A.A. Blok, according to the testimony of people who knew him well, had a colossal moral influence on those around him. "You more than a person and more than a poet, you are not carrying your own human burden,” E. Karavaeva wrote to him. M. Tsvetaeva dedicated more than twenty poems to Blok and called him “a complete conscience.” These two assessments perhaps contain the main thing about Blok as a person.
A. Blok always very subtly felt the pulse of his country, his people, and took all changes in the life of society close to his heart. After the lyrical diary addressed to To the beautiful lady, V poetic world the poet includes new themes, new images. The landscape changes: instead of mountain heights and radiant horizons there is a swamp or a city with its terrible ulcers. If earlier for the block there were only his personal experiences and his Heavenly Virgin, now he sees people next to him, tormented by poverty, lost in the labyrinth of a stone city, crushed by the hopelessness and hopelessness of poverty and lawlessness.
One after another, poems appear in which the poet expresses sympathy for the oppressed and condemns the indifference of the “well-fed.” In 1910 he writes famous poem"On railway».
When you read this poem, you immediately remember Nekrasov’s lines about the unbearably difficult fate of a Russian woman. The theme and idea of the poem “Troika” is especially close. It seems to me that the plots and even the compositional organization of these works have something in common. Alexander Blok, as it were, picks up a topic deeply and comprehensively studied by Nikolai Nekrasov more than half a century ago, and shows that little has changed in the fate of a Russian woman. She is still powerless and oppressed, lonely and unhappy. She has no future. Youth passes, exhausted in “empty dreams.” In dreams of a worthy life, of a faithful and attentive friend, of happy family, about peace and prosperity. But a woman from the people cannot escape from the iron clutches of need and backbreaking work.
Let’s compare with Nekrasov:
And why are you running hastily?
Following the rushing troika?
At you, beautifully akimbo,
A passing cornet looked up.
Here's Blok's:
Just once a hussar, with a careless hand
Leaning on the scarlet velvet,
He slid a gentle smile over her...
He slipped and the train sped off into the distance.
Blok’s poem is more tragic: the girl threw herself under the wheels of the locomotive, driven by “road, iron melancholy” to despair:
Under the embankment, in the unmown ditch,
Lies and looks as if alive,
In a colored scarf thrown on her braids,
Beautiful and young...
The worst thing is that none of those around him attached much importance to what happened. “The carriages walked in a familiar line,” they “looked around the unfortunate woman with an even gaze,” and, I think, after a few minutes they forgot about what they saw. Indifference and heartlessness have struck society. This society is sick, morally sick. The poem literally screams about this:
Don't approach her with questions
You don’t care, but she’s satisfied:
Love, sadness or wheels
She is crushed - everything hurts.
The poem is written in realistic traditions. A through image of the road runs through the entire work. The railway is not just a symbol of a difficult path, but also of hopelessness, the “cast iron” of existence and the death of the soul. The theme of “death on the way” appears in the poem from the first stanza and goes beyond the scope of the work.
Iambic pentameter alternates with tetrameter, creating some kind of monotonous and mournful rhythm, gradually turning into the monotonous sound of wheels. A train in the dark turns into a terrible three-eyed monster (personification). The poet skillfully uses synecdoche: “the yellow and blue were silent, the green ones cried and sang.” By the color of the carriages we learn about their passengers. The rich public rode in yellow and blue, and ordinary people rode in green.
The epithets correspond to the author’s mood (“faded bushes”, “habitual” line, “careless” hand). Vivid metaphors amaze with their accuracy and originality (“desert eyes of carriages,” “iron” melancholy). Blok also paints a generalized image of autocratic Russia in this poem. This is a gendarme standing like an idol next to a victim lying in a ditch.
After creating the poem “On the Railway,” Blok increasingly wrote poems that were plot scenes about the fate of people ruined, tortured, crushed by circumstances and harsh reality. The gap between dream and reality deepens in the poet’s work; the dull prose of life surrounds him with an ever-closer ring. The poet is haunted by a premonition of an impending catastrophe, a feeling of the imminent death of the old world. One of the main themes in Blok’s lyrics is the theme of retribution - retribution to a society that shackled, froze, enslaved a person, which threw young, young, young people under the wheels of its iron indifference. strong people. After the poem “On the Railroad” he will write:
Nineteenth century, iron,
Truly a cruel age!
