Memory. Apollo Grigoriev. Apollon Grigoriev - Russian poet, literary critic and translator. Biography, creativity Apollon Grigoriev critic of the magazine time

Grigoriev Apollon Alexandrovich, poet, critic, was born on 20.VII (1.VIII) .1822 in Moscow in the family of an official.

Early showed a penchant for literature and theater, was fond of foreign languages. From 1838-42 he studied at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University, from which he graduated as the first candidate. He was left as a librarian, and then appointed secretary of the university board.

In the autumn of 1843, secretly from his parents, Apollon Alexandrovich left for St. Petersburg, fleeing "family dogmatism." Attempts to serve in the capital were also unsuccessful, and he forever leaves the idea of a career as an official.

In early 1847, Grigoriev returned to Moscow and soon married L. F. Korsh. He teaches jurisprudence at the Alexander Orphan's Institute and at the 1st Men's Gymnasium.

In 1857, Apollon Alexandrovich traveled abroad with the family of Prince Trubetskoy as a tutor to his son. Traveled to Italy, France and Germany.

At the end of 1858 he returned to his homeland, to St. Petersburg.

In May 1861, Grigoriev went to Orenburg, where he taught literature at the Neplyuevsky cadet corps.

In 1862 he returned to the capital again. An extremely unorganized lifestyle, frequent need undermined his powerful body early, and soon he died suddenly.

As a child, Apollon Alexandrovich began to write poetry.

In 1843, his first poems were published in the Moskvityanin magazine.

Grigoriev's literary activity began in St. Petersburg, where he actively collaborated in the theater magazine "Repertoire and Pantheon" and in the "Finnish Bulletin". Acts as a prose writer, poet, playwright, translator, theater reviewer. "With enthusiasm and passion" writes lyric poems, novels and stories

"Ophelia" (1846),

"One of many" (1846),

"Meeting" (1846) and others,

critical articles about the theatre, dramatic works.

The most significant of them is the poetic drama "Two Egoisms" ("Repertoire and Pantheon", 1845).

Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev (1822-64) - Russian literary and theater critic, poet. The creator of the so-called. organic criticism: articles about N. V. Gogol, A. N. Ostrovsky, A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, I. S. Turgenev, N. A. Nekrasov, A. A. Fet and others. .

According to the worldview, Apollon Grigoriev is a soil worker. In the center of Grigoriev's lyrics are the thoughts and sufferings of a romantic person: the cycle "Struggle" (published in full in 1857), including the verse-romances "Oh, talk to me at least .." and "Gypsy Hungarian", the cycle "Improvisations of a wandering romantic » (1860). Poem-confession "Up the Volga" (1862). Autobiographical prose.

Pushkin is our everything.

Apollon Grigoriev is one of the most prominent Russian critics. Born in 1822 in Moscow, where his father was secretary of the city magistrate. Having received a good home education, he graduated from Moscow University as the first candidate of the Faculty of Law and immediately received the position of Secretary of the University Board. Not such, however, was the nature of Grigoriev, to firmly settle anywhere. Having failed in love, he suddenly left for St. Petersburg, tried to get a job both in the Deanery Council and in the Senate, but, due to his completely artistic attitude to the service, he quickly lost it.

Around 1845, Apollon Grigoriev established relations with the Notes of the Fatherland, where he placed several poems, and with the Repertoire and the Pantheon. In the last journal, he wrote a number of little-than-remarkable articles in all sorts of literary genres: poems, critical articles, theatrical reports, translations, etc. In 1846, Grigoriev published his poems in a separate book, which were met with no more than condescending criticism. Subsequently, A. Grigoriev wrote a little original poetry, but translated a lot: from Shakespeare ("A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Merchant of Venice", "Romeo and Juliet"), from Byron ("Parisina", excerpts from "Childe Harold" etc.), Molière, Delavigne.

Art alone brings something new, organic into the world.

Grigoriev Apollon Alexandrovich

The lifestyle of Apollon Grigoriev during his entire stay in St. Petersburg was the most stormy, and the unfortunate Russian “weakness”, instilled by student revelry, more and more captured him. In 1847, he moved back to Moscow, became a law teacher at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium, actively collaborated in the Moscow City Listk and tried to settle down. Marriage to L.F. Korsh, the sister of famous writers, briefly made him a man of the right way of life.

In 1850, Apollon Grigoriev settled in the "Moskvityanin" and became the head of a wonderful circle, known as the "young edition of the Moskvityanin." Without any effort on the part of the representatives of the "old editors" - Pogodin and Shevyrev, somehow by itself around their magazine gathered, in the words of Grigoriev, "a young, courageous, drunk, but honest and brilliant with talents" friendly circle, which included: Ostrovsky, Pisemsky, Boris Almazov, Alexei Potekhin, Pechersky-Melnikov, Edelson, Lev Alexandrovich May, Nick. Berg, Gorbunov, and others. None of them was a Slavophil of the orthodox persuasion, but Moskvityanin attracted all of them by the fact that here they could freely substantiate their socio-political worldview on the foundation of Russian reality.

The soil is the depth of people's life, the mysterious side of the historical movement.

