ARTHUR RIMBAUD
(1854-1891)
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville and lived a short life - only 37 years. But Rimbaud died long before the official date of his own death: the last of his recognizable works, “Time in Hell,” was completed in the summer of 1873, when the poet was only nineteen. In other words, this brilliant person managed to live for almost two more decades, forever excluding poetry from his own life.
Charleville is a small town in northeastern France. There, Rimbaud, at the age of seven, began to write in prose, and then in poetry, and there he received school education. Already as a child, Arthur amazed his teachers not only with his extraordinary success in his studies, but also with his phenomenal maturity of mind.
In August 1870, Rimbaud left Charleville, reached Paris, and then went to Belgium, where he tried to take up journalism. With the help of the police, the mother returned her minor son home. It will always be like this from this moment on, until his death - as if aimed at some mysterious goal, Rambo is constantly trying to move, looking for something. A constant renewal of the pathos of his poetic thinking.
The fate of this poet reflected turning points in the modern history of France. The actions of the Paris Commune helped the rebels to “rip out the roots”, to leave the past, from bourgeois Charleville. The poet's first protest was romantic; romanticism also inspired his lyrics. Rambo began with student devotion to the authorities of that time: V. Hugo, the poets of Parnassus, C. Baudelaire - in other words French romantics. Indicative of the beginning of Rimbaud’s work is the huge poem “The Blacksmith”. Everything in it is reminiscent of Hugo's poetry: the historical plot of the times of the Great French Revolution, epic content and epic form, republican thought and monumental style.
Mastering the experience of romanticism, Rambo in a short time seemed to repeat in his creative path the stages of development of this literary movement. This came out in the very first phase of the poet’s creative biography, which lasted 18 months - from January 2, 1870, the date of publication of Rimbaud’s first poem, until May 1871, the date of the defeat of the Commune. Each step of the poet's poetic growth was marked by a desire that seemed strange at first glance - to get rid of what he himself had already created.
By the dawn of 1870, Rimbaud had written more than 10 poems, in which the dependence on the romantic tradition was more tangible. Almost all of them were written in Alexandrian verse, which embodied the deep-rooted norms of “correct” French versification. When moving to the next phase of creativity, the tone and style of Rimbaud's poetry practically does not change. Pathos gives way to sarcasm - the poet moves from the admirable in the past to the unworthy of the real. Majestic and sublime images are replaced by useless and caricatured ones. Hard, sharp, defiant intonations are established.
The stages of the path of Rimbaud the poet are measured from time to time in a few verses. Thus, learning from the experience of romanticism, Rambo became interested in Baudelaire. “Flowers of Evil” come to mind when reading his sonnet “Venus Anadyomene.” This sonnet is already a new step in the development of his aesthetics. The poet seems to be eradicating the “literary” idea of beauty. The embodiment of love - the lady and the sign of love - Venus are humiliated to the caricature of a prostitute. Rambo also encroaches on love specifically, approaching complete disbelief.
In the summer of 1870, the poet left Charleville, which embodied for him public order, religion, and family. At this time, Rimbaud was already a perfect satirist poet, who had a well-stocked arsenal of ironic, mocking, and grotesque colors.
The Franco-Prussian War was gaining momentum, and the poet celebrated his sixteenth birthday with poems about the war. This, namely, the sonnet “Sleeping in the Log”. But, unlike ordinary sonnets, for which restraint and rigor in the selection of themes were considered indispensable, Rimbaud’s sonnet is characterized by a fierce, mocking tone, a fast rhythm close to colloquial poetic speech, lexical freedom, introduction and sudden changes in style. This is an almost grotesque combination of sonnet form and an “earthly” satirical plot, full of anarchic challenge. The sonnet “My Ciganeria” corresponds to all these definitions - a real hymn to bohemia, to a person who has broken away from society and is left alone with the sky and stars. In the poem “The Assessors,” the tendency toward lignification and fossilization is triumphantly inherent in “human functions.” Any hint of life and action disappears. A person is constrained by a function, and then the function is replaced by its outer shell, an objective feature. This creates a satirical image of the “chair man.”
Only four or five poems belong to the period of the Commune - the newest phase in Rimbaud's work - but this is truly a new era in the development of the poet. All these poems amaze with their wisdom and depth, despite the fact that Rimbaud was barely sixteen years old! Only he mocked the poor, mocked the ladies - and it seemed that the poet’s nihilism knew no bounds - and now he is making a real hymn to the female worker - “The Hands of Jeanne-Marie” - a sign similar to Delacroix’s “Freedom on the Barricades”. Suddenly cynicism and feigned rudeness disappear,
The defeat of the Paris Commune and the victory of the Versailles people are perceived by the poet as the deepest catastrophe. The poems written by Rimbaud during the days of the Commune demonstrate how small it was for him. The defeat of the uprising meant for Rimbaud the victory of the “Assessors” - “those who sit.”
After the death of the Commune, Rimbaud would invest all his hopes only in art. He stops studying despite impressive progress and generally avoids any permanent activity. This was at first a demonstration of the rebellious mood of the poet, since he did not belong to the lazy people.
A new cycle of wandering begins. In August 1871, Rimbaud sent his poems to Verlaine, and he, carried away by them, invited the poet to Paris. There Rimbaud becomes close to Verlaine and other poets and resorts to the lifestyle of a true bohemia. In February 1872, Rimbaud returned home, but in May he again went to Paris. Then he makes several trips to Belgium, Great Britain, again to France and then returns to Belgium. In July 1873, Verlaine, during another fierce argument between two poets, shoots at Rimbaud, wounds him, and he himself ends up in jail. First, in 1874, Rambo was in Great Britain, then in Germany, Italy; Lives for some time in Charleville, from where he leaves for Austria and Holland. This never-ending “journey” stretches right up to 1880, when the poet completely leaves Europe. This is the decade of poverty, odd jobs, strange tests. The poet lives without even being bound by the fact of geographical presence in one place.
On May 13, 1871, he writes a letter in which he declares his intention to create new poetry: “I want to be a poet, I’m trying to transform myself into a clairvoyant... We are talking about achieving an unknown method of derangement of all emotions...”. Rambo’s zeal for “clairvoyance” is directly associated with rebellion, and “disorder of emotions” is contrasted with “ordinary” social existence.
In the sonnet “Vowels,” Rambo proposes a new principle for the formation of appearance, which is based on free association between sound and color, and visual impressions. In “Vowels,” the “clairvoyant poet” subordinates everything to his own consciousness and is able to create nature and the universe devoid of impartial laws; cause-and-effect relationships. Like most of Rimbaud's poems, "Vowels" has a huge number of interpretations. For example, one of them suggests viewing the poem as a symbolic picture of human existence: from the darkness ( dark color) light (snow-white color E), through violent passions ( reddish color) to wisdom (greenish color) and knowledge of the secrets of the Universe (blue color A). The principle of contrast plays an important role in “Vowels”: dark - snow-white, death - life; disgusting - beautiful, fleeting - accidental. Rimbaud uses the form of a sonnet, which usually consists of a thesis, antithesis and their synthesis, in other words, in its very structure there is a contradiction, and this allows us to consider “Vowels” as a standard for the symbolist search for “correspondences” between different principles of life, as a panoramic picture of the Universe.
Assimilation of the vowel sound to color meant neglect of the word as a semantic unit, as a carrier of a certain meaning. Sound, isolated from the semantic context, acquires the function of “suggestion”, direct impact on feelings, “suggestibility”, with the help of which the “unknown” is found. Such a literary technique was already predicted by Verlaine’s principle of “music first” (which, of course, directly influenced Rambo), but Verlaine’s impressionism preserved both the image of a given soul and a certain natural image, and in Rambo everything ordinary and tangible becomes unknown.