By you into the darkness of the starless night.
Careless abandoned man!
****
The twentieth century...even more homeless,
Even worse than life is darkness.
(Even blacker and bigger
Shadow of Lucifer's wing) (From the poem "Retribution")
Questions for analyzing the poem “On the Railroad”:
- Why is this poem included in the third volume of the poet's lyrics?
- What is the tragedy of the heroine?
- How is the picture of a “scary world” created?
- Find the key words in the poem.
- Why did the author include this poem in the “Motherland” cycle?
The very title of the poem “On the Railroad” evokes an association with the motif of the path, and the first stanza specifies that this is the path to death, the death of a young woman. The picture that the author paints is related to the theme of the Russian land. This is evidenced by the objective world, the details of the portrait: an unmown ditch, a colored scarf, braids. The author tells about the life of the heroine, identifying the reasons for her death.
The line of words accompanying the heroine speaks of her as if she were alive: “she walked with a sedate gait,” “she waited, worried, for love, she has a gentle blush, cool curls. But the world that is opposed to it is indifferent to man, to living feelings. He is deathly. Therefore, the author uses image words such as “sleepy”, “even gaze”, “careless hand”, “deserted eyes of carriages”. Life indifferently rushes past the heroine, the world does not care about the expectations of youth. Therefore, a feeling of the meaninglessness of existence, empty dreams, and iron melancholy is born. The epithet “iron” is not accidental. It concentrates dull despair associated with the “terrible world” that kills the soul. That's why
an image of a heart being taken out appears (“the heart has been taken out a long time ago”). Even death evokes nothing in a crowd of people except idle curiosity. And only the heart of the lyrical hero responds with pain.
It is no coincidence that this poem was placed in the “Motherland” cycle. “Scary world” is also a symbol modern Blok Russia. There is a social hint in the poem: “The yellow and blue ones were silent, the green ones cried and sang.” Yellow and blue carriages are for wealthy people, green carriages are for common people. Therefore, the symbolic words “crying” and “singing” reflect the theme of suffering and the people’s fate.
Under the embankment, in the unmown ditch,
Lies and looks as if alive,
In a colored scarf thrown on her braids,
Beautiful and young.
Sometimes I walked with a sedate gait
To the noise and whistle behind the nearby forest.
Walking all the way around the long platform,
She waited, worried, under the canopy.
Three bright eyes rushing -
Softer blush, cooler curl:
The carriages walked in the usual line,
They shook and creaked;
The yellow and blue ones were silent;
The green ones cried and sang.
We got up sleepy behind the glass
And looked around with an even gaze
Her, the gendarme next to her...
Just once, a hussar with a careless hand
Leaning on the scarlet velvet,
He slipped and the train sped off into the distance.
Exhausted in empty dreams...
Road melancholy, iron
She whistled, breaking my heart...
So many bows were given,
So many greedy glances cast
Into the deserted eyes of the carriages...
Don't approach her with questions
You don’t care, but she’s satisfied:
With love, mud or wheels
She is crushed - everything hurts.
The work of A. Blok, with all the diversity of its problematics and artistic solutions, represents a single whole, one work unfolded in time, a reflection of the path traveled by the poet.
Blok himself pointed out this feature of his work: “... this is my path... now that it has been passed, I am firmly convinced that this is due and that all the poems together are a “trilogy of incarnation.”
Cross-cutting motifs, details, and images permeate the poet’s entire lyrics. The poem “On the Railway” is included in the figurative system of Blok’s creativity as the implementation of the theme of the path, the end-to-end image of the road. It was written under the impression of reading the novel by L.N. Tolstoy's "Resurrection". Blok says this about his poem: “Unconscious imitation of an episode from Tolstoy’s “Resurrection”: Katyusha Maslova at a small station sees Nekhlyudov in a velvet chair in a brightly lit first-class compartment in the window of the carriage.”
I can’t help but remember the tragic death of another Tolstoy heroine, Anna Karenina...
The poem “On the Railroad,” despite its visible external content, undoubtedly has another, deeper plan, and its central position in the “Motherland” cycle is no coincidence.
The adverbial sequence “under an embankment, in an unmown ditch,” which opens the poem, begins it with a tragic denouement, before us is the implementation of the reverse narration technique.
