George Gorgon Byron was the most prominent English poet of the 19th century. His poems were on everyone's lips. Translated into many languages, they inspired poets to create their own compositions. Many European poets - admirers and successors of Byron - found in him motives consonant with their own thoughts and feelings. Starting from Byronic verses, using them as a form of self-expression, they invested in translations and a particle of their own worldview. The English poet was also warmly appreciated by the progressive Russian society. Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Baratynsky, as well as the Decembrist poets, to whom the rebellious English poet was especially consonant, were fond of Byron's work. Byron's heroes fascinated with their boldness, unusualness, mystery, and, naturally, many had the idea of \u200b\u200btheir resemblance to the author himself. This is partly true.
After completing his elementary education at a school for children of the aristocracy, Byron entered the University of Cambridge. However, university sciences did not fascinate the future poet, did not provide an answer to the acute political and social issues of our time that worried him. He reads a lot, giving preference to historical writings and memoirs.
Young Byron is increasingly overcome by feelings of frustration and loneliness. The poet's conflict with the highest aristocratic society is brewing. These motives will form the basis of his first collection of poetry - largely immature and imitative - "Hours of Leisure", published in 1807.
Already in the early lyrics of the poet, the strokes of his future tragedy are outlined: the final break with the ruling class of England and voluntary exile. Already now he is ready to sacrifice the hereditary estate and the loud title of lord, so as not to live among the people he hates. The poet would gladly change the "haughty England prison" for the beauty of primeval nature with virgin forests, sky-high mountain peaks and wide valleys, as he writes about this in his poem "If I could in the desert seas." Here Byron bitterly admits: "I lived a little, but it is clear to my heart that the world is alien to me, as I am to the world." The poem ends on the same pessimistic note. The poet's soul, bound by the prejudices of an aristocratic society, longs for a different share, strives into the unknown:
Oh, if only from a narrow vale,
Like a dove to the warm world of the nest,
Leave, fly into the heavenly space.
Forgetting earthly things forever!
Byron conveys a tragic feeling of loneliness in the poem "The Inscription on the Grave of a Newfoundland Dog." In the words addressed by the lyrical hero to the people around him, the deepest contempt sounds. Mired in all sorts of vices, empty, hypocritical people should, in his opinion, feel shame in front of any animal.
Although the lyric hero of Byron's poetry subsequently evolved along with his author, the main features of his spiritual image: world sorrow, rebellious intransigence, fiery passions and freedom-loving aspirations - all these features
remained unchanged. Some idle critics even accused Byron of misanthropy, identifying the author himself with the heroes of his works. Of course, there is some truth in this. Every writer, poet, creating works, first of all expresses himself. In his literary heroes, he puts some, part of his soul. And although many writers deny this, the opposite statements are also known. For example, Flaubert and Gogol. The latter in the book "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends" writes about "Dead Souls": "None of my readers knew that, laughing at my heroes, he laughed at me ... I began to endow my heroes in addition to their own nasty things with my own rubbish. "
The statement of A.S. Pushkin about the uniformity of heroes in almost all of Byron's works: “... He (Byron - PB) comprehended, created and described a single character (namely his own), everything except some satirical antics ... he referred to .. . to a gloomy, powerful person, so mysteriously captivating. " As you know, Pushkin was most captivated by the image of Byron's Childe Harold, the characteristic features of which he endowed his hero, Onegin, calling him "a Muscovite in Harold's cloak."
However, Byron, like the lyrical hero of his early lyrics, despised and hated not all of humanity as a whole, but only some of its representatives from the environment of a depraved and vicious aristocratic society, in the circle of which he saw himself alone and outcast. He loved mankind and was ready to help the oppressed peoples (Italians and Greeks) to throw off the hated foreign yoke, which he later proved with his life and work.
Unable to endure the painful situation that reigned around him, Byron in 1809 set off on a trip to the Mediterranean countries, the fruit of which was the first two songs of the poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage".
The poem is a kind of diary, united into one poetic whole by some semblance of the plot. The connecting beginning of the work is the story of the wandering of a young aristocrat, satiated with worldly pleasures and disillusioned with life. At first, the image of Childe Harold, leaving England, merges with the image of the author, but the further the story unfolds, the sharper the line between them is drawn. Along with the image of the bored aristocrat Childe Harold, the image of the lyrical hero, embodying the author's "I", is increasingly emerging. The lyrical hero speaks enthusiastically about the Spanish people, heroically defending their homeland from the French invaders, grieving over the former greatness of Greece, enslaved by the Turks. “And humbled under the Turkish lashes, Greece stretched out, trampled in the mud,” the poet says bitterly. But nevertheless Byron, contemplating this woeful sight, does not lose faith in the possibility of the rebirth of freedom. With unflagging strength, the poet's call for an uprising sounds: "O Greece, rise up to fight!" Unlike his character Childe Harold, Byron is by no means a passive contemplator of life. His restless, restless soul, as it were, contains all the sorrow and pain of humanity.
The poem was a huge success. However, in different strata of society, they treated her differently. Some saw in Byron's work only a disappointed hero, others appreciated not so much the image of the bored aristocrat Childe Harold as the pathos
the love of freedom that permeates the entire poem. Nevertheless, the image of the main character of the poem turned out to be deeply in tune with modernity. Although this disillusioned English aristocrat was not at all an exact likeness of Byron, in his appearance the typical features of that special character of the romantic hero, which many later developed in their works, were already outlined. writers XIX century. (Childe Harold will become the prototype of Pushkin Onegin, Lermontov Pechorin, etc.).
The theme of the conflict between personality and society will be continued in the subsequent works of Byron, in the so-called "oriental poems", written in 1813 - 1816. In this poetic cycle, which includes six poems ("Gyaur", "Corsair", "Lara", "Abydos Bride", "Parisina", "Siege of Corinth"), the Byronic hero is finally formed in his complex relationship with the world and himself. At the center of each poem is a truly demonic personality. This is the type of avenger disappointed in everything noble robberwho despises the society that has banished him. (Note here that this type of hero was used by Alexander Pushkin in his story "Dubrovsky"). The portrait of the hero of the "oriental poems" Byron basically gives purely conditional, without going into details. For him, the main thing is the inner state of the hero. After all, the heroes of these poems were, as it were, a living embodiment of the vague romantic ideal that owned Byron at that time. The poet's hatred of the aristocratic circles of England was about to develop into an open rebellion, but it remained unclear how to accomplish this and where are the forces on which to rely. Subsequently, Byron will find an application for his internal protest and join the Carbonari movement, who fought to free Italy from the Austrian yoke. In the meantime, in the "eastern floodplains" Byron's hero, like the poet himself, carries only one denial of the lonely individualist. For example, here is how the author describes the main character of the poem "Corsair" of the sea robber Konrad:
Deceived, we avoid everything stronger,
From a young age he despised rooks
And, having chosen anger as the crown of their joys,
The evil of a few began to take out on everyone.
Like other heroes of "oriental poems", Konrad in the past was an ordinary man - honest, virtuous, loving. Byron, slightly raising the veil of secrecy, reports that the dark lot that Konrad inherited is the result of persecution by a soulless and evil society, which persecutes everything bright, free and original. Thus, placing responsibility for the crimes of the Corsair on a corrupt and insignificant society, Byron at the same time poeticizes his personality and the state of mind in which Konrad is. The most astute critics at one time noted this idealization of Byron's individualistic willfulness. So, Pushkin condemned the selfishness of the heroes of the "oriental poems" by Byron, in particular - Konrad. And Mickiewicz even discerned in the hero of "Corsair" some resemblance to Napoleon. No wonder. Byron probably had some sympathy for Napoleon, as evidenced by his republican sentiments. In 1815, in the House of Lords, Byron voted against the war with France.
The revolutionary rebellion of the English poet led him to a complete break with bourgeois England. The hostility of the ruling circles towards Byron was especially intensified by his defense of Luddites, who destroyed machines in factories in protest against inhuman working conditions. As a result, having made Byron an object of cruel persecution and bullying, taking advantage of the drama of his personal life (divorce from his wife), reactionary England pushed the poet on the path of exile.
In 1816 - 1817. after traveling through the Alps, Byron creates the dramatic poem "Manfred". Building the work in the form of a kind of excursion into the inner life of the "Byronic" hero, the poet shows the tragedy of mental discord, which was only hinted at by his "oriental poems". Manfred is a thinker like Faust, disillusioned with the sciences. But if Goethe's Faust, discarding the dead, scholastic sciences, seeks the path to true knowledge and finds the meaning of life in labor for the good of people, then Manfred, having made sure that: "The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life," calls the spirits to demand oblivion ... Here Byron's romantic disillusionment contrasts with Goethe's enlightenment optimism. But Manfred does not resign himself to his fate, he rebelles, proudly challenges God and, in the end, dies rebellious. In "Manfred" Byron, with much more certainty than in earlier works, speaks of those destructive principles that lurk in modern individualistic consciousness. The titanic individualism of the proud "superman" Manfred acts as a kind of sign of the times.
This is even more evident in the mystery of "Cain", which represents a significant peak in the work of Byron. The poet uses the biblical plot to give his hero's rebellion a truly universal scale. Cain rebelles against God, who, in his opinion, is the culprit of evil on earth. The entire world order is declared imperfect. Next to Cain is the image of Lucifer, a proud rebel who was defeated in open battle with God, but did not submit.
Cain differs from the former romantic heroes of Byron, who, in proud, loneliness, opposed themselves to all other people. Cain's hatred of God appears as a result of compassion for people. It is caused by pain for human destiny. But, fighting against evil, Cain himself becomes an instrument of evil, and his rebellion turns out to be futile. Byron does not find a way out of the contradictions of the era and leaves the hero a lonely wanderer, going into the unknown. But such an end does not diminish the fighting pathos of this rebellious drama. The condemnation of Abel sounded in it as a protest against any reconciliation and slavish obedience to the tyranny of those in power.
Written in 1821, just after the suppression of the uprising of the Carbonarii, Byron's mystery "Cain" with great poetic power captured the depth of the poet's despair, who was convinced that the hopes of people, in particular Italians, for liberation from foreign domination were unrealizable. Byron saw firsthand the doom of his Promethean revolt against the cruel laws of life and history.
As a result, in the unfinished work - the novel in verse "Don Juan" - the Byronic hero appears in a different perspective. Contrary to the world literary tradition, which portrayed Don Juan as a strong-willed, active personality, and in complete contradiction with the principles of building the characters of his former heroes, Byron makes him a person unable to resist the pressure of the external environment. In relations with his many lovers, Don Juan acts not as a seducer, but as a seduced one. Meanwhile, nature endowed him with both courage and nobility of feelings. And although sublime motives are not alien to Don Juan, he is inferior to them only occasionally. On the whole, the circumstances are stronger than Don Juan. It is the idea of \u200b\u200btheir omnipotence that becomes the source of irony that permeates the entire work.
The storyline of the novel is interrupted from time to time lyrical digressions... In their center stands the second lyrical hero of Don Juan - the author himself. In his sorrowful, but at the same time and satirically caustic speeches, the image of a corrupt, self-serving world arises, the objective display of which is the basis of the author's intention.
"The ruler of thoughts" (according to Pushkin) of a whole generation, Byron had a great beneficial effect on his contemporaries. Even the concept of "Byronism" has arisen and has become widespread, which is often equated with world sorrow, that is, suffering caused by the feeling that the universe is governed by cruel laws hostile to man. Byronism, however, is not limited to pessimism and disappointment. It includes other aspects of the poet's multifaceted life and work: skepticism, irony, individualistic rebellion, and at the same time - loyalty to public service in the struggle against despotism, both political and spiritual.

Generalized image of a person created by J.G. Byron, reflecting Byronic ideas about the human person and in many ways close to the author himself. The heroes of Byron's poems and dramas are different, but in all the images created by the English poet, one can trace a certain general idea, highlight the features that bring them all together.

“B. g. " differs from other people already outwardly. Despite his youth, his forehead is cut with wrinkles - a testament to the strength of his experiences. The hero's gaze is also expressive: he can be gloomy, fiery, mysterious, frightening (to such an extent that only a few are able to withstand it), can burn with anger, rage, determination, one can guess from him about the secret passions tormenting “B. g. "

Corresponds to the scale of the hero's personality and the setting in which he is depicted: over the sea, at the entrance to a cave (Corsair), at night on a narrow mountain path (Gyaur), in an ancient gloomy castle (Lara).

“B. g. " proud, gloomy, lonely, and the passion that owns him absorbs him completely, without a trace (Selim's passion for Zuleika, Giaur's desire to take revenge on Hassan). The hero's desire for freedom is indomitable, he rebelles against any compulsion, restriction, even against the existing world order (Cain).

Next to such a hero is usually his beloved - the complete opposite of him, a meek, gentle, loving creature. She is the only one who can reconcile “B. g. " in peace and tame his violent temper. The death of his beloved means for the hero the collapse of all his hopes for happiness, the loss of the meaning of existence (Gyaur, Manfred). The existence of such a generalized type “B. g. " also pointed out A.S. Pushkin. According to the observation of the Russian poet, in the person of his hero Byron displays "the ghost of himself." Pushkin calls “B. g. " "Dark, powerful", "mysteriously captivating."

Researcher M.N. Rozanov characterized such a hero as "titanic". V.M. Zhirmunsky in the study "Byron and Pushkin" talks about "B. g. " not only as a hero of Byron's works.

