Портрет писателя Федора Михайловича Достоевского
Василий Перов
1872
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Innokenty Annensky - Иннокентий Федорович Анненский
 (1856-1909)
Русский поэт.
Родился в состоятельной чиновничьей семье. Рос в Петербурге, в среде, где
соединялись элементы бюрократические и помещичьи.
По окончании [1879]
историко-филологического факультета Петербургского университета служил
преподавателем древних языков и русской словесности, впоследствии директором
гимназии в Киеве, Петербурге, Царском селе.
Читал лекции по
древнегреческой литературе на Высших женских курсах.
В печати выступил с
начала 80-х годов научными рецензиями, критическими статьями и статьями по
педагогическим вопросам.
С начала 90-х годов
занялся изучением греческих трагиков.
Более всего
значителен Анненский как поэт. Стихи начал писать с детства, но напечатал их
впервые в 1904. В своей поэзии Анненский, как он сам говорит, стремился выразить
"городскую, отчасти каменную, музейную душу", которую "пытали Достоевским",
"больную и чуткую душу наших дней". Мир "больной души" - основная стихия
творчества Анненского. Анненский оставался верен "декадентству" в течение всей
жизни. Анненский - типичный "поэт для поэтов". Свою единственную прижизненную
книгу стихов он выпустил под характерным псевдонимом "Никто".
Творчество
Анненского, эта поэзия скуки, страха и отравы, "злых обид" и великой жалости к
малым вещам, один из самых больных цветков умирающей буржуазно-дворянской
культуры - естественно остается чуждым всем здоровым тенденциям
современности.
http://www.worldart.ru/people_bio.php?id=12447 |
He was a poet,
critic and translator, representative of the first wave of Russian Symbolism.
Sometimes cited as a Slavic counterpart to the poètes maudits,
Annensky managed to render into Russian the
essential intonations of Baudelaire and
Verlaine, while the
subtle music, ominous allusions, arcane vocabulary, the spell of minutely
changing colours and odours were all his own. His influence on the first
post-Symbolist generation of poets (Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Mandelshtam) was
paramount.
Annensky was born
into the family of a public official in Omsk on September 1 N.S. 1855 [1].
In 1860, while still a child, he was taken to Saint Petersburg.
Innokenty lost his parents early on, and was raised in the family of his older
brother, Nikolai Annensky, a prominent Narodnik and
political activist.
In 1879, Innokenty
graduated from the philological
department of St. Petersburg University, where he concentrated on Historical-comparative
linguistics. He became a
teacher, and taught classical languages and ancient literature studies in a
gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo. He
served as the Director of this school from 1886 until his death
in 1909. Anna Akhmatova
graduated from this school, and called Annensky "my only teacher," as did
Nikolai Gumilev, who
called him "the last of Tsarskoe Selo's swans."
Annensky was somewhat reluctant to publish his original
poems and first gained renown with his masterful translations of
Euripides and the
French Symbolists. From 1890 until his death
in 1909, he translated from Ancient Greek all
the works of Euripides. At the
beginning of the 1900s, Annensky
wrote a series of tragedies modelled after those of ancient Greece:
Melanippa-filosof (1901), Tsar
Iksion (1903), Laodamia (1906). Some of these
works were dedicated to his colleague, Faddei Zielinski,
who would later write his obituary.
As a literary critic,
Annensky published The Book of Reflections, two volumes of essays on
Nikolai Gogol,
Mikhail Lermontov,
Ivan Goncharov, and,
his favourite, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His essays were sometimes termed "critical prose" because of the
artistic value of these texts. During his last months, Annensky worked as an
editor of Sergei Makovsky's
journal Apollon, in which he published some essays on poetry theory.
Nikolai Gumilev
valued these theoretical works very highly and considered Annensky to be the
first true acmeist.
In literary history,
Annensky is remembered primarily as a poet. He started
writing poetry in the 1870s but did not
publish it. He followed the advice of his older brother, Nikolay, not to publish
anything until he is 35. His first collection of poems, entitled Quiet
Songs, was published in 1904 under the
pseudonym Nik. T.-o (i.e., "No one" in Russian). It gained moderate
praise from leading Symbolists, many of whom didn't suspect that Annensky was
the author. His second book, Cypress Box, was much more important. The
poet died just days before its projected publication. Many of his unpublished
pieces were edited in the 1920s by his stepson, Valentin Krivich, who was a
minor poet.
On December 11 N.S. 1909, Innokenty
Annensky died from a heart attack
at the Tsarskoe Selo railway station in Saint Petersburg.
His death was linked to family difficulties. Many of his finest pieces (e.g.,
Stansy, Dalnie Ruki) were actually inspired by Annensky's
unrequited love for his daughter-in-law.
Annensky's best poems
are intricate and obscure: the images are meant to evoke (rather than to record)
subtle associations of half-forgotten memories. He once said that the most
important thing in poetry is a thread that would bind all the rambling
associations into a tightly structured short poem. Aleksander Blok
called him a necrophiliac poet, with death being his only theme. While this
assessment may appear harsh and far-fetched, it is true that Annensky alluded to
death in the sinister odours he cites in many of his poems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innokenty_Annensky |
Poetry (Eng)
Bella Akhmadulina - Белла Ахатовна Ахмадулина
 Родилась 10 апреля 1937 года в Москве.
Русская поэтесса.
Окончила Литературный
институт им. М. Горького (1960). Печатается с 1955.
В 1962 году вышел
сборник стихов "Струна", в 1970 году - сборник "Уроки музыки". Ахмадулиной
принадлежат также поэма "Моя родословная" (1964), очерки, переводы стихов (с
грузинского и других языков, в том числе сборник стихов грузинской поэтессы Анны
Каландадзе "Летите, листья", 1959), киносценарии.
© Большая советская энциклопедия. http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ www.expert.ru |
Bella
(Izabella) Akhatovna Akhmadulina is a Russian poet who has been
cited by Joseph Brodsky as
the best living poet in the Russian language.
Bella was born on
the 10 April 1937 in Moscow.
Akhmadulina was the only child of a Tatar father and a
Russian-Italian mother. Her
literary career began when she was a school-girl working as a journalist on the
Moscow newspaper "Metrostroevets" and improving her poetic skills at
a circle organized by a poet Yevgeny Vinokurov. Her first poems were published
in 1955 in a magazine "October" and approved by orthodox Soviet
poets.
After finishing
school she entered the Gorky Literary Institute from which she graduated in
1960. During her studying at the institute she published her poems &
articles in different newspapers, both official and handwritten. In 1962
the first collection of her poems named "String" was a resounding
success. In spite of being expurged a lot of collections of verses were
published later: "Music lessons" (1969), "Poems" (1975),
"Candle" (1977), "Dreams on Georgia" (1977), "Coastline"
(1991) and others. Some of her poems have become popular songs.
Bella's first
marriage was to Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1954); her second husband was Yuri Nagibin (1960);
in 1974, she married her current husband, the famous Russian artist Boris
Messerer. They have a house in Peredelkino and a
studio in Moscow.
The main themes of
Akhmadulina's works are friendship, love, and relations between people. She is
the author of numerous essays about Russian poets and translations. Some of them
were devoted to her close friend, Bulat Okudzhava.
Akhmadulina avoids writing political poems, but she took part in political
events of her youth supporting the movement of so-called
dissidents.
In 1977, Bella
Akhmadulina became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Akhmadulina |
Poetry (Eng)
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/akhmadulina
Поэзия (Rus)
http://www.worldart.ru/lyric/lyric.php?id=3810
Anna Akhmatova - Анна Андреевна Ахматова
 Анна Андреевна Горенко, по первому мужу Гумилева, - поэтесса.
Первую книгу стихов
"Вечер" выпустила в 1912 году (изд. "Цех поэтов"). Затем книги стихов: "Четки",
(неск. изд.), "Белая стая" (неск. изд.), "Подорожник" (изд. "Петрополис", П.,
1921), "Anno Domini MCMXXI" (изд. "Петрополис", П., 1922) и поэму "У самого
моря" (изд. "Алконост", П., 1921).
Ахматова - поэтесса
дворянства.
Только в стихах,
написанных Ахматовой после 1914, начинают звучать общественные мотивы, что
вполне естественно, ибо даже стекла дворянских особняков не могли не отозваться
на раскаты войны 1914-1918 и Октябрьского переворота.
Война 1914-1918 дает
скорбным интонациям поэтессы историческую мотивировку.
Эмоциональную
наполненность стихотворений Ахматовой облекает в форму разговора или рассказа
присутствующему.
Стараясь свою поэзию
сделать конкретной, четкой, интимной, Ахматова, помимо того, что ограничивает
свой тематический материал и облекает его в форму разговора с присутствующими,
еще ограничивает также и размер своих стихов. Последние отличаются
необыкновенной короткостью как отдельных фраз, так и стихотворения в целом.
Что касается
поэтического словаря Ахматовой, то он очень простой и обыденный, хотя в
контексте он получает свое "ахматовское" наполнение. Ахматова принадлежит к
литературной группе акмеистов.
М. и С. © 2004 ФЭБ http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
She was the
pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko, the leader, heart, and soul of the
Saint Petersburg
tradition of Russian poetry for half a century.
Akhmatova's work
ranges from short lyric poems to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles,
such as Requiem(1935-40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her
work addresses a variety of themes including time and memory, the fate of
creative women, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of
Stalinism.
Akhmatova was born at
Bolshoy Fontan in Odessa, Ukraine. Her
childhood does not appear to have been happy; her parents separated in 1905. She was
educated in Tsarskoe Selo (where
she first met her future husband, Nikolay Gumilyov)
and in Kyiv. Anna started writing poetry at the age of 11, inspired by her
favourite poets: Racine, Pushkin, and
Baratynsky. As her
father did not want to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name, she
chose to adopt the surname of her Tatar grandmother as
a pseudonym.
Many of the male
Russian poets of the time declared their love for Akhmatova; she reciprocated
the attentions of Osip Mandelstam, whose wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, would eventually forgive Akhmatova in her autobiography, Hope
Against Hope [2].
In 1910, she married the boyish poet, Nikolay Gumilyov,
who very soon left her for lion hunting in
Africa, the battlefields of World War I, and the
society of Parisian grisettes. Her husband did not take her poems seriously, and
was shocked when Alexander Blok
declared to him that he preferred her poems to his. Their son, Lev, born in 1912, was to become
a famous Neo-Eurasianist
historian.
In 1912, she
published her first collection, entitled Evening. It contained brief,
psychologically taut pieces which English readers may find distantly reminiscent
of Robert Browning and
Thomas Hardy. They
were acclaimed for their classical diction, telling details, and the skilful use
of colour.
By the time her
second collection, the Rosary, appeared in 1914, there
were thousands of women composing poems "in honour of Akhmatova." Her early
poems usually picture a man and a woman involved in the most poignant, ambiguous
moment of their relationship. Such pieces were much imitated and later parodied
by Nabokov and others.
Akhmatova was prompted to exclaim: "I taught our women how to speak, but don't
know how to make them silent".
Together with her
husband, Akhmatova enjoyed a high reputation in the circle of Acmeist poets. Her aristocratic manners and artistic integrity won her the
titles "Queen of the Neva" and "Soul of the Silver Age," as the period came to
be known in the history of Russian poetry. Many decades later, she would recall
this blessed time of her life in the longest of her works, "Poem Without a Hero"
(1940–65), inspired by Pushkin's Eugene
Onegin.
Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for activities
considered anti-Soviet;
Akhmatova then married a prominent Assyriologist Vladimir Shilejko,
and then an art scholar, Nikolay Punin, who
died in the Stalinist Gulag camps. After
that, she spurned several proposals from the married poet, Boris Pasternak.
After 1922,
Akhmatova was condemned as a bourgeois element,
and from 1925 to 1940, her poetry was
banned from publication. She earned her living by translating Leopardi and
publishing essays, including some brilliant essays on Pushkin, in
scholarly periodicals. All of her friends either emigrated or were
repressed.
Only a few people in
the West suspected that she was still alive, when she was allowed to publish a
collection of new poems in 1940. During
World War II, when
she witnessed the nightmare of the 900-Day Siege, her patriotic poems found their way to the front pages of Pravda. After
Akhmatova returned to Leningrad following the Central Asian evacuation in
1944, she was distressed by "a terrible ghost that pretended to be my
city."
Upon learning about
Isaiah Berlin's visit to Akhmatova in 1946, Stalin's
associate in charge of culture, Andrei Zhdanov,
publicly labelled
her "half harlot, half nun", had her poems banned from publication, and
attempted to have her expelled from the Writers' Union,
tantamount to a death sentence by starvation.[2]
Her son spent his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she even
resorted to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release.
Their relations remained strained, however.
Although officially
stifled, Akhmatova's work continued to circulate in samizdat form and
even by word of mouth, as
she became a symbol of suppressed Russian heritage.
After Stalin's death,
Akhmatova's preeminence among Russian poets was grudgingly conceded, even by
party officials, and a censored edition of her work was published; conspicuously
absent was Requiem, which Isaiah Berlin had predicted in 1946 would never
be published in the Soviet Union.
Her later pieces, composed in neoclassical rhyme and mood, seem to be the voice of many she has
outlived. Her dacha in Komarovo was frequented by Joseph Brodsky and
other young poets, who continued Akhmatova's traditions of St. Petersburg poetry
into the 21st century.
In honor of her 75th
birthday in 1964, special
observances were held and new collections of her verse were published.
Akhmatova got a chance
to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965, when
she was allowed to travel to Sicily and England, in
order to receive the Taormina prize and
an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University
(she was accompanied by her life-long friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya).
In 1962, her dacha was
visited by Robert Frost. In
1968, a two volume collection of Akhmatova's prose and poetry was
published by Inter-Language Literary
Associates of West Germany.
Akhmatova's reputation
continued to grow after her death, and it was in the year of her centenary that
one of the greatest poetic monuments of the 20th century, Akhmatova's
Requiem, was finally published in her homeland.
There is a museum
devoted to Akhmatova at the apartment where she lived with Nikolai Punin
at the garden wing of the Fountain House (more properly known as the Sheremetev Palace) on the Fontanka Embankment,
where Akhmatova lived from the mid 1920s until
1952.
|
Poetry (Eng)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Akhmatova
Поэзия (Rus)
http://slova.org.ru/ahmatova
Alexander Blok - Александр Александрович Блок
(1880-1921)
Русский поэт, один из
самых выдающихся представителей русского символизма. По отцу, профессору-юристу,
потомок обрусевшего выходца из Германии, придворного врача. По матери - из
русской дворянской семьи Бекетовых.
Со стороны обоих
родителей Блок унаследовал интеллектуальную одаренность, склонность к занятиям
литературой, искусством, наукой, но наряду с этим и несомненную психическую
отягощенность.
По окончании
гимназии поступил на юридический факультет Петербургского университета; с
третьего курса перешел на историко-филологический факультет, который окончил в
1906.
"Сочинять стихи"
начал, по его собственным словам, "чуть ли не с пяти лет"; "серьезное писание
началось около 18 лет".
Блок - по
преимуществу поэт-лирик.
Впервые стихи Блока
были напечатаны в 1903, в петербургском журнале Мережковских "Новый путь" и
одновременно в Москве, в альманахе "Северные цветы", издательства "Скорпион". В
том же 1903 Блок женился на дочери университетского товарища деда, соседа его по
Шахматову, знаменитого химика Менделеева, - Л. Д. Менделеевой.
В конце 1904 в
издательстве "Гриф" вышел первый сборник стихов Блока - "Стихи о Прекрасной
Даме".
Блок становится
литератором-профессионалом: сотрудничает в ряде журналов, печатает стихи,
статьи, рецензии, выпускает сборник за сборником своих новых произведений.
Блок предпринял три
заграничных путешествия - в Италию, Бретань и на юг Франции.
Блок встретил с
радостными надеждами Октябрьский переворот. Работает в правлении Союза
писателей.
Годы вслед за
1919 отмечены резким упадком настроения, апатией, подавленностью, мрачным
отчаянием. Одновременно ухудшается физическое состояние Блока. В мае 1921 Блок
заболевает воспалением сердечных клапанов. 7 авг. 1921 он скончался.
Д. Благой © ФЭБ http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
Blok was born in
St Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives
were men of letters, his father being a law professor in
Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg State
University. After his parents'
separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the Shakhmatovo manor near Moscow, where he
discovered the philosophy of his uncle Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and
Afanasy Fet. These
influences would be fused and transformed into the harmonies of his early
pieces, later collected in the book Ante Lucem.
He fell in love with
Lyubov (Lyuba) Mendeleeva (the great chemist's daughter) and married her in 1903. Later, she
would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow
Symbolist Andrey Bely. To
Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry that brought him fame, Stikhi o
prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904). In it,
he transformed his humble wife into a timeless vision of the feminine soul and
eternal womanhood (The Greek Sophia of Solovyov's
teaching).
The idealized mystical images presented in his first book helped
establish Blok as a leader of the Russian Symbolist movement. Blok's early verse is impeccably musical and rich in sound,
but he later sought to introduce daring rhythmic patterns and uneven beats into
his poetry. Poetical inspiration came to him naturally, often producing
unforgettable, otherworldly images out of the most banal surroundings and
trivial events (Fabrika, 1903). Consequently, his mature poems are often
based on the conflict between the Platonic vision of
ideal beauty and the disappointing reality of foul industrial outskirts
(Neznakomka, 1906).
The image of St.
Petersburg he crafted for his next collection of poems, The City
(1904-08), was both impressionistic and eerie. Subsequent collections,
Faina and the Mask of Snow, helped augment Blok's reputation to
fabulous dimensions. He was often compared with Alexander Pushkin, and the whole Silver Age of Russian Poetry was sometimes styled the "Age of Blok". In the
1910s, Blok was almost universally admired by literary colleagues, and his
influence on younger poets was virtually unsurpassed. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva,
Boris Pasternak, and
Vladimir Nabokov
wrote important verse tributes to Blok.
During the later period of his life, Blok
concentrated primarily on political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of
his country (Vozmezdie, 1910-21; Rodina, 1907-16; Skify,
1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he was full of vague apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair.
"I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed
to me", he wrote in his diary during the summer of 1917. Quite
unexpectedly for most of his admirers, he accepted the October Revolution as the final resolution of these apocalyptic
yearnings.
Blok expressed his
views on the revolution in the enigmatic The Twelve (1918).
The long poem, with its "mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms, and harsh,
slangy language" (as the Encyclopædia Britannica termed it), is one of the most controversial in
the whole corpus of the Russian poetry. It describes the march of twelve Bolshevik soldiers
(likened to the Twelve Apostles who
followed Christ) through the streets of revolutionary Petrograd, with a
fierce winter blizzard raging around them.
Alexander Blok, on all accounts one of the most important
poets of the century, envisioned his poetical output as composed of three
volumes. The first volume contains his early poems about the Fair Lady; its
dominant colour is white. The second volume, dominated by the blue colour,
comments upon the impossibility of reaching the ideal he craved for. The third
volume, featuring his poems from pre-revolutionary years, is steeped in fiery or
bloody red.
In Blok's poetry,
colours are essential, for they convey mystical intimations of things beyond
human experience. Blue or violet is the colour of frustration, when the poet
understands that his hope to see the Lady is delusive. The yellow colour of
street lanterns, windows and sunsets is the colour of treason and triviality.
Black hints at something terrible, dangerous but potentially capable of esoteric
revelation. Russian words for yellow and black are spelled by the poet with a
long O instead of YO, in order to underline "a hole inside the
word".
Following on the
footsteps of Fyodor Tyutchev, Blok developed a complicated system of poetic
symbols. In his early work, for instance, wind stands for the Fair
Lady's approach, whereas morning or spring is the time when their
meeting is most likely to happen. Winter and night are the evil
times when the poet and his lady are far away from each other. Bog and
mire stand for everyday life with no spiritual light from
above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Blok |
Poetry (Eng)
http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/unknown.htmlПозия (Rus)
Joseph Brodsky - Иосиф Александрович Бродский
Бродский Иосиф
Александрович (1940 - 1996), поэт. Родился 24 мая в Ленинграде. До 15 лет учился
в школе, затем работал, сменив много профессий. Писать стихи, по его
собственному свидетельству, начал в 16 лет. К 1963 уже был хорошо известен и
ценим как поэт среди молодежи и в неофициальных литературных кругах. Его перу
принадлежали такие популярные стихи, как "Рождественский романс", "Стансы",
"Сонет", "Холмы". Официальная
литература его отвергала, не давая возможности опубликоваться. Он жил только
случайными заказами на стихотворные переводы. В 1963 был арестован и приговорен
к пяти годам ссылки с обязательным привлечением к труду по Указу "Об
ответственности за тунеядство". В ссылке продолжает писать: "Шум ливня...",
"Песня", "Зимняя почта", "Одной поэтессе" написаны в эти годы. В 1965 был
досрочно освобожден благодаря заступничеству Ахматовой, Маршака, Шостаковича и
других деятелей искусства, под давлением широкой кампании возмущения как в
Советской стране, гак и за рубежом. Но по-прежнему ни один журнал и ни одно
издательство не осмелились опубликовать стихи Бродского. Он смог написать только
4 стихотворения в сборнике "День поэзии", несколько детских стихов и
переводов. В 1972 поэт был вынужден покинуть родину. Бродский уезжает в США, где
получает признание и нормальные условия для литературной работы. Он преподает
русскую литературу в университетах и колледжах. Продолжает писать стихи на
русском и прозу на английском. На Западе, в основном в США, вышло восемь
стихотворных книг на русском языке: "Стихотворения и поэмы" (1965); "Остановка в
пустыне" (1970); "В Англии" (1977); "Конец прекрасной эпохи" (1977); "Часть
речи" (1977); "Римские элегии" (1982); "Новые стансы к Августе" (1983); "Урания"
(1987); драма "Мрамор" (на русском языке, 1984); книга эссе "Меньше, чем
единица" (на английском, 1986). В 1987 получил Нобелевскую премию как русский
литератор. Последние годы жил в Нью-Йорке, женился, родилась дочь. Болезнь
сердца привела к смерти, наступившей в 1996. Похоронен, по его последней воле, в
Венеции.