Grigoriev Apollon Alexandrovich

Grigoriev was the chief theoretician and standard-bearer of the circle. In the ensuing struggle with the St. Petersburg magazines, the weapons of the opponents were most often directed against him. This struggle was waged by Grigoriev on a principled basis, but he was usually answered on the basis of ridicule, both because Petersburg criticism, in the interval between Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, could not expose people capable of an ideological dispute, and because Grigoriev, with his exaggerations and strangeness himself gave rise to ridicule. He was especially scoffed at by the incongruous delights of Ostrovsky, who was for him not just a talented writer, but a “herald of the new truth” and whom he commented not only on articles, but also on poems, and, moreover, very bad ones - for example, “elegy - ode - satire": "Art and Truth" (1854), caused by the presentation of the comedy "Poverty is not a vice."

Lyubim Tortsov was in earnestly proclaimed here as a representative of the “pure Russian soul” and was reproached with “old Europe” and “toothless-young America, sick with dog-like old age.” Ten years later, Apollo himself recalled his trick with horror and found the only justification for it in the "sincerity of feeling." This kind of tactless and extremely harmful to the prestige of the ideas he defended, the antics of Grigoriev were one of the characteristic phenomena of his entire literary activity and one of the reasons for its low popularity.

By Orthodoxy I mean the elemental-historical principle, which is destined to live and give new forms of life.

Grigoriev Apollon Alexandrovich

And the more Grigoriev wrote, the more his unpopularity grew. It reached its apogee in the 1860s. With his most vague and confused arguments about the "organic" method, he was so out of place in the era of "seductive clarity" of tasks and aspirations that they stopped laughing at him, even stopped reading him. A great admirer of Grigoriev's talent and the editor of Vremya, Dostoevsky, who indignantly remarked that Grigoriev's articles were not directly cut, friendly suggested that he once sign a pseudonym and, at least in such a contraband way, draw attention to his articles. A. Grigoriev wrote in the "Moskvityanin" until its termination in 1856, after which he worked in the "Russian Conversation", "Library for Reading", the original "Russian Word", where for some time he was one of the three editors, in the "Russian World ”, “Svetoche”, “Son of the Fatherland” by Starchevsky, “Russian Herald” by Katkov, but he did not manage to settle down anywhere.

In 1861, the Dostoevsky brothers' Vremya appeared, and Grigoriev seemed to once again enter a solid literary marina. As in "Moskvityanin", a whole circle of "pochvennik" writers - Nikolai Strakhov, Dmitry Averkiev, Fyodor Dostoevsky and others - were grouped here, connected with each other both by common sympathies and antipathies, and by personal friendship. They all treated Grigoriev with sincere respect. Soon, however, he felt in this environment some kind of cold attitude towards his mystical broadcasts, and in the same year he left for Orenburg as a teacher of Russian language and literature in the cadet corps. Not without enthusiasm, Grigoriev set to work, but quickly cooled off, and a year later he returned to St. Petersburg and again began to live a hectic life of literary bohemia, up to and including sitting in a debtor's prison.

One art embodies in its creations what is unknown in the air of the era.

Grigoriev Apollon Alexandrovich

In 1863 "Time" was banned. Apollon Grigoriev migrated to the weekly "Anchor". He edited the newspaper and wrote theatrical reviews, which unexpectedly had great success, thanks to the extraordinary animation that Grigoriev brought to the reporter's routine and the dryness of theatrical marks. He analyzed the acting of actors with the same thoroughness and with the same passionate pathos with which he treated the phenomena of other arts. At the same time, in addition to his delicate taste, he showed great acquaintance with German and French theorists of stage art. In 1864 Vremya was resurrected in the form of the Epoch. Grigoriev again takes on the role of the "first critic", but not for long. The binge, which turned directly into a physical, painful illness, broke Grigoriev's mighty body: on September 25, 1864, he died and was buried at the Mitrofanevsky cemetery, next to the same victim of wine - the poet Mei.

Scattered in various and mostly unreadable journals, Grigoriev's articles were collected in 1876 by N.N. Insurance in one volume. If the publication was successful, it was supposed to release further volumes, but this intention has not yet been realized. Grigoriev's unpopularity among the general public thus continues. But in a close circle of people who are especially interested in literature, the importance of Grigoriev has increased significantly, in comparison with his downtroddenness during his lifetime. It is not easy to give any precise formulation of Grigoriev's critical views for many reasons. Clarity has never been part of Grigoriev's critical talent, and the extreme confusion and obscurity of his exposition did not scare the public away from his articles for nothing.

A certain idea of the main features of Grigoriev's worldview is also hindered by the complete indiscipline of thought in his articles. With the same carelessness with which he burned through his physical strength, he squandered his mental wealth, not giving himself the trouble to draw up an exact outline of the article, not having the strength to refrain from the temptation to talk at once about the questions encountered in passing. Due to the fact that a significant part of his articles are placed in Moskvityanin, Vremya and Epoch, where either he himself or his friends were at the head of the business, these articles are directly striking in their disorder and carelessness. He himself was well aware of the lyrical disorder of his writings, he himself once described them as "careless articles, written wide open", but he liked this as a guarantee of their complete "sincerity".

