In the last years of his life, from 1898 to 1904, the chamberlain of His Imperial Majesty's court, chamberlain, and editor-in-chief of the Government Bulletin, Konstantin Konstantinovich Sluchevsky, gathered young poets on Fridays. Among them were Merezhkovsky, Gippius, Bryusov, Balmont, Sologub, Fofanov, Minsky and many others. Translator and poet Friedrich Fiedler described Sluchevsky's apartment in detail in his diary. He was impressed by the abundance of antiques and called it an "antique museum". Konstantin Konstantinovich was a member of the Society of Antiquities Lovers (Fiedler Friedrich. Aus der Literatenwelt: Charakterzuge und Urteile: Tagebuch. Gottingen. 1996. S. 246). Despite the fact that the 62-year-old Sluchevsky was declared the "king of Russian poets", and his Fridays-the " Academy of Verse "(Bryusov V. Ya. Diaries 1891-1910. Moscow, 1927. p. 54), for Fiedler and other visitors to Fridays, the owner himself, the poet-chamberlain, was, in general, part of its antique collection, representative of a different era. This seemingly strange rapprochement between the modernists and the privy councilor, who had been writing poetry since 1858, demonstrates Sluchevsky's unique role in the history of Russian literature and his unquestionable influence on subsequent generations of Russian poets.

The young D. Merezhkovsky wrote in 1892 that the characteristic feature of "future ideal poetry" is "greed for the untried, the pursuit of elusive shades, for the dark and unconscious in our sensitivity", and stated "three main elements of the new art: mystical content, symbols and expansion of artistic expressiveness" (Merezhkovsky D. S. On the causes of decline and new trends in modern Russian literature / / L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Eternal Satellites, Moscow, 1995, p. 536). It was in the 90-ies that the popularity of Sluchevsky's poetry increased, in which the character of-

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These three elements of" new art " have been present since the 60s.

His first poems, published in the magazine Sovremennik in 1860, brought him fame. At that time, they aroused both enthusiastic responses from Ap. Grigoriev and I. Turgenev, as well as venomous parodies from critics of the revolutionary-democratic trend. 40 years later, these very poems, which Kurochkin and Dobrolyubov called "nonsense", were admired by young symbolists. Themes, motifs, innovative images of Sluchevsky's lyrics and poems, who wrote about the irrational movements of the human soul, turned out to be consonant with the new generation.

His work was surprisingly diverse and innovative. Along with landscape and philosophical lyrics, in his prose and poetry you can find exotic Egyptian motifs, and narratives about the cruel customs of the Middle Ages, and descriptions of contradictory actions and feelings, and mystical revelations, and fantastic stories, and descriptions of madness. In Sluchevsky and the Russian modernists, there are many echoes of motifs and plots, ideas and images. At the end of the XIX century, a lot of translated literature was published in Russia, so it is impossible to say with certainty that this or that image was borrowed necessarily from Konstantin Konstantinovich, but the very fact of the presence in his works, many of which were written in the 60 - 70s, of moods, images and themes characteristic of the turn of the century, certainly, it deserves attention.

About Sluchevsky as the forerunner of symbolism was written more than once: Yu. Ivask (Ivask Yu. Sluchevsky // Novy zhurnal. 1965. N 79. pp. 270-284), S. Makovsky (Makovsky S. Konstantin Sluchevsky. Predtecha simvolizma [The Forerunner of symbolism]. 1960. N 59. pp. 71-92), A. Fedorov (Fedorov A. Poeticheskoe tvorchestvo K. K. Sluchevsky / / K. K. Sluchevsky. Pokhotvoreniya i poemy [Poems and Poems], Moscow-L., 1962, pp. 5-52.), D. Chizhevsky (K. K. Slucevskij als Dichter / / Forgotten Poems. Munchen. 1968. S. 9 - 18). Critics have noted Sluchevsky's frequent reference to themes that later became central to modernism : the duality of the world and man, on the one hand, and the need to synthesize, merge, and erase the boundaries between concepts that were rigidly delineated before, such as love and hate, good and evil, God and the devil, on the other.

