Prince Meshchersky. Genus history

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Died friend of the poet Gabriel Derzhavin, hospitable Prince Meshchersky. The poet was so saddened by his departure that he responded with an ode. Despite the absence of the odic dimensions and grandeur inherent in the genre, these eighty-eight lines touch the reader's soul so much that the search for information about who Prince Meshchersky is and what he is known for inevitably begins. It turns out - nothing. The most ordinary person, although a representative of an ancient family. Prince Alexander, about whom Derzhavin grieved so much, was significantly surpassed in fame by his descendant, Vladimir, who wrote as a publicist, and also published and edited the magazine Grazhdanin. But Prince Vladimir began publishing in 1887, and Derzhavin's ode "On the Death of Prince Meshchersky" was written in 1779, almost a hundred years ago.

Ode

Death and eternity are two topics that concern everyone and constantly intersect in the odeDerzhavin, the unprecedented sincerity and penetration of the lyrics - that's why these poems quickly became famous and fell in love with the reader. Their lines contain a deep philosophy regarding the insignificant human existence and the huge incomprehensible universe, inside which Prince Meshchersky is still alive. It is comforting for the reader that Derzhavin shows humanity as a part of nature, which is eternal, and therefore people are also a part of this eternity, although each individual life is certainly finite, short-lived and transient. After all, any person - noble and insignificant - will surely die.

The genius of Derzhavin managed to combine life with death in the joyful sensation of the first and the tragic experience of the latter, and the deceased Prince Meshchersky, with the light hand of the poet, received an eternally joyful life - the poet empathized with his close friend so deeply and passionately. Death is gloomy, inexorable, it is indifferent to the fact that the whole life of the hero of the lines of Derzhavin's ode was festive, filled with beauty and contentment, luxury and bliss. The drama is heightened to the limit by precisely this opposition: it is impossible to respond to the death of Prince Meshchersky with the word "has been exhausted." The conflict itself, unfolding in the ode, is conflicting, as is the figurative system used by the author.

The conflict embedded in the structure of the ode leads to the understanding that the dialectical essence of the universe is contradictory and cannot be brought to unity with a single human destiny. "Where the table was food - there is a coffin …" - a verse exceptional in its richness. "On the death of the princeMeshchersky" - an ode to eleven stanzas, where in each line life tries to resist death.

Confrontation

Eight lines of any stanza of this ode necessarily declare the opposition of life and death. This is affirmed at various levels of presentation of poetic material. A figurative row, the construction of syntactic constructions, changes in rhythmic patterns of sound, and so on. Derzhavin uses tropes very abundantly - poetic allegories, which over time, already in the work of his followers, will take shape as an oxymoron. This is a rather complicated trope, but also extremely expressive: "Dead Souls" by Gogol, "The Living Corpse" by Tolstoy, "Hot Snow" by Bondarev - the names themselves convey all the ambiguity of experiences, feelings, mental states in the transmission of certain events.

Derzhavin became the founder of this means of expression in the literary language. Absolutely opposite meanings coexist in the same image - this is an oxymoron. Ambiguity, contradictions in everything - not only in every act of a person, in his behavior, but all of life - is only an oxymoron, hence such a high degree of truthfulness in the lines of this ode. An analysis of the poem "On the Death of Prince Meshchersky" clearly shows those principles that will subsequently be developed, improved and will increase the psychological load of the work to the maximum. For example, the phrase: "Today is God, tomorrow is dust." This means the following: we are born in order to die, andalong with life, his death is acceptable. This is the main idea and the super-task accomplished by Derzhavin in this work.

