Balmont years of life and death. Konstantin Balmont ~ biography, photo, personal life, best poems

June 3, 1867 in the Shuisky district, in the Vladimir region, Konstantin Balmont was born into a noble family. The poet's mother had a great influence on the future poet.

Balmont was brought up on the Russian classics, Reading was a favorite pastime. In 1876, Konstantin entered the Shuya gymnasium, but he was expelled from the gymnasium for illegal activities. The boy barely graduated from the Vladimir gymnasium.

Since 1886, Balmont has been studying at Moscow University at the Faculty of Law. But a year later he was noticed in the unrest of students, spent several days in Butyrka prison, and then was exiled to Shuya. There was another unsuccessful attempt to continue his studies at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum, after Balmont was engaged only in self-education.

A nervous breakdown, lack of money, a quarrel with his mother over a spontaneous marriage and other troubles seemed unbearable. Konstantin had a suicide attempt. Having jumped from the third floor to the pavement, he remained alive, but spent a whole year literally chained to a bed.

In the same year, the first book of the poet was published. The Collection of Poems drew much criticism and disapproval from his close comrades. Balmont bought up and destroyed almost the entire print run of the book.

Rethinking his life, Balmont decides for himself that his vocation is poetry. He reads a lot, literally “swallows” entire libraries of Russian and foreign literature, studies languages, and translates. In 1894, a collection of poems "Under the northern sky" was published.

In 1897 the poet lectured at Oxford. Balmont travels a lot with E. A. Andreeva, with whom he married. The impressions received on trips to European countries are reflected in his work. One after another, books with his works appear.

The beginning of the twentieth century is marked as the time of the highest popularity of Balmont. His influence on young poets can hardly be overestimated. People admire the poet, buy up his books, criticize, argue, imitate his style.

In 1905 Constantine visits the USA and Mexico. After a short stay in his homeland, the poet lives for seven years in Paris. In 1912, Balmont travels around the world and only in 1913 does he finally find himself back in Russia. The poet perceives the February Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the tsar enthusiastically, but rejects the October Revolution. In 1921, Balmont and his family leave Russia forever.

They live in France. The poet yearns for Russia all the years of emigration.

Konstantin Balmont died at the end of 1942 on December 24 in Paris. The Russian symbolist poet was buried in Nauzy-le-Grand, a suburb of Paris.

Life and art

Early life and education

Konstantin Balmont, Russian poet and writer, originally from the small village of Gumnishchi, which was located in the Vladimir province. Having been born on June 15, 1867, he lived with his family in his native village until the age of 10. The boy's parents were highly educated and intelligent. From early childhood, they tried to instill in their children a love of knowledge. Konstantin's father, Dmitry Konstantinovich, received a law degree in his youth. He first worked as a judge, but after moving to Shuya, he began to act as head of the zemstvo council.

The children began to study at the gymnasium. Here, young Balmont felt a craving for literature and art. His mother, Vera Nikolaevna, played a big role in this. Kostya did not have a special zeal for gaining knowledge and studied mediocrely. He devoted all his free time to reading and studying new trends in poetry and literature. The young man was expelled from the gymnasium for participating in revolutionary circles. To continue his studies, he had to move to Vladimir, where he studied until 1886. After the final exams, he dropped the documents to Moscow State University, where he could study for only a year. On charges of organizing unrest among the student masses, the revolutionary was expelled from the student community and registered with the police station.

creative way

Konstantin composed his first works at the age of ten. However, my mother was critical of the poems, and the teenager abandoned attempts to create something worthwhile for several years. Konstantin received faith in his own strength at the age of 18, after a successful publication in the St. Petersburg literary almanac "Picturesque Review". Upon reaching the age of 20, Balmont discovered his abilities in learning foreign languages. For several years he translated many works of the poetic genre, but after an unsuccessful marriage and a suicide attempt, he was bedridden for a long time. During the year, the poet composed enough poems to combine them into a separate collection. They did not arouse public interest, and the author sent the entire circulation to the scrap.

In order not to succumb to extensive depression, the novice writer reads a lot and studies foreign languages. He managed to translate several serious historical studies. At the end of the 90s of the nineteenth century, the peak of Balmont's creative flowering falls. He publishes several collections of his poems, which have already had considerable success. Having received public recognition, the poet marries a second time and goes on a tour of Europe with his wife.

Konstantin returned to his homeland already a recognized poet. At the beginning of the 20th century, he set about creating a fourth book of poetry. She saw the light in 1903 and received the name "Let's be like the sun." This work became a cult and brought the author a huge success. Since 1905, Konstantin Dmitrievich began to travel around the world, first in Mexico, and then in America.

Since 1920, due to the deteriorating health of his wife and daughter, the famous poet settled with them in France. In Paris, Balmont published several collections of poems and autobiographical works. He died on December 23, 1942 in the picturesque town of Noisy-le-Grand, located near Paris.

Konstantin Balmont is a Russian poet, translator, prose writer, critic, and essayist. A bright representative of the Silver Age. He published 35 collections of poetry, 20 books of prose. He translated a large number of works by foreign writers. Konstantin Dmitrievich is the author of literary studies, philological treatises, and critical essays. His poems "Snowflake", "Reeds", "Autumn", "By Winter", "Fairy" and many others are included in the school curriculum.

Childhood and youth

Konstantin Balmont was born and lived until the age of 10 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, in a poor but noble family. His father, Dmitry Konstantinovich, first worked as a judge, later took the post of head of the zemstvo council. Mother Vera Nikolaevna was from a family where they loved and were fond of literature. The woman arranged literary evenings, staged performances and published in the local newspaper.

Vera Nikolaevna knew several foreign languages, and she was characterized by a share of "free-thinking", "unwanted" people often visited their house. Later, he wrote that his mother not only instilled in him a love of literature, but from her he inherited his "mental structure." In the family, in addition to Konstantin, there were seven sons. He was third. Watching his mother teach his older brothers to read and write, the boy taught himself to read at the age of 5.

The family lived in a house that stood on the banks of the river, surrounded by gardens. Therefore, when the time came to send the children to school, they moved to Shuya. Thus, they had to break away from nature. The boy wrote his first poems at the age of 10. But his mother did not approve of these undertakings, and he did not write anything for the next 6 years.

In 1876, Balmont was enrolled in the Shuya gymnasium. At first, Kostya proved himself to be a diligent student, but soon he got bored with all this. He became interested in reading, while he read some books in German and French in the original. He was expelled from the gymnasium for poor teaching and revolutionary sentiments. Even then, he was in an illegal circle that distributed leaflets from the People's Will party.