The tragic ending determines the emotional tone of the retrospective descriptions that make up the main part, central in position in the text. The first and last (ninth) stanzas form a ring, both of them are given in the momentary present, before us is a clear ring composition of the text. The central, retrospective part opens with the word “happened”, placed at the beginning of the stanza and the verse line, in the most “shock” position. This “happened” puts all subsequent actions into the general plan of a long-past repeat: “It happened, she walked, waited, worried... walked, trembled, creaked, were silent, cried and sang, stood up, walked around, rushed... exhausted, whistled... tearing...”. All events, all actions related directly to the one who is now “lying and looking as if alive” are given, as it were, in isolation from the subject. Incompleteness becomes structural important factor text.
"She" appears only in the last line of the fifth stanza:
We got up sleepy behind the glass
And looked around with an even gaze
Platform, garden with faded bushes,
Her, the gendarme next to her...
The approaching train is presented distantly, like an unknown creature. Then gradual “recognition” occurs: at first, perception seems to move from auditory signals to visual ones: “a noise and a whistle behind the nearby forest, three bright eyes rushing in.” Then: “the carriages were moving along the usual line.” Each appearance of the “three bright eyes” is perceived as hope and promise, therefore:
...A softer blush, a cooler curl...
The rough drafts say this more clearly:
Always promised the unknown
Three red eyes moving...
The heroine’s repeated transformation (“a softer blush, a cooler curl…”) is driven by hope:
Perhaps one of those passing by
Look more closely from the windows...
These two lines are not actually the heroine’s direct speech. It is for her, who meets and sees off the train, that all the people on it are “passing through.” Replacing the indefinite pronoun “someone” with the interrogative-relative “who” is typical for colloquial speech. The voice of the one who now “lies and looks as if alive” breaks into the narrator’s voice. “She” enlivens this piece: under the sign of hope and expectation, the story is transferred to another time plane - the present-future in the past: “a softer blush, a cooler curl” (now), “she will look” (the future). The ellipsis, as a sign of silence, completes this stanza, breaking it off.
The carriages walked in the usual line,
They shook and creaked;
The yellow and blue ones were silent;
The green ones cried and sang.
When talking about human destiny, about hopes and expectations, trouble was conveyed, among other means of expression, by violating the direct order of words. At the beginning of the verse, the circumstance was put forward (“under an embankment, in an unmown ditch”), then introductory words(“it happened”, “perhaps”), then the definition became in postposition (“three bright eyes rushing”), then the anchoring part of the nominal predicate was brought forward (“a softer blush, a cooler curl”); and only the beginning of the fourth stanza differs in direct word order:
The carriages walked in the usual line... -
subject, predicate, secondary members. In the world of machines and mechanisms, everything is correct and clear, everything is subject to a certain routine.
The second part of the same stanza is already with the word order broken:
The yellow and blue ones were silent;
The green ones cried and sang.
Here the movement of the train is given as if in the perception of the heroine.
The formula of movement combines “her” and “carriages” that are not identified in the text: “she walked with a decorous gait” - “they walked in the usual line.” Moreover, in the verb go (walked, walked), in each specific case different meanings of this verb are activated. She walked - “moved, stepping over” - “walked with a decorous gait...”. “The carriages were moving” - “moving, overcoming space.” Here these meanings are deliberately brought closer together; something mechanical, as if directed from the outside, appears in this movement towards each other. All actions (“walked”, “trembled”, “creaked”, “were silent”, “crying and sang”) are equally habitual and long-lasting (“they walked in the usual line”).
In pre-revolutionary Russia, first and second class carriages, respectively, were “yellow and blue”; “green” – third class carriages. Here the prosperous “yellows and blues” are contrasted with the “greens”. This contrast is complicated by the contrast of grammatical structures - the two-part “The yellow and blue ones were silent” (subtle metonymy) is contrasted with the one-part one with an indefinite personal meaning of the predicate: “In the green ones they cried and sang” - it is unknown, and it doesn’t matter who is crying and singing there.
Yellow, blue, green carriages are not just real signs of a moving train, but symbols of differently shaped human destinies.
We got up sleepy behind the glass
And looked around with sleepy eyes
Platform, garden with faded bushes,
Her, the gendarme next to her...