Использованы материалы
кн.: Русские писатели и поэты. Краткий биографический словарь. Москва,
2000. |
Brodsky was
born into a Jewish family in
Leningrad, the son
of a professional photographer in the
Soviet Navy. In
early childhood he survived the Siege of Leningrad. When he was fifteen, Brodsky left school and tried to enter the
School of Submariners (школа подводников) without success. He went on to work as
a milling machine operator (фрезеровщик) at a plant. Later, having decided to
become a physician, he worked
at a morgue at the Kresty prison. He
subsequently held a variety of jobs at a hospital, in a ship's boiler room, and
on geological expeditions. At the same time, Brodsky engaged in a program of self-education. He
learned English and
Polish (mainly to
translate poems by Czesław Miłosz, who was Brodsky's favourite poet and a friend), and acquired a deep
interest in classical philosophy,
religion, mythology, and
English and American poetry.
Later in life, he admitted that he picked up books from anywhere he could find
them, including even garbage dumps. Brodsky began writing his own poetry and producing literary
translations around 1957. His writings were apolitical. The young Brodsky was
encouraged and influenced by the poet Anna Akhmatova who called some of his verses "enchanting." He had no degree in the
liberal arts.
In 1963, he was arrested and
in 1964 charged with parasitism ("тунеядство") by the Soviet authorities.
For his "parasitism" Brodsky
was sentenced to five years of internal exile with obligatory engagement in physical work and
served 18 months in Archangelsk region.
The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet and foreign literary
figures, such as Evgeny Evtushenko
and Jean Paul Sartre,
protested. In 1964,
Leonid Brezhnev came to power. As the Khrushchev Thaw
period ended, only four of Brodsky's poems were published in the Soviet Union.
He refused to publish his writings censored and most of
his work has appeared only in the West or in samizdat.
On June 4, 1972 Brodsky was
expelled from the USSR. He became a U.S. citizen in
1977. His first teaching position in the United States was at the University of Michigan (U-M). He was Poet-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at Queens College, Smith College,
Columbia University, and the Cambridge University in England. He was a
Five-College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. He achieved
major successes in his career as an English language poet and essayist. In 1978, Brodsky was awarded an honorary degree
of Doctor of Letters at
Yale University, and
on May 23, 1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters. In 1981, Brodsky
received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation's "genius" award.
In 1986, his
collection of essays Less Than One won the National
Book Critic's Award for Criticism. In 1987, he won the Nobel
Prize for Literature, being the fifth Russian-born writer to do so. At an
interview in Stockholm airport, to a
question: "You are an American citizen who is receiving the Prize for
Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?", he responded:
"I am Jewish - a Russian poet and an English essayist". In 1991, Brodsky became Poet Laureate of the United States.
His inauguration address was printed in Poetry Review. He married Maria Sozzani
in 1990. They had one daughter. Brodsky died
of a heart attack in his New
York City apartment on January 28, 1996 and was
buried in the Episcopalian section at Isola di San Michele cemetery in
Venice, Italy. Venice is the setting for
his book Watermark. Poets who influenced
Brodsky included Osip Mandelstam, W.H. Auden and Robert Frost.
|
Poetry of Joseph Brodsky (Rus)
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/brodskii_iosif/brodskii_iosif_sobranie_sochinenii/
Poetry of Joseph Brodsky (Eng)
http://www.poemhunter.com/joseph-brodsky/
Valery Bryusov - Валерий Яковлевич Брюсов
(1873-1924)
Брюсов один из крупнейших русских писателей первой четверти XX
века.
Родился в
Москве в зажиточной купеческой семье. Дед Брюсова по отцу - крепостной
крестьянин, откупившийся на волю, - открыл в Москве пробочную торговлю,
разбогател. Отец Брюсова оказался неспособным продолжать торговое дело.
На воспитание
Брюсова с самого начала сказался распад крепкого дедовского быта.
Учился Брюсов
в частных гимназиях, затем на историко-филологическом факультете Московского
университета (окончил в 1899).
Писать начал
ребенком, сочиняя "печатными буквами" "научные статьи", рассказы и стихи (первые
стихотворные опыты относятся к 1881).
Знакомство с
французской поэзией открыло Брюсову "новый мир". С целью насадить символизм в
России Брюсов издает в 1894-1895 три маленьких сборника "Русские символисты".
В 1895
выпускает свои стихи отдельной книжкой под вызывающим названием "Chefs
d’oeuvre".
С конца 90-х
годов Брюсов начал журнальную работу секретарем "Русского архива", с 1903 -
секретарем "Нового пути".
С 1910 по
1912 он заведует литературно-критическим отделом "Русской
мысли". К этому времени он
уже имеет длинный ряд книг - сборников стихов, рассказов, романов, критических
статей, переводов, исследований и т. п. (всего при жизни Брюсова вышло более 80
его книг); в сборниках, журналах, газетах он печатает огромное количество
статей, заметок, рецензий; состоит членом большинства литературных обществ;
путешествует по Европе.
Сочинения
Брюсова переводятся на главные европейские, ряд славянских и некоторые восточные
языки.
В 1914
Брюсов едет военным корреспондентом на фронт. Патриотические настроения первых
месяцев скоро сменяются у Брюсова разочарованием в "освободительных" целях
войны.
С конца 1917
начинает работать с советской властью. Работает с 1921 профессором I МГУ.
Литературнаая
деятельность Брюсова исключительно разнообразна. Поэт, романист, драматург,
переводчик соединяются в нем с критиком, ученым исследователем стиха, историком
и теоретиком литературы, редактором-комментатором. Однако с наибольшей силой и
завершенностью художественная индивидуальность Брюсова и его социальная сущность
выразились в его поэзии.
Д. Благой ©
ФЭБhttp://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
He was a Russian poet,
prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the
principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.
Valery Bryusov was
born on December 13
[O.S. December 1] 1873 in Moscow, into
a merchant's family. His parents had little do with his upbringing, and as a boy
Bryusov was largely left to himself. He spent a great deal of time reading
"everything that fell into [his] hands," including the works of Charles Darwin and Jules Verne, as well
as various materialistic and scientific essays. The future poet received an
excellent education, studying in two Moscow gymnasiums
between 1885 and 1893.
Bryusov began his
literary career in the early 1890s while still a
student at Moscow State University with his translations of the poetry of the French Symbolists
(Paul Verlaine,
Maurice Maeterlinck, and Stéphane Mallarmé) as well at that of Edgar Allan Poe.
Bryusov also began to publish his own poems, which were very much influence by
the Decadent and
Symbolist movements of his contemporary Europe.
At the time, Russian
Symbolism was still mainly a set of theories and had few notable practitioners.
Therefore, in order to represent Symbolism as a movement of formidable
following, Bryusov adopted numerous pen names and
published three volumes of his own verse, entitled Russian Symbolists. An
Anthology (1894-95). Bryusov's
mystification proved successful - several young poets were attracted to
Symbolism as the latest fashion in Russian letters.
With the appearance
of Tertia Vigilia in 1900, he came to be
revered by other Symbolists as an authority in matters of art. In 1904 he became the
editor of the influential literary magazine
Vesy
(The Balance), which consolidated his position in the Russian literary
world. Bryusov's mature works were notable for their celebration of sensual
pleasures as well as their mastery of a wide range of poetic forms, from the
acrostic to the carmina figurata.
By the 1910s, Bryusov's
poetry had begun to seem cold and strained to many of his contemporaries. As a
result, his reputation gradually declined and, with it, his power in the Russian
literary world. He was adamantly opposed to the efforts of Georgy Chulkov and Vyacheslav Ivanov to move Symbolism in the direction of Mystical Anarchism.
Though many of his
fellow Symbolists fled Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Bryusov remained until his death in 1924. He
supported the Bolshevik government
and received a position in the cultural ministry of the new Soviet state.
Bryusov most famous prose works are the
historical novels The Altar of Victory (depicting life in Ancient Rome)
and The Fiery Angel (depicting the psychological climate of 16th century Germany). The latter
tells the story of a scholar and his attempts to win the love of a young woman
whose spiritual integrity is seriously undermined by her participation in occult
practices and her dealings with unclean forces. It served as the basis for
Sergei Prokofiev's
opera The Fiery
Angel.
As a translator, Bryusov was the first to render the works of
the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren
accessible to Russian readers, and he was one of the major translators of
Paul Verlaine's
poetry. His most famous translations are of Edgar Allan Poe, Romain Rolland, Maurice Maeterlinck, Victor Hugo,
Jean Racine,
Ausonius, Molière, Byron, and Oscar Wilde. Bryusov also translated Johann Goethe's
Faust and Virgil's Aeneid.
During the 1910s, Bryusov was especially interested in translating Armenian poetry.
|
Poetry (Eng)
Поэзия (Rus)
Ivan Bunin - Иван Алексеевич Бунин
|
Прозаик и поэт, нобелевский
лауреат, классик мировой литературы ХХ столетия.
Иван Алексеевич Бунин родился
10 октября 1870 года в Воронеже. Род Буниных славен своими родственными связями
с такими выдающимися деятелями русской истории и культуры как Василий Андреевич
Жуковский, братья Иван и Петр Киреевские и др. Детство писателя прошло в
Орловской губернии под Ельцом на хуторе Бутырки. С конца 80-х годов Бунин
начинает печататься как поэт, а с 1890-го публикует свои первые рассказы. В
1900-е годы он уже известный писатель и живет на литературные гонорары. Много
путешествует - Турция, Греция, Египет, Сирия, Палестина, Тунис, Цейлон и т.д.
После двух неудачных женитьб знакомится с Верой Николаевной Муромцевой, дочерью
председателя Государственной думы, женится на ней, и она становится его
неразлучной спутницей до конца жизни. В 1909 году Бунина избирают почетным
академиком императорской Академии наук. Он участвует в деятельности лучших
издательств того времени - "Шиповник" и "Знание". Резко отрицательно приняв
большевистский переворот, в 1918 году уезжает сперва в Одессу, а оттуда - в
Константинополь. Впечатления об этом периоде своей жизни выражены писателем в
его книге "Окаянные дни". Из Константинополя Бунины переезжают в Белград, из
Белграда - в Париж, потом - ближе к морю, в Грасс, где писатель и остается жить
практически до последних дней. 9 ноября 1933 года Бунин награждается Нобелевской
премией по литературе за книги "Господин из Сан-Франциско" и "Жизнь Арсеньева".
Одной из вершин позднего творчества писателя является сборник рассказов "Темные
аллеи", вышедший в Париже в 1946 году. Умер Иван Алексеевич в 1953 году, во
Франции.
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/bunin_ivan/  |
Bunin was born on his
parents' estate in Voronezh province in central
Russia. He came from a long line of landed gentry and serf owners, but his
grandfather and father had squandered nearly all of the estate.
He was sent to the public school in
Yelets in 1881, but had to return home after
five years. His brother, who was university-educated, encouraged him to read the
Russian classics and to write. At 17,
he published his first poem in 1887 in a St. Petersburg literary magazine.
His first collection of poems, Listopad (1901), was warmly welcomed by
critics. Although his poems are said to continue the 19th-century traditions of
the Parnassian poets, they are steeped
in oriental mysticism and sparkle with striking, carefully chosen epithets.
Vladimir Nabokov was a great
admirer of Bunin's verse, comparing him with Alexander Blok, but scorned his
prose. In 1889, he followed his brother to
Kharkov, where he
became a government clerk, assistant editor of a local paper, librarian, and
court statistician. Bunin also began a correspondence with Anton Chekhov, with
whom he became close friends. He also had a more distant relationship with
Maxim
Gorky and Leo
Tolstoy. In 1891, he published his first short
story, "Country Sketch" in a literary journal. As the time went by, he switched
from writing poems to short stories. His first acclaimed novellas were "On the
Farm," "The News From Home," "To the Edge of the World," "Antonov Apples," and
"The Gentleman from San Francisco," the latter being his most representative
piece and the one translated in English by D.
H. Lawrence. Bunin was a well-known translator himself. The best known
of his translations is Longfellow's
"The Song of Hiawatha" for which
Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize in 1903. He also did
translations of Byron, Tennyson, and
Musset. In 1909, he was elected to the
Russian Academy.
From 1895 on, Bunin divided his time
between Moscow and St.
Petersburg. He married the daughter of a Greek revolutionary in 1898, but the marriage ended in
divorce. Although he remarried in 1907, Bunin's romances with other
women continued right up to the end of his life. His tempestous private life in
emigration is the subject of the internationally acclaimed Russian movie, The
Diary of His Wife (2000). Bunin
published his first full-length work, The Village, when he was 40. It was
a bleak portrayal of village life, with its stupidity, brutality, and violence.
Its harsh realism, "the characters having sunk so far below the average of
intelligence as to be scarcely human," brought him in touch with Maxim
Gorky. Two years later, he published Dry Valley, which was a veiled
portrayal of his family. Before World War I, Bunin traveled in
Ceylon, Palestine, Egypt, and Turkey, and these travels left
their mark on his writing. He spent the winters from 1912 to 1914 on Capri with Gorky.
Bunin left Moscow after the revolution in
1917, moving to Odessa. He left Odessa on the last French ship in
1919 and settled in Grasse, France. There, he published
his diary The Accursed Days, which voiced his aristocratic aversion to the
Bolshevik regime. About the Soviet
government he wrote: "What a disgusting gallery of convicts!"
Bunin was much lionized in the emigration,
where he came to be viewed as the eldest of living Russian writers in the
tradition of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Accordingly, he was the first Russian to win
the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1933. On the journey through
Germany to accept the prize in Stockholm, he was detained by the
Nazis, ostensibly for jewel
smuggling, and forced to drink a bottle of castor oil. In the 1930s, Bunin published two parts of a projected
autobiographic trilogy: The Life of Arsenyev and Lika, which were "neither
a short novel, nor a novel, nor a long short story, but . . . of a genre yet
unknown." Later, he worked upon his celebrated cycle of nostalgic stories with a
strong erotic undercurrent and a Proustian ring. They were
published as the Dark Avenues in 1943. Bunin was a strong opponent of the Nazis and reportedly sheltered a
Jew in his house in Grasse throughout the occupation.
To the end of his life, he became interested in Soviet literature and even
entertained plans of returning to Russia, as Aleksandr Kuprin had done before.
Bunin died of a heart attack in a Paris attic flat, while his
invaluable book of reminiscences on Chekhov was still unfinished.
Several years later, his works were allowed for publication in the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunin |
The Gentleman from San
Francisco (Eng)
The Life of Arsenyev
(Rus)
Andrey Voznesensky - Андрей Андреевич Вознесенский
Русский поэт.
Родился 12.5.1933, в Москве.
Окончил Московский
архитектурный институт (1957).
Выступил со стихами
в 1958.
Поэма Вознесенкого
"Мастера" (1959) привлекла внимание свежестью языка, убеждённостью в высоком
призвании искусства.
Сборник "40
лирических отступлений из поэмы „Треугольная груша”" (1962), в основном
посвящённый впечатлениям поэта от поездки в США, вызвал критическую дискуссию о
"современном стиле", о гражданской позиции художника.
Выделяются поэмы
В. "Лонжюмо" (1963), посвящённая В. И. Ленину, и "Оза" (1964) - раздумье о
человеческой личности в эпоху всеобщего "наступления" техники.
Поэзия
Вознесенкого отличается острым чувством современности, динамичностью стиха,
усложнённой, часто парадоксальной, ассоциативной образностью "урбанистического"
характера, причудливой игрой аллитераций.
В. М. Литвинов © Большая советская энциклопедия. http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
He is a Russian poet and writer who
has been referred to by Robert Lowell as
"one of the greatest living poets in any language." He lives and works in
Moscow.
Early in his life,
Andrey was fascinated with painting and
architecture, in
1957 graduating from the Moscow Architectural Institute. His enthusiasm
for poetry, though, proved to be stronger. While still a teenager, he sent his
poems to Boris Pasternak; the
friendship between the two had a strong influence on the young poet.
His first poems were
published in 1958 and immediately reflected his unique style. His lyrics are
characterized by his tendency "to measure" the contemporary person by modern
categories and images, by the eccentricity of metaphors, by the
complex rhythmical system and sound effects. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Pablo Neruda have
been cited among the poets who influenced him most.
In 1960s, during the
so-called Thaw, Voznesensky
frequently traveled abroad: to the U.S., France,
Germany, Italy and other
countries. Popularity of Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina
were marked by performances in front of the adoring thousands at the stadiums, in
the concert halls and universities. One
collection of his poems, "Antimiry" ("Anti-worlds") served as the basis for a
famous performance at the Taganka Theater in
1965.
Voznesensky's
friendship with many contemporary writers, artists and other intellectuals is
reflected in his poetry and essays. He is known to wider audiences for the
superhit Million of Scarlet Roses that he penned for Alla Pugacheva in 1984 and for the
hugely successful rock opera Juno
and Avos (1979), based on the life and death of Nikolay Rezanov.
In 1978 Voznesensky was
awarded the USSR State Prize. He
is an honorable member of ten academies, including Russian academy of learning
(1993), the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, Parisian Académie Goncourt and others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Andreyevich_Voznesensky |
Поэзия (Rus)
http://www.worldart.ru/lyric
Vladimir Vysotsky - Владимир Семёнович Высоцкий
(1938, Москва — 1980, там
же)
Высоцкий актёр,
поэт, певец и исполнитель собственных песен.
Родился в семье
военного. С 1946 Высоцкий жил в новой семье отца, в том числе в 1947—49 в городе
Эберсвальд (Германия). Вернувшись в Москву, семья поселилась в Большом Каретном
переулке.
В 1955 — 1956 учился
в Московском инженерно-строительном институте имени В.В. Куйбышева, в 1960
окончил школу-студию МХАТ имени Вл. И. Немировича-Данченко, работал в Московском
драматическом театре имени А.С. Пушкина и Театре миниатюр, с 1964 в Театре на
Таганке.
Высоцкий исполнил
специально сочинённые им для фильма песни.
В 1981 вышел первый
сборник его стихов «Нерв».
Высоцкий, поэт,
певец, актёр, имел огромное значение для общественного сознания 1960—80-х годов.
Литература:
1. Живая жизнь. Штрихи к биографии
Владимира Высоцкого, М., 1988.
2. Влади М., Владимир, или Прерванный
полет, перевод с французского, М.,
1989.
К.В. Стародуб, © Энциклопедия «Москва». |
He was an iconic
Russian singer, songwriter, poet, and actor whose career has had an immense
and enduring effect on Russian culture. The multifaceted talent of Vladimir
Vysotsky is often described by the word bard that
acquired a special meaning in the Soviet Union,
although he himself spoke of this term with irony. He thought of himself mainly
as an actor and writer, and once remarked, "I do not belong to what people call
bards or minstrels or whatever." Though his work was largely ignored by the
official Soviet cultural establishment, he achieved remarkable fame during his
lifetime, and to this day exerts significant influence on many of Russia's
popular musicians and actors who wish to emulate his iconic status.
Vladimir Vysotsky
was born in Moscow. His father
was an army officer and his mother a German language
translator. His parents divorced shortly after his birth, and he was brought up
by his stepmother of Armenian descent,
whom he called "aunt" Yevgenia [1].
He spent two years of his childhood living with his father and stepmother at a
military base in Eberswalde in the
Soviet-occupied section of post-WWII Germany
(later GDR). In 1955, Vladimir
enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Civil
Engineering, but dropped out
after just one semester to pursue an acting career. In 1959, he started
acting at the Aleksandr Pushkin Theatre where he had mostly small parts.
Vysotsky's first
wife was Iza Zhukova. He met his second wife, Ludmilla Abramova, in 1961. They were
married in 1965 and had two sons, Arkady and Nikita.
In 1964, director
Yuri Lyubimov, who
was to become his close friend and mentor, invited him to join the popular
Moscow Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the Taganka. There, Vysotsky made headlines with his
leading roles in Shakespeare's Hamlet and
Brecht's Life
of Galileo. Around the same time, he also appeared in several films,
which featured a few of his songs, e.g., Vertikal
("The Vertical"), a film about mountain climbing.
Most of Vysotsky's work from that period, however, did not get official
recognition and thus no contracts from Melodiya, the
monopolist of the Soviet recording industry. Nevertheless, his popularity
continued to grow, as, with the advent of portable tape-recorders in the USSR,
his music became available to the masses in the form of home-made reel-to-reel
audio tape recordings, and later on cassette tapes. He became known for his
unique singing style and for his lyrics, which featured social and political
commentary in often humorous street jargon. His lyrics resonated with millions
of Soviet people in every corner of the country; his songs were sung at house
parties and amateur concerts.
After his divorce,
Vysotsky fell in love with Marina Vlady, a
French actress of Russian descent, who was working at Mosfilm on a joint
Soviet-French production at that time. Marina had been married before and had 3
children, while Vladimir had two. Fueled by Marina's exotic status as a
Frenchwoman in the USSR, and Vladimir's unmatched popularity in his country,
their love was passionate and impulsive. They were married in 1969. For 10 years
the two maintained a long-distance relationship as Marina compromised her career
in France in order to spend more time in Moscow, and Vladimir's friends pulled
strings in order for him to be allowed to travel abroad to stay with his wife.
Marina eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave
her an unlimited-entry visa into the USSR, and provided Vladimir with some
immunity against prosecution by the government, which was becoming weary of his
covertly anti-Soviet lyrics and his odds-defying popularity with the masses. The
problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of
Vysotsky's songs.
By the mid-1970s,
Vysotsky had been suffering from alcoholism for quite
some time. Many of his songs from the period deal – either directly or
metaphorically – with alcoholism, insanity, mania, and obsessions. This was also
the height of his popularity, when, as described in Vlady's book about her
husband, walking down the street on a summer night, one could hear Vystotsky's
recognizable voice coming literally from every open window. Unable to completely
ignore his musical phenomenon, Melodiya did release
a few of his songs on vinyl in the late 1970s, which, however, constituted only
a small portion of his creative work, which millions already owned on tape and
knew by heart.
At the same time,
Vysotsky gained official recognition as a theater and film actor. He starred in
a hugely popular TV series Mesto
Vstrechi Izmenit' Nel'zya ("The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed") about
two cops fighting crime in late 1940s Stalinist Russia. In spite of his
successful acting career, Vysotsky continued to make a living with his concert
tours across the country, often on a compulsive binge-like schedule, which, it
is believed, contributed to the deterioration of his health. He died in Moscow
at the age of 42 of heart failure.
