***

Blaise Pascal: "Man is just a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed..."

Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev

There is melodiousness in sea ​​waves

Est in arundineis modulatio musica ripis.

There is melodiousness in the sea waves,
Harmony in spontaneous disputes,
And the harmonious musky rustle
Flows through the shifting reeds.

Equanimity in everything,
There is complete harmony in nature, -

We are aware of the discord with her.

Where and how did the discord arise?
And why in the general choir
The soul doesn’t sing like the sea,
And the thinking reed murmurs?

And from the earth to the extreme stars
Still unrequited to this day
Voice in the wilderness,
Souls of desperate protest?

*There is musical harmony in the coastal reeds (lat.). A line from a poem by a 4th century Roman poet. BC e. Ausonia.

V. Ya. Bryusov (1911) about Tyutchev’s poetic activity:

“Tyutchev’s poetry belongs to the most significant, most remarkable creations of the Russian spirit.
The starting point of Tyutchev’s worldview, it seems to us, can be found in his significant poems written “On the Road to Vshchizh”:
Nature does not know about the past,
Our ghostly years are alien to her.
And in front of her we are vaguely aware
Ourselves are just a dream of nature.
One by one all your children,
Those who accomplish their useless feat,
She equally greets her
An all-consuming and peaceful abyss.

Only nature as a whole has true existence. Man is just a “dream of nature.” His life, his activity is just a “useless feat.” This is Tyutchev’s philosophy, his innermost worldview. This broad pantheism explains almost all of his poetry.
It is quite understandable that such a worldview first of all leads to reverent admiration for the life of nature.
She has a soul, she has freedom,
It has love, it has language! -
Tyutchev speaks about nature. Tyutchev strives to capture, understand and explain this soul of nature, this language and this freedom in all its manifestations.
Everything in nature is alive for Tyutchev, everything speaks to him “in a language understandable to the heart,” and he pities those with whom the forests are silent, before whom the night is silent, with whom the thunderstorm does not confer in a friendly conversation...
Tyutchev's poems about nature are almost always a passionate declaration of love. It seems to Tyutchev that the highest bliss available to man is to admire the diverse manifestations of natural life.
On the contrary, in human life everything seems to Tyutchev as insignificance, powerlessness, slavery. For him, a person in front of nature is a “homeless orphan,” “weak,” and “naked.” Only with bitter mockery does Tyutchev call the man “the king of the earth” (“The kite rose from the clearing”). Rather, he is inclined to see in man an accidental creation of nature, no different from creatures not gifted with consciousness. “A thinking reed” - this is how Tyutchev defines a person in one poem. In another, as if developing this thought, he asks: “Why is man indignant at this earthly grain?” About nature, in its entirety, Tyutchev says definitely: “there is freedom in it,” but in human life he sees only “illusory freedom.” In the spring, in mountain peaks, Tyutchev saw deities in the rays of the stars; on the contrary, he says about man:
...not given insignificant dust
Breathe divine fire.
But man is not only an insignificant drop in the ocean of natural life, he is also a disharmonious beginning in it. Man strives to assert his isolation, his separation from the general life of the world, and thereby brings discord into it. Having spoken about the melodiousness that “is in the sea waves”, about the “harmonious Musik rustle” flowing in the reeds, about the “complete consonance” in all of nature, Tyutchev continues:
Only in our illusory freedom
We are aware of the discord...
In another, no less characteristic poem, Tyutchev depicts the old “Italian Villa”, abandoned many centuries ago and completely merged with the life of nature. She seems to him “a blissful shadow, the shadow of the Elysees”... But as soon as a man stepped into it again, “everything became confused,” a “convulsive trembling” ran through the cypress trees, the fountain fell silent, and some inarticulate babbling was heard... Tyutchev explains this is because -
evil life, with its rebellious heat,
I crossed the treasured threshold.
In order to defeat the “evil life” in oneself, so as not to bring “discord” into the world of nature, one must merge with it, dissolve in it. Tyutchev definitely speaks about this in his praise of spring:
Game and sacrifice of private life,
Come, reject the deception of feelings,
And rush, cheerful, autocratic,
Into this life-giving ocean!...
And the life of the divine-universal
Although for a moment be involved.
In another poem (“When we called something ours”), he talks about the last consolation - to disappear into the great “everything” of the world, just as individual rivers disappear into the sea. And Tyutchev himself either exclaims, turning to the darkness: “Let me taste destruction, mix it with the slumbering world!”, then expresses the desire to “drown your entire soul” in the charm of the night sea, then finally admits with great simplicity: “Everything is without a trace, and so easy not to be!..."
Tyutchev asked himself:
Where and how did the discord arise?
And why in the general choir
The soul doesn’t sing like the sea,
And the thinking reed grumbles!
He could have given an answer to his question: because a person does not seek merging with nature, does not want to “reject the deception of feelings,” that is, the belief in the isolation of his personality. Anticipating the teaching of Indian wisdom, which in those years was still not widespread in Europe, Tyutchev recognized true existence only in the world soul and denied it in individual “I”. He believed that individual existence is a ghost, a delusion from which death frees us, returning us to the great “everything.” One poem speaks quite clearly about this (“Look, how in the river space”),
in which people’s lives are compared to river ice floes carried by the stream “into the all-encompassing sea.” They are all there, big and small, “having lost their former image,” merging “with the fatal abyss.” Tyutchev himself explains his allegory:
Oh, our thoughts are seduced,
You, the human “I”:
Isn't this your meaning?
Isn't this your destiny?
True immortality belongs only to nature, in its entirety, to that nature to which “our ghostly years are alien.” When “the composition of the parts of the earth is destroyed,” everything visible will be covered with waters,
And God's face will be depicted in them.
It is remarkable that in the pantheistic deification of nature, Tyutchev the poet seems to lose his faith in the personal Divinity, which he passionately defended as a thinker. So, on a clear day during the burial ceremony, the sermon of a learned, dignified pastor about the blood of Christ already seems to Tyutchev only “clever, decent speech,” and he contrasts it with the “imperishable, clear sky” and the birds “voicedly soaring in the abyss of the air.” At another moment, on a “lazy, breathing afternoon,” Tyutchev is reminded of the very name of the deity whom his poetry really serves—the name of “the great Pan,” slumbering in the cave of the nymphs... And who knows whether these thoughts may be related to a strange exclamation that escaped Tyutchev at some difficult moment:
Take courage, heart, to the end:
And there is no Creator in creation,
And there is no point in praying!

