V. A. Zhukovsky considered the translation of “Elegy Written in a Rural Cemetery” by the English poet Thomas Gray to be the beginning of his poetic creativity. It was from this translation that a new and original phenomenon Russian poetry - poem " Rural cemetery"(1802). The creation of this work was influenced by many reasons: the study of Western European poetry, the experience of the translator, the literary tastes of the time, the artistic preferences of the author, and the debate about the appointment of a person that took place among the poet’s circle of friends.

Following Thomas Gray in the development of poetic thought, Zhukovsky introduces into his translation ideas and moods that express his own worldview. The picture of a modest rural cemetery, the description of which is based on the impression of the surroundings of the poet Mishensky’s native village, sets the author in an elegiac mood:

Under the roof of black pines and leaning elms,
Which stand around, hanging,
Here are the forefathers of the village, in secluded tombs,
Shut up forever, they sleep soundly.

The poet’s focus is on reflections on the meaning of human life, on his relationship with the world around him. Before us is a skillfully organized flow of feelings and thoughts of a specific person. The elegy represents a change of questions, as if spontaneously arising in the mind of the lyrical hero. The entire poem is a collection of philosophical and moral-psychological motifs, replacing each other, imbued with a sad mood and held together by the general idea of ​​the transience of life and the vicissitudes of happiness. The reflective hero states:

Death rages on everyone - the king, the favorite of glory,
The terrible one is looking for everyone... and will never find...

Developing the idea of ​​equality of all before death, Zhukovsky draws attention to the social contradictions that exist in society. He gives his sympathies not to the “slaves of vanity”, not to the “confidantes of fortune”, but to ordinary villagers, after whom the earth was “sprinkled”. Convinced that all people are equal by nature, he mourns for these simple villagers, born “to be crowned or soar with thoughts,” but died in ignorance by blind chance:

Their fate burdened squalor with chains,
Their genius was killed by strict need.

In affirming the ideal of natural equality of people, the author is close French writer J.-J. Rousseau, whose work he became acquainted with while still in boarding school and, like many young people of that time, became very interested in his philosophy.

The originality of the poem “Rural Cemetery” lies in the poet’s concentration on the internal experiences of the individual, revealed in the organic fusion of nature and human feelings. The transfer of this state is greatly facilitated by the animation of nature: “the day is already growing pale,” “heeded by the moon,” “the quiet voice of the day,” “under the slumbering willow,” “the oak groves were trembling,” “the day of young breath.”

The original translation of “Rural Cemetery” reveals the poetic individuality of the author, who was close to sentimentalism during the creation of the poem. He achieves here an amazing melody and melodiousness of the verse, giving it a soulful intonation.

Recreating everyday life, the poet introduces everyday colloquial vocabulary: “hut”, “beetle”, “shepherd”, “sickles”, “hearth”, “plough”, “herd”. But there are few such words in the elegy. The vocabulary here is predominantly sentimentalist, philosophical and contemplative. The poem is dominated by words related to emotional experiences (“contempt”, “sorrow”, “sigh”, “tears”, “sadly”) and broad thoughts about life (“peace of the silent reign”, “death rages on everyone”, “ almighty destinies"). Epithets and comparisons are sentimental, such as “sad ringing”, “tender heart”, “sweet voice”, “languid eyes”, “meek in heart”, “sensitive in soul”.

The bright emotional and melodic expressiveness of the poem is achieved by the descriptive and lyrical structure of the phrase (“In the foggy twilight the surroundings disappear...”), often used anaphora (“Only occasionally they buzz... Only heard in the distance”), repetitions (“Everywhere there is silence, everywhere dead dream..."), appeals (“And you, confidants of fortune”), questions (“Will death soften?”) and exclamations (“Oh, maybe under this grave!”).

So, without being a translation in the full sense of the word, “Rural Cemetery” becomes a work of Russian national literature. In the image of a young poet reflecting in a rural cemetery, Zhukovsky enhances the features of dreaminess, melancholy, poetic spirituality, significantly bringing this image closer to his own inner world and making it as close as possible to the Russian reader, brought up on the sentimental poems of Dmitriev, Kapnist, Karamzin.

