Yesterday, a group of friends and I went to visit Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov's summer house. Nekrasov was a 19th-century poet, who was particularly famous for writing on the suffering of the peaseantry. He really focused on conveying the charm of peasant life in his work, often adapting folk songs and peasant poems, but he also acknowledged and gave a voice to those who suffered in society. My favourite poem from him is ‘Когда из мрака заблужденья...’ (‘When from the darkness of delusion...’), in which he tells the plight of a woman who’s driven to prostitution by extreme poverty. Although he's not exactly famous outside of Russia, he was one of the intellectuals that carried weight in the literary scene of 19th century, and not only as an author, but also as a critique and a publisher. Both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy were published in his literary magazine Sovremennik, which was later suppressed as it became the voice of a certain political opposition. So you could imagine how excited I was to visit the place where he wrote many of his pieces. The summer house itself is located in Karabikha, a small town about 25/30 minutes away from Yaroslavl. The bus there was only 27 roubles and the weather was surprisingly pleasant. We had a guided tour (in Russian obviously) of the main house of the property and were told about Nekrasov's life and his family, which I won't go into details about here because you can just as easily read his wikipedia page. We then just had tea and decided to go for a walk in the woods behind the property. We sat on a bench and my friend's landlady started reciting 'Мне осталась одна забава...' by Sergei Yesenin (a quite random choice). As I listened to her, breathing in the smell of dying leaves and watching the already golden paysage, all I could think of was the extent of Russia's quality as a subject of poetry. Poetry itself seems to be an essential part of Russian culture. Children have to memorise dozens of poems throughout their education and people in general are very involved and proud of their classics. Our translation teacher Olga Baricovna often majestically recites parts of Pushkin's poems to illustrate grammar rules or set expressions she's teaching us. When I asked my friend Nikita, who is NOT someone who would typically be interested poetry (spends most of his time playing video games or watching basketball games, finds reading fictional literature boring and tedious...), why Russians liked poetry so much, he said this: 'Ну то что она самая крутая, самая эмоциональная! Затрагивает все проблемы! Актуальна по сей день!', and enthusiastically showed me this video of actor Alexander Petrov reciting 'Облако в штанах' by Vladimir Mayakovsky, his favourite poet. How unusual this would be in the UK! I personally think that their affection for poetry has to do with the fact that Russian is a 'великий и могучий' language to cite Ivan Turgenev (I highly recommend checking out his poem 'Русский Язык', which is, to put it simply, his love confession to the Russian language.). The effect of poetry depends on the combination of concision, imagery, grammatical parallelism, sound organisation, etc...without forgetting the poem's timelessness. I don't have to tell you how complex, intricate and rich the Russian language is. In Russian, we can express the durability, the frequency, even the intensity of an action with just a conjugated verb if we choose the aspect and possibly the prefix well. We can, thanks to cases, move around all the components of a sentence without impeding the reader's ability to understand its meaning, and I could go on and on. Hence, Russian poetry can be so extremely precise, melodious, meaningful and seem so effortless. As a result, in Russia poetry is not something only bookworms are interested in. It is an actual and vibrant part of Russian literature. Verses from famous poems can even be used in every day conversations as sayings. I will give you some examples, which you can go ahead and translate for yourself:
As for myself, I am trying to read as much Russian poetry as possible, and I recommend doing the same. It helps with pronunciation and you just get used to hearing Russian.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Let me know what you think about it. До свидания!
1 Comment
Andrea Jackson
10/25/2017 06:55:29 am
Dear Safaa,
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AuthorThird year student at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Studies Russian, German and International Relations. Loves traveling. Loves languages. Loves to share. Hence, this BLOG! Archives
January 2018
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