In all his literary life, Apollon Grigoriev did not intend to clarify his worldview in any definite way. It was so obscure even to his closest friends and admirers that his last article, The Paradoxes of Organic Criticism (1864), as usual, unfinished and dealing with a thousand things besides the main subject, is a response to Dostoevsky’s invitation to set out, finally, a critical profession de foi his.

Grigoriev himself more and more willingly called his criticism "organic", in contrast to both the camp of "theoreticians" - Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and "aesthetic" criticism, which defends the principle of "art for art's sake", and from criticism "historical" , by which he meant Belinsky. Belinsky Grigoriev put unusually high. He called him "an immortal fighter of ideas", "with a great and powerful spirit", "with a truly brilliant nature." But Belinsky saw in art only a reflection of life, and the very concept of life for him was too direct and "holological." According to Grigoriev, “life is something mysterious and inexhaustible, an abyss that absorbs every finite mind, an immense expanse in which the logical conclusion of any smart head often disappears, like a wave in the ocean - something even ironic and at the same time full of love. which produces from itself worlds after worlds”... Accordingly, “the organic view recognizes creative, direct, natural, vital forces as its starting point. In other words: not one mind, with its logical requirements and the theories generated by them, but the mind plus life and its organic manifestations.

However, Apollon Grigoriev strongly condemned the “serpentine position: what is - it is reasonable”. He recognized the mystical admiration of the Slavophils for the Russian folk spirit as “narrow” and only put Khomyakov high, and that because he “one of the Slavophiles combined the thirst for the ideal in an amazing way with faith in the limitlessness of life and therefore did not settle down on ideals” Konstantin Aksakov and others. In Victor Hugo's book on Shakespeare, Grigoriev saw one of the most complete formulations of the "organic" theory, whose followers he also considered Joseph Renin, Emerson and Carlyle. And the "original, huge ore" of organic theory, according to Grigoriev, is "Schelling's works in all phases of his development." Grigoriev proudly called himself a student of this "great teacher." From the admiration for the organic power of life in its various manifestations, Grigoriev’s conviction follows that the abstract, naked truth, in its pure form, is inaccessible to us, that we can only assimilate the colored truth, the expression of which can only be national art. Pushkin is by no means great by his size alone. artistic talent: it is great because it has transformed in itself a number of foreign influences into something completely independent. In Pushkin, for the first time, "our Russian physiognomy, the true measure of all our social, moral and artistic sympathies, a complete outline of the type of the Russian soul" was isolated and clearly identified. That is why Grigoriev dwelled with special love on Belkin's personality, which Belinsky hardly commented on, on The Captain's Daughter and Dubrovsky. With the same love he dwelled on Maxim Maksimych from "A Hero of Our Time" and with particular hatred - on Pechorin as one of those "predatory" types that are completely alien to the Russian spirit.

Art, by its very essence, is not only national - it is even local. Every talented writer is inevitably "the voice of a well-known soil, locality, which has a right in the life of the whole people, as a type, as a color, as an ebb, a shade." Reducing art in this way to almost unconscious creativity, Apollon Grigoriev did not even like to use the words: influence, as something too abstract and not very spontaneous, but introduced a new term "ventilation". Together with Tyutchev, Grigoriev exclaimed that nature “is not a cast, not a soulless face”, that directly and directly it has a soul, it has freedom, it has love, it has a language. True talents are embraced by these organic "trends" and echo them consonantly in their works. But since a truly talented writer is an elemental echo of organic forces, he must certainly reflect some still unknown side of the national-organic life of a given people, he must say a "new word." Therefore, Grigoriev considered each writer primarily in relation to whether he said "a new word." The most powerful "new word" in the latest Russian literature was said by Ostrovsky; he discovered a new, unknown world, to which he treated not negatively, but with deep love.

The true meaning of Grigoriev is in the beauty of his own spiritual personality, in a deeply sincere striving for a boundless and bright ideal. Stronger than all the confused and vague reasoning of Apollon Grigoriev is the charm of his moral being, which is a truly "organic" penetration by the best principles of the high and sublime.

Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev - quotes

Art alone brings something new, organic into the world.

Ostrovsky, alone in the present literary era, has his own firm, new and at the same time ideal worldview, with a special shade, conditioned both by the data of the era, and, perhaps, by the data of the nature of the poet himself. We will call this shade, without any hesitation, the fundamental Russian world outlook, healthy and calm, humorous without morbidity, direct without infatuation to one extreme or another, ideal, finally, in the just sense of idealism, without false grandiosity or just as false sentimentality.

The soil is the depth of people's life, the mysterious side of the historical movement.

By Orthodoxy I mean the elemental-historical principle, which is destined to live and give new forms of life.

One art embodies in its creations what is unknown in the air of the era.

It is not for nothing that the 19th century is called the golden age of Russian poetry. At this time, many great word artists worked, among which was Apollon Grigoriev. His biography, set out in this article, will give you general ideas about this talented person. Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigoriev (life - 1822-1864) is known as a Russian poet, translator, theater and literary critic, memoirist.

