K. Balmont is an outstanding Russian poet of the Silver Age. Most of his works are dominated not by people, but by generalized images and feelings. A similar example is the poem “Fantasy,” written by him in 1893, on the eve of the zenith of Balmont’s creativity (it occurred in 1900.)
The main theme, the idea of ​​“Fantasy” is the extraordinary beauty of winter nature, which can change, symbolizing shades of mental state, evoking different feelings and emotions.
The lyrical plot of the poem lies in the change in the atmosphere of silence, tranquility of the winter forest with impending changes, anxiety, sadness, growing with every moment:
The prophetic forest sleeps peacefully
Hearing the quiet groan of a blizzard...
But in the next stanza we read:
And the trees are dreaming of something
These are the spirits of the night rushing, these are their eyes sparkling,
At the hour of deep midnight, spirits rush through the forest...
The natural, fairy-tale plot of the work does not raise serious life problems; it is filled with romance and artistic expressiveness.
The composition of the poem emphasizes a certain mystery, calm, romance, and sometimes anxiety and trepidation.
The lyrical hero in most of the poem is only an observer. His perception of the world around him conveys the shades of his state of mind. He feels in the trembling outlines of the forest something mysterious, unearthly, inaccessible to human understanding:
And the trees are dreaming of something
Something that no one will ever dream of...
The poem expresses various shades of mood - the serenity and sleepy calm of a winter night, shades of anxiety, sadness, mystery and tranquility.
In his poem, the author used cross rhyme, which enhanced the artistic expressiveness of the work.
The images of Balmont, created by him in “Fantasy,” lack clear outlines and are surrounded by mystery: “murmur of the wind,” “light rain,” “sparks of moonlight,” “secret dreams,” “spirits of the night.”
The poem is full of epithets (a quiet groan, slender branches, mournful prayer, fairy-tale trunks, clear and bright dreams) and comparative phrases (like living statues, as if a star sparkles, as if light rain flows like a worm). Very often Balmont uses personification (the forest is calmly dozing, the pines are whispering, the spruce trees are whispering), and in the second stanza he uses rhetorical questions.
Reading the poem “Fantasy”, you get pleasure from its musicality, artistic expressiveness, and pictures of the extraordinary beauty of nature.

In the poem, at first glance, K. Balmont paints a picture of a sleeping winter forest:

The prophetic forest calmly slumbers, the bright shine of the Moon accepts
And he listens to the murmur of the wind, all filled with secret dreams.

Further, the picture of the forest seems to dissolve, giving way to something indefinite: sighs, singing, melancholy, intoxication, spirits of the night with sparkling eyes. All these fleeting images and impressions arise in the imagination of the lyrical hero, born of his imagination, which is why the poem is called that.

The lyrical hero feels in the slightly trembling outlines of the forest something mysterious, unearthly, inaccessible to human understanding. To create a feeling of mystery, romance, and anxiety, the poet uses a variety of artistic means. For example, comparisons (“like living statues”, “like a star sparkling”, “like light rain flowing”, “like a worm”). Images of nature (wind, blizzard, forest) are enlivened by personification. In the poem, everything moves, feels, lives: the forest “calmly slumbers,” “heeds the murmur of the wind,” “filled with secret dreams”; “the moan of a blizzard,” “the pines are whispering, the spruce trees are whispering.” The poem is full of epithets (“quiet groan”, “slender branches”, “sorrowful prayer”, “prophetic fairytale trunks”, “clear bright dreams”, etc.). The author often resorts to lexical repetitions: whisper - whisper, someone's - someone's, this - this, what - what, everything - everything, thirst - thirst, rush - rush.

The syntactic devices are also interesting. The second stanza contains a series of rhetorical questions:

What torments them, what worries them? What, like a worm, is secretly eating them?
Why can’t their swarm sing the joyful hymn of Heaven?

The poem is characterized by rows of homogeneous structures. For example:

Without remembering anything, without cursing anything,
Slender branches bend, listen to the sounds of midnight.

“It’s as if they are tormented by anxiety, a thirst for faith, a thirst for God...”

In the poem one can hear a lulling splashing, an indistinct murmur, the silence of the moonlit night is broken by whispers and sighs. To create these sound associations, the author widely uses alliteration (repetition of consonants) hissing and whistling: (zh, sh, shch, h; z, s), as well as sonorants: (l, r, m, n.). For example:

Hearing the quiet groan of a blizzard, pine trees whisper, spruce trees whisper...
...The outlines of prophetic fairy-tale trunks tremble a little...