Rambo truly introduces the period of “clairvoyance” with the poem “The Drunken Ship,” written in the summer of 1871. “The Drunken Ship” is a story about the trip that the “clairvoyant” poet wants to complete. A certain ship that begins sailing on a troubled sea quickly loses both its crew and its rudder, and is finally ready to go to the bottom. In the poem, a double image of a “man-ship” appears, a double fate - both a broken ship and a broken heart of the poet. Rimbaud not only depicts his journey through the “unknown” in the form of a “drunk ship”. He foresees both the imminent death of the ship, the beginning of a terrible journey, and his poetic fate. “The Drunken Ship” is also a typical myth about the world, a poet’s confession in the form of a “little odyssey,” a journey in search of oneself. The poet identifies himself with the ship, which, having lost its crew, “lost its own cargo,” surrenders to the elements in ecstasy. Both in the external, narrative plane of “The Drunken Ship” and in the hidden lyrical plane, the opposite feelings are intertwined: perseverance and anxiety, admiration for boundless will and horror of being lost forever. The images of poetry lose clarity, become deformed, and it is difficult to find the border between the real and the imaginary.
The “substitution” that took place in “The Drunken Ship” marked the formation of a new poetic system based on a symbolic reflection of reality.
Directly after "The Drunken Ship" appeared a series of poems written in the summer of 1872 during the poet's wanderings. These are Rimbaud's last poems, and they again constitute a special step in his work. The poet became “clairvoyant”. The image of society almost completely disappears from his works. It may seem that Rimbaud's last poetry is like wandering sketches made by a very observant poet during his wanderings. In general, in Rambo’s “Last Verses,” very real, specific memories are abstracted to the level of a sign, which means either “landscape of the soul,” or the landscape of the Universe. The aesthetic effect of these works is determined by the phenomenal fusion of the most ordinary and the most complex. “Clairvoyance” led the poet to shake his foundations classical system versification - although impartially it was a process of enrichment, expansion of the abilities of French verse. But, even freed from the rules, Rambo still continued to write poetry - in other words, he obeyed the conventions of poetic language.
The maturation of prosaicism in the poet's last works suggested that fatal liberation from art itself, which ended Rimbaud's path. “Illuminations” (1872-1873, published in 1886) is the name of the cycle of “prose poems” made during the period of “clairvoyance.”
None of the fragments that make up the cycle can be correctly explained. The poetic “I” makes its own Universe, and in this space - its own time, its own measurements of things that unite all human experience in the moment of its mysterious experience as a person. In Rimbaud’s “Illuminations,” memories are detached from their own prototypes, live their own lives, and therefore the meaning is very significant. Such a verse is already very close to poetic prose, where the rhythm is created by a general sensual intonation, sometimes lengthening, sometimes shortening phrases, repetitions, inversions, division into stanzas of a free type, a meaningful sound system.
In the summer of 1873, “Through Hell” appeared, an act of bloodthirsty self-criticism. “Through Hell” presents an extraordinary person, a phenomenal personality, capable of firmly and impartially assessing her own experience, her own path - and decisively condemning it. Rambo is only nineteen years old at this time, but his farewell creation is the creation of the wisest adult. The poet’s lifestyle by this time was a typical “test”, which he stopped. In the last work, he becomes a sinner who has come to repentance. “Through Hell” is something like a trial, during which a monologue is delivered by the accused, who takes on the role of the prosecutor.
Continuing his wanderings, Rambo found himself again and again. He never returned to poetry and soon left Europe. In 1880, Rimbaud reached Cyprus, then to Egypt, later to Aden, until he eventually ended up in the town of Harare, Ethiopia, where he remained almost until the end of his life. The last, African step of his path was at once the last act of renunciation of poetry and himself. While engaged in trade in Harare, Rambo never told anyone about his own past life. He never returned to poetry, and what he wrote during his boundless wanderings was devoid of any poetry. The letters that were received from him in Europe are striking in their unusual dryness and matter-of-factness, the absolute absence of fantasy, imagination and any lyricism.
First, in 1891, the poet began to experience unbearable pain in his right leg. Rambo was transported to Marseille, his leg was cut off at the clinic, and he returned to his mother. In November of the same year, Rimbaud died of sarcoma.
Caricature of Arthur Rimbaud. Magazine cover « Modern people"No. 318, January 1888. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Siren-Com
Over the 37 years of his life, Arthur Rimbaud saw and experienced what an ordinary person sometimes achieves at the age of 50, if not more. He himself said that some old people are children compared to him. And he really had reason to think so.
Arthur was born in 1854 in a village in northeastern France into the family of a military man and a strict but caring wealthy peasant woman. France of the 19th century was a cauldron of social cataclysms, an era of endless change. One revolution follows another, an empire gives way to a republic, then again to an empire and again to a republic. This turbulent era could not but influence the development of young talent.
The father left the family 6 years after the birth of the future poet. The mother is raising four children alone. It’s especially difficult for the second eldest, Arthur. Having outstanding intelligence and talent, he considers school a mental hospital, dreams of becoming a journalist and tries to run away from home several times. So one day, having reached Paris, he ends up in prison because he is mistaken for a spy.
In an attempt to find fame, arrogant teenager Rimbaud sends his works to various famous people - even a prince. Surprisingly, this technique works - at the age of 15, Arthur is awarded a prize for poetry written in Latin and liked by the heir to the throne. Among its recipients are other writers. Poetry young man really liked the already famous at that time poet Paul Verlaine, whose life Rimbaud will change forever.
Having received Verlaine's approval, Rimbaud comes to Paris. He wants to become a super poet or a revolutionary, for him it’s about the same thing. Poetry that does not initiate change does not interest him at all. At the same time, he not only begins to be friends with Verlaine, he almost subjugates him to himself. Rimbaud is 10 years younger, but he is the leader in this pair. He shared his worldview with Paul and guided him on his path, believing that Verlaine is made of clay, and takes the form that the “master” wants to make of him.
Verlaine and Rimbaud (bottom left) in a painting by Henri Fantin-Latour. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org
At this time, Arthur’s poem “The Drunken Ship” was published for the first time, which later became his calling card.
Verlaine and his pregnant wife sheltered the aspiring poet, but Rimbaud did not get along with Paul’s wife. He considers her stupid, and she considers him rude and unclean. Verlaine's wife throws Rimbaud out of the house. But to her horror, Paul leaves after him. Friends set off to travel around Europe, where they will earn money by writing poetry and teaching French.
Rimbaud's talent for versification and increasing fame make him confident in his genius. His work becomes one of the main milestones of symbolism: free poetry, in which any feelings are embodied in any images. Arthur even declares himself clairvoyant, wanting to be a mediator between man and the universe.
Arthur Rimbaud in mid-December 1875. Drawing by Ernest Delais. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Ernest Delahaye
Until now, he had not led the most exemplary life: he smoked a pipe while still a teenager. Now he fanatically tortures himself with hunger strikes, insomnia, alcohol and drugs. In all this he is accompanied by his faithful friend Verlaine. In Brussels, Paul, in a drunken delirium, shoots Rimbaud in the arm. Verlaine is sent to prison - his friend does not visit him and meets him only two years later.
Arthur's violent temper pushes him to take another unpredictable step. Before reaching the age of 20, he decides that he no longer wants to be a poet. Despite the fact that the number of published works can be counted on one hand, they are quite successful. Rimbaud even writes about this his first short book in prose, “One Summer in Hell,” which he publishes in 1873.
