White Birch (Ye Saining)
There is a white birch,
standing beside my window,
covered with snow,
like a cloak of silver frost.
The furry branches were
covered with ice cream.
Like hems made of snow-
The fringe glittered.
The birches were shrouded in
dreamlike silence,
and golden sparks
leapt over the snowflakes.
The morning sun shone lazily
around it,
sprinkling more silver flakes
all over the branches.
The Birches of Volgograd
Ma? Agashina, words
G? Ponomarenko
1.
You also grew up here in Russia,
where the fields and forests are picturesque.
We have birches in every song,
Birches, under the windows of every house.
Every year spring blooms out new shoots,
and they dance their branches in the wind.
But the birches in Volgograd,
the very sight of which is like a knife in the heart.
2.
It is the birch that is brought from afar,
and planted, quietly listening to the noise of the feathery grass.
What kind of years did the birch spend,
Under the Volgograd artillery fire,
It was thinking about Russia for a long time,
It was missing the old forest home.
People lying under the birches,
you might as well ask them.
3.
Under the trees, the grass is not trampled,
underground, no one comes to answer.
But how the soldier he hoped,
Someone often mourned him!
Just as wives and children came to weep for him,
You too were born a soldier,
How could you not understand him!
4,
You also grew up here in Russia,
here, too, is the home of the birch...
Now no matter where you are,
You will remember my birch,
You see, stoic and upright trunk,
You see, silently dancing branches.
The birch that grows in Volgograd,
you will never forget him.
(1967)
Sergei Aleksandrovich Esenin (1895 - 1925) was born in Ryazan province in a peasant family, raised by his maternal grandfather, a rich peasant, graduated from the Normal School in 1912, then traveled to Moscow alone and worked as a proofreader in a printing house. In the spring of 1916 he was drafted into the army, and after his discharge he married Reich; in 1919 he took part in the publication of the Manifesto of the Imagists, and later wrote Life and Art (1921), a critical work on life and art. Art" (1921), a critique of the Imagists, demonstrating his return to real life. he married Duncan in 1921, traveled to Europe and the United States the following year, and returned to the Soviet Union in 1923, where he published articles critical of the American way of life. he married Tolstaya, the granddaughter of Lev Tolstoy, in september 1925, and was hospitalized in november for treatment of his mental illness. on december 26, he wrote his last poem in blood: "Farewell, my friend, farewell, / Dear, you are always in my heart. // A fated separation, / Heralding a reunion in the afterlife. /Farewell, my friend, no need to say goodbye, no need to shake hands, /don't be sad, don't grieve- /In this world, dying is nothing new /living, of course, is even less rare." He hanged himself in a Leningrad hotel before dawn on the 28th, at the age of thirty, what Confucius called the age of maturity. A year later, in the winter, a gunshot rang out at his grave, and Benislavskaya, who had loved and missed him, is said to have died a martyr's death for him, and it is to her that the words "my friend" in Yessenin's fateful poem refer.