For Tyutchev, love is not a bright, saving feeling, not a “union of soul with a dear soul,” as “the legend says,” but a “fatal duel” in which -
We are most likely to destroy,
What is dear to our hearts.
For Tyutchev, love is always passion, since it is passion that brings us closer to chaos. Tyutchev’s eye prefers the “gloomy, dull fire of desire” to the “fiery, wonderful game”; in him he finds “a stronger charm.” He places the temptation of secret, forbidden love above “innocent”, and justifies his choice by the fact that grape berries, full, as if with blood, of their juice are more beautiful than pure, fragrant roses... Tyutchev calls passion itself “wild blindness” and how would identify it with the night. Just as a person becomes blind in the darkness of the night, so he becomes blind in the darkness of passion, because here and there he enters the realm of chaos.
But at the same time, death for Tyutchev, although he was inclined to see in it a complete and hopeless disappearance, was filled with a secret temptation. In his wonderful poem “Twins,” he puts death and love on the same level, saying that both “bewitch the heart with their insoluble mystery.”
And there are no more beautiful couple in the world,
And there is no more terrible charm,
Her betraying heart.
Perhaps this temptation of death forced Tyutchev to find beauty in every dying. He saw “mysterious beauty” in the lightness of autumn evenings, he liked the damage: “damage”, “exhaustion”, “the gentle smile of withering”. “How fadingly cute!” - he exclaimed one day. But he also spoke directly about the beauty of death. In the poem “Mal’aria”, lovingly depicting the “high cloudless firmament”, “the warm wind swaying the tops of the trees”, “the smell of roses”, he adds:
... and all this is death!
And then he exclaims enthusiastically:
I love this God's wrath, I love this invisibly
There is a mysterious evil spilled throughout everything....
Along with death, Tyutchev was attracted to everything fatal, everything that promised death. He speaks with tenderness about “a heart that thirsts for storms.” With the same tenderness he depicts a soul that, “with a fatal consciousness of its rights,” itself goes towards death (“There are two forces, two fatal forces”). He is attracted to history by “fatal moments” (“Cicero”). In the depths of the most tender feeling he sees a destructive fatal force. The poet’s love must destroy the “maiden” who trusted him (“Don’t believe, don’t trust the poet, maiden”); the bird must die at the hand of the girl who fed it “from the first feathers” (“Not without reason by a merciful God”), and the poet adds:
The day will come, the immutable day,
Your pet is careless
He will die under your foot.
And almost in the tone of a hymn, so unusual for him, Tyutchev glorifies the hopeless struggle with Fate of a man condemned in advance to defeat:
Take courage, O friends, fight diligently,
Although the battle is not equal, the fight is hopeless!
Let the Olympians have an envious eye
Look at the struggle of unyielding hearts!

