The last cataclysm: analysis of the poem. Analysis of the poem by F.I. Tyutchev "The Last Cataclysm" Let's turn to the Book of Genesis
There are probably few of them. For one of the most memorable works of F. I. Tyutchev "Silentium". Meanwhile, the poem "The Last Cataclysm" contains a very deep philosophical meaning. Do you want to know which one? The article is detailed.
It consists of one quatrain. What did Tyutchev want to convey to the reader in such a short work? Why was it written? How does it reflect the poet's worldview?
Let's look for answers to these questions. They lie on the surface. Read the article and see for yourself.
What does it represent?
"The Last Cataclysm" is a philosophical miniature. It is dedicated to the theme of the Flood. Why does the poet address this biblical theme? He foresees a new catastrophe. But what? Will it be a repeat of the previous one? Maybe yes, maybe not.
Let's go back to Genesis
According to the Old Testament story, God was angry with people. To such an extent that he decided to destroy his own creation. But there was a pious man named Noah in the midst of the sea of people. God warned him about the coming flood, ordering him to build a ship. In this ship it was possible to escape from the flood.
The construction work took many years. Finally the ark was ready. Noah and his family boarded it, taking the animals with them. A pair of each creature. It rained right after that.
It rained for forty days and nights. And it took Noah about a year to land. The ark landed on Mount Ararat. Pious Noah thanked God for salvation. After that, God promised that the Flood would never happen again.
Tyutchev about a new disaster
In the poem "The Last Cataclysm" Fyodor Ivanovich speaks of coming catastrophe. He anticipates it, as was said above. But at the same time, Fedor Ivanovich considers a new flood as a source of life. Sounds pretty weird. However, according to Tyutchev, after the flood the world will return to its roots. By the beginning of time. Water will absorb all living things, but at the same time it will become a source of new life. Maximum destruction becomes maximum creation. The earth is plunged into chaos, this is its initial state.
Thus, "The Last Cataclysm" is not something frightening. Not a gloomy prediction of the end of the world, but a reflection of the source of new life, perpetual motion.
From a political point of view
Fedor Ivanovich was not shy about his political views. Sometimes expressed them in poems. Literary critics believe that Tyutchev's verse "The Last Cataclysm" is the personification of social upheavals awaiting the world. Fedor Ivanovich was rather skeptical about revolutions and coups. From his point of view, there were two forces: the conservative Russia and the revolutionary Europe.
It is known that the poet was a senior censor. His activities made it possible to prohibit the distribution of the manifesto of the Communist Party on the territory of the Russian Empire.
Given the political views of the poet, it is quite logical that the verse "The Last Cataclysm" is a warning about world social upheavals. They are known to lead to catastrophic consequences often.
Disappointment
What else can be hidden in Tyutchev's "Last Cataclysm"? Dissatisfaction with the outside world, disappointment in it. At the time of writing the poem, the state of mind of the poet could leave much to be desired. This is reflected in the work.
Fedor Ivanovich is a famous poet-philosopher. There is nothing superfluous in his works. Every word is thoughtful and thoughtful.
The inevitability of the cataclysm and the impossibility of humanity to stop it. This is one motive. The second lies in the same inevitability of the rebirth of life. The old life will perish, but a new one will be reborn. How harmoniously these two, it would seem, absolutely incongruous things are combined. At the time of writing the poem, the poet was mentally ill. It is quite possible. But he understands that this agony of the soul, its "last cataclysm" is not eternal. It will pass, and the "white life streak" will come to replace it.
Returning to God
The last line of the poem: "And the face of God will be depicted in them." It has a deep philosophical meaning. All existence, from the creation of the world to the Second Coming, is based on God. Everything happens according to His will. And nothing is done without His knowledge.
The divine face is incomprehensible to people due to sinfulness. But people and God are interconnected. The first cannot live without faith. Faith is in God. And only after the catastrophe will the true face of God be displayed in the water surface. He is embodied in this picture, being present there.
God is the main poetic image of the poem. There is no personal human "I" in this poem. His philosophy is emphasized by the generalized use of vocabulary.
God is shown on the surface of the water. The poem combines incompatible concepts. God is incorporeal, but here he takes on an image. Water is the image of a mirror. Hidden in the poem is a comparison of the waters with a mirror.
The intonation of the poem "The Last Cataclysm" is unhurried. Makes you think about the lines of the piece.
