Balmont, Konstantin Dmitrievich - short biography. Konstantin Balmont - biography, information, personal life Balmont family

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Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (June 3, 1867, village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province - December 23, 1942, Noisy-le-Grand, France) - symbolist poet, translator, essayist, one of the most prominent representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age. He published 35 collections of poetry, 20 books of prose, and translated from many languages. Author of autobiographical prose, memoirs, philological treatises, historical and literary studies and critical essays.

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 Shuya district court and zemstvo: first as a collegiate registrar, then as a justice of the peace, and finally as chairman of the district zemstvo council.

Mother Vera Nikolaevna, née Lebedeva, came from a colonel’s family, in which they loved literature and studied it professionally. She appeared in the local press, organized literary evenings and amateur performances. She had a strong influence on the worldview of the future poet, introducing him to 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 a stranger to some freethinking”: “unreliable” guests were received in the house. It was from his mother that Balmont, as he himself wrote, inherited “unbridledness and passion” and his entire “mental structure.”

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 became bored with his studies, and his performance decreased, but the time came for binge reading, and he read French and German works in the original. Impressed by what he read, he began writing poetry himself at the age of ten. “On a bright sunny day they appeared, 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 attempt 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 subsequently explained the background to this early revolutionary mood as follows: “I was happy, and I wanted everyone to feel just as good. It seemed to me that if it was good only for me and a few, it was ugly.”.

At the end of 1885, Balmont's literary debut took place. 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 he completed his studies at the gymnasium.

The young poet’s acquaintance 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 favorable mentoring review.

In 1889, Balmont married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina, daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk merchant. A year later, in Yaroslavl, with his own funds, he published his first "Collection of poems"- some of the youthful works included in the book were published back in 1885. However, the debut collection of 1890 did not arouse interest, close people did not accept it, and soon after its 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, jumped 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: his marriage quarreled Balmont with his parents and deprived him of financial support, but the immediate impetus was the “Kreutzer Sonata” he had read shortly before. The year spent in bed, as the poet himself recalled, turned out to be creatively very fruitful and entailed “an unprecedented flowering of mental excitement and cheerfulness”.

It was in this year that he realized himself as a poet and saw his own destiny. In 1923, in his biographical story “The Air Route,” he wrote: “In a long year, when I, lying in bed, no longer expected that I would ever get up, I learned from the early morning chirping of sparrows outside the window and from the moon rays passing through the window into my room, and from all the steps that reached up to my hearing, the great fairy tale of life, understood the sacred inviolability of life. And when I finally got up, my soul became free, like the wind in a field, no one any longer had power over it except a creative dream, and creativity blossomed wildly.”.

For some time after his illness, Balmont, who by this time had separated from his wife, lived in poverty. According to his own recollections, he spent months “I didn’t know what it was to be full, and I went to bakeries to admire the rolls and breads through the glass”.

Moscow University professor N.I. Storozhenko also provided Balmont with enormous assistance.

In 1887-1889, the poet actively translated German and French authors, then in 1892-1894 he began working on the works of Percy Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. It is this period that is considered the time of his creative development.

Professor Storozhenko, in addition, introduced Balmont to the editorial board of Severny Vestnik, around which poets of the new direction were grouped.

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 “frenzied love for poetry” made on him.

Collection "Under the Northern Sky", published in 1894, is considered to be the starting point of Balmont’s creative path. The book received a wide response, and reviews were mostly positive.

If the debut in 1894 was not distinguished by originality, then in the second collection "In the Vast"(1895) Balmont began searching for “a new space, a new freedom”, the possibilities of combining the poetic word with melody.

He enthusiastically studied the history of Russia, books on natural sciences and folk art. Already in his mature years, addressing aspiring writers with instructions, he wrote that a debutant needs “to be able to sit over a philosophical book and an English dictionary and Spanish grammar on a spring day, when you really want to ride a boat and maybe kiss someone. Be able to read 100, 300, and 3,000 books, including many, many boring ones. To love not only joy, but also pain. Silently cherish within yourself not only happiness, but also the melancholy that pierces your heart.”.

By 1895, Balmont met Jurgis Baltrushaitis, which gradually grew into a friendship that lasted many years, and S. A. Polyakov, an educated Moscow merchant, mathematician and polyglot, translator of Knut Hamsun. It was Polyakov, the publisher of the modernist magazine “Vesy”, who five years later established the symbolist publishing house “Scorpion”, where Balmont’s best books were published.

In 1896, Balmont married translator E. A. Andreeva and went with his wife to Western Europe. Several years spent abroad provided the aspiring writer, who was interested, in addition to his main subject, in history, religion and philosophy, with enormous opportunities. He visited France, Holland, Spain, Italy, spending a lot of time in libraries, improving his knowledge of languages.

In 1899, K. Balmont was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

On March 14, Balmont spoke at a literary evening in the hall of the City Duma and read a poem "Little Sultan", which in a veiled form criticized the regime of terror in Russia and its organizer, Nicholas II (“That was in Turkey, where conscience is an empty thing, there reigns a fist, a whip, a scimitar, two or three zeros, four scoundrels and a stupid little sultan”). The poem went around and was going to be published in the Iskra newspaper.

By decision of the “special meeting” the poet was expelled from St. Petersburg, deprived of the right to reside in capital and university cities for three years.

In the summer of 1903, Balmont returned to Moscow, then headed to the Baltic coast, where he began writing poetry, which was included in the collection “Only Love.”

After spending the 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.

The poetry circles of the Balmontists that were created during 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 among it.

Many poets (including Lokhvitskaya, Bryusov, Andrei Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, M. A. Voloshin, S. M. Gorodetsky) dedicated poems to him, seeing in him a “spontaneous genius,” the eternally free Arigon, doomed to rise above the world and completely immersed “in the revelations of his bottomless soul.”

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

Our king is Mukden, our king is Tsushima,
Our king is a bloody stain,
The stench of gunpowder and smoke,
In which the mind is dark...
Our king is a blind misery,
Prison and whip, trial, execution,
The hanged king is twice as low,
What he promised, but didn’t dare give.
He is a coward, he feels with hesitation,
But it will happen, the hour of reckoning awaits.
Who began to reign - Khodynka,
He will end up 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.

In January 1905, the poet took a trip to Mexico, from where he went to California. The poet's travel notes and essays, along with his free adaptations of Indian cosmogonic myths and legends, were later included in “Snake Flowers” (1910). This period of Balmont’s creativity ended with the release of the collection "Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns"(1905), largely inspired by the events of the Russo-Japanese War.

In December, during the days of the Moscow uprising, Balmont often visited 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 passion for the revolution was sincere, although, as the future showed, shallow. Fearing arrest, on the night of 1906 the poet hastily left for Paris.

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 traveling long distances.

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 formed the book “The Land of Osiris” (1914), in 1912 he made a trip to 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.

On March 11, 1912, at a meeting of the Neophilological Society at St. Petersburg University on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of literary activity in the presence of more than 1000 people gathered K. D. Balmont was proclaimed a great Russian poet.

In honor of the poet’s return, ceremonial receptions were held at the Society of Free Aesthetics and the Literary and Artistic Circle.

In 1914, the publication of Balmont's complete collection of poems in ten volumes was completed, which lasted seven years. At the same time he published a collection of poetry "White architect. The Mystery of the Four Lamps"- your impressions of Oceania.

From Georgia, Balmont returned to France, where the outbreak of the First World War found him. Only at the end of May 1915, by a roundabout 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 sketch was published "Poetry as Magic"- a kind of continuation of the 1900 declaration “Elementary words on symbolic poetry.” In this treatise on the essence and purpose of lyric poetry, the poet attributed to the word “incantatory magical power” and even “physical power.”

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, Balmont left Russia forever on May 25, 1920 and reached Paris through Revel.

In Paris, Balmont and his family settled in a small furnished apartment.

The poet immediately found himself between two fires. On the one hand, the emigrant community suspected him of being a Soviet sympathizer.

On the other hand, the Soviet press began to “brand him as a crafty deceiver” who “at the cost of lies” achieved freedom for himself and abused the trust of the Soviet government, which generously released him to the West “to study the revolutionary creativity of the masses.”

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-Vie), and until the late autumn of 1926 in the Gironde (Lacano-Océan).

At the beginning of November 1926, after leaving Lacanau, 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.

Balmont unambiguously stated 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 unscrupulous, endless lies of merciless, evil rulers,” he wrote in 1921.

In the article "Bloody Liars" the poet spoke about the ups and downs of his life in Moscow in 1917-1920. In emigrant periodicals of the early 1920s, his poetic lines about “the actors of Satan”, about the “blood-drunk” Russian land, about the “days of humiliation of Russia”, about the “red drops” that went into the Russian land regularly appeared. A number of these poems were included in the collection "Haze"(Paris, 1922) - the poet’s first emigrant book.

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

In 1927, in a journalistic article "A Little Zoology for Little Red Riding Hood" Balmont reacted to the scandalous speech of the Soviet plenipotentiary representative in Poland D.V. Bogomolov, who at the reception stated that Adam Mickiewicz in his famous poem “To Muscovite Friends” (the generally accepted translation of the title is “Russian Friends”) was supposedly addressing 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."

Unlike his friend, who gravitated towards the “right” direction, Balmont generally adhered to “left”, liberal-democratic views, was critical of ideas, did not accept “conciliatory” tendencies (smenovekhism, 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” of Western Europe in the 1920-1930s.

It was generally accepted that emigration was a sign of decline for Balmont. This opinion, shared by many Russian emigrant poets, was subsequently disputed more than once. In different countries during these years, Balmont published books of poems “Gift to the Earth”, “Bright Hour” (1921), “Haze” (1922), “Mine is for her. Poems about Russia" (1923), "In the widening distance" (1929), "Northern Lights" (1933), "Blue Horseshoe", "Light Service" (1937).

In 1923, he published books of autobiographical prose, “Under the New Sickle” and “Air Route,” and 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 long lecture tours in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, in the summer of 1930 he made a trip to Lithuania, while simultaneously translating West Slavic poetry, but the main theme of Balmont’s works during these years remained Russia: memories of it and longing for what was lost.

In 1932, it became clear that the poet was suffering from a serious mental illness. From August 1932 to May 1935, the Balmonts lived in Clamart near Paris, in poverty. In the spring of 1935, Balmont was admitted to the clinic.

In April 1936, 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 organizing the evening entitled “Writers for Poets” 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.

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 and his wife, the widow of Yu. Baltrushaitis, two or three acquaintances and daughter Mirra.

The French public learned about the poet's death from an article in the pro-Hitler Parisian Messenger, which gave, as was then customary, a thorough reprimand to the late poet for the fact that at one time he supported the revolutionaries.

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

Personal life of Konstantin Balmont

Balmont said 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 at the age of nine, the first passion was at the age of fourteen.”

“Wandering through countless cities, I am always delighted with one thing - love,” the poet admitted in one of his poems.

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 Road to blessed Tiflis and Transcaucasia,” - he wrote later.

But the honeymoon 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 a devilish one,” and tormented him with jealousy. It is generally accepted that it was she who turned him to wine, as evidenced by the poet’s confessional poem “Forest Fire.”

The wife did not sympathize with either the literary aspirations or the revolutionary sentiments of her husband and was prone to quarrels. In many ways, it was the painful relationship with Garelina that pushed Balmont to attempt suicide on the morning of March 13, 1890. Soon after his recovery, which was only partial - the lameness remained with him for the rest of his life - Balmont broke up with L. Garelina.

The first child born in this marriage died, the second - son Nikolai - subsequently suffered from a nervous disorder.

Having separated from the poet, Larisa Mikhailovna married the journalist and literary historian N.A. Engelhardt 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 colonial goods shops) and was distinguished by 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 reciprocate for a long time. When the latter arose, it turned out that the poet was married: then the parents forbade their daughter to meet her lover. However, Ekaterina Alekseevna, enlightened in the “newest spirit,” looked at the rituals as a formality and soon moved in with the poet.

The divorce proceedings, 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.

Balmont and E. A. Andreeva were united by a common literary interest; the couple carried out many joint translations, in particular of Gerhart Hauptmann and Odd Nansen.

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”.

In the early 1900s in Paris, Balmont met Elena Konstantinovna Tsvetkovskaya(1880-1943), daughter of General K. G. Tsvetkovsky, then a student at the Faculty of Mathematics at the Sorbonne and a passionate admirer of his poetry. Balmont, judging by some of his letters, 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” divided: Balmont either lived with his family or left with Elena. For example, in 1905 they went to Mexico for three months.

The poet's family life became completely confused after E.K. Tsvetkovskaya gave birth to 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.

Mental anguish led to a breakdown: in 1909, Balmont made a new suicide attempt, again jumped out of the window and again survived. Until 1917, Balmont lived in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra, coming from time to time to Moscow to visit Andreeva and his daughter Nina.

Balmont emigrated from Russia with his third (civil-law) wife E.K. Tsvetkovskaya and daughter Mirra.

However, he did not break off friendly relations with Andreeva. Only in 1934, when Soviet citizens were prohibited from corresponding with relatives and friends living abroad, was this connection interrupted.

Unlike E. A. Andreeva, Elena Konstantinovna was “helpless in everyday life and could not organize her life in any way.” She considered it her duty to follow Balmont everywhere: eyewitnesses recalled how she, “having abandoned her child at home, followed her husband somewhere to a tavern and could not get him out of there for 24 hours.”

E.K. Tsvetkovskaya turned out to be not the poet’s last love. In Paris, he resumed his acquaintance with the princess, which began in March 1919. Dagmar Shakhovskoy(1893-1967). “One of my dear ones, half-Swedish, half-Polish, Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya, nee Baroness Lilienfeld, Russified, more than once sang Estonian songs to me,” - this is how Balmont characterized his beloved in one of his letters.

Shakhovskaya gave birth to Balmont two children - Georgy (Georges) (1922-1943) and Svetlana (b. 1925).

The poet could not leave his family; meeting 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 survived.

Balmont's feelings were reflected in many of his later poems and 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 poet's death.

Mirra Konstantinovna Balmont (in her marriage - Boychenko, in her second marriage - Autina) wrote poetry and published in the 1920s under the pseudonym Aglaya Gamayun. She died in Noisy-le-Grand in 1970.