Arthur Rimbaud in Harare. 1883 Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Inconnu
Finally, children's dreams of becoming a journalist resonate. Wanting to write articles about geographical research, Rimbaud goes on a journey - this time to another continent. Later his report will be published by the Geographical Society in Paris.
“I was immersed in dreams of crusades, of missing discoverers of new lands, of republics that had no history, of strangled religious wars, of revolutions of morals, of the movement of peoples and continents: I believed in any magic,” wrote Rimbaud.
First, the former poet volunteers for the Dutch colonial army, later gets a job as a translator in a circus and travels with the troupe across Scandinavia, and then goes to live in Africa. There, Rimbaud begins to trade weapons and people and even runs a trading post in Ethiopia until he is diagnosed with cancer. Being ill, Arthur returns to France, where his leg is amputated, but sarcoma leaves him bedridden. The disease killed the writer at the age of 37.
The poet never comprehended love, blaming everything at the end of his life on his cowardice, not only in his actions, but also in his thoughts. Rimbaud, as he once wanted, became a great French poet. But the greatest success came to his works after the death of the author. In the 20th century, Rimbaud became extremely popular. So much so that 100 years after his death, the President of France personally oversees the installation of a monument dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud.
Weekly AiF/ Culture/ 10/21/2015
I would like to begin my story about this unique poet with a quote from Jean Cocteau: “People have finally understood that the poet is cursed from birth, doomed to terrible loneliness, he is crazy.” “The Damned Poets” is the title of Paul Verlaine’s book, a third of which is dedicated to his friend Arthur Rimbaud. Restlessness, mental discord, outcast, rejection, drug and mental illness, madness - all this, of course, included this term. But in a broader sense, the curse that weighed on them was the depth of the existential gift, the state between the delight and horror of life, the ability to hear all the whispers of the call of Being.
Angel and demon, meteor, new messiah, literary Christopher Columbus - whatever the researchers called him. Boldly invading “non-poetic” spheres, not being afraid of vulgarisms, everyday vocabulary, common speech, introducing it for the first time into French poetry - hitherto pompous and eloquent - with extraordinary spontaneity and emotionality, he reproduces a new poetic reality: enchanting, sonorous and extremely imaginative.
Poetry will come to you among hurricanes,
The movement of living forces will raise you again -
Chosen one, rise up and reject death, rising up,
The trumpet sounded a wake-up call on the silenced bugle!
The poet will rise and fumble in his memory
The sobs of hard labor and the city bottom -
He will scald women like a scourge with a ray of love
Under the cannonade of stanzas - then hold on, punks!
Rimbaud lived a short life - only 37 years - the classic age of a genius. The absolute uniqueness of the Rimbaud phenomenon lies in two dates: the beginning of creativity at the age of fifteen (1869) and the end and departure from it at nineteen (1873). Thus, there are only 5 years, which researchers divide into three periods - early, middle and late, and late - this is everything that the teenager wrote at 18 and 19 years old. But something else is much more surprising - in these five years, Rimbaud managed to travel a path for which European and, in particular, French poetry needed half a century! Rimbaud was a precocious child of the 20th century.
Infant Terrible
He was born October 20, 1854 in Charleville, a small town in northeastern France, not far from Belgium.
The city resembled an abandoned poor village: desolation, outback, boredom of provincial life. Arthur hated his small homeland and did not want to get out of it. In letters to his teacher he wrote: “I’m dying, I’m rotting in this vulgarity, in this muck, in this landscape in shades of gray. My hometown- the most idiotic in the entire province. Nothing new comes to bookstores - not a single new publication. Here it is, death!
Arthur at 12 years old
Rimbaud persistently engaged in self-education; his thirst for knowledge reached the point of fanaticism. He locked himself in a closet at home so that no one would disturb him, and studied languages 24 hours a day.
He was the first student in his class, won all tournaments and competitions, his works were published in magazines and received literary awards.
Charleville College
The village teacher immediately recognized an extraordinary personality in Rimbaud, but his intuition told him that this young man would cause people a lot of trouble. “Yes, of course, he is smart,” he said, “but for some reason I don’t like his look and smile. He will end badly - his head cannot accommodate the ordinary. He will be a genius, but I don’t know whether he’s good or evil.”
Arthur - teenager
A child prodigy who early discovered an extraordinary maturity of mind (“a monster of talent,” Pasternak will say about him), he already in his school years shocked those around him with his contempt for the generally accepted, the overthrow of foundations and sacred things.
He didn't believe in God. For Arthur Rimbaud, the Almighty has always been synonymous with Duty, Order, Chains, all the evil that he hated in life. One of his sonnets was called: "Evil" In it, the greedy God sleeps while people kill each other, and wakes up only when the praying mantis donates 10 centimes to him.
I'm crying until my stomach hurts, I'm laughing
over Your all-forgiveness, O merciful one!
I'm damned, poor, drunk - to the blessed rhymer
not up to you, let the helpful stinkers
snore with you! Go to sleep! I don't want to hibernate.
These are lines from a poem by Rimbaud “Righteous”, where the motive of the rejection of a rebel who rebels against God and refuses forgiveness sounds, an attack against the “numbness” of Christianity, which lulls a person, distracting him from the struggle for life. The violent, anti-Christian thrust of the poem echoes Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity as a slave ideology.
In the provinces I am disgusted by churches.
What could be more stupid? - A shabby cassock
lousy menagerie of peasant sons
drooling psalms chanting tirelessly...
Rimbaud's poems are distinguished by a mocking tone, blasphemous, blasphemous character. This is “Evening prayer
”, where the sublime form of the sonnet and the sublime theme of prayer contrasts sharply with the base content, which boils down to a description of the consumption of beer and the exercise of natural needs. Poems of this kind include “ Poor people in church”, where Rimbaud ridicules the piety of the parishioners, the vanity and pettiness of their prayers: “ A lady complains to the Lord about her liver after licking a little holy water from her fingers”.
There was evidence that in his native Charleville, Rimbaud spat at the priests he met and wrote slogans threatening God on the walls.
Gustave Dore. Jacob fights with an angel
As a child, Rimbaud had an ideal - a convict. He admired this incorrigible sinner, against whom the entire well-meaning world had taken up arms, and he alone stood against all the laws and commandments. Rimbaud wanted to be the same - strong, proud and outcast. He had a saying: “ My superiority over others lies in the fact that I have no heart.".
Was he like that or did he just want to look like a kind of superman, shocking those around him? He always tried to seem angry and sarcastic. Perhaps it was a mask that had grown to the face.
He did not recognize authorities and was equally rude to both enemies and friends. One day young Rimbaud was introduced to the famous Victor Hugo, the first poet of France, and he, having read his poems, said in shock: “ Yes, this is little Shakespeare! And he patted the boy on the head, but Arthur abruptly pulled away and hissed: “This old bore makes me sick!”, calling him a “paper scrapper” and “a lover of vulgar pomp.”
Victor Hugo
It was impossible to patronize Rimbaud. He was proud, proud and obnoxious.
At the age of 14 he wrote the poem “ Seven-year-old poets", which is autobiographical in nature, from which we learn a lot about the poet’s childhood.
At the age of seven he was writing lengthy novels
About life in the wilderness of deserts, about rocks and savannas,
Where is the light of free will? And in what I stated,
A magazine with pictures helped a lot.
At night his dreams were tormented by black torment.
He didn't love God. He loved smoked
The people who walked into the suburbs in blouses, and the loudmouth -
Town Crier - beat the drum three times
And he announced the decree to the laughter and whistles of the people.
He dreamed of meadows where nature was bright,
Shining swell, healing smell, honey,
Where is the gold of the stems, peace and free flight.