Konstantin moved to Vladimir and studied there until 1886. While still studying at the gymnasium, his poems were published in the capital's magazine "Picturesque Review", but this event went unnoticed. After he entered the Moscow University at the Faculty of Law. But even here he did not stay long.

He became close to Pyotr Nikolayev, who was a sixties revolutionary. Therefore, it is not surprising that after 2 years he was expelled for participating in student disorder. Immediately after this incident, he was expelled from Moscow to Shuya.

In 1889, Balmont decided to recover at the university, but due to a nervous breakdown, he again could not finish his studies. The same fate befell him at the Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, where he entered later. After this attempt, he decided to leave the idea of getting a "state" education.

Literature

Balmont wrote his first collection of poems when he was bedridden after an unsuccessful suicide. The book was published in Yaroslavl in 1890, but later the poet himself personally destroyed the main part of the circulation.

Nevertheless, the collection "Under the Northern Sky" is considered the starting point in the poet's work. He was greeted with admiration by the public, as were his subsequent works - "In the vastness of darkness" and "Silence". He was willingly published in modern magazines, Balmont became popular, he was considered the most promising of the "decadents".

In the mid-1890s, he begins to communicate closely with,. Soon Balmont became the most popular symbolist poet in Russia. In poetry, he admires the phenomena of the world, and in some collections he openly touches on “demonic” topics. This can be seen in "Evil Charms", the circulation of which was confiscated by the authorities for reasons of censorship.

Balmont travels a lot, so his work is permeated with images of exotic countries and multiculturalism. It attracts and delights readers. The poet adheres to spontaneous improvisation - he never made changes to the texts, he believed that the first creative impulse was the most correct.

Contemporaries highly appreciated "Fairy Tales", written by Balmont in 1905. The poet dedicated this collection of fairy-tale songs to his daughter Nina.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was a revolutionary in spirit and in life. Expulsion from the gymnasium and the university did not stop the poet. Once he publicly read the verse "Little Sultan", in which everyone saw a parallel with. For this, he was expelled from St. Petersburg and banned from living in university cities for 2 years.

He was an opponent of tsarism, so his participation in the First Russian Revolution was expected. At that time, he became friends with and wrote poems that looked more like rhymed leaflets.

During the December Moscow uprising of 1905, Balmont speaks to students. But, fearing arrest, he was forced to leave Russia. From 1906 to 1913 he lived in France as a political emigrant. Being in a kind of exile, he continues to write, but critics increasingly began to talk about the decline of Balmont's work. In his latest works, they noticed a certain stereotyped and self-repeating.

The poet himself considered his best book to be “Burning Buildings. Lyrics of the modern soul. If before this collection his lyrics were filled with longing and melancholy, then “Burning Buildings” opened Balmont from the other side - “sunny” and cheerful notes appeared in his work.

Returning to Russia in 1913, he published a 10-volume complete set of works. He works on translations and lectures around the country. Balmont received the February Revolution enthusiastically, as did the entire Russian intelligentsia. But soon he was horrified by the anarchy that was happening in the country.

When the October Revolution began, he was in St. Petersburg, according to him, it was a "hurricane of madness" and "chaos." In 1920, the poet moved to Moscow, but soon, due to the poor health of his wife and daughter, he moved with them to France. He never returned to Russia.

In 1923, Balmont published two autobiographies - "Under the New Sickle" and "Air Route". Until the first half of the 1930s, he traveled all over Europe, his performances were a success with the public. But he no longer enjoyed recognition among the Russian diaspora.

The sunset of his work came in 1937, when he published his last collection of poems, Light Service.

Personal life

In 1889, Konstantin Balmont married the daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk merchant, Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina. Their mother introduced them, but when he announced his intention to marry, she spoke out against this marriage. Konstantin showed his inflexibility and even went to break with his family for the sake of his beloved.

Konstantin Balmont and his first wife Larisa Garelina

As it turned out, his young wife was prone to unjustified jealousy. They always quarreled, the woman did not support him either in literary or revolutionary endeavors. Some researchers note that it was she who addicted Balmont to wine.

On March 13, 1890, the poet decided to commit suicide - he threw himself onto the pavement from the third floor of his own apartment. But the attempt failed - he lay in bed for a year, and from his injuries he remained lame for the rest of his life.

In marriage with Larisa, they had two children. Their first child died in infancy, the second - son Nikolai - was ill with a nervous breakdown. As a result, Konstantin and Larisa separated, she married a journalist and writer Engelhardt.

In 1896 Balmont married a second time. His wife was Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva. The girl was from a wealthy family - smart, educated and beautiful. Immediately after the wedding, the lovers left for France. In 1901 their daughter Nina was born. In many ways, they were united by literary activity, together they worked on translations.

Konstantin Balmont and his third wife Elena Tsvetkovskaya

Ekaterina Alekseevna was not an imperious person, but she dictated the lifestyle of the spouses. And everything would have been fine if Balmont had not met Elena Konstantinovna Tsvetkovskaya in Paris. The girl was fascinated by the poet, looked at him as if at a god. From now on, he lived with his family, then for a couple of months he went on trips abroad with Catherine.

His family life was completely confused when Tsvetkovskaya gave birth to a daughter, Mirra. This event finally tied Konstantin to Elena, but at the same time he did not want to part with Andreeva. Mental torment again led Balmont to suicide. He jumped out of the window, but, like last time, survived.

As a result, he began to live in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra, and occasionally visited Moscow to Andreeva and his daughter Nina. They later immigrated to France. There Balmont began to meet with Dagmar Shakhovskaya. He did not leave the family, but met with the woman regularly, writing letters to her daily. As a result, she bore him two children - a son, Georges, and a daughter, Svetlana.

But in the most difficult years of his life, Tsvetkovskaya was still next to him. She was so devoted to him that she did not even live a year after his death, she left after him.

Death

After moving to France, he yearned for Russia. But his health was deteriorating, there were financial problems, so there was no question of returning. He lived in a cheap apartment with a broken window.

In 1937, the poet was diagnosed with a mental illness. From that moment on, he no longer wrote poetry.

On December 23, 1942, he died in the Russian House shelter, not far from Paris, in Noisy-le-Grand. The cause of his death was pneumonia. The poet died in poverty and oblivion.