Origin of A. A. Grigoriev

Apollon Alexandrovich was born in Moscow on July 20, 1822. His grandfather was a peasant who came to Moscow to work from a remote province. For hard work in official positions, this man received the nobility. As for his father, he disobeyed the will of his parents and connected his life with the daughter of a serf coachman. Only a year after the birth of their son, Apollo's parents got married, so the future poet was considered an illegitimate child. Apollon Grigoriev managed to receive personal nobility only in 1850, when he was in the rank of titular adviser. The noble title was thus restored.

Period of study, clerical work

The future poet was educated at home. This allowed him to enter immediately at Moscow University, bypassing the gymnasium. Here, at the Faculty of Law, he listened to lectures by M. P. Pogodin, T. N. Granovsky, S. P. Shevyrev and others. A. A. Fet was also fellow students of our hero. Together with them, he organized a literary circle in which young poets read their works to each other. In 1842, Apollon Alexandrovich graduated from the university. After that, he worked in the library, and then became the secretary of the Council. However, Grigoriev was not given clerical work - he kept the protocols inaccurately, when issuing books he forgot to register them.

First publications

Apollon Grigoriev began to publish in 1843. His poems appeared very actively in the period from 1843 to 1845. This was facilitated by an unrequited feeling for A.F. Korsh. Many themes of Grigoriev's lyrics are explained precisely by this love drama - spontaneity and unbridled feelings, fatal passion, love-struggle. The poem "Comet" belongs to this period, where the poet compares the chaos of love feelings with cosmic processes. The same sentiments are present in the first prose work of Apollon Alexandrovich, made in the form of a diary. The work is called "Leaves from the Wandering Sophist's Manuscript" (written in 1844, published in 1917).

Years of life in St. Petersburg

Burdened with debts, devastated after disappointment in love, Grigoriev decided to start new life. He secretly went to Petersburg, where he had no acquaintances. Grigoriev in the period from 1844 to 1845 served in the Senate and in the Council of the Deanery, but then decided to leave the service in order to devote all his time to literary work. Grigoriev wrote both dramas, and poetry, and prose, and theatrical and literary criticism. In 1844-1846. Apollon Alexandrovich collaborated with "Repertoire and Pantheon". In this journal, he became a writer. He published critical articles on the theatre, reviews of performances, as well as many poems and a drama in verse, The Two Egotisms (in 1845). At the same time, his trilogy appeared, the first part of which is "Man of the Future", the second - "My Acquaintance with Vitalin" and the final one - "Ophelia". Apollon Grigoriev was also engaged in translations (in 1846, "Antigone Sophocles", "School of the Husbands of Molière" and other works appeared).

Return to Moscow

Grigoriev had a broad nature, which made him change his beliefs, rush from one extreme to another, seek out new ideals and attachments. In 1847, disillusioned with Petersburg, he returned to Moscow. Here he began to cooperate with the newspaper "Moscow city sheet". Among the works of this period, it is necessary to note 4 articles by Grigoriev "Gogol and his latest book"created in 1847.

Marriage

In the same year, Apollon Alexandrovich tied the knot. The wife of Apollon Grigoriev was the sister of A.F. Korsh. However, soon because of her frivolous behavior, the marriage was annulled. Grigoriev again began a period of mental anguish and disappointment. Many works of this period of the poet's life probably would not have been created if not for the wife of Apollon Grigoriev and her frivolous behavior. At this time, Apollon Alexandrovich published a poetic cycle called "The Diary of Love and Prayer." In 1879, this cycle was published in its entirety, after the death of Apollon Grigoriev. The poems placed in it are dedicated to a beautiful stranger and unrequited love for her.

Teaching activity, Grigoriev-critic

In the period from 1848 to 1857, Apollon Alexandrovich was a teacher. He led the law in several educational institutions. At the same time, he collaborated with magazines and created new compositions. In 1850, Grigoriev became close to the editors of the Moskvityanin. He organized a "young editorial board" together with A. N. Ostrovsky. As a matter of fact, it was a department of criticism of "Moskvityanin".

As a critic, Apollon Grigoriev at this time becomes the main figure in theatrical circles. He preached naturalness and realism in acting and dramaturgy. Many productions and plays were appreciated by Apollon Grigoriev. He wrote about Ostrovsky's Thunderstorm primarily as a work of art. The main advantage of the play, the critic considered the author's ability to poetically and reliably portray the Russian national life. Grigoriev noted the charm of provincial life and the beauty of Russian nature, but practically did not touch on the tragedy of the events depicted in the work.

Apollon Grigoriev is known as the author of the phrase "Pushkin is our everything." The work of Alexander Sergeevich, of course, he put very highly. His reasoning is very interesting, in particular, what Apollon Grigoriev said about Eugene Onegin. The critic believed that Eugene's spleen is connected with his natural innate criticism, which is characteristic of Russian common sense. Apollo Alexandrovich said that society is not to blame for the disappointment and spleen that gripped Onegin. He noted that they stem not from skepticism and bitterness, as in Childe Harold, but from Eugene's talent.