The most popular work of Sluchevsky among symbolists was the poem or apocryphal legend "Eloa" (1882). It reflects the poet's idea of the contradictory structure of the universe, which is very close to the views of senior symbolists. In the poem, Satan calls God "his one-year-old", "his own brother", equal to him both in power over people and in ignorance of the supreme absolute of the universe, because they are both the product of an unknown power:

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God and I are two hostile brothers.
Primordial zones of higher Power,
Unknown to us, her brainchild!..
(Sluchevsky K. K. Poems and poems, Moscow-L., 1962, p. 365; further only p.).

The interaction of good and evil, their hidden play, and most importantly, the inseparable unity of these two hostile forces in the creation of Beauty-all this greatly interested the poet. Beauty arises only when ugliness and perfection exist simultaneously. Without curves, sinkholes, mountains would not be so beautiful, says Satan:

My creation is Beauty.
Always, everywhere inherent in crashes!
And beauty is good! I am kind with malice...
and that is the duality. (366)
This idea especially appealed to K. Balmont, who was the most enthusiastic admirer of Sluchevsky's poetry. A few years later, in 1903, after reading the poem "Eloa", he wrote:

I love you, devil, I love you, God.
To one , my moans, and to the other, my sigh,
To one, my screams, and to the other, my dreams,
But you are both great, you are the delight of Beauty.
(K. Balmont. Poems, Moscow, 1990, P. 177)

The cycle of Balmont's poems "The Devil Artist"," The Parable of the Devil", certainly echoes Sluchevsky's cycle "Mephistopheles". And in describing nightmares, hallucinations and delusional visions, Balmont may have been guided not only by Western European samples, but also by the "old man" Sluchevsky, in whose diverse works one could find images of madness, ugliness, and phantasmagoria for every taste.

The influence of Sluchevsky can also be traced in the work of V. Bryusov, who called the poet a "teacher". In 1860, Sluchevsky published the poem "Memphis Priest" in Sovremennik. Then it was ridiculed as a figment of a sick imagination, and 40 years later it was performed by the owner of "Fridays" at the numerous requests of listeners. The forbidden love of an Egyptian priest for a young priestess, the conflict of power and individual freedom, the struggle of love and hate, unnatural, irrational actions - all this could not but appeal to young symbolists. In 1900, Bryusov wrote the poem "The Priest of Isis", which was originally published in Russian.-

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but under the title "Disciple" (In the collection Tertia Vigilia, published in the "Book of New Poems. 1887-1900". M " 1900).

A few years later, N. Gumilyov's work will have similar motifs: in the poem" Lovers " (1908), the great priest falls in love with a naiad and forgets his vow. In the collection "From the Corner" in 1899, Sluchevsky published the poem " The past is extinguished in them...", in which accepting death from the hands of a beloved in the name of a faded passion is perceived as a majestic sacrifice to feeling. It certainly echoes Gumilyov's poem "Poisoned" (1912). The unexpected and terrifying image of the executioner and severed heads in Gumilyov's poem "The Lost Tram" may also be an echo of the shocking naturalism in Sluchevsky's poem "After the Execution in Geneva". Gumilyov did not know the poet personally and did not attend his "Fridays". But when, after his death, it was decided to continue the "Sluchevsky Evenings", which were held almost until 1917, Gumilev attended them and even wrote the acrostic "Poet-Sluchevsky", in which he demonstrated a good knowledge of his poetry (see about this: Azadovsky K. M., Timenchik R. D. To the biography of I. S. Gumilev // Russian literature. 1988. N 2. pp. 171-186).

Many themes and images of the poetry of F. Sologub, one of his most sincere admirers, echo Sluchevsky's work. Sologub fully shared the poet's interest in death, in life in another world, and he also sang about the "greatness of the hearse" and the solemnity of cemeteries. Some of his images and motifs can also be found in Sologub's prose. For example, in the novel" Small Imp", Peredonov's mad battle with paper wallpaper on the wall resembles the hallucinations of another school teacher - from Sluchevsky's short story "Crack", written and published at least 15 years before "Small Imp": a dismissed gymnasium teacher, Pyotr Spiridonovich, tries to physically destroy a crack on the wall, which is in the process of being destroyed. his visions come alive and transform into his enemies.

