The topic of this article is the analysis of the poem “The Word”. Gumilyov is a bright figure in Russian literature, without whom it is impossible to imagine the poetry of the Silver Age. His works are distinguished by their extraordinary brightness and strength of lyrical pressure. The poem to which this article is devoted is a reflection on the nature of the word and its influence on the fate of a person.
"Pillar of Fire"
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov was a gambling traveler and a dreamy romantic. The poem “The Word” is one of his later works. It was written in the year of the poet's death.
In his youth, Gumilyov visited vibrant southern countries. His early work is dominated by colorful exotic images. But the Russian poet was not only a dreamy adventurer, but also a fearless warrior and a man of honor. He could never have renounced his comrades, and therefore was shot in 1921 for being accused of participating in an anti-government conspiracy.
In his later work, exoticism and lyricism gave way to a philosophical theme. This can be discovered by analyzing the poem “The Word”. Gumilev used symbols in it, but the work is still in the spirit of Acmeism. The poem was included in the collection “Pillar of Fire,” which is completely imbued with philosophical ideas. A complete analysis of N. Gumilyov’s poem should begin with the interpretation of the theme of existence and symbolic images.
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“The Word” has always been recognized as Gumilyov’s programmatic poem, the poet’s last and loudest cry. Famous publisher, poet and translator of the early twentieth century. Nikolai Otsup wrote that this particular poem “sounds like a church bell that casts out night demons in the morning.”
“The Word” is one of the most famous and cited works of N. S. Gumilyov (along with “Giraffe” and “Lost Tram”). It was published in 1921 in the collection “Pillar of Fire,” which came out of print after Gumilyov was shot.
Source https://gumilev.ru
The poem figuratively says that the loss of faith in God depreciates and makes life meaningless, that atheism is destructive, that rejection of faith leads to the disintegration of the very foundations of existence, to spiritual death.
"Word"
The first three stanzas talk about something high and torn from the earth. The following depicts a relatively terrestrial setting. Being the founder of Acmeism, Gumilyov gave his work the characteristic features of this direction: accuracy, clarity, distinctness and definiteness of images. But the poem differs from others in the latest collection in the presence of a symbolic balance between heavenly and earthly and a philosophical image of the balance of life and being. It contains various metaphors (“The sun was stopped with a word...”).
The Acmeists did not attach so much importance to imagery. For them, the beauty of an individual metaphor was more important. Signs of an acmeistic work with some features of symbolism can be seen by analyzing the poem “The Word”. It was not by chance that Gumilyov combined these seemingly different poetic traditions. Indeed, thanks to the school of symbolists, he became one of the creators of a new movement in literature.
“They destroyed cities with words”
Nikolai Gumilyov in his youth dreamed of ending up in distant countries at any cost. The young poet was seduced by exoticism and danger. He was dissuaded, considering such adventures risky for life. But he went on a journey wanting to enjoy the beauty of the African landscape. And then he created a number of wonderful lyrical works filled with distant exotic images.
In 1918, Russian emigrants rushed to Europe. The homeland has become unsafe. But it was at this time that the poet returned to Russia from France. This was three years before his death. An analysis of the poem “The Word” gives some idea of the poet’s worldview in the last years of his life. Gumilev was unable to leave Russia again. He could create his last collection of poems only in his homeland. He attached great importance to the word both in his work and in life. It, according to the poet, contained divine power. But it, Gumilyov argued, could be both terrible and foul-smelling.
Analysis of the poem “The Word” by Gumilyov
In this poem, he praises the word needed to formulate a person’s thoughts and ideas. The poet himself is well aware of the various Eastern ideological teachings. The famous mantra aum was studied by him flawlessly, for this reason numerous secrets of the universe were explored.
Since the world was created with such a word, it was also used to describe the nature of the Most High. And if we turn to the analysis of Gumilyov’s poem “The Word,” then in it he directly compares the following two types of engagement with the world: natural, necessary for everyday life, certain radical actions, and spiritual.
The first appears in codes or numbers. There is also spiritual study, which results directly in the word. The poet writes, observing the same values that the great Lermontov and Pushkin honored. Gumilyov is convinced that only a writer is able to show the people the sacred power of the word. Nikolai Gumilyov in “The Lay” rushes to the Holy Scriptures, considered the most important collection of books for every self-respecting Christian.
