What works did Balmont write? Konstantin Balmont - Airway (Stories). “Russian Sappho” Mirra Lokhvitskaya

He began writing poetry in childhood. The first book of poems, “Collection of Poems,” was published in Yaroslavl at the expense of the author in 1890. After the book was published, the young poet burned almost the entire small edition.

Balmont's wide popularity came quite late, and in the late 1890s he was rather known as a talented translator from Norwegian, Spanish, English and other languages.
In 1903, one of the poet’s best collections, “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” and the collection “Only Love” were published.

1905 - two collections “Liturgy of Beauty” and “Fairy Tales”.
Balmont responded to the events of the first Russian revolution with the collections “Poems” (1906) and “Songs of the Avenger” (1907).
1907 book “Firebird. Slavic flute"

collections “Birds in the Air” (1908), “Round Dance of the Times” (1908), “Green Vertograd” (1909).

author of three books containing literary critical and aesthetic articles: “Mountain Peaks” (1904), “White Lightning” (1908), “Sea Glow” (1910).
Before the October Revolution, Balmont created two more truly interesting collections, “Ash” (1916) and “Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon” (1917).

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was born on June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province. Father, Dmitry Konstantinovich, served in the Shuisky district court and zemstvo, rising from a minor employee with the rank of collegiate registrar to a justice of the peace, and then to the chairman of the district zemstvo council. Mother, Vera Nikolaevna, nee Lebedeva, was an educated woman, and greatly influenced the poet’s future worldview, introducing him to the world of music, literature, and history.
In 1876-1883, Balmont studied at the Shuya gymnasium, from where he was expelled for participating in an anti-government circle. He continued his education at the Vladimir gymnasium, then in Moscow at the university, and the Demidov Lyceum in Yaroslavl. In 1887, for participating in student unrest, he was expelled from Moscow University and exiled to Shuya. Higher education never received it, but thanks to his hard work and curiosity he became one of the most erudite and cultured people of its time. Balmont read a huge number of books every year, studied, according to various sources, from 14 to 16 languages, in addition to literature and art, he was interested in history, ethnography, and chemistry.
He began writing poetry in childhood. The first book of poems, “Collection of Poems,” was published in Yaroslavl at the expense of the author in 1890. After the book was published, the young poet burned almost the entire small edition.
Decisive time in formation poetic worldview Balmont - mid-1890s. Until now, his poems have not stood out as anything special among late populist poetry. Publication of the collections “Under the Northern Sky” (1894) and “In the Boundless” (1895), translation of two scientific works“The History of Scandinavian Literature” by Horn-Schweitzer and “The History of Italian Literature” by Gaspari, acquaintance with V. Bryusov and other representatives of the new movement in art, strengthened the poet’s faith in himself and his special purpose. In 1898, Balmont published the collection “Silence,” which finally marked the author’s place in modern literature.
Balmont was destined to become one of the founders of a new direction in literature - symbolism. However, among the “senior symbolists” (D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub, V. Bryusov) and among the “younger” (A. Blok, Andrei Bely, Vyach. Ivanov) he had his own position associated with a broader understanding symbolism as poetry, which, in addition to the specific meaning, has hidden content, expressed through hints, mood, musical sound. Of all the symbolists, Balmont most consistently developed the impressionistic branch. His poetic world- this is a world of subtle fleeting observations, fragile feelings.
Balmont's predecessors in poetry, in his opinion, were Zhukovsky, Lermontov, Fet, Shelley and E. Poe.
Balmont's wide popularity came quite late, and in the late 1890s he was rather known as a talented translator from Norwegian, Spanish, English and other languages.
In 1903, one of the poet’s best collections, “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” and the collection “Only Love” were published. And before that, for the anti-government poem “Little Sultan”, read at a literary evening in the city duma, the authorities expelled Balmont from St. Petersburg, banning him from living in other university cities. And in 1902, Balmont went abroad, finding himself a political emigrant.
In addition to almost all European countries, Balmont visited the United States of America and Mexico and in the summer of 1905 returned to Moscow, where his two collections “Liturgy of Beauty” and “Fairy Tales” were published.
Balmont responded to the events of the first Russian revolution with the collections “Poems” (1906) and “Songs of the Avenger” (1907). Fearing persecution, the poet again leaves Russia and goes to France, where he lives until 1913. From here he travels to Spain, Egypt, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Ceylon, India.
The book “Firebird” published in 1907. The Slav’s Pipe,” in which Balmont developed a national theme, did not bring him success and from that time on the gradual decline of the poet’s fame began. However, Balmont himself was not aware of his creative decline. He remains aloof from the fierce polemics between the symbolists, waged on the pages of “Libra” and “The Golden Fleece”, and disagrees with Bryusov in understanding the tasks facing contemporary art, still writes a lot, easily, selflessly. One after another, the collections “Birds in the Air” (1908), “Round Dance of the Times” (1908), and “Green Vertograd” (1909) were published. A. Blok speaks about them with unusual harshness.
In May 1913, after an amnesty was declared in connection with the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, Balmont returned to Russia and for some time found himself in the center of attention of the literary community. By this time, he was not only a famous poet, but also the author of three books containing literary, critical and aesthetic articles: “Mountain Peaks” (1904), “White Lightning” (1908), “Sea Glow” (1910).
Before the October Revolution, Balmont created two more truly interesting collections, “Ash” (1916) and “Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon” (1917).
Balmont welcomed the overthrow of the autocracy, but the events that followed the revolution scared him away, and thanks to the support of A. Lunacharsky, Balmont received permission to temporarily travel abroad in June 1920. The temporary departure turned into long years of emigration for the poet.
In exile, Balmont published several collections of poetry: “Gift to the Earth” (1921), “Haze” (1922), “Mine to Her” (1923), “Spreading Distances” (1929), “ Northern lights"(1931), "The Blue Horseshoe" (1935), "Light Service" (1936-1937).
He died on December 23, 1942 from pneumonia. He was buried in the town of Noisy-le-Grand near Paris, where he lived in recent years.