Sluchevsky's rapprochement with the symbolists was natural, but, being fond of his poetry, they tried not to advertise or publicly acknowledge his influence on their work. There were several reasons for this. For Sluchevsky, the triumph of idealism in poetry was a long - awaited goal; for symbolists, it was the beginning of a path from which they sought a new spirituality, a new role for poetry and the poet in the transformation of reality. He was treated with respect, love, but condescension, as a new generation treats an old one that has not realized its capabilities.

Sluchevsky was close to and understood the philosophical and poetic quest of the symbolists, he felt like a like-minded person, but they considered him strange: he wrote not only a God-fighting book.-

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emu "Eloa "and heretical " Afterlife Songs", but also was known for his patriotic, monarchical and religious poems.

There were also literary and creative reasons for this aloofness. For example, the confusion of Sluchevsky's philosophical views, despite receiving his Ph. D. from the University of Heidelberg. This was repeatedly noted by V. Solovyov, who highly valued Sluchevsky's poetry (Solovyov V. Analysis of K. K. Sluchevsky's book " Historical Pictures. Different stories." 2. St. Petersburg, 1896; Impressionism of Thought // Poems. Aesthetics. Literary Criticism, Moscow, 1990, pp. 366-371).

But, perhaps, the main drawback of Sluchevsky was the unevenness of his poetry and often careless attitude to the form, "clumsiness and ugliness" of the verse, as even the most sincere of his fans said. Recognizing that the time had finally come for Sluchevsky, the critic S. A. Andreevsky wrote in 1900:: "The content of his poetry corresponded to the reflective and dreaming, hallucinating, disjointed and chaotic modern soul... The content was consistent. Yes. But the form?! " (Andreevsky S. A. Degeneration of rhyme / / Literary essays. St. Petersburg, 1902, p. 455).

Symbolists, on the other hand, set out to improve the form, worked on the expressiveness of the verse, striving for its musicality and harmony. In Sluchevsky's poems, they saw expressiveness, originality, but at the same time a clear indifference to style. The poet himself probably would not agree with this statement. He spent his entire life editing, correcting, and "improving" his poems, and he sincerely considered his innovative attempts to enhance expressiveness to be flawed. And, unfortunately, he often corrected lines that could have been the pride of many twentieth-century poets.

Indeed, Sluchevsky's style is anti-musical, rough. But he continued not Pushkin's tradition of harmonic poetry, but the " reserve line of development of Russian verse "(in the words of Vyach. Vs. Ivanov), which connected Derzhavin with the poetry of the XX century. Many features of this particular style later became the basis of Futurist poetics and twentieth-century poetry in general. Such as contrasting stylistic use of words, prose verse, materialization of metaphors, inversion, archaic management, etc. Sluchevsky in this respect is a link from the archaists, Lyubomudrov and Shevyrev to Annensky, Tsvetaeva, early Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Khodasevich and Zabolotsky. "He was a futurist long before the Futurists," wrote Vyacheslav Ivanov in his article "Literary Parallels to Pasternak's Caucasian Poems "(To Honor Vladimir Fedorovich Markov: Readings in Russian Modernism, Moscow, 1993, p. 161).

A characteristic technique in twentieth-century poetry was, for example, the desire for unconventional ways of metaphorization, such as through the use of metaphors.-

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dimensional materialization of an immaterial image, i.e., when dreams, thoughts, and feelings are endowed with physical weight, volume, and size. This technique was actively used by Sluchevsky:

Thoughts extinguished, feelings forgotten,
The mummies of my poor head. (242)

You flew like a storm into the wilds of the soul!
It has long been made landslides,
And accumulated at the bottom of boulders, pellets
And shattered rocks! (307)
The description of the soul-gorge, soul-cave clearly anticipates Mayakovsky: "For all of you/ who liked or like /kept by icons at the soul in the cave..."

