Characteristics of romanticism in the literature of the 19th century. Romanticism: representatives, distinctive features, literary forms. How did romanticism manifest itself?

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The era of romanticism occupies an important place in world art. This trend existed for a fairly short amount of time in the history of literature, painting and music, but left a big mark in the formation of trends, the creation of images and plots. We invite you to take a closer look at this phenomenon.

Romanticism is an artistic movement in culture, characterized by the depiction of strong passions, an ideal world and the struggle of the individual with society.

The word “romanticism” itself initially had the meaning of “mystical”, “unusual”, but later acquired a slightly different meaning: “different”, “new”, “progressive”.

History of origin

The period of romanticism occurred at the end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. The crisis of classicism and the excessive journalisticism of the Enlightenment led to a transition from the cult of reason to the cult of feeling. The connecting link between classicism and romanticism was sentimentalism, in which feeling became rational and natural. He became a kind of source of a new direction. The romantics went further and completely immersed themselves in irrational thoughts.

The origins of romanticism began to emerge in Germany, where by that time the literary movement “Storm and Drang” was popular. Its adherents expressed quite radical ideas, which contributed to the development of a romantic rebellious attitude among them. The development of romanticism continued in France, Russia, England, the USA and other countries. Caspar David Friedrich is considered the founder of romanticism in painting. The founder of Russian literature is Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky.

The main movements of romanticism were folklore (based on folk art), Byronic (melancholy and loneliness), grotesque-fantastic (depiction of an unreal world), utopian (search for an ideal) and Voltairean (description of historical events).

Main features and principles

The main characteristic of romanticism is the predominance of feeling over reason. From reality, the author takes the reader to an ideal world or he himself yearns for it. Hence another sign - dual worlds, created according to the principle of “romantic antithesis”.

Romanticism can rightfully be considered an experimental movement in which fantastic images are skillfully woven into works. Escapism, that is, escape from reality, is achieved by motives of the past or immersion in mysticism. The author chooses fantasy, the past, exoticism or folklore as a means of escaping reality.

Displaying human emotions through nature is another feature of romanticism. If we talk about originality in the depiction of a person, then often he appears to the reader as lonely, atypical. The motive appears " extra person", a rebel disillusioned with civilization and fighting against the elements.

Philosophy

The spirit of romanticism was imbued with the category of the sublime, that is, the contemplation of beauty. Followers new era they tried to rethink religion, explaining it as a feeling of infinity, and put the idea of the inexplicability of mystical phenomena above the ideas of atheism.

The essence of romanticism was the struggle of man against society, the predominance of sensuality over rationality.

How did romanticism manifest itself?

In art, romanticism manifested itself in all areas except architecture.

In music

Romantic composers looked at music in a new way. The melodies sounded the motif of loneliness, much attention was paid to conflict and dual worlds, with the help of a personal tone, the authors added autobiography to their works for self-expression, new techniques were used: for example, expanding the timbre palette of sound.

As in literature, interest in folklore appeared here, and fantastic images were added to operas. The main genres in musical romanticism The previously unpopular song and miniature, which came from classicism, opera and overture, as well as poetic genres: fantasy, ballad and others, became popular. The most famous representatives of this movement are Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Liszt. Examples of works: Berlioz “A Fantastic Story”, Mozart “The Magic Flute” and others.

In painting

The aesthetics of romanticism has its own unique character. The most popular genre in Romanticism paintings is landscape. For example, for one of the most famous representatives of Russian romanticism, Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, this is the stormy sea element (“Sea with a ship”). One of the first romantic artists, Caspar David Friedrich, introduced third-person landscape into painting, showing a person from the back against the backdrop of mysterious nature and creating the feeling that we are looking through the eyes of this character (examples of works: “Two Contemplating the Moon”, “Rocky Mountains”) shores of Ryugin Island"). The superiority of nature over man and his loneliness is especially felt in the painting “Monk on the Seashore.”

Fine art in the era of romanticism became experimental. William Turner preferred to create canvases with sweeping strokes, with almost imperceptible details (“Blizzard. Steamboat at the entrance to the harbor”). In turn, the harbinger of realism Theodore Gericault also painted paintings that bear little resemblance to the images real life. For example, in the painting “The Raft of Medusa,” people dying of hunger look like athletic heroes. If we talk about still lifes, then all the objects in the paintings are staged and cleaned (Charles Thomas Bale “Still Life with Grapes”).

In literature

If in the Age of Enlightenment, with rare exceptions, lyrical and lyric epic genres were absent, then in romanticism they play a major role. The works are distinguished by their imagery and originality of plot. Either this is an embellished reality, or these are completely fantastic situations. The hero of romanticism has exceptional qualities that influence his fate. Books written two centuries ago are still in demand not only among schoolchildren and students, but also among all interested readers. Examples of works and representatives of the movement are presented below.

Abroad

Among the poets of the early 19th century are Heinrich Heine (the collection “The Book of Songs”), William Wordsworth (“Lyrical Ballads”), Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, as well as George Noel Gordon Byron, the author of the poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” The historical novels of Walter Scott (for example, "", "Quentin Durward"), the novels of Jane Austen (""), the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe ("", ""), the stories of Washington Irving ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow") have gained great popularity ") and the tales of one of the first representatives of romanticism, Ernest Theodore Amadeus Hoffmann ("The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", "").

Also known are the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“Tales of the Ancient Mariner”) and Alfred de Musset (“Confessions of a Son of the Century”). It is remarkable with what ease the reader gets from the real world to the fictional one and back, as a result of which they both merge into one whole. This is partly achieved by the simple language of many works and the relaxed narration of such unusual things.

In Russia

Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky is considered the founder of Russian romanticism (elegy "", ballad ""). Co school curriculum Everyone is familiar with Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov’s poem “,” where special attention is paid to the motif of loneliness. It was not for nothing that the poet was called the Russian Byron. The philosophical lyrics of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, the early poems and poems of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, the poetry of Konstantin Nikolaevich Batyushkov and Nikolai Mikhailovich Yazykov - all this had a great influence on the development of domestic romanticism.

The early work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is also presented in this direction (for example, mystical stories from the “”) cycle. It is interesting that romanticism in Russia developed in parallel with classicism and sometimes these two directions did not contradict each other too sharply.

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The artistic method that developed in early XIX V. and became widespread as a direction (current) in the art and literature of most European countries, including Russia, as well as in the literature of the USA. To later eras the term “romanticism” is applied largely on the basis of the artistic experience of the first half of the 19th century V.

The work of the romantics in each country has its own specifics, explained by the peculiarities of national historical development, and at the same time it also has some stable common features.

In this general characteristic of romanticism we can highlight: the historical soil on which it arises, the features of the method and the character of the hero.

The common historical ground on which European romanticism arose was the turning point associated with the Great French Revolution. The Romantics adopted from their time the idea of individual freedom put forward by the revolution, but at the same time in Western countries they realized the defenselessness of man in a society where monetary interests prevailed. Therefore, the worldview of many romantics is characterized by confusion and confusion in front of the world around them, and the tragedy of the individual’s fate.

The main event of Russian history at the beginning of the 19th century. The Patriotic War of 1812 and the Decembrist uprising of 1825 appeared, which had a huge impact on the entire course of artistic development Russia and determined the range of topics and questions that worried Russian romantics (see Russian literature of the 19th century).

But for all the originality and originality of Russian romanticism, its development is inseparable from the general movement of European romantic literature, just as the milestones of national history are inseparable from the course of European events: the political and social ideas of the Decembrists are continuously connected with the basic principles put forward by the French Revolution.