So, the originality of K. Balmont’s poem lies in the use of symbolic images of free elements, various means of expression (personifications, epithets, lexical repetitions), special musicality and sound organization. Lightness, airiness, trembling are felt in the vibrating lyrical landscape. The poet draws only the outlines of objects that seem changeable and fleeting in the moonlight.

Knis Margarita, 11th grade A

Analysis of the poem "Fantasy"

“Fantasy” outwardly represents a detailed description of a sleeping winter forest. The poet does not localize the position of the lyrical “observer” in any way, does not specify the psychological circumstances of his visions. Therefore, he uses the theme of winter nature only as an excuse to unleash the boundless play of his lyrical imagination. In fact, the content of the poem becomes a mosaic of fleeting images born of the poet’s imagination. The composition of the poem is amorphous: each subsequent line not so much expands the scope of the image as varies the initial fleeting impression in different ways.

This impression hardly deepens: only at the end of the second stanza does a hint of the activity of the lyrical subject appear. A series of interrogative sentences outlines the existence of a second, mystical plane of the poem. Behind the “quiet moans” of the trees, the poet discerns ghostly “spirits of the night” - ephemeral creatures with “sparkling eyes.” “Moonlight” is complemented by a new quality: intuition interprets the beautiful anxiety of the forest as “a thirst for faith, a thirst for God.” However, the new twist in the lyrical plot is not developed: barely manifested, the intonation of mystical anxiety again gives way to self-directed admiration of the “forest” scenery.

The internal expressiveness of the poem lies in the transformation of a static picture of a frozen forest into a dynamic stream of images, constantly changing its course. Natural elements - wind, blizzard, forest - are enlivened here by the most characteristic technique for Balmont - personification: in the poem everything moves, feels, lives. Images of free elements (wind, sea, fire) in Balmont’s artistic world seem to shine through, acquiring transparency and depth of symbolism. They convey sensations of the free play of forces, lightness, airiness, uninhibited audacity, and ultimately, the freedom of man in the world. In “Fantasy,” behind the rapidly changing, kaleidoscopically flashing faces of the winter night, there is the artist’s light-winged imagination, his unfettered creative will. The external outlines of Balmont’s images lack graphic clarity. With the finest touches, the poet applies only the contours of objects, making them seem to pulsate under the moonlight. Balmont’s lyrical landscapes are generally characterized by motifs of trembling, vibration, trembling, which impart to the figurative structure the qualities of unsteadiness, changeability, and fleetingness: “shapes tremble,” “murmur of the wind,” “rain flows,” “sparks of moonlight,” etc.

“Fantasy,” like most of Balmont’s other poems, is permeated with a rainbow of light and air. The created images (pine trees, spruce trees, birch trees, etc.) lose their substance, acquire a volatile weightlessness, as if they dissolve in “light rain”, in “moonlight”. This is facilitated by the poet’s passion for stringing together numerous epithets, in the chain of which the noun they define drowns.

Another noticeable feature of Balmont’s poetics in the poem is its intense, sometimes hypertrophied (self-directed) musicality. The verbal and sound flow in “Fantasy” takes on the color of a lulling splashing, gentle murmur. The silence of the moonlit night is shaded by flashes of whispers, sighs, and prayers. Balmont's favorite rhythmic move is repetitions of various types. These are, first of all, lexical repetitions. Often, within the boundaries of one verse, one word is repeated twice, or even three times (sometimes in a slightly modified form). A peculiar principle of lexical “echo” is also used, when a word reappears several verses after its first appearance. So, in the third stanza - a kind of musical code of the poem - the words and verbal groups used in the first and second stanzas are repeated: singing, radiance, moon, trembling, prophetic, dozing, listening, moaning.

Even more important is the repetition of homogeneous grammatical constructions, used both within a separate verse and within a stanza - thanks to grammatical homogeneity, the semantic differences of words are leveled out, so that, for example, the verbal pairs “sleeping - listening” or “remembering - cursing” are perceived almost as pairs of synonyms.

No less noticeable is another facet of the sound organization of the verse - the widest use of alliteration and assonance. Balmont especially loves instrumentation with hissing and whistling consonants: sound waves roll through the poem zh-sh-sch-ch, s-z; The role of sonorant consonants l-r-m-n is great. The poet does not ignore the opportunity to effectively use assonances: for example, in the third verse, in five of the eight stressed positions there is a c, and in the sixth, the stressed a is used four times. Balmont has the ability to give a traditional poetic meter (in this case, the classical trochee) a new rhythmic shade. Due to the strong lengthening, the rhythmic movement acquires the qualities of sleepy slowness, melodious slowness, and measured divination.

