Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (06/15/1867, Gumnishchi, Vladimir province - 12/23/1942, Noisy-le-Grand, France) - Russian poet.

Constantin Balmont: biography

By birth, the future poet was a nobleman. Although his great-grandfather bore the surname Balamut. Later, the named surname was changed in a foreign way. Balmont's father was the chairman. Konstantin received training at the Shuya gymnasium, however, he was expelled from it, since he attended an illegal circle. short biography Balmont tells that he created his first works at the age of 9.

In 1886 Balmont began his studies at the law faculty of Moscow University. A year later, due to participation in student riots, he was expelled until 1888. Soon he left the university of his own free will, entering the Demidov juridical lyceum, from which he was also expelled. It was then that the first collection of poetry, which Balmont wrote, was published.

The poet's biography tells that at the same time, due to constant quarrels with his first wife, he tried to commit suicide. The suicide attempt ended for him with a lifelong limp.

Among K. Balmont it is worth mentioning the collections “Burning Buildings” and “In Boundlessness”. The poet's relationship with the authorities was tense. So, in 1901 for the verse "Little Sultan" he was deprived of the right to live in university and capital cities for 2 years. K. Balmont, whose biography has been investigated in some detail, leaves for the Volkonskys' estate (now the Belgorod region), where he works on a poetry collection "Let's Be Like the Sun". In 1902 he moved to Paris.

In the early 1900s, Balmont wrote many romantic poems. Thus, in 1903 the collection “Only Love. Seven-flowered ", in 1905 -" Liturgy of Beauty ". The named collections bring fame to Balmont. The poet himself travels at this time. So, by 1905 he managed to visit Italy, Mexico, England and Spain.

When political unrest breaks out in Russia, Balmont returns to his homeland. He collaborates with the social democratic publication “ New life"And with the magazine" Red Banner ". But at the end of 1905 Balmont, whose biography is rich in travel, again comes to Paris. In the years that followed, he continued to travel a lot.

When in 1913 political emigrants were granted amnesty, K. Balmont returned to Russia. The poet welcomes but opposes Oktyabrskaya. In this regard, in 1920 he again left Russia, settling in France.

While in exile, Balmont, whose biography is inextricably linked with his homeland, actively worked in Russian periodicals published in Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. In 1924 he published a book of memoirs entitled Where is My Home ?, wrote essays about the revolution in Russia, White Dream and Torch in the Night. In the 1920s, Balmont published such collections of poetry as "A Gift to the Earth", "Marevo", "Bright Hour", "Song of the Working Hammer", "In the Far Away". In 1930, K. Balmont completed the translation of the Old Russian work "The Lay of Igor's Host." The last collection of his poems was published in 1937 under the title "Light Service".

At the end of his life, the poet suffered from mental illness. K. Balmont died in an orphanage known as the Russian House, located near Paris.

Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich (1867-1942)

Russian poet. Born in the village of Gumnishche, Vladimir province, into a noble family. He studied at the gymnasium in Shuya. In 1886 he entered the law faculty of Moscow University, but was expelled for his participation in the student movement.

The first collection of poems by Balmont was published in Yaroslavl in 1890, the second - "Under the Northern Sky" - in 1894. They are dominated by motives of civil grief. Soon Balmont appears as one of the pioneers of symbolism.

V late XIX- early XX centuries. the poet published collections "In the Boundless", "Silence", "Let's Be Like the Sun". In 1895-1905. Balmont was perhaps the most famous among Russian poets; later, its popularity declines. His poetry is characterized by an emphasized exoticism, a certain mannerism and narcissism.

Balmont made several voyages around the world, describing them in essay books of prose. He was captured by the revolutionary events of 1905, performed with poems praising the workers (the book "Songs of the Avenger").

From the end of the same year, due to the repressions of the autocracy, he lived abroad and was able to return to his homeland under an amnesty only in 1913. He translated a lot from the poetry of the West and the East. He was the first to translate into Russian the poem by the classic of Georgian literature Shota Rustaveli "The Knight in the Panther's Skin".

In 1921 he emigrated, lived in great need in France. There he created a cycle of vivid poems full of longing for Russia.

He died in the town of Noisy-le-Grand near Paris.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont (June 3, 1867, the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province - December 23, 1942, Noisy-le-Grand, France) - symbolist poet, translator, essayist, one of the most prominent representatives of Russian poetry of the Silver Age. Published 35 collections of poetry, 20 books of prose, translated from many languages. Author of autobiographical prose, memoirs, philological treatises, historical and literary studies and critical essays.

Konstantin Balmont was born on June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province, the third of seven sons.

It is known that the poet's grandfather was a naval officer.

Father Dmitry Konstantinovich Balmont (1835-1907) served in the Shuya district court and zemstvo: first as a collegiate registrar, then as a magistrate, and finally as chairman of the district zemstvo council.

Mother Vera Nikolaevna, nee Lebedeva, came from a colonel's family, in which they loved literature and dealt with it professionally. She appeared in the local press, organized literary evenings and amateur performances. She had a strong influence on the worldview of the future poet, introducing him into the world of music, literature, history, first teaching him to comprehend the "beauty of a woman's soul."

