Pushkin “Bakhchisarai Fountain” - analysis. What is the Bakhchisarai fountain crying about?

The romantic hero, or rather the anti-hero, in the poem is Giray. His individualism is emphasized by Pushkin from the very beginning. Considering only his own will and desires, Giray tramples on the rights, feelings and dignity of other people. The tragic ending for such a hero is natural - he himself predicts it. “Genius and villainy are two incompatible things,” Pushkin will say in “Mozart and Salieri,” and this equally applies to the hero of “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.” The law of world harmony predetermines that, having sowed death, grief and destruction in foreign lands, Giray himself reaps the same (compare with “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”, where Dodon’s “reckoning” is predetermined already in the first lines, where it is stated that “from a young age He was formidable, and every now and then he boldly inflicted insults on his neighbors." Happiness and love cannot be built on bad actions and feelings. If the building is based on a rotten foundation, the building will collapse sooner or later (compare with Masha’s refusal to go with Dubrovsky after her wedding to Vereisky - in “Dubrovsky”, or Tatiana’s refusal to cheat on her husband - in “Onegin”). Maria cannot love Giray by definition. An individualistic hero, occupied only with his own feelings and desires, deaf to the suffering of other people, cannot count on love from them. Love, according to Pushkin, is a state of soul, inspiration, which by its nature gives more than it requires. Giray is not capable of such a feeling. Hence, the passion that Zarema burns towards him is quite logical. Zarema's passion, although strong, is also individualistic. First of all, she strives to completely own the object of her feelings, regardless of his feelings and desires (which is in direct contradiction with Pushkin’s humanistic worldview: see, for example, the poem “I loved you...”). In addition, Zarema’s passion from the very beginning is doomed to a tragic ending, since she “forgot the faith of earlier days” and what suffering was sown by Giray in her native land. Thus, the individualistic hero receives the same thing; it is as if he finds himself in front of a mirror, which, reflecting the gaze of the Gorgon Medusa, kills her herself.

But for Pushkin it is also important that completely innocent people share this responsibility with the individualist hero. According to Pushkin, the individualist hero, like any person, is completely free to decide his own destiny, but not to dispose of others. However, in reality this does not work. The depth of Pushkin’s penetration into the problem lies in the fact that he revealed the very essence of the individualistic view of the world, its destructiveness and original depravity. According to Pushkin, any individualistic hero inevitably begins to control the destinies of others, since his entire system of views is inhumane and inhumane in its very essence. Therefore, living in a world that is humanistic in nature, an individualist hero, whose philosophy is opposite to the very essence of the world order, will inevitably cause destruction both in relation to the world around him and in relation to those people who in one way or another encounter such a hero. The individualistic hero is not responsible for other people, he is not even responsible for the consequences of his own actions, since the coordinate system of the individualistic worldview begins with the hero’s “I” and ends with him. Hence, the picture of general desolation that the author sees on the site of the former harem is quite natural. An individualistic hero, when he passes away, leaves nothing behind except destruction and grief, which, like wounds, soon heal, because any illness passes sooner or later.

It is no coincidence that the poet ends the poem with a kind of hymn to southern nature, which is all saturated with sun, joy and life. The life-affirming motive, the voice of nature itself, powerfully sounding at the end, shows that the whole story that happened here is akin to a bad dream, an obsession, now, however, half-forgotten (compare with “Blizzard” and “Undertaker” from “Belkin’s Tales”).

MANN Yuri Vladimirovich
literary critic, Doctor of Philology, professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, author of more than 400 works, including 23 books

“BAKHCHISARAI FOUNTAIN” by A.S. PUSHKIN (1821-1823)

Annotation. The author of the article examines the poetics of A.S. Pushkin’s romantic poem and its artistic features.
Key words: romantic hero, typical features, motive of alienation, conflict, system of female images, narrator and central character, criticism and Pushkin about the poem.

The poem “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” is the only southern poem that begins not with a descriptive or lyrical title, but with a portrait of the central character. In this portrait one can see the typical features of a romantic hero: “Girey sat with his eyes downcast”, “Signs of anger and sadness / On his gloomy face”, “... a stern brow / Expresses the excitement of the heart”, “What moves a proud soul?” A little later, we will also discern elegiac colors in it (“And the cold hours of the night / Spends the gloomy, lonely ...”), as if passed on to Giray from his literary predecessors - the characters of the first two southern poems.

Yes, Pushkin’s new hero, the “proud ruler” of Crimea, Khan Girey, is also involved in the romantic process of alienation. His motive was unrequited love. The significance of this motif is emphasized by a threefold retardation question (“What motivates the proud soul?”, “Has treason / entered his harem through the criminal path...”, “Why is Girey’s mind full of sadness?”); a question to which the answer is final and irrefutable. In the future, this motive only intensifies: the death of Maria took away the khan’s last hope.

The bitterness of love is experienced by Giray in all the romantic tension. The famous description of the pose of Khan Girey, the melodrama of which Pushkin later openly condemned, follows from the artistic concept of the poem:

He is often in fatal battles
Raises his saber and swings
Suddenly remains motionless
Running around with madness all around,
He turns pale, as if full of fear,
And he whispers something, and sometimes
Burning tears flow like a river.