Vysotsky's body
was laid out at the Taganka Theatre, where the funeral service was held. He was
later buried at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. Thousands of Moscow citizens left the stadiums (as it was
the time of the Olympics) to
attend the funeral. Although no official figure was released, it was later
estimated that over one million people attended Vysotsky's funeral, almost as
many as that of Pope John Paul II in
2005. The Soviet authorities, taken aback by the unexpected impact on the masses
of the death of an underground singer, ordered troops into Moscow to prevent
possible riots. Vysotsky was posthumously awarded
the title Meritorious Artist of Soviet
Union.
|
Poetry (Eng)
Поэзия (Rus)
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Федор Михайлович Достоевский
Федор Михайлович
Достоевский родился 30 октября 1821 г. в Москве. Отец его был хирургом в
госпитале для бедных; перед выходом в отставку он получил дворянский титул и
уехал жить в деревню, в свое поместье. Натура развратная и очень жестокая,
особенно в старости, он дошёл до того, что возмущённые крепостные крестьяне
зверски убили его. Первый приступ
эпилепсии у будущего гения русской литературы случился в возрасте семи лет.
1837 г. - важная дата для
Достоевского. Это год смерти его матери, год смерти Пушкина, которым он с братом
зачитывается с детства, год переезда в Петербург и поступления в
военно-инженерное училище. В 1839 г. он получает известие о расправе над отцом.
За год до оставления военной
карьеры Достоевский впервые переводит и издает «Евгению Гранде» Бальзака (1843).
Год спустя выходит в свет его первое произведение, «Бедные люди», и сразу для
всех становится ясно - появился большой писатель. Но следующая книга, «Двойник»,
встречает неуспех. После публикации «Белых ночей» он был арестован (1849) в
связи с «делом Петрашевского», в кружке которого, кроме разговоров и чтения
письма Белинского Гоголю, ничего серьезного не происходило. Суд и суровый
приговор к смертной казни скорее был похож на трагифарс. Только на эшафоте
осужденным объявляют о помиловании, заменив смерть жизнью на каторге. Один из
приговоренных к казни в этот момент сходит с ума. Лишь через 10 лет Достоевский, будучи уже женатым,
возвращается в Петербург, но негласное наблюдение за ним не прекращается до
конца его дней. Годы заключения абсолютно перевернули его взгляд на мир. В
период с 1860 по 1866 гг. работа с братом в собственном журнале, романы «Записки
из мёртвого дома», «Униженные и оскорбленные», «Зимние заметки о летних
впечатлениях» и «Записки из подполья» - можно сказать, что настоящий Достоевский
рождается из этого произведения. Поездки за границу со своей возлюбленной
Аполлинарией Сусловой (жестокий роман с которой длится 3 года), разорительная
игра в рулетку, постоянные попытки добыть денег и в то же время - смерть жены и
брата, долги которого он берет на себя. Это время открытия им для себя Запада и
возникновения ненависти к нему. В
безвыходном материальном положении Достоевский пишет главы «Преступления и
наказания», посылая их прямо в журнальный набор, и они печатаются из номера в
номер. В это же время он обязан написать «Игрока», на что у него попросту не
хватает физических сил. По совету друзей Достоевский берет молодую
стенографистку, которая легко справляется с непосильной задачей, и «Игрок» готов
через месяц. Роман «Преступление и наказание» закончен и оплачен очень хорошо,
но чтоб этих денег у него не отобрали кредиторы , писатель уезжает за границу со
своей помощницей Анной Григорьевной, ставшей его новой женой. Впервые в жизни
Достоевскому действительно по-настоящему повезло. Эта женщина постепенно
устроила ему нормальную жизнь, взяла на свои плечи все экономические заботы, и с
1871 г. он навсегда бросает рулетку. В 1867 г. написан роман «Идиот». Последние годы жизни невероятно плодотворны: 1871 - «Бесы», 1873 -
начало «Дневника писателя» (серия фельетонов, очерков, полемических заметок и
страстных публицистических заметок на злобу дня), 1874 - «Подросток», 1876 -
«Кроткая», 1879 - «Братья Карамазовы». В это же время два события стали
значительными для Достоевского. В 1878 г. император Александр II пригласил к
себе писателя, чтобы представить его своей семье, и в 1880 г., всего лишь за год
до смерти, Достоевский произнес знаменитую речь на открытии памятника Пушкину в
Москве. Это, наконец, настоящий триумф. Он уверен, что теперь является первым
писателем в России и победил-таки графа Льва Толстого. Несмотря на ту известность, которую Достоевский
получил в конце своей жизни, поистине непреходящая, всемирная слава пришла к
нему после смерти. В частности, даже Фридрих Ницше признавал, что Достоевский
единственный, кто сумел ему объяснить, что такое человеческая
психология.
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/dostoevskii_fedor/ |
Dostoevsky
was Russian on his mother's side. His paternal ancestors were Lithuanian, from a
place called Dostoyeve, natives of the government of Minsk, not far from
Pinsk. Dostoevsky's paternal ancestors were Polonized nobles (szlachta) and
went to war bearing Polish Radwan Coat of Arms. Dostoevsky (Polish "Dostojewski") Radwan armorial bearings were
drawn for the Dostoevsky Museum in Moscow. The family
eventually passed into Ukrainia.
Dostoevsky was the second of seven
children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's father was a retired
military surgeon and a violent alcoholic, who
served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. The
hospital was situated in one of the worst areas in Moscow. Local landmarks
included a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for
abandoned infants. This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young
Dostoevsky, whose interests in and compassion for the poor, oppressed, and
tormented was apparent. Though his parents forbade it, Dostoevsky liked to
wander out to the hospital garden, where the suffering patients sat to catch a
glimpse of sun. The young Dostoevsky loved to spend time with these patients and
hear their stories.There are many
stories of Dostoevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children. After
returning home from work, he would take a nap while his children, ordered to
keep absolutely silent, stood by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted
at any flies that came near his head. However, it is the opinion of Joseph
Frank, a biographer of Dostoevsky, that the father figure in The Brothers Karamazov is not based on Dostoevsky's own father.
Letters and personal accounts demonstrate that they had a fairly loving
relationship.Shortly after
his mother died of tuberculosis in
1837, Dostoevsky and his brother were sent to the Military Engineering Academy
at St. Petersburg.
Fyodor's father died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by
some that he was murdered by his own serfs. According to
one account, they became enraged during one of his drunken fits of violence,
restrained him, and poured vodka into his mouth
until he drowned. Another story holds that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a
neighboring landowner invented the story of his murder so that he might buy the
estate inexpensively. Some have argued that his father's personality had
influenced the character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the "wicked and
sentimental buffoon", father of the main characters in his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, but such claims fail to withstand the scrutiny
of many critics.Dostoevsky
was an epileptic and his
first seizure occurred when he was 9 years old. Epileptic seizures recurred
sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoevsky's experiences are thought to
have formed the basis for his description of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in his
novel The Idiot and that of Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, among
others.At the St. Petersburg Academy of Military
Engineering, Dostoevsky was
taught mathematics, a
subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Though he focused on areas different from mathematics, he did well on the exams
and received a commission in 1841. That year, he is known to have written two
romantic plays, influenced by the German Romantic poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller: Mary Stuart and
Boris Godunov. The
plays have not been preserved. Dostoevsky described himself as a "dreamer" when
he was a young man, and at that time revered Schiller. However,
in the years during which he yielded his great masterpieces, his opinions
changed and he sometimes poked fun at Schiller.Dostoevsky was made a lieutenant in 1842,
and left the Engineering Academy the following year. He completed a translation
into Russian of Balzac's novel
Eugénie Grandet in 1843, but it brought him little or no attention.
Dostoevsky started to write his own fiction in late 1844 after leaving the army.
In 1845, his first work, the epistolary short novel, Poor Folk, published
in the periodical The Contemporary (Sovremennik), was
met with great acclaim. As legend has it, the editor of the magazine, poet
Nikolai Nekrasov,
walked into the office of liberal critic Vissarion Belinsky and announced, "a new Gogol has arisen!"
Belinsky, his followers and many others agreed and after the novel was fully
published in book form at the beginning of the next year, Dostoevsky became a
literary celebrity at the age of 24.In 1846, Belinsky and many others reacted negatively to his novella,
The Double, a psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego overtakes his
life. Dostoevsky's fame began to cool. Much of his work after Poor Folk met with mixed reviews and it seemed that Belinsky's prediction that
Dostoevsky would be one of the greatest writers of Russia was
mistaken.Dostoevsky was
arrested and imprisoned on April 23, 1849 for being a
part of the liberal intellectual
group, the Petrashevsky Circle. Czar Nicholas I
after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe was harsh on
any sort of underground organization which he felt could put autocracy into jeopardy. On November 16 that
year Dostoevsky, along with the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was
sentenced to death.
After a mock execution, in
which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather
waiting to be shot by a firing squad,
Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard
labor at a katorga prison camp
in Omsk, Siberia. Dostoevsky
described later to his brother the sufferings he went through as the years in
which he was "shut up in a coffin."He was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the
Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a private (and
later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion, stationed at the
fortress of Semipalatinsk, now
in Kazakhstan. While
there, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the wife of an
acquaintance in Siberia. They married in February 1857, after her husband's
death.
|
The Brothers Karamazov (Rus)
Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Евгений Александрович Евтушенко
Родился 18
июля на станции Зима Красноярской области. Его отец был геологом, но всю жизнь
писал стихи и научил сына любить поэзию. Когдасемья переехала в Москву, будущий
поэт во время учебы в школе занимался в поэтической студии Дворца пионеров
Дзержинского района. Позднее посещал литконсультации издательства "Молодая
гвардия", где более трех лет поэт А.Досталь занимался с юным поэтом, который
очень много писал, отличаясь фантастической работоспособностью. Регулярно начал
печататься с шестнадцати лет, но началом серьезной работы Евтушенко
считает стихотворения "Вагон" и "Перед встречей", написанные в 1952.
В 1951 поступил в
Литературный институт им. М.Горького,
собравший в своих стенах целую плеяду будущих поэтов и прозаиков (В.Соколов.
Б.Ахмадулина, Р.Рождественский, Ю.Казаков и др.). Позже поэт напишет о них в своих
воспоминаниях.
В 1950-е публикует
целую серию поэтических сборников: "Третий снег"(1955), "Шоссе Энтузиастов"
(1956), "Обещание" 1957) и др. Стихотворение "Хотят ли русские войны",
положенное на музыку, стало массовой песней.
После опубликования
во французском еженедельнике "Экспресс" своей "Автобиографии" (1963) был
подвергнут резкой критике. Вместе с Ю.Казаковым уезжает на Печору, живет на
Севере, знакомится с трудом рыбаков и зверобоев. Эта поездка оставила яркий след
в его творчестве, породила большой цикл стихотворений, опубликованных
впоследствии в "Новом мире" и "Юности" ("Баллада о браконьерстве", "Баллада о
миражах", "Качка" и др.).
Евтушенко не только
был на всех континентах земли, но и написал стихи и поэмы о каждой стране, где
побывал. Его имя известно во всем мире. Популярности поэта способствовала и его
манера чтения стихов с эстрады.
Грузинская тема
занимает особое место в творчестве Евтушенко. Он много переводил с грузинского,
писал о Грузии. В 1979 издательство "Мерани" выпустило большой том его
стихотворений о Грузии и переводов грузинской поэзии - "Тяжелее земли".
С середины 1960-х,
когда им была написана "Братская ГЭС", Евтушенко постоянно обращается к большой
поэтической форме. Им опубликовано 14 поэм ("Казанский университет", 1970;
"Ивановские ситцы", 1976; "Непрядва", 1980; "Под кожей статуи Свободы", 1968;
"Снег в Токио", 1974; "Голубь в Сантьяго", 1978; "Мама и нейтронная бомба",
1982, и др.).
Евтушенко начал
писать прозу еще в юности, в студенческие годы. Первый рассказ - "Четвертая
Мещанская" был напечатан в журнале "Юность" в 1959. Через четыре года появился
второй - "Куриный бог". В результате нескольких поездок на Кубу родилась поэма в
прозе - "Я - Куба", ставшая основой для написания сценария фильма, поставленного
в 1964. Деятельность в кинематографической сфере тоже была успешной - фильм
"Взлет" (1979), где он сыграл главную роль (Циолковского), позже целиком
авторский фильм "Детский сад" (1984).
В 1967 была написана
повесть "Пирл-Харбор" и после большого перерыва, в начале 1980-х - повесть
"Ардабиола" и роман "Ягодные места", положительно оцененный В.Распутиным.
Е.Евтушенко
принадлежит книга "Талант есть чудо неслучайное" (1980), где собраны лучшие
критические работы поэта. В 1996 выходит книга-альбом "Дай Бог...", в которую
включены последние стихи.
Живет и работает в
Москве. Преподает в американских университетах русскую поэзию по собственному
учебнику ("Антология русской поэзии").
http://www.litera.ru/stixiya/articles/409.html |
He is a Russian
poet. He also
directed several films. Reportedly, before the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and
the dissident movement in Russia, Yevtushenko, through his poetry, was the first
voice to speak out against Stalinism.
Born Yevgeni
Aleksandrovich Gangnus (later he took his mother's last name, Yevtushenko) in
the Irkutsk region of Siberia in a small
town called Zima Junction. His
maternal grandfather, named Ermolai Naumovich Evtushenko, had been a Red Army
officer during the Russian Revolution and the Civil War (both of Yevtusheko's
grandfathers were arrested as "enemies of the people" in 1937 during Stalin's
purges). The future poet's father, named Aleksandr Rudolfovich Gangnus, was a
geologist, as was his mother, named Zinaida Ermolaevna Evtushenko, who later
became a singer. The boy accompanied his father on geological expeditions to
Kazakhstan in 1948, and to Altai, Siberia, in 1950. Young Yevtushenko wrote his
first verses and humorous songs "chastushki" while living in Zima,
Siberia.
After the Second
World War, Yevtushenko moved to Moscow. From 1951-1954 he studied at the
Gorky Institute of Literature in
Moscow, from which he dropped
out. He published his first poem in 1949 and his first book three years later.
In 1952 he joined the Union of Soviet Writers after publication of his first collection of poetry. His early poem
So mnoyu chto-to proiskhodit (Something is happening to me) became
a very popular song, performed by actor-songwriter Aleksandr Dolsky. In 1955 Yevtushenko wrote a poem about the Soviet borders
being an obstacle in his life. His first important publication was the poem
Stantsiya Zima (Zima Junction 1956). In 1957, he was expelled from
the Literary Institute for "individualism". He was banned from traveling, but
gained wide popularity with the Russian public. His early work also drew praise
from the likes of Boris Pasternak,
Carl Sandburg and
Robert Frost.
Yevtushenko was one
of the authors politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw (Khrushchev declared a cultural "Thaw" that allowed some freedom of
expression). In 1961 he wrote what
would become perhaps his most famous poem, Babi Yar, in which he
denounced the Soviet distortion of
historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre of the
Jewish population of Kiev in September
1941, as well as the antisemitism still
widespead in the Soviet Union. The usual Soviet policy in relation to the Holocaust in Russia was to describe it as atrocities against Soviet
citizens, and to avoid mentioning that it was a genocide
specifically of the Jews. Therefore, Yevtushenko's Babi Yar was quite
controversial and politically incorrect, "for it spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet
government's own persecution of Jewish people."[1]
Following a centuries-old Russian tradition, Yevtushenko became a public
poet. The poem achieved widespread circulation in the underground samizdat
press, and later was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems,
by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar. Publication of the
poem in the state-controlled Soviet press was delayed until 1984.
In 1961,
Yevtushenko also published Nasledniki Stalina (The Heirs of
Stalin), in which he stated that although Stalin was dead, Stalinism and its legacy still dominated the country; in the poem he also
directly addressed the Soviet government, imploring them to make sure that
Stalin would "never rise again". Published originally in Pravda, the poem was not
republished until a quarter of a century later, in the times of the
comparatively liberal party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yevtushenko became
one of the best known poets of the 1950's and 1960's in the Soviet Union. He was
part of the 1960's generation, which included such writers as Vasili Aksyonov, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina,
Robert Rozhdestvensky; as well as actors Andrei Mironov,
Aleksandr Zbruyev, Natalya Fateyeva, and many others. During the time, Anna Akhmatova, a fiercely anti-Soviet rule poet (a number of whose family
members suffered under the communist rule) criticised Yevtushenko's aesthetic
ideals and his poetics.
In 1965, Yevtushenko
joined Anna Akhmatova, Kornei Chukovsky,
Jean-Paul Sartre and
others and co-signed the letter of protest against the unfair trial of Joseph Brodsky (a fellow poet influenced by Anna Akhmatova) as a result of
the court case against him initiated by the Soviet authorities. He subsequently
co-signed a letter against the Warsaw Pact invasion of
Czechoslovakia in
1968.
In 1989 Yevtushenko
was elected as a representative in the Soviet Parliament, where he was a member
of the pro-democratic group supporting Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1991, he supported Boris Yeltsin, as
the latter's defended the parliament of the Russian Federation during the hardline coup that sought to oust Gorbachev and reverse
"perestroika".
In 1989 Yevtushenko
was elected as a representative in the Soviet Parliament, where he was a member
of the pro-democratic group supporting Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1991, he supported Boris Yeltsin, as
the latter's defended the parliament of the Russian Federation during the hardline coup that sought to oust Gorbachev and reverse
"perestroika".
Yevtushenko, who now
(October, 2007) divides his time between Russia and the United States, teaches
Russian and European poetry and the history of world cinema at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and at
Queens College of the City University of New York. In the West he is best
known for his criticism of the Soviet bureaucracy
and appeals for getting rid of the legacy of Stalin. He is now
working on a three-volume collection of Russian poetry from the 11th-20th
century, and plans a novel based on his time in Havana during the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
In October 2007 he
was an artist-in-residence with the School of Arts and Humanities at the
University of Maryland, and recited his poem "Babi Yar" before a performance of
Dmitri Shostakovich's 13th Symphony, which sets five of his poems, by the
University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra and the men of the UM Choirs, with
David Brundage as the bass soloist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Yevtushenko |
Sergei Yesenin - Сергей Александрович Есенин
 http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/esenin_sergei/ |
Sergei Yesenin (sometimes spelled as Esenin) was born in
Konstantinovo in the Ryazan region of
Russian Empire to a
peasant family. He spent most of his childhood in his grandparents' home. He
began to write poetry at the age of nine.In 1912, he moved to Moscow where he
supported himself working as a proofreader in a
printing company. The following year he enrolled in Moscow State University as an external student and studied there for a year and a half. His
early poetry was inspired by Russian folklore. In 1915,
he moved to St. Petersburg,
where he became acquainted with fellow-poets Alexander Blok,
Sergei Gorodetsky,
Nikolai Klyuev and
Andrey Bely. It was
in St. Petersburg that he became well known in literature circles. Alexander Blok was especially helpful in promoting Yesenin's early career as
a poet. Yesenin said that Bely gave him the meaning of form while Blok and
Klyuev taught him lyricism.In 1915, Yesenin published his first book of poems, Radunitsa, soon
followed by Ritual for the Dead (1916). Through his collections of poignant
poetry about love and the simple life, he became one of the most popular poets
of the day.His first marriage was
in 1913 to Anna Izryadnova, a co-worker from the publishing house, with whom he
had a son, Yuri. (During the Stalinist purges, Yuri Yesenin was arrested and died in 1937 at a Gulag labor camp.) In 1915 he
came to St Petersburg, where he met Klyuev. From 1916 to 1917, Yesenin was drafted into military duty, but
soon after the October Revolution of 1917, Russia exited World War I.
Believing that the revolution would bring a better life, he briefly supported
it, but soon became disillusioned and sometimes even criticized the Bolshevik rule in such poems as The Stern October Has Deceived
Me.In August
1917 Yesenin married for a second time to an actress, Zinaida Raikh (later wife
of Vsevolod Meyerhold). They had two children, a daughter, Tatyana, and a son, Konstantin.
Konstantin Yesenin would become a well-known soccer statistician.In September
1918, he founded his own publishing house called "Трудовая Артель Художников
Слова" (the "Moscow Labor Company of the Artists of Word.") In the fall of 1921, while visiting the studio
of painter Alexei Yakovlev, he met the Paris-based American
dancer Isadora Duncan, a
woman 18 years his senior who knew only a dozen words in Russian, while he spoke
no foreign languages. They married on May 2, 1922. Yesenin
accompanied his new celebrity wife on a tour of Europe and the
United States but at
this point in his life, an addiction to alcohol had gotten
out of control. Often drunk, his violent rages resulted in him destroying hotel
rooms and causing disturbances in restaurants. This behavior received a great
deal of publicity in the international press. His marriage to Duncan was brief
and in May 1923 he returned to Moscow. He almost immediately became involved
with actress Augusta Miklashevskaya and is rumoured to have married her in a
civil ceremony, although he had not obtained a divorce from Isadora Duncan.That same
year he had a son by the poet Nadezhda Volpin. Sergei Yesenin never knew his son
by Volpin, but Alexander Esenin-Volpin grew up to become a prominent poet and activist
in the Soviet Union's
dissident movement of the 1960s with Andrei Sakharov and
others. After moving to the United States, Esenin-Volpin became a prominent
mathematician.The last two
years of Yesenin's life were filled with constant erratic and drunken behavior,
but he also created some of his most famous poems. In 1925 Yesenin met and
married his fifth wife, Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. She attempted to get him help but he suffered a complete mental breakdown and
was hospitalized for a month. Two days after his release for Christmas, he
allegedly cut his wrist and wrote a farewell poem in his own blood, then the
following day hanged himself from the heating pipes on the ceiling of his room
in the Hotel Anglettere. He was 30 years old. Yesenin was always surrounded by satellites. The saddest thing
of all was to see, next to Yesenin, a random group of men who had nothing to do
with literature, but simply liked (as they still do) to drink somebody else's
vodka, bask in someone else's fame, and hide behind someone else's authority. It
was not through this black swarm, however, that he perished, he drew them to
himself. He knew what they were worth; but in his state he found it easier to be
with people he despised.Although he
was one of Russia's most popular poets and had been given an elaborate funeral
by the State, most of his writings were banned by the Kremlin during
the reigns of Joseph Stalin and
Nikita Khrushchev.