The titanic, heroic image created by Byron turned out to be so interesting to his contemporaries that the features of Byronism can also be found in the works of other authors. Thus, “B. g. " ceases to belong to Byron alone and turns into a kind of socio-cultural phenomenon, continuing the tradition of English "scary novels" of the 18th century. and reinterpreted in a new way by the authors of the 19th century. In Russian literature, in particular, in the work of Pushkin, to whom the monograph by V.M. Zhirmunsky, “B. g. " debunks, showing not only his strength, but also his weakness.

Of modern research on this issue, the work "Byron and Romanticism" (Cambridge, 2002) by Jerome McGann, author of several books on Byron, and also the editor of his complete works, is especially interesting. The key concepts for this work are "mask" and "masquerade". According to McGann, “B. g. " - this is a kind of mask, put on by Byron not to hide his true face, but on the contrary, to show it, as paradoxically "Byron puts on a mask and is able to tell the truth about himself." The mask acts as a means of self-knowledge: the poet, depicting a close, but not identical to himself, a hero, sought to objectify himself, to explore his own thoughts and feelings. However, this method of self-knowledge is imperfect, since ultimately the heroes created by Byron act according to his "poetic orders."

Byron McGann includes not only fictional characters - Childe Harold, Giaur, Corsair, Lara, Manfred - as "masks", but also images of real historical figures appearing in Byron's work: Dante, Torquato Tasso, Napoleon.

In part, Byron's relationship with B. g. " remind L.'s attitude to the "Lermontov man", but there are some differences. Hero L. is not necessarily his "mask", his self-projection.

The poet is also interested in other, unlike him heroes, "ordinary people": fishermen, peasants, mountaineers, soldiers, and later - the old "Caucasian" Maxim Maksimych. L.'s interest in the other is also manifested in the fact that he refers to the image of a neighbor in Art. "Neighbor" (1830 or 1831), "Neighbor" (1837), "Neighbor" (1840).

This dissimilarity of the two poets is especially clearly seen when comparing Byron's poem "Lara" and Lermontov's novel "Vadim". Both Lara and Vadim are the leaders of the peasant uprising, tragic demonic personalities. But if Byron is only interested in the spiritual life of Lara (and partly the girl in love with him, who accompanies him under the guise of a page), then L. became so carried away by the image of ordinary people that they overshadowed the image of Vadim and turned out from an artistic point of view more convincing than him. However, at an early stage of creativity, Byron's heroes - rebellious, incomprehensible, lonely - were exactly the people to whom L. had an "aesthetic interest." Byron attracted the young man L. strength, passion, energy, thirst for activity. It is these heroes that prevail in his early work: Vadim, taking revenge on Rurik for the death of Leda and the enslavement of his native Novgorod, Fernando, seeking to snatch Emilia from the clutches of the insidious Sorrini, etc. Even the Corsair from an early poem, written before meeting Byron in the original, is already endowed with these character traits. Consequently, L.'s interest in strong and passionate personalities is explained not by imitation of Byron, but by the inner need of the poet himself to portray just such people. The Russian poet sincerely admired the British genius, but he wanted to "achieve" him, that is, to equal him in the strength of his talent, fame, the degree of originality of creative and personal destiny, and not to become like him.

Lit .: 1) N.M. Belova Byronic Hero and Pechorin. - Saratov: Publishing Center "Science", 2009 - 95 p .; 2) Zhirmunsky V.M. Byron and Pushkin. Pushkin and Western Literature. - L .: Nauka, 1978 .-- 424 p .; 3) Pushkin A.S. Full. collection cit .: In 10 volumes - volume VII. - L .: Science. Leningrad. Branch, 1977-1979; 4) Rozanov M.N. Essay on the history of English literature of the XIX century. Part one. The era of Byron. - M .: State Publishing House, 1922. - 247 p .; 5) McGann, Jerome J. Byron and Romanticism. - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

T.S. Milovanova

His poetic works embodied the most acute vital problems of his era. The tremendous artistic value of Byron's legacy cannot be separated from its historical significance. His poetry, which became a direct response to the great revolutionary upheavals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, summed up the general position of European romanticism as a special direction of the spiritual life of the era that arose as a reaction to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment associated with it. Berkovsky had every reason to say that Byron ...

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Introduction

The work of the great English poet Byron (1788-1824) is undoubtedly one of the most significant phenomena in the history of world literary and social thought. His poetic works embodied the most acute, vital problems of his era. In the forms of romantic symbolism, they already outline the range of issues, the detailed development of which will be dealt with by later art.XIX , and to a certain extent alsoXX century. The tremendous artistic value of Byron's legacy cannot be separated from its historical significance. His poetry, which became a direct response to the great revolutionary upheavals of the endXVIII - early XIX century, to the utmost generalized the general position of European romanticism as a special direction of the spiritual life of the era, which arose as a reaction to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment associated with it.

In this regard, N. Ya. Berkovsky had every reason to say that Byron “personifies not one of the trends in romanticism, as they usually interpret it, but romanticism as such, in its full and expanded form. This ... has always been understood here in Russia, since the days of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev "1 .

The relevance of studying Byron's work is determined not only by the influence that he had on all subsequent literature, including Russian literature in the person of its best representatives, not only by the significance of his works and images, but also, according to V.A. Lukov, the development of new literary genres (lyric-epic poem, philosophical drama-mystery, novel in verse, etc.), innovation in various fields of poetics, as well as participation in the literary struggle of his time2 ... It is also necessary to add to this that it was the Byronic hero who became the classic type of the romantic exiled hero, which began to be called by the appropriate term - "Byronic hero".

The theme of this work is “Rogue Heroes in Byron's Poems.

The purpose of the work is to conduct comparative analysis rogue heroes in Byron's poems (for example, 3-4 of Byron's poems). The poems "Prometheus", "Manfred", "Prisoner of Chillon" and "Corsair" were chosen as the analyzed works.

Work tasks:

1. Consider the main characteristics of romanticism as a literary movement of the 19th century;
2. consider the main types and key features of the romantic hero in Western European literature;
3. give a brief description of the work of J. G. Byron;
4. analyze the images of Byronic heroes-rogue by the example of the poems "Prometheus", "Manfred", "Prisoner of Chillon" and "Corsair".

The subject of study is the work of J. G. Byron as the brightest representative of the literature of romanticism; the object of study is the romantic rogue hero in Byron's work.

When writing the work, critical articles were used
V.G. Belinsky, the works of Soviet and modern scholars on literary criticism, devoted to both the history of Western European literature in general and the study of the work of J.G. Byron, in particular.

The research methods were: the method of studying the scientific research domestic and foreign literature, method of analysis, method of comparison and analogy.

The scientific value of the work consists in a comprehensive study of sources and critical works devoted to the poet's work.

The practical value of the research lies in the possibility of using the obtained materials for speaking at seminars and conferences devoted to Western European literature.

The structure of the work corresponds to the tasks set: the work consists of an introduction, two chapters divided into paragraphs, a conclusion and a list of references.

Chapter 1. The Romantic Hero in Western European Literature: Characteristics

§ 1. Romanticism in Western European literature of the early nineteenth century

The romantic era is a time of unprecedented flowering of literature, painting and music. In literary criticism, romanticism is a broad literary movement that began in the last decade of the 18th century. It dominated Western literature for the entire first third of the 19th century, and even longer in some countries.His main artistic discoveries were made in the first quarter of the century (Byronic poem, historical novel by W. Scott, short stories-fairy tales of German romantics, including Hoffmann, an extraordinary rise of romantic lyrics in a number of countries).

The famous researcher of romanticism N. Ya. Berkovsky wrote: "Romanticism took shape as a whole culture, diversely developed, and it was in this that it was similar to its predecessors - the Renaissance, classicism, the Enlightenment."3 .

In other words, romanticism was not just a literary trend - it constituted an entire cultural era. People of this era found a new sense of the world and created a new aesthetics. The art of the romantic era was very different from what prevailed in the previous period - in the era of the Enlightenment.

The Great French Revolution of 1789-1794 marked the line dividing new era from the Age of Enlightenment. It was not only the forms of the state that changed, the social structure of society, the arrangement of classes. The whole system of representations, illuminated for centuries, was shaken. "The old forms of the basis were crushed," wrote F. Schiller in his poem "The Beginning of a New Age" (1801).

For classical Western philosophy of the 17th - early 19th centuries. the dominant was the rational paradigm, the roots of which go back to the depths of antiquity, during the Renaissance, its active formation takes place, with the beginning of the New Time it strengthens, and in the 18th century. becomes dominant. Its cornerstone is the principle of the rationality of being, when reason is understood quite abstractly and broadly not only as an individual human, but also as outside the individual - World Reason, Divine Reason, and natural laws and spiritual culture - as a manifestation of natural and human reason. This principle was based, figuratively speaking, on three "whales" that formed the basis of the rational paradigm, and to one degree or another was recognized by the overwhelming majority of European philosophers:

First, it was assumed that nature and society are arranged rationally and are governed not by blind, but by reasonable laws (divine, natural, spiritual, etc.). Secondly, the prevailing belief was that these laws are cognizable by man (epistemological optimism) with the help of reason or sensory experience, the results of which are nevertheless comprehended by reason.

Thirdly, philosophers had no doubt that, using the knowledge gained, it is possible to force nature to serve man, and to reasonably improve society and man.4 .

With the help of scientific reason, the enlighteners believed, all problems could be solved.

But the reality - scientific and socio-historical, turned out to be much more complex and ambiguous than the enlighteners looked at it optimistically. In the Old and New Worlds, various spiritualistic, mediumistic and other phenomena began to spread widely, undermining the naive materialism of established scientific and philosophical theories. Social processes by no means justified the hopes for the triumph of the scientific, "enlightened reason": there was no noticeable improvement in man and society. On the contrary, it seemed that humanity is not able to solve its problems rationally and rationally.

All this undermined the foundations of the classical philosophical paradigm. More and more doubts grew about the rational organization of nature, about the possibility of improving society and historical progress. Beliefs in the relativity of truth spread. In philosophy, fermentation intensified. Classical rationalism collapsed, helped by the rapid fading away of the influential Hegelian school. An active search for non-standard ideas, approaches and concepts of world outlook began5 .

The enlighteners ideologically prepared the revolution. But they could not foresee all its consequences. The "kingdom of reason" promised by thinkers did not take placeXVIII century. At the turn of the century, contradictions were already outlined, largely still incomprehensible to contemporaries. Goethe put into the mouth of one of the heroes of the poem "Hermann and Dorothea" the words about the hopes that the revolution had awakened in the minds: when the French revolutionary troops came to the western German lands, "all eyes were on the unknown new roads." This time of hope, however, soon gave way to disappointment:

They began to reach for domination

people who are deaf to good, indifferent to the common good ...

The main feature of the romantic worldview was the idea of \u200b\u200ba tragic gap between the ideal and real life... Therefore, among them it was so popular to deny reality and the desire to escape from it into the world of fantasy. The forms of such romantic denial were the retreat into history and the creation of images that were exclusively heroic, symbolic and fantastic. The greatest poets of English romanticism are Byron and Shelley, poets of the "storm", fascinated by the ideas of struggle. Their element is political pathos, sympathy for the oppressed and disadvantaged, protection of individual freedom. The images of rebel heroes, individualists with a sense of tragic doom, for a long time retained an influence on all European literature6 .

Most representatives of romanticism are characterized byrejection of the bourgeois way of life, protest against the vulgarity and prosaicity, lack of spirituality and selfishness of bourgeois relations. The reality, the reality of history turned out to be beyond the control of "reason", irrational, full of secrets and unforeseen events, and the modern world order - hostile to human nature and his personal freedom.

The subjective, emotional and personal attitude to the surrounding world, its depiction from the standpoint of a person who does not accept the surrounding bourgeois prose, constitutes the basis of the romantic worldview. This is a reaction to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment that prepared it, but this should be understood not as a rejection of the revolution (although this is not excluded), but as a denial of the social order that arose as a result of the revolution.

Hence - a typical for romantics appeal to science fiction, legends, to events of the distant past, keen interest in ancient myths and, what is especially important, the creation of new myths. These traits were most characteristic of the German romantics. So, it was Novalis's novel-myth “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” that stood at the origins of romanticism, and one of the later romantics, playwright and composer Richard Wagner, who reinterpreted the ancient myth, created the grandiose tetralogy “Ring of the Nibelungen”. However, this was typical not only of German romantics (albeit to a lesser extent). So, Victor Hugo in his collection of poems "Eastern" and Byron in their "oriental poems" (like the Russian romantics who turned to the themes of the Caucasus) did not paint the real East, but the fictional one, forming, in essence, a myth about the East, contrasting with reality unacceptable to them7 .

Realism that replaced romanticism -direction in literature and art, aiming at the true reproduction of reality in its typical features. At the same time, special attention was paid to the acute social contradictions of bourgeois society.

Over a fairly long period, romanticism coexisted with a new trend - realism in the work of many writers. For example, in the work of one of the most prominent French writers - Victor Hugo. The complexity and originality of Hugo's creative method lies in the fact that in his works the realistic tendency was closely intertwined with the romantic.

The romantic aesthetics set forth by the writer in the 20s of the XIX century. in the preface to the drama "Cromwell", was consistently embodied in his works of art. Romanticism, elation, the desire to highlight something grandiose, sometimes monstrous - all this is characteristic of the Hugo method. And yet the writer did not remain alien to the artistic achievements of realism. He took from him an interest in the document, in precise historical and geographical details; the realistic tendency that developed in the writer's work helped him to draw portraits of soldiers from the Red Hat battalion in his novel "Ninety-third Year" in a simple and vital way, to give a lot of interesting information about France in 1793.
In V. Hugo's novel “Cathedral Notre dame de paris», Topographical sketches of Paris, descriptions of interiors, attention to costumes of that time are remarkable; the authenticity of the events is confirmed by the chronological accuracy of the time of the novel, the introduction of many real events and even historical figures of that time.