In 1856 "Moskvityanin" was closed. After that, Apollon Alexandrovich was invited to other magazines, such as Sovremennik and Russkaya Beseda. However, he was ready to accept the offer only under the condition of personal leadership of the critical department. Therefore, the negotiations ended only with the publication of Grigoriev's poems, articles and translations.

New love

In 1852-57. Grigoriev Apollon Alexandrovich again experienced unrequited love, this time for L. Ya. Vizard. In 1857, the poetic cycle "Struggle" appeared, which included Grigoriev's most famous poems "Gypsy Hungarian" and "Oh, at least you speak with me ...". A. A. Blok called these works the pearls of Russian lyrics.

Trip to Europe

Apollon Grigoriev, having become the home teacher and tutor of Prince I. Yu. Trubetskoy, went to Europe (Italy, France). Between 1857 and 1858 he lived in Florence and Paris, visiting museums. Returning to his homeland, Grigoriev continued to publish, since 1861 actively collaborating with the magazines Epoch and Vremya, headed by F. M. and M. M. Dostoevsky. M. Dostoevsky advised Apollon Alexandrovich to create memoirs about the development of the modern generation, which Apollon Grigoriev did. His work includes "My literary and moral wanderings" - the result of understanding the proposed topic.

Philosophical and aesthetic views of Grigoriev

The philosophical and aesthetic views of Grigoriev were formed under the influence of Slavophilism (Khomyakov) and romanticism (Emerson, Schelling, Carlyle). He recognized the decisive importance of religious and national-patriarchal principles in the life of the people. However, in his work, this was combined with criticism of the absolutization of the communal principle, puritanical judgments about literature. Apollon Alexandrovich also defended the idea of national unity before and after Peter the Great. He believed that both Westernism and Slavophilism were characterized by the limitation of historical life to the framework of schemes, abstract theorizing. Nevertheless, according to Grigoriev, the communal ideal of the Slavophiles is incomparably better than the program of Westernism, which recognizes uniformity (uniform humanity, barracks) as its ideal.

Grigoriev's worldview is most fully reflected in the theory of organic criticism created by him. The very concept of organic criticism corresponds to the understanding of the organic nature of art, in which various organic principles of life are synthetically embodied. In his opinion, art is a part of life, its ideal expression, and not just a copy of reality.

Features of poetic creativity

Grigoriev's poetic work developed under the influence of Lermontov. Apollon Alexandrovich himself called himself the last romantic. The motives of disharmony of the world and hopeless suffering are the main ones in his work. They often spill out into the element of hysterical fun, revelry. Many of Grigoriev's poems (especially the cycle about the city) were difficult to publish due to their acute social orientation. This was possible only in the foreign Russian press. In general, the poetic heritage of the author of interest to us is very unequal, but his best works are distinguished by their brightness and extraordinary emotionality.

last years of life

Apollon Grigoriev during his life was an atheist and a mystic, a Slavophile and a freemason, a controversial enemy and a good comrade, a drunkard and a moral person. In the end, all these extremes broke him. Apollon Grigoriev got entangled in debt. In 1861 he had to serve time in debtor's prison. After that, he tried for the last time to change his life, for which he went to Orenburg. Here Grigoriev was a teacher in the cadet corps. However, this trip only aggravated the poet's condition. In addition, once again there was a break with his wife M. F. Dubrovskaya. Apollo Alexandrovich increasingly sought oblivion in wine. Returning from Orenburg, he worked, but intermittently. Grigoriev avoided rapprochement with literary parties, he wanted to serve only art.

Death of A. A. Grigoriev

In 1864, Apollon Alexandrovich had to serve two more times in a debtor's prison. Completely devastated by emotional experiences, Apollon Grigoriev died in St. Petersburg. His biography ends on September 25, 1864.

