of God and the poet’s “earthly” beloved. But in his mind, there is a connection between them, and this connection is mystical. Just like the romantic poets, Blok recreates the image of a real woman in accordance with his ideal, turning her into a Beautiful Lady, into a Madonna. The poet himself (the lyrical hero) appears before us, according to Yu. Aikhenvald’s definition, “a knight and a pilgrim.”

He has a presentiment of the Mother of God, follows “in the footsteps of her blue paths,” breaking ties with reality and being transported to a completely different world - the world of “dreams and fogs,” the world of dreams. Blok called the cycle of poems about the Beautiful Lady a “closed book of existence,” which reflected a journey through the “countries of the soul” at the “early morning dawn.” “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” convey a special—prayerful—state of the hero’s (author’s) soul, a state of inner contemplation. Blok’s lyrical hero contains the entire Universe, his soul is equal in size to the universe:

I don't care - the Universe is in me...

Blok contrasts this ideal world with the real one. It is in the realm of the ideal that he seeks salvation from the vulgarity and rudeness of earthly existence:

I'm looking for salvation.

My lights burn on the heights of the mountains -

The entire area of ​​the night was illuminated.

But brightest of all is the spiritual gaze in me

And you are far away.

The Beautiful Lady is the undivided mistress of the poet’s soul, the motive of insight is associated with her (“I am here at the end, filled with insight”); she opens the way for him to comprehend Eternity, being her messenger:

I'm just waiting for a conventional vision,

To fly off into another void...

In many poems of the cycle, the image of the Beautiful Lady is incorporeal, unsteady, barely perceptible, perceived not so much by sight (internal) as by hearing (also internal):

The wind brought from afar

Your sonorous songs...

Thus, the Beautiful Lady becomes a link between the earthly (alien) and heavenly (native) worlds. We see that the lyrical hero values ​​earthly attributes little - with all his being he strives upward. Let us turn to the poem “I Enter Dark Temples.” The entire poem is imbued with a solemn mood, the hero is waiting to meet her “in the flickering of red lamps.” As you know, red is the color of fire and passion. The soul of the one awaiting the appearance of the Beautiful Lady is filled with this passion: “I tremble from the creaking of the doors.” He unbearably wants to see Her, but he knows that this is impossible:

And the illuminated one looks into my face

Only an image, only a dream about Her.

This invisible presence is more valuable to the hero than the real one. Moreover, he is afraid of a real meeting, as evidenced, for example, by a line from the poem “I Anticipate You”:

But I’m scared: You will change your appearance.

The poet understands that the earthly embodiment of a dream is impossible without the destruction of the ideal.

As we see, the image of the Beautiful Lady has more heavenly than earthly features: it seems sublime, absolutely inaccessible and incomprehensible. And yet the earthly is present in him. This is indicated by addressing Her as “you,” earthly epithets (“sweetheart”), and some features that make Her appearance visible: “virgin robe,” “white dress,” “pale beauty.” In some poems, the poet fits the image of the heroine into the real earthly landscape:

We met you at sunset

You cut through the bay with an oar.

With all his upward aspiration, Blok’s lyrical hero cannot completely break with the earth. Moreover, he begins to be burdened by this gap and strives to “overcome dreams and fogs” in the name of gaining reality. That is why Blok called “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” the beginning of the “trilogy of humanization.”

The whole horizon is on fire, and the appearance is near,

But I'm scared - you'll change your appearance

You, and arouse impudent suspicion,

Changing the usual features at the end.

In our minds, the name of Blok is associated, first of all, with the image of a romantic poet who glorifies in his poems the ideal beloved, the embodiment of perfect femininity and beauty. The appearance of this motif (rather, even the leitmotif of the author’s early work) is associated with the aesthetics of symbolism and with the philosophy and poetry of Vl. Solovyova. The latter’s teaching about the World Soul or Eternal Femininity, called upon to renew and revive the world, passed through the prism of Blok’s poetic talent. At the same time, “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” is largely autobiographical, as far as this word can be applied to a poetic work. Blok embodied in them the intimate and lyrical experiences of his youth. The beloved girl becomes in his poems the Holy, Most Pure Virgin, a symbol of femininity and beauty.

The entire cycle of poems about the Beautiful Lady is permeated with the pathos of chaste love for a woman, knightly service to her and admiration for him as the personification of the ideal of spiritual beauty, a symbol of everything sublimely beautiful. The heroine of Blok's poetry is seen by the hero not as an earthly woman, but as a deity. She has several names: Beautiful Lady, Forever Young, Holy Virgin, Lady of the Universe. She is heavenly, mysterious, inaccessible, detached from earthly troubles:

Transparent, unknown shadows

They swim to you, and with them

You're floating

Into the arms of azure dreams,

Incomprehensible to us, -

You give yourself.