The general feeling from Balmont's lyrics is the spontaneity of the poet's reaction to the world, his ability to poetically exalt the inconstancy of moods and tastes, the impressionistic nature of his vision and a strong desire for external musicality.

balmont poem fantasy

Lesson objectives: by analyzing a specific poem, see the features of K. Balmont’s poetic style, understand his creative “laboratory”, understand the significance of the poet’s work for the development of Russian poetry as a whole.

Lesson progress

Teacher: Literary era at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The almost half-century reign of realism, glorified by the names of Pushkin and Lermontov, gave way to an era of unbridled creative experimentation. The speed with which new directions, currents, and schools appear is amazing. One of the first researchers of this era, Vengerov, notes: “None of the previous periods of our literature knew so many literary names, did not know such rapid achievement of fame, such dizzying bookselling successes...” If we consider the space from 1890 to 1910, we get the impression of what something like a kaleidoscope. Although Russian symbolism arose as an integral movement, it very soon became refracted into bright, independent individuals. Which poet, in your opinion, is the most prominent representative of Russian symbolism?

Student: V. Bryusov, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, K. Balmont, F. Sologub...

Teacher: In one sentence, name a striking feature of each person’s poetics.

Student: V. Bryusov – all creativity is characterized by a materialistic view of the world; in his poetry there is no mystical symbolism characteristic of symbolists; his lyrical hero is an individualist who does not accept modernity and worships only art; D. Merezhkovsky - characterized by awareness of fatal loneliness, dual personality, preaching beauty; Z. Gippius - mysticism, spiritual melancholy, loneliness, discord between reality and dreams; K. Balmont - rejection of the outside world, grief, exaltation of love, nature; powerful musicality of the verse; his poetry is impressionistic; F. Sologub – deeply pessimistic poetry; mythological and folklore images are typical.

Teacher: But their work has a lot in common.

Student: Yes, what they have in common is their desire, with the help of artistic images-symbols, often mysterious in meaning, to reflect the secret aspects of existence in fiction; they believed in the saving mission of beauty and protested against reality, confident in the dysfunction and death of the modern social order.

Teacher: Today we again turn to the work of a unique, original poet. A poet who was admired and called a genius. So, K. Balmont, poem “Fantasy”. Year of writing: 1893. What events in Balmont’s life and work occurred during this period?

Student: In 1892, Balmont visited Scandinavia for the first time, which he not only fell in love with, but also became close to. Reflections of Scandinavian impressions sparkled in the book of poems “Under the Northern Sky,” where the second poem was “Fantasy.” This collection of poems became not only a significant event in Balmont’s creative biography, but also marked a new artistic direction - symbolism. In a number of poems, the imitation of Fet and Tyutchev is still noticeable, but a fresh, original poetic gift was felt in everything.

Reading a poem by heart.

Teacher: If you look at the poem, you can visually distinguish 3 stanzas, 3 semantic parts.

Conversation with the class on the first semantic part.

What picture was drawn by Balmont in part 1? – Picture of a sleeping winter forest. Nature is immersed not just in sleep, but in a state of peaceful calm, everything is shrouded in drowsiness, laziness (“they slumber calmly,” “it’s pleasant to rest”). The author seems to be describing the real material world, but when reading the poem, we seem to break away from earthly realities and go to some fairy-tale, mysterious world, fantastic (for some reason we remember the fairy tale by A. Rowe “Morozko”).

How does the poet achieve this? What do we see? – We do not see pine, spruce and birch trees, but their outlines. It seems that if you close your eyes for a moment and open them again, they will already disappear. We do not see the moon itself, but only “sparks of moonlight,” “bright shine.” There is a feeling of a moment, a moment, lightness, instability, changeability of what is happening. What do we hear? – We hear “the murmur of the wind”, “the quiet moan of a blizzard”, the whisper of firs and pines (alliteration “sch”, “w”, “ch”, “t”, “s” helps). It seems that someone has put a finger to their lips and quietly says: “Shhhhh.” Which visual medium does Balmont prefer? - Personification. Before us is a living image of nature. She lives, although she “sleeps”; behind her dormancy lies a stormy inner life: the forest is “prophetic” (foreseeing the future, prophetic), “filled with secret dreams” (dreams unknown to anyone, hidden, deeply personal), etc. And only the penultimate line “Remembering nothing, cursing no one” indicates the presence of a deeply emotional lyrical hero.