Vera Nikolaevna knew well foreign languages, I read a lot and “was not alien to some freethinking”: the house received “unreliable” guests. It was from his mother that Balmont, as he himself wrote, inherited "unbridledness and passion", his entire "mental structure."

The future poet learned to read on his own at the age of five, spying on his mother, who taught his older brother to read. A moved father gave Constantine on this occasion the first book, "something about savages Oceanians." The mother introduced her son to examples of the best poetry.

When it came time to send older children to school, the family moved to Shuya. Moving to the city did not mean a separation from nature: the Balmont house, surrounded by a vast garden, stood on the picturesque bank of the Teza River; his father, a lover of hunting, often went to Gumnishchi, and Konstantin accompanied him more often than others.

In 1876, Balmont entered the preparatory class of the Shuya gymnasium, which he later called "the nest of decadence and capitalists, whose factories spoiled the air and water in the river." At first, the boy made progress, but soon he got bored with learning, and his academic performance declined, but it was time for drunken reading, and he read French and German works in the original. Impressed by what he had read, at the age of ten he began to write poetry himself. "On a bright sunny day they arose, two poems at once, one about winter, the other about summer"- he recalled. These poetic endeavors, however, were criticized by his mother, and the boy did not try to repeat his poetic experiment for six years.

Balmont was forced to leave the seventh grade in 1884 due to belonging to an illegal circle, which consisted of high school students, visiting students and teachers, and was engaged in printing and distributing proclamations of the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya party in Shuya. The poet later explained the background of this early revolutionary attitude of his as follows: “I was happy and I wanted everyone to feel the same way. It seemed to me that if only me and a few are good, it is ugly ".

Through the efforts of his mother, Balmont was transferred to the gymnasium of the city of Vladimir. But here he had to live in the apartment of a Greek teacher, who zealously fulfilled the duties of a "overseer".

At the end of 1885 Balmont made his literary debut. Three of his poems were published in the popular St. Petersburg magazine Zhivopisnoe Obozreniye (November 2 - December 7). This event was not noticed by anyone except the mentor, who forbade Balmont to publish until he completed his studies at the gymnasium.

The acquaintance of the young poet with V.G. Korolenko dates back to this time. Famous writer Having received a notebook with his poems from Balmont's high school comrades, he took them seriously and wrote a detailed letter to the high school student - a benevolent mentoring review.

In 1886, Konstantin Balmont entered the law faculty of Moscow University, where he became close to P.F.Nikolaev, a revolutionary of the sixties. But already in 1887, for participating in the riots (associated with the introduction of a new university charter, which students considered reactionary), Balmont was expelled, arrested and imprisoned for three days in Butyrka prison, and then exiled to Shuya without trial.

In 1889, Balmont returned to the university, but due to severe nervous exhaustion he could not study - neither there, nor in the Yaroslavl Demidov Lyceum of Legal Sciences, where he successfully entered. In September 1890, he was expelled from the Lyceum and on that gave up trying to get a "state education".

In 1889 Balmont married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelin, daughter of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk merchant. A year later, in Yaroslavl, at his own expense, he published his first "Collection of poems"- some of the youthful works included in the book were published back in 1885. However, the debut collection of 1890 did not arouse interest, close people did not accept him, and soon after the release, the poet burned almost the entire small edition.

In March 1890, an incident occurred that left an imprint on the entire subsequent life of Balmont: he tried to commit suicide, jumped out of the third floor window, suffered severe fractures and spent a year in bed.

It was believed that despair from his family and financial situation pushed him to such an act: the marriage quarreled Balmont with his parents and deprived him of financial support, while the immediate impetus was the Kreutzer Sonata, read shortly before. The year spent in bed, as the poet himself recalled, turned out to be creatively very fruitful and attracted "An unprecedented flowering of mental excitement and cheerfulness".

It was in this year that he realized himself as a poet, saw his own destiny. In 1923, in the biographical story “ Air way”He wrote: “In a long year, when I, lying in bed, no longer hoped that I would ever get up, I learned from the early morning chirping of sparrows outside the window and from the moonbeams that passed through the window into my room, and from all the steps that reached to my hearing, the great fairy tale of life, understood the holy inviolability of life. And when at last I got up, my soul became free, like the wind in the field, no one had any more power over it, except for a creative dream, and creativity blossomed in a violent color ".

For some time after his illness, Balmont, by this time separated from his wife, lived in need. He, according to his own memories, for months “I didn’t know what it was like to be full, and went up to the bakery to admire the rolls and bread through the glass”.

Professor of Moscow University N.I. Storozhenko also rendered great help to Balmont.

In 1887-1889, the poet actively translated German and French authors, then in 1892-1894 he took up work on the works of Percy Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. This period is considered the time of his creative development.

Professor Storozhenko, in addition, introduced Balmont to the editorial office of the Northern Herald, around which the poets of the new trend were grouped.