The appearance of the “Rural Cemetery” on the pages of the journal “Bulletin of Europe” published by Karamzin brought Zhukovsky fame. It became obvious that a talented poet had appeared in Russian poetry. Zhukovsky's apprenticeship was over. Began new stage his literary activity.

One of the authors of Russian elegies is Vasily Zhukovsky. Among the many elegies he wrote, the work “Rural Cemetery,” created by the author in 1802, occupies a special place. In it, the author seems to be in conflict with his soul. The lyrical hero, who in this poem is Zhukovsky himself, has a decadent mood. He is ready to accept the fact that sooner or later everything ends in death, he is ready to give up, not to fight for what is dear.

This ballad is filled with romance rural life, which delighted Zhukovsky. In this regard, the first lines of the poem are dedicated to recreating the picture of the peaceful everyday life of English peasants who have finished their working day. Nature, and with it people, come to the silence, peace and tranquility of the evening.

But the poet is confident that the evening will end, after the night a new day will come with its problems and worries. But there is a place in the world that is not affected by any of these human problems - an old rural cemetery. The only creature on it is the wise owl bird. The author admires the silence here and at the same time sadly regrets that people buried under the slabs are no longer able to admire simple human joys; they cannot change the world and other people.

The hero treats the graves of ordinary people with special reverence, calling those buried here pearls. But really, how many brilliant minds, talents, kind, fair people was and is among common people.

During life, you should not evaluate a person only by appearance and the thickness of the wallet, and after death by the tombstone. The main thing is that after death, a memory remains about the person, so that there are those who loved, remembered and wanted to come to the grave at least occasionally.

Based on Thomas Gray's elegy, Zhukovsky wrote the poem "Rural Cemetery." There is no despondency and crying for lost lives, but there is the solemnity of the moment of departure into another world, the calm and tranquility of souls who have completed their earthly journey.

A traveler entering a cemetery indulges in thoughts about eternal values. Near gravestones and with crosses he tries to understand the meaning human existence. He understands that in the face of death everyone is equal, both the peaceful farmer and the brave warrior. No matter how different people’s destinies may be during life, everyone appears equal before God.

The narrator mourns for everyone, but gives preference to the simple villagers who transformed the land and obtained their daily bread. He remembers good people whom I met along the way, strong men and a weak young man who did not have time to see all the joys of life. The worthy are remembered and continue to live in memory. This is precisely the main thing, and not at all the beauty of the monument on the grave.

Weaving spoken words into poetic lines and adding his own emotional experiences, the poet created a work that brought him wide fame. The free translation from English resulted in a truly Russian poem. Emotional coloring, sentimental lyricism and spirituality in the image simple paintings everyday life made it possible to bring poetry closer to the people.

Essay » Zhukovsky » Essay: Analysis of the poem by V. A. Zhukovsky “Rural Cemetery”

Analysis of the poem by V. A. Zhukovsky “Rural Cemetery”

V. A. Zhukovsky considered the translation of “Elegy Written in a Rural Cemetery” by the English poet Thomas Gray to be the beginning of his poetic creativity. It was from this translation that a new and original phenomenon of Russian poetry was born - the poem “Rural Cemetery” (1802). The creation of this work was influenced by many reasons: the study of Western European poetry, the experience of the translator, the literary tastes of the time, the artistic preferences of the author, and the debate about the appointment of a person that took place among the poet’s circle of friends.

Following Thomas Gray in the development of poetic thought, Zhukovsky introduces into his translation ideas and moods that express his own worldview. The picture of a modest rural cemetery, the description of which is based on the impression of the surroundings of the poet Mishensky’s native village, sets the author in an elegiac mood:

Under the roof of black pines and leaning elms,

Which stand around, hanging,

Here are the forefathers of the village, in secluded tombs,

Shut up forever, they sleep soundly.

The poet’s focus is on reflections on the meaning of human life, on his relationship with the world around him. Before us is a skillfully organized flow of feelings and thoughts of a specific person. The elegy represents a change of questions, as if spontaneously arising in the mind of the lyrical hero. The entire poem is a collection of philosophical and moral-psychological motifs, replacing each other, imbued with a sad mood and held together by the general idea of ​​the transience of life and the vicissitudes of happiness. The reflective hero states:

Death rages on everyone - the king, the favorite of glory,

The terrible one is looking for everyone... and will never find...

