Night tram Once this street seemed to me as wide as a river. There were two tram tracks along Bolshaya Gruzinskaya at that time, and it was necessary to cross it very carefully. In forty-three, everything seemed huge, because I was small. A sultry haze hangs over Moscow.

CHAPTER 17 A Tram to Moscow Before us, on the other bank of the Volga, lay Staritsa. Even from a distance, this ancient town testified to the former splendor and luxury of Tsarist Russia. Magnificent Orthodox churches towered over modest secular buildings. Thick

In The Lost Tram, N. Gumilyov depicts turning points during the revolution, which he could not accept. This is felt quite well in the work, especially the public position, which I also could not find at the time. From the very beginning, the reader is attracted and at the same time surprised by the title of the verse. For some time he does not catch the meaning, how can a tram get lost? Perhaps, in fact, it doesn’t make sense, and maybe you shouldn’t look for an explanation for it. You just need to delve into the text itself and understand what the author means by these words.

There is a symbolic image in the poem - a tram, which represents the revolution. The lyrical hero is in complete disappointment, he does not believe in the best. He is sure that the results that have not been achieved will not be able to escape from the stream of the "Abyss of Time", there is no point in returning. The tram started moving, and the car could no longer be stopped. He is heading in a direction unknown to the lyrical hero. All he sees is whole piles of "dead heads".

The poem is dominated by another symbol less noticeable by the reader - "India of the Spirit". For the lyrical hero, this is a symbol of the desired, but at the same time inaccessible world, where complete harmony reigns. It's too late to buy a ticket, the tram has started and is not going to stop even at Mashenka's house. This Russian image is the embodiment of pre-revolutionary Russia. Besides, why do it when she is no longer in the house. The lyrical hero is not sure of her death, which puts the reader in a misunderstanding.

The reader understands that these are the simple hopes of the lyrical hero, and he prays with him for the health of the girl. The hero does not know what will happen next, where the “lost tram” will arrive, and what will happen to us, people, after many years. The poet devotes the poem "The Lost Tram" to the time of the confusion of the human soul. This is a time when a large number of people simply could not find their own path that would lead them into an era of great change. The author gives the reader the opportunity to delve into and understand the relationship between time and space.

Lesson summary for grade 11 on the topic

“Interpretation of the poem by N.S. Gumilyov "The Lost Tram".

Naumova Marina Valerievna,

teacher of Russian language and literature, MBOU secondary school No. 8, Raduzhny KhMAO-Yugra

The purpose of the lesson: to expand the understanding of the poetry of N.S. Gumilyov, highlight the main features of the artistic world in the work, consider the features of the spatio-temporal organization of the text.

Lesson equipment: portrait of N.S. Gumilyov, reproduction from the painting by K. Yuon "New Planet", photograph of the sculpture by E.M. Falcone "Monument to Peter the Great", creative works of students (poster painting), musical accompaniment (Wolfgang Amodeus Mozart "Requiem"), a reproduction from S. Dali's painting "The Rider of Death on Horseback".

Methodical methods: analytical conversation, commented reading, analysis and interpretation of the poem.

Lesson Plan

I. Introduction. Word of the teacher about the poet.

1. The history of the creation of the work. Reading prose by heart (an excerpt from memoirs from Irina Odoevtseva's book "On the Banks of the Neva").

2. Expressive reading of the poem by heart.

3. Commented reading and analytical conversation, work in groups on cards (implementation of preliminary homework).

4. Creative laboratory of students.

5. Message from students based on the painting by K. Yuon "New Planet".

III. Final word of the teacher

IV. Homework following from the main conclusions of the lesson.

During the classes

I. Teacher's word.

The teacher reads the quatrain by heart to the musical accompaniment of Mozart's music.

And I will not die in bed

With a notary and a doctor,

And in some wild crack,

Drowned in thick ivy...

This is how the poet Nikolai Gumilyov prophesies about his death. An acmeist poet who was able to overcome the limits of this literary movement that had become narrow for him and take a worthy place among Russian martyr writers.

Today we turn to the last collection of poems with the symbolic title "Pillar of Fire", published after the death of Gumilyov. Truly, this collection is a poetic and spiritual testament of the writer. The inexorable steps of history, the revolutionary era and prophetic insight are captured in this collection.

Here the lyrical hero experiences four spiritual metamorphoses (“Memory”), pays tribute to the difficult pangs of the birth of poetry (“The Sixth Sense”), elevates the Word (“Word”) to the rank of Divine power, sees his own death and the collapse of the world (“Lost Tram”) .

II. Work on a lyric.

Our task is to see the transformation of images in the poetry of N. Gumilyov through the interpretation of the central work of the collection - the poem "The Lost Tram".

1. The history of the creation of the work (student's report, reading prose by heart).

There are various memories of acquaintances, students of the master of poetry about the history of its creation. The exact date of writing is unknown, therefore, in some collections it is 1919, and in some 1920. Irina Odoevtseva, in her memoir book On the Banks of the Neva, cites Gumilyov's words about how the poem "The Lost Tram" was born.

- You can congratulate me on the completely unusual poems that I composed when returning home. And so unexpected. I still don't understand how it happened. I walked along the bridge across the Neva - dawn and silence all around. Empty. Only crows croak. And suddenly a tram flew past me very close. Sparks of the tram, like a fiery track at a pink dawn. I stopped - something suddenly pierced me, it dawned on me. I looked around, not understanding where I was and what was happening to me. I stood on the bridge, holding on to the railing, then slowly moved on, home. And then it happened. I immediately found the first line, as if I had it ready. I continued to say line after line, as if reading someone else's poem: ………

2. Expressive reading of the poem by heart.

Conclusion. Undoubtedly, this tragic poem contains the poet's perception of the revolution and the foreseeing of his own death.

3. Commented reading and analytical conversation, work in groups on cards.

- What is the feeling of reading? What are the feelings of the hero?

The poem evokes a feeling of horror, a feeling of a protracted terrible dream - I want to wake up as soon as possible. The lyrical hero experiences the whole gamut of feelings from horror to the calmness characteristic of courageous people in the face of death.

- How does the graphic design confirm this and how is it reflected at the level of syntax?

The emotional state of the hero is emphasized by the graphic design: thus, the pauses separating the narration and the hero's attitude to what is happening are indicated by dots; the hero's internal dialogue with himself evokes questions that arise as the terrible journey progresses: where am I? where is your voice and body now, could it be that you died? Do you see the station where you can buy a ticket to the India of the Spirit? The prayer and despair of the hero are contained in the refrain: “stop, wagon driver, stop the wagon now!” And the work ends on a special spiritual take-off with an exclamatory sentence: “Masha, I never thought that it was possible to love and be sad like that!” Of particular interest is the syntactic structure of the work: the author mainly uses simple and non-union sentences - this is how the speed of the tram is conveyed. Against this background, the use of one-component sentences acquires special significance. After the cry of the hero's soul with a request to stop, a terrible conclusion follows: "It's too late." The nominative sentences “Signboard…”, “And in the lane there is a boardwalk fence, a house with three windows and a gray lawn…” lead us after the hero to the “zoological garden of planets”.

- Prove that the ominous coloring is injected from the very beginning of the work.

A tragic note and an ominous color appear already at the beginning of the work: the hero hears a crow's voice - a symbol of impending misfortune, the ringing of a lute - a symbol of the earthly and distant thunders - a symbol of heavenly. The hero is not powerful in himself: for him it is a mystery why he jumped on the footboard of a tram that leaves a fiery path in the light of day.

The tram easily breaks away from the realities of St. Petersburg (from the Neva) and takes the hero across three bridges to an unreal world, where the easily recognizable "Green" turns into a scaffold. Next - outer space, where "people and shadows stand at the entrance to the zoological garden of planets." It is noteworthy that the next shift is the path to the reality of St. Petersburg. Two symbols of this city fly towards the hero: Isaac and the Bronze Horseman. The same shifts are observed in time: the hero takes such a position that he simultaneously sees the past (“I went to present myself to the Empress with a powdered scythe”) and the future (his inevitable death).

