Лермонтов

Every touch of Lermontov's work brings us face to face with his titanic spirit, entered into a "proud enmity with heaven", rebellious and freedom-loving, with the raging and restless passions of a heart that has been swinging between love and hate all its life, yearning for freedom, but suffocating in the atmosphere of slavery and lackeys, thirsting for faith and a high purpose, but is forced to writhe in disbelief and despair, to tremble with anger and tremble with rage before the picture of the Russian autocracy. His amazing personality has the ability to draw us closest to him, to make us suffer with his sufferings, to rise with his impulses, to feel his anger towards the cold external brilliance and internal nothingness of secular society, which, like the ancient anchar tree, poisons everyone who touches it. He had the misfortune to be born in the valley of horror and despair, to breathe the decaying breath of defeat after the fateful year of 1825, to live through the years of deaf groans, of broken flights, of mercilessly trampled faith, when evil and vulgarity triumphed unhindered, when informers and renegades became the heroes of the day. Years when only blue uniforms were visible before the eye, when in the monstrous empire of Russia every police officer was a tsar, and the tsar was a crowned police officer. In this valley of slavery and torture, of silent anger and hidden unrest, Lermontov's muse was born. From her first days she experienced the freezing cold of the autocratic empire and came to the bitter, terrifying conclusions that the closest person to everyone was himself, that everyone was doomed to proud solitude. Herzen says of this era that "you had to know how to hate out of love, to despise out of humanity, you had to possess boundless pride, so that with chains on your hands and feet you could hold your head high." And although the adolescent and young man Lermontov is surrounded on all sides by evil, he does not bow his head before it, although he sees how they are destroying the wall between good and evil, how the masters trade with their people, and the people with their freedom, he does not fall into disarming reflection, into passivity and inaction, but chooses the path of manly purposeful struggle. It does not matter that this struggle leads him to death - it is as if he remains undefeated. He is not at all to blame for having fallen into "a bottomless abyss into which the best swimmers sink," where even the greatest talents disappear before they have reached what they are fighting for. The storm of his feelings, the power of his fiery word survived an entire century and reached us and his descendants, who have settled the enmity with heaven by conquering its heights, who know the price of courage and a proud mind.

Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov is one of the undisputed peaks of Russian and world revolutionary-romantic poetry. His ideological and artistic formation entirely refers to the period after the defeat of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. It is precisely the period between 1828 and 1837 that is unusually rich both in the poet's personal life and in events that changed the face of Russian society at that time. The reactionary policy that Nicholas I established towards all democratic strata remained unchanged almost until his death. It is significant that for thirty years (1825-1855) 674 uprisings took place in Russia according to official data, but in reality there must have been much more. Characterizing this historical period, V. I. Lenin wrote: "This is the era from the Decembrists to Herzen. Serfdom Russia is oppressed and immobile. An insignificant minority of the nobles protested, powerless without the support of the people. But the best people of the nobles helped to awaken the people." At the same time, the class struggle intensified in the West - in England the Chartist movement was developing, in France the July Revolution broke out, in Italy the Young Italy society was developing revolutionary and liberation activities. To a certain extent, these events found an echo in the highly sensitive Lermontov, helping to build him as a poet of the post-Decembrist era. This is even a whole line that was outlined in Lermontov's development as early as his entry into Moscow University.

Lermontov's works were known in Bulgaria even before the Liberation of the country, but they gained wide popularity only later. The generations of the 1980s and 1990s were introduced to them in high school. According to contemporaries, often after noisy disputes in literary circles, they sang in chorus "Вы хожу один я на доругу", recited many poems by the great poet by heart - in Russian, as was fashionable at the time. Lermontov's work is known to the Bulgarian intelligentsia directly in the original. This is due, on the one hand, to Bulgarians - Russian graduates, and on the other - to the introduction of Russian as a mandatory subject in the schools of free Bulgaria. "When visiting Bulgarian public and private libraries, it is a common occurrence to find Russian books and especially classical works of Russian literature, including the works of M. Yu. Lermontov," wrote P. Zabolotsky in 1914. "This fact must be taken into account when talking about the acquaintance of Bulgarians with Lermontov, since only getting to know the translations of Lermontov's works and the Russian scientific literature on Lermontov in Bulgarian cannot give us a correct idea of ​​the degree of his fame among the Bulgarian educated public, which does not feel the need for translations from Russian, since it has the opportunity to read him in the original."

Recently, interest in Lermontov in the West has definitely grown. It cannot be compared with the campaign for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it is far from the feverish curiosity about Gogol, but it is already noticeable and emphasized enough. Lermontov is translated, read, here and there walks the theater ramp. People write and talk about him. Perhaps in this way the real significance of a great writer, comparatively less known to the Western intelligentsia, is being restored, perhaps the so-called "poet of disappointment" appeals to the fashionable decadent moods with his misinterpreted "spleen", with his deliberately accentuated and generalized dissatisfaction with life", with his clearly forced capitulation to the "demonic" forces of the world; Perhaps Lermontov is the last excavation of the modern "modern" from the unread antiquity "According to the established standard for the new as a well-forgotten old". There are many reasons for the resurrection of a great name. But, it seems to me, those listed so far do not explain an already long-standing interest, beyond simple snobbish fascinations.