The work of the famous Russian poet Konstantin Balmont Silver Age is quite controversial in terms of direction and style. Initially, the poet was considered the first symbolist to become so famous. However, his early work can still be attributed to impressionism.

All this affected the fact that Konstantin Balmont’s poems were mainly about love, about fleeting impressions and feelings, his work seems to connect heaven and earth, and leaves a sweet aftertaste. In addition, the early poems of the symbolist Balmont were accompanied by a rather sad mood and humility of a lonely young man.

Themes of poems by Konstantin Balmont:

All further work of the poet was constantly changing. The next stage was the search for new space and emotions that could be found in the works. The transition to “Nietzschean” motifs and heroes became the reason for stormy criticism of Balmont’s poems from the outside. The last stage in the poet’s work was the transition from sad themes to more bright colors life and emotions.

In the autumn season, there is nothing better than reading the poems of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont.

Konstantin Balmont is a Russian poet, translator, prose writer, critic, essayist. A bright representative of the Silver Age. He published 35 collections of poetry and 20 books of prose. Translated a large number of works by foreign writers. Konstantin Dmitrievich is the author of literary studies, philological treatises, and critical essays. His poems “Snowflake”, “Reeds”, “Autumn”, “Towards Winter”, “Fairy” and many others are included in the school curriculum.

Childhood and youth

Konstantin Balmont was born and lived until he was 10 years old in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, in a poor but noble family. His father Dmitry Konstantinovich first worked as a judge, and later took the post of head of the zemstvo government. Mother Vera Nikolaevna came from a family where they loved and were passionate about literature. The woman arranged literary evenings, staged plays and was published in a local newspaper.

Vera Nikolaevna knew several foreign languages, and she had a share of “freethinking”; “undesirable” people often visited their house. He later wrote that his mother not only instilled in him a love of literature, but from her he inherited his “mental structure.” In addition to Konstantin, the family had seven sons. He was third. Watching his mother teach his older brothers to read, the boy learned to read on his own at the age of 5.

A family lived in a house that stood on the river bank, surrounded by gardens. Therefore, when the time came to send their children to school, they moved to Shuya. Thus, they had to break away from nature. The boy wrote his first poems at the age of 10. But his mother did not approve of these endeavors, and he did not write anything for the next 6 years.