Nikolay Bukharin's
criticism of Esenin contributed significantly to the banning. Only in 1966 were
most of his works republished.Sergei Yesenin's poems are taught to Russian schoolchildren and many
have been set to music, recorded as popular songs. The early death,
unsympathetic views by some of the literary elite, adoration by ordinary people,
and sensational behavior, all contributed to the enduring and near mythical
popular image of the Russian poet.Sergei Yesenin is interred in Moscow's Vagankovskoye Cemetery. His grave is marked by a white marble
sculpture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esenin |
Poetry of Sergei Yesenin
(Rus)
Poetry of Sergei Yesenin
(Eng)
Nikolai Zabolotsky - Николай Алексеевич Заболоцкий
[24.4(7.5).1903, Казань, -
14.10.1958, Москва]
Русский советский
поэт.
Окончил
Ленинградский педагогический институт им. А. И. Герцена (1925).
Начал
печататься в 1928. Заболоцкий -
лирик философского склада, размышляющий о месте человека в мироздании.
В 1929
опубликовал сборник стихов "Столбцы", в котором фантастично преломился
мещанский, нэповский быт, ненавистный поэту.
Поэт
утверждает неизбежную победу прекрасного в мире.
И. Б. Роднянская, © Большая советская
энциклопедия.http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
He is a
Russian poet, children's writer and translator. He was a
Modernist and a founder of the Russian avant-garde group OBERIU.
Nikolay Alekseevich
Zabolotsky was born on May 7, 1903 near the city of Kazan. His early
life was spent in the towns of Sernur (now in the Republic of Mari El) and
Urzhum (now in the Kirov Oblast). In
1920, Zabolotsky left his family and moved to Moscow, enrolling
simultaneously in the departments of medicine and
philology at the university there. A
year later, he moved to Petrograd (now
Saint Petersburg)
and enrolled in the Pedagogical Institute of Saint Petersburg State
University.
Zabolotsky had
already begun to write poetry at this time. His formative period showed the
influences of the Futurist
works of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, the lyrical poems of Alexander Blok and
Sergei Esenin, and
the art of Pavel Filonov and
Marc Chagall. During
this period, Zabolotsky also met his future wife, E.V.
Klykova.
In 1928, Zabolotsky
founded the avant-garde group OBERIU with
Daniil Kharms and
Alexander Vvedensky. The group's acronym stood for "The Association of Real Art" (in
Russian, Объединение реального искусства). During this period, Zabolotsky
began to be published. His first book of poetry, Columns (Столбцы,
1929), was a series of grotesque vignettes on the life that Lenin's NEP
(New Economic Policy) had created. It included the poem "The Signs of the Zodiac Fade" (Меркнут знаки зодиака), an absurdist lullaby that, 76 years
later, in 2005, provided the words for a Russian pop hit. In (1937), Zabolotsky
published his second book of poetry. This collection showed the subject matter
of Zabolotsky's work moving from social concerns to elegies and nature poetry.
This book is notable for its inclusion of pantheistic
themes.
Amidst Stalin's increased censorship of the arts, Zabolotsky fell victim to the
Soviet government's purges. In 1938, he was sent to
Siberia. A period of creative silence followed until his rehabilitation
eight years later, in 1946. Upon his
return to Moscow in 1948, Zabolotsky
turned to translation, occupying himself most notably with a translation of
The Tale of Igor's Campaign. He also translated several Georgian poets
(including Rustaveli's
epic poem The
Knight in the Panther's Skin, as well as more modern Georgian poets such
as Vazha-Pshavela,
Grigol Orbeliani,
David Gurmanishvili) and traveled frequently to Georgia.
Zabolotsky also resumed his work as an original poet. However, the literature of
his post-exile years experienced drastic stylistic changes. His poetry began to
take a more traditional, conservative form and was often compared to the work of
Tyutchev.
The last few years
of Zabolotsky's life were beset by illness. He suffered a debilitating heart
attack and, from 1956 onward, spent
much of his time in the town of Tarusa. A second
heart attack claimed his life on October 14, 1958 in Moscow.
|
Poetry (Eng)
Поэзия (Rus)
Mikhail Lermontov - Михаил Юрьевич Лермонтов
(1814-41)
Русский поэт.
Учился в Московском
университете (1830-32).
Окончил
Санкт-Петербургскую школу гвардейских подпрапорщиков и кавалерийских юнкеров
(1834).
В 1837 за
стихотворение "Смерть поэта" (о гибели А. С. Пушкина) был сослан в армию на
Кавказ.
Разочарование в
действительности, характерное для последекабрьских умонастроений, скептицизм,
стремление к идеалу свободной и мятежной личности питали его ранние
романтические стихи, а в зрелой лирике и мечта о душевном покое ("Дума", "И
скучно и грустно", "Молитва", "Пророк", "Выхожу один я на дорогу"; поэма
"Мцыри", 1839; драма "Маскарад", 1835).
Убит на дуэли в
Пятигорске.
|
(Born 1814, Died 1841)
Mikhail Lermontov was descended
from George Learmont, a Scottish officer who entered the Russian service in the
early seventeenth century.
His literary fame began with a
poem on the death of Pushkin,
full of angry invective against the court circles ; for this Lermontov, a Guards
officer, was courtmartialled and temorarily transferred to the Caucasus.
The Last House-warming (1840), in
which he protests against the transfer of Napoleon's body from St. Helena to the
Invalides, is an example of his rhetorical power.
He was killed in a duel at the
age of twenty-seven.
From "The Heritage of Russian Verse,"
by Dimitri Obolenskyhttp://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/lermontov/lermontov_ind.html |
Poetry (Eng)
Поэзия (Rus)
Vladimir Mayakovskiy - Владимир Владимирович Маяковский
(1894-1930)
Маяковский -
русский поэт.
Родился в селе
Багдады Кутаисской губернии в семье лесничего. Учился в кутаисской и московской
гимназиях, курса однако не окончил. В 1908 году 14-летним мальчиком примкнул к
большевикам, вел пропагандистскую работу, отбывал заключение в Бутырской тюрьме.
Обучался живописи в
училище живописи, ваяния и зодчества, откуда вскоре был исключен за
футуристическую "левизну".
Совместно с В.
Хлебниковым, Д. Бурлюком и А. Крученых Маяковский организовал группу
кубофутуристов, подписав их манифест "Пощечина общественному вкусу" [1912]. В
империалистическую войну 1914 года Маяковский занял пораженческие позиции.
В 1915 году был
призван на военную службу чертежником.
Восторженно
встретил, однако скоро разочаровался в Февральской революции. В Октябрьские дни
стал работать с большевиками.
Совершил несколько
поездок за границу - по Западной Европе (Франция, Испания) и Америке (США и
Мексика).
Личный кризис
привел Маяковского 14 апреля 1930 года к самоубийству.
Маяковский -
поэтический борец и новатор. Творчество Маяковского противоречиво и сложно. Он
органически проделал сложнейшую поэтическую перестройку. Творчество Маяковского
связано в начальных своих истоках с русским футуризмом, и все же Маяковский
выделялся из среды русских футуристов.
http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
Mayakovsky was a
Russian poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of
early-20th century
Russian Futurism.
He was born the last
of three children in Baghdati, Georgia where
his father worked as a forest ranger. His
father was of Cossack and Russian
descent while his mother was of Ukrainian descent. Although Mayakovsky spoke
Georgian at school and with friends, his family spoke primarily Russian at home.
At the age of 14 Mayakovsky took part in socialist
demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi, where he
attended the local grammar school. After the sudden and premature death of his
father in 1906, the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to
Moscow, where he attended School No. 5.
In Moscow, Mayakovsky
developed a passion for Marxist literature
and took part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party; he was to later become
an RSDLP (Bolshevik) member.
In 1908, he was dismissed from the Grammar School because his mother was no
longer able to afford the tuition fees.
Around this time,
Mayakovsky was imprisoned on three occasions for subversive political
activities, but being underage, he avoided transportation. During a period of
solitary confinement in Butyrka prison in
1909, he began to write poetry, but his poems were confiscated. On his
release from prison, he continued working within the socialist movement, and in
1911 he joined the Moscow Art School
where he became acquainted with members of the Russian Futurist
movement. He became a leading spokesman for the group Gileas (Гилея), and
a close friend of David Burlyuk, whom
he saw as his mentor.
The 1912 Futurist
publication, A Slap in the Face of Public
Taste (Пощёчина общественному вкусу) contained Mayakovsky's first
published poems: "Night" (Ночь), and "Morning" (Утро). Because of their
political activities, Burlyuk and Mayakovsky were expelled from the Moscow Art
School in 1914.
His work continued
in the Futurist vein until 1914. His artistic development then shifted
increasingly in the direction of narrative and it was this work, published
during the period immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, which was to establish his reputation as a poet in Russia
and abroad.
A Cloud in Trousers (1915) was Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length and
it depicted the heated subjects of love, revolution, religion, and art written
from the vantage point of a spurned lover. The language of the work was the
language of the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to debunk
idealistic and romanticised notions of poetry and poets.
In the summer of
1915, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, and it
is to her that the poem "The Backbone Flute" (1916) was dedicated; unfortunately
for Mayakovsky, she was the wife of his publisher, Osip Brik. The love
affair, as well as his impressions of war and revolution,
strongly influenced his works of these years. The poem "War and the World"
(1916) addressed the horrors of WWI and "Man" (1917) is a poem dealing with the
anguish of love.
Mayakovsky was
rejected as a volunteer at the beginning of WWI, and during 1915-1917 worked at the
Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman. At the onset of the
Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky was in Smolny, Petrograd. There he witnessed the
October Revolution.
After moving back
to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating —
both graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters. In
1919, he published his first collection of poems Collected Works
1909-1919.
As one of the few
Soviet writers who were allowed to travel freely, his voyages to Latvia,
Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Cuba influenced works like My
Discovery of America, 1925. He also travelled extensively throughout the
Soviet Union.
The relevance of
Mayakovsky cannot be limited to Soviet poetry. While over years, he was
considered the Soviet poet par excellence, he also changed the perceptions of
poetry in wider 20th Century
culture. His political activism as a propagandistic
agitator was rarely understood and often looked upon unfavourably by
contemporaries, even close friends like Boris Pasternak.
Mayakovsky was interred at the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.
Poetically,
Mayakovsky had no followers among Russian poets, his style was never properly
analysed or further developed.
|
Poetry (Eng)
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky
Поэзия (Rus)
http://www.vmayakovsky.ru
Vladimir Nabokov - Владимир Владимирович Набоков
|
Владимир
Владимирович Набоков - русско-американский писатель, переводчик,
литературовед.
Будущий писатель
родился 23 апреля 1899 года в столице Российской империи Санкт-Петербурге в
знатной и богатой семье. В насыщенном событиями 1917 году его отец недолгое
время входил в число министров правительства Керенского, а когда к власти в
стране пришли большевики, Набоковы были вынуждены эмигрировать. В 1919 году
Владимир поступил в Кембриджский университет и окончил его в 1922 году. В марте
того же года в Берлине во время покушения на главу партии кадетов Павла Милюкова
погиб отец Набокова, заслонивший Милюкова от пули террориста-монархиста.
Двадцатые-тридцатые годы Набоков
провел в Берлине, потом жил в Париже, в 1940 году перебрался в США. Блестящий ум
и превосходное чувство юмора позволили Набокову стать отличным писателем.
Характерной особенностью его произведений были не столько живость образов, идей
и закрученность сюжета, сколько виртуозное владение английским - языком для него
неродным. Владимир Набоков
опубликовал множество романов, из которых наибольшую известность получили
написанные на русском языке «Машенька», «Камера обскура», «Дар», а из созданных
на английском - «Лолита», «Пнин» и книга мемуаров «Другие берега». Кроме того,
писатель перевел на английский язык «Слово о полку Игореве» и «Евгения Онегина».
В 1961 году он вместе с женой
обосновался в Швейцарии. Скончался Владимир Набоков 2 июля 1977 года в возрасте
78 лет.
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/nabokov_vladimir/ |
Nabokov was
born on April 10, 1899 according to
the Julian calendar in
use in Russia at that time. The Gregorian
equivalent is April 22, which is
achieved by adding 12 days to the Julian date.The eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife, née Elena Ivanovna
Rukavishnikova, he was born to a rich and prominent Orthodox
family of the untitled nobility of Saint Petersburg. He spent his childhood and youth there and at the country estate
Vyra near Siverskaya. Nabokov's
childhood, which he called "perfect," was remarkable in several ways. The family
spoke Russian, English and French in their
household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact, much to his
father's patriotic chagrin, Nabokov could read and write English before he could
Russian. In Speak, Memory Nabokov
recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall
in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent
exile, as well as providing a theme which echoes from his first book, Mary, all the way to
later works such as Ada or
Ardor: A Family Chronicle. In 1916 Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhestveno,
next to Vyra, from his uncle Vasiliy Ivanovich Rukavishnikov ("Uncle Ruka" in
Speak, Memory), but lost it in the revolution one year later; this was the only
house he would ever own.The Nabokov family left Saint Petersburg in the wake of the 1917
Revolution
for a friend's estate in the Crimea, where they
remained for 18 months. The family did not expect to be out of Saint Petersburg
for very long, but in fact they would never return. In September of 1918, they
moved to Livadia. After the
withdrawal of the German Army (November, 1918) and following the defeat of the
White Army in early
1919, the Nabokovs left for exile in western Europe. On April 2, 1919, the
family left Sevastopol. They settled briefly in England, where Vladimir enrolled
in Trinity College, Cambridge and
studied Slavic and Romance languages. His Cambridge experiences would later help him in the writing of
the novel Glory. In 1920, his
family moved to Berlin where his father set up the émigré newspaper Rul'. VN
would follow to Berlin after his studies at Cambridge two years
later.In 1922,
Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Russian monarchists as he tried
to shelter their real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This
episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in the author's
fiction, where characters would meet their deaths under mistaken terms. In
Pale
Fire, for example, the poet Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him
and is murdered. Shortly after his father's death, his mother and sister moved
to Prague. VN, however, stayed in Berlin where he became a recognized poet and
writer within the émigré community and published under his pen name V. Sirin -
it may signify an owl or a mythological bird - , a pseudonym
he used for his Russian writings for about four decades. In Berlin, he also
tutored and gave tennis lessons.In 1922 Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert; the
engagement was broken off in early 1923 as he had no steady job. In May 1923, he
met Véra Evseyevna Slonim and got married to her in 1925. Their only
child, Dmitri, was born in
1934.In 1936, when Vera lost her
job due to the antisemitic environment, and the assassin of his father was
appointed second-in-command of the Russian émigré group, Nabokov started to look
for jobs in the English-speaking world. He left Germany with his family in 1937.
He and his family moved to Paris,
but also stayed during this journey at times at Prague, Cannes, Menton, Cap
d'Antibes, and Frejus. In May 1940 the Nabokov family fled from the advancing
German troops to the United States on board the
Champlain.The Nabokovs settled down in Manhattan and VN started a job at the
American Museum of Natural
History. In October he met
Edmund Wilson, who
introduced Nabokov's work to American editors, leading eventually (extremely
eventually) to his recognition.Nabokov came to Wellesley College in
1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created
specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and
pursue his lepidoptery. Nabokov
is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. His lecture
series on major nineteenth-century Russian writers was hailed as "funny,"
"learned," and "brilliantly satirical." The Nabokovs resided in
Wellesley, Massachusetts during the 1941-42 academic year; they moved to
Cambridge, Massachusetts in September, 1942 and lived there until June, 1948.
Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to
Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. He served
through the 1947-48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian Department, offering
courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as
much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things
Russian. At the same time he was curator of lepidoptery at
Harvard's Museum of Comparative Biology. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European
literature at Cornell University. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.Also in 1945, Vladimir Nabokov was told by a relative that his
homosexual brother,
Sergei (b. 1900,) who had lived most of his adult life in Paris and Austria, had
died in a Nazi concentration camp at Neuengamme, Germany,
shortly before Germany's final collapse.Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita while traveling on
butterfly-collection trips in the western United
States. (Nabokov never learned to drive, Vera acted as chauffeur; when VN
attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, it was Vera who stopped him. He
called her the best-humored woman he had ever known.) In June, 1953 he and his
family came to Ashland, Oregon,
renting a house on Meade Street from Professor Taylor, head of the Southern Oregon
College Department of Social Science. There he finished Lolita and began writing the
novel Pnin. He roamed
the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem Lines Written in
Oregon. On October 1, 1953, he and his family left for Ithaca, New York.
After the great financial success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to
return to Europe and devote himself exclusively to writing. Also his son had got
a position as an operatic bass at Reggio Emilia. On October
1, 1961, he and Véra moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland; he stayed there
until the end of his life. From his sixth-floor quarters he conducted his
business and took tours to the Alps, Corsica, and Sicily to hunt butterflies. In
1976 he was hospitalized with an undiagnosed fever; rehospitalized in Lausanne
in 1977, he suffered from severe bronchial congestion, and died on July 2. His
remains were cremated and are buried at the Clarens cemetery in Vevey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov |
Lolita (Rus)
Bulat Okudzhava - Булат Шалвович Окуджава
(1924, Москва —
1997, Париж)
Булат Окуджава
- поэт, писатель, исполнитель собственных песен.
Родился на
Арбате, там же провёл своё детство. Отец, ответственный партработник, в 1937 был
расстрелян, мать заключена в лагерь. Жил у родственников в Тбилиси, откуда
добровольцем в 1942 ушёл на фронт; в 1945—50 учился на филологическом факультете
Тбилисского университета.
После
окончания университета до 1955 преподавал русский язык в сельской школе под
Калугой (в Калуге в 1956 вышел первый сборник его стихов «Лирика»).
После
реабилитации матери в годы «оттепели» получил возможность вместе с ней
поселиться в Москве; работал в отделе поэзии «Литературной газеты». С середины
50-х годов начал исполнять под гитару собственные песни.
Автор
исторических романов, сочетающих глубину и парадоксальность мысли с
изобретательностью композиции и изяществом слога.
Поэзию Окуджавы
отличают доверительная лирико-индивидуальная интонация, мотивы традиционного
городского романса, воспевание простых человеческих чувств — дружбы,
взаимопомощи, любви, дух противостояния «маленького человека» с его тонкостью
чувств, ранимостью и порядочностью бездушию «большой» государственной машины.
Особое место в
поэзии Окуджавы наряду с военной тематикой занимает тема Москвы, старого Арбата
как символов неувядаемо-прекрасной и неистребимой московской «ауры», вечно новой
жизни простых москвичей, своеобразных заповедников отечественной культуры.
Окуджава — один из наиболее ярких представителей «шестидесятников», создатель
нового поэтического образа древней столицы.
© Энциклопедия «Москва», Л. Б. Либединская. http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
He was one of the
founders of the Russian genre called "author's song"
(авторская песня, avtorskaya pesnya). He was of Georgian
origin, born in Moscow and died in
Paris. He was the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His
songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French
chansonnier style
represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens.
Though his songs were never overtly political (in contrast to those of some of
his fellow "bards"), the
freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle
challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years
to give official sanction to Okudzhava as a singer-songwriter.
Bulat Okudzhava was
born in Moscow on May 9, 1924 into a family
of communists who had come from Tbilisi, the capital
of Georgia, for
study and work connected with the Communist Party. The son of a Georgian
father and an Armenian mother,
Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian. This was
because his mother, who spoke Armenian, Georgian
and Azerbaijani,
had always requested everyone who came to visit her house: "Please, speak the
language of Lenin - Russian."
His father, a high Communist Party
member from Georgia, was arrested in 1937 during the
Great Purge and
executed as a German spy on the basis of
a false accusation. His mother was also arrested and spent 18 years in the
prison camps of the Gulag (1937-1955). Bulat
Okudzhava returned to Tbilisi and lived there with relatives.
In 1941, at the age of
17, one year before his scheduled school graduation, he volunteered for the
Red Army infantry and from
1942 participated in the war with Nazi
Germany. With the end of the Second World War,
after his discharge from the service in 1945, he returned to
Tbilisi where he passed his high school graduation tests and enrolled in
Tbilisi State University, graduating in 1950. After
graduating, he worked as a teacher - first in a rural school in the village of
Shamordino in Kaluga district, and
later in the city of Kaluga
itself.
In 1956, three years
after the death of Stalin, Okudzhava
returned to Moscow, where he worked first as an editor in the publishing house
Molodaya Gvardiya
("Young Guard"), and later as the head of the poetry division at the most
prominent national literary weekly in the former USSR, Literaturnaya Gazeta ("Literary Newspaper"). It was then, in the middle of the 1950s,
that he began to compose songs and to perform them, accompanying himself on a
Russian guitar.
Soon he was giving
concerts. He only employed a few chords and had no
formal training in music, but he possessed an exceptional melodic gift, and the
intelligent lyrics of his songs blended perfectly with his music and his voice.
His songs were praised by his friends, and amateur recordings were made. These
unofficial recordings were widely copied (as so-called magnitizdat) and spread across the USSR (and in Poland), where other
young people picked up guitars and started singing the songs for themselves. In
1969, his lyrics appeared in the classic Soviet film White Sun of the Desert.
Though Okudzhava's
songs were not published by any official media organization until the late
1970s, they quickly achieved enormous popularity (especially among the intelligentsia) - mainly in the USSR at first, but soon among
Russian-speakers in other countries as well. Vladimir Nabokov,
for example, cited his Sentimental March in the novel Ada or
Ardor.
Okudzhava, however,
regarded himself primarily as a poet and claimed that his musical recordings
were insignificant. During the 1980s, he also published a great deal of prose
(his novel The Show is Over won him the Russian Booker Prize in 1994). By the 1980s,
recordings of Okudzhava performing his songs finally began to be officially
released in the Soviet Union, and many volumes of his poetry appeared
separately. In 1991, he was awarded the USSR State Prize.
Okudzhava died in
Paris on June 12, 1997, and is buried
in the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow. A monument marks the building at 43 Arbat Street where
he lived. His dacha in Peredelkino is open to the public as a museum.
A minor planet 3149 Okudzhava discovered by Czech astronomer Zdeňka Vávrová in 1981 is named after him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulat_Okudzhava |
Poetry (Eng)
http://zhurnal.lib.ru/a/alec_v/compare-all-en.shtml
Поэзия (Rus)
http://www.worldart.ru/lyric/lyric.php?id=7085
Boris Pasternak - Борис Леонидович Пастернак
Великий русский поэт, классик
отечественной и мировой литературы.