Realists often entered into polemics with romantics, criticizing them for being disconnected from reality, for the abstract nature of creativity, but “even when the experience of predecessors is rejected in acute polemics, the writer, often without even realizing it, absorbs some part of this experience. So, the conquests of psychological realismXIX centuries (Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) were undoubtedly prepared by romantics, their close attention to the personality, to emotional experiences "8 .

Deep penetration into the complex spiritual world of a person; overcoming the metaphysical opposition of good and evil, which was characteristic of many enlighteners; historicism; close attention to color - national, geographic - all these conquests of romanticism enriched the artistic vision of realists. We can say that realismXIX century (critical realism) could not be a simple return to realismXVIII century (enlightenment realism) already because between them lay the era of innovation of romantics.

§ 2. The romantic hero as a literary type

The moral pathos of romantics was associated, first of all, with the affirmation of the value of the individual, which was embodied in the images of romantic heroes. The first, most striking type is the loner hero, the outcast hero, who is usually called the Byronic hero.The opposition of the poet to the crowd, the hero to the rabble, the individual to the society, which does not understand and persecutes him, is a characteristic feature of romantic literature.9 .

E. Kozhina wrote about such a hero: “A person of the romantic generation, a witness to bloodshed, cruelty, tragic destinies of people and entire nations, striving for the bright and heroic, but paralyzed in advance by a pitiful reality, out of hatred for the bourgeois, elevating the knights of the Middle Ages to a pedestal and even more acute in front of their monolithic figures, his own duality, inferiority and instability, a person who is proud of his “I”, because only it distinguishes him from the middle class, and at the same time is burdened by him, a person who combines protest, powerlessness, and naive illusions, and pessimism, and unspent energy, and passionate lyricism - this person is present in all romantic paintings of the 1820s "10 .

The dizzying change of events inspired, gave rise to hopes for changes, awakened dreams, but sometimes even led to despair. The slogans of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood proclaimed by the revolution opened up space for the human spirit. However, it soon became clear that these principles were impracticable. Having given rise to unprecedented hopes, the revolution did not justify them. It was discovered early that the freedom obtained was not only good. It also manifested itself in cruel and predatory individualism. The post-revolutionary order least of all resembled the kingdom of reason that the thinkers and writers of the Enlightenment dreamed of. The cataclysms of the era influenced the mindset of the entire romantic generation. The mood of romantics constantly fluctuates between delight and despair, inspiration and disappointment, fiery enthusiasm and truly world grief. The feeling of absolute and boundless freedom of the individual is adjacent to the awareness of her tragic insecurity.

S. Frank wrote that “the nineteenth century opens with a feeling of“ world sorrow ”. In the outlook of Byron, Leopardi, Alfred Musset - in Russia in Lermontov, Baratynsky, Tyutchev - in the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, in the tragic music of Beethoven, in the terrible fantasy of Hoffmann, in the sad irony of Heine - there is no new consciousness in the world of tragic irony his hopes, the hopeless contradiction between the intimate needs and hopes of the human heart and the cosmic and social conditions of human existence "11 .

Indeed, does not Schopenhauer himself speak of the pessimism of his views, whose teachings are painted in gloomy tones, and who constantly says that the world is filled with evil, meaninglessness, unhappiness, that life is suffering: “If the immediate and immediate goal of our life is not suffering, then our existence is the most stupid and inexpedient phenomenon. For it is absurd to admit that the endless suffering, flowing from the essential needs of life, with which the world is overflowing, was aimless and purely accidental. Although every single misfortune seems to be an exception, misfortune in general is a rule "12 .

The life of the human spirit among romantics is contrasted with the baseness of material existence. From the feeling of his unhappiness, the cult of a unique individual personality was born. She was perceived as the only support and as the only point of reference for life values. Human individuality was thought of as an absolutely self-valuable principle, torn out of the surrounding world and in many respects opposed to it.

The hero of romantic literature is a person who has broken away from old ties, asserting his absolute dissimilarity from all others. By virtue of this alone, it is exceptional. Romantic artists tended to shy away from portraying common and ordinary people. Lonely dreamers, brilliant artists, prophets, personalities endowed with deep passions, titanic power of feelings act as the main characters in their artistic work. They may be villains, but never mediocre. Most often they are endowed with a rebellious mind.

The gradations of disagreement with the world order of such heroes can be different: from René's rebellious uneasiness in the novel of the same name by Chateaubriand to total disillusionment with people, reason and world order inherent in many of Byron's heroes. The romantic hero is always in a state of some kind of spiritual limit. His senses are heightened. The contours of the personality are determined by the passion of nature, the irrepressibility of desires and aspirations. The romantic personality is exceptional already by virtue of its original nature and therefore is completely individual13 .

The exclusive intrinsic value of individuality did not allow even the thought of its dependence on the surrounding circumstances. The starting point of a romantic conflict is the individual's desire for complete independence, the assertion of the primacy of free will over necessity. The discovery of the self-worth of the individual was the artistic conquest of romanticism. But it led to the aestheticization of individuality. The very uncommon personality has already become the subject of aesthetic admiration. Breaking free from the environment, the romantic hero could sometimes manifest himself in violation of prohibitions, in individualism and selfishness, or even simply in crimes (Manfred, Corsair, or Cain by Byron). Ethical and aesthetic in the assessment of personality may not coincide. In this, the romantics were very different from the enlighteners, who, on the contrary, in their assessment of the hero, the ethical and aesthetic principles completely merged14 .

Enlighteners XVIII century, many positive heroes were created who were carriers of high moral values, who embodied, in their opinion, reason and natural norms. Thus, Robinson Crusoe D. Defoe became the symbol of the new, "natural", rational hero15 and Gulliver Jonathan Swift16 ... The true hero of the Enlightenment is undoubtedly Goethe's Faust17 .

The romantic hero is not just a positive hero, he is not even always positive, the romantic hero is a hero reflecting the poet's longing for the ideal. After all, the question of whether the Demon is positive or negative for Lermontov, Konrad in Byron's Corsair does not arise at all - they are majestic, enclosing indomitable strength of mind in their appearance, in their deeds. A romantic hero, as V.G.Belinsky wrote, is a "personality leaning on itself", a personality opposing itself to the entire surrounding world18 .

An example of a romantic hero is Julien Sorel from Stendhal's Red and Black. The personal fate of Julien Sorel has developed in close dependence on this change in historical weather. From the past he borrows his inner code of honor, the present condemns him to dishonor. By his inclinations "a man of 93", an admirer of revolutionaries and Napoleon, he was "late to be born." The time has passed when the position was won by personal valor, courage, intelligence. Now the plebeian for the "hunt for happiness" is offered the only help that is in use among the children of timelessness: prudent and hypocritical piety. The color of luck has changed, as if you turned a roulette wheel: today, to win, you have to bet not on red, but on black. And the young man, obsessed with the dream of glory, is faced with a choice: either to disappear into obscurity, or to try to assert himself, adjusting to his age, putting on a "uniform in time" - a cassock. He turns away from friends and serves those whom he despises in his soul; an atheist, he pretends to be a saint; admirer of the Jacobins, trying to penetrate the circle of aristocrats; endowed with a sharp mind, he agrees with fools. Realizing that "every man for himself in this desert of selfishness called life", he rushed into the fray, hoping to win with the weapon imposed on him19 .

And yet Sorel, having embarked on the path of adaptation, did not completely become an opportunist; choosing the ways to win happiness, accepted by everyone around, he did not completely share themmorality. And the point here is not simply that a gifted young man is immeasurably smarter than the mediocrity with whom he is in service. His hypocrisy itself is not humiliated obedience, but a kind of challenge to society, accompanied by a refusal to recognize the right of the "masters of life" to respect and their claims to set moral principles to their subordinates. The top is the enemy, vile, cunning, vengeful. Taking advantage of their favor, Sorel, however, does not know the debts of conscience in front of them, because, even when courting a capable young man, they see in him not a person, but a quick servant20 .

An ardent heart, energy, sincerity, courage and strength of character, a morally healthy attitude towards the world and people, a constant need for action, in work, in the fruitful work of the intellect, humane responsiveness to people, respect for ordinary workers, love for nature, beauty in life and art, all this distinguished Julien's nature, and all this he had to suppress in himself, trying to adapt to the bestial laws of the world around him. This attempt was unsuccessful: "Julien retreated before the court of his conscience, he could not overcome the craving for justice."

One of the most beloved symbols of romanticism was Prometheus, embodying courage, heroism, self-sacrifice, unbending will and intransigence. An example of a work based on the myth of Prometheus is the poem by P.B. Shelley's "Prometheus Free", which is one of the most significant works of the poet. Shelley, changing the denouement of the mythological plot, in which, as you know, Prometheus still reconciled with Zeus. The poet himself wrote: "I was against such a pitiful outcome as the reconciliation of a fighter for humanity with his oppressor."21 ... Shelley creates an ideal hero out of the image of Prometheus, punished by the gods for helping people by violating their will. In Shelley's poem, the agony of Prometheus is rewarded with the triumph of his release. Appearing in the third part of the poem, the fantastic creature Demogorgon overthrows Zeus, proclaiming: "There is no return for the tyranny of heaven, and there is no longer your successor."

Women's images of romanticism are also contradictory, but extraordinary. Many authors of the era of romanticism returned to the history of Medea. The Austrian writer of the era of romanticism F. Grillparzer wrote the trilogy "The Golden Fleece", which reflected the "tragedy of rock" characteristic of German romanticism. "The Golden Fleece" is often called the most complete dramatic version of the "biography" of the ancient Greek heroine. In the first part, the one-act drama The Guest, we see Medea as a very young girl forced to endure her tyrant father. She prevents the killing of Phrix, their guest who fled to Colchis on a golden ram. It was he who sacrificed a golden fleece ram to Zeus in gratitude for saving him from death and hung the golden fleece in the sacred grove of Ares. The seekers of the golden fleece appear before us in the four-act play "The Argonauts". In it, Medea desperately but unsuccessfully tries to fight her feelings for Jason, against her will, becoming his accomplice. In the third part, the five-act tragedy Medea, the story reaches its climax. Medea, brought by Jason to Corinth, appears to those around him as a stranger from barbarian lands, a witch and a sorceress. In the works of romantics, the phenomenon is quite often encountered that at the heart of many insoluble conflicts lies alienness. Returning to his homeland in Corinth, Jason is ashamed of his girlfriend, but still refuses to fulfill Creon's demand and drive her away. And only having fallen in love with his daughter, Jason himself hated Medea.

home tragic theme Grillparzer's Medea is in her loneliness, because even her own children are ashamed and avoid her. Medea is not destined to get rid of this punishment even in Delphi, where she fled after the murder of Creusa and her sons. Grillparzer did not at all seek to justify his heroine, but it was important for him to discover the motives of her actions. At Grillparzer Medea, the daughter of a distant barbaric country, did not accept the fate prepared for her, she rebelled against someone else's way of life, and this very attracted romantics.22

The image of Medea, striking in its contradiction, is seen by many in a transformed form in the heroines of Stendhal and Barbe d'Oreville. Both writers depict the deadly Medea in different ideological contexts, but invariably endow her with a sense of alienation, which turns out to be detrimental to the integrity of the individual and, therefore, entails death itself23 .

Many literary scholars correlate the image of Medea with the image of the heroine of the novel "Bewitched" by Barbe d "Oreville, Jeanne-Madeleine de Feardin, as well as with the image of the field of the famous heroine of Stendhal's novel" Red and Black "Matilda. Here we see three main components of the famous myth: unexpected, stormy the birth of passion, magical actions sometimes with good, then with destructive intentions, revenge of an abandoned witch - a rejected woman24 .

These are just a few examples of romantic heroes and heroines.

The revolution proclaimed the freedom of the individual, opening up "unknown new roads" for her, but this same revolution gave birth to a bourgeois order, a spirit of acquisitiveness and selfishness. These two sides of personality (the pathos of freedom and individualism) are very difficult to manifest in the romantic concept of the world and man. VG Belinsky found a wonderful formula, speaking of Byron (and his hero): "this is a human personality, rebellious against the common and, in his proud rebellion, leaning on himself"25 .

However, in the depths of romanticism, another type of personality is also being formed. This is, first of all, the personality of an artist - a poet, musician, painter, also exalted above the crowd of ordinary people, officials, property owners, and secular idlers. Here we are no longer talking about the claims of an exceptional personality, but about the rights of a true artist to judge the world and people.

The romantic image of the artist (for example, among German writers) is far from always adequate to the Byronic hero. Moreover, the Byronic hero-individualist is opposed to a universal personality who strives for the highest harmony (as if absorbing all the diversity of the world).The universality of such a personality is the antithesis of any limitation of a person, associated with even narrow mercantile interests, even with a greed for profit that destroys the personality, etc.

Romantics did not always correctly assess the social consequences of revolutions. But they sharply felt the anti-aesthetic character of society, which threatens the very existence of art, in which "heartless cash" reigns. Romantic artist, unlike some writers of the second halfXIX century, did not seek to hide from the world in the "ivory tower". But he felt tragically alone, suffocating from this loneliness.

