Analysis of Sergei Yesenin’s poem “Soviet Rus'. “Consonances of living words” in a poem by S.A.
S. Yesenin had to live during times of social upheavals, which left a mark on his soul and creativity. The poem in question is studied in 11th grade. Find out more about him by reading the brief analysis of “Soviet Rus'” according to the plan.
Brief Analysis
History of creation- the work was created in 1924, when the poet, after a long separation from his father’s house, visited the village. Konstantinovo.
Theme of the poem– social changes and their impact on people.
Composition– According to its meaning, the poem can be divided into parts: a story about returning to one’s native village, a description of changes, revealing the motive of the poet and poetic art. The text is divided into four and five verses, the last stanza is an octave (octave).
Genre- poem.
Poetic size– iambic bi-, tri- and pentameter, cross rhyme ABAB and ring ABBA, some lines do not rhyme.
Metaphors- “life is in full swing”, “I don’t find shelter in anyone’s eyes”, “thoughts pass through my head in a swarm”, “the voice of thought speaks to my heart”, “a new light is burning for another generation near the huts”.
Epithets – “sullen pilgrim”, “far side”, “scandalous peeit”, “sunken cheeks”, “dry blush”, “clumsy speeches”.
Comparisons- “at the volost, as if gathered in a church,” “bare feet, like heifers under the gate, sank into the poplar ditches.”
History of creation
S. Yesenin perceived the October Revolution with the hope of changing the life of the people for the better. He was especially worried about the villagers, since he himself came from a village. His man left him to get the opportunity to seriously engage in verbal art.
The history of the creation of the work is connected with Yesenin’s return to his native village of Konstantinovo after an 8-year separation. He did not come on his own, but with his friend A. Sakharov, to whom he dedicated “Soviet Rus',” written in 1824.
Subject
The title of the poem prepares the reader for descriptions of the new life that came after the revolution. In fact, his lines reproduce not so much Soviet life as the inner state of the lyrical hero, who feels like a stranger in his small homeland.
In the first verse, the author mentions a hurricane that passed through. By natural disaster he means the turning point events of the early twentieth century: revolutions, civil war. Events to which entire poems were dedicated in the literature of the twentieth century are reproduced by Yesenin in two lines.
Having survived them, the lyrical hero returned to the “orphaned land.” The man realizes with bitterness that there are no familiar people left in his native place. Even the old mill becomes uncomfortable with change. Despite all this, the hero proudly calls himself a citizen of the village, although it will be famous only for the birth of the “scandalous piita”.
Gradually, descriptions of the “new” village appear in the poem. There are now completely different generations of young people here, from whose lips different songs fly. The heart of the lyrical hero shrinks when he watches the conversations of people under the parish. People's speech is clumsy and “unwashed”. They admire the exploits of the Red Army. The visitor reacts negatively to what he hears, as evidenced by the phrase: “the maples wrinkle with the ears of their long branches.” He is not delighted with the Komsomol members with their propaganda.
What he sees tells the main character that he is a stranger here and is not needed. The man makes the only right decision: to reconcile. He is ready to give everything to the new society except his “lyre”. This is how the motive of poetic creativity appears in the last stanzas. The ideal poet, according to Yesenin, should keep his lyre to himself and sing only peace.
Composition
The composition of the work is intricate. It can be divided into semantic parts: a story about returning to his native village, a description of changes, revealing the motive of the poet and poetic art. The text is divided into four and five verses, the last stanza is an octave (octave).
Genre
The genre is poem, since the poem can distinguish between epic and lyrical components. “Soviet Rus'” is written in multi-foot (two-, three- and pentameter) iambic lines. The author used cross ABAB and ring ABBA rhyming, some lines do not rhyme.
Means of expression
To create a gallery of images of the Soviet era, reproduce the feelings and emotions of the hero, reveal the theme and realize the idea, S. Yesenin used means of expression. The text contains metaphors- “life is in full swing”, “I don’t find shelter in anyone’s eyes”, “thoughts pass through my head like a swarm”, “the voice of thought speaks to my heart”, “a new light is burning for another generation near the huts”; epithets- “gloomy pilgrim”, “far side”, “scandalous piti”, “sunken cheeks”, “dry blush” “clumsy speeches”; comparisons- “at the volost, as if gathered in a church,” “bare feet, like heifers under the gate, sank along the poplar ditches”; oxymoron- “sad joy.”
Yesenin’s poem “Soviet Rus'” was written in 1924, at the final stage of the poet’s work. At this time, it was fashionable to write works exclusively from the standpoint of glorifying the new system, its immense idealization. Yesenin himself was no exception; many of his works of this period are imbued with similar motifs.