And again inversion and contrast. “Sleepy” with their “even gaze” and “she”, who finally appears in the text, are contrasted. “She” for the “sleepy” ones is the same boring and familiar object as the platform, the garden with faded bushes, the gendarmes. And again, ellipsis as a means of highlighting a word, image, thought, as a sign of anxiety and expectation.”
In this stream of gray everyday life, one single bright spot suddenly flashed:
Only once did the hussar with a careless hand
Leaning on the scarlet velvet,
He slid a gentle smile over her...
The tenderness and melodiousness of the sound is enhanced in this stanza by the rhyme on “-oy” (careless - tender), where the commonly used form on “-oy” is also possible.
It is significant that at the beginning of the stanza the circumstance of time “only once” is placed, emphasizing the uniqueness of this happy moment. The whole picture is a contrast with dull everyday life: the festive joy of life shines through even in the very pose of the hussar. Velvet is not just red - scarlet. Here scarlet is a sign of hope, the possibility of love. Particularly significant is the rhyming pair “scarlet” - “umchalo”, which not only rhyme, but also inevitably correlate with each other. Hope as hope, given in the third stanza:
Perhaps one of those passing by
Look more closely from the windows... -
destroyed by inexorable fate, fate, that terrible force that controls human destinies in scary world, rushing past on its appointed, iron path.
It is significant that the train did not rush off, but was “swept away.” The action seems to happen by itself, fatally. An unknown force took away the dream (“perhaps”), the possibility of happiness disappeared - and the narrative returns to normal again: further use verb forms, transmitting to in general terms long past, repeating (“happened”) everything that happened after:
Thus the useless youth rushed,
Exhausted in empty dreams...
Road melancholy, iron
She whistled, breaking my heart...
Lexical repetitions: “the train sped off into the distance” - “so youth rushed” unite the sixth and seventh stanzas. In the seventh stanza one can see the image of the road, the image of a rushing train: “rushed,” “road melancholy, iron,” “whistled.”
At the beginning of the next, eighth stanza, the particle “so what” is added, separated by a pause from the following text. It is this cry of “What” that determines the emotional tone of the entire stanza, the last in the retrospective part. Anaphora: “So much... So much...” unites the second and third verse lines. The entire stanza is sharply highlighted by the first verse:
Why, the heart has been taken out a long time ago!
(the only exclamatory sentence in the poetic text), and is united by repeating grammatically homogeneous forms: “taken out,” “given,” “thrown.”
“Three bright eyes rushing” turn into “desert eyes of carriages”; The “empty dreams” of the previous stanza are correlated with the “desert eyes of the carriages.” “Only once” of the sixth stanza - the only, and even then illusory, possibility of happiness - is contrasted with the repeated “So many bows were given, so many greedy glances were cast...”
The ninth and last stanza returns us to the “present”, to the one who “lies and looks as if alive.” The basis of the figurative system of this stanza is contrast. “She”, appearing for the second time in the role of the subject, is contrasted with the inhabitants of the “cars”: “She is enough” - “You don’t care.”
Row homogeneous members: “love, dirt or wheels...” – combines general auditory antonyms. The first two members of the series reveal in the short passive participle “crushed” its metaphorical meaning - “destroyed, crushed morally”; the third member - “with wheels” - reveals the immediate meaning in the word “crushed” - “killed, put to death,” “deliberately deprived of life.” “Crushed by wheels” also evokes by association the idea of a metaphorical wheel of fortune, history, breaking human destinies. This image was used by Blok: “... he is ready to grab with his human hand the wheel that moves the history of mankind...” (from the Preface to “Retribution”).
The first members of the series - “love, dirt” are contrasted with the third member - “wheels”, but not only: the entire series is united by the verb “crushed” and the common meaning for each member of a tool, an instrument of action.
“She is crushed” is the final form, closing a series of short participles: “the heart is taken out,” “many bows are given,” “many glances are cast.” Particularly relevant are short passive participles in the lines: “Why, the heart has been taken out a long time ago!” and “She’s crushed—everything hurts.” These lines frame the last two stanzas of the poem.
The passive form “crushed”, “taken out” becomes a figuratively significant dominant of the entire poem.
