Materials for the comment…: m_bezrodnyj - LiveJournal. Analysis of the poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails "Mandelstam Mandelstam insomnia Homer tight sails size

The creative process of the poet Osip Emilievich Mandelstam is extremely ambiguous. It is divided into several stages, in terms of structure and mood, which are radically different from each other. The poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails "was written in the early years of his activity and is saturated with a kind of romanticism.

Insomnia ... was written in the late summer of 1915. And it was published for the first time in the next publication of Mandelstam's collection "Stone". There are two versions of how this poem was created. The first and not very popular tells that Osip Emilievich in those years was interested in ancient literature and was an ardent admirer of ancient Greek authors.

Another, more popular one, conveys the opinion of his close friends. They believed that the lyrics were inspired by Mandelstam's trip to Koktebel, to the house of his old friend, Maximilian Voloshin (the Tsvetaeva sisters and Alexei Tolstoy rested there). There Osip was shown part of an old ship that could have been built in medieval times.

Genre, direction, size

The poem was written in iambic six-foot with the addition of pyrrhic. The rhyme is circular, where the feminine alternates with the masculine.

The direction within which the creative genius of Mandelstam developed is called "acmeism". From the point of view of literary theory, it is correct to call this phenomenon a flow, since it is not as large and ambitious as, for example, realism or classicism. The Acmeist poet prefers not abstract images-symbols, but rather concrete and understandable to all artistic images, metaphors and allegories. He writes down to earth, without using zaum and complex philosophical concepts.

The genre is a lyric poem.

Composition

The novelty of a poem is determined by its construction. The three-stage composition reflects the path traveled by the lyrical hero in his reflections.

1. The first quatrain is the plot of the plot. The hero tries to sleep, and now, a long list of Achaean ships in the hero's imagination turns into a "crane train" heading into the distance.
2. The author asks himself the question: where, and why are they sailing? Trying to answer this question in the second quatrain, Mandelstam asks even more serious questions, recalling the plot of an ancient poem, where a bloody war broke out because of love, which took the lives of hundreds of heroes.
3. The poem ends with a line that conveys the state of mind of the lyric hero. The sea is noisy and thundering. But it should be assumed (given that the work was written in Koktebel) that he finally falls asleep to these sounds of the night, dark sea.

Images and symbols

All images and symbols are taken by the author from Homer's ancient poem "Iliad". It deals with the dispute between the Olympic goddesses who did not invite the goddess of discord to the feast. In a fit of revenge, she quarreled three women from the divine pantheon (Hera, Aphrodite and Athena), throwing one golden apple on the table, intended for the most beautiful of them. The ladies went to Paris (the Trojan prince), the most beautiful youth on earth, to judge them. Each offered her gift as a bribe, but Paris chose Aphrodite's offer - the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Elena, the wife of the Achaean king. The man stole the chosen one, and then her husband, along with the troops of other rulers, went in search. The Achaeans could not stand the shame and declared war on Troy, who fell in the struggle, but resisted very courageously.

• List of ships- a long and monotonous enumeration that the ancient Greek poet Homer added to his poem The Iliad. That is how many ships went to conquer Troy. The author counted them in order to fall asleep, because his heart is also bewitched by love, he cannot find peace in any way.
• Divine foam- This is a reference to the appearance of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She came ashore from sea foam, which in this case is a symbol of love.
• Elena Troyanskaya- a woman, because of the love for whom the troops of both sides were killed. The Achaeans did not need land and power, they came at the call of their hearts.
• Contrasting the poetic voice of Homer and the sea is necessary in order to show the futility of the efforts of the lyrical hero. Whatever he does, he will not forget his own yearning of his heart, because everything moves with love. The sea in this case is a free element that returns the author to the present, to reality, where he is also tormented by feeling.

Topics and problems

• Antique motives... The poem begins with the meditation of the lyrical hero during the enumeration of the names of the ancient Greek ships. This is the "Catalog" mentioned in Homer's Iliad. In the ancient work there is a detailed listing of each of the detachment of soldiers heading for the Trojan War. Twenty-four-year-old Mandelstam, while writing poetry, studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of the Faculty of Philology at St. Petersburg University. Reading the list of ships from Homer's poem was considered an excellent remedy for insomnia. It is with this word that the poet begins his work.
• Love theme. The hero suffers from the fact that he cannot sleep and begins to list the names. However, this does not help, and after reading the list to the middle, he begins to reflect. The main problem of the hero is as old as the world is love. The excitement of the sea is like the excitement in his heart. He does not know how to be, how to fall asleep and "who to listen to."
• The problem of sacrifice of love. Mandelstam perceives feeling as a cult - he needs to make sacrifices, it is bloodthirsty in its fury. For his sake, the elements worry and destroy ships, for his sake wars are made, where the best of the best perish. Not everyone is ready to devote themselves to love, putting all the dearest on its altar.

Meaning

The author recalls the Iliad, how the Kings, who were crowned with “divine foam,” sailed to Troy in the hope of returning the beautiful Helen, who had been kidnapped by Paris. Because of her, the Trojan War broke out. It turns out that the most important cause of bloodshed is not the conquest of lands, but love. So the lyrical hero is surprised how this force sweeps away everything in its path, how people for thousands of years give their lives for it.

In the third quatrain, he tries to understand this incomprehensible power, which turns out to be more powerful than Homer and the sea. The author no longer understands what to listen to and who to believe if everything falls before the mighty force of attraction of souls. He asks Homer, but he is silent, because everything was already expressed a long time ago, before our era. Only the sea rustles as violently and stubbornly as the heart of a man in love beats.

Means of artistic expression

The poem contains a lot of tropes on which the lyrical narration is built. This is very characteristic of Acmeism, the trend to which Mandelstam belonged.

Metaphorical expressions, epithets such as "long brood", "crane train" immediately transfer the reader to the thoughts of the hero, allow a deeper sense of the ancient Greek era, which the author is thinking about. The ships seem to be compared with a flock of cranes, rushing somewhere into the distance, where they literally sit "like a wedge" in foreign lands.

Rhetorical questions convey the hero's thoughtfulness, his doubts, anxiety. At the same moment, the element of the sea is very clearly manifested. For the author, she is as if alive.

The adjective "black" - at the same time reminds us that the author was resting at that moment on the Crimean coast, and at the same time refers to eternity, the bottomlessness of sea waters. And they, like an endless stream of thoughts, rumble somewhere in the author's head.

Interesting? Keep it on your wall!

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships to the middle:
This long brood, this crane train,
That he once rose above Hellas.

Like a crane wedge into other people's borders, -
On the heads of kings divine foam, -
Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena
That Troy is one of you, Achaean men?

Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.
Whom should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,
And the black sea, whirling, rustles

And with a heavy crash he approaches the headboard.

More poems:

1. Insomnia torments me more than a hangover, herb tincture does not help ... This is probably a disease in fact, and the nurse is probably right. So you can't, you have to sleep - the wiser morning of any midnight trouble! We'll wake up tomorrow ...
2. There is music of calm heights in the world, There is a prophetic lute over the gloomy gloom. The one scorched by fate, whom the turn has overtaken, When she hums and murmurs in a wondrous whirlwind. Not worn out by the old air ...
3. My daughter and I see off with fairy tales Every day the evening dawn: I braid the manes in the horses' stalls, I give rings to red girls. And from the feathers of the caught firebird My fingers are burned, And the star in ...
4. Didn't believe, Brushed it off: Myth! But on the palaces, On the walls taken in battle, It has long been proven that Old Man Homer, Who sang the death of Troy, was true. Over her, fallen, Eternity has passed, The Earth has covered the Collapsed ...
5. The elders of Ilion sat In a circle at the city gates; The hail defense is already lasting. The tenth year, a difficult year! They did not expect salvation, And they only remembered the fallen, And the one that was Wine ...
6. It is not written from grievances, I cannot sleep from worries. Somewhere a leaf is waving - A bird has flown by. From the open windows Midnight pours into the room. From the sky, a white cocoon Pulls the threads to the whirlpool. I bathe ...
7. In hours of gratifying silence Do not know sleep, sad eyes; And the ghost of dear old times Crowded into the chest with the darkness of the night; And alive in my memory Fun, tears of youthful days, All the charm, ...
8. Furniture cracks at night. Somewhere dripping from the water supply. From the daily burden to the shoulders At this time, freedom is given, At this time, things are given Wordless human souls, And the blind, dumb, deaf Disperse ...
9. What excites my dreams On the usual bed of sleep? Spring is blowing on my face and chest Fresh air is quietly kissing my eyes The midnight moon. Eh, a shelter for tender delights, The joy of youth ...
10. Happy is he who dares to admit his own passion without horror; Whom in an unknown fate timid Hope cherishes: Whom the misty ray of the moon Leads voluptuous at midnight; Whom the faithful key will quietly Open ...