With the general tendency to deny the surrounding world, romanticism did not constitute a unity of social political views. On the contrary, the views of the romantics on society, their positions in society, the struggle of their time were sharply different - from revolutionary (more precisely, rebellious) to conservative and reactionary. This often gives grounds to divide romanticism into reactionary, contemplative, liberal, progressive, etc. It is more correct, however, to talk about the progressiveness or reactionaryness not of the method of romanticism itself, but of the social, philosophical or political views of the writer, taking into account that artistic creativity is such, for example , a romantic poet, like V. A. Zhukovsky, is much broader and richer than his political and religious convictions.

Special interest in personality, the nature of its relationship to the surrounding reality, on the one hand, and opposition real world ideal (extra-bourgeois, anti-bourgeois) - on the other. The romantic artist does not set himself the task of accurately reproducing reality. It is more important for him to express his attitude towards it, moreover, to create his own, fictitious image of the world, often on the principle of contrast with the surrounding life, so that through this fiction, through contrast, he can convey to the reader both his ideal and his rejection of the world he denies. This active personal principle in romanticism leaves an imprint on the entire structure of a work of art and determines its subjective character. Events occurring in romantic poems, dramas and other works are important only for revealing the characteristics of the personality that interests the author.

So, for example, the story of Tamara in the poem “The Demon” by M. Yu. Lermontov is subordinated to the main task - to recreate the “restless spirit” - the spirit of the Demon, to convey in cosmic images the tragedy of modern man and, finally, the attitude of the poet himself to reality,

Where they can’t do it without fear
Neither hate nor love.

The literature of romanticism put forward its own hero, who most often expresses the author’s attitude to reality. This is a person with especially strong feelings, with a uniquely acute reaction to a world that rejects the laws to which others obey. Therefore, he is always placed above those around him (“... I was not created for people: I am too proud for them, they are too vile for me,” says Arbenin in M. Lermontov’s drama “The Strange Man”).

This hero is lonely, and the theme of loneliness varies in works of various genres, especially often in lyric poetry (“In the wild north it stands alone...” G. Heine, “An oak leaf has torn away from its native branch...” M. Yu. Lermontov). Lonely are the heroes of Lermontov, the heroes of the oriental poems of J. Byron. Even rebel heroes are lonely: Cain in Byron, Conrad Wallenrod in A. Mickiewicz. These are exceptional characters in exceptional circumstances.

The heroes of romanticism are restless, passionate, indomitable. “I was born / With a seething soul like lava,” exclaims Arbenin in Lermontov’s “Masquerade.” “The languor of peace is hateful” to Byron’s hero; “... this is a human personality, indignant against the common and, in its proud rebellion, relying on itself,” wrote V. G. Belinsky about Byron’s hero.

The romantic personality, carrying rebellion and negation, was vividly recreated by the Decembrist poets - representatives of the first stage of Russian romanticism (K. F. Ryleev, A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, V. K. Kuchelbecker).

Increased interest in personality and peace of mind man contributed to the flourishing of lyrical and lyric-epic genres - in a number of countries it was the era of romanticism that brought forward great national poets (in France - Hugo, in Poland - Mickiewicz, in England - Byron, in Germany - Heine). At the same time, the deepening of the romantics into the human “I” largely prepared the psychological realism XIX V. A major discovery of romanticism was historicism. If all life appeared to the romantics in motion, in the struggle of opposites, then this was reflected in the depiction of the past. Was born

historical novel (W. Scott, V. Hugo, A. Dumas), historical drama. The Romantics sought to colorfully convey the flavor of the era, both national and geographical. They did a lot to popularize oral folk art, as well as works of medieval literature. Promoting the original art of their people, the romantics drew attention to the artistic treasures of other peoples, emphasizing the unique features of each culture. Turning to folklore, the romantics often embodied legends in the ballad genre - a plot song with dramatic content (German romantics, poets of the “lake school” in England, V. A. Zhukovsky in Russia). The era of romanticism was marked by the flourishing of literary translation (in Russia, V. A. Zhukovsky was a brilliant propagandist of not only Western European, but also Eastern poetry). Rejecting the strict norms prescribed by the aesthetics of classicism, the romantics proclaimed the right of every poet to diversity artistic forms created by all peoples.

Romanticism does not disappear from the scene immediately with the establishment of critical realism. For example, in France, such famous romantic novels by Hugo as “Les Miserables” and “The Year 93” were created many years after the completion of the creative career of the realists Stendhal and O. de Balzac. In Russia, the romantic poems of M. Yu. Lermontov and the lyrics of F. I. Tyutchev were created when literature had already declared itself with significant successes of realism.

But the fate of romanticism did not end there. Many decades later, in other historical conditions, writers often again turned to romantic means of artistic depiction. Thus, the young M. Gorky, creating both realistic and romantic stories at the same time, it was in romantic works that he most fully expressed the pathos of struggle, the spontaneous impulse for the revolutionary reorganization of society (the image of Danko in “Old Woman Izergil”, “Song of the Falcon”, “Song of the Petrel” ").

However, in the 20th century. Romanticism no longer constitutes an integral artistic movement. It's about only about the features of romanticism in the works of individual writers.

In Soviet literature, the features of the romantic method were clearly manifested in the works of many prose writers (A. S. Green, A. P. Gaidar, I. E. Babel) and poets (E. G. Bagritsky, M. A. Svetlov, K. M. Simonov, B. A. Ruchev).

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Municipal Educational Institution Secondary School No. 5

Romanticism

Performed):

Zhukova Irina

Dobryanka, 2004.

Introduction

1. The origins of romanticism

2. Romanticism as a movement in literature

3. The emergence of romanticism in Russia

4. Romantic traditions in the works of writers

4.1 The poem “Gypsies” as a romantic work by A. S. Pushkin

4.2 “Mtsyri” - a romantic poem by M. Yu. Lermontov.. 15

4.3 " Scarlet Sails" - a romantic story by A. S. Green.. 19

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

romanticism literature Pushkin Lermontov

The words “romance” and “romantic” are known to everyone. We say: “the romance of distant travels”, “a romantic mood”, “to be a romantic at heart”... With these words we want to express the attractiveness of travel, the unusualness of a person, the mystery and sublimity of his soul. In these words one hears something desirable and alluring, dreamy and unrealizable, unusual and beautiful.

My work is devoted to the analysis of a special trend in literature - romanticism.

The romantic writer is dissatisfied with the everyday, gray life that surrounds each of us, because this life is boring, full of injustice, evil, ugliness... There is nothing extraordinary or heroic in it. And then the author creates his own world, colorful, beautiful, permeated with the sun and the smell of the sea, inhabited by strong, noble, beautiful people. Justice prevails in this world, and the fate of a person is in his own hands. You just need to believe and fight for your dream.

A romantic writer may be attracted to distant, exotic countries and peoples, with their own customs, way of life, concepts of honor and duty. The Caucasus was especially attractive to Russian romantics. Romantics love mountains and the sea - after all, they are sublime, majestic, rebellious, and people must match them.

And if you ask a romantic hero what is more valuable to him than life, he will answer without hesitation: freedom! This word is written on the banner of romanticism. For the sake of freedom, the romantic hero is capable of anything, and even crime will not stop him - if he feels inner rightness.

The romantic hero is a complete personality. An ordinary person has a little bit of everything mixed in: good and evil, courage and cowardice, nobility and meanness... A romantic hero is not like that. One can always identify a leading, all-subordinating character trait in him.

The romantic hero has a sense of the value and independence of the human personality, its inner freedom. Formerly a man listened to the voice of tradition, to the voice of someone older in age, in rank, in position. These voices told him how to live, how to behave in this or that case. And now the main adviser for a person has become the voice of his soul, his conscience. The romantic hero is internally free, independent of other people’s opinions, he is able to express his disagreement with a boring and monotonous life.

