In the brilliant galaxy of poets of the Pushkin era, A. Delvig stands out as the creator of masterpieces of Russian romance, including "My Nightingale, My Nightingale", set to music by A. A. Alyabyev and M. I. Glinka, the elegy "When, my Soul, you Asked for it" to the music of the lyceum poet comrade M. L. Yakovlev and composer A. S. Dargomyzhsky,"Not an autumn frequent rain", about which M. I. Glinka recalled: "Delvig wrote me a romance " Not an autumn frequent Rain". The music for these words I later took for Antonida's romance "I grieve not for that, my friends", in the opera "Life for the Tsar" (cit. by: A. Delvig. Poems, L., 1951, P. 272).

Delvig was clearly aware of the genre of his works, calling them romances, that is, creating them for song performance. The poet himself was extremely musical. The image of singing Delvig was imprinted in biographical information and in memoirs about him. His romances were inspired by A. A. Alyabyev and M. I. Glinka (the romance "Don't Say: Love will pass..."), P. P. Bulgakov, A. S. Dargomyzhsky, V. Zhdanov and I. Rupini (the romance" A Beautiful Day, a Happy Day"), F. S. Akimenko, P. P. Schenk and V. A. Zolotarev (the romance "A Beautiful Day, a Happy Day").Only I recognized you"), A. E. Varlamov (the romance" The Lonely Month sailed, swaying in the fog"), M. L. Yakovlev (the romance "Yesterday of Bacchanalian friends"). Especially fond of Delvig's songwriting was A. A. Alyabyev, who composed music not only for the poet's romances, but also for his "Russian songs", which are stylized folk songs.

What is the secret of the charm of Delvig's poems, which still continue to excite the hearts of readers and listeners of his romances? They always talk about the soul: "Why should I extinguish my soul?

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glittering desires?"; "And pure joy flew Into my gloomy soul"; "And in us the soul boiled in your summers"; " The days of enchantment that have passed, I cannot return you to my soul!".

But the greatest place is given to the soul in the romance "Elegy" ("When, my soul, you asked for it"). In the first stanza, the poet refers to his own soul as "you", as if talking to it:

When, my soul, did you ask for it

To perish or to love,

When wishes and dreams come true

People were crowding in on you.,

When have I not drunk tears yet

From the Cup of Genesis, -

Why then, in a wreath of roses,

I didn't go to the shadows!

In the second stanza, the rhetorical questions continue, but they are already addressed to the" sign "of youth-the songs of "past days", with which the poet also conducts a mental conversation:

Why did you draw it like this

In my memory,

Unified Youth Sign,

You, songs of the past days!

I bitterly dales and forests

And a cute look., -

So why your votes

You have preserved my hearing!

The whole " Elegy "is built on tripling and anaphora: three interrogative" when "starting three subordinate clauses of time correspond to three rhetorical"why". The third stanza is also based on tripling imperative verb forms with negation:

Don't give me back my happiness,

At least it breathes in you!

With him in a flash of antiquity

I said goodbye a long time ago.

Don't break the rules, I pray,

You are the sleep of my soul

And terrible words: I love you

Don't repeat it to her!

The appeals "When, my soul, you asked for it", "A single sign of youth, You, songs of past days" and five emotionally colored sentences (marked with exclamation marks) give the figures of the poetic syntax of this romance a special expressiveness.

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The romantic maximalist worldview was expressed in the lines " When, my soul, you asked to Die or love." It is not by chance that A. Bely recalled these very words of Delvig in connection with the death of A. Blok, the romantic poet of the XX century: "And the soul asks: love or death; real human, humane life, or death. The soul cannot live as an orangutan. And Blok's death for me is a call to "perish or love"" (cit. by: Rassadin St. Sputniki, Moscow, 1983, p. 46).

In the romance "Don't Say: love will pass" Delvig does not want to put up with reality: "Love's days are short. But I will not grow old with it cold; I will die with it, like the dull sound of a suddenly broken string." The poet does not put on a romantic mask: he felt this way in real life. This is indicated, for example, by his letters to his fiancee S. M. Saltykova: "Let them separate us, but all the forces of the earth and heaven will not force me to stop loving you" (Delvig A. A. Works. L., 1986. P. 301). "Take care of me with your love, use everything to make me the highest happy person, or rather say: 'die, friend' and I will accept this word as a blessing, "wrote the poet, who was forced to wait for the" greatest happiness or perfect destruction " - permission to marry. Refusal "will destroy all of me, so destroy me that if I stay alive, I will stay because of the lowest meanness "(Ibid., pp. 296, 297).

Delvig's lyrical hero suffers from the unattainability of eternal love. But this is not Lermontov's cold "it is impossible to love forever", on the contrary, Delvig's hero is ready to pay for love even with happiness:

Don't say: love will pass,

What your friend wants to forget;

In her he trusts for eternity,

He gives her happiness as a sacrifice.

The volatility and irrevocability of happiness is the leitmotif of Delvig's romances. And the price that the heart pays for love is too high:

What's in love for me

got it from the cruel heavens

No bitter tears, no deep wounds,

Without tedious boredom?

