Where was Balmont born? Balmont, Konstantin Dmitrievich - short biography

aliases: B-b, TO.; Gridinsky; Don; K.B.; Lionel

Russian symbolist poet, translator and essayist, one of the most prominent representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age

Konstantin Balmont

short biography

Konstantin Balmont- the future famous Russian symbolist poet and writer, a talented translator, essayist, researcher, a bright representative of the Silver Age, who published 20 prose and 35 poetry collections - was born in the Vladimir province, the village of Gumischi in 1867. His father was a zemstvo activist, mother - a general's daughter, a very educated woman, an admirer and connoisseur of literature. Her influence on the worldview of her son, his character, temperament was very noticeable.

The house of their family was open to persons who were considered unreliable, and young Konstantin for a long time was imbued with the spirit of rebellion, the desire to reshape this imperfect world. Participation in a revolutionary circle cost him expulsion from the gymnasium; he was also expelled from the law faculty of Moscow University, where he entered in 1886. Severe nervous exhaustion, dislike for jurisprudence and passion for literature did not allow him to finish his studies at the university, where he was reinstated. He failed to finish the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, from where he was expelled in September 1890.

Balmont's literary debut took place as early as 1885: the magazine "Picturesque Review" published three of his poetic experiments, which went unnoticed. Later, V. G. Korolenko, whom Balmont considered the “godfather”, drew attention to the style of the beginning poet. 1887-1889 became the very beginning of his role as a poet-translator; he began with interpretations of poetic works by French and German authors. In 1890, the first collection of poems was published, published at his own expense. When Balmont saw that no one showed interest in his work, including those close to him, he personally set fire to the entire circulation.

In the spring of 1890, family problems (by that time Konstantin had been married for a year) led him to an acute nervous breakdown and an attempted suicide. However, a jump from a third floor window put him to bed for a year. The weakness of the body was combined with the incredibly intense work of the spirit; it was at this time that Balmont, according to his confession, came to realize himself as a poet, his true destiny.

In 1892, he undertook a trip to the Scandinavian countries, which further stimulated interest in translation. The first time after the illness was full of hardships, but Balmont was adamant in choosing a further path. Korolenko again extended a helping hand to him, and Professor of Moscow University N. I. Storozhenko took him under his wing. It was at his suggestion that Balmont was entrusted with the translations of the History of Scandinavian Literature and the History of Italian Literature, which were published in 1895-1897. 1892-1894 were devoted to intensive work on the work of E. Poe and P. Shelley. Since then, Balmont has quite loudly declared himself as a major translator, and subsequent activities in this field have secured his reputation as the largest poet-translator of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, a real polyglot, because he translated works from 30 languages.

A new stage in creativity began in 1894: the collection "Under the Northern Sky" testified to the end of the period of formation and the emergence of a new name in Russian poetry. In 1895, his collection “In the Vastness” was published, in 1898 - “Silence”, in 1900 - “Burning Buildings”, written in line with symbolism. In 1902, Balmont married a second time and left to travel around Europe. Visits to foreign lands became a fiery passion, in his biography there was such a fact as a round-the-world trip (1912); was a poet in Australia, South Africa, South America, in many countries of the world. In 1903, the "book of symbols" "Let's be like the sun" was published, which received the greatest fame, followed by "Only Love" (1903), "The Liturgy of Beauty" (1905).

Balmont reacted sympathetically and even enthusiastically to the revolutions of 1905 and the February Revolution of 1917. But nothing remained of his revolutionary spirit after October; the Bolsheviks personified for him the principle that destroys and suppresses the personality. Taking advantage of the permission to temporarily leave in June 1920, Balmont and his family go abroad, to France, forever.

But the flight from the Bolsheviks does not make the poet happy, he feels loneliness, nostalgia, does not join the community of emigrants, but, on the contrary, chooses a small town of Capbreton far from the capital as his place of residence. He continues to write and translate actively: during the years of emigration, 22 out of 50 volumes of essays came out from under his pen. material security. In the mid-30s, a severe nervous breakdown, aggravated by age and financial difficulties, more and more made itself felt, and the last stage in the poet's biography passed under the sign of these depressing circumstances. Death overtook him on December 24, 1942, in the town of Noisy-le-Grand, located near Paris. Balmont's last refuge was the Russian House shelter, once founded by his mother.

Biography from Wikipedia

Konstantin Balmont was born on June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, the third of seven sons. It is known that the poet's grandfather was a naval officer. Father Dmitry Konstantinovich Balmont (1835-1907) served in the Shuisky district court and zemstvo: first as a magistrate, then as chairman of the district zemstvo council. Mother Vera Nikolaevna, nee Lebedeva, came from a colonel's family, in which they loved literature and were engaged in it professionally; she appeared in the local press, arranged literary evenings, amateur performances. The mother had a strong influence on the worldview of the future poet, introducing him into the world of music, literature, history, and was the first to teach him to comprehend the "beauty of the female soul." Vera Nikolaevna knew foreign languages ​​well, read a lot and "was not alien to some free-thinking": "unreliable" guests were received in the house. It was from his mother that Balmont, as he himself wrote, inherited "unbridledness and passion", his entire "mental system".

Childhood

K. D. Balmont in the 1880s

The future poet learned to read on his own at the age of five, spying on his mother, who taught her elder brother to read and write. The touched father presented Konstantin on this occasion with the first book, "something about savage oceanians." Mother introduced her son to samples of the best poetry. “The first poets I read were folk songs, Nikitin, Koltsov, Nekrasov and Pushkin. Of all the poems in the world, I love Lermontov's Mountain Peaks (not Goethe, Lermontov) the most, ”the poet later wrote. At the same time, “... My best teachers in poetry were the estate, the garden, streams, marsh lakes, the rustle of leaves, butterflies, birds and dawns,” he recalled in the 1910s. “A beautiful small kingdom of comfort and silence,” he later wrote about a village with a dozen huts, in which there was a modest estate - an old house surrounded by a shady garden. The barns and the native land where the first ten years of his life passed, the poet recalled all his life and always described with great love.

When the time came to send older children to school, the family moved to Shuya. Moving to the city did not mean a separation from nature: the Balmont house, surrounded by a vast garden, stood on the picturesque bank of the Teza River; his father, a hunting lover, often traveled to Gumnishchi, and Konstantin accompanied him more often than others. In 1876, Balmont entered the preparatory class of the Shuya gymnasium, which he later called "a nest of decadence and capitalists, whose factories spoiled the air and water in the river." At first, the boy made progress, but soon he got bored with his studies, and his performance decreased, but the time came for drunken reading, and he read French and German works in the original. Impressed by what he read, at the age of ten he began to write poetry himself. “On a bright sunny day, they arose, two poems at once, one about winter, the other about summer,” he recalled. These poetic endeavors, however, were criticized by his mother, and the boy did not try to repeat his poetic experiment for six years.

Balmont was forced to leave the seventh grade in 1884 because he belonged to an illegal circle, which consisted of high school students, visiting students and teachers, and was engaged in printing and distributing proclamations of the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya party in Shuya. The poet later explained the background of this early revolutionary mood as follows: “... I was happy, and I wanted everyone to be just as good. It seemed to me that if it’s good only for me and for a few, it’s ugly.”

Through the efforts of his mother, Balmont was transferred to the gymnasium of the city of Vladimir. But here he had to live in an apartment with a Greek teacher, who zealously performed the duties of a "supervisor". At the end of 1885, Balmont made his literary debut. Three of his poems were published in the popular St. Petersburg magazine "Picturesque Review" (November 2 - December 7). This event was not noticed by anyone except the mentor, who forbade Balmont to publish until the end of his studies at the gymnasium. The acquaintance of the young poet with V. G. Korolenko dates back to this time. The famous writer, having received a notebook with his poems from Balmont's comrades at the gymnasium, took them seriously and wrote a detailed letter to the gymnasium student - a benevolent mentor's review. “He wrote to me that I have a lot of beautiful details, successfully snatched from the natural world, that you need to focus your attention, and not chase after every passing moth, that you don’t need to rush your feeling with thought, but you need to trust the unconscious area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe soul, which is imperceptibly accumulates his observations and comparisons, and then all of a sudden it all blooms, like a flower blooms after a long invisible pore of accumulating its forces, ”Balmont recalled. “If you manage to concentrate and work, we will hear something extraordinary from you over time,” ended the letter of Korolenko, whom the poet later called his “godfather”. Balmont graduated from the course in 1886, in his own words, "having lived, as in prison, for a year and a half." “I curse the gymnasium with all my might. She disfigured my nervous system for a long time, ”the poet later wrote. He described his childhood and youth in detail in his autobiographical novel Under the New Sickle (Berlin, 1923). At the age of seventeen, Balmont also experienced his first literary shock: the novel The Brothers Karamazov, as he later recalled, gave him "more than any book in the world."

In 1886, Konstantin Balmont entered the law faculty of Moscow University, where he became close friends with P. F. Nikolaev, a sixties revolutionary. But already in 1887, for participating in the riots (related to the introduction of a new university charter, which students considered reactionary), Balmont was expelled, arrested and imprisoned for three days in Butyrka prison, and then sent to Shuya without trial. Balmont, who "in his youth was most fond of public issues", until the end of his life considered himself a revolutionary and a rebel who dreamed "of the embodiment of human happiness on earth." Poetry in the interests of Balmont prevailed only later; in his youth, he tried to become a propagandist and "go to the people."

Literary debut

In 1888, Balmont returned to the university, but due to severe nervous exhaustion he could not study - neither there nor at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, where he entered in 1889. In September 1890, he was expelled from the lyceum and left attempts to get a "state education" on this. “... I could not force myself<заниматься юридическими науками>, but he lived truly and intensely the life of his heart, and also was in a great passion for German literature, ”he wrote in 1911. Balmont owed his knowledge in the field of history, philosophy, literature and philology to himself and his older brother, who was passionately fond of philosophy. Balmont recalled that at the age of 13 he learned the English word selfhelp (“self-help”), since then he fell in love with research and “mental work” and worked, sparing his strength, until the end of his days.

In 1889, Balmont married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina, the daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk merchant. A year later, in Yaroslavl, at his own expense, he published his first "Collection of Poems"; some of the youthful works included in the book were published as early as 1885. However, the debut collection of 1890 did not arouse interest, close people did not accept it, and soon after the release, the poet burned almost the entire small edition.

In March 1890, an incident occurred that left an imprint on Balmont's entire subsequent life: he tried to commit suicide, threw himself out of a third-floor window, received serious fractures and spent a year in bed. It was believed that despair from his family and financial situation pushed him to such an act: marriage quarreled with Balmont's parents and deprived him of financial support, the immediate impetus was the Kreutzer Sonata read shortly before. The year spent in bed, as the poet himself recalled, turned out to be creatively very fruitful and led to "an unprecedented flowering of mental excitement and cheerfulness." It was during this year that he realized himself as a poet, saw his own destiny. In 1923, in the biographical story The Airway, he wrote:

In a long year, when I, lying in bed, no longer expected that I would ever get up, I learned from the pre-morning chirping of sparrows outside the window and from the moonbeams that passed through the window into my room, and from all the steps that reached my hearing, the great tale of life, realized the holy inviolability of life. And when I finally got up, my soul became free, like the wind in a field, no one else had power over it, except for a creative dream, and creativity blossomed in a riotous color ...

K. Balmont. Airway (Berlin, 1923).

Some time after his illness, Balmont, by this time separated from his wife, lived in need; he, according to his own recollections, for months "did not know what it was to be full, and approached the bakery to admire the rolls and bread through the glass." “The beginning of literary activity was associated with many torments and failures. For four or five years no magazine wanted to print me. The first collection of my poems ... did not, of course, have any success. Close people, with their negative attitude, significantly increased the severity of the first failures, ”he wrote in an autobiographical letter of 1903. By "close people" the poet meant his wife Larisa, as well as friends from among the "thinking students" who met the publication with hostility, believing that the author had betrayed the "ideals of social struggle" and closed himself within the framework of "pure art". In these difficult days, Balmont was again helped by V. G. Korolenko. “Now he came to me, greatly crushed by various hardships, but apparently not discouraged. He, poor fellow, is very timid, and a simple, attentive attitude to his work will already encourage him and will make a difference, ”he wrote in September 1891, referring to M. N. Albov, who was then one of the editors of the Severny Vestnik magazine ”, with a request to pay attention to the novice poet.

Professor of Moscow University N. I. Storozhenko also provided great assistance to Balmont. “He truly saved me from hunger and, like a father to his son, threw a faithful bridge ...”, the poet later recalled. Balmont took his article about Shelley to him (“very bad”, by his own later admission), and he took the novice writer under his wing. It was Storozhenko who persuaded the publisher K. T. Soldatenkov to entrust the novice poet with the translation of two fundamental books - Horn-Schweitzer's History of Scandinavian Literature and Gaspari's History of Italian Literature. Both translations were published in 1894-1895. “These works were my daily bread for three whole years and gave me the opportunity to fulfill my poetic dreams,” Balmont wrote in the essay “Seeing Eyes”. In 1887-1889, the poet actively translated German and French authors, then in 1892-1894 he took up work on the works of Percy Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe; It is this period that is considered the time of his creative formation.

Professor Storozhenko, in addition, introduced Balmont to the editorial office of the Severny Vestnik, around which the poets of the new direction were grouped. Balmont's first trip to St. Petersburg took place in October 1892: here he met N. M. Minsky, D. S. Merezhkovsky and Z. N. Gippius; general rosy impressions, however, were overshadowed by the emerging mutual antipathy with the latter.

On the basis of translation activities, Balmont became closer to the patron of arts, an expert on Western European literatures, Prince A. N. Urusov, who in many ways contributed to the expansion of the literary horizons of the young poet. At the expense of the philanthropist, Balmont published two books of translations by Edgar Allan Poe (“Ballads and Fantasies”, “Mysterious Tales”). “He published my translation of Poe's Mysterious Tales and loudly praised my first poems, which compiled the books Under the Northern Sky and In the Boundlessness,” Balmont later recalled. “Urusov helped my soul to free itself, helped me find myself,” the poet wrote in 1904 in his book Mountain Peaks. Calling his undertakings “... ridiculed steps on broken glass, on dark sharp-edged flints, along a dusty road, as if leading to nothing,” Balmont, among the people who helped him, also noted the translator and publicist P. F. Nikolaev.

In September 1894, in the student "Circle of Lovers of Western European Literature", Balmont met V. Ya. Bryusov, who later became his closest friend. Bryusov wrote about the "exceptional" impression that the poet's personality and his "frantic love for poetry" made on him.

The collection "Under the Northern Sky", published in 1894, is considered to be the starting point of Balmont's creative path. In December 1893, shortly before the publication of the book, the poet wrote in a letter to N. M. Minsky: “I have written a whole series of poems (my own) and in January I will start printing them in a separate book. I have a presentiment that my liberal friends will scold me very much, because there is no liberalism in them, but there are enough “corrupting” moods.” The poems were in many ways a product of their time (full of complaints about a dull, bleak life, descriptions of romantic experiences), but the aspiring poet's forebodings were only partially justified: the book received a wide response, and reviews were mostly positive. They noted the undoubted talent of the debutant, his "own physiognomy, the grace of form" and the freedom with which he owns it.

Rise to glory

If the debut of 1894 did not differ in originality, then in the second collection "In the boundlessness" (1895), Balmont began to search for "new space, new freedom", the possibilities of combining the poetic word with the melody. “... I showed what a poet who loves music can do with Russian verse. They have rhythms and chimes of euphonies, found for the first time, ”he later wrote about the poems of the 1890s. Despite the fact that contemporary critics recognized Balmont’s collection “In the Vastness” as unsuccessful, “the brilliance of verse and poetic flight” (according to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron) provided the young poet with access to leading literary magazines.

The 1890s were for Balmont a period of active creative work in a wide variety of fields of knowledge. The poet, who had a phenomenal capacity for work, mastered "one after another, many languages, reveling in work, like a man possessed ... he read entire libraries of books, from treatises on Spanish painting he loved to studies on Chinese and Sanskrit." He enthusiastically studied the history of Russia, books on the natural sciences and folk art. Already in his mature years, addressing novice writers with instruction, he wrote that a debutant needs “... to be able to sit on his spring day over a philosophical book and an English dictionary, and Spanish grammar, when you really want to ride a boat and, maybe, you can kiss someone. To be able to read 100, and 300, and 3,000 books, among which there are many, many boring ones. Love not only joy, but also pain. Silently cherish in yourself not only happiness, but also the longing that pierces your heart.

By 1895, Balmont's acquaintances with Jurgis Baltrushaitis, which gradually grew into a friendship that lasted for many years, and S. A. Polyakov, an educated Moscow businessman, mathematician and polyglot, translator of Knut Hamsun, belong. It was Polyakov, the publisher of the modernist journal Vese, who five years later established the symbolist publishing house Scorpion, which published Balmont's best books.