In 1876, Balmont was enrolled in the Shuya gymnasium. At first, Kostya showed himself to be a diligent student, but soon he got bored with it all. He became interested in reading, some books in German and French he read in the original. He was expelled from the gymnasium for poor teaching and revolutionary sentiments. Even then, he was a member of an illegal circle that distributed leaflets for the Narodnaya Volya party.

Konstantin moved to Vladimir and studied there until 1886. While still studying at the gymnasium, his poems were published in the capital’s magazine “Picturesque Review”, but this event went unnoticed. Afterwards he entered Moscow University at the Faculty of Law. But he didn’t stay long here either.

He became close to Pyotr Nikolaev, who was a revolutionary in the sixties. Therefore, it is not surprising that after 2 years he was expelled for participating in a student riot. Immediately after this incident he was expelled from Moscow to Shuya.

In 1889, Balmont decided to return to the university, but due to a nervous disorder he was again unable to complete his studies. The same fate befell him at the Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, where he entered later. After this attempt, he decided to abandon the idea of ​​getting a “government” education.

Literature

Balmont wrote his first collection of poems while he was bedridden after an unsuccessful suicide. The book was published in Yaroslavl in 1890, but later the poet himself personally destroyed the bulk of the circulation.

Nevertheless, the starting point in the poet’s work is considered to be the collection “Under the Northern Sky.” It was greeted by the public with admiration, as were his subsequent works - “In the Vastness of Darkness” and “Silence”. They began to willingly publish him in modern magazines, Balmont became popular, he was considered the most promising of the “decadents.”

In the mid-1890s, he began to communicate closely with,. Soon Balmont becomes the most popular symbolist poet in Russia. In his poems he admires the phenomena of the world, and in some collections he openly touches on “demonic” themes. This is noticeable in Evil Spells, the circulation of which was confiscated by the authorities for censorship reasons.

Balmont travels a lot, so his work is permeated with images exotic countries and multiculturalism. This attracts and delights readers. The poet adheres to spontaneous improvisation - he never made changes to the texts, he believed that the first creative impulse is the most correct.

Contemporaries highly appreciated “Fairy Tales,” written by Balmont in 1905. The poet dedicated this collection of fairy-tale songs to his daughter Nina.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was a revolutionary in spirit and in life. Expulsion from high school and university did not stop the poet. Once he publicly read the verse “Little Sultan”, in which everyone saw a parallel with. For this he was expelled from St. Petersburg and banned from living in university cities for 2 years.

He was an opponent of tsarism, so his participation in the First Russian Revolution was expected. At that time, he became friends with and wrote poems that were more like rhyming leaflets.

During the December Moscow uprising of 1905, Balmont speaks to students. But, fearing arrest, he was forced to leave Russia. From 1906 to 1913 he lived in France as a political emigrant. While in a kind of exile, he continues to write, but critics increasingly began to talk about the decline of Balmont’s work. In his latest works they noticed a certain pattern and self-repetition.

The poet himself considered his best book“Burning buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul." If before this collection his lyrics were filled with melancholy and melancholy, then “Burning Buildings” revealed a different side to Balmont - “sunny” and cheerful notes appeared in his work.

Returning to Russia in 1913, he published a 10-volume complete collection of works. He works on translations and gives lectures around the country. February revolution Balmont received it enthusiastically, as did the entire Russian intelligentsia. But he soon became horrified by the anarchy that was happening in the country.

When did it start October Revolution, he was in St. Petersburg, in his words, it was a “hurricane of madness” and “chaos.” In 1920, the poet moved to Moscow, but soon, due to the poor health of his wife and daughter, he moved with them to France. He never returned to Russia.

In 1923, Balmont published two autobiographies - “Under the New Sickle” and “Air Route”. Until the first half of the 1930s, he traveled all over Europe, and his performances were a success among the public. But he no longer enjoyed recognition among the Russian diaspora.

The decline of his work came in 1937, when he published his latest collection poems "Light Service".