Works by Konstantin Balmont

“Collection of poems” (Yaroslavl, 1890)
“Under the northern sky (elegy, stanzas, sonnets)” (St. Petersburg, 1894)
“In the vastness of darkness” (Moscow, 1895 and 1896)
"Silence. Lyrical poems" (St. Petersburg, 1898)
“Burning buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul" (Moscow, 1900)
“We will be like the sun. Book of Symbols" (Moscow, 1903)
"Only love. Seven Flowers" (M., "Grif", 1903)
"Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns" (M., "Grif", 1905)
“Fairy Tales (Children's Songs)” (M., “Grif”, 1905)
"Collected Poems" M., 1905; 2nd ed. M., 1908.
“Evil Spells (Book of Spells)” (M., “Golden Fleece”, 1906)
"Poems" (1906)
“The Firebird (Slavic Pipe)” (M., “Scorpio”, 1907)
"Liturgy of Beauty (Spontaneous Hymns)" (1907)
"Songs of the Avenger" (1907)
“Three Flowerings (Theater of Youth and Beauty)” (1907)
"Only love". 2nd ed.(1908)
“Round Dance of the Times (Vseglasnost)” (M., 1909)
"Birds in the Air (Singing Lines)" (1908)
“Green Vertograd (Kissing Words)” (St. Petersburg, “Rosehip”, 1909)
“Links. Selected Poems. 1890-1912" (M.: Scorpion, 1913)
“The White Architect (The Mystery of the Four Lamps)” (1914)
“Ash (Vision of a tree)” (Moscow, ed. Nekrasov, 1916)
"Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon" (1917; Berlin, 1921)
“Collected lyrics” (Books 1-2, 4-6. M., 1917-1918)
“Ring” (M., 1920)
“Seven Poems” (M., “Zadruga”, 1920)
"Selected Poems" (New York, 1920)
“Solar yarn. Izbornik" (1890-1918) (M., published by Sabashnikov, 1921)
"Gamajun" (Stockholm, "Northern Lights", 1921)
“Gift to the Earth” (Paris, “Russian Land”, 1921)
"Bright Hour" (Paris, 1921)
“Song of the Working Hammer” (M., 1922)
"Haze" (Paris, 1922)
“Under the New Sickle” (Berlin, Slovo, 1923)
“Mine - Her (Russia)” (Prague, “Flame”, 1924)
“In the widening 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 by Konstantin Balmont

“Mountain Peaks” (Moscow, 1904; book one)
“Calls of Antiquity. Hymns, songs and plans of the ancients" (Pb., 1908, Berlin, 1923)
“Snake Flowers” (“Travel Letters from Mexico”, M., Scorpio, 1910)
"Sea Glow" (1910)
“Glow of Dawn” (1912)
"The Land of Osiris" Egyptian essays. (M., 1914)
“Poetry as magic” (M., Scorpio, 1915)
“Light and sound in nature and Scriabin’s light symphony” (1917)
"Where is my house?" (Paris, 1924)

Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942) is a wonderful symbolist poet, one of the brightest representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age. Author of a number of philological treatises, critical essays and historical and literary studies. Balmont is a talented translator who has been involved in adapting works written in many languages into Russian. Since the late 90s of the 19th century, he literally reigned in Russian poetry, for which he received the nickname “the sun king of Russian poetry.”

Childhood and youth

Konstantin Balmont was born on June 15, 1867 in the small village of Gumnishchi, Vladimir province, where his parents’ estate was located. His father came from landowners and first worked as a justice of the peace, after which he moved to serve in the zemstvo government. His mother, Vera Nikolaevna, was well educated and from early childhood attracted her son into the boundless world of literary creativity.

When the boy was 10 years old, the family moved to the city of Shuya. Here Konstantin was assigned to study at the local gymnasium, but in the 7th grade he was expelled for participating in the activities of a revolutionary circle. Therefore, he had to complete his studies at the Vladimir Gymnasium. In 1886, Balmont began his studies at Moscow University, but things didn’t work out here either. A year later, for anti-government work in student circles, he was expelled and sent into exile in Shuya.

Balmont never received a higher education, although he was reinstated at the university. Due to severe nervous exhaustion, he left the walls of his alma mater. It was not possible to complete his studies at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum, where the poet also entered. But thanks to his diligence and hard work, he became one of the most erudite representatives of his generation, having learned about 15 languages and being well versed in chemistry, history, and ethnography.

Poetic path

In 1890, Balmont’s first book, “Collected Poems,” was published in Yaroslavl. The opuses of this time have a clear imprint of late populism with its sadness and melancholy, which lowers almost every poem. The author bought almost the entire small edition and destroyed it with his own hands.

At first, Konstantin did not stand out much from the background of many other masters of the poetic word. The situation begins to change after the publication of two collections of poetry, “Under the Northern Sky” (1894) and “In the Boundless” (1895), in which the development of his mastery was already traced. Meeting V. Bryusov helped me see my place in poetry and greatly strengthened my self-confidence. In 1898, the collection “Silence” appeared, leaving no doubt about the greatness of its author.

At the beginning of the new century, Balmont's creativity flourished. In 1900, the collection “Burning Buildings” was published, in the preface to which the poet says: “In this book I speak not only for myself, but also for others who are silent.”. In 1902, Konstantin Dmitrievich was forced to go abroad for reading the anti-government poem “Little Sultan”. He visited many countries of the Old World, the USA and Mexico, and returned to Russia only in 1905. It was during this period that some of the best collections, “Only Love” and “Let’s Be Like the Sun” (1903), came from his pen. A. Blok will call the latter one of the greatest creations of symbolism. The poet himself did not deny this, writing in one of his autobiographies: “I am convinced that before me in Russia they did not know how to write sonorous poetry”.

The first Russian revolution resonated in Balmont’s heart with a series of poems that were included in the poetry collections “Poems” (1906) and “Songs of the Avenger” (1907). Not wanting to incur a negative reaction from the tsarist government, he emigrated to France, where he would live until 1913. Thus, the poet withdrew himself from the fierce symbolist dispute that was taking place in the country at that time. But he, as always, is fruitful, writes a lot and easily, publishing three collections in 1908-1909: “Round Dance of the Times”, “Birds in the Air” and “Green Vertograd”.

By the time he returned to Russia, Konstantin Dmitrievich was already known as the author of a series of critical articles that received great resonance - “Mountain Peaks” (1904), “White Lightning” (1908) and “Sea Glow” (1910).

Balmont accepted the fall of tsarist power, but the events of the Civil War greatly frightened him and, using the patronage of the People's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, he managed to go abroad. At first, the poet considered this departure as temporary, but the trip turned out to be a long emigration.

Life in exile

In the first decade of his life abroad, Balmont was quite fruitful. From his pen many magnificent collections come out - “Mine-to-her. Poems about Russia” (1923), “Gift to the Earth” (1921), “In the widening distance” (1929). At this time, the autobiographical prose “Under the New Sickle” and the book of memoirs “Where is My Home?” appeared.

With the beginning of the 30s, the Balmont family fully experienced poverty. Occasional funds received from funds to help Russian writers did not save the situation. The situation worsened after the poet was diagnosed with a serious mental illness. Since 1935, he has alternated between living in a charity home and in a cheap rented apartment. In rare moments of insight, he tried to reread War and Peace and his old works. The Russian poet died in a Russian orphanage in Paris on December 23, 1942.

Poet-innovator

Konstantin Balmont is deservedly considered one of the outstanding representatives of symbolism, personifying its impressionist direction. His poetry is distinguished by its extraordinary musicality and colorfulness. For him, beauty was associated with a formidable element, appearing before us either angelically pure and bright, or demonically dark and terrible. But whatever the element, it always remains free, irrational and alive, completely beyond the control of the human mind.

Balmont managed to define his own “I” more deeply than others in the rich world of reincarnations, which was unusually far from reality. He doesn't try to tell a story about this world. Instead, he shares personal impressions and moods with the reader, trying to change reality with his subjective world. Balmont was characterized by deep democracy, manifested in a sensitive and reasonable reaction to the political and social events of the era.

O. Mandelstam once very accurately described Balmont’s poetry as “a foreign representation from a non-existent phonetic power.”

Personal life

He met his first wife, Larisa Garelina, the daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk manufacturer, in 1888 at the theater, where she performed on the amateur stage. Even before the wedding, the poet’s mother was categorically against marriage and turned out to be right. A happy family life did not work out. The wife's passion for alcohol, the death of the first child and the serious illness of the second, as well as chronic poverty made the poet's life impossible. He even tried to commit suicide, but failed to complete his plan. Subsequently, this episode will find expression in the series of works “The White Bride”, “A Scream in the Night” and some others.

After his divorce from Garelina, poetess Mirra Lokhvitskaya became Balmont’s new muse. At the time we met, she was married and had five children. The close relations of the poets arose on the basis of common ideas about literature. However, early death due to a serious illness interrupted the romance. In honor of his beloved, Balmont will release one of the best collections, “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” and in memory of her he will name his daughter from his new common-law wife Elena Tsvetkovskaya Mirra. Later the poet writes: "The bright years of my feelings for her... were clearly reflected in my work".

The second official wife of Konstantin Dmitrievich turned out to be Ekaterina Andreeva-Balmont, whose parents were large merchants. She, like her husband, was a writer. Together with Balmont, they were engaged in translations, in particular, adapting the works of G. Hauptmann and O. Nansen for the Russian language. In 1901, the couple had a daughter, Nika, in whose honor her father would write a collection of poems, “Fairy Tales.” Another passion during the foreign period would be Dagmar Shakhovskaya, to whom the poet dedicated 858 love letters filled with tender feelings. However, it is not she who will spend the last years of her life with the slowly fading poet, but her common-law wife Ekaterina Tsvetkovskaya.



Birth name::	Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont
Nicknames:	B-b, K.; Gridinsky; Don; K.B.; Lionel
Date of Birth:
Place of Birth:	Village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province
Date of death:
A place of death:	Noisy-le-Grand, France
Citizenship:	Russian empire
Occupation:	Symbolist poet, translator, essayist
Direction:	Symbolism
	Elegy, ballad
	"Under the Northern Sky"

Biography

Childhood

Literary debut

Rise to Fame

Peak of popularity

Conflict with the authorities

Return: 1913-1920

Between two revolutions

Creativity in exile

last years of life

Translation activities

Personal life

Analysis of creativity

Creativity of 1905-1909

Late Balmont

Evolution of worldview

Balmont and Mirra Lokhvitskaya

Balmont and Maxim Gorky

Balmont and I. S. Shmelev

Appearance and character

Works (favorites)

Poetry collections

Collections of articles and essays

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont(June 3 (15), 1867, village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province - December 23, 1942, Noisy-le-Grand, France) - symbolist poet, translator, essayist, one of the most prominent representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age. Published 35 collections of poetry, 20 books of prose, translated from many languages (W. Blake, E. Poe, P. B. Shelley, O. Wilde, G. Hauptmann, C. Baudelaire, G. Suderman; Spanish songs, Slovak, Georgian epic, Yugoslav, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Mexican, Japanese poetry). Author of autobiographical prose, memoirs, philological treatises, historical and literary studies and critical essays.

Biography

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 collegiate registrar, then as a justice of the peace, and finally as chairman of the district zemstvo council. Mother Vera Nikolaevna, née Lebedeva, came from a general’s family, in which they loved literature and were engaged in it professionally; she appeared in the local press, organized literary evenings and amateur performances; she had a strong influence on the worldview of the future poet, introducing him to 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 a stranger to some freethinking”: “unreliable” guests were received in the house. It was from his mother that Balmont, as he himself wrote, inherited “unbridledness and passion” and his entire “mental structure.”

Childhood

The future poet learned to read on his own at the age of five, watching his mother, who taught her older brother to read and write. The touched father gave Konstantin his first book on this occasion, “something about the savages of the Oceanians.” The mother introduced her son to examples 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, swamp lakes, the rustling of leaves, butterflies, birds and dawns,” he recalled in the 1910s. “A beautiful little kingdom of comfort and silence,” he later wrote about a village with a dozen huts, near which there was a modest estate - an old house surrounded by a shady garden. The poet remembered the threshing grounds and his native land, where the first ten years of his life passed, throughout his life and always described them with great love.

When the time came to send the older children to school, the family moved to Shuya. Moving to the city did not mean a break from nature: the Balmonts’ house, surrounded by an extensive garden, stood on the picturesque bank of the Teza River; Father, a lover of hunting, often went 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 became bored with his studies, and his performance decreased, but the time came for binge reading, and he read French and German works in the original. Impressed by what he read, he began writing poetry himself at the age of ten. “On a bright sunny day they appeared, 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 attempt to repeat his poetic experiment for six years.

From the seventh grade in 1884, Balmont was expelled for belonging 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 to this early revolutionary mood as follows: “...I was happy, and I wanted everyone to feel just as good. It seemed to me that if it was good only for me and a few, it was ugly.”

Through the efforts of his mother, Balmont was transferred to the gymnasium in the city of Vladimir. But here he had to live in the apartment of a Greek teacher, who zealously performed the duties of a “supervisor.” At the end of 1885, Balmont, a final year student, 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 he completed his studies at the gymnasium. Balmont graduated from the course in 1886, in his own words, “having lived like 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 teenage years in detail in his autobiographical novel “Under the New Sickle” (Berlin, 1923). At the age of seventeen, Balmont 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 to P. F. Nikolaev, a revolutionary of the sixties. But already in 1887, for participating in riots (associated with the introduction of a new university charter, which students considered reactionary), Balmont was expelled, arrested and sent to Butyrka prison for three days, and then deported to Shuya without trial. Balmont, who “in his youth was most interested in social issues,” until the end of his life considered himself a revolutionary and rebel who dreamed of “the embodiment of human happiness on earth.” Poetry prevailed in Balmont’s interests only later; in his youth, he longed to become a propagandist and “go among the people.”

Literary debut

In 1889, Balmont returned to the university, but due to severe nervous exhaustion he was unable to study, either there or at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, where he successfully entered. In September 1890, he was expelled from the lyceum and abandoned his attempts to obtain a “government education.” “...I could not force myself, but I lived truly and intensely the life of my heart, and was also in 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 passionate about philosophy. Balmont recalled that at the age of 13 he learned the English word selfhelp (“self-help”), from then on he fell in love with research and “mental work” and worked without sparing his strength until the end of his days.