The October Revolution brought about a fundamental change in his work. He glorified the revolution and praised the working class, but fundamentally he did not understand the revolution or the Soviet system. As a result, he exuded an unruly and cynical "Esenin temperament", which is represented by the group poem "The Voice of the Moscow Tavern" (1921-1923). "Esenin's temperament is very reminiscent of the "Faustian spirit" of the Romantic era, which embraced both sides of the coin, especially the "Byronic hero", and they can be seen as manifestations of the same poet in different eras. They can be seen as manifestations of the same poet in different times. The "Yeseninian temperament" is in fact the unique expression of the "last poet of the countryside" who found himself on the opposite side of the development of the times in the midst of its changes. According to Pasternak (1890-1960), "Esenin treated his life as if it were a fairy tale, like Prince Ivan who crossed the sea on the back of a gray wolf and seized Isadora Duncan as if by the tail of a firebird. His poems are also written in fairy tale style, suddenly laying out word formations as if playing cards, and suddenly recording it in the blood of his heart. The most precious thing in his poems is the landscape of his native land, the central zone of Russia, the Ryazan province, full of forests, which he depicted with vertigo-inducing freshness, as in his childhood." Yevtushenko (1933- ) called him "one of the purest Russian poets": "Esenin's poetry is an indigenous phenomenon. Esenin's rhythms radiate a mineral splendor peculiar to the structure of the Russian land. Esenin's poetry is a unique spawn of Russian nature, of the Russian language (including fairy tales, ballads, village folk songs, proverbs and sayings, incantations, laments, ceremonial songs, partly handed down from ancient times)." Their grasp of Yesenin is undoubtedly extremely astute. "Suddenly the words are laid out like a game of cards, and suddenly they are written down in the blood of the heart" are the two different manifestations of the "Esenin temperament" in his poetry. The reason why he is called "a purest Russian poet" is that Yevtushenko grasped the cause of "Esenin's temperament" from a deeper level: out of his persistent attachment to the Russian countryside, he could not identify with the powerful advance of modern civilization and its destruction of the countryside. The destruction of the countryside by the powerful advance of modern civilization. If Pushkin was a poet who was in the forefront of his time and called for national freedom, then Esenin undoubtedly, consciously or unconsciously, acted as the "antagonist" of his time, and his strong desire to preserve the regional culture of his time was the one that he strongly desired to preserve. This judgment is quite profound. What distinguishes Yesenin from the other poets of the Silver Age is that he did not go into exile after the October Revolution, swearing to be at odds with it as Gippius and others did. Except for two years when he traveled with Duncan, he remained on Russian soil. However, he was increasingly distressed by the reality of the situation: "On the paths of the azure fields, / Soon there will be guests of steel. / The sun-drenched oats, / Only a few shriveled seeds remain. / / Strange dead threshing floors, / Songs sung to you won't bring you to life! / Only those horses and oats / Will grieve for their aged masters." In The Lenten Sacrifice, he directly embodies this conflict with the typical scene of an "iron horse" (i.e., a train) racing against a live horse. Pasternak, who lived and socialized with him as a contemporary, was full of understanding sympathy for Yesenin: "The place of Yesenin's landscape poetry is taken in his work for the labyrinth of the modern metropolis. It is the agitated, inhuman misery of a contemporary whose lonely soul is lost in this labyrinth and destroys morals that he depicts."
Of course, to attribute Yesenin's death solely to the urban-rural conflict does not tell the whole story; his three marriages are striking. The breakup of his first marriage was a source of remorse for the poet, and if his previous debauchery was the result of a storm that turned heaven and earth so that he "did not understand where the ominous events were leading me," the fact that he "continued to fall" after Raih broke up with him cannot be said to have anything to do with the breakup of his marriage. It cannot be said that the breakup of the marriage had nothing to do with it. A year before he committed suicide, he also wrote "Letter to a Woman" to Lai Yihe to pour out his heart. Goethe said: "The eternal woman leads us up. So what happens after the loss of the lead? It cannot be denied that Yesenin's fall to his death was not one of those endings. His lightning romance with the American dancer Duncan was romantic and full of sorrows; they came together at lightning speed and went their separate ways at lightning speed. Nursing the wounds of love in the envious and puzzled eyes of the crowd. His third marriage was less than six months old before the poet bid farewell to the earthly world.
To talk about the poet's death in isolation from his work seems a bit of an understatement. And I thought that the death of Yesenin is the fundamental problem plaguing the modern man, whether he is a natural civilized man, or a civilized man formed after conversion, and whether he is with the times or dreaming of the Tang Dynasty, he has been impossible to escape these problems encountered by Yesenin. Yesenin's death is the inevitable result of all the factors acting on the poet's mind to the point of depression into a spiritual crisis. Before him, there are also poets suicide situation, but the phenomenon of poets suicide is from him here to start. Time goes on, the years go by, and since Yesenin declared, "I am the last poet of the countryside," pure lyric poetry has reached its peak, and at the same time it has come to an end.