Personal life

In 1889, Konstantin Balmont married the daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk merchant, Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina. Their mother introduced them, but when he announced his intention to marry, she spoke out against this marriage. Konstantin showed his inflexibility and even broke with his family for the sake of his beloved.

As it turned out, his young wife was prone to unjustified jealousy. They always quarreled; the woman did not support him in either his literary or revolutionary endeavors. Some researchers note that it was she who introduced Balmont to wine.

On March 13, 1890, the poet decided to commit suicide - he threw himself onto the pavement from the third floor of his own apartment. But the attempt failed - he spent a year in bed, and his injuries left him lame for the rest of his life.

Married to Larisa, they had two children. Their first child died in infancy, the second - son Nikolai - was ill nervous disorder. As a result, Konstantin and Larisa separated, she married the journalist and writer Engelhardt.

In 1896, Balmont married for the second time. His wife was Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva. The girl was from a wealthy family - smart, educated and beautiful. Immediately after the wedding, the lovers left for France. In 1901, their daughter Nina was born. In many ways, they were united by literary activity; together they worked on translations.

Ekaterina Alekseevna was not a powerful person, but she dictated the lifestyle of the spouses. And everything would have been fine if Balmont had not met Elena Konstantinovna Tsvetkovskaya in Paris. The girl was fascinated by the poet, looked at him as if he were a god. From now on, he either lived with his family or went on trips abroad with Catherine for a couple of months.

His family life became completely confused when Tsvetkovskaya gave birth to her daughter Mirra. This event finally tied Konstantin to Elena, but at the same time he did not want to separate from Andreeva. Mental anguish again led Balmont to suicide. He jumped out of the window, but, like last time, he survived.

As a result, he began to live in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra and occasionally visited Andreeva and his daughter Nina in Moscow. They later immigrated to France. There Balmont began dating Dagmar Shakhovskaya. He did not leave the family, but met with the woman regularly and wrote letters to her daily. As a result, she bore him two children - a son, Georges, and a daughter, Svetlana.

But in the most difficult years of his life, Tsvetkovskaya was still with him. She was so devoted to him that she did not even live a year after his death, she left after him.

Death

Having moved to France, he missed Russia. But his health was deteriorating, there were financial problems, so there was no talk of returning. He lived in a cheap apartment with a broken window.

In 1937, the poet was diagnosed with mental illness. From that moment on, he no longer wrote poetry.

On December 23, 1942, he died in the Russian House shelter, near Paris, in Noisy-le-Grand. The cause of his death was pneumonia. The poet died in poverty and oblivion.

Bibliography

• 1894 – “Under the northern sky (elegy, stanzas, sonnets)”
• 1895 – “In the vastness of darkness”
• 1898 – “Silence. Lyrical poems"
• 1900 – “Burning buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul"
• 1903 – “We will be like the sun. Book of Symbols"
• 1903 – “Only love. Seven-flowered"
• 1905 – “Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns"
• 1905 – “Fairy Tales (Children’s Songs)”
• 1906 – “Evil Spells (Book of Spells)”
• 1906 – “Poems”
• 1907 – “Songs of the Avenger”
• 1908 – “Birds in the Air (Medical Lines)”
• 1909 – “Green Vertograd (Kissing Words)”
• 1917 – “Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon”
• 1920 – “Ring”
• 1920 – “Seven Poems”
• 1922 – “Song of the Working Hammer”
• 1929 – “In the widening distance (Poem about Russia)”
• 1930 – “Complicity of Souls”
• 1937 – “Light Service”

He got his Scottish surname, unusual for Russia, thanks to a distant ancestor - a sailor who forever cast anchor off the coast of Pushkin and Lermontov. Creativity of Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich in Soviet time was forgotten by for obvious reasons. The country of the hammer and sickle did not need creators who worked outside of socialist realism, whose lines did not speak about struggle, about heroes of war and labor... Meanwhile, this poet, who has a truly powerful talent, whose exceptionally melodic poems continued the tradition of a pure, not for parties, but for the people.

"Create always, create everywhere..."