Родился 29 января
(10 февраля) 1890 года в Москве в семье художника Л О. Пастернака и пианистки
Р.И. Кауфман. В доме часто собирались музыканты, художники, писатели, среди
гостей бывали Л.Н. Толстой, Н.Н. Ге, А.Н. Скрябин, В.А. Серов. Атмосфера
родительского дома определила глубокую укорененность творчества Пастернака в
культурной традиции и одновременно приучила к восприятию искусства как
повседневного кропотливого труда. В
детстве Пастернак обучался живописи, затем в 1903-08 гг. всерьез готовился к
композиторской карьере, в 1909-13 гг. учился на философском отделении
историко-филологического факультета Московского университета, в 1912 году провел
один семестр в Марбургском университете в Германии, где слушал лекции философа
Г. Когена. После окончания университета занимался практически лишь литературной
деятельностью, однако профессиональная музыкальная и философская подготовка во
многом предопределила особенности пастернаковского художественного мира.
Первые шаги Пастернака в литературе
были отмечены ориентацией на поэтов-символистов А. Белого, А.А. Блока, Вяч. И.
Иванова и И.Ф. Анненского. Он участвовал в московских символистских литературных
и философских кружках, в 1914 году вошел в футуристическую группу "Центрифуга".
С начала 1920-х гг. Пастернак стал одной из самых заметных фигур в советской
поэзии, его влияние ощутимо в творчестве очень многих младших
поэтов-современников П.Г. Антокольского, Н.А. Заболоцкого, Н.С. Тихонова, А.А.
Тарковского и К.М. Симонова. С середины 1930-х гг. и до самого конца жизни одним
из главных литературных занятий Пастернака стала переводческая деятельность. Он
переводил современную и классическую грузинскую поэзию, трагедии и сонеты
Шекспира, "Фауста" Гете и многие другие произведения. Итогом своего творчества сам Пастернак считал роман "Доктор
Живаго", над которым он работал с 1946 по 1955 год. В издании романа на родине
Пастернаку было отказано. Он передал его для публикации итальянскому издателю, и
в 1957 году появилась публикация "Доктора Живаго" на итальянском языке, вскоре
последовали русское, английское, французское, немецкое и шведское издания (в
СССР был опубликован только в 1988 году). В 1958 "за выдающиеся заслуги в
современной лирической поэзии и на традиционном поприще великой русской прозы"
Пастернаку присудили Нобелевскую премию по литературе, что было воспринято в
СССР как чисто политическая акция. На страницах печати развернулась кампания
травли поэта, Пастернак был исключен из Союза писателей, ему грозили высылкой из
страны, было даже заведено уголовное дело по обвинению в измене Родине. Все это
вынудило Пастернака отказаться от Нобелевской премии (диплом и медаль были
вручены его сыну в 1989 году). Скончался Борис Пастернак 30 мая 1960 года.
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/pasternak_boris/ |
Pasternak
was born in Moscow on February 10, (Gregorian), 1890 (Julian January 29). His father was a prominent
Jewish painter Leonid Pasternak,
professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and
Architecture and his mother was
Rosa (Raitza) Kaufman, a concert pianist, the daughter of painter Isidor Kaufman.
Pasternak was brought up in a highly cosmopolitan atmosphere, and visitors to
his home included pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and writer Leo Tolstoy.
Inspired by his neighbour
Alexander Scriabin, Pasternak resolved to become a composer and entered the Moscow Conservatory. In 1910 he abruptly left the conservatory for the University of Marburg, where he studied under Neo-Kantian
philosophers Hermann Cohen and
Nicolai Hartmann.
Although invited to become a scholar, he decided against making philosophy a
profession and returned to Moscow in 1914. His first poetry collection,
influenced by Alexander Blok and
the Russian Futurists,
was published later the same year. Pasternak's early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with
Kant's ideas. Its fabric includes striking alliterations, wild rhythmic
combinations, day-to-day vocabulary, and hidden allusions to his favourite poets
like Rilke, Lermontov and German
Romantic poets. During the
First World War , he
taught and worked at a chemical factory in Vsevolodovo-Vilve (Perm gubernia, near Perm), which
undoubtedly provided him with material for Dr. Zhivago many years later. Unlike
many of his relatives and friends, Pasternak did not leave Russia after the
revolution. Instead, he was fascinated with the new ideas and possibilities that
revolution brought to life. Pasternak spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe country near
Saratov, where he fell in love with a Jewish girl. This passion resulted in
the collection My Sister Life, which he wrote over a period of three months, but
was too embarrassed to publish for four years because of its novel style. When
it finally was published in 1921, the book revolutionised Russian poetry. It
made Pasternak the model for younger poets, and decisively changed the poetry of
Osip Mandelshtam and
Marina Tsvetayeva,
to name a few. Following My Sister Life, Pasternak produced some hermetic pieces
of uneven quality, including his masterpiece - the lyric cycle entitled Rupture
(1921). Authors such as Vladimir Mayakovsky,
Andrey
Bely, and Vladimir
Nabokov applauded Pasternak's poems as works of pure, unbridled inspiration.
In the late 1920s, he also participated in the much celebrated tripartite
correspondence with Rilke and Tsvetayeva.By the end of the 1920s, Pasternak increasingly felt that his
colourful modernist style was at odds with the doctrine of Socialist Realism approved by the
Communist party. He attempted to make his poetry more comprehensible to the
masses by reworking his earlier pieces and starting two lengthy poems on the
Russian Revolution. He also turned
to prose and wrote several autobiographical stories, notably The Childhood of
Lovers and Safe Conduct. Boris Pasternak
(in the foreground) and Korney Chukovsky at the first
Congress of the Soviet Union of Writers
in 1934. By 1932, Pasternak had
strikingly reshaped his style to make it acceptable to the Soviet public and
printed the new collection of poems aptly entitled The Second Birth.
Although its Caucasian pieces were as brilliant as the earlier efforts, the book
alienated the core of Pasternak's refined audience abroad. He simplified his
style even further for his next collection of patriotic verse, Early Trains
(1943), which prompted Nabokov
to describe Pasternak as a "weeping Bolshevik" and "Emily Dickinson in
trousers." During the great purges
of the later 1930s, Pasternak became progressively disillusioned with Communist
ideals. Reluctant to publish his own poetry, he turned to translating Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear),
Goethe (Faust), Rilke (Requiem für eine Freundin),
Paul
Verlaine, and Georgian poets. Pasternak's
translations of Shakespeare have proved popular with the Russian public because
of their colloquial, modernised dialogues, but critics accused him of
"pasternakizing" the English playwright. His cousin, the Jewish-Polish poet Leon Pasternak was not so lucky.
As a result of his political activities in Poland — writing satirical verses for
socialist revolutionary periodicals - he was imprisoned in 1934 in the Bereza
Kartuska Detention Camp.Several years
before the start of the Second World War, Pasternak and
his wife settled in Peredelkino, a village for writers
several miles from Moscow. He was filled with a love
of life that gave his poetry a hopeful tone. This is reflected in the name of
his autobiographical hero Zhivago, derived from the Russian word for live.
Another famous character, Lara, is said to have been modeled on his mistress,
Olga Ivinskaya.As the book
was frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, Doctor
Zhivago was smuggled abroad and published in an Italian translation
by the Italian publishing house Feltrinelli in 1957. The
novel became an instant sensation, and was subsequently translated and published
in many non-Soviet bloc countries. In 1958 and 1959, the American edition spent
26 weeks at the top of The New York Times'
bestseller list. In it, the newly-Christian Pasternak laments that his Jewish
people long ago refused to listen to the "new force which had come out of their
own midst."He also disagreed therein with the Bolshevik idea of "building a new
man . . ." Although none of his Soviet critics had the chance to read the
proscribed novel, some of them publicly demanded, "kick the pig out of our
kitchen-garden," i.e., expel Pasternak from the USSR. This led to a jocular
Russian saying used to poke fun at illiterate criticism, "I did not read
Pasternak, but I condemn him". Doctor Zhivago was eventually published in the
USSR in 1988.The screen adaptation, directed
by David
Lean, was of epic proportions, being toured
in the roadshow tradition, and starred
Omar
Sharif and Julie
Christie. Concentrating on the romantic
aspects of the tale, it quickly became a worldwide blockbuster, but wasn't
released in Russia until near the time of the fall of the Soviet
Union.Pasternak was named the winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1958. Pasternak died of lung cancer on May 30, 1960. Despite only a small notice
appearing in the Literary Gazette, thousands of people traveled from Moscow to
his funeral in Peredelkino. "Volunteers carried his open coffin to his burial
place and those who were present (including the poet Andrey Voznesensky) recited from
memory the banned poem 'Hamlet'." The poet and bard Alexander Galich wrote a
politically charged song dedicated to his memory.A minor planet 3508 Pasternak, discovered
by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in
1980 is named after him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak |
Doctor Zhivago (Rus)
Aleksandr Pushkin - Александр Сергеевич Пушкин
.PNG)
Александр Сергеевич
Пушкин родился 6 июня (по старому стилю - 26 мая) 1799 года в Москве, в
небогатой дворянской семье, однако числившую в предках и бояр времен чуть ли не
Александра Невского, и "царского арапа" Абрама Петровича Ганнибала. В детские
годы великого поэта большое влияние на него оказал дядя, Василий Львович Пушкин,
знавший несколько языков, знакомый с поэтами и сам не чуждый литературным
занятиям. Маленького Александра воспитывали французы-гувернеры, он рано выучился
читать и уже в детстве начал писать стихи, правда, по-французски; летние месяцы
он проводил у бабушки под Москвой. 19 октября 1811 года открылся Царскосельский
лицей, и одним из первых воспитанников лицея стал Александр Пушкин. Шесть
лицейских лет коренным образом повлияли на него: он сформировался как поэт,
свидетельством чему - высоко отмеченное Г.Р.Державиным стихотворение
"Воспоминание в Царском Селе" и участие в литературном кружке "Арзамас", - а
атмосфера свободомыслия и революционных идей во многом определили впоследствии
гражданскую позицию многих лицеистов, в том числе и самого Пушкина. По окончании в 1817 году лицея Александр
Сергеевич Пушкин получил назначение в Коллегию иностранных дел. Впрочем,
чиновничья служба мало интересует поэта, и он окунается в бурную петербургскую
жизнь, вступает в литературно-театральное общество "Зеленая лампа", сочиняет
проникнутые идеалами свободы стихи и острые эпиграммы. Крупнейшим поэтическим
произведением Пушкина стала поэма "Руслан и Людмила", опубликованная в 1820 году
и вызвавшая яростные споры. Выпады против власть предержащих не остались без
внимания, и в мае 1820 года, под видом служебного перемещения, поэта, по сути,
высылают из столицы. Пушкин отправляется на Кавказ, потом в Крым, живет в
Кишиневе и Одессе, встречается с будущими декабристами. В "южный" период
творчества расцвел романтизм Пушкина, и произведения этих лет укрепили за ним
славу первого русского поэта благодаря ярким характерам и непревзойденному
мастерству, а также созвучности настроениям передовых общественных кругов.
Написаны "Кинжал", "Кавказский пленник", "Демон", "Гаврилиада", "Цыганы", начат
"Евгений Онегин". Но в творчестве поэта зреет кризис, связанный с разочарованием
в просветительской идее торжества разума и раздумьями о трагических поражениях
революционных движений в Европе. В
июле 1824 года, как неблагонадежного и вследствие стычек с начальством, в
частности с графом М.С.Воронцовым - за женой которого Е.К.Воронцовой Пушкин
ухаживал, - поэта высылают в псковское имение Михайловское под надзор родителей.
И здесь возникает ряд шедевров, таких как "Подражания Корану", "Я помню чудное
мгновенье", "Пророк", трагедия "Борис Годунов". После разгрома восстания
декабристов в сентябре 1826 года Пушкин вызван в Москву, где происходит беседа
между ним и новым царем Николаем I. Хотя поэт и не скрывал от царя, что, окажись
в декабре в Петербурге, тоже вышел бы на Сенатскую, тот объявил о своем
покровительстве и об освобождении его от обычной цензуры и намекнул на
перспективу либеральных реформ и возможное прощение осужденных, убеждая
сотрудничать с властью в интересах прогресса. Пушкин решил пойти навстречу царю,
полагая этот шаг соглашением на равных... В эти годы в творчестве Пушкина
пробуждается интерес к истории России, к личности царя-преобразователя Петра I,
примеру которого поэт призывает следовать нынешнего монарха. Он создает
"Стансы", "Полтаву", начинает "Арапа Петра Великого". В 1830 году Пушкин повторно сватается к Наталии Николаевне
Гончаровой и получает согласие на брак, а осенью того же года отправляется по
имущественным делам в Болдино, где его на три месяца задерживают холерные
карантины. Эта первая "болдинская осень" стала наивысшей точкой пушкинского
творчества: достаточно назвать немногие произведения, вышедшие тогда из-под пера
великого писателя - "Повести Белкина", "Маленькие трагедии", "Сказка о попе и
работнике его Балде", "Бесы", "Элегия", "Прощание"... И вторая "болдинская
осень", 1833 года, когда на обратном пути с Волги и Урала Пушкин вновь заехал в
имение, по значению не уступает первой: "История Пугачева", "Медный всадник",
"Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке", "Осень". Начатую в Болдине повесть "Пиковая дама" он
срочно дописывает и печатает в журнале "Библиотека для чтения", платившем ему по
высшим ставкам. Но Пушкин все равно испытывает крайнее стеснение в средствах:
светские обязанности, рождение детей требуют немалых расходов, а последние книги
большого дохода не принесли. И после гибели поэта его долги будут оплачены из
казны... Кроме того, в 1836 году, несмотря на нападки реакционной прессы,
несмотря на критику, заявляющую о конце эпохи Пушкина, он начинает издавать
журнал "Современник", который тоже не улучшил финансовых дел. К концу 1836 года подспудно зревший конфликт
между "вольнодумцем камер-юнкером Пушкиным" и враждебными ему высшим светом и
бюрократической знатью вылился в анонимные письма, оскорбительные для чести жены
поэта и его самого. В результате произошло открытое столкновение Пушкина с
поклонником его жены, французским эмигрантом Дантесом, и утром 27 января (8
февраля - по новому стилю) в предместье Петербурга, на Черной речке, состоялась
дуэль. Пушкин был ранен в живот и через двое суток умер. Гибель поэта стала национальной трагедией.
"Солнце русской Поэзии закатилось", - так сказал в некрологе В.Ф.Одоевский.
Однако вклад пушкинского гения в русскую литературу поистине бесценен, и
творческим завещанием великого поэта осталось его стихотворение "Я памятник себе
воздвиг нерукотворный...". Именно эти строки выбиты на пьедестале одного из
памятников Пушкину в Санкт-Петербурге.
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/pushkin_aleksandr/ |
Pushkin's
father Sergei Lvovich Pushkin descended from a distinguished family of the
Russian nobility which traced its ancestry back to the 12th century. Pushkin's
mother Nadezhda Ossipovna Gannibal descended through her paternal grandmother
from German and Scandinavian nobility. Her paternal grandfather, i.e. Pushkin's
great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal a page raised by Peter the Great, and
who traces his origin to Africa. One theory
is that he came from northern Ethiopia which then
was known as Abyssinia now
existing as modern day Eritrea, in the
banks of the Mareb River in a town called Logon. More recent research, however,
indicates that he originated in what today is the Sultanate of Logone-Birni
south of Lake Chad in
Cameroon. After education in France as a military engineer,
Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually
General-en-Chef for the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.
Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fourteen. By the
time he finished as part of the first graduating class of the prestigious
Imperial Lyceum in
Tsarskoe Selo near
St. Petersburg, the
Russian literary scene recognized his talent widely. After finishing school,
Pushkin installed himself in the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture
of the capital, St. Petersburg. In
1820 he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila, amidst much controversy about its subject and
style. Pushkin gradually
became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary
radicals. This angered the government, and led to his transfer from the capital
(1820). He went to the Caucasus and to the
Crimea, then to Kamenka and Kishinev, where he
became a Freemason. Here he
joined the Filiki Eteria, a
secret organization whose purpose was to overthrow the Ottoman rule over
Greece and establish an independent Greek state. He was inspired by the
Greek Revolution and
when the war against the Ottoman Turks broke
out he kept a diary with the events of the great national uprising. He stayed in
Kishinev until 1823 and wrote there two Romantic poems which
brought him wide acclaim, The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain of
Bakhchisaray. In 1823 Pushkin moved to Odessa, where he
again clashed with the government, which sent him into exile at his mother's
rural estate in north Russia from 1824 to 1826. However, some of the authorities
allowed him to visit Tsar Nicholas I to petition for his release, which he obtained. But some of the
insurgents in the Decembrist Uprising (1825) in St. Petersburg had kept some of his early political poems
amongst their papers, and soon Pushkin found himself under the strict control of
government censors and unable to travel or publish at will. He had written what
became his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov, while at his mother's estate but could not
gain permission to publish it until five years later. The drama's original,
uncensored version would not receive a premiere until 2007. In 1831, highlighting the growth of Pushkin's
talent and influence and the merging of two of Russia's greatest early writers,
he met Nikolai Gogol. After reading Gogol's 1831-2 volume of short stories Evenings on a
Farm near Dikanka, Pushkin would support him critically and later in 1836 after
starting his magazine, The Contemporary, would feature some of Gogol's most
famous short stories. Later, Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, became regulars of court society.
When the Tsar gave Pushkin the lowest court title, the poet became enraged: He
felt this occurred not only so that his wife, who had many admirers—including
the Tsar himself—could properly attend court balls, but also to humiliate him.
In 1837, falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had
started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover,
Georges d'Anthès, to a duel which left both
men injured, Pushkin mortally. He died two days later. The government feared a political
demonstration at his funeral, which it moved to a smaller location and made open
only to close relatives and friends. His body was spirited away secretly at
midnight and buried on his mother's estate. Pushkin had four children from his marriage to Natalya: Alexander,
Grigory, Maria, and Natalia (the last of whom married, morganatically, into the royal house of Nassau and become the
Countess of Merenberg).
Critics consider many of his
works masterpieces, such as the poem The
Bronze Horseman and the drama The Stone
Guest, a tale of the fall of Don Juan. His poetic short
drama "Mozart and Salieri" was the inspiration for Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Pushkin
himself preferred his verse novel Eugene
Onegin, which he wrote over the course of his life and which,
starting a tradition of great Russian novels, follows a few central characters
but varies widely in tone and focus. "Onegin" is a work of such complexity that,
while only about a hundred pages long, translator Vladimir Nabokov needed
two full volumes of material to fully render its meaning in English. Because of
this difficulty in translation, Pushkin's verse remains largely unknown to
English readers. Even so, Pushkin has profoundly influenced western writers like
Henry
James. Pushkin's works
also provided fertile ground for Russian composers. Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila is the earliest important Pushkin-inspired opera, and
a landmark in the tradition of Russian music. Tchaikovsky's operas Eugene Onegin (1879) and The Queen of Spades (1890) became perhaps better known outside of Russia
than Pushkin's own works of the same name, while Mussorgsky's monumental
Boris Godunov (two versions, 1868-9 and 1871-2) ranks as one of the very finest
and most original of Russian operas. Other Russian operas based on Pushkin
include Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka and The Stone Guest; Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri,
Tale of Tsar Saltan, and The Golden Cockerel; Cui's Prisoner of the Caucasus, Feast in Time of Plague, and The Captain's Daughter; Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa; and Nápravník's
Dubrovsky. This is not to mention ballets and cantatas, as well as
innumerable songs set to Pushkin's
verse. Alexander Pushkin is usually
credited with developing literary Russian. Not only is he seen as having
originated the highly nuanced level of language which characterizes Russian
literature after him, but he is also credited with substantially augmenting the
Russian lexicon. Where he found gaps in the Russian vocabulary, he devised
calques. His
rich vocabulary and highly sensitive style are the foundation for modern
literary Russian. Alexander Pushkin played an absolutely unique role in the
Russian literature. Russian literature virtually begins with Alexander Pushkin.
His talent set up new records for development of the Russian language and
culture. He became the father of Russian literature in 19th century, marking the
highest achievements of 18th century and the beginning of literary process of
19th century. Alexander Pushkin introduced Russia to all the European literary
genres as well as a great number of West European writers. He brought natural
speech and foreign influences to create modern poetic Russian. Though his life
was brief, he left examples of nearly every literary genre of his day: lyric
poetry, narrative poetry, the novel, the short story, the drama, the critical
essay, and even the personal letter. From him derive the folk tales and genre
pieces of other authors: Esenin, Leskov and Gorky. His use of Russian language
formed the basis of the style of novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. Pushkin was
recognized by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, his successor and pupil, the great Russian critic Vissarion
Grigoryevich Belinsky, who produced the fullest and deepest critical study of
Pushkin's work, which still retains much of its relevance. Alexander Pushkin
became an inseparable part of the literary world of the Russian people. He also
exerted a profound influence on other aspects of Russian culture, most notably
in opera. Translated into all the major languages, his works are regarded both
as expressing most completely Russian national consciousness and as transcending
national barriers. Pushkin’s intelligence, sharpness of his opinion, his
devotion to poetry, realistic thinking and incredible historical and political
intuition make him one of the greatest Russian national
geniuses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushkin |
Onegin (Rus)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Александр Исаевич Солженицын
Солженицын
Александр Исаевич (род. 1918, Кисловодск) - писатель. Род. в семье офицера, умершего до рождения
сына. Воспитывался матерью, жил в трудных материальных условиях в
Ростове-на-Дону. Еще в школе писал стихи, рассказы и мечтал стать писателем, но,
не имея возможности уехать в столицу, в 1936 поступил на физико-математический
факультет Ростовского университета. В 1939, не оставляя университет, поступил на
заочное отделение Московского института философии, литературы и искусства
(МИФЛИ). В 1941, за несколько дней до начала Отечественной войны 1941 - 1945,
окончил университет. Из-за ограничений по здоровью попал в обоз и лишь потом,
после ускоренного курса артиллерийского училища, с весны 1943 по февраль 1945
командовал артиллерийской батареей, пройдя путь от Орла до Восточной Пруссии.