In 1896, Balmont married the translator E. A. Andreeva and went with his wife to Western Europe. Several years spent abroad provided the novice writer, who was interested, in addition to the main subject, in history, religion and philosophy, with great opportunities. He visited France, Holland, Spain, Italy, spending a lot of time in libraries, improving his knowledge of languages. In the same days, he wrote to his mother from Rome: “All this year abroad, I feel myself on the stage, among the scenery. And there - in the distance - my sad beauty, for which I won’t take ten Italy. ” In the spring of 1897, Balmont was invited to England to lecture on Russian poetry at Oxford University, where he met, in particular, the anthropologist Edward Tylor and the philologist and historian of religions Thomas Rhys-Davids. “For the first time in my life, I live entirely and undividedly by aesthetic and mental interests, and I can’t get enough of the treasuries of painting, poetry and philosophy,” he enthusiastically wrote to Akim Volynsky. Impressions from the travels of 1896-1897 were reflected in the collection "Silence": it was perceived by critics as the best book of the poet at that time. “It seemed to me that the collection bears the imprint of an increasingly stronger style. Your own, Balmont style and color,” Prince Urusov wrote to the poet in 1898. In 1899, K. Balmont was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

Peak of popularity

At the end of the 1890s, Balmont did not stay in one place for a long time; the main points of his route were St. Petersburg (October 1898 - April 1899), Moscow and the Moscow region (May - September 1899), Berlin, Paris, Spain, Biarritz and Oxford (end of the year). In 1899, Balmont wrote to the poetess L. Vilkina:

I have a lot of news. And all are good. I'm lucky". I am writing. I want to live, live, live forever. If you only knew how many new poems I have written! More than a hundred. It was crazy, a fairy tale, new. I am publishing a new book, completely different from the previous ones. She will surprise many. I changed my understanding of the world. No matter how funny my phrase sounds, I will say: I understood the world. For many years, perhaps forever.

K. Balmont - L. Vilkina

The collection "Burning Buildings" (1900), which occupies a central place in the poet's creative biography, was created for the most part in the Polyakovs' estate "Bathhouses" in the Moscow district; its owner was mentioned with great warmth in the dedication. “You have to be merciless to yourself. Only then can something be achieved, ”Balmont formulated his motto in the preface to Burning Buildings with these words. The author defined the main task of the book as the desire for inner liberation and self-knowledge. In 1901, sending the collection to L. N. Tolstoy, the poet wrote: “This book is a continuous cry of a torn soul, and, if you like, miserable, ugly. But I will not refuse any of its pages and - for now - I love ugliness no less than harmony. Thanks to the collection Burning Buildings, Balmont gained all-Russian fame and became one of the leaders of symbolism, a new movement in Russian literature. “For a decade, Balmont reigned indivisibly over Russian poetry. Other poets either dutifully followed him, or, with great effort, defended their independence from his overwhelming influence,” wrote V. Ya. Bryusov.

Gradually, Balmont's way of life, largely under the influence of S. Polyakov, began to change. The life of the poet in Moscow passed in assiduous studies at home, alternating with violent revels, when an alarmed wife began to look for him throughout the city. At the same time, inspiration did not leave the poet. “Something more complicated than I could have expected has come to me, and now I am writing page after page, hurrying and watching myself, so as not to be mistaken in joyful haste. How unexpected is your own soul! It is worth looking into it to see new distances ... I feel that I have attacked the ore ... And if I do not leave this earth, I will write a book that will not die, ”he wrote in December 1900 to I. I. Yasinsky. Balmont's fourth poetry collection Let's Be Like the Sun (1902) sold 1,800 copies within six months, which was considered an unheard-of success for a poetic publication, cemented the author's reputation as a leader of symbolism and, in retrospect, is considered his best poetic book. Blok called "Let's be like the sun" "a book, unique in its kind in terms of immeasurable wealth."

Conflict with power

In 1901, an event occurred that had a significant impact on the life and work of Balmont and made him "a true hero in St. Petersburg." In March, he took part in a mass student demonstration on the square near the Kazan Cathedral, the main demand of which was the abolition of the decree on sending unreliable students to the military service. The demonstration was dispersed by the police and the Cossacks, among its participants were victims. On March 14, Balmont spoke at a literary evening in the hall of the City Duma and read the poem “The Little Sultan”, which in a veiled form criticized the terror regime in Russia and its organizer, Nicholas II (“That was in Turkey, where conscience is an empty thing, the fist reigns there, whip, scimitar, two or three zeros, four scoundrels and a stupid little sultan”). The poem went from hand to hand, it was going to be published in the Iskra newspaper by V. I. Lenin.

According to the decision of the "special meeting", the poet was expelled from St. Petersburg, for three years he lost the right to reside in the capital and university cities. For several months he stayed with friends at the Volkonsky Sabynino estate in the Kursk province (now the Belgorod region), in March 1902 he left for Paris, then lived in England, Belgium, and again in France. In the summer of 1903, Balmont returned to Moscow, then headed to the Baltic coast, where he took up poetry, which was included in the collection Only Love. After spending autumn and winter in Moscow, at the beginning of 1904 Balmont again found himself in Europe (Spain, Switzerland, after returning to Moscow - France), where he often acted as a lecturer; in particular, he gave public lectures on Russian and Western European literature at a higher school in Paris. By the time of the release of the collection “Only love. Semitsvetnik (1903), the poet already enjoyed all-Russian fame. He was surrounded by enthusiastic fans and admirers. “A whole category of young ladies and young ladies of“ Balmontists ”appeared - various Zinochki, Lyuba, Katenka constantly jostled with us, admired Balmont. He, of course, unfurled the sails and blissfully sailed in the wind, ”recalled B.K. Zaitsev, who was next to Balmont.

The poetic circles of Balmontists created in these years tried to imitate the idol not only in poetic self-expression, but also in life. Already in 1896, Valery Bryusov wrote about the “Balmont school”, including, in particular, Mirra Lokhvitskaya. “They all adopt Balmont’s appearance: the brilliant finish of the verse, the flaunting of rhymes, consonances, and the very essence of his poetry,” he wrote. Balmont, according to Teffi, "surprised and delighted with his" chime of crystal harmonies "that poured into the soul with the first spring happiness." “... Russia was precisely in love with Balmont ... They read him, recited and sang from the stage. Cavaliers whispered his words to their ladies, schoolgirls copied them into notebooks ... ". Many poets (including Lokhvitskaya, Bryusov, Andrey Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, M. A. Voloshin, S. M. Gorodetsky) dedicated poems to him, seeing in him a “spontaneous genius”, an eternally free Arigon, doomed to rise above the world and completely immersed "in the revelations of his bottomless soul."

"Our king"

In 1906, Balmont wrote the poem "Our Tsar" about Emperor Nicholas II:

Our king is Mukden, our king is Tsushima,
Our king is a bloodstain
The stench of gunpowder and smoke
In which the mind is dark...
Our king is blind squalor,
Prison and whip, jurisdiction, execution,
Tsar hangman, the low twice,
What he promised, but did not dare to give.
He's a coward, he feels stuttering
But it will be, the hour of reckoning awaits.
Who began to reign - Khodynka,
He will finish - standing on the scaffold.

Another poem from the same cycle - "To Nicholas the Last" - ended with the words: "You must be killed, you have become a disaster for everyone."

In 1904-1905, the Scorpion publishing house published a collection of Balmont's poems in two volumes. At the end of 1904, the poet took a trip to Mexico, from where he went to California. The poet's travel notes and essays, along with his free-form transcriptions of Native American cosmogonic myths and legends, were later included in Snake Flowers (1910). This period of Balmont's work ended with the release of the collection Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental Hymns (1905), largely inspired by the events of the Russo-Japanese War.

In 1905, Balmont returned to Russia and took an active part in political life. In December, the poet, in his own words, "took some part in the armed uprising of Moscow, more in poetry." Having become close to Maxim Gorky, Balmont began active cooperation with the social democratic newspaper Novaya Zhizn and the Parisian magazine Krasnoye Znamya, which was published by A. V. Amfiteatrov. E. Andreeva-Balmont confirmed in her memoirs: in 1905 the poet "was passionately carried away by the revolutionary movement", "spent all his days on the street, built barricades, made speeches, climbing on the pedestals." In December, during the days of the Moscow uprising, Balmont was often on the streets, carried a loaded revolver in his pocket, and made speeches to students. He even expected reprisals against himself, as it seemed to him, a complete revolutionary. His enthusiasm for the revolution was sincere, although, as the future showed, not deep; fearing arrest, on the night of 1906, the poet hastily left for Paris.

First emigration: 1906-1913

In 1906, Balmont settled in Paris, considering himself a political emigrant. He settled in the quiet Parisian quarter of Passy, ​​but spent most of his time on long journeys. Almost immediately, he felt a strong homesickness. “Life forced me to break away from Russia for a long time, and at times it seems to me that I no longer live, that only my strings still sound,” he wrote to Professor F. D. Batyushkov in 1907. Contrary to popular belief, the poet's fears of possible persecution by the Russian authorities were not unfounded. A. A. Ninov in the documentary study “So the Poets Lived…”, examining in detail the materials relating to the “revolutionary activity” of K. Balmont, comes to the conclusion that the Okhrana “considered the poet a dangerous political person” and secret supervision of him was maintained even abroad .

Two collections of 1906-1907 were compiled from works in which K. Balmont directly responded to the events of the first Russian revolution. The book "Poems" (St. Petersburg, 1906) was confiscated by the police; "Songs of the Avenger" (Paris, 1907) were banned from distribution in Russia. During the years of the first emigration, the collections Evil Spells (1906) were also published, which was arrested by the censors because of “blasphemous” poems, as well as The Firebird. Pipe of a Slav" (1907) and "Green Heliport. Kissing words "(1909). The mood and imagery of these books, which reflected the poet's fascination with the ancient epic side of Russian and Slavic culture, were consonant with The Calls of Antiquity (1909). Criticism scornfully spoke of a new turn in the creative development of the poet, but Balmont himself was not aware of and did not recognize the creative decline.

In the spring of 1907, Balmont visited the Balearic Islands, at the end of 1909 he visited Egypt, writing a series of essays that later compiled the book “The Land of Osiris” (1914), in 1912 he traveled through the southern countries, which lasted 11 months, visiting the Canary Islands, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, Ceylon, India. Oceania and communication with the inhabitants of the islands of New Guinea, Samoa, and Tonga made a particularly deep impression on him. “I want to enrich my mind, which is bored with the exorbitant predominance of the personal element in my whole life,” the poet explained his passion for travel in one of his letters.

On March 11, 1912, at a meeting of the Neophilological Society at St. Petersburg University on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his literary activity, in the presence of more than 1,000 gathered, K. D. Balmont was proclaimed a great Russian poet.

To the lectures of K. D. Balmont. Caricature by N. I. Altman, 1914; "Sun of Russia", 1915

Return: 1913-1920

In 1913, an amnesty was granted to political emigrants on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, and on May 5, 1913, Balmont returned to Moscow. At the Brest railway station in Moscow, a solemn public meeting was arranged for him. The gendarmes forbade the poet to address the audience who met him with a speech; instead, according to press reports of the day, he scattered fresh lilies of the valley among the crowd. In honor of the return of the poet, solemn receptions were arranged in the Society of Free Aesthetics and the Literary and Artistic Circle. In 1914, the publication of the complete collection of Balmont's poems in ten volumes was completed, which lasted seven years. At the same time, he published a poetry collection “White Architect. The Mystery of the Four Lamps”, my impressions of Oceania.

After returning, Balmont traveled a lot around the country with lectures ("Oceania", "Poetry as Magic" and others). “The heart is shrinking here ... there are many tears in our beauty,” the poet remarked, having got after distant wanderings to the Oka, to Russian meadows and fields, where “rye is human-sized and higher.” “I love Russia and Russians. Oh, we Russians do not value ourselves! We do not know how condescending, patient and delicate we are. I believe in Russia, I believe in its brightest future, ”he wrote in one of the articles of the time.

In early 1914, the poet returned to Paris, then in April he went to Georgia, where he received a magnificent reception (in particular, a greeting from Akaki Tsereteli, the patriarch of Georgian literature) and held a course of lectures that were a great success. The poet began to study the Georgian language and took up the translation of Shota Rustaveli's poem "The Knight in the Panther's Skin". Among other major translation works of Balmont of this time is the transcription of ancient Indian monuments (“Upanishads”, Kalidasa's dramas, Asvagosha's poem “The Life of the Buddha”). On this occasion, K. Balmont corresponded with the famous French Indologist and Buddologist Sylvain Levy.

From Georgia, Balmont returned to France, where he found the beginning of the First World War. Only at the end of May 1915, by a circuitous route - through England, Norway and Sweden - did the poet return to Russia. At the end of September, Balmont went on a two-month trip to the cities of Russia with lectures, and a year later he repeated the tour, which turned out to be longer and ended in the Far East, from where he briefly left for Japan in May 1916.

In 1915, Balmont's theoretical study "Poetry as Magic" was published - a kind of continuation of the 1900 declaration "Elementary words about symbolic poetry"; in this treatise on the essence and purpose of lyric poetry, the poet attributed to the word "incantatory and magical power" and even "physical power." The research largely continued what had been started in the books Mountain Peaks (1904), White Lightnings (1908), Sea Glow (1910), dedicated to the work of Russian and Western European poets. At the same time, he wrote without ceasing, especially often referring to the genre of the sonnet. During these years, the poet created 255 sonnets, which made up the collection "Sonnets of the Sun, Sky and Moon" (1917). Books Ash. The Vision of the Tree (1916) and Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon (1917) were met warmer than the previous ones, but even in them the critics saw mainly "monotony and an abundance of banal prettiness."

Between two revolutions

S. Polyakov-Lithuanians:
... Balmont did not adapt for a single minute to Soviet power. He did not write in Bolshevik publications, did not serve, did not sell his works to the Proletkult.<…>He was threatened with death from starvation. But even then he rejected the proposal of the Soviet authorities to buy his books from him ...
In fact, the poet, albeit reluctantly, collaborated with the Bolsheviks. Ill.: Collection "Table" (1918). K. Balmont among former and new poets.

Balmont welcomed the February Revolution, began to collaborate in the Society of Proletarian Arts, but soon became disillusioned with the new government and joined the Cadets party, which demanded that the war continue to a victorious end. In one of the issues of the newspaper "Morning of Russia" he welcomed the activities of General Lavr Kornilov. The poet categorically did not accept the October Revolution, which made him horrified by the "chaos" and "hurricane of madness" of the "troubled times" and reconsider many of his previous views. In the 1918 publicist book Am I a Revolutionary or Not? Balmont, characterizing the Bolsheviks as carriers of the destructive principle, suppressing the "personality", nevertheless expressed the conviction that the poet should be outside the parties, that the poet "has his own paths, his own destiny - he is more of a comet than a planet (that is, he moves not in a certain orbit).

During these years, Balmont lived in Petrograd with E. K. Tsvetkovskaya (1880-1943), his third wife, and daughter Mirra, from time to time coming to Moscow to E. A. Andreeva and daughter Nina. Forced in this way to support two families, Balmont was in poverty, partly also because of the unwillingness to compromise with the new government. When at a literary lecture someone gave Balmont a note asking why he did not publish his works, the answer was: “I don’t want to ... I can’t print from those who have blood on their hands.” It was alleged that once the issue of his execution was discussed in the Extraordinary Commission, but, as S. Polyakov later wrote, "there was no majority of votes."

In 1920, together with E. K. Tsvetkovskaya and his daughter Mirra, the poet moved to Moscow, where "sometimes, in order to keep warm, they had to spend the whole day in bed." In relation to the authorities, Balmont was loyal: he worked in the People's Commissariat for Education, prepared poems and translations for publication, and lectured. On the day of May 1, 1920, in the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions in Moscow, he read his poem “The Song of the Working Hammer”, the next day he greeted artist M. N. Yermolova with poems at her anniversary evening at the Maly Theater. In the same year, Moscow writers organized a celebration of Balmont, which marked the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of his first, "Yaroslavl", poetry collection. At the beginning of 1920, the poet began to arrange a trip abroad, referring to the deteriorating health of his wife and daughter. By this time, the beginning of a long and lasting friendship between Balmont and Marina Tsvetaeva, who in Moscow was in a similar, very difficult situation, dates back.

Second emigration: 1920-1942

Having received at the request of Jurgis Baltrushaitis from A. V. Lunacharsky permission to temporarily go abroad on a business trip, together with his wife, daughter and distant relative A. N. Ivanova, on May 25, 1920, Balmont left Russia forever and reached Paris through Revel. Boris Zaitsev believed that Baltrushaitis, who was the Lithuanian envoy in Moscow, saved Balmont from starvation: he was begging and starving in cold Moscow, “he carried firewood from a dismantled fence on himself.” Stanitsky (S. V. von Stein), recalling a meeting with Balmont in 1920 in Reval, remarked: “The seal of painful exhaustion lay on his face, and he seemed to be still in the grip of dark and mournful experiences, already abandoned in the country of lawlessness and evil , but wholly not yet exhausted by him.