- Prove that the path of the lost tram is the path to the city and the world of the dead.

Gumilyov uses words related to death several times: before the reader is a poor old man who died a year ago in Beirut, Masha, who has long disappeared from the face of the earth (but not from the soul of the hero!) Masha. The image of an executioner bringing death also appears. The carriage driver does not respond to the calls of the lyrical hero. Yes, and the horse's hooves threaten death.

First of all, the author uses such a technique as inversion. He deliberately violates the usual word order (“I walked”, “he raced in a storm”, “my heart beats in response”). This serves to set the tone of the story. Sound recording is also used in the poem. So, in the first stanza, there is a line that conveys the cry of a crow flock, “and suddenly I heard a crow’s cry,” or in the sixth stanza, conveying the beating of the heart, “my heart beats so languidly and so anxiously in response.” This allows the reader to enter the image of a lyrical hero. The rhythmic instrumentation of the work is interesting: Gumilyov uses dactyl, which is interspersed with pyrrhic and sponde, and creates a feeling of the sound of wheels. By the way, this rhythm was used for the same purpose by N. Nekrasov in the poem "Railway" - "I quickly fly along cast-iron rails, I think my own thought."

Many objects and phenomena in Gumilyov's work acquire a symbolic sound. So, a lost tram is a symbol of life that has gone off the knurled track, a carriage driver is either an executioner or a disembodied ghost - a representative of the dead world, the Bronze Horseman is a symbol of Russian history, St. Isaac's Cathedral is a symbol of faith and Orthodoxy. For the lyrical hero, everything that happens is a revelation, a vision of his own death. In vain he dreams of buying a ticket-pass to another world - the India of the spirit. The tram and its captive "fly" towards inevitable death, because the driver is deaf to pleas. It is also symbolic that the hero is destined to die under the hooves of a rider who personifies Russian history. The only stable point in this apocalyptic picture is St. Isaac's Cathedral - the faithful stronghold of Orthodoxy: it is here that the hero wants to hear a memorial service for himself.

In general, the work is an extended metaphor. A metaphorical epithet is already the title of the work - "The Lost Tram". Such metaphors as "India of the Spirit", "Isakiy is embedded in the sky", "the zoological garden of the planets" awaken the reader's imagination, create images of a universal scale and give what is happening a special tragedy.

4. Communication of creative groups.

Such unusual associations, a combination of logically incompatible objects and signs is called surrealism.

- Remember, what other literary and artistic movement preceded surrealism?

The main goal of Impressionism is the pursuit of impression. The inimitable poet Osip Mandelstam in the poem "Impressionism" wrote: "The artist depicted us a deep swoon of lilacs ...". To paraphrase Mandelstam, one can say this about surrealism: “The artist depicted us only shadows from lilacs ...” Salvador Dali is a brilliant artist of surrealism. As an example of surrealism in painting, the painting "The Horseman named Death" is presented. This is how the Spanish artist sees the theme of death. The same type of figurativeness is in N. Gumilyov's poem "The Lost Tram". The poet anticipated the phenomenon of surrealism in his work.

Information for students.

SURREALISM - a literary and artistic movement of the early 20th century, it is characterized by illogical images and non-standard thinking.

The creative groups in their homework were asked to present the metaphorical picture "Zoological Garden of the Planets" in a surreal spirit, both in painting and in the artistic word. What is your interpretation of this image? (Artwork is attached).

Now it is not surprising that Gumilyov appears in the poem, which, at first glance, are not connected with the plot of Mashenka and the Empress. But maybe you have a literary association? Who are we talking about? (Children's answers).

Teacher information.

According to Irina Odoevtseva, the image of Masha is a tribute to Pushkin, meaning Masha Mironova from The Captain's Daughter.

- Let's go back to the last lines of the work. How do you understand them?

The two words here are the key words "forever" and "never". These are mutually exclusive terms. This is tragic: with this it is really "it is both difficult to breathe and painful to live." Here it is the feeling of the catastrophe of the collapse of the world! Here it is a prophetic premonition of one's own death!

Such a feeling is tormented not only by the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, but also by the entire creative intelligentsia of that era: an example of this is the painting by K. Yuon “The New Planet”.

4. Message based on the painting by K. Yuon "New Planet" (attached).

What do you think the two works have in common, what unites them? What lines from the poem can reveal the meaning of K. Yuon's painting?

First of all, what is common here is the perception of the era, the premonition of the coming apocalypse, the feeling of the fragility of the universe and the fragility of the human soul and life. The meaning of the picture is revealed by the following lines:

Now I understand: our freedom

Only from there is the beating light,

People and shadows stand at the entrance

In the zoological garden of planets.

4. Conclusion. Homework.

Thus, the poem "The Lost Tram" became a sign of the times and immortalized the name of its creator. And the tram became a symbol of the fatal era and wandered from work to work.

Application No. 1

Questions for analytical conversation.

1. What feeling does what you read evoke? What are the feelings of the hero?

How does the graphic design confirm this and how is it reflected at the level of syntax?

2. Prove that the ominous coloring is injected from the very beginning of the work.

3. Why is the poem called "The Lost Tram"? How do you understand the words of V. Ivanov “The displacement and connection of all earthly places ever seen by the poet is accompanied by the same displacement of times”? Justify your answer.

4. Prove that the path of the lost tram is the path to the city and the world of the dead.

6. Literary critics note: “Starting with “overcoming symbolism”, Gumilyov returned to it using symbols; acmeistic dispassion for public life has given way to a broken soul, full of a sense of impending cataclysm.” Find the symbols and prove the validity of this statement.

7. Please note that this work is characterized by a special metaphor. Give examples of metaphors. What does the poet achieve by using this artistic means? What is it trying to emphasize?

9. Remember, what other literary and artistic movement preceded surrealism?

10. Now it is not surprising the appearance in Gumilev's poem, not connected, at first glance, with the plot of Mashenka and the Empress. But maybe you have a literary association? Who are we talking about?

11. Let's return to the last lines of the work. How do you understand them?

Application №2

MESSAGE FROM K. YUON'S PICTURE "NEW PLANET".

K. Yuon is a Russian artist of the early 20th century, a contemporary of N. Gumilyov. The painting "New Planet" was painted in 1921. It is a symbolic and allegorical composition in the poster genre.

In addition, it should be remembered that the artist's work was formed in that period of Russian art, when symbolism was the dominant trend. The events of October are presented here on a cosmic scale. The new planet is Soviet Russia, the appearance of which shocked the universe and shifted the luminaries from their paths.

Tiny figurines of people thrown to the ground in horror or stretching their arms to the sky flooded with mystical light are called to remind that the fate of one person is insignificant against the backdrop of world cataclysms.

Application №3

Handout

Nikolai Gumilyov

The poetics of late Gumilyov is enigmatic. As is known, the author of the "Pillar of Fire" departs from "pure" acmeism and returns - at least partially - to symbolism, although at the same time, some features of acmeistic poetics are preserved in his later work.

Exercise. Read a poem from the collection "Pillar of Fire".

Lost Tram

I was walking down an unfamiliar street

And suddenly I heard a crow's voice,

And the ringing of the lute, and distant thunders, -

A tram was flying in front of me.

How I jumped on his bandwagon

It was a mystery to me

In the air a fiery track

He left even in the light of day.

He raced like a dark, winged storm,

He got lost in the abyss of time...

Stop, wagon driver,

Stop the car now.

Late. We've gone over the wall

We slipped through a grove of palm trees

Across the Neva, across the Nile and the Seine

We thundered over three bridges.

And, flashing by the window frame,

Gave us an inquisitive look

The beggar old man - of course, the same one,

That he died in Beirut a year ago.

Where I am? So languid and so anxious

My heart beats in response:

“You see the station where you can

Buy a ticket to the India of the Spirit?

Signboard... bloodshot letters

They say: "Green", - I know, here

Instead of cabbage and instead of swede

Dead heads are for sale.