On the basis of his translation activities, Balmont came closer to the philanthropist, connoisseur of Western European literature, Prince A. N. Urusov, who in many ways contributed to the expansion of the literary horizons of the young poet. At the expense of the philanthropist, Balmont published two books of translations by Edgar Poe ("Ballads and Fantasies", "Mysterious Tales").

In September 1894, in the student's "Circle of Western European Literature Lovers," Balmont met V. Ya. Bryusov, who later became his closest friend. Bryusov wrote about the "exceptional" impression that the poet's personality and his "frenzied love for poetry" made on him.

Collection "Under the northern sky", published in 1894, is considered to be the starting point of Balmont's career. The book received a wide response and reviews were mostly positive.

If the debut of 1894 was not distinguished by originality, then in the second collection "In the vastness"(1895) Balmont embarked on a search for "new space, new freedom", opportunities for connecting poetic word with melody.

The 1890s were for Balmont a period of active creative work in a wide variety of fields of knowledge. The poet, who had a phenomenal capacity for work, mastered "one after another many languages, reveling in his work, like a man possessed ... read entire libraries of books, from treatises on his beloved Spanish painting to research on the Chinese language and Sanskrit."

He enthusiastically studied the history of Russia, books on natural sciences and folk art. Already in his mature years, referring to novice writers with guidance, he wrote that a debutant needs “To be able to sit on a philosophical book on your spring day and English dictionary, and Spanish grammar, when you so want to ride a boat and maybe you can kiss someone. To be able to read 100, 300, and 3,000 books, many of which are boring. To love not only joy, but also pain. Silently cherish in oneself not only happiness, but also the longing that pierces the heart ".

By 1895, Balmont's acquaintances with Jurgis Baltrushaitis, which gradually grew into a friendship that lasted for many years, and S.A. It was Polyakov, the publisher of the modernist magazine Libra, who founded the Scorpion symbolist publishing house five years later. best books Balmont.

In 1896 Balmont married the translator E. A. Andreeva and went with his wife to Western Europe. The several years spent abroad provided the aspiring writer who was interested, in addition to the main subject, history, religion and philosophy, with tremendous opportunities. He visited France, Holland, Spain, Italy, spending a lot of time in libraries, improving his knowledge of languages.

In 1899 K. Balmont was elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

In 1901, an event took place that had a significant impact on the life and work of Balmont and made him "a true hero in St. Petersburg." In March, he took part in a mass student demonstration on the square near the Kazan Cathedral, the main demand of which was the cancellation of the decree on sending unreliable students to military service. The demonstration was dispersed by the police and Cossacks, and there were victims among the participants.

On March 14, Balmont spoke at a literary evening in the hall of the City Duma and read a poem "Little Sultan", in a veiled form criticizing the terror regime in Russia and its organizer, Nicholas II (“That was in Turkey, where conscience is an empty thing, there reigns a fist, a whip, a scimitar, two or three zeros, four scoundrels and a stupid little sultan”). The poem went from hand to hand, it was going to be published in the newspaper "Iskra".

By decree of the "special meeting" the poet was expelled from St. Petersburg, depriving him of the right to live in capital and university cities for three years.

In the summer of 1903, Balmont returned to Moscow, then went to the Baltic coast, where he studied poems that were included in the collection "Only Love".

After spending the autumn and winter in Moscow, at the beginning of 1904 Balmont again found himself in Europe (Spain, Switzerland, after returning to Moscow - France), where he often acted as a lecturer.

The poetic circles of balmontists that were created during these years tried to imitate the idol not only in poetic self-expression, but also in life.

Already in 1896, Valery Bryusov wrote about the "Balmont school", including Mirra Lokhvitskaya among it.

Many poets (including Lokhvitskaya, Bryusov, Andrei Bely, Viach. Ivanov, MA Voloshin, SM Gorodetsky) dedicated poems to him, seeing in him a "spontaneous genius", the ever-free Arigon, doomed to rise above the world and completely immersed in the revelations of his bottomless soul.

In 1906 Balmont wrote the poem "Our Tsar" about Emperor Nicholas II:

Our king is Mukden, our king is Tsushima,
Our king is a bloody stain
The stench of gunpowder and smoke
In which the mind is dark ...
Our king is blind misery,
Prison and whip, judgment, execution,
The gallows king, half as low,
That he promised, but did not dare to give.
He's a coward, he stumbles
But it will be, the hour of reckoning awaits.
Who began to reign - Khodynka,
He will finish - standing on the scaffold.

Another poem from the same cycle - "Nicholas the Last" - ended with the words: "You must be killed, you have become a misfortune for everyone."

In 1904-1905, the Scorpion publishing house published a collection of Balmont's poems in two volumes.

In January 1905, the poet took a trip to Mexico, from where he went to California. The poet's travel notes and sketches, along with his free transcriptions of Indian cosmogonic myths and legends, were later included in Serpent Flowers (1910). This period of Balmont's creativity ended with the release of the collection “Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns "(1905), largely inspired by the events of the Russian-Japanese war.

