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7THE THEME AND PROBLEM OF BEAUTY IN THE POETICS OF NIKOLAI ZABOLOTSKY
Kopteva G.
Siberian Transport University, Novosibirsk, Russia Associate Professor of Foreign languages, Candidate of Philological Sciences
Abstract
This article examines the problem of beauty in the poetics of Nikolai Zabolotsky. Zabolotsky considered the "artistic word" (its work) to be his main activity in life, his way to describe the surrounding reality. His special, reverent attitude to the word, on the one hand, and to nature, on the other, determined both the ethics and aesthetics of this poet. The moral sense in works of the mature Zabolotsky is dominant. Moreover, the poet has always been concerned about the problem of beauty and ugliness of a person, his face and his soul. Starting from the very first poems, a spiritualized face appears in his poetics as an iconic sign. For him, the face plays a fundamental role, and the question of the meaning of beauty is of a "reciprocal" nature. The defining quality in "beauty" and the object of aesthetic contemplation can be internal integrity, that is, the integrity of the soul, personality. Personality as an internal unity of the spiritual principle is the highest form of integrity, and Zabolotsky's understanding of beauty obviously implies that beauty is the highest form of integrity of the spiritual component of the human personality.
Keywords: the meaning of beauty, soul, face, portrait, philosophical question, inner integrity, spiritual principle.
The problem of the beauty and ugliness of a man, of his face and his soul has always worried the poet. His poem "The Ugly Girl" is some result of painful thoughts on this topic. The element of beauty of the human soul is the universal dominant principle here. Both the title and the content of the poem give rise to allusive associations with the beloved heroine of Leo Tolstoy ("an ugly, but lively girl"). The girl's face is depicted by Zabolotsky in negative perspective: "the mouth is long, the teeth are crooked", the features are "not good", "sharp and ugly". But the aesthetic moment of the "pure flame", the "infant grace" of her soul looks all the more relevant in the poem: "Someone else's joy, as well as her own, / Torments her and breaks out of her heart, / And the girl rejoices and laughs, / Overcoming by the happiness of being." [4, P. 218 (here and further the translation is mine - G.K.)] This classic, at the first glance, type of an ugly girl turns out to be extremely plastic for the author's painting due to the extraordinary inner beauty contained in the character. A number of internal and external details and ones of the "today's life" of this child receives its value weight here, everything is comprehended and formed by the loving consciousness of the author, for whom the girl's future life is already explicitly illuminated by a tragic light: "there will be a day when she, crying, / Will see with horror that in the midst of friends / She is just an unpleasant looking girl!" [4, P. 218] In the moment of creative love for the empathized content, in the hope expressed firmly and confidently - "I want to believe", - the aesthetic activity of the author itself affects. The eternal philosophical question "what is Beauty?" and bewilderment, in the context of the situation, almost indignation, "why do people deify it?" sound rhetorical. The soul is some vessel, according to ancient, mythopoetic ideas. The plot of the poem is closed with a key question here - "Is it a vessel in which there is just emptiness, / Or a fire flickering in a vessel?" [4, P. 219] It suggests a completely unambiguous answer, so obvious that some critics and researchers considered the poem a primitive.
The idea of the same question (at the crossroads of ethics and aesthetics) - about the meaning of beauty -
is developed by Zabolotsky in his poem "The Old Actress" (1956), written a year later after "The Ugly Girl" (1955). In a number of epic forms, both of these poems can be considered as novellas or poetic stories, since they tell about real, visually typical persons, possessing descriptive and psychological concreteness. Lyrics and epic often coexist in the poetics of Nikolai Zabolotsky, this is the fundamental feature of his poems, and the ethical component is organically fused into his poetic style. The image of face is very important here, the face is for the author a way of exposing the essential moments of the human personality.