But since he was more inclined towards dark subjects,
Then in his room, a nondescript refuge,
With the moving dampness, with the window battened down,
He read his novel and thought about it.
There is a red firmament, flooded wilds,
Among the dense bushes of plants are carnal stems,
Failure of hopes, and flight, and collapse.
At that time, the neighborhood fell silent under the windows.
And he, alone, frozen between the bed sheets,
I had a presentiment of the flight of ship's canvas.
These lines already contain the beginnings of his future “ Drunken ship».
Wanderer
Rimbaud tried in every possible way to escape from his outback and constantly ran away from home.
During one of these escapes, he tried to join the communards, who were then recruiting troops and even promised a salary - which was important for a poor teenager. But, after spending several days in the barracks surrounded by drunken, foul-mouthed soldiers, where he also had to defend his honor from the attacks of rude louts, Rimbaud escaped from there, later expressing in a poem “ Stolen Heart“The dream stolen from him, faith in the revolution. The reaction of rejection was so strong that it did not leave any traces of high patriotic feelings. Rimbaud hated revolutionaries with their “dirty hands” for the rest of his life. Just as he hated the bourgeoisie, and would have hated any system under which he lived - such was his nature.
During his wanderings, he writes amazing poetry. Here is one of the most famous, “ Premonition»:
By remote paths, among thick grass,
I'll go wandering in the blue evenings;
The wind touches your bare head,
And I will feel freshness under my feet.
Endless love will fill my chest.
But I will remain silent and forget all the words.
I, like a gypsy, will leave - further and further on the road!
And as if with a woman, with Nature I will be happy.
He traveled - as they would call it now - by hitchhiking. Rimbaud hailed a passing cart and asked for a lift to the nearest town. And as payment for the journey, he told all sorts of fictitious stories, of which he had a countless number. With the help of the police, the mother returned the prodigal son to his home, but soon the obstinate teenager ran away again. And Rimbaud’s entire short life, his strange way of life, was already determined by this boyish restlessness - always, until his death, he would be directed somewhere towards something, he would constantly move, look for something.
To pull out the roots, to leave—that’s what he tried unsuccessfully to accomplish with his shoots. To leave the past, from bourgeois Charleville, from this idiocy of provincial life that was destined for him here, from a “normal” existence, which was unbearable for such a rebel as Rimbaud.
Charleville. Quai de la Madeleine. The Rimbaud family house is second from the right.
When the teacher tried to convince him that he needed to finish his studies and get a bachelor’s degree, which “will open any door for him,” Rimbaud replied contemptuously: “ You are just like everyone else!”- and in his mouth this was the worst insult. He was not like everyone else, not from this test, not from this world, he was already far away.
His sonnet " My vagrancy" ("My gypsyism"), written on the road, is a small masterpiece, full of irony and bitter tenderness, a true hymn to bohemia, to a wandering poet, cut off from society, left alone with the sky and stars, a man who has found freedom. I especially like the translation A. Revich:
I warmed my hands in my torn pockets;
My outfit was wretched, my coat was just a name;
I, Muse, was your traveling companion
And - oh-la-la! - dreamed of fairy-tale love.
His frayed pants had holes in them.
I - a little boy - wandered along, hurrying after the rhyme.
The Big Bear promised me a place to stay for the night,
Whose stars whispered tenderly from above;
One September evening, sitting down by the roadside,
I listened to the babbling of the stars; the forehead touched with trembling
Dew, intoxicating, like a bouquet of old wines;
I was in the clouds, rhyming in a frenzy,
Like a lyre, he hugged his cold knees,
Like strings, pulling elastic bands from boots.
Arthur Rimbaud. Rice. Verlaine
Clairvoyant
Rimbaud considered himself a “clairvoyant,” destined to penetrate into the depths of the secrets of the human soul. An explanation of these thoughts of his is in a letter to Paul Demeny dated May 15, 1871:
« The poet makes himself a clairvoyant through a long and systematic disorder of all his senses. He goes for any form of love, suffering, madness. He searches for himself, he tries all the poisons on himself in order to leave only their quintessence. This is unbearable torment, the poet requires supernatural strength of spirit, but he will become a great patient, a great criminal, a great damned one - and a great Scientist! For he will reach the unknown!»
A clairvoyant is a diver exploring the abyss; he is from the depths of the human subconscious, like pearls from depths of the sea, brings to us grains of new knowledge.
IN " Alchemy words"Rimbaud talks about his experiments: the invention of vowel colors, recordings of silence, recordings of dizziness. He strives to free all sensory and emotional states from the rut of the generally accepted, habitual, prescribed by common sense and morality. This is necessary for the artist to see things in a new way: without prejudice, directly and freely. The poet’s task is to remove the blinders of consciousness in order to penetrate the unconscious, to comprehend the mystical connection of things and phenomena.
This state of liberation of feelings and thoughts, which Rimbaud called clairvoyance, was achieved by exhausting oneself with insomnia, hashish, opium, and alcohol. He worked himself up into such a mental state. His clairvoyance is closest in nature to hallucinations. From "Alchemy words»:
“I got used to the simplest of obsessions: I clearly saw a mosque on the site of a factory, a school of drummers led by angels, charabancs on the heavenly roads, I saw monsters and miracles...” It was a pathologically acute ability to think in images, to live in a world of dreams and illusions. This world of fantasy, phantasmagoria, allusions, which fueled Rimbaud’s work, is very subtly and associatively conveyed in the picture Valentina Hugo.
Rimbaud in the world of his phantasmagoric images
In his poems, Rimbaud sought " express the unspeakable" Freeing them from rationality and logical connections, he sought to influence the subconscious. Many of them do not lend themselves to a specific semantic reading and allow for the possibility of different interpretations. His vision of the world does not fit our ideas. Delusional pictures, wild fantasies, encrypted hints of something known only to the initiated. This " strange lyrics, where every step is a secret", as she put it 70 years later Anna Akhmatova.
"Drunk Ship"
Among the poems, Rimbaud stands out sharply "The Drunken Ship" (1871). This is the poet’s most famous work; you can re-read it endlessly and discover new nuances every time. An amazing density of images, a wealth of imagination, some kind of unbridled, sophisticated metaphor. It has been translated here for almost 100 years, there are more than a dozen poetic translations"Drunk Ship" : David Samoilov, Benedikt Lifshits, Pavel Antokolsky, Evgeny Vitkovsky...
At the center of the poem is a ship setting sail on a choppy sea, quickly losing both crew and rudder, and ultimately ready to sink. The ship is reproduced so authentically and is so humanized that it acquires the ability to both feel and speak. This is a visible, visual embodiment of the poet’s self, the state of his soul. In the poem, a double image of a human ship, a double fate arises - both a broken ship and a broken heart of the poet. And although we seem to be talking about a ship lost in a storm, you understand that it is not the ship that is plunging into the sea, but the soul - into the ocean of existence, where the element of impressions, extraordinary sensations grows in powerful waves, overwhelming the poet’s soul. The string of wonderful, menacing dangers here is a foretaste of the delights and torments of Rimbaud himself before setting off - without a rudder or sails - on the voyage of life.
DRUNKEN SHIP
When, freed from the scourge, I
Floated at the behest of the rivers, deaf and stormy,
On painted pillars there are targets for spears -
The sailors ran out amid the cries of the redskins.
Now I would let all my load go for nothing -
Flemish grain and English fabrics,
While this chaos was going on on the shore,
I swam wherever it took me, forgetting about the captain.
In a fierce crowd I rushed into the distance of the seas,
Like a child’s brain, it’s been deaf for another winter.