This is also the case with the romance "Disillusionment":

Past days of enchantment,

I can't bring you back to my soul!

In love knowing only suffering,

She has lost her desires

And again he doesn't ask to be loved.

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That's why the soul goes to sleep: "Don't break the law, I pray. You are the dream of my soul And the terrible words: "Do not repeat it!"

The image of the "dream of the soul" in Russian literature has many meanings, it was addressed by Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Goncharov. In his essay dedicated to Delvig, St. Rassadin notes that the dream of the soul is an analogue of the poet's creative state, expresses the focus of spiritual forces, "in the poems about the desire for death and sleep, it was not the lazy sluggishness of existence that affected, but, on the contrary, too much sensitivity. Too big to live" (Rassadin St. Decree. op. p. 54). The critic rightly explains that the soul's sleep is painfully sensitive: the poet is afraid of the word "love" - this means that the thirst for love and pain is alive and constant.

On the awakening of the soul from sleep to love-the romance "Only I learned you":

You said I love you -

And pure joy flew off

Into my dark soul.

The word "love" was still spoken to the soul. The rapidity of the awakening of feelings is emphasized by intonation-setting a dash, meaning a rapid change of events, "only", putting verbs at the beginning of stanzas:

I just recognized you -

And a sweet thrill for the first time

My heart began to pound.

You squeezed my hand -

And life, and all the joys of life

I have sacrificed to you.

Using opposites, antonyms (dark - light, torment - happiness), Delvig conveys the psychological process of the birth of love from emotional excitement ("My heart began to beat in me"). to the shocked silence and clear realization of what love has brought:

I stare at you in silence, -

There is no word for all the torment, all the happiness

Express my passion.

Every bright thought,

High every feeling

You create in the soul.

The image of the light that love brings with it also appears in Delvig's "Beautiful Day, Happy Day".:

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Beautiful day, happy day:

And the sun, and love!

A shadow escaped from the bare fields -

My heart brightens again.

Wake up, groves and fields;

Let life all boils:

She's mine, she's mine!

My heart tells me.

The romance is imbued with a jubilant sense of happiness. This is due to the intonation organization of the syntax: exclamation sentences, enumerations, appeals, and unjoint sentences with dashes and colons between them. All this implies an agitated increase in intonation and creates a special melody of the verse, superimposing on the intonation grid of the rhythm (as you know, on low-impact feet the voice rises, on high-impact ones it decreases).

Delvig widely used figures of poetic syntax in his romances: parallelisms, repetitions, rhetorical questions, etc. And this was natural: "in the poetics of traditional poetic images, syntax had to have a special, often crucial, meaning. It was on the rhythmic-syntactic system that the task of extracting subtle differentiating shades from words fell at that time" (Ginzburg L. Ya. On lyrics,Moscow, 1974, p. 45).

The Short Literary Encyclopedia notes that " Delvig's lyrics, despite their intimate nature, played a major role in the development of poetic forms and metrical techniques in poetry "(Moscow, 1964, vol. 2, p. 583). Indeed, the metrical forms of Delvig are diverse, but they are strictly maintained even in cases of complex alternations of sizes, for example, dactyl and anapest, as in the romance "I Only Recognized you" (the metric and stanzas of all Delvig's poems are analyzed and formalized in the article by L. T. Senchina in the collection "Russian Versification", Moscow, 1979).

Delvig, like Vyazemsky and Baratynsky, belonged to the Russian elegiac school founded by Zhukovsky and Batyushkov. In the poetics of this school, we will find neither vivid metaphors nor figurative specifics. According to a fair observation by L. Ya. Ginzburg, " elegiac poetics is the poetics of recognition. And tradition, fundamental repetition is one of its strongest poetic means" (Edict op. p. 29). These stylistic "signals" - tears, dreams, dreams, murmurs, desires, valleys and forests, etc. - "they are relatively unambiguous (as far as a poetic word can be unambiguous), and they lead to a series of predetermined associations" (Decree op.p. 27).

Delvig's epithets are traditional for the poetics of romance: cruel skies, gloomy soul, sweet awe, young dreams, deep wounds.

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But there are also emotionally vivid, individual definitions of "tiresome melancholy", "terrible words: I love". Delvig's periphrases are also in the spirit of the poetic style of the time: "When I still did not drink tears From the cup of being, Why then, in a wreath of roses, Did I not go to the shadows!". Let us recall Lermontov's poem "The Cup of Life":

"We drink from the cup of being

With closed eyes.

Golden wetting edges

With your own tears."

The researchers ' conclusions about the poetics of the Russian elegiac school are also applicable to Delvig's romances: they are " the most characteristic example of a stable, closed style, impenetrable to raw, aesthetically unprocessed everyday words. All the elements of this perfectly developed system are subordinated to one goal - they should express the beautiful world of a finely feeling soul "(Edict op. p. 29).

Delvig's impressionable and tender soul expressed itself in his romances, which still excite and touch us today with their sincerity, nobility and beauty. They convey to us "the days of enchantment that have passed..."

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