The Word is God
As you know, you don’t choose times. But they live and die in them. The poet sought to understand the era in which he happened to exist. A comparative analysis of Gumilyov’s poem “You spoke empty words...” and the work to which this article is devoted reveals the poet’s loyalty to the theme of human honor. The word is not an empty phrase. And those who underestimate its importance are capable of generating a lot of grief and suffering. However, in the later poem, Christian motifs are visible, which were previously absent in Gumilyov’s work. Perhaps, in difficult times for Russia, the only way out for the poet was faith?
Characteristic features of the poem
The work itself is written in a sublime style. When analyzing the poem “The Word” by Gumilyov, one can find many outdated words (“that day,” for example), which is very acceptable for Russian poetry. It is worth delving into the sound of such a verse and by the tone you can decide that you are pronouncing a mantra.
The meaning of Gumilyov’s poem “The Word” is that he is trying to find a balance of relationships among these spheres. In his brainchild there are many modified assessments that have a purely conditional meaning: “On that day when God bowed his face over the new world.”
Biblical motives
The word in the Gospel and in the Old Testament has a special meaning. In Christian culture it is divine. The Word is truth, grace, wisdom.
When the author says that in ancient times the sun was stopped by the Word, he thereby refers to one of the episodes in the book of Joshua. In order to defeat his enemies, Moses' successor, with the help of divine power, was able to do the impossible. He stopped the sun.
Subjects
The writer himself stated that in the absence of symbols the Acmeist movement would not have arisen. All this was done because he was a sign of the Silver Age. And his death also foreshadowed the collapse of the enlightened era. “The Lay” by Nikolai Gumilyov is one of the key works of the “Pillar of Fire” collection; biblical echoes can be found in it. This is a particularly focused presentation of the Holy Scriptures.
When analyzing the poem “The Word” by Gumilyov, one can notice that it uses opposition; it is built on two visible connotation points: the word and the number. The latter is certainly associated with darkness, the opposite of light. For all the time, they tried to unravel this figure, and the poet existed in a period when the discovery of the “number of the beast” was actually possible.
Numbers
There is an antithesis in the work. An analysis of N. Gumilyov’s poem “The Word” makes us think about why the author contrasts numbers with the main image. The poet used them as symbols. Numbers are nothing more than practical rules that people apply in a base, unspiritual life. In the fourth stanza, where we talk about the gray-haired patriarch, the poet talks about how in ancient times people treated the Word with great trepidation. They tried not to use it in vain. After all, it has great mighty power.
Biblical allusions of the poem
First of all, the contrast between the spiritual word (God is called the Word in the Bible) and numbers seems biblical. The Book of Numbers in the Old Testament tells about historical events and rules, that is, about earthly things. There is a mention of the sun being stopped by a word in the Book of Joshua, who during the battle to conquer the Promised Land stopped the sun by calling out to God. The wall of the city of Jericho was also destroyed under the leadership of Joshua by the cry of the people and trumpets according to the will of God.
The patriarch drawing a number in the sand is a rather antique image. Some associate him with Pythagoras, others with Archimedes, who died in Syracuse when the city was attacked by the Romans. Archimedes sat over the drawings. It was the concentration on numbers and the request not to interfere that caused his death. The word is omnipotent, but numbers are destructive.
Some researchers see in the gray-haired patriarch Moses, who was tongue-tied, words were not given to him, unlike numbers.
A word in the midst of earthly anxieties
In the fifth and sixth stanzas, Gumilyov depicts his contemporary reality. The meaningful conjunction “but” is repeated several times. With its help, the author points out the perception of the word by modern people and those who lived in the Old Testament era. In ancient times, people appreciated its high significance, but over time they forgot about it. The poet felt that the time in which he lives is marked by terrible events. Something important has collapsed. Nikolai Gumilyov transferred these feelings into his work. Analysis of the poem “The Word” allows us to understand the main philosophical ideas in the poet’s mature work. The poet believed that, having forgotten the high meaning of the Word, people lost faith. The main Christian virtues were replaced by unspiritual judgments and attempts to organize earthly life without God.