And the Peninsulas were torn from their anchors,
Separating from the land, they rushed past.
The storm awakened me, the charioteer of the sea victims,
Like a cork, I danced on the waves for ten days,
Disregarding the foolish gaze of the shore lights,
Among the blind elements that have lost their minds.
A wave tossed in the pine shell,
And it was sweet to me, like sour wood to a boy
Washed away all traces of vomit and wine
And she tore off the rudders when she went on a rampage.
Since then I have been washed by the poetry of the seas,
A thick infusion of stars and a ghostly glow,
I ate the blue, where no one wanders
A bewitched corpse, drawn by the sea current.
Where suddenly the blue fades from the brightness of the day,
And, driving away delirium, taking over the dull rhythm,
Larger than your lyres, more powerful than the fumes of intoxication,
The bitterest love boils like red wort.
I know a tornado, a breaker, a whirlpool, a storm,
The stormy firmament over the roaring evening,
Dawn, which is alarmed like a flock of Sisars;
And I saw what the living only imagine.
I saw the low dawns of a pre-dawn dream,
Condensed into bruises of mystical visions,
And the waves that tremble and move like a wheel,
Like actors from ancient performances.
I was delirious about the snow in the greenish haze,
I brought my kisses to the eyes of the seas:
The circulation of forces unknown to the earth,
Singing phosphors, two-color flickering.
For a long time I contemplated how, overcome with anger,
The surf roars, like a herd in hysteria,
Not yet knowing that the wild Ocean
He will humbly fall at the feet of Saint Mary.
You know! I sailed along the unearthly Floridas,
Where the flowers are, the eyes of panthers, similar in appearance
With people, and bending over, a rainbow hovers there
Colored harness for underwater herds.
I smelled the stench of swamps, the likeness of old marshes,
Where the guts of Leviathan rot in the reeds,
I saw a dead calm and in it - the waters of rebellion,
And in the murky depths of the pearly fog -
The heat of the sky, the pale disk, the flicker of glaciers
And the vile shallows among the dirty bays,
Where are the fat snakes - the food of forest bugs -
In a dope they fall from screw-shaped trees.
How to show children singing fish, sea bream,
And goldfish that know no sorrow!
I flew in the foam of petals, glad for the coolness.
Unearthly winds inspired my flight.
It used to be that the Ocean, tired of the poles,
Rocked me to sleep, singing monotonously
The colored haze was ready to be sucked into the sides...
I was like a woman, kneeling....
Almost an island, I set off again,
Dragging dung and birds in a frenzy,
And a cautious corpse, planning to sleep,
Backing away, he crawled through the fragile fastenings.
And so, satanic in the azure of the wind,
I am the one who borrowed the hairstyle from the tornadoes.
Hanseatic sailboat and guard sloop
They won’t accept my drunk body for tow!
I, free, rushed in the smoke through the purple light,
The brick firmament rams like walls
Stained - for the poet to savor! —
Completely deprived of suns or snot of foam;
Tossed about, all in lights, crazy board,
Racing with a crowd of seahorses,
When July crushed with his fist
Ultramarine of the skies, and pierced the craters;
Malshtroem heard far away,
And the hippos race and groan from their wombs,
Tearing up the blue, tirelessly,
I began to yearn for the harbors of Europe.
I saw the heavens that went crazy a long time ago
Between the star islands I sailed with astral dust...
Is it possible that in those nights you sleep, surrounded
A golden flock of birds, the Coming Omnipotence?
I burst into tears! How terrible is the passage of time,
The moon is sarcastic and the dawns are merciless!
I'm drunk up to my neck with the bitterness of love.
Hurry up and crash, keel! Let me sink into the sea!
No! I would like to go to that Europe where the baby
In the fragrant twilight in front of the sewer ditch,
Involuntarily sad and listening to the silence,
It watches the boat like a fragile moth.
But I can’t take it anymore, tired of the shafts,
Stay ahead of ships, flying towards storms,
And I can’t stand the arrogance of pennants,
And it’s scary for me to look into the eyes of floating prisons.
Translation by D. Samoilov
There were Soviet literary scholars who primitively interpreted “The Drunken Ship,” seeing in it the influence of the third French Revolution and the Paris Commune. But all these are far-fetched allusions. “Drunk Ship” is about something else.
Rimbaud's anarchic, boyish rebellion and his ardent anti-bourgeoisism have not political and social, but romantic, individualistic roots. The route of a drunken (“crazy” - in other translations) ship is a route of clairvoyance, a search for the unknown in oneself and in the world, where the poet’s self breaks away from the beaten path, loses the rudder, the landmark, and then before the gaze of an absolutely free ship-man who has descended from orbit, unprecedented landscapes, strange pictures, bizarre visions open up. “The Drunken Ship” is not only the fate of the poet himself, a picture of his imminent death predicted by him, it is a philosophy of life, an image of human existence, knowledge of one’s own soul.
I like this work best in translation D. Samoilova. It is less understandable, unlike the translations of Vitkovsky and Kudinov, but it is more effective, it has more power, poetry, this feeling of wild, menacing, bright elements. Listen to this poem brilliantly performed David Avrutov. It will sound to the music of a French composer Cesar Franck, his symphonies in D minor 1886.
Rimbaud not only depicted his journey into the unknown in the form of the fate of a drunken ship, he predicted the imminent death of the ship, his imminent death. The ability to recreate in verse one’s poetic destiny, one’s poetic essence seems phenomenal. But at the time of its writing, Arthur was only 17 years old.
It is curious that he wrote it without ever having seen the sea. The source of inspiration was his childhood memories associated with the river Meuse (Maasom)) and - reading.
This is an old mill on the Meuse River in Charleville. The only water element then accessible to Rimbaud’s gaze. The legendary “Drunk Ship” was written at this mill. The Meuse River washed the Quai de la Madeleine, where the tannery stood at that time. Arthur loved to wallow there in the wet sand, among wild plants and the remains of broken dishes.
Among book sources, commentators call “Toilers of the Sea” by Hugo, “2000 Leagues Under the Sea” by J. Verne, “The Voyage” by Baudelaire. However, the abundance of literary reminiscences does not prevent “The Drunken Ship” from being an original work in its symbolism and in its figurative and rhythmic richness. Before Rimbaud, no one wrote anything like this.
In the autumn of 1891, Parisian literary café circles were seething with gossip about the poet, whose poems shook the foundations of French poetry. For lovers of the sweet wine of poetry, this symphony, full of feverish delirium, was like a sip of pure alcohol. The name of the new genius Arthur Rimbaud was on everyone’s lips; they spoke of him as a legend.
Russian poetry will later respond to “The Drunken Ship” with almost the same genius “ By a Lost Tram" by Gumilyov, where his Russian brother also foresaw his tragic fate.
Meeting with Verlaine
Rimbaud found it unbearable to vegetate in the wilderness and obscurity, from which he persistently sought a way out. Having heard from the teacher about the existence of the famous modernist poet Paul Verlaine in Paris,
Rimbaud writes him a desperate letter, begging " do not push away the trustingly outstretched hand" Along with the letter, he sends his poems, which delighted Verlaine, who received them, and he invites the young poet to visit him: “Come, dear friend, great soul, they are waiting for you, they admire you!”
Paul Verlaine
Pissarro. Paris
Verlaine went to meet Arthur at the station, but did not recognize him there, because he expected to see - judging by the poems - a tall young man of 25-30 years old with a demonic appearance with a gloomy, feverish, rebellious look. Rimbaud looked completely different. It was a teenager, a boy, Gavroche.