Understanding the compositional and stylistic forms of the word in Blok’s work helps to understand the meaning of the poem in a different way and enter the author’s lyrical world.
In Blok's poetics, the path as a symbol, theme and idea plays a special role. The poem “On the Railway” illuminates one of the facets of the end-to-end image of the path.
The railway is a symbol of the path, movement, and development. A train, a steam locomotive, the image of a “road-path”, a station as a stage of the journey or a moment of the journey, the lights of the locomotive and the lights of the semaphore - these images permeate all of Blok’s texts, from poems to private letters. And his own, personal and creative, fate appears in the symbolic image of a train. In a letter to A. Bely, the same image of the path-fate appears: “It is very likely that my train will only make its last turns - and then arrive at the station, where it will remain for a long time. Even if the station is average, from it you can look back at the path you have traveled and the path ahead. Nowadays, with the train gradually slowing down, many alarming snippets are still whistling in our ears...” The image of a train - a symbol of fate, the poet’s own life, rushing uncontrollably on an unknown path, also appears in the poem “You were the brightest, most faithful and most charming of all...”. The image of the railway develops into a symbol of the railway - an inexorable and boundless fate:
My train flies like a gypsy song
Like those irrevocable days...
What was loved is all past, past,
There is an unknown path ahead...
Blessed, indelibly
Irreversible...sorry!
In Blok’s letter to E.P. Ivanov has a significant message relating to the very day that marked the original draft of the poem “On the Railway”: “I was in St. Petersburg... I wanted to come to your service; but he suddenly waved his hand and sadly climbed into the carriage. What a dull pain that comes from boredom! And so constantly - life “follows” by like a train, sleepy, drunk, and cheerful, and boring people stick out in the windows, and I, yawning, look after him from the “wet platform”. Or - they are still waiting for happiness, like trains at night on an open platform covered with snow.” All the correspondences between this entry and the poem are indicative and significant: both in the letter and in the poem there is a common emotional tonality that brings realities closer together: “... sleepy, drunk, and cheerful, and boring people stick out in the windows” - “... sleepy people stood up behind the windows,” “they were silent yellow and blue, in green, they cried and sang.” And finally, the main unifying motif: the train as a sign of hope for happiness: “... three bright eyes rushing in,” “... they are still waiting for happiness, like trains at night on an open platform covered with snow.”
A path, a road, is not only a symbol of movement and development, but it is also a symbol of the outcome, as a promise and a pledge. The image of a track and a train appears many times in Blok’s work as an object of comparison, suggesting a clear solution:
...Let this thought appear strict,
Simple and white as the road
What a long journey, Carmen!
(“Oh yes, love is as free as a bird...”)
And the same image of the path, the train as a sign of exit, of hope appears in the article “Neither Dreams nor Reality”: “All our lives we have waited for happiness, like people at dusk waiting for long hours for a train on an open, snow-covered platform. They were blinded by the snow, and everyone was waiting for three lights to appear at the turn. Here is finally a tall, narrow locomotive; but no longer for joy: everyone is so tired, it’s so cold that it’s impossible to warm up even in a warm carriage.”
The poem “On the Railroad” reveals the essence of life in the Scary World, this steady, irresistible and merciless path. The railway, in symbolic understanding, undoubtedly belongs to the number of symbols and signs of the Terrible World.
In the creative practice of A. Blok, “iron”, “iron” is on the verge of symbol and reality, in constant interaction and interpenetration. Already in “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” “iron” appears in a symbolic meaning:
We were tormented, erased for centuries,
Hearts were tempered with iron...
(“About legends, about fairy tales, about secrets...”)
“Iron”, “iron” - “cruel, merciless, inevitable”:
This is the law of iron fate...
(“Retribution”, ch. I)
And the wizard is in power
She seemed full of strength
Which with an iron hand
Trapped in a useless knot...
(“Retribution”, ch. II)
The apocalyptic image - the “iron rod” in Blok’s figurative system appears as a symbol of an inevitable and formidable danger or as an instrument of punishment and retribution:
He is raised - this iron rod -
Over our heads...
The symbolic designation of inevitability, severe inflexibility through the image of “iron”, “iron” stands out among Blok’s symbols with a sharp negative assessment, even if in the word “iron” the meaning “strong, irresistible” comes to the fore:
It seems more ironclad, more intense
My dead dream...