The theme of romanticism in literature is still relevant today.

1. The origins of romanticism

Formation European romanticism usually attributed to the end of the 18th - first quarter of the 19th century. This is where his ancestry comes from. This approach has its own legitimacy. At this time, romantic art most fully reveals its essence and is formed as literary direction. However, writers of a romantic worldview, i.e. those who are aware of the incompatibility of the ideal and their contemporary society were creating long before the 19th century. Hegel, in his lectures on aesthetics, speaks of the romanticism of the Middle Ages, when real public relations due to their prosaic and lack of spirituality, they forced writers living by spiritual interests to go into religious mysticism in search of an ideal. Hegel's point of view was largely shared by Belinsky, who further expanded the historical boundaries of romanticism. The critic found romantic traits in Euripides and in the lyrics of Tibullus, and considered Plato the herald of romantic aesthetic ideas. At the same time, the critic noted the variability of romantic views on art, their conditionality by certain socio-historical circumstances.

Romanticism in its origins is an anti-feudal phenomenon. It was formed as a movement during a period of acute crisis of the feudal system, during the years of the Great French Revolution, and represents a reaction to a social order in which a person was assessed primarily by his title and wealth, and not by his spiritual capabilities. Romantics protest against the humiliation of humanity in man, they fight for elevation and emancipation of the individual.

The Great French Bourgeois Revolution, which shook the foundations of the old society to the core, changed the psychology of not only the state, but also the “private person.” By participating in class battles and in the national liberation struggle, the masses made history. Politics became their daily business. The changed life, the new ideological and aesthetic needs of the revolutionary era required new forms for their depiction. The life of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Europe was difficult to fit into the framework of an everyday novel or everyday drama. The romantics who replaced the realists are looking for new genre structures and transforming the old ones.

2. Romanticism as a movement in literature

Romanticism is, first of all, a special worldview based on the conviction of the superiority of “spirit” over “matter.” Creative beginning, according to the romantics, possesses everything truly spiritual, which they identified with the truly human. And, on the contrary, everything material, in their opinion, coming to the fore, disfigures the true nature of man, does not allow his essence to manifest itself, in the conditions of bourgeois reality, it divides people, becomes a source of hostility between them, and leads to tragic situations. A positive hero in romanticism, as a rule, rises in the level of his consciousness above the world of self-interest that surrounds him, is incompatible with it, he sees the purpose of life not in making a career, not in accumulating wealth, but in serving the high ideals of humanity - humanity, freedom , brotherhood. Negative romantic characters, in contrast to positive ones, are in harmony with society; their negativity lies primarily in the fact that they live according to the laws of the bourgeois environment around them. Consequently (and this is very important), romanticism is not only a striving for the ideal and poeticization of everything spiritually beautiful, it is at the same time an exposure of the ugly in its specific socio-historical form. Moreover, the criticism of lack of spirituality was given to romantic art from the very beginning, it follows from the very essence of the romantic attitude towards public life. Of course, not all writers and not all genres manifest it with the required breadth and intensity. But critical pathos is evident not only in the dramas of Lermontov or in the “secular stories” of V. Odoevsky, it is also palpable in the elegies of Zhukovsky, revealing the sorrows and sorrows of a spiritually rich personality in the conditions of feudal Russia.

The romantic worldview, due to its dualism (the openness of “spirit” and “mother”), determines the depiction of life in sharp contrasts. The presence of contrast is one of the characteristic features of the romantic type of creativity and, therefore, style. The spiritual and material in the works of the romantics are sharply opposed to each other. A positive romantic hero is usually depicted as a lonely creature, moreover, doomed to suffer in his contemporary society (Giaour, Corsair in Byron, Chernets in Kozlov, Voinarovsky in Ryleev, Mtsyri in Lermontov and others). In depicting the ugly, the romantics often achieve such everyday concreteness that it is difficult to distinguish their work from the realistic. On the basis of a romantic worldview, it is possible to create not only individual images, but also entire works that are realistic in the type of creativity.

Romanticism is merciless towards those who, fighting for their own aggrandizement, thinking about enrichment or languishing with a thirst for pleasure, transgress universal principles in the name of this. moral laws, tramples on universal human values (humanity, love of freedom, and others).

In romantic literature there are many images of heroes infected with individualism (Manfred, Lara by Byron, Pechorin, Demon by Lermontov and others), but they look like deeply tragic creatures, suffering from loneliness, yearning to merge with the world of ordinary people. Revealing the tragedy of individualistic man, romanticism showed the essence of true heroism, manifesting itself in selfless service to the ideals of humanity. Personality in romantic aesthetics is not valuable in itself. Its value increases as the benefit it brings to the people increases. The affirmation of a person in romanticism consists, first of all, in liberating him from individualism, from the harmful effects of private property psychology.

At the center of romantic art is the human personality, its spiritual world, its ideals, anxieties and sorrows in the conditions of the bourgeois system of life, the thirst for freedom and independence. The romantic hero suffers from alienation, from the inability to change his situation. Therefore, the popular genres of romantic literature, which most fully reflect the essence of the romantic worldview, are tragedies, dramatic, lyrical, epic and lyrical poems, short stories, and elegy. Romanticism revealed the incompatibility of everything truly human with the private property principle of life, and this is its great historical meaning. He introduced into literature a man-fighter who, despite his doom, acts freely, because he realizes that struggle is necessary to achieve a goal.

Romantics are characterized by breadth and scale of artistic thinking. To embody ideas of universal human significance, they use Christian legends, biblical tales, ancient mythology, and folk traditions. Poets of the romantic movement resort to fantasy, symbolism and other conventional techniques of artistic depiction, which gives them the opportunity to show reality in such a wide spread that was completely unthinkable in realistic art. It is unlikely, for example, that it is possible to convey the entire content of Lermontov’s “Demon”, adhering to the principle of realistic typification. The poet embraces the entire universe with his gaze, sketches cosmic landscapes, in the reproduction of which realistic concreteness, familiar in the conditions of earthly reality, would be inappropriate:

On the air ocean

Without a rudder and without sails

Silently floating in the fog

Choirs of slender luminaries.

In this case, the character of the poem was more consistent not with accuracy, but, on the contrary, with the uncertainty of the drawing, which to a greater extent conveys not a person’s ideas about the universe, but his feelings. In the same way, “grounding” and concretizing the image of the Demon would lead to a certain decrease in the understanding of him as a titanic being, endowed with superhuman power.

Interest in the conventional techniques of artistic representation is explained by the fact that romantics often pose philosophical and worldview questions for resolution, although, as already noted, they do not shy away from depicting the everyday, the prosaic, everything that is incompatible with the spiritual, human. In romantic literature (in a dramatic poem), the conflict is usually built on a collision not of characters, but of ideas, entire worldview concepts (“Manfred”, “Cain” by Byron, “Prometheus Unbound” by Shelley), which, naturally, took art beyond the limits of realistic concreteness.

The intellectuality of the romantic hero and his penchant for reflection are largely explained by the fact that he acts in different conditions than the characters in an educational novel or a “philistine” drama of the 18th century. The latter acted in the closed sphere of everyday relations, the theme of love occupied one of the central places in their lives. The romantics brought art to the wide expanses of history. They saw that the fate of people, the nature of their consciousness is determined not so much by the social environment as by the era as a whole, the political, social, and spiritual processes occurring in it, which most decisively influence the future of all humanity. Thus, the idea of the self-worth of the individual, its dependence on itself, its will, collapsed, and its conditionality was revealed by the complex world of socio-historical circumstances.

