Stranger (1906)
The poem was written during a difficult period in Alexander Blok’s personal life, when his wife, L. D. Mendeleeva, began an affair with his friend, poet Andrei Bely. It was born from wanderings around the St. Petersburg suburbs, and specifically from impressions from walks in the holiday village of Ozerki. Many real features and signs in the poem are from here: the restaurant, the dust of the alleys, the barriers.
The genre of the work is a story in verse. The plot is a meeting of the lyrical hero with a Stranger in a country restaurant. The main theme is the clash of dreams and reality.
The composition is based on the principle of opposition - antithesis. The dream is opposed to harsh reality. Compositionally, the poem consists of two parts. One part (the first six stanzas) shows the reality of the vulgar world, the second part (the last seven stanzas) depicts the romantic ideal. These two worlds are incompatible for Blok. The world of his dreams is fragile and thin, devoid of real outlines. But this world is his only salvation and opportunity to remain himself. Alexander Blok gives this world, inspired by the image of the Stranger, to his readers.
The poem begins with a description of a spring evening. However, the fresh breath of spring is not felt at all - the poet calls the spring air noxious. The first part is filled with prosaic details. This is the dust of the alleys, and the boredom of country dachas, and the pretzel of a bakery, and tried-and-true wits who “walk with the ladies among the ditches.” The author uses coarse language (the lackeys stick out sleepily), depicts unpleasant sounds (a child's cry; a woman's squeal; the creaking of rowlocks). Vulgarity infects everything around with its corrupting spirit. And even traditionally poetic image the moon appears here in a distorted form:
And in the sky, accustomed to everything,
The disk is bent senselessly.
In this part, the author deliberately piles up difficult-to-pronounce consonant sounds. For example: “In the evenings above the restaurants, / The hot air is wild and deaf”: pvchrm ndrstrnm grch sigh dk ghl. And instead of the assonances typical of Blok’s poetry (repetition of vowel sounds) on a-o-e, which add melody to the verse, we hear dull alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) and assonances on i (hot air is wild and dull; a woman’s squeal; a disk is bent), which hurt the ears.
In this world, instead of the sun, “the pretzel of the bakery is golden,” and love is replaced by walks of ladies with “tested wits” (who probably repeat the same jokes every day). “Tested wits” walk with the ladies not just anywhere, but “among the ditches.” The image of the restaurant is also symbolic - it is the embodiment of vulgarity. The author depicts not just an evening restaurant, but a space where “the hot air is wild and deaf,” where a “spring and pernicious spirit” rules the general gloom. Here boredom, drunkenness and monotonous fun took on the character of a repetitive and meaningless rotation. The phrase “And every evening” speaks about the whirling of life in this automatic wheel. This phrase is repeated three times, like the conjunction and - this achieves the feeling of a vicious circle (And the spring and pernicious spirit rules the drunken cries; And a child’s cry is heard; And a woman’s squeal is heard). The author uses all verbs in the present tense. This world is disgusting and scary. In literally everything, the lyrical hero feels a repulsive disharmony of sounds and smells, colors and feelings. He finds consolation in wine:
And every evening my only friend is reflected in my glass with tart and mysterious moisture,
Like me, humbled and stunned.
The motif of intoxication is repeated several times: “drunkards with rabbit eyes” shout: “Invinoveritas!” - “The truth is in wine!” (lat.). The stranger walks “among the drunken people”; the lyrical hero himself speaks about the “tart and mysterious moisture”. But intoxication is also a immersion in the world of dreams.
This disgusting world is contrasted with the Stranger, who appears “every evening at the appointed hour” in the second part of the poem. Alliteration - repetition, rough accumulation of consonant sounds in the description dirty street- are replaced by the repetition of vowel sounds - assonances (Breathing with perfumes and mists, / She sits by the window. / And the ancient beliefs blow / Her elastic silks). The hissing ones convey the rustle of silk. Assonances and alliterations create a feeling of airiness of the female image.
The stranger is devoid of realistic features; she is entirely shrouded in mystery. This image is fenced off from the dirt and vulgarity of reality by the sublime perception of the lyrical hero. The stranger is the ideal of femininity and beauty, a symbol of what the lyrical hero lacks - love, beauty, spirituality.
The Mysterious Stranger is “always without companions, alone.” The loneliness of the heroes not only sets them apart from the general crowd, but also attracts them to each other:
And chained by a strange intimacy,
I look behind the dark veil,
And I see the enchanted shore and the enchanted distance.