Today’s critic would probably call this a “borderline situation,” when the crisis experienced takes a person beyond the established stereotype of thoughts and feelings and breaks the usual ties with the environment. However, a contemporary reviewer of Pushkin was able to feel this: “Ardent love, which broke the bonds of moral beings, forms the idea of ​​this creation” (1).

So, in Girey, with the motivation of unrequited love relating to him, Pushkin returns to the hero of “Prisoner of the Caucasus” (“...I did not know mutual love”)? Yes, but only in a new way. Or rather, it duplicates the motivation from the first southern poem on a different level.

But let’s first look at the motivation for alienation in “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” from the point of view of its clarity and certainty. It should be noted that in general in this poem Pushkin carried out an interesting and unsolved by his contemporaries experience of regrouping moments of complexity and understatement. The essence of the experiment was that understatement increased quantitatively in one, least significant direction, due to which it decreased in another, more important one. The first direction is event-based, plot-driven; the second is the explanation and motivation for the actions of the main characters. In the eyes of critics, the first direction completely overshadowed the second, and “The Bakhchisaray Fountain” earned a reputation as the most mysterious (and in this sense, romantic) of Pushkin’s poems.

In this famous manifesto of Russian romanticism, published together with the poem “Conversation between the publisher and the classic from the Vyborg side or from Vasilievsky Island,” P. A. Vyazemsky specifically defended the right to understatement. One of the participants in “The Conversation...”, a “classic,” grumbles: “In such a case, the reader should be the author’s apprentice and finish the story for him. Light hints, vague riddles: these are the materials produced by a romantic poet...” To this the publisher replies: “The less the prosaic connection is shown in the parts, the greater the benefits in relation to the whole” (2).

In “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” the “hints” about the Circassian woman’s suicide were quite clear: one would have to be completely deaf to doubt the circumstances of her death. In “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” the circumstances of Maria’s death are veiled (“Who knows?”). Although everything makes one think that Zarema fulfilled her threat (“I own the dagger...”), the narrator “doesn’t know” exactly what her fault is (“Whatever the guilt...”), “doesn’t know” circumstances of Mary’s death (“But what brought her to the grave?”). In “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” the reader only had to finish the story; in “The Bakhchisarai Fountain,” he was also forced to guess (3).

But to the extent that Pushkin intensified the mystery around one of the plot points of the poem, he clarified the very motivation for romantic alienation. In “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” there was a complex set of motives at work, unreconciled in their empirical reality and forcing one to look for a connecting line between them (this is where, first of all, the reader acted as the “apprentice of the author”!). In “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” there is no complexity of motivation. Doubts similar to those that worried M.P. Pogodin: what motivates the captive, love or the desire for freedom? - in relation to Giray would have no basis. It is clear that love, and love in all its romantic tension, when the rejected feeling and loss of the beloved is experienced as a deep, in today's terms, existential tragedy. Here, we repeat, is the source of Giray’s notorious melodramatic pose.

That is why to consider that Giray’s love “is only a side motive that Pushkin did not even think of developing, that Giray is obviously static and that staticity finds visible expression in the melodrama of his pose” (4) means to completely push aside the conflict of the poem. A conflict that organically fit into the context of Pushkin’s southern poems, and (as we will see later) all of Russian romanticism.
“The meaning of the “Bakhchisarai Fountain,” continues the same researcher, “is not at all in Giray, but in the synthesis of two female images, two types of love, between which Pushkin hesitated: this is the contradiction between the ideal of Madonna, who is “above the world and passions,” and a bacchanalian ideal of a purely “earthly”, uncompromising pagan passion” (5).

K.P. Bryullov. Bakhchisarai fountain. 1849

So, let's turn to the “two female images”. As established by V.M. Zhirmunsky, Russian romantic poem was influenced by Byron’s typology of female characters.
According to the researcher, Byron “distinguishes between two types of ideal beauty: an oriental woman with black eyes and dark hair, and a beautiful Christian woman, blue-eyed and fair-haired.<...>The contrast not only captures the external appearance of the heroine, but extends to the inner world (a gentle, meek, virtuous Christian woman and a passionate, unbridled, criminal harem beauty).<...>The image of the heroine in Pushkin's southern poems goes back to this Byronic tradition.<...>The contrast between Maria and Zarema in “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” repeats the relationship between Gulnara and Medora in “The Corsair”: the external appearance corresponds to the internal characteristics...” (6).

Within this typology, Zhirmunsky also notes the difference between Pushkin’s and Byron’s writing styles. The Russian poet “occupies the heroine’s spiritual world... to a much greater extent than Byron.” In “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” the background of both Zarema and Maria is given, “while Byron reserves similar techniques for the biographical characterization of the hero” (7).