In 1889, Balmont married Larisa Garelina, the daughter of a Shuya manufacturer. 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 back in 1885. The young poet’s acquaintance 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 favorable mentoring review. “He wrote to me that I have a lot of beautiful details, successfully snatched from the world of nature, that you need to concentrate your attention, and not chase every passing moth, that you don’t need to rush your feeling with thought, but you need to trust the unconscious area of the soul, which is imperceptible accumulates his observations and comparisons, and then suddenly it all blossoms, like a flower blossoms after a long, invisible time of accumulation of its strength,” Balmont recalled. “If you can concentrate and work, we will hear something extraordinary from you over time,” ended the letter from Korolenko, whom the poet later called his “godfather.” However, the debut collection of 1890 did not arouse interest, close people did not accept it, and soon after its 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, jumped 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: his marriage quarreled Balmont with his parents and deprived him of financial support, but the immediate impetus was the “Kreutzer Sonata” he had read shortly before. The year spent in bed, as the poet himself recalled, turned out to be creatively very fruitful and resulted in “an unprecedented flowering of mental excitement and cheerfulness.” It was in this year that he realized himself as a poet and saw his own destiny. In 1923, in his biographical story “The Air Route,” he wrote:

For some time after his illness, Balmont, who by this time had separated from his wife, lived in poverty; he, according to his own recollections, for months “didn’t know what it was to be full, and went to bakeries to admire the rolls and breads through the glass.” “The beginning of literary activity was associated with a lot of pain and failure. For four or five years, no magazine wanted to publish me. The first collection of my poems... was not, of course, 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 greeted the publication with hostility, believing that the author had betrayed the “ideals of social struggle” and withdrawn himself within the framework of “pure art.” In these difficult days, V. G. Korolenko again helped Balmont. “Now he came to me, greatly crushed by various adversities, but, apparently, not lost in spirit. 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, addressing M. N. Albov, who was then one of the editors of the Northern Messenger magazine ", with a request to pay attention to the aspiring poet.

Moscow University professor N.I. Storozhenko also provided Balmont with enormous assistance. “He truly saved me from hunger and, like a father, threw a faithful bridge to his son...” the poet later recalled. Balmont took him his article about Shelley (“very bad,” according to his own later admission), and he took the aspiring writer under his wing. It was Storozhenko who persuaded the publisher K. T. Soldatenkov to entrust the aspiring poet with the translation of two fundamental books - “The History of Scandinavian Literature” by Horn-Schweitzer and “The History of Italian Literature” by Gaspari. Both translations were published in 1894-1895. “These works were my daily bread for three whole years and gave me the desired opportunities to realize 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 began working on the works of Percy Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe; It is this period that is considered the time of his creative development.

Professor Storozhenko, in addition, introduced Balmont to the editorial board of Severny Vestnik, around which 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; the general rosy impressions, however, were overshadowed by the emerging mutual antipathy with the latter.

On the basis of his translation activities, Balmont became close to the philanthropist, an expert in Western European literature, Prince A. N. Urusov, who greatly contributed to expanding the literary horizons of the young poet. With the help of a patron of the arts, Balmont published two books of translations of Edgar Allan Poe (“Ballads and Fantasies”, “Mysterious Stories”). “He published my translation of Poe’s Mysterious Tales and loudly praised my first poems, which formed the books Under the Northern Sky and In the Boundless,” Balmont later recalled. “Urusov helped my soul free itself, helped me find myself,” the poet wrote in 1904 in the 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.

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 book was published, 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 begin publishing them as a separate book. I have a presentiment that my liberal friends will scold me very much, because there is no liberalism in them, and there are enough “corrupting” sentiments.” The poems were in many ways a product of their time (filled with complaints about a dull, joyless life, descriptions of romantic experiences), but the aspiring poet’s premonitions were only partly justified: the book received a wide response, and the reviews were mostly positive. They noted the undoubted talent of the debutant, his “own physiognomy, grace of form” and the freedom with which he wields it.

Rise to Fame

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

The 1890s were a period of active creative work for Balmont in a wide variety of fields of knowledge. The poet, who had a phenomenal capacity for work, mastered “many languages one after another, reveling in his work like a man possessed... he read entire libraries of books, starting with treatises on his favorite Spanish painting and ending with studies on the Chinese language and Sanskrit.” He enthusiastically studied the history of Russia, books on natural sciences and folk art. Already in his mature years, addressing aspiring writers with instructions, he wrote that a debutant needs “...to be able to sit over a philosophical book and an English dictionary and Spanish grammar on his spring day, when he so wants to ride a boat and, perhaps, can kiss someone. Be able to read 100, 300, and 3,000 books, including many, many boring ones. To love not only joy, but also pain. Silently cherish within yourself not only happiness, but also the melancholy that pierces your heart.”

In 1896, Balmont married translator E. A. Andreeva and went with his wife to Western Europe. Several years spent abroad provided the aspiring writer, who was interested, in addition to his main subject, in history, religion and philosophy, with enormous opportunities. He visited France, Italy, Holland, Spain, Italy, spending a lot of time in libraries, improving his knowledge of languages. On those same days, he wrote to his mother from Rome: “All this year abroad I feel like I’m on the stage, among the scenery. And there - in the distance - is 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 just can’t get enough of the treasuries of painting, poetry and philosophy,” he wrote enthusiastically to Akim Volynsky. Impressions from the travels of 1896-1897 were reflected in the collection “Silence”: it was perceived by critics as the poet’s best book 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.

With the help of Moscow friends (including Moscow University professor N.I. Storozhenko), he began to receive orders for translations. In 1899 he was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

Peak of popularity

In the late 1890s, Balmont did not stay in one place for long; 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:

The collection “Burning Buildings” (1900), which occupies a central place in the poet’s creative biography, was created mostly on the Polyakov estate “Banki” in the Moscow district; its owner was mentioned with great warmth in the dedication. “You have to be merciless with yourself. Only then can something be achieved,” - with these words in the preface to “Burning Buildings” Balmont formulated his motto. The author defined the main objective of the book as the desire for internal 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, wretched, ugly. But I will not refuse a single page of it 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 inseparably over Russian poetry. Other poets either obediently followed him, or, with great effort, defended their independence from his overwhelming influence,” wrote V. Ya. Bryusov.

Gradually, Balmont’s lifestyle, largely under the influence of S. Polyakov, began to change. The poet's life in Moscow was spent in diligent studies at home, alternating with violent revelries, when his alarmed wife began to look for him throughout the city. At the same time, inspiration did not leave the poet. “Something more complex than I could have expected came to me, and now I am writing page by page, hurrying and watching myself so as not to be mistaken in joyful haste. How unexpected is your own soul! It’s worth looking into it to see new distances... I feel like I’ve attacked the ore... And if I don’t leave this earth, I’ll write a book that won’t 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 poetry publication, cemented the author’s reputation as a leader of symbolism, and in retrospect is considered his best poetry book. Blok called “Let's Be Like the Sun” “a book that is one of a kind in its immeasurable richness.”

Conflict with the authorities

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 military service. The demonstration was dispersed by the police and Cossacks, and there were casualties among its participants. On March 14, Balmont spoke at a literary evening in the hall of the City Duma and read the poem “Little Sultan,” which in a veiled form criticized the regime of terror in Russia and its organizer, Nicholas II (“That was in Turkey, where conscience is an empty thing, the fist reigns there, a whip, a scimitar, two or three zeros, four scoundrels and a stupid little sultan"). The poem went around, V.I. Lenin was going to publish it in the Iskra newspaper.

By decision of the “special meeting” the poet was expelled from St. Petersburg, deprived of the right to reside in capital and university cities for three years. He stayed with friends for several months at the Volkonsky estate in Sabynino, Kursk province (now Belgorod region), in March 1902 he went to 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 began writing poetry, which was included in the collection “Only Love.” After spending the 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 high school in Paris. By the time of the release of the collection “Only Love. Seven Flowers" (1903), the poet already enjoyed all-Russian fame. He was surrounded by enthusiastic fans and admirers. “A whole class of young ladies and young ladies “Balmont players” appeared - various Zinochkas, Lyubas, Katenkas constantly milled about with us, admiring Balmont. He, of course, set his sails and sailed blissfully with the wind,” recalled B.K. Zaitsev, who lived next to Balmont.

The poetry circles of Balmonists that were created during 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 among it. “They all adopt Balmont’s appearance: the brilliant finishing 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,” which poured into the soul with the first spring happiness.” “...Russia was precisely in love with Balmont... He was read, recited and sung from the stage. Gentlemen whispered his words to their ladies, schoolgirls copied them into notebooks...” Many poets (including Lokhvitskaya, Bryusov, Andrei Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, M. A. Voloshin, S. M. Gorodetsky) dedicated poems to him, seeing in him a “spontaneous genius,” the 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 bloody stain,
The stench of gunpowder and smoke,
In which the mind is dark...
Our king is a blind misery,
Prison and whip, trial, execution,
The hanged king is twice as low,
What he promised, but didn’t dare give.
He is a coward, he feels with hesitation,
But it will happen, the hour of reckoning awaits.
Who began to reign - Khodynka,
He will end up 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. In January 1905, the poet took a trip to Mexico, from where he went to California. The poet's travel notes and essays, along with his free adaptations of Indian cosmogonic myths and legends, were later included in “Snake Flowers” (1910). This period of Balmont’s creativity ended with the release of the collection “Liturgy of Beauty. Spontaneous 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, mostly through poetry.” Having become close to Maxim Gorky, Balmont began active collaboration with the Social Democratic newspaper “New Life” and the Parisian magazine “Red Banner”, which was published by A. V. Amphiteatrov. E. Andreeva-Balmont confirmed in her memoirs: in 1905, the poet “was passionately interested in the revolutionary movement,” “he spent all his days on the street, building barricades, making speeches, climbing on pedestals.” In December, during the days of the Moscow uprising, Balmont often visited 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 passion for the revolution was sincere, although, as the future showed, shallow; 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 traveling long distances. Almost immediately he felt a sharp homesickness. “Life forced me to break away from Russia for a long time, and at times it seems to me that I am no longer living, that only my strings are still sounding,” 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 his documentary study “This is how the poets lived...”, examining in detail the materials relating to the “revolutionary activities” of K. Balmont, comes to the conclusion that the secret police “considered the poet a dangerous political person” and secret surveillance over him was maintained even by border.

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, “Knowledge”) was confiscated by the police; “Songs of the Avenger” (Paris, 1907) was banned for distribution in Russia. During the years of the first emigration, the collections “Evil Spells” (1906), arrested by censorship due to “blasphemous” poems, and “Firebird. Slav's pipe" (1907) and "Green Vertograd. Kissing words" (1909). The mood and imagery of these books, which reflected the poet’s passion for the ancient epic side of Russian and Slavic culture, were also consonant with “Calls of Antiquity” (1909). Critics spoke disparagingly about the new turn in the poet’s creative development, but Balmont himself was not aware of and did not recognize the creative decline.

Return: 1913-1920

In 1913, political emigrants on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov were granted an amnesty, and on May 5, 1913, Balmont returned to Moscow. A solemn public meeting was arranged for him at the Brest railway station in Moscow. The gendarmes forbade the poet to address the public who greeted him with a speech; instead, according to press reports at the time, he scattered fresh lilies of the valley among the crowd. In honor of the poet’s return, ceremonial receptions were held at the Society of Free Aesthetics and the Literary and Artistic Circle. In 1914, the publication of Balmont's complete collection of 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”, their impressions of Oceania.

After his return, Balmont traveled a lot around the country giving lectures (“Oceania”, “Poetry as Magic” and others). “The heart shrinks here... there are many tears in our beauty,” the poet noted, after finding himself after long journeys on the Oka River, in Russian meadows and fields, where “rye is as tall as a man and taller.” “I love Russia and Russians. Oh, we Russians don’t value ourselves! We don't know how forgiving, patient and delicate we are. I believe in Russia, I believe in its brightest future,” he wrote in one of his articles at that time.

At the beginning of 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 gave a course of lectures that were a great success. The poet began to study the Georgian language and began translating Shota Rustaveli’s poem “The Knight in the Skin of a Tiger.” Among Balmont's other major translation works of this time was the transcription of ancient Indian monuments ("Upanishads", Kalidasa's dramas, Asvagoshi's poem "The Life of Buddha").

In 1915, Balmont’s theoretical sketch “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 magical power” and even “physical power.” The research largely continued what was begun in the books “Mountain Peaks” (1904), “White Lightning” (1908), “Sea Glow” (1910), dedicated to the work of Russian and Western European poets. At the same time, he wrote without ceasing, especially often turning to the sonnet genre. During these years, the poet created 255 sonnets, which made up the collection “Sonnets of the Sun, Sky and Moon” (1917). Books “Ash. Vision of a Tree" (1916) and "Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon" (1917) were received warmer than the previous ones, but even in them the critics saw mainly "monotony and an abundance of banal beauty."

Between two revolutions

Balmont welcomed the February Revolution, began collaborating in the Society of Proletarian Arts, but soon became disillusioned with the new government and joined the Cadet Party, which demanded the continuation of the war to a victorious end. In one of the issues of the Morning of Russia newspaper, 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. Being a supporter of absolute freedom, he did not accept the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he considered “a curb on free speech.” In the 1918 journalistic book “Am I a Revolutionary or Not?” Balmont, characterizing the Bolsheviks as carriers of a destructive principle, suppressing “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 specific 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 visit E.A. Andreeva and daughter Nina. Thus forced to support two families, Balmont lived in poverty, partly also due to his unwillingness to compromise with the new government. When, at a literary lecture, someone handed Balmont a note asking why he did not publish his works, the answer was: “I don’t want to... I can’t publish for those who have blood on their hands.” It was alleged that once the Extraordinary Commission discussed the issue of his execution, 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 stay warm, they had to spend the whole day in bed.” Balmont was loyal to the authorities: he worked in the People's Commissariat for Education, prepared poems and translations for publication, and gave lectures. On May 1, 1920, in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions in Moscow, he read his poem “Song of the Working Hammer,” and the next day he greeted the artist M. N. Ermolova with poetry at her anniversary evening at the Maly Theater. In the same year, Moscow writers organized a celebration of Balmont, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of his first, “Yaroslavl,” poetry collection. At the end of 1920, the poet began making plans to travel abroad, citing the deteriorating health of his wife and daughter. The beginning of Balmont’s long and lasting friendship with Marina Tsvetaeva, who was in a similar, very difficult situation in Moscow, dates back to this time.