In Paris, Balmont and his family settled in a small furnished apartment. As Teffi recalled, “the window in the dining room was always hung with a thick brown curtain, because the poet broke the glass. Inserting new glass made no sense - it could easily break again. Therefore, the room was always dark and cold. “Terrible apartment,” they said. “There is no glass, and it is blowing.”

The poet immediately found himself between two fires. On the one hand, the émigré community suspected him of being a Soviet sympathizer. As S. Polyakov ironically remarked, Balmont “…violated the ceremonial of flight from Soviet Russia. Instead of secretly escaping from Moscow, making his way as a wanderer through the forests and valleys of Finland, accidentally falling from the bullet of a drunken Red Army soldier or Finn on the border, he stubbornly sought permission to leave with his family for four months, received it and arrived in Paris unshot. The position of the poet was involuntarily “exacerbated” by Lunacharsky, who denied rumors in a Moscow newspaper that he was agitating abroad against the Soviet regime. This allowed right emigre circles to notice “... meaningfully: Balmont in correspondence with Lunacharsky. Well, of course, a Bolshevik!” However, the poet himself, interceding from France for Russian writers who were waiting to leave Russia, made phrases that did not condemn the state of affairs in Soviet Russia: “Everything that happens in Russia is so complicated and so mixed up”, hinting at the fact that much of what is being done in “cultural” Europe is also deeply disgusting to him. This was the reason for the attack on him by emigrant publicists (“... What is difficult? Mass executions? What is mixed up? Systematic robbery, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the destruction of all freedoms, military expeditions to pacify the peasants?”).

On the other hand, the Soviet press began to “stigmatize him as a crafty deceiver,” who “at the cost of lies” won freedom for himself, abused the trust of the Soviet government, which generously let him go to the West “to study the revolutionary creativity of the masses.” Stanitsky wrote:

With dignity and calmly Balmont answered all these reproaches. But it is worth thinking about them in order to once again feel the charm of Soviet ethics - a purely cannibalistic type. The poet Balmont, whose whole being protests against the soviet power, which has ruined his homeland and every day kills its powerful, creative spirit in its smallest manifestations, is obliged to sacredly keep his word given to the tyrants-commissars and emergency workers. But these same principles of moral behavior are by no means guiding principles for the Soviet government and its agents. Killing parliamentarians, machine-gunning defenseless women and children, starving to death tens of thousands of innocent people - all this, of course, in the opinion of "comrade Bolsheviks" - is nothing compared to the violation of Balmont's promise to return to Lenin's communist Eden , Bukharin and Trotsky.

Stanitsky about Balmont. Last news. 1921

As Yu. K. Terapiano later wrote, “there was no other poet in the Russian diaspora who so acutely experienced isolation from Russia.” Balmont called emigration "life among strangers", although he worked unusually hard at the same time; in 1921 alone, six of his books were published. In exile, Balmont actively collaborated with the Paris News newspaper, the Sovremennye Zapiski magazine, and numerous Russian periodicals published in other European countries. His attitude towards Soviet Russia remained ambiguous, but longing for Russia was constant: “I want Russia ... empty, empty. There is no spirit in Europe,” he wrote to E. Andreeva in December 1921. The severity of isolation from the homeland was aggravated by the feeling of loneliness, alienation from emigrant circles.

Soon Balmont left Paris and settled in the town of Capbreton in the province of Brittany, where he spent 1921-1922. In 1924 he lived in the Lower Charente (Chateleyon), in 1925 - in the Vendée (Saint-Gilles-sur-Vi), until late autumn 1926 - in the Gironde (Lacano-Ocean). In early November 1926, after leaving Lakano, Balmont and his wife went to Bordeaux. Balmont often rented a villa in Capbreton, where he communicated with many Russians and lived intermittently until the end of 1931, spending here not only the summer but also the winter months.

Public activity and journalism

M. A. Durnov. Balmont in Paris

Balmont unequivocally declared his attitude towards Soviet Russia soon after he left the country. “The Russian people are truly tired of their misfortunes and, most importantly, of the shameless, endless lies of merciless, evil rulers,” he wrote in 1921. In the article "Bloody Liars" the poet spoke about the vicissitudes of his life in Moscow in 1917-1920. In the emigrant periodicals of the early 1920s, his poetic lines about the "actors of Satan", about the "drunk blood" of the Russian land, about the "days of humiliation of Russia", about the "red drops" that went to the Russian land, regularly appeared. A number of these poems were included in the collection "Marevo" (Paris, 1922) - the poet's first emigrant book. The name of the collection was predetermined by the first line of the poem of the same name: "Muddy haze, damn brew ...".

In 1923, K. D. Balmont, along with M. Gorky and I. A. Bunin, was nominated by R. Rolland for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1927, with a publicistic article “A little bit of zoology for Little Red Riding Hood”, Balmont reacted to the scandalous speech of the Soviet plenipotentiary representative in Poland D.V. "Russian friends") allegedly addressed the future - to modern Bolshevik Russia. In the same year, an anonymous appeal “To the Writers of the World” was published in Paris, signed “Group of Russian Writers. Russia, May 1927". Among those who responded to the call of I. D. Galperin-Kaminsky to support the appeal was (along with Bunin, Zaitsev, Kuprin, Merezhkovsky and others) and Balmont. In October 1927, the poet sent a “cry-plea” to Knut Hamsun, and without waiting for an answer, he turned to Halperin-Kaminsky:

First of all, I will point out that I was expecting a chorus of reciprocal voices, I was expecting a human resounding outcry from European writers, for I have not yet completely lost faith in Europe. I waited a month. I waited two. Silence. I wrote to a prominent writer, with whom I have a personally good relationship, to a writer of the world and very favored in pre-revolutionary Russia - to Knut Hamsun, I addressed on behalf of those martyrs of thought and word who are tormented in the worst prison that has ever been on earth , in Soviet Russia. For two months now, Hamsun has been silent in response to my letter. I wrote a few words and sent the words of Merezhkovsky, Bunin, Shmelev and others, printed by you in "Avenir", to my friend - friend-brother - Alphonse de Chateaubriand. He is silent. To whom should I call?

In an address to Romain Rolland in the same place, Balmont wrote: “Believe me, we are not as vagabonds by nature as you might think. We left Russia in order to be able in Europe to try to shout at least something about the Dying Mother, to shout in the deaf ear of the callous and indifferent, who are busy only with themselves ... ”The poet also sharply reacted to the policy of the British government of James MacDonald, who entered into trade negotiations with the Bolsheviks , and later recognized the USSR. “The recognition by England of an armed gang of international crooks who, with the help of the Germans, seized power in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which had weakened due to our military defeat, was a mortal blow to everything honest that still remained after the monstrous war in Europe,” he wrote in 1930.

Unlike his friend Ivan Shmelev, who gravitated towards the “right” direction, Balmont generally adhered to “left”, liberal-democratic views, was critical of the ideas of Ivan Ilyin, did not accept “conciliatory” tendencies (Smenovekhovism, Eurasianism, and so on) , radical political movements (fascism). At the same time, he shunned the former socialists - A.F. Kerensky, I.I. Fondaminsky - and watched with horror the "leftward" movement in Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, in particular, the enthusiasm for socialism among a significant part of the French intellectual elite. Balmont vividly responded to events that shocked emigration: the abduction by Soviet agents in January 1930 of General A.P. Kutepov, the tragic death of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, who did a lot for Russian emigrants; took part in joint actions and protests of emigration (“To fight against denationalization” - in connection with the growing threat of separation of Russian children abroad from the Russian language and Russian culture; “Help native enlightenment”), but at the same time avoided participation in political organizations.

Balmont was outraged by the indifference of Western European writers to what was happening in the USSR, and this feeling was superimposed on the general disappointment with the whole Western way of life. Europe had previously made him bitter with its rational pragmatism. Back in 1907, the poet remarked: “Strange people are European people, strangely uninteresting. They have to prove everything. I never look for evidence." “No one here reads anything. Here everyone is interested in sports and cars. Cursed time, senseless generation! I feel about the same as the last Peruvian ruler among the arrogant Spanish newcomers, ”he wrote in 1927.

Creativity in exile

It was generally accepted that emigration passed for Balmont under the sign of decline; this opinion, shared by many Russian émigré poets, was subsequently disputed more than once. In different countries, Balmont during these years published books of poems “Gift to the Earth”, “Bright Hour” (1921), “Haze” (1922), “Mine - to her. Poems about Russia "(1923), "In the Parted Distance" (1929), "Northern Lights" (1933), "Blue Horseshoe", "Light Service" (1937). In 1923 he published books of autobiographical prose Under the New Sickle and Air Way, in 1924 he published a book of memoirs Where is My Home? (Prague, 1924), wrote documentary essays "Torch in the Night" and "White Dream" about his experiences in the winter of 1919 in revolutionary Russia. Balmont made lengthy lecture tours in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, in the summer of 1930 he traveled to Lithuania, simultaneously translating West Slavic poetry, but Russia remained the main theme of Balmont's works during these years: memories of her and longing for the lost.

“I want Russia. I want Russia to have a transforming dawn. I only want this. Nothing else,” he wrote to E. A. Andreeva. The poet was drawn back to Russia, and he, inclined to succumb to momentary moods, more than once expressed a desire to return to his homeland in the 1920s. “I live and don't live living abroad. Despite all the horrors of Russia, I am very sorry that I left Moscow,” he wrote to the poet A. B. Kusikov on May 17, 1922. At some point, Balmont was close to taking this step. “I completely decided to return, but again everything was confused in my soul,” he informed E. A. Andreeva on June 13, 1923. “You will feel how I always love Russia and how the thought of our nature dominates me.<…>One word “lingonberry” or “sweet clover” causes such excitement in my soul that one word is enough for poetry to escape from a trembling heart, ”the poet wrote on August 19, 1925 to his daughter Nina Bruni, sending her new poems.

last years of life

By the end of the 1920s, the life of K. Balmont and E. Andreeva became more and more difficult. Literary fees were meager, financial support, which came mainly from the Czech Republic and Yugoslavia, which created funds to help Russian writers, became irregular, then stopped. The poet had to take care of three women, and the daughter Mirra, who was distinguished by extreme carelessness and impracticality, gave him a lot of trouble. “Konstantin Dmitrievich is in a very difficult situation, barely making ends meet ... Keep in mind that our glorious Poet is struggling from real need, the help that came to him from America has ended ... The Poet’s affairs are getting worse and worse,” wrote I.S. Shmelev V.F. Seeler, one of the few who regularly provided assistance to Balmont.

The situation became critical after it became clear in 1932 that the poet was suffering from a serious mental illness. From August 1932 to May 1935, the Balmonts lived without a break in Clamart near Paris, in poverty. In the spring of 1935, Balmont ended up in a clinic. “We are in great trouble and in complete poverty ... And Konstantin Dmitrievich has neither a decent nightgown, nor night shoes, nor pajamas. We are dying, dear friend, if you can, help, advise ... ”, Tsvetkovskaya wrote to Zeeler on April 6, 1935. Despite illness and distress, the poet retained his former eccentricity and sense of humor. Regarding the car accident in which he fell in the mid-1930s, Balmont, in a letter to V.V. Obolyaninov, complained not about bruises, but about a damaged suit: the legs on which they are put on ... ". In a letter to E. A. Andreeva, the poet wrote:

What am I now? Yes, still the same. My new acquaintances and even my old ones laugh when I say how old I am, and they don't believe me. To love a dream, thought and creativity forever is eternal youth. My beard is indeed whitish, and there is enough frost on the temples, but still my hair is curly, and it is fair-haired, not gray. My outer face is still the same, but there is a lot of sadness in my heart...

K. D. Balmont - E. A. Andreeva

In April 1936, the Parisian Russian writers celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Balmont's writing activity with a creative evening, designed to raise funds to help the sick poet. The committee for the organization of the evening called "To the Poet - Writers" included famous figures of Russian culture: I. S. Shmelev, M. Aldanov, I. A. Bunin, B. K. Zaitsev, A. N. Benois, A. T. Grechaninov, P. N. Milyukov, S. V. Rachmaninov.

At the end of 1936, Balmont and Tsvetkovskaya moved to Noisy-le-Grand near Paris. The last years of his life, the poet stayed alternately either in a charity house for Russians, which was kept by M. Kuzmina-Karavaeva, or in a cheap furnished apartment. As Yuri Terapiano recalled, "the Germans were indifferent to Balmont, while the Russian Nazis reproached him for his former revolutionary convictions." However, by this time Balmont had finally fallen into a "twilight state"; he came to Paris, but with great difficulty. In the hours of enlightenment, when mental illness receded, Balmont, according to the recollections of those who knew him, with a feeling of happiness opened the volume of "War and Peace" or reread his old books; he could not write for a long time.

In 1940-1942, Balmont did not leave Noisy-le-Grand; here, in the Russian House shelter, he died on the night of December 23, 1942 from pneumonia. He was buried in the local Catholic cemetery, under a gray stone tombstone with the inscription: "Constantin Balmont, poète russe" ("Konstantin Balmont, Russian poet"). Several people came from Paris to say goodbye to the poet: B.K. Zaitsev with his wife, the widow of Y. Baltrushaitis, two or three acquaintances and daughter Mirra. Irina Odoevtseva recalled: “... it was raining heavily. When the coffin was lowered into the grave, it turned out to be filled with water, and the coffin floated up. He had to be held up with a pole while the grave was filled in.” The French public learned about the death of the poet from an article in the pro-Hitler Paris Gazette, which made, "as was then customary, a thorough reprimand to the late poet for having once supported the revolutionaries."

Since the late 1960s Balmont's poems in the USSR began to be printed in anthologies. In 1984, a large collection of selected works was published.

Family

It is generally accepted that the poet's father, Dmitry Konstantinovich Balmont (1835-1907), came from a noble family, which, according to family legend, had Scandinavian (according to some sources, Scottish) roots. The poet himself in 1903 wrote about his origin:

... According to family legends, my ancestors were some Scottish or Scandinavian sailors who moved to Russia ... My grandfather, on my father's side, was a naval officer, took part in the Russian-Turkish war and earned the personal gratitude of Nicholas I for his courage. My mother's ancestors (nee Lebedeva) were Tatars. The ancestor was Prince White Swan of the Golden Horde. Perhaps this can partly explain the wildness and passion that always distinguished my mother, and which I inherited from her, as well as my whole mental structure. My mother's father (also a military man, a general) wrote poetry, but did not publish them. All my mother's sisters (there are many) wrote but did not print them.

Autobiographical letter. 1903

There is an alternative version of the origin of the name Balmont. Thus, the researcher P. Kupriyanovsky points out that the poet's great-grandfather, a cavalry sergeant of the Catherine's Life Guards Regiment, could bear the surname Balamut, which was later ennobled by "altering in a foreign way." This assumption is also consistent with the memoirs of E. Andreeva-Balmont, who stated that “... the great-grandfather of the poet's father was a sergeant in one of the cavalry Life Guards regiments of Empress Catherine II Balamut ... We kept this document on parchment and with seals. In Ukraine, the surname Balamut is still quite common. The poet's great-grandfather Ivan Andreevich Balamut was a Kherson landowner... How the surname Balamut moved to Balmont - I could not establish. ”In turn, opponents of this version noted that it contradicts the laws of textual criticism; it would be more natural to assume that, on the contrary, "the people adapted the foreign name of the landowner to their understanding."

D. K. Balmont served for half a century in the Shuya Zemstvo - as a mediator, justice of the peace, chairman of the congress of justices of the peace and, finally, chairman of the county zemstvo council. In 1906, D. K. Balmont retired, a year later he died. In the memory of the poet, he remained a quiet and kind person who passionately loved nature and hunting. Mother Vera Nikolaevna came from a colonel's family; she received an institute education and was distinguished by an active character: she taught and treated peasants, arranged amateur performances and concerts, and was sometimes published in provincial newspapers. Dmitry Konstantinovich and Vera Nikolaevna had seven sons. All the poet's relatives pronounced their surname with an emphasis on the first syllable, the poet only subsequently independently, as he claimed, "because of the whim of one woman", shifted the emphasis to the second.

Personal life

K. D. Balmont told in his autobiography that he began to fall in love very early: “The first passionate thought about a woman was at the age of five, the first real love was nine years old, the first passion was fourteen years old,” he wrote. “Wandering through countless cities, I am always delighted with one thing - love,” the poet later admitted in one of his poems. Valery Bryusov, analyzing his work, wrote: “Balmont’s poetry glorifies and glorifies all the rites of love, all its rainbow. Balmont himself says that, following the paths of love, he can achieve “too much - everything!”