Below are no indications of overlaps with other works of Mandelstam: such information is useful if it is able to clarify the content of the commented text, and redundant if there is no darkness in it. The commentator did not look for answers to the questions “could the author read it” and “did the author realize ...”, believing that the commentary is evidence not of the author, but of the language. The following indications on the cross-talk of Mandelstam's text with the works of other authors are intended to help readers assess the resources of the poetic language and its ability to self-reflection.

Commented text:

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.

I read the list of ships to the middle:

This long brood, this crane train,

That he once rose above Hellas.

Like a crane wedge to foreign borders -

Divine foam on the heads of kings -

Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena

That Troy is one of you, Achaean men?

Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.

Whom should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,

And the black sea, whirling, rustles

And with a heavy crash he approaches the headboard.

The commentator considers it his pleasant duty to express his gratitude to M. Bobrik, V. Brainin-Passek, A. Zholkovsky, O. Lekmanov, N. Mazur, N. Okhotin, O. Proskurin, E. Soshkin and M. Fedorova for their help in the work.

Materials for the comment:

Insomnia - Along with the works of authors such as Sappho and Du Fu, Petrarch and Shakespeare, Heine and Mallarmé, the commented text is included in the anthology of literature on insomnia (see: Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems. N. Y. 1999; Schlaflos: Das Buch der hellen Naechte. Lengwil, 2002), however, it is difficult to form an idea of ​​the Russian tradition in the development of this topic. It lacks, for example, the motives of anxiety, which are obligatory for most Russian "poems composed during insomnia": "Why are you disturbing me?" (Pushkin), “I am worried mercilessly” (Yazykov), “I will close my vezhda only - and my heart is alarmed” (Benediktov), ​​“And I could not close it at all / Disturbed eyes” (Ogarev), “Again in my soul anxiety and dreams” (Apukhtin), “Before them, the heart is again in alarm and on fire” (Fet), “And disturbing insomnia away / You cannot drive away into a transparent night” (Blok) and / or languor: “Hours of agonizing vigil” (Pushkin), “Agonizing night story! " (Tyutchev), "How tiring and sleepy / Hours of my insomnia!" (Yazykov), "In the hour of an agonizing vigil" and "Why in the hours of languor" (Ap. Grigoriev), "And only you languish in silence alone" and "Mystery, eternal, formidable mystery torments / Mind tired of work" (Nadson), “And the sinful heart torments me with its / Unbearable injustice” (Fet), “Tomya and tenderness of expectation” (Annensky). Mandelstam's text is closer to the works describing falling asleep - under the influence of sea rolling, the noise of the surf, fatigue from reading or counting imaginary identical objects; only Mandelstam uses not one, but all of the aforementioned hypnotics.

Insomnia. Homer - Freedom from external vision, acquired through sleep or blindness, is a condition of supervision: “I am sweetly lulled by my imagination, / And poetry awakens in me” (Pushkin), “O, surround yourself with darkness, poet, surrounded by silence, / Be lonely and blind, like Homer, and deaf, like Beethoven;

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails - The nominative structure of the beginning (compare in other nocturnes: "Whisper, timid breath ...", "Night, street, lamp, pharmacy ..."; see: Nilsson N. A. Osip Mandel'stam. Stockholm 1974. P. 36) gives it the appearance of a finished structure, which increases its suitability as a material for reverent citation: “And there are no other signs bestowed from the ages, / it is only worth repeating, recalling the voices: / Night, street, lantern, pharmacy ... / Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails "(Kovalev) or travesty:" Insomnia. Harem. Tight bodies "(Gandelsman).

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails ... list of ships - Homer serves not only as a model of blessed freedom from external sight, but also as a means of immersion in a trance: occupying about a third of the volume of Canto 2 of the Iliad, the story of the Achaean commanders who brought their ships to Troy has a reputation as a tiresome lecture: “This collection of legends about the warriors of Agamemnon, sometimes just a list of them seems to us now rather boring "(Annensky," What is poetry? "; see: Nilsson. Op. cit., 37–38). In the translation of Gnedich, the second canto of the Iliad is entitled “Dream. Boeotia, or the List of Ships "- in it Zeus tells the god of sleep:" Race, deceiving Dream, to the fast-flying ships of the Achaeans. "

read halfway through - Subsequently, Dante’s voice will be heard here: “Insomnia, Homer, tight sails ...” / He lived the list of ships until the middle ”(Strochkov) and“ Earthly life, like a list of ships, / I barely read until the middle ”(Kudinov).

Insomnia ... crane - Wed subsequently: “When insomnia, birds are a proven company”, “there were birds before I lost count” (Soshkin).

ships ... like a crane - In the Iliad, warriors are likened to birds, including flying cranes (see: Terras V. Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandel'štam // Slavic and East European Journal. 1965. Vol. 10, no. 3.P. 258). The parallelism of ships and birds, in its expanded form absent in the Iliad, is not uncommon in Russian poetry: “But in the fog there, like a flock of swans, / The ships carried by the waves whiten” (Batyushkov), “There are ships of the brave Achaeans, / How build cheerful swans, / Fly to death, as to a feast "(Glinka)," Winged ships flock "(Shevyrev)," Chu, the guns have burst! winged ships / The village of battle was covered with a cloud, / The ship ran into the Neva - and now, among the swells, / Swinging, it swims like a young swan "and" The ship floats like a thundering swan ... "(Pushkin)," Ship<…>will spread a winged passage "(Küchelbecker)," When the village of ships, / Rustling with vast wings, / Rows of raging shafts / With a high chest pushes / And darling flies to the land "(Yazykov)," Fly, my winged ship "(A.K. Tolstoy), “As on unfolded wings, / A ship was flying” (A. Maikov), “Winged ships turn white” (Merezhkovsky), “A ship glimmered, sailing away with dawn<…>like a white swan, spreading wings "(White)," On the pier / Winged ships "(Voloshin). And vice versa, flight can be like swimming: “A merry lark hovers / And drowns in blue swells, / Scattering songs in the wind! / When the eagle soars above the heights of the steep rocks, / Wide sails spreading, / And across the steppe, through the abyss of waters / The village of cranes floats to its homeland "(Venevitinov; in the original, Goethe has no motive for swimming). If the army is like birds, then the opposite is also true: "And above - in formation / Or with a sharp wedge, / Like an army, / Through the whole sky / Flies over / Regiment of cranes" (A. Maikov). The militarization of the air will increase the demand for this metaphor: "Above them, in the clouds, look, near, in the distance, / Steel cranes soar, - / Those are our miraculous planes!" (Poor man), “And, built for battle, / They fly over you / There are cranes in the blue sky. / You commanded: - Fly! - / And they are already in the distance "(Barto)," Who will rise and shoot down / This black plane?<…>And they flew over the fields / Cranes for cranes, / And rushed into the attack: / 'Well, damn you, beware!' ”(Chukovsky). In the song of the 1970s, fallen warriors transform into flying cranes, and "there is a small gap in that formation - / Perhaps this is a place for me!" (Gamzatov, lane Grebneva) - a motive that in the centon era will unite with the ships of Mandelstam: “in the list of ships / there is a place for me” (Starikovsky).

Insomnia ... ships ... like a crane - The similarity in the figure of movement and the shape of the body, as well as the similarity (phonetic and morphological) of the words "ships" and "cranes" themselves made them members of quasi-folklore parallelism - from "She has ships in the sea, he has cranes in the sky" (Bestuzhev- Marlinsky, “Roman and Olga”) to “The crane flies across the sky, the ship goes on the sea” (Kim), as well as in a rhyme pair, starting at the latest from Blok: “And they are sinking on the blizzard sea / Ships. / And moaning over the southern sea / Cranes. " In Mandelstam, this parallelism, reinforced by the figure of comparison, motivates the confusion of two hypnotic practices - reading a boring text and counting animals of the same species. Wed subsequently: "Ship, crane, sleep" (Lvov).

train crane - Perhaps a translation of the expression "Kranichzug" ("Zug der Kraniche"), found, for example, in Schiller ("Was ist's mit diesem Kranichzug?") And in the scene with Elena the Beautiful in "Faust" ("... gleich der Kraniche / Laut-heiser klingendem Zug "; compare: Nilsson. Op. cit., 39).

crane ... to foreign borders - Wed: “In the steppe the cranes were shouting, / And the power of the thought carried away / Outside the borders of the native land” (Fet). For Russian and Soviet authors, the image of flying cranes often accompanies reflections on the homeland and foreign land: “Their guest will be visited by a minute / Crane, a nomadic hermit. / Oh, where then, orphaned, / Where will I be! To what countries, / To what alien limits / A brave sail will proudly rush / My boat on the galloping waves! " (Davydov), “I shout to the ships, / I shout to the cranes. / - No thanks! I scream loudly. - / You swim yourself! / And fly yourself! / Only I don't want anywhere<…>I'm out of here / At all / Nowhere / I don't want to! / I will stay in the Soviet Country! " (Kharms), “Migratory birds are flying / In the autumn distance, blue, / They are flying to hot countries, / And I stay with you. / And I stay with you, / Native forever country! / I don’t need the Turkish coast, / And I don’t need Africa ”(Isakovsky). The cry of the cranes is an attribute of Russia: “Chu! the cranes are pulling in the sky, / And their cry, like a roll call / Keeping the sleep of their native land / Lord's sentries "(Nekrasov)," About the homeland - the cry of cranes "(T. Beck); when they hear him in a foreign land, they remember their homeland: “They are flying close and sobbing louder, / As if they brought me sorrowful news ... / What unfriendly land are you from / Have you flown here for the night, cranes? .. / I know that a country where the sun is already without power, / Where the shroud is waiting, getting cold, the earth / And where the dull wind howls in the bare forests, - / That is my dear land, then my fatherland ”(A. Zhemchuzhnikov). Since the movement of cranes "to foreign borders" is a movement to the south, and the Achaean ships are heading in the other direction and are still likened to cranes, the commented text acquires a resemblance to the playing of an antique plot in Central Russian scenery, which was popular in the Art Nouveau era.