In a red shirt, with a face like an udder,

The executioner also cut off my head,

She lay with others

Here, in a slippery box, at the very bottom.

And in the alley there is a wooden fence,

A house with three windows and a gray lawn...

Stop, wagon driver,

Stop the car now.

Mashenka, you lived and sang here,

I, the groom, weaved a carpet,

Could it be that you died?

How you moaned in your room,

I'm with a powdered scythe

Went to introduce himself to the Empress

And I didn't see you again.

Now I understand: our freedom -

Only from there is the beating light,

People and shadows stand at the entrance

In the zoological garden of planets.

And immediately the wind is familiar and sweet,

And over the bridge flies at me

The rider's hand in an iron glove

And two hooves of his horse.

Faithful stronghold of Orthodoxy

Isaiah is embedded in the sky,

There I will serve a prayer for health

Mashenki and memorial service for me.

And yet forever the heart is gloomy,

And it's hard to breathe, and it hurts to live ...

Masha, I never thought

What can be so love and sadness.

March 1920

Why is the poem called "The Lost Tram"? How do you understand the words of V. Ivanov “The displacement and connection of all earthly places ever seen by the poet is accompanied by the same displacement of times”? Justify your answer.

Prove that the path of a lost tram is the path to the world of the dead.

Literary critics note: “Starting with “overcoming symbolism”, Gumilyov returned to it using symbols; acmeistic dispassion for public life has given way to a broken soul, full of a sense of impending cataclysm.” Find the symbols and prove the validity of this statement.

Please note that this work is characterized by a special metaphor. Give examples of metaphors. What does the poet achieve by using this artistic means? What is it trying to emphasize?

What is the reason for the appearance in Gumilyov's poem, not connected, at first glance, with the plot of Mashenka and the Empress. But maybe you have a literary association? Who are we talking about?

Let's look at the last lines of the piece. How do you understand them? What are the key words here? Why?

Application No. 4

Creative work of students.

CREATIVE WORK OF OLGA KONTSEDAL ON THE THEME

"ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN OF THE PLANETS"

The leading theme of Gumilyov's work "The Lost Tram" is the theme of death, a premonition of the apocalypse, catastrophe. Therefore, the central image of the poem can be considered the "Zoological Garden of the Planets." This is a metaphor-symbol and a metaphor-subject. Here acmeism and symbolism are intertwined. This image is a “semantic funnel”, the key to the whole work, the answer to the question “Where did the lost tram “fly away”?”.

The Zoological Garden of the Planets gives rise to complex associations: everything in this garden undergoes disastrous changes. The skull of Saturn is grinning; the moon howls like a she-wolf; Mars spreads like a bloody puddle; icy, deadly cold pours over Pluto. Heads cut off by the executioner fall from the inverted star bucket.

What a cosmic crash! This is the realm of death, it breathes cold and does not warm anyone "only from there the beating light."

The lyrical hero hovers over this world of evil and horror, surveying the past and the future. What does he see? “People and shadows stand at the entrance to the Zoological Garden of the Planets.

CREATIVE WORK OF VALENTINA ZAVRICHKO ON THE THEME

"ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN OF THE PLANETS"

The image of the "Zoological Garden of the Planets" can be represented as an allegory.

Ancient myths say: "The earth is supported by elephants."

This elephant is a symbol of a blooming, beautiful Earth. The world of joy, harmony, light is conveyed by warm, life-affirming tones. In this world there is a place for a house with three windows and a gray lawn and a multi-colored carpet woven by Masha.

But this world is fragile.

A moment ... And the "composition of parts of the earth" collapses!

In Bunin's letters, the history of the Titanic was not reflected in any way; he writes the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" three years and four months after the sinking of the ship. The steamer on which the gentleman is sailing is called "Atlantis", as the legendary island-state that has gone under water. In the same way, "Titanic" refers to the titans - mythical creatures who opposed themselves to the Greek gods, entered into a fight with them and lost. As one newspaper recalled, reacting to the symbolic name of the steamer, “Zeus overthrew the strong and daring titans with thunderous blows. The place of their last repentance was a gloomy abyss, darkness lying below the deepest depths of Tartarus.

There is a motive in the story, rather uncharacteristic for Bunin, the motive of premonition:

“The politely and elegantly bowed host, the remarkably elegant young man who met them, for a moment struck the gentleman from San Francisco: looking at him, the gentleman from San Francisco suddenly remembered that this night, among other confusion that besieged him in a dream, he I saw exactly this gentleman, exactly the same as this one, in the same business card with round edges and with the same mirror-combed head.
Surprised, he almost stopped. But since not even the mustard seed of any so-called mystical feelings remained in his soul for a long time, his surprise immediately faded: he jokingly told his wife and daughter about this strange coincidence of dream and reality, walking along the corridor of the hotel. The daughter, however, looked at him with alarm at that moment: her heart was suddenly squeezed by melancholy, a feeling of terrible loneliness on this alien, dark island ... "

Ivan Bunin."The Gentleman from San Francisco"

A story about how naive and deadly is the pride of a man of civilization, his self-confidence, his feeling that everything is subject to him. The gentleman from San Francisco, who calculates his entire journey, is faced with something that cannot be calculated - with death, and death is stronger. And the whole story is written under the sign of death.

“It is no coincidence that Bunin's hero has no name. This is a man of Western civilization. This is a consumer society man, as they would say now. This is a man of comfort and hotel thinking. He becomes a consumer, and for him, in general, listening to mass in Naples or shooting pigeons are all in the same row, these are all similar pleasures, about which he reflects with the same interest.

And Western civilization is on the brink of disaster—that seems to be the meaning of The Gentleman from San Francisco. Of course, this is not so much due to the death of the Titanic, which Bunin, of course, could not ignore.<...>The First World War seemed to mark for Bunin this very crisis of Western civilization.

Lev Sobolev

Nevertheless, Bunin also shows an alternative - these are the highlanders praying to the statue of the Virgin, or the fisherman Luigi. The simple life is still important to them.

Abstract

Vyacheslav Ivanov - poet, theorist of Russian symbolism - local, "circle" classic. He studied in Berlin with Theodor Mommsen, studied Roman history, and then retrained as a poet and turned from Rome to Greece. He began to study the history of religion - and, in particular, explained the origin of the ancient Greek tragedy through the cult of Dionysus. In his interpretation, Dionysus was a kind of forerunner of Christ: he is a dying and resurrecting god. The priestesses and worshipers of Dionysus who participated in the rites of the symbolic murder of the god were called maenads; during these rites they entered into sacred ecstasy. About this Ivanov wrote the poem "Manada", which was extremely popular:

Sorrow found and confusion on Manadu;
Her heart sank with sadness.
Motionless by the greedy cave
Became a verbless Manada.
He looks with a gloomy eye - and does not see;
Stuffy mouth opened - and does not breathe.

In the appeal of the maenad to God, a break in the rhythm stands out:

“I froze with a sharp-breasted rock,
Breaking the black mists
Carving a beam from blue abysses...
You are a massacre
slash
With a lightning tooth my stone, Dionysus!

Ivanov originally wrote this part of the poem for the tragedy "Niobe", which suggests that this text is not for reading, but for pronouncing. When the actress Valentina Shchegoleva first read "Manada" at Ivanov's party, everyone was delighted.

The rhythmic technique from "Manada" was remembered, then moved on to Mandelstam's verses and Chukovsky's "Barmaley". But where did he come from? Ivanov lectured on poetry and, according to the recollection of listeners, describing the rhythmic richness of Russian folklore, he cited the song “Oh you, canopy, my canopy” as an example, which could well serve as a source for the rhythm of “Manada”.

Abstract

"The Lost Tram" is the most mysterious poem by Nikolai Gumilyov. The poet wrote it in 40 minutes: he said that someone seemed to dictate it to him without a single blot. The poem obviously describes a dream, but what does this dream mean? It is known that in literature the tram is a symbol of the movement of history; and with Gumilyov it becomes a symbol of the Russian revolution. Gumilyov really jumped on the bandwagon of the Russian revolution: in 1917 he was not in Russia, but in 1918 he returned, although he was dissuaded. At that moment, it was no longer possible to turn off the path of the revolution, just as a tram cannot turn off.