In 1905, Balmont returned to Russia and took an active part in political life... In December, the poet, in his own words, "took part in the armed uprising of Moscow, more in poetry." Having become close to Maxim Gorky, Balmont began active cooperation with the social-democratic newspaper Novaya Zhizn and the Parisian magazine Krasnoe Znamya, which was published by A. V. Amfitheatrov.

In December, during the days of the Moscow uprising, Balmont often visited the streets, carried a loaded revolver in his pocket, and made speeches to students. He even expected reprisals against himself, as it seemed to him, a complete revolutionary. His enthusiasm for the revolution was sincere, although, as the future showed, it was not deep. Fearing arrest, on the night of 1906, the poet hastily left for Paris.

In 1906 Balmont settled in Paris, considering himself a political émigré. He settled in the quiet Parisian quarter of Passy, ​​but spent most of his time on long journeys.

Two collections of 1906-1907 were composed of works in which K. Balmont directly responded to the events of the first Russian revolution. The book "Poems" (St. Petersburg, 1906) was confiscated by the police. "Songs of the Avenger" (Paris, 1907) were banned from distribution in Russia.

In the spring of 1907, Balmont visited the Balearic Islands, at the end of 1909 he visited Egypt, writing a series of essays, which later compiled the book "The Land of Osiris" (1914), in 1912 he traveled through southern countries lasting 11 months, visiting the Canary Islands, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, Ceylon, India. Oceania and communication with the inhabitants of the islands of New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga made a particularly deep impression on him.

March 11, 1912 at a meeting of the Neophilological Society at St. Petersburg University on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of literary activity in the presence of more than 1000 people K. D. Balmont was proclaimed a great Russian poet.

In 1913, amnesty was granted to political emigrants on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov, and on May 5, 1913, Balmont returned to Moscow. A solemn public meeting was arranged for him at the Brest railway station in Moscow. The gendarmes forbade the poet to address the audience that met him with a speech. Instead, as was clear from the press of the time, he scattered fresh lilies of the valley among the crowd.

In honor of the poet's return, receptions were held at the Society of Free Aesthetics and the Literary and Art Circle.

In 1914, the publication of the complete collection of Balmont's poems in ten volumes was completed, which lasted seven years. Then he published a collection of poetry “White Architect. The Mystery of the Four Lamps "- my impressions of Oceania.

At the beginning of 1914, the poet returned to Paris, then in April he went to Georgia, where he received a magnificent reception (in particular, a greeting from Akaki Tsereteli, the patriarch of Georgian literature) and gave a course of lectures that had great success. The poet began to study Georgian language and took up the translation of Shota Rustaveli's poem "The Knight in the Panther's Skin".

From Georgia, Balmont returned to France, where he was caught by the outbreak of the First World War. Only at the end of May 1915, by a roundabout route - through England, Norway and Sweden - the poet returned to Russia. At the end of September, Balmont went on a two-month trip to the cities of Russia with lectures, and a year later he repeated the tour, which turned out to be longer and ended in Far East from where he briefly left for Japan in May 1916.

In 1915 Balmont's theoretical sketch was published "Poetry as Magic"- a kind of continuation of the 1900 declaration "Elementary words about symbolic poetry". In this treatise on the essence and purpose of lyric poetry, the poet attributed to the word "spell-magical power" and even "physical power".

Balmont welcomed February revolution, began to cooperate in the Society of Proletarian Arts, but soon became disillusioned with the new government and joined the Cadet Party, which demanded the continuation of the war to a victorious end.

Having received, at the request of Jurgis Baltrushaitis, permission from A.V. Lunacharsky to temporarily go abroad on a business trip, together with his wife, daughter and distant relative A. N. Ivanova, Balmont left Russia forever on May 25, 1920 and reached Paris through Revel.

In Paris, Balmont and his family settled in a small furnished apartment.

The poet immediately found himself between two fires. On the one hand, the émigré community suspected him of being sympathetic to the Soviets.

On the other hand, the Soviet press began to "brand him as a crafty deceiver" who "at the cost of lies" achieved freedom for himself, abused his trust Soviet power, who generously released him to the West "to study the revolutionary creativity of the masses."

Soon Balmont left Paris and settled in the town of Capbreton in the province of Brittany, where he spent 1921-1922.

In 1924 he lived in Lower Charente (Chatelion), in 1925 - in Vendée (Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie), until the late autumn of 1926 - in Gironde (Lacanau-Ocean).

In early November 1926, leaving Lacanau, Balmont and his wife went to Bordeaux. Balmont often rented a villa in Capbreton, where he communicated with many Russians and lived intermittently until the end of 1931, spending here not only the summer, but also the winter months.

Balmont unequivocally announced his attitude to Soviet Russia soon after he left the country.

"The Russian people are truly tired of their ill-fated and, most importantly, of the shameless, endless lies of merciless, evil rulers," he wrote in 1921.