Thus, in romanticism, two antagonistic concepts of personality can be distinguished: individualistic and universalistic. Their fate in the subsequent development of world culture was ambiguous. The rebellion of the Byronic hero - the individualist was beautiful, carried away his contemporaries, but at the same time its futility was quickly revealed. History has severely condemned the claims of the individual to create his own judgment. On the other hand, the idea of \u200b\u200buniversality reflected a longing for the ideal of a comprehensively developed person, free from the limitations of bourgeois society.

Chapter 2. The Byronic Hero as the "Classic Type" of the Romantic Hero

§ 1. The main features of Byron's work

Romanticism as the dominant trend gradually established itself in English art in the 1790s and 1800s. It was a terrible time. The revolutionary events in France shocked the whole world, and in England itself another, silent, but no less significant revolution took place - the so-called industrial revolution, which caused, on the one hand, the colossal growth of industrial cities, and on the other, gave rise to glaring social disasters: mass pauperism , hunger, prostitution, the growth of crime, impoverishment and the final ruin of the village.

The image of Byron becomes the image of an entire era in the history of European self-awareness. She will be named after the poet - the era of Byronism. In his personality they saw the embodied spirit of the times, they believed that Byron "put the song of a whole generation to music" (Vyazemsky)26 ... Byronism was defined as "world sorrow", which was an echo of the unfulfilled hopes that aroused the French Revolution. As a reflection caused by the spectacle of the triumph of reaction in post-Napoleonic Europe. As rebellion, capable of expressing itself only by contempt for universal obedience and sanctimonious well-being. As a cult of individualism, or rather, as the apotheosis of unlimited freedom, which is accompanied by endless loneliness27 .

The great Russian writer F.M. Dostoevsky wrote: “Although Byronism was instantaneous, it was a great, holy and extraordinary phenomenon in the life of European mankind, and almost in the life of all mankind. Byronism appeared in a moment of terrible longing of people, their disappointment and almost despair. After the ecstatic raptures of a new faith in new ideals proclaimed at the end of the last century in France ... an outcome came so different from what was expected, so deceiving the faith of people, that perhaps there has never been so sad in the history of Western Europe minutes ... The old idols lay broken. And at that very moment a great and mighty genius, a passionate poet, appeared. In his sounds sounded the then longing of mankind and his gloomy disappointment in his appointment and in the ideals that deceived him. It was a new and even then unheard of muse of revenge and sorrow, curse and despair. The spirit of Byronism suddenly swept through, as it were, throughout humanity, everything responded to him "28 .

Recognized as the leader of European romanticism in one of its most militant and rebellious variants, Byron was linked to the traditions of the Enlightenment through complex and contradictory relationships. Like other advanced people of his era, he was acutely aware of the discrepancy between the utopian beliefs of the enlighteners and reality. Son of an egoistic age, he was far from the complacent optimism of thinkersXVIII centuries with their doctrine of the good nature of "natural man".

But if Byron was tormented by doubts about many of the truths of the Enlightenment and the possibility of their practical implementation, the poet never questioned their moral and ethical value. From the feeling of the greatness of the educational and revolutionary ideals and from bitter doubts about the possibility of their realization, the whole complex complex of "Byronism" with its deep contradictions, with its fluctuations between light and shadow arose; with heroic impulses to the "impossible" and tragic awareness of the immutability of the laws of history29 .

The general ideological and aesthetic foundations of the poet's creativity did not form immediately. The first of his poetic speeches was the collection of youthful poems "Hours of Leisure" (1807), which still had an imitative and immature character. The bright originality of Byron's creative personality, as well as the unique originality of his artistic style, were fully revealed at the next stage of the poet's literary activity, the beginning of which was marked by the appearance of the first two songs of his monumental poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812).

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which became Byron's most famous work, brought its author worldwide fame, at the same time being the largest event in the history of European romanticism. It is a kind of lyrical diary in which the poet expressed his attitude to life, gave an assessment of his era, the material for it was Byron's impressions of his trip to Europe, undertaken in 1812. Taking scattered diary entries as the basis of his work, Byron combined them into one poetic whole, giving it a certain semblance of plot unity. He made the story of the wanderings of the protagonist Childe Harold as the unifying beginning of his story, using this motive to recreate the wide panorama of modern Europe. The appearance of various countries, contemplated by Childe Harold from the ship, is reproduced by the poet in a purely romantic "picturesque" manner, with an abundance of lyrical nuances and an almost dazzling brightness of the color spectrum30 ... With a typical romantic addiction tonational "exotic", "local flavor" Byron depicts the manners and customs of different countries.

With his characteristic tyrannical pathos, the poet shows that the spirit of freedom, which so recently inspired all of humanity, has not completely faded away. It still continues to exist in the heroic struggle of the Spanish peasants against the foreign conquerors of their homeland or in the civic virtues of the harsh rebellious Albanians. And yet, persecuted freedom more and more goes into the realm of traditions, memories, legends.31 .

In Greece, which became the cradle of democracy, now nothing reminded of the once free ancient Hellas (“And humbled under the Turkish lashes, Greece stretched out, trampled into the mud”). In a world that is chained, only nature remains free, the lush and joyful bloom which appears as a contrast to the cruelty and anger reigning in human society ("Let the genius die, liberty died, eternal nature is beautiful and bright").

But the poet, contemplating the woeful spectacle of the defeat of freedom, does not lose faith in the possibility of its revival. All his spirit, all his mighty energy are aimed at awakening the fading revolutionary spirit. Throughout the entire poem, it sounds with unflagging force a call to rebellion, to fight tyranny ("Oh, Greece, rise up to fight!").

And unlike Childe Harold, who only watches from the sidelines, Byron is by no means a passive contemplator of world tragedy. His restless, restless soul, as if a constituent part of the world soul, contains all the sorrow and pain of mankind ("world sorrow"). It is this feeling of the infinity of the human spirit, its fusion with the world whole, combined with purely poetic features - the global breadth of the theme's spread, dazzling brightness of colors, magnificent landscape sketches, etc. - that, according to M.S. Kurginyan, Byron's work at the highest achievement of the romantic art of the beginningXIX century 32.

It is no accident that in the minds of many fans and followers of Byron, who enthusiastically accepted the poem, Byron remained primarily the author of "Childe Harold". Among them was A. Pushkin, in whose works the name of Childe Harold is repeatedly mentioned, and quite often in correlation with Pushkin's own heroes (Onegin - "Muscovite in Harold's cloak").

Undoubtedly, the main source of the attractive force of "Childe Harold" for his contemporaries was in the spirit of militant love of freedom embodied in the poem. Both in its ideological content and in its poetic embodiment, Childe Harold is a true sign of its time. The image of the main character of the poem - the internally devastated, homeless wanderer, tragically lonely Childe Harold was also deeply consonant with modernity. Although this disenchanted, disbelieved English aristocrat was not an exact likeness of Byron (as the poet's contemporaries mistakenly thought), in his appearance there were already outlined (still in the "dotted outline") features of a special character, which became the romantic prototype of all opposition-minded heroes of literatureXIX century, and who will later be called the Byronic hero, most of all suffering from loneliness:

I am alone in the world among the empty

boundless waters.

Why should I sigh for others,

who will sigh for me? -

- Asks Byron's Childe Harold mournfully.

The indivisibility of this single lyrical complex manifests itself with particular clarity in poems dedicated to Greece, a country whose dream of liberation has become a cross-cutting motive of Byron's poetry. An agitated tone, heightened emotionality and a peculiar nostalgic tone, born of memories of the past greatness of this country, are already present in one of the earliest poems about Greece in the "Song of the Greek Rebels"(1812):

O Greece, rise!

Radiance of Ancient Glory

Fighters calls to swear

For a majestic feat.

In later poems by Byron on the same topicy personal emphasis increases. In the last of them, written almost on the eve of his death ("The last lines addressed to Greece," 1824), the poet refers to the country of his dreams as to a beloved woman or mother:

Love you! don't be harsh with me!

…………………………………… \

My love is imperishable basis!

I am yours - and I cannot cope with this!

He himself best described his own perception of civic issues in one of the lyric works - "From a Diary in Kefalonia" (1823):

The dead sleep is disturbed - can I sleep?

Tyrants crush the world - will I give in?

The harvest is ripe - should I hesitate to reap?

On the bed - a prickly thorn; I do not sleep;

In my ears that day, the trumpet sings,

Her heart echoes ...

Per. A. Blok

The sound of this battle "trumpet", singing in unison with the poet's heart, was intelligible to his contemporaries. But the rebellious pathos of his poetry was perceived by them in different ways.

Consistent with the moods of the world's progressive people (many of them could say about Byron, together with M. Yu. Lermontov: “We have one soul, the same torment”), the revolutionary rebellion of the English poet led him to a complete break with England. Having inherited the title of Lord, but having lived in poverty since childhood, the poet found himself in an alien environment, he and this environment experienced mutual rejection and contempt for each other: he because of the hypocrisy of his noble acquaintances, they are because of his past and because of his views.

The enmity of her ruling circles towards Byron was especially intensified by his actions in defense of the Luddites (workers who destroyed cars in protest against inhuman working conditions). Added to all this was a personal drama: the parents of his wife did not accept Byron, destroying the marriage. Spurred on by all this, British "moralists" took advantage of his divorce proceedings to settle scores with him. Byron became the target of bullying and bullying, in fact, England turned its greatest poet into an exile.

Childe Harold's relationship with a society he despised already bore the grain of the conflict that became the basis of the European novel.XIX century. This conflict between personality and society will receive a much greater degree of certainty in the works created after the first two songs of Childe Harold, in the cycle of the so-called Oriental poems (1813-1816). In this poetic cycle, consisting of six poems ("Gyaur", "Corsair", "Lara", "Abydos Bride", "Parisina", "Siege of Corinth"), the Byronic hero is finally formed in his complex relationship with the world and himself. yourself. Place of "oriental poems" in creative biography poet and at the same time in the history of romanticism is determined by the fact that for the first time a new romantic concept of personality was clearly formulated, which arose as a result of a rethinking of enlightenment views on man.

A dramatic turning point in Byron's personal life coincided in time with a turning point in world history. The fall of Napoleon, the triumph of reaction, the embodiment of which was the Holy Alliance, opened one of the most bleak pages european history, laying the foundation for a new stage in the poet's work and life33 ... His creative thought is now directed towards the mainstream of philosophy.

The peak of Byron's creativity is considered to be his philosophical drama "Cain", the protagonist of which is a fighter against God; who took up arms against the universal tyrant - Jehovah. In his religious drama, which he called "the mystery," the poet uses biblical myth to debate the Bible. But the god in "Cain" is not only a symbol of religion. In his gloomy image, the poet unites all forms of tyrannical arbitrariness. His Jehovah is both the ominous power of religion, and the despotic yoke of a reactionary anti-people state, and, finally, the general laws of being, indifferent to the sorrows and sufferings of mankind.

Byron, following the enlighteners, opposes this multifaceted world evil with the idea of \u200b\u200ba bold and free human mind, which does not accept the cruelty and injustice prevailing in the world.

The son of Adam and Eve, exiled from paradise for their pursuit of the knowledge of good and evil, Cain questions their fear-born claims of God's mercy and justice. On this path of searching and doubt, Lucifer (one of the names of the devil) becomes his patron, whose majestic and mournful image embodies the idea of \u200b\u200ban angry rebellious mind. His beautiful, "like night" appearance is marked by the stamp of tragic duality. The dialectic of good and evil, which was revealed to the romantics as internally interrelated principles of life and history, determined the contradictory structure of the image of Lucifer. The evil that he creates is not his original goal (“I wanted to be your creator,” he says to Cain, “and I would have created you differently”). Byron's Lucifer (whose name means "light-bearer" in translation) is one who seeks to become a creator, but becomes a destroyer.By introducing Cain to the mysteries of being, he together with him flies into the supra-starry spheres, and the gloomy picture of the cold lifeless universe (recreated by Byron based on his acquaintance with the astronomical theories of Cuvier) finally convinces the hero of the drama that the universal principle of the universe is the reign of death and evil ( "Evil is the leaven of all life and lifelessness," Lucifer teaches Cain).

Cain learns the justice of the lesson taught to him from his own experience. Returning to earth as an already finished and convinced enemy of God, who gives life to his creatures only to kill them, Cain, in a fit of blind unreasoning hatred, unleashes a blow intended for the invincible and inaccessible Jehovah on his meek and humble brother Abel.

This fratricidal act, as it were, marks the last stage in the process of Cain's knowledge of life. In himself, he knows the insurmountability and omnipresence of evil. His impulse for good gives birtha crime. A protest against Jehovah's destroyer turns into murder and suffering. Hating death, Cain is the first to bring her into the world. This paradox, prompted by the experience of the recent revolution and generalizing its results, gives at the same time the most vivid embodiment of the irreconcilable contradictions of Byron's worldview.

Created in 1821, after the defeat of the Carbonari movement, the mystery of Byron with tremendous poetic power captured the depth of the tragic despair of the poet, who knew the impracticability of the noble hopes of mankind and the doom of his Promethean rebellion against the cruel laws of life and history. It was the feeling of their insurmountability that made the poet look with special energy for the reasons for the imperfection of life in the objective laws of social life. In the diaries and letters of Byron (1821-1824), as well as in his poetic works, a new understanding of history for him is already outlined not as a mysterious fate, but as a set of real relations of human society. Associated with this shift in emphasis is the strengthening of the realistic tendencies of his poetry.