Romanticism as a certain worldview and type of creativity should not be confused with romance, i.e. a dream of a wonderful goal, with aspiration towards an ideal and a passionate desire to see it realized. Romance, depending on a person’s views, can be either revolutionary, calling forward, or conservative, poeticizing the past. It can grow on a realistic basis and be utopian in nature.

Based on the assumption of the variability of history and human concepts, the romantics opposed the imitation of antiquity and defended the principles of original art based on the truthful reproduction of their national life, its way of life, morals, beliefs, etc.

Russian romantics defend the idea of “local color,” which involves depicting life in national-historical originality. This was the beginning of the penetration of national-historical specificity into art, which ultimately led to the victory of the realistic method in Russian literature.

3. The emergence of romanticism in Russia

In the 19th century, Russia was somewhat culturally isolated. Romanticism arose seven years later than in Europe. We can talk about his some imitation. In Russian culture there was no opposition between man and the world and God. Zhukovsky appears, who remakes German ballads in the Russian way: “Svetlana” and “Lyudmila”. Byron's version of romanticism was lived and felt in his work first by Pushkin, then by Lermontov.

Russian romanticism, starting with Zhukovsky, blossomed in the works of many other writers: K. Batyushkov, A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, E. Baratynsky, F. Tyutchev, V. Odoevsky, V. Garshin, A. Kuprin, A. Blok, A. Green, K. Paustovsky and many others.

4. Romantic traditions in the works of writers

In my work I will focus on the analysis of the romantic works of writers A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov and A. S. Green.

4.1 The poem “Gypsies” as a romantic work by A. S. Pushkin

Along with the best examples of romantic lyrics, the most important creative achievements of Pushkin the romantic were the poems “Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1821), “The Robber Brothers” (1822), “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” (1823) created during the years of southern exile, and the poem “Gypsies” completed in Mikhailovsky "(1824). They most fully and vividly embodied the image of an individualist hero, disappointed and lonely, dissatisfied with life and striving for freedom.

Both the character of the demonic rebel and the genre of the romantic poem itself took shape in Pushkin’s work under the undoubted influence of Byron, who, according to Vyazemsky, “set to music the song of a generation,” Byron, the author of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” and a cycle of so-called “oriental” poems. Following the path paved by Byron, Pushkin created an original, Russian version of the Byronic poem, which had a huge impact on Russian literature.

Following Byron, Pushkin chooses extraordinary people as heroes of his works. They are characterized by proud and strong personalities, marked by spiritual superiority over others and at odds with society. The romantic poet does not tell the reader about the hero’s past, about the conditions and circumstances of his life, and does not show how his character developed. Only in the most general outline, he says deliberately vaguely and unclearly about the reasons for his disappointment and enmity with society. It thickens an atmosphere of mystery and enigma around him.

The action of a romantic poem most often unfolds not in the environment to which the hero belongs by birth and upbringing, but in a special, exceptional setting, against the backdrop of majestic nature: the sea, mountains, waterfalls, storms - among semi-wild peoples not touched by European civilization. And this further emphasizes the unusualness of the hero, the exclusivity of his personality.

Lonely and alien to those around him, the hero of a romantic poem is akin only to the author, and sometimes even acts as his double. In a note about Byron, Pushkin wrote: “He created himself a second time, now under the turban of a renegade, now in the cloak of a corsair, now as a giaur...”. This characteristic is partially applicable to Pushkin himself: the images of the Prisoner and Aleko are largely autobiographical. They are like masks, from under which the author’s features are visible (the similarity is emphasized, in particular, by the consonance of names: Aleko - Alexander). The narration about the fate of the hero is therefore colored by deep personal feelings, and the story about his experiences imperceptibly turns into the lyrical confession of the author.

Despite the undoubted commonality of the romantic poems of Pushkin and Byron, Pushkin’s poem is deeply original, creatively independent, and in many ways polemical in relation to Byron. As in the lyrics, the harsh features of Byron's romanticism in Pushkin are softened, expressed less consistently and clearly, and are largely transformed.

Much more significant in works are descriptions of nature, depictions of everyday life and customs, and finally, the function of other characters. Their opinions, their views on life coexist equally in the poem with the position of the main character.

The poem “Gypsies” written by Pushkin in 1824 reflects the severe crisis of the romantic worldview that the poet was experiencing at that time (1823 - 1824). He became disillusioned with all his romantic ideals: freedom, the high purpose of poetry, romantic eternal love.

From criticism of the “high society” the poet moves on to a direct denunciation of European civilization - the entire “urban” culture. It appears in “Gypsies” as a collection of grave moral vices, a world of money-grubbing and slavery, as a kingdom of boredom and the tedious monotony of life.

If only you knew

When would you imagine

The captivity of stuffy cities!

There are people in heaps behind the fence,

They don’t breathe the morning cool,

Not the spring smell of meadows;

They are ashamed of love, thoughts are driven away,

They trade according to their will,

They bow their heads before idols

And they ask for money and chains, -

in these terms Aleko tells Zemfira “about the fact that he left forever.”

Aleko enters into a sharp and irreconcilable conflict with the outside world (“he is persecuted by the law,” Zemfira tells his father), he breaks all ties with him and does not think about returning back, and his arrival in the gypsy camp is a real rebellion against society.

In “Gypsies,” finally, the patriarchal “natural” way of life and the world of civilization confront each other much more definitely and sharply. They appear as the embodiment of freedom and slavery, bright, sincere feelings and “dead bliss”, unpretentious poverty and idle luxury. In a gypsy camp

Everything is meager, wild, everything is discordant;

But everything is so alive and restless,

So alien to our dead negligence,

So alien to this idle life,

Like a monotonous slave song.

The “natural” environment in “Gypsies” is depicted - for the first time in southern poems - as an element of freedom. It is no coincidence that the “predatory” and warlike Circassians replaced here by free, but “peaceful” gypsies, who are “timid and kind in soul.” After all, even for the terrible double murder, Aleko only paid with expulsion from the camp. But freedom itself is now recognized as a painful problem, as a complex moral and psychological category. In “Gypsies,” Pushkin expressed a new idea about the character of an individualist hero, about personal freedom in general.

Aleko, having come to the “sons of nature,” receives complete external freedom: “he is free just like them.” Aleko is ready to merge with the gypsies, live their lives, obey their customs. “He loves their canopy lodgings, / And the rapture of eternal laziness, / And their poor, sonorous language.” He eats “unharvested millet” with them, leads a bear around the villages, finds happiness in Zemfira’s love. The poet seems to remove all the obstacles on the hero’s path to a new world for him.

Nevertheless, Aleko is not given the opportunity to enjoy happiness and experience the taste of true freedom. The characteristic features of a romantic individualist still live in him: pride, self-will, a sense of superiority over other people. Even a peaceful life in a gypsy camp cannot make him forget about the storms he experienced, about fame and luxury, about the temptations of European civilization:

Its sometimes magical glory

A distant star beckoned,

Unexpected luxury and fun

People came to him sometimes;

Over a lonely head

And the thunder often rumbled...

The main thing is that Aleko is unable to overcome the rebellious passions raging “in his tormented chest.” And it is no coincidence that the author warns the reader about the approach of an inevitable catastrophe - a new explosion of passions (“They will wake up: wait”).

The inevitability of a tragic outcome is thus rooted in the very nature of the hero, poisoned by European civilization and its entire spirit. It would seem that he has completely merged with the free gypsy community, but he still remains internally alien to it. It seemed that very little was required of him: that, like a true gypsy, he “did not know a safe nest and would not get used to anything.” But Aleko cannot “get used to it”, cannot live without Zemfira and her love. It seems natural to him even to demand constancy and fidelity from her, to consider that she belongs entirely to him:

Don't change, my gentle friend!