The article "Bloody Liars" the poet spoke about the twists and turns of his life in Moscow in 1917-1920. In the emigre periodicals of the early 1920s, his poetic lines regularly appeared about the "actors of Satan", about the "blood-drunk" Russian land, about the "days of humiliation of Russia", about the "red drops" that went to the Russian land. A number of these poems were included in the collection "Marevo"(Paris, 1922) - the poet's first émigré book.

In 1923, K. D. Balmont, simultaneously with M. Gorky and I. A. Bunin, was nominated by R. Rolland for Nobel Prize on literature.

In 1927, a publicistic article "A little bit of zoology for Little Red Riding Hood" Balmont reacted to the scandalous speech of the Soviet plenipotentiary representative in Poland D.V. Bogomolov, who at the reception said that Adam Mitskevich, in his famous poem "Friends-Muscovites" Bolshevik Russia. In the same year, an anonymous proclamation "To the writers of the world" was published in Paris, signed by the "Group of Russian Writers. Russia, May 1927 ".

Unlike his friend, who gravitated towards the "right" direction, Balmont adhered to generally "left", liberal-democratic views, was critical of ideas, did not accept "conciliatory" tendencies (changeover, Eurasianism, and so on), radical political movements (fascism). At the same time, he avoided the former socialists - A. F. Kerensky, I. I. Fondaminsky and watched with horror the "leftward" Western Europe in the 1920s-1930s.

Balmont was outraged by the indifference of Western European writers to what was happening in the USSR, and this feeling was superimposed on the general disappointment with the entire Western way of life.

It was considered that the emigration passed for Balmont under the sign of decline. This opinion, shared by many Russian émigré poets, was subsequently challenged more than once. V different countries During these years Balmont published books of poetry "Gift to the Earth", "Bright Hour" (1921), "Marevo" (1922), "Mine - to her. Poems about Russia "(1923)," In the Far Away "(1929)," Northern Lights "(1933)," Blue Horseshoe "," Light Service "(1937).

In 1923 he published books of autobiographical prose "Under a New Sickle" and "Air Way", in 1924 he published a book of memoirs "Where is my home?" (Prague, 1924), wrote documentary sketches "Torch in the Night" and "White Dream" about what he experienced in the winter of 1919 in revolutionary Russia. Balmont made long lecture tours in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, in the summer of 1930 he made a trip to Lithuania, in parallel doing translations of West Slavic poetry, but the main theme of Balmont's works during these years remained Russia: memories of her and longing for the lost.

In 1932, it became clear that the poet was suffering from serious mental illness... From August 1932 to May 1935, the Balmont lived without a break in Clamart, near Paris, in poverty. In the spring of 1935, Balmont was admitted to the clinic.

In April 1936, Parisian Russian writers celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Balmont's writing with a creative evening designed to raise funds to help the sick poet. The committee for organizing the evening entitled "To the Poet - Writers" included famous figures of Russian culture: I. Shmelev, M. Aldanov, I. A. Bunin, B. K. Zaitsev, A. N. Benois, A. T. Grechaninov, P. N. Milyukov, S. V. Rachmaninov.

At the end of 1936, Balmont and Tsvetkovskaya moved to Noisy-le-Grand near Paris. Last years In his life, the poet alternately stayed in a charity house for the Russians, which was kept by M. Kuzmina-Karavaeva, or in a cheap furnished apartment. In the hours of enlightenment, when the mental illness receded, Balmont, according to the recollections of those who knew him, with a feeling of happiness opened the volume of "War and Peace" or re-read his old books; he could not write for a long time.

In 1940-1942 Balmont did not leave Noisy-le-Grand. Here, in the Russian House orphanage, he died on the night of December 23, 1942 from pneumonia. He was buried in the local Catholic cemetery, under a gray stone tombstone with the inscription: "Constantin Balmont, poète russe" ("Constantin Balmont, Russian poet").

Several people came from Paris to say goodbye to the poet: B. K. Zaitsev with his wife, the widow of Y. Baltrushaitis, two or three acquaintances and daughter Mirra.

The French public learned about the death of the poet from an article in the pro-Hitler "Parisian Gazette", which made, "as it was supposed, a thorough reprimand to the late poet for the fact that at one time he supported the revolutionaries."

Since the late 1960s. Balmont's poems in the USSR began to be published in anthologies. In 1984 a large collection of selected works was published.

Personal life of Konstantin Balmont

Balmont told in his autobiography that he began to fall in love very early: "The first passionate thought about a woman was at the age of five, the first real love was at the age of nine, and the first passion was at fourteen."

“Wandering through countless cities, I am always delighted with one - love,” the poet confessed in one of his poems.

In 1889, Constantin Balmont married Larisa Mikhailovna Garelina, the daughter of a Shuya manufacturer, "a beautiful young lady of the Botticellian type." The mother, who facilitated the acquaintance, sharply opposed the marriage, but the young man was adamant in his decision and decided to break with his family.

"I was not yet twenty-two years old when I ... married a beautiful girl, and we left in early spring, or rather, at the end of winter, to the Caucasus, to the Kabardin region, and from there along the Georgian Military Highway to the blessed Tiflis and Transcaucasia", - he wrote later.