Thoughts about the vicissitudes of life and history, which were present earlier in his works, now become his constant companions. This tendency is especially clearly expressed in the last two songs of Childe Harold, where the desire to generalize the historical experience of mankind, which was previously characteristic of the poet, takes on a much more purposeful character. Reflections on the past, clothed in the form of various historical reminiscences (Ancient Rome, from which ruins remained, Lausanne and Ferney, where the shadows of "two titans" - Voltaire and Rousseau live, Florence, who expelled Dante, Ferrara, who betrayed Tasso), included in the third and the fourth song of Byron's poem, indicate the direction of his quest.

The key image of the second part of "Childe Harold" is the field at Waterloo. A radical turn in the fate of Europe, which took place at the site of the last battle of Napoleon, pushes Byron to summarize the results of the just past era and assess the activities of its protagonist, Napoleon Bonaparte.The "History Lesson" tells the poet not only conclusions about its individual events and figures, but also about the entire historical process as a whole, perceived by the author of "Childe Harold" as a chain of fatal fatal catastrophes. And at the same time, contrary to his own concept of historical "fate", the poet comes to the conclusion that "after all, your spirit, Freedom, is alive!", Still calling on the peoples of the world to fight for Freedom."Rise, rise, - he turns to Italy (which was under the yoke of Austria), - and, having driven the bloodsucker, show us your proud, freedom-loving disposition!"

This rebellious spirit was inherent not only in Byron's poetry, but throughout his life. The death of the poet, who was in a detachment of Greek rebels, interrupted his short, but such a bright life and creative path.

§ 2. Byronic exiled heroes: Prometheus, Manfred, the Prisoner of Chillon and the Corsair

As already noted, a special type of romantic hero was the Byronic hero-exile, a rebel, rejecting society and rejected by it. Undoubtedly, one of the brightest Byronic heroes is Childe - Harold, however, in other works of Byron, images of romantic heroes, rebel heroes, and exiled heroes appear vividly and clearly.

In the context of our particular theme - the theme of a rogue hero in Byron's work, one of his early poems, The Corsair (1814), which is part of the cycle of Oriental Poems, where the Byronic conflict of an outstanding personality and a hostile society is presented in a particularly full and direct expression.

Corsair. The hero of "Corsair" - the sea robber Konrad, by the very nature of his activities, is an outcast. His way of life is a direct challenge not only to the prevailing moral norms, but also to the system of dominant state laws, the violation of which turns Konrad into a "professional" criminal. The reasons for this acute collision between the hero and the entire civilized world, beyond which Konrad retired, are gradually revealed in the course of the plot development of the poem. The guiding thread to her ideological concept is the symbolic image of the sea, which appears in the pirates' song, which is predestined to the narrative in the form of a kind of prologue. This appeal to the sea is one of the constant lyrical motives of Byron's work. A. Pushkin, who called Byron "the singer of the sea", likens the English poet to this "free element":

Noise, get excited about the bad weather:

He was, oh sea, your singer!

Your image was marked on it,

He was created by your spirit:

How powerful and deep and gloomy you are

Like you, nothing is indomitable.

"To the sea" 34

The entire content of the poem can be viewed as a development and justification of its metaphorical prologue. The soul of Konrad, a pirate sailing the seas, is also the sea. Stormy, indomitable, free, resisting all attempts at enslavement, it does not fit into any unequivocal rationalistic formulas. Good and evil, generosity and cruelty, rebellious impulses and longing for harmony exist in her in an indissoluble unity. A man of powerful unbridled passions, Konrad is equally capable of murder and heroic self-sacrifice (during the fire of the seraglio belonging to his enemy - Pasha Seyid,Konrad rescues the latter's wives).

The tragedy of Konrad lies precisely in the fact that his fatal passions bring death not only to him, but also to everyone who is somehow connected with him. Marked with the seal of sinister fate, Konrad sows death and destruction around him. This is one of the sources of his grief and as yet not very clear, barely outlined, mental discord, the basis of which is the consciousness of his unity with the underworld, involvement in his atrocities. In this poem Konrad is still trying to find an excuse for himself: “Yes, I am a criminal, like everyone else around. About whom shall I say otherwise, about whom? " And yet his way of life, as if imposed on him by a hostile world, to some extent weighs on him. After all, this freedom-loving rebel-individualist is by no means intended by nature for "dark deeds":

He was created for good, but evil

To himself, his distorting, attracted.

All mocked and betrayed all;

Like the feeling of falling dew

Under the arch of the grotto; and how is this grotto,

It turned to stone in its turn

After going through your earthly bondage ...

Per. Yu. Petrova

Like many of Byron's heroes, Konrad in the distant past was pure, trusting and loving. Slightly lifting the veil of mystery enveloping the prehistory of his hero, the poet says that the gloomy lot he has chosen is the result of persecution by a soulless and evil society, which persecutes everything bright, free and original. Placing responsibility for the destructive activities of the Corsair on a corrupt and insignificant society, Byron poeticizes his personality and the state of mind in which he is. As a true romantic, the author of "Corsair" finds a special "nighttime" "demonic" beauty in this confused consciousness, in the chaotic impulses of the human heart. Its source is a proud thirst for freedom - in spite of everything and by all means.

It was this angry protest against the enslavement of the Personality that determined the enormous power of the artistic influence of Byronic poems on readers.XIX century. At the same time, the most discerning of them saw in Byron's apology for individualistic willfulness and the potential danger it contained. So, A.S. Pushkin, admired Byron's love of freedom, but condemned him for the poeticization of individualism, behind the gloomy “pride” of Byron's heroes, he saw the “hopeless egoism” hidden in them (“Lord Byron with a successful whim / He put on dull romanticism and hopeless egoism” )35 .

In his poem "Gypsies" Pushkin put into the mouth of one of her characters - an old gypsy - words that sound like a sentence not only to Aleko, but also to the Byronic hero as a literary-psychological category: "You only want freedom for yourself." These words contain an extremely accurate indication of the most vulnerable point of Byron's concept of personality. But for all the fairness of this assessment, one cannot fail to see that this most controversial side of the Byronic characters arose on a very real historical basis. It is no coincidence that the Polish poet and publicist A. Mickiewicz, together with some critics of Byron, saw not only in Manfred, but also in "Le Corsaire" a well-known resemblance to Napoleon36 .

Prometheus. J. Gordon Byron drew many of his ideas from the ancient myth of Prometheus. In 1817, Byron wrote to the publisher J. Merry: “As a boy, I deeply admired Aeschylus' Prometheus. "Prometheus" has always occupied my thoughts so much that it is easy for me to imagine its influence on everything I wrote "37 ... In 1816 in Switzerland, in the most tragic year of his life, Byron wrote the poem "Prometheus".

Titanium! To our earthly destiny,

To our sorrowful vale,

To human pain

You looked without contempt;

But what did he receive as a reward?

Suffering, tension of forces

Yes, a vulture that endlessly

Torments the liver of a proud man

A rock, a sad sound of chains,

Suffocating burden of anguish

Yes, the groan that is buried in the heart,

Suppressed by you, quieted down

So that about your sorrows

He could not tell the gods.

The poem is built in the form of an appeal to the titan, the solemn, odic intonation recreates the image of the sufferer-stoic, warrior and fighter, in whom “The greatness is hidden the sample / For the human race!”. Special attention is paid to the tacit contempt of Prometheus towards Zeus, the “proud god”: “... the groan that is buried in the heart, / You suppressed, quieted down ...”. "The silent answer" of Prometheus to the Thunderer speaks of the silence of the titan as the main threat to God.

In the context historical events and the life circumstances of Byron in 1816 (restoration of monarchical regimes in Europe, exile), the most important theme of the poem acquires special significance - a bitter meditation about a fierce fate, an all-powerful fate, which turns a person's earthly lot into a "mournful vale". In the last part of the poem, human fate is tragically comprehended - "the path of mortals - / Human life is a bright current, / Running, sweeping away the path ...", "aimless existence, / Resistance, vegetation ...". The work ends with the affirmation of the will of man, the ability to "triumph" "in the depths of the most bitter torments."

In the poem "Prometheus" Byron drew the image of a hero, a titan, persecuted because he wants to ease the human pain of those living on earth. Almighty Fate fettered him as punishment for his good desire to "put an end to misfortunes." And although the sufferings of Prometheus are beyond all forces, he does not humble himself before the Tyranny of the Thunderer. The heroic of the tragic image of Prometheus is that he can “turn death into victory”. The legendary image of the Greek myth and tragedy of Aeschylus acquires in Byron's poem the features of civic valor, courage and fearlessness characteristic of the hero of revolutionary romantic poetry38 .

The images of Prometheus, Manfred and Cain in Byron's poems of the same name are consonant with a proud protest to circumstances and a challenge to tyranny. So, Manfred declares to the spirits of the elements who came to him:

Immortal spirit, the legacy of Prometheus,

The fire lit in me is just as bright

Mighty and all-embracing like yours

Although he is clothed with an earthly finger.

But if Byron himself, creating the image of Prometheus, only partially brought his fate closer to his own, then the readers and interpreters of the poet's work often directly identified him with Prometheus. So, V. A. Zhukovsky in a letter to N. V. Gogol, speaking about Byron, whose spirit is "high, powerful, but the spirit of denial, pride and contempt", writes: "... we have a titan Prometheus, chained to a rock Caucasian and proudly swearing Zeus, to whom the vulture tears his insides "39 .

Belinsky gave a vivid description of Byron's work: “Byron was the Prometheus of our century, chained to a rock, tormented by a kite: a mighty genius, on his own mountain, looked ahead, - and without considering, beyond the shimmering distance, the promised land of the future, he cursed the present and declared him an irreconcilable and eternal enmity ... "40 .

Prometheus became one of the favorite symbols of romanticism, embodying courage, heroism, self-sacrifice, unbending will and intransigence.

"Manfred". In the philosophical drama "Manfred" (1816), one of the initial lines of her hero - a wizardand the magician Manfred says: "The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life." This bitter aphorism summarizes not only the results of historical experience, but also the experience of Byron himself, whose play was created under the sign of a certain reassessment of his own values. Building his drama as a kind of excursion into the inner life of the "Byronic" hero, the poet shows the tragedy of his hero's mental discord. Romantic Faust - magician and magician Manfred, like his German prototype, was disappointed in knowledge.

Having received superhuman power over the elements of nature, Manfred, at the same time, was plunged into a state of fierce internal conflict. Obsessed with despair and grievous remorse, he wanders the heights of the Alps, finding neither oblivion nor peace. Spirits, subject to Manfred, are unable to help him in his attempts to escape from himself. A complex mental collision, which acts as the dramatic axis of the work, is a kind of psychological modification of the Byronic conflict of a gifted person with a hostile world41 .

Having retired from the world he despised, the hero of the drama did not sever his inner connection with him. In "Manfred" Byron, with much more certainty than in his earlier works, points to those destructive principles that are hidden in his contemporary individualistic consciousness.

The titanic individualism of the proud “superman” Manfred is a sign of the times. As the son of his age, Manfred, like Napoleon, is the bearer of an epochal consciousness. This is indicated by the symbolic song of "destinies" - the peculiar spirits of history flying over the head of Manfred. The image of the "crowned villain cast into the dust" (in other words, Napoleon), appearing in their sinister chants, clearly correlates with the image of Manfred. For the romantic poet, both of them - his hero Manfred and the ousted emperor of France - are instruments of "destinies" and their ruler - the genius of evil Ahriman.

Knowledge of the secrets of life, which are hidden from ordinary people, was bought by Manfred at the cost of human sacrifice. One of them was his beloved Astarte (“I shed blood,” says the hero of the drama, “it was not her blood, and yet her blood was shed”).

The parallels between Faust and Manfred constantly accompany the reader. But if Goethe was characterized by an optimistic understanding of progress as a continuous progressive movement of history, and the unity of its creative and destructive principles (Faust and Mephistopheles) acted as a necessary prerequisite for the creative renewal of life, then for Byron, to whom history seemed to be a chain of catastrophes, the problem of the costs of progress was presented tragically insoluble. And yet, the recognition of the laws of the historical development of society that are not subject to reason does not lead the poet to surrender to the principles of life hostile to man. His Manfred until the last minute defends his right to think and dare. Proudly rejecting the help of religion, he closes himself in his mountain castle and dies, as he lived, alone. This adamant stoicism is affirmed by Byron as the only form of life worthy of man.

This thought, constituting the basis of the artistic development of the drama, acquires the utmost clarity in it. This is facilitated by the genre of "monodrama" - plays with a single character42 ... The image of the hero occupies the entire poetic space of the drama, acquiring truly grandiose proportions. His soul is a true microcosm. Everything in the world is born from its depths. It contains all the elements of the universe - in himself Manfred carries hell and paradise and he himself makes judgment on himself. Objectively, the pathos of the poem is in the affirmation of the greatness of the human spirit. From his titanic efforts, a critical, rebellious, protesting thought was born. It is she who constitutes the most valuable conquest of mankind, paid for at the price of blood and suffering. These are Byron's reflections on the results of the tragic path traversed by humanity at the turnXVIII and XIX centuries 43.

"Prisoner of Chillon"(1816). This poem was based on a real life fact: the tragic story of a Geneva citizen, François de Bonivard, who was imprisoned in the Chillon prison in 1530 for religious and political reasons and was imprisoned until 1537. Taking advantage of this episode of the distant past as the material for one of his most lyrically mournful works, Byron put a cutting-edge content into it. In his interpretation, it became an indictment against political reaction of any kind of history. Under the pen of the great poet, the gloomy image of the Chillon Castle has grown to the scale of an ominous symbol of a cruel tyrannical world - a world-prison where people endure torments for their loyalty to moral and patriotic ideals, before which, according to V.G.Belinsky, “Dante's own hell seems like paradise "44 .