“For Gumilyov, an acmeist who always strives for clarity, clarity of a poetic plot, this story about a dream is really quite surprising, because this is an impressionistic, confused story - these are dying verses, by and large.”

Dmitry Bykov

The tram takes the author through three key moments in human history: across the Neva, where the October Revolution took place, across the Seine, where the French Revolution took place, and takes him to the Nile, where, beginning with the flight of the Jews from Egypt, the centuries-old struggle against slavery was born.

But there are two specifically Russian subtexts in the poem - Pushkin's. The first is The Captain's Daughter.

“This is a hint at the fate of a person in the revolution, at the fate of Grinev. His biography here is guessed unusually accurately. A man who has firm ideas about honor, a man who answers Pugachev: “Think for yourself how I can swear to you,” this is, in fact, Gumilyov in 1918 and 1919, a man with an iron officer’s code of honor, who found himself in become Pugachev. And all he can do here is give lectures to the studio students and translate for Gorky's World Literature by Coleridge or Voltaire.

Dmitry Bykov

The second Pushkin subtext, more unexpected, is The Bronze Horseman.

“After all, what, in fact, is Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman about? Of course, not about the fact that the little man is paying for the pride of Peter, who built the city on the Neva. The entire figurative structure of Pushkin's poem says that Peter is right, because as a result, St. Petersburg towers and gardens were erected over the shelter of the wretched Finn. But the point is that the little man is paying for this, and he is paying not for Petersburg, but for the violence of the enslaved elements. When the enslaved Neva goes back to the city, this is described in the same terms in which the uprising is described in The Captain's Daughter. The flood in the Bronze Horseman is a Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless, and Evgeny becomes a victim of this revolution, because his beloved has died.

Dmitry Bykov

Blok and Gumilyov have little in common, but they have a common perception of the revolution: a revolution is the death of a woman, a Beautiful Lady, a Stranger, Katya, Parasha or Masha. The hero of Gumilyov tries to save his beloved and realizes that he himself is doomed.

“The revolution, this stray tram that rolls through living destinies, does not bring freedom, but carries a terrible predestination. All the time I want to shout: “Stop, wagon driver, stop the car now,” but he does not stop, because the revolution has its own law, not human. And our freedom is only a beating light from there, only a heavenly promise, only stellar messages that we are trying to decipher. There is no freedom on earth, there is no freedom in reality - freedom is always from somewhere. And in the zoological garden of the planets, the magical cosmic future.”

Dmitry Bykov

"The Lost Tram" is the first and only suggestive poem written by the rationalist Gumilyov. It seemed to be dictated to him from the future, and the poet would have written in this manner later, but Gumilyov's insights and India of the spirit remained unknown to us.

Abstract

It is logical to assume that the authorities in the 1930s had to hide information about mass repressions, such as the Holodomor. It is hard to imagine, for example, a theatrical play about the Gulag, but there was such a thing - and even became a theatrical hit in 1935. This is the play "Aristocrats" by Nikolai Pogodin. The playwright wrote it to order, they called him, offered to write a work about prisoners - the builders of the White Sea Canal, they gave him a day to think, and he did not refuse.

The construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal was indicative: it was supposed to demonstrate the advantages of the Soviet regime and the success of industrialization. At the same time, it was carried out at a difficult time - and they decided to build without imported equipment, expensive materials and by using prisoners whose work was not paid. Maxim Gorky was inspired by the construction site, and 120 Soviet writers set off on a journey through the LBC, who then described the idealized life of the builders and the reforging of former criminals.

After returning from the White Sea Canal, Pogodin decided to write a comedy about the Gulag. The "aristocrats" from its name are two groups of prisoners who refuse to be reforged: one is former criminals, the other is former intellectuals.

“Since it was a comedy, Nikolai Pogodin did his best to entertain the audience. There are a lot of puns, thieves' language, witty jokes and various attractions in the play. For example, the virtuosity of pocket fraud is repeatedly demonstrated on stage. The heroes are constantly stealing something from someone, hiding it, and some important objects - they change hands many times over the course of several seconds of the stage action. Or the prisoners just as easily deceive the camp authorities. For example, the main character Kostya Kapitan, in order to arrange a date with the girl he is in love with, deceives the warden, dresses up as a girl, goes to bed in a scarf and thus amuses the Soviet public.
In addition, there were deliberately brutal moments in the play, which were supposed to frap the Soviet public. The heroes openly admit to murders, teach each other fatal blows, and in one of the scenes the hero, refusing to work, cripples himself: he takes a knife, tears his shirt and cuts his chest and arms.

Ilya Venyavkin

Everything ends well: the criminals begin to work together and compete for the banner of the shock workers of labor, and the intellectuals use their special knowledge in design. The real heroes are the Chekists - "engineers of human souls" who can find an approach to a person so that he is reborn. At the end, the play becomes even sentimental: the reforged criminals cry.

“Thus, the Gulag was openly shown to the Soviet public. But at the same time, he appeared as another platform for creating a new person: no horrors were shown that really happened there, and in a rather cheerful and light atmosphere, the main characters told about their rebirth.
It couldn't go on for too long. Literally a year after the play hit the stage, official rhetoric took another turn. In 1936, the first Moscow show trial took place against Zinoviev and Kamenev. And the newspapers changed their tone dramatically. It turned out that it was impossible to talk more about the correction of criminals. The rhetoric shifted from correcting misguided citizens to ruthlessly rooting out enemies. It was already impossible to imagine on the Soviet stage a story about how a convicted person repented and was reborn. And Pogodin's play was quietly removed from the repertoire.

Ilya Venyavkin 

Abstract

"Christmas Romance" of 1961 or 1962 is one of Joseph Brodsky's calling cards; he did not stop reading this poem even in exile.

Floats in inexplicable anguish
in the midst of a brick garden
night boat unquenchable
from Alexander Garden,
night flashlight unsociable,
like a yellow rose
over the heads of your loved ones,
at the feet of passers-by.

What is this flashlight? This, of course, is not the Eternal Flame, which has not yet been in the Alexander Garden. Most likely the moon. The moon looks like a yellow rose, and the moon is shaped like the sail of a ship that sails in the Moscow night sky. Sleepwalkers are sleepwalkers, and the word "newlywed" suggests a honeymoon; the “yellow staircase” is a staircase illuminated by moonlight, and the moon also looks like a “night cake”.

But why does the moon appear in the Christmas poem and not the star? Because in the sky above the Alexander Garden there is already a star - the Kremlin one. And Brodsky resorts to substitution, which becomes an important device in the poem. We remember that Brodsky is from Petersburg. It is not named in the poem, but the river is constantly implied, yellow is the color of Dostoevsky's Petersburg, the poet calls the city the capital. There is also an Alexander Garden in St. Petersburg, near the Admiralty, on the spire of which there is a boat. Thus, there is one more doubling in the poem - these are two capitals: the real capital, Petersburg, and the illusory one - Moscow.

“And then the time has come to ask, perhaps, the most important question - why does Brodsky need a chain of these doublings? The answer is actually very simple. The poem is called "Christmas romance", and in the finale the words "Your New Year in dark blue" appear. Here it is, the key doubling, the main doubling. Muscovites, contemporary with Brodsky in 1962, Petersburgers, and indeed all Soviet people in general, celebrated not the main, not a real holiday. According to Brodsky, the real holiday is Christmas. Instead, they celebrated a substitute holiday, they celebrated the New Year.
And in the light of this interpretation, let's carefully look again at the end of the poem:

Your New Year in dark blue
wave amid the noise of the city
floats in an inexplicable longing,
like life starts again
as if there will be light and glory,
good day and plenty of bread,
as if life will swing to the right,
swinging to the left.