And I... one of my desires

Sharing love, leisure with you,

And voluntary exile.

"You are for him more valuable than the world“,” the Old Gypsy explains to his daughter the reason and meaning of Aleko’s insane jealousy.

It is this all-consuming passion, the rejection of any other view of life and love that makes Aleko internally unfree. This is where the contradiction between “his freedom and their will” manifests itself most clearly. Not being free himself, he inevitably becomes a tyrant and despot in relation to others. The hero's tragedy is thereby given a sharp ideological meaning. The point, then, is not simply that Aleko cannot cope with his passions. He cannot overcome the narrow, limited idea of freedom that is characteristic of him as a man of civilization. He brings into the patriarchal environment the views, norms and prejudices of the “enlightenment” - the world he left behind. Therefore, he considers himself entitled to take revenge on Zemfira for her free love for the Young Gypsy, to cruelly punish them both. The flip side of his freedom-loving aspirations inevitably turns out to be selfishness and arbitrariness.

This is best demonstrated by Aleko’s dispute with the Old Gypsy - a dispute in which a complete mutual misunderstanding is revealed: after all, the gypsies have neither law nor property (“We are wild, we have no laws,” the Old Gypsy will say in the finale), they have no and concepts of law.

Wanting to console Aleko, the old man tells him “a story about himself” - about the betrayal of his beloved wife Mariula to Zemfira’s mother. Convinced that love is alien to any coercion or violence, he will calmly and firmly overcome his misfortune. In what happened, he even sees a fatal inevitability - a manifestation of the eternal law of life: “Joy is given to everyone in succession; / What happened will not happen again.” This wise calm, uncomplaining humility in the face higher power Aleko can neither understand nor accept:

Why didn't you hurry?

Immediately after the ungrateful

And to predators and to her, the insidious one,

Didn't you plunge a dagger into your heart?

..............................................

I'm not like that. No, I'm not arguing

I will not give up my rights,

Or at least I’ll enjoy vengeance.

Particularly noteworthy is Aleko’s reasoning that in order to protect his “rights” he is able to destroy even a sleeping enemy, push him into the “abyss of the sea” and enjoy the sound of his fall.

But revenge, violence and freedom, the Old Gypsy thinks, are incompatible. For true freedom presupposes, first of all, respect for another person, for his personality, his feelings. At the end of the poem, he not only accuses Aleko of selfishness (“You only want freedom for yourself”), but also emphasizes the incompatibility of his beliefs and moral principles with the truly free morality of the gypsy camp (“You are not born for a wild lot”).

For a romantic hero, the loss of his beloved “is tantamount to the collapse of the “world.” Therefore, the murder he committed expresses not only his disappointment in wild freedom, but also a rebellion against the world order. Fleeing from the law pursuing him, he cannot imagine a way of life that would not be regulated by law and justice. Love for him is not a “whim of the heart,” as for Zemfira and the Old Gypsy, but marriage. For Aleko “renounced only the external, superficial forms of culture, and not its internal foundations.”

One can obviously speak of a dual, critical and at the same time sympathetic attitude of the author towards his hero, for the poet had liberating aspirations and hopes associated with the character of the individualist hero. By deromanticizing Aleko, Pushkin does not expose him at all, but reveals the tragedy of his desire for freedom, which inevitably turns into internal lack of freedom, fraught with the danger of egoistic tyranny.

For a positive assessment of gypsy freedom, it is enough that it is morally higher, purer than a civilized society. Another thing is that as the plot develops, it becomes clear that the world of the gypsy camp, with which Aleko so inevitably comes into conflict, is also not cloudless, not idyllic. Just as “fatal passions” lurk in the hero’s soul under the cover of external carelessness, so the life of the gypsies is deceptive in appearance. At first, it seems akin to the existence of a “migratory bird” that knows “neither care nor labor.” “Frisky will”, “the rapture of eternal laziness”, “peace”, “carelessness” - this is how the poet characterizes the free gypsy life.

However, in the second half of the poem the picture changes dramatically. “Peaceful,” kind, carefree “sons of nature” also, it turns out, are not free from passions. The signal heralding these changes is Zemfira’s song, full of fire and passion, which is not by chance placed in the very center of the work, in its compositional focus. This song is imbued not only with the rapture of love, it sounds like an evil mockery of a hateful husband, full of hatred and contempt for him.

Having arisen so suddenly, the theme of passion rapidly grows and receives a truly catastrophic development. One after another, there are scenes of Zemfira's stormy and passionate date with the Young Gypsy, Aleko's insane jealousy and the second date - with its tragic and bloody denouement.

The scene of Aleko's nightmare is noteworthy. The hero remembers his former love (he “pronounces a different name”), which was also probably resolved by a cruel drama (possibly the murder of his beloved). Passions, hitherto tamed, peacefully dormant “in his tormented chest,” instantly awaken and flare up with a hot flame. This mistake of passions, their tragic collision, constitutes the climax of the poem. It is no coincidence that in the second half of the work the dramatic form becomes predominant. This is where almost all of the dramatized episodes of Gypsy are centered.

The original idyll of gypsy freedom collapses under the pressure of a violent play of passions. Passions are recognized in the poem as a universal law of life. They live everywhere: “in the captivity of stuffy cities,” and in the chest of a disappointed hero, and in a free gypsy community. It is impossible to hide from them, there is no point in running. Hence the hopeless conclusion in the epilogue: “And fatal passions are everywhere, / And there is no protection from fate.” These words accurately and clearly express the ideological result of the work (and partly of the entire southern cycle of poems).

And this is natural: where passions live, there must also be their victims - people suffering, chilled, disappointed. Freedom in itself does not guarantee happiness. Escape from civilization is pointless and futile.

The material that Pushkin first artistically introduced into Russian literature is inexhaustible: the characteristic images of the poet’s peers, the European enlightened and suffering youth of the 19th century, the world of the humiliated and insulted, the elements of peasant life and the national historical world; great socio-historical conflicts and the world of experiences of a solitary human soul, seized by an all-consuming idea that became its destiny, etc. And each of these areas found in the further development of literature its great artists - the wonderful successors of Pushkin - Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy.

4.2 “Mtsyri” - a romantic poem by M. Yu. Lermontov

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov began writing poetry early: he was only 13-14 years old. He studied with his predecessors - Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin.

In general, Lermontov’s lyrics are imbued with sorrow and seem to sound like a complaint about life. But a real poet speaks in poetry not about his personal “I”, but about a man of his time, about the reality around him. Lermontov speaks about his time - about the dark and difficult era of the 30s of the 19th century.

All the poet’s work is imbued with this heroic spirit of action and struggle. It recalls the time when the mighty words of the poet ignited a fighter for battle and sounded “like a bell on a veche tower in the days of national celebrations and troubles” (“Poet”). He uses as an example the merchant Kalashnikov, boldly defending his honor, or a young monk fleeing from a monastery to experience the “bliss of freedom” (“Mtsyri”). In the mouth of a veteran soldier, recalling the Battle of Borodino, he puts words addressed to his contemporaries, who insisted on reconciliation with reality: “Yes, there were people in our time, not like the current tribe: heroes - not you!” (“Borodino”).

Lermontov's favorite hero is a hero of active action. Lermontov's knowledge of the world, his prophecies and predictions always had as their subject the practical aspiration of man and served it. No matter how gloomy the poet’s forecasts were, no matter how bleak his forebodings and predictions were, they never paralyzed his will to fight, but only forced him to seek the law of action with new persistence.

