Of course, my spirit is immortal!

A. S. Pushkin

On January 28, 1837, the great Russian poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was seriously wounded in a duel with Dantes. It was hard and painful. Dr. Spassky asked the dying man if he would like to see his friends.

"Call me!"

Zhukovsky, Vielgorsky, Vyazemsky, Turgenev, Dahl, Danzas entered one after another...

Pushkin shook hands with them as they said goodbye, and they cried.

Suddenly Alexander Sergeyevich asked:

"Aren't the Karamzins here?" They were immediately sent to the Karamzins. The historian's widow has arrived

Ekaterina Andreyevna.

"Bless me!" the dying man asked her. Ekaterina Andreyevna made the sign of the cross over the poet from a distance, from the threshold. Pushkin beckoned to Karamzina, took her hand, and placed it on his forehead. She blessed the poet, and the dying man kissed her hand. Karamzina came out sobbing.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin said goodbye to the earthly world, having confessed and received communion, as his grandfathers and great-grandfathers did...

While studying at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the young man thought about the meaning of his stay on earth, about what is hidden behind the mysterious words "life", "eternity", "time", "soul", "love", "God". He is young, he is cheerful, warmed by the "ray of lyceum clear days", but suddenly at the age of sixteen he writes the poem "My epitaph":

Here Pushkin is buried;

he's with the young muse,

With love, Lena

spent a fun century.

I didn't do anything good,

But he was a soul,

By God, a good man.

And here is the philosophical ode "Mustache". Funny, playful, but like an eternal refrain of life, it contains the words "Memento mori" - remember death. The poet reminded me of this, because he believed that if you kill time in vain, then it also kills you. The ode is addressed to the narcissistic Hussar, who is proud of his "young beauty", lives cheerfully and carelessly, grooms himself and, as they say, "does not blow in the mustache". "The sage with the shaved beard, shaking his bald head, said with a sigh to the moustache":

Be proud, Hussar!

But remember forever,

What is everything in the world

fleeting -

The ruinous hours fly by,

Blush cheeks turn yellow,

And black curls will turn gray,

And old age will whiten your moustache.

The older the poet gets, the more intently he looks into the abyss called eternity, into which, as Vladimir Nabokov aptly put it, we all fly at about "four thousand five hundred heartbeats an hour." Pushkin indulges in deep thoughts, his poems and poems become more serious, more philosophical, and more filled with deep visionary meaning every year. Sometimes it seems that he sees "through a magic crystal" not only "the distance of a free novel", but also what a mere mortal is not allowed to see. At the heart of this brilliant vision, or rather guidance, is not the pranks of "only one muse", but a solid foundation of faith. Faith in God. Pushkin spent his entire life deeply reading the text of Holy Scripture. His reference book was the Gospel, the poet knew the Acts of the Holy Apostles well. Being an Orthodox Christian, he answered many questions of life with quotations from the Bible, only translated into verse form. Somewhere deep, on an intuitive, subconscious level, our national poet guessed that " the poetic essence of language is the language of Essence." Isn't that what his poem "Angel"shows?

The spirit of denial, the spirit of doubt, looked upon the pure spirit. And the heat of involuntary emotion For the first time vaguely recognized.

"I'm sorry ," he said.,

"I saw you,

And you didn't shine at me for nothing:

I didn't hate everything in the sky,

I didn't despise everything in the world."

Just a few lines, and what a philosophical depth... Saint Isaac the Syrian answered the question: "What is a merciful heart?": "The heart of man is kindled for all creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every creature." Feeling pity in his poems even for the "enemy of truth", the" spirit of denial", Pushkin seems to demonstrate his involvement in everything heavenly and earthly, his "all-humanity", which F. M. Dostoevsky so figuratively spoke about at the anniversary of the poet.

Summer of 1826. Pushkin is serving his tsarist exile in the village of Mikhailovsky. "Without leaving the hut-I contemplate the whole world!" - says the saying of Lao Tzu. This is how the poet's lifestyle in Mikhailovsky can be described.