Another profile
Sergei Aleksandrovich? Aleksandrovich? Esenin: (Сергей Есенин, 1895 - 1925) was a Russian poet of the idyllic school. Born in Ryazan province to a peasant family and raised by his rich grandfather, he graduated from the Normal School in 1912 and went to Moscow, where he worked as a proofreader in a printing house while attending the Surikov Literary and Musical Group and taking part-time courses at the Sarniavsky Commoner's University; he published his lyrical poem Birch in 1914, and in 1915 he made friends with Blok, Gorky, and Mayakovsky, among others, and published his first collection of poetry, Day of the Dead. He enlisted in the army in the spring of 1916 and married Reich after his discharge.In 1919 he participated in the publication of the Manifesto of the Imagists and later wrote Life and Art. Criticizing the Imagists, he demonstrated his return to real life. he married Duncan in 1921, traveled to Europe and the United States the following year, and returned to the Soviet Union in 1923, where he published articles criticizing the American way of life. in September 1925, he married Tolstoy, the granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy, who was the first woman to be born in the United States. He married Tolstoy's granddaughter, Tolstaya, in September 1925, and was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment in November; on December 26 he wrote in blood the following fateful poem: "Farewell, my friend, goodbye, / my dear, you will always be in my heart. //Fated to part, /Heralding a reunion in the afterlife. //Farewell, my friend, no need to say goodbye, no need to shake hands, / Don't be sad, don't grieve - / In this world, dying is nothing new / Living, of course, is even less rare." He hanged himself in a Leningrad hotel before dawn on the 28th, at the age of thirty, what Confucius called the age of maturity. A year later, in the winter, a gunshot rang out at his grave, and Benislavskaya, who had loved and missed him, is said to have died a martyr's death for him, and it is to her that the words "my friend" in Yessenin's fatal poem refer.
In the vast territory of Russia, there grows a kind of ordinary and extraordinary tree. It is so ordinary: in the fields, in the mountains, in the forests. Everywhere you can see, everywhere I it is so extraordinary: both the willow's delicate and graceful, but also the pine's straight and strong upright. The feminine and masculine beauty is so rare in its harmony and perfection! On its strong and upright trunk, it is poetically wrapped in a thick layer of shining silver. What a pure silver color! It reminds you of pure love, holy love, crystal poetry, sacred ideals ...... Its roots are y rooted into the ground underfoot, in this noisy earthly world, it enjoys silently flourish their lush green. Its branches section upward, play playful clouds, seems to communicate with another spirit of the world! It is rooted in this world, but it seems to be traveling in another world. It seems to belong to another world, which makes it shine with a mysterious and charming light! This ordinary and magical tree, its name is a birch!
Just like the Chinese like pine, bamboo and plum, the Japanese are passionately in love with terrier flowers, the Canadians love the red maple, the Russians love the birch. Russians love the land under their feet, love the reality of life, but there is a strong sense of transcendence, they are concerned about the future, meditate on the other side of the world, enthusiastically exploring the mystery of human destiny; they are just in the soft, soft in the rigid, a set of masculine beauty and feminine beauty in one. This, as long as we look at the well-known representative of Russian culture, Lev Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Yessenin, Aitmatov know that the birch is the Russian people's spiritual home support.
Why do birches always appear in Russian poetry?
Every country and every nation has its favorite flowers and trees. Peony is the national flower of China, and plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum were loved by the Chinese literati and were called "gentlemen of flowers".
Russians also have their own favorite flowers and trees. People through the literary creation of flowers and trees to pour feelings, express their own wishes, with the accumulation of culture and history, these flowers and trees will be marked with a distinctive national culture. For example, chrysanthemums symbolize very different meanings in the eyes of the East and the West. China and Japan hold a similar Eastern aesthetic appreciation for chrysanthemums. The Chinese use chrysanthemums to symbolize the character of a person who is not afraid of the cold and who has a high standard of integrity in his or her evening. In the Tang Dynasty, there is a poem about chrysanthemums, which reads, "When autumn arrives on September 8, after my flower blossoms, all the flowers will be killed, and the fragrance will permeate Chang'an, and the city will be filled with golden armor." The Japanese regard the chrysanthemum as the embodiment of the sun, and the sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum is the emblem of the imperial family and the pattern of the national coat of arms. But Western Europeans and Russians use chrysanthemums to symbolize the shortness of life and death. Chrysanthemums are mostly yellow, yellow in the Russian view is a symbol of betrayal, breakup, out of these concepts, people rarely use chrysanthemums to decorate and beautify the room or gift friends and relatives, only in the funeral or mourning the death of the use.