Grigoriev Apollon Alexandrovich is one of the most prominent Russian critics. Born in 1822 in Moscow, where his father was secretary of the city magistrate. Having received a good home education, he graduated from Moscow University as the first candidate of the Faculty of Law and immediately received the position of Secretary of the University Board. Not such, however, was the nature of Grigoriev, to firmly settle anywhere. Having failed in love, he suddenly left for St. Petersburg, tried to get a job both in the Deanery Council and in the Senate, but, due to his completely artistic attitude to the service, he quickly lost it. Around 1845, he establishes relations with the Notes of the Fatherland, where he places several poems, and with the Repertoire and the Pantheon. In the last journal, he wrote a number of little-than-remarkable articles in all sorts of literary genres: poems, critical articles, theatrical reports, translations, etc. In 1846, Grigoriev published his poems in a separate book, which were met with no more than condescending criticism. Subsequently, Grigoriev wrote a little original poetry, but translated a lot: from Shakespeare ("A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Merchant of Venice", "Romeo and Juliet"), from Byron ("Parisina", excerpts from "Childe Harold", etc. .), Molière, Delavigne. Grigoriev's way of life during his entire stay in St. Petersburg was the most stormy, and the unfortunate Russian "weakness", instilled by student revelry, more and more captured him. In 1847, he moved back to Moscow, became a law teacher at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium, actively collaborated in the Moscow City Listk and tried to settle down. Marriage to L.F. Korsh, the sister of famous writers, briefly made him a man of the right way of life. In 1850, Grigoriev settled in the "Moskvityanin" and became the head of a remarkable circle, known as the "young edition of the Moskvityanin". Without any effort on the part of the representatives of the "old editors" - Pogodin and Shevyrev, somehow by itself around their magazine gathered, in the words of Grigoriev, "a young, courageous, drunken, but honest and brilliant with talents" friendly circle, which included: Ostrovsky, Pisemsky, Almazov, A. Potekhin, Pechersky-Melnikov, Edelson, May, Nick. Berg, Gorbunov, and others. None of them was a Slavophil of the orthodox persuasion, but "Moskvityanin" attracted all of them by the fact that here they could freely substantiate their socio-political worldview on the foundation of Russian reality. Grigoriev was the chief theoretician and standard-bearer of the circle. In the ensuing struggle with the St. Petersburg magazines, the weapons of the opponents were most often directed against him. This struggle was waged by Grigoriev on a principled basis, but he was usually answered on the basis of ridicule, both because Petersburg criticism, in the interval between Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, could not put forward people capable of an ideological dispute, and because Grigoriev, with his exaggerations and oddities gave rise to ridicule. He was especially scoffed at by the incongruous delights of Ostrovsky, who for him was not a simple talented writer, but a "herald of the new truth" and whom he commented not only on articles, but also on poems, and, moreover, very bad ones - for example, "elegy - ode - satire": "Art and Truth" (1854), caused by the presentation of the comedy "Poverty is not a vice." Lyubim Tortsov was proclaimed in earnest here as a representative of the "pure Russian soul" and was reproached with "old Europe" and "toothless-young America, sick with dog-like old age." Ten years later, Grigoriev himself recalled his trick with horror and found the only justification for it in the "sincerity of feeling." Grigoriev's antics, tactless and extremely harmful to the prestige of the ideas he defended, were one of the characteristic phenomena of his entire literary activity and one of the reasons for his low popularity. And the more Grigoriev wrote, the more his unpopularity grew. It reached its apogee in the 1860s. With his most obscure and confused arguments about the "organic" method, he was so out of place in the era of "seductive clarity" of tasks and aspirations that they stopped laughing at him, even stopped reading him. A great admirer of Grigoriev's talent and the editor of Vremya, Dostoevsky, who indignantly remarked that Grigoriev's articles were not directly cut, friendly suggested that he once sign a pseudonym and, at least in such a contraband way, draw attention to his articles. In "Moskvityanin" Grigoriev wrote until its termination in 1856, after which he worked in "Russian Conversation", "Library for Reading", the original "Russian Word", where for some time he was one of three editors, in the "Russian World", "Svetoche", "Son of the Fatherland" by Starchevsky, "Russian Herald" by Katkov, but he did not manage to settle down anywhere. In 1861, the Dostoevsky brothers' Vremya appeared, and Grigoriev seemed to once again enter a solid literary marina. As in "Moskvityanin", a whole circle of "soil" writers was grouped here - Strakhov, Averkiev, Dostoevsky and others. , - interconnected both by a commonality of likes and dislikes, and by personal friendship. They all treated Grigoriev with sincere respect. Soon, however, he felt in this environment some kind of cold attitude towards his mystical broadcasts, and in the same year he left for Orenburg as a teacher of Russian language and literature in the cadet corps. Not without enthusiasm, Grigoriev set to work, but quickly cooled off, and a year later he returned to St. Petersburg and again began to live a hectic life of literary bohemia, up to and including sitting in a debtor's prison. In 1863 "Time" was banned. Grigoriev migrated to the weekly "Anchor". He edited the newspaper and wrote theatrical reviews, which unexpectedly had great success, thanks to the extraordinary animation that Grigoriev brought to the reporter's routine and the dryness of theatrical marks. He analyzed the acting of actors with the same thoroughness and with the same passionate pathos with