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

Sphinx, nature - here we meetdual Tyutchev, perfectly familiar with Greek mythology and comprehend being. In his philosophical thoughts, the poet reflects on topics that concern so many. Often he is aphoristic and invites the reader to continue his reflections himself, to be a “co-author”, so to speak. Tyutchev offers the later poem “Nature-Sphynx” as a new riddle in which there may be no meaning, which is spoken about with caustic bitterness.

The Mystery of the Sphinx

In Greek mythology, the Sphinx was represented as a monster with a female head, having the body of a lioness, eagle wings and a serpent's tail.

He guarded the entrance to Thebes.Each passing person asked a riddle: "What kind of a creature can be four-legged, two-legged, or have three legs?". Everyone did not answer correctly, the sphinx devoured. Only one Oedipus escaped this fate. He replied: "As a child, a person crawls on four limbs, when he becomes an adult, he walks with two legs, and in old age he uses a cane." The monster defeated by the answer rushed from the cliff and died.

Sphinx and Masons

In the Russian masons in the 20s in St. Petersburg wasbed under the significant name "The Dying Sphynx." That is, they believed that their wisdom and erudition allowed them to solve riddles. Of course, F.I. Tyutchev, when thinking that there is a sphinx. Nature has always performed in a different capacity. Nevertheless, the Sphinx, grandiose in its solitude, a relic of Egyptian antiquity, stands solemnly and silently in the presence of a terrible desert as a symbol of eternity.

He looks only forward to the future, while weand all who preceded us lived their short lives and disappeared forever. And he always was and always will be. That is the sphinx. Nature, its cosmogony, is even more majestic, cold and rational, and inevitable rock always accompanies it.

Mir Tyutcheva

Мир, в котором существовал поэт, всегда dual: he strives for solitude, but he is attracted to the beautiful world of God, where streams are ringing, roses are fragrant and blooming, and where the sky is transparent. Here he almost does not feel loneliness, merging with the Universe.

Early landscape lyrics

В молодости, в 20-е годы, Ф.И.Tyutchev perceived nature as a living creature, which has both a soul and a language. He could personify the thunderstorm like a goblet, from which Hebe, laughing, spilled thunder and downpours on the ground. Sphinx, nature were not opposed and not compared by the poet.

In his student years, in the circle of interests and reading attwo rulers of thoughts of that time entered it, completely different from each other, in many ways even opposite to each other - Pascal and Russo. They both were not completely forgotten by Tyutchev. Much later, after Pascal, the poet will call a man "a murmuring thinking reed." But Russo’s ideas that nature speaks a language that is 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, combining into a single love, philosophy and nature. But the path to the idea that nature is the sphinx will be long.

Characteristic features of nature in the youth of the poet

Romanticism has gained a dominant position, and thiscould not leave a mark in Tyutchev's poetry. For a month he has a luminous god, mountains are deities of his own, deities, his day shining by the will of the high gods hung over the abyss of the fateful world. All poetic images are sublime and extremely romantic, and very often jubilant. Not so will late Tyutchev.

The lyrics of a mature poet

In the 30s and 40s, disturbing motives inworks of the poet, especially when he reflects on love and nature. So, “Spring Waters” can stand nearby with their bright light joyful 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 the poet knows how impossible it is to say in a word exactly what worries and worries him.

Late period

In the 50s and 70s, anxiety deepens, whichalways accompanied the worldview of F. Tyutchev. Life is becoming gloomy and hopeless. He discusses the two fatal forces that participate in every fate from birth to the grave, about Death and the Judgment of men. And even when he admires how the clouds melt in the sky, how the honey aroma blows from the fields, he cannot finish this warm picture solemnly and seriously: centuries will pass, we will leave, but the river will also flow and the fields will lie under the heat. In these years the lines “Nature - Sphinx” will be written, the poem is short and aphoristic. Like many other works that came out of the pen of the poet-philosopher.

"Nature is the Sphinx"

Thinking philosophically about the secrets of being, the 66-year-old poet in 1869 came to the conclusion that all secrets are empty fabrications.

The riddles of the sphinx nature are not riddles at all.They have nothing to solve, they just need to be accepted. This desire to simply merge with something huge from his youth pursued the poet, because he knew that man could not change cataclysms. The believer in him questions the secret of the creation of the world by the Creator. There may never have been puzzles in nature, it doesn’t even ask, but the author claims. To perceive as nonsense, as empty, as the fact that nature is a sphinx, Tyutchev can only completely disbelieve in the Creator’s intention. By this time, a bitter series of losses will pass: E. Denisieva died in 1864, their children - daughter Elena and son Nikolai - in 1865, mother - in 1866, and much earlier - the wife of Eleanor. And nothing can be changed. In gloomy despair, with absolute calm, he prints on paper the aphoristic lines “Nature - Sphinx” by Tyutchev. The quatrain is written in solemn measured five-footed iambic.

Comment Turgenev

Loving and appreciating the poetry of F. Tyutchev I.S.Turgenev will write almost ten years later two poems in prose - “The Sphinx” and “Nature”. He does not refute the poem "Nature - the Sphinx." Tyutchev presented, as never before, nature as a destroyer, and the sphinx as its personification. Turgenev, on the other hand, recognized the sphinx as either a Yaroslavl or a Ryazan cunning peasant whom no Oedipus could unravel. The nature of I. Turgenev is extremely severe and majestic, and there is no difference between the flea and the “king” of all living things - man. She knows neither good nor evil, she equally cares for everyone and destroys everyone. The law for her is only reason.

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