The conclusions drawn by the researcher can be continued. And again we repeat that all three heroes - Girey, Zarema and Maria - are only partially united by the unity of the love situation in general. Along with the alienation of the central character, similar spiritual processes occur in the female characters. This is where the reason for introducing backstory into the characteristics of the heroines, the right to which usually belonged only to the hero of the poem, is revealed. After all, backstories describe the character’s state before the crisis point, when he was still united by naive harmonious relationships with people and with the environment.
The predominant tone of Mary's backstory (life in her father's house) is morning, infancy, beginning. Spring day is still ahead. Time is given over to “mere amusements,” but they are already permeated with spiritual movements: “She enlivened home feasts / With a magic harp.” Mentioned here is a favorite image of the romantics, an almost pure embodiment of spirituality.

Pushkin calls the harp “magical”. But this telling detail is only mentioned, the mellifluous melody is not emphasized (as in Zhukovsky’s “Aeolian Harp”). Whose harp is adjacent to “feasts”, which carry almost the opposite meaning - daring youth, revelry of feelings (cf. in the same poem in the narrator’s digression: “Having left the north at last, / Forgetting the feasts for a long time ...”). However, the meaning of “feasts” is not emphasized, but softened, “domesticated” (“home feasts”).

Belinsky called Mary “the virgin of the Middle Ages.” Slonimsky, in the above discussion, defined it with Pushkin’s phrase: “Above the world and passions.” However, with Pushkin, as always, everything is more complicated. Love is not alien to Mary - she just hasn’t awakened yet (“She didn’t know love yet”). Mary is distinguished not by hostility to the “world” or “passions,” but by strict harmony: “Slender, lively movements / And languid blue eyes.” The epithet “languid” is then refracted several times in different semantic planes of the poem - in the description of “sweet Taurida”: the moon “brings a languid radiance to the valleys, to the hills, to the forest”; in the narrator’s address to himself: “How long, languid prisoner, / Will you kiss the shackles...” (meaning the shackles of love). It is interesting that Pushkin secondarily correlates the epithet “languid” with Maria in the description of her captivity in the Khan’s palace. Here Zarema comes in and sees the sleeping princess:

...the heat of a virgin's sleep
Her cheeks perked up
And, showing a fresh trail of tears,
They lit up with a languid smile.
So the moonlight illuminates
Rain-burdened color.

Obviously, the epithet “languid” is used here in another (today almost lost) meaning, languid as experiencing languor, suffering. But in this context, the epithet is also important because it carries out the function of a collision between two states of Mary - today and formerly. It is absolutely clear that Maria is dreaming, that the dream returned her to the days of happy childhood, and as an echo of a former harmonious state - not love, but its possibility, its blossoming in the future - a languid smile awakened. It arose through tears that had not yet dried, as if through today’s state, and the subsequent comparison (“this is how the moonlight illuminates...”) subtly personifies this struggle. Here, not only the “rain-burdened color” completes (and enhances) the image of the girl’s tear-stained face, but also the moonlight is correlated with a languid smile not by chance: this is the same light that cast a “languid” radiance on the sleeping Taurida. After all that has been said, there is no need to explain that Zarema’s question to the Polish princess: “Why do you disturb a weak heart with cold beauty?” - this is not the final definition of Maria, but only a kind of reception of her appearance in the consciousness of the “fiery” Zarema (and even strengthened by the deliberate intention to contrast her with herself).

Meanwhile, the Khan's captivity crushed and interrupted the natural development of Mary. Although Maria found herself in the power of a man who was madly in love with her and softened the strict laws of the “harem” for her, it was still the power of her father’s murderer, a power that oppressed her will and feelings. We can talk about the development of the situation of prison in “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”: this time it was applied by Pushkin to a female character. And in the description of Mary, elegiac vocabulary also appears (“her despondency, tears, groans...”, a little lower - a typical elegiac turn: “What should she do in the desert of the world?”). And Mary, too, was faced with an inevitable choice between liberation and slavery (this time the slavery of a concubine), and she found a way out not in struggle, not in flight, but in humility. In this sense, one can note the extraordinary strengthening of the ideal-spiritual principle in her, which violated the original harmony. In this and only in this sense, one can accept Belinsky’s words that Mary is “a virgin of the Middle Ages, a meek, modest, childishly pious creature” (8).

Moreover, she found strength in weakness, constancy of spirit in trust in a higher will. Maria sees the whole “sad world” as a prison, and another world appears to her as a prisoner - the goal of his escape: “a long-desired light” (cf. in “Prisoner of the Caucasus”: “... I will die far from the desired shores”). When Zarema’s nighttime confession revealed to her the entire abyss of uncontrollable, seething passions, Maria realized that nothing in this world could save her and that all her threads with this life were severed.

The whole complexity of Pushkin’s psychological picture is also visible here:

Incomprehensible to an innocent maiden
The language of tormenting passions,
He is strange, he is terrible to her.

In other words, Maria cannot understand everything said by Zarema through internal experience, but it is accessible to her consciousness. This place, by the way, has a parallel: Zarema’s instant, impulsive approach to the world of Mary:

Georgian! Everything is in your soul
The dear one awakened something,
All with the sounds of forgotten days
Suddenly he spoke indistinctly.

Pushkin brings together - for a fraction of a second - characters who reflect with their consciousness an opposite spiritual state.