Developing the idea of ​​equality of all before death, Zhukovsky draws attention to the social contradictions that exist in society. He gives his sympathies not to the “slaves of vanity”, not to the “confidantes of fortune”, but to ordinary villagers, after whom the earth was “sprinkled”. Convinced that all people are equal by nature, he mourns for these simple villagers, born “to be crowned or soar with thoughts,” but died in ignorance by blind chance:

Their fate burdened squalor with chains,

Their genius was killed by strict need.

In affirming the ideal of natural equality of people, the author is close to the French writer J.-J. Rousseau, whose work he became acquainted with while still in boarding school and, like many young people of that time, became very interested in his philosophy.

The originality of the poem “Rural Cemetery” lies in the poet’s concentration on the internal experiences of the individual, revealed in the organic fusion of nature and human feelings. The transfer of this state is greatly facilitated by the animation of nature: “the day is already growing pale,” “heeded by the moon,” “the quiet voice of the day,” “under the slumbering willow,” “the oak groves were trembling,” “the day of young breath.”

The original translation of “Rural Cemetery” reveals the poetic individuality of the author, who was close to sentimentalism during the creation of the poem. He achieves here an amazing melody and melodiousness of the verse, giving it a soulful intonation.

Recreating everyday life, the poet introduces everyday colloquial vocabulary: “hut”, “beetle”, “shepherd”, “sickles”, “hearth”, “plough”, “herd”. But there are few such words in the elegy. The vocabulary here is predominantly sentimentalist, philosophical and contemplative. The poem is dominated by words related to emotional experiences (“contempt”, “sorrow”, “sigh”, “tears”, “sadly”) and broad thoughts about life (“peace of the silent reign”, “death rages on everyone”, “ almighty destinies"). Epithets and comparisons are sentimental, such as “sad ringing”, “tender heart”, “sweet voice”, “languid eyes”, “meek in heart”, “sensitive in soul”.

The bright emotional and melodic expressiveness of the poem is achieved by the descriptive and lyrical structure of the phrase (“In the foggy twilight the surroundings disappear.”), often used anaphora (“Only occasionally they buzz. They are only heard in the distance”), repetitions (“Silence everywhere, dead sleep everywhere.”) , appeals (“And you, confidantes of fortune”), questions (“Will death soften?”) and exclamations (“Oh, maybe under this grave!”).

So, without being a translation in the full sense of the word, “Rural Cemetery” becomes a work of Russian national literature. In the image of a young poet reflecting in a rural cemetery, Zhukovsky enhances the features of dreaminess, melancholy, and poetic spirituality, significantly bringing this image closer to his inner world and making it as close as possible to the Russian reader, brought up on the sentimental poems of Dmitriev, Kapnist, Karamzin.

The appearance of the “Rural Cemetery” on the pages of the journal “Bulletin of Europe” published by Karamzin brought Zhukovsky fame. It became obvious that a talented poet had appeared in Russian poetry. Zhukovsky's apprenticeship was over. A new stage of his literary activity began.

Analysis of the poem

1. The history of the creation of the work.

2. Characteristics of the work lyrical genre(type of lyrics, artistic method, genre).

3. Analysis of the content of the work (analysis of the plot, characteristics of the lyrical hero, motives and tonality).

4. Features of the composition of the work.

5. Analysis of funds artistic expression and versification (the presence of tropes and stylistic figures, rhythm, meter, rhyme, stanza).

6. The meaning of the poem for the poet’s entire work.

The original version of the poem “Rural Cemetery” was created by V.A. Zhukovsky in 1801, then the work was revised at the request of N.M. Karamzin, who was the poet’s publisher. In the summer of 1802, while in Mishenskoye, the author practically rewrote the elegy. And in 1802 it was published in the journal “Bulletin of Europe”. The work is dedicated to the poet’s friend, Andrei Turgenev.