Pushkin, at the age of twenty-six, contemplates the whole world from the height of poetic imagination. During the two years of exile, the poet wrote more than seventy poems, the poems "Gypsies" and "Count Nulin", "A Scene from Faust", four chapters of the novel "Eugene Onegin "and the tragedy"Boris Godunov". And all these works make the reader think about life and death, truth and lies, true and imaginary values of being.

The cross-cutting theme of his new creative research can be called the words of the poet himself: "you can not lose the meaning of life for the sake of life." According to eyewitnesses, during the exile, Alexander Sergeyevich often visited the Svyatogorsky Monastery (where he was originally buried), had a long conversation with the brethren and the rector, a hundred-year-old father Gennady, who served the poet after his death. This was a kind of sign of fate.

Once Pushkin came to the church before the service and his eyes accidentally fell on the open pages of the Bible. The poet read them, and they literally shocked him. At night, as if illuminated by a strange light, he jumped up and began to write the first lines of his famous poem "The Prophet":

We are tormented by spiritual thirst,

In the grim desert I dragged myself along, -

And the six-winged seraph

He came to me at a crossroads.

It turned out that the famous Old Testament prophet Isaiah appeared to the poet from the pages of the Bible - a preacher of truth and a merciless denouncer of sins and human vices. It seems that after this poem, Pushkin himself takes the path of prophecy, sacrificial service to the people, to the Motherland. His poetic "verb" burns through "cruel hearts", awakens the human conscience.

During his exile, the poet reflects a lot on the mysteries of life, carefully reads the Lives of saints, and sincerely admires their courage in the fight against earthly passions. About the Gospel Pushkin says: "There is a book in which every word is interpreted, preached in all parts of the world, applied to all the circumstances of life and incidents of the world; from which it is impossible to repeat not a single expression that would not be known by heart, which would not already be a proverb; it does not already contain anything unknown for us;

but this book is called the Gospel, and such is its ever-new charm that if we accidentally open it, sated with the world or depressed by despondency, we can no longer resist its sweet passion and plunge into its Divine eloquence."

It is a well-known fact: shortly before his tragic death, Alexander Sergeyevich admitted in a conversation with the writer A. S. Khomyakov that he would definitely teach his children to read the Bible.

According to the poet P. A. Vyazemsky, Pushkin was " imbued with the beauty of many prayers, knew them by heart and often repeated them." It was this deep knowledge and spiritual vision that allowed him to translate the spirit of the Lord's prayer "Our Father"so accurately, logically and with inspiration:

Father of men, Heavenly Father! May Your eternal name be hallowed in our hearts! Thy will be done with us Both in heaven and on earth! Give us our daily bread by Your bountiful hand, and as we forgive people, so forgive us, Father, who are insignificant before You, your children, and do not lead us into temptation.

The second prayer, arranged by Pushkin in verse form, is often heard during the days of Great Lent. This is the prayer of Ephraim Siri-n, who lived in the IV century. St. Ephraim the Syrian is one of the most revered saints of the Orthodox Church. His spiritual heritage is extensive, but his most famous work is a short prayer. Pushkin, being a poet, immediately felt its lyricism and depth and translated it into poems.

Each rhyme of the poet is full of meaning to the limit. The poet puts it this way::

Lord of my days,

the spirit of idleness sad Lyubonachaliya,

this hidden serpent,

And idle talk

don't let my soul go.

But let me ripen mine,

Oh, my God, my sins.

Yes my brother from me

he will not accept judgment.

And the spirit of humility, patience,

love

And chastity in my heart

bring it to life.

Few people know about the controversy between Alexander Sergeyevich and Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow. Meanwhile, it largely influenced the views of the poet, helped to awaken him "from spiritual blindness." It is quite logical: after all, one great person influenced another great person. Metropolitan Philaret (in the world Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov, 1783-1867) went down in the history of the Russian Church as the greatest ascetic. He was loved by ordinary people, respected by princes and tsars. Filaret paid special attention to the development of spiritual educational institutions and charitable activities,

spiritual and moral enlightenment. He was subsequently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

As rector of the Theological Academy, Filaret attended exams at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. Later, a correspondence began between him and Pushkin. The reason for this was a poetic impromptu that appeared in print on Pushkin's birthday-May 26, 1828. The poem began like this:

A gift in vain, an accidental gift Life, why are you given to me? Or why are You condemned to execution by secret fate?