In this constant attraction to chaos, to what is fatal for man, Tyutchev felt his soul as “an inhabitant of two worlds.” She always strived to cross the threshold of the “second” existence. And Tyutchev could not help but ask himself the question whether it was possible to cross this threshold, whether it was possible for a person to “merge with the infinite.”
Tyutchev had two lyres, however, wonderfully coordinated with each other. The first was dedicated to poetry glorifying the “brilliance of manifestations” of the daytime world, pacifying, obvious poetry. Tyutchev said this about her:
She flies from heaven to us,
Heavenly - to earthly sons,
With azure clarity in your gaze,
And to the rioting sea
The oil of reconciliation is pouring.
Another was dedicated to chaos and sought to repeat “terrible songs” that explode “sometimes violent sounds” in the heart. This poetry wanted to talk about the fatal, about the secret, and in order to awaken, it needed “that hour of visions and miracles,” when the soul loses the memory of its daily existence. Tyutchev speaks about the hour of such inspiration:
Then the night thickens like chaos on the waters,
Unconsciousness, like Atlas, crushes the land,
Only the Muse's virgin soul,
In prophetic dreams the gods are disturbed..."

Great ones about poetry:

Poetry is like painting: some works will captivate you more if you look at them closely, and others if you move further away.

Small cutesy poems irritate the nerves more than the creaking of unoiled wheels.

The most valuable thing in life and in poetry is what has gone wrong.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Of all the arts, poetry is the most susceptible to the temptation to replace its own peculiar beauty with stolen splendors.

Humboldt V.

Poems are successful if they are created with spiritual clarity.

The writing of poetry is closer to worship than is usually believed.

If only you knew from what rubbish poems grow without shame... Like a dandelion on a fence, like burdocks and quinoa.

A. A. Akhmatova

Poetry is not only in verses: it is poured out everywhere, it is all around us. Look at these trees, at this sky - beauty and life emanate from everywhere, and where there is beauty and life, there is poetry.

I. S. Turgenev

For many people, writing poetry is a growing pain of the mind.

G. Lichtenberg

A beautiful verse is like a bow drawn through the sonorous fibers of our being. The poet makes our thoughts sing within us, not our own. By telling us about the woman he loves, he delightfully awakens in our souls our love and our sorrow. He's a magician. By understanding him, we become poets like him.

Where graceful poetry flows, there is no room for vanity.

Murasaki Shikibu

I turn to Russian versification. I think that over time we will turn to blank verse. There are too few rhymes in the Russian language. One calls the other. The flame inevitably drags the stone behind it. It is through feeling that art certainly emerges. Who is not tired of love and blood, difficult and wonderful, faithful and hypocritical, and so on.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

-...Are your poems good, tell me yourself?
- Monstrous! – Ivan suddenly said boldly and frankly.
- Do not write anymore! – the newcomer asked pleadingly.
- I promise and swear! - Ivan said solemnly...