The house of the "Old Actress" repeatedly awarded with orders and titles carefully preserves the memory of her former "otherworldly", "disturbing beauty" and fame. This memory is embodied in portraits, albums, numerous photographs that preserve a beautiful image for new generations. But the heart of the actress is hard, stingy and capricious, she has a quarrelsome character, and her whole appearance is now hunched and shabby. The high tonality of the description of the sultry Italian appearance of a young beauty contrasts in the poem with the ironic, satirical portrait of a grumpy old woman. Looking at her beautiful portraits, a homeless little girl (whom the old aunt took in and placed in a "semi-dark basement", as if out of mercy, but most likely out of the benefit of having a free housekeeper in the house), is struck by such a striking contrast: the former beauty of the actress and her spiritual callousness. Such a contradiction has an onto-logical meaning, that is why the lyrical hero's amazement is so great. After all, he knows the immutable truth: as the face looks, so can the soul look, since this is the artistic truth of the expressed and externally perceived action. The beautiful face of the "old actress" is actually a mask, but her true essence, artfully exposed by the poet is ugly, and makes a repulsive impression on everyone. Thus, the beauty of the "forgotten idol" of theatrical Moscow turns into a myth that is carefully preserved by the space of her room "in the Empire style", by the space of her house. The wrong side of this beauty turns out to be the complete opposite of the
"front" side (it is obvious in the context of the narrative), as the contrast of her comfortable home - to a semi-dark low basement, where the little niece is forced to spend her nights on a "rag blanket". The poem ends with the following exclamation: and "such hearts" are lifted above the world by the "unreasonable power of art"! [4, P. 224] The indignant words of the lyrical hero become an expression of the author's point of view. Human existence is aesthetically comprehended by the poet through the contrast of external beauty and internal ugliness, and through the polarity of destinies, sometimes very unfair.
It is appropriate to remember here that the aesthetic embraces both the beautiful and the ugly. "By the aesthetic we mean that act of our perception of objects of the external world, which mediates between the dispersion of mass impressions and the analytical assimilation of phenomena, which we call scientific. In the aesthetic act, we distract from the world of impressions of sound and light the internal images of objects, their shapes, colors, types, sounds as separated from us, reflecting the objective world." [2, P. 299] Here is what the poet wrote in one of his program articles: "A lot of human faces, each of which is a living mirror of inner life, the finest instrument of a soul full of secrets - what could be more attractive than constant communication with them, their observation, friendly community? ... A complex and diverse world with all its victories and defeats, with its joys and sorrows, tragedies and farces surrounds me, and I myself am one of its active particles."^, P. 592] Zabolotsky considered the "artistic word" to be his main activity in life and a way to describe the surrounding reality.
His poem "Portrait" begins with a call-declaration: "Love painting, poets!" The explanatory further argument allows you to expand the generalization and translate it into a sensual-figurative form: only painting is able to image the signs of a changeable soul. The soul is the subject of the primary, close attention of artists of word and painters. The soul often finds its material embodiment in the face, - and at the same time in the portrait. Rokotov's portrait of A.P. Struyskaya once deeply impressed the poet. He was impressed by the expression and beauty of the woman's eyes. Those visitors who saw the portrait of Struyskaya in the Tretyakov Gallery could undoubtedly feel the magic and the hard-to-define attractive power of those eyes. Two stanzas -two segments of the poem are dedicated to their image, and in the fifth segment there is the result, the general aesthetic impression of Zabolotsky's perception of this portrait: "When darkness comes / And a thunderstorm is approaching, / Her beautiful eyes flicker from the bottom of my soul." [4, P. 201] The poem "Portrait" as a poetic work of philosophical nature develops a thought-image, a picture, and at the same time a thought-feeling. The heroine's eyes are "two mists", "two deceptions" (here the chthonic colors of haze and misfortune-failure are mixed with perception), "the connection of two riddles"; and all these are elements of associative parallelism. They are combined with a variety of sensual categories that formalize a complete aesthetic perception: "a half-delight, half-fright", "an
anticipation of death throes" and "a fit" of insane tenderness. The motivic relationship between "face" and "portrait" (as an iconic sign of a face) is interesting in itself and is most likely connected with the author's general tendency - his desire to see the world in its entirety, in the connections of the private and general, individual and typical, momentary and eternal. The portrait, on the one hand, creates a complex of stable features of the "external person", and on the other hand, captures his dynamic essence - gestures, facial expressions, grace. A portrait is an attempt to capture a person's appearance in its endless dynamics, it is some attempt to capture the living, the transitory, to perpetuate a moment. Moreover, not only a human face can be beautiful for a poet. The very special, reverent attitude to nature determined both his ethics and aesthetics.