Second emigration: 1920-1942

In June 1920, at the request of Jurgis Baltrushaitis, having received permission from A.V. Lunacharsky to temporarily go abroad on a business trip, together with his wife, daughter and distant relative A.N. Ivanova, 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, “carrying firewood from a dismantled fence on himself.” Stanitsky (S.V. von Stein), recalling a meeting with Balmont in 1920 in Reval, noted: “The stamp of painful exhaustion lay on his face, and he all seemed still in the grip of dark and sorrowful experiences, already abandoned in the country of lawlessness and evil , but not yet completely 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 covered with a thick brown curtain, because the poet broke the glass. There was no point in inserting new glass - it could easily break again. Therefore, the room was always dark and cold. “Terrible apartment,” they said. “There is no glass, and it’s blowing.”

The poet immediately found himself between two fires. On the one hand, the radical emigrant community suspected him of being a Soviet sympathizer. As S. Polyakov ironically noted, Balmont “... violated the ceremony of escape from Soviet Russia. Instead of fleeing from Moscow secretly, making his way as a wanderer through the forests and valleys of Finland, and accidentally falling at the border from the bullet of a drunken Red Army soldier or Finn, he persistently sought permission to leave with his family for four months, received it and arrived in Paris unshot.” The poet’s position was unwittingly “aggravated” by Lunacharsky, who in a Moscow newspaper denied rumors that he was campaigning abroad against the Soviet regime. This allowed right-wing emigrant circles to notice “...significantly: 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 confused,” hinting at the fact that much of what is being done in “cultural” Europe is also deeply disgusting to him. This served as a reason for an attack on him by emigrant publicists (“...What is complicated? Mass executions? What is confused? Systematic robbery, dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, destruction of all freedoms, military expeditions to pacify the peasants?”).

Balmont responded with dignity and calm to all these reproaches. But it’s worth thinking about them in order to once again feel the charm of Soviet ethics - a purely cannibalistic style. The poet Balmont, whose entire being protests against Soviet power, which has ruined his homeland and every day kills its powerful, creative spirit in its slightest manifestations, is obliged to sacredly keep his word given to the rapist commissars and emergency officers. But these same principles of moral behavior are by no means guiding the Soviet government and its agents. Killing parliamentarians, shooting defenseless women and children with machine guns, executing tens of thousands of innocent people by starvation - all this, of course, in the opinion of “comrade Bolsheviks” is nothing compared to violating 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 dispersion who experienced isolation from Russia just as keenly.” Balmont called emigration “life among strangers,” although he worked unusually hard; in 1921 alone, six of his books were published. In exile, Balmont actively collaborated with the newspaper “Paris News”, the magazine “Modern Notes”, and numerous Russian periodicals published in other European countries. His attitude towards Soviet Russia remained ambiguous, but his 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 a feeling of loneliness and 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-Vie), and until the late autumn of 1926 in the Gironde (Lacano-Océan). At the beginning of November 1926, after leaving Lacanau, 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.

Social activities and journalism

Balmont unambiguously stated 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 unscrupulous, 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 emigrant periodicals of the early 1920s, his poetic lines about the “Actors of Satan”, about the “blood-drunk” Russian land, about the “days of the humiliation of Russia”, about the “red drops” that went into 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 title of the collection was predetermined by the first line of the poem of the same name: “Muddy haze, damn brew...”

In 1927, with a journalistic article “A Little Zoology for Little Red Riding Hood,” Balmont responded to the scandalous speech of the Soviet plenipotentiary representative in Poland D.V. Bogomolov, who at the reception stated that Adam Mickiewicz in his famous poem “To Muscovite Friends” (the generally accepted translation of the title is “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-pleading” to Knut Hamsun, and without waiting for an answer, he turned to Galperin-Kaminsky:

First of all, I will point out that I was waiting for a chorus of response voices, waiting for a human responsive cry from European writers, because I had not yet completely lost faith in Europe. I waited a month. I waited two. Silence. I wrote to a major writer, with whom I have a personal good relationship, to a world-famous writer 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 existed 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 that you published in Avenir to my friend - friend-brother - Alphonse de Chateaubriand. He is silent. To whom should I appeal?..

In an address to Romain Rolland there, Balmont wrote: “Believe me, we are not as vagabond by nature as you might think. We left Russia so that we could have the opportunity in Europe to try to shout something about the Perishing Mother, to shout into the deaf ears of the hardened and indifferent, who are busy only with themselves...” The poet also reacted sharply to the policy of the British government of James MacDonald, who entered into trade negotiations with the Bolsheviks , and later recognized the USSR. “England’s recognition 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, and did not accept “conciliatory” tendencies (smenovekhism, 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” of Western Europe in the 1920s - 1930s, in particular, the passion for socialism among a significant part of the French intellectual elite. Balmont responded vividly to events that shocked the emigration: the kidnapping of General A.P. Kutepov by Soviet agents in January 1930, 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 education”), 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 entire Western way of life. Europe had previously caused him bitterness with its rational pragmatism. Back in 1907, the poet remarked: “Strange people are European people, strangely uninteresting. They need to prove everything. I never look for evidence." “Nobody here reads anything. Everyone here is interested in sports and cars. Damn time, senseless generation! “I feel about the same as the last Peruvian ruler among the insolent Spanish newcomers,” he wrote in 1927.

Creativity in exile

It is generally accepted that emigration was a sign of decline for Balmont; this opinion, shared by many Russian emigrant poets, was subsequently disputed more than once. In different countries during these years, Balmont published books of poems “Gift to the Earth”, “Bright Hour” (1921), “Haze” (1922), “Mine is for her. Poems about Russia" (1923), "In the widening distance" (1929), "Northern Lights" (1933), "Blue Horseshoe", "Light Service" (1937). In 1923, he published books of autobiographical prose, “Under the New Sickle” and “Air Route,” and 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 long lecture tours in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, in the summer of 1930 he made a trip to Lithuania, while simultaneously translating West Slavic poetry, but the main theme of Balmont’s works during these years remained Russia: memories of it and longing for what was lost.

“I want Russia. I want there to be a transformative dawn in Russia. That's all I want. Nothing else,” he wrote to E. A. Andreeva. The poet was drawn back to Russia, and he, inclined to succumb to the mood of the moment, more than once expressed in the 1920s a desire to return to his homeland. “I live and do not live, living abroad. Despite all the horrors of Russia, I very much regret 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 had completely decided to return, but again everything in my soul was confused,” he reported to E. A. Andreeva on June 13, 1923. “You will feel how much I always love Russia and how the thought of our nature possesses me. One word “lingonberry” or “clover” evokes such excitement in my soul that one word is enough for poetry to burst out of my 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. Tsvetkovskaya became increasingly 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 and then ceased. The poet also had to take care of three women, and his daughter Mirra, who was extremely carefree and impractical, caused him a lot of trouble. “K[onstantin] D[mitrievich] is in a very difficult situation, he can barely make 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 is getting worse and worse, worse,” wrote I. S. Shmelev to 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 in Clamart near Paris, in poverty. In the spring of 1935, Balmont was admitted to the 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 perishing, dear friend, if you can, help, advise…” Tsvetkovskaya wrote to Seeler on April 6, 1935. Despite his illness and plight, the poet retained his former eccentricity and sense of humor. Regarding a car accident in which he got into in the mid-1930s, Balmont, in a letter to V.V. Obolyaninov, complained not about bruises, but about a damaged suit: “A Russian emigrant really has to think about what is more profitable for him to lose - his pants or the legs on which they are worn...". In a letter to E. A. Andreeva, the poet reported:

At the end of 1936, Balmont and Tsvetkovskaya moved to Noisy-le-Grand near Paris. The last years of his life, the poet alternately stayed in a charity home for Russians, which was maintained by M. Kuzmina-Karavaeva, and in a cheap furnished apartment. As Yuri Terapiano recalled, “the Germans treated Balmont with indifference, while the Russian Nazis reproached him for his previous revolutionary beliefs.” However, by this moment Balmont had finally fallen into a “twilight state”; he came to Paris, but with great difficulty. In hours of enlightenment, when mental illness subsided, Balmont, according to the recollections of those who knew him, with a feeling of happiness opened the volume of “War and Peace” or re-read his old books; He had not been able to 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 and his wife, the widow of Yu. Baltrushaitis, two or three acquaintances and daughter Mirra. Irina Odoevtseva recalled that “... it was raining heavily. When they began to lower the coffin into the grave, it turned out to be filled with water, and the coffin floated up. They had to hold him down with a pole while they filled up the grave.” The French public learned about the poet's death from an article in the pro-Hitler Parisian Messenger, which gave, as was then customary, a thorough reprimand to the late poet for the fact that at one time he supported the revolutionaries.

Translation activities

The range of foreign language literatures and authors that Balmont translated 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 hobby, which was realized in translations by Georg Brandes, Henrik Ibsen, and Bjornstjerne Bjornson.

In 1893-1899, Balmont published the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in his own translation with an introductory article in seven editions. In 1903-1905, the Znanie partnership published a revised and expanded edition of three volumes. More artistically successful and later recognized as textbook translations of Edgar Allan Poe were published in 1895 in two volumes and were 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 “Murr the Cat” by E. T. Hoffman (St. Petersburg, 1893), “Salome” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde (M., 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 Charles Baudelaire. His translations of Horn's History of Scandinavian Literature (Moscow, 1894) and Gaspari's History of Italian Literature (Moscow, 1895-1997) are considered important for literary studies. Balmont edited the works of Gerhart Hauptmann (1900 and later), the works of Hermann Suderman (1902-1903), and “The History of Painting” by Muter (St. Petersburg, 1900-1904). Balmont, who studied the Georgian language after a trip to Georgia in 1914, is the author of a translation of Shota Rustaveli’s poem “The Knight in the Skin of a Tiger”; he himself considered it the best love poem ever created in Europe (“a bridge of fire connecting heaven and earth”). After visiting Japan in 1916, he translated tanka and haiku by various Japanese authors, from ancient to modern.

Not all of Balmont's works were highly rated. His translations of Ibsen (Ghosts, Moscow, 1894), Hauptmann (Hannele, The Sunken Bell) and Walt Whitman (Grass Shoots, 1911) caused serious criticism from critics. Analyzing the translations of Shelley carried out by Balmont, Korney Chukovsky called the resulting “new face”, half-Shelley, half-Balmont, Shelmont. Nevertheless, the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary states that “the fact of the single-handed translation of several tens of thousands of rhymed verses by a poet as complex and profound as Shelley can be called a feat in the field of Russian poetic translation literature.”

According to M.I. Voloshin, “Balmont translated Shelley, Edgar Poe, Calderon, Walt Whitman, Spanish folk songs, Mexican sacred books, Egyptian hymns, Polynesian myths, Balmont knows twenty languages, Balmont read 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 the reflection of his own face in different frames, of all languages he created one, his own, and the gray dust of libraries on his light wings of Ariel turns into the rainbow dust of a butterfly's wings."

And 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 to a “reflection” and believed that it could be “more beautiful and radiant” than the original:

Giving artistic equivalence in translation is a never-impossible task. A work of art, in its essence, is singular and unique in its face. You 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, generally speaking, 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 cry seven times, seven times the echo is more beautiful and stronger than the sound. This happens sometimes, but very rarely, with poetic translations. And the reflection is only a vague reflection of the face. But with high qualities of the mirror, with favorable conditions for its position and lighting, a beautiful face in the mirror becomes more beautiful and radiant in its reflected existence. Echoes in the forest are one of the best charms.

K. D. Balmont

Balmont always treated Russia as an integral part of the pan-Slavic world. “I am a Slav and I will remain one,” the poet wrote in 1912. Having a special love for Poland, he translated a lot from Polish - in particular, the works of Adam Mickiewicz, Stanislaw Wyspiański, Zygmunt Krasiński, Bolesław Leśmian, Jan Kasprowicz, Jan Lechon, and wrote a lot about Poland and Polish poetry. Later, in the 1920s, Balmont translated Czech poetry (Jaroslav Vrchlicki, “Selected Poems.” Prague, 1928), Bulgarian (“The Golden Sheaf of Bulgarian Poetry. Folk Songs.” Sofia, 1930), Serbian, Croatian, Slovak. Balmont also considered Lithuania to be related to the Slavic world: his first translations of Lithuanian folk songs date back to 1908. Among the poets he translated were Petras Babickas, Mykolas Vaitkus and Ludas Gyra; 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 “Tales of Igor’s Campaign” (Russia and the Slavs, 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 Slavism,” wrote that Balmont, who turned out to be “closer to the original than any of his predecessors,” was able to reflect in his translation “the conciseness, precision of the original... to convey all the colors, sounds, movement with which the “Lay” is so rich, its bright lyricism, the majesty of the epic parts... to feel in his translation the national idea of the “Lay” and the love for the homeland with which he burned 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.

Family

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

...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 the First for his bravery. My mother's ancestors (née Lebedeva) were Tatars. The ancestor was Prince White Swan of the Golden Horde. Perhaps this can partly explain the unbridledness and passion that always distinguished my mother, and which I inherited from her, as well as my entire mental structure. My mother's father (also a military man, a general) wrote poems, but did not publish them. All my mother's sisters (there are many of them) wrote, but did not publish them.

Autobiographical letter. 1903

There is an alternative version of the origin of the Balmont surname. Thus, researcher P. Kupriyanovsky points out that the poet’s great-grandfather, a cavalry sergeant in Catherine’s Life Guards Regiment, could bear the surname Balamut, which was later ennobled by “alteration in a foreign way.” This assumption is 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... This document on parchment and with seals was kept with us. In Ukraine, the surname Balamut still exists and is quite common. The poet’s great-grandfather Ivan Andreevich Balamut was a Kherson landowner... How the surname Balamut transferred to Balmont - I have not been able to 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 peace mediator, a justice of the peace, chairman of the congress of justices of the peace, and, finally, chairman of the district zemstvo government. In 1906, D.K. Balmont retired and died a year later. In the poet’s memory, he remained a quiet and kind man who passionately loved nature and hunting. Mother Vera Nikolaevna came from a general's family; She received an institute education and was distinguished by her active character: she taught and treated peasants, organized amateur performances and concerts, and sometimes published in provincial newspapers. Dmitry Konstantinovich and Vera Nikolaevna had seven sons. All the poet’s relatives pronounced their last name with the emphasis on the first syllable; the poet only later independently, as he claimed, “because of the whim of one woman,” transferred the emphasis to the second.