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov. "Master and Margarita"

We all write poetry; poets differ from others only in that they write in their words.

John Fowles. "The French Lieutenant's Mistress"

Every poem is a veil stretched over the edges of a few words. These words shine like stars, and because of them the poem exists.

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok

Ancient poets, unlike modern ones, rarely wrote more than a dozen poems during their long lives. This is understandable: they were all excellent magicians and did not like to waste themselves on trifles. Therefore, behind each poetic work of those times, a whole Universe was certainly hidden, filled with miracles - often dangerous for those who carelessly awaken the dozing lines.

Max Fry. "Chatty Dead"

I gave one of my clumsy hippopotamuses this heavenly tail:...

Mayakovsky! Your poems do not warm, do not excite, do not infect!
- My poems are not a stove, not a sea, and not a plague!

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

Poems are our inner music, clothed in words, permeated with thin strings of meanings and dreams, and therefore, drive away the critics. They are just pathetic sippers of poetry. What can a critic say about the depths of your soul? Don't let his vulgar groping hands in there. Let poetry seem to him like an absurd moo, a chaotic pile-up of words. For us, this is a song of freedom from a boring mind, a glorious song sounding on the snow-white slopes of our amazing soul.

Boris Krieger. "A Thousand Lives"

Poems are the thrill of the heart, the excitement of the soul and tears. And tears are nothing more than pure poetry that has rejected the word.

Rustle

Flows through the shifting reeds.

Equanimity in everything,

There is complete harmony in nature, -

Only in our illusory freedom

We are aware of the discord with her.

Where and how did the discord arise?

And why in the general choir

The soul doesn’t sing like the sea,

Other editions and options

3   And the [quiet] musky rustle

After 12  And from the earth to the extreme stars

Still unrequited to this day

Voice in the wilderness

Souls of desperate protest?

Autograph - RSL. F. 308. K. 1. Unit. hr. 6.

COMMENTS:

Autograph - RSL. F. 308. K. 1. Unit. hr. 6.

Lists - Muran. album(pp. 125–126), with the note: “May 11, 1865”; Album Tutch. - Birileva(p. 40), with the same date.

First publication - RV. 1865. T. 58. August. P. 432. Included in Ed. 1868. P. 215; Ed. St. Petersburg, 1886. P. 276; Ed. 1900. P. 279.

Printed according to list Muran. album.

Autograph draft. The 3rd line originally looked like: “And the quiet musky rustle.” The word “quiet” is crossed out and “slender” is written at the top. There is a 4th stanza, missing both in lists and in printed texts, starting with Ed. 1868.

A line from the Roman poet Ausonius (IV century BC) was chosen as the epigraph, replacing “in” instead of “et”: “... either his memory failed him, or he had a publication in his hands with this option,” explains A. I. Georgievsky in the work “Tyutchev in 1862–1866” (quoted from: Tyutch. in playback P. 200). Georgievsky reports that he was forced to turn for information to the professor of St. Petersburg University I. I. Kholodnyak, who brought full text Ausonia's verse:

Est et arundineis modulatio musika ripis,

Cumque suis loquitur tremulum comapinea ventis

(“And the banks overgrown with reeds are characterized by musical harmony, and the shaggy tops of the pine trees, trembling, speak to their wind” - lat.). Ed. 1868, Ed. St. Petersburg, 1886 mistakenly printed the epigraph as the title of the poem.