She is inaccessible to the hero, because he is only a man, earthly, sinful, mortal:

And here, below, in the dust, in humiliation,

Seeing immortal features for a moment,

An unknown slave, full of inspiration,

Sings you. You don't know him...

The lyrical hero of the cycle, the poet's double -

Sometimes a servant, sometimes a sweetheart, And forever a slave.

A knight, a kneeling monk, a slave, he performs his service to the beautiful queen, the Most Pure Virgin:

I enter dark temples,

I perform a poor ritual,

There I am waiting for the Beautiful Lady

In the flickering red lamps.

The hero senses her presence in everything - in the bottomless azure of the sky, in the spring wind, in the song of the violin:

From that time on, no matter the night, no matter the day,

Your white shadow is above me,

The smell of white flowers among the gardens,

Rustle, light steps near the ponds...

At the same time, the heroine is almost ethereal, incorporeal, her image does not imply anything concrete, “tangible,” because everything earthly is alien to her:

Here is a face emerging from lace,

A face emerges from the lace...

Here her blizzard trills float,

The bright stars trail in a train...

“I can’t hear either sighs or speech,” says the hero.

To describe the object of his worship, the author uses epithets such as “radiant”, “mysterious”, “ineffable”, “illuminated”, “gratifying”. But in some poems about the Beautiful Lady, her image takes on more specific, earthly features, devoid of a touch of mysticism:

I'll get up on a foggy morning,

The sun will hit your face.

Are you, dear friend,

Are you coming up to my porch?

Before us is no longer an abstract image, but an earthly woman; It should be noted that when talking about her, the poet refuses capital letters.

In the poems that followed the cycle about the Beautiful Lady, one can trace the further development of her image. The heroine of the cycle remained a celestial being who did not condescend to the hero and his love. In later poems, the figure of a new heroine appears, who also in her own way embodied the ideal of beauty and light. Heavenly angel, Star Maiden suddenly falls to the ground:

You flowed like a bloody star,

I measured your path in sorrow,

When you started to fall.

The metaphysical fall of Virgo is disturbing and saddening

Hero, but then he realizes when he finds his lover

On unconsecrated ground, in the “unlit gate” that

And this gaze is no less bright,

What was in the foggy heights.

Having descended from “heaven,” the heroine did not lose her beauty, charm, charm. This is how the Stranger is born - an angel descended to earth, “a genius of pure beauty,” in the words of A.S. Pushkin. In the poem “A Trail Spattered with Stars,” the heroine is compared to a comet falling down, connecting heaven and earth with its fall:

A train spattered with stars

Blue, blue, blue gaze.

Between earth and heaven

A fire raised by a whirlwind.

Thus, the image of the mystical “Eternal Femininity” is replaced in Blok’s poetic world by the romantic image of the Stranger living on earth. And then another conflict arises:

In the midst of this mysterious vulgarity,

Tell me what to do with you -

Unattainable and the only one

How's the evening smoky blue?

The heroine is doomed to stay in a world of vulgarity and dirt. How is it possible for the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the ordinary to coexist? Blok tries to answer this question in his poem “Stranger.” It is built on the opposition of two worlds. In the first part, the poet gives a picture of the ugly everyday reality (stuffiness of the streets, boredom, dust, crying, screeching). The routine, familiarity of what is happening is emphasized by the repeated use of the combination “and every evening.” And at the same time -

At the appointed hour

(Or am I just dreaming?)

The girl's figure, captured by silks,

A window moves through a foggy window.

The image of the Stranger cannot be interpreted unambiguously. Is this just a vision dreamed by the hero sitting over a glass of wine? Is this a real woman, endowed with the attributes of a romantic lover - again, not without the influence of alcohol? A heir to romanticism, Blok does not avoid ambiguity and irony. One thing is certain: dreams and reality are incompatible; there is no place for ideals in the everyday world. The last lines look like a sarcastic conclusion:

You're right, drunken monster!

I know: the truth is in the wine.

But - who knows? Maybe this is the wine of poetry? Romantic in nature: the image of the Beautiful Lady gives a tragic sound to Blok’s works. The ideal beloved is distant, inaccessible, lifeless, she is just a symbol. Over time, her image is filled with life content: the poet is looking for his heroine in this world. But the meeting cannot bring him either joy or peace, since the impossibility of its existence on earth is obvious. This is how the image of the Beautiful Lady - the Eternal Femininity of the desired friend - the fallen angel - the Stranger - develops and finds its end in Blok’s poetry.