"Love for the individual includes compassion..." [6, P. 436]. Any human being must have had, according to the poet's ideas, a moral sense in relation to all living things in the surrounding world. Those ideas were coupled with Zabolotsky's belief in the human mind, in the ability of the latter to control the laws of nature, devoid of a rational beginning. This moral feeling in the poetics of the mature Zabolotsky is dominant, starting from the very first poems, where a spiritualized face appears as an axiological sign. A very special place among his works is occupied by the poem "The Face of a Horse". It is written in a classical free-sized, different-footed iambic: "Animals do not sleep. They are in the darkness of the night / Standing over the world like a stone wall." [4, P. 23] Stanzas are heterogeneous and contain from 2 to 6-8 lines, and the fifth, climactic stanza includes 5 lines. Due to this a special intonation tension appears while reading. Violations of "strophic expectations" [7] give the poem a special dramatic character: "We would have heard the words. / These words are big, like apples, thick, / Like honey or hard-boiled milk. / Words that pierce like a flame, / And, having flown into the soul like a fire into a hut, / Illuminate the poor decoration. / Words that never die, / And about them we sing our songs." [4, P. 24] The verse division steadily tends to coincide with the syntactic one, and the ends of sentences and syntagmas coincide mainly with the ends of verses. This balances the perception euphonically and rhythmically, it gives to the poem the character of solemnity: "And the horse stands like a knight on duty, / The wind plays in his light hair, / His eyes burn like two huge worlds, / And the mane spreads like royal porphyry." [4, P. 23] The poet sees the horse as inexpressibly beautiful creature - it is a royal animal in his perception of the world. The free iambic, as a rising size, was often used by classical poets to express strong emotions; Nikolai Zabolotsky apparently used it for the same purpose. The poem can be considered as an example of the juxtaposition and opposition (at the same time) of rhymed and non-rhymed verse: it is partially rhymed, but the second, fifth and seventh (last) stanzas are written without rhyme. This enhances its dramatic character: the blank verse at the end gives the impression of a solemn monologue, and the last stanza sounds almost tragic: "But now the stable is empty, / The trees have also dispersed, / The Miserly morning has swaddled the mountains, / The fields have been opened for
work. / And the horse is in a cage of shafts, / Dragging a covered cart, / Stares with submissive eyes / Into a mysterious and motionless world."[4, P. 24]
The epic element is very strong here: it is, in fact, an ode to the horse. The ode, being a lyrical genre, is very close to the lyric-epic in its solemnity, in "hyperbolic style". It is natural for the ode - the significance of the theme, the depiction of the great historical events or persons. In the poem "The Face of a Horse" there are many signs of this genre: nature itself, personified and likened, and the heat of inspiration, and the deep lyrical feeling of the author. There is also a kind of structural disorder and unity of thought-idea, novelty and variety of ways of expressing it, and above all, highness and taste (these characteristic features of the ode were called in the treatise "Reasoning about lyrical poetry, or about Ode", created in 1811-1816, by G.R. Derzhavin [3]). The "face" of Zabolotsky's horse is beautiful, intelligent and attentive; and "if a man could see" this magical face, he would "tear out his impotent tongue and give it to a horse" (!). This name - "The Face of a Horse" and the very theme of the poem define clearly the author's ethical and aesthetic outlook: he opposes his own world, the human world - to the world of nature, which also has its own face.
In the concrete bodily organization of the personality for the great writer Nikolai Zabolotsky, the face plays a fundamental role. The aesthetic attitude of Zab-olotsky to the person's face, in his ontological understanding, necessarily implies not only the aesthetic object of the image, but also a potential recipient of the creative efforts of the author. That's why his question about the meaning of beauty is "reciprocal" in nature, as we could already observe. Just as there can't be, according to M. Bakhtin, "meaning in itself" [1], so there can be no beauty in itself, according to Nikolai Zabo-lotsky, from the point of view of his aesthetic attitude. The objective basis of the aesthetic is the integrity of the contemplated, that is, its completeness and non-excess, which is often called "beauty". Such an understanding of beauty as a "single completeness of the
whole" goes back, as is well known, to Plato, and in this formula, all three words are important, since the redundancy of completeness, as if overflowing, will inevitably entail the destruction of unity and, this way, the loss of integrity. So, with the word "beauty" is defined, as a rule, the external completeness and non-excess (of phenomena). However, the internal integrity can also be the object of aesthetic contemplation, that is, the integrity of a soul can be, or the integrity of a personality. Moreover, personality as the inner unity of the spiritual principle is the highest form of integrity accessible to human perception. Nikolai Zabolotsky's aesthetic perception of the reality of the surrounding world, as it is known, varies in different periods of his creative work. But Zabolotsky's understanding of beauty obviously implies that The Beauty is the highest form of integrity of the spiritual component of the human personality.
We are confident that the research in this direction can be continued.
References
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