Bibliography

1894 - "Under the northern sky (elegies, stanzas, sonnets)"
1895 - "In the vastness of darkness"
1898 - Silence. Lyric poems»
1900 - “Burning buildings. Lyrics of the Modern Soul"
1903 - “We will be like the sun. Book of Symbols»
1903 - “Only love. Semitsvetnik"
1905 - “The Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns»
1905 - "Fairy Tales (Children's Songs)"
1906 - "Evil Spells (Book of Spells)"
1906 - "Poems"
1907 - "Songs of the Avenger"
1908 - "Birds in the Air (Chanting Lines)"
1909 - "Green garden (Kissing words)"
1917 - "Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and the Moon"
1920 - "Ring"
1920 - "Seven Poems"
1922 - "Song of the working hammer"
1929 - "In the parted distance (Poem about Russia)"
1930 - "Complicity of Souls"
1937 - Light Service

Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942) is a remarkable symbolist poet, one of the brightest representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age. Author of a number of philological treatises, critical essays and historical and literary studies. Balmont is a talented translator who adapted works written in many languages into Russian. From the end of the 90s of the 19th century, he literally reigned in Russian poetry, for which he received the nickname "the sun king of Russian lyrics."

Childhood and youth

Konstantin Balmont was born on June 15, 1867 in the small village of Gumnishchi, Vladimir province, where the parents' estate was located. His father was a landowner and first worked as a magistrate, after which he moved to serve in the Zemstvo council. Mother, Vera Nikolaevna, was well educated and from early childhood carried her son into the boundless world of literary creativity.

When the boy was 10 years old, the family moved to the city of Shuya. Here Konstantin was determined to study at the local gymnasium, but in the 7th grade he was expelled for participating in the activities of the revolutionary circle. Therefore, he had to finish his studies at the Vladimir gymnasium. In 1886, Balmont began his studies at Moscow University, but it did not work out here either. A year later, for anti-government work in student circles, he was expelled and sent into exile in Shuya.

Balmont never received a higher education, although he was reinstated at the university. Due to severe nervous exhaustion, he left the walls of the alma mater. It was not possible to complete his studies at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum, where the poet also entered. But thanks to his diligence and diligence, he became one of the most erudite representatives of his generation, having learned about 15 languages and being well versed in chemistry, history, and ethnography.

Poetic path

In 1890, Balmont's first book, A Collection of Poems, was published in Yaroslavl. The opuses of this time have a clear imprint of late populism with its sadness and melancholy, belittling almost every poem. The author bought out almost the entire small edition and destroyed it with his own hands.

At first, Konstantin did not stand out much against the background of many other masters of the poetic word. The situation begins to change after the publication of two collections of poems "Under the Northern Sky" (1894) and "In the Vastness" (1895), in which the formation of his mastery was already traced. Acquaintance with V. Bryusov helped to see his place in poetry and greatly strengthened his self-confidence. In 1898, the collection "Silence" appeared, leaving no doubt about the greatness of its author.

At the beginning of the new century, the flowering of Balmont's creativity begins. In 1900, the collection Burning Buildings was published, in the preface to which the poet says: "In this book, I speak not only for myself, but also for others who are silent". In 1902, Konstantin Dmitrievich was forced to go abroad for reading the anti-government poem "The Little Sultan". He will visit many countries of the Old World, the USA and Mexico, and will return to Russia only in 1905. It was during this period that one of the best collections "Only Love" and "Let's Be Like the Sun" (1903) came out from under his pen. The last A. Blok will call one of the greatest creations of symbolism. The poet himself did not deny this, writing in one of his autobiographies: "I am convinced that before me in Russia they did not know how to write sonorous poetry".

The first Russian revolution echoed in the heart of Balmont with a series of poems that fell into the poetry collections "Poems" (1906) and "Songs of the Avenger" (1907). Not wanting to incur a negative reaction from the tsarist government, he emigrates to France, where he will live until 1913. Thus, the poet withdrew himself from the fierce dispute of the Symbolists, which was taking place at that time in the country. But he, as always, is fruitful, writes a lot and easily, having published three collections in 1908-1909: "Dance of Times", "Birds in the Air" and "Green Heliport".

By the time he returned to Russia, Konstantin Dmitrievich was already known as the author of a series of articles filled with criticism that received a great response - "Mountain Peaks" (1904), "White Lightning" (1908) and "Sea Glow" (1910).

Balmont accepted the fall of tsarist power, but the events of the Civil War frightened him greatly and, using the patronage of the People's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, he managed to go abroad. At first, the poet considered this departure as temporary, but the trip turned out to be a long emigration.

Life in exile

In the first decade of his life abroad, Balmont is quite fruitful. Many magnificent collections come out from under his pen - "My-her. Poems about Russia" (1923), Gift of the Earth "(1921)," In the parted distance "(1929). At this time, the autobiographical prose "Under the new sickle" and the book of memoirs "Where is my home?" appeared.

With the beginning of the 30s, the Balmont family fully felt poverty. From time to time, funds received from aid funds for Russian writers did not save the situation. The situation worsened after the poet was diagnosed with a severe mental illness. Since 1935, he alternately lives in a charity house, then in a cheap rented apartment. In rare moments of insight, he tried to reread "War and Peace" and his old works. The Russian poet died in a Russian orphanage in Paris on December 23, 1942.

Innovative poet

Konstantin Balmont is deservedly considered one of the outstanding representatives of symbolism, personifying his impressionist direction. His poetry is distinguished by extraordinary musicality and brilliance. For him, beauty was associated with a formidable element that appears before us either angelically pure and bright, or demonically dark and terrible. But whatever the element, it always remains free, irrational and alive, completely beyond the control of the human mind.

Balmont managed to define his own "I" deeper than others in the rich world of reincarnations, which was unusually far from reality. He does not try to tell about this world. Instead, he shares his personal impressions and moods with the reader, trying to reverse reality with his subjective world. Balmont was characterized by deep democratism, manifested in a sensitive and reasonable reaction to the political and social events of the era.

O. Mandelstam once very accurately described Balmont's poetry as "foreign representation from a non-existent phonetic power."

Personal life

With his first wife, Larisa Garelina, the daughter of an Ivanovo-Voznesensk manufacturer, he met in 1888 at the theater, where she performed on the amateur stage. Even before the wedding, the poet's mother was categorically against marriage and turned out to be right. There was no happy family life. The wife's passion for alcohol, the death of the first child and the serious illness of the second, as well as chronic poverty, made the life of the poet impossible. He even tried to commit suicide, but failed to complete the plan. Subsequently, this episode will find expression in a series of works "The White Bride", "Scream in the Night" and some others.

After a divorce from Garelina, the poetess Mirra Lokhvitskaya became Balmont's new muse. At the time of the meeting, she was married and had five children. The close relationship of poets arose on the basis of common ideas about literature. However, an early death due to a serious illness interrupted the novel. In honor of his beloved, Balmont will release one of the best collections, "We'll Be Like the Sun," and in memory of her, she will name her daughter from her new common-law wife, Elena Tsvetkovskaya, Mirra. The poet later writes: "The bright years of my feelings for her ... are clearly reflected in my work".