The stone tomb in which they are buried gradually kills their body and soul. Unlike his brothers, who died in front of Bonivar, he remains physically alive. But his soul is half dying. The darkness surrounding the prisoner fills him inner world and lodges in him a formless chaos:

And I saw, as in a heavy dream,

Everything is pale, dark, dull to me ...

That was - darkness without darkness;

It was - an abyss of emptiness

No stretch and no boundaries;

They were images without faces;

That was a terrible world,

Without sky, light and lights,

Without time, without days and years,

Without trade, without blessings and troubles,

Neither life nor death is like a dream of coffins,

Like an ocean without shores

Crushed by a heavy haze

Motionless, dark and dumb ...

Per. V. A. Chukovsky

The stoically adamant martyr of the idea does not take the path of renunciation, but he turns into a passive, indifferent person to everything, and, what is perhaps the most terrible thing, resigns himself to bondage and even begins to love the place of his imprisonment:

When outside your prison door

I stepped into freedom,

I sighed about my prison.

Starting with this work, according to critics, a new image of a fighter for the happiness of mankind - a philanthropist who is ready to shoulder the heavy burden of human suffering is put forward in the center of Byron's works.45 .

A hero free from society, an outcast, present in all Byron's works, is unhappy, but independence for him is dearer than peace, comfort, even happiness. The Byronic hero is uncompromising, there is no hypocrisy in him, tk. ties with a society in which hypocrisy is a way of life are severed. The poet recognizes only one human connection as possible for his free, unhypocritical and lonely hero - a feeling of great love, only one ideal exists for him - the ideal of Freedom, for the sake of which he is ready to give up everything, become an outcast.

This individualistic pride, sung by Byron, was a feature of the epoch-making consciousness in its romantic, exaggeratedly vivid expression. It is this ability to penetrate into the spirit of the era that explains the significance of the influence that Byron's work had on modern and subsequent literature.

Conclusion

The work of the great English poet Byron (1788-1824) is undoubtedly one of the most significant phenomena in the history of world literary and social thought. His poetic works embodied the most acute, vital problems of his era.The image of Byron becomes the image of an entire era in the history of European self-awareness. She will be named after the poet - the era of Byronism. In his personality they saw the embodied spirit of the times, and he himself was considered the recognized leader of European romanticism in one of its most militant rebellious versions.

In literary criticism, romanticism is a broad literary movement that began in the last decade of the 18th century. It dominated Western literature for the entire first third of the 19th century, and even longer in some countries.

Born as a reaction to the rationalism and mechanism of the aesthetics of classicism and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which was established in the era of the revolutionary breakdown of feudal society, the former, seemingly unshakable world order, romanticism (both as a special kind of worldview and as an artistic direction) has become one of the most complex and internally contradictory phenomena in the history of culture. Disappointment in the ideals of the Enlightenment, in the results of the Great French Revolution, the denial of the utilitarianism of modern reality, the principles of bourgeois practicalism, the victim of which was human individuality, a pessimistic view of the prospects of social development, the mentality of "world sorrow" was combined in romanticism with the desire for harmony of the world order, spiritual integrity of the individual , with a gravitation towards the "infinite", with the search for new, absolute and unconditional ideals.

The moral pathos of romantics was associated primarily with the assertion of the value of the individual, which was embodied in the images of romantic heroes. The most striking type of romantic hero is the loner hero, the outcast hero, who is usually called the Byronic hero.The opposition of a poet to a crowd, a hero to a rabble, an individual to a society that does not understand and persecutes him is a characteristic feature of romantic literature. The hero of romantic literature is a person who has broken away from old ties, asserting his absolute dissimilarity from all others. By virtue of this alone, it is exceptional. Romantic artists, and Byron was the first among them, tended to avoid portraying the common and ordinary people. Lonely dreamers, brilliant artists, prophets, personalities endowed with deep passions, titanic power of feelings act as the main characters in their artistic work. They can be villains like Manfred or the Corsair, they can be fighters rejected by society like Prometheus or the Prisoner of Chillon, but never mediocre. Most often, they are endowed with a rebellious consciousness that puts them above ordinary people.

The outcast hero, free from society, present in all the works of Byron, is unhappy, but independence for him is dearer than peace, comfort, even happiness. The Byronic hero is uncompromising, there is no hypocrisy in him, tk. ties with a society in which hypocrisy is a way of life are severed. The poet recognizes only one human connection as possible for his free, unhypocritical and lonely hero - a feeling of great love, only one ideal exists for him - the ideal of Freedom, for the sake of which he is ready to give up everything, become an outcast.This individualistic pride, sung by Byron in the images of his rogue heroes, was a feature of the epoch-making consciousness in its romantic, exaggeratedly vivid expression.

List of references

1. Byron D.G. Sobr. op. in 4 volumes.- M.: 1981.
2. Ableev S.R.History of world philosophy: textbook / S.R. Ableev. - M .: AST: Astrel, 2005 .-- 414, p. - (Graduate School).
3. Afonina O. Comments / / Byron D.G. Favorites.- M.: 1982.
4. Belinsky V.G. collection op. in 13 volumes.- M.: 1954.
5. Berkovsky N. Ya. Romanticism in Germany. - L.: 1973.
6. Botnikova A.B. German Romanticism: Dialogue of Artistic Forms. - M.: Aspect Press.- 2005.
7. Vanslov V.V. Aesthetics of Romanticism.- M.: 1966.
8. Velikovsky S.I. Stendhal's truth. / Stendhal. Red and black. - M .: Pravda. - 1989
9. Goethe I.V. , Faust ... - M .: "Children's Literature". - 1969
10. Dostoevsky F.M. collection op. - L.: 1984.
11. Dragomiretskaya NV Literary process.— In the book: A short dictionary of literary terms.- M.: 1978
12. Dyakonova N. Ya. Byron in the years of exile.- L.: 1974
13. Elistratova A.A.Health of English romanticism and modernity.- M.: 1960
14. Life and Death in the Literature of Romanticism: Opposition or Unity? / resp. ed. H.A. Vishnevskaya, E.Yu. Saprykin; Institute of World Literature. A.M. Gorky RAS. - M .: 2010.
15. Zhukovsky V.A.Aesthetics and criticism.- M.: 1985.
16. Zverev A. "Confrontation between trouble and evil ..." / / Byron D. G. At the crossroads of being ... Letters. Memories. Feedback.- M.: 1989.
17. History of foreign literatureXIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva. - M .: Education.- 1982.-320 p.
18. Kovaleva O. V. Foreign literature of the XI X century. Romanticism. Tutorial / O. V. Kovaleva, L. G. Shakhov a - M .: LLC "Publishing house" ONIK C 21 century ".- 2005. - 272 p .: ill
19. Kozhina E. Romantic battle.- L.: 1969
20. Kurginyan M.S.George Byron.- M .: 1958
21. Lukov V.A. Literary history: Foreign literature from the beginnings to the present day. - M .: Academy.- 2003.
22. Lobko L. Grillparzer // History of Western European Theater. - M .: 1964. - T.4
23. Mitskevich A. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes.- M .: 1954
24. The problems of romanticism.- M .: 1971, sb. 2,
25. Pushkin A.S. Complete. collection op. in 10 volumes.- M .: 1958
26. Swift D. The Tale of the Barrel. Gulliver's Travels - M .: Pravda. - 1987
27. Frank S. L. Dostoevsky and the crisis of humanism // Frank S. L. Russian worldview. - SPb.: 1996.
28. Schopenhauer A. Thoughts. - Kharkiv: "Folio".- 2009.

1 The problems of romanticism. - M .: 1971. - Sat. 2.- S. 17.

3 Berkovsky N. Ya. Romanticism in Germany. - L .: 1973 .-- P. 19

4 Ableev S.R.History of world philosophy: textbook / S.R. Ableev. - M .: AST: Astrel, 2005 .-- 414, p. - (Graduate School). P. 223

5 Ableev S.R.History of world philosophy: textbook / S.R. Ableev. - M .: AST: Astrel, 2005 .-- 414, p. - (Graduate School). P. 221

6 Lukov V.A. Literary history: Foreign literature from the beginnings to the present day. - M .: Academy. - 2003 .-- S. 124

7 History of foreign literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva.— M .: Education, 1982. — 320 p. P. 7

8 Dragomiretskaya NV Literary process.— In the book: A short dictionary of literary terms. - M .: 1978. - S. 80-81.

9 Lukov V.A. Literary history: Foreign literature from the beginnings to the present day. - M .: Academy. - 2003 .-- S. 251

10 Kozhina E. Romantic battle. - L .: 1969 .-- S. 112.

11 Frank S. L. Dostoevsky and the crisis of humanism // Frank S. L. Russian worldview. - SPb .: 1996 .-- P. 362.

12 Schopenhauer A. Thoughts. - Kharkiv: "Folio". - 2009. - P.49.

13 Botnikova A.B. German Romanticism: Dialogue of Artistic Forms. - M .: Aspect Press, 2005 .-- 352 p.

14 Botnikova A.B. German Romanticism: Dialogue of Artistic Forms. - M .: Aspect Press. - 2005. - 352s. - P. 14

15 Defoe D. Robinson Crusoe. - M .: Higher school. - 1990

16 Swift D. The Tale of the Barrel. Gulliver's Travels - M .: Pravda, 1987

17 Goethe I.V., Faust. - M .: "Children's Literature". - 1969

18 History of foreign literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva. - M .: Education. - 1982.-320 p. P. 23

19 Stendhal. Red and black. - M .: Pravda. - 1989, p. 37

20 Velikovsky S.I. Stendhal's truth. / Stendhal. Red and black. - M .: Pravda. - 1989 - P. 6

21 Quoted from: Mikhalskaya N.P., Anikin G.V. history of English literature. - M .: Academy. - 1998.- C 116.

22 Lobko L. Grillparzer // History of Western European Theater. - M .: 1964. - T.4. - S.275-290

23 Life and Death in the Literature of Romanticism: Opposition or Unity? / resp. ed. H.A. Vishnevskaya, E.Yu. Saprykin; Institute of World Literature. A.M. Gorky RAS. - M .: 2010.- S. 330

24 Ibid. P. 330

25 Belinsky V.G. collection op. in 13 volumes. - M.: 1954, vol. 4. - S. 424.

26 Quote from: Zverev A. "Confrontation between trouble and evil ..." / / Byron D. G. At the crossroads of being ... Letters. Memories. Feedback. - M.: 1989.

27 Kovaleva O. V. Foreign literature of the XI X century. Romanticism. Textbook / OV Kovaleva, LG Shakhov a - M.: LLC "Publishing house" ONIK C 21 century " - 2005 .-- 272 p .: ill.

28 Dostoevsky F.M. collection op. - L: 1984 .-- T. 26 .-- S. 113-114

29 History of foreign literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya.N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva. - M .: Education. - 1982. - 320 pp. - P. 69

30 Elistratova A.A.Health of English romanticism and modernity. - M .: 1960

31 History of foreign literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva. - M .: Education. - 1982. - 320 p. P. 73

32 Kurginyan M.S.George Byron. - M .: 1958

33 Dyakonova N. Ya. Byron in the years of exile. - L .: 1974

34 Pushkin A.S. Complete. collection op. in 10 volumes. - M .: 1958. - t. 7. - p. 52-53.

35 Quote from: History of Foreign Literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva. - M .: Education. - 1982. - 320 p. P. 23

36 Mitskevich A. Sobr. op. in 5 volumes. - M .: 1954 - t. 4, - S. 63.

37 Afonina O. Comments / / Byron D.G. Favorites. - M .: 1982 .-- S. 409

38 Kovaleva O. V. Foreign literature of the XI X century. Romanticism. Tutorial / O. V. Kovaleva, L. G. Shakhov a - M.: Publishing House ONIK S 21st Century LLC - 2005.

39 Zhukovsky V.A.Aesthetics and criticism. - M .: 1985. - C 336

40 Belinsky V.G.Sobr. op. in 3 volumes - M .: 1948 .-- T. 2. - S. 454

41 History of foreign literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva.— M .: Education - 1982. — 320 p. - P. 73

43 History of foreign literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva.— M .: Education - 1982. — 320 p. - S. 23.

44 Belinsky V.G. Poly. collection op. in 13 volumes. - M .: 1955 - t. 7. - S. 209.

45 History of foreign literature of the XIX century: Textbook. manual for ped students. in-tov on specials. No. 2101 "Rus. lang. and lit. "/ Ed. Ya. N. Zasursky, S. V. Turaeva.— M .: Education - 1982. — 320 p. - P. 23

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Byron was one of the first writers of the 19th century to make an attempt in a romantic-conventional form to paint a picture of a complex mental life people of their time.

The appearance of the Byronic hero, a lonely wanderer, carrying through his life his mysterious grief and his bitter dream of freedom, in general terms, was formed already in the oriental poems created at the first stage of the poet's creative path. In different poems, he appears under different names, but the main features of his character and his relationship with the outside world remain unchanged.

A man of ardent, destructive passions, persecuted and persecuted by society, he rebelles against its laws. He - a rebel and freedom lover - is not on the way with modern world, mired in the mud of petty calculations and selfish motives. It was this angry protest against the enslavement of the individual, this rebellion against the enslaving force of bourgeois relations that determined the enormous power of the artistic influence of Byron's poems on the reader of the early 19th century. But other features of the Byronic hero - his fatal passions, his proud isolation, his gloomy loneliness - spoke much to the heart of the poet's contemporaries.