The legacy that Balmont left us is quite voluminous and impressive: 35 collections of poetry and 20 books of prose. His poems aroused the admiration of his compatriots for the ease of the author's style. Konstantin Dmitrievich wrote a lot, but he never “tormented lines out of himself” and did not optimize the text with numerous edits. His poems were always written on the first try, in one sitting. Balmont spoke about how he created poetry in a completely original way - in a poem.

The above is not an exaggeration. Mikhail Vasilyevich Sabashnikov, with whom the poet stayed in 1901, recalled that dozens of lines were formed in his head, and he wrote poems on paper immediately, without a single edit. When asked how he succeeds, Konstantin Dmitrievich answered with a disarming smile: “After all, I’m a poet!”

Brief description of creativity

Literary scholars, experts on his work, talk about the formation, flourishing and decline of the level of the works that Balmont created. short biography and creativity indicate to us, however, an amazing capacity for work (he wrote daily and always on a whim).

Balmont’s most popular works are collections of poems by the mature poet “Only Love,” “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” and “Burning Buildings.” Among the early works, the collection “Silence” stands out.

Balmont’s work (briefly quoting literary critics of the early 20th century), with the subsequent general tendency towards the attenuation of the author’s talent (after the three above-mentioned collections), also has a number of “highlights”. Worth noting are “Fairy Tales” - cute children's songs written in a style later adopted by Korney Chukovsky. Also interesting are the “foreign poems” created under the impression of what he saw during his travels in Egypt and Oceania.

Biography. Childhood

His father, Dmitry Konstantinovich, was a zemstvo doctor and also owned an estate. His mother (nee Lebedeva), a creative person, according to the future poet, “did more to cultivate a love for poetry and music” than all subsequent teachers. Konstantin became the third son in a family where there were seven children in total, all of them sons.

Konstantin Dmitrievich had his own special tao (perception of life). It is no coincidence that Balmont’s life and work are closely related. Since childhood, a powerful creative principle was instilled in him, which manifested itself in a contemplative worldview.

Since childhood, he had been disgusted by schoolwork and loyalty. Romanticism often prevailed over common sense. He never finished school (the Shuya male heir to Tsarevich Alexei gymnasium), having been expelled from the 7th grade for participating in a revolutionary circle. The last one school course He graduated from the Vladimir gymnasium under the round-the-clock supervision of a teacher. He later remembered only two teachers with gratitude: a history and geography teacher and a literature teacher.

After studying for a year at Moscow University, he was also expelled for “organizing riots”, then he was expelled from the Demidov Lyceum in Yaroslavl...

As we can see, Konstantin did not begin his poetic career easily, and his work is still the subject of controversy among literary scholars.

Balmont's personality

The personality of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont is quite complex. He was not “like everyone else.” Exclusivity... It can be determined even by the portrait of the poet, by his gaze, by his posture. It immediately becomes clear: before us is not an apprentice, but a master of poetry. His personality was bright and charismatic. He was an amazingly organic person; Balmont’s life and work are like a single inspired impulse.

He began writing poems at the age of 22 (for comparison, Lermontov’s first works were written at the age of 15). Before this, as we already know, there was an incomplete education, as well as an unsuccessful marriage with the daughter of a Shuya factory owner, which ended in a suicide attempt (the poet jumped out of a 3rd floor window onto the pavement.) Balmont was pushed by the unsettled family life and the death of his first child from meningitis. His first wife Garelina Larisa Mikhailovna, a beauty of the Botticelli type, tormented him with jealousy, imbalance and disdain for dreams of great literature. He poured out his emotions from the discord (and later from divorce) with his wife in the poems “Your fragrant shoulders were breathing...”, “No, no one did so much harm to me...”, “Oh, woman, child, accustomed to playing...”.

Self-education

How did young Balmont, having become an outcast due to his loyalty to the education system, turn into an educated person, an ideologist of the new? Quoting Konstantin Dmitrievich himself, his mind once “hooked” on one purely British word - selfhelp (self-help). Self-education. It became for Konstantin Dmitrievich a springboard into the future...

Being by his nature a true worker of the pen, Konstantin Dmitrievich never followed any external system imposed on him from the outside and alien to his nature. Balmont's creativity is entirely based on his passion for self-education and openness to impressions. He was attracted to literature, philology, history, philosophy, in which he was a real specialist. He loved to travel.