Divine foam on the heads of kings - "Phrase<...>evokes productive ancient associations - the kings of the clan society, their arrogance, strife, the birth of Aphrodite from the foam, pagan polytheism, the proximity of the gods to people "( Polyakova S. Osip Mandelstam. Ann Arbor 1992 C. 28). Wed See also: “We are splashes of red foam / Over the pallor of the seas. / Leave the earthly captivity, / Sit among the kings! " (Viach. Ivanov; see: Lekmanov O. Notes on the topic "Mandelstam and Vyacheslav Ivanov" // "Own" and "someone else's" word in a literary text. Tver, 1999.S. 199).

Where are you sailing? - Wed: “The mass moved and cut the waves. / Floats. Where can we sail? ", Here the fleet is likened to birds:" And the flock of ships sinks ", and the creative state - to sleep (Pushkin); “All the swell is like the sea. I, as if in reality, / Somewhere in the distance on a ship sailing<…>Where am I sailing? " (Ogarev).

crane wedge ... Where are you sailing? - Wed: "Where are you rushing, winged villages?" (A. Odoevsky).

Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena - The similarity with Lermontov's "In dust and blood his knees glide" (cf. the roll call of the endings of verses and hemistichs: "... you are Elena" / "... blood is a knee") will appear in the centon: "Where are you sailing when would not Elena? / Wherever you look, her hem is everywhere, / Her knees slide in dust and blood ”(Eremenko).

long ... like a crane wedge ... Elena - Dante's shadows of those convicted of debauchery, including Helena, Achilles and Paris, move “like cranes<…>long line "(" come i gru<…>lunga riga "; Wed: Nilsson. Op. cit., 39). Lozinsky, translating this place, will remember Mandelstam: "How a crane wedge flies to the south."

When would it not be Elena, That Troy is one of you, Achaean men? - Wed: "No, it is impossible to condemn that Troy sons and Achaeans / Abuse for such a wife and suffer so long troubles" (Iliad, trans. Gnedich; see: Terras. Op. cit., 258).

Homer ... crane ... sea - Wed: “The shafts of the iambic seas are sad, / And the wandering flocks of cranes, / And the palm tree about which Odysseus / Told the embarrassed Navzikae” (Gumilev).

foam ... Elena ... the sea - Wed: “And now Elena is born<…>Whiter than sea foam "(Merezhkovsky).

ships ... foam ... Elena ... the sea - Wed: "You are pale and beautiful as foam<…>You and death, you and the life of ships. / O Elena, Elena, Elena, / You are the beautiful foam of the seas "(Balmont; see: Markov V. Kommentar zu den Dichtungen von K. D. Bal'mont. Koeln 1988 S. 195).

Both the sea and Homer - Russian authors, following Byron ("By the deep sea, and music in its roar"; trans. Batyushkov: "And there is harmony in the word of the shafts") declare art to be a natural element of the sea: "(A. Maikov)," There is singing in the waves of the sea, / Harmony in spontaneous disputes "(Tyutchev); hence the assimilation of verses to waves with imitation of the rhythm of the surf - from "What to swim in the sea, read Dante: / His poems are firm and full, / Like elastic waves of the sea!" (Shevyrev) to “I was born and raised in the Baltic swamps, next to / gray zinc waves, always running in two, / and from here - all the rhymes” (Brodsky). In Mandelstam, this declaration is reduced to an equation, the probative power of which is provided by the sound similarity of its members: "sea" and "Homer". This "almost anagram" ( Nilsson. Op. cit., 41), possibly inspired by Pushkin's phrase "What is the Zhukovsky sea - and what is its Homer" (see: Ronen O. Poetics of Osip Mandelstam. SPb., 2002. p. 25), will be expanded into a hexametric palindrome "The sea is mighty - I will answer it with Homer to match it" (Avaliani). Pasternak will use a punning way of proving the thesis about the nature of poetry to the sea, and also on Pushkin's material: “'To the sea' was: the sea + Pushkin's love for it<…>poet + sea, two elements, which are so unforgettable - Boris Pasternak: "The element of the free element / With the free element of verse" ... "(Tsvetaeva," My Pushkin "; compare:" Farewell, free element! "and" ... verses will flow freely "). The association "Pushkin - Sea - Poetry" (reflected in the call to "throw" him "from the Steamer of Modernity") goes back at the latest to Merezhkovsky, who argued that the poet and the hero "are born from the same element. The symbol of this element in nature for Pushkin is the sea. The sea is like the soul of a poet and a hero ”(“ Pushkin ”); here and soon at Rozanov's ("About the Pushkin Academy") Pushkin became close to Homer.

Like a crane wedge ... everything moves - Wed subsequently: “like a crane wedge when it takes / course south. Like everything moving forward ”(Brodsky).

everything moves with love - An idea that goes back, in particular, to Dante (see: Nilsson. Op. cit., 42); in a similar verbal form, compare: "Only love holds and moves life" (Turgenev, "Sparrow").

And the sea ... with love - Hidden roll call "and the sea - amore" (cf .: Lachmann R. Gedaechtnis und Literatur. Frankfurt am Main, 1990. S. 400)?

divine foam ... Both the sea and Homer ... love ... listen - Wed: “What a charm<…>in this eavesdropping of the sea Anadiomene, born from the foam, for it is a symbol of Homer's poetry "(Zhukovsky about his work on the translation of the Odyssey). Wed also Vyazemsky's "Sea", where the sea element appears as the cradle of the "charmer of the world" and an eternal source of poetry.

Homer is silent- So the counselor Virgil leaves Dante.

read halfway through ... Homer is silent - Wed: “For the Bible, yawning, I sleep” (Derzhavin), “And I yawned over Virgil” (Pushkin), “They beat the dawn ... from my hands / Old Dante falls out, / On my lips a verse that has been started / The half-read calmed down” ( Pushkin).

I read the list of ships until the middle ... the sea is black - "Black Pontus" is mentioned in the "Iliad" (translation by Gnedich; see: Taranovsky K. Essays on Mandel'štam. Cambridge MA; London, 1976. P. 147) approximately in the middle of the "list of ships" (see: Lifshits G. A polysemantic word in poetic speech. M., 2002.S. 169).

is silent, And the black sea ... makes noise - Wed: "Everything is silent / Only the Black Sea makes noise" (Pushkin; see: Taranovsky. Op. cit., 147; Wed: Lachmann. Op. cit., 401) and "And the Black Sea is making noise without stopping" (Lermontov; see: Taranovsky. Op. cit., 147).

sea ​​... flirting - The idea of ​​the "dialect of the sea" as a hymn to the creator of the universe (murmur maris, a frequent phrase in Latin poetry; proposed by Cicero as an exemplary one) was assimilated by the new European literature: Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Byron, Hugo, Batyushkov, Vyazemsky, Baratynsky, Pushkin, etc. . (see: // New literary review. 2004. No. 66, pp. 128–129).

flirting, making noise - Wed: "What are you making noise about, folk talkers?" (Pushkin).

And with a heavy crash - Wed: "And fell with a heavy roar" (Pushkin).

Insomnia ... foam ... the sea ... rustles ... roars - Wed: "I heard the roar of the depths of the sea, / And into the quiet area of ​​visions and dreams / The foam of the roaring shafts burst in" (Tyutchev).

sea ​​... love ... headboard - Wed later: “And he will follow my shadow - how? with love? / Not! sooner will entail his propensity for water movement. / But it will return to you, like a great surf to the head, / like Dante as a leader, yielding to destruction ”(Brodsky).