At the same time, no matter what tests Lermontov’s dreams were subjected to when colliding with the world of reality, no matter how the surrounding prose of life contradicted them, no matter how the poet regretted unfulfilled hopes and destroyed ideals, he still went on to the feat of knowledge with heroic fearlessness. And nothing could turn him away from a harsh and merciless assessment of himself, his ideals, desires and hopes.

Cognition and action are the two principles that Lermontov reunited in the single “I” of his hero. The circumstances of the time limited the range of his poetic possibilities: he showed himself mainly as a poet of a proud personality, defending himself and his human pride.

In Lermontov’s poetry, the public echoes the deeply intimate and personal: the family drama, “the terrible fate of father and son,” which brought the poet a chain of hopeless suffering, is aggravated by the pain of unrequited love, and the tragedy of love is revealed as the tragedy of the entire poetic perception of the world. His pain revealed to him the pain of others; through suffering, he discovered his human kinship with others, starting from the serf peasant of the village of Tarkhany and ending with the great poet of England Byron.

The topic of the poet and poetry particularly excited Lermontov and attracted his attention for many years. For him, this topic was connected with all the great questions of the time; it was an integral part of the entire historical development of mankind. The poet and the people, poetry and revolution, poetry in the fight against bourgeois society and serfdom - these are the aspects of this problem for Lermontov.

Lermontov was in love with the Caucasus from the very beginning early childhood. The majesty of the mountains, the crystal purity and at the same time dangerous power of the rivers, the bright unusual greenery and people, freedom-loving and proud, shook the imagination of a big-eyed and impressionable child. Perhaps this is why, even in his youth, Lermontov was so attracted to the image of a rebel, on the verge of death, making an angry protest speech (the poem “Confession”, 1830, the action takes place in Spain) before the elder monk. Or maybe it was a premonition of his own death and a subconscious protest against the monastic prohibition to rejoice in everything that is given by God in this life. This acute desire to experience ordinary human, earthly happiness is heard in the dying confession of young Mtsyri, the hero of one of Lermontov’s most remarkable poems about the Caucasus (1839 - the poet himself had very little time left).

“Mtsyri” is a romantic poem by M. Yu. Lermontov. The plot of this work, its idea, conflict and composition are closely related to the image of the main character, with his aspirations and experiences. Lermontov is looking for his ideal hero-fighter and finds him in the image of Mtsyri, in which he embodies best features leading people of their time.

The uniqueness of Mtsyri's personality as a romantic hero is also emphasized by the unusual circumstances of his life. From childhood, fate doomed him to a dull monastic existence, which was completely alien to his ardent, fiery nature. Captivity could not kill his desire for freedom; on the contrary, it even more fueled his desire to “go to his native country” at any cost.

The author pays main attention to the world of Mtsyri’s internal experiences, and not to the circumstances of his external life. The author briefly and epically calmly talks about them in the short second chapter. And the entire poem is a monologue by Mtsyri, his confession to the monk. This means that such a composition of the poem, characteristic of romantic works, imbues it with a lyrical element that prevails over the epic. It is not the author who describes Mtsyri’s feelings and experiences, but the hero himself who talks about it. The events that happen to him are shown through his subjective perception. The composition of the monologue is also subordinated to the task of gradually revealing his inner world. First, the hero talks about his secret thoughts and dreams, hidden from outsiders. “A child at heart, a monk by destiny,” he was possessed by a “fiery passion” for freedom, a thirst for life. And the hero, as an exceptional, rebellious personality, challenges fate. This means that Mtsyri’s character, his thoughts and actions determine the plot of the poem.

Having escaped during a thunderstorm, Mtsyri for the first time sees the world that was hidden from him by the monastery walls. That’s why he peers so intently at every picture that opens to him, listens to the polyphonic world of sounds. Mtsyri is blinded by the beauty and splendor of the Caucasus. He retains in his memory “lush fields, hills covered with a crown of trees growing all around,” “mountain ranges as bizarre as dreams.” These pictures evoke in the hero vague memories of his native country, which he was deprived of as a child.

The landscape in the poem not only constitutes a romantic background that surrounds the hero. It helps to reveal his character, that is, it becomes one of the ways to create a romantic image. Since nature in the poem is given in Mtsyri’s perception, his character can be judged by what exactly attracts the hero to it, how he talks about it. The diversity and richness of the landscape described by Mtsyri emphasize the monotony of the monastery environment. The young man is attracted by the power and scope of Caucasian nature; he is not afraid of the dangers lurking in it. For example, he enjoys the splendor of the vast blue vault in the early morning, and then endures the withering heat of the mountains.

Thus, we see that Mtsyri perceives nature in all its integrity, and this speaks of the spiritual breadth of his nature. Describing nature, Mtsyri first of all draws attention to its greatness and grandeur, and this leads him to the conclusion about the perfection and harmony of the world. The romanticism of the landscape is enhanced by how figuratively and emotionally Mtsyri speaks about it. His speech often uses colorful epithets (“angry shaft”, “burning abyss”, “sleepy flowers”). The emotionality of the images of nature is also enhanced by the unusual comparisons found in Mtsyri’s story. In the young man's story about nature, one can feel love and sympathy for all living things: singing birds, a jackal crying like a child. Even the snake slithers, “playing and basking.” The culmination of Mtsyri's three-day wanderings is his fight with the leopard, in which his fearlessness, thirst for fight, contempt for death, and humane attitude towards the defeated enemy were revealed with particular force. The battle with the leopard is depicted in the spirit of the romantic tradition. The leopard is described very conditionally as bright image a predator in general. This “eternal guest of the desert” is endowed with a “bloody gaze” and a “mad leap.” The victory of a weak youth over a mighty beast is romantic. It symbolizes the power of a person, his spirit, the ability to overcome all obstacles encountered on his way. The dangers that Mtsyri faces are romantic symbols of the evil that accompanies a person throughout his life. But here they are extremely concentrated, since the real life of Mtsyri is compressed to three days. And in his dying hour, realizing the tragic hopelessness of his situation, the hero did not exchange it for “paradise and eternity.” Through all my short life Mtsyri carried a powerful passion for freedom, for struggle.

In Lermontov's lyrics, issues of social behavior merge with a deep analysis of the human soul, taken in the fullness of its life feelings and aspirations. The result is a complete image of the lyrical hero - tragic, but full of strength, courage, pride and nobility. Before Lermontov, there was no such organic fusion of man and citizen in Russian poetry, just as there was no deep reflection on issues of life and behavior.

4.3 “Scarlet Sails” - a romantic story by A. S. Green

The romantic story “Scarlet Sails” by Alexander Stepanovich Green personifies a wonderful youthful dream that will certainly come true if you believe and wait.

The writer himself lived a hard life. It is almost incomprehensible how this gloomy man, untainted, carried through his painful existence the gift of a powerful imagination, purity of feelings and a shy smile. The difficulties he experienced robbed the writer of his love for reality: it was too terrible and hopeless. He always tried to get away from her, believing that it was better to live with elusive dreams than with the “trash and rubbish” of every day.

Having started writing, Greene created in his work heroes with strong and independent characters, cheerful and courageous, who inhabited a beautiful land full of flowering gardens, lush meadows and the endless sea. This fictitious “happy land”, not marked on any geographical map, should be that “paradise” where everyone living is happy, there is no hunger and disease, wars and misfortunes, and its inhabitants are engaged in creative work and creativity.

Russian life for the writer was limited to the philistine Vyatka, a dirty trade school, shelters, backbreaking labor, prison and chronic hunger. But somewhere beyond the gray horizon sparkled countries created from light, sea winds and flowering herbs. People, brown from the sun, lived there - gold miners, hunters, artists, cheerful vagabonds, selfless women, cheerful and gentle, like children, but above all - sailors.