RV follows the autograph, preserving all 16 poetic lines. Regarding the fourth stanza, Georgievsky wrote: “When and by whom and for what reasons was this stanza omitted from printed publications, unfortunately, I did not have a chance to ask Tyutchev himself about this, and it is very possible that he did not know anything about this omission in those publications that appeared during his lifetime. Perhaps our censorship at that time was against the third verse in this stanza, as borrowed from Holy Scripture, and also against the fourth verse, since it is not appropriate for the soul of a Christian to fall into despair, nor to protest against the dictates of Heaven, and perhaps the poet himself found some obscurity and uncertainty in this stanza, some inconvenience in citing words from the Holy Scriptures is not sense, as they were said, or found this whole stanza excessively gloomy in its content; but undoubtedly, it was fully consistent with his mood at that time, in which he was ready to desperately protest against the premature death of the creatures so beloved by him (E. A. Denisyeva, Tyutchev’s “last love”, who died in 1864, and their two small children - Lelya and Kolya, who died in early May 1865 - Ed.) and more than once asked myself the question, it was worth it for this poor Lelya to be born into the light of God (the eldest Lelya, E. A. Denisyeva. - Ed.), who by her very birth caused so much grief to many people" ( Tyutch. in playback P. 200). The poem was born after the funeral of little Lelya and Kolya. Marie, E. A. Denisyeva’s half-sister, was Tyutchev’s “great consolation and joy” in those days, Georgievsky recalls. “The weather was wonderful, as often happens in St. Petersburg in the first half of May,” he wrote, “and he and Fyodor Ivanovich in an open carriage went either to the Volkovo cemetery, to the grave of both Lol and Kolya, or to the Islands. On one of these trips, Fyodor Ivanovich, on a piece of notepaper that happened to be in his pocket, sitting in a stroller, wrote in pencil for Marie his beautiful poem with the epigraph: “Est in arundineis modulatio musika ripis...” ( Tyutch. in playback P. 199). The fourth stanza did not appear in Ed. 1868, most likely, with the knowledge of Tyutchev; It is also missing from the lists made by the poet’s daughter. The inaccuracy of the rhyme could also have played a role: “stars” - “protest” (although, of course, “stars” was read with e- Not e).

Regarding the first appearance of the poem in print, I. S. Aksakov wrote to E. F. Tyutcheva: “In the Russian Messenger, in the last book, poems by Fyodor Ivanovich were published. Beautiful poems, full of thoughts, I don’t like one word in them, a foreign one: protest” ( Last love. P. 60). “Apparently,” notes K. V. Pigarev, “Aksakov’s opinion was taken into account by Tyutchev: in M. F. Birileva’s list, the last stanza ending with the words “protest” is missing. There is no reason to think that the poet’s daughter would arbitrarily decide to shorten this stanza. At the same time, it is also obvious that the list precedes the Ed. 1868, and not vice versa" ( Lyrics I. pp. 423–424). However, in Ed. 1984(the textual preparation of the text was carried out by Pigarev) the poem was printed with the 4th stanza (see p. 202).

Disagreement with the opinion of I. S. Aksakov was expressed by B. M. Kozyrev: “One can regret that in the publication of “Literary Monuments” the last stanza was removed from the text to please Aksakov’s opinion. The piercing stylistic dissonance of this stanza: “And from the earth to the extreme stars / Everything is unanswered to this day / The voice of one crying in the desert, / The soul’s desperate protest” - deeply corresponds to the tragic content of the poem. And with its disappearance, all the tragedy, the whole meaning of this thing disappeared, which was a cry about the “abandonment” of man in a musically harmonious, but alien Universe"( LN-1. P. 87).

“Here the reader finds, with the help of the commentary, a purely Tyutchev amalgam of quotes from Ausonius, the book of the prophet Isaiah from the Bible and Pascal’s “Thoughts.” In addition, Gregg found a paraphrase from Schiller in the 3rd stanza (“Die Räuber”, IV, 5).

To all these sources, I would add, perhaps, two more: the Pythagorean-Platonic doctrine of world harmony (“Equanimity in everything, / Complete consonance in nature...”) and, finally, in the most paradoxical contrast with this philosophy, the expression “desperate protest ”, as if straight out of the pages of radical journalism of the 60s. And all together there is a real Tyutchev creation. Along with many other elements, it (like a number of its other “purely philosophical” ones, that is, built more on reflection than on the poetic intuition of things) contains attacks against the rationalistic, Cartesian-Spinozist idea of ​​nature as a soulless mechanism” (there same).