"Graceful, cool and noble" Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva (1867-1950)

In 1889, Konstantin Balmont married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina, the daughter of a Shuya manufacturer, "a beautiful young lady of the Botticelli type." The mother, who facilitated the acquaintance, sharply opposed the marriage, but the young man was adamant in his decision and decided to break with his family. “I was not yet twenty-two years old when I ... married a beautiful girl, and we left in early spring, or rather, at the end of winter, to the Caucasus, to the Kabardian region, and from there along the Georgian Military Highway to the blessed Tiflis and Transcaucasia”, he later wrote. But the wedding trip did not become a prologue to a happy family life.

Researchers often write about Garelina as a neurasthenic nature, who showed love to Balmont "in a demonic face, even devilish", tormented by jealousy; it is generally accepted that it was she who addicted him to wine, as indicated by the confessional poem of the poet "Forest Fire". The wife did not sympathize with either the literary aspirations or the revolutionary moods of her husband and was prone to quarrels. In many ways, it was the painful connection with Garelina that prompted Balmont to attempt suicide on the morning of March 13, 1890. Soon after his recovery, which was only partial - he had a limp for the rest of his life - Balmont broke up with L. Garelina. The first child born in this marriage died, the second - the son Nikolai - subsequently suffered from a nervous breakdown. Later, researchers warned against excessive “demonization” of the image of Balmont’s first wife: after breaking up with the latter, Larisa Mikhailovna married the journalist and literary historian N. A. Engelgardt and lived peacefully with him for many years. Her daughter from this marriage, Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, became the second wife of Nikolai Gumilyov.

The poet's second wife, Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva-Balmont (1867-1952), a relative of the famous Moscow publishers Sabashnikovs, came from a wealthy merchant family (the Andreevs owned shops of colonial goods) and was distinguished by a rare education. Contemporaries also noted the external attractiveness of this tall and slender young woman "with beautiful black eyes." For a long time she was unrequitedly in love with A. I. Urusov. Balmont, as Andreeva recalled, quickly became interested in her, but did not meet reciprocity for a long time. When the latter arose, it turned out that the poet was married: then the parents forbade their daughter to meet with her lover. However, Ekaterina Alekseevna, enlightened in the "latest spirit", looked at the rites as a formality and soon moved to the poet. The divorce process, allowing Garelina to enter into a second marriage, forbade her husband to marry forever, but, having found an old document where the groom was listed as unmarried, the lovers got married on September 27, 1896, and the next day they went abroad, to France.

With E. A. Andreeva, Balmont was united by a common literary interest; the couple made many joint translations, in particular Gerhart Hauptmann and Odd Nansen. Boris Zaitsev, in his memoirs about Balmont, called Ekaterina Alekseevna "a graceful, cool and noble woman, highly cultured and not without power." Their apartment on the fourth floor of a house in Tolstovsky was, as Zaitsev wrote, “the work of Ekaterina Alekseevna, as well as their way of life was also largely directed by her.” Balmont was "... in faithful, loving and healthy hands, and at home he led a life even just working." In 1901, their daughter Ninika was born - Nina Konstantinovna Balmont-Bruni (died in Moscow in 1989), to whom the poet dedicated the collection Fairy Tales.

Taffy about Mirra Balmont:
Once, in childhood, she undressed naked and climbed under the table, and no amount of persuasion could pull her out of there. The parents decided that it was probably some kind of illness and called the doctor. The doctor, looking at Elena carefully, asked: “Are you obviously her mother?” - "Yes". - More attentively on Balmont. "Are you a father?" - "M-m-m-yes." The doctor spread his hands. - "Well, what do you want from her?"
In the photo: Balmont with French friends and the Shmelyovs. Far right - E. K. Tsvetkovskaya, far left - daughter Mirra

In the early 1900s, in Paris, Balmont met Elena Konstantinovna Tsvetkovskaya (1880-1943), the daughter of General K. G. Tsvetkovsky, then a student at the Sorbonne Faculty of Mathematics and a passionate admirer of his poetry. The latter, "not strong in character, ... with her whole being was involved in the whirlpool of the poet's madness", whose every word "sounded to her like the voice of God." Balmont, judging by some of his letters, in particular to Bryusov, was not in love with Tsvetkovskaya, but soon began to feel the need for her as a truly faithful, devoted friend. Gradually, the "spheres of influence" were divided: Balmont either lived with his family, or left with Elena; for example, in 1905 they left for three months in Mexico. The poet's family life was completely confused after E.K. Tsvetkovskaya had a daughter in December 1907, who was named Mirra - in memory of Mirra Lokhvitskaya, a poetess with whom he had complex and deep feelings. The appearance of the child finally tied Balmont to Elena Konstantinovna, but at the same time he did not want to leave Ekaterina Alekseevna either. Mental anguish led to a breakdown: in 1909, Balmont made a new suicide attempt, again jumped out of the window and survived again. Until 1917, Balmont lived in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra, coming from time to time to Moscow to Andreeva and his daughter Nina.

Balmont emigrated from Russia with his third (civil) wife E.K. Tsvetkovskaya and daughter Mirra. However, he did not break off friendly relations with Andreeva either; only in 1934, when Soviet citizens were forbidden to correspond with relatives and friends living abroad, this connection was interrupted. The new matrimonial duet Teffi, recalling one of the meetings, described as follows: “He entered, raising his forehead high, as if carrying a golden crown of glory. His neck was wrapped twice in black, some kind of Lermontov tie, which no one wears. Lynx eyes, long, reddish hair. Behind him is his faithful shadow, his Elena, a small, thin, dark-faced creature, living only on strong tea and love for the poet. According to Teffi, the couple communicated with each other in an unusually pretentious manner. Elena Konstantinovna never called Balmont "husband", she said: "poet." The phrase "The husband asks for a drink" in their language was pronounced as "The poet wants to quench himself with moisture."

Unlike E. A. Andreeva, Elena Konstantinovna was "worldly helpless and could not organize life in any way." She considered it her duty to follow Balmont everywhere: eyewitnesses recalled how she, “leaving her child at home, followed her husband somewhere to a tavern and could not take him out of there for a day.” “With such a life, it is not surprising that by the age of forty she already looked like an old woman,” Teffi noted.

E. K. Tsvetkovskaya was not the last love of the poet. In Paris, he resumed his acquaintance with Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya (1893-1967), which had begun in March 1919. “One of my dear ones, half-Swede, half-Polish, Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya, nee Baroness Lilienfeld, Russified, sang Estonian songs to me more than once,” Balmont described his beloved in one of his letters. Shakhovskaya gave birth to Balmont two children - George (George) (1922-1943?) and Svetlana (b. 1925). The poet could not leave his family; meeting with Shakhovskaya only occasionally, he wrote to her often, almost daily, declaring his love over and over again, talking about his impressions and plans; 858 of his letters and postcards have been preserved. Balmont's feeling was reflected in many of his later poems and in the novel Under the New Sickle (1923). Be that as it may, it was not D. Shakhovskaya, but E. Tsvetkovskaya, who spent the last, most disastrous years of his life with Balmont; she died in 1943, a year after the death of the poet. Mirra Konstantinovna Balmont (married - Boychenko, in the second marriage - Autina) wrote poetry and published in the 1920s under the pseudonym Aglaya Gamayun. She died in Noisy-le-Grand in 1970.

Appearance and character

Andrei Bely characterized Balmont as an unusually lonely, detached from the real world and defenseless person, and he saw the cause of troubles in the properties of a restless and fickle, but at the same time unusually generous nature: “He failed to combine in himself all those riches that nature awarded him. He is an eternal mote of spiritual treasures ... He will receive - and squander, receive and squander. He gives them to us. He spills his creative goblet on us. But he himself does not eat from his creativity. Bely left an expressive description of Balmont's appearance:

Light, slightly limping gait accurately throws Balmont forward into space. Rather, as if from space, Balmont falls to the ground - to the salon, to the street. And the impulse breaks in him, and he, realizing that he has hit the wrong place, ceremoniously restrains himself, puts on pince-nez and haughtily (or rather, frightened) looks around, raises dry lips, framed by a beard red as fire. Deeply set in their orbits, his almost eyebrowless brown eyes look sadly, meekly and incredulously: they can also look vengefully, betraying something helpless in Balmont himself. And that's why his whole appearance doubles. Arrogance and impotence, grandeur and lethargy, boldness, fear - all this alternates in him, and what a subtle whimsical scale passes on his emaciated face, pale, with widely swollen nostrils! And how insignificant that face may seem! And what an elusive grace sometimes radiates from this face!

A. Bely. The meadow is green. 1910

"Bohemian" Balmont and Sergei Gorodetsky with their spouses A. A. Gorodetskaya and E. K. Tsvetkovskaya (left), St. Petersburg, 1907.

“Slightly reddish, with lively quick eyes, head held high, high straight collars, ... a wedge-shaped beard, a kind of combat. (Portrait of Serov conveys it perfectly.) Something provocative, always ready to boil, to respond with harshness or enthusiasm. If compared with birds, then this is a magnificent chanticleer, greeting the day, light, life ... ”, - this is how Boris Zaitsev remembered Balmont.

Ilya Ehrenburg recalled that Balmont read his poems in an "inspirational and arrogant" voice, like "a shaman who knows that his words have power, if not over an evil spirit, then over poor nomads." The poet, according to him, spoke in all languages ​​​​with an accent - not with Russian, but with Balmont's, pronouncing the sound "n" in a peculiar way - "either in French, or in Polish." Speaking about the impression that Balmont made already in the 1930s, Ehrenburg wrote that on the street he could be mistaken "... for a Spanish anarchist or simply for a madman who deceived the vigilance of the guards." V. S. Yanovsky, recalling a meeting with Balmont in the 1930s, remarked: "... decrepit, gray-haired, with a sharp beard, Balmont ... looked like the ancient god Svarog or Dazhbog, in any case, something Old Slavonic."

Contemporaries characterized Balmont as an extremely sensitive, nervous and enthusiastic person, “easy-going”, inquisitive and good-natured, but at the same time prone to affectation and narcissism. Balmont's behavior was dominated by theatricality, mannerisms and pretentiousness, there was a tendency to affectation and outrageousness. Curious cases are known when he was laid down in Paris in the middle of the pavement to be run over by a fiacre, or when “on a moonlit night, in a coat and hat, with a cane in his hands, he entered, spellbound by the moon, up to his throat into a pond, trying to experience unknown sensations and describe them in verse". Boris Zaitsev told how the poet once asked his wife: “Vera, do you want the poet to come to you, bypassing boring earthly paths, directly from himself, to Boris’s room, through the air?” (two married couples were neighbors). Recalling the first such “flight”, Zaitsev noted in his memoirs: “Thank God, in Tolstovsky he did not fulfill his intention. He continued to come to us by boring earthly paths, along the sidewalk of his lane he turned into our Spaso-Peskovsky, past the church.

Laughing good-naturedly at the manners of his acquaintance, Zaitsev remarked that Balmont “was also different: sad, very simple. He willingly read his new poems to those present and brought them to tears with the penetration of reading. Many of those who knew the poet confirmed that from under the mask of the “great poet” in love with his own image, from time to time a completely different character could be seen. “Balmont loved the pose. Yes, this is understandable. Constantly surrounded by worship, he considered it necessary to behave as, in his opinion, a great poet should behave. He tilted his head, knitting his brows. But his laughter betrayed him. His laugh was good-natured, childish, and somehow defenseless. This childish laugh of his explained many of his absurd actions. He, like a child, gave himself up to the mood of the moment ... ”, Teffi recalled.

Rare humanity, the warmth of the Balmont character were noted. P.P. Pertsov, who knew the poet from his youth, wrote that it was difficult to meet such a “pleasant, helpfully friendly person” as Balmont. Marina Tsvetaeva, who met with the poet in the most difficult times, testified that he could give his “last pipe, last crust, last log” to the needy. The Soviet translator Mark Talov, who found himself in Paris in the twenties without a livelihood, recalled how, leaving Balmont’s apartment, where he timidly visited, he found in his coat pocket money secretly invested there by the poet, who at that time himself lived far away not luxurious.

Many spoke about the impressionability and impulsiveness of Balmont. He himself considered the most remarkable events of his life "those sudden inner gaps that sometimes open in the soul about the most insignificant external facts." So, “for the first time, sparkling, to mystical conviction, the thought of the possibility and inevitability of world happiness” was born in him “at the age of seventeen, when one day in Vladimir, on a bright winter day, from the mountain, he saw in the distance a blackening long peasant convoy.”

In the character of Balmont, something feminine was also noticed: “in whatever militant poses he got up ... all his life he was closer and dearer to female souls.” The poet himself believed that the absence of sisters aroused in him a special interest in female nature. At the same time, a certain “childishness” was preserved in his nature all his life, which he himself even somewhat “flirted with” and which many considered feigned. However, it was noted that even in his mature years, the poet really "carried in his soul something very direct, tender, childish." “I still feel like a fiery high school student, shy and impudent,” Balmont himself admitted when he was already under thirty.

The penchant for external effects, the deliberate “bohemianism” did the poet a disservice: few knew that “for all the exaltation ... Balmont was a tireless worker”, worked hard, wrote every day and was very fruitful, all his life he was engaged in self-education (“read entire libraries”) , studied languages ​​and natural sciences, and traveling, enriched himself not only with new impressions, but also with information on the history, ethnography, and folklore of each country. In the mass view, Balmont remained primarily a pretentious eccentric, but many noted rationality and consistency in his character. S. V. Sabashnikov recalled that the poet “…almost did not make blots in his manuscripts. Poems in dozens of lines, apparently, formed completely finished in his head and were entered into the manuscript at once.

If any correction was needed, he rewrote the text in a new edition, without making any blots or additions to the original text. His handwriting was neat, clear and beautiful. Despite the extraordinary nervousness of Konstantin Dmitrievich, his handwriting did not reflect, however, any changes in his moods ... And in his habits, he seemed pedantically neat, not allowing any slovenliness. The books, the desk and all the accessories of the poet were always in much better order than those of us, the so-called business people. This accuracy in work made Balmont a very pleasant employee of the publishing house.

S. V. Sabashnikov about K. D. Balmont

“The manuscripts submitted to him have always been finalized and have not been subjected to changes in typesetting. Proofs were read clearly and returned quickly,” added the publisher.

Valery Bryusov noted in Balmont a frenzied love for poetry, "a subtle flair for the beauty of verse." Remembering the evenings and nights when they “endlessly read their poems to each other and ... the poems of their favorite poets,” Bryusov admitted: “I was one before meeting Balmont and became different after meeting him.” Bryusov explained the peculiarities of Balmont's behavior in life by the deep poetry of his character. Therefore, it cannot be measured by a common arshin.

Creation

Balmont became the first representative of symbolism in poetry, who received all-Russian fame. It was noted, however, that his work as a whole was not purely symbolist; neither was the poet a “decadent” in the full sense of the word: decadence for him “…served not only and not so much as a form of aesthetic attitude to life, but as a convenient shell for creating the image of the creator of new art.” The first collections of Balmont, with all the abundance of decadent-symbolist signs in them, were attributed by literary critics to impressionism, a trend in art that aimed to convey fleeting, unsteady impressions. Basically, these were “purely romantic poems, as if opposing heaven and earth, calling to the distant, unearthly,” saturated with motifs consonant with the work of A. N. Pleshcheev or S. Ya. Nadson. It was noted that the mood of "sadness, some kind of orphanhood, homelessness", which dominated Balmont's early poems, were echoes of the former "thoughts of the sick, tired generation of the intelligentsia." The poet himself noted that his work began "with sadness, depression and twilight", "under the northern sky". The lyrical hero of Balmont's early works (according to A. Izmailov) is "a meek and meek young man, imbued with the most well-intentioned and moderate feelings."

"Let's be like the sun",
"Journal for All", November 1902.

Collections "In the vastness" (1895) and "Silence. Lyric Poems" (1898) were marked by an active search for "new space, new freedom". The main ideas for these books were the ideas of the transience of being and the variability of the world. The author paid increased attention to the technique of verse, demonstrating a clear passion for sound writing and musicality. Symbolism in his understanding was primarily a means of searching for "new combinations of thoughts, colors and sounds", a method of building "from the sounds, syllables and words of his native speech a treasured chapel, where everything is full of profound meaning and penetration." Symbolic poetry “speaks in its own special language, and this language is rich in intonations, like music and painting, it excites a complex mood in the soul, more than any other kind of poetry, it touches our sound and visual impressions,” Balmont wrote in the book “Mountain Peaks” . The poet also shared the idea, which was part of the general system of symbolist views, that the sound matter of a word is invested with a high meaning; like any materiality, - "represents from the spiritual substance."