However, “Soviet Rus'” falls out of the general range of poems of this period. Yesenin recognizes the correctness and necessity of the victory of the Soviet system, but does it in passing, as something unimportant and secondary. The main motive of the work is the loneliness of the author, his uselessness, backwardness under the new regime.
The poet describes returning to his native village after a long absence. With surprise and pain, he feels that during his absence, huge changes have occurred in his homeland. Yesenin visited many places, he himself became one of the first ranks of fighters for a new life. However, no matter where he was, he was always confident that he could always return to where he began his life's journey. And this place seemed to him a quiet, unchanging haven, where he would find peace and gain strength for further struggle.
The new Russian outback amazes the poet. Peasant life has changed beyond recognition. New heroes, new relationships have appeared, the whole old way of life has become completely different. Yesenin is happy about these changes, but admits that he himself is now no longer needed with his old-fashioned and incomprehensible poems.
The final part of the poem is a kind of manifesto of the former rebel poet. Yesenin declares that he will remain faithful only to his creative gift, which, unlike people, never betrayed him.
The last lines of the work are one of the strongest places in the work of the national poet. Contrary to the majority of internationalists of that time, Yesenin firmly says that the main thing for him remains only one thing - “a sixth of the land with a short name - “Rus”.
Analysis of the poem Soviet Rus' according to plan
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S. Yesenin’s triptych “Soviet Rus'”, “Homeless Rus'”, “Leaving Rus'” dates back to 1924, developing the motif of farewell to a wooden village, to hut Russia.
A dramatic but optimistic ending, an elegy " Soviet Rus'" It tells about the events taking place in the vastness of a great country (“A hurricane passed through here. / There are few of us left” - the opening stanza of the work), and it affirms love for the Motherland - Russia - no matter what. The poem ends in the style of V. Mayakovsky - poster-like, catchy, like a slogan. In the ending there is not a single traditional Yesenin complicated image; the style of narration is transparent, simple, and precise in meaning:
I will chant
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.
However, along with this socially significant situation - “to love or not to love” the now Soviet Motherland - the poem shows the poet’s relationship with his native, changed village, “consulted”, getting used to the changes. Eight years later, the poet returns “to an orphaned land,” where everything turns out to be different from before: there is no home, no acquaintances, no one to “bow my hat to.” The most striking image-detail that appears in the mind of a lonely, outcast “scandalous poet”, not hostile to the new, but deeply offended, touched to the quick, are the words: “In my own country I am like a foreigner.” The “foreigner” is all the more upset because he is perceived as such, a stranger in his native village.
In the last stanzas of the poem, the author confesses his love for his Motherland. Along with love for his native land, the poet puts love for poetry, reveals the motive of knightly loyalty to art: it turns out that his loneliness will be brightened by the abandoned lyre - a symbol of creativity. Thus, the poem develops in parallel the themes of the Motherland and poetry. The confidence that life has not been lived in vain grows stronger. Encouraged and resurrected in soul, the hero-author takes a higher note: elegiac pathos is replaced by odic pathos. And the third motive sounds at the end of the work - the motive of faith in the younger generation, its better future: “Blossom, young ones, and be healthy in body! "
The second part of the triptych - “ Homeless Rus'"- is based on the story of the life of children rejected by society - street children - and complements the picture shown in "Soviet Rus'". The poet addresses his poems to homeless children - the future of the country, in which Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, Nekrasov may perish, to those children who spend the night in randomly found heated places.
IN " Rus''s passing“The poet continues to reveal the theme of the split in society, talking about the fact that he himself has not yet “fitted” into the new life. The refrain “I know, that’s why I want so much, / With my pants up, / To run after the Komsomol,” is repeated twice in the poem. For the first time in this poem, S. Yesenin openly declared his post-October duality with aphoristic lines:
I have one foot left in the past.
Trying to catch up with the steel army.
I slide and fall differently.
The events of the October Revolution were accepted by S. Yesenin quite enthusiastically. He was not afraid of the blood in which the whole country plunged. He, as a native of the village, first of all, longed for an improvement in the lives of the peasants, because he understood their difficult situation.
Having left his home, the author lived and worked in Moscow. For a long time he did not have the opportunity to escape to where his childhood dreams came from. He simply dreamed of visiting his native village, his native home. The year 1924 gave the poet such an opportunity and Sergei Yesenin was shocked to the core by everything that appeared before his eyes. Against the backdrop of such emotional experiences, the poet created the frank poetic work “Soviet Rus'”.
The author, foreseeing his imminent death, decided not to choose expressions, but to write everything as it really is. After a trip to Konstantinovo, Yesenin for the first time thought about what his work was worth, and why he was engaged in literary activity?