Writing style
The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The endings are both feminine and masculine. Rhymes are different: cross, open and closed. And this adds to the poem a sense of ambiguity. It seems that there are two absolutely around the world.
Summarizing
"The Last Cataclysm" was written in 1829. This is a philosophical poem, containing something that literary critics have been able to explore for a long time. The invisible mind, thoughts and worldview of Fedor Ivanovich Tyutchev.
Conclusion
The article analyzes the poem "The Last Cataclysm". Someone will see something close in the poem. Agree mentally with its author. But for some this verse is foreign. And this person will exclaim: "I do not agree!" - thus entering into a mental argument with the poet. For this, philosophical poems are needed so that everyone can see this world in their own way. These kinds of verses give impetus to reflection. They help to express their point of view, not be afraid to enter into an argument and defend their own position. Helps develop a person's personality.
Fedor Ivanovich Tyutchev
When the last hour of nature strikes,
The composition of the parts will collapse earthly:
Everything visible will again be covered by water,
And God's face will be depicted in them!
Pablo Genoves collages
The Last Cataclysm is a philosophical miniature first published in the almanac Dennitsa in 1831. In it, Tyutchev refers to the legend of the Flood, which is widespread in the mythology of different peoples. Among Christians, the most famous story is that told in Genesis. According to her, the flood became a punishment for mankind for moral decline. The Lord decided to leave alive only the pious Noah and the members of his family. God warned them in advance about the coming flood and ordered them to build an ark on which they could be saved during the catastrophe. The construction of the ship took 120 years. When the work was completed, Noah went on board, taking the animals with him. Immediately after this, water poured onto the earth, and the flood continued for forty days. It took nearly a year for Noah to get off the ark onto dry land. As they say in the Book of Genesis, the ship moored to Mount Ararat. Thanking God for salvation, Noah made a sacrifice, after which the Lord blessed him and everything that is on earth.
Tyutchev's poem speaks of a repetition of the global flood: "... Everything visible will again be covered by water ...". The poet anticipates a catastrophe, only, in his opinion, it will bring the earth not only destruction. After the flood, the world will return to the beginning of time, to its divine origins. "The Last Cataclysm" is not a doomsday horror story. Water here acts as a source of life, as a result, perpetual motion, which is generally characteristic of Tyutchev's work. In a significant part of his landscape-philosophical poems, her image is found in one form or another - “Wave and Thought”, “Snowy Mountains”, “Fountain”. This list could go on for a very long time. According to Tyutchev, water will completely absorb the earth, but new life will subsequently appear from it. It turns out that the poem shows a single and two-faced process at the same time. Maximum destruction becomes the beginning of maximum creation. The earth must plunge into chaos, which, according to ancient Greek mythology, is the primary state of the universe.
According to a number of literary critics, "The Last Cataclysm" has a social connotation - Tyutchev compares social upheavals in it with natural disasters. This statement is not meaningless. Fedor Ivanovich was very skeptical about revolutions and coups, which was reflected in his journalistic articles. The poet sometimes expressed his political views in poems. According to Tyutchev, in the modern world there were only two forces - conservative Russia and revolutionary Europe. Fedor Ivanovich believed that under the auspices of the first, it was necessary to create a union of Slavic-Orthodox countries. In 1848, the poet took over as senior censor. As part of his activities, he banned the distribution of the manifesto of the Communist Party, translated into Russian, on the territory of the Russian Empire. If Tyutchev's political views are taken into account, then "The Last Cataclysm" can indeed be perceived as a statement about social upheavals, which often lead to irreversible catastrophic consequences.
The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The size chosen by the poet is not accidental. As Tomashevsky wrote, in the first decades of the 19th century, iambic pentameter began to be widely used in tragedies. Tyutchev also emphasizes the sublime tragedy of his work with the help of vocabulary: “the last hour will strike”, “the waters will cover”, “the composition of the earthly parts will collapse”. The last line testifies that the catastrophe will lead to the birth of a new life. For her, Fedor Ivanovich chooses a positively colored vocabulary: "... And the face of God will be depicted in them!".
When the last hour of nature strikes,
The composition of the parts will collapse earthly:
Everything visible will again be covered by water,
And God's face will be depicted in them!
Analysis of the poem "The Last Cataclysm" by Tyutchev
Philosophical lyrics - business card Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev. The work "The Last Cataclysm" can also be attributed to it.