The second official wife of Konstantin Dmitrievich was Ekaterina Andreeva-Balmont, whose parents were prominent merchants. She, like her husband, was a writer. Together with Balmont, they were engaged in translations, in particular, adapting the works of G. Hauptmann and O. Nansen for the Russian language. In 1901, the couple will have a daughter, Nika, in honor of which her father will write a collection of poems "Fairy Tales". Another passion in the foreign period will be Dagmar Shakhovskaya, to whom the poet will dedicate 858 love letters filled with tender feelings. However, it is not she who will spend the last years of her life with the slowly fading poet, but the common-law wife Ekaterina Tsvetkovskaya.

Creativity Balmont(1867-1942)

Childhood and youth of Balmont
The beginning of Balmont's work
Balmont's poetry at the beginning of the 20th century
The image of beauty in the lyrics of Balmont
Balmont and the Revolution of 1905
Nature in the lyrics of Balmont
Features of Balmont's poetry
Balmont as a translator
Balmont and the October Revolution
Balmont in exile
Prose of Balmont
The last years of Balmont's life

In the constellation of poetic talents of the Silver Age, one of the first places belongs to K. D. Balmont. V. Bryusov wrote back in 1912: “There was no equal to Balmont in the art of verse in Russian literature ... where others saw a limit, Balmont discovered infinity.”

However, the fate of the creative heritage of this poet was not easy. For decades in our country he was not republished, and in solid literary works and textbooks he was invariably certified as a decadent. And only the collections of his selected poems that have appeared in recent years are rediscovering to the modern reader a subtle and deep lyricist, a magician of verse, who had a unique sense of word and rhythm.

Throughout almost the entire life of Balmont, various kinds of legends, myths and conjectures arose around his name. The poet himself was also involved in the appearance of some of them. One of these myths is related to his genealogy.

1. Childhood and youth of Balmont.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was born on June 4 (16), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, into a poor noble family. The poet himself named people from Scotland and Lithuania among his ancestors. In fact, as archival documents testify, the roots of his genealogical tree are primordially Russian. His great-great-grandfather by the name of Balamut was at the time of Catherine the 11th a sergeant of one of the Life Hussar regiments, his great-grandfather was a Kherson landowner.

For the first time, the grandfather of the future poet Konstantin Ivanovich, later a naval officer, began to bear the surname Balmont. When he was enlisted as a boy for military service, the surname Balamut, dissonant for a nobleman, was changed to Balmont. The poet himself pronounced his surname emphatically in the French manner, that is, with an emphasis on the last syllable. However, at the end of his life, he reported: “Father pronounced our last name - Balmont, I began to pronounce it because of the whim of one woman - Balmont. That's right, I think, the first ”(letter to V.V. Obolyaninov dated June 30, 1937).

In childhood, Balmont was greatly influenced by his mother, a well-educated woman. It was she who introduced him, according to his confession, into "the world of music, literature, history, linguistics." Reading became the boy's favorite pastime. He was brought up on the works of Russian classics. “The first poets I read,” he reported in his autobiography, “were folk songs, Nikitin, Koltsov, Nekrasov and Pushkin. Of all the poems in the world, I love Lermontov's "Mountain Peaks" the most.

After graduating from the Vladimir Gymnasium, Balmont entered the law faculty of Moscow University, but he only had to study there for a year: in 1887 he was expelled for participating in student unrest and exiled to Shuya. An attempt to continue his studies at the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum was also unsuccessful. In order to gain systematic knowledge, Balmont is engaged in self-education for a long time and persistently, especially in the field of literature, history and linguistics, having perfectly studied 16 foreign languages.

Thanks to tireless work, a thirst for knowledge and great curiosity, Balmont became one of the educated people of his time. It is no coincidence that already in 1897 he was invited to England, where he lectured on Russian poetry at the famous Oxford University.

A painful episode in the life of Balmont was his marriage to L. Gorelina. About the difficult and internally tense relationship with this woman, who drove her husband to a frenzy with jealousy, Balmont will tell later in the stories "The White Bride" and "March 13". The day indicated in the title of the last work was the date of a failed suicide attempt: on March 13, 1890, K. Balmont threw himself out of the window of the third floor of the hotel and was taken to the hospital with many fractures. The year spent in a hospital bed did not pass without a trace for the future poet: Balmont felt the value of life, and all his subsequent work would be imbued with this mood.

2. The beginning of Balmont's work.

Balmont began to write in his high school years. Acquaintance with V. G. Korolenko, and then with V. Bryusov, joining the group of senior symbolists, unusually activated his creative energy. Collections of his poems are published one after another. (In total, the poet wrote 35 books of poetry). The name of Balmont becomes famous, his books are readily published and sold out.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Balmont was a recognized poet, about whose work much is written and argued, from whom younger contemporaries learn the skill. A. Blok and A. Bely considered him one of their teachers. And not by chance. The ability to generously and simply enjoy life, to speak vividly, unbanal, elegantly and beautifully about what he experienced and saw, which is characteristic of Balmont’s best poems, created for him enormous, truly all-Russian fame in the first decade of the 20th century. “The thoughts of everyone who really loved poetry were seized by Balmont and made everyone fall in love with his sonorous and melodious verse,” testified the same V. Bryusov.

The talent of the young poet was also noticed by such a strict connoisseur of beauty as A.P. Chekhov was. In 1902, he wrote to Balmont: “You know, I love your talent, and each of your books gives me a lot of pleasure and excitement”3.

The circle of Balmont's lyrical experiences is wide and changeable. In the poems of the early collections “Under the Northern Sky” (1894), “In the Boundlessness” (1895), “Silence” (1898), a contemplative mood prevails, a departure into the world of Beauty in itself: “Far from the restless and hazy land / / Within the bottomless mute purity / / I built a castle airy radiant / / Airy radiant Palace of Beauty. The general tone of subsequent books changes and becomes life-affirming, capacious in content and meaning.

Among the symbolists, Balmont had his own position associated with a broader understanding of the symbol, which, in addition to a specific meaning, has a hidden content, expressed through hints, mood, and musical sound. Of all the symbolists, he most consistently developed impressionism - the poetry of impressions.

Balmont outlined his creative program in the preface to the book of poems translated by him by E. Poe and in the collection of critical articles “Mountain Peaks”: him with the most tender threads.