Prince Alexander Meshchersky

Ode, composed by Derzhavin and published anonymously in the "Saint Petersburg Bulletin" in 1779, made this man famous. Young Ivan Dmitriev was so impressed by these lines that he wanted to get to know the author, and not only him. The city, and subsequently the country, hummed, exchanging delight. Even Pushkin, many years after the publication of this work, was so impressed that he took Derzhavin's line as the epigraph to the chapter of Dubrovsky. After all, it would seem impossible to express thoughts about life and death more concretely and briefly. The whole picture of human existence expands to boundless limits. The lines, aphoristically chased, convey almost nothing life-descriptive about their lyrical, suddenly deceased hero.

Son of luxury, a prosperous person and the best of he alth. What was striking was his death for friends, relatives and acquaintances. The ode is usually written about historically significant persons, at least this is prescribed by all the laws of classicism. And here - just a friend of the poet. An ordinary mortal, nothing out of the total number of contemporaries outstanding. This is not Suvorov, not Potemkin, but an ordinary prince. Why did Derzhavin's poem "On the Death of Prince Meshchersky" make such an indelible impression not only on contemporaries, but also on distant descendants? This is also an innovation:At the moment, no poet has shown such a large scale the omnipotence and community of the laws of the universe through the fate of the most ordinary of people.

Image of Death

Death is written out by Derzhavin in all its might - in detail and colorfully. Its image is shown in dynamics - sequentially and deployed. From gnashing of teeth to truncation of oblique days of human life - in the first stanza. From swallowing entire kingdoms and mercilessly smashing everything around - to the second.

Further, the scope takes on cosmic dimensions: the stars are crushed, the suns are dying out, all worlds are threatened with death. There is also some "grounding" here, so as not to fly into this space irrevocably. Derzhavin switches the reader to understanding of life with a small mocking scene: death looks, smiling, at the kings, at the lush rich, at the proud wise men - and sharpens, sharpens the blade of his scythe.

Leitmotifs

The clarity of the division into stanzas does not violate the smoothness of the narration. For this purpose, Derzhavin placed a whole series of special artistic devices at his service. The stanzas seem to flow into one another (a technique used for the first time in Russian literature so completely and clearly). Concentrating the main idea in the last line of the stanza, the poet repeats it in the first line of the next one, then developing and strengthening it. The thought and image that are repeated throughout the text are called the leitmotif, and Derzhavin took advantage of it. Ode "On the Death of Prince Meshchersky" is precisely why it turned out to be such a harmonious and consistent work. The main leitmotifs were indifferent and passionless death and fleeting, like a dream, life.

Metaphysical text

Prince Meshchersky was not given high positions, prominent positions, he did not become famous in any way - neither in the military, nor in the administrative, nor in the art department. A man without special talents, with pleasant features of purely Russian hospitality (which, in principle, practically everyone then possessed). The first title that Derzhavin gave to his work referred it to the genre of a poetic message, but not to the canonical ode: "To S. V. Perfilyev, on the death of Alexander Ivanovich Meshchersky." However, the pathos of a true ode, sounding like a bell tocsin, betrayed the genre affiliation from the first stanza: "The verb of the times! Metal ringing!".

And immediately the metaphysical problems become clear. The death of any - even a completely unknown person makes humanity a little less complete, and every living person a little less complete. The death of a friend is shown as an existential event in the streams of amazing poetic revelations. Talking about the death of the prince, Derzhavin clearly compares it with his own. The unity of each person with all mankind - this is the metaphysics of this idea. And at the same time, the ode "On the death of Prince Meshchersky" speaks of the opposition to death, since with each line it prompts reflection on the meaning of being of a particular person in the general universe, despite its intrepid laws.

Semanticstructure

Original metamorphoses await the reader in every verse: the pioneer of Russian poetry for the first time introduced absolutely new categories into literature: high-low, eternal-temporal, particular-general, abstract-concrete. Of course, all this has been known since the time of Aristotle. But only with Derzhavin do these categories cease to sound mutually exclusive, entering into a synthesis.