But the wedding trip was not a prologue to a happy family life.

Researchers often write about Garelin as a neurasthenic nature, who showed Balmont love “in a demonic face, even a devilish one,” tormented with jealousy. It is generally accepted that it was she who made him addicted to wine, as indicated by the poet's confessional poem "Forest Fire".

The wife did not sympathize with either the literary aspirations or the revolutionary mood of her husband and was prone to quarrels. In many ways, it was the painful relationship with Garelin that pushed Balmont to attempt suicide on the morning of March 13, 1890. Soon after his recovery, which was only partial - the limp remained with him for the rest of his life - Balmont parted with L. Garelin.

The first child born in this marriage died, the second - son Nikolai - subsequently suffered from a nervous breakdown.

After parting with the poet, Larisa Mikhailovna married a journalist and literary historian N.A.Engelgardt and lived peacefully with him for many years. Her daughter from this marriage, Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, became the second wife of Nikolai Gumilyov.

The poet's second wife, Ekaterina Alekseevna Andreeva-Balmont(1867-1952), a relative of the famous Moscow publishers Sabashnikovs, came from a wealthy merchant family (the Andreevs owned shops of colonial goods) and was distinguished by a rare education.

Contemporaries also noted the external attractiveness of this tall and slender young woman "with beautiful black eyes." For a long time she was unrequitedly in love with A. I. Urusov. Balmont, as Andreeva recalled, quickly became carried away by her, but for a long time did not meet reciprocity. When the latter arose, it turned out that the poet was married: then the parents forbade their daughter to meet with her lover. However, Ekaterina Alekseevna, enlightened in the "newest spirit", looked at the rituals as a formality and soon moved to the poet.

The divorce proceedings, allowing Garelina to enter into a second marriage, forbade her husband to marry forever, but after finding an old document where the groom was listed as unmarried, the lovers got married on September 27, 1896, and the next day they left abroad, to France.

With EA Andreeva, Balmont was united by a community of literary interests, the couple made a lot of joint translations, in particular, Gerhart Hauptmann and Odd Nansen.

In 1901, they had a daughter, Ninika, Nina Konstantinovna Balmont-Bruni (she died in Moscow in 1989), to whom the poet dedicated the collection Fairy Tales.

In the early 1900s in Paris, Balmont met with Elena Konstantinovna Tsvetkovskaya(1880-1943), daughter of General K.G. Tsvetkovsky, then a student Faculty of Mathematics Sorbonne and a passionate admirer of his poetry. Balmont, judging by some of his letters, was not in love with Tsvetkovskaya, but soon began to feel the need for her as a truly faithful, devoted friend.

Gradually "spheres of influence" were divided: Balmont either lived with his family, then left with Elena. For example, in 1905 they left for Mexico for three months.

The poet's family life became completely confused after, in December 1907, a daughter was born to E.K. The appearance of the child finally tied Balmont to Elena Konstantinovna, but at the same time he did not want to leave Ekaterina Alekseevna either.

Mental torment led to a breakdown: in 1909, Balmont made a new suicide attempt, again threw himself out of the window and again survived. Until 1917, Balmont lived in St. Petersburg with Tsvetkovskaya and Mirra, coming from time to time to Moscow to visit Andreeva and her daughter Nina.

Balmont emigrated from Russia with his third (common-law) wife E.K. Tsvetkovskaya and daughter Mirra.

However, he did not break off friendly relations with Andreeva either. Only in 1934, when Soviet citizens were forbidden to correspond with relatives and friends living abroad, this connection was interrupted.

Unlike EA Andreeva, Elena Konstantinovna was "worldly helpless and could not organize her life in any way." She considered it her duty to follow Balmont everywhere: eyewitnesses recalled how she, "leaving her child at home, went with her husband somewhere in a tavern and could not take him out for 24 hours."

E.K. Tsvetkovskaya was not last love poet. In Paris, he resumed his acquaintance with the princess, which had begun in March 1919. Dagmar Shakhovskoy(1893-1967). “One of my dear ones, half-Swedish, half-polka, Princess Dagmar Shakhovskaya, nee Baroness Lilienfeld, Russified, sang Estonian songs to me more than once,” - this is how Balmont described his beloved in one of his letters.

Shakhovskaya gave birth to two children Balmont - Georgy (Georges) (1922-1943) and Svetlana (b. 1925).

The poet could not leave his family; meeting with Shakhovskoy only occasionally, he often, almost daily wrote to her, repeatedly confessing his love, talking about his impressions and plans. Preserved 858 of his letters and postcards.

Balmont's feeling was reflected in many of his later poems and the novel Under a New Sickle (1923). Be that as it may, not D. Shakhovskaya, but E. Tsvetkovskaya spent the last, most disastrous years of his life with Balmont. She died in 1943, a year after the death of the poet.

Mirra Konstantinovna Balmont (married - Boychenko, second marriage - Autina) wrote poetry and was published in the 1920s under the pseudonym Aglaya Gamayun. She died at Noisy-le-Grand in 1970.