Green loved not so much the sea as the sea coasts he imagined, where everything that he considered the most attractive in the world was connected: archipelagos of legendary islands, sand dunes overgrown with flowers, foamy sea distances, warm lagoons sparkling with bronze from the abundance of fish, ancient forests, the smell of lush thickets mixed with the smell of salty breezes, and, finally, cozy seaside towns.

Almost every story by Green contains descriptions of these non-existent cities - Lissa, Zurbagan, Gel-Gyu and Gerton. The writer put into the appearance of these fictional cities the features of all the Black Sea ports he had seen.

All the writer’s stories are full of dreams of a “dazzling incident” and joy, but most of all his story “Scarlet Sails”. It is characteristic that Green thought about and began writing this captivating and fabulous book in Petrograd in 1920, when, after typhus, he wandered around the icy city, looking for a new place to stay every night with random, semi-familiar people.

In the romantic story “Scarlet Sails,” Green develops his long-standing idea that people need faith in a fairy tale, it excites hearts, does not allow them to calm down, and makes them passionately desire such a romantic life. But miracles do not come by themselves; every person must cultivate a sense of beauty, the ability to perceive the surrounding beauty, and actively intervene in life. The writer was convinced that if you take away a person’s ability to dream, then the most important need that gives rise to culture, art and the desire to fight for a wonderful future will disappear.

From the very beginning of the story, the reader finds himself in extraordinary world, created by the imagination of the writer. The harsh region, gloomy people make Longren suffer, having lost his beloved and loving wife. But a strong-willed man, he finds the strength to resist others and even raise his daughter as a bright and bright creature. Rejected by her peers, Assol perfectly understands nature, which accepts the girl into its arms. This world enriches the heroine’s soul, making her a wonderful creation, the ideal to which we should strive. “Assol penetrated the tall, dew-sprinkling meadow grass; holding her hand palm down over her panicles, she walked, smiling at the flowing touch. Looking into the special faces of flowers, into the tangle of stems, she discerned almost human hints there - postures, efforts, movements, features and glances...”

Assol's father made a living by making and selling toys. The world of toys in which Assol lived naturally shaped her character. And in life she had to face gossip and evil. It was quite natural that the real world scared her. Running away from him, trying to keep a sense of beauty in her heart, she believed in a beautiful fairy tale about scarlet sails, told to her by a kind man. This kind but unhappy man undoubtedly wished her well, but his fairy tale turned out to be suffering for her. Assol believed in the fairy tale and made it part of her soul. The girl was ready for a miracle - and a miracle found her. And yet, it was the fairy tale that helped her not to sink into the swamp of philistine life.

There, in this swamp, lived people for whom dreams were inaccessible. They were ready to mock any person who lived, thought, and felt differently from the way they lived, thought, and felt. Therefore, Assol, with her wonderful inner world, with her a magical dream, they considered the village fool. It seems to me that these people were deeply unhappy. They thought and felt limitedly, their very desires were limited, but subconsciously they suffered from the thought that they were missing something.

This “something” was not food, shelter, although for many even this was not what they would like, no, it was a person’s spiritual need to at least occasionally see the beautiful, to come into contact with the beautiful. It seems to me that this need in a person cannot be eradicated by anything.

And it is not their crime, but their misfortune that they have become so coarse in soul that they have not learned to see beauty in thoughts and feelings. They saw only a dirty world and lived in this reality. Assol lived in another, fictional world, incomprehensible and therefore not accepted by the average person. Dream and reality collided. This contradiction ruined Assol.

This is a very life fact, probably experienced by the writer himself. Very often, people who do not understand another person, perhaps even a great and beautiful one, consider him a fool. It's easier for them this way.

Green shows how, through intricate paths, two people, created for each other, move towards a meeting. Gray lives in a completely different world. Wealth, luxury, power are given to him by birthright. And in the soul there lives a dream not about jewelry and feasts, but about the sea and sails. In defiance of his family, he becomes a sailor, sails around the world, and one day an accident brings him to the tavern of the village where Assol lives. Like a crude joke, they tell Gray the story of a madwoman who is waiting for the prince on a ship with scarlet sails.

Seeing Assol, he fell in love with her, appreciating the beauty and spiritual qualities of the girl. “He felt like a blow - a simultaneous blow to his heart and head. Along the road, facing him, was that same Ship Assol... The amazing features of her face, reminiscent of the secret of indelibly exciting, although simple words, appeared before him now in the light of her gaze.” Love helped Gray understand Assol's soul, accept the only Possible Solution- replace the sails of your galliot “Secret” with scarlet ones. Now for Assol he becomes the fairy-tale hero for whom she has been waiting for so long and to whom she unconditionally gave her “golden” heart.

The writer rewards the heroine with love for her beautiful soul, kind and faithful heart. But Gray is also happy with this meeting. The love of such an extraordinary girl as Assol is a rare success.

It was as if two strings sounded together... Soon the morning will come when the ship approaches the shore, and Assol shouts: “I’m here! Here I am!" - and starts running straight through the water.

The romantic story “Scarlet Sails” is beautiful for its optimism, faith in a dream, and the victory of a dream over the philistine world. It is beautiful because it inspires hope that there are people in the world who are able to hear and understand each other. Assol, accustomed only to ridicule, nevertheless escaped from this terrible world and sailed to the ship, proving to everyone that any dream can come true if you really believe in it, do not betray it, do not doubt it.

Green was not only a magnificent landscape painter and master of plot, but also a subtle psychologist. He wrote about self-sacrifice, courage - the heroic traits inherent in the most ordinary people. He wrote about his love for work, for his profession, about the lack of knowledge and the power of nature. Finally, very few writers wrote so purely, carefully and emotionally about love for a woman, as Greene did.

The writer believed in man and believed that everything beautiful on earth depends on the will of strong, honest-hearted people (“Scarlet Sails”, 1923; “Heart of the Desert”, 1923; “Running on the Waves”, 1928; “Golden Chain”, “Road” nowhere", 1929, etc.).

Greene said that “the whole earth, with everything that is on it, is given to us for life wherever it is.” A fairy tale is needed not only for children, but also for adults. It causes excitement - the source of high human passions. She does not allow you to calm down and always shows new, sparkling distances, a different life, she worries and makes you passionately desire this life. This is its value, and this is the value of the clear and powerful charm of Greene's stories.

What unites the works of Green, Lermontov and Pushkin that I reviewed? Russian romantics believed that the subject of the image should only be life, taken in its poetic moments, primarily the feelings and passions of a person.

Only creativity that grows on a national basis can, according to the theorists of Russian romanticism, be inspired and not rational. The imitator, in their opinion, is devoid of inspiration.

The historical significance of Russian romantic aesthetics lies in the struggle against metaphysical views on aesthetic categories, in the defense of historicism, dialectical views on art, in calls for the concrete reproduction of life in all its connections and contradictions. Its main provisions played a major constructive role in the formation of the theory of critical realism.

Conclusion

Having examined romanticism as an artistic movement in my work, I came to the conclusion that the peculiarity of every work of art and literature is that it does not die with its creator and its era, but continues to live later, and in the process of this later life historically naturally enters into new relationships with history. And these relationships can illuminate the work for contemporaries with a new light, can enrich it with new, previously unnoticed semantic facets, bring from its depth to the surface such important, but not yet recognized by previous generations, moments of psychological and moral content, the meaning of which for the first time could be realized. - truly appreciated only in the conditions of a subsequent, more mature era.