In these final lines are collected motifs associated with Christ. “As if life would begin again” – resurrection. “Light and Glory” are motifs associated in the Christian tradition with the figure of Jesus Christ. “Have a good day and plenty of bread” is the famous story about the five loaves. But all these images associated with Christ and Christmas are accompanied by a terrible and tragic “as if”. As if, because in this country this year, instead of Christmas, they celebrate the New Year.

Oleg Lekmanov 

Abstract

By 1969, Fazil Iskander was already a well-known writer, the author of the satirical "Constellation of Kozlotur". The Thaw creative freedom was gradually shrinking - the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel had already taken place - and there were few ways of creative realization left: samizdat, tamizdat or Aesopian language. He wrote the story "Summer Day".

"In the case of Aesopian literature, the creative task of the artist was twofold - both to write what you want as best and as clearly as possible, and to please the censors in order to get the text into print."

Alexander Zholkovsky

The narrator meets a handsome German tourist, who tells how the Gestapo tried to convince him to cooperate during the war years. He does not act like a hero, but he does not agree to inform on his colleagues - for the sake of "preserving the moral muscles of the nation." However, morality is still not going smoothly: the hero lies to his wife and almost kills a friend suspected of betrayal.

“On careful reading, it turns out that the word, literature, literature is at the center of the narrative. And not just because literature likes to talk about itself, to be metaliterature, but also in a more essential, existential and literary original sense. The physicist and his friend did not just write anti-Hitler leaflets, which is already some kind of literary act. But they ridiculed the bad German language and the style of Mein Kampf there. That is, they criticized the Fuhrer from an aesthetic and literary point of view. Further, a German speaks to a narrator in excellent Russian, which he learned in order to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, great authors who wrote on ethical topics.
Thus, Iskander solves two central tasks at once. This German physicist is essentially a Russian intellectual in disguise, since the whole situation of the story is an artificial, Aesopian disguised Soviet situation: it says "Gestapo" - read "KGB". Aesop's writing is ready to disguise the actual plot as a fairy tale, as life on another planet, as ancient times, as events in the world of insects, but in such a way that everything is perfectly recognizable to the reader.

Alexander Zholkovsky

And the “intermediate” position of the German physicist, who refuses both direct cooperation with the Gestapo and direct heroism, repeats the half-heartedness of the situation in which the writer who writes in Aesop, that is, Iskander himself, finds himself.

The German physicist in the story has a negative double - this is a pink Soviet pensioner sitting at a nearby table in a cafe and talking about literature with an elderly woman with the obvious goal of showing his education and power.

“He is also aged, which means he also survived the era of totalitarianism (in his case, Stalinism) and also loves literature. But he has learned absolutely nothing, he cannot read at all, and as a result he still believes in Soviet newspapers. His attention to the word is purely superficial, formal, fruitless. His interest, his interest in literature, is not ethical, not serious, not existential, but directed exclusively to power games with a pitiful and helpless woman.

Alexander Zholkovsky 

Abstract

Contrary to the rumors that appeared after the publication of "House on the Embankment" in 1976 in the journal "Friendship of Peoples", this story (or a short novel) easily passed the censorship. The action takes place in three time slices: 1937, 1947, 1972. Stalin's name is never mentioned in the novel, but everyone understands that the novel is about Stalinism, fear, political choice and the moral collapse of a person who has entered into a deal with the system.

The story of Trifonov himself and his work is sewn into the novel. In 1950, at the height of the anti-Semitic campaign against cosmopolitans, he wrote the opportunistic story "Students" - about MSU students who encounter and condemn cosmopolitan teachers. Thus, Trifonov stepped over himself: his parents were repressed. "Students" receive the Stalin Prize, and Trifonov perceives this success as a catastrophe and falls silent for a long time.

The hero of The House on the Embankment, Vadim Glebov, must make a choice: he is with his teacher Ganchuk, who has fallen under a political campaign, or not with him. At the same time, Ganchuk is not an angel - and it is easy to retreat, but betraying him, you betray yourself. In another timeline, the hero breaks the lives of classmates by denouncing them.

“And Trifonov begins to reveal the mechanisms of political terror. Political terror, according to Trifonov, is not based on ideals, albeit misunderstood, and not even on simple human weakness, but is steeply based on envy.<...>The hero Glebov actually lives in a barracks house. And he envies the children of high-ranking nomenklatura figures who study with him in the same class. He dreams of living in the Waterfront House. This is a symbol of Soviet power, this is a symbol of Soviet success, this is a symbol of power, to which he wants to join, and he sets himself the goal - he will live in the House on the embankment.

And with his teacher Ganchuk, he is connected not so much by relations of scientific continuity, but by the dream of getting into the House on the embankment, where this Ganchuk lives. For the sake of this, a love affair unfolds, and he betrays love. For the sake of this, his scientific career unfolds, and he betrays science. For this he is either ready or not ready to betray his teacher.

Alexander Arkhangelsky

A chance will save the hero from direct betrayal, but he can no longer become a man again. And Trifonov's novel is saved from excessive moralism by the fact that the hero is a projection of the writer himself. Merciless to himself, he turns out to have the right to present moral scores to his time.

The poetics of late Gumilyov is enigmatic.

As you know, the author of the "Pillar of Fire" departs from "pure" acmeism and returns - at least partially - to symbolism, although at the same time some features of acmeist poetics are preserved in his later work. However, a complex (and purely individual) synthesis of symbolist and acmeist principles, combined with an increasingly complex religious and philosophical understanding of the place and role of man in being, gives rise to many difficulties in perceiving the artistic world of late Gumilyov as a single mental and aesthetic whole.

So, let's try to figure it out.

This poem is about a journey into oneself, about knowing oneself as an "other". The lyrical hero of The Lost Tram, having come into contact with his "former lives", observes them in the most direct way, therefore Gumilyov's appeal to the medieval genre of vision, which is relatively rare in the literature of the 20th century, is quite natural and natural.

For the lyrical hero of the poem, who is very close to its author, a "direct" visual perception of his "former lives" opens up. This manifested itself with no less brightness in the poems "Memory" (written in July 1919) and "Lost Tram" (written in March 1920), and the first poem in this sense is even more revealing, therefore, before considering in more detail "Lost tram", it is necessary to refer to this work, especially since both poems are close textually, to which A. A. Akhmatova drew attention back in 1926.

"Memory" opens with the words:

Only snakes shed their skins
So that the soul grows old and grows.
We, alas, are not like snakes,
We change souls, not bodies.

Memory, you are the hand of a giantess
You lead life like a horse by the bridle,
You tell me about the ones before
They lived in this body before me.

According to Gumilyov, the human personality lives many lives and, accordingly, "changes" many souls, and the lyrical hero, remembering his former individualities (in fact, these are the stages of his life path), separates them from his current "I". They lived before him, in other words, the individual "I" turns out to be not identical with the personality, which, according to Gumilyov, is not reducible either to the soul, or to certain individual qualities, or even to the human "I": the lyrical hero of "Memory" about his former incarnations speaks in the third person - "he", separating their individual "I" from his own.

Let us now turn to The Lost Tram. Like the hero of the most famous vision in Western European literature, Dante's Comedy, the lyrical hero of the poem from the very beginning finds himself in an unfamiliar area. But if Dante sees a forest in front of him, then Gumilyov's landscape is emphatically urbanized:

I was walking down an unfamiliar street
And suddenly I heard a crow's voice,
And lute chimes and distant thunders,
A tram was flying in front of me.

How I jumped on his bandwagon
It was a mystery to me
In the air a fiery track
He left even in the light of day.

It would seem that this tram is similar to any ordinary carriage on rails. With this understanding, “lute chimes” and “distant thunders” are a poetic description of ordinary sounds that accompany the movement of a tram, and a “fiery path” is just an electric spark, but the very genre of vision and all further action force us to discover something fundamentally different in this description. In front of us is a mystical tram, and "lute chimes", and "distant thunders", and "fiery path" take on a special meaning in this context. All this should be taken not metaphorically, but literally: it is the lute, it is thunder, it is fire. In this case, we face a certain mystical monster, the appearance of which is accompanied by the cry of crows, that is, the traditional sign of fate and danger.