The work of Alexander Blok dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. This period was marked for all of Russia as a turning point in its history and was reflected in many of the works of the great poet. Many of Blok's poems, dedicated to the political situation in the country, evoke opposing opinions among readers. Some admire them, others do not recognize them. But we can say for sure that everyone reads works related to Blok’s early lyrics with great pleasure. Undoubtedly, these are masterpieces of love lyrics. Blok created them, inspired by his young wife, the daughter of the great Russian scientist Mendeleev. Her beauty served as the source of Blok’s thoughts, which, formed into beautiful poems, made the hearts of many of his admirers worry. In Blok's works there is no image of a specific woman. His Muse appears in the image of eternal femininity, tenderness, and purity. The beautiful Lady of Blok personifies an ordinary earthly woman, something sublime, combining the best feminine traits:
Oh, Holy One, how tender the candles are,
How pleasing are Your features!
I can't hear neither sighs nor speeches,
But I believe: Darling - You.
Blok presents himself as a servant of the Beautiful Lady, as her knight:
I enter dark temples,
I perform a poor ritual.
There I am waiting for the Beautiful Lady
In the flickering red lamps.
In his poems, Blok is based on his experiences and feelings, he opens his soul, appears before us as an ardent, dreamy young man. It is as if reality does not exist for him; he is completely devoted to his dreams of the Beautiful Lady:
Discordantly excited by the rustling life,
Confused in a whisper, a cry,
Immovably chained by a white dream
To the shore of late times.
You are white, in the depths of turbulence,
In life she is strict and angry.
Secretly anxious and secretly loved,
Virgo, Dawn, Kupina.
But gradually a crisis occurs in his youthful daydreaming; it gives way to an awareness of reality. His Beautiful Lady takes on certain features and becomes more earthly. In “The Stranger” Blok describes his new Muse. Blok transfers her from an elevated environment to an ordinary one, characteristic of every simple woman:
In the evenings above the restaurants
The hot air is wild and deaf,
And rules with drunken shouts
Spring and pernicious spirit.
She is still beautiful, proud, rising above monotony and vulgarity. But still there have been changes:
And slowly, walking between the drunken,
Always without companions, alone,
Breathing spirits and mists,
She sits by the window.
And they breathe ancient beliefs
Her elastic silks
And a hat with mourning feathers,
And in the rings there is a narrow hand.
This description leads us to think about her aristocratic, noble origin. Her face is covered with a veil, which symbolizes some kind of secret. We still don’t know everything about the new Beautiful Lady; it seems that behind her wonderful appearance there is something unknown:
And chained by a strange intimacy,
I look behind the dark veil,
And I see the enchanted shore
And the enchanted distance.
Silent secrets have been entrusted to me,
Someone's sun was handed to me,
And all the souls of my bend
Tart wine pierced.
Perhaps it was this secret that formed the basis for the title of the poem “Stranger.” Time passed, and Blok’s opinion about his Muse changed more and more and moved further away from the image of the Beautiful Lady and the Stranger. During this period, Blok dedicated most of his creations to the Motherland. Many poets represented the Motherland in their works as a mother. Blok spoke of her as a wife, as a beloved:
Oh, my Rus'! My wife! To the point of pain
We have a long way to go!
This is what Blok writes about Russia in the cycle “On the Kulikovo Field.” In the poem “Autumn Day,” Blok again represents his Motherland as his wife:
Oh, my poor country,
What do you mean to your heart?
Oh my poor wife
Why are you crying bitterly?
Thus, Blok was constantly changing, and with him the image of his Muse was constantly changing. These poems, filled with great love for femininity and the Motherland, can be liked by people of any age, men and women, people who are keen on politics and far from it, because they are about love, an eternal feeling close to any person. Blok's early poems are always relevant, just as love is always relevant.

The great Russian poet of the 20th century, Alexander Alexandrovich Blok, went through a difficult life and creative path. He began as a symbolist who believed in mysticism, and at the end of his creative path he came to the idea of ​​selfless service to the Motherland. Alexander Blok was born into the family of the rector of St. Petersburg University, so from childhood he was surrounded by high culture. He began writing poetry early and became interested in philosophy just as early. All this influenced the young man to become a poet.

The cycle “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” is the main lyrical work in the early work of Alexander Blok. It is composed of poems from 1899-1902 and reflects the romantically sublime worldview of a young man who is in mystical anticipation of meeting his beautiful beloved. However, the cycle was published as a separate edition in 1904, at a time when the poet moved away from “the moments of my prophetic poems” and was experiencing a spiritual crisis.

