Sphinx, nature - a monster, with riddles all devouring. Images in the literature

Sphinx, nature - here we meet with the dual Tyutchev, perfectly familiar with Greek mythology and comprehending being. The poet in his philosophical reflections reflects on topics that concern so many. Often he is aphoristic and suggests the reader himself to continue his reflections, to be a "co-author", so to speak. Later, the poem "Nature-Sphinx" Tyutchev offers as a new puzzle, in which there may not be a sense, which speaks with a sarcastic bitterness.

The Mystery of the Sphinx

In Greek mythology, the Sphinx was presented as a monster with a female head, having a lioness's body, eagle's wings and a snake's tail. He guarded the entrance to Thebes. Each passing one was asked a riddle: "Which creature can be four-legged, two-legged or have three legs?". Everyone who did not respond correctly, the sphinx devoured. Only one Oedipus escaped this fate. He replied: "As a child, a person crawls on four limbs, becoming an adult, walking with two legs, and in old age using a cane." Defeated by the answer monster rushed from the cliff and died.

Sphinx and Masons

The Russian Masons in the 1920s in St. Petersburg had a lodge under the significant name "Dying Sphinx". That is, they believed that their wisdom and erudition enabled them to solve riddles. This, of course, knew F.I. Tyutchev, when he thought that there is a Sphinx. Nature always acted in a different capacity. Nevertheless, grandiose in its solitude, the Sphinx, a relic of Egyptian antiquity, stands solemnly and quietly in the presence of a terrible desert as a symbol of eternity. He only looks forward to the future, whereas we and all who preceded us have lived their short lives and have disappeared forever. And he always was and always will be. This is the Sphinx. Nature, its cosmogony, is even more majestic, cold and rational, and inevitable rock always accompanies it.

World of Tyutchev

The world in which the poet existed is always ambivalent: he aspires to loneliness, but he is attracted by the beautiful world of God, where streams ring, the roses smell and are blooming, and where the sky is transparent. Here he almost does not feel lonely, merging with the universe.

Early landscape lyricism

In his youth, in the 1920s, F.I. Tyutchev perceived nature as a living being, which has both soul and language. He could personify the storm as a goblet, from which Hebe, laughing, shed thunder and showers on the ground. Sphinx, nature is not opposed and not compared by the poet. In his student years in the circle of interests and reading, he included two masters of the thoughts of that time, completely different among themselves, in many respects even opposing each other - Pascal and Rousseau. They both did not completely forget Tyutchev. Much later, after Pascal, the poet calls a person "a murmuring thinking reed." And Rousseau's ideas, that nature speaks in a language understandable to all people, were attractive to Tyutchev, which was expressed in the fact that he wrote that in nature there is love and freedom. But the poet was looking for his own ways in the knowledge of the world, uniting in a single love, philosophy and nature. But the way to the idea that nature is the Sphinx will be long.

The characteristic features of nature in the poet's youth

Romanticism won the dominant position, and this could not leave a trace in Tyutchev's poetry. Month of him - the god of the radiant, the mountains - the deities native, the day of his brilliant shining by the will of the high gods hung over the abyss of the fatal world. All poetic images are sublime and extremely romantic, and very often jubilant. Not such will be the late Tyutchev.

Lyrics of a mature poet

In the 30's and 40's, disturbing motifs in the poet's works increase, especially when he thinks about love and nature. So, the "Veshnie Vody" can stand side by side with their bright bright joyous coloring, and at the same time he can see the secret and ambiguous smile of nature, and the mysterious "Silence", when feelings and thoughts should be silent, like stars at night, because it is The poet knows how impossible it is to express with words precisely what disturbs and disturbs him.

Late period

In the 1950s and 1970s, anxiety deepened, which always accompanied F. Tyutchev's world outlook. Life is getting darker and more desperate. He talks about two fateful forces that participate in every fate from birth to the grave, about Death and the Human Court. And even when he admires how clouds in the sky melt, how honey aroma blows from the fields, he can not finish this warm picture solemnly and seriously: centuries will pass, we will leave, but the river and fields will also flow under the heat. In these years, the lines "Nature-Sphinx" will be written, the poem is short and aphoristic. Like many other works that have come from the poet philosopher's pen.

"Nature - the Sphinx"

Philosophically reflecting on the mysteries of life, the 66-year-old poet in 1869 comes to the conclusion that all secrets are empty inventions. The mysteries of the Sphinx-nature are not riddles at all. They have nothing to solve, they just need to accept. This desire to simply merge with something huge from a youth persecuted the poet, because he knew that man can not change cataclysms. A believer in it questions the mystery of the creation of the world by the Creator. Riddles in nature, maybe never had, do not even ask, but the author claims. To perceive as nonsense, as empty, as that nature is the Sphinx, Tiutchev can only completely lose faith in the Creator's craft. By this time a bitter loss will pass: E. Denisyeva died in 1864, their children - daughter Elena and son Nikolai - in 1865, the mother - in 1866, and much earlier - the wife of Eleanor. And nothing can be changed. In gloomy despair, with absolute calm, he deduces on the paper the aphoristic lines "Nature - the Sphinx" Tyutchev. The quatrain is written with a solemn measuring pentameter.

Turgenev's Commentary

Lyubov, who loved and appreciated the poetry of F. Tyutchev, IS. Turgenev wrote almost ten years later two poems in prose - "Sphinx" and "Nature". He does not refute the poem "Nature - Sphinx". Tyutchev introduced, as never before, nature to the destroyer, and the Sphinx - her personification. Turgenev, on the other hand, recognized in the features of the sphinx either Yaroslavl or Ryazan cunning little peasant whom no Oedipus could guess. The nature of I. Turgenev is extremely severe and majestic, and she has no difference between a flea and a "king" of everything living - a man. She knows neither good nor evil, she cares about all and destroys everyone. The law for her is only the mind.

Both Russian geniuses who endlessly loved and understood nature and knew philosophy, each in their own way approached the development of the topic, giving the reader to look at it from different angles.