Odic, elevated, enthusiastic sounding states its most disappointing postulates. Human life and its meaning: only a mortal does not think of dying. Such oxymorons are numerous, and all of them in this ode are tragic, this is how Derzhavin feels them. "On the death of Prince Meshchersky" is an ode that puts the reader in the face of death as the only constant, since any entity tomorrow or in a thousand years, like a baobab, dies anyway.

Warning to the reader

The existence of such a constant is doubtful and illusory, because existential, as it were, does not make sense, and, therefore, the essence is not true if there are no traces of it left in the future. Derzhavin added meaning to the well-fed, but mostly meaningless existence of his acquaintance, the ode "On the Death of Prince Meshchersky".

The analysis of this work was made not only by philologists, but also by philosophers, where all its details are connected with the model of the universe, where there is no self-foundation of the existence of an individual, since individuality is devoid of beingness. However, the inner experience of the poet enters into an argument with inevitability, as if warning the reader that he is on the edge.abyss that the chain of transformations will not be interrupted, everyone and everything will disappear in this cosmic mystery without the slightest trace.

Another Prince Meshchersky

Derzhavin had nothing to do with Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Meshchersky, although his ancestor was honored with an ode to his death. Prince Alexander Ivanovich was a state councilor, served in the customs office. He loved literature and the St. Petersburg English Society (club). The Meshchersky family originated from the Tatar princes of the thirteenth century, in the fourteenth and fifteenth they owned Meshchera, among the representatives of the family there were governors - city and regimental. This and all that is known about the Meshchersky princes, nothing special. But in 1838, Karamzin's grandson, Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, was born, a person not in Derzhavin's odious manner. This is one of the main characters of the social life of Russia in the nineteenth century, a character not only of mind-blowing rumors, but also of obscene anecdotes. He worked a lot, published a magazine (later a newspaper), wrote "Speeches of a Conservative", which were quite famous among his contemporaries.

His father is Guard Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Meshchersky, his mother is the eldest daughter of the famous historiographer and writer Nikolai Karamzin. Parents are morally beautiful people, enlightened and believing in ideals. The son, in his own words, had both a bad character and a nature. He dreamed about exploits in the name of the Fatherland and about sexual attention from strangers. The literary path was chosen by him by chance. In 1981, he described the emperor's visit to the Potemkins, with whom he was on friendly terms. Soon, Prince Meshchersky was granted the chamber junkership. And workin the Ministry of Internal Affairs, after which the road to the famous circle formed nearby was opened. And the prince's rapid rise to the elite of Russian statehood began.

Counselor to the Sovereign

The tutor of the heir, Count Stroganov, liked Prince Meshchersky, so the prince's social circle settled down at sky-high heights - he became a close friend of Tsarevich Nikolai (the same meaning is embedded here, despite the attitude towards the future Russian monarch). Secular life was given to Vladimir Meshchersky not as easy as it seems: either Stroganov would call him a “bad courtesan,” or they would whisper too loudly and giggle behind his back. However, Meshchersky nevertheless became an adviser for the entire entourage of the heir and for himself. The Tsarevich was seriously ill, and the prince accompanied him to Europe for treatment, for which the head of the internal affairs department, Valuev, called him "intimate at court."

After the death of Nicholas (they talked about suicide on the basis of homosexuality), Meshchersky was given another crown prince, in the future - Alexander III, who had feelings for the prince's cousin. Meshchersky managed to neutralize this attachment of the future monarch by taking fire upon himself, for which the imperial family remained very grateful to him. By this time, the writer's itch began to annoy the prince very much, and with the help of the crown prince, a real stronghold of autocracy was established - the magazine "Citizen". Thanks to excellent heirs, the founder of the journal remained in people's memory. After all, his work was continued by such people asDostoevsky, Tyutchev, Maikov. And Meshchersky himself, on the pages of Grazhdanin, mercilessly fought against secular education, the Zemstvo, jury trials, peasant self-government and intellectual Jews. "Sodom prince and citizen of Gomorrah", according to Vladimir Solovyov.