L.N. Tolstoy marked the poem with the letters “T.” G.!" (Tyutchev. Depth!).

Interpreting the poem, V. Ya. Bryusov wrote: “But man is not only a nonentity, a small drop in the ocean of nature, he is also a disharmonious principle in it. Man strives to strengthen his isolation, his separation from the general world life, and thereby brings discord into it” (Bryusov V. Ya. F. I. Tyutchev. The meaning of his creativity // Bryusov V. Ya. Collected works: In 7 volumes . M., 1975. T. 6. P. 197).

V.F. Savodnik noted: “Nature lives its own special, integral and self-sufficient life, full of beauty and grandeur and harmony, but alien to everything human and indifferent to it. It is precisely this integrity and completeness of being that a person who is not given the opportunity to merge with nature and join the mysterious and beautiful world life does not have. The poet, with sad bewilderment, stops before the question of this discord between man and nature, and thinks about its causes" ( Gardener. P. 187).

“The original sin is in the original egoism of man,” argued D.S. Darsky. - It is he who prevents you from entering into the consonant order of nature. Man separated himself from nature. Exaggeratedly attached to his isolation, he has become detached from the unanimous integrity of the universe and persists in weak self-affirmation. In man there is neither response nor participation in universal life, and he sounds like discordant dissonance in the general chorus" ( Darsky. P. 124).

According to the thoughts of D. S. Merezhkovsky, Tyutchev first thought that “in the human world there are lies and evil, but in the elemental world there is truth and good...” ( Merezhkovsky. P. 82). The question posed in the poem, the researcher believed, “remained unanswered, but deepened to infinity when the questioner saw that discord was not only between man and nature, but also in nature itself, that evil was at the very root of being, in the very essence peace as will" (ibid.).

In Russian XIX literature century, a special place belongs to Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, who, according to I. S. Turgenev, created “speeches that are not destined to die.” One of the central themes in his mature lyrics is the theme of love, which is revealed with special drama in poems dedicated to E. A. Dvnisyeva. The state of falling in love is as natural for a poet as intense thoughts about the eternal questions of existence.

Reading the poem “There is melodiousness in the sea waves...”, one imagines a man standing alone on the seashore and thinking about life and death, love and freedom, the momentary and the eternal...

Tyutchev has few poems with exact dates. In this case it is known - May 11, 1865. The poem was written right in the stroller, during the author’s trip to the islands in St. Petersburg on the ninth day of the death of his children from Denisyeva.

“There is a melodiousness in the sea waves,

Harmony in spontaneous disputes,

And the harmonious musky rustle

Flows through the shifting reeds."

In these lines one can see a poet of a special philosophical make-up - he not only has the gift of a landscape painter, but also his own philosophy of nature. His mind struggles with the mysteries of the universe, trying to penetrate the mystery of the contradictory unity of nature and man.

“Equanimity in everything,

Consonance is complete in nature, _

Only in our illusory freedom

We are aware of the discord with her.”

Tyutchev speaks of the separation of man from nature as something unnatural, not corresponding to the “peaceful order” of natural existence. The soul, which sings not like the sea, is contrasted with “the complete consonance in nature.”

Man is a reed standing before the vast universe-sea. But this is a “thinking” reed; it grumbles in the general chorus, instead of making a harmonious rustle in harmony with being.

“Where and how did the discord arise?

And why in the general choir

The soul doesn’t sing like the sea,

And the thinking reed murmurs?

“Trying to understand its cause, the author suggests that the discord exists more in the human mind, and not in reality. As stated in the 4th stanza, not published subsequently, human soul desperate protest remains “the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The reason for the discord with nature lies in man himself. It is not she who rejects him, but he himself, immersed in evil passions, unable to accept her harmonious and blessed world into himself. At the same time, the general structure of the existence of nature is such that living individuality is isolated from it.