Personal life

K. D. Balmont said 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 at nine years old, the first passion was at 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 rituals of love, its entire rainbow. Balmont himself says that, following the paths of love, he can achieve “too much - everything!”

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 Road to blessed Tiflis and Transcaucasia,” - he later wrote. But the honeymoon 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 a devilish one,” and tormented him with jealousy; It is generally accepted that it was she who turned him to wine, as evidenced by the poet’s confessional poem “Forest Fire.” The wife did not sympathize with either the literary aspirations or the revolutionary sentiments of her husband and was prone to quarrels. In many ways, it was the painful relationship with Garelina that pushed Balmont to attempt suicide on the morning of March 13, 1890. Soon after his recovery, which was only partial - the lameness remained with him for the rest of his life - Balmont broke up with L. Garelina. The first child born in this marriage died, the second - son Nikolai - subsequently suffered from a nervous disorder. Later, researchers warned against excessive “demonization” of the image of Balmont’s first wife: having separated from the latter, Larisa Mikhailovna married the journalist and literary historian N.A. Engelhardt 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 colonial goods shops) and was distinguished by 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 reciprocate for a long time. When the latter arose, it turned out that the poet was married: then the parents forbade their daughter to meet her lover. However, Ekaterina Alekseevna, enlightened in the “newest spirit,” looked at the rituals as a formality and soon moved in with the poet. The divorce proceedings, 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.

Balmont shared common literary interests with E. A. Andreeva; The couple carried out many joint translations, in particular of Gerhart Hauptmann and Odd Nansen. Boris Zaitsev, in his memoirs about Balmont, called Ekaterina Alekseevna “an elegant, cool and noble woman, highly cultured and not without authority.” Their apartment on the fourth floor of a building in Tolstoy was, as Zaitsev wrote, “the work of Ekaterina Alekseevna, just as their lifestyle was also largely directed by her.” Balmont was “... in faithful, loving and healthy hands and at home he led a life, even just a working one.” 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”.

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 Faculty of Mathematics at the Sorbonne and a passionate admirer of his poetry. The latter, “not strong in character, ... with her whole being was drawn into the whirlpool of the poet’s madness,” every word of which “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” divided: Balmont either lived with his family or left with Elena; for example, in 1905 they went to Mexico for three months. The poet's family life became completely confused after E.K. Tsvetkovskaya gave birth to 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. Mental anguish led to a breakdown: in 1909, Balmont made a new suicide attempt, again jumped out of the window and again survived. Until 1917, Balmont lived in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra, coming from time to time to Moscow to visit Andreeva and his daughter Nina.

Balmont emigrated from Russia with his third (civil-law) wife E.K. Tsvetkovskaya and daughter Mirra. However, he did not break off friendly relations with Andreeva; Only in 1934, when Soviet citizens were prohibited from corresponding with relatives and friends living abroad, this connection was interrupted. Teffi, recalling one of their meetings, described the new married duo as follows: “He entered with his forehead raised high, as if he was carrying a golden crown of glory. His neck was wrapped twice in a 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’s recollections, 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.”

E.K. Tsvetkovskaya turned out to be not the poet’s last love. In Paris, he resumed his acquaintance with Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya (1893-1967), which began in March 1919. “One of my dear ones, half-Swedish, half-Polish, Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya, nee Baroness Lilienfeld, Russified, more than once sang Estonian songs to me,” - this is how Balmont characterized his beloved in one of his letters. Shakhovskaya gave birth to two children for Balmont - Georges (1922-194?) and Svetlana (b. 1925). The poet could not leave his family; meeting 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 survived. 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 poet's death. Mirra Konstantinovna Balmont (in her marriage - Boychenko, in her second marriage - Autina) wrote poetry and published in the 1920s under the pseudonym Aglaya Gamayun. She died in Noisy-le-Grand in 1970.

Analysis of creativity

Balmont became the first representative of symbolism in poetry to gain all-Russian fame. It was noted, however, that his work as a whole was not purely symbolist; The poet was not 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 rather a convenient shell for creating the image of the creator of new art.” Balmont’s first collections, with all the abundance of decadent-symbolist features in them, were attributed by literary scholars to impressionism, a movement in art that aimed to convey fleeting, unsteady impressions. Basically, these were “purely romantic poems, as if contrasting heaven and earth, calling to the distant, otherworldly,” 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 loneliness, homelessness” that dominated Balmont’s early poems were echoes of the previous “thoughts of a sick, tired generation of 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 humble young man, imbued with the most well-intentioned and moderate feelings.”

The collections “In the Boundless” (1895) and “Silence. Lyrical Poems" (1898) were marked by an active search for "new space, new freedom." The main ideas for these books were the transience of existence and the variability of the world. The author paid increased attention to the technique of verse, demonstrating a clear passion for sound recording and musicality. Symbolism in his understanding was, first of all, a means of searching for “new combinations of thoughts, colors and sounds”, a method of building “from the sounds, syllables and words of one’s native speech a treasured chapel, where everything is filled with deep meaning and penetration.” Symbolic poetry “speaks its own special language, and this language is rich in intonations, like music and painting, it arouses a complex mood in the soul, more than any other kind of poetry, it touches our sound and visual impressions,” wrote Balmont 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 all materiality, it “represents a spiritual substance.”

The presence of new, “Nietzschean” motifs and heroes (“spontaneous genius,” “unlike human,” striving “beyond the limit” and even “beyond the limits of 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 that occupied a significant place in the book (“Dead ships”, “Chords”, “Before the painting of El Greco”, “In Oxford”, “In the vicinity of Madrid”, “To Shelley”) were not simple descriptions, but they expressed a 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 a force of nature. He loves 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 “frenzied joy, the pressure of violent forces.” Since 1900, Balmont’s “elegiac” hero has turned into his own opposite: an active personality, “almost with orgiastic passion, affirming in this world the aspiration to the Sun, fire, light”; Fire occupied a special place in Balmont’s hierarchy of images as a manifestation of cosmic forces. Finding himself 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 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 “anxiety in the air, a sign of impulse, movement” (“The Cry 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. A significantly new factor in Russian poetry was Balmont's eroticism. The poems “She gave herself up without reproach...” and “I want to be daring...” became his most popular works; from them they learned “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 “guise of an elemental genius” he adopted, the egocentrism that reached the point of narcissism, on the one hand, and the eternal sun worship, loyalty to the dream, the search for the beautiful and perfect, 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 depiction. Many drew attention to the shocking component of his work: almost frantic expressions of determination and energy, a craving for the use of “dagger words.” Prince A.I. 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 adversities of the native community.” It was noted that “the 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 existence” 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 stylized songs dedicated to his daughter Nina, received high marks from his contemporaries. “In Fairy Tales, the spring of Balmont’s creativity again flows with a clear, crystalline, melodious stream. 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, what is its best eternal glory. These are tender, airy songs that create their own music. They look like the silver ringing of thoughtful bells, “narrow-bottomed, multi-colored on the 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, “Silence” (about the islands in the Pacific Ocean) and “Iceland”, which Bryusov highly valued. Constantly searching for “new combinations of thoughts, colors and sounds” and establishing “striking” images, the poet believed that he was creating “lyrics of the modern soul,” a soul that has “many faces.” Transferring heroes through time and space, across many eras (“Scythians”, “Oprichniki”, “In the Dead Days” and so on), he affirmed the image of a “spontaneous genius”, a “superman” (“Oh, the bliss of being strong and proud and forever free!” - “Albatross”).

One of the fundamental principles of Balmont's philosophy during 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 unconscious, and delight, and shame. / And the swamp space, and the heights of the mountains"). Balmont could admire the scorpion with its “pride and desire for freedom”, bless the crippled, “crooked cacti”, “snakes and lizards, rejected births”. At the same time, the sincerity of Balmont’s “demonism,” expressed in demonstrative submission to the elements of passion, was not questioned. According to Balmont, the poet is an “inspired demigod,” “a 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 Poetry,” he admitted: “...I don’t think about poetry and, really, I never compose.” Once written, he never corrected or edited it again, believing that the first impulse was the most correct, but he wrote continuously, and a lot. The poet believed that only a moment, always one and only, reveals the truth, makes it possible to “see the distant distance” (“I do not know wisdom suitable for others, / I put only fleetingness into poetry. / In every fleetingness I see worlds, / Full of changing 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 he could express them more fully and beautifully. He either sang of Evil, then Good, then leaned towards paganism, then bowed to Christianity.” She told how one day, having noticed a cart of hay driving down the street from the apartment window, Balmont immediately created the poem “In the Capital”; how suddenly the sound of raindrops falling from the roof gave him complete stanzas. Balmont tried to live up to the self-characterization: “I am a cloud, I am the breath of the breeze” given in the book “Under the Northern Sky” until the end of his life.

Many found the melodic repetition technique developed by Balmont unusually effective (“I caught the passing shadows with a dream. / The passing shadows of the fading day. / I climbed the tower, and the steps trembled, / And the steps trembled under my feet”). It was noted that Balmont was able to “repeat a single word in such a way that a bewitching power was awakened in him” (“But even in the hour before sleep, between the rocks of my loved ones again / I will see the sun, the sun, the sun - red as blood”). Balmont developed his own style of colorful epithet, introduced into widespread use such nouns as “lights”, “dusk”, “smoke”, “bottomlessness”, “fleetingness”, and continued, following the traditions of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Gnedich, an experiment with merging individual epithets into clusters (“joyfully widened rivers”, “their every glance is calculated and 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. Rarely is a poet so free and easy to solve the most complex rhythmic problems and, avoiding banality, to be as alien and artificial as Balmont,” “equally alien to Fet’s provincialisms and 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 as an undoubted advantage of his poems the rare musicality that sounded in sharp contrast to the “anemic magazine poetry” of the end of the previous century. As if rediscovering for the reader the beauty and intrinsic value of the word, its, as Annensky put it, “musical potency,” Balmont largely corresponded to the motto proclaimed by Paul Verlaine: “Music first of all.” Valery Bryusov, who during the first years was strongly influenced by Balmont, wrote that Balmont fell in love with all poetry lovers “with his sonorous verse,” that “there were no equals to Balmont in the art of verse in Russian literature.” “I have the calm conviction that before me, in general, in Russia they did not know how to write sonorous poetry,” was the poet’s brief assessment of his own contribution to literature, made in those years.

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

Researchers noted that Balmont’s poetry, built on effective verbal and musical harmonies, conveyed the atmosphere and mood well, but at the same time the drawing and the plasticity of the images suffered, the outlines of the depicted object became foggy and blurred. It was noted that the novelty of poetic means, which Balmont was proud of, was only relative. “Balmont’s verse is the verse of our past, improved, refined, but essentially still the same,” wrote Valery Bryusov in 1912. The declared “desire to become accustomed 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 was a consequence of the lack of “a single creative core in the soul, a lack of integrity, which many, many symbolists suffered from.” Andrei Bely spoke about the “pettiness of his “daring””, “the ugliness of his “freedom””, his tendency to “constantly lie to himself, which has already become the truth for his soul.” Later, Vladimir Mayakovsky called Balmont and Igor Severyanin “manufacturers of molasses.”

Innokenty Annensky about Balmont

The poet's defiantly narcissistic revelations shocked the literary community; he was reproached for arrogance and narcissism. Among those who came to his defense 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 delirium 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 first of all our I, only conscious and expressed by Balmont.” “A verse is not the creation of a poet; it does not even, if you like, belong to the poet. 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 both for itself and for others, and narcissism appears here as if replacing the classical pride of poets in their merits.” Claiming that “Balmont’s self lives, in addition to the power of its aesthetic love, by two absurdities - the absurdity of integrity and the absurdity of justification,” Annensky cited as an example the poem “To Distant Close Ones” (Your reasoning is alien to me: “Christ”, “Antichrist”, “Devil” , “God”...), noting the presence of internal polemics in it, which “in itself decomposes the integrity of perceptions.”

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

Creativity of 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 a challenge and reproach to modernity, a "curse to people" who, according to the poet's conviction, had fallen "from the fundamental principles of Being", Nature and the Sun, who had lost their original integrity ("We tore, split the living unity of all elements"; "People have stopped loving the Sun, we need to 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 autocracy”, “clueless-cultural” philistinism, glorified “conscious, brave workers” and in general were distinguished by extreme radicalism. Contemporary poets, as well as later researchers of creativity, did not value this “political period” in Balmont’s work highly. “At what unfortunate hour did it occur to Balmont that he could be a singer of social and political relations, a civic singer of modern Russia!.. The three-kopeck book published by the Znanie partnership 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 unique angle: Balmont revealed to the reader the “epic” Rus', the legends and tales of which he sought to translate into his own, modern way. The poet’s passion for Slavic antiquity was reflected in the poetry collection “Evil Spells” (1906) and the books “The Firebird. Slav's pipe" (1907) and "Green Vertograd. Kissing words" (1909), which presented poetically processed folklore stories and texts, including sectarian songs, sorcerer's spells and Khlyst's "zeal" (which, from the poet's point of view, reflected the "people's mind"), as well as the collection "Calls of Antiquity "with its examples of the “first creativity” of non-Slavic peoples, ritual-magical and priestly poetry. The folklore experiments of the poet, who undertook to transform epics and folk tales in a “decadent” way, met with a mostly negative reaction from critics and were regarded as “obviously unsuccessful and false stylizations, reminiscent of a toy neo-Russian style” in painting and architecture of that time. Already in 1905, Alexander Blok wrote about the “excessive spice” of Balmont’s poems; Bryusov emphasized that Balmont’s epic heroes were “ridiculous and pitiful” in a “decadent frock coat.” In 1909, Blok wrote about his new poems: “This is almost exclusively absurd nonsense... At best, it looks like some kind of nonsense, in which, with great effort, one can grasp (or invent) an unsteady lyrical meaning... there is a wonderful Russian poet Balmont , and the new poet Balmont is no more.”