The presence of new, "Nietzschean" motives and heroes ("spontaneous genius", "unlike a person", torn "beyond the limits" and even "beyond - both truth and lies") critics noted already in the collection "Silence". It is believed that Silence is the best of Balmont's first three books. “It seemed to me that the collection bears the imprint of an increasingly stronger style. Your own, Balmont style and color,” Prince Urusov wrote to the poet in 1898. The impressions from the travels of 1896-1897, which occupied a significant place in the book (“Dead Ships”, “Chords”, “In front of the El Greco Painting”, “In Oxford”, “Near Madrid”, “To Shelley”) were not simple descriptions, but they expressed the desire to get used to the spirit of a foreign or bygone civilization, a foreign country, to identify themselves "either with a novice of Brahma, or with some priest from the country of the Aztecs." “I merge with everyone every moment,” Balmont declared. “The poet is an element. He likes to take on the most diverse faces, and in each face he is self-identical. He clings lovingly to everything, and everything enters his soul, like the sun, moisture and air enter a plant… The poet is open to the world…”, he wrote.

At the turn of the century, the general tone of Balmont's poetry changed dramatically: moods of despondency and hopelessness gave way to bright colors, imagery, filled with "frantic joy, the pressure of violent forces." Beginning in 1900, the “elegiac” hero of Balmont turned into his own opposite: an active personality, “almost with orgiastic passion affirming in this world the aspiration to the Sun, fire, light”; a special place in the Balmont hierarchy of images was occupied by Fire as a manifestation of cosmic forces. Being for some time the leader of the “new poetry”, Balmont willingly formulated its principles: symbolist poets, in his words, “are fanned by breaths coming from the realm of the beyond”, they, “recreating materiality with their complex impressionability, rule over the world and penetrate into his mysteries.

The collections Burning Buildings (1900) and Let's Be Like the Sun (1902), as well as the book Only Love (1903), are considered the strongest in Balmont's literary heritage. Researchers noted the presence of prophetic notes here, regarding the image of “burning buildings” as a symbol of “alarm in the air, a sign of impulse, movement” (“Scream of the Sentinel”). The main motives here were "sunshine", the desire for constant renewal, the thirst to "stop the moment". “When you listen to Balmont, you always listen to spring,” wrote A. A. Blok. An essentially new factor in Russian poetry was Balmont's erotica. The poems “She surrendered herself without reproach ...” and “I want to be bold ...” became his most popular works; they taught “if not to love, then, in any case, to write about love in a ‘new’ spirit.” And yet, recognizing in Balmont the leader of symbolism, the researchers noted: “the mask of elemental genius adopted by him, egocentrism, reaching narcissism, on the one hand, and eternal sun worship, fidelity to a dream, the search for beauty and perfection, on the other, allow us to speak of him as about a neo-romantic poet. After Burning Buildings, both critics and readers began to perceive Balmont as an innovator who opened up new possibilities for Russian verse, expanding its figurativeness. Many drew attention to the shocking component of his work: almost frenzied expressions of determination and energy, craving for the use of "dagger words". Prince AI Urusov called "Burning Buildings" a "psychiatric document." E. V. Anichkov regarded Balmont’s program collections as “moral, artistic and simply physical liberation from the former mournful school of Russian poetry, which tied poetry to the hardships of the native public.” It was noted that "proud optimism, the life-affirming pathos of Balmont's lyrics, the desire for freedom from the shackles imposed by society, and a return to the fundamental principles of being" were perceived by readers "not just as an aesthetic phenomenon, but as a new worldview."

Fairy Tales (1905) - a collection of children's fairy tale songs-stylizations, dedicated to daughter Nina, received high marks from contemporaries. “In Fairy Tales, the spring of Balmont's creativity again beats with a stream of clear, crystal, melodious. In these "children's songs" everything that is most valuable in his poetry came to life, what was given to it as a heavenly gift, in which is its best eternal glory. These are gentle, airy songs that create their own music. They look like the silver ringing of pensive bells, "narrow-bottomed, multi-colored on a stamen under the window," wrote Valery Bryusov.

Among the best “foreign” poems, critics noted the cycle of poems about Egypt “Extinct Volcanoes”, “Memories of an Evening in Amsterdam”, noted by Maxim Gorky, “Quiet” (about the islands in the Pacific Ocean) and “Iceland”, which Bryusov highly appreciated. Being in constant search for "new combinations of thoughts, colors and sounds" and the approval of "striking" images, the poet believed that he was creating "lyrics of the modern soul", a soul that has "many faces". Transferring heroes in time and space, over many eras (“Scythians”, “Oprichniki”, “In the Dead Days” and so on), he affirmed the image of a “spontaneous genius”, “superman” (“Oh, bliss to be strong and proud and forever free!" - "Albatross").

One of the fundamental principles of Balmont's philosophy in the years of his creative heyday was the affirmation of the equality of the sublime and the base, the beautiful and the ugly, characteristic of the decadent worldview as a whole. A significant place in the poet's work was occupied by the "reality of conscience", in which a kind of war against integrity took place, the polarization of opposing forces, their "justification" ("The whole world must be justified / So that one can live! ..", "But I love the unaccountable, and delight, and shame. / And the space of the marsh, and the height of the mountains"). Balmont could admire the scorpion with its "pride and desire for freedom", bless the cripples, "crooked cacti", "snakes and lizards outcast childbirth." At the same time, the sincerity of Balmont's "demonism", expressed in demonstrative submission to the elements of passions, was not questioned. According to Balmont, the poet is "an inspired demigod", "the genius of a melodious dream".

Balmont's poetic creativity was spontaneous and subject to the dictates of the moment. In the miniature “How I Write Poems,” he admitted: “... I don’t think about poetry and, really, I never compose.” Once written, he never corrected, did not edit, believing that the first impulse is the most correct, he wrote continuously, and very much. The poet believed that only a moment, always the one and only, reveals the truth, makes it possible to “see the far distance” (“I don’t know wisdom suitable for others, / I put only transiences into verse. / In each fleetingness I see worlds, / Full of changeable rainbow play"). Balmont's wife E. A. Andreeva also wrote about this: “He lived in the moment and was content with it, not embarrassed by the colorful change of moments, if only to express them more fully and more beautifully. He either sang of Evil, then Good, then he leaned towards paganism, then he bowed before Christianity. She told how one day, noticing from the window of the apartment a cart of hay riding down the street, Balmont immediately created the poem “In the Capital”; how suddenly the sound of raindrops falling from the roof gave rise to completed stanzas in him. Self-characterization: “I am a cloud, I am a breath of a breeze,” given in the book “Under the Northern Sky”, Balmont tried to match until the end of his life.

Portrait of Balmont by Nikolai Ulyanov (1909)
Despite the fact that the Soviet literary criticism of Balmont's work bypassed, the figure of the poet intrigued many. So, Balmont and his younger brother Mikhail, the Omsk magistrate, became the heroes of Leonid Martynov's poem "Poetry as Magic" (1939). The poem is based on the historical fact of the writer's arrival in Omsk in 1916.

Many found the melodic repetition technique developed by Balmont to be unusually effective (“I dreamed of catching the departing shadows. / The departing shadows of the fading day. / I climbed the tower, and the steps trembled, / And the steps trembled under my foot”). It was noted that Balmont was able to “repeat a single word in such a way that a bewitching power awakened in it” (“But even at the hour before drowsiness, between the rocks of the native again / I will see the sun, the sun, the sun is red like blood”). Balmont developed his own style of colorful epithet, introduced into wide use such nouns as “lights”, “dusks”, “smoke”, “bottomless”, “transience”, continued, following the traditions of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Gnedich, experiment with merging individual epithets in clusters (“joyfully-expanded rivers”, “their every look is calculated-truthful”, “the trees are so gloomy-strangely silent”). Not everyone accepted these innovations, but Innokenty Annensky, objecting to Balmont's critics, argued that his “refinement ... is far from pretentiousness. A rare poet so freely and easily solves the most complex rhythmic problems and, avoiding banality, is as alien to artificiality as Balmont is, "equally alien to provincialism and Fet's German stylelessness." According to the critic, it was this poet who “brought out of the numbness of singular forms” a whole series of abstractions, which in his interpretation “lit up and became more airy”.

Everyone, even skeptics, noted the rare musicality that sounded in sharp contrast to the “anemic magazine poetry” of the end of the previous century as an undoubted merit of his poems. As if re-discovering before the reader the beauty and inherent value of the word, its, in the words of Annensky, "musical potency", Balmont largely corresponded to the motto proclaimed by Paul Verlaine: "Music is first of all." Valery Bryusov, who in the early years was strongly influenced by Balmont, wrote that Balmont fell in love with all lovers of poetry "with his sonorous melodious verse", that "there were no equals to Balmont in the art of verse in Russian literature." “I have a calm conviction that before me, in general, they didn’t know how to write sonorous poetry in Russia,” such was the poet’s brief assessment of his own contribution to literature made in those years.

Along with the merits, contemporary critics of Balmont found many shortcomings in his work. Yu. I. Aikhenvald called Balmont’s work uneven, who, along with poems, “which are captivating with the musical flexibility of their size, the richness of their psychological range,” found in the poet “such stanzas that are verbose and unpleasantly noisy, even dissonant, which are far from poetry and reveal breakthroughs and gaps in rational, rhetorical prose. According to Dmitry Mirsky, "most of what he wrote can be safely discarded as unnecessary, including all the poems after 1905, and all prose without exception - the most languid, pompous and meaningless in Russian literature." Although “in terms of sound, Balmont really surpassed all Russian poets,” he is also distinguished by “a complete lack of a sense of the Russian language, which, apparently, is explained by the Westernizing nature of his poetry. His poems sound foreign. Even the best ones sound like translations.”

The researchers noted that Balmont's poetry, built on spectacular verbal and musical consonances, conveyed the atmosphere and mood well, but at the same time the drawing, the plasticity of images suffered, the outlines of the depicted object were foggy and blurred. It was noted that the novelty of poetic means, which Balmont was proud of, was only relative. “Balmont’s verse is a verse of our past, improved, refined, but, in essence, all the same,” wrote Valery Bryusov in 1912. The declared “desire to get used to the spirit of a foreign or bygone civilization, a foreign country” was interpreted by some as a claim to universality; it was believed that the latter is a consequence of the lack of "a single creative core in the soul, the lack of integrity, which many and many symbolists suffered from." Andrei Bely spoke of "the pettiness of his 'daring'", "the ugliness of his 'freedom'", a tendency to "constant lies to himself, which has already become the truth for his soul." Later, Vladimir Mayakovsky called Balmont and Igor Severyanin "molasses manufacturers."

Innokenty Annensky about Balmont

The defiantly narcissistic revelations of the poet shocked the literary community; he was accused of arrogance and narcissism. Among those who stood up for him was one of the ideologists of symbolism, Innokenty Annensky, who (in particular, regarding one of the most “egocentric” poems “I am the sophistication of Russian slow speech ...”) reproached criticism for bias, believing that it "may seem like delusions of grandeur only to those people who do not want to see this form of insanity behind the banality of romantic formulas." Annensky suggested that "Mr. Balmont's 'I' is not personal and not collective, but, above all, our I, only recognized and expressed by Balmont." “The verse is not the creation of the poet, it does not even belong to the poet, if you like. The verse is inseparable from the lyrical self, it is its connection with the world, its place in nature; maybe his justification,” the critic explained, adding: “The new verse is strong in its love for itself and for others, and narcissism appears here as if to replace the classic poets’ pride in their merits.” Arguing that "I Balmont lives, in addition to the power of my aesthetic love, with two absurdities - the absurdity of integrity and the absurdity of justification", Annensky cited the poem "Distant close" as an example (Your reasoning is alien to me: "Christ", "Antichrist", "Devil" , "God" ...), noting the presence in it of internal polemicism, which "already in itself decomposes the integrity of perceptions."

According to Annensky, it was Balmont who was one of the first in Russian poetry to begin the study of the dark world of the unconscious, which was first pointed out in the last century by the "great visionary" Edgar Allan Poe. To a common reproach against Balmont regarding the “immorality” of his lyrical hero, Annensky remarked: “... Balmont wants to be both bold and courageous, hate, admire crime, combine the executioner with the victim ...”, because “tenderness and femininity - that’s basic and, so to speak, defining properties of his poetry. These “properties” explained the critic and the “comprehensiveness” of the poet’s worldview: “Balmont’s poetry has everything you want: Russian tradition, and Baudelaire, and Chinese theology, and the Flemish landscape in Rodenbach’s illumination, and Ribeira, and the Upanishads, and Agura- Mazda, and Scottish saga, and folk psychology, and Nietzsche, and Nietzscheanism. And at the same time, the poet always lives wholeheartedly in what he writes, what his verse is in love with at the present moment, which is equally unfaithful to anything.

Creativity 1905-1909

The pre-revolutionary period of Balmont's work ended with the release of the collection Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental Hymns" (1905), the main motives of which were the challenge and reproach of modernity, "the curse of people" who, according to the poet, have fallen away "from the fundamental principles of Being", Nature and the Sun, who have lost their original integrity ("We tore, split the living unity of all elements"; "People have fallen out of love with the Sun, we must return them to the Sun"). Balmont’s poems of 1905-1907, presented in two collections banned in Russia, “Poems” (1906) and “Songs of the Avenger” (Paris, 1907), denounced the “beast of the autocracy”, “blasphemy-cultural” petty bourgeoisie, glorified “conscious brave workers” and in general they were extremely radical. By contemporary poets, as later by researchers of creativity, this "political period" in the work of Balmont was not highly rated. “In what an unfortunate hour it occurred to Balmont that he could be a singer of social and political relations, a civil singer of modern Russia! .. A three-kopeck book published by the Knowledge Association makes a painful impression. There is not a penny of poetry here,” wrote Valery Bryusov.

During these years, the national theme also appeared in the poet's work, revealing itself from a peculiar angle: Balmont revealed to the reader "epic" Rus', the legends and tales of which he sought to shift in his own, modern way. The poet's fascination with Slavic antiquity was reflected in the poetry collection "Evil Spells" (1906), the books "The Firebird. Pipe of a Slav" (1907) and "Green Heliport. Kissing Words (1909), where poetically processed folklore stories and texts were presented, including sectarian songs, enchanting spells and Khlyst's "zeal" (in which, from the poet's point of view, the "people's mind" was reflected), as well as the collection "Calls of Antiquity ” with its samples of “primary creativity” of non-Slavic peoples, ritual-magical and priestly poetry. Folklore experiments of the poet, who undertook to transpose epics and folk tales in a “decadent” manner, met with a generally negative reaction from critics, were regarded as “obviously unsuccessful and false stylizations reminiscent of a toy neo-Russian style” in painting and architecture of that time. Alexander Blok already in 1905 wrote about the "excessive spice" of Balmont's poems, Bryusov emphasized that Balmont's epic heroes are "ridiculous and pitiful" in the "decadent's coat". Blok wrote about his new poems in 1909: “This is almost exclusively ridiculous nonsense ... At best, it looks like some kind of nonsense in which, with great effort, you can catch (or invent) a shaky lyrical meaning ... there is a wonderful Russian poet Balmont , and the new poet Balmont is no more.

In the collections “Birds in the air. Melodious lines "(St. Petersburg, 1908) and" Round dance of times. Publicity ”(M., 1909), criticism noted the uniformity of themes, images and techniques; Balmont was reproached for remaining a prisoner of the old, Symbolist canons. The so-called "Balmontisms" ("sunny", "kissing", "luxuriant" and so on) in the new cultural and social atmosphere caused bewilderment and irritation. Subsequently, it was recognized that, objectively, the poet's work declined and it lost the significance that it had at the beginning of the century.

Late Balmont

K. D. Balmont. Drawing by M. A. Voloshin. 1900s

Balmont's work of 1910-1914 was largely marked by impressions from numerous and lengthy trips - in particular, to Egypt ("The Land of Osiris", 1914), as well as to the islands of Oceania, where, as it seemed to the poet, he found really happy people, not lost their immediacy and "purity". Balmont popularized oral traditions, tales and legends of the peoples of Oceania in Russian for a long time, in particular, in the collection “The White Architect. The Mystery of the Four Lamps" (1914). During these years, criticism mainly wrote about his creative "sunset"; the novelty factor of the Balmont style ceased to operate, the technique remained the same and, according to many, was reborn into a stamp. The books The Glow of the Dawn (1912) and Ash. Vision of the tree" (1916), but they also noted "tedious monotony, lethargy, banal prettiness - a sign of all of Balmont's late lyrics."

Creativity Balmont in exile received mixed reviews. The poet's contemporaries considered this period to be decadent: "... That Balmont's verse seems discordant to us, which deceived with a new melodiousness," V. V. Nabokov wrote about him. Later researchers noted that in books published after 1917, Balmont also showed new, strong sides of his talent. “Balmont’s later poems are more naked, simpler, more humane and more accessible than what he wrote before. They are most often about Russia, and that Balmont’s “Slavic gilding” that Innokenty Annensky once mentioned is more clearly visible in them, ”wrote the poet Nikolai Bannikov. He also noted that "Balmont's peculiarity - to throw, as it were, casually some inspired, rarely beautiful individual lines" - manifested itself in emigre creativity as vividly as ever. Such poems as "Dune Pines" and "Russian Language" are called "little masterpieces" by the critic. It was noted that the representative of the “older” generation of Russian symbolists, “buried alive by many as a poet”, Balmont in those years sounded in a new way: “In his poems ... there are no longer“ transient ”, but genuine, deep feelings: anger, bitterness, despair. The capricious “whimsinesses” characteristic of his work are superseded by a feeling of great general misfortune, the pretentious “beautifulness” - by the severity and clarity of expression.