The poem was written in 1829. Its author at that time was 26 years old, he has been serving in Germany for several years in diplomatic work, even promoted to titular advisers, takes active position in the affairs of gaining independence by Greece, defends the need for Russian patronage of the Greek people, happily married, raising children. In the homeland, he happens on short visits. In this atmosphere of apparent contentment, the flowering of vitality and family well-being, he writes the work "The Last Cataclysm". According to the genre - religious lyrics, in size - iambic with cross rhyming, it consists of only one quatrain. The tone is almost prophetic. Vocabulary is sublime, solemn, sometimes outdated. The very size of the poem emphasizes the high tragedy of what is happening. Meanwhile, the poet describes the first catastrophe (flood) rather than the last. If we rely on the Holy Scriptures, then at the end of the world there will be streams not of water, but of fire. It should be noted that the poet shudders at the spectacle of changes in nature, a person as an actively acting hero is absent in the work. "The Last Hour": a metaphor. "Composition of parts": destruction of the earth, atmosphere, hydrosphere. The renewed nature of the world will appear from the water, the visible imprint of the glory of God will lie on everything. Never again and no one will question his power. The final exclamation in the finale seems to emphasize the inevitability of the approaching transformation. By the way, the title of the poem may not carry a negative, frightening connotation. Perhaps what is meant is transformation, purification, change, and not destruction, death, chaos. These verses are also interesting because the young F. Tyutchev thought about the end of this world more in a philosophical than a Christian spirit. For example, there is no hint of the doctrine of the Last Judgment. However, in such a short sketch it is almost impossible to express the whole of Christian eschatology. These lines look almost like an impromptu, a record of the thought that struck him, instant insight. He considered it so important that he soon offered it for publication. In the quatrain, inversion is used several times: the waters will cover.
The poem "The Last Cataclysm" was first published in the journal "Dennitsa" 2 years after its creation.
Analysis of the poem by F.I. Tyutchev "The Last Cataclysm"
We will try to show the main approaches to a lyric poem of the classical type using the analysis of a poem by F.I. Tyutchev "The Last Cataclysm" (1830).
When the last hour of nature strikes,
The composition of the parts will collapse earthly:
Everything visible will again be covered by water,
And God's face will be depicted in them!
We begin the analysis with the poetics of the title, since it contains the main lyrical image, the main emotion and philosophical idea for the poet are hidden. In fact, the title reflects the author's understanding of the text. The adjective "last" denotes events taking place on the verge, at the last line.
The very word "cataclysm" (not "transformation" or "change", close in meaning) emphasizes the philosophical meaning of the poem. Judging by the title, it can be assumed that the text will unfold a picture from the Apocalypse, depicting the last day of creation. However, Tyutchev is an original poet-philosopher. For him, the last day will be the first day of the new creation.
The poem consists of one stanza (monostrophy) - a quatrain (quatrain). However, compositionally, this stanza is divided into two parts - the first two verses (poetic lines) and the last two.
This division is meaningful, it reflects the two main world processes (destruction and creation), which are given in two symmetrically located verbs "will be destroyed" and "will be depicted" in the text.
There are two elements in the poem - earth and water. Drawing the death of the earth under water, Tyutchev refers to the biblical myth of Noah's flood ("Everything visible will again be covered by water"). In this appeal itself there is a simultaneous indication of death and salvation.
The philosophical nature of the verse is emphasized by the non-subjective construction - the absence of the pronouns "I", "you", "we", etc., which embody the image of a person in the verse. The poem carries a philosophical generalization. This is also evidenced by the choice of vocabulary - not empirical, but extremely abstract ("the last hour of nature", "everything visible", "God's face").
The process of destruction is "fixed" in the syntax of the verse: the first two lines are characterized by deep inversion (wrong, reverse word order in the sentence). Compare for example reverse word order (sentence with inversion) and direct:
"When the last hour of nature strikes...";
"When the last hour of nature strikes..."
In the first case, the stress falling on the end is determined by the laws of verse construction, in the second it is logical.
The inversion disappears in the last line, which corresponds to the process of creation. The last line of the verse is distinguished not only by the absence of inversion ("And the face of God will be depicted in them!"), not only by the exclamatory intonation, which reflects the special pathos of the phrase, but also by the phonetically sound "and", repeated many times, in a special way the ending of the verse "And God's a face will be shown in them!"