Zarema’s backstory covers both childhood in her native Georgia and life “in the shadow of a harem.” The line between one and the other time zone is given through Zarema’s perception - sharply, effectively, almost picturesquely (“I remember... the sea / And the man in the height / Above the sails...”), but beyond this line there is no psychological break. It seemed that Zarema was just waiting to become Girey’s wife: “My secret desires have come true...” Life in a harem for her is not captivity, but sweet captivity, the triumph of her beauty and passion - over her rivals, over the khan, over the whole world. We already know what such love meant in the artistic worldview of the romantics and what consequences its loss threatened. In the poem, Zarema appears for the first time in a pose that almost repeats Giray’s initial pose. The same indifference to those around them who are trying to dispel it, the same silence of sadness (here again and, so to speak, unmixed elegiac colors are used, which in the portrait of the khan are adjacent to other colors: in his face there are “signs” and “anger and sadness”). The same unequivocal definition of the cause of suffering (“Nothing, nothing is sweet to her: / Giray stopped loving Zarema”), warning against a similar diagnosis of Giray’s “sadness.”

Thus, all three characters, by the beginning of the poem or a little later, are brought to a crisis point, when the current situation seems unbearable, and death inevitable or desirable (“His betrayal will kill me,” says Zarema; Giray’s petrification at the moment of the fight is also indifference to mortal danger; Maria’s desire for an accelerated death has already been mentioned). In all three cases, the final cause of suffering is a love feeling - either as a rejected or unrequited feeling (Zarema, Giray), or as threatening violence against the feeling (Maria). The author of “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” seems to miss the main motivation for alienation along several mutually reflecting planes.

In “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” the Circassian woman’s motivation for rejected love interacted with the complex, but by no means only, love motivation of the captive. In “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” the motivation develops as one theme with variations, harmoniously uniting the hero with his environment.

The most significant variations are revealed by the central character - Khan Giray. Zarema does not betray herself in everything, moving from the fury of passion to the fury of despair and revenge. Mary’s character also moves within the limits of her own capabilities, leading to a sharp increase in the moments of high spirituality already inherent in it. Giray is the only one who moves from one level to another, from fiery physical passion to deep heartfelt melancholy, relatively speaking, from the level of Zarema to Maria’s kurov. In this sense, Belinsky’s remark is correct: “Without understanding how, why and for what, he respects the shrine of this defenseless beauty... he behaves in relation to it almost like a paladin of the Middle Ages...” (9).

All this, by the way, again points to the central place occupied by Khan Giray in the structure of the conflict. However, there is a limit to the development of Giray's feeling. Belinsky’s reservation “almost like a paladin of the Middle Ages” is correct, and not only in the historical sense of the insufficient approximation of Pushkin’s hero to medieval chivalry. Let us remember that for Belinsky and the cultural and philosophical tradition he inherited, medieval romanticism is synonymous with historically true romanticism, which naturally developed in its time and marked a necessary phase in European culture. (By the way, Pushkin as a theorist, the author of the reflections “On Classical and Romantic Poetry” is not alien to such a concept, but this is a separate question.) If Belinsky had identified the feeling of a khan with the love of a “paladin of the Middle Ages,” he would have made Pushkin’s hero the bearer of that progressive at one time, a cultural tradition that, in his opinion, was artistically and creatively represented in our country by, say, Zhukovsky. This is the important semantic limitation that the “almost” clause brought with it. And it, of course, corresponded to the restrictive “signposts” of the poem itself.

In “Prisoner of the Caucasus” there were moments of the author’s speech that had the character of complete solidarity with the central character, insight into his feelings and views (not to mention the closeness of the structure of the speech of the narrator and the hero throughout almost the entire poem). As we remember, there are two such moments: reflections on “freedom” and on “original love.” They removed any limitation of the character’s inner world, making him in the most significant moments equal to the author’s spiritual world and his ideal. In the new “Bakhchisarai Fountain” the hero is different, and there are no more moments of the author’s speech that would be in the nature of solidarity with him. True, there is one place that has a more complex nature. After the lines about Mary’s captivity in the Khan’s palace (“The austere shrine is hidden / A miraculously saved corner”) it says:

So the heart, a victim of delusions,
Among the vicious intoxications
Keeps one holy pledge,
One divine feeling...

These lines expand on what was said before in some very significant sense. So you can only talk about what you do not separate from yourself, you consider ideal without any reservations. It’s like an intimate confession that burst out at a special moment and was not fully said, cut off mid-sentence (then there are two lines of ellipses). But who are these lines about? Hardly about Girey: “holy pledge”, “divine feeling” - all this exceeds the degree of spiritual awakening of the pagan khan. These lines are about what the narrator himself experiences, expressed in his terms and correlated with his inner world, with his “hidden” deep love (10) (in the epilogue this will become the main theme of the poem). The lyrical digression does not merge the narrator with the central character, as in “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” but separates them.