Был награжден орденами Отечественной войны (1943), Красной Звезды (1944) и
произведен в капитаны. В февраля 1945 был арестован за переписку с другом, где
критически высказался о И.В. Сталине.Осужден заочно решением Особого совещания
НКВД (ОСО) "за антисоветскую агитацию и попытку к созданию антисоветской
организации" к 8 годам лагерей. Солженицын выжил потому, что как математик попал
в "шарашку" - из системы научно-исследовательских институтов МВД-КГБ, где
пробыло 1946 по 1950. В лагерях работал чернорабочим, каменщиком, литейщиком. В
1953, после окончания срока, был административно отправлен на "вечное
ссыльно-поселение" в аул Кок-Терек в Южном Казахстане. Был болен раком и вылечен
в 1954 в Ташкенте. Во время ссылки преподавал в сельской школе физику,
математику и втайне писал. В 1956 был реабилитирован Верховным судом СССР,
переехал в Рязань, где продолжал учительствовать и работать над романом "В круге
первом" и др., даже не мечтая о публикациях при жизни. В 1961 А.Т. Твардовский,
главный редактор "Нового мира", после XXII съезда КПСС смог добиться разрешения
Н.С. Хрущева на публикацию повести Солженицына "Один день Ивана Денисовича",
принесшей автору мировую славу. В 1963 вышли в свет "Матренин двор", "Случай на
станции Кочетовка". В 1964 Солженицын ушел из школы и полностью отдался лит.
труду. Его кандидатура на Ленинскую премию была отклонена. Свержение Н.С.
Хрущева сделало его положение сложным, а с 1967 началась травля Солженицына. В
1969 он был исключен из Союза писателей СССР. Его произведения печатались за
границей, а сам он жил на даче у музыканта М. Ростроповича. В 1970 Солженицын
был удостоен Нобелевской премии по литературе. В 1973 во Франции вышел в свет
1-й том "Архипелага ГУЛАГ", в котором Солженицын показал трагедию народа при
тоталитарном соц. режиме. В 1974 кампания против Солженицына в советской прессе
достигла предела. Солженицын был арестован, обвинен в "измене родине", лишен
советского гражданства и без суда вывезен из страны. Жил в Цюрихе. С 1976
поселился в США. В 1978 - 1988 в Париже вышло в свет 18-томное собрание его
сочинений. Солженицын - человек, глубоко верующий, не приемлющий рев. насилия,
во многих своих произведениях стремится обосновать альтернативный реальной
истории путь мирового развития. В 1974 он основал "Русский общественный фонд",
передав в него все гонорары за "Архипелаг ГУЛАГ". В 1977 основал "Всероссийскую
мемуарную библиотеку" и "Исследования новейшей русской истории". В 1989 началась
широкая публикация произведений Солженицына в СССР, прежде всего "Архипелага
ГУЛАГ". За границей и на. родине личность и творчество Солженицына вызвали
множество как восторженных, так и резко критических книг и статей. В 1994 вслед
за своими произведениями писатель с семьей вернулся в Россию.
http://pupilby.net/biorus/062.shtml |
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk,
Russia, the son of a young widowed mother, Taisia
Solzhenitsyn (née Scherbak), whose father had risen, it seems, from humble
beginnings, much of a self-made man, and acquired a large estate in the Kuban
region by the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War
I, the daughter had gone to study in Moscow, where she met Isaaky
Solzhenitsyn, a young army officer, also from the Caucasus region (the family
background of his parents is vividly brought alive in the opening chapters of August
1914, and later on in the Red Wheel novel cycle). In
1918, his young wife became pregnant, but soon after this was confirmed, Isaaky
was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his mother and aunt in
lowly circumstances; his earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War and
the family property was turned into a kolkhoz by 1930. Solzhenitsyn
has stated that his mother was fighting for survival and that they had to keep
his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His mother encouraged
his literary and scientific leanings; she died shortly before 1940.
Solzhenitsyn
studied mathematics at
Rostov State University, while at the same time taking correspondence courses from the
Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and
History (at this time heavily
ideological in scope; as he himself makes clear, he did not question the state
ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union before he had spent some time in
the camps). During World War II, he
served as the commander of an artillery position finding company in the
Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated.
In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia he was
arrested for criticising Joseph Stalin in
private correspondence with a friend and sentenced to an eight-year term in a
labour camp, to be
followed by permanent internal exile. The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several
different work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent
in a sharashka, special scientific
research facilities run by Ministry of State Security: these formed the
experiences distilled in The First Circle,
published in the West in 1968. In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for
political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in
Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer,
and foundryman.
His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. While there he had a tumor removed,
although his cancer was not then diagnosed.
From March
1953, Solzhenitsyn began a sentence of internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in
southern Kazakhstan. His
undiagnosed cancer spread, until, by the end of the year, he was close to death.
However, in 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where he was cured. These experiences became the basis of his
novel Cancer Ward and also found
an echo in the short story The
right hand. It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that
Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the
philosophical and religious positions of his later life; this turn has some
interesting parallel streaks to Dostoevsky's time in Siberia
and his quest for faith a hundred years earlier. Solzhenitsyn's gradual turn to
a philosophically-minded Christianity is described
at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag
Archipelago. ("The Soul and Barbed Wire.") During his years of exile, and following his
reprieve and return to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a
secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in
writing. He later wrote, in the short autobiography
composed at the time of his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Finally, when he was 42 years old, he approached a poet and the
chief editor of the Noviy Mir magazine Alexander
Tvardovsky with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It
was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev.
This would be Solzhenitsyn's only book-length work to be published in the Soviet
Union until 1990. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the
Soviet system of prison labor to the attention of the West. It caused as much a
sensation in the Soviet Union as it did the West — not only by its striking
realism and candour, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet
literature since the twenties on a politically charged theme, written by a
non-party member, even by a man who had been to Siberia for "libellous speech"
about the leaders, and still it had not been censored. In this sense, the
publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard-of instance of free,
unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. Most Soviet readers
realized this, but after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time
for such raw exposing works came quietly, but perceptibly, to a close.
Solzhenitsyn did not give in but tried, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his
novel, The Cancer Ward, legally published in the Soviet Union. This had to
get the approval of the Union of writers, and though some there appreciated it,
the work ultimately was denied publication if it were not revised and cleaned of
suspect statements and anti-soviet insinuations (these turnings are recounted
and documented in The
Oak and the Calf). In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in
Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid that he would not be let back into
the Soviet Union to his family once he had left it. Instead, it was suggested
that he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish
embassy in Moscow. The Swedish
government refused to accept this solution, since such a ceremony and the
ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and
damage Sweden's relations to the superpower. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his
prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been deported from the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago
was a three volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon
Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners
and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. It
discussed the system's origins from Lenin and the very founding of the
Communist regime, detailing everything from interrogation procedures and
prisoner transports, to camp culture, prisoner uprisings and
revolts, and the practice of internal exile. The
appearance of the book in the West put the word gulag into the Western political
vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities.
Solzhenitsyn became a
cause célèbre in the West, earning him the enmity of the Soviet regime. He could
have emigrated at any time, but always expressed the desire to stay in his
motherland and work for change from within. During this period, he was sheltered
by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was
eventually forced into exile himself. However, on February 13,
1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had
found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. Less
than a week later, the Soviets carried out reprisals against Yevgeny Yevtushenko
for his support of Solzhenitsyn. After a time in Switzerland,
Solzhenitsyn was invited to Stanford University in the United States to
"facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family." He stayed on the
11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution. Solzhenitsyn moved to Cavendish, Vermont in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard
University in 1978 and on Thursday, June 8, 1978 he gave his
Commencement Address condemning modern western culture. Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn
worked hard on his historical cycle of the Russian
Revolution of 1917 The Red Wheel, four
"knots" (parts of the whole) of which had been completed by 1992, and outside of
this, several shorter works. Despite an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in
America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been comfortable
outside his homeland. He did not become fluent in spoken English despite
spending two decades in the United States; he has read works in English since
his teens however, something his mother encouraged him to do. More important, he
resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of
talking to fit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and
the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in
conservative circles in the West, and fit very well with the toughening-up of
foreign policy under U.S. President Ronald Reagan. But
liberals and secularists were increasingly critical of what they perceived as
his reactionary
preference for Russian patriotism
and the Russian Orthodox religion. In 1990, his
Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his
wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind
in the United States (later, his oldest son Ermolay returned to Russia, to work
for the Moscow office of a leading management consultancy firm). Since then, he
has lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the
dachas once occupied by Mikhail Suslov and
Konstantin Chernenko. Since
returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn has published eight two-part short
stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary
memoir on his years in the West (The Grain Between the Millstones) and a
two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years
Together 2001, 2002). In it, Solzhenitsyn emphatically repudiates the idea that
the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were the work of a "Jewish conspiracy"
(see chapters 9, 14, and 15 of that work). At the same time, he calls on both
Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted
in complicity with the Communist regime. The reception of this work confirms that
Solzhenitsyn remains a polarizing figure both at home and abroad. According to
his critics, the book confirmed Solzhenitsyn's anti-Semitic views as well as his
ideas of Russian supremacy to other nations. Professor Robert Service of Oxford University has defended Solzhenitsyn as being
"absolutely right", noting that Trotsky
himself claimed Jews were disproportionately represented in the early Soviet
bureaucracy. Another
famous Russian dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich, wrote a polemical study "A Portrait Against the
Background of a Myth" ("Портрет на фоне мифа", 2002.), in which he had tried to
prove Solzhenitsyn's egoism, antisemitism, and lack of writing skills. Voinovich
had already mocked Solzhenitsyn in his novel Moscow 2042, portraying him
by the self-centered egomaniac Sim Simich Karnavalov, an extreme and brutal
dictatorial writer who tries to destroy the Soviet Union and, eventually, to
become the king of Russia. Using a more circuitous line of argument, Joseph
Brodsky, in his essay Catastrophes in the Air (in Less than One), argued
that Solzhenitsyn, while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet
Communism, failed to discern that the historical crimes he unearthed might be
the outcome of authoritarian traits that were really part of the heritage of Old
Russia and of "the severe spirit of Orthodoxy" (venerated by Solzhenitsyn) and
much less due to more recent (Marxist) political ideology.
In
his recent political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia
in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn has criticized the oligarchic excesses of the
new Russian 'democracy,' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet communism. He
has defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme
nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government to a free
Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in
the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. He has also sought to "protect"
the national character of the Russian Orthodox church and fought against the
admission of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to Russia from other
countries. For a brief period, he had his own TV show, where he freely expressed
his views. The show was cancelled because of low ratings, but Solzhenitsyn
continued to maintain a relatively high profile in the media.
All of
Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, has
achieved acclaim as a pianist and
conductor in
the United States. Since the death
of Naguib Mahfouz in
2006, Solzhenitsyn is the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn’s selected works
is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three published
volumes has recently taken place in Moscow. On June 5, 2007, Russian
President Vladimir Putin
signed a decree conferring an award on Solzhenitsyn. President Putin personally
visited the writer at his home on June 12, 2007, to give him
the award.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solzhenitsin |
Leo Tolstoy - Лев Николаевич Толстой
Толстой Лев
Николаевич (1828, имение Ясная Поляна Тульской губернии - 1910, станция Астапово
Рязано-Уральской ж.д.) - писатель. Родился в аристократической графской семье.
Рано остался без родителей и жил у родственников. В 1844 поступил на вост. ф-т Казанского унта, но фактически не
занимался и, не имея возможности сдать экзамены, перевелся на юридический ф-т,
где продолжал вести светский образ жизни. В 1847 он оставил университет и, возвратившись в Ясную Поляну,
занимался самообразованием; в 1848 уехал в Москву, где, по его собственным
словам, жил «очень безалаберно». Но все это время в нем проходила напряженная
духовная работа: Толстой пытался понять мир и свое место в нем. В 1851 поступил на военную службу на Кавказе и
начал серьезно заниматься литературой: были написаны «Детство», «Отрочество»,
рассказы. В 1854 Толстой участвовал
в обороне Севастополя. В 1856 в чине поручика оставил военную службу,
путешествовал по Западной Европе. Вернувшись в Россию, стал мировым посредником,
приняв участие в проведении крестьянской реформы, но вызвал неприязнь помещиков
защитой крестьянских интересов и был освобожден от должности. В 60-х годах открыл у себя в уезде ряд школ,
главным центром которых стала первая в России экспериментальная яснополянская
школа, ставшая для Толстого «поэтическим, прелестным делом, от которого нельзя
оторваться». Он учил детей без принуждения, видя в них таких же свободных людей,
как он сам; создал оригинальную методику, не потерявшую своего значения.
В 1862 Толстой женился на С. А.
Берс и поселился в Ясной Поляне, где написал романы «Война и мир», «Анна
Каренина» и др. В 1884 переехал в
Москву, где участвовал в переписи населения. Социально-религиозные и философские искания привели Толстого к
созданию собственной религиозно-философской системы (толстовства), изложенной им
в статьях «Критика догматического богословия», «В чем моя вера» и др. Толстой
проповедовал в жизни и художественных произведениях («Воскресение», «Смерть
Ивана Ильича», «Крейцерова соната» и др.) необходимость нравственного
усовершенствования, всеобщую любовь, непротивление злу насилием, за что
подвергался нападкам как со стороны революционно-демократических деятелей, так и
со стороны церкви, от которой Толстой был отлучен решением Синода в 1901.
Никогда не оставаясь равнодушным к
страданиям людей, он боролся с голодом в 1891, выступил со статьей «Не могу
молчать», протестуя против смертных казней в 1908, и др. Мучаясь своей принадлежностью к высшему
обществу, возможностью жить лучше, чем рядом находившиеся крестьяне, Толстой в
октябре 1910, выполняя свое решение прожить последние годы соответственно своим
взглядам, тайно покинул Ясную Поляну, отрекшись от «круга богатых и ученых».
Заболев в пути, умер. Был похоронен
в Ясной Поляне. А. М. Горький
сказал о нем: «Этот человек сделал поистине огромное дело: дал итог пережитого
за целый век и дал его с изумительной правдивостью, силой и красотой».
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/tolstoi_lev/ |
Leo Tolstoy
was born August 28,1828, on his father's estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula guberniya of Central Russia. The Tolstoys are a well-known family of old
Russian nobility, the writer's mother was born a Princess Volkonsky, while his grandmothers came from the Troubetzkoy and
Gorchakov princely families. Tolstoy was connected to the grandest families of
Russian aristocracy; Alexander Pushkin
was his fourth cousin. His birth as a member of the highest Russian nobility
distinguishes Tolstoy from other writers of his generation. He always remained a
class-conscious nobleman who cherished his impeccable French pronunciation and
kept aloof from the intelligentsia.
Tolstoy's childhood was
spent between Moscow and Yasnaya
Polyana, in a family of three brothers and a sister. He has left an
extraordinarily vivid record of his early human environment in the notes he
wrote for his biographer Pavel Biryukov. He lost his mother when he was two, and his father when he
was nine. His subsequent education was in the hands of his aunt, Madame
Ergolsky, who is supposed to be the starting point of Sonya in War and Peace.
(His father and mother are respectively the starting points for the characters
of Nicholas Rostov and Princess Marya in the same novel.) In 1844, Tolstoy began studying law and
Oriental languages
at Kazan University,
where teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." He found
no meaning in further studies and left the university in the middle of a term.
In 1849 he settled down at Yasnaya Polyana, where he attempted to be useful to
his peasants but soon discovered the ineffectiveness of his uninformed zeal.
Most of the life he led at
the university, and after leaving it, was unremarkable compared to many young
men of his class, irregular and full of pleasure-seeking – wine, cards, and
women – not entirely unlike the life led by Pushkin
before his exile to the south. But Tolstoy was incapable of such lighthearted
acceptance of life-as-it-came. From the very beginning, his diary (which is
extant from 1847 on) reveals an insatiable thirst for a rational and moral
justification of life, a thirst that forever remained a ruling force in his
mind. The same diary was his first experiment in forging a technique of
psychological analysis which was to become his principal literary weapon.
Tolstoy's first
literary effort was a translation of A
Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Sterne's influence on
his early works was substantial, although he subsequently denigrated him as "a
devious writer". In 1851, he attempted a more ambitious and more definitely
creative kind of writing, his first short story "A History of
Yesterday". In the same year, sick of his seemingly empty and useless life in
Moscow, which brought heavy gambling debts, he went to the Caucasus, where he joined an
artillery unit garrisoned in the Cossack part of Chechnya, as a
volunteer of private rank, but of noble birth (junker). In 1852 he
completed his first novel Childhood and sent it to Nikolai Nekrasov for
publication in the Sovremennik.
Although Tolstoy was annoyed with the publishing cuts, the story had an
immediate success and gave Tolstoy a definite place in Russian literature.
In his battery
Tolstoy lived the rather easy and unoccupied life of a noble officer of means.
He had much spare time, and most of it was spent in hunting. In the little
fighting he saw, he did very well. In 1854 he received his commission and was,
at his request, transferred to the army operating against the Turks in Wallachia, where he
took part in the siege of Silistra (located in
North-Eastern Bulgaria). In November of the same year he joined the garrison of Sevastopol. There he saw some of the most serious fighting
of the century. He took part in the defence of the famous Fourth Bastion and in
the Battle of Chernaya River, the bad management of which he satirized in a
humorous song, the only piece of verse he is known to have written.
In Sevastopol he
wrote the battlefield observations Sebastopol
Sketches, widely viewed as his first approach to the techniques to be
used so effectively in War and Peace. Appearing as they did in the Sovremennik
monthly while the siege was still on, the stories greatly increased the general
interest in their author. In fact, the Tsar Alexander II was
known to have said in praise of the author of the work, "Guard well the life of
that man." Soon after the abandonment of the fortress, Tolstoy went on leave of
absence to Petersburg and Moscow. The following year he left the army,
thoroughly disgusted with the meaningless carnage he had witnessed.
The years
1856-61 were passed between Petersburg, Moscow, Yasnaya, and foreign countries.
In 1857 (and again in 1860-61) he traveled abroad and returned disillusioned by
the selfishness and materialism of
European bourgeois
civilization, a feeling expressed in his short story Lucerne and more
circuitously in Three Deaths. As he drifted towards a more oriental
worldview with Buddhist overtones,
Tolstoy learned to feel himself in other living creatures. He started to write
Kholstomer,
which contains a passage of interior monologue by a horse. These years after the Crimean War were the only time in Tolstoy's
life when he mixed with the literary world. He was welcomed by the litterateurs
of Petersburg and Moscow as one of their most eminent fellow craftsmen. As he
confessed afterwards, his vanity and pride were greatly flattered by his
success. But he did not get on with them. He was too much of an aristocrat to
like this semi-Bohemian intelligentsia. All the structure of his mind was
against the grain of the progressive Westernizers, epitomized by Ivan Turgenev, who was widely considered the greatest living Russian author of the
period. Turgenev, who was in
many ways Tolstoy's opposite, was also one of his strongest admirers; he called
Tolstoy's 1862 short novel The Cossacks "the best story written in our
language". Tolstoy did not
believe in Westernized
progress and culture, and liked to tease Turgenev by his outspoken or cynical
statements. His lack of sympathy with the literary world culminated in a
resounding quarrel with Turgenev in 1861, whom he challenged to a duel but
afterwards apologized for doing so. The whole story is very characteristic and
revelatory of Tolstoy's character, with its profound impatience of other
people's assumed superiority and their perceived lack of intellectual honesty.
The only writers with whom he remained friends were the conservative
"landlordist" Afanasy Fet and the
democratic Slavophile Nikolay Strakhov,
both of them entirely out of tune with the main current of contemporary thought.
In 1859 he started a school
for peasant children at Yasnaya, followed by twelve others, whose
ground-breaking libertarian principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay, "The
School at Yasnaya Polyana". He also authored a great number of stories for
peasant children. Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived, but as a
direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's
Summerhill School,
the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example
of a coherent theory of libertarian education. In 1862 Tolstoy published a
pedagogical magazine, Yasnaya Polyana, in which he contended that it was
not the intellectuals who should teach the peasants, but rather the peasants the
intellectuals. He came to believe that he was undeserving of his inherited
wealth, and gained renown among the peasantry for his generosity. He would
frequently return to his country estate with vagrants whom he felt needed a
helping hand, and would often dispense large sums of money to street beggars
while on trips to the city. In 1861 he accepted the post of Justice of the
Peace, a magistrature that had been introduced to supervise the carrying
into life of the Emancipation
reform of 1861. Meanwhile his insatiate quest for moral stability continued to
torment him. He had now abandoned the wild living of his youth, and thought of
marrying. In 1856 he made his first unsuccessful attempt to marry Mlle Arseniev. In 1860 he was profoundly affected by the death of his
brother Nicholas, even though he had been faced with the loss of his parents and
guardian aunts during his childhood. Tolstoy considered the death of his brother
his first encounter with the inevitable reality of death. After these reverses,
Tolstoy reflected in his diary that at thirty four, no woman could love him,
since he was too old and ugly. In 1862, at last, he proposed to Sofia Andreyevna
Behrs and was accepted. They were married on 23 September of the
same year. His marriage is
one of the two most important landmarks in the life of Tolstoy, the other being
his conversion. Once he entertained a passionate and hopeless aspiration after
that whole and unreflecting "natural" state which he found among the peasants,
and especially among the Cossacks in whose villages he had lived in the
Caucasus. His marriage provided for him an escape from unrelenting
self-questioning. It was the gate towards a more stable and lasting "natural
state". Family life, and an unreasoning acceptance of and submission to the life
to which he was born, now became his religion. For the first fifteen years of his married life he
lived in a blissful state of confidently satisfied life, whose philosophy is
expressed with supreme creative power in War and
Peace. Sophie Behrs, almost a girl when he married her and 16 years
his junior, proved an ideal wife and mother and mistress of the house. On the
eve of their marriage, Tolstoy gave her his diaries detailing his sexual
relations with female serfs. Together they had twelve children, five of whom
died in their childhoods. Sophie was, moreover, a devoted help to her husband
in his literary work, and the story is well known how she acted as copyist to
his War and Peace, copying seven times from beginning to end. The family
fortune, owing to Tolstoy's efficient management of his estates and to the sales
of his works, was prosperous, making it possible to provide adequately for the
increasing family. Tolstoy had always been fundamentally a rationalist. But at
the time he wrote his great novels, his rationalism was suffering an eclipse.