The task of the poet, Balmont argued, is to penetrate the secret meaning of phenomena with the help of hints, omissions, associations, to create a special mood through the widespread use of sound writing, to recreate the flow of instant impressions and thoughts.

At the turn of the century, the themes changed and new forms were sought not only in literature, but also in art in general. I. Repin believed that the basic principle of new poetry is "the manifestation of individual sensations of the human soul, sensations sometimes so strange, subtle and deep that only a poet dreams of."

The next collection of Balmont's poems, Burning Buildings, published in 1900, can serve as an excellent illustration of these words. In it, the poet reveals the souls of people of different eras and nationalities: temperamental Spaniards (“Like a Spaniard”), courageous, warlike Scythians (“Scythians”), Galician Prince Dmitry Krasny (“Death of Dmitry Red”), Tsar Ivan the Terrible and his guardsmen (“ Oprichniki"), Lermontov ("To Lermontov"), tells the story of a mysterious and unpredictable female soul ("Jane Valmore's Castle").

Explaining the idea of his collection, the author wrote: “This book is not in vain called the lyrics of the modern soul. Never creating in my soul an artificial love for what is now modernity and what has been repeated many times in other forms, I have never closed my ears to the voices that sound from the past and the inevitable future ... In this book, I speak not only for myself, but and for many others."

Naturally, the central place in the gallery of images created by the poet is occupied by the image of a lyrical hero: sensitive, attentive, open to all the joys of the world, whose soul does not rest:

I want to break the blue

Calm dreams.

I want burning buildings

I want screaming storms! -

these lines from the poem "Dagger Words" determine the overall tone of the collection.

Considering its variability and diversity to be an indispensable quality of the human soul (“There is everything in the souls”), Balmont draws diverse manifestations of the human character. In his work, he paid tribute to individualism (“I hate humanity / / I run away from him in a hurry / / My only fatherland / / My desert soul”). However, this was nothing more than outrageous and, to a certain extent, a fleeting tribute to fashion, because all his work, with such rare exceptions, is imbued with ideas of kindness, attention to man and the world around him.

3. Balmont's poetry at the beginning of the 20th century.

In his best works, included in the collections “We will be like the sun” (1903), “Only love. Semitsvetnik" (1903), "Slav's pipe" (1907), "Kissing words" (1909), "Ash tree" (1916), "Sonnets of the sun, honey and moon" (1917) and others Balmont acted as an outstanding lyric poet. The diverse shades of nature recreated in his works, the ability to feel and capture "instants", musicality and melodiousness, whimsical impressionistic sketches give his poems subtle grace and depth.

The creativity of the mature Balmont is imbued and illuminated by the sublimely romantic dream of the Sun, Beauty, the greatness of the World. He seeks to oppose the soulless civilization of the "Iron Age" with a holistic, perfect and beautiful "sunny" beginning. Balmont made an attempt in his work to build a cosmogonic picture of the world, in the center of which, the supreme deity is the Sun, the source of light and joy of being. In the opening poem of Let's Be Like the Sun (1903), he writes:

I came to this world to see the Sun.

And if the day is gone

I will sing. I will sing about the sun.

At the hour of death!

These cheerful notes color the poetry of Balmont at the beginning of the 20th century. The theme of the Sun in its victory over Darkness runs through all his work. In a notebook of 1904, the poet notes: "Fire, Earth, Water and Air are the four royal elements with which my soul invariably lives in joyful and secret contact." Fire is Balmont's favorite element, which in his poetic consciousness is associated with the ideal of Beauty, Harmony and Creativity.

Another natural element - Water - is firmly connected with the mysterious power of love for a woman. Therefore, the lyrical hero of Balmont - "forever young, forever free" - is ready again and again, each time anew, to experience "her delight - ecstasy", recklessly surrender to "hops of passions". At the same time, his feeling is warmed by attention to his beloved, worship of her physical and spiritual beauty (“I will wait”, “Tenderest of all”, “In my garden”, “There is no day” that I do not think about you”, “Separated”, “ Katerina" and others). Only in one poem - "I want" (1902) - the poet paid tribute to eroticism.

Balmont's lyrics are hymns to the elements, earth and space, the life of nature, love and passion, a dream that draws forward, the creative self-assertion of a person. Generously using the colors of the impressionistic palette, he creates life-affirming, multicolored and polyphonic poetry. In it is a feast of sensations, a jubilant enjoyment of the richness of nature, a motley change of the subtlest perceptions and unsteady mental states.

The highest life value in Balmont's poetry is the moment of merging with the beauty of the world. The alternation of these beautiful moments is, according to the poet, the main content of the human personality. The lyrical hero of his poems is looking for consonances, internal connections with nature, he feels a spiritual need for unity with her:

I asked the free wind

What should I do to be young?

The playing wind answered me:

"Be airy, like the wind, like smoke!"

In contact with the uncomplicated beauty of nature, the lyrical hero is seized by a joyful harmonious calmness, he feels all the undivided fullness of life. The intoxication with happiness for him is a communion with eternity, for the immortality of man, the poet is convinced, lies in the immortality of the eternally living and always beautiful nature:

But, dear brother, and I, and you -

We are only dreams of Beauty

unfading flowers,

Endless gardens.

This lyric-philosophical meditation clearly reflects the meaning of the poet's perception of the world.

He likens a person to natural elements, changeable and powerful. The state of his soul, according to Balmont, is burning, a fire of passions and feelings, quick, often almost imperceptibly succeeding moments. The poetic world of Balmont is a world of the finest fleeting observations, childishly fragile “feelings”. In the program poem "I do not know wisdom ..." (1902), he states:

I do not know wisdom suitable for others, I put only transiences into verse. In every evanescence I see worlds Full of changing, iridescent play.

Transience is elevated by Balmont to a philosophical principle. The fullness of human existence is revealed in every moment of his life. To be able to catch this moment, to enjoy it, to appreciate life - this, according to Balmont, is the meaning of human existence, the wise “covenant of being”. So was the poet himself. “He lived in the moment and was content with it, not embarrassed by the motley change of moments, if only to express them more fully and more beautifully,” testifies the second wife of Balmont, E. A. Andreeva-Balmont.

His works expressed the eternal aspiration of a person to the future, the restlessness of the soul, the passionate search for truth, the craving for beauty, the "inexhaustibility of dreams":

Moments of tender beauty

I wove into a star dance.

But the inexhaustibility of dreams

Calling me - go ahead.

("The visiting round dance")

4. The image of beauty in the lyrics of Balmont.

One of the central images of Balmont is the image of Beauty. He sees beauty as the goal, the symbol, and the pathos of life. His lyrical hero is directed towards her with all his being and is sure of finding her:

We rush to the wonderful world

To unknown beauty.