However, having separated this digression with a subtle associative game, he outlines the similarity in the difference itself (again, typically Pushkin’s instant rapprochement of opposite spiritual states). The current of associativity flows through the verb “store”. This and related verbs permeate the previous description of the princess’s captivity: “The palace of Bakhchisarai / Hides the young princess,” “And, it seems, in that solitude / Someone unearthly hid,” “The austere shrine hides / A miraculously saved corner.” The beginning of the author's digression closes this chain: “So the heart, a victim of delusions... / Keeps one holy pledge.” A parallelism is established: just as in the midst of vice and delusion the heart keeps the “holy pledge”, the “divine feeling”, so the khan’s palace (controlled by his will, his love) keeps the “shrine” of beauty in the midst of the “crazy bliss” of passions. A correlate arises which, without changing Giray’s feelings essentially, throws on him the light of the highest romantic significance.

Thus, in “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” there is an objectification of the romantic conflict. The leading moment of this process is a change in the scale of the central character: he is lowered, relegated to a different level, since he should no longer represent the “distinctive features” of the “youth of the 19th century.” There is a certain distancing between the author and the hero, but the latter still retains something significant, romantically meaningful.

In “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” a different approach to the ambiguity of both the central character and his environment was revealed for the first time. Belinsky noted that in the paintings of Crimea “there is no this element of loftiness that is so visible in “Prisoner of the Caucasus”” (11).
Along with the muting of the “element of sublimity,” the ambiguity of the “freedom” (a combination of love of freedom with cruelty, etc.), which appeared in “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” was also softened (although not completely removed).

In the “Bakhchisarai Fountain” in the “Tatar Song” there are the lines:

But he is more blessed, O Zarema,
Who loves peace and bliss,
Like a rose in the silence of a harem
Cherishes you, my dear.

The combination of “peace” and “peace” is explained further: for the sake of Zarema, the khan interrupted cruel wars. (Cf. also the last reminder of the world in the author’s closing speech: “A fan of the muses, a worshiper of the world.”) Khan, of course, is both cruel and vindictive, but these qualities of his are not combined with love, appearing only in times of despair and bitterness.

In addition to the three main characters of “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”, who develop its conflict, there are two more very important characters in the poem. One is the “evil eunuch”, sheer indifference and dispassion for beauty. Another character, or rather another, is the “sweet” Taurida, exuding the breath of “peaceful bliss.” These are, of course, unchanging characters, motionless, like stage scenes. But by their very constancy they strictly outline the stage where, between complete indifference to love, on the one hand, and the love that permeates everything around, personified in nature itself, on the other hand, the conflict of fatal romantic passion is fully revealed in all its modulations.

Thanks to the unity of collision and, ultimately, the unity of motivation, “The Bakhchisarai Fountain,” the first of Pushkin’s southern poems, left readers with the impression of integrity and completeness.
“Everything that happens between Girey, Maria and Zarema,” wrote I.V. Kireevsky, “is so closely connected with the surrounding objects that the entire story can be called one scene from the life of a harem. All digressions and breaks are connected by one common feeling; everyone strives to make one, main impression” (12).

Kireevsky concluded that the poem was “more mature” compared to “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” However, Pushkin did not agree with the widespread opinion of critics: “The Bakhchisarai Fountain is weaker than The Prisoner.” This was written in 1830 (in the notes “Rebuttal to Critics”), when for the author of “Eugene Onegin” and “Boris Godunov” broad “non-romantic” principles could have received paramount importance in his first southern poem. But even by 1824, on the eve of work on “Gypsies,” much in “Prisoner of the Caucasus” retained for the poet the meaning of a creative stimulus and not yet exhausted possibilities.

NOTES

1 KARNIOLIN-PINSKY M.M. “Bakhchisarai Fountain”, poem by A.S. Pushkin // Son of the Fatherland. - 1824. - No. 13. - P. 274.
2 Quote. by: PUSHKIN A.S. Bakhchisarai fountain. - St. Petersburg, 1824. - P. XVII. See also: VYAZEMSKY PA. Aesthetics and literary criticism. M., 1984. - P. 52.
3 Wed. correct remarks of the researcher:
“In The Bakhchisarai Fountain... the mystery of entertainment plays an even more significant role. The illusion of a mystery is created around the fate of both heroines, which is left to the reader to solve” // SLONIMSKY AL. Pushkin's mastery. - M., 1963 - P. 230.
4 SLONIMSKY AL. Pushkin's mastery. - M., 1963. - P. 234.
5 Ibid.
6 ZHIRMUNSKY V.M. Byron and Pushkin. - M„ 1978. - P. 161,164.
7 Ibid. - pp. 166-167.
8 BELINSKY V.G. Poly. collection cit.: In 13 volumes - 1955. - T. 7. - P. 379.
9 BELINSKY V.G. Complete collection cit.: In 13 volumes - M., 1955. - T. 7. - P. 379.
10 On the real basis of the “hidden” love of the author of “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”, see: Tynyanov Yu.N. Nameless love // ​​TYNYANOV Yu.N. Pushkin and his contemporaries. - M„ 1968. - P. 209-232.
11 BELINSKY V.G. Full collection cit.: In 11 volumes - M., 1955. - T. 7. - P. 381.
12 KIREEVSKY I.V. Criticism and aesthetics. - M., 1998. - P. 69.

"Literature at school". - 2017. - No. 7. - P. 2-6.