Poetry and religion
Nikolai Gumilyov devoted several articles to the topic touched upon in this poem. They occupy not the last place in his work. Believing that poetry and religion are sides of the same coin, the Russian poet spoke about the need for spiritual work. This work should not pursue an aesthetic or ethical goal, but a higher one, unknown to mere mortals. Thanks to ethics, a person adapts to society. Aesthetics develops his ability to receive pleasure. Religion and poetry are above these categories. The inability of people to comprehend the highest purpose of the Word, according to Gumilyov, leads to the fact that it becomes dead.
The poem “The Word” covers different eras in human history. In this work, the poet speaks primarily about the high spiritual beginning of man, about the oblivion of the spirit, which was characteristic of the time in which he lived. Only religion and poetry can save humanity - spheres that are above ordinary reason. And their main category is the Word.
Poetic representation of the image “word” (based on the poem “The Word” by N. S. Gumilyov)
Bibliographic description:
Kruglyak, T.V. Poetic representation of the image “word” (based on the poem “The Word” by N.S. Gumilyov) / T.V. Kruglyak. — Text: immediate // Current issues of philological sciences: materials of the IV International. scientific conf. (Kazan, October 2021). — Kazan: Buk, 2021. — pp. 17-19. — URL: https://moluch.ru/conf/phil/archive/232/11104/ (access date: 09/25/2021).
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov is a theorist of Acmeism and the creator of the “Workshop of Poets.” The Acmeist movement proclaimed a careful attitude to the word; Acmeists valued, above all, “the freshness of words and thoughts, simplicity” (Akhmatova), which determined the nature of the new poetry. “Reality in poetry is the word as such,” Mandelstam argued. A keen interest in linguistics awakens, eyes are opened to the external (sound) and internal (semantic) nature of the word, “the static nature of “moods” and “experiences” is replaced by energy, activity, constructiveness, and in this titanic task the poet is guided by faith in the power of the word. Therefore, all new poets are extreme verbalists" [7, p. 373]. Preserving the modernist sacred attitude to the word, “the Acmeists followed Adam, whose role before the Fall was determined by naming (naming) the realities of the earthly world. Returning to the language of the original virgin names - this is precisely the task that the Acmeists set themselves" [3, p. 121].
Critics note that it was N.S. Gumilyov who “had an extremely strong sense of responsibility to the word. This partly explains his desire for clarity and distinctness in poetry, the desire to avoid any “mystical” motives in his work... For N.S. Gumilyov, the word is not a rattle for the entertainment of grown-up children, but a pointing finger.” The poet is reproached for some dryness of his poems, but “it was restraint, a consciousness of responsibility to the word, the enormous power of which he knew” [1]. N.S. Gumilev in his poems recalled that “in the beginning was the Word.” In the diary of A. A. Blok, who compiled a summary of N. S. Gumilyov’s speech about
O. E. Mandelstam at an evening at the Poets Club in 1920, Gumilyov is quoted as saying: “In the beginning there was the Word, from the Word arose thoughts, words, no longer similar to the Word, but having, however, His source; and everything will end with the Word - everything will disappear, only It will remain” [4].
Gumilyov’s best book of poetry, “The Pillar of Fire,” which dates to the last period of his life and includes the poem “The Word” (1921), is focused on deep spiritual movements associated with an acute experience of modernity and a feeling of tragic anxiety. During this period, critics began to criticize the poet’s work [6, p. 140].