But the peculiarity of Gumilyov's character was precisely in the fact that he loved danger, consciously strove for it, admired it. He conveyed the same character trait to his lyrical hero, in this case an autobiographical one. And getting inside the tram, exuding thunder and fire (but also "lute chimes" - a sign of sophistication and sophistication), the lyrical hero consciously goes towards the dangerous and unknown. All this is quite consistent with the genre of the ballad in which the poem is written. The syncretic combination of the two genres (ballads and visions) leads to the neighborhood in the artistic world of the poem of the drama of the plot, the discontinuity of the narration, the "terrible", unsaid, romantic-mysterious (the romantic tradition was very important for Gumilyov), in other words, what is inherent in the ballad, - the neighborhood of all this with mystical insights and wanderings, with immersion in a not quite material world, which is typical for the genre of vision.

He raced like a dark, winged storm,
He got lost in the abyss of time...
Stop, wagon driver,
Stop the car now.

Late. We've gone over the wall
We slipped through a grove of palm trees
Across the Neva, across the Nile and the Seine
We thundered over three bridges.

A lost tram turns out to be outside of time and space. It turns out to be a kind of mystical time machine, freely moving into chronotopes associated with the "former lives" of the lyrical hero.

And, flashing by the window frame,
Gave us an inquisitive look
The beggar old man - of course the same one,
That he died in Beirut a year ago.

Where I am? So languid and so anxious
My heart beats in response:
You see the station where you can
Buy a ticket to the India of the Spirit?

Signboard... bloodshot letters
They say - green - I know, here
Instead of cabbage and instead of swede
Dead heads are for sale.

In a red shirt, with a face like an udder,
The executioner also cut off my head,
She lay with others
Here, in a slippery box, at the very bottom.

If "a year ago" is counted from the "current life" of the lyrical hero, then the description of the execution clearly refers to an era much more distant. However, the chronotope here can hardly be precisely defined at all. And the likeness of the face to the udder, apparently, was inspired by the reading of F. Rabelais, who quite often "swapped" the top and bottom. As you know, Gumilyov called Rabelais among the four most important writers for the development of acmeism, but what is being borrowed here is not the "wise physiology" that the head of the acmeist workshop attributed to this author, and not the ambivalent laughter glorified by M. M. Bakhtin, but the visual discredit of the character, when instead of a face, he has something disgusting.

At the same time, the combination of sales of goals, red shirt and green shop does not make it possible to accurately determine the chronotope. The very fact of the sale of heads, moreover, in such an ordinary place as a green shop, perhaps testifies to the events of the French Revolution. So, Thomas Carlyle provides information about the manufacture at that time of trousers from the skin of guillotined men (women's skin was not good because it was too soft), and from the heads of guillotined women - blond wigs (perruques blondes). But the executioners at that time performed their duties not in red shirts, but in camisoles. In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to look at one of the many engravings depicting guillotining. At the same time, there may not be strict historical accuracy in a lyrical work.

So, the visionary becomes a witness to the execution of his former "I", and this whole scene resembles the finale of Gumilyov's story "African Hunt": "And at night I dreamed that for participating in some kind of Abyssinian palace coup they cut off my head, and I, bleeding I applaud the skill of the executioner and rejoice at how simple, good and not at all painful it all is.

Knowing the future fate of the poet, one can only wonder how clearly he foresaw his own death. There is a prediction of the future through the past. Akhmatova wrote: "Gumilyov is a poet not yet read. A visionary and a prophet. He predicted his death with details down to the autumn grass." However, in this and other prophecies of Gumilyov cited by Anna Andreevna, it is only and exclusively about himself. He really was both a visionary and a prophet, but he prophesied only about himself. Unlike, for example, Lermontov's "Prediction", which speaks of the fate of all of Russia, or Blok's "Voice from the Choir", where it is about the apocalyptic future of the world and humanity.

And one more feature of both of the above episodes with decapitation: there is no pain in them at all. In "The African Hunt" this is stated directly, in "The Lost Tram" the executioner does not cut off the head, does not cut it off, does not even cut it off, but cuts it off. You can cut off something superfluous that interferes, for example, tops from the same swede. And instead of the expected sensation of pain - humiliation at the bottom of a slippery box. All this is reminiscent not so much of an execution as such, but of a terrible dream about an execution. Such a somewhat detached manner in depicting one's own death, when everything that happens seems "not completely" material, is quite consistent with the genre of vision. However, the fragility of vision does not exclude the material concreteness of the slippery box and the dead heads in it.

It should also be noted that, unlike the poem "Memory", where the lyrical hero speaks of his former incarnations in the third person, in "The Lost Tram" there is no such linguistic distance between the former "I" of the visionary and his current "I" . The lyrical hero immediately and finally accepts his former individuality - into himself. There is a union of all these individualities into a kind of personal (but supra-individual) syncretic whole. And the fact that the visionary says “I” about his previous incarnations testifies to their complete and final acceptance. If the lyrical hero of "Memory" can love or not love his "past existences", and therefore speaks of them in the third person, then for the lyrical hero of "The Lost Tram" this is absolutely impossible. If in "Memory" - the recollection of their former individualities, then in "The Lost Tram" - their merging with the individual "I" of the visionary, the extension of the very concept of "I" to them.

And the execution of the "former incarnation" of the lyrical hero turns out to be a step on the way to a kind of "India of the Spirit" ... The theme of India for Gumilyov is by no means accidental. So, in the poem "Great Memory" he wrote:

And that's all life! Whirling, singing,
Seas, deserts, cities,
flickering reflection
Lost forever...

When, finally, having risen
From sleep, I will be me again, -
A simple Indian who dozed off
On a sacred evening by the stream?

However, India is not real here. In general, the acmeistic love of life inherent even in the late Gumilyov is directly opposite to the Indian worldview, for which the goal is getting rid of life, leaving it. Therefore, the "India of the Spirit" of the "simple Indian" is a tribute to the European tradition.

At the same time, it is impossible not to mention that Gumilyov was rather uncomfortable in the “eastern world” he himself glorified. Indicative in this sense is the poem "Eight Lines":

Not a rustle of midnight distances,
Not the songs that mother sang
We never understood
Something worth understanding.

The return from esoteric beauties and exoticism to Russia is truly a discovery for the poet. And we see the same return in the ballad "The Lost Tram".

The action is transferred to Petersburg at the end of the 18th century. The time can be determined quite accurately, since the monument to Peter I, the "Bronze Horseman", was opened in 1782, and Catherine II, whom the lyrical hero "with a powdered scythe went to introduce himself", died in 1796. Finding herself in the chronotope of St. Petersburg at the end of the 18th century, the tram stops wandering through the "former lives" of the lyrical hero and finally stops. The goal of traveling through time and space has been achieved.

And the goal is Mashenka and her world.

It is characteristic that it is here that the wagon driver is mentioned for the last time. Gumilyov's vision has some common features with Dante's Comedy, in which he calls his companion Virgil "duca" - "leader". The lyrical hero of "The Lost Tram" also has a "leader", but this leader is not so much personally and exclusively for him, as for the entire tram, the leader for the carriage. And Mashenka in Gumilyov plays the role of Beatrice in many ways. And just as Dante's driver disappears before the appearance of the true guide, Beatrice (Purgatory, XXX, 49-51), Gumilyov's car driver is mentioned for the last time before the first mention of Mashenka.

It should be noted that the parallel with Dante for Gumilyov is by no means accidental. Acmeists showed a special interest in the Italian writer, suffice it to recall A. A. Akhmatova and O. E. Mandelstam.

Masha's world is the world of Orthodoxy. The admiration of the Orthodox "stronghold" of St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the prayer service "for Mashenka's health" testify to the very strong influence of Orthodoxy on the hero of the poem.