In the collections “Birds in the Air. Chanted lines" (St. Petersburg, 1908) and "Round dance of the times. All Glasnost” (Moscow, 1909) criticism noted the monotony of themes, images and techniques; Balmont was reproached for remaining captive to the old, symbolist canons. The so-called “Balmontisms” (“sun-faced”, “kissing”, “lush-colored” and so on) in the new cultural and social atmosphere caused bewilderment and irritation. Subsequently, it was recognized that objectively there was a decline in the poet’s work and it lost the significance that it had at the beginning of the century.

Late Balmont

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 truly happy people, not having lost spontaneity and “purity”. Balmont popularized oral traditions, fairy 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 “decline”; the factor of novelty of the Balmont style ceased to operate, the technique remained the same and, in the opinion of many, degenerated into a cliche. The books “Glow of the Dawn” (1912) and “Ash. Vision of a Tree" (1916), but they also noted "tiring monotony, lethargy, banal beauty - a sign of all of Balmont's later lyrics."

Balmont's work in exile received mixed reviews. The poet’s contemporaries considered this period decadent: “...That Balmont verse seems discordant to us, which deceived with its new melodiousness,” V.V. Nabokov wrote about him. Later researchers noted that in books published after 1917, Balmont 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 in them that Balmont “Slavic gilding” that Innokenty Annensky once mentioned appears more clearly,” wrote the poet Nikolai Bannikov. He noted that “Balmont’s peculiarity of throwing out, as if carelessly, some inspired, extremely beautiful individual lines” was manifested in the emigrant creativity more clearly than ever. The critic calls poems such as “Dune Pines” and “Russian Language” “small masterpieces.” It was noted that a representative of the “older” generation of Russian symbolists, “buried alive by many as a poet,” Balmont began to sound new in those years: “In his poems... no longer “fleeting things” appear, but genuine, deep feelings: anger, bitterness, despair. The capricious “whimsicalities” characteristic of his work are supplanted by a feeling of enormous universal misfortune, and the pretentious “beauties” are replaced by rigor and clarity of expression.”

Evolution of worldview

Balmont's early work was considered largely secondary in ideological and philosophical terms: his passion for the ideas of “brotherhood, honor, freedom” was a tribute to the general sentiments 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, sadness, renunciation / And voluntary torment / Christ crucified for us”). There is an opinion that, having become a professional translator, Balmont came under the influence of the literature he translated. Gradually, “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”, “climbing” 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.” Balmont outlined the essence of his new worldview in the essay “At the Heights,” published in 1895:

“Demonic” ideas and moods began to dominate in Balmont’s poetry, which gradually took possession of him in real life. Having become close to S.A. Polyakov, the poet received significant funds at his disposal and went on a spree, an important part of which were romantic “victories” that had a somewhat sinister, pagan connotation. N. Petrovskaya, who fell into the zone of attraction of Balmont’s “charms”, but soon emerged from it under the influence of Bryusov’s “fields”, recalled: “... It was necessary... or to become a companion of his “crazy nights”, throwing my entire being into these monstrous fires, up to and including health, or join the staff of his “myrrh-bearing wives,” humbly following on the heels of the triumphal chariot, speaking in chorus only about him, breathing only the incense of his glory and abandoning even their hearths, lovers and husbands for this great mission...”

Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron about Balmont

The “demonic” moods in Balmont’s poetry were characterized by contemporary criticism of the poet as follows:

A whole collection of witches, incubus devils and succubus devils, vampires, dead people crawling out of their coffins, monstrous toads, chimeras, etc. parades before the stunned reader. The poet is in the closest communication with all this venerable company; believe him, he himself is a real monster. He not only “loved his dissipation”, he not only consists entirely of “tiger passions”, “snake 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,

He sings and praises Satan.

The tastes and sympathies of a devil worshiper are the most satanic. He fell in love with the albatross, this “sea and air robber”, for the “shamelessness of pirate impulses”, he glorifies the scorpion, he feels a spiritual affinity with Nero who “burned Rome”... he loves the color red because it is the color of blood...

How Balmont himself perceived his own life in those years can be judged by his correspondence with Bryusov. One of the constant themes of these letters was the proclamation of one’s own uniqueness and eminence above the world. But the poet also felt horror at what was happening: “Valery, dear, write to me, don’t leave me, I’m in so much pain. If only I were able 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 his 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 again fled to another Sabbath temple, where many maidens sang songs to me... E. came for me and took me, completely distraught, to Merrekul, where for several days and nights I was in a hell of nightmares and waking dreams, such that my eyes frightened those watching..."

Traveling around the world largely strengthened Balmont in his rejection of Christianity. “Cursed be the Conquerors who do not spare a 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 this, a gradual return to the “bright beginning” began in his spiritual development. Boris Zaitsev, characterizing the poet’s worldview, wrote: “Of course, self-admiration, the absence of a sense of God and one’s smallness before Him, but a certain sunshine lived in him, light and natural musicality.” Zaitsev considered the poet “a pagan, but a worshiper of light” (unlike Bryusov), noting: “... there were real Russian features in him... and he himself could be touching (in good moments).”

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 flows into the perfect form of the sonnet, and The main thing is that it is clear that the poet is no longer rushing into the abyss - he is groping his way to God.” The poet’s internal rebirth was also facilitated by his friendship with I. S. Shmelev, which arose in emigration. As Zaitsev wrote, Balmont, who always “paganly worshiped life, its joys and splendors,” 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.”

Memories and reviews of 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:

“I could spend my 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 captured anywhere... and my whole soul is filled with 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 the heat and seas in front of the Tsar’s 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, noting about Balmont that he “... reads very funny, with a clang,” 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 could also be completely different... quiet, even sad... Despite the presence of fans, he behaved simply - no theater,” the memoirist noted. Roman Gul also spoke about the Moscow period of Balmont’s life - however, in his own words, “monstrous things”, and also from hearsay. I. A. Bunin spoke negatively about Balmont, seeing in the poet a man who “... throughout his long life did not say a single word in simplicity.” “Balmont was generally an amazing person. A man who sometimes delighted many with his “childishness,” his unexpected naive laughter, which, however, was always with some demonic cunning, a man in whose nature there was quite a bit of feigned tenderness, “sweetness,” to use his language, but not a little at all the other - wild rowdiness, brutal pugnacity, vulgar 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 emigrant period artistic value. The poet Mikhail Tsetlin, noting soon after Balmont’s death that what he had done would be enough not for one human life, but “for the entire literature of a small nation,” lamented that the poets of the new generation of Russian emigration “...worshipped Blok, discovered Annensky, loved Sologub , read Khodasevich, but were indifferent to Balmont. He lived in spiritual solitude."

As E. A. Yevtushenko wrote many years later, “...Balmont had plenty of flirtatious, empty sound writing, “prettyness.” However, poetry was his true love, and he served only her alone - perhaps too priestly, intoxicated by the incense he burned, but selflessly.” “There are good poems, excellent poems, but they pass by, die without a trace. And there are poems that seem banal, but there is a certain radioactivity in them, a special magic. These poems 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 first of all Vyacheslav Ivanov, a poet who, in his words, was able to combine “deep philosophical sentiments with 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 internal work seeking a way out, and, mainly, a manifestation of that flashy, tasteless, advertising Americanism that marks our entire broken Russian life " In another interview of the same time, the poet spoke even more harshly about this trend:

Speaking about 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: I, a believer in solar harmony, have become alien to his gloomy moods,” he said in 1914. Balmont personally met with Leo Tolstoy; “This is like an untold confession,” - this is how he characterized his impressions of the meeting. 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. “When Balmont and I went abroad after the wedding, a correspondence began between the poets, and Balmont, of all his friends, missed Bryusov most of all. I wrote to him often and impatiently waited for his letters,” testified E. A. Andreeva-Balmont. Balmont's arrival in Moscow ended in a disagreement. Andreeva gave her explanation in this regard in her book of memoirs: “I have reason to think that Bryusov was jealous of his wife, Ioanna Matveevna, of Balmont, who, captivated by her, did not think, as always, to hide his delight from either his wife or husband... But I can’t say for sure.” 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 chose not to even mention in her memoirs.

Balmont's second close friend became Mirra Lokhvitskaya in the late 1890s. The details of their personal relationship cannot be restored through documentation: the only surviving source can be the two poets’ own poetic confessions, published in the course of an explicit or hidden dialogue that lasted almost a decade. Balmont and Lokhvitskaya met presumably in 1895 in Crimea. Lokhvitskaya, a married woman with children and by that time a more famous poetess than Balmont, was the first to begin a poetic dialogue, which gradually developed into a stormy “novel in verse.” In addition to direct dedications, researchers subsequently discovered many “halves” poems, the meaning of which became clear only when compared (Balmont: “... The sun is completing its boring path. Something prevents the heart from breathing...” - Lokhvitskaya: “The winter sun has completed its silver path. Happy is whoever can rest on a sweet breast..." and so on).

After three years, Lokhvitskaya began to consciously complete the platonic novel, realizing that in reality there could be no continuation. On her part, a kind of sign of a break was the poem “In the Sarcophagus” (in the spirit of “Annabelle-Lee”: “I dreamed that you and I were dozing in the sarcophagus, / Listening to how the surf beats the waves against the stones. / And our names burned in a wonderful saga / 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 the curse, / That here we are in the grave - in the grave! - we are in a vile embrace position ...").

As T. Alexandrova noted, Lokhvitskaya “made the choice of a person 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 growing needs.” His poetic appeals did not stop, but frank confessions in them now gave way to threats. Lokhvitskaya’s health deteriorated, heart problems arose, and 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 brought 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 of the early twentieth century. For many years the poet continued to admire the poetic talent of his early deceased lover and told Anna Akhmatova that before meeting her he knew only two poetesses: Sappho and Mirra Lokhvitskaya.

Balmont and Maxim Gorky

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

Balmont and Maeterlinck

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

He didn’t 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 nearby. I outlined the proposal of the Art Theater. Maeterlinck was silent. I repeated. He remained silent. Then the dog barked and I left.

Teffi. Memories.

Gorky and Balmont first met in the fall of 1901 in Yalta. Together with Chekhov, they went to Gaspra to visit Leo Tolstoy, who lived there. “I met Balmont. This neurasthenic is devilishly interesting and talented!..,” Gorky reported in one of his letters. Gorky credited Balmont with the fact that he, as he believed, “cursed, doused with 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 the fact that he is “a complete strong personality, ... a songbird, and not an inky soul.” In the early 1900s, Gorky, in his own words, undertook to tune the poet “in a democratic way.” He attracted Balmont to participate in the publishing house “Znanie”, spoke in defense of the poet when the press began to ridicule his revolutionary hobbies and collaboration with Bolshevik publications. Balmont, who succumbed to “tuning” for some time, 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.” Gorky and Balmont did not achieve a real rapprochement. Gradually, Gorky spoke more and more critically of Balmont’s work, believing that in the latter’s poetry everything is aimed at sonority to the detriment of social motives: “What is Balmont? This bell tower is tall and patterned, but the bells on it are all small... Isn’t it time to ring the big ones?” Considering Balmont a master of language, the writer made a reservation: “A great poet, of course, but a slave to the words that intoxicate him.”

The final break between Gorky and Balmont occurred after the poet left for 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 was directed at Gorky. In the emigrant newspapers “Vozrozhdenie”, “Segodnya” and “For Freedom!” Balmont’s article “The Tradesman Peshkov” was published. By pseudonym: Gorky" with sharp criticism of the proletarian writer. The poet concluded his poetic “Open Letter to Gorky” (“You threw a stone at the face of the Motherland People. / Your treacherous criminal hand / Places your own sin on the shoulders of a man ...”) 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 “The Hammer and Sickle” solely for the 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 proletarian writer believed, had a fatal impact on the fate of many Russian poets, who in those days vainly hoped to receive permission to leave: among them were Bely, Blok, Sologub. In a polemical frenzy, Gorky spoke of Balmont as an unintelligent person and, due to alcoholism, not entirely normal. “As a poet, he is the author of one truly beautiful book of poems, Let’s Be Like the Sun. Everything else he does 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 they began to act as a united front in their protests and public actions.

There were also disagreements between them. Thus, Shmelev did not approve of Balmont’s “cosmopolitanism.” “Eh, Konstantin Dmitrievich, you still have Lithuanians, Finns, and Mexicans. At least one Russian book…” he said while visiting. Balmont recalled that, in response to this, he also showed him the Russian books lying 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, regarding Ivan Ilyin’s article on the crisis in modern art (“He clearly understands little about poetry and music if... he says such unacceptable words about the excellent work of the brilliant and enlightened Scriabin, purely Russian and highly enlightened 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 occurred during the years of emigration in Balmont’s worldview; the poet turned to Christian values, which he had rejected for many years. In 1930 the poet wrote:

Balmont ardently supported Shmelev, who at times found himself a victim of literary intrigues, and on this basis quarreled with the editors of Latest News, which published an article by Georgy Ivanov, who disparaged the novel “Love Story.” Defending Shmelev, Balmont wrote that he “of all modern Russian writers has the richest and most original Russian language”; his “Inexhaustible Chalice” stands “on par with the best stories of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” and is appreciated primarily 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 you had not been there, there would not have been the brightest and most affectionate feeling in my life over the past 8-9 years, there would not have been the most faithful and strong spiritual support and support, in the hours when the tormented soul was ready to break... "- wrote Balmont on October 1, 1933.

Appearance and character

Andrei Bely characterized Balmont as an unusually lonely, isolated from the real world and defenseless person, and saw the cause of troubles in the properties of a restless and fickle, but at the same time unusually generous nature: “He was unable to combine in himself all the riches that nature had awarded him. He is an eternal spender of spiritual treasures... He will receive and squander, he will receive and squander. He gives them to us. He spills his creative cup on us. But he himself does not partake of his creativity.” Bely also left an expressive description of Balmont’s appearance:

His light, slightly limping gait seems to throw Balmont forward into space. Or rather, it’s as if Balmont falls from space onto the ground - into the salon, onto the street. And the impulse is broken in him, and he, realizing that he was in the wrong place, ceremoniously restrains himself, puts on his pince-nez and looks arrogantly (or rather, scared) around, raising his dry lips, framed by a beard as red as fire. His almost eyebrowless brown eyes, sitting deep in their sockets, look sadly, meekly and incredulously: they can also look vengefully, betraying something helpless in Balmont himself. And that’s why his whole appearance is double. Arrogance and powerlessness, greatness and lethargy, boldness, fear - all this alternates in him, and what a subtle, whimsical range runs through his emaciated face, pale, with widely flared nostrils! And how insignificant this face can seem! And what elusive grace this face sometimes radiates!