The Mystery of the Bakhchisarai Fountain

Fountains are perhaps the most common elements of the cultural landscape, emphasizing romantic landscapes and personifying the languid bliss of luxurious gardens and parks. However, the first fountains that appeared in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia had a mainly practical purpose - they were used to water gardens and vegetable gardens. They gained particular popularity in the East, where in gardens surrounded by terraces of multi-colored tiles, cool streams of water flowed, and their numerous splashes played in the sun’s rays with all the colors of the rainbow. Fountains were common in Southern Europe, China, Japan and many other countries as a special element of park architecture, making the space filled with attractive and romantic images.

Today there are hundreds of famous fountains in the world, located in Italy, France, Germany, the USA, China and Russia. In our northern country, fountains have become a favorite element of city and park architecture; the most interesting and majestic examples of them are located in the parks and palace complexes of St. Petersburg, but, perhaps, none of them is as widely known as the small and modest fountain in the Khan’s Palace Bakhchisarai - the ancient capital of the Crimean Khanate.

Our great poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, impressed by the tragic story associated with one of the fountains of Bakhchisarai, created the majestic poem “Bakhchisarai Fountain”. In general, the Khan's palace in Bakhchisarai is a real “pearl” in the cultural and historical space of Crimea. Pushkin, Akhmatova, Mitskevich and other poets in their poetic work more than once turned to the legendary and always exciting image of the Khan's palace. Construction of the palace began at the beginning of the 16th century by Khan Sahib I Giray, and the city of Bakhchisarai grew along with the palace.

For almost two and a half centuries, Bakhchisaray was the main residence of the Crimean rulers; it was rebuilt several times, but the architectural style, reflecting the Ottoman tradition and conveying the Muslim spirit of the Garden of Eden on earth, made it the most perfect monument of the era of the Crimean Khanate. The Bakhchisarai Palace was not the only residence of the khan. There were five more small khan's palaces in Crimea - the old palace of Devlet Saray, the palaces of Ulakly Saray, Alma Saray, Kachi Saray, and Syuren Saray. But these were more like country residences, and Bakhchisarai, known to us by the famous fountain glorified by A.S. Pushkin, always remained the real palace. The most romantic image of the palace “Fountain of Tears” was built under the ruler Kyrym Geray as a memory of great love and the bitterness of loss.

Photos of the Bakhchisaray district and active tours in Crimea

Selsibil (Fountain of Tears) was created in 1764 by master Omer in memory of Geray’s deceased wife Dilyara-Bikech, whose name is associated with a beautiful legend about love, jealousy, hatred and sadness. According to legend, the great ruler and brave warrior Kyrym Geray passionately fell in love with one of the concubines of his harem, the beautiful Dilyara, but a jealous rival poisoned her, leaving the khan in inconsolable grief. To leave a memory of his beloved, he embodied the image dear to his heart in a modest but symbolic obelisk of a fountain of tears, created in a classical Islamic manner that allows one to express deep feelings using floral and plant forms and ornaments.

The poetic legend is figuratively conveyed by the symbolism of the fountain, where from the core of the flower, as from a human eye, tears flow drop by drop, falling into the large upper bowl - the bowl of the heart, then gradually the pain subsides, and the drops slowly ooze into two small bowls. But the memory of love is always alive, and periodically it raises a wave of bitterness and sadness, increasing the flow of the cut into the large middle bowl. Love suffering, either subsiding or intensifying, accompanies a person throughout his entire earthly life until he leaves for another world, indicated on the white marble of the fountain with a symbolic spiral reflecting the eternity of existence. A.S. Pushkin heard this legend during his Caucasian trip with the family of General Raevsky in 1820. The impressionable poet was deeply touched by the love story of the all-powerful khan for Dilyara and her tragic death at the hands of a jealous rival, and the fountain, erected as a monument to eternal sorrow, inspired him to write one of the most unusual romantic works.

True, the poet did not like the fountain, nor did the palace itself, which by that time had become fairly dilapidated. However, Pushkin’s poetic imagination, under the influence of this almost philosophical parable about the power and beauty of earthly love, which does not lose its eternal meaning even after death, still makes everyone who comes to the palace to the “fountain of tears” see in it something more than a modest vertical marble slab with a slowly trickling stream of water.

In his letter to his friend Delvig, he writes that he came to Bakhchisarai sick and, upon entering the palace, saw a damaged fountain, from a rusty tube of which water was falling drop by drop. Despite this, the history of the palace and the unusual fountain gave the poet an extraordinary creative impulse, which inspired him to create two poetic masterpieces: the poem “The Bakhchisaray Fountain” and the poem “The Fountain of the Bakhchisaray Palace”. Reflecting on this amazing fact, one cannot help but note the peculiarity of the relationship between the real and imaginary world, which today is called “virtual”. In fact, reality tends to be transformed by people’s consciousness into different images, which sometimes have nothing to do with reality.

In the case of the Bakhchisarai Fountain, Pushkin’s poetic imagination constructed a new - sad and therefore very romantic image of the “fountain of tears”, which for almost 200 years has been passed on to more and more generations.