which he treated the phenomena of other arts. At the same time, in addition to his delicate taste, he showed great acquaintance with German and French theorists of stage art. In 1864 Vremya was resurrected in the form of Epoch. Grigoriev again takes up the role of the "first critic", but not for long. The binge, which turned directly into a physical, painful illness, broke Grigoriev's mighty body: on September 25, 1864, he died and was buried at the Mitrofanevsky cemetery, next to the same victim of wine - the poet Mei. Scattered in various and mostly unreadable journals, Grigoriev's articles were collected in 1876 by N.N. Insurance in one volume. If the publication was successful, it was supposed to release further volumes, but this intention has not yet been realized. Grigoriev's unpopularity among the general public thus continues. But in a close circle of people who are especially interested in literature, the importance of Grigoriev has increased significantly, in comparison with his downtroddenness during his lifetime. It is not easy to give any precise formulation of Grigoriev's critical views for many reasons. Clarity has never been part of Grigoriev's critical talent, and the extreme confusion and obscurity of his exposition did not scare the public away from his articles for nothing. A certain idea of the main features of Grigoriev's worldview is also hindered by the complete indiscipline of thought in his articles. With the same carelessness with which he burned through his physical strength, he squandered his mental wealth, not giving himself the trouble to draw up an exact outline of the article, not having the strength to refrain from the temptation to talk at once about the questions encountered in passing. Due to the fact that a significant part of his articles appeared in Moskvitianin, Vremya and Epoch, where either he himself or his friends were at the head of the business, these articles are directly striking in their discordance and negligence. He himself was well aware of the lyrical disorder of his writings, he himself once described them as "careless articles, written wide open," but he liked this as a guarantee of their complete "sincerity." In all his literary life, he did not intend to clarify his worldview in any definite way. It was so obscure even to his closest friends and admirers that his last article, "Paradoxes of Organic Criticism" (1864), as usual, unfinished and dealing with a thousand things besides the main subject, is a response to Dostoevsky's invitation to set out, finally, a critical profession de foi his. Grigoriev himself more and more willingly called his criticism "organic", in contrast to both the camp of "theorists" - Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and "aesthetic" criticism, which defends the principle of "art for art's sake", and from criticism "historical" , by which he meant Belinsky. Belinsky Grigoriev put unusually high. He called him "an immortal fighter of ideas", "with a great and powerful spirit", "with a truly brilliant nature". But Belinsky saw in art only a reflection of life, and the very concept of life for him was too direct and "holological." According to Grigoriev, "life is something mysterious and inexhaustible, an abyss that absorbs every finite mind, an immense expanse in which the logical conclusion of any smart head often disappears, like a wave in the ocean - something even ironic and at the same time full of love. which produces worlds after worlds from itself"... Accordingly, "the organic view recognizes creative, immediate, natural, vital forces as its starting point. In other words: not only the mind, with its logical requirements and the theories generated by them, but the mind plus life and its organic manifestations. However, Grigoriev resolutely condemned the "serpentine situation: what is - is reasonable." He recognized the mystical admiration of the Slavophils for the Russian folk spirit as "narrow" and only put Khomyakov high, and that because he "one of the Slavophiles combined the thirst for the ideal in an amazing way with faith in the infinity of life and therefore did not rest on the ideals" Konstantin Aksakov and others. In Victor Hugo's book on Shakespeare, Grigoriev saw one of the most complete formulations of the "organic" theory, of which he also considered Renan, Emerson, and Carlyle to be followers. And the "original, enormous ore" of organic theory, according to Grigoriev, is "Schelling's works in all phases of his development." Grigoriev proudly called himself a student of this "great teacher." From the admiration for the organic power of life in its various manifestations, Grigoriev’s conviction follows that the abstract, naked truth, in its pure form, is inaccessible to us, that we can only assimilate the colored truth, the expression of which can only be national art. Pushkin is by no means great because of the size of his artistic talent: he is great because he has transformed in himself a whole range of foreign influences into something completely independent. In Pushkin, for the first time, "our Russian physiognomy, the true measure of all our social, moral and artistic sympathies, a complete outline of the type of the Russian soul" was isolated and clearly identified. That is why Grigoriev dwelled with special love on Belkin's personality, which Belinsky hardly commented on, on The Captain's Daughter and Dubrovsky. With the same love he dwelled on Maxim Maksimych from "A Hero of Our Time" and with particular hatred - on Pechorin as one of those "predatory" types who are completely alien to the Russian spirit. Art, by its very essence, is not only national - it is even local. Every talented writer is inevitably "the voice of a well-known soil, locality, which has a right in the life of the whole people, as a type, as a color, as an ebb, a shade." Reducing art in this way to almost unconscious creativity, Grigoriev did not even like to use the words: influence, as something too abstract and not very spontaneous, but introduced a new term "tendency". Together with Tyutchev, Grigoriev exclaimed that nature "is not a cast, not a soulless face", which is directly and immediately