In the famous poem “The Word” [2, p. 273], consisting of six stanzas, three parts can be clearly distinguished, in which certain micro-themes are revealed. So, in the first part - stanzas 1-2 - a picture of the power of the primordial word is created. The complex sentence representing the entire first stanza has one obvious actant - “God bowed his face”, while the lexeme “word”, used in the instrumental instrumental case, acts as a weapon - “The sun was stopped with a word, with a word they destroyed cities.” From the very beginning, the poet makes it clear that God was the creator and the only beginning of everything. The second stanza, which is a complex sentence with a subordinate cause, has the Word as its main active object: it is the divine “word” that is the force that forces the usual course of things to change - “And the eagle did not flap its wings, The stars huddled in horror to the moon, If... The Word floated in above." The lexical and thematic groups of nouns found in this part indicate the author’s desire to show the unlimited possibilities of the word. A group of words with the theme “world, phenomena, objects of the world”: world, God, sun, city, eagle, stars, moon - paint a wide panorama of reality. The attribution of the word to phenomena of a higher order is represented by the use of the following lexemes related to the topic “height”: inclined, sun, eagle, stars, moon, height. Through a comparative phrase with the conjunction “exactly”, the poet assigns the word the status of a sacred living thing - “like a pink flame”, and the presence of archaic forms (“that one”, “wings”) emphasizes a solemn, respectful attitude towards the word. However, it is worth paying attention to the temporal indicators of the events described: verbs in the imperfect past tense form - “declined”, “stopped”, “destroyed”, “did not wave”, “huddled”, “floated”, conjunctions with a temporary meaning - “when ", "then" and the circumstance of time "on that day" - all this refers us to the idea that the poet wanted to emphasize the remoteness of that time.
The content of the second microtheme (stanzas 3–4) is contrasted with the previous one, as immediately indicated by the adversative conjunction “a” with which the third stanza begins: the high power of the word cannot be compared with the earthly, low number - “And for the low life there were numbers...”. However, the number, according to Gumilyov, limply passed into the hands of people, becoming a substitute for what the human mind could not comprehend. The poet introduces the comparison “Like livestock, yoked”, which relates to the definition of the essence of number’s service to people and emphasizes the lack of will, doom to work (“Yoked - being enslaved by someone, under a yoke” [8, p. 546]) , which “conveys all shades of meaning.” The word reveals a truth that people are not destined to reach, which is why they have to be content with only “shades of meaning” conveyed by numbers, and not with the essence itself. People are too sinful for the word to be revealed to them, because even the patriarch as “the head of the church hierarchy” [8, p. 496] does not dare to contact him. So in this part of the poem, in contrast to the high sphere of habitation of the word, the everyday, material life of people who have chosen a number as their gods is presented, people who understand all the sacred unattainability of the word and are afraid to desecrate it (“Not daring to turn to sound, I drew a number in the sand with a cane”) .
In the final stanzas of the work, another temporary space opens up - the present. The adversarial conjunction “but”, which crowns the fifth stanza, and the use of past tense verbs of the perfect form “forgot”, “set” indicate the completion of the process, the impossibility of its further development. However, constructions using forms of the present non-actual tense - “... radiantly Only the word...”, “It is said that the word is God”, make it clear that the holiness of the word is rebellious to time. In the same stanza, the poet reveals the essence of his understanding of the word. A complex sentence with an explanatory clause explains: “And in the Gospel of John It is said that this word is God.” Nouns in the nominative case “word”, “God” are the main members of the sentence, therefore, according to the rules of Russian spelling, a dash is placed between them. However, the location of the lexeme “this” between the main members of the sentence has its own nuances, behind which important information is hidden: if the word “this” is used on the border of two sentences, of which the second contains an interpretation, an explanation of the first, then it is an indicative word, but in In our case, a different use is presented - after the predicate, before the dash. In this case, “this” appears in the form of a demonstrative particle, used when emphasizing or highlighting one or another member of a sentence. So, from here we conclude: for N.S. Gumilyov, the primacy of God in relation to the word is obvious, not the Word is God, but the word is God, and only the word about God, God himself is holiness “in the midst of earthly anxieties.”
The sixth stanza conveys the bitterness of people’s loss of understanding of the holiness of the Word, which the poet conveys through the use of lexemes that carry clearly negative emotions: “meager,” “empty,” “bad,” “dead.” The lyrical hero also takes responsibility for this - the personal pronoun “we” shows his inclusion in the general share of guilt. According to N.S. Gumilyov, people made a mistake in relation to the word - “...they set the meager limits of nature as a limit.” The perfect form of the past tense verb “set” shows the irreversibility of the action. God, embodied in the Word, was imprisoned in the sphere of human habitation, was exchanged for small coins - words with their essence erased and taken away from them. The lexeme “nature” according to the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language”, ed. S.I. Ozhegova, N.Yu. Shvedova has two meanings: “(obsolete) 1. The very essence, the essence of something. 2. The same as nature)” [8, p. 188]. We dare to assume that the poet used this word precisely in the second meaning, since in the following lines, through a comparative phrase with the particle “how,” the current words are likened to one of the most industrious creatures of God living in nature - bees, who were left without their queen and honeycombs. honey in an “empty hive” without purpose and meaning of life. Thus, according to the poet, the word, which once possessed the holiness of God himself, who created it and invested the great essence, has been corrupted by people: now it is not the highest idea, but material, thinginess. The comparison “like bees” also shows that words that were alive, through the fault of people, acquired their new sad definition - “dead words” that were spoiled by people, their greed, the desire to encroach on the sacred, to appropriate it for themselves. Words that are spoiled and worn out by people “smell bad.”