In his native village, he did not meet familiar faces; he had no one to greet him. The home looked like a small pile of ashes. It burned to the ground. Passing residents did not recognize the richly dressed wanderer as Yesenin, who lived here as a child. But he dedicated almost all of his creative works to these ordinary people, his native village, and the wonderful beauties of Russian nature. The author was sure that his work was needed by such simple, sincere people. However, it turns out that the poet lived in his fantasies, in a fictitious world.
Observing the surrounding reality, the poet feels ridiculous and insignificant. He is like a stranger in his own country. His beloved, melodious and pure Russian language began to look like clumsy phrases. And Yesenin blamed everything on the revolution, which brought proletarian sentiments to his native land. Now, after a visit to his native land, the author does not perceive those villagers at all, they seem strangers to him. That sincerity, that friendship has disappeared in them. The poet does not understand their thinking, their language, their way of life. The peasants instantly abandoned their past, centuries-old traditions, and culture.
Having no other choice, Yesenin admits that he is ready to accept the changes that came with the revolution. He agreed with the new November and May holidays, with new foundations in society. Only one thing remained unchanged in the poet’s soul. This is his lyre, in which he continued to sing of his beautiful and departed Motherland, the magnificent lands of old Russia.
The poetry of Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin is so lyrical and melodious that it immediately goes to music. It is no coincidence that so many famous songs have been written based on his poems. At the same time, no one undertakes to set the poems of Alexander Blok or Vladimir Mayakovsky to music, and if this happens, then such creations do not take root in society: no one performs them, and the works remain lyrical, not musical masterpieces.
Maxim Gorky also wrote that Sergei Yesenin is not so much a person, “as an organ created by nature to express the inexhaustible “sadness of the fields,” love for all living things in the world and mercy.” Perhaps this is the main conflict between Yesenin and his era: the conflict between the “living” and the “iron”. Apparently, this is the reason why Yesenin’s poetry was perceived by the official ideology as alien and hostile, and Yesenin himself, who accepted the revolution (“I accept everything”), perceived “alien youth” as a strong enemy.
Sergei Aleksandrovich expresses his feeling of uselessness in all his works written in 1924-1925, but I especially want to highlight the poem « » , written by the poet after his return from abroad and a trip in May 1924 to his native village of Konstantinovo together with his close friend Alexander Sakharov, to whom this lyrical confession is dedicated.
The title itself - “Soviet Rus'” - sounds somewhat declarative, as if the poet had finally decided to speak about his attitude to the new country, the new government and political system. However, after reading it, it becomes clear that the hero of this poem is a man who has lost his past, but has never found his future. As Yuri Annenkov later wrote in the article “In Memory of Yesenin,” “Yesenin’s creative spring, unfolding, came across the edge of an era and broke.” Indeed, the lyrical spring of Sergei Yesenin’s creativity could truly unfold only in a society where man is in harmony with nature. Such harmony is felt in Yesenin’s early poems - “In the Hut”, “Good Morning!”, “Birch”.
These works help to understand what the state of the hero is now, having returned to his native village, where now everything is different: "other boys sing other songs", “Sunday villagers... discuss their “live”, “the lame Red Army soldier... talks importantly about Budyonny, about how the Reds recaptured Perekop”. The author manages to very accurately convey the context of the era of the post-revolutionary years and the time after the Civil War.
But, probably, the most unpleasant discovery for the hero is the fact that here we need "Poor Demyan's propaganda", And his “poetry is no longer needed here”, and, apparently, he himself is not needed here either. With irony the hero exclaims:
Why the hell am I
Screamed in verse that I am friendly with the people?
This is reminiscent of the situation with the hero of I. S. Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons,” when Bazarov claimed that he knew the people well, and in their eyes he himself was “something like a clown.”
The hero of Yesenin’s poem feels like a foreigner in his own country. This is probably why there are so many rhetorical questions and exclamations in the work. They help convey the inner thoughts of the hero and help express the attitude of the author himself. The disappointed hero consoles himself with what he sang then “when my land was sick”.
And then, without false modesty, he declares that he is a citizen of the village, which “only those who will be famous are the fact that here a woman once gave birth to a Russian scandalous pet”. But this is all bravado. Realizing that he is falling out of the “clip” of the new era, the hero not only resigns himself to his fate, he seems to bless the young, "healthy body", and talking about the soul, he admits that he will give “with all my soul to October and May”, but he won’t give the lyre to my dear. Most likely, this expresses the position of the poet himself, who is forced to accept changes in the social system, but does not want to write about it in his works.
But he believes that sooner or later “tribal enmity will pass”(apparently, this is how Yesenin assessed the October Revolution), and then he will have the opportunity to sing
With the whole being in the poet
Sixth of the land
With a short name “Rus”.
Realizing the need for the changes taking place, Sergei Yesenin still, even in these last lines, emphasizes his commitment to the past, using the ancient word “Rus”.