It is also important to note that the firmly expressed knowledge of the lyrical hero that he will serve a prayer service for Mashenka’s health and a memorial service on his own, obviously excludes Akhmatova’s version, which is very popular among researchers of Gumilyov’s work, according to which “in the form of a flying horseman” (Peter I) before the lyrical hero is death. This statement was substantiated by the fact that in a textually very similar place in the poem "Memory" immediately after the appearance of the "strange" wind, the hero dies. At the same time, it was not taken into account that in the artistic world of Gumilyov, the confidence firmly expressed by the lyrical hero that he would do something, in essence, means a prophecy that simply cannot but come true. So, for example, in the finale of the poem "Memory", to which Akhmatova referred, substantiating her version, the death of the lyrical hero is predicted in this way, therefore the death of the visionary in "The Lost Tram" before the prayer for health and memorial service is absolutely impossible.

In connection with the parallel "Mashenka - Beatrice", the following lines from Gumilev's poem cycle "Beatrice", first published in 1909, deserve attention:

There lived a restless artist,
In the world of evil faces -
Sinner, debauchee, atheist,
But he loved Beatrice.

To call Dante an atheist, even before the influence of Beatrice or during the period of the weakening of this influence, is clearly impossible. Obviously, this is not about Dante at all. And indeed, in this poetic cycle, according to Akhmatova, we are talking about her. It was she who played the role of Beatrice for Gumilyov. But Beatrice is not Dante's, but somewhat different, Gumilyov's, who taught him, an atheist, faith.

Akhmatova recalled: "In 1916, when I regretted that everything had turned out so strange, he said:" No, you taught me to believe in God and love Russia. "And in the poem" The Lost Tram "Mashenka, despite the fact that she is not at all like Akhmatova, she plays the same role, she does not specifically teach anything, but in her world the love of a lyrical hero for Russia and faith in God become natural and necessary.

Indicative of the characterization of the lyrical hero is the appearance of the Bronze Horseman. The visionary, as it were, is put in the place of Pushkin's Eugene. But his reaction to such a situation is just the opposite. He not only does not run from under the hooves, but even rejoices at the possible death. Death would be sweet for him, that's why the "sweet" wind appears. He endowed the lyrical hero of his poem with the desire to meet death joyfully and courageously, to enjoy it, and to evoke pity in others. This manifested itself both in the above-quoted passage from the "African Hunt", and in the episode from "The Lost Tram" with the chopping off of heads, and, for example, in the poem "Poisoned":

Me from paradise, cool paradise,
You can see the white reflections of the day ...
And it's sweet for me - don't cry, dear, -
Know that you poisoned me.

At the same time, a comparison of the Bronze Horseman by Gumilyov with Pushkin's "idol on a bronze horse" reveals their difference. It is not by chance that Pushkin's Horseman rides with a roar and a heavy ringing. He carries a huge burden, he is able to crush everything in his path.
And Gumilyov has something completely different:

And immediately the wind is familiar and sweet,
And over the bridge flies at me
The rider's hand in an iron glove
And two hooves of his horse.

No rumble. No heaviness. The rider is flying. It flies just like the "tram flew" at the beginning of the poem. The rider (like the tram that rushes through the grove of palm trees, countries and continents) has no weight. It flies completely silently towards the visionary, but it is not scary, but joyful. This feeling of weightless flight is achieved by metonymic "cutting" both the Horseman himself and his horse. It flies at the same time - and only the hand, and the whole Rider; only two hooves visible to the visionary fly, and the whole horse. Not a monolithic heaviness, but a weightless flight of parts and the whole.

The Bronze Horseman here is associated not so much with the specifics of the personality of Peter I, but with the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200ba monarchy, to which Gumilyov, as you know, was very positive. The episode under consideration is largely polemical in relation to a similar scene from A. Bely's "Petersburg", where the author's assessment of the Bronze Horseman, as well as the Senate and the Synod as manifestations of imperial state power that suppress a person, is unambiguously negative. In contrast, the "sweetness" of the meeting with the Bronze Horseman and prayers in the "stronghold of Orthodoxy" emphasize the loyalty of the lyrical hero to the state-monarchical symbols, their acceptance. At the same time, the position of the lyrical hero is ambiguous, since his separation from Mashenka is somehow connected with the presentation to the empress, in other words, the state power, according to Gumilyov, still suppresses a person, although the attitude towards it is positive. Such an interpretation of the "man-state" problem is very reminiscent of Pushkin's ("The Captain's Daughter").

S. P. Bobrov was the first to draw attention to the roll call of these two works in his 1922 review of Gumilev's Pillar of Fire. However, the differences are also significant. Gumilyov "takes away" from Pushkin's Pugachev (counselor) his execution and "transfers" it to the lyrical hero. The same thing happens with the presentation of the lyrical hero to the empress, instead of Pushkin's Mashenka. Perhaps, here the acmeistic desire, which was preserved in the late Gumilyov, to experience everything personally, to “absorb” this experience, also manifested itself. But the drama of the finale of Gumilev's poem contrasts sharply with the successful conclusion of "The Captain's Daughter" with the wedding of Mashenka and Grinev. In The Lost Tram, the dramatic denouement is also predetermined by the confusion and absurdity of three revolutionary eras: 1917, the era of the Great French Revolution (presumably) and the era of the Pugachev Rebellion; the "confusion" of "former lives" and chronotopes is largely the result of being in revolutionary absurdity.

And the metonymic "dismemberment" of the Bronze Horseman, apparently, is associated with the weakening of the Russian monarchy at the beginning of the 20th century: "dismemberment" precedes direct disintegration ... In addition, the "weightlessness" of the Bronze Horseman, like the "weightlessness" of the tram, is associated with the specifics of the genre of vision . The world seen from inside the tram is a world, although earthly, but not entirely material, it is a world where pain and physical suffering are materially imperceptible, it is a world where there are no sounds. The only sounds that do not come from the mouth of the visionary himself are the sounds that precede him getting inside the tram, and the sounds produced by the tram itself, which on the "three bridges" suddenly gain weight and "rattle" like an ordinary car on rails. Apparently, it was important for Gumilyov to emphasize here the "reality" of being on the Neva, the Nile and the Seine, the "reality" of the geographical exploration of the world.

But - the heads are cut off silently, the rider flies silently, and all the appeals of the lyrical hero to the carriage driver and to Masha remain unanswered. The visionary is surrounded by complete dumbness, and this makes it possible to assume that the very idea of ​​traveling through time and space was inspired by silent cinematography to Gumilyov. In this case, the change of chronotopes corresponds to the change of episodes during film editing. However, sounds can hardly penetrate through the glass of a tram, so the soundlessness of the outside world can also be explained in a “natural” way.

One way or another, but the dumbness surrounding the lyrical hero of "The Lost Tram" resembles the dumbness of Blok's vision "Sometimes before evening ...":

Evening sometimes
I went down the mountain at dusk,
And here in front of me - behind the darkness -
Features sad sisters.

She walks silently
Behind her, the darkness moves,
And along the valleys, along the ravines
Breasts sigh without number.

- Sister, from where in the rain and cold
You go with the sad crowd,
Who was driven out by hunger with scourges
To the graves of a nomadic life?

Here she came, she stopped
And raised the torch in the darkness,
And a quiet light lit up
All that is invisible on earth.

And there, in the roadside ditches,
I, shuddering, saw
Features of torment impossible
And the writhing of weakened bodies.

And again the stuffy torch is lowered,
And, smiling at me, passed -
The same smoky and airy
Like surrounding darkness.

But I remember these faces
And the silence of empty orbits,
And the doomed string
Always in front of me.

A. A. Blok's visionary also has his "Beatrice", "sister", to whom he addresses with a question, but does not receive an answer. Silent is the crowd of hungry people, silent is their torment in the roadside ditches. But if Blok’s silence emphasizes the tragedy of a foreseeable apocalyptic doom, then Gumilyov’s soundlessness of the worlds opening before the lyrical hero is connected with the impermeability of the barrier between them and the visionary. He would like to cross this barrier in order to completely and completely remain in Mashenka's world, but he cannot. The closed space of the tram turns out to be a kind of extra-chronotopic trap, a cage from which there is no way out. The question arises whether this cell is connected with the "zoological garden of the planets", at the entrance to which there are people and shadows?