The evolution of the worldview

In ideological and philosophical terms, Balmont's early work was considered largely secondary: his fascination with the ideas of "brotherhood, honor, freedom" was a tribute to the general mood of the poetic community. The dominant themes of his work were the Christian feeling of compassion, admiration for the beauty of religious shrines (“There is only beauty in the world - / Love, sorrow, renunciation / And voluntary torment / Christ crucified for us”). There is an opinion that, having become a professional translator, Balmont fell under the influence of the literature he translated. Gradually, the “Christian-democratic” dreams of a bright future began to seem outdated to him, Christianity lost its former attractiveness, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the works of Henrik Ibsen with their vivid imagery (“towers”, “construction”, “ascent” to the heights) found a warm response in the soul. peace). Valery Bryusov, whom Balmont met in 1894, wrote in his diary that Balmont "called Christ a lackey, a philosopher for the poor."

No, I don't want to cry forever. No, I want to be free. Free from weaknesses must be the one who wants to stand on top ...<...>To rise to the top means to be above oneself. Climbing up is rebirth. I know you can't always be on top. But I will return to the people, I will go down to tell what I saw above. In due time I will return to the abandoned, and now - let me embrace loneliness for a moment, let me breathe in the free wind!

K. Balmont. "At the height", 1895

Balmont's poetry began to be dominated by "demonic" ideas and moods, which gradually took possession of him in real life. Having become close with S. A. Polyakov, the poet received significant funds at his disposal and embarked on a spree, an important part of which was romantic “victories”, which had a somewhat sinister, pagan connotation. N. Petrovskaya, who fell into the zone of attraction of Balmont’s “charms”, but soon left it under the influence of Bryusov’s “fields”, recalled: “... It was necessary ... or to become a companion of his“ crazy nights ”, throwing all your being into these monstrous fires, up to and including health, or go to the staff of his “myrrh-bearing women”, humbly following on the heels of the triumphal chariot, speaking in unison only about him, breathing only the incense of his glory and leaving even their hearths, beloveds and husbands for this great mission ... "

Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron about Balmont

"Demonic" moods in Balmont's poetry were characterized by contemporary criticism of the poet:
A whole collection of witches, incubi and succubus devils, vampires crawling out of the coffins of the dead, monstrous toads, chimeras, etc. defile before the dumbfounded reader. The poet is in the closest communication with all this venerable company; believe him, because he himself is a real monster. He not only “fell in love with his debauchery”, he not only consists of “tiger passions”, “serpentine feelings and thoughts” - he is a direct worshiper of the devil:

If somewhere, beyond the world
Someone wise rules the world
Why is my spirit, a vampire,
Satan sings and praises.

How Balmont himself perceived his own life of those years can be judged from his correspondence with Bryusov. One of the constant themes of these letters was the proclamation of one's own uniqueness, elevation above the world. But the poet also felt horror at what was happening: “Valery, dear, write to me, do not leave me, I am so tormented. If only I had the strength to talk about the power of the Devil, about the jubilant horror that I bring into my life! Do not want anymore. I play with Madness and Madness plays with me” (from a letter dated April 15, 1902). The poet described his next meeting with a new lover, E. Tsvetkovskaya, in a letter dated July 26, 1903: “... Elena came to St. Petersburg. I saw her, but ran away to a brothel. I like brothels. Then I lay on the floor, in a fit of hysterical stubbornness. Then I fled again to another temple of the Sabbath, where many virgins sang songs to me ... E. came for me and took me completely distraught to Merrecule, where for several days and nights I was in the hell of nightmares and daydreams, such that my eyes frightened the onlookers ... ".

Traveling around the world in many ways strengthened Balmont in his rejection of Christianity. “Cursed be the Conquerors who do not spare stone. I don't feel sorry for the mutilated bodies, I don't feel sorry for the dead. But to see a vile Christian cathedral on the site of an ancient temple where they prayed to the Sun, but to know that it stands on monuments of mysterious art buried in the ground, ”he wrote from Mexico to Bryusov. It is believed that the extreme point of the "poet's fall into the abyss" was marked by the collection "Evil Spells": after that, in his spiritual development, a gradual return to the "bright beginning" began. Boris Zaitsev, describing the poet's worldview, wrote: "Of course, self-admiration, the lack of a sense of God and one's smallness before Him, but some kind of sunshine lived in him, light and natural musicality." Zaitsev considered the poet "a pagan, but a worshiper of the light" (unlike Bryusov), noting: "... there were real Russian features in him ... and he himself was touching (in good times)."

The upheavals of 1917-1920 led to radical changes in the poet's worldview. The first evidence of this appeared already in the collection “Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon” (1917), where the new Balmont appeared before the reader: “there is still a lot of pretentiousness in him, but still more spiritual balance, which harmoniously merges into the perfect form of the sonnet, and the main thing is that it is clear that the poet is no longer torn into the abyss - he is groping for the way to God. The inner rebirth of the poet was also facilitated by his friendship with I.S. Shmelev, which arose in exile. As Zaitsev wrote, Balmont, who always "paganly worshiped life, its joys and brilliance", confessing before his death, made a deep impression on the priest with the sincerity and power of repentance: he "considered himself an incorrigible sinner who cannot be forgiven."

Translation activities

The range of foreign literatures and authors translated by Balmont was extremely wide. In 1887-1889, he was mainly engaged in translations of Western European poets - Heinrich Heine, Nikolaus Lenau, Alfred Musset, Sully-Prudhomme). A trip to the Scandinavian countries (1892) marked the beginning of his new passion, which was realized in the translations of Georg Brandes, Henrik Ibsen, Bjornstjerne Bjornson.

Almanac publishing house "Vulture", 1904, ed. S. A. Sokolov-Krechetov.

In 1893-1899, Balmont published in seven editions the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in his own translation with an introductory article. In 1903-1905, the Znanie partnership published their revised and expanded edition in three volumes. More artistically successful and subsequently recognized as textbook translations by Edgar Allan Poe were published in 1895 in two volumes and later included in the collected works of 1901.

Balmont translated nine dramas by Pedro Calderon (first edition - 1900); among his other famous translation works are “Cat Murr” by E. T. Hoffmann (St. Petersburg, 1893), “Salome” and “The Ballad of Reading Prison” by Oscar Wilde (Moscow, 1904). He also translated Spanish poets and playwrights Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, English poets, prose writers, playwrights - William Blake, Oscar Wilde, J. G. Byron, A. Tennyson, J. Milton - poems by C. Baudelaire. His translations of Horn's History of Scandinavian Literature (M., 1894) and Gaspari's History of Italian Literature (M., 1895-1997) are considered important for literary criticism. Under the editorship of Balmont, the works of Gerhart Hauptmann (1900 and later), the works of Herman Zudermann (1902-1903), Muther's "History of Painting" (St. Petersburg, 1900-1904) were published. Balmont, who studied the Georgian language after a trip to Georgia in 1914, is the author of the translation of Shota Rustaveli's poem "The Knight in the Panther's Skin"; he himself considered it the best love poem ever written in Europe ("a bridge of fire that connects heaven and earth"). After visiting Japan in 1916, he translated tanka and haiku from various Japanese authors, from ancient to modern.

Not all of Balmont's works were highly rated. Serious critics criticized his translations of Ibsen (Ghosts, Moscow, 1894), Hauptmann (Gannele, The Sunken Bell) and Walt Whitman (Grass Shoots, 1911). Analyzing the translations of Shelley made by Balmont, Korney Chukovsky called the resulting “new face”, half-Shelley, half-Balmont, called Shelmont. Nevertheless, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron states that "the fact of the sole translation of several tens of thousands of rhymed poems by the poet, as complex and deep as Shelley, can be called a feat in the field of Russian poetic translation literature."

According to M. I. Voloshin, “Balmont translated Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Calderon, Walt Witman, Spanish folk songs, Mexican sacred books, Egyptian hymns, Polynesian myths, Balmont knows twenty languages, Balmont translated entire libraries of Oxford, Brussels, Paris, Madrid ... All this is not true, because the works of all poets were for him only a mirror, in which he saw only a reflection of his own face in different frames, from all languages ​​​​he created one, his own, and the gray dust of libraries on his light wings of Ariel turns into the iridescent dust of butterfly wings.

Indeed, the poet never strived for accuracy in translations: it was important for him to convey the "spirit" of the original, as he felt it. Moreover, he compared the translation with a "reflection" and believed that it could be "more beautiful and radiant" than the original:

To give artistic equivalence in translation is never an impossible task. A work of art, in its essence, is single and unique in its face. One can only give something approaching more or less. Sometimes you give an exact translation, but the soul disappears, sometimes you give a free translation, but the soul remains. Sometimes the translation is accurate, and the soul remains in it. But, speaking in general, poetic translation is only an echo, a response, an echo, a reflection. As a rule, the echo is poorer than the sound, the echo reproduces only partially the voice that awakened it, but sometimes, in the mountains, in caves, in vaulted castles, the echo, having arisen, will sing your exclamation seven times, seven times the echo is more beautiful and stronger than the sound. This happens sometimes, but very rarely, and with poetic translations. And the reflection is only a vague reflection of the face. But with the high qualities of the mirror, when finding favorable conditions for its position and illumination, a beautiful face in the mirror becomes more beautiful and radiant in its reflected existence. Echo in the forest is one of the best charms.

K. D. Balmont

Oscar Wilde. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". Translation by K. D. Balmont; Cover by Modest Durnov. Scorpio, 1904.

Balmont always treated Russia as an integral part of the all-Slavic world. “I am a Slav and I will continue to be,” the poet wrote in 1912. Experiencing a special love for Poland, he translated a lot from Polish - in particular, the works of Adam Mickiewicz, Stanislaw Wyspiansky, Zygmunt Krasinsky, Boleslaw Lesmian, Jan Kasprowicz, Jan Lechon, wrote a lot about Poland and Polish poetry. Later, in the 1920s, Balmont translated Czech poetry (Yaroslav Vrkhlitsky, Selected Poems. Prague, 1928), Bulgarian ("Golden Sheaf of Bulgarian Poetry. Folk Songs." Sofia, 1930), Serbian, Croatian, Slovak. Balmont also considered Lithuania to be related to the Slavic world: the first translations of Lithuanian folk songs made by him date back to 1908. Among the poets he translated were Petras Babickas, Mykolas Vaitkus and Ludas Gira; Balmont had a close friendship with the latter. Balmont's book Northern Lights. Poems about Lithuania and Rus'” was published in 1931 in Paris.

By 1930, Balmont translated The Tale of Igor's Campaign (Russia and Slavdom, 1930. No. 81) into modern Russian, dedicating his work to Professor N. K. Kulman. The professor himself, in the article “The Fate of the Tale of Igor's Campaign”, published in the same issue of the magazine “Russia and Slavdom”, wrote that Balmont, who turned out to be “closer to the original than any of his predecessors”, managed to reflect in his translation, “the conciseness, chasing of the original ... to convey all the colors, sounds, movement that the Lay is so rich in, its bright lyricism, the majesty of the epic parts ... to feel in your translation the national idea of ​​the Lay and that love for the motherland that burned it author". Balmont spoke about working with Kulman on the translation of The Tale of Igor's Campaign in the article Joy. (Letter from France)”, published in the newspaper “Segodnya”.

Memories and reviews about Balmont

Of all the memoirists, the warmest memories of K. D. Balmont were left by M. I. Tsvetaeva, who was very friendly with the poet. She wrote:

If they gave me to define Balmont in one word, I would, without hesitation, say: Poet ... I would not say this about Yesenin, or Mandelstam, or Mayakovsky, or Gumilyov, or even Blok, because everyone named, there was something else besides the poet in them. More or less, better or worse, but something else. In Balmont, except for the poet in him, there is nothing. Balmont - Poet-adequate. On Balmont - in his every gesture, step, word - the stigma - seal - the star of the poet.

M. I. Tsvetaeva.

The poetic dialogue of the poet with Mirra Lokhvitskaya in the journal of I. I. Yasinsky "Monthly compositions", 1902, January

“I could spend the evenings telling you about the living Balmont, whose devoted eyewitness I had the good fortune to be for nineteen years, about Balmont - completely misunderstood and not imprinted anywhere ... and my whole soul is full of gratitude,” she admitted.

In her memoirs, Tsvetaeva was also critical - in particular, she spoke about the “non-Russianness” of Balmont’s poetry: “In the Russian fairy tale, Balmont is not Ivan Tsarevich, but an overseas guest, scattering all the gifts of heat and seas in front of the royal daughter. I always have the feeling that Balmont speaks some foreign language, which - I don’t know, Balmont’s. A.P. Chekhov wrote about the external side of the same feature, noticing about Balmont that he "... reads very funny, with a broken voice," so that "... it can be difficult to understand him."

B.K. Zaitsev captured the image of Balmont of Moscow - eccentric, spoiled by worship, capricious. “But he was also completely different ... quiet, even sad ... Despite the presence of fans, he kept himself simple - no theater,” the memoirist noted. Roman Gul also spoke about the Moscow period of Balmont's life - however, in his own words, "monstrous things", moreover, from other people's words. I. A. Bunin spoke negatively about Balmont, who saw in the poet a man who "... in his entire long life did not say a single word in simplicity." “Balmont was generally an amazing person. A man who sometimes admired many with his "childishness", unexpected naive laughter, which, however, was always with some demonic cunning, a man in whose nature there was not a little feigned tenderness, "sweetness", to put it in his language, but not a little and not at all the other - wild riot, brutal pugnacity, public insolence. This was a man who, all his life, was truly exhausted from narcissism, was intoxicated with himself ... ”, - wrote Bunin.

In the memoirs of V. S. Yanovsky, Andrei Sedykh and I. V. Odoevtseva, the poet in exile was shown as a living anachronism. Memoirists, for the most part, treated Balmont only with human sympathy, denying his works of the emigre period artistic value. The poet Mikhail Tsetlin, noticing shortly after Balmont’s death that what he had done would have been enough not for one human life, but “for the whole literature of a small people”, complained that the poets of the new generation of Russian emigration “... worshiped Blok, discovered Annensky, loved Sologub , read Khodasevich, but were indifferent to Balmont. He lived in spiritual loneliness."

As E. A. Yevtushenko wrote many years later, “... Balmont had plenty of flirtatious empty sound writing, “beautifulness”. However, poetry was his true love, and he served only her alone - perhaps too priestly, intoxicated by the incense he himself smoked, but selflessly. “There are good poems, excellent poems, but they pass by, they die without a trace. And there are poems that seem banal, but there is a certain radioactivity in them, a special magic. These verses live. These were some of Balmont's poems, ”wrote Teffi.

Balmont - about predecessors and contemporaries

Balmont called Calderon, William Blake and "the most outstanding symbolist" Edgar Allan Poe his symbolist predecessors. In Russia, the poet believed, "symbolism comes from Fet and Tyutchev." Of the contemporary Russian symbolists, Balmont noted primarily Vyacheslav Ivanov, a poet who, in his words, is able to combine "deep philosophical moods with an extraordinary beauty of form", as well as Jurgis Baltrushaitis, Sergei Gorodetsky, Anna Akhmatova, whom he put "on the same level with Mirra Lokhvitskaya", and Fyodor Sologub, calling the latter "the most attractive of modern writers and one of the most talented poets").

Balmont spoke critically of futurism, noting: “I consider the Futurist fermentation that is associated with some new names to be manifestations of inner work seeking a way out, and, mainly, a manifestation of that flashy, tasteless, advertising Americanism that marked our entire broken Russian life. ". In another interview of the same time, the poet spoke about this trend even more sharply:

What I know from futuristic literature is so illiterate that it is impossible to speak of futurism as a literary movement. I didn’t take anything out of Russian Futurism: it contains miserable attempts, flat and arrogant speeches and incessant scandals. In Italy, Futurism is moderate, because there the stamp of completeness is imposed on all trends in art ... Russian Futurists "monkey" with Italian Futurism. The Russian language is still evolving and is by no means finished yet. We are currently experiencing a turning point. Futurism is interesting in only one respect. He is a vivid spokesman for what is happening before our eyes.

K. Balmont in an interview with the newspaper "Vilna Courier", 1914

Speaking about the Russian classics, the poet mentioned, first of all, F. M. Dostoevsky - the only Russian writer, along with A. S. Pushkin and A. A. Fet, who had a strong influence on him. “True, lately I have moved away from him: to me, who believes in solar harmony, his gloomy moods have become alien,” he said in 1914. Balmont personally met with Leo Tolstoy; “It's like an untold confession,” he described his impressions of the meeting in this way. However, “I don’t like Tolstoy as a novelist, and I love him even less as a philosopher,” he said already in 1914. Among the classical writers closest to him in spirit, Balmont named Gogol and Turgenev; Among contemporary fiction writers, Boris Zaitsev was noted as a writer "with subtle moods".