A. Bely. The meadow is green. 1910

“Slightly reddish, with lively quick eyes, head held high, high straight collars, ... a beard with a wedge, a fighting appearance. (Serov’s portrait conveys it perfectly.) Something perky, always ready to boil, respond sharply or enthusiastically. If you compare it with birds, then this is a magnificent chanticleer, welcoming the day, light, life...” - this is how Boris Zaitsev remembered Balmont.

Ilya Erenburg recalled that Balmont read his poems in an “inspired and arrogant” voice, like “a shaman who knows that his words have power, if not over the evil spirit, then over the poor nomads.” The poet, according to him, spoke all languages with an accent - not Russian, but Balmontov’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 his meeting with Balmont in the 1930s, noted: “...decrepit, gray-haired, with a sharp beard, Balmont... looked like the ancient god Svarog or Dazhbog, in any case, something Old Slavic.”

Contemporaries described 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, mannerism and pretentiousness, and there was a tendency towards affectation and shockingness. There are funny cases when he lay down in Paris in the middle of the pavement to be run over by a cab, or when “on a moonlit night, in a coat and hat, with a cane in his hands, he entered, bewitched by the moon, neck-deep into a pond, trying to experience unknown sensations and describe them in verse". Boris Zaitsev told how a poet once asked his wife: “Vera, do you want the poet to come to you, bypassing boring earthly paths, straight from you, to Boris’s room, by air?” (the two married couples were neighbors). Recalling the first such “flight,” Zaitsev noted in his memoirs: “Thank God, I did not carry out my intentions in Tolstoy. He continued to come to us along 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 friend, Zaitsev noted that Balmont “was also different: sad, very simple. He willingly read his new poems to those present and brought them to tears with the soulfulness of his reading.” Many of those who knew the poet confirmed: from under the mask of a “great poet” in love with his own image, a completely different character was peeked out from time to time. “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 threw back his head and frowned. But his laughter gave him away. His laughter was good-natured, childish and somehow defenseless. This childish laughter explained many of his absurd actions. He, like a child, surrendered to the mood of the moment...” Teffi recalled.

The rare humanity and warmth of Balmont’s character were noted. P.P. Pertsov, who knew the poet from his youth, wrote that it was difficult to meet such a “pleasant, helpful and 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 someone in need. The Soviet translator Mark Talov, who found himself in Paris without a livelihood in the twenties, recalled how, leaving Balmont’s apartment, where he timidly came for a visit, he found money in his coat pocket, secretly put there by the poet, who at that time himself lived far away not luxurious.

Many spoke about Balmont’s impressionability and impulsiveness. He himself considered the most remarkable events of his life “those internal sudden enlightenments that sometimes open in the soul regarding the most insignificant external facts.” Thus, “for the first time, the thought of the possibility and inevitability of universal happiness, sparkling with mystical conviction,” 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 long, black, peasant train.”

Something feminine was also noticed in Balmont’s character: “no matter what warlike poses he took... all his life, women’s souls were closer and dearer to him.” 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” remained in his nature all his life, with which he himself even “flirtated” somewhat and which many considered feigned. However, it was noted that even in his mature years the poet really “carried in his soul something very spontaneous, tender, childish.” “I still feel like an ardent high school student, shy and daring,” Balmont himself admitted when he was already approaching thirty.

A penchant for external effects and deliberate “bohemianism” did the poet a disservice: few knew that “for all his exaltation... Balmont was a tireless worker,” he worked hard, wrote every day and very fruitfully, and spent his entire life educating himself (“he read entire libraries”). , studied languages and natural sciences, and while traveling, enriched himself not only with new impressions, but also with information on the history, ethnography, and folklore of each country. In the popular imagination, Balmont remained primarily a pretentious eccentric, but many noted rationality and consistency in his character. S.V. Sabashnikov recalled that the poet “...almost made no blots in his manuscripts. Poems of dozens of lines apparently formed completely complete in his head and were immediately entered into the manuscript.”

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

S. V. Sabashnikov about K. D. Balmont

“The manuscripts presented to him were always finished and were no longer subject to changes in typesetting. The proofs were read clearly and returned quickly,” the publisher added.

Valery Bryusov noted in Balmont a frenzied love for poetry, “a subtle instinct for the beauty of verse.” Remembering the evenings and nights when they “endlessly read each other their poems and ... poems by their favorite poets,” Bryusov admitted: “I was one before meeting Balmont and became another after meeting him.” Bryusov explained the peculiarities of Balmont’s behavior in life by the deep poetry of his character. “He experiences life like a poet, and only poets can experience it, as it was given to them alone: finding at every point the fullness of life. Therefore, it cannot be measured by a common yardstick.”

Works (favorites)

Poetry collections

“Collection of poems” (Yaroslavl, 1890)
“Under the northern sky (elegies, stanzas, sonnets)” (St. Petersburg, 1894)
“In the vastness of darkness” (Moscow, 1895 and 1896)
"Silence. Lyrical poems" (St. Petersburg, 1898)
“Burning buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul" (Moscow, 1900)
“We will be like the sun. Book of Symbols" (Moscow, 1903)
"Only love. Seven Flowers" (M., 1903)
"Liturgy of Beauty. Spontaneous hymns" (Moscow, 1905)
“Fairy Tales (Children's Songs)” (M., 1905)
“Evil Spells (Book of Spells)” (M., 1906)
"Poems" (1906)
“Firebird (Slavic Pipe)” (1907)
"Liturgy of Beauty (Spontaneous Hymns)" (1907)
"Songs of the Avenger" (1907)
“Three Flowerings (Theater of Youth and Beauty)” (1907)
“Round Dance of the Times (Vseglasnost)” (M., 1909)
"Birds in the Air (Singing Lines)" (1908)
“Green Vertograd (Kissing Words)” (1909)
“Links. Selected Poems. 1890-1912" (M.: Scorpion, 1913)
“The White Architect (The Mystery of the Four Lamps)” (1914)
"Ash Tree (Vision of a Tree)" (1916)
"Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and Moon" (1917)
“Collected Lyrics” (Books 1-2, 4, 6. M., 1917)

“Ring” (M., 1920)
"Seven Poems" (1920)
“Solar yarn. Izbornik" (1890-1918) (M., 1921)
"Gift to the Earth" (1921)
“Song of the Working Hammer” (M., 1922)
"Haze" (1922)
"Under the New Sickle" (1923)
“Mine is hers (Russia)” (Prague, 1924)
“In the widening distance (Poem about Russia)” (Belgrade, 1929)
"Complicity of Souls" (1930)
“Northern Lights (Poems about Lithuania and Rus')” (Paris, 1931)
Blue Horseshoe (Poems about Siberia) (?)
"Light Service" (1937)

Collections of articles and essays

“Mountain Peaks” (Moscow, 1904; book one)
“Calls of Antiquity. Hymns, songs and plans of the ancients" (Pb., 1908)
“Snake Flowers” (“Travel Letters from Mexico”, M., 1910)
"Sea Glow" (1910)
“Glow of Dawn” (1912)
“Light and sound in nature and Scriabin’s light symphony” (1917)

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 (translation into Malay by Viktor Pogadayev).

He got his Scottish surname, unusual for Russia, thanks to a distant ancestor - a sailor who forever cast anchor off the coast of Pushkin and Lermontov. The work of Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich was consigned to oblivion during Soviet times for obvious reasons. The country of the hammer and sickle did not need creators who worked outside of socialist realism, whose lines did not speak about struggle, about heroes of war and labor... Meanwhile, this poet, who has a truly powerful talent, whose exceptionally melodic poems continued the tradition of a pure, not for parties, but for the people.

"Create always, create everywhere..."

The legacy that Balmont left us is quite voluminous and impressive: 35 collections of poetry and 20 books of prose. His poems aroused the admiration of his compatriots for the ease of the author's style. Konstantin Dmitrievich wrote a lot, but he never “tormented lines out of himself” and did not optimize the text with numerous edits. His poems were always written on the first try, in one sitting. Balmont spoke about how he created poetry in a completely original way - in a poem.

The above is not an exaggeration. Mikhail Vasilyevich Sabashnikov, with whom the poet stayed in 1901, recalled that dozens of lines were formed in his head, and he wrote poems on paper immediately, without a single edit. When asked how he succeeds, Konstantin Dmitrievich answered with a disarming smile: “After all, I’m a poet!”

Brief description of creativity

Literary scholars, experts on his work, talk about the formation, flourishing and decline of the level of the works that Balmont created. A short biography and creativity indicate to us, however, an amazing capacity for work (he wrote daily and always on a whim).

Balmont’s most popular works are the collections of poems by the mature poet “Only Love,” “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” and “Burning Buildings.” Among the early works, the collection “Silence” stands out.

Balmont’s work (briefly quoting literary critics of the early 20th century), with the subsequent general tendency towards the attenuation of the author’s talent (after the three above-mentioned collections), also has a number of “highlights”. Worth noting are “Fairy Tales” - cute children's songs written in a style later adopted by Korney Chukovsky. Also interesting are the “foreign poems” created under the impression of what he saw during his travels in Egypt and Oceania.

Biography. Childhood

His father, Dmitry Konstantinovich, was a zemstvo doctor and also owned an estate. His mother (nee Lebedeva), a creative person, according to the future poet, “did more to cultivate a love for poetry and music” than all subsequent teachers. Konstantin became the third son in a family where there were seven children in total, all of them sons.

Konstantin Dmitrievich had his own special tao (perception of life). It is no coincidence that Balmont’s life and work are closely related. Since childhood, a powerful creative principle was instilled in him, which manifested itself in a contemplative worldview.

Since childhood, he had been disgusted by schoolwork and loyalty. Romanticism often prevailed over common sense. He never finished school (the Shuya male heir to Tsarevich Alexei gymnasium), having been expelled from the 7th grade for participating in a revolutionary circle. He completed his last school year at the Vladimir Gymnasium under the round-the-clock supervision of a teacher. He later remembered only two teachers with gratitude: a history and geography teacher and a literature teacher.

After studying for a year at Moscow University, he was also expelled for “organizing riots”, then he was expelled from the Demidov Lyceum in Yaroslavl...

As we can see, Konstantin did not begin his poetic career easily, and his work is still the subject of controversy among literary scholars.

Balmont's personality

The personality of Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont is quite complex. He was not “like everyone else.” Exclusivity... It can be determined even by the portrait of the poet, by his gaze, by his posture. It immediately becomes clear: before us is not an apprentice, but a master of poetry. His personality was bright and charismatic. He was an amazingly organic person; Balmont’s life and work are like a single inspired impulse.

He began writing poems at the age of 22 (for comparison, Lermontov’s first works were written at the age of 15). Before this, as we already know, there was an incomplete education, as well as an unsuccessful marriage with the daughter of a Shuya factory owner, which ended in a suicide attempt (the poet jumped out of a 3rd floor window onto the pavement.) Balmont was pushed by the unsettled family life and the death of his first child from meningitis. His first wife Garelina Larisa Mikhailovna, a beauty of the Botticelli type, tormented him with jealousy, imbalance and disdain for dreams of great literature. He poured out his emotions from the discord (and later from divorce) with his wife in the poems “Your fragrant shoulders were breathing...”, “No, no one did so much harm to me...”, “Oh, woman, child, accustomed to playing...”.

Self-education

How did young Balmont, having become an outcast due to his loyalty to the education system, turn into an educated person, an ideologist of the new? Quoting Konstantin Dmitrievich himself, his mind once “hooked” on one purely British word - selfhelp (self-help). Self-education. It became for Konstantin Dmitrievich a springboard into the future...

Being by his nature a true worker of the pen, Konstantin Dmitrievich never followed any external system imposed on him from the outside and alien to his nature. Balmont's creativity is entirely based on his passion for self-education and openness to impressions. He was attracted to literature, philology, history, philosophy, in which he was a real specialist. He loved to travel.

The beginning of a creative journey

Inherent in Fet, Nadson and Pleshcheev, it did not become an end in itself for Balmont (in the 70-80s of the 19th century, many poets created poems with motifs of sadness, sadness, restlessness, and loneliness). For Konstantin Dmitrievich it turned into the road to symbolism he paved. He will write about this a little later.

Unconventional self-education

Unconventional self-education determines the characteristics of Balmont’s creativity. This was truly a man who created with words. Poet. And he perceived the world in the same way as a poet can see it: not with the help of analysis and reasoning, but relying only on impressions and sensations. “The first movement of the soul is the most correct,” this rule, developed by him himself, became immutable for his entire life. It raised him to the heights of creativity, but it also ruined his talent.

The romantic hero of Balmont in the early period of his work was committed to Christian values. He, experimenting with combinations of various sounds and thoughts, erects a “cherished chapel.”

However, it is obvious that under the influence of his travels of 1896-1897, as well as translations of foreign poetry, Balmont gradually comes to a different worldview.

It should be recognized that following the romantic style of Russian poets of the 80s. Balmont's work began, briefly assessing which, we can say that he really became the founder of symbolism in Russian poetry. The collections of poetry “Silence” and “In the Boundless” are considered significant for the period of the poet’s formation.

He outlined his views on symbolism in 1900 in the article “Elementary Words on Symbolic Poetry.” Symbolists, unlike realists, according to Balmont, are not just observers, they are thinkers looking at the world through the window of their dreams. At the same time, Balmont considers the most important principles in symbolic poetry to be “hidden abstraction” and “obvious beauty.”

By nature, Balmont was not a gray mouse, but a leader. A short biography and creativity confirm this. Charisma and a natural desire for freedom... It was these qualities that allowed him, at the peak of his popularity, to “become the center of attraction” for numerous Balmontist societies in Russia. According to Ehrenburg’s recollections (this was much later), Balmont’s personality impressed even the arrogant Parisians from the fashionable Passy district.

New wings of poetry

Balmont fell in love with his future second wife Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva at first sight. This stage in his life is reflected in the collection of poems “In the Vast.” The poems dedicated to her are numerous and original: “Black-eyed Doe”, “Why does the moon always intoxicate us?”, “Night Flowers”.