The beginning of a creative journey

Inherent in Fet, Nadson and Pleshcheev, it did not become an end in itself for Balmont (in the 70-80s of the 19th century, many poets created poems with motifs of sadness, sadness, restlessness, and loneliness). For Konstantin Dmitrievich it turned into the road to symbolism he paved. He will write about this a little later.

Unconventional self-education

Unconventional self-education determines the characteristics of Balmont’s creativity. This was truly a man who created with words. Poet. And he perceived the world in the same way as a poet can see it: not with the help of analysis and reasoning, but relying only on impressions and sensations. “The first movement of the soul is the most correct,” this rule, developed by him himself, became immutable for his entire life. It raised him to the heights of creativity, but it also ruined his talent.

The romantic hero of Balmont in the early period of his work was committed to Christian values. He, experimenting with combinations of various sounds and thoughts, erects a “cherished chapel.”

However, it is obvious that under the influence of his travels of 1896-1897, as well as translations of foreign poetry, Balmont gradually comes to a different worldview.

It should be recognized that following the romantic style of Russian poets of the 80s. Balmont's work began, briefly assessing which, we can say that he really became the founder of symbolism in Russian poetry. The collections of poetry “Silence” and “In the Boundless” are considered significant for the period of the poet’s formation.

He outlined his views on symbolism in 1900 in the article “Elementary Words on Symbolic Poetry.” Symbolists, unlike realists, according to Balmont, are not just observers, they are thinkers looking at the world through the window of their dreams. At the same time, Balmont considers “hidden abstraction” and “obvious beauty” to be the most important principles in symbolic poetry.

By nature, Balmont was not a gray mouse, but a leader. A short biography and creativity confirm this. Charisma and a natural desire for freedom... It was these qualities that allowed him, at the peak of his popularity, to “become the center of attraction” for numerous Balmontist societies in Russia. According to Ehrenburg’s recollections (this was much later), Balmont’s personality impressed even the arrogant Parisians from the fashionable Passy district.

New wings of poetry

Balmont fell in love with his future second wife Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva at first sight. This stage in his life is reflected in the collection of poems “In the Vast.” The poems dedicated to her are numerous and original: “Black-eyed Doe”, “Why does the moon always intoxicate us?”, “Night Flowers”.

The lovers lived in Europe for a long time, and then, returning to Moscow, Balmont in 1898 published a collection of poems “Silence” in the Scorpio publishing house. In the collection, the poems were preceded by an epigraph selected from Tyutchev’s works: “There is a certain hour of universal silence.” The poems in it are grouped into 12 sections called “lyrical poems.” Konstantin Dmitrievich, inspired by the theosophical teachings of Blavatsky, already in this collection of poems noticeably departs from the Christian worldview.

The poet's understanding of his role in art

The collection “Silence” becomes a facet that distinguishes Balmont as a poet professing symbolism. Further developing the accepted vector of creativity, Konstantin Dmitrievich writes an article called “Calderon's drama of personality,” where he indirectly justified his departure from the classical Christian model. This was done, as always, figuratively. He considered earthly life to be “a falling away from the bright Source.”

Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky talentedly presented the features of Balmont’s work and his author’s style. He believed that “I”, written by Balmont, does not fundamentally indicate belonging to the poet, it is initially socialized. Therefore, Konstantin Dmitrievich’s poem is unique in its soulful lyricism, expressed in associating oneself with others, which the reader invariably feels. Reading his poems, it seems that Balmont is filled with light and energy, which he generously shares with others:

What Balmont presents as optimistic narcissism is in fact more altruistic than the phenomenon of the public demonstration of poets’ pride in their merits, as well as their equally public hanging of laurels on themselves.

Balmont's work, to put it briefly in the words of Annensky, is saturated with the internal philosophical polemicism inherent in it, which determines the integrity of the worldview. The latter is expressed in the fact that Balmont wants to present the event to his reader comprehensively: both from the position of the executioner and from the position of the victim. He does not have an unambiguous assessment of anything; he is initially characterized by a pluralism of opinions. He came to it thanks to his talent and hard work, a whole century ahead of the time when this became the norm of social consciousness for developed countries.