“An angelic child, his lovely head seemed surprised by the tousled state of his own hair.” (Theodore de Banville).
A. Rimbaud. Rice. P. Casalza
Yes, he had the face of a 13-year-old child: chubby cheeks, pink skin and forget-me-not eyes.
This is how Valentina Hugo saw him:
This is how he portrayed him Picasso:
Marcoussis:
Verlaine and Rimbaud missed each other at the station and Rimbaud himself found this house, where he found a warm welcome and shelter.
This was Verlaine's fatal step. Parsnip wrote: “When Rimbaud settled with the Verlaines, their normal life ended. Verlaine’s further existence is filled with the tears of his wife and child.”
Mathilde Mothe, Verlaine's wife
From Verlaine's poems:
I see two at sea.
Oh sea, sea - streams of tears!
Sea salt in my eyes
and the night where the storms are so cruel,
and the stars of my bitter eyes.
I see a woman, and with her
child of adolescence.
And the waves are moving faster and faster
their boat, where there are no masts or oars...
Verlaine also had his own “Drunken Ship”.
I will not retell the story of the relationship between the two “damned poets”; this is described in sufficient detail in the famous film by Agnieszka Holland “ Total eclipse"(1995), based on the play of the same name by Christopher Hampton (1967), in which the role of Rimbaud was played Leonardo DiCaprio.
Stills from the film:
Last year I gave a two-hour lecture in our library “ Damned poets"about Verlaine and Rimbaud. Here is her audio recording
The lecture was mainly about creativity, but there were newspaper writers who saw and heard in it what they wanted to see and hear. A custom-made devastating article was concocted, which contained as much untruth as creative helplessness, which caused a whole flurry of indignant responses and refutations from my listeners. I posted my response to it on my website along with letters from other authors. For those interested, you can read them here:
"Hell Time"
However, Rimbaud’s global significance was based not on his poetry, but on his prose works, the main of which is the book “ One Summer in Hell" ("Time in Hell"), inspired by his relationship with Verlaine. This book seems to be illuminated by the light of hellfire. Rimbaud appears in it as a repentant sinner, realizing that his sins are so great that there is no hope for remission. He finds redemption in ruthless frankness, in a merciless verdict on himself. This book is something like a court hearing, during which the speech of the accused dominates, who also takes on the role of the prosecutor.
“You will remain a vile forever,” exclaimed the demon, who awarded me a wreath of delicate poppies. “You are worthy of destruction with all your passions, selfishness and other mortal sins.” - Yes, I took on a lot! But don’t be so irritated, dear Satan, I beg you! Let me bring you these vile sheets of paper from notebook damn...»
Rimbaud confesses to “pig love,” as he calls it, without hesitating to show the dirt in which he has been wallowing for several years. Both the dialogue with the “hellish husband” Verlaine and the poems play the role of incriminating documents.
The leitmotif of the book is the theme of defeat. Rimbaud is the first to mock his ambition, illusions and pitiful achievements. Chapter " Alchemy of the word" opens with ironic words: " About myself. The story of one of my madnesses." The book is imbued with immeasurable bitterness, despair from what has not happened and has not come true.
“I tried to invent new flesh... and flowers, and new stars, and new language. He wanted to achieve supernatural power. So what? I must bury my imagination and memory! The glory of the artist and creator of fairy tales has been dispelled! I, who called myself a magician or an angel, freed from all morality, I returned to earth, where I need to look for something to do, to come into contact with rough reality...”
This book did not bring him fame during Rimbaud’s lifetime. Not a single copy of it was sold, and he burned almost the entire circulation. A literary career was now closed to him. The life he dreamed of did not succeed, and he rejected this one, which was destined for him by fate. Dead end.
In recklessness, in the hall
Days passed without a trace
Have no will in captivity
I've wasted years.
If only time could come back
So that the heart wakes up!
No! - I said to myself. -
No return, go!
Without regretting anything,
Don't want to soar.
The days ahead are short:
Leave without looking back.
("Song from the Highest Tower")
Rimbaud breaks with the old world. From the book "It's time in hell»: “Farewell, chimeras, ideals, delusions! Look for me among the shipwrecked..." And - in verse :
No, enough of this whim -
water lily in a glass.
Doesn't quench your thirst
drink of dreams.
Arthur throws drafts, notebooks, letters, papers into the fire. Years full of passions and madness, hopes and illusions, turned into ashes in an instant. He will never return to poetry.
Conquistador
A. Rimbaud in Africa
Africa beckoned him, as it would later attract Gumilyov. Arab countries: Abyssinia, Sudan, Zanzibar... He wanted to visit everywhere. How he had long dreamed of these lands!
From the book "Words in delirium»: « I dreamed of crusades, missing expeditions, states that had sunk into oblivion...” “The sea air will burn through my lungs, the sun of unknown latitudes will tan my skin. I will swim, roll in the grass, hunt and, of course, smoke; I will sip strong drinks, like molten metal, as my dear ancestors did while sitting by the fire. When I return, I will have muscles of steel, tanned skin, and a fierce gaze. Looking at me, anyone will immediately understand that I am one of the strong breed.”.
He hoped that the East would transform the useless poet into a superman, a conquistador. Rimbaud reached Cyprus, Egypt, then Aden, the extreme southern point of the Arabian Peninsula. Eventually he ended up in the city of Harare, in Ethiopia, and stayed there for the rest of his life, that is, for the last decade of his life. At first he will be a simple agricultural worker there, then an agent for the purchase of raw materials, a buyer of coffee, and later he will open his own business: he will import materials for the production of guns and cartridges. He will have time to marry a local native for a short time, but will soon send her to her previous place of residence.
Photo of Rimbaud in Harare, taken by himself
While engaged in trade in Harare, Rimbaud seemed to have forgotten that he had once been a poet. He didn't tell anyone about his past life. And what he wrote during his wanderings - articles, notes for the geographical society - seemed to be defiantly devoid of any poetry. Rimbaud found himself in a world that was fantastically interesting for a European, where the poet’s soul seemed to be rushing, the “drunk ship” of his dreams, but everything he wrote there - articles or letters - were just dry business statements and were striking in the absolute lack of fantasy, imagination, lyricism, everything that manifested itself with such powerful force in artistic creativity.
From the book " It's time in hell»: « I forgot how to speak. As before, in the same desert, on the same night, a silver star appears to my tired eyes, although now this does not in the least touch the Lords of life, the three wise men - heart, soul and spirit.”.
Perhaps Rimbaud’s departure from poetry is his response to the world that despised him, so to speak, slamming the door, an act of rejection, non-recognition, despair. Or maybe he intuitively felt his poetic exhaustion - a feeling unknown to most poets. Perhaps Rimbaud, like Blok later, when faced with the hardships of life, simply stopped hearing music and heavenly sounds.
In hell
He felt very bad in his self-imposed exile. Rimbaud's letters to his mother and sister are reminiscent of that part of Dante's Divine Comedy, where the poet describes the circles of hell:
“It’s spring stuffy outside, sweat pours down your body in streams, your stomach is in pain, your brain is melting, things are getting worse than ever, bad news is coming. Why the hell brought me to this damned country! What the hell dared me to start trading in this hell! Apart from the local Bedouins, there is no one to talk to here; within a year you will become dumber than the dumbest idiot. What a miserable existence I drag out in this crazy climate, in these inhuman conditions! My life here is a complete nightmare. It is impossible to live more painfully than I live.”
He dreamed of making money more money to escape from this hell, settle down somewhere calm, get married, start a family. These were his dreams now. He dreamed of peace. He is very tired.
Maybe somehow
fate will let me go
in a familiar outback
take a sip of peace -
and end the journey peacefully.