("Through the Gray Smoke")
More often, “iron” means “inevitable”
With iron necessity
Will I sleep on white sheets?..
(“All this was, was, was...”)
The Iron Age, iron fate, iron path acquire some stability as phrases denoting a range of ideas inextricably linked with the symbolic meaning of the word “iron”:
Nineteenth century, iron,
Truly a cruel age!
(“Retribution”, Chapter I)
The metaphor “iron” appears in Blok’s poetics as a symbol of cold and evil cruelty.
In the poem “On the Railroad,” the image of the railroad appears as an image of a steady path, an inevitably rushing merciless fate.
In Blok’s lyrics, the theme of the path is inextricably linked with the theme of Russia, the theme of the Motherland:
Oh, my Rus'! My wife! To the point of pain
We have a long way to go!
(“On the Kulikovo field”)
No, I’m going on a journey uninvited by anyone,
And may the earth be easy for me!
Relax under the roof of a tavern.
("Autumn Will")
Blok represents Russia as a “humanized” generalized image: “The more you feel the connection with your homeland, the more real and willingly you imagine it as a living organism... The homeland is a huge, dear, breathing being... Nothing is lost, everything is fixable, because she died and we did not die.” In Blok’s figurative system, Russia often appears in the guise of a Russian woman in a colorful or patterned scarf:
And the impossible is possible
The long road is easy
When the road flashes in the distance
An instant glance from under a scarf...
("Russia")
No, not an old face and not a lean one
Under a Moscow colored handkerchief!
("New America")
In the poem “On the Railway,” the one who “lies and looks as if alive, in a colored scarf thrown on her braids”—isn’t this “crushed” Russia itself? (Remember that this poem was included by the poet in the cycle “Motherland”).
5 (100%) 1 voteMaria Pavlovna Ivanova
Under the embankment, in the unmown ditch,
Lies and looks as if alive,
In a colored scarf thrown on her braids,
Beautiful and young.
Sometimes I walked with a sedate gait
To the noise and whistle behind the nearby forest.
Walking all the way around the long platform,
She waited, worried, under the canopy.
Three bright eyes rushing -
Softer blush, cooler curl:
Perhaps one of those passing by
Look more closely from the windows...
The carriages walked in the usual line,
They shook and creaked;
The yellow and blue ones were silent;
The green ones cried and sang.
We got up sleepy behind the glass
And looked around with an even gaze
Platform, garden with faded bushes,
Her, the gendarme next to her...
Just once a hussar, with a careless hand
Leaning on the scarlet velvet,
Slipped over her with a tender smile,
He slipped and the train sped off into the distance.
Thus the useless youth rushed,
Exhausted in empty dreams...
Road melancholy, iron
She whistled, breaking my heart...
Why, the heart has been taken out a long time ago!
So many bows were given,
So many greedy glances cast
Into the deserted eyes of the carriages...
Don't approach her with questions
You don’t care, but she’s satisfied:
With love, mud or wheels
She is crushed - everything hurts.
Analysis of the poem “On the Railway” by Blok
The poem “On the Railroad” (1910) is included in Blok’s “Motherland” cycle. The poet depicted not just an accidental episode of the death of a woman under the wheels of a steam locomotive. This is a symbolic image of the difficult Russian fate. Blok pointed out that the plot is based on the tragic story of the death of Anna Karenina.
What is certain is that the heroine is deeply unhappy. What makes her come to the station is suffering and hope for happiness. Before the arrival of a steam locomotive, a woman is always very worried and tries to give herself a more attractive appearance (“softer blush”, “cooler curl”). Such preparations are typical for a girl of easy virtue. But hardly a railway platform appropriate place to find clients.
Blok invites the reader to “finish” the woman’s fate himself. If this is a peasant woman, then she may be trying to escape from village life. The author especially highlights the fleeting smile of the hussar, which for a moment gave the girl hope. This scene is reminiscent of Nekrasov's Troika. The only difference is the means of transportation.
But days pass after days, and the passengers of passing locomotives do not care about the lonely girl. Her youth is irrevocably spent in melancholy and useless waiting. The heroine falls into despair, her endless “bows” and “greedy gazes” do not lead to any result. Her friends probably found life partners a long time ago, but she still lives in her imagination. In this state, she decides to commit suicide. The railroad took her youth, let it take her life too. Physical death no longer matters, since the girl has long been “crushed by love.” She experienced real pain during her life.