The philosophy of War and Peace and Anna Karenina (which he formulates in A
Confession as "that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one's
family") was a surrender of his rationalism to the inherent irrationality of
life. Any notion that one could have control over one's own life and the lives
of others was abandoned, in favor of the notion that the sum of the free wills
of thousands made for the massive movements of history. Hence the greatest
wisdom (according to War and Peace) consisted in accepting without
sophistication one's place in life and making the best of it. But already in the
last part of Anna Karenina a growing disquietude becomes very apparent. When he
was writing it the crisis had already begun that is so memorably recorded in A
Confession and from which he was to emerge with a new religious and ethical
teaching. Tolstoy's
rationalism found satisfaction in the admirably constructed system of his
doctrine. But the irrational Tolstoy remained alive beneath the hardened crust
of crystallized dogma. Tolstoy's
diaries reveal that the desires of the flesh were active in him until an
unusually advanced age; and the desire for expansion, the desire that gave life
to War and Peace, the desire for the fullness of life with all its pleasure and
beauty, never died in him. We catch few glimpses of this in his writings, for he
subjected them to a strict and narrow discipline. He wrote as effortlessly as
ever in his late years and produced admirable works of art, such as Hadji Murad, one of many pieces that appeared posthumously. It became
increasingly apparent that, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov,
there were only two subjects that Tolstoy was really interested in and thought
worth writing about – and that is life and death. The
relationship between life and death was examined by him over and over again,
with increasing complexity, in the final version of Kholstomer, in War and
Peace, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in How Much Land Does a Man
Need? and in Master and Man. Soon after A Confession became known, Tolstoy began, at
first against his will, to recruit disciples. The first of these was Vladimir Chertkov, an
ex-officer of the Horse Guards and founder of the Tolstoyans, described by D.S.
Mirsky as a "narrow fanatic and a hard, despotic man, who exercised an
enormous practical influence on Tolstoy and became a sort of grand [[vizier] of
the new community". Tolstoy also established contact with certain sects of Christian communists
and anarchists, like the
Dukhobors.
Despite his unorthodox views and support for Thoreau's doctrine of civil disobedience,
Tolstoy was unmolested by the government, solicitous to avoid negative publicity
abroad. Only in 1901 did the Synod excommunicate him. This act,
widely but rather unjudiciously resented both at home and abroad, merely
registered a matter of common knowledge – that Tolstoy had ceased to be a
follower of the Orthodox Church. As his reputation among people of all classes grew immensely,
a few Tolstoyan communes
formed throughout Russia in order to put into practice Tolstoy's religious
doctrines. And, by the last two decades of his life, Tolstoy enjoyed a place in
the world's esteem that had not been held by any man of letters since the death
of Voltaire. Yasnaya Polyana became a new Ferney – or even
more than that, almost a new Jerusalem. Pilgrims
from all parts flocked there to see the great old man. But Tolstoy's own family
remained hostile to his teaching, with the exception of his youngest daughter
Alexandra Tolstaya. His wife especially took up a position of decided opposition to his
new ideas. She refused to give up her possessions and asserted her duty to
provide for her large family. Tolstoy renounced the copyright of his new
works but had to surrender his landed property and the copyright of his earlier
works to his wife. The later years of his married life have been described by
biographer A. N. Wilson as one
of the unhappiest in literary history. Tolstoy was remarkably healthy for his age, but he fell seriously ill
in 1901 and had to live for a long time in Gaspra and Simeiz,
Crimea. Still he continued working to the last and never showed the
slightest sign of any weakening of brain power. Ever more oppressed by the
apparent contradiction between his preaching of communism and the
easy life he led under the regime of his wife, full of a growing irritation
against his family, which was urged on by Chertkov, he finally left Yasnaya, in
the company of his daughter Alexandra and his doctor, for an unknown
destination. After some restless and aimless wandering he headed for a convent
where his sister was the mother superior but had to stop at Astapovo
junction. There he was laid up in the stationmaster's house and died, apparently
of cold, on November 20, 1910. He was buried in a simple peasant's grave in a
wood 500 meters from Yasnaya Polyana. Thousands of peasants lined the streets at
his funeral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy |
Anna Karenina (Rus)
Ivan Turgenev - Иван Сергеевич Тургенев
Русский писатель.
Иван Сергеевич Тургенев родился 9 ноября 1818 в Орле. Отец - Сергей Николаевич
Тургенев - отставной полковник-кирасир, участник Отечественной войны 1812 года.
Женитьба на немолодой, некрасивой, но весьма богатой Варваре Петровне
Лутовиновой, унаследовавшей имение Спасское Орловской губернии и 5000 душ, была
делом расчета. Брак был не из счастливых и не сдерживал Сергея Николаевича (одна
из его многочисленных "шалостей" описана Тургеневым в повести "Первая любовь").
Отец умер в 1834, оставив трех сыновей - Николая, Ивана и скоро умершего от
эпилепсии Сергея. Мать Тургенева унаследовала от рода Лутовиновых их жестокость
и деспотизм. Жестоким "побоям и истязаниям" подвергались все обитатели дома, в
том числе и Иван Тургенев, хотя он считался любимым сыном матери. До 9 лет Иван
Тургенев прожил в наследственном Лутовиновском Спасском. В 1827 Тургеневы, чтобы дать детям образование,
поселились в Москве, в купленном на Самотеке доме. Иван Тургенев учился сначала
в пансионе Вейденгаммера; затем его отдали пансионером к директору Лазаревского
института Краузе. В 1833 Тургенев поступил в Московский университет, а через год
перешел в Петербургский университет на словесное отделение философского
факультета, которое окончил в 1836 со степенью действительного студента, а в
1837 получил степень кандидата. Первые литературные опыты И.С. Тургенева
относятся к середине 1830-х годов (драматическая поэма "Стено"). В 1838 в
журнале "Современник" состоялась первая публикация произведений Тургенева (стихи
"Вечер" и "К Венере Медицейской"). В 1838-1840 он учился в Берлинском
университете, занимаясь философией, древними языками, историей. В 1843 из печати
выходит сборник стихов Тургенева, подписанный буквами Т.Л. (Тургенев-Лутовинов).
В 1842 в Петербургском университете сдал экзамен на степень магистра философии,
после чего совершил еще одну поездку в Германию. Вернувшись в 1842 в
Санкт-Петербург, следуя желанию матери, Тургенев поступил в министерство
внутренних дел, где служил чиновником особых поручений до 1844 (начальником
канцелярии был В.И. Даль). В 1843 Тургенев познакомился с французской певицей
Полиной Виардо-Гарсия, муж которой переводил его сочинения на французский язык
(в тесном общении с семьею Виардо Тургенев прожил 38 лет). За привязанность к
"проклятой цыганке" мать Тургенева в течение трех лет не давала ему ни гроша. В
1847 Тургенев вместе с семейством Виардо уехал за границу, жил в Берлине,
Дрездене, а затем отправился во Францию. Стараясь сократить свои потребности до
минимума, писатель жил авансами из редакций, займами. В 1850 Тургенев вернулся в
Россию, но с матерью, умершей в том же году, так и не свиделся. Разделив с
братом крупное состояние матери, он по возможности облегчил тяготы доставшихся
ему крестьян. Живя в 1870-е годы в Париже, Тургенев входил в кружок крупнейших
французских писателей - Г. Флобера, Э. Золя, А. Доде, братьев Гонкур, где
пользовался репутацией одного из крупнейших писателей-реалистов. В 1878 И.С.
Тургенев был избран вице-президентом Международного литературного конгресса в
Париже. В 1879 Оксфордский университет присвоил Тургеневу степень доктора
обычного права. Приезды Тургенева в Россию в 1878-1881 были истинными триумфами.
Умер И.С. Тургенев 3 сентября 1883 в местечке Буживаль, близ Парижа. По желанию
писателя, тело его было привезено в Петербург и похоронено на Волковом кладбище
(Литераторские мостки). Такого стечения народа, какое было на похоронах И.С.
Тургенева, не было ни на одних похоронах частных лиц. Среди произведений Ивана Сергеевича Тургенева - стихи, поэмы,
очерки, рассказы, повести, романы, пьесы, критические статьи, рецензии, письма.
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/turgenev_ivan/ |
Turgenev
was born into a landed and wealthy family in Oryol, Russia, on
October 28,
1818. His father Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, a colonel in the Imperial
Russian cavalry, was a chronic philanderer making Ivan's mother, a not overly
comely wealthy heiress that had had an unhappy childhood, miserable and bitter.
Ivan's father died when Ivan was sixteen, leaving Turgenev and his brother
Nicholas to be brought up by their abusive mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova.
After the standard schooling for a child of a gentleman's family, Turgenev
studied for one year at the University of Moscow and then moved to the University of St Petersburg, focusing on Classics, Russian literature and philology. He was
sent in 1838 to the University of Berlin to study philosophy
(particularly Hegel) and history.
Turgenev was impressed with German central-European society, and returned home a
Westernizer, as
opposed to a Slavophile,
believing that Russia could best improve itself by incorporating ideas from the
Age of Enlightenment. Like many of his educated contemporaries, he was particularly
opposed to serfdom.
A family serf
read to him verses from the Rossiad of Kheraskov, a celebrated poet
of the 18th century. Turgenev's early attempts in literature, poems, and
sketches had indications of genius and were favorably spoken of by Belinsky, then
the leading Russian literary critic. During the latter part of his life,
Turgenev did not reside much in Russia; he lived either at Baden-Baden or Paris, often in
proximity to the family of the celebrated singer Pauline
Garcia-Viardot, with whom he had a lifelong affair.
Turgenev never married, although he
had a daughter with one of his family's serfs. Tall and broad, Turgenev's
personality was timid, restrained and soft-spoken. His closest literary friend
was Gustave Flaubert. His relations
with Leo
Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky were often
strained, as the two were Slavophiles, opposing Turgenev in this respect. His
rocky friendship with Tolstoy in 1861 wrought such animosity that Tolstoy
challenged Turgenev to a duel, afterwards apologizing. The two did not speak for
17 years. Dostoevsky would parody Turgenev in his 1872 novel Demons, through the
character of the novelist, Karamazinov. Dostoevsky's famous 1880 speech at the
unveiling of the Pushkin monument brought about his reconciliation with
Turgenev. Turgenev occasionally visited England, and in 1879 the degree of
Doctor of Civil Law was conferred upon him by the University of Oxford. He died at
Bougival, near Paris, on
4
September 1883. On his deathbed he pleaded
with Tolstoy: "My friend, return to literature!" After this, Tolstoy would write
such works as The Death of Ivan Ilych and
The Kreutzer Sonata.
Shortly after his death, Turgenev's brain
was weighed at 2,021 grams, a world record for largest
human brain size. Turgenev first
made his name with A Sportsman's
Sketches (Записки охотника), also known as Sketches from a Hunter's
Album or Notes of a Hunter. Based on the author's own observations while hunting
birds and hares in his mother's estate of Spasskoye, the work appeared in a
collected form in 1852. In 1852, between Turgenev's Sketches and his first
important novels, he wrote his (now notorious) obituary to his idol Nikolai
Gogol in the Saint Petersburg Gazette. The key passage reads, "Gogol is
dead!... What Russian heart is not shaken by those three words?... He is gone,
that man whom we now have the right, the bitter right given to us by death, to
call great." The censor of St. Petersburg did not approve of this idolatry and
banned its publication, but Turgenev managed to fool the Moscow censor into
printing it. These underhanded tactics landed the young writer in prison for a
month, and he was forced into exile to his estate for nearly two years.
In the 1840s and early 50s during
the rule of Tsar Nicholas I, the political climate
in Russia was stifling for many writers. This is evident in the despair and
subsequent death of Gogol, the notorious oppression, and the persecution and
arrests of artists, scientists, and writers, including Dostoevsky. During this
time, thousands of Russian intellectuals (Russian intelligents) emigrated to Europe. Among them were Alexander Herzen and Turgenev
himself. In the early 1850s Turgenev wrote several short novels (povesti in
Russian): The Diary of a Superfluous Man (dramatized as The Journey of the Fifth
Horse), Faust, The Lull. In them Turgenev expressed the anxieties and hopes of
Russians of his generation. In 1854 he settled in Europe and during the next
year produced his first post-Russian important work: the novel Rudin, the story
of a man in his late twenties, torn between his much loved but barbaric homeland
and a comfortable but unsatisfactory life in Europe. "Rudin" is also a story of
nostalgia for the 1840s. In 1858 he wrote the novel A Nest of Nobles (Дворянское
гнездо, published 1859), also a story of the nostalgia for the beauty of the
lost, which contains one of his most memorable female characters, Elena.
In 1855 Alexander II became the Russian
tsar, and the political climate in Russia became more relaxed. Inspired by the
positive social changes, in 1859 Turgenev wrote the novel On the Eve (Накануне),
in which he portrayed the Bulgarian revolutionary Dmitri. In 1862 Fathers and Sons (Отцы и
дети), his most enduring work, was published. Its lead character, Basarov, is
heralded as a representative of the new people character of the 1860s Russian
novel. Critics of the day did not
take Fathers and Sons seriously and after the relative critical failure of
his masterpiece, Turgenev was disillusioned and started to write less. His next
novel, Smoke (Дым), was published in 1867 and was again received less than
enthusiastically in his native country. His last work of any length, Virgin Soil
(Новь), was published in 1877. Shorter stories, such as Torrents of
Spring (Вешние воды), First
Love, and Asya were also written around this time. These were later
collected into three volumes. His last works were Poetry in Prose and Clara
Milich, which appeared in the European Messenger. Turgenev is considered one of
the great Victorian novelists,
ranked with Thackeray,
Hawthorne, and Henry
James, though his style was much different from these American and British
writers. Turgenev has often been compared to his Russian contemporaries, Leo
Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky, who
wrote around the same time and on similar
issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turgenev |
Fathers and Sons (Rus)
Anton Chekhov - Антон Павлович Чехов
Чехов Антон
Павлович (1860 - 1904), прозаик, драматург. Родился 17 января (29 н.с.) в
Таганроге в семье купеческой, со строгими правилами воспитания. С детских лет
Чехов помогал отцу в лавке. В 1868
поступил в гимназию. Когда вся семья Чеховых переехала в Москву, будущий
писатель остался в Таганроге и зарабатывал на жизнь репетиторством, чтобы
окончить учение. Окончив гимназию в 1879, уехал в Москву и поступил на
медицинский факультет Московского университета, где слушал лекции знаменитых
профессоров - Н.Склифосовского, Г.Захарьина и др. В 1884, получив звание уездного врача, начал заниматься
врачебной практикой. Еще будучи гимназистом, Чехов писал юморески, участвуя в
гимназическом журнале. В студенческие годы, чтобы зарабатывать себе на жизнь,
сотрудничал в журналах "Стрекоза", "Будильник", "Зритель" и др., подписываясь
разными псевдонимами, но чаще всего Антоша Чехонте, С 1882 писал для
петербургского журнала "Осколки", вел обозрение "Осколки московской жизни" (1883
- 85). В 1884 выходит первая книга рассказов Чехова - "Сказки Мельпомены", затем
следуют "Пестрые рассказы" (1886), "В сумерках" (1887), "Хмурые люди" (1890). В
эти годы писатель испытывает сильное влияние Л.Толстого, которое сказывается в
рассказах "Именины", "Скучная история". Неудовлетворенность своим творчеством, своими знаниями, особенно
знанием жизни, подвигает его на решение, удивившее современников, - ехать на
остров Сахалин, остров царской каторги и ссылки. Это путешествие было подвигом
писателя. Поездка через всю страну, пребывание на Сахалине, изучение жизни
каторжан и ссыльных, проведенная Чеховым перепись населения Сахалина - все это
оставило глубокий след в его творческом сознании. После возвращения написал
книгу "Остров Сахалин" (1893 - 94); отразились сахалинские впечатления и в
рассказах "В ссылке" (1892), "Палата № 6". Поездка значительно ухудшила
состояние здоровья Чехова, обострился туберкулезный процесс. В конце 1880 много работал для театра: пьесы
"Иванов", "Леший", "Свадьба", водевили "Медведь", "Юбилей" и др. В 1892 покупает имение Мелихово, где помогает
местным крестьянам как врач, строит школы для крестьянских детей, выезжает в
губернии, охваченные голодом, участвует во всеобщей переписи населения.
В Мелихово было написано много
прекрасных произведений: "Попрыгунья", "Скрипка Ротшильда", "Учитель
словесности", "Чайка", "Дядя Ваня" и др. В начале века Чехов создает такие
замечательные пьесы, как "Три сестры" и "Вишневый сад". Все пьесы были
поставлены на сцене МХАТа. В 1898
Чехов переезжает в Ялту, где построил дом, в котором у него бывали Л.Толстой, М.
Горький, И.Бунин, А.Куприн, художник И.Левитан. В 1901 Чехов женился на актрисе
МХАТа О.Книппер. В последние годы
писатель был занят подготовкой своего собрания сочинений, вышедшего двумя
изданиями (1899 - 1902 и 1903) в издательстве А.Маркса. В 1904 в связи с резким ухудшением здоровья
Чехов поехал для лечения в Германию, на курорт Банденвейлер. Здесь 2 июня (15
н.с.) он скончался.
Русские писатели и поэты. Краткий
биографический словарь. Москва, 2000.http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/chehov_anton/ |
Anton
Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860, the third of
six surviving children, in Taganrog, Russia, a port on the Sea of Azov in
southern Russia where his
father, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, the son of a former serf, ran a
grocery store. A choirmaster, religious fanatic, and keen flogger of his
children, Pavel Chekhov has been seen as the model for his son's many portraits
of hypocrites. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent
storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels with her
cloth-merchant father all over Russia. Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys, followed
by the Taganrog gymnasium,
now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium,
where he was kept down for a year at fifteen for failing a Greek exam. He sang
at the Greek Orthodox monastery in Taganrog and in his father's choirs.
In 1876, Chekhov's
father was declared bankrupt after over-extending his finances building a new
house, and to avoid the debtor's prison fled to
Moscow, where
his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending the university. The
family lived in poverty in Moscow, Chekhov's mother physically and emotionally
broken. Chekhov was left behind to sell the family possessions and finish his
education. Chekhov
remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man called Selivanov
who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for
the price of their house.Chekhov had to pay for his own education, which he
managed by — among other jobs — private tutoring, catching and selling goldfinches,
and selling short sketches to the newspapers. He sent every rouble he could spare to Moscow,
along with humorous letters to cheer up the family.During this time he read
widely and analytically, including Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Schopenhauer; and he
wrote a full-length comedy drama, Fatherless, which his brother Alexander
dismissed as "an inexcusable though innocent fabrication". Chekhov also enjoyed
a series of love affairs, one with the wife of a teacher.
In 1879, Chekhov completed
his schooling and joined his family in Moscow, having gained admission to the
medical school at Moscow University.Chekhov now
assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay
his tuition fees, he daily wrote short, humorous sketches and vignettes of
contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha
Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man without a Spleen" (Человек без селезенки).
His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler
of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing for Oskolki (Fragments),
owned by Nikolai Leikin, one of the leading publishers of the time. Chekhov's
tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.
In 1884, Chekhov qualified
as a physician, which he
considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and
treated the poor for free. In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing
blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened; but he would not admit tuberculosis
to his family and friends. He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning
enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodation. Early
in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most respected papers in
Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire
magnate Alexey Suvorin, who
paid per line a rate double Leikin's and allowed him three times the space.
Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.
Before long, Chekhov was
attracting literary as well as popular attention. The sixty-four-year-old
Dmitry Grigorovich, a
celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short
story The Huntsman. He went on to advise Chekhov to slow down, write less, and
concentrate on literary quality. In 1887, with a little string-pulling by Grigorevich, the short
story collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic
worth". That year, exhausted
from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine which reawakened
him to the beauty of the steppe.On his return, he
began the novella-length short story The Steppe, "something rather odd and much
too original", eventually published in Severny Vestnik (Northern Herald). In a
narrative which drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov
evokes a chaise
journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from
home, his companions a priest and a merchant. The Steppe, which has been called
a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", represented a significant advance for
Chekhov, exhibiting much of the quality of his mature fiction and winning him
publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper.
In Autumn 1887, a
theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result
being Ivanov,
written in a fortnight and produced that November. Though Chekhov found the
experience "sickening", and painted a comic portrait of the chaotic production
in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit, praised, to Chekhov's
bemusement, as a work of originality. Mihail Chekhov considered Ivanov a key
moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career. From this
period comes an observation of Chekhov's which has become known as "Chekhov's Gun".
The death of Chekhov's
brother Nikolai from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced A Dreary Story,
finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life which he
realises has been without purpose. Mihail Chekhov, who recorded his brother's
depression and restlessness after Nikolai's death, was researching prisons at
the time as part of his law studies, and Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his
own life, soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform himself.
In 1890, Chekhov undertook
an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, and river steamer to the far
east of Russia and the katorga, or penal colony,
on Sakhalin Island, north of
Japan, where
he spent three months interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers for a
census. The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half month journey to
Sakhalin are considered among his best. His remarks to his sister about
Tomsk
were to become notorious. The inhabitants of Tomsk later retaliated by erecting a mocking
statue of Chekhov. Chekhov later
concluded that charity and subscription were not the answer, but that the
government had a duty to finance humane treatment of the convicts. His findings
were published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of
Sakhalin), a work of social science, not literature, and worthy and informative
rather than brilliant. Chekhov found literary expression for the hell of
Sakhalin in his long short story The Murder, the last section of which is set on
Sakhalin, where the murderer Yakov loads coal in the night, longing for home.
In 1892, Chekhov bought the
small country estate of Melikhovo, about forty miles south of Moscow, where he
lived until 1899 with his family. "It's nice to be a lord," he joked to
Shcheglov; but he took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously and
soon made himself useful to the local peasants. As well as organising relief for
victims of the famine and cholera outbreaks of
1892, he went on to build three schools, a fire station, and a clinic, and to
donate his medical services to peasants for miles around, despite frequent
recurrences of his tuberculosis. Chekhov began writing his play The Seagull in 1894, in a
lodge he had built in the orchard at Melikhovo. In the two years since moving to
the estate, he had refurbished the house, taken up agriculture and horticulture, tended
orchard and pond, and planted many trees, which, according to Mihail, he "looked
after… as though they were his children. Like Colonel Vershinin in his Three
Sisters, as he looked at them he dreamed of what they would be like
in three or four hundred years." The first night of The Seagull on 17 October 1896 at the Alexandrinsky
Theatre in Petersburg was a fiasco, booed by the audience, and stung Chekhov
into renouncing the theatre.But the play so impressed the playwright Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko that he convinced Constantin
Stanislavski to direct it for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in
1898. Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing
coaxed the buried subtleties from the text and restored Chekhov's interest in
playwriting. The Art Theatre commissioned more plays from Chekhov and the
following year staged Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov had completed in 1896.