Insomnia ... by love ... by the headboard - Wed: “The holy joys of friends flew away - / Their swarm of sleep in the morning circle played you; / And the angel of delight, your relatives, with love / Invisibly clung to your headboard "(Zhukovsky)," Guardian My genius - with love / In joy he was given separation: / Will I fall asleep? will creep to the headboard / And delight a sad dream "(Batyushkov)," Fall asleep, - with prayer, with love / My ghost in their happy dream / Will fly to their native headboard "(Küchelbecker)," I cry like a child, cuddling to the head, / I rush over the bed of sleep, tormented by love "(Davydov)," And before the morning, the dream is desired / Tired eyes closed<…>The head of the bed bent over her; / And his gaze with such love, / He looked at her so sadly "(Lermontov)," Then these sounds, with sympathy, with love, / The beauty whispers, leaning towards the headboard ... / She fell asleep ... "(Benediktov), “I am waiting for the hour of the night to come sooner. / Did he strike? Having clung to the headboard / Exhausted, aching head, / I dream of the past with delight and love "(Rostopchina)," Some sounds rush / And cling to my headboard. / They are full of languid parting, / They tremble with unprecedented love "(Fet)," In bed I cried, leaning to the head; / And the heart was full of forgiveness, / But all are not people, - with endless love / I loved God and myself as one ”(Merezhkovsky).

Insomnia ... sea ... love ... headboard - Wed: “Here the prince falls asleep in anxiety and grief, / The dark sea lulls him sweetly ... / The prince dreams: quietly to his head / The angel bows down and whispers with love” (Apukhtin).

1915 - Parallelism of the Trojan War and the First World War (see: Dutli R. Meine Zeit, mein Tier: Osip Mandelstam. Zuerich, 2003. S. 128) clarifies the understanding of love as a source of universal movement: this source is eternal.

"Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails ”is an example of the use of ancient culture to reflect on the eternal moral and philosophical category of love. The poem is studied in grade 11. We suggest that you familiarize yourself with a brief analysis “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails "according to plan.

Brief analysis

History of creation- the work was created in 1915, when the poet was staying in Koktebel. It was first published in the second edition of the debut collection "Stone" (1916).

Poem theme- Trojan War; power of love.

Composition- The poem is a monologue-meditation on the stated themes. In terms of meaning, it is divided into three parts: a story about insomnia, which made you turn to Homer, an appeal to "Achaean men" thinking about love.

genre- elegy.

Poetic size- written in iambic six-foot, ring rhyme ABBA.

Metaphors – "This long brood, this train is crane", "everything moves with love", "the sea ... with a heavy roar comes to the headboard".

Epithets – "Tight sails", "divine foam", "black sea",

Comparison – "Like a crane wedge ... where are you sailing."

History of creation

It is known that Osip Mandelstam was a student of the Faculty of History and Philology of the Romano-Germanic department. He never graduated from the university, did not receive a diploma, but this period of his life left an imprint on the poet's work. Philology students studied the Iliad in full. They considered reading the list of ships a proven cure for insomnia. This fact found a place in the analyzed poem.

As a student, Mandelstam devoted himself to poetry. His creations were noticed by older brothers in the pen. In 1915 the young poet stayed in Koktebel in the house of Maximilian Voloshin. Here the work “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails. " Close acquaintances of the poet claimed that he was inspired to write poetry by the wreck of an old ship seen in Koktebel.

Topic

Ancient literature influenced the work of poets of different eras. O. Mandelstam, with the help of her, tries to reveal the eternal philosophical theme of love. In the center of the author's attention is the Trojan War.

The lines of the poem are written in the first person. Thus, the reader can follow the train of thought of the lyric hero directly. In the first stanza, the hero admits that he could not sleep, so he began to read the list of ships. He reached the middle, and then this process was interrupted by thoughts about the causes of the war. The lyrical hero believes that the "Achaean men" fought not for Troy, but for Elena.

Composition

The poem is a meditative monologue of a lyrical hero. According to its meaning, it is divided into three parts: a story about insomnia, which made me turn to Homer, an appeal to “Achaean men,” reflections on love. The work consists of three quatrains, which corresponds to the semantic organization of the text.

genre

Expression tools

In order to reveal the topic and show his attitude to the problem posed O. Mandelstam uses means of expressiveness. The text contains metaphors- "this long brood, this train is crane", "everything moves with love", "the sea ... with a heavy roar comes to the headboard"; epithets- "tight sails", "divine foam", "black sea"; comparison- "like a crane wedge ... where are you sailing."

Poem test

Analysis rating

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1891 - 1921. Collection "Stone".

"Insomnia. Homer. Tight Sails "1915.

Analysis of the poem "Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails ...".1915.

Mandelstam affirms in his poems the unity of cultural layers. According to the memoirs of A. Akhmatova, when asked what acmeism is, the poet replied: "Longing for world culture." It is no coincidence that images, motives of Homer and Racine, Pushkin and Dickens, Gothic and Empire style, antiquity and classicism are organically interwoven into his poems, inextricably linked with modernity.

Like a crane wedge to foreign borders -

Divine foam on the heads of kings -

Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.

Questions to identify a general idea of ​​the poem as a whole.

Frontal work.

1. What attracted this poem, what feelings did it evoke? What images are being created? What lines reflect the main idea?

2. What is the story behind this poem?

3. What happens to the lyric hero? How is the feeling of insomnia conveyed in the poem?

Questions for analyzing the poem in groups.

To help students, dictionaries, excerpts from articles of literary scholars are offered.

The image of the ships.

1. Why do we see ships best?

2. What ships: moving or stationary? Pay attention to verbs, sentence types, verse size.

3. Pay attention to the tense of the verbs in the first two stanzas, to the adverb associated with the concept of tense. What have you noticed?

Images of the Achaeans and Helena.

4. What is the role of the word crane? With what associations is this word associated with you?

5. The image of Elena is the focus of all the threads of the poem. What do we know about this image?

6. Why is the word in the poem Elena rhymes with combination ? How do you understand this line?

Images of the sea and Homer.

7. What associations do you have in connection with a couple of words: and sea ​​and homer united by the union and and the word all(sea + Homer = everything)?

8. How do you think, in what sense is the word used by the poet? listen?

9. What image of the sea is created in the poem? What is the general emotional tone of the epithets? How does the poet emphasize the fatefulness of the choice of the lyric hero with the help of sound writing?

Estimated answers.

1. What attracted this poem, what feelings did it evoke? What images are being created? What lines reflect the main idea?

The poem attracts with calmness, mystery, grandeur. The images of the Achaeans from Homer's Iliad, ships, the sea, and a lyrical hero are created. The main thought in the line: everything moves love.

2. Let us draw on well-known facts related to the history of the creation of this poem.

According to one version, Mandelstam's poem was inspired by a wreck of an ancient ship found by Maximilian Voloshin, with whom he was staying in Koktebel. However, the theme of antiquity as a whole is characteristic of Mandelstam's early poems. The poet's passion for the ancient world is his striving for the standard of beauty and for the basis that gave rise to this beauty.

The theme of the sea, like the theme of antiquity in the poem, is not accidental, and is caused not only by the place of birth of the poem: Mandelstam first came to Koktebel in June 1915. Many critics noted that Mandelstam prefers water to all elements. Moreover, his preference is not for rushing streams falling from heaven or rushing over the mountains; he is attracted by calm and eternal movement: plain rivers, lakes, but more often - the most grandiose form - the ocean, majestically rolling huge shafts. The theme of the sea is inextricably linked with the theme of antiquity: both are majestic, grandiose, calm, mysterious.

It is known that O. Mandelstam during this period of his life was in love with M. Tsvetaeva, but she did not reciprocate.

3. What happens to the lyric hero? How is the feeling of insomnia conveyed in the poem?

The lyrical hero is tormented by insomnia. On the shores of the Black Sea, he reads Homer, reflects that both the Achaeans and Homer were inspired by love. Homer - the past - is silent. And the sea, whose divine foam was on the heads of the kings, makes a noise, comes to the head of the lyrical hero. And it moves with love, linking the past with the present.

The feeling of insomnia is perfectly conveyed by the action: "I have read the list of ships ...". The poet turns to the second song of Homer's Iliad, The Dream of Boeotius, or the List of Ships, dedicated to the sailing of ships to the siege of Troy. The list of Greek ships sailing to Troy from Homer's Iliad contains 1186 ship names with the names of generals and descriptions on 366 lines. The infinity of the battle list of ships and creates the feeling of the endlessness of this night.

Work on the image of the ships.

1. Why do we see ships best?

The image of ships: the epithet helps to see them tight sails, comparison with a crane train, crane wedge. A visual image arises.

2. What ships do you see moving or stationary? Pay attention to verbs, sentence types, verse size.

The ships are moving very fast, in the wind: tight sails. The speed of movement is emphasized by a comparison with cranes: ships fly, a metaphor once rose above Hellas enhances the image of movement-flight. It seems that the ships are moving not over the sea, but over land.

Let's try again to re-read the lines in which the image of the ships is created. Usually, movement is conveyed using a quick change of verbs, energetic words, a large number of consonants in which the voice predominates (sonorous, voiced, requiring strong articulation), an energetic rhythm. Mandelstam has no impetuosity in the movement of ships. On the contrary, a feeling of slowness and duration is created. There are very few verbs, most of the sentences are nouns or incomplete. Yes, and the existing verbs as a result of inversion lose their power: they are put at the end of the sentence.