Brief biographical encyclopedia. 2012

early years

Apollon Grigoriev was born on July 16 (28) of the year in Zamoskvorechye from the relationship of the titular adviser Alexander Ivanovich Grigoriev (1788-1863) with the daughter of a serf coachman. Only after the wedding of his parents in 1823 was he taken from the Founding Home.

The pictures of childhood in the very heart of merchant Moscow were subsequently resurrected by him in the book of memoirs “My literary and moral wanderings”, which, according to D. Mirsky, “transmits the smell and taste of the era” no worse than Herzen’s Past and Thoughts.

Having received a good home education, Grigoriev graduated from Moscow University as the first candidate of the Faculty of Law ().

From December 1842 to August 1843 he was in charge of the university library, from August 1843 he served as secretary of the University Council. At the university, close relations began with A. A. Fet, Ya. P. Polonsky, S. M. Solovyov.

Having failed in love (for Antonina Fedorovna Korsh) and weighed down by the willfulness of his parents, Grigoriev suddenly left for St. Petersburg, where he served in the Council of the Deanery and the Senate. From the summer of 1845 he devoted himself entirely to literary pursuits.

The beginning of the creative path

He made his debut in print with the poem "Good night!", published under the pseudonym A. Trismegistov in the magazine "Moskvityanin" (1843, No. 7). B - reviews of dramatic and opera performances, articles and essays, poems and poetic drama "Two Egoisms", stories "Man of the Future", "My Acquaintance with Vitalin", "Ophelia" were placed in the magazine "Repertoire and Pantheon". At the same time he translated ("Antigone" by Sophocles, "School of Husbands" by Moliere), occasionally participated in other publications.

There were provincial actors, and merchants, and petty officials with swollen faces - and all this petty rabble, along with writers, indulged in colossal, monstrous drunkenness ... Drunkenness united everyone, they flaunted drunkenness and were proud.

Grigoriev was the chief theorist of the circle. In the ensuing struggle with the St. Petersburg magazines, the "weapons" of the opponents were most often directed precisely against him. This struggle was waged by Grigoriev on a principled basis, but he was usually answered on the basis of ridicule: because Petersburg criticism, in the interval between Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, could not put forward people capable of ideological dispute, and because Grigoriev, with his exaggerations and oddities, himself gave rise to ridicule. He was especially mocked by the incongruous delights of Ostrovsky, who for him was not a simple talented writer, but a "herald of the new truth."

During these years, Grigoriev put forward the theory of "organic criticism", according to which art, including literary art, should grow organically from the national soil. Such are Ostrovsky and his predecessor Pushkin with his "meek people" depicted in The Captain's Daughter. Completely alien to the Russian character, according to Grigoriev, the Byronic "predatory type", most clearly represented in Russian literature by Pechorin.

Grigoryev commented on Ostrovsky not only with articles, but also with poems, and very bad ones at that - for example, the “elegy-ode-satire” “Art and Truth” (1854), caused by the presentation of the comedy “Poverty is no vice”. Lyubim Tortsov was in earnestly proclaimed here as a representative of the “pure Russian soul” and was reproached with “old Europe” and “toothless-young America, sick with dog-like old age.” Ten years later, Grigoriev himself recalled his trick with horror and found the only justification for it in the "sincerity of feeling." Grigoriev's antics, tactless and extremely harmful to the prestige of the ideas he defended, were one of the characteristic phenomena of his entire literary activity and one of the reasons for his low popularity.

Like-minded people often spent evenings in taverns, where “dead drunk, but pure in heart, kissed and drank with factory workers”, were heard by gypsy choirs, reproached the West for lack of spirituality and extolled the Russian national character. A typical excerpt from Grigoriev's letter to Edelson dated November 23, 1857 (name day of A. N. Ostrovsky):

Two anniversaries of that day tormented me: one - when “Poverty is not a vice” was read and you threw up upstairs, and when “Don’t live as you want” was read and you threw up downstairs in the office.

The more Grigoriev wrote, the more his unpopularity grew. It reached its apogee in the 1860s. With his most obscure and confused arguments about the "organic" method and various other abstractions, he was so out of place in the era of "seductive clarity" of tasks and aspirations that they stopped laughing at him, even stopped reading him. A great admirer of Grigoriev's talent and the editor of Vremya, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who indignantly noticed that Grigoriev's articles were not directly cut, friendly suggested that he once sign a pseudonym and, at least in such a contraband way, draw attention to his articles.

last years of life

In "Moskvityanin" Grigoriev wrote until its termination in 1856, after which he worked in "Russian Conversation", "Library for Reading", the original "- but he did not manage to settle down anywhere. In 1861, “Time” by the Dostoevsky brothers arose, and Grigoriev seemed to have again entered a solid literary marina.

As in "Moskvityanin", a whole circle of "pochvennik" writers - Strakhov, Averkiev, Dostoevsky and others - were grouped here, interconnected both by a commonality of sympathies and antipathies, and by personal friendship. They all treated Grigoriev with sincere respect. In the magazines "Time" and "Epoch" Grigoriev published literary-critical articles and reviews, memoirs, led the Russian Theater column.

Soon I felt in this environment some kind of cold attitude towards his mystical broadcasts. In the same 1861 he left for Orenburg as a teacher of the Russian language and literature in the cadet corps. Not without enthusiasm, Grigoriev set to work, but quickly cooled off. A year later he returned to St. Petersburg and again began to live a hectic life of a literary bohemian, up to and including sitting in a debtor's prison. In 1863 "Time" was banned. Grigoriev migrated to the weekly Anchor. He edited the newspaper and wrote theatrical reviews, which unexpectedly had great success thanks to the extraordinary animation that Grigoriev brought to the reporter's routine and the dryness of theatrical marks. He analyzed the game of actors with the same thoroughness and with the same passionate pathos with which he treated the phenomena of other arts. At the same time, in addition to his delicate taste, he also showed great acquaintance with German and French theorists of stage art.

In 1864 "Time" was resurrected in the form of "Epoch". Grigoriev again took up the role of the "first critic", but not for long. The binge, which turned directly into a physical, painful illness, broke Grigoriev's mighty body. The poet died on September 25 (October 7) in St. Petersburg. He was buried at the Mitrofanevsky cemetery, next to the same victim of wine - the poet Mei; later reburied at the Volkovo cemetery. Scattered across different magazines Grigoriev's articles were collected in one volume in 1876