This poem was a free translation of the elegy of the English sentimentalist poet Thomas Gray. But at the same time, it was an original and programmatic work not only for the work of V.A. Zhukovsky, but also for all Russian poetry. Gray's elegy "Rural Cemetery" was known in Russian translations back in the 18th century. Simultaneously with Zhukovsky, P.I. worked on its translation. Golenishchev-Kutuzov. However, all these adaptations did not make the work a property of Russian literature. And only the poem by V.A. Zhukovsky, as V. Soloviev accurately noted, began to “be considered the beginning of truly human poetry in Russia.” He even dedicated his poem to this elegy, entitled “The Motherland of Russian Poetry”:

It was not for nothing that you appeared at the rural cemetery,
O sweet genius of my native land!
Even the rainbow of dreams, even the heat of youthful passion
You captivated me later, but with the first best gift
The sadness that remains in the old cemetery
God gave you the autumn season.

It is characteristic that in 1839 V.A. Zhukovsky again returned to work on the elegy, and this time he used hexameter, abandoning rhymes. And this one new translation was very close to the original:

The late bell announces the end of the departed day,
A tired herd wanders across the field with a quiet bleat;
The plowman, who had fallen asleep, returns home slowly
The world yields to silence and to me...

Elegy to V.A. We can classify Zhukovsky as a meditative lyricist. At the same time, it is imbued with philosophical reflections, psychologism, and is saturated with landscapes.

The entire work is permeated with a single mood of slight sadness, generated by the lyrical hero’s reflections on the fragility and fleetingness of life. The poem opens with a modest village landscape. All of nature seems to calm down, plunging into sleep: “the day is growing pale,” “The surroundings disappear in the foggy twilight,” “silence is everywhere.” And this dream of nature precedes philosophical reflection on another dream - the eternal one. The landscape smoothly turns into a lyrical meditation on mortality human existence. The entire development of the elegy represents a change in questions arising in the soul of the lyrical hero. Thoughts about human destinies built on comparison, on the technique of antithesis. "Fortune's confidants", filled with proud contempt for ordinary people, in the elegy are contrasted with modest and peaceful workers, “the forefathers of the village.” It is on the side of the latter that the lyrical hero’s sympathies lie. Revealing the unshakable proximity of life and non-existence, he leads us to a simple conclusion: in the face of death, everyone is equal - both the humble peasant and the “king, the favorite of glory.” He speaks with bitterness about people whose lives were cut short by an absurd and tragic fate:

Oh! Maybe there's something hidden under this grave
The ashes of a tender heart that knew how to love.
And the grave-robber worm nests in the dry head,
Born to be crowned or soar with thoughts!

In the poem by V.A. Zhukovsky skillfully creates a sense of the severity of loss. In the third part of the elegy, the image of an untimely deceased young poet, accustomed to meeting the dawn on a high hill, appears. This image of the dawn in this case is symbolic - it echoes the birth of talent. But the threefold repetition of this image conveys the psychological tension growing in the poem and creates a premonition of trouble. Numerous verbs and the author’s repeated use of dashes give the work special dynamism and drama.

The dawn rose - but he did not appear at dawn,
He didn’t come to the willow tree, or to the hill, or into the forest;
Again the dawn rose - he was not found anywhere;
My gaze searched for him, searched for him, but did not find him.

The epitaph on the poet’s grave is a kind of culmination of the author’s thoughts:

Passerby, pray over this grave;
He found refuge in her from all earthly anxieties,
Here he left everything that was sinful in him,
With the hope that his Savior God lives.

The originality of this philosophical and psychological poem lies in its focus on the internal experiences of the lyrical hero, revealed in the organic unity of the natural world and the world of human feelings.

Compositionally, the elegy is divided into three parts. The first part is a peaceful rural landscape. The second part is reflections in a rural cemetery. The third part is thoughts about young poet, “solitary singer.”