Bibliography

1. A. G. Kutuzov “Textbook-reader. In the world of literature. 8th grade", Moscow, 2002. Articles "Romantic traditions in literature" (pp. 216 - 218), "Romantic hero" (pp. 218 - 219), "When and why romanticism appeared" (pp. 219 - 220).

2. R. Gaim “Romantic School”, Moscow, 1891.

3. “Russian Romanticism”, Leningrad, 1978.

4. N. G. Bykova “Literature. Schoolchildren's Handbook", Moscow, 1995.

5. O. E. Orlova “700 best school essays", Moscow, 2003.

6. A. M. Gurevich “Romanticism of Pushkin”, Moscow, 1993.

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The emergence of romanticism

The birthplace of the movement is considered to be Europe, in particular England and France, which is where the name of this artistic movement - “romantisme” – comes from. This is explained by the fact that romanticism of the 19th century arose as a consequence of the Great French Revolution.

The revolution destroyed the entire pre-existing hierarchy and mixed up society and social strata. The man began to feel lonely and began to seek solace in gambling and other entertainment. Against this background, the idea arose that all life is a game in which there are winners and losers. Everyone's main hero romantic work becomes a person playing with fate, with fate.

What is romanticism

Romanticism is everything that exists only in books: incomprehensible, incredible and fantastic phenomena, at the same time associated with the affirmation of personality through its spiritual and creative life. Mainly the events unfold against the backdrop of expressed passions, all the heroes have clearly demonstrated characters and are often endowed with a rebellious spirit.

Writers of the Romantic era emphasize that the main value in life is a person’s personality. Each person is a separate world full of amazing beauty. It is from there that all inspiration and sublime feelings are drawn, and also a tendency towards idealization appears.

According to novelists, the ideal is an ephemeral concept, but nevertheless has the right to exist. The ideal is beyond everything ordinary, therefore the main character and his ideas are directly opposed to everyday relationships and material things.

Distinctive features

Features of romanticism lie in the main ideas and conflicts.

The main idea of almost every work is the constant movement of the hero in physical space. This fact seems to reflect the confusion of the soul, his continuously ongoing reflections and at the same time changes in the world around him.

Like many artistic directions, romanticism has its own conflicts. Here the whole concept is built on the complex relationship of the protagonist with the outside world. He is very self-centered and at the same time rebels against base, vulgar, material objects of reality, which one way or another manifests itself in the character’s actions, thoughts and ideas. The most clearly expressed in this regard are the following literary examples of romanticism: Childe Harold - the main character from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and Pechorin - from Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time".

If we summarize all of the above, it turns out that the basis of any such work is the gap between reality and the idealized world, which has very sharp edges.

Romanticism in European literature

European romanticism of the 19th century is remarkable in that most of its works have a fantastic basis. These are numerous fairy-tale legends, short stories and stories.

The main countries in which romanticism as a literary movement manifested itself most expressively are France, England and Germany.

This artistic phenomenon has several stages:

1801-1815. The beginning of the formation of romantic aesthetics.
1815-1830. The formation and flourishing of the movement, the definition of the main postulates of this direction.
1830-1848. Romanticism takes on more social forms.

Each of the above countries made its own special contribution to the development of this cultural phenomenon. In France, the romantic ones had a more political overtones; the writers were hostile towards the new bourgeoisie. This society, according to French leaders, destroyed the integrity of the individual, her beauty and freedom of spirit.

Romanticism has existed in English legends for quite a long time, but until the end of the 18th century it did not stand out as a separate literary movement. English works, unlike French ones, are filled with Gothic, religion, national folklore, and the culture of peasant and working-class societies (including spiritual ones). In addition, English prose and lyrics are filled with travel to distant lands and exploration of foreign lands.

In Germany, romanticism as a literary movement was formed under the influence of idealistic philosophy. The foundations were individuality and those oppressed by feudalism, as well as the perception of the universe as a single living system. Almost every German work is permeated with reflections on the existence of man and the life of his spirit.

Europe: examples of works

The following literary works are considered the most notable European works in the spirit of romanticism:

Treatise “The Genius of Christianity”, stories “Atala” and “Rene” by Chateaubriand;

Novels “Dolphine”, “Corinna, or Italy” by Germaine de Stael;

The novel "Adolphe" by Benjamin Constant;

The novel “Confession of a Son of the Century” by Musset;

Roman "Saint-Mars" by Vigny;

Manifesto "Preface" to the work "Cromwell", the novel "Notre Dame" by Hugo;

The drama "Henry III and His Court", a series of novels about the musketeers, "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "Queen Margot" by Dumas;

Novels “Indiana”, “The Wandering Apprentice”, “Horace”, “Consuelo” by George Sand;

Manifesto "Racine and Shakespeare" by Stendhal;

The poems "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" by Coleridge;

- “Eastern Poems” and “Manfred” by Byron;

Collected Works of Balzac;

The novel "Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott;

The fairy tale “Hyacinth and Rose”, the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” by Novalis;

Collections of short stories, fairy tales and novels by Hoffmann.

Romanticism in Russian literature

Russian romanticism of the 19th century arose under the direct influence of Western European literature. However, despite this, it had its own characteristic features, which were traced back in previous periods.

This artistic phenomenon in Russia fully reflected the hostility of progressives and revolutionaries towards the ruling bourgeoisie, in particular, towards its way of life - unbridled, immoral and cruel. Russian romanticism of the 19th century was a direct consequence of rebellious sentiments and anticipation of turning points in the country's history.

In the literature of that time, two directions are distinguished: psychological and civil. The first was based on the description and analysis of feelings and experiences, while the second was based on propaganda of the fight against modern society. The common and main idea of all novelists was that a poet or writer had to behave in accordance with the ideals that he described in his works.

Russia: examples of works

The most striking examples of romanticism in literature Russia XIX century is:

The stories “Ondine”, “The Prisoner of Chillon”, the ballads “The Forest King”, “The Fisherman”, “Lenora” by Zhukovsky;

Works “Eugene Onegin”, “The Queen of Spades” by Pushkin;

- “The Night Before Christmas” by Gogol;

- “Hero of Our Time” by Lermontov.

Romanticism in American Literature

In America, the direction received a slightly later development: its initial stage dates back to 1820-1830, the subsequent one - to 1840-1860 of the 19th century. Both stages were exceptionally influenced by civil unrest both in France (which served as the impetus for the creation of the United States) and directly in America itself (the war of independence from England and the war between North and South).

Artistic movements in American romanticism are represented by two types: abolitionist, which advocated liberation from slavery, and eastern, which idealized plantation.

American literature of this period is based on a rethinking of knowledge and genres captured from Europe and mixed with the unique way of life and pace of life on the still new and little-explored continent. American works are richly flavored with national intonations, a sense of independence and the struggle for freedom.

American romanticism. Examples of works

The Alhambra series, the stories "The Phantom Bridegroom", "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving;

The Last of the Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper;

The poem “The Raven”, the stories “Ligeia”, “The Gold Bug”, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and others by E. Alan Poe;

Gorton's novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables;

Melville's novels Typee and Moby Dick;

The novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe;

Poetically translated legends “Evangeline”, “The Song of Hiawatha”, “The Matchmaking of Miles Standish” by Longfellow;

Whitman's Leaves of Grass collection;

Essay "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" by Margaret Fuller.

Romanticism as a literary movement had a fairly strong influence on musical, theatrical art and painting - just remember the numerous productions and paintings of those times. This happened mainly due to such qualities of the movement as high aesthetics and emotionality, heroism and pathos, chivalry, idealization and humanism. Despite the fact that the age of romanticism was quite short-lived, this did not in any way affect the popularity of books written in the 19th century in subsequent decades - works of literary art from that period are loved and revered by the public to this day.

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