In March 1897 Chekhov
suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs while on a visit to Moscow and, with
great difficulty, was persuaded to enter a clinic, where the doctors diagnosed
tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs and ordered a change in his manner
of life. After his father's death
in 1898, Chekhov bought a plot of land at Alushta, near Yalta, and built a villa
there, into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year. Though
he planted trees and flowers at Alushta, kept dogs and tame cranes, and received
guests such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky,
Chekhov was always relieved to leave his "hot Siberia" for Moscow or
travels abroad. He vowed to move to Taganrog as soon as a water supply was
installed there. At Alushta he completed two more plays for the Art Theatre,
composing with greater difficulty than in the days when he "wrote serenely, the
way I eat pancakes now"; he took a year each over Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. On 25 May
1901 Chekhov
married Olga Knipper — quietly,
owing to his horror of weddings — a former protegée and sometime lover of
Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull.
The letter proved prophetic of
Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in
Moscow, pursuing her acting career. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's
letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart. The
literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence which
preserves gems of theatre history, including shared complaints about
Stanislavski's directing methods and Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing
in his plays. At
Yalta, Chekhov wrote one of his most famous stories, The Lady with the Dog
(also called Lady with Lapdog), which depicts what at first seems a casual
liaison between a married man and a married woman in Yalta. Neither expects
anything lasting from the encounter, but they find themselves drawn back to each
other, risking the security of their family lives. By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill. On 3
June he set off with Olga for the
German spa town of Badenweiler in the
Black Forest, from
where he wrote outwardly jovial letters to his sister Masha describing the food
and surroundings and assuring her and his mother that he was getting better. In
his last letter, he complained about the way the German women dressed.
Chekhov’s death has become
one of "the great set pieces of literary history", retold, embroidered,
and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story Errand by
Raymond Carver.
Chekhov’s body was transported to
Moscow in a refrigerated railway car for fresh oysters, a detail which
offended Gorky. Some of the thousands of mourners followed the funeral
procession of a General Keller by mistake, to the accompaniment of a military
band. Chekhov was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Chekhov#Legacy |
Plays (Rus)
Michail Sholokhov - Михаил Александрович Шолохов
Михаил
Шолохов родился 24 мая 1905 года на хуторе Кружилином,
станица Вешенская, область Войска Донского. В 1920 вступил в продовольственный
отряд. Участвовал в боях с белогвардейцами на Дону. В конце 1922 года приехал в
Москву. В 1923 году в газете «Юношеская правда» опубликовал первыйфельетон
«Испытание», первый рассказ Шолохова («Родинка») появился в газете «Молодой
ленинец» в 1924 году. В 1926 вышел сборник «Донские рассказы» с предисловием А.
С. Серафимовича (земляка М. Шолохова). В 1924 году Шолохов вернулся на Дон и
поселился встанице Вешенской, где жил до последних дней. По его произведениям
поставлены фильмы «Тихий Дон», «Поднятая целина», «Пастух», «Судьба человека»,
«Жеребенок», «Нахаленок», «Когда казаки плачут», «Донская повесть», «В лазоревой
степи», «Они сражались за Родину» и др. В 1939 году Шолохов стал действительным
членом Академии наук СССР, дважды был удостоен звания Героя Социалистического
Труда (1967, 1980). В 1941 году получил Государственную премию СССР за роман
«Тихий Дон». В 1965 году заслуги Шолохова передмировой литературой были отмечены
Нобелевской премией. Шолохов Михаил Александрович родился 11 мая (24 н.с.) 1905 года на
хуторе Кружилин станицы Вешенской в крестьянской семье. Учился в
церковноприходской школе, затем в гимназии, окончив четыре класса. После
революции был учителем по ликвидации безграмотности, статистиком,
делопроизводителем, продовольственным инспектором. Работал в комбедах по изъятию
хлеба. В конце 1922 года, в семнадцать лет, приезжает в Москву, собираясь
учиться, но не смог поступить на рабфак и трудится чернорабочим, занимаясь
самообразованием. Встречается здесь с поэтами и писателями группы «Молодая
гвардия». В 1923 году в газете «Юношеская правда» публикуется его первый
фельетон «Испытание». На следующий год – рассказ «Родинка». В 1925 году состоялась встреча Шолохова с А.
Серафимовичем, который «сказал слова одобрения и признания». На всю жизнь
сохранил писатель благодарность Серафимовичу, считая его одним из первых своих
учителей. В газетах и журналах того времени появляются рассказы Шолохова,
впоследствии объединённые в сборники «Донские рассказы» и «Лазоревая степь»
(1926). В конце 1926 года писатель приступил к работе над романом «Тихий Дон»,
первая книга которого публикуется в начале 1928 г., сразу получив признание и
восторженные отзывы М. Горького и А. Серафимовича. В 1929 году отдельными
изданиями выходит вторая книга «Тихого Дона». Работа над завершением третьей
книги прерывается, так как он начинает работу над романом «Поднятая целина»,
вышедшим в 1932 году и ставшим событием в литературной жизни страны.
В 1930-е годы Шолохов продолжает
работу над романом «Поднятая целина», завершает третью и четвертую книги «Тихого
Дона», публикует статьи о литературе и культуре. Во время Отечественной войны Шолохов был военным
корреспондентом «Правды», «Красной звезды», часто выезжал на фронт. Его очерки
«На Дону», «На Смоленском направлении», рассказ «Наука ненависти» публиковались
в разных изданиях и имели большую популярность. Во время войны начал публикацию
глав из нового романа «Они сражались за Родину» (доработанный вариант
опубликован в 1969 году). В 1950-е
годы писатель работает над продолжением романа «Они сражались за Родину»,
публикует рассказ «Судьба человека». В 1960 году выходит вторая книга «Поднятой
целины». В 1965 году Михаилу
Шолохову присуждается Нобелевская премия за роман «Тихий Дон». 21 февраля 1984 года Михаила Александровича
Шолохова не стало.
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/sholohov_mihail/ |
Sholokhov
was born in the Rostov-on-Don region of Russia, in the "land
of the Cossacks" - the
Kruzhlinin hamlet, part of stanitsa Veshenskaya, in the former Administrative Region of the Don Cossack Army. His father, Aleksander Mikhailovich (1865-1925), was a member
of the lower middle class, at times a farmer, cattle trader, and miller.
Sholokhov's mother, Anastacia Danilovna Chernikova (1871-1942), came from
Ukrainian peasant stock (her
father was a peasent in the Chernihiv oblast)
and was the widow of a Cossack. She was illiterate but learned to read and write
in order to correspond with her son. Sholokhov attended schools in Kargin, Moscow, Boguchar, and
Veshenskaya until 1918, when he joined the side of the revolutionaries in the
Russian civil war.
He was only 13 years old. He spent the next few years chasing bandits and
outlaws. Sholokhov began writing at 17. The Birthmark[1], Sholokhov's first story,
appeared when he was 19. In 1922 Sholokhov moved to Moscow to
become a journalist, but he had to support himself through manual labour. He was
a stevedore, stonemason, and accountant
from 1922 to 1924, but he also intermittently participated in writers
"seminars". His first work to appear in print was the satirical article A Test
(1922). In
1924 Sholokhov returned to Veshenskaya and devoted himself entirely to
writing. In the same year he married Maria Petrovna Gromoslavskaia, the daughter
of Pyotr Gromoslavsky, the ataman of the
Bukanovskaya stanitsa; they had two daughters and two sons.
His first book
Tales from the Don, a volume of stories about his native region during World War I and
the Russian Civil War, largely based on his personal experiences, was published
in 1926. The story "Nakhalyonok", partially based on his own childhood, was
later made into a popular film. In the same year Sholokhov began writing
And Quiet Flows the Don which earned the Stalin Prize and
took him fourteen years to complete (1926-1940). It became the most-read work of
Soviet fiction and was heralded as a powerful example of socialist realism,
and won him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. It deals with the experiences of the Cossacks
before and during World War One and
the Russian Civil War.
Virgin Soil Upturned, which earned the Lenin Prize, took 28
years to complete. It was composed of two parts: Seeds of Tomorrow (1932) and
Harvest on the Don (1960), and reflects life during collectivization in the Don
area. The short story The Fate of a Man (1957) was made into a popular Russian
film and his unfinished novel They Fought for Their Country is about the
Great Patriotic War. In the 1930s he
wrote several letters to Stalin about the
appalling conditions in the kolkhozes and
sovkhozes along the Don, requesting assistance for the
farmers. During World War II
Sholokhov wrote about the Soviet war efforts for various journals. He also
covered the devastation caused by Nazi troops along the Don. His mother was
killed when Veshenskaya was bombed in 1942. Sholokhov's collected works were published in eight
volumes between 1956 and 1960.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholokhov |
And Quiet Flows the Don (Rus)
Fedor Tyutchev - Федор Иванович Тютчев
(1803-1873)
Тютчев - один
из крупнейших русских поэтов. Происходил из родовитой, но небогатой дворянской
семьи.
Получил уже в
юности широкое гуманитарное, в частности литературное образование домашнее и в
Московском университете, которое неустанно пополнял, живя за границей.
В 1822
получил назначение чиновником русского посольства в Мюнхене. За границей (в
Германии, Италии и др.) прожил 22 года, лишь изредка наезжая в Россию. В 1844
Тютчев возвратился в Россию, был восстановлен в правах и званиях и до конца
жизни служил в цензурном ведомстве. Тютчев не был плодовит как поэт (его наследие - около 300
стихотворений). Начав печататься рано (с 16 лет), он печатался редко.
Тютчева основа
поэтического языка - сгущенная метафора.
Прижизненная
известность Тютчева ограничивалась кругом литераторов и знатоков; широкую
популярность его поэзия приобрела лишь с конца XIX века.
Б. Михайловский © ФЭБ http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/ |
He is
generally considered the last of three great Romantic poets of Russia, following
Alexander Pushkin
and Mikhail Lermontov.
Tyutchev was born
into an old noble family in Ovstug near Bryansk. His
childhood years were spent in Moscow, where he
joined the classicist academy of Professor Merzlyakov at the age of 15. His
first printed work was a translation of Horace's epistle to
Maecenas. From that time on, his poetic language was distinguished from that
of Pushkin and other contemporaries by its liberal use of majestic, solemn
Slavonic archaisms. His
family teacher was Semyon Raich,
one of the first Russian experts in German philosophy; it was him who imparted
to Tyutchev a taste for metaphysical speculations. In 1819-1821, Tyutchev
attended Moscow University,
where he specialized in philology. In
1822 he joined the Foreign Office and accompanied his relative, Count
Ostermann-Tolstoy,
to Munich. He fell in love with the city and remained abroad for 22
years. In Munich he fell in
love with Bavarian Countess Amalie Lerchenfeld. Tyutchev's poem Tears or Slyozy (Люблю, друзья,
ласкать очами...) coincides with one of their dates, and most likely
dedicated to Amalie. Among other poems inspired by Amalie are K N., and
Ia pomniu vremia zolotoe… The published letters and diaries of Count
Maximilian Joseph von
Lerchenfeld illuminate the
first years of Tyutchev as a diplomat in Munich (1822–26), giving details of his
frustrated love affair for Amalie, nearly involving a duel with his colleague,
Baron Alexander von Krüdener(on January 19, 1825). After they both got
married, they continued to be friends and frequented the same diplomatic society
in Munich. In 1870, Tyutchev met
Amalie again and her new husband, Governor-General of Finland Nikolay Adlerberg in
Karlsbad resort. This resulted in the poem Ia vstretil vas - i vsio
biloe titled K.B.. The poet later explained to Yakov Polonsky that the characters stand for Krüdener Baroness. Both of his
wives (сountess von Pfeffel
and Ernestina Dörnberg) didn't understand a single word in Russian.
This is hardly surprising, given the fact that Tyutchev spoke French better than
Russian, and all his private correspondence was Francophone. In 1836, the
"Jesuit" Prince Gagarin obtained from Tyutchev a permission to publish his
selected poems in Sovremennik, a literary
journal edited by Pushkin. Although
appreciated by the great Russian poet, these superb lyrics failed to spark off
any public interest. For the following 14 years, Tyutchev didn't publish a
single line of poetry. He wrote several political articles, though, which were
published in Revue des Deux
Mondes. These articles brought him in touch with the diplomat Prince Gorchakov,
who would remain Tyutchev's intimate friend for the rest of his
life. In 1837,
Tyutchev was transferred from Munich to the Russian embassy in Turin. He found his
new place of residence uncongenial to his disposition and retired from service
to settle in Munich. Upon leaving Turin it was discovered that Tyutchev had not
received permission to leave his post, and was officially dismissed from his
diplomatic position as a result. He continued to live in Germany for five more
years without position before returning to Russia. Upon his eventual return to
St Petersburg in
1844, the poet was much lionized in the highest society. His daughter
Kitty caused a sensation, and the novelist Leo Tolstoy wooed
her, "almost prepared to marry her impassively, without love, but she received
me with studied coldness", as he remarked in a diary. Kitty would later become
influential at Pobedonostsev's circle at the Russian court. As a poet, Tyutchev was little known during his lifetime. His
300 short poems are the only pieces he ever wrote in Russian, with every fifth
of them being a translation. Tyutchev regarded his poems as bagatelles,
not worthy of study, revision or publication. He generally didn't care to write
them down and, if he did, he would often lose papers they were scribbled upon.
Nikolay Nekrasov, when listing Russian poets in 1850, praised
Tyutchev as one of the most talented among "minor poets". It was only in
1854 that his first collection of verse was printed, and that was
prepared by Turgenev, without
any help from the author. In
1846 Tyutchev met Elena Denisyeva, over twenty years his junior, and began an illicit affair
with her. Having born three children to the poet, she succumbed to tuberculosis, but a small body of lyrics dedicated to Denisyeva are
rightfully considered among the finest love poems in the language. Written in
the form of dramatic dialogues and deftly employing odd rhythms and rhymes, they
are permeated with a sublime feeling of subdued despair. One of these poems,
The Last Love, is often cited as Tyutchev's
masterpiece. In the early
1870s, the deaths of his brother, son, and daughter left Tyutchev partly
paralysed. He died in Tsarskoe Selo
in 1873 and was interred at Novodevichy Monastery in St
Petersburg.
Tyutchev is one of
the most memorized and quoted Russian poets. Occasional pieces and political
poems constitute about a half of his sparse poetical output. Politically, he was
a militant Slavophile, who
never needed a particular reason to berate the Western powers, Vatican, Ottoman Empire, or
Poland, perceived by him as Judas of pan-Slavic interests. The failure of
the Crimean War
made him look critically at the Russian government, too. The rest of his poems,
whether describing a scene of nature or passions of love, put a premium on
metaphysics. Tyutchev's world is bipolar. He commonly operates with such
categories as night and day, north and south, dream and reality, cosmos and
chaos, still world of winter and spring teeming with life. Each of these images
is imbued with specific meaning. In the
chaotic and fathomless world of "night", "winter", or "north" man feels himself
tragically abandoned and lonely. Hence, a modernist sense of frightening anxiety
that permeates his poetry. Unsurprisingly, it was not until 20th century that
Tyutchev was rediscovered and hailed as a great poet by the Russian Symbolists such as Andrey Bely and
Alexander Blok.
|
Poetry (Eng)
http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/001/241/1.htm
Поэзия (Rus)
Velimir Khlebnikov - Велимир (Виктор Владимирович) Хлебников
|
(28.10 (9.11).1885, с.
Малые Дербсты бывшей Астраханской губернии, - 28.6.1922, деревня Санталово
бывшей Новгородской губернии)
Хлебников Велимир (Виктор Владимирович) -
русский поэт.
Родился в
семье учёного-биолога. В 1903-1911 учился на физико-математическом факультете
Казанского, затем на физико-математическом и историко-филологическом факультетах
Петербургского университета.
В 1905 начал
печатать естественнонаучные сочинения, литературные - в 1908 году.
В 1910-х
годах входил в литературное объединение "Гилея", участвовал в футуристических
изданиях.
Художественные произведения вышли отдельными книгами: "Изборник", "Творения"
(обе - 1914).
После
Октябрьской революции 1917 года работал в РОСТА, Главполитпросвете, печатался в
периодике.
Большая
часть литературного наследия Хлебникова не была опубликована при его жизни.
Многие малые
произведения Хлебникова имели в ранний период чисто экспериментальный характер.
Его
литературная эволюция шла от романтизма к реалистическим завоеваниям зрелой
прозы, монументальных поэм о 1-й мировой войне 1914-18 и Октябрьской революции.
Мечту о
всемирном братстве людей, собственном поэтическом предчувствия "нового
космического сознания" Хлебников пытался проверить математическими расчётами и
выяснением "законов времени" (книга "Учитель и ученик", 1912; "Время - мера
мира", 1916; "Доски судьбы", 1922).
Стремясь к
синтетическому знанию, к сближению методов науки и искусства, Хлебников
утопически полагал открыть на этом пути возможность создания "новой мифологии" и
"сверхъязыка" грядущего свободного человечества.
В. В.
Маяковский называл Хлебникова "мастером стиха" и говорил о большом значении его
опыта для создания нового поэтического языка.
© Большая советская энциклопедия. |
(1885 –
1922)
Originally named
Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, born on Oct. 28, 1885, in the Kalmyk Autonomous
Republic in Russia.
Khlebnikov grew up
to be well-educated in the disciplines of science, nature, folklore, mythology,
mathematics, literature, art, history, and languages.
A poet who
became known as the founder of Russian Futurism and whose esoteric verses
exerted a significant influence on Soviet poetry after his death.
Khlebnikov is
becoming recognized as one of the major Russian poets of the twentieth century,
having for years been dismissed as a purveyor of unintelligible verbal
trickery.
Velimir Khlebnikov died
June 28, 1922.
|
Poetry (Eng)
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem
Поэзия (Rus)
http://mysli.h15.ru/classic4/zakl.php
Marina Tsvetaeva - Марина Ивановна Цветаева
(26. 9 (8.10).1892, Москва, - 31.8.1941, Елабуга)
Русская поэтесса.
Дочь И. В. Цветаева.
В 1910 году
выпустила сборник "Вечерний альбом", в 1912 - "Волшебный фонарь".
В стихах 1912-1915
годов - обретение поэтического мастерства.
Стихи 1916
года (сборник "Вёрсты", выпуск 1, 1922) посвящены России, русским поэтам,
поэтизируют возвышенную, гордую героиню, наделённую безмерностью чувств.
Лирика 1917-22
отмечена сложным, противоречивым ощущением революции, романтическим неприятием
всяческого насилия, в области поэтики - разнообразием интонаций и лексики (от
высокоторжественной до простонародной), частушечными ритмами. В эти же годы созданы цикл пьес, поэма-сказка
"Царь-девица".
Весной 1922
года Цветаева уехала за границу, жила в Чехословакии, с конца 1925 - во
Франции.
Печаталась в белоэмигрантской периодике. Выпустила ряд книг.
В 1938-39 годах был написан антифашистский цикл "Стихи к Чехии".
В 1939 вернулась в СССР. Занималась стихотворными переводами.
Находясь в эвакуации, под влиянием тяжёлых жизненных обстоятельств покончила с
собой.
Поэзия Цветаевой эволюционировала от простых, напевных, классически
ясных форм к более экспрессивным, стремительным ритмически изощрённым; язык
лирики Цветаевой 30-х годов афористичен, каждое слово предельно насыщено смыслом
и чувством.
http://www.world-art.ru/lyric/Л. Л. Саакянц, © Большая советская энциклопедия. |
Marina Tsvetaeva
was born in Moscow. She was one
of the most original of the Russian 20th-century poets.
Her work was not
looked kindly upon by Stalin and the
Bolshevik régime; her literary rehabilitation only began in the 1960s.
Tsvetaeva's poetry
arose from her own deeply convoluted personality, her eccentricity and tightly
disciplined use of language. Among her themes were female sexuality, and the
tension in women's private emotions; she bridges the mutually contradictory
schools of Acmeism and
symbolism.
Much of Tsvetaeva's
poetry has its roots in the depths of her displaced and disturbed childhood.
Her father was
Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of art history at the
University of Moscow, who later founded the Alexander III Museum, which is now known as
the Pushkin Museum of
Fine Arts.
Tsvetaeva's mother,
Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, was Ivan's second wife, a highly literate woman. She
was also a volatile (and a frustrated) concert pianist, with some Polish
ancestry on her mother's side. In 1902, Tsvetaeva's
mother contracted tuberculosis.
Because it was believed that a change in climate could help cure the disease,
the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906.
They lived for a
while by the sea at Nervi, near Genoa. There, away
from the rigid constraints of a bourgeois Muscovite life, Marina was able for
the first time to run free, climb cliffs, and vent her imagination in childhood
games.
Her own first
collection of poems, Evening Album, was self-published in 1910. At Koktebel,
Tsvetaeva met Sergei (Seryozha) Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in the Officers'
Academy.
Tsvetaeva and her
husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution, and had two daughters.
The Moscow famine was to exact a terrible toll on Tsvetaeva. Starvation and
worry were to erode her looks. With no immediate family to turn to, she had no
way to support herself or her daughters.
In 1919, she placed
Irina in a state orphanage, mistakenly believing that she would be better fed
there. Tragically, she was mistaken, and Irina died of starvation in 1920.
In
August 1922, the family moved to Prague.
In
1925, the family settled in Paris, where they would live for the next 14 years.
Tsvetaeva did not feel at all at home in Paris's predominantly ex-bourgeois
circle of Russian émigré writers.
In
1939, she returned to the Soviet Union. In 1941,
Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga. On 31
August, 1941 while living in Yelabuga, Tsvetaeva hanged
herself.
|
Poetry (Eng)
ttp://www.geocities.com/erdenechimegb/Marina_Tsvetaeva.html
Поэзия (Rus)
http://mysli.h15.ru/classic1/mne.php
Иллюстрация К "Сказке О Царе Салтане" А. С. Пушкина
Иван Билибин
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