The poeticization of the beauty and eternity of being has a sacred character in Balmont, due to his religious consciousness, faith in the Creator, who is present in every moment, in every manifestation of living life. In the poem “Prayer”, the lyrical hero, reflecting at the hour of sunset about who is in control of the development and movement of life, comes to the conclusion that the human personality is forever connected with the Creator:

One who is near and far

Before Whom is your whole life,

Just a rainbow of the stream, -

Only He is eternally - I am.

Like Pushkin and Lermontov, Balmont praises the Creator for the beauty and grandeur of the universe:

I love the chasms of the mountain mist, Where the hungry eagles scream... But the most precious thing in the world is the Joy of singing your praises, Merciful God.

Singing the beauty and unique moments of life, the poet calls to remember and love the Creator. In the poem "Bridge" he claims that nature is an eternal mediator between God and man, through it the Creator reveals His greatness and love.

5. Balmont and the revolution of 1905.

The civic moods of the time also penetrated Balmont's poetry. He warmly responded to the approaching revolution of 1905-1907, creating a number of popular poems: "The Little Sultan" (1906), "Frankly", "Land and Freedom", "To the Russian Worker" (1906) and others, in which he criticizes the authorities and expresses faith in the creative forces of the Russian proletariat (“Worker, only for you, / / Hope of all Russia”).

For public reading of the poem "Little Sultan" at a charity evening, the poet was forbidden to live in the capitals, metropolitan provinces and university cities for two years, and after the defeat of the revolution, persecution by the authorities forced him to leave Russia for several years, where he returned again only after the amnesty of 1913.

6. Nature in Balmont's lyrics.

However, social issues were not his element. Mature Balmont is predominantly a singer of the human soul, love and nature. Nature for him is as rich in shades of its states and charming with discreet beauty, as is the human soul:

There is a tired tenderness in Russian nature,

The silent pain of hidden sadness

Hopelessness of grief, silence,

immensity,

Cold heights, leaving distances, -

he writes in the poem "Verbalism" (1900).

The ability to vigilantly peer into the rich world of nature, to convey the diverse shades of its states and movements in close correlation with the inner world of the lyrical hero or heroine are characteristic of many of Balmont's poems: "Birch", "Autumn", "Butterfly", "Smear", "Seven-flower" , "Voice of sunset", "Cherkeshenka", "Pervozimie" and others.

In 1907, in the article “On Lyrics”, A. Blok wrote: “When you listen to Balmont, you always listen to spring.” It's right. With all the variety of themes and motives of his work, Balmont, par excellence, is a poet of spring, the awakening of nature and the human soul, a poet of the flowering of life, uplifting. These moods determined the special spirituality, impressionism, flowery and melodiousness of his verse.

7. Features of Balmont's poetry.

The problem of artistic skill is one of the important problems of Balmont's work. Understanding creative talent as a gift sent down from above ("among people you are a deity's governor"), he stands up for the writer's increased demands on himself. For him, this is an indispensable condition for the "survivability" of the poetic soul, a guarantee of its burning creativity and improvement of skill:

So that your dreams never shine,

So that your soul is always alive

Scatter gold on steel in melodies,

Pour the fire frozen into ringing words, -

Balmont addresses his fellow writers in the poem "Sin mideo". The poet, as the creator and singer of Beauty, should, according to Balmont, become like a luminary, "radiate reasonable, good, eternal." The work of Balmont himself is a vivid illustration of these requirements. “Poetry is inner music, outwardly expressed by measured speech,” Balmont believed. Giving an assessment of his own work, the poet, not without pride (and some narcissism), noted as one of his greatest merits filigree work on the word and musicality of the verse.

In the poem "I am the sophistication of Russian slow speech ..." (1901), he wrote:

I am the sophistication of Russian slow speech,

Before me are other poets - forerunners,

I first discovered in this speech deviations,

Perepevnye, angry, gentle ringing.

The musicality of Balmont's verse is given by the internal rhymes he willingly uses. For example, in the poem "Fantasy" (1893), internal rhymes hold the half-lines and the following line together:

Like living sculptures, in sparks of moonlight,

The outlines of pines, firs and birches tremble a little.

The opening poem, “In the Boundlessness” (1894), is built on the catches of the preceding half-verses and, in essence, also on internal rhymes:

I dreamed of catching the departing shadows,

The fading shadows of the fading day,

I climbed the tower, and the steps trembled,

And the steps trembled under my feet.

Internal rhymes were often found in Russian poetry in the first half of the 19th century. They are found in the ballads of Zhukovsky, in the poems of Pushkin and the poets of his galaxy. But by the end of the 19th century they had fallen into disuse, and Balmont deserves the merit of their actualization.

Along with internal rhymes, Balmont widely resorted to other forms of musicality - to assonances and alliterations, that is, to the consonance of vowels and consonants. For Russian poetry, this was also not a discovery, but, starting with Balmont, all this turned out to be the focus of attention. For example, the poem "Moisture" (1899) is entirely built on the internal consonance of the consonant "l":

The oar slipped from the boat

The coolness is gentle.

"Cute! My dear!" - light,

Sweet from a cursory glance.

The magic of sounds is the element of Balmont. He strove to create such poetry, which, without resorting to the means of subject-logical influence, like music, would reveal a certain state of the soul. And he did it brilliantly. Annensky, Blok, Bryusov, Bely, Shmelev, Gorky fell under the charm of his melodious verse more than once, not to mention the general readership.

Balmont's lyrics are very rich in colors. “Perhaps all nature is a mosaic of flowers,” the poet claimed and sought to show this in his work. His poem "Fata Morgana", consisting of 21 poems, is a song in praise of multicolor. Each poem is dedicated to some color or combination of colors.

Many of Balmont's works are characterized by synesthesia - a continuous image of color, smell and sound. The renewal of poetic speech in his work follows the path of merging verbal images with picturesque and musical ones. This is the genre specificity of his landscape lyrics, in which poetry, painting, and music are closely connected, reflecting the richness of the surrounding world and involving the reader in the color-sound and musical flow of impressions and experiences.

Balmont surprised his contemporaries with the courage and unexpectedness of metaphors. For him, for example, it cost nothing to say: “the scent of the sun”, “the sound of the flute is dawn, blue”. Balmont's metaphor, like that of other symbolists, was the main artistic device for transforming the phenomena of the world into a symbol. Balmont's poetic vocabulary is rich and original. He is distinguished by refinement and virtuosity of comparisons and especially epithets.