Romantic image of the Bakhchisarai Palace

In the poem itself, written in 1821, the theme of the fountain sounds very sad; according to Pushkinists, this sadness is inspired by a feeling for an unknown lady with whom the poet was, in his words, “for a long time and stupidly in love.” However, despite the fact that many of the poet’s love stories are well known, the name of the lady who inspired the poet’s poem “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” still remains a mystery. This fact is certainly intriguing and attracts increased attention to the Bakhchisarai Palace, which today has become an unusually beautiful and well-kept museum and the most important part of the historical, cultural and archaeological museum-reserve of federal significance.

At the same time, the tourist attractiveness of the palace and its commercial success were largely due to the poetic phrase of A.S. Pushkin, who called Selsibil “a fountain of tears.”

The memory of the poet is reverently preserved by the old Bakhchisarai Palace in a small courtyard-gallery next to the fountain of tears there is a bust of A.S. Pushkin. All visitors to the palace museum usually strive for it as soon as they cross the threshold of the museum complex. The question about the fountain is the first thing they ask, and guides have to restrain tourists’ desire to see it right away, so as not to destroy the orderly thread of the museum route. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to mention that the eternally in love young poet, without knowing it, breathed new life with his poetry into the walls of the old Khan’s palace, which today appears before us not only as a historical object, but also as an abode of romantic images, masterfully conveyed by the creative efforts of the marble fountain sculptor and poet.

Glorifying the Bakhchisarai fountain in a famous poem, the poet complements its visual image with a special sign - two roses, personifying love and sadness.

Fountain of love, living fountain!

I brought you two roses as a gift.

I love your silent conversation

And poetic tears.

With the light hand of the poet, roses became a symbol of the fountain. They always lie on his main bowl, which represents a heart suffering from love. Living roses, which are brought every day from the beautiful Bakhchisaray garden, very subtly emphasize Pushkin’s mood of “hidden love”, which “overcomes everything and never ceases...”

By the way, the famous fountain of tears is not the only one in the Bakhchisarai Palace. The atmosphere of heavenly bliss was created by several other interesting fountains located both in the palace itself and in the Khan’s garden, but only “Selsibil”, or the fountain of tears, became a truly famous brand of Bakhchisarai. The power of the poetic image created by the great poet beyond time and space, his romantic appeal to descendants is heard and felt by new generations of Russians, which can be judged using the materials of the tourist electronic service "Tripadvisor" (Russia), which conducted a survey of tourists who visited the Bakhchisarai Palace in 2016-2017.2

Of course, visitors and excursionists expressed their emotions about the famous fountain in different ways and, despite the range of opinions, the vast majority of them shared the feelings and impressions of A.S. Pushkin, who, having rejected the first not very positive impression, was deeply imbued with the secret and emotional power of the fountain tears, dedicating to him his most powerful and mysterious poetic work.

Here are the most typical and interesting reviews:

It was interesting to listen to how, at the request of the Sultan, a talented man embodied a magnificent idea in stone, how Alexander Sergeevich was inspired by this story and embodied this legend in his own way, how people continue to admire these creations and even continue to lay 2 roses, as the genius once did poet.

You will not immediately find the fountain described by Pushkin. There are several fountains in the palace and there are similar ones. All are very beautiful, as are the gardens where they are located.

Everything connected with the Khan's Palace is a little different. As it seems. There is nothing grandiose, everything is small and not pretentious. But it has its own interesting history. For example, Pushkin sang about this fountain in his poems. It was he who once placed two roses on the fountain, and so it happened.

Maybe someone was not impressed by the modest appearance, but in order to feel it you need not to gallop, but calmly and preferably in private, and of course knowing the lines of A.S. Pushkin...

Even a cursory content analysis of reviews of the fountain shows the extraordinary vitality of successful poetic images that mythologize the space, which at the same time enhances its symbolic value, making tourist routes and excursion programs unusually successful. The summary rating of reviews given below clearly conveys the modern attitude of tourists visiting the Bakhchisarai Palace to the fountain of tears. It is generally very positive, which proves the need to enhance the impression of tourist attractions with famous artistic images.

A. S. Pushkin’s poem “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” immerses the reader in the atmosphere of the East. The author recreated the Bakhchisarai flavor through landscapes and interiors, shrouded in secrets and oriental aromas, images of the khan and concubines. The work cannot leave any reader indifferent. Schoolchildren get acquainted with him in the 10th grade. We suggest making your preparation for the lesson easier by reading the analysis of the poem presented below.

Brief Analysis

Year of writing - 1821-1823

History of creation- The work was written when the poet was in southern exile. The creation of Alexander Sergeevich’s poem was inspired by the Crimean landscapes, as well as a legend told to the poet by a young woman.

Subject- real love.

Composition- The features of the composition are dictated by the genre of the work and its content. The plot is revealed sequentially; non-plot elements play an important role in realizing the ideological sound and reproducing the internal state of the main characters.

Genre- Poem.

Direction- Romanticism.