Balmont and Mirra Lokhvitskaya

In Russia, before emigrating, Balmont had two truly close people. The poet wrote about one of them, V. Ya. Bryusov, as “the only person he needed” in Russia. I wrote to him often and waited impatiently for his letters, ”testified E. A. Andreeva-Balmont. Balmont's arrival in Moscow ended in a spat. Andreeva gave her explanation on this matter in her memoirs: “I have reason to think that Bryusov was jealous of his wife, Ioanna Matveevna, of Balmont, who, having been captivated by her, did not think, as always, to hide his enthusiasm either from his wife or from husband ... But I can’t say.” However, there was reason to believe that the stumbling block in the relationship between the two poets was another woman, whom Balmont's second wife preferred not to even mention in her memoirs.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya
It is still considered to be her "unsuccessful imitator" of Balmont, but this is far from the truth. It is known that even the famous poem by Balmont "I want" -
I want to be bold, I want to be bold
Twist wreaths from juicy bunches,
I want to get drunk on a luxurious body,
I want to rip off your clothes
I want the heat of a satin chest,
We merge two desires into one ...
- was secondary, being a belated response to the "Bacchic Song" by Mirra Lokhvitskaya.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya became the second close friend of Balmont in the late 1890s. The details of their personal relationship are undocumented: the only surviving source is the two poets' own confessions in verse, published in the course of an overt or covert dialogue that lasted almost a decade. Balmont and Lokhvitskaya met presumably in 1895 in the Crimea. Lokhvitskaya, a married woman with children and by that time more famous than Balmont, a poetess, was the first to start a poetic dialogue, which gradually developed into a stormy "novel in verse." In addition to direct dedications, the researchers subsequently discovered many “half” poems, the meaning of which became clear only when compared (Balmont: “... The sun makes its boring path. Something prevents the heart from breathing ...” - Lokhvitskaya: “The winter sun has made a silver path. Happy - who can rest on a sweet chest ... ”and so on).

After three years, Lokhvitskaya began to consciously complete the Platonic novel, realizing that there could be no continuation of it in reality. On her part, a kind of sign of the break was the poem “In the sarcophagus” (in the spirit of “Annabel-Lee”: “I dreamed - you and I were dozing in the sarcophagus, / Listening to how the surf beats a wave against stones. / And our names burned in a wonderful sage / Two stars merged into one"). Balmont wrote several responses to this poem, in particular one of the most famous, "Inseparable" ("... Frozen corpses, we lived in the consciousness of a curse, / What's in the grave - in the grave! - we are in a vile pose of hugs ...").

As T. Aleksandrova noted, Lokhvitskaya “made the choice of a man of the 19th century: the choice of duty, conscience, responsibility before God”; Balmont made the choice of the 20th century: "the most complete satisfaction of the growing needs." His verse appeals did not stop, but frank confessions in them now gave way to threats. Lokhvitskaya’s health condition worsened, heart problems arose, she continued to respond to Balmont’s new poems with “painful constancy”. This strong, but at the same time destructive connection, which plunged both poets into a deep personal crisis, was put to an end by the early death of Lokhvitskaya in 1905. Her literary romance with Balmont remained one of the most mysterious phenomena of Russian literary life at the beginning of the 20th century. For many years the poet continued to admire the poetic talent of his beloved, who died early, and told Anna Akhmatova that before meeting her he knew only two poetesses: Sappho and Mirra Lokhvitskaya.

Balmont and Maxim Gorky

The correspondence acquaintance of the poet with Gorky took place on September 10, 1896, when the latter in the feuilleton of the cycle "Fugitive Notes", published by "Nizhny Novgorod Listok", first spoke about Balmont's poems. Drawing a parallel between the author of the collection “In the Boundlessness” and Zinaida Gippius (“Beyond”), the author ironically advised both to go “beyond the limit, to the abyss of bright immensity”. Gradually, Gorky's opinion about the poet began to change: he liked such poems as "The Smith", "Albatross", "Memories of an Evening in Amsterdam". Gorky left a second review of the poet in the same newspaper on November 14, 1900. In turn, the poems "Witch", "Spring" and "Roadside Herbs" in the journal "Life" (1900) Balmont published with a dedication to Gorky.

Balmont and Maeterlinck

The Moscow Art Theater instructed Balmont to negotiate with Maurice Maeterlinck on the production of his The Blue Bird. The poet told Teffi about this episode:

He did not let me in for a long time, and the servant ran from me to him and disappeared somewhere in the depths of the house. Finally, the servant let me into some tenth room, completely empty. A fat dog was sitting on a chair. Maeterlinck stood next to him. I outlined the proposal of the Art Theatre. Maeterlinck was silent. I repeated. He continued to be silent. Then the dog barked and I left. Taffy. Memories.

Gorky and Balmont first met in the autumn of 1901 in Yalta. Together with Chekhov, they went to Gaspra to see Leo Tolstoy, who lived there. “I met Balmont. This neurasthenic is devilishly interesting and talented! .. ”, Gorky wrote in one of his letters. Gorky credited Balmont with the fact that he, as he believed, "cursed, doused the poison of contempt ... a fussy, aimless life, full of cowardice and lies, covered with faded words, the dull life of half-dead people." Balmont, in turn, appreciated the writer for being "a complete strong personality, ... a songbird, not an inky soul." In the early 1900s, Gorky, in his own words, undertook to set the poet "in a democratic way." He attracted Balmont to participate in the Znanie publishing house, defended the poet when the press began to ridicule his revolutionary hobbies, cooperation with Bolshevik publications. Balmont, who for some time succumbed to “tuning”, admitted in 1901: “I was sincere with you all the time, but too often incomplete. How difficult it is for me to free myself at once - both from the false, and from the dark, and from my inclination towards madness, towards excessive madness. There was no real rapprochement between Gorky and Balmont. Gradually, Gorky spoke more and more critically about the work of Balmont, believing that in the latter's poetry everything is directed towards sonority to the detriment of social motives: “What is Balmont? This belfry is high and patterned, and the bells on it are all small ... Isn't it time to ring the big ones? Considering Balmont a master of the language, the writer made a reservation: "A great poet, of course, but a slave to words that intoxicate him."

The final break between Gorky and Balmont occurred after the poet's departure to France in 1920. By the end of this decade, the main pathos of the poet's denunciations related to the infringement of rights and freedoms in Soviet Russia turned out to be directed at Gorky. In the emigrant newspapers Vozrozhdenie, Segodnya and Za Svoboda! Balmont's article “Petishite Peshkov. By pseudonym: Gorky" with sharp criticism of the writer. The poet ended his poetic “Open Letter to Gorky” (“You threw a stone at the face of the Native People. / Your treacherously criminal hand / Lays down your own sin on the peasant’s shoulders ...”) the poet ended with the question: “... And who is stronger in you: a blind man or just a liar? » Gorky, in turn, made serious accusations against Balmont, who, according to his version, wrote a cycle of bad pseudo-revolutionary poems "Hammer and Sickle" for the sole purpose of obtaining permission to travel abroad, and having achieved his goal, declared himself an enemy of Bolshevism and allowed himself "hasty" statements, which, as the writer believed, had a fatal effect on the fate of many Russian poets who vainly hoped in those days to get permission to leave: among them were called Bely, Blok, Sologub. In a polemical fervor, Gorky spoke of Balmont as a stupid person and, due to alcoholism, not quite normal. “As a poet, he is the author of one, really beautiful book of poems “We will be like the sun”. Everything else with him is a very skillful and musical play on words, nothing more.

Balmont and I. S. Shmelev

At the end of 1926, K. D. Balmont, unexpectedly for many, became close to I. S. Shmelev, and this friendship lasted until his death. Before the revolution, they belonged to opposite literary camps (respectively, "decadent" and "realistic") and seemed to have nothing in common with each other, but in emigration, almost immediately, in their protests and public actions, they began to act as a united front.

There were also disagreements between them. Thus, Shmelev did not approve of Balmont's "cosmopolitanism". “Oh, Konstantin Dmitrievich, after all, you have Lithuanians and Finns, and Mexicans. What would be at least one Russian book ... ”, - he said, being at a party. Balmont recalled that, in answering this, he also showed him the Russian books that lay in the room, but this had very little effect on Shmelev. “He is upset that I am multilingual and multi-loving. He would like me to love only Russia,” the poet complained. In turn, Balmont argued with Shmelev more than once - in particular, about Ivan Ilyin’s article on the crisis in contemporary art (“He clearly understands little in poetry and music if ... he says such unacceptable words about the excellent work of the brilliant and enlightened Scriabin, pure Russian and highly illumined Vyacheslav Ivanov, radiant Stravinsky, classically pure Prokofiev…”).

In many ways, the strong spiritual union of two seemingly completely different people was explained by the fundamental changes that took place during the years of emigration in Balmont's worldview; the poet turned to Christian values, which he rejected for many years. In 1930 the poet wrote:

When in 1920 I escaped from the satanic horror of distraught Moscow... my old good friend, and sometimes friend, and sometimes even friend Ivan Alekseevich Bunin came to me with a kind word... and, by the way, brought me the "Inexhaustible Chalice" Shmelev. I vaguely knew Shmelyov's name, I knew that he was talented - and nothing more. I opened this story. “Something Turgenev,” I said. “Read it,” Bunin said in a mysterious voice. Yes, I have read this story. I read it at different times, three and four times. […] I am reading it now in Dutch. This fire cannot be extinguished by any barrier. This light breaks through uncontrollably.

K. Balmont, "Today", 1930

Balmont ardently supported Shmelev, who at times turned out to be a victim of near-literary intrigues, and on this basis he quarreled with the editors of Latest News, which published an article by Georgy Ivanov, who disparaged the novel Love Story. Defending Shmelyov, Balmont wrote that he “of all modern Russian writers has the richest and most original Russian language”; his "Inexhaustible Chalice" stands "on a par with the best stories of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky", and is appreciated - first of all, in countries "accustomed to respecting artistic talent and spiritual purity."

In the difficult 1930s for the poet, friendship with Shmelev remained his main support. “Friend, if it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t be the brightest and most affectionate feeling in my life over the past 8-9 years, there wouldn’t be the most faithful and strong spiritual support and support, during the hours when the tormented soul was ready to break ... ", - Balmont wrote on October 1, 1933.

Works (selected)

Poetry collections

1890 - 1917

• "Collection of poems" (Yaroslavl, 1890)
• "Under the northern sky (elegies, stanzas, sonnets)" (St. Petersburg, 1894)
• "In the vastness of darkness" (M., 1895 and 1896)
• "Silence. Lyric poems "(St. Petersburg, 1898)
• "Burning buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul "(M., 1900)
• “We will be like the sun. The Book of Symbols (Moscow, 1903)
• "Only love. Semitsvetnik" (M., "Vulture", 1903)
• "The Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns "(M., "Vulture", 1905)
• "Fairy Tales (Children's Songs)" (M., "Vulture", 1905)
• "Collected poems" M., 1905; 2nd ed. M., 1908.
• "Evil Spells (Book of Spells)" (M., "Golden Fleece", 1906)
• "Poems" (1906)
• "The Firebird (Svirel Slav)" (M., "Scorpion", 1907)
• "The Liturgy of Beauty (Elemental Hymns)" (1907)
• "Songs of the Avenger" (1907)
• "Three heydays (Theater of youth and beauty)" (1907)
• "Only love". 2nd ed. (1908)
• "Round dance of times (All-glasnost)" (M., 1909)
• "Birds in the Air (Sung Lines)" (1908)
• "Green garden (Kissing words)" (St. Petersburg, Rosehip, 1909)
• "Links. Selected Poems. 1890-1912" (M.: Scorpio, 1913)
• "The White Architect (The Mystery of the Four Lamps)" (1914)
• "Ash (Vision of a tree)" (M., ed. Nekrasov, 1916)
• "Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon" (1917; Berlin, 1921)
• "Collection of Lyrics" (Books 1-2, 4-6. M., 1917-1918)

1920 - 1937

• "Ring" (M., 1920)
• "Seven Poems" (M., "Zadruga", 1920)
• Selected Poems (New York, 1920)
• "Solar thread. Izbornik "(1890-1918) (M., ed. Sabashnikovs, 1921)
• "Gamayun" (Stockholm, "Northern Lights", 1921)
• "Gift to the Earth" (Paris, "Russian Land", 1921)
• "Bright Hour" (Paris, 1921)
• "Song of the working hammer" (M., 1922)
• "Green" (Paris, 1922)
• "Under the new sickle" (Berlin, "Word", 1923)
• "Mine - Her (Russia)" (Prague, "Flame", 1924)
• "In the parted distance (Poem about Russia)" (Belgrade, 1929)
• "Complicity of Souls" (1930)
• "Northern Lights (Poems about Lithuania and Rus')" (Paris, 1931)
• Blue Horseshoe (Poems about Siberia) (1937)
• "Light Service" (Harbin, 1937)

Collections of articles and essays

• "Mountain Peaks" (M., 1904; book one)
• "Calls of antiquity. Hymns, songs and plans of the ancients ”(St. Petersburg: Pantheon,; Berlin, 1923)
• “Snake Flowers” ​​(“Travel Letters from Mexico”, Moscow: Scorpion, 1910)
• "Sea Glow" (1910)
• "Dawn Glow" (1912)
• "Edge of Osiris". Egyptian essays. (M., 1914. - 324 p.)
• Poetry is like magic. (M.: Scorpio, 1915)
• "Light sound in nature and Scriabin's light symphony" (1917)
• "Where is my house?" (Paris, 1924)

Translations of Balmont's works into foreign languages

• Gamelan (Gamelang) - in Doa Penyair. Antologi Puisi sempena Program Bicara Karya dan Baca Puisi eSastera.Com. Kota Bharu, 2005, p. 32 (translated into Malay by Victor Pogadaev).

Memory

• On May 12, 2011, a monument to Konstantin Balmont was unveiled in Vilnius (Lithuania).
• On November 29, 2013, a memorial plaque to Balmont was unveiled in Moscow at 15 Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky lane, building 1 (on the house where he lived for the last five years before leaving abroad). Architect M. Corsi, sculptor A. Taratynov. The relief on the board is made according to the portrait by Valentin Serov in 1905.
• In the city of Krasnogorsk near Moscow (microdistrict Opalikha) there is Balmont Street.
• In August 2015, the Foundation for Public, Cultural and Educational Initiatives named after K. D. Balmont was established in Moscow. Among the main tasks of the Foundation is the popularization of the heritage of outstanding figures of Russian culture, including those undeservedly forgotten. With the assistance of the Foundation, a book was published about love and mutually addressed creativity of K. Balmont and M. Lokhvitskaya “Flying souls have a double flight ...: Poetic roll call” (Compiled and prefaced by T. L. Alexandrova. - M .: Aquarius, 2015-336 p. .). The Foundation is preparing a program of jubilee events for the 150th anniversary of K. D. Balmont in 2017, holds literary evenings and competitions (in particular, on June 15, 2016, with the support of the Department of Labor and Social Protection of Moscow, the competition "Balmont Readings" was held) , is working on a project to create a separate museum of the poet.

Popular biographies

Biography and episodes of life Konstantin Balmont. When born and died Konstantin Balmont, memorable places and dates of important events in his life. poet quotes, images and videos.

Years of life of Konstantin Balmont:

born June 3, 1867, died December 23, 1942

Epitaph

“The sky is in my spiritual depth,
There, far away, barely visible, at the bottom.
It's wonderful and terrible - to go to the beyond,
I'm afraid to look into the abyss of the soul,
It's scary to drown in your depths.
Everything in her merged into an infinite wholeness,
I only sing prayers to my soul,
Only one I love infinity,
my soul!”
From a poem by K. Balmont “There is everything in the souls”

Biography

The star of Russian poetry, Konstantin Balmont, did not achieve fame and recognition immediately. In his creative life there were failures, and mental anguish, and severe crises. Full of romantic ideals, the young man saw himself as a fighter for freedom, a revolutionary, an ascetic, but by no means a poet. Meanwhile, it was his name that gained fame and deserved admiration throughout Russia as the main domestic symbolist poet.

Balmont's work fully reflected his character. Most of all, he was attracted by beauty, music, and the aesthetics of poetry. Many reproached him for being "decorative", for having a shallow view of the world. But Balmont wrote the way he saw it - impetuous, sometimes overly ornate, enthusiastic and even snobbish; but at the same time - melodious, brilliant and always from the very depths of the soul.

The poet really sincerely sympathized with the oppressed position of the Russian people all his life and ranked himself among the revolutionaries. He did not participate in truly revolutionary activities, but more than once attracted close attention to himself with his rebellious antics. Balmont in every possible way approved the overthrow of the tsarist regime and even considered it necessary to leave the country for political emigration after participating in an anti-government rally.