According to ancient Russian legend, every flower and tree contains magical power. In Russian folklore, flowers and trees are often regarded as living creatures, like humans, that feel, breathe and communicate with each other. They are not subject to whipping, cutting, or humiliation, and many customs and beliefs related to plants and flowers have been passed down in folklore. Contemporary Russian writer I.Ракша believes that the Russian word здравствуй (hello) is related to trees: the first letter з is a variant of the preposition с (together with ......), and the root драв, from де-рево (tree), so the Russian word "hello" means that as long as a tree is not a tree, it can be used as the root of the word здрав. Hello" means that if you are with trees, you will be healthy and everything will go well. This is a family saying, but it is a reflection of the place of trees in the minds of Russians.
So, what kind of flowers and trees do Russians really like?
Birch (берёза ) can inspire the most beautiful feelings of the Russian people, they love a sacred tree (священное дерево).
First, the birch tree is the embodiment of good luck and happiness. It is customary to plant sprouting birch trees in front of the house on the Day of Mourning (the seventh Thursday after Easter), inserted in the fields, the girls wore a crown of birch twigs on their heads, and held a series of mourning activities to eliminate calamities and evil spirits, and prayed for happiness and well-being and a good harvest.
Secondly, the birch is the messenger of spring and love in the eyes of the Russians, the embodiment of a pure, slim girl, which can also be a metaphor for a young woman or a young mother. Such as Вчера была червонная калина , а теперь стала белая берёза . (Yesterday it was a redoubtable girl, but today it is a young woman in the middle of her life.)
Third, because of the birch has a beautiful, pure, persistent character, it has become a symbol of Russia, is the embodiment of the motherland and hometown, it often appears in the faraway traveler's homesickness dream, it is every time to evoke the traveler's nostalgia. When people return from a long journey, the sight of birches reminds them of a cozy home. Since ancient times, birch has been closely connected with the daily life of Russians. In ancient times, people wrote on the birch bark, which makes Russia's bright ancient culture can be preserved; steam bath when the birch broom is the Russian people's favorite bathing tool; in the spring, people like to go to the forest to collect birch sap as a drink to drink; under the birch tree is the lovers dating place, is the witness of their love.
Supplementary Materials
I. Historical Reasons
1. The City of Birches and Eagles
April 14, 1703, the young Tsar Peter I toured all the islands in the mouth of the Neva River for the purpose of constructing a new fortress, and at last he took a fancy to an island called the "Rabbit Island" (also known as the Island of Joy). 16th, Peter himself officiated at the groundbreaking ceremony. On the 16th, Peter himself performed the ceremony of laying the foundation stone. A stone box containing the remains of the saint Andrei Pervozvanai was buried in the earth, and on the lid of the box was engraved the words: "On May 16, 1703, according to the bull of Jesus Christ, the great tsar and the great duke, the monarch of all Russia, Peter Alexeevich, laid the foundation stone of St. Petersburg, the capital of the empire." Peter ordered two small white birches to be cut down and buried in two pits as a sign of the future city gates. While this was going on, an eagle soaring over the island suddenly raced down and landed on the birch trunks. Peter was overjoyed and thought it was a sign from heaven, because he knew that it was the same eagle that instructed the Byzantine Emperor to build the capital city of Constantinople. From then on, the birch, the eagle and the tsar became the most holy trinity in Russia.
The St. Petersburg fortress was built in four months because, in addition to fearing an invasion by the mighty Swedes, Peter I longed for a window through which Russia could face the world.
In November 1703, the first foreign merchant ship, a Dutch vessel laden with salt and wine, entered the harbor of St. Petersburg.
The St. Petersburg fortress was first built of earth, and in 1706 it was converted to stone, the city was 9 meters high and about 20 meters wide, surrounded by water on all sides. The wooden church in honor of Saints Peter and Paul (converted to stone in 1712), now known as the Peter and Paul Church, was first built in the fortress. It differs from traditional Russian churches in that the bell tower has a high spire. It was built according to the wishes of Peter I, who wanted to imitate the church spires of Europe, but also to make this spire higher than all the church spires he had seen in Europe. At the time of its construction, Peter I had repeatedly led foreign envoys up to the tower to see the panoramic view of the future city. Since its completion, all the tsars (except Paul II, who died in