Works by Konstantin Balmont

"Collection of Poems" (Yaroslavl, 1890)
"Under the northern sky (elegies, stanzas, sonnets)" (St. Petersburg, 1894)
"In the vastness of darkness" (M., 1895 and 1896)
"Silence. Lyric Poems "(St. Petersburg, 1898)
“Burning buildings. Lyrics of the Modern Soul "(M., 1900)
“Let's be like the sun. Book of symbols "(M., 1903)
"Only love. Seven-flowered "(M.," Vulture ", 1903)
“Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental hymns "(Moscow," Griffin ", 1905)
Fairy Tales (Children's Songs) (M., Grif, 1905)
"Collection of Poems" M., 1905; 2nd ed. M., 1908.
"Evil spell (Book of spells)" (M., "Golden Fleece", 1906)
"Poems" (1906)
"The Firebird (Slav's Svirel)" (M., "Scorpion", 1907)
"Liturgy of Beauty (Elemental Hymns)" (1907)
"Songs of the Avenger" (1907)
"Three flourishes (Theater of youth and beauty)" (1907)
"Only love". 2nd ed. (1908)
"Round Dance of Times (Vseglasnost)" (Moscow, 1909)
"Birds in the Air (Singing Strings)" (1908)
"Green Helicopter City (Kissing Words)" (St. Petersburg, "Rosehip", 1909)
“Links. Selected Poems. 1890-1912 "(Moscow: Scorpio, 1913)
"The White Architect (The Sacrament of the Four Lamps)" (1914)
"Ash (The Vision of the Tree)" (Moscow, Nekrasov Publishing House, 1916)
Sonnets of the Sun, Honey and the Moon (1917; Berlin, 1921)
"Collection of Lyrics" (Book. 1-2, 4-6. M., 1917-1918)
"The Ring" (M., 1920)
"Seven Poems" (M., "Zadruga", 1920)
Selected Poems (New York, 1920)
“Solar yarn. Izbornik "(1890-1918) (M., ed. Sabashnikovs, 1921)
"Gamayun" (Stockholm, "Northern Lights", 1921)
"Gift to the Earth" (Paris, "Russian land", 1921)
"Bright Hour" (Paris, 1921)
"Song of the Working Hammer" (Moscow, 1922)
"Marevo" (Paris, 1922)
"Under a new sickle" (Berlin, "Word", 1923)
"Mine - to Her (Russia)" (Prague, "Flame", 1924)
"In the Extended Distance (Poem about Russia)" (Belgrade, 1929)
Complicity of Souls (1930)
"Northern Lights" (Poems about Lithuania and Russia) (Paris, 1931)
"Blue Horseshoe" (Poems about Siberia) (1937)
Light Service (Harbin, 1937)

Collections of articles and essays by Konstantin Balmont

Mountain Peaks (Moscow, 1904; first book)
“Calls of Antiquity. Hymns, songs and ideas of the ancients "(Pb., 1908, Berlin, 1923)
"Snake Flowers" ("Travel Letters from Mexico", M., Scorpio, 1910)
"Sea Glow" (1910)
"The glow of the dawn" (1912)
"Land of Osiris". Egyptian Essays. (M., 1914)
"Poetry as Magic" (M., Scorpio, 1915)
"Light and sound in nature and Scriabin's light symphony" (1917)
"Where is my house?" (Paris, 1924)

Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont was born on June 3 (15), 1867 in the village of Gumnishchi, Shuisky district, Vladimir province. Father, Dmitry Konstantinovich, served in the Shuisky district court and zemstvo, going from a minor employee with the rank of collegiate registrar to a magistrate, and then to the chairman of the district zemstvo council. Mother, Vera Nikolaevna, nee Lebedeva, was an educated woman, and greatly influenced the future worldview of the poet, introducing him into the world of music, literature, history.

In 1876-1883, Balmont studied at the Shuya gymnasium, from where he was expelled for participating in an anti-government circle. He continued his education at the Vladimir Gymnasium, then at the University of Moscow, and the Demidov Lyceum in Yaroslavl. In 1887 he was expelled from Moscow University for participation in student unrest and exiled to Shuya. Higher education never received, but thanks to his hard work and curiosity, he became one of the most erudite and cultured people of his time. Balmont annually read a huge number of books, studied, according to various sources, from 14 to 16 languages, besides literature and art, he was fond of history, ethnography, chemistry.

He began to write poetry in childhood. The first book of poems "Collection of Poems" was published in Yaroslavl at the expense of the author in 1890. After the book was published, the young poet burned almost the entire small print run.

The decisive time in the formation of Balmont's poetic worldview was the mid-1890s. Until now, his poems did not stand out as something special among late national poetry. Publication of the collections "Under the Northern Sky" (1894) and "In Boundlessness" (1895), translation of two scientific papers Gorna-Schweitzer's History of Scandinavian Literature and Gaspari's History of Italian Literature, acquaintance with [V. Bryusov] and other representatives of the new direction in art, strengthened the poet's faith in himself and his special mission. In 1898 Balmont published the collection Silence, which finally marked the author's place in modern literature.