But when the October Revolution took place, Balmont was horrified. The bloody terror shocked him, who returned to his homeland. The poet could not stay in such Russia and emigrated a second time. Life away from his homeland turned out to be very difficult for him: few of the domestic emigrants experienced separation from their beloved country so hard. Moreover, the attitude towards Balmont in the emigrant environment was ambiguous: his past “revolutionary” speeches had not yet been forgotten.

In the last years of his life, Balmont and his family were in desperate need. The poet, by nature prone to exaltation and violent impulses, began to progress mental illness. Konstantin Balmont died of pneumonia. Only a few people attended his funeral.

life line

June 3, 1867 Date of birth of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont.
1884 Leaving the 7th grade of the gymnasium due to participation in an illegal circle. Transfer to the gymnasium in Vladimir.
1885 The first publication of poems by K. Balmont in the St. Petersburg magazine "Picturesque Review".
1886 Admission to the law faculty of Moscow University.
1887 Expulsion from the university, arrest, deportation to Shuya.
1889 Marriage to L. Garelina.
1890 Publication of the first collection of poems at his own expense. Suicide attempt.
1892-1894 Work on translations by P. Shelley and E. A. Poe.
1894 Edition of the poetry collection "Under the northern sky".
1895 Edition of the collection "In the vastness".
1896 Marriage to E. Andreeva. Euro-trip.
1900 Publication of the collection "Burning Buildings", which made the poet famous in Russia.
1901 Participation in a mass student demonstration in St. Petersburg. Expulsion from the capital.
1906-1913 The first political emigration.
1920 Second emigration.
1923 Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1935 Balmont ends up in a clinic with a serious mental illness.
December 23, 1942 Date of death of Konstantin Balmont.

Memorable places

1. The village of Gumnishchi (Ivanovo region), where Konstantin Balmont was born.
2. Shuya, where K. Balmont lived as a child.
3. Gymnasium in Vladimir (now - Vladimir Linguistic Gymnasium), where K. Balmont studied.
4. Moscow University, where Balmont studied.
5. Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences (now - Yaroslavl State University), where Balmont studied.
6. Oxford University, where Balmont lectured on Russian poetry in 1897
7. Paris, where Balmont moved in 1906, and then, for the second time, in 1920
8. Noisy-le-Grand, where Konstantin Balmont died and was buried.

Episodes of life

The rare surname Balmont went to the poet, as he himself believed, either from Scandinavian or Scottish sailor ancestors.

Konstantin Balmont traveled a lot, having seen a huge number of countries and cities in different parts of the world, including Europe, Mexico, California, Egypt, South Africa, India, Australia, New Guinea.

The bohemian appearance and somewhat languid, romantic manners of Balmont often created the wrong impression of him in the eyes of others. Few people knew how hard he worked and how persistently he educated himself; how carefully he proofreads his own manuscripts, bringing them to perfection.

Program about Konstantin Balmont from the series "Poets of Russia of the 20th century"

Testaments

“Free from weaknesses should be the one who wants to stand on top ... To rise to a height means to be above oneself.”

"My best teachers in poetry were - the estate, the garden, streams, marsh lakes, the rustle of leaves, butterflies, birds and dawns."

condolences

“Russia was precisely in love with Balmont ... They read him, recited and sang from the stage. The gentlemen whispered his words to their ladies, the schoolgirls copied them into notebooks.
Taffy, writer

“He failed to combine in himself all the riches that nature has bestowed upon him. He is an eternal mote of spiritual treasures ... He will receive - and squander, receive and squander. He gives them to us."
Andrei Bely, writer, poet

“He experiences life like a poet, and as soon as poets can experience it, as given to them alone: ​​finding at every point the fullness of life.”
Valery Bryusov, poet

“He lived in the moment and was content with it, not embarrassed by the motley change of moments, if only to express them more fully and more beautifully. He either sang of Evil, then of Good, then he leaned towards paganism, then he bowed before Christianity.
E. Andreeva, poet's wife

“If they let me define Balmont in one word, I would, without hesitation, say: Poet ... I would not say this about Yesenin, or Mandelstam, or Mayakovsky, or Gumilyov, or even Blok, because all of those named there was something else besides the poet in them ... On Balmont - in his every gesture, step, word - the stigma - the seal - the star of the poet.
Marina Tsvetaeva, poetess

Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich (1867 -1942). The Silver Age in Russia lasted only a couple of pre-revolutionary decades, but gave Russian poetry many bright names. And for a whole decade Konstantin Balmont reigned on the poetic Olympus.

He was born near Shuya, in the family of a provincial nobleman. He learned to read by attending the lessons of his mother, who taught his older brother. Mother formed the beginnings of Konstantin's worldview, introducing him to the world of high art.

Education at the gymnasium ended with an exception due to the distribution of the People's Will proclamations. Nevertheless, he managed to get an education (1886), although the poet had painful impressions about this period. Balmont's debut (1885) in a famous magazine went unnoticed; the published collection also did not evoke responses.

The second collection, "In the Vastness" (1894), was marked by a completely new form and rhythm. His poetry keeps getting better. Having got out of lack of money, the poet travels, works hard, lectures on Russian poetry in England. In the collection of poems "Burning Buildings" (1900), readers saw that Balmont, who would control the souls of the Russian intelligentsia of the early 20th century.

Konstantin Balmont becomes the leader of symbolism. He is imitated, envied, fans are trying to break into the apartment. The poet, inclined towards romanticism, takes part in the revolution of 1905, because of which he was forced to hide abroad.

Upon returning to his homeland, Balmont publishes a ten-volume edition of his works. He is engaged in translations, lectures. The poet welcomed the February Revolution, but soon lost interest in its slogans. And the revolution of October 1917 caused him rejection. Balmont seeks permission to leave and leaves his homeland forever.

In exile, the poet avoids circles hostile to the USSR. Help is nowhere to be found. In addition, Balmont contains two families, and the financial situation is becoming increasingly difficult. He wrote his last collection of poems, Light Service (1937), already suffering from a mental illness. In recent years, he settled in a charity home, where he died of pneumonia in the winter of 1942.

Konstantin Balmont returned to Russian readers when the first anthologies of poets of the Silver Age were published in the sixties.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867-1942) - Russian poet, prose writer, critic, translator.

Konstantin Balmont was born on June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, in the family of a zemstvo leader. Like hundreds of boys of his generation, Balmont was carried away by revolutionary and rebellious moods. In 1884 he was even expelled from the gymnasium for participating in a "revolutionary circle". Balmont graduated from the gymnasium in 1886 in Vladimir and entered the law faculty of Moscow University. A year later, he was also expelled from the university - for participating in student riots. After a short exile to his native Shuya, Balmont was reinstated at the university. But Balmont did not complete the full course: in 1889 he dropped out of school in order to study literature. In March 1890, he first experienced an acute nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide.

In 1885, Balmont made his debut as a poet in the magazine "Picturesque Review", in 1887-1889. actively translated German and French authors, and in 1890 in Yaroslavl published the first collection of poems at his own expense. The book turned out to be frankly weak and, stung by the negligence of readers, Balmont destroyed almost all of its circulation.

In 1892, Balmont traveled to Scandinavia, where he got acquainted with the literature of the "end of the century" and was enthusiastically imbued with its "atmosphere". He set about translating the works of "fashionable" authors: G. Ibsen, G. Brandes and others. He also translated works on the history of Scandinavian (1894) and Italian (1895-1897) literature. In 1895 he published two volumes of translations from Poe. Thus began the work of Balmont as the largest Russian poet-translator of the turn of the century. Possessing the unique abilities of a polyglot, for half a century of his literary activity he left translations from 30 languages, including the Baltic, Slavic, Indian, Sanskrit (the poem of the ancient Indian author Asvagosha "The Life of the Buddha", published in 1913; "Upanishads", Vedic hymns, dramas Kalidasa ), Georgian (Sh. Rustaveli's poem "The Knight in the Panther's Skin"). Most of all Balmont worked with Spanish and English poetry. Back in 1893 he translated and published the complete works of the English romantic poet P.-B. Shelley. However, his translations are very subjective and free. K. Chukovsky even called Balmont - Shelley's translator "Shelmont".

In 1894, the collection of poems "Under the Northern Sky" appeared, with which Balmont truly entered Russian poetry. In this book, as in the collections close to it in time, "In the Boundlessness" (1895) and "Silence" (1898), Balmont, an established poet and exponent of the life-feeling of a critical era, still gives off a "Nadsonian", eighties tones: his hero languishes "in the realm of dead, powerless silence," he is tired of "waiting in vain for spring," he is afraid of the bog of the ordinary, which "will lure, squeeze, suck." But all these familiar experiences are given here with a new force of forcing, tension. As a result, a new quality arises: the syndrome of decline, decadence (from the French decadence - decline), one of the first and most striking exponents of which in Russia was Balmont.

Along with A. Fet, Balmont is the most striking impressionist of Russian poetry. Even the titles of his poems and cycles carry a deliberate watercolor blurring of colors: "Moonlight", "We walked in a golden fog", "Pale gold in a haze", "Air-white". The world of Balmont's poems, as on the canvases of artists of this style, is blurred, de-objected. It is not people, things or even feelings that dominate here, but incorporeal qualities formed from adjective nouns with an abstract suffix "awn": transience, vastness, etc.

Balmont's experiments were appreciated and accepted by great Russian poetry. At the same time, by the end of the 1900s, they gave rise to an unthinkable number of epigones, nicknamed "Balmontists" and bringing the magnificent decorativeness of their teacher to the limit of vulgarity.

Balmont's work reached its zenith in the collections of the early 1900s "Burning Buildings" (1900), "We'll Be Like the Sun" (1903), "Only Love" (1903), "The Liturgy of Beauty" (1905). In the center of Balmont's poetry of these years are images of the elements: light, fire, sun. The poet shocks the audience with his demonic posture, "burning buildings". The author sings "hymns" to vice, fraternizes through the centuries with the Roman emperor-villain Nero. Most of the comrades-in-arms (I. Annensky, V. Bryusov, M. Gorky and others) considered the "superhuman" claims of these collections, alien to the "feminine nature" of the "poet of tenderness and meekness", to be masquerade.

In 1907-1913 Balmont lived in France, considering himself a political emigrant. He traveled a lot around the world: he circumnavigated the world, visited America, Egypt, Australia, the islands of Oceania, Japan. During these years, critics write more and more about his "decline": the novelty factor of the Balmont style ceased to operate, they got used to it. The poet's technique remained the same and, according to many, was reborn into a stamp. However, Balmont of these years discovers new thematic horizons, turns to myth and folklore. For the first time, Slavic antiquity sounded in the collection "Evil Spells" (1906). The subsequent books "The Firebird", "The Pipe of the Slav" (1907) and "The Green Helicopter", "Kissing Words" (1909) contain the processing of folklore plots and texts, the arrangement of "epic" Rus' in a "modern" way. Moreover, the author pays the main attention to all kinds of sorcery spells and Khlyst's zeal, in which, from his point of view, the "people's mind" is reflected. These attempts were unanimously assessed by critics as clearly unsuccessful and false stylizations, reminiscent of a toy "neo-Russian style" in painting and architecture of the era.

Balmont met the February Revolution of 1917 with enthusiasm, but the October Revolution made him horrified by the "chaos" and "hurricane of madness" of the "troubled times" and reconsider his former "revolutionary spirit". In the 1918 publicist book "Am I a Revolutionary or Not?" he presented the Bolsheviks as carriers of the destructive principle, suppressing the "personality". Having received permission to temporarily go abroad on a business trip, together with his wife and daughter in June 1920, he left Russia forever and reached Paris through Revel.

In France, he acutely felt the pain of isolation from other Russian emigration, and this feeling was aggravated by self-exile: he settled in the small town of Capbreton on the coast of the province of Brittany. The only consolation Balmont-emigrant for two decades was the opportunity to remember, dream and "sing" about Russia. The title of one of the books dedicated to the Motherland "Mine - to Her" (1924) is the last creative motto of the poet.

Until the mid-1930s, Balmont's creative energy did not weaken. Of the 50 volumes of his works, 22 were published in exile (the last collection, Light Service, was published in 1937). But this did not bring a new reader, or deliverance from want. Among the new motifs in Balmont's poetry of these years is the religious enlightenment of experiences. From the mid-1930s, signs of mental illness, which overshadowed the last years of the poet's life, became more and more pronounced.

Balmont died on December 24, 1942 in Noisy-le-Grand in France, listening to the reading of his poems, in an almshouse near Paris, arranged by Mother Mary (E. Yu. Kuzmina-Karavaeva).

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (with an accent on the first syllable - a generic name, on the second - a literary one) - Russian poet, prose writer, critic, translator - was born June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, in a poor noble family. Here he lived until the age of 10.

Balmont's father worked as a judge, then as head of the zemstvo council. The love of literature and music was instilled in the future poet by his mother. The family moved to the city of Shuya when the older children went to school. In 1876 Balmont studied at the Shuya gymnasium, but soon he got tired of studying, and he began to pay more and more attention to reading. After being expelled from the gymnasium for revolutionary sentiments, Balmont transferred to the city of Vladimir, where he studied before 1886. Studied at Moscow University at the Department of Law ( 1886-1887.; expelled for participating in student riots).

K. Balmont published poems for the first time in 1885 in the magazine "Picturesque Review" in St. Petersburg. Late 1880s Balmont was engaged in translation activities. In 1890 due to a disastrous financial situation and an unsuccessful first marriage, Balmont tried to commit suicide - he jumped out of the window, but survived. Having received serious injuries, he lay in bed for a year. This year has been creatively productive. The first poetry collection was published in Yaroslavl in 1890(destroyed most of the circulation).

He gained initial fame as a translator of the works of B.P. Shelley and E. Poe. Balmont was engaged in translations (from more than 30 languages) all his life, his translations of Calderon's plays and "The Knight in the Panther's Skin" by S. Rustaveli became classic.

Books of poems "Under the northern sky" ( 1894 ) and "In the vastness" ( 1895 ) are close to impressionism, marked by the musical melodiousness of the verse. Having approached the circle of senior symbolists ( mid 1890s., living in Moscow, Balmont communicates with V.Ya. Bryusov, a little later in St. Petersburg - with D.S. Merezhkovsky, Z.N. Gippius, N.M. Minsky), Konstantin Balmont becomes one of the most famous poets of this trend.

Married for the second time in 1896, Balmont leaves for Europe. He has been traveling for several years. In 1897 in England he lectures on Russian poetry.

A kind of lyrical trilogy are his best poetry collections - "Silence" ( 1898 ), "Burning Buildings" ( 1900 ) and "Let's be like the Sun" ( 1903 ). Enthusiastic openness to all phenomena of the world, incl. and “demonic” (especially noticeable in the cycle “The Devil Artist” and in the collection “Evil Spells” confiscated by the censors, 1906 ), the ability to capture instantaneous experiences, mastery of complex forms of verse, and the phonetic richness of speech made Balmont's poems extremely popular.

Books of critical essays - "Mountain Peaks" ( 1904 ), "Poetry as magic" ( 1915 ). Readers were delighted by the knowledge of many languages ​​​​and the poet's multiculturalism, images of exotic countries (K. Balmont visited Mexico, Polynesia, Australia, Japan, etc.), the reputation of an active "life-creator" (including in his personal life, well known to the public ).

However, the abundance of travel experiences often interfered with the deep experience of other cultures, in his work they became hardly distinguishable from each other. Polywriting (voluminous books of new poems were published almost every time) entailed self-repetition, impressionistic descriptions of the nature and soul of the poet became stereotyped. And although individual poems and even books were successful (for example, "The Liturgy of Beauty", 1905 ; "Firebird", 1907 ; "Glow of dawn" 1912 ), criticism increasingly spoke of the decline of K. Balmont's work. K. Balmont's biased speeches with political poems did not save the situation either. He was harassed on several occasions, 1906-1913. he was forced to live abroad (mainly in Paris), but his revolutionary poems (“Songs of the Avenger”, 1907 , etc.) do not correspond to the level of the poet's talent.

K. Balmont spent the years of the First World War and the revolution in Russia. In the essay book "Am I a Revolutionary or Not" ( 1918 ) asserted the priority of the individual over social transformations. In 1920 because of the poor health of his third wife and daughter, with the permission of the Soviet government, he went with them to France. He never returned to Russia again. In Paris, Balmont publishes 6 more collections of his poems, and in 1923- autobiographical books: "Under the new sickle", "Air way". There he soon made a sharp criticism of the Bolshevik regime.

In the 1920s and in the first half of the 1930s. Konstantin Balmont continued to publish a lot, wrote poetry and prose, translated Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Lithuanian poets, while traveling around Europe his performances were successful, but Balmont was no longer recognized in the centers of the Russian diaspora.

Since 1937 mentally ill, practically did not write. Konstantin Balmont died of pneumonia December 23, 1942 in Noisy-le-Grand (near Paris) in the Russian House shelter in poverty and oblivion.