What images - symbols are found in the first semantic part? - Image of the moon. The moon is an extraterrestrial world, a world of dreams, fantasies, where philosophical thought is born, where creative fantasy and imagination comes; a world very far from reality. The moon is associated with space, and space with eternity, and eternity with immortality. Let us remember how in 1942 in Paris, the sick and beggar Balmont, saying goodbye to life, to the sun, to poetry, said that he would go along the Milky Way into eternity: “I have been on this shore enough... Having accomplished my cherished goal, I guard the hour of the morning, So that in the Milky Way, where new stars are conceived...” There are also images - symbols of the free elements of a blizzard and wind (we understand that the poet’s imagination is not constrained by anything, nothing is stopping him now, the poet is free, free...).

Student presentation on the topic: “Images - symbols in Balmont’s work.”

Balmont often uses various images - symbols. Having analyzed 3 collections of the poet’s poems (“Under the Northern Sky,” “Silence,” “In the Vastness”), I came to the conclusion that one of the most common is the image of the moon. Here are a few lines from the poem: “Why does the Moon always intoxicate us? Because she is cold and pale. The Sun gives us too much radiance, And no one will sing to him such a song, That the nightingale sings to the Moon, under the Moon, between the dark branches, on a fragrant night”; “When the Moon sparkles in the darkness of the night with Its sickle, brilliant and tender, My soul strives for another world, Captivated by everything distant, everything boundless” (“Moonlight”); “On the diamond cover of snow, Under the cold radiance of the Moon, It’s good for you and me... How joyful it is to dream and love... In the kingdom of pure snow, In the kingdom of the pale Moon” (Without a smile, without words).

“The evening wind breathes a dying breath. The full moon has a changeable face. The joy is insane. The sadness is incomprehensible. A moment of the impossible. A moment of happiness.” (“Song without words”). In the following collections of poems (for example, “Burning Buildings”) the Moon appears somewhat less frequently and is called “fading,” “pale,” “dying,” but in the later collection “Let’s Be Like the Sun,” the Moon again becomes a frequent image—a symbol, although the poet says that he “came into this world to see the sun.” The very names of the poems in the collection speak about this: “In Praise of the Moon”, “Influence of the Moon”, “New Moon”, “Moon Silence”. We can conclude that the Moon for Balmont is “the dominion of great silence”; this mysterious queen of dreams and daydreams marks the other side of existence, the unmanifest, hidden world. The moon is a symbol of another, beautiful world, a world of dreams and visions, it is a departure from the present into a sublime world. No wonder he wrote: “I can’t live in the present, I love restless dreams...”

Conversation with the class on the second semantic part.

In part 2, a gate opens before the reader into a vast and wonderful world of imagination, fantasy, far from reality, but which so excites the poet and calls the lyrical hero on a long journey. As in a kaleidoscope, the faces of the winter night, its moments, change here, and Balmont’s fantasy also changes quickly. What do we hear now? – Already “sighs”, “praying”, nature seems to be tormented by anxiety, “longing”, but here there is “ecstasy”, i.e. state of delight, pleasure. Lexical repetitions are often used in Part 2, words are repeated as if they are lulling (how can one not remember V. Mayakovsky, who said that “Balmont’s poems are smooth and measured, like rocking chairs and Turkish sofas...”!). But this state is characteristic not only of nature. Who else? – To a person, a lyrical hero. We, together with the lyrical hero, feel this state of delight. “Spirits of the night” (cherished desires, memories) appear, sometimes memories of the past torment, the soul becomes painful. Some kind of anxiety arises (“as if they feel sorry for something”). Why is it a pity for the lyrical hero? – It’s a pity that all this is not in reality, that it is a fairy-tale deception (“something that people will not dream about”). The lyrical hero approaches this philosophically.

Conversation with the class on the third semantic part.

In the third, smallest part, everything returns to normal. There is no longer any tension, no fatal secrets, no rhetorical questions. Where does part 3 begin? – From the conjunction “a”, the second and third parts are opposed, and the first and third parts seem to frame the second. In Part 3, everything calmed down (“sweetly slumbering,” “indifferently... listening,” “accepting with calm”). Why? – Probably, both nature and the lyrical hero are preparing to meet new impressions. There will be many more wonderful moments and discoveries. And this was only a short moment in the endless flow of time. – Yes, Balmont was able to “stop a moment”, capture it in a poem, he showed us a personal, and at the same time, momentary perception of the night. He is an impressionist artist (I recall the words of Goethe: “Stop, moment, you are beautiful”).

What is the meaning of the title of the poem? – Fantasy is the ability for creative imagination, which reaches its culmination point when the natural world and the inner world of man are in harmony. The harmony of the majestic world of nature, the vast cosmos and the boundless depths of the human soul, the visions, dreams and dreams of each of us.