History of creation

The history of the creation of the work is connected with the southern exile of A. S. Pushkin. Before going to Chisinau, Alexander Sergeevich in September 1820 stayed in the Raevskys’ house in Bakhchisarai. In a letter to Delvig, the poet admitted that he had previously heard about the Bakhchisarai fountain. Legends said that this was a monument erected by a loving khan. Pushkin went to look at this “miracle”, but was disappointed, because he saw a ruin.

Nevertheless, the Crimean landscapes did not leave the poet indifferent. Inspired the creation of a poem and a story by a young woman. She told Alexander Sergeevich a legend, which formed the basis of the work. It is known that the poet was in love with this very woman, as evidenced by his letters addressed to his brother. Researchers have not yet found out the identity of the beautiful admirer.

The years in which the work was written are 1821-1823. In 1821, the poet began work on the text of the poem, in 1822 he wrote the main part, and in the fall of 1823 he made the final edits. The Bakhchisarai Fountain was first published in 1824.

Subject

In “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” the analysis should begin with a description of the main theme and system of images.

Eastern motives, as well as the motif of love, are common in world literature. A.S. Pushkin could not stay away from them. In the context of the central theme, the author reveals moral problems: suffering due to unhappy love, revenge, life and death, religion, loyalty to one’s feelings, loyalty to one’s homeland.

At the beginning of the work, the reader meets Khan Girey. The hero is not happy, we will learn about the reason for this mood further. It turns out that a new girl has appeared in his harem - Polish Maria. Khan fell madly in love with her. The hero forgot about Zarema, the main wife, the beauty of the harem.

Zarema loves the khan. She decides to talk to Maria. The woman quietly makes her way into the Polish woman’s room. At this time the girl prays before the image of the Most Pure Virgin. Zarema first asks to leave Girey, then threatens Maria.

Soon Maria dies. Khan punishes Zarema by throwing her into the abyss. A man cannot forget his beloved Polish girl. He finds salvation in attacks on Russian lands. Returning from the war, he erected a fountain, which was called the fountain of tears.

The work develops the idea that true love is not limited by religion or age; true feelings cannot be forgotten.

Composition

The features of the composition are dictated by the genre of the work and its content. The plot is revealed sequentially; non-plot elements play an important role in realizing the ideological sound and reproducing the internal state of the main characters.

Genre

The plan for analyzing a literary work requires a mandatory description of its genre features. The genre of the work is a poem, since it has a lyrical component (written in verse, lyrical indents play an important role, the emotional background is clearly expressed) and an epic (plot) The direction of A. S. Pushkin’s poem “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” is romanticism, as evidenced by the motives and features of the image of the khan.

Literature is one of the main components of every person’s life. From books, from childhood, we learn what good is and what evil is, what insidious and corrupt people there are, and how to live correctly in our society. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is rightfully considered one of the most popular Russian writers. During his short, unfortunately, life, he wrote many works that are very easy to read and have deep meaning. His poems and poems are filled with romance, sensuality and humanity. “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” is one of the author’s most famous works. This poem was written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after Pushkin visited the Bakhchisaray palace of the Crimean khans. He was so impressed that he decided to describe what he saw on paper.

The history of the poem

One day, the family of General Raevsky invited the writer to visit the Khan’s Palace with them. This event was planned for the autumn of 1820. When the poet arrived at the place, he saw a monument that he had only heard about - a fountain of tears.

It was rusty and abandoned. Pushkin walked around the area and decided to write a poem called “The Bakhchisarai Fountain.” Already in the spring of next year he began work. Oddly enough, the author did not want the work to be published, explaining that many places reminded him of his beloved woman.

The plot of the work

The poem “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” describes the actions taking place in the harem. The main character, Zarema, is considered the khan’s most beloved concubine, but she is only sad that the master has not paid attention to her for a long time. Has he stopped loving her? After all, a new girl appeared in the house - a princess named Maria. She was kidnapped from her home and is as innocent as a drop of dew. Zarema sees her as a rival and decides to eliminate her at all costs. The woman enters the new girl’s room and assures the girl that if she does not leave the khan, then she will not live in this world. The work “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” describes in detail the hard life of young girls (the master’s concubines). Pushkin, finding himself in that environment and learning the details of life in the harem, simply froze in amazement.

It was wild for him to treat a woman like that; With all his lovers, he behaved completely differently: he blew away specks of dust from them, read poetry under the stars, kissed them crazy. Here everything was the other way around. A stunning poem was written by Alexander Pushkin. “The Bakhchisarai Fountain” is a work that not only lifted the curtain, telling about the life of a harem, but also for the first time showed the Russian people how other women could live. Further, the poem describes the death of Maria, and then Zarema, who was specially drowned. Khan at this time leaves for war with unpleasant memories - now he does not have the best concubines. In honor of the innocent girl who died at the hands of a jealous woman, the khan ordered the construction of a huge fountain in the palace, which in the future began to be called the “fountain of tears.”

Instead of an afterword

Today readers know that Pushkin wrote “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” over the course of two years, and it was not easy for him. No one ever found out the name of his secret lover, but some suggest that perhaps she could end up in one of the harems of the Crimean Khanate. Be that as it may, today we have an excellent opportunity to admire a stunning literary work about a high and noble feeling.