Ominous fate, gravitating over the heroes of Byron, imparts to their activities a special tragically contradictory character. The freedom fighter, Byron's hero, at the same time carries some kind of destructive beginning. Rebelling against the world of violence, he himself acts as one of its weapons, striving for "harmony", he unleashes "chaos". His passions are fatal to those around him, and his love is as destructive as his hatred.

“I loved her and I ruined her” - these words of Manfred give an exhaustive formula for those love tragedies that are played out in various versions in each of the oriental poems. Unwittingly, Byron's hero sows death and destruction on his way. Fighting the underworld, he himself becomes a criminal. The difficulty of the position of the tragic hero Byron is that his connection with the world of violence is much deeper than he himself thinks. In some aspects of his consciousness he is connected with the order of things against which he himself protests. This is his "tragic fault". He carries within himself that beginning that is dissolved in the life of the surrounding world, hostile to him - the beginning of egoism. The world has imposed a "Cain seal" on him, shaping his soul in a certain way.

It is in the duality and contradictions of the hero's soul that one of the sources of his inner tragedy is rooted. His conflict with a hostile world is usually complicated by violent internal struggles. Realizing his connection with the underworld, Byron's hero experiences the tragedy of an internal split. He is a martyr, against whom not only the forces of the whole world have taken up arms, but who is in constant discord with himself. Manfred, wandering around the Alps, vainly prays to the spirits subject to him that they give him oblivion. It is said of Azo that his heart was hiding from himself. “To separate myself from myself is the goal of my knowledge,” Byron writes in a half-joking, half-serious form. “Demons share power over our noblest thoughts,” he says in another letter.

The tragedy of internal discord experienced by Byron's hero is fundamentally different from the "tragedy of repentance" that the reactionary romantics were so fond of portraying. The moral torment of the Byronic rebel does not arise from regrets that he violated the laws of a hostile society. Their source is the consciousness of their community with the hostile world, their involvement in its atrocities.

In Byron's system of worldview ideas, much remains of the enlightened belief that a person "could be different." The heroes of his oriental poems once, in the distant past, were pure, trusting, kind and loving. But the persecution of light and human malice made them what they are. Society has turned them into selfish and criminals.

All the heroes of Byron are the words of the poet, expressed by him in relation to himself: “I am a loser. It seems to me that by nature I possessed kind heart, but they trampled and distorted him so much that it became cruel, like the sole of a highlander ",

A poetic expression of the same idea is the eleventh stanza of The Corsair, which tells the story of the Byron's hero's “student years”. Describing Konrad, Byron says of him:

Konrad, however, did not order

Serve as an instrument of sinful deeds.

But the spirit has changed, and with it the vocation

Involuntarily involved in his deeds

In the fight with people and with the sky in enmity.

He was disappointed in misfortune

And he began to avoid people capriciously.

A wise man in words, a madman in deeds,

He was too firm for concessions ...

And virtue as the source of evil

He cursed - not traitors to the cause.

Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Byron would like to believe that "everything comes out clean from the hands of the creator and everything spoils in the hands of man."

But unlike the enlighteners, Byron already has a "sense of history", the idea of \u200b\u200bsome eternal laws that rise above the world, forcing a person, as it were, against his will, to be included in a historically determined course of things. These laws are embodied both in the phenomena of the social life of society and in the person himself.

As a true romantic, Byron sought the basis of historical processes not only in the reasons of an objectively historical order, but also in the very nature of man.

"Cain"

On January 28, 1821, Byron writes in his Diary: “I considered the plots of four future tragedies<…>, namely "Sardanapalus" already begun; “Cain” is a metaphysical plot, a little in the spirit of “Manfred”, but in 5 acts, maybe with a chorus; Francesca da Rimini in five acts; and maybe I will try to write about Tiberius ... ". Further in the entry from the same date, the poet discusses the nature of man's fear of the future and the reasons for his doubts about the present. He also says that only in the Past can we find answers to questions about the Future, and only Hope supports humanity's striving forward. In this regard, he also defines the role of poetry. “What is poetry? - Feeling of the Past and Future of the Worlds. In the same diary entry, he also gives a sketch of Lucifer's speech for the tragedy "Cain":

Whenever death was only evil - a madman!

Would I let you live?

Live as I live, as your father lived,

How will your great-grandchildren live.

This diary entry is the key to Byron's understanding of the essence of poetry, and the list of plots of the tragedies he conceived suggests that the poet's attention was drawn to those episodes of the world of the Past, which reflect different facets of despotism.

Of the works that Byron planned to create in this diary entry, only two were realized - "Sardanapalus", a drama about the tragic conflict between a person's natural desire for happiness and his responsibility as a statesman for the fate of the people, a drama in which the hero's despotism lies in neglect of duties the sovereign and the connivance of evil, and the tragedy "Cain".

Despite the fact that the author himself calls "Cain" a tragedy in his diary, later, in the preface to this work, he gives him a more detailed description. "Cain" is defined there as a mystery, as in the Middle Ages they called representations on biblical subjects. However, the content of the work does not at all have that moralizing character, which is inherent in "morality", its idea comes into serious conflict with the traditional Christian interpretation of the plot about Cain.

"Cain" is dedicated to Byron, another famous English writer of the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott, for whom such a gift was, of course, honorable, but at the same time rather dangerous, because the attitude of the majority of the public towards "Cain" was indignant.

Perfectly aware of the unpreparedness of society for the perception of such a non-standard and in many ways provocative work, Byron sought to soften the impression of him, commenting in the preface those moments that might seem especially blasphemous to his contemporaries.

It is known that Byron's relationship to the Bible and to the Christian faith was extremely complex. During his life, he repeatedly tried to turn to religion and even gave one of his daughters to be raised in a Catholic monastery. We cannot judge today what the great poet came to at the end of his life, but he was definitely not an atheist. Moreover, he apparently knew the biblical text very well, and the preface to "Cain" confirms this. At the beginning of the preface, the poet explains that he tried to the best of his ability, to make sure that each of the heroes was expressed in his own language and, if he took anything from the Holy Scriptures, it was extremely rare. Further, the poet brushes aside all possible assumptions of readers and critics that his mystery is just another variation on the theme of Milton's "Paradise Lost" or an echo of some other work. At the same time, there is no doubt that "Paradise Lost" with its interpretation of Lucifer, which is close to Byron, as a proud fighter against the tyranny of God, had a certain impact on "Cain". The poet himself does not deny that Milton made a great impression on him, although he was read many years before the creation of "Cain".

The epigraph to the mystery is also very interesting. This is a quote from the Bible:

"The serpent was more cunning than all the beasts of the field, which the Lord God created." Relying on this phrase, the poet actually denies the position recognized in Christianity that Eve was seduced by the devil. He comments on this in the preface: “The reader probably remembers that the book of Genesis does not say that Eve was seduced by the devil, but speaks of a serpent, and only because he is“ the most cunning of the beasts of the field ”. That is, the responsibility for the Fall is shifted onto the person himself. In the first act of the play, this thought will come from the lips of Lucifer.

So, "Cain" is a mystery in five acts, in it there are eight characters: Adam, Cain, Abel, Angel of the Lord, Lucifer, Eve, Ada, Sela. All characters are biblical, the main action takes place on earth, after the expulsion of the first people from paradise. The canonical story of Cain and Abel is very laconic. “… Cain brought a gift to the Lord from the fruits of the earth. And Abel also brought out of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. And the Lord looked upon Abel and his gift; But he did not look after Cain and his gift. Cain was greatly distressed, and his face drooped. And the Lord said to Cain: Why are you upset? And why did your face droop? If you are doing good, will you not raise your face? And if you do not do good, then sin lies at the door; he attracts you to him, but you dominate him. And Cain said to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rebelled against his brother Abel and killed him. " The essence of Christian tradition is humility; Cain's main sin is pride, his guilt is undeniable. Byron, on the other hand, gives a completely different vision of this plot.

Cain is burdened by his existence, he reproaches his parents that they did not taste of the tree of life, which would allow them not to be burdened by the fear of death. There is not even a fraction of the humility in him that is inherent in Adam, Eve and their other children.

In the description of the appearance of Lucifer, one can feel the continuity from the Miltonian Satan, he is very far from the Christian interpretation of this image.

He looks

Greater than angels; he is the same

Beautiful as disembodied, but, it seems,

Not as beautiful as it once was….

(Act I, Scene 1)

Lucifer is perceived by the hero with almost admiration, he immediately guesses the power of this spirit. At the same time, he notes that "grief seems to me to be a part of his soul ...". A titanic, gloomy, mysterious image immediately appears before us.

Initially, it seems that in "Cain" the forces of good and evil are clearly indicated, but this is the complexity and dignity of this work, that its "poles" change places several times and we do not get an unambiguous answer to the question of what is good, and what is evil.

In Cain's monologues during their journey with Lucifer, Byron reveals to the reader the image of his hero; this person is not at all selfish, deeply compassionate, endowed with a natural striving for good and truth. He resists when Lucifer tempts him, causing unkind feelings in his soul for his own brother. We see that Cain himself has long thought about why everyone, and even the all-good Jehovah, treat Abel more favorably than him. The evil spirit kindles in the hero a spark of dislike for his brother, but Cain still resists this feeling. He asks Lucifer to open his abode or the abode of Jehovah to him. The following lines of the Spirit change the reader's attitude towards this character. Gradually, it becomes clear that he does not wish good for people at all, but only uses them in the struggle with Jehovah for power.

Cain's rebellion against God is the result of his dissatisfaction with the world around him, in which there is so much evil. By the power of his mind, the hero realizes that Lucifer is not his ally and is indifferent to him and to the fate of mankind, just like God.

After the culmination of the work (the murder of Abel), Cain becomes doomed to eternal wanderings, he is cursed by his own mother, "the eternal curse of the serpent." And "the eternal curse of the serpent" in the context of this drama is knowledge. The hopeless tragedy of Byron's mystery lies in the fact that, glorifying the uprising against oppression, the poet simultaneously reveals a moral ambiguity that cannot be avoided by those who fight him.

This struggle is necessary to save the dignity, reason and independence of mankind, but it requires moral sacrifices, in turn destructive for him, bringing suffering and death.

Various conclusions can be drawn from this undoubtedly complex, multifaceted work; it is true that it reflects the burdensome searches and doubts of Byron himself, his enlightening faith in the endless possibilities of the human mind, combined with a romantic and tragic perception of the world, painted in dark tones. Let's not forget that the very time of writing the work dictated its own conditions, because no work, even the most abstract from the contemporary reality to the author, can be devoid of political coloring.

It is worth adding that "Cain", of course, caused a storm of indignation from the public after it was published, but at the same time rave reviews from contemporaries. Walter Scott, to whom the mystery was dedicated, despite his deep religiosity, gave a very high assessment to the work: “... but I never imagined that his Muse could take such a majestic takeoff. He, no doubt, caught up with Milton, but following his own path. " Shelley was equally impressed by the drama. In one of his letters, he notes: "'Cain' is something apocalyptic, a revelation that has not yet happened."

"Don Juan"

This work, each word of which bears the "stamp of immortality" is interesting as, perhaps, the highest degree of manifestation of Byron's talent. Not only is Byronic's interpretation of the image of Don Juan striking, but also his dissimilarity with the type of heroes that existed in his work before.

In 1818, Byron arrived in Italy, where he soon joined the Carbonari movement, advocating the liberation of Italy from the Austro-Hungarian yoke. At this time, the tyrannical motives, which have always occupied a significant place in his work, are intensified. "Don Juan" is deliberately prosaic, if one can say this about a poetic work. Eternal questions are interpreted here through life situations and problems contemporary to the poet.

The main motives of "Don Juan" are grief over the humiliation of educational ideals, exposure of the vices of society, protest against a war of conquest, praise of a just struggle against any despotism.

All these themes are revealed in the poem with the help of a variety of artistic means, many of them are innovative for that time. Byron strives for maximum accuracy of the phrase, he introduces into his poem the vocabulary of various spheres of life, including elements of folk art, which gives the work an extraordinary liveliness and variety.

The hero of the poem is very far from the Byronic character we are used to, possessed by dark passions and doomed by fate to perish. Don Juan is a multidimensional and developing character, in contrast to monolithic romantic heroes who experience a change in internal states, but remain themselves until the very end. In contrast to the same universal heroes, depicted as if in isolation from the real world, the poet creates Don Juan in very specific conditions. The story of the hero here, as it were, refutes Rousseau's idea of \u200b\u200ba "natural man" accepted by the enlighteners and reveals the tragedy of human existence in general.

Don Juan is shown by the author for a rather long period of time; he undergoes a variety of adventures, during which, as in "Le Corsaire", the character of the hero appears. The young Spaniard experiences a shipwreck, and the short-term happiness of pure love, and slavery, and war, and then passes the temptation of the luxurious life of a courtier - the favorite of Catherine II. The poem was not finished, her last songs take us to the not distant past of England for Byron, where Don Juan moves in the highest circles as a Russian envoy. All these numerous adventures allow Byron to illuminate various spheres of the life of European society and expose its vices.

The most interesting episodes of the poem for a Russian person are the seventh, eighth and ninth songs. They tell about Don Juan's participation in the capture of the fortress of Izmail together with Russian troops, and then about his life at the court of Catherine II. Any war, except for national liberation, is for the poet an unconditional evil, bloodshed, committed at the whim of soulless tyrants. Catherine II becomes the center of tyranny, the apogee of absolutism for Byron. Through the description of the Russian court and the details of the bloody war, Byron reveals the essence of any European tyranny and any European war. It is in these songs that the poet's most angry remarks against despotism sound. He appeals to his descendants with the confidence that in the future tyranny will be only a shameful memory of the past of mankind.