The poem is written in iambic six-foot. This is the longest iambic lines used in Russian versification - the Alexandrian verse. Due to the intonation of meditation, contemplation, this size has long been used in philosophical and meditative lyrics, as well as in such a genre as elegy. Such a relaxed rhythm devoid of poetic smoothness creates the feeling of free prosaic conversation - calm thinking aloud. To convey the movement, a more energetic meter would be required: a "marching" odic stanza and the associated iambic tetrameter. The contradiction between sound and vision is evident.

3. Pay attention to the tense of the verbs in the first two stanzas, to the adverb associated with the concept of tense. What have you noticed?

The first stanza is past tense verbs. Once upon a time reinforces the meaning of the past tense - so long ago that it is no longer possible to find out the exact time of the event. Second stanza - present: you float.

Conclusion

So, before us are ships, if I may say so, in motionless motion, the poet created the image of frozen time - the past, eternally remaining present. In the reality of culture, time does not coincide with astronomical time. It can stop, repeat, intersect with another. Art can transcend time. Culture is a connecting beginning in history, it ensures the continuity and continuity of the development of human civilization.

Work on the image of the Achaeans and Helen.

4. Have you noticed that the word crane used twice. What role is assigned to it? With what associations is this word associated with you?

Autumn. School of cranes. Long, graceful, elongated outlines. Smooth outstretched wingspan. Light sadness. Soul-tearing Kurlykan. The cry of cranes is associated with crying (hence the numerous legends and traditions, including in ancient mythology, connecting cranes with mourners at funerals, the souls of the dead).

Gradually and smoothly, the poet's thoughts from the list of ships go to the targets, the Achaeans. And this leads to the idea that the reason driving the huge army is love: "Whenever Helen, // What is Troy to you alone, Achaean men?"

This is very reminiscent of the effect of Homer's list of ships on listeners: the list of ships leads them to philosophical reflections on life; for Mandelstam too.

5. The image of Elena is the focus of all the threads of the poem. What do we know about this image?

Elena is a dual image. It could be said about her in the words of Blok: beauty is terrible. She brings both joy and sorrow to everyone who sees her.

Her origin is divine: Elena's father is Zeus himself, her mother is the goddess of retribution Nemesis. Elena emerges from the egg, Leda finds and brings up her. By her very birth, Elena is destined to be a judgment of fate. The most beautiful of women, she is the envy of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, at the same time being her strongest weapon. The very rumor about the beauty of Elena is capable of causing strife: all Hellenic leaders and heroes woo her. To prevent a clash, they swear an oath to defend the honor of whoever becomes Elena's husband.

Elena will bring pain and dishonor to her husband Menelaus, death to Paris, with whom she will flee, unable to resist the passion inspired by Aphrodite. The city that sheltered the fugitive - Troy - will be destroyed to the ground. Most of Elena's suitors who went to the walls of Troy will die.

The Achaean army, ready to stone the queen with stones, will stop before her beauty, and she will be returned home, to Sparta, with honor and triumph.

Elena means torch, torch.

This name is the focus of all the lines of the poem. The goal of the movement that generates and stops it. The beginning of life and death, which manifests itself in combinations long brood - a crane train. Let's turn to Dahl's dictionary. Train - several joint carriages traveling along the same track; solemn, ceremonial ride or procession. The dictionary gives two examples of the most common word combinations in the second meaning: wedding train - funeral train... And all the meanings are realized by Mandelstam. This is where Mandelstam's comparison of ships with cranes comes from.

6. Why is the word in the poem Elena rhymes with combination divine foam on the heads of kings? How do you understand this line?

Divine Foam and Elena are rhymed for a reason.

Let's turn to Dahl's dictionary. Divine - peculiar to God, proceeding from Him; Like him, tall, excellent, beautiful, incomparable, unattainable. It turns out that the foam is divinely beautiful, it, light and melting, is more beautiful than the earthly crown as much as the path to Elena is more significant than the path to the riches of Ilion.

Conclusion

The path to Three is the path to non-being and, at the same time, the movement to beauty, caused by love, the movement, which is the fullness of being, life itself and, at the same time, death. Achaean men, wise, majestic, strong, proud, crowned with divine foam for the kingdom. And this kingdom is eternity.

Work on the images of Homer and the sea.

7. What associations do you have in connection with a couple of words: and sea and homer united by the union and and the word all?

The main idea of ​​the poem sounds in stanza III. Here, for the first time in a poem, a union appears and in the amplifying meaning. It strengthens the connection, practically equals two concepts: sea, Homer - and unites them with the word all.

In the 17th-18th centuries, the word Homer was written Omir or Omer. Words are composed of the same letters, before us is an anagram. In poetry, the purpose of such a technique is to create a connection between the meanings of words that does not exist outside the given text.

Impersonal and personality

nature and man

life and art

chaos and reason

element and culture

formlessness and form

eternity and a moment stopped by man etc.

Conclusion

We can say that these are opposite concepts that make up a single whole.

Strict formula: , it would seem, should close the poem. But here's a new question: Whom should I listen to? And we return to reality, to the lyrical hero.

8. What is the meaning of the word used by the poet? listen?

Do as the speaker is commanded. The fate of the lyrical hero depends on this.

9. What image of the sea is created in the poem? What is the general emotional tone of the epithets? How does the poet emphasize the fatefulness of the choice of the lyric hero with the help of sound writing?

The sea is formidable, flowing, in perpetual motion, black, heavy crash - inevitability, formidable force, perhaps even hostility. This is the general emotional tone.

Assonance on O... This vowel sound is considered "dark, booming, menacing." ( A - warm, light - it was in the words Elena, divine foam) . Emotional tone is combined with sound writing.

Conclusion

And now, when a formidable force, whatever its name - element, fate, fate - is coming close to the headboard lyric hero (unprotected hero), the poem is complete. It is not enough to summarize: Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love, you still need to surrender to this movement, to obey the universal law, as the Achaeans obeyed the fate, going to the walls of Troy. This is where the insomnia of the lyrical hero comes from. It is very difficult to live life to the fullest, strive for beauty, love, it requires courage and mental strength.

Conclusion.Features of the poetics of early Mandelstam:

• architecture,
• treating the word as a building material (the word is a stone),
• understanding art as a connecting thread between generations,
• motives of creation, creativity, life affirmation.

Homework:

Students read the collection "Stone". Carry out written tasks C3, C4. Learn by heart one of your favorite poems.

Examples of homework:

What images of the poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails ... ”is the lyrical hero's idea of ​​life connected?

In Mandelstam's poem, a number of images pass before us: the lyrical hero, Homer, the sea. The lyrical hero suffers from insomnia; he faces a difficult life choice. He reflects on life and therefore reads Homer's Iliad, its second chapter, which contains a list of the Achaeans' ships (more than a thousand names and titles), striving for Troy to fulfill their promise and return Helen, abducted by Paris, to her lawful spouse Menelaus. The Achaeans, who have fulfilled their duty, who dared to resist fate, the gods, who have shown courage, who have defended their human dignity at the cost of life, are crowned with "divine" foam for eternity. The Iliad and its creator Homer are immortal, thanks to art, according to Mandelstam, the connection between generations is realized. The lyrical hero pays tribute to the Achaean men and grieves about their tragic fate: "this long brood, this train is a crane" (in mythology, mourning cranes at funerals or the souls of the dead, which is reflected in Gamzatov's poem "Cranes").

The line "Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love" opposes and at the same time unites the images of Homer and the sea. And if Homer here is the personification of art, ancient culture, the feat of past generations, then the sea is nature, of which man is also a component, the real life of the lyric hero. Homer is silent. Now the lyrical hero is faced with a choice: how to act. And it is not easy to make it: "And the black sea, whirling, makes noise // And with a heavy roar comes to the headboard."

Shchegoleva Tatiana. 11I. 2009

veykova.ru

History of creation

The poem was written in August 1915 in Koktebel. Included in the second edition of the first collection of Mandelstam "Stone" in 1916 (the first edition was published in 1913).

Mandelstam arrived in Koktebel at the very end of June 1915 and spent the rest of the summer in the House of the Poet. At the same time, the Tsvetaeva sisters, Sofia Parnok, Alexei Tolstoy and his wife Natalia Krandievskaya lived there at that time. The owner of the House, Maximilian Voloshin, was in Paris at that time.

Theme, main idea and composition

The formal theme of the poem is the reflections of the lyrical hero while reading the so-called List, or Catalog, of ships (νεῶν κατάλογος). We are talking about Homer's Iliad, Song of the Second, verses 494 to 759: they give a detailed account of each detachment of Greek Achaeans, which was sent on a separate ship to the Trojan War. This formal theme is related to the formal status of 24-year-old Osip Mandelstam: at the time of writing the poem, he is a student of the Romano-Germanic department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University (enrolled on September 10, 1911 and enrolled until 1917). Formally, the poet did not finish the course and did not receive a diploma, i.e. had no higher education.