Another technique popular in modernist poetry is to endow traditional poetic images with unconventional properties. So, smoke and clouds, usually light and weightless, become heavy and heavy, for example, in Mayakovsky's early poem "Monstrous Funeral" (1915) - the air is almost a solid body:

Then it opened, groaning and unwilling,
Dusty air is dry ochre.
I got out of the air and started driving
The silent hearse of a monstrous funeral.
(V. Mayakovsky. Selected proc.: In 2 volumes, Moscow-Leningrad, 1963, p. 101; further-only p.).

Sluchevsky used this technique repeatedly:

December afternoon! Nature froze:
Heavy sky heavy height
Like lead and ink for a long time
They lovingly took up painting everywhere (128).

Little light in our winter!
The air is dark and impure,
Not even smoke will rise -
So it is heavy and layered (260).
Perhaps it was these lines that prompted Innokenty Annensky:

I would love winter,
Yes, the burden is heavy...
it even makes smoke
Don't go into the clouds.
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This cutting of lines,
This heavy flight,
This beggar's blue
And tear-stained ice!
(Annensky I. F. Izbr. proc. l., 1988, p. 57).

Often, as a result of excessive materialization of the image, new poetic author's myths are created. Melancholy in Sluchevsky's poetry is transformed into the Goddess Melancholy (in Annensky - "My Melancholy"), and rumors - into the villain of the Rumor-father, who generates a swarm of sons who, like mosquitoes, are annoying and omnipresent:

A Ridiculous Rumor is spreading
From the toothless mouths of gray-haired old women (182).
Perhaps this poem later inspired V. Vysotsky: "And like flies here and there, rumors go home, And toothless old women spread Them around the minds...".

A characteristic feature of Sluchevsky's style from the earliest poems is a complex, intricate structure of figurative metaphorical constructions:

The wind goes izbochas
Along the Shirokaya Neva River,
Snow lays rolls
Women of krivobokoy (282).
The creative case of the metaphor "snow covers the rolls" is a control that slows down perception, just like inversion. But in Mayakovsky's poetry, these are already familiar techniques: "And in the sky, a ray of light with an earring in your ear, a star..." (99).

Superscheme accents used by Sluchevsky further destroy the harmony and smoothness of the sound, when monosyllabic stressed words are separated by pauses from the line:

Pine trees to meet! Immobile
Pink-chested trunks ...
Know: chest to chest! That's the way it should be!
In the world, the custom is as follows ...(237).
Such selection and isolation of words will be a typical technique of Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva.

Sluchevsky did not make it difficult to write verse intentionally, suffering from his " inability to write smoothly and smoothly." Many critics blamed him for various "errors that make it difficult to read" (Ivask. Edict. op. p. 281), that is, for being a researcher of the history of Russian verse.-

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Markov called it "an anticipation of futurism, with its demand to complicate the texture of verse" (Markov Vl. On freedom in poetry. St. Petersburg, 1994, p. 281).

Thus, contemporaries at the end of the XIX century found exotic themes and bold images in Sluchevsky's work, in his "shop of antiquities", and poets of the XX century could find innovative metaphors and techniques for enhancing expressiveness that were consonant with their search.

After the writer's death in 1904, his name was long forgotten. This was largely due to political events that changed the mood in society and turned the life of the literary avant-garde upside down. Apocalyptic motifs of the late 19th century found real images in life, the thirst for creative transformation of the world took shape in romantic and revolutionary appeals. Sluchevsky "becomes obsolete". Of course, his monarchism, social position, and conservative views played a role here. His name is not just forgotten, it is disowned - this is what Bryusov did: reworking early poems after the 1917 revolution, he replaced Sluchevsky's name in the text of one of the poems (the seventh stanza of the poem "Notebook" from the cycle "From Books"), removed the dedication to the poet in "Demons of Dust", replaced epigraphs from Sluchevsky's poems ("In March days"; "Cryptomeria" cycle).

According to Fiedler, the poet was sad that after his death his antique collection would be put under the hammer for a song (Fiedler. Edict. op. p. 241), in general, this is what happened. Visitors to the poetry workshop of Konstantin Sluchevsky drew inspiration and images from his poetry, but forgot to pay with proper recognition.

Middlebury College

Vermont, USA

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