The poem "The Last Cataclysm" is written in iambic pentameter with masculine (percussion - "earthly", "them") and feminine (unstressed - "nature", "water") endings. Rhymes in the verse are both grammatical (nature - water) and non-grammatical (earthly - them). Cross, open (ending in a vowel) and closed (ending in a consonant). All this construction of the verse is based on the law of duality, "binarity", which is reflected primarily on the content level.
Along with the first line ("When the last hour of nature strikes"), where there is not a single metrical failure, a pure iambic is presented, which expresses the inexorability and inevitability of the onset of the "last hour", all other lines contain digressions (they fall on the main verbs "destroyed", "depicted"). The lack of stress is called pyrrhic. Let's imagine the second line of the verse "The composition of the earthly parts will collapse" as a metric scheme (a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables, denoting U - unstressed, I - stressed):
The fourth foot, attributable to the verb "will collapse", will turn out to be "lightened", pyrrhic.
Especially a lot of digressions occur in the third line ("Everything visible will again be covered by water"):
II/UU/UI/UI/UI/U.
A superscheme stress appears in the first foot, called in versification sponde (II - two syllables of stress). The second foot is pyrrhic, with a missing accent.
Generally a large number of Failures in this line can be explained, in our opinion, by the fact that a human tragedy is hidden in it. The last cataclysm will not only destroy the "composition of the earthly parts", but will also turn into a human tragedy. At first glance, there is no place for the human in the poem. As we noted at the beginning, the poem is an enormous philosophical generalization. However, the expression "everything visible" (from the Old Slavonic word "ghost" - "eye") includes the human plane, so the line is, as it were, colored by human emotion, violating the usual rhythm of the verse.
The proposed analysis, as noted above, is not a "key" with which you can "open" any poetic text.
On this page, read the text "Cataclysm" by Fyodor Tyutchev, written in 1849.
When the last hour of nature strikes,
The composition of the parts will collapse earthly:
Everything visible will again be covered by water,
And God's face will be depicted in them!
Note:
Autograph - RGALI. F. 505. Op. 1. Unit ridge 11. L. 2v.
The first publication - Dennitsa. 1831. S. 89, the poem has the title - "The Last Cataclysm." It was not included in other lifetime publications, then - RA. 1879, p. 128; NNS. S. 24; Ed. SPb., 1886. S. 67; Ed. 1900. S. 67.
Autograph on one sheet with verse. "Snowy mountains"; title is missing. The handwriting is clear, the graphics feature is capital letters in the words "Hour", "Parts", "Earthly", "Visible", "Water", "God"; the same tendency to mythologize the picture is expressed as in the verse. “Snowy mountains” (see commentary on p. 325): the essential in being is graphically highlighted. There is a list (RGALI. F. 505. Op. 1. Item 52. L. 30 v.) among other works with the general title “From Tyutchev’s poems kept by Prince I.S. Gagarin"; the list is called "The Last Cataclysm", as in Dennitsa. There is reason to believe that the name belongs to the poet himself.
Features of Tyutchev's spelling of some words that are especially significant for the picture are not preserved either in the first or in subsequent editions. Text in NNS, Ed. 1886 and Ed. 1900 coincides, but in the last two in the second line - a variant of the 2nd line: "The composition of the parts of the earth will be destroyed." The poem was printed everywhere without a title.
Dated according to the context in the autograph: the same as the "Snowy Mountains", no later than 1829.
In Tyutchev's poems about nature in the late 1820s, "The Last Cataclysm" stands, in essence, next to "Vision." If in such lyrical masterpieces as “Spring Thunderstorm”, “Spring Waters”, “Morning in the Mountains” and (mostly) “Snowy Mountains”, “Noon”, the fertile, non-stinging, bright, daytime cosmos is shown (in the ancient Greek sense words), then "The Last Cataclysm" and "Vision" draw a "certain hour" of being ("chariots of the universe"), disturbing the soul. In "The Last Cataclysm" - premonition, even clairvoyance, the disasters of the planet; further development of this theme - in "Madness" with the image of the disasters of the earth and crazy attempts at their optimistic interpretation. However, "The Last Cataclysm" differs sharply from all other poems with the image of chaos by the assertion of the victory of the Divine Principle over chaotic decay.