Balmont was destined to become one of the pioneers of a new direction in literature - symbolism. However, among the “senior Symbolists” ([D. Merezhkovsky [, [Z. Gippius], [F. Sologub], [V. Bryusov])) and among the “younger” ([A. Blok], [Andrey Bely], Vyacheslav Ivanov ) he had his own position associated with a broader understanding of symbolism as poetry, which, in addition to a specific meaning, has a hidden content, expressed through hints, mood, musical sound. Of all the Symbolists, Balmont developed the impressionist branch most consistently. His poetic world is the world of the subtlest fleeting observations, fragile feelings.

Balmont's forerunners in poetry were, in his opinion, Zhukovsky, Lermontov, Fet, Shelley and E. Po.

Balmont became widely known quite late, and in the late 1890s he was rather known as a talented translator from Norwegian, Spanish, English and other languages.

In 1903, one of the poet's best collections "Let's be like the sun" and a collection "Only love" were published. And before that, for the anti-government poem "Little Sultan", read at a literary evening in the city duma, the authorities expelled Balmont from St. Petersburg, banning him from living in other university cities. And in 1902 Balmont went abroad, becoming a political emigrant.

In addition to almost all European countries, Balmont visited the United States of America and Mexico and in the summer of 1905 returned to Moscow, where two of his collections, Liturgy of Beauty and Fairy Tales, were published.

Balmont responded to the events of the first Russian revolution with collections of Poems (1906) and Songs of the Avenger (1907). Fearing persecution, the poet leaves Russia again and leaves for France, where he lives until 1913. From here he makes trips to Spain, Egypt, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Ceylon, India.

Published in 1907, the book “The Firebird. The Slav's Svirel ”, in which Balmont developed the national theme, did not bring him success, and from that time on, the poet's fame gradually began to decline. However, Balmont himself was unaware of his creative decline. He remains aloof from the fierce polemics between the Symbolists in the pages of Libra and the Golden Fleece, differs from Bryusov in his understanding of the tasks facing contemporary art, and continues to write a lot, easily, selflessly. One by one the collections Birds in the Air (1908), Round Dance of Times (1908), and Green Helicopter (1909) were published. [A. Block].

In May 1913, after the announcement of an amnesty in connection with the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, Balmont returned to Russia and for some time found himself in the center of attention of the literary community. By this time, he was not only a famous poet, but also the author of three books containing literary-critical and aesthetic articles: Mountain Peaks (1904), White Lightning (1908), Sea Glow (1910).

Front October Revolution Balmont creates two more really interesting collections "Ash" (1916) and "Sonnets of the sun, honey and moon" (1917).

Balmont welcomed the overthrow of the autocracy, but the events that followed the revolution scared him away, and thanks to the support of A. Lunacharsky, Balmont received in June 1920 permission to temporarily leave the country. The temporary departure turned into long years of emigration for the poet.

He died on December 23, 1942 from pneumonia. He was buried in the town of Noisy le Grand near Paris, where he lived in recent years.

Balmont Konstantin Dmitrievich (1867 -1942). silver Age lasted only a couple of pre-revolutionary decades in Russia, but gave many bright names for Russian poetry. And for a whole decade Konstantin Balmont reigned on the poetic Olympus.

He was born near Shuya, in the family of a provincial nobleman. He learned to read while attending the lessons of his mother, who taught his older brother. Mother formed the beginning of Constantine's worldview, introducing him to the world of high art.

Education in the gymnasium ended with expulsion due to the spread of the People's Will proclamations. Nevertheless, they managed to get an education (1886), although the poet had painful impressions about this period. Balmont's debut (1885) in a well-known magazine went unnoticed; the published collection also did not cause any response.

The second collection, In Boundlessness (1894), was marked by a completely new form and rhythm. His poems are getting better. Having got out of lack of money, the poet travels, works hard, lectures on Russian poetry in England. In the collection of poems "Burning Buildings" (1900), readers saw that Balmont, who will own the souls of the Russian intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century.

Constantin Balmont becomes the leader of symbolism. They imitate him, envy him, fans are trying to break into the apartment. The poet inclined to romanticism takes part in the 1905 revolution, because of which he was forced to hide abroad.

Upon returning to his homeland, Balmont publishes a ten-volume edition of his works. He is engaged in translations, lectures. The poet welcomed the February revolution, but soon lost interest in its slogans. And the October 1917 revolution caused his rejection. Balmont seeks permission to leave and leaves his homeland forever.

In emigration, the poet avoids circles hostile to the USSR. There is nowhere to get help. In addition, Balmont maintains two families, and the financial situation is becoming more difficult. The last collection of poems "Light Service" (1937), he wrote, already suffering from a mental illness. In recent years, he settled in a nursing home, where he died of pneumonia in the winter of 1942.

Konstantin Balmont returned to Russian readers when, in the sixties, the first anthologies of poets of the Silver Age were published.