The size of the work is iambic hexameter. The quatrains (quatrains) are united by cross rhyme. The poet uses a variety of means of artistic expression: personification (“the day is already growing pale,” “under the slumbering willow,” “the oak trees were trembling”), epithets (“golden field,” “sad ringing,” “sweet voice,” “tender heart,” “ timid modesty"), anaphora ("Only occasionally, buzzing, the evening beetle flickers, Only the sad ringing of horns can be heard in the distance"), rhetorical questions ("And who parted with this life without grief?"), exclamations ("And the path of greatness to the grave leads us!"). In the elegy we encounter Church Slavonic vocabulary, words of high style (“Dennitsa”, “lobzaniy”, “vainly”, “fingers”), abstract logical phraseological units (“Gifts of abundance pour on mortals like a river”, “Flee the paths of murder”) . All these are traces of classicist influences on the work of V.A. Zhukovsky. The elegy is full of alliteration (“a tired villager with a slow foot”, “Only occasionally, buzzing, the evening beetle flickers”, “will death be softened by woven praise”) and assonance (“In a bottomless abyss it shines with beauty”).

“Rural Cemetery” was enthusiastically received by readers and was immediately directed by V.A. Zhukovsky among the best Russian poets. As critics have noted, the image of the young singer, a bearer of humanistic ideals, suffering from the disharmony of the reality around him and anticipating his own death, then becomes the leading lyrical hero poetry by V.A. Zhukovsky.

The favorite time for the early romantic was the transition from day to night, from twilight to evening, from the darkness of night to dawn. At such moments, a person feels that not everything is over, that he himself is changing, that life is unpredictable, full of mystery, and that death, perhaps, is also just a transition of the soul to another, unknown state.

The favorite place where a romantic indulges in sad thoughts about the frailty of the world is a cemetery. Everything here reminds us of the past, of the separation that dominates people. But at the same time it reminds you gently, without breaking your heart. Monuments on graves, entwined with greenery, fanned by the cool breeze, speak not only of losses, but also of the fact that suffering will pass in the same way as joy passes. And only sad peace will remain, diffused in nature.

The favorite hero of the romantic poet is the poet himself. Who, if not a “singer”, endowed with special hearing, is able to hear the voices of nature, understand the pain and joy of life, rise above the vanity, in order to embrace the whole world with his soul in one impulse, merge with the entire Universe?.. It is dedicated to the memory of the “poor singer” the English pre-romanticist Thomas Gray and with him Zhukovsky had their “cemetery” thoughts in the twilight.

But at the same time, Zhukovsky deliberately makes his descriptions much less visible, but enhances their emotional tone.

The day is already turning pale, hiding behind the mountain;
Noisy herds crowd over the river;
Tired villager with slow feet
He goes, lost in thought, to his quiet hut.

Here, almost every noun is “given” its own adjective (epithet). The villager is tired. The foot is slow. The hut is calm. That is, the reader’s attention is shifted from the object itself to its non-objective attribute. Gray has all this too. But it’s as if that’s not enough for Zhukovsky; he adds two more words indicating the state: “thoughtful” and “turning pale.” It would seem that the word fades is connected with the visual series. But imagine: if the day turns pale in the literal, objective sense, it means it is becoming brighter. But the elegy describes something opposite: the onset of twilight. Therefore, the word fades here means something else: fades, fades, disappears. Maybe like life itself.

In the second stanza this effect only intensifies. Visual images (albeit translated into an emotional plane) give way to sound ones. The more impenetrable the darkness becomes in the world the poet speaks of, the more he navigates by sound. And the main artistic load in the second stanza falls not on epithets, but on sound writing:

The surroundings disappear in the foggy twilight...
There is silence everywhere; dead sleep everywhere;
Only occasionally, buzzing, the evening beetle flickers,
Only the dull ringing of horns can be heard in the distance.

Extended, doubling sonorous “m”, “nn”, hissing “sh”, “sch”, whistling “s”, “z”. The third line, “Only occasionally, buzzing, does the evening beetle flicker” seems simply onomatopoeic. But at the same time, this line “works” with its sound writing to create a mood, and an alarming one, by no means as calm and peaceful as in the first stanza.

The elegy becomes more and more gloomy from stanza to stanza. At the end of the second stanza, like a signal bell, a word sounds that in the genre of elegy plays the role of a kind of stylistic password: “dull.” Sad means completely immersed in one’s sadness, merging with it, not knowing any other mood, having lost hope. A dull sound is almost the same thing as a mournful sound, that is, monotonous, melancholy, wounding to the very heart.