“The Enchanted Shore” is a symbol of a harmonious, but unattainable world. It seems that he is nearby, but if you stretch out your hand, he disappears.
And bowed ostrich feathers sway in my brain,
And bottomless blue eyes bloom on the far shore.
The poet uses the word ochi, which has fallen out of widespread use, giving sublimity to the image of the Stranger. Her blue bottomless eyes ( Blue colour Blok means starry, high, unattainable) are contrasted with the rabbit eyes of drunkards.
The Stranger is a transformed image of a Beautiful Lady. This is an ordinary visitor to a country restaurant or a “vague vision” of a lyrical hero. This image symbolizes the duality of consciousness of the lyrical hero. He really wants to get away from the reality he hates, but it does not disappear anywhere - and it is into this world that the Stranger comes. This introduces tragic notes into the image of the lyrical hero. Spirits and mists, bottomless blue eyes of strangers and the distant shore are just dreams, momentary intoxication, but the true meaning of life is revealed to the lyrical hero in these moments.
“The Stranger” was written during a difficult period for the poet - when he himself was going through a difficult personal drama. His beloved, Lyubov Mendeleeva, left him for his friend and fellow poet Andrei Bely. Blok had a hard time with this separation, which is perhaps partly why the poem is permeated with such sadness.
According to many researchers, the poet conveys the atmosphere of the St. Petersburg outskirts; in addition, here one can find his impressions of trips to the dacha, where the poet visited more than once during this period, dull rural entertainment and local inhabitants.
Plot
So, the scene of action is a certain place in which all the dirt and vulgarity seem to be deliberately concentrated big city. Here the air itself is heavy, it’s hard to breathe, the eyes of those around you are empty, all around are not people, but grotesque creatures “with the eyes of rabbits.” This world is disharmonious, viscous and dreary, and existence in it is devoid of any meaning.And every evening in this place, terrifying in its everyday vulgarity, she appears - no longer the Beautiful Lady of Blok’s early lyrics, but a woman in whose heart there obviously lurks some secret, some kind of bitterness that makes her come here. This woman, wrapped in silk and exuding the scent of perfume, is obviously gray world, she is a stranger in it.
The stranger walks through the mud without getting dirty with it, and remains a kind of sublime ideal.
It is significant that the lyrical hero does not at all seek to dispel the mystery surrounding her, to approach her and ask her name, to find out what brought her here. Indeed, in this case, the romantic aura surrounding the mysterious stranger will disappear; from a stranger, she will turn into just an earthly woman, in whose life, perhaps, something happened. It is important for him precisely as an image showing that even in the most pitchless darkness there is light and beauty, as a sign of a mystical miracle that brings meaning and fills life with content.
Literary analysis
The poem is written in iambic pentameter with classic cross-alternation and feminine rhyme.
The entire work can be roughly divided into two parts: in the first, an atmosphere of hopelessness reigns, while the second is illuminated by the presence of the mysterious Stranger. At the same time, the antithesis of images is constantly
The poem "Stranger" by A. Blok was written in Ozerki on April 24, 1906. It belongs to the “City” cycle, in which the poet touches on one of the main problems for him - the people and the intelligentsia.
In this poem, the hero meets his beloved in a restaurant. she appears to him only in drunken dreams. If before she was his Beautiful Lady, now she is just a stranger (unknown woman). In the future, the image Beautiful Lady will lose the magical aura and she will become a real woman.
The idea of this poem is the meeting of the lyrical hero with his beloved, who appears before him in a new guise. With the help of wine, he tries to come to terms with reality. The world does not suit him, he is disappointed in his dreams and has lost the meaning of life.
This poem, depicting a mysteriously captivating image of a stranger, is built on a system of contrasts: the lyrical hero is sharply opposed to the disharmonious world of the St. Petersburg suburb, the boredom of “country dachas” spilled everywhere. it is felt in unpleasant sounds(in drunken shouts, the creaking of rowlocks, women's squealing), in ugly pictures (even the lunar disk is “crooked”), deadness, “decay and a pernicious spirit.”
The lyrical hero has only one interlocutor - the “only friend” reflected in the glass, that is, himself or his double. But this double is mute, for, like the one who drinks the tart moisture, he is “humble and stunned.” This means absolute loneliness!