The lovers lived in Europe for a long time, and then, returning to Moscow, Balmont in 1898 published a collection of poems “Silence” in the Scorpio publishing house. In the collection, the poems were preceded by an epigraph selected from Tyutchev’s works: “There is a certain hour of universal silence.” The poems in it are grouped into 12 sections called “lyrical poems.” Konstantin Dmitrievich, inspired by the theosophical teachings of Blavatsky, already in this collection of poems noticeably departs from the Christian worldview.

The poet's understanding of his role in art

The collection “Silence” becomes a facet that distinguishes Balmont as a poet professing symbolism. Further developing the accepted vector of creativity, Konstantin Dmitrievich writes an article called “Calderon's drama of personality,” where he indirectly justified his departure from the classical Christian model. This was done, as always, figuratively. He considered earthly life to be “a falling away from the bright Source.”

Innokenty Fedorovich Annensky talentedly presented the features of Balmont’s work and his author’s style. He believed that “I”, written by Balmont, does not fundamentally indicate belonging to the poet, it is initially socialized. Therefore, Konstantin Dmitrievich’s poem is unique in its soulful lyricism, expressed in associating oneself with others, which the reader invariably feels. Reading his poems, it seems that Balmont is filled with light and energy, which he generously shares with others:

What Balmont presents as optimistic narcissism is in fact more altruistic than the phenomenon of the public demonstration of poets’ pride in their merits, as well as their equally public hanging of laurels on themselves.

Balmont's work, to put it briefly in the words of Annensky, is saturated with the internal philosophical polemicism inherent in it, which determines the integrity of the worldview. The latter is expressed in the fact that Balmont wants to present the event to his reader comprehensively: both from the position of the executioner and from the position of the victim. He does not have an unambiguous assessment of anything; he is initially characterized by a pluralism of opinions. He came to it thanks to his talent and hard work, a whole century ahead of the time when this became the norm of social consciousness for developed countries.

Sunny genius

The work of the poet Balmont is unique. In fact, Konstantin Dmitrievich purely formally joined various movements, so that it would be more convenient for him to promote his new poetic ideas, which he never lacked. In the last decade of the 19th century, a metamorphosis occurred in the poet’s work: melancholy and transience give way to sunny optimism.

If in earlier poems the mood of Nietzscheanism could be traced, then at the peak of the development of talent, the work of Konstantin Balmont began to be distinguished by the author’s specific optimism and “sunshine”, “fieryness”.

Alexander Blok, who is also a symbolist poet, presented a vivid description of Balmont’s work of that period very succinctly, saying that it was as bright and life-affirming as spring.

Peak of creative powers

Balmont’s poetic gift sounded in full force for the first time in poems from the collection “Burning Buildings.” It contains 131 poems written during the poet’s stay in S.V. Polyakov’s house.

All of them, as the poet claimed, were composed under the influence of “one mood” (Balmont did not think of creativity any other way). “The poem should no longer be in a minor key!” - Balmont decided. Starting with this collection, he finally moved away from decadence. The poet, boldly experimenting with combinations of sounds, colors and thoughts, created “lyrics of the modern soul”, “torn soul”, “wretched, ugly”.

At this time he was in close communication with St. Petersburg bohemia. I knew one weakness for my husband. He couldn't drink wine. Although Konstantin Dmitrievich had a strong, wiry build, his nervous system (obviously damaged in childhood and youth) “worked” inadequately. After drinking wine, he “carried” through brothels. However, as a result, he found himself in a completely pitiful state: lying on the floor and paralyzed by deep hysteria. This happened more than once while working on Burning Buildings, when he was in company with Baltrushaitis and Polyakov.

We must pay tribute to Ekaterina Alekseevna, the earthly guardian angel of her husband. She understood the essence of her husband, whom she considered the most honest and sincere and who, to her chagrin, had affairs. For example, as with Dagny Christensen in Paris, the poems “The Sun Withdrew” and “From the Line of Kings” are dedicated to her. It is significant that Balmont’s affair with a Norwegian woman, who worked as a St. Petersburg correspondent, ended as abruptly as it began. After all, his heart still belonged to one woman - Ekaterina Andreevna, Beatrice, as he called her.

In 1903, Konstantin Dmitrievich published with difficulty the collection “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” written in 1901-1902. You can feel the hand of a master in it. Note that about 10 works did not pass the censorship. The work of the poet Balmont, according to censors, has become overly sensual and erotic.

Literary scholars believe that this collection of works, which presents readers with a cosmogonic model of the world, is evidence of a new, highest level of development of the poet. Being on the verge of a mental break while working on the previous collection, Konstantin Dmitrievich seemed to understand that it was impossible to “live by rebellion.” The poet seeks truth at the intersection of Hinduism, paganism and Christianity. He expresses his worship of elemental objects: fire ("Hymn to Fire"), wind ("Wind"), the ocean ("Appeal to the Ocean"). In the same 1903, the publishing house “Grif” published the third collection, crowning the peak of Balmont’s creativity, “Only Love. Seven-flowered garden."

Instead of a conclusion

Inscrutable even for such poets “by the grace of God” as Balmont. Life and work for him after 1903 are briefly characterized in one word - “recession”. Therefore, Alexander Blok, who essentially became the next leader of Russian symbolism, assessed Balmont’s further (after the collection “Only Love”) in his own way. He presented him with a damning description, saying that there is a great Russian poet Balmont, but there is no “new Balmont”.

However, not being literary scholars of the last century, we nevertheless became acquainted with the late work of Konstantin Dmitrievich. Our verdict: it’s worth reading, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there... However, we have no reason to be distrustful of Blok’s words. Indeed, from the point of view of literary criticism, Balmont as a poet is the banner of symbolism, after the collection “Only Love. Seven-flowered" has exhausted itself. Therefore, it is logical on our part to conclude this short story about the life and work of K. D. Balmont, the “sunny genius” of Russian poetry.

Balmont - son of Balmont

Many have heard about the poet Konstantin Balmont, but few have read him, although collections of poems by this prominent and prolific author of the “Silver Age” are regularly published, his versatile work is carefully studied. Time has changed, aesthetic tastes and artistic assessments have changed. Today Balmont is mainly interested in literary scholars and historians of the poetry of Russian symbolism. And at the beginning of the 20th century, his name thundered throughout Russia and his poetic performances filled huge halls.

However, we will not talk about him, but about his completely forgotten son Nikolai Konstantinovich Balmont (1890–1924), who also wrote poetry and, in addition, was fond of music. He spent most of his short life in St. Petersburg with his mother Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina (1864–1942), the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Shuya, who was educated in a Moscow boarding school. Having fallen in love with the “Botticelli” beauty, Balmont dropped out of university and got married in 1888 against the will of his mother. But the young wife turned out to be jealous, did not share her husband’s interests and suffered from his unbridled and nervous character. The marriage broke up two years later, and in 1896 the poet, having received a divorce, married translator E.A. Andreeva, who became his constant assistant.

Young Kolya was raised by his mother, who in 1894 remarried St. Petersburg resident Nikolai Aleksandrovich Engelhardt (1867–1942), author of historical novels, conservative publicist and employee of the newspaper “Novoe Vremya”. He came from a well-born noble family (his father was a famous populist economist), owned the Batishchevo estate in the Dorogobuzh district of the Smolensk province, where his stepson Kolya often visited in the summer. In his youth, Engelhardt wrote poetry and was friends with Balmont.

Konstantin Balmont

Since 1902, Kolya studied (grades 4 and 5) at the capital’s gymnasium Ya.G. Gurevich (Ligovsky Ave., 1/43), known for her liberal spirit, but did not communicate with her father, who lived abroad for a long time. After graduating from high school in 1911, the young man entered the Chinese department of the Faculty of Oriental Languages at St. Petersburg University. A year later, he transferred to the department of Russian literature, where he studied for four semesters with venerable professors: I.A. Shlyapkina, I.A. Baudouin-de-Courtenay, S.A. Vengerov and S.F. Platonov. Then, due to “family circumstances,” there was a two-year break in his studies, and only in 1916 Nikolai Balmont resumed his studies, but never completed the course. According to the memoirs of O.N. Hildebrandt-Arbenina, he “was red-haired, green-eyed, with a light pink face and a tic in his face...”. In the style of the aesthetic youth of that time, his comrades called him “Dorian Gray” after the literary hero Oscar Wilde.

While studying at the university, Nikolai Balmont joined the student circle of poets associated with the Pushkin Society and the Vengerov Seminary - hence the orientation of these poets towards the Pushkin era. Leonid Kannegiser was also a member of the circle; now he is known primarily for the murder of M.S. Uritsky. According to M.I. Tsvetaeva, in his apartment at 10 Saperny Lane, “all the young people have parted hair, volumes of Pushkin in their hands.” In this apartment, home performances were staged with the participation of young Nix Balmont, who revered M.A. Kuzmina, talked with D.S. Merezhkovsky, Z.N. Gippius, R. Ivnev, visiting with him F.K. Sologuba. It is known that the student wrote poetry, but he failed to publish a single collection.

Nix lived with his friend Kannegiser from time to time, although his usual residence was a four-story corner house at 18 Ertelev Lane (now Chekhov Street), built by the architect P.I. Balinsky in the eclectic style. There, in six-room apartment No. 14 on the top floor, since 1907 his mother and stepfather lived, as well as their children: Anna Engelhardt (1895–1942), the future wife of N.S. Gumileva, and Alexander. Nix was adopted by his stepfather.

Gumilev met Anna in June 1915, at the evening of V.Ya. Bryusov at the Tenishevsky School. “Pretty, with slightly Mongolian eyes and cheekbones,” recalled Hildebrand-Arbenina, “the flighty and fidgety young Anya loved to be in artistic circles. To Nix's displeasure, Gumilyov married her in 1918 after divorcing A.A. Akhmatova. According to Anna Andreevna, “I somehow got married hastily, on purpose, out of spite.” Gumilyov dedicated his latest poetry collection, “Pillar of Fire,” to the new Anna. In a short marriage, a daughter, Elena, was born; she, like her mother, died in besieged Leningrad in 1942. A little earlier, Anna’s father and stepmother died of hunger; after the death, they continued to live with them in the above-mentioned house in Ertelev Lane. They lived meagerly (“we live on bread, potatoes and boiling water”), but the repressions did not affect anyone, despite H.A.’s political reputation. Engelhard, who called Marxism “retrograde.”

When Konstantin Balmont returned from Paris to Petrograd in the spring of 1915, he settled on Vasilyevsky Island, on the 22nd line, no. 5, apt. 20. As Andreeva recalled: “Spacious, light, 7 rooms, a wonderful dining room, in addition to my office, I have a large guest room, electricity, a bathroom, snowy expanses are visible from the windows, the Neva is two minutes away<…>. For the whole winter of 1915/16, Kolya lived with his father in St. Petersburg, to their mutual joy, without the slightest clashes or misunderstandings.”

“But he was very dissatisfied with his son. He doesn't like everything he does. Over time, he becomes more and more alien and unpleasant to him. I think that Balmont’s irritation with his son at that time stemmed from the fact that Balmont could not stand abnormal people, psychopaths, people with any kind of mental abnormalities. Previously, when Kolya was healthy, they had a good relationship<…>. Kolya was close to his father, Balmont was gentle and attentive to him, he treated him more like a young friend than a son.” The author of the memoirs forgets that Kolya inherited nervousness from his father, which became the cause of his gradually developing mental illness. Ill health, alas, was complicated by bohemian life, because of which the young man came into conflict with his family.

In September 1917, Nikolai and his father moved to Moscow, from where in the summer of 1920 the poet left for Paris, accompanied by his third (common-law) wife E.K. Tsvetkovskaya and daughter Mirra. Andreev's second wife and Nikolai remained in Moscow. “I studied issues of light and music at the conservatory. In 1919 he visited us in Ivanovo with obvious signs of a nervous disease. In Moscow he was close to Balmont's second wife [E. A.] Andreeva. She seemed to take part in it. Then he fell ill with schizophrenia and died in the hospital from tuberculosis in 1924,” recalled Alexander Nikolaevich Engelhardt, Anna’s brother, about the Moscow period of the life of the unlucky son of the “king of poets.”

Classmate M.V. Babenchikov wrote: “It was hard to watch how slowly and persistently his nervous system was destroyed, how he lost his memory and turned into a helpless child. A man with undoubtedly rich inclinations, Nix Balmont left nothing behind, and only those closest to him were able to appreciate his subtle talent that died early.” Konstantin Balmont could not come to the funeral of his only son, and probably did not want to.

This text is an introductory fragment. From the book Poets and Tsars author Novodvorskaya Valeria

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Balmont is the son of Balmont Central State Historical Academy of St. Petersburg. F. 14. Op. 3. D. 59082. Azadovsky K.M., Lavrov A.B. Anna Engelhardt - Gumilyov's wife: based on materials from the archive of D.E. Maksimova // Nikolay Gumilyov: research and materials. St. Petersburg, 1994. P. 361, 372, 377. Hildebrandt-Arbenina O.N. Gumilev // Ibid. pp. 438–470.

From the author's book

ANDREEVA (married Balmont) Ekaterina Alekseevna 1867–1950 Translator, memoirist; wife of K. Balmont. “The first time, looking into her face, I reached out to her with all my soul, but... in all that time I never spoke to her. In this face there is a lively, open readiness to go to

From the author's book

BALMONT Konstantin Dmitrievich 3(15).6.1867 – 23.12.1942 Poet, critic, essayist, translator. Publications in the magazines “Scales”, “Apollo” and others. Poetry collections “Under the Northern Sky” (St. Petersburg, 1894), “In the Boundless” (M., 1895), “Silence” (St. Petersburg, 1898), “Burning building. (Lyrics of the modern soul)" (M.,

From the author's book

BALMONT Nikolai Konstantinovich 1891–1926 Poet, pianist, amateur composer. Son of K. D. Balmont from his first marriage to L. A. Garelina. “Red-haired, with a porcelain pinkish face, green eyes, and a nervous tic on his face!...Nix at the university was called “Dorian Gray”” (O. Hildebrandt.

From the author's book

Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (1867–1942) - Russian poet, essayist, literary historian. Every soul has many faces, every person contains many people, and many of these people, forming one person, must be mercilessly thrown into the fire.

From the author's book

K. D. Balmont and the poetry of the Indians And Mexico arose, an inspired vision... If the tradition of translating Indian poetry into Russian cannot be called established, then, of course, it can be called a long-standing one. From the time when the Russian reader was first able to become acquainted with the high

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"Create always, create everywhere..."

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