Detailed textual acquaintance with the Iliad, both then, as now, was part of the compulsory program of the Faculty of Philology. And reading the List of Ships among philology students from time immemorial was considered the best remedy precisely for insomnia, with the name of which the poet begins his poem. So, there is an informal problem (the lyrical hero suffers from insomnia) and a recipe for the informal use of the List (as a sleeping pill). However, in this sense, there is no help from the List ...

What is the informal status of 24-year-old Osip Mandelstam? Among connoisseurs, as the author of The Stone, he is unquestionably and indisputably recognized as a Master. Max Voloshin himself invited him to live in the House of the Poet - on this poetic Olympus of the Silver Age! The discrepancy between the formal status of the lyric hero and the informal, formal and informal attitude to ancient culture, in general to cultural heritage - this is the real theme of this poem. Having sounded in the first edition of "Stone" ("... And a young dolphin swims In the gray depths of the world"), now, starting from the second edition, she finds new confirmation in this summer poem of 1915, powerful and irrefutable, like the noise of the Black Sea surf.

It would seem that the main idea of ​​this poem ("Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love") is far from new. Already in the first century AD, the Apostle Paul believed that he summed up everything that was said in world literature on this topic in his famous passage about love (First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verses 1-13). The novelty of this thought (and of the poem as a whole) is determined by the path of searches of the lyric hero, reflected by the composition of this lyric meditation, composed of three quatrains.

The first quatrain is the exposition and the outset of the lyrical plot: the lyrical hero, tormented by insomnia, tries to enter the measured rhythm of Homer's narrative. However, the “long brood” of Achaean ships in the imagination of the modern reader turns into a “crane train”, exciting both with its epic scope and uncertainty of purpose: the cranes fly south, fleeing from the cold - from what are the Homeric Achaeans fleeing or where are they striving?

The second quatrain (the development of the lyrical plot) is devoted to the search for an answer to this question. The answer is given in a peculiar way - in the form of two rhetorical questions. Wedging "into other people's borders" ("like a wedge of a crane"), the Achaeans obey the order of their kings, whose word is indisputable (after all, they have divine foam on their heads, they are "anointed"). The goal of the kings themselves is known to us, their choice of Troy (according to Homer) is determined not so much by the strategic location of this important port of the Aegean Sea (at the very entrance to the Marmara Sea), as by the jealousy of the Spartan king Menelaus (it was from him that the Trojan Paris kidnapped his lawful wife Helena the Most Beautiful ) and the insult inflicted on Hellas.

The third quatrain - an unexpected climax and denouement - begins with an informal, pagan understanding of love: as it were, we did not expect it from a lyric hero who formally belongs to the Judeo-Christian culture. It turns out that both Homer and the sea element yield to and submit to the more powerful elements - the elemental force of carnal love. There is something to experience the culture shock: "Who should I listen to?" As for Homer - he does not pretend to be listened(in the authoritarian sense of the word). Homer we heard and heard- but he only conveyed to us (even by his own hexameter) the voice of the ebb and flow of the sea wave, which, on the contrary, has the confidence of an orator. And here, in the penultimate line of Mandelstam's poem, one cannot help but hear and hear the roll call with the poem of the seemingly distant Nekrasov ("There is noise in the capitals, whirlwinds thunder ..."), and not only with the first line of this poem, but also with the whole them in a single way (the endless element of the field at Nekrasov - the element of the sea at Mandelstam).

Literary direction and genre

The very name of the collection "Stone" is considered an anagram of the word "akme", from which the name of the literary direction of acmeism is derived, Mandelstam is one of its generally recognized "pillars", the author of not only one of his formal prose manifestos, but also informal - poetic ones, one of which and this poem appears.

The choice of the genre - lyrical elegy-meditation on the insurmountability of the sea element - refers to the ancient root of European lyric poetry - the elegy of Archilochus.

Trails and images

In this, as in many (especially early) poems by Mandelstam, the epithet is the king and god of the lyric plot, it is the epithets that convey both the logic of action in the Homeric era, and the way the lyric hero understands it.

Tight the sails at once, from the first verse, fill the whole poem with wind and storm. A long brood, train crane- metaphorical epithets create a comparison of the Achaean ships with crane flock. Immediately, literally through the line, the obsessive repetition of the epithet - crane wedge in strangers frontiers: this wedges within the Trojans, an inhuman, inexorable, elemental force - apparently with the same grave with a roar, like the sea - to the head (head) of the lyrical hero, powerless in its thought.

At the same time, the sea - black(with a small letter, since we are not talking about a description of the Crimean coast of the Black Sea, but about eternity), and one of the main attributes of the sea, foam, becomes divine an attribute of ancient kings, indulging in the elements of war and the sea, love and jealousy, resentment and revenge - willingly and thoughtlessly, out of reflex, because they do not have "culture" as an experience of reflection (neither Homer nor Archilochus were born yet).

goldlit.ru

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships to the middle:
This long brood, this crane train,
That he once rose above Hellas.
Like a crane wedge to foreign borders -
Divine foam on the heads of kings -
Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena
That Troy is one of you, Achaean men!
Both the sea and Homer - everything is moved by love.
Whom should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,
And the black sea, whirling, rustles
And with a heavy crash he approaches the headboard.
.

This poem was published in the second edition of The Stone (1916) and dated by the poet in 1915. Like many of Mandelstam's poems, it has no name, but it may be the first word - "Insomnia." This allows us to attribute this poem to the genre of "poems written during insomnia", interesting examples of which can be found in the literature of many countries. As for Russian literature, the first poem that comes to mind is Pushkin's Poems Composed During Insomnia. But in contemporary Mandelstam, especially post-Symbolist poetry, almost every significant poet has either one poem (Akhmatova, 1912; Andrei Bely, 1921; Pasternak, 1953), or a whole cycle of poems (Annensky, 1904; Vyacheslav Ivanov, 1911; M. Tsvetaeva, 1923) under the title "Insomnia" or "Insomnia". Mandelstam's poem is unlike any of them; following this tradition, it nevertheless has its own unique features.

We feel it from the very first line. It contains three nouns, each of which is an independent sentence. Such wordless sentences can be found in Russian poetry of the XIX century (the most famous example is, of course, Fet's poem "Whisper. Timid breathing."), But in post-symbolic poetry such sentences are so common that one can speak of / 65 /
stylistic reception (Block: "Night, street, lantern ..."; Pasternak: "Clouds. Stars. And on the side - shlyakh and Aleko"; Akhmatova: "Twenty-first. Night. Monday // Outlines of the capital in the darkness") 1.

There are such examples in Mandelstam's poems of 1913-1914. The poem "Cinematography" begins with the following lines: "Cinematography. Three benches // Sentimental fever. ", And another poem -" "Ice cream!" The sun. Air biscuit. // A transparent glass with icy water. "

As you can see from the above examples, such non-verbal sentences are used mainly in order to most colorfully and accurately describe the environment (landscape, city, interior) or (like Akhmatova's) to give an idea of ​​the date and time. Nouns are semantically linked, each giving a new detail, making up the picture piece by piece, step by step. Mandelstam's poem "Cinematography" belongs to this type, but the poem "Ice Cream! .." is a little different from it, and we do not immediately get a clear picture. Between the cry "Ice cream" (used in a vernacular form, literally conveying the exclamation of a street vendor: "Ice cream!") And the word "biscuit", which are combined with each other, there is the word "sun". The adjective "airy", which, having an obvious connection with "the sun", refers in this case to the word "biscuit", connects the words in a line. It takes some time to tie these parts together, and then we will see a picture of a sunny St. Petersburg day, seen through the eyes of a child.

In the poem "Insomnia ..." the description of time and environment is much more complicated. The poet composes the picture not sequentially, but in great leaps. There are such large semantic gaps between words that from the first time it is difficult to find associations connecting poetic images. What do the words "insomnia" and "Homer" have in common! It is much easier, of course, to connect the words "Homer" and "sails"; and it is only in the second line that the relationship between these three keywords, from which the poem is based, becomes clear. To get rid of insomnia, the poet reads Homer, or rather the "List of Ships" of Hellas. This is a rather difficult reading before going to bed, and at the same time, reading the list of ships has an ironic connotation: people usually count sheep to sleep, while the poet counts Homeric ships.

The third line adds two comparisons that characterize the list of ships; both are original and unexpected. / 66 /

In the words "this long brood" we meet the outdated "this": common for poetry of the 18th century, at a later time it became archaism. On the other hand, the word "brood" has completely different stylistic features and is usually used in relation to certain birds ("duck brood", "brood of chickens"). "Long" in combination with the word "brood" also gives the impression of something unusual, since the last word usually refers to chicks huddled, for example, under the wing of their mother.

Ships sail to Troy and are therefore compared to a long line of birds floating on the water; probably the reader's first association is a comparison with a family of ducks! We see that this definition also has an ironic connotation. Here there is a stylistic discrepancy between the archaic, poetic word "this" and the simpler, in comparison with the previous one, the word "brood", but, on the other hand, one can feel the connection between these seemingly incongruous words: the sublime poetic phrase is followed by more " down to earth ”and simple. We cannot say with certainty what the poet wanted to draw our attention to.