It is also noteworthy that in the text of the autograph of "The Lost Tram", stored in the Lesman collection, instead of "people and shadows" there is "people and animals", and it is natural for animals to be in the zoological garden, but by no means as spectators. Thus, the lyrical hero turns out to be a prisoner of his "mystical cage", just as people are prisoners of the cosmic "zoological garden". True, there, in space, is the only, according to Gumilyov, source of human freedom, but the fact is that the one who "gives" freedom can take it away in the future ...

Indicative in this sense are the lines from the draft autograph of the poem "The Word", which in 1919 Gumilyov presented to his father-in-law N. A. Engelhardt:

Former hell seemed to us a paradise,
We hired the devil as a servant
Because we do not distinguish
Evil from good and from the abyss on high.

The lyrical hero of "The Lost Tram", who turned out to be a prisoner of his mystical "cage", a lost chronotopic world, is very reminiscent of the lyrical hero of Gumilyov's poem "Stockholm", written in 1917, and the hero suddenly "realized" that he was "lost forever. In the blind transitions of spaces and times".

The same understanding of the word "forever" is found in "The Lost Tram", when the lyrical hero of the poem finally reaches the union in one consciousness of his previous individualities. At the same time, some of its super-individual features are also revealed:

And yet forever the heart is gloomy,
And it's hard to breathe, and it hurts to live ...

In whatever era the hero of the poem lives, no matter how many lives and souls he “passes” through himself, gloominess did not leave his heart, and it was just as difficult and painful for him to breathe and live as it is now, during the personal “unification” of individualities. . And suddenly - without any transition - insight. Suddenly, the visionary says that in none of his previous lives he even suspected that love could be like this. And at the same time, there is not a shadow of exoticism here, even at the level of rhyme. The most banal verbal rhyme for "it": "to live", "to love", "to be sad". And - an unexpected realization of the absolute exclusivity of this love. Thus, the final result and acquisition of Gumilev's vision is precisely love, just as in Dante's vision:

Here the high spirit took off;
But passion and will already strove for me,
As if the wheel is given an even turn,

Love that moves the sun and luminaries.

But if in Dante's "Comedy" love is understood in a Christian way, then in "The Lost Tramway" the lyrical hero's finding love for Mashenka does not mean that he has acquired the fullness of Christian love. And this is no coincidence. If the goal of the visionary for Dante is the knowledge of the Divine world order and salvation, then the goal for Gumilyov is the knowledge of his "former lives" and the achievement of personal happiness, which turns out (and irrevocably) in the past, in the 18th century. Hence the dramatic hopelessness of the finale.

But even such an ending by no means excludes the lyrical hero from gaining vitality through initiation to true love. As a result of a mystical journey, he cognizes himself, removing himself from his knowing "I" - himself, but in the past, and, in addition, affirms his love for the world:

There is a God, there is a world, they live forever,
And the life of people is instantaneous and miserable,
But a person contains everything,
Who loves the world and believes in God.

These lines from Gumilyov's poem "Fra Beato Angelico", written in 1912, are quite comparable with the artistic world of late Gumilyov, in particular with the world of "The Lost Tram". If traveling through time is nothing but a journey into oneself, then traveling through space signifies an anti-gnostic, and therefore anti-symbolist acceptance of the world. A person contains the world and thus not only does not reject it, but accepts it. And if the containment of God (the Eucharist) is a physical process, then for Gumilyov the containment of the world is also a physical process, and the journey turns out to be only a form of taking the world into oneself. Thus, in The African Hunt, written in 1914, the killing of exotic African animals strengthens the narrator's connection with the world: "At night, lying on a straw mat, I thought for a long time why I do not feel any remorse, killing animals for fun, and why my blood connection with the world is only strengthened by these murders. But for the late Gumilyov, the acceptance of something means mastery, physical empathy with what is accepted. That is why the Neva, the Nile and the Seine were needed, because he was on them, accepted them into his individual world and strengthened the connection with the whole through a physical connection with parts of the world. But the fullness of earthly love (albeit in the past) and the fullness of communication with the world - this is acmeism.

At the same time, the picture of the world in Gumilyov's vision, as has been repeatedly pointed out, is not acmeistic, but rather symbolic (the intangible fragility and ephemeral nature of the artistic space of the poem and the symbolic ambiguity of images are indicative). In addition, freedom, understood as light emanating from the cosmos, is a clear sign of the symbolist worldview. However, the late Gumilyov's return to symbolism is as incomplete as it is inconsistent. And the fact that the quite "ordinary" Mashenka turns out to be the axiological center of Gumilev's poem is by no means accidental. The poet mixes the artistic principles of symbolism and acmeism in search of some new symbolist-acmeistic synthesis. And "The Lost Tram" just demonstrates the possibilities of such a synthesis.

Notes:

1. Members of the literary group of acmeists perceived this term in different ways. Hereinafter, the term "acmeism" is interpreted in accordance with the way N. S. Gumilyov understood it.

2. See: Averintsev S. S. Origins and development of early Christian literature // History of world literature: In 9 vols. M .: Nauka, 1983. T. 1. S. 512; Gasparov M. L. Latin literature // Ibid. 1984. V. 2. S. 505.

3. See: Luknitskaya V. Nikolai Gumilyov: The life of a poet based on materials from the home archive of the Luknitsky family. L.: Lenizdat, 1990. S. 226.

4. Ibid. S. 240.

5. See: Luknitsky P.N. About Gumilyov: From the diaries // Lit. review. 1989. No. 6. S. 88.

6. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 288.

7. The opinion of Akhmatova deserves attention, according to which Gumilyov in the poems "Memory" and "The Lost Tram" under the guise of reincarnations "describes<…>his biography" (Luknitsky P.N. About Gumilyov, p. 88).

8. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 297-299. Further references to this text are not given.

9. See: Gumilyov N.S. The legacy of symbolism and acmeism. S. 19.

10. Ibid.

11. See: Carlyle T. French Revolution: History. M.: Thought, 1991. S. 504-505.

12. Ibid.

13. Gumilyov N.S. Sobr. op. T. 2. S. 231.

14. "The most unread poet": Anna Akhmatova's notes about Nikolai Gumilyov // Novy Mir. 1990. No. 5. S. 221.

15. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 220.

16. See: A. Kuraev, deacon. Where the Soul Goes: Early Christianity and the Transmigration of Souls. M .: Trinity word: Phoenix, 2001. S. 40-51.

17. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 196.

18. Luknitsky P. N. About Gumilyov. S. 88.

19. Ibid. S. 87.

20. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 110.

21. See: Akhmatova A. A., Gumilyov N. S. Poems and Letters // New World. 1986. No. 9. S. 198, 210-211.

22. That is, that their marriage broke up. — P.S.

23. "The most unread poet." S. 220.

24. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 139.

25. See: Bely A. Petersburg. M.: Respublika, 1994. S. 218-219.

26. See: Bobrov S. P. [Rec. on the book "Pillar of Fire"]. SPb., 1921 // Krasnaya nov. 1922. Book. 3. S. 264.

27. See: Blok A.A. Sobr. cit.: In 8 vols. T. 2. M .: GIHL, 1960. S. 189-190.

28. Gumilyov N. S. Poems and poems. L.: Owls. writer, 1988. S. 514.

29. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 540.

30. Luknitskaya V. Nikolai Gumilyov. S. 200.

31. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 218.

32. Paradise, XXXIII, 142-145 (translated by M.L. Lozinsky).

33. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 1. S. 176.

34. Luknitskaya V. Nikolai Gumilyov. S. 139.

35. Ibid. S. 175.

36. Gumilyov N. S. Sobr. op. T. 2. S. 231.