In the last stanza, the author warns: “Don’t approach her with questions, you don’t care...” It would seem that the dead girl “doesn’t care” anymore. But Blok specifically draws attention to this. People will gossip and go about their business, forgetting about what happened. And the girl drank the cup of suffering to the end. Death was a relief for her. Discussion of her fate and the motives that pushed her to commit suicide would be a desecration of the memory of a pure soul.
The poem “On the Railroad” makes you think about the reasons that push young and healthy people to commit suicide. In Christianity this is considered a terrible sin. But such a step can be led to by the usual indifference of others who, at the right moment, did not want to support a desperate person.
Dedicated to Maria Pavlovna Ivanova
You can fully feel the depth of the tragedy in Alexander Blok’s poem “On the Railway,” which the poet wrote in the summer of 1910 and dedicated to Maria Pavlovna Ivanova. What the author wanted to convey to the woman was the question history conveyed to us only that Alexander had close friendly relations with the Pavlov family.
The poem tells about the death of a girl under the wheels of a train. Already from the first lines, the poems grab your heartstrings and don’t let go until the last letter. Blok wants to emphasize the beauty of the dead girl using symbolism. A colored scarf over a braid speaks of a woman’s youth, and an uncut moat emphasizes the point life path, that moment when a person no longer cares about worldly worries.
Waiting without answer
The girl lived near the railway and often waited under a canopy for the train to pass. This moment from the second quatrain says that the deceased was a local resident and it is unlikely that the railway was a novelty to her. She waited, when the trains flew past, for someone to look at her from the jingling windows, but no one cared about the lonely girl near the tracks.
The author does not go into detail, but analysis without diving into the depths of the lines says that the beauty experienced many bitter moments in her life. Perhaps her lover did not reciprocate, perhaps she could not say “yes” to someone’s passionate words. As we will see from the end of the poem, this does not matter.
The carriages walked in the usual line,
They shook and creaked;
The yellow and blue ones were silent;
The green ones cried and sang.
Inactivity of the railway
IN Tsarist Russia the color of the carriages depended on the class. They cried and sang in the green ones, because these were 3rd class carriages where commoners traveled. The yellow carriages were second class, and the blue carriages were first class. Wealthy passengers were traveling there more on business, away from singing and crying. The girl near the railway did not arouse anyone's interest.
Trains even now, when the deceased is lying near the tracks, run past with a whistle, but even now there is no concern for her. There was no need for a living one, much less a dead one. Only once did the hussars glance from the carriage, and even then he did it out of natural curiosity.
It was not for nothing that Blok chose the railway as the site of the tragedy, because the trains rushing along it well symbolize the passing of youth. Only yesterday the girl was rosy-cheeked and sparkling with beauty, but today she lies in a ditch and only her gaze remains as if she were alive. She lived with hope and faith, but the deserted eyes of the carriages were indifferent - no one looked friendly from the window, no one caressed her in life, and now the journey was over.
Epilogue
At the conclusion of the poem, Blok compares the dead girl with the living one and does not advise anyone to approach her with questions. In the end, it doesn’t matter what killed her - love, the dirt of life or the wheels of a train! One fact remains - regardless of the cause of death, the girl is in pain, because somewhere out there she will still have to answer for early care, for not drinking the cup of life until the day before, for not sharing her beauty with the world.
Despite the dramatic nature of the poem, there are also germs of life in it. Blok teaches us to value life and drink its bitter cup to the end, because the gift of birth was given to us from above. The author also hints that silence is sometimes better than inappropriate questions.
Under the embankment, in the unmown ditch,
Lies and looks as if alive,
In a colored scarf thrown on her braids,
Beautiful and young.
Sometimes I walked with a sedate gait
To the noise and whistle behind the nearby forest.
Walking all the way around the long platform,
She waited, worried, under the canopy.
Three bright eyes rushing -
Softer blush, cooler curl:
Perhaps one of those passing by
Look more closely from the windows...
The carriages walked in the usual line,
They shook and creaked;
The yellow and blue ones were silent;
The green ones cried and sang.