In 1915, when Mandelstam wrote this poem, there was a discussion in the literature of Homer's list of ships. Two years earlier, the Apollo magazine published a posthumous essay by Annensky, What is Poetry? One of the provisions of the article: poetry should inspire rather than assert certain facts. (Annensky cites Homer's "List of Ships" as proof.) From a modern point of view, a long listing of unfamiliar names is tiresome (and this is one of the reasons why the poet in Mandelstam's poem chooses this reading for the night). But, on the other hand, there is a kind of magic charm in the "List". This list can be used to illustrate Verlaine's lines "de la musique avant toute chose". The names themselves no longer mean anything to the modern reader, but their unusual sound gives free rein to the imagination and restores the picture of the historical event: “What is so tricky if once even the symbols of the names to the music of the verse evoked in the listeners a whole world of sensations and memories, where the clicks of the battle interfered with the clink of glory, and the shine of golden armor and purple sails with the sound of the dark Aegean waves? ”2.

The word "brood", which also has an additional meaning, is a type of re-etymologization. "To bring out / lead" means to "raise", "feed", "educate"; another meaning of this word is "to lead", "to lead" / 67 /
and so on, so here, as I understand it, there is a play on words. Then the whole line has a rhythm different from the first two. Iambic six-foot is used here, which is unusual for modern Russian poetry. Associated with the Alexandrian verse and the Russian hexameter, in this poem he is directly related to Homer and classical poetry. In the first two lines, the usual male caesura ("Homer", "ships"), In the third and fourth, it changes to dactylic ("brood", "Hellas"), In other words, as soon as the poet's thought switches from insomnia to thinking about the Iliad ”, The rhythm of the verse itself changes: not only the dactylic caesura, but also the repetitive“ this ”(in unstressed positions), and the inner rhyme (“ long ”-“ crane ”) - all this gives the line a special meaning and expressiveness.

Another description characterizing the list of ships is “this train is crane”. The associations associated with swimming birds in the previous comparison develop further, and, as is typical for Mandelstam, poetic images "rise" from the earth to the sky: ships are now compared to a crane wedge heading for Troy. The "crane" metaphor is, of course, popular and not new, as Victor Terras notes, it was used in the Iliad 3. An example of this can be found in Song of the third: “Troy sons rush, with a talk, with a cry, like birds: // The cry is such a cranes under the high sky, // If, avoiding both winter storms and endless rains, // With a cry of herds fly through the fast flow of the Ocean ... ”(translation by N. Gnedich). There are similar lines in the Second Song, this time about the Achaeans: “Their tribes, like migratory birds, innumerable flocks, // In a lush Asian meadow, with wide-flowing Caystr, // They twist here and there and have fun with the splashing of their wings, // With a cry sit down opposite the seated and announce the meadow, - // So the Argives tribes, from their ships and from the booth, // Noisily rushed to the Scamandrian meadow; " (translated by N. Gnedich). In these two comparisons, the emphasis is on the calls of the cranes. Dante has something similar in "Hell": "Like a crane wedge flies to the south // With a sad song in the height above the mountain, // So before me, groaning, rushed a circle // Shadows ..." (translated by M. Lozinsky). We find the same thing in Goethe.

The Mandelstam comparison, however, is unusual in that no one has yet, I'm sure, used it to apply to ships.
Like the first description of the list of ships, the second - "This train is crane" - surprises with the combination of words of various stylistic levels. The archaic appears again / 68 /
and the poetic “this”, followed by the word “train”, besides its usual meaning, it also has the meaning of “procession” (Blok: “I’m looking at your royal train”) or the following vehicles: usually these are wagons, sleighs and so on ("wedding train"). The use of this word with the definition of "crane" is rather unusual, on the other hand, the word "train", which evokes more solemn associations, is better combined with the poetic "this." Now it seems that the poet has thrown away the ironic intonations that were present in the previous lines; a seriousness emerges that culminates in the next three questions. This impression arises from the predominance of [a] in stressed and unstressed syllables.

In the next stanza, we find another comparison related to a string of ships. This time it is quite familiar: "crane wedge". It is not the comparison that is unusual here, but the orchestration of the sounds. In the third line of the first stanza, we have already noted the inner rhyme: "long - crane". It repeats itself and develops further: "crane wedge". This sound repetition is similar to the following: “alien boundaries”. In addition, all stress on [and], [y] is repeated three times in the same positions ([zhu], [chu], [ru]), three times is repeated [w]. Such orchestration, as it were, imitates the cries of cranes and the noise of their wings and gives the whole line a rhythm, enhancing the feeling of flight. Emphasizing the cry of the cranes, Mandelstam resorts to the old poetic tradition, but at the same time enriches it, introduces his own changes.

In the second line, a phrase appears that destroys the prevailing concept of flight and returns us to the people on their way to Troy: “On the heads of kings, divine foam”. The kings are, without a doubt, the same ones that are on board the ships indicated in the list, but the meaning of the words "divine foam" is not so clear. It may simply mean foam - the ships sailed at such a high speed that the sea one flew aboard, hitting people. Or, linking this phrase with the previous comparison about the flight of cranes, we must understand that there were clouds on the heads of the kings?

The definition of "divine" is reminiscent of Mandelstam's poem Silentium, which refers to the birth of the goddess Aphrodite. Since the goddess of love was born from sea foam, the foam can be called "divine." It means that it is associated with the secret of love, and this phrase precedes the statement that everything, including the sea, is moved by love. / 69 /

The next question is related to ships and people sailing to Troy: "Where are you sailing?" The question seems out of place, since it is understandable that the kings have a clear idea of ​​where they are going. In fact, only the geographic goal is clear, behind which another, more abstract and more important one can be seen. The next sentence (non-verbal) puts everything in its place. This is the main place in the poem. Now we begin to understand what the poet wanted to say.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the answer to the question is contained in the question: "Whenever Helen, // What is Troy for you alone, Achaean men?" It was love that prompted the "Achaean men" to assemble a fleet and go to Troy. This idea is then repeated by the author in a generalized form in the first line of the third quatrain: "Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love." As an answer to the second question from the previous quatrain, we get a short and simple conclusion: "everything moves with love." But there are two more mysterious and thought-provoking words here: "sea" and "Homer". What do they mean? Meanwhile, the words go well with each other. Not only semantically - in the two previous quatrains they were already used together - but also in sound. Both words contain similar sounds: "Homer" is an almost complete anagram of the word "sea."

The idea that Homer is moved by love can be understood in different ways. If we judge Homer as a poet, then all poetry is moved by love, and not only by the love of an individual person, but also by love in a more abstract sense. Homer can also be a metonymy for the historical events described in the Odyssey and Iliad. The main driving force of the story is love, passion, human emotions. This is pretty clear, but how can we say that the sea is moved by love? At first glance, it seems that the word "sea" in meaning is associated with the word "Homer" and with the associations caused by this name. Playing an important role in the Iliad, the word "sea" is consonant with the name "Homer" and is a metonymy to it.

As the poem develops, the challenge turns out to be simple. The "sea" seems to have a meaning of its own. It assumes, for example, that everything in the Universe moves and is governed by love. This, by the way, is a common poetic place. Of course, there is no such thing in the Iliad, but, as Victor Terrace5 notes, this idea is clearly expressed in Hesiod's Theogony: “First of all, Chaos originated in the universe, and then // Wide-breasted Gaia, a safe universal shelter, // Gloomy Tartarus, in the earth's interior / 70 /
deep, // And between all the eternal gods, the most beautiful - Eros. // Sweetheart - for all gods and earthly people // He conquers the soul in the chest and deprives everyone of reasoning * ”6.

We find the same idea in one of the "antique poems" by Leconte de Lisle, a French parnassian. His long poem "Elena" describes the events leading to the kidnapping of Elena and the beginning of the Trojan War. This poem also places great emphasis on the theme of love; as a general conclusion, a long monologue is given, proving the power of love, the power of Eros, as the ruler of all mankind - thoughts that are also found in Hesiod:

Toi, par qui la terre féconde
Gémit sous un tourment cruel,
Eros, dominateur du ciel,
Eros, Eros, dompteur du monde.

The classical idea also developed in the principle of divine love, driving the universe, represented in the Platonic idea of ​​perfection in love and in Aristotle's idea of ​​an "immovable engine" (Mandelstam's "moves" is clearly reflected in classical philosophy); in the form of a carefully developed hierarchy, this principle was also presented in the medieval religious idea: “The connecting bonds of the entire system is love, whether it is the lowest kind of love that moves the stone to set it in the right place, or is it naturally inspired love for God in the soul person "7. In the last three verses of Dante's "Paradise", the poet reaches the highest circle, where divine love is revealed to him, driving the universe and from that moment guiding his own thoughts and will:
Here the high spirit took off; But passion and will was already striving for me, As if a wheel is given a smooth run. Love that moves the sun and the stars **.