Was it worth leaving Charleville? In letters home he admits:
“I’m completely gray. I'll get old too fast doing this stupid job and hanging out with savages and idiots. I feel like my life is coming to an end.".
How prophetic those final lines of “The Drunken Ship” turned out to be, where, as if with some inner otherworldly vision, he foresaw even then, at the age of 17, what he came to the realization of at 35 after so much wandering and torment.
If I need the water of Europe, then not the waves
its seas are needed, and the puddle where in the spring,
squatting, child, full of sadness,
sets his fragile boat afloat.
This is what a person essentially needs. How late he realized this.
Meanwhile, Rimbaud's health was deteriorating. He suffered from typhoid fever, suffered from stomach diseases due to the spicy food there, and suffered from rheumatic pain in his back, knee, and shoulder. Varicose veins in the leg were complicated by hydroarthrosis, the aggravation of which was facilitated by chronic syphilis. The pain became unbearable. A malignant tumor appeared on my leg. Rimbaud could no longer walk.
He was forced to interrupt his business, selling everything he had for next to nothing, having received a bill of exchange for an insignificant amount.
From a letter to his mother: “ What a pitiful reward for all the work, hardships and hardships. Alas! How insignificant our life is!” In addition, this bill was issued by the Marseilles branch of a Parisian bank and was payable in Paris within 10 days, where Rimbaud was no longer able to travel. What stress, hard work and hardships this bill cost him, and he could not even get money on it! And for the sake of this piece of paper he ruined his life!
On a covered stretcher with terrible torture (he hired 16 porters with his last money) Rimbaud was taken to Marseille. There his leg was amputated. His letters home from this period are the most pathetic: “ I cry day and night. I am a complete man, I have been crippled for life. How miserable our life is, full of need and suffering! So why, why do we even exist?!»
his sister is coming to see him Isabelle, who decides from now on to devote her life to her brother, and selflessly looks after him. Meanwhile, the disease progressed: the stump became swollen, the tumor reached the groin, Rimbaud was practically paralyzed. He was injected with morphine. Amazingly, all this was already predicted by him in his infernal book!
From the book "It's time in hell»: I should deserve hell for anger, hell for pride, hell for voluptuousness - a whole symphony of hellish torments! I'm dying of fatigue. I’m in a coffin, I’m given over to be eaten by worms, it’s so terrible!
Ah, to come back to life! At least take a peek at her deformities. Damn this poison a thousand times! Lord God, have mercy, protect me, I feel so bad!.. And the flame rises with the sinner burning in it.”.
In Marseille, where he was dying, doctors did not know that the most gifted poet in France was dying in the hospital. The entry in the hospital register read: “ On November 10, 1891, merchant Rimbaud died at the age of 37.».
There is an amazing place in Isabelle’s memoirs where she talks about how, in her dying delirium, her brother was still waiting for some ship that would take him on board, and muttered some strange words, similar to poetry. This means that in the last minutes of his life, poetry returned to Rimbaud...
Immortality
He was buried in Charleville. The coffin was accompanied by only two people: mother and sister.
Grave of Rimbaud and his family in Charleville
Monument to Rimbaud in Charleville
When, 10 years after the poet’s death in 1901, the construction of a monument to him began on Vokzalnaya Square, his mother, who was invited to attend the opening ceremony, refused to come, not believing in the reality of what was happening, thinking that it was someone’s cruel joke.
Charleville now
From Paul Verlaine's poems dedicated to Rimbaud:
The Sunday bell floats into space,
It flows and lasts.
From the branches your prayer into space
The bird lifts up.
Oh Lord, what peace
How bottomless!
Brings the city to my peace
Your speech is sleepy.
What have you done? What's wrong with you?
Are you crazy?
Tell me, what did you do to yourself?
How did you waste your life?
I’ll risk bringing here my own, which seems to concentrate everything that I said here:
Arthur Rimbaud
Born in provincial Charleville.
I was in the underworld. Went to the astral plane.
He was idolized and reviled.
Arthur Rimbaud. Rebel. Original.
How he hated his abode,
cherishing in my thoughts the ardent “down with!”
“He will be a genius,” the teacher prophesied, “
I don’t know if I’m good or evil.”
Seeing no good in prayers and labors,
poetry the coming star
indulged in an orgy of vice,
the innocence of the body was curbed early.
Down with rottenness, routine, decrepitude of the flesh!
The era is dead. The musty world stinks.
The ship took off in a drifting flight.
He's doomed. He must win!
Loving your own destruction as God,
despising the lights of coastal lighthouses,
flew in the banners of anger and delight,
wherever I wanted, the currents carried me.
Neanderthal with a dove's gaze,
in which the heavens were reflected.
Oh, only for those who have seen the flames of hell,
There are such innocent voices!
How to tell the story of a fall
and oblivion, the alchemy of words,
fantastic night vigils,
the tragedy of unfulfilled miracles?..
Lucifer's bill has been paid in full.
Lost a cruel bet.
In the deep desert, in the Ethiopian heat
you sentenced yourself to hard labor.
Untamed and unreconciled
He left without forgiving the world or God.
Where was the ship - logs are floating on the sea...
Oh, how you took revenge on yourself!
Instead of an epilogue
From Marina Vladi’s book “Vladimir or Interrupted Flight”:
“You come home late one night, and I can tell from the way you slam the door that you’re nervous. I can see you from the kitchen at the end of the hallway. You throw away your coat and cap and walk towards me with long steps, shaking some kind of gray book.
“This is too much! Can you imagine, this guy, this Frenchman - he steals everything from me! He writes like me, it's pure plagiarism! No, look: don’t these words, this rhythm remind you of anything? He studied my songs well, huh? Scoundrel! And the translator is a bastard, he wasn’t shy!”
I can't read a word, you're flipping through the pages very quickly. Then you start walking back and forth around the apartment, and, emphasizing the rhymes with a blow of your palm, you quote to me the parts that outrage you the most. I start laughing, I can't stop. Gasping, I finally tell you that you apparently will not die from modesty and that the one who drives you into such a fury is none other than our great poet, born almost a century before you - Arthur Rimbaud. You open the title page and blush at such a mistake. And, leaving behind grudges, you read me poems by the famous poet all night with delight.”
Arthur Rimbaud- Symbolist poet, more similar to romantic poets. Born into a bourgeois family. The mother instilled in the children charity and love of God, and the father taught them rationality and economy. From childhood, Arthur was God-fearing, obedient, and a brilliant student. His abilities amazed everyone. From the age of six or seven he began to write prose, and then poetry. He read a lot, was fond of the works of F. Rabelais and V. Hugo, as well as the poetry of the “Parnassians”.
First period The writer's creativity (until 1871) was marked by the influence of authorities, but this did not prevent the maturation of a rebellious spirit both against traditional ethics and against the bourgeois order of provincial Charleville.
In 1871 he left the lyceum and, having reached Paris, fell into a whirlwind of revolutionary events. But after the defeat of the Commune, having lost faith in the social struggle, Rimbaud, in a letter to a friend dated June 10, 1871, asks to destroy his works dedicated to the Communards.
In August 1871, returning to Charleville, Arthur sent his poems to Paul Verlaine, then went to see him in Paris. Verlaine introduces Rimbaud into literary circles and is, so to speak, his mentor. Friends traveled around Europe for a whole year.
In second period Short-term creativity, Rimbaud's poetry takes on a tragic sound.