Sunny genius

The work of the poet Balmont is unique. In fact, Konstantin Dmitrievich purely formally joined various movements, so that it would be more convenient for him to promote his new poetic ideas, which he never lacked. In the last decade of the 19th century, a metamorphosis occurred in the poet’s work: melancholy and transience give way to sunny optimism.

If in earlier poems the mood of Nietzscheanism could be traced, then at the peak of the development of talent, the work of Konstantin Balmont began to be distinguished by the author’s specific optimism and “sunshine”, “fieryness”.

Alexander Blok, who is also a symbolist poet, presented a vivid description of Balmont’s work of that period very succinctly, saying that it was as bright and life-affirming as spring.

Peak of creative powers

Balmont’s poetic gift sounded in full force for the first time in poems from the collection “Burning Buildings.” It contains 131 poems written during the poet’s stay in S.V. Polyakov’s house.

All of them, as the poet claimed, were composed under the influence of “one mood” (Balmont did not think of creativity any other way). “The poem should no longer be in a minor key!” - Balmont decided. Starting with this collection, he finally moved away from decadence. The poet, boldly experimenting with combinations of sounds, colors and thoughts, created “lyrics of the modern soul”, “torn soul”, “wretched, ugly”.

At this time he was in close communication with St. Petersburg bohemia. I knew one weakness for my husband. He couldn't drink wine. Although Konstantin Dmitrievich had a strong, wiry build, he nervous system(obviously, torn in childhood and youth) “worked” inadequately. After the wine, he “carried” to brothels. However, as a result, he found himself in a completely pitiful state: lying on the floor and paralyzed by deep hysteria. This happened more than once while working on Burning Buildings, when he was in company with Baltrushaitis and Polyakov.

We must pay tribute to Ekaterina Alekseevna, the earthly guardian angel of her husband. She understood the essence of her husband, whom she considered the most honest and sincere and who, to her chagrin, had affairs. For example, as with Dagny Christensen in Paris, the poems “The Sun Withdrew” and “From the Line of Kings” are dedicated to her. It is significant that Balmont’s affair with a Norwegian woman, who worked as a St. Petersburg correspondent, ended as abruptly as it began. After all, his heart still belonged to one woman - Ekaterina Andreevna, Beatrice, as he called her.

In 1903, Konstantin Dmitrievich published with difficulty the collection “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” written in 1901-1902. You can feel the hand of a master in it. Note that about 10 works did not pass the censorship. The work of the poet Balmont, according to censors, has become overly sensual and erotic.

Literary scholars believe that this collection of works, which presents readers with a cosmogonic model of the world, is evidence of a new, highest level of development of the poet. Being on the verge of a mental break while working on the previous collection, Konstantin Dmitrievich seemed to understand that it was impossible to “live by rebellion.” The poet seeks truth at the intersection of Hinduism, paganism and Christianity. He expresses his worship of elemental objects: fire ("Hymn to Fire"), wind ("Wind"), the ocean ("Appeal to the Ocean"). In the same 1903, the publishing house “Grif” published the third collection, crowning the peak of Balmont’s creativity, “Only Love. Seven-flowered garden."

Instead of a conclusion

Inscrutable even for such poets “by the grace of God” as Balmont. His life and work after 1903 are briefly characterized in one word - “recession.” Therefore, Alexander Blok, who essentially became the next leader of Russian symbolism, assessed Balmont’s further (after the collection “Only Love”) in his own way. He presented him with a damning description, saying that there is a great Russian poet Balmont, but there is no “new Balmont”.

However, not being literary scholars of the last century, we nevertheless became acquainted with the late work of Konstantin Dmitrievich. Our verdict: it’s worth reading, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there... However, we have no reason to be distrustful of Blok’s words. Indeed, from the point of view of literary criticism, Balmont as a poet is the banner of symbolism, after the collection “Only Love. Seven-flowered" has exhausted itself. Therefore, it is logical for us to conclude here short story about the life and work of K. D. Balmont, the “sunny genius” of Russian poetry.