Tyutchev believes that this discord is a temporary protest, after which either a merger with nature or death occurs (it is no coincidence that the poet compares a person to a reed that grows not on land, but in “coastal reeds” and dies without water).

The language of the poem amazes with its colorfulness, liveliness, trembling words and phrases. The poet uses the metaphor “thinking reed” - a person, the epithets “spontaneous disputes”, “shaky reeds”, “phantom freedom”. And what’s interesting: the work doesn’t smell like it was composed, it seems to have been born of itself.

Nature in the poem is like a living creature. She feels, breathes, is sad. In itself, the animation of nature is usually for poetry, but for Tyutchev it is not just personification, not just a metaphor: the living beauty of nature. He “accepted and understood not as his fantasy, but as the truth.”

There are a lot of reminiscences in “Songability...”: this is the “thinking reed” of Blaise Pascal, who wrote that man is just a reed, but he is higher than the universe, “because he has consciousness”; and the Roman poet Ausonius, who put Christian subtext into the words “there is musical harmony in the coastal reeds” (the epigraph to the poem), and the biblical “voice of one crying in the wilderness”, which was not included in the final edition.

F.I. Tyutchev is trying to understand the boundless worlds of the unknown: the mysterious “ocean” of universal existence and the hidden sides of the human soul. This is a very characteristic poem for the poet, where a phenomenon in nature is similar to what happens in the human soul. Natural disputes shake not only nature, but also inner life a person, enriching her with a variety of feelings, but more often leaving behind the pain of loss and spiritual emptiness.

There is melodiousness in the sea waves... Tyutchev F.I.

Harmony in spontaneous disputes,

And the harmonious musky rustle

Flows through the shifting reeds.

Equanimity in everything,

Consonance is complete in nature, -

Only in our illusory freedom

We are aware of the discord with her.

Where and how did the discord arise?

And why in the general choir

The soul doesn’t sing like the sea,

And the thinking reed murmurs?

* There is musical harmony

in coastal reeds (lat.) -

Fate decreed that the poet and politician Fyodor Tyutchev spent a significant part of his life in St. Petersburg. It was here that they passed last years his life, when, after receiving the title of Privy Councilor, Tyutchev was forced to constantly remain at the imperial court. The harsh climate of the northern Russian capital weighed heavily on the poet, who by that time was already experiencing serious health problems. Nevertheless, Tyutchev could not help but admire the strict beauty of nature, its grandeur and severity, trying to understand why people cannot live according to its laws. The poet was especially attracted by the harsh Baltic Sea, to which in 1865 he dedicated his poem “There is melodiousness in the sea waves...”.

The indigenous inhabitants of St. Petersburg have always considered the depths of the sea to be the source of numerous troubles and, at the same time, treated it with respect, since it was the sea that gave them food and livelihood. Few people thought of viewing it from a romantic point of view. However, Tyutchev managed to open in water element traits that turned out to be consonant with his own worldview. So, in the waves the poet saw a special melodiousness and harmony that are characteristic of nature, but remain outside the field of vision of most people. Wondering why only a few are able not only to understand the beauty of the world around us, but also to follow its simple laws, Tyutchev comes to the conclusion that we ourselves are to blame for this. “Only in our illusory freedom do we recognize discord with it,” the poet notes, believing that only strong mental turmoil forces a person to turn to his roots, seeking protection from nature. Only then does a person realize that “the soul does not sing like the sea” and, therefore, becomes insensitive, hardened and indifferent to that priceless gift called the Universe.

Losing contact with the outside world, which one day suddenly becomes alien and frightening, is, according to Tyutchev, the most terrible test for any of us. Indeed, at this moment a person loses a part of his soul and ceases to live according to the laws of nature. As a result, the “desperate soul’s protest” turns into a “voice crying in the wilderness,” to which it is impossible to get a response. Simple questions remain unanswered and life turns into a series of random circumstances in which it is impossible to trace patterns only because the laws of nature themselves become alien to humans and are rejected as something empty and without value.