Balmont, who was not in vain called the "poet of adjectives", significantly increased the role of the epithet in Russian lyrics at the beginning of the 20th century. He injects many definitions to the word being defined (“Above the water, over the river without a word. Wordless, voiceless, languid ...”), reinforces the epithet with repetitions, internal rhyme (“If I were a ringing, brilliant, free wave ...”), resorts to compound epithets (“Colors are sadly rich”) and to neologism epithets.

These features of Balmont's poetics are also inherent in his poems for children, which made up the Fairy Tales cycle. They depict a lively and uniquely bright world of real and fantastic creatures: the good mistress of the natural kingdom of the fairy, mischievous mermaids, butterflies, wagtails, etc. blood related from birth.

Balmont's poems are bright and unique. He himself was just as bright and alive. In the memoirs of B. Zaitsev, I. Shmelev, M. Tsvetaeva, Yu. Terapiano, G. Grebenshchikov, the image of a spiritually rich, sensitive, easily wounded person with amazing psychological vigilance arises, for whom the concepts of honor and responsibility in the performance of his main life duty are serving art - were holy.

The role of Balmont in the history of Russian poetic culture can hardly be overestimated. He was not only a virtuoso of verse (“Paganini of Russian verse” was called by his contemporaries), but also a man of vast philological culture in general, of living universal knowledge.

8. Balmont as a translator.

He was one of the first Russian poets of the early 20th century who introduced the Russian reader to many wonderful works of world poetry. Russian symbolists considered translation activity an indispensable, almost obligatory part of their own poetic work. People of the highest education and broad literary interests, who spoke many foreign languages, they freely oriented themselves in the development of contemporary European literatures.

Poetic translation was a natural need for them, a phenomenon primarily creative. Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Annensky, Bely, Blok, Voloshin, Bunin and others were excellent translators. But even among them, Balmont stands out for his erudition and the scale of his poetic interests. Thanks to his translations, the Russian reader received a whole poetic library of the world. He willingly translated Byron, Shelley, Wilde, Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire, Calderon, Tumanyan, Rustaveli, Bulgarian, Polish and Spanish folk tales and songs, Mayan and Aztec folklore.

Balmont traveled a lot around the world and saw a lot. He made three trips around the world, visiting the most exotic, even by today's standards, countries and seeing many corners of the earth. The heart and soul of the poet were widely open to the world, his culture, and each new country left its own noticeable mark on his work.

That is why Balmont told the Russian reader about many things for the first time, generously sharing his findings with him. “Balmont knew many languages besides European ones,” his daughter N.K. Balmont-Bruni wrote in her memoirs, “and being captivated by some work, translating it into Russian, he could not be satisfied with European interlinear translations: he always enthusiastically studied something new for him language, trying as deeply as possible to penetrate into the secrets of his beauty.

9. Balmont and the October Revolution.

Balmont did not accept the October Revolution, regarding it as violence against the Russian people. Here is one stroke from ~ his memoirs, important for characterizing his personality: “When, due to some false denunciation, as if I were praising Denikin in poems published somewhere, they politely invited me to the Cheka and, among other things, the lady investigator asked me: What political party do you belong to? - I answered briefly - "Poet".

Hardly survived the years of the civil war, he petitions for a business trip abroad. In 1921, Balmont left his homeland forever. Having arrived in Paris and settled with his family in a modest apartment, the poet, drowning out acute nostalgic longing, works hard and hard. But all his thoughts and works are about Russia. He dedicates to this theme all the poetic collections published abroad “Gift to the Earth” (1921), “Mine - to her. Russia” (1923), “In the Parted Distance” (1929), “Northern Lights” (1931), “Blue Horseshoe” (1935), a book of essays “Where is my home?”, which is impossible to read without deep pain.

Glory of life. There are breakthroughs of evil,

Long pages of blindness.

But you can not renounce the native.

Shine on me, Russia, only you, -

he writes in the poem "Reconciliation" (1921).

10. Balmont in exile.

In the poems of his emigrant years, the poet recalls the beauty of Russian nature (“Night Rain”, “On Shooting”, “September”, “Taiga”), refers to the images of relatives and friends dear to his heart (“Mother”, “Father”), glorifies the native word, rich and colorful Russian speech:

Language, our magnificent language.

River and steppe expanse in it,

In it screams of an eagle and a wolf roar,

The chant, and the ringing, and the pilgrim's incense.

In it the cooing of a dove in the spring,

The rise of the lark to the sun - higher, higher.

Birch Grove. Light through.

Heavenly rain spilled on the roof.

The murmur of the underground key.

Spring ray playing on the door.

In it is the One who did not take the swing of the sword,

And seven swords in the seer's heart...

("Russian language")

All these works could be epigraphed with the words of the poet himself: "My mourning is not marked for months, it will last for many strange years." In 1933, in an article dedicated to I. Shmelev, he wrote: “With all our life, with all our thought, with all our creativity, with all our memories and with all our hope, we are in Russia, with Russia, wherever we are.”

An important place in Balmont's poetic work of these years is occupied by his poems dedicated to his fellow writers - emigrant writers Kuprin, Grebenshchikov, Shmelev - whom he greatly appreciated and with whom he was connected by ties of close friendship. In these works, not only an assessment of the writers' creativity is expressed, but the main theme constantly sounds, varying, either explicit or deeply hidden - longing for the Motherland. Here is one of the poems published for the first time about Shmelev, to whom he dedicated about 30 poetic messages, not counting the poetic fragments in the letters:

You filled your bins

They have rye, and barley, and wheat,

And native July darkness,

What lightning embroiders into brocade.

You filled your hearing spirit

Russian speech, drowsiness and mint,

You know exactly what the shepherd will say,

Joking with a thieving cow.

You know exactly what the blacksmith thinks,

Throwing your hammer to the anvil,

You know the power that the wolf has,

In the garden, which is not a canvas for a long time.

You drunk those words as a child

What is now in the stories - like ubrus,

Bogosvet, unfading grass,

Fresh buttercup yellow beads.

Together with the woodpecker, you are the wisdom of sciences

Preempted, accustomed stubbornly

Know that the right beat or sound

Associated with the sacraments of the Temple.

And when you laugh, oh brother

I admire your sly look,

Joking, you are immediately happy

Fly away for all-star glory.

And when, having exchanged longing,

We are a dream - in places unforgotten,

I'm with you - happy, different,

Where the wind in the willows remembers us.

("bins")

It has already become a tradition to consider the work of Balmont of the emigrant years as a gradual extinction. Fortunately, this is far from the case. Such Balmont’s poems of recent years as “Night Rain”, “River”, “Russian Language”, “First Winter”, “Bin”, “Winter Hour”, “Flying into Summer”, “Poems about Russia” and many others can be with good reason to call them masterpieces - they are so lyrical, musical, deep and perfect in content and artistic form.