The conventional (and again favored by the pre-Romantics) landscape of the third stanza aggravates this mood:

Only a wild owl, hiding under the ancient vault
That tower, laments, listened to by the moon,
On the one who outraged the midnight arrival
Her silent dominion is peace.

An ancient vault, a wild owl, the moon pouring out its deathly pale light onto all of nature... If in the first stanza the peasant’s hut was called “calm”, and nothing disturbed this calm, then in the third stanza the “peace” of the silent dominion of the tower is disturbed .

And now, finally, we, together with the poet, are approaching the tragically intense center of the elegy. The theme of death begins to sound more and more insistently in it. The author, trying to enhance the heavy, gloomy mood, intensifies the drama. The “sleep” of the deceased is called “unwaking”. That is, even the thought of the future resurrection (“awakening”) of the dead is not allowed. The fifth stanza, which is entirely built on a series of negations (neither... nor... nothing), is crowned with a harsh formula: “Nothing will call the dead from their graves.”

And then, having developed the theme, the poet extends his sad conclusion to all people:

Death rages on everyone - the king, the favorite of glory,
The formidable one is looking for everyone... and will never find;
The omnipotent destinies have unshakable statutes:
And the path of greatness leads us to the grave!

Death is merciless. She equally indifferently takes away both the “Ashes of a tender heart that knew how to love,” destined “to be in a crown or to soar with thoughts,” but bound by “squalor in chains” (that is, peasant poverty and lack of education), and the ashes of the one who was born “to fight the storm.” troubles, conquer fortune.”

And here the poet’s voice, which had just sounded accusatory, bitter, almost angry, suddenly softens. It’s as if, having reached the utmost intensity, approaching the pole of despair, the poet’s thought smoothly returns to the point of peace. It is not without reason that this word, which echoed in the first stanza of the poem (“its calm hut...”) and was rejected in the second (“the peace of silent dominion...”), again takes its rightful place in Zhukovsky’s poetic language:

And here they sleep peacefully under the shadow of the grave -
And a modest monument, in the shelter of dense pine trees,
With a simple inscription and simple carvings,
He invites the passerby to sigh over their ashes.

Love preserved their memory on this stone,
Their years, I tried to write down their names;
Around the biblical morality depicted,
Why should we learn to die?

The poet objects to himself. Just now he called the sleep of the dead undisturbed. That is, he said that death is omnipotent. And so he slowly and difficultly begins to come to terms with the idea of ​​the inevitability of death. Moreover, he constructs a poetic statement in such a way that it can be understood in two ways - as a reasoning about the untimely death of a poet friend and as a reflection on oneself, on one’s possible death:

And you, deceased friend, solitary singer,
And your hour will strike, the last, fatal;
And to your grave, accompanied by a dream,
The sensitive will come to hear your lot.

At the beginning of the poem, a feeling of hopelessness grows from line to line. Now it sounds sad, but not hopeless. Yes, death is omnipotent, but not omnipotent. Because there is a life-giving friendship that can keep the flame alive." tender soul"; friendship, for which even “dead dust in a cold urn breathes” and which is akin to faith:

Here he left everything that was sinful in him,
With the hope that his savior, God, lives.

The basis of this friendship, its heart root, is sensitivity. That same sensitivity to which Karamzin dedicated his story. And there is something deeply symbolic in the fact that at the origins of new Russian prose and new Russian poetry there are two works - “ Poor Lisa Karamzin and Zhukovsky's Rural Cemetery, glorifying the same ideal - the ideal of sensitivity.

By the way, from a mature point of view European romanticism this is far from cardinal virtue. Impressionability - yes, inspiration - yes, conflict with the vulgar world of everyday life - yes, preference for the elements over peace - yes. But soft sensitivity is, as a rule, alien to romance. But this is the peculiarity of Russian romanticism, that it (largely thanks to Zhukovsky) chose not to abandon highest achievements sentimental era, do not go to the last limit in solving romantic problems. And only after two literary generations, Mikhail Lermontov had to finish what Zhukovsky had not said, and follow the romantic road to its fatal outcome.