The Metropolitan could not ignore such lines. Moreover, young people listened carefully to Pushkin's words. And he writes:

It is not in vain, it is not by chance that Life is given to us from God. Not without the will of God in secret And condemned to execution. I myself called Evil out of the dark abysses with wayward power, I myself filled my soul with passion, I stirred my mind with doubt.

The poems immediately became known to Pushkin, and he responded with the famous "Stanzas".

Metropolitan Gribanovsky wrote on this occasion: "Our history knows of no other example of such a literary contest between a strict in his views and a wise Russian archpastor and a freedom-loving genius poet, in which the latter was not only not ashamed to admit that he was defeated, but also, like a humble disciple, gratefully kissed the hand of his spiritual mentor."

At the end of February 1831, on the eve of Great Lent, an important event in the life of Alexander Pushkin took place. He finally found the one he had been looking for for so long - Natalia Nikolaevna Goncharova - "the purest charms, the purest sample." On the eve of the wedding, on February 17, in his new apartment on Arbat, he gathered close friends for a bachelor party. Oddly enough, the host was so sad, so gloomy, that the guests were "downright uncomfortable." Pushkin read poems in which he said goodbye to youth, to that period of life that you will not forget and will not return... There was something disturbing, tormenting, and heart-and-soul confusing in the verses:

But I don't want to,

O friend, to die;

I want to live,

to think and suffer;

And I know,

I will enjoy myself

Between sorrows,

worries and worries;

Sometimes again

I'll get drunk on harmony,

Over Fiction

I'll shed my tears,

And maybe -

on my sad sunset

Love will shine

a parting smile.

Love "flashed", big love... But then a dueling pistol shot followed. This fateful event happened six years after the poet's marriage, but one can only be surprised at Pushkin's brilliant intuition. It was not for nothing that the ancients said that poets were servants of the gods. They are able not only to see, but also to foresee, including their own destinies...

Shortly before his death, in 1835, Pushkin visited his beloved Mikhailovskoye for the last time. His thoughts, feelings, and experiences are filled with light sadness... The poet notes that at the roots of his old friends" girlfriends " - pines ten years after his exile ," now a young grove has grown, a green family." Here it is, a phenomenon

time and at the same time the secret mighty voice of life itself! Pushkin sensitively hears all its modulations, semitones and shades. And he is delighted to turn to nature itself:

Hello, tribe

Young, unfamiliar!

Don't I See your mighty

late age.

But then the grandson will see it, who will pass by and "remember me". "And let life play at the grave entrance of the young, and indifferent nature shine with eternal beauty," the poet wrote. And so it all happened...

The words "eternal", "eternal", "eternity" are key words for Pushkin's work. According to Dostoevsky, eternity is fraught with an eternal riddle, connected directly with the personality of a Great Man.

Here is what V. A. Zhukovsky wrote to the poet's father, Sergei Lvovich Pushkin, immediately after his son's death: "When everyone left, I sat down in front of him and looked at his face for a long time alone. I had never seen anything like what was on that face in that first moment of death. His head was bowed a little; his hands, which had been convulsively moving for a few minutes, were calmly stretched out, as if they had fallen to rest after hard work. But what was expressed on his face, I can not say in words. It was so new and yet so familiar to me. It wasn't a dream or peace! It was not the expression of intelligence that was so characteristic of this face before, nor was it a poetic expression! No! Some deep, wonderful thought was developing in him, something like a vision, some complete, deep contented knowledge. As I stared at him, I wanted to ask him everything: what do you see, friend?"

Truly, "poet" and "eternity" are inseparable concepts.