The tavern, carbon dioxide world is opposed by the emerging stranger. She is lonely (“Always without companions, alone...”), and in this respect she is a soul akin to the lyrical hero. In addition, she, like him, is tragic (the feathers on her hat are “mourning”). At the same time, the stranger clearly belongs to this restaurant world and fits into it. In her poetic form, the heroine appears as a miracle, as something extraordinary, rare, and exceptional. And at the same time it is everyday. It is noteworthy that with the appearance of her image in the sound world of the poem, a surge of whistling and hissing sounds arises:
And every evening at the appointed hour
(Or am I just dreaming?)
The girl's figure, captured by silks,
A window moves through a foggy window.
The poet minimizes unpronounceable consonants, turning to sonorous consonants (l, n, m, r), shading them with hissing and whistling ones (ch, sh, s), reminiscent of the rustling of silk.
The lyrical hero succumbs to the charm of the stranger’s beauty, he is “chained” by her “strange intimacy”; but he does not accept her image, slides past it, looks through it. His ideal is obviously broader; it is not “covered” by the image of the Stranger, it is higher than it. And a different world opens up for the lyrical hero, new image, corresponding to his ideal (“And I see the enchanted shore / and the enchanted distance”). Some special captivating secret is connected with this other distance; the image of eyes, “blue, bottomless”, appears; belonging to the heroine of another, “distant” shore. This image is also mysterious and vague, it is completely devoid of flesh and tactility. It is called the “sun”, endowed with a bright, dazzling light, another contrast of earthly and heavenly, real and lyrical is born.
Silent secrets have been entrusted to me,
Someone gave me the sun,
And all the souls of my bend
Tart wine pierced.
But in the experience of witchcraft, anxiety suddenly sets in. What if these are just drunken hallucinations (“Or am I just dreaming?”). There is also the hero’s confession: the treasure lies deep in the soul. This spiritual wealth is unsteady and illusory if it is deprived of support in reality, if the image of eternal femininity disappears, as the Stranger disappeared into the fog. And the hero returns to the terrible reality: “You are truly a drunken monster! / I know: the truth is in wine.”
An image of enormous tragic power appears: drunkards unite into a “drunken monster”, stupidly and imperiously looking at the hero and forcing him to admit that he is right (“the truth is in wine”).
To reveal the theme and idea of the work, the author uses the following figurative and expressive means: metaphors (“the air is deaf,” “bottomless eyes,” “pierced by wine”), personification (“eyes bloom,” “accustomed to everything”), comparison (“drunkards with the eyes of rabbits"), epithets ("mysterious moisture", "deep secrets"), anaphora ("and every evening"), sound writing ("rowlocks creak", "ancient beliefs blow"), painting ("the pretzel of the bakery is golden") .
The main principle determining the composition of a work is contrast. It is in contrasting comparisons that the conflict between the desired and the given, the ideal and reality is realized, which forms the basis of romantic art and is widely used by Blok, the symbolist, throughout his work. In this poem, the sharp contrast between the two parts finds expression in the theme of vocabulary, the sound organization of the verse. Only the rhythmic pattern (four-line iambic with a rare alternation of dactylic and masculine rhymes for this meter) remains unchanged.
The poem "Stranger" begins and ends with a restaurant, a deafening scream, and the same motto - "the truth is in wine." In oblivion of all humiliating abominations" scary world", in "electric dreams in reality", in ecstasy, at least bestowed by wine, the author looked for a way out into other worlds - it was easier to remember "deep secrets", and "blue, bottomless eyes" blossomed only when the tart wine pierced everything " bends of the soul,” and an ordinary prostitute turned into a beautiful Stranger.
Symbolist poetry was a philosophy of intuitive creativity, the expression of unclear feelings and subtle ideas through incoherent, unsystematic symbols. The so-called secret writing of the unspoken. The second most important symbolist category was the obligatory musicality of the verse.
The reader must independently decipher the poetry of Alexander Blok's allusions and take part in creativity, complementing the picture of fantasy or conventional reality of the poetic landscape, worldview or ineffable experience of the creator.
One of Blok’s hobbies was the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, from the ideal of unity of which the symbol of the eternal feminine principle, or femininity, came into his work. The surrounding world of the beginning of the century, with its tragic contradictions and social catastrophes, seemed terrible to the poet, and this was even the name of the central poetic cycle of this period.