Poem " Seated". he is disgusted by everything that is frozen and dead. A romantic theme, but the originality of Rimbaud’s lyrics is well reflected here. “People are chairs ...", people are things - people who lose everything human. The connection of the incompatible, the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead. The concept of the poet - a clairvoyant. The poet is an intermediary between higher powers and the reader. It is necessary to acquire this ability of a medium. These are not his own ideas, but the pronouncement of what comes to him from above. To do this, he must destroy everything rational in himself. And for this, all means are good. - because of this he was drinking))) handsome
"Drunk ship". The poem consists of 25 quatrains of Alexandrian verse with cross rhyme and deliberately loose rhythm. Written on behalf of a ship torn from its anchor, and rushing around the world at the will of waves and winds.
Before the poet’s gaze passes a series of phantasmagoria, violent storms “in the dark eye sockets of the seas,” cascades of lightning “from the flaming pits of black-blue skies,” mysterious and ominous coastal forests, “where leopards look through the eyes of people,” and a desperate dream of the splendor of power.
In the end there is only disappointment and the desire to get to at least some pier.
Having written this brilliant poem at the age of 17, Rimbaud predicted in it his own destiny, full of wanderings and wanderings, ending in the collapse of life and death in an ancient European harbor.
IN third period creativity (1872 - 1873) Rimbaud writes the cycle “ Insight”, which witnessed the birth of an unusual form of verse, which can be called prose verse or rhythmic prose.
Rimbaud had a fickle and capricious fate. Both in his work and in life, he looked for different paths, sometimes completely opposite. After P. Verlaine, who shot Rimbaud, goes to prison, the worried Rimbaud falls into neuroses. The cry of the soul, the prayer of a person who no longer counts on anyone’s help, but still calls someone unknown from the Universe, became the book “ One Summer in Hell"(1873), the only collection published during the poet’s lifetime. But the writer was unable to pay for the small print run (500 copies) and the books remained in storage. They were found by chance several decades later, and before that there was a legend that Rimbaud himself destroyed the entire circulation.
The break with Verlaine, lack of money, and spiritual discomfort led to an acute creative crisis. In the poet's last works one could feel the pain and despair of a lonely soul.
The “drunk ship” of Rimbaud’s fate has completely lost its course. The poet is looking for oblivion in alcohol, drugs, and violent passions. But this did not calm down the “pain of burning contradictions,” and he decided to change his life. After he turned 20, he did not write a single rhymed line. Having abandoned art, he traveled around England, Germany, Belgium, sold all sorts of trinkets in European bazaars, tried to mow grass in Dutch villages, and even served as a soldier in the Dutch colonial troops in Sumatra. Visited Egypt, Cyprus, Zanzibar. Rimbaud studied the language of the blacks of Somalia, explored the lands of Africa where no civilized man had set foot, and helped the emperor of Abyssinia prepare a war against Italy. In recent years he worked for the trading company Vianne, Bardet and Co., which sold coffee, ivory and leather.
Researchers interpret Rimbaud's break with poetry in different ways. The French writer A. Camus saw in this “ suicide of the spirit", and the Austrian prose writer Stefan Zweig - " disrespect for art, neglect of it" There is a version that the poet fled from Paris in order to find himself in something else, to establish himself, and then return independent and free, having gotten rid of a drunken sleep. Some modern researchers believe that the poet reached the extreme limit in his experiments with words and, looking beyond it, saw only emptiness; he still tried to write, but could no longer find meaning in poetic creativity. However, the mystery of Rimbaud's poetry has not yet been solved. What is mysterious is not only his departure from art, but above all what he managed to write in a short period, which became an entire era in world literature.
At 37 years old, tired and still full of strength, Rimbaud returned to France. It is not known what his future fate would have been, but in 1891 he developed a tumor on his right knee, which turned out to be a sarcoma. On November 10, 1891, he died in a Marseilles hospital.
Paul Verlaine And Arthur Rimbaud- two French poets who made a huge contribution to world literature. Their relationship is called passionate, destructive, “wrong.” Paul Verlaine was a man of fine spiritual organization, easily susceptible to the influence of others, and Rimbaud was called a young brilliant scoundrel. Be that as it may, their relationship gave rise to beautiful poems that are still read by descendants.
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854. The father left the family when his son was still very young. The mother had a tough character and did not show any tenderness either to her son or to the other children. Studying was easy for Arthur; from childhood he showed success in rhyming, but he lacked diligence. The mother did not care at all about instilling basic manners in her son, paying attention to appearance. Arthur grew up an absolute slob. The unique talent of writing contrasted sharply with Rimbaud's careless appearance.
The irrepressible energy of the young poet could not find entry into the provinces. When Arthur Rimbaud turned 16, he decided to write to Paul Verlaine, already a famous poet at that time. The young man admired Verlaine’s work and attached his poems to the letter. To Rimbaud's great surprise, Paul Verlaine liked his poetry, and he even invited the young man to Paris, paying for his travel.
The conditions in which Paul Verlaine grew up were completely different from the life of his protégé. The mother, who suffered three miscarriages, considered her son a unique child and made every effort to give him the best. Paul grew up as an ugly boy, but in return, nature endowed him with talent.
The excessive care of his enthusiastic mother led to the fact that Paul easily succumbed to the influence of others. Already at a young age he tasted the taste of alcohol and hashish. But what scared the poet most of all was his attraction to men. Paul Verlaine believed that this was unnatural. He tried to “cure himself from this disease” by tying the knot.
The poet's chosen one was Matilda Monet. As a 17-year-old girl, she read Verlaine's poems. They married in 1870, and Matilda soon became pregnant.
In 1871, Arthur Rimbaud appeared on the poet’s doorstep. He looked terrible: disheveled, unwashed hair, dirty clothes, cold eyes. When he was invited to the table, the provincial poet constantly belched, slurped, spoke with open mouth. Matilda was horrified, and Paul looked at the young talent as if spellbound. Rimbaud perceived the poet’s wife as an enemy, and in conversations with Verlaine, he called her nothing more than “rat.”
Paul Verlaine introduced Arthur Rimbaud, who was 10 years his junior, into his circle. Friends did not know how to treat the poet's protégé. Everyone recognized his talent, but Rimbaud’s terrible behavior repelled people.
Matilda could not tolerate Rimbaud at home for long and, in the end, insisted that her husband send him out the door. Paul Verlaine tried to place the young poet among his friends, but he was driven away from everywhere. Then he rented a room for his “dear friend.”
Arthur Rimbaud had a detrimental influence on Verlaine. If earlier he somehow restrained the “demons” inside himself, now they broke free. When Verlaine switched to the side of homosexual love, the images of Minerva and Venus immediately disappeared from his poems. Moreover, Verlaine began to drink to the point of unconsciousness every day. The poet preferred absinthe to wine.
The poet, while intoxicated, became very aggressive. Paul Verlaine began to beat his wife, but every time after fights he begged Matilda for forgiveness. Once he almost caused a miscarriage. In the end, she could not stand it and filed for divorce.
In the passionate relationship between the two poets, aggression was constantly present. One day Arthur wounded Paul with a knife in the thigh and arm. He did not report to the police. After some time, Verlaine shot at Rimbaud, and this ended with a 2-year prison sentence for him. However, Arthur Rimbaud was even happy about this turn of events; he began to get tired of his adult, always drunk lover.
After Verlaine's release from prison, they met for the last time. Their conversation ended in a quarrel. Arthur Rimbaud found himself rich patrons and went to the colonies. As for Paul Verlaine, every year he sank lower and lower. He considered the only “bright spot” in his life to be his connection with the “brilliant scoundrel.”
Arthur Rimbaud died at 37 years old. It is this age that is called critical for poets: “Pushkin guessed a duel for this figure, and Mayakovsky laid his temple on the gun.”