It is also worth noting that the poem is based on numerous biblical reminiscences. The line “They stopped the sun with a word” refers to the event told in the Book of Joshua, when Joshua, a companion of Moses, a commander, the leader of the people of Israel, in a battle against the army of the five kings of Canaan, stopped the sun with a word over the battlefield: “And the sun and the moon stood still.” stood until the people took revenge on their enemies (X, 10–14)” [4, p. 165]. And the line “With the word they destroyed cities” contains “a reminder of another event from the same Book (VI), when the walls of the city of Jericho fell from the cry of the people and the sound of trumpets.” But a person at least somewhat familiar with the Bible, after reading “And in the Gospel of John It is said that this word is God,” will immediately remember the great: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Holy Gospel from John).
Taking into account all the linguistic, literary and general cultural facts we are considering, we dare to assume that the word, the image of which was created by N.S. Gumilyov in the poem of the same name, is for the poet a sacred, divine value, a revelation of God. This is the true nature of the word, which people have trampled upon, materializing and crushing it. Thus, the reasoning of N. S. Trubetskoy, cited by Yu. S. Stepanov in his “Dictionary of Constants of Russian Culture” about the Word-Logos of the Gospel as “the perfect revelation of the Being of God, the eternal image of God” can, in our opinion, be the basis for perception of the word by N. S. Gumilyov. Also, it seems, the poet was close to the thought of his contemporary, the famous literary critic V. B. Shklovsky: “The most ancient poetic creativity of man was the creativity of words. Now words are dead, and language is like a cemetery, but the newly born word was vividly figurative... and often, when you get to the now lost, erased image that was once the basis of the word, you are amazed at its beauty, which was and is no longer there.” [9].
Literature:
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- Gumilyov N. S. The Word // Works. In 3 volumes. T. 1. Poems, Poems. - M.: Artist. lit., 1991. - P. 273.
- Egorova L.N. History of Russian literature of the 20th century. First half: textbook: In 2 books. - Book 1: General questions / L.P. Egorova, A.A. Fokin, I.N. Ivanova, etc. - 2nd ed., revised. - M., FLINTA, 2014. 450 p.
- Kachurin M. G. The Bible and Russian Literature: Reader. - St. Petersburg: “Karavella”, 1995. 582 p.
- Klimova E. V. From archival research: sketch “Plan for the analysis of a poem” by N. Gumilyov. [Electronic resource] // Nikolai Gumilyov: electronic collected works. - Access mode. — URL: https://gumilev.ru/about/143/ (date accessed 05/03/2016).
- Kuzmina S. F. History of Russian literature of the 20th century. Poetry of the Silver Age. Tutorial. — 2nd ed. - M.: Flinta: Nauka, 2009. 400 p.
- Mochulsky K.V. Classicism in modern Russian poetry // Criticism of Russian abroad. - M.: AST, 2002. T. 2. 418 p.
- Ozhegov S.I. Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language: 80,000 words and phraseological expressions / S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. - The Russian Academy of Sciences. Institute of Language named after. V. V. Vinogradova. — 4th ed., supplemented. - M.: Azbukovnik, 1999. 944 p.
- Shklovsky V.B. Hamburg account. Articles-memoirs - essays (1914–1933). - M.: Soviet writer, 1990. 331 p.
Basic terms
(automatically generated)
: word, God, poet, complex sentence, stanza, main member of the sentence, adversative conjunction, past tense, perfective aspect, comparative phrase.