Mandelstam's "everything moves with love" can be perceived as an aphorism that completes Elena's story. But the poem doesn't end there, as it could. It takes a new turn. A completely unexpected question follows: "Whom should I listen to?" It is unexpected, since so far we have said that both "Homer" and "the sea" move by the same force. Is there a difference in who / 71 /
of them to listen to the poet? There is obviously a difference, and the poet tells us about his choice: he is listening to the voice of not “Homer” and not the “sea” from the poem, but the noise of the real rumbling Black Sea.
Again, as in the case of flying cranes, the image of the sea is created by orchestrating sounds in striking position. Again, the male caesura changes to dactylic, [o] predominates in the lines, especially in the latter, then there is a spectacular alternation of [h] - [w] - [x]. All of this lends special significance to the last lines.

What is the point here? If until now everything was clear enough: the poet, suffering from insomnia, chooses Homer as a night reading. The book evokes a series of associations and images centered on love. After a while, he puts the book aside and listens to the sound of the sea rumbling around him. What does this sea mean? Is this a metaphor of a dream, a poet's slumber?

The sea has been the focus of attention in the previous verses as well. This was Homer's sea, and the first line in the third quatrain unites them. Now, in the last two lines, the sea has a different meaning. This is no longer a sea with divine foam, but the gloomy Black Sea: "the black sea." Terrace says that this is a "typical Homeric" image and cites similar lines from the Iliad about the Achaeans: "... and into the assembly square // The people rushed from their ships and from the booth, // With a cry: like the waves of a silent sea , // Huge crashing into the shore, thundering; and Pontus answers them "*** 8.

But this image apparently has a broader meaning: both concrete and metaphorical. This "black sea" may actually be the Black Sea and therefore it may contain memories of the Crimea and Voloshin's Koktebel. Marina Tsvetaeva, quoting this poem, even wrote: "The Black Sea" 9. And Mandelstam's poem "Not believing a miracle on Sunday ...", which speaks of the Crimea and which, probably, was written partially there, draws us "those hills ... // Where Russia breaks off // Above the sea, black and deaf."

The image of the sea can also represent the Neva River, which has played an important role in Mandelstam's poems since 1916. She is mentioned not only in neutral-colored expressions, such as "on the banks of the Neva" or "Neva wave", but also with adjectives that convey the feelings of the poet: "heavy Neva" and even "over the black Neva". Image of the sea, / 72 /
appearing in the room is also present in other poems with references to the Neva, namely in two poems called "Straw". They also refer to "poems composed during insomnia": "When, Straw, do not sleep in a huge bedroom ...". The first poem contains a picture of snowy December:

December solemn flows its breath,
As if the room was heavy Neva.

In the second, in similar lines, "as if" turns into a "materialized metaphor":

There is a heavy Neva in a huge room,
And blue blood flows from the granite.

As in the poem "Insomnia ..." the image of water is used to create an atmosphere of something cold, heavy. In the first of the poems, there are also slightly solemn intonations. This is the "solemn December", which is compared with the Neva; "Solemn" looks like a parallel to the word "flirting" in our poem. In the second poem there is no longer such solemnity and the severity is emphasized: the "breath" of December disappears, and instead of it appears the image of granite with the adjective "heavy".
In other words, it is important here that the “black sea” in the poem does not have any biographical connotation and connection with certain geographical names, be it the Black Sea or the Neva. But this hardly clarifies the understanding of the meaning of the poem. What is clear is that a metaphor is being used here. But what does it mean? "Homer" is something definite and understandable, we would like the "sea" to also have a specific meaning. However, here the point is - a typical device of Mandelstam - that the poet compares a noun that has a specific meaning with a word that can be interpreted in different ways.

In the beginning, the sea was associated with Homer, which meant that they had something in common. Then the poet makes a choice between them, keeping in mind the existing difference. What opposition do we face here? Homer describes historical events that happened a long time ago. Reading the Iliad, the poet is transported from the present (insomnia) into the past. When he puts the book aside ("and now Homer is silent"), he returns to the present again. The sea here is not only Homer's sea, but the real sea, which at the moment is roaring around the poet. / 73 /

So we can understand the sea as a symbol of the present, embracing the life of the poet, his feelings. The poem is dated 1915. The passions and emotions of people act as the driving force of history, once again plunging humanity into a long, bloody war. Regimental lists of soldiers and officers who were sent to the battlefield or lists of dead soldiers and officers are common things for that time: maybe it is they that the poet associates with the list of ships in Hellas. The image of the sea in the room takes on a tinge of danger, forcing us to recall Annensky's poem "The Black Sea", in which (in contrast to the well-known Pushkin's poem "To the Sea") it symbolizes not revolution, but death ("No! You are not a symbol of rebellion, // You - the feast cup of death ") 10. The verb "flirting", characteristic of eighteenth-century rhetoric, also gives the impression of a classic tragedy.
This is one of the interpretations of the last lines. But there are others. The sea, like Homer, which has already been noted, “moves by love,” and this poem is undoubtedly about love. But Mandelstam's love lyrics are much different from similar poems by other poets. The poet's personal feelings rarely lie on the surface, they are combined and intertwined with other themes, such as poetry and history, as in our case. The "thing" that fits the head of someone's bed may be an image that suggests love: for example, a lover who approaches the bed of the beloved. Homer's Iliad told the poet about love, and when he puts the book down, the sea waves whisper to him about the same. As we can see, the poet is interested in this topic, he cannot drown out the threatening and at the same time eloquent voice of the sea that fills the room; the sea, which has come so close to the poet's head that it threatens to swallow him.

Another interpretation of these lines is possible. In many poems, Mandelstam compares nature with poetry, art and culture, likes to contrast them or bring them closer together. "Nature is the same Rome and is reflected in it," says one poem, and in another - "There are orioles in the forests ..." - nature is compared with the poetics of Homer. The poem "Insomnia ..." also refers to such verses, although here we are not dealing with all of nature, but with a part of it. The meaning is the following: should the author listen to the voice of poetry speaking about love, war, death, or the voice of Nature, the voice of Life itself, speaking about the same?
I give different readings to show that the question of understanding these images remains open. This "open-mindedness" is part of the ambiguity of the entire poem that makes the reader think. It starts from the very first line; when the meaning of this line becomes clear, the plot and the idea of ​​the poem become more or less clear. But the concluding lines introduce a new turn, which was actually necessary after the conclusion: "Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love." Despite the fact that the poem could have ended with these words, a kind of aphoristic conclusion (by the way, not particularly original), its last lines are such that again make the meaning vague, and we are given the right to reflect on what the author had in mind. However, there is no need to choose only one of the given interpretations. I think they are all present here.

yasko.livejournal.com

O. Mandelstam - Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships to the middle:
This long brood, this crane train,
That he once rose above Hellas.

Like a crane wedge into other people's borders, -
On the heads of kings divine foam, -
Where are you sailing? Whenever Elena
That Troy is one of you, Achaean men?

Both the sea and Homer - everything moves with love.
Whom should I listen to? And now Homer is silent,
And the black sea, whirling, rustles
And with a heavy crash he approaches the headboard.
Translation of the song
There is no translation. You can you can add it!
If you find an error in the named

read by Sergey Yursky

YURSKY, SERGEY YURIEVICH, (b. 1935), actor, director, writer, poet, screenwriter. People's Artist of the Russian Federation.

Mandelstam Osip Emilievich - poet, prose writer, essayist.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891, Warsaw - 1938, Vladivostok, transit camp), Russian poet, prose writer. Relations with parents were very alienated, loneliness, "homelessness" - this is how Mandelstam presented his childhood in his autobiographical prose "The Noise of Time" (1925). For Mandelstam's social self-awareness, it was important to consider himself a commoner, a keen sense of the injustice that exists in society.
Mandelstam's attitude to Soviet power since the late 1920s. ranges from a sharp rejection and denunciation to repentance before the new reality and the glorification of I. V. Stalin. The most famous example of denunciation is the anti-Stalinist poem "We live without feeling the country ..." (1933) and the autobiographical "Fourth prose". The most famous attempt to take power is the poem "If I would take coal for the highest praise ...", which was named "". In mid-May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested and exiled to the city of Cherdyn in the Northern Urals. He was accused of writing and reading anti-Soviet poems. From July 1934 to May 1937 he lived in Voronezh, where he created a cycle of poems "Voronezh Notebooks", in which the focus on lexical vernacular and colloquial intonation is combined with complex metaphors and sound playing. The main theme is the history and place of man in it ("Poems about the Unknown Soldier"). In mid-May 1937 he returned to Moscow, but he was forbidden to live in the capital. He lived near Moscow, in Savyolovo, where he wrote his last poems, then in Kalinin (now Tver). In early March 1938, Mandelstam was arrested in the Samatiha sanatorium near Moscow. A month later, he was sentenced: 5 years in the camps for counter-revolutionary activities. He died of exhaustion in a transit camp in Vladivostok.