We got up sleepy behind the glass
And looked around with an even gaze
Platform, garden with faded bushes,
Her, the gendarme next to her...
The poem “On the Railway” (1910) allows us to understand the special place that the theme of the homeland occupies in Blok’s work. Very often his lyrics do not directly and directly talk about his homeland, but Russia invariably remains the central and generalizing image. The poem “On the Railroad” was included by the author in the “Motherland” cycle, because from the heart-rending story of a girl crushed by “love, dirt, or wheels” emerges bright image pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, in which some live in poverty and hunger, while others bathe in luxury. The fate of the homeland in the destinies of people becomes a cross-cutting motif for Blok’s lyrics; the country is presented as a “humanized” generalized image.
Reading the lines of the poem, we see not just a railway platform with a train approaching it, but people filling this train and, through them, the whole country. The metaphors “blue” and “yellow,” personifying the upper class and its indifferent attitude to the fate of the country, are antonymous to the word “green,” and the verb “were silent” takes on the opposite meaning of the verbs “crying and singing.” In the first and second class carriages (“yellow” and “blue”) the passengers were complacently silent, but in the “green” carriages they cried and sang (I recall Nekrasov’s “this groan is called a song”). However, reducing the problems of the poem only to issues of social injustice in Russian society would be wrong. The title itself, “On the Railroad,” can be considered significant in this regard. The image of a road, a path in Blok’s poetics is a symbol of movement and development. It is metaphorically connected in general with the fate of Russia and appears more than once in Blok’s lyrics. An example is the poem “Autumn Will” (1905), where the image of the path is not only the center of the pictorial system, but also the basis of the plot line (“I am entering a path open to the eyes...”; “Who lured me onto a familiar path, / He grinned at me through the prison window / Or was he drawn by the stone path / A beggar singing psalms?”).
The theme of death on the way appears from the first lines of the poem:
Under the embankment, in the unmown ditch,
Lies and looks as if alive...
Death is not mentioned, but the phrase “as if alive” makes everything clear. The contrast of the tragedy that happened is the description of the living beauty of the already dead girl:
In a colored scarf thrown on her braids,
Beautiful and young
In Blok's early poems there was a similar theme - premature death, the murder of beauty and youth. In the poem “From the Newspapers” (1903), a woman also decides to commit suicide by lying down on the rails, since only death can illuminate the soul with radiance, since the heroine cannot even provide children with a prosperous life, despite all her efforts:
It doesn't hurt mommy, pink babies.
Mommy herself lay down on the rails.
To a kind person, a fat neighbor,
Thank you, thank you. Mom couldn't.
Thus, the theme of the path takes on the symbolic meaning of the outcome.
Parallels are easily restored with Nekrasov’s poem “The Railway” (1864), where the railway becomes a symbol of the severe oppression experienced by the Russian people. One of the central ideas here and there is the idea of inequality among representatives of different classes, because of which some use the results of the labor of others, not noticing the pain and suffering around them. Later, Yesenin in his works will use the image of a steam locomotive as the personification of the new Iron Age of a soulless civilization, which also brings suffering. The epithet “iron” contextually denotes cruelty and mercilessness. It receives an expressive connotation of inevitability, the train in the heroine’s view is “three bright eyes rushing”, “noise and whistle behind the nearby forest”. These images reveal the essence of life in the Scary World as a merciless path; it is no coincidence that the appearance of the train is accompanied by twilight.
At the same time, the road acts as a sign of hope, possible joy and happiness:
Sometimes I walked with a sedate gait
To the noise and whistle behind the nearby forest.
Walking all the way around the long platform,
She waited, worried, under the canopy.
Thus the useless youth rushed,
Exhausted in empty dreams...
Road melancholy, iron
She whistled, breaking my heart...
The images of the path of life and the railway are as close as possible: the heroine’s youth “rushed”, and “the melancholy of the road, an iron whistle.” Literally every word can be attributed not only to the description of the girl’s fate, but also to the description of the train. The image of the railway develops into a symbol of the railway, unknown but inevitable. In order to strengthen this impression, the author uses the compositional technique of reverse narration, when a tragic denouement precedes the narration. Of course, such an ending immediately determines the emotional tone of the retrospective description of the action. It is also important that the category of present tense is present only in the first and last stanzas, as if framing the story of what happened.