Let the decorated thrones

And all the kings who sat on them

As alien to you as forgotten laws

<……………………………….>

You will look at a loss -

Could such creations live!

The "Russian episode" in the life of the Spanish hero is not too long, but what Byron reports about the manners and customs of the Russian court in sufficient detail and eloquently testifies to the enormous work done by the poet, who has never been to Russia, but sincerely and unbiasedly tried to understand the nature of the Russian autocracy.

Summing up, it should be noted that “Don Juan” and “Cain” are, as it were, different facets of the same idea, which Byron expressed in his works throughout his life, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe greatness of the individual and the overthrow of any form of tyranny.

Conclusion

Forty years after the death of Byron P.A. Vyazemsky wrote:

Our century, our two generations

They were delusional. Both old and young

Drank from his magic bowl

I stream sweet honey and poison.

("Byron", 1864)

This is said about Russia and Russian poetry. And it is clear that it is no coincidence that "sweet honey" and "poison" are placed side by side. This phrase indicated the contradictory worldview and creativity and the ambiguity of Byron's perception in various social and literary circles.

A.S. Pushkin in the poem "To the Sea" relates Byron and Napoleon. "And after him - this is how the Russian poet perceives two events in one row (three years separate the death of Byron from the death of Napoleon) - another genius rushed away from us, another ruler of our thoughts."

Both are geniuses, both are masters of thought. And as a result - in a few lines: "The world is empty ..." In the context of other judgments of this era, it is obvious that "genius" in this case is not just an assessment of the highest talent, in one case - a commander, in the other - a poet, but recognition of the exclusiveness of a person, her phenomenal power over the minds and hearts of her contemporaries. The word "genius" here reads like a concept from the romantic vocabulary of the era.

The death of the poet in Missolonga has made adjustments to all previous assessments and characteristics. Now for the European public he no longer appeared as a “poet of pride”, but as a hero who, according to his own prediction, found a “warrior's grave”.

For all the difference in approaches to assessing Byron, the first responses of Russian poets to his death are essentially unambiguous: A.S. Pushkin ("mighty, deep, gloomy", "indomitable"), D. Venevitinova ("Eagle! What kind of a hostile Perun stopped your flight?"), I. Kozlova ("Hellas! He is bloody in your hour // Drain his lot with your destiny ”), V. Küchelbecker (“ Titreus, ally and cover // Freedom of breathing regiments ”), K. Ryleev (“ Some tyrants and slaves // His sudden death are glad ”) ... All these responses are a kind of heroic elegies ... And almost every poet who glorifies Byron casts reproaches on his homeland, which did not appreciate its son.

Soaring mind, luminary of the century

Your son, your friend and your poet, -

K. Ryleev addresses to the “Queen of the proud seas”. And further:

Byron faded in the prime of life

In the holy struggle for the freedom of the Greek.

These responses, on the fresh traces of the tragic death, of course, do not give a deep assessment of Byron's work, but they are united by the main thing - the feeling of grief over the untimely death of the great poet.

List of references

1. Boccaccio. Beaumarchais. Beranger. Byron. Balzac. Biographical series 1890 - 1915. Chelyabinsk: Ural LTD, 1998

2. Great romantic. Byron and World Literature. M: Science, 1991.

3. Dyakonova N.Ya. Byron in the years of exile. M: True, 1974

4. Dyakonova N.Ya. Lyric poetry by Byron. M: True, 1978

5. Leslie M. Lord Byron. Hostage of passion. M: Centerpolygraph, 2002

6. Mezhenko Yu. Famous writers. Destiny and creativity. Rostov: Phoenix, 2007

7. Maurois A. Don Juan, or the Life of Byron. M: AST, 2009

8. Maurois A. Literary portraits. Byron. M: Terra - Book Club, 1998

9. Romm A.S. George Noel Gordon Byron. L .; Moscow: Art, 1961

10.http: //lib.ru/POEZIQ/BAJRON/byron4_4.txt (preface)

Byronism is a trend in literature that has influenced many of the most talented writers and poets around the world. It was especially popular among Russian writers of the 19th century. Let's find out more about Byronism and its creator, and also consider the most famous Russian writers of this period who were fascinated by this trend.

Who is Byron?

Before considering what Byronism is in literature (definition and distinctive features of this movement), it is worth learning about its founder - the British aristocrat poet George Gordon Byron.

The childhood of the future literary idol passed in poverty, since, despite his noble birth, the poet was able to receive the hereditary title and money only at the age of 10, when his distant relative died.

While studying at Cambridge University, Byron discovered his talent as a poet and began to write poetry. They were well received in literary circles, but the poem about a bored nobleman "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" brought real fame to the author. Soon after its publication, Byron's noble longing spread like a plague not only across Britain, but throughout Europe.

As befits an idol, he lived to the fullest: he won the hearts of beautiful ladies, squandered money without an account, openly criticized the current political system and fought in duels.

According to the fateful tradition of geniuses, Byron died young - at 36 years old. The cause of his death was a cold, but of greater interest is how the poet fell ill. Despite his popularity, Byron was better known as a theorist, and the author himself dreamed of proving that he would be as noble in deeds as in words. That is why, when the Greeks (whose culture the writer admired all his life) began a war with the Ottoman Empire for independence, the poet came to their aid. He spent all his money and influence to equip rebel soldiers. However, he did not live to see victory, having caught a cold and died.

Byronic hero

Soon after the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the concept of the Byronic hero emerged in world literature. In fact, Childe Harold was the first of this species.

Subsequently, such characters were often found in the works of Russian writers - Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev and, of course, Dostoevsky.

What are the distinguishing features of the Byronic hero?

• He is always very smart, has an excellent education and upbringing.
• The hero is characterized by cynicism and arrogance. He is almost always in opposition to the authorities, which means that he is doomed to the lot of an exile.
• Such a character is a kind of sex symbol that can seduce anyone. However, the classic Byronic hero does not find much joy in this and most often does it just like that.
• AND main feature such a hero is his mystery. There is a secret in the heart and past of each such character, which, like a magnet, attracts everyone, especially women.

Byronism - what is it?

Having learned who Byron is and what features the type of hero of works of art created by him has, it is worth considering the main thing. So, let's find out the answer to the question: "Byronism in literature - what is it?"

A similar name bears a special course of romanticism of the 19th century, whose adherents inherit the traditions of Lord Byron's work. In other words, the Byronic lyric hero is at the center of any work of this kind.

Special features of this literary movement

Having learned the answer to the question "Byronism - what is it?", It is worth considering works written in a similar style.

• For the majority of adherents of this trend in creativity, a mood of disappointment in the world and its social order is characteristic.
• Also an important feature of the Byronic characters is the so-called world melancholy. As Pushkin wrote about this, "Like an English spleen, in short: Russian blues."
• Another feature of Byronic works is the feeling of the protagonist of his own difference from everyone around him.
• Despite the ostentatious detachment from the world and melancholy, adherents of this trend are characterized by an attempt to elevate their heroes (as well as themselves) to the role of possible saviors of humanity. For many at that time, Napoleon Bonaparte became a kind of embodiment of this ideal. By the way, that is why he appears in one form or another in many works of that time.

Byronism in European literature

After the release of "Pilgrimage ..." almost all young writers of Europe were captivated by the beauty of the style and ideas of the author.

At the same time, more mature writers saw perfectly well that behind the lord's enthusiastic romance and noble impulses there was nothing but youthful maximalism and a selfish belief in his own uniqueness. But they too often proved unable to resist the charm of the poetry of the yearning Briton.

The most famous Byronist writers in France are Alfred Victor de Vigny and Alfred de Musset.

Even Victor Hugo, gravitating towards realism, shared the desire of Byron's heroes for freedom and their readiness to resist the authorities.

In Italy, the most famous representative of Byronism is Giacomo Leopardi, in Germany - Heinrich Heine, in Poland - Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki.

Byronism in Russian literature of the 19th century

Like other European geniuses, the writers of Tsarist Russia were fascinated by the ideas of the British yearning lord and were inspired by them when creating their own works.

Among the fans of Byronism, the most successful were such authors as V. Küchelbecker, A. Polezhaev, A. Pushkin. M. Lermontov, A. Griboyedov.

In addition, the influence of this trend can be found in the works of F. Dostoevsky, I. Turgenev.

Interesting facts about Byronism in Pushkin's work

Considering in more detail the examples of Byronism in the work of Russian writers, it is worth starting with the founder of the Russian literary language - A.S. Pushkin.

Like his school friend Kuchelbecker, the future classic was in love with Byron's poetry. Moreover, according to the testimony of contemporaries, Alexander Sergeevich admired the British's ability to describe exotic countries and their inhabitants most of all.

For this reason, in the early poetry of Pushkin ("Prisoner of the Caucasus", "Bakhchisarai Fountain"), romantic Byronism is quite strongly felt.

When Alexander Sergeyevich matured as a poet, he began to more soberly evaluate the work of his idol. Thus, his famous novel in verse "Eugene Onegin" became a kind of Russian parody of Childe Harold.

Throughout the entire work, its creator mocks at the society's hobby for Byronism. In particular, the author ridicules the main postulates of this movement in its "noble melancholy", laziness, superficial education and constant striving for the forbidden. At the same time, the creator of the novel actively used in it such a favorite Byron technique - the author's witty remarks during the action.

Even in later periods, the influence of Byron is noticeable in Pushkin's work. It seems that the classic was to some extent competing with his British counterpart. For example, in response to the poem of Lord Mazepa, Alexander Sergeevich wrote "Poltava".

In the works of Pushkin and Byron, there are stories about Don Juan. It is interesting that in Alexander Sergeevich the famous seducer is more inherent in the features of the Byronic hero than in the creator of Childe Harold.

Byronism in Lermontov's work

Another talented Russian poet - an adherent of this trend is Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov.

It is possible that his admiration for the work of the British genius was due to the poet's love for the poetry of Pushkin. So, in the biographies of the writers there is an interesting fact: they both at different times wrote poems in the style of Byronism - "Prisoner of the Caucasus".

Lermontov's hobby for Byronism developed along the same lines as that of Alexander Sergeevich. The young genius wrote several poems ("Izmail-Bey", "Hadji Abrek", "Mtsyri"), full of admiration for the oriental flavor of the Caucasian peoples and all the same unquenchable melancholy and disappointment in life.

Growing up, the poet also began to rethink his passion for romantic melancholy, but, unlike Pushkin, he continued to feel the closeness of his fate to the work of Byron. Perhaps this can explain the peculiar restlessness of Mikhail Yuryevich and his self-destructive behavior, which cost him his life. Some researchers of his work believe that the poet not only sought to imitate his British idol, but also unconsciously turned into a kind of Childe Harold.

As for Lermontov's later work, an example of Byronism in poetry is "The Demon", and in prose - "A Hero of Our Time."

The image of a demon in the poem of the same name was inspired by the author by Lucifer from Byron's "Cain". But the main character of the "Hero of Our Time" Pechorin is an original find by Lermontov, endowed with many of its own features.

Byron's motives in the works of Turgenev and Dostoevsky

Unlike Lermontov and Pushkin, Turgenev and Dostoevsky were busy people, they did not have time for aristocratic melancholy. Despite this, their works were influenced by the trend in question.

For instance, main character Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons" Yevgeny Bazarov is a typical Byronic hero, called the then fashionable word "nihilist." At the same time, Turgenev throughout the entire work not only skillfully demonstrates the utopian nature of his ideas, but also once again shows the uselessness of such "heroes of our time" to society. Just what is the phrase in the finale of Fathers and Sons about young Russian students: “... with whom Heidelberg is filled and who, surprising at first naive German professors with their sober view of things, subsequently surprise those same professors with their complete inaction and absolute laziness ... unable to distinguish oxygen from nitrogen, but full of denial and self-respect ... ".

The master of words, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, went even further in his criticism of Byronism. In his epoch-making novel "Crime and Punishment", he displays the images of not one, but several Byronic heroes (Rodion Raskolnikov and Arkady Svidrigailov) whom he opposes to each other.

Raskolnikov is disappointed in life and finds solace in his "special mission" - saving the world. As a result, he goes on a crime that does no good to anyone.

Svidrigailov is a more typical Byronic hero. He is mysterious, rich, intelligent, cynical and devilishly seductive. Suffering from the traditional "world melancholy", he falls in love with Raskolnikov's sister. In the finale, he has to realize that her reciprocity cannot heal him - so the hero kills himself.

In contrast to Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov fails to achieve anything he wants, but in the finale he finds not only a new goal in life, but also a new mentor (Sonya), which helps him to get on the right path.

Researchers of Dostoevsky's work believe that even more features of Byronism can be found in the novel The Brothers Karamazov. Here Fyodor Mikhailovich not only shows a whole series of Childe Harolds with a Russian flavor, but also directly criticizes such a worldview: “Dreamy love longs for a quick, quickly satisfying feat and for everyone to look at it. Here it really comes to the point that they even give up their lives, so long as it does not last long, but rather quickly, as if on a stage, and for everyone to look and praise. But active love is work and endurance, but for others it is, perhaps, a whole science ... ".

After such a deep analysis of the foundations of Byronism in literature and human psychology, as Dostoevsky did in his time, it seemed that this topic should have ceased to excite the minds of writers. However, the magic of the noble point has not dried up to this day.

Therefore, mysterious heroes, languishing with loneliness and misunderstanding, are still one of the most common book characters.