Block. "Stranger" (analysis)
As a result of leaving the “terrible” existence, the lyrical hero of the poem forms his own, beautiful and poetic world. If we take the poem that Blok wrote during this period - “Stranger” - analysis will show that it can be conditionally divided into two parts. Moreover, in the first, consisting of six quatrains, for some reason there will be everything that he did not like: wild and dull hot air; dust and boredom, children's crying; noisy couples walking between ditches; creaking, squealing; lackeys and drunkards with red eyes.
A. Blok “Stranger” (analysis of the 1st part)
The poem was created in 1906. This period of life was difficult for Blok, starting with family troubles and ending with a break with the Symbolist poets. The time was also turbulent in terms of social upheaval. The poet was haunted by the feeling of trouble, the contradictory tragedy of life, which gave rise to “deaf darkness.”
It was born as a result of aimless wanderings around the St. Petersburg environs and trips to Ozerki to the dacha. Sublimely solemn quatrains, where the heroine is beautiful in her mystery, are interspersed with quatrains-statements of a hero disappointed with life, who has unconscious anxiety in his soul. He believes that the world is dying, is sliding into darkness, into the abyss, and needs to be saved. Lawlessness and unbelief reign in it.
The lyrical hero of the poem, in search of a way out, goes into revelry and drunkenness. Now he is his own friend and drinking companion. The wine “humbles” and “stuns” him. The real world, where ditches, dust, wits and their screeching ladies, the meaninglessly curved disk of the moon, fades into the background when She enters the room at the “appointed” hour.
Block. “Stranger” (analysis of part 2)
The hero doubts the reality of what is happening. There are symbols of ambiguity: sleep and fog (“dreaming”, the window is foggy). The hero is not able to capture the whole image of her; details appear in his mind (the girl’s figure covered in silks, a hat with a veil and feathers, a hand in rings. The second part also consists of six quatrains. The last is the result, the conclusion.
The secret of this poem is that it is impossible to say for sure whether the Stranger is real or imaginary. Blok would probably not approve of analyzing his creation, breaking it down into components of his wonderful magical world. Yes, this will not give anything! Each reader must decide for himself.
Do more detailed analysis? “The Stranger”, Blok, as well as his other poems are unlikely to need it. It is better to read, feel, follow the poet’s imagination and receive unspeakable pleasure from the beauty and musicality of his fantasies!
Analysis of the poem by A.A. Block "Stranger"
Conventionally, the poem can be divided into two parts. In the first part, the author describes the dacha village with all its views that evoke melancholy and hopelessness. In the second - the reflections of the lyrical hero and the image of the Beautiful Stranger.
The atmosphere of the holiday village can be described as soulless, ordinary, dreary. Despite the fact that its inhabitants seem to be having fun, but at the same time, their entertainment does not evoke any positive emotions or interest either in the author or in the lyrical hero of the poem. The author emphasizes:
And in the sky, accustomed to everything
The disk is bent senselessly
that even the omnipresent sun was bored with this state of affairs.
The lyrical hero has a clear disgust for everything that happens around him. He is trying to relieve his melancholy and loneliness. He lost faith in beauty, in spirituality, in goodness. The landscape surrounding him puts unbearable pressure on his delicate nature. The hero suffers from loneliness, but at the same time does not want to brighten it up in a crowd of drunks.
And being in this in a state of disrepair spirit, the lyrical hero sees her - a Beautiful Stranger, shrouded in a fog of mystery, but he does not try to dispel this mystery. In all this dreary everyday life, she becomes a symbol of beauty, romance, and high feelings. The soul of the hero changes, the verse changes. Sharp rhymes are replaced by melody. It is impossible to say who the Stranger really is, perhaps she is just a woman, but due to the huge contrast with the general landscape, she becomes the ideal of femininity and beauty, a symbol of what the world and the hero lack so much - love, spirituality, beauty, romance.
Experiencing all these deep feelings, the lyrical hero understands that not everything is lost for him, that there is still a chance to break out of this routine, that only he can destroy it for himself. This is his path and his mission.
In addition to analyzing the excellent poem “Stranger,” it is recommended that you familiarize yourself with other works:
- “Russia”, analysis of Blok’s poem
- “The Twelve”, analysis of the poem by Alexander Blok
- “Factory”, analysis of Blok’s poem
- “Rus”, analysis of Blok’s poem
- “Summer Evening”, analysis of Blok’s poem
- “Dawn”, analysis of Blok’s poem