3. Gippius responded this way about the young poet’s just-published collection: “This book was born exactly outside of time, outside of modernity in any case. It is both old and new, although perhaps it is not eternal, for it is woven from a web that is too light.” This review correctly guessed the peculiarity of Blok’s famous lyrical cycle - the too light fabric of the poems, which only outlines the image of the Beautiful Lady. Nevertheless, Blok had a real feeling and a real experience from which poetry was born.

Throughout his youth, Alexander Blok was passionate about philosophy

V. Solovyov, who said that beauty lies at the heart of the world. This beauty is accessible to man only as the unattainable Ideal of Eternal Femininity. Blok was struck by this idea, and he began to look for echoes of this ideal in all girls. These philosophical views were intertwined with an emerging feeling, so the image of a Beautiful Lady appeared in the work of the young poet. This Lady is the Divine ideal of beauty and love.

In Blok’s soul, the image of the real girl Lyubov Mendeleeva and the image of Eternal Femininity are inextricably linked; they cannot be separated from each other. It was the meeting with Lyubov Mendeleeva that became the reason for the creation of the cycle. All of Blok’s early poems are colored with feelings for her:

Evening twilight, believe me,

I was reminded of an unclear answer.

I'm waiting for the door to suddenly open,

The fading light will come running.

Like dreams pale in the past.

I still have the features of my face

And fragments of unknown words,

Like responses from previous worlds...

Blok's poems are full of dreams about the appearance of the Beautiful Lady; he waits for her arrival, yearns and suffers. Its appearance is a phenomenon of beauty and harmony in the earthly world; it must resolve all existing contradictions. It is interesting that to create the image of a Beautiful Lady, Blok mainly uses white. The Beautiful Lady brings with her light that disperses darkness, which means love, happiness and joy of life. The Beautiful Lady is a deity, she lives in a different dimension than the poet, so he cannot retain her image in his memory. For him, she is a wonderful memory, a dream, a light shadow, a vision. He worships her, prays to her like an icon, and is afraid that she will cheat on him.

Young Alexander Blok really believed that the descent of Beauty to earth was possible and that this would happen in modern times, during his lifetime. He considered himself the prophet of this phenomenon, and his grandfather’s estate, Shakhmatovo, as the place where the Eternal Femininity should appear. That is why the waves on which her white boat floats are the poet’s poems. This circumstance forces the poet stubbornly, despite doubts and reason, in spite of everything, to wait for her arrival:

I live in this height, believe me,

Vague memory of gloomy years,

I vaguely remember that the door will open,

The fading light will come running.

The lyrical hero of the cycle is inseparable from the poet; Blok does not distance himself from him at all, which creates a special intimacy in the tone of the cycle. Many believed that this cycle is a reflection of love relationships

A. Blok and L. Mendeleeva. But this is not entirely true: the poet’s philosophical ideas are also reflected here. The poet sees his ideal in comprehending, through love, the infinite in the finite, the spiritual in the material, the eternal in the modern. He tries to combine the mystical and the ordinary in his work and thereby bring the long-awaited moment closer.

The Beautiful Lady still appears to her admirer, but he cannot recognize her. He froze with admiration and waits for her words, but she is silent. The moment they meet is very brief, and then she leaves. He did not even suspect that everything could turn out this way: the poet believed that the Lady would always be with him. But she is unearthly, which means she cannot be in the vulgar world of everyday life. This circumstance causes the poet acute pain, his dreams are shattered, and he begins to see clearly. The poet cannot keep the Beautiful Lady because she is unattainable, like a dream. Together with her, he loses all his youthful illusions and dreams, and is left alone with the real world. Thus begins a new stage in the life and work of A. Blok.

The cycle “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” was unusual for Russian poetry. The symbolists really liked it, although Blok himself did not really like this cycle. To modern readers these poems seem complex and incomprehensible because they are written in a symbolist style. However, in them Blok well conveyed the drama of the love feeling that everyone experienced in their youth.

With the name of Blok In our worldview, we are connected, first of all, with the image of a romantic poet, glorifying in his poems the ideal beloved, the embodiment of accomplished femininity and beauty. The appearance of this motif (rather, even the leitmotif of the author’s early work) is associated with the aesthetics of symbolism and with the philosophy and poetry of V. Solovyov. The latter’s teaching about the Universal Soul or Eternal Femininity, designed to renew and revive the world, passed through the prism of Blok’s poetic talent. At the same time, “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” is largely autobiographical, as far as this word can be applied to a poetic work. Blok embodied in them the lovingly lyrical experiences of his youth. The beloved girl becomes in his poems the Holy, Most Pure Virgin, a symbol of femininity and beauty. The entire cycle of poems about the Beautiful Lady is permeated with the pathos of chaste love for a woman, knightly service to her and admiration for her as the personification of the ideal of spiritual beauty, a symbol of everything sublimely beautiful. The heroine of Blok's poetry is seen by the hero not as an earthly woman, but as a deity. She has several names: Beautiful Lady, Forever Young, Holy Virgin, Volodarka of the Universe. She is heavenly, mysterious, inaccessible, removed from earthly disasters. She is inaccessible to the hero, because he is only a man, earthly, sinful, mortal. The lyrical hero of the cycle, the poet's double -