Balmont was very fond of color (just remember “Red Sail in a Blue Sea, in a Blue Sea...”). But in this poem “Fantasy” there is practically no color scheme. Why? – Balmont deliberately places emphasis on the auditory, tactile, and visual perception of the surrounding reality. Only the life-affirming epithet “bright” appears in the poem. It should be noted that the poem does not have a pronounced division into individual stanzas. Why? – This is explained by the fact that the author initially conceived the poem to be very musical and melodious. After all, Balmont was musically gifted. Music fills everything in his work. His poems, like notes, can be marked with musical symbols. About 500 romances were created based on his poems. The work “Fantasy” is not read, but sung, and this is facilitated by internal rhymes, which the poet so often resorts to. Indeed, when you read Balmont, you find yourself in a fairy tale, listening to spring.

Final word. Every spring in the city of Shuya, Ivanovo region, a bright and interesting holiday opens - the Balmont children's poetry festival “Sunny Elf”, in which children from all schools in the city take part. The festival is attended by many guests, including K. Balmont’s daughter S.K. Shal. The festival lasts a whole week, during which children visit exhibitions, exhibitions of drawings based on the works of K. Balmont, and a competition for the best reading of the poet’s poems is also held as part of the festival. The poet is remembered because every line of his works cannot but touch the most tender and subtle strings of any human soul, and Balmont’s refined perception of nature will not leave any reader indifferent.

Homework: read the poem “Cherry plum”, answer the question: “What characteristic features of K. Balmont’s original creativity are manifested in this poem?”

Balmont is an outstanding symbolist poet of the Silver Age. One of his works is the poem “Fantasy,” written in 1893. The poet describes a sleeping winter forest in it, putting into the description all the play of his lyrical imagination, all the shades of his own fleeting impressions. Behind the rapidly changing images of the forest night is the poet’s unfettered creative nature.
The lyrical hero in most of the poem is only an observer. Only at the end of the second stanza does he become more active, and a series of rhetorical questions follows. Here the mystical overtones of the work also appear: behind the “quiet groans” of the trees, the poet distinguishes the “spirits of the night”, their “thirst for faith, thirst for God.” The lyrical hero feels in the slightly trembling outlines of the forest something mysterious, unearthly, inaccessible to human understanding.
The lyrical plot of the poem is silence, calm, drowsiness, giving way to movement (“these are the spirits of the night rushing”) and a tinge of anxiety, sadness (“someone’s mournful prayer”, “what is tormenting them, what is troubling them?”), growing with every moment ( “Their singing sounds more and more loudly, the languor in it is more and more audible”). Then a calm doze “without torment, without suffering” sets in again.
Natural elements - wind, blizzard, forest - are enlivened by personification. In the poem, everything moves, feels, lives: “living sculptures”, the forest “calmly slumbers”, “heeds the murmur of the wind”, “filled with secret dreams”; “the moan of a blizzard,” “the pines are whispering, the spruce trees are whispering,” and so on.
Balmont’s images are vague, devoid of clear outlines, airy: “the outlines tremble slightly,” “the murmur of the wind,” “light rain flows,” “sparks of moonlight.”
“Fantasy” is permeated with a rainbow play of light. Everything is buried in “sparks of moonlight”, “light rain”; even dreams are clear and bright.
“Fantasy,” like many of Balmont’s works, is characterized by musicality. The flow of sounds creates the impression of gentle murmur and splashing. Hissing z-sh-sch-ch, whistling s-z, consonants l-r-m-n are often repeated. Musicality is also achieved by repeating certain words: moon, radiance, singing, trembling, prophetic, dozing, listening, groaning. Rhymes are used even within lines: statues - radiance, dozing - listening, snowstorms - eating, remembering - cursing. Balmont often resorts to anaphors: whisper - whisper, someone's - someone's, exactly - exactly, this - this, what - what, everything - everything, thirst - thirst, rushing - rushing.
To emphasize the mystery, melodious drowsiness, romance, and sometimes anxiety, Balmont uses expressive means of language. The poem begins with the oxymoron “living statues,” immediately setting the reader up for the desired perception. The poem is full of epithets (slumbers - calmly, sweetly, through - secret, groan - quiet, branches - slender, prayer - mournful, trunks - prophetic and fabulous, dreams - clear and bright) and comparative phrases (“like living statues”, “exactly a star sparkles”, “like light rain flows”, “like a worm”). Very often Balmont uses personification, and in the second stanza he uses rhetorical questions.
The general impression is his spontaneity in perceiving the world around him, his ability to lyrically express subtle shades of his spiritual mood. Reading “Fantasy”, you get pleasure from the musicality of the verse, deep artistic expressiveness, drawing wonderful, extraordinary pictures in your imagination.