These and other works of the late Balmont reveal to us new facets of his poetic talent. Many of them organically combine lyrics and epic, associated with the image of the life and life of old Russia.

The poet often introduces dialogue into his works, draws characteristic signs of everyday life, a lively colloquial folk speech abounding in dialectisms with its phraseological units, lexical "flaws" that convey the character, level of culture, mood of the speaker ("Poems about Russia", etc.).

For the first time in his work, Balmont appears as a tragic poet. His hero does not want to come to terms with the fate of an exile living “among soulless ghosts”, but speaks about his mental pain with restraint and at the same time confidentially, hoping for mutual understanding:

Who will shake the curtain of thunder,

Come, open my eyes.

I didn't die. No. I'm alive. longing,

Listening to the thunderstorm...

("Who?")

11. Balmont's prose.

K. Balmont is also the author of several prose books. In his prose, as in poetry, Balmont is par excellence a lyricist. He worked in various prose genres - he wrote dozens of stories, the novel "Under the New Sickle", acted as a critic, publicist, memoirist, but most fully expressed himself in the essay genre, which Balmont mastered even before the revolution.

During this period, 6 collections of his essays were published. The first of them - "Mountain Peaks" (1904) attracted, perhaps, the greatest attention of critics. A. Blok spoke of this book as "a series of bright, varied pictures woven together by the power of a very complete worldview." "Mountain Peaks" is not only an essay about Calderon, Hamlet, Blake, but also a significant step towards self-knowledge of Russian symbolism.

As a continuation of the "Mountain Peaks" are perceived four years later "White Lightnings" - essays about the "versatile and greedy soul of Goethe", about the "singer of personality and life" Walt Whitman, about "in love with pleasure and fading in sorrow" O. Wilde, about the poetics of folk beliefs.

A year later, "Sea Glow" was written - a book of reflections and impressionistic sketches - "singing fictions" that arose as instant subjective responses to the events of literature and life. Particular attention is paid here to Slavic culture, a topic to which Balmont would return in the 1920s and 1930s.

The next book - "Snake Flowers" (1910) - essays on the culture of ancient America, travel letters, translations. This was followed by a book of essays "The Land of Osiris", and a year later (1916) - "Poetry as Magic" - a small book about the meaning and image of verse, an excellent commentary on the poetic work of Balmont himself.

In France, Balmont also published the book "The Air Way", collecting stories previously published in periodicals and adding to them a few things written in exile. The second émigré collection, The Rustle of Horror, was never published. The pictorial side is strong in The Airway, especially in episodes where experiences are difficult to verbalize. This is the description of the mysterious "music of the spheres" heard by the hero of the "Moon Guest".

Balmont's prose is not psychological, but he finds his own lyrical way of conveying refined spiritual experience. All of the Airway stories are autobiographical. The book “Under the new sickle” is the same - the only novel in Balmont's work. The narrative element is subordinated to the pictorial element in it, but the novel is interesting with pictures of old Russia, provincial courtyard life, animated by lyrical intonations and a description of the fate of the boy “with a quiet disposition and a contemplative mind, colored with artistry.

As in the pre-revolutionary period, in emigration, the main genre of Balmont the prose writer was the essay. But now the theme of Balmont the essayist is fundamentally changing: he also writes about literature, but more about his everyday life, which is given significance by some ordinary incident, a flashing memory. Snow in Paris, the memory of a cold and hungry winter in the Moscow region in 1919, the anniversary of separation from Moscow, a comparison of a thunderstorm with a revolution - all this becomes the subject of an essay. Written in 1920-1923, they were collected by Balmont into the book "Where is my home?", which he would later call "essays on enslaved Russia."

The last book of prose published during Balmont's lifetime was The Complicity of Souls (Sofia, 1930). It brings together 18 short lyrical essays on contemporary and folklore poetry of the Slavs and Lithuania. The book includes Balmont's translations of poetry and prose from Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and other languages. Some of the essays are among the best in the legacy of Balmont the essayist.

12. The last years of Balmont's life.

In 1927, the poet moved from "His Gasoline Majesty the city of Paris" to the small village of Capbreton on the Atlantic coast. Lives hard, always in need.

But still, despite all the more frequent bouts of depression, he writes and translates a lot. Balmont constantly talks about his longing for his homeland, about his desire to at least look at it again from the corner of his eye: in poetry, at meetings with I. Shmelev, who came to Capbreton every summer to work, in letters. “I always want to go to Moscow. I think about the great joy of hearing the Russian language, that I am Russian, and not a citizen of the Universe, and least of all a citizen of an old, boring, gray Europe, ”he admits to E. Andreeva-Balmont

Balmont called his last book of poems Light Service (1937). In it, he, as it were, sums up the passionate worship of the Sun, Love, Beauty, "Poetry as magic."

1876 - admission to the preparatory class of the Shuya gymnasium.

1884 - expelled from the 7th grade of the gymnasium for belonging to an illegal circle. Transferred to the gymnasium of the city of Vladimir.

1885 - Literary debut. Three poems were published in the St. Petersburg magazine "Picturesque Review" (December).

1886 - graduation from the gymnasium and admission to the law faculty of Moscow University.

1887 - expelled from the university for participating in student riots, exiled to Shuya.

1887–1889 – deals with translations of German and French authors.

1890 - publishes the first "Collection of Poems" with his own money.

1892 - the first trip to St. Petersburg. Acquaintance with N.M. Minsky, D.S. Merezhkovsky, Z.N. Gippius.

1894 - the release of the collection "Under the northern sky".

1895 - the release of the collection "In the boundlessness".

1896 - a trip to Western Europe, where he spent several years. Visited France, Holland, Spain, Italy.

1897 - reads lectures on Russian poetry in England at Oxford.

1899 - Elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

1900 - the release of the collection "Burning Buildings".

1901 - expelled from St. Petersburg.

1902 - the fourth poetry collection "Let's be like the Sun" (1800 copies were sold in six months).

1903 - the release of the collection "Only Love. Semitsvetnik".

1904–1905 - A collection of poems is published in two volumes (publishing house "Scorpion").

1906–1913 - the first emigration.

1907 - the collection "The Firebird" is published (publishing house "Scorpion").

1913 - homecoming. After returning from exile, he especially often turns to the sonnet genre. From 1913 to 1920, the poet created 255 sonnets, which made up the collection "Sonnets of the Sun, Sky and Moon" (1917).

1920–1942 - second emigration.