Sometimes a servant, sometimes a sweetheart, And forever a slave. A knight, a kneeling monk, a slave - he carries out his service to the beautiful queen, the Most Pure Virgin: I enter dark temples, I perform a poor ritual, There I wait for the Beautiful Lady In the flickering of red lamps.

The hero senses her presence in everything - in the bottomless azure of the sky, in the spring wind, in the song of the violin. At the same time, the heroine is almost ethereal, her image does not imply anything concrete, “tangible”, because everything earthly is alien to her:

Here a face emerges from the lace, A face emerges from the lace... Here her blizzard trills float, Dragging the bright stars in a train...

“I can’t hear either sighs or speech,” says the hero. To describe the object of his worship, the author uses epithets such as “radiant”, “mysterious”, “ineffable”, “illuminated”, “comforting”. But in some poems about the Beautiful Lady, her image takes on more specific, earthly features, devoid of a touch of mysticism:

I'll get up on a drizzly morning,

The sun will hit your face.

You, dear friend,

Will you come to my porch?

Before us is no longer an averted image, but an earthly woman. In the poems that followed the cycle about the Beautiful Lady, one can trace the further development of her image. The heroine of the cycle remained a celestial being and did not take pity on the hero or his love. In later poems, the figure of a new heroine appears, who also in her own way embodied the ideal of beauty and light. Heavenly angel, Star Maiden suddenly falls to the ground:

You flowed like a bloody star, I changed your path in total, When you began to fall.

The metaphysical fall of the Virgin worries and saddens the hero, but then he understands, having found his beloved on the unconsecrated ground, in the “unlit gate”, that

And this look is no less bright than it was in the foggy heights.

Having descended from “heaven,” the heroine did not lose her beauty, charm, and charm. This is how the Stranger is born - an angel who descended to earth, “a genius of pure beauty,” in the words of A.S. Pushkin. In the poem “Trail Spattered with Stars,” the heroine is compared to a comet, falling down, connecting heaven and earth with her fall:

A train stained with stars, Blue, blue, blue look. Between earth and heaven, a fire raised by a whirlwind.

Thus, the image of the mystical “Eternal Femininity” is replaced in Blok’s poetic world by the romantic image of the Stranger living on the land. And then another conflict arises:

Among this mysterious vulgarity, Tell me, what should I do with you - unattainable and unique, Like a smoky blue evening?

The heroine is doomed to stay in a world of vulgarity and dirt. How is it possible for the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the everyday to coexist? Blok tries to answer this question in his poem “Stranger.” It is built on the opposition of two worlds. In the first part, the poet gives a picture of the ugly everyday reality (stuffiness of the streets, boredom, dust, crying, screeching. The routine, familiarity of what is happening is emphasized by the repeated use of the combination “and every evening. And at the same time -

... At the appointed hour, (But I’m only dreaming?) The girl’s figure, captured in silks, moves in the foggy window.

The image of the Stranger cannot be interpreted unambiguously. Is it really just a vision that the hero had while sitting over a glass of wine? Is it a real woman, endowed with the attributes of a romantic lover - again, not without the influence of alcohol? A heir to romanticism, Blok does not avoid ambiguity and irony. One thing is certain: dreams and reality are incompatible; there is no place for ideals in the everyday world. The last lines look like a sarcastic conclusion:

You're right, drunken monster! I know: the truth is in the wine.

But who knows? maybe this is the wine of poetry? The image of the Beautiful Lady, romantic in nature, gives a tragic sound to Blok's works. The ideal beloved is distant, inaccessible, lifeless, she is only a symbol. Subsequently, her image is filled with life content: the poet is looking for his heroine in this world. But the meeting cannot bring him either joy or peace, since the impossibility of its existence on earth is obvious. This is how the image of the Beautiful Lady - the Eternal Femininity of the desired friend - the fallen angel - the Stranger - develops and finds its end in Blok’s poetry.

The whole horizon is on fire, And the appearance is close, But I’m afraid - You will change your appearance, And audaciously awaken suspicion, replacing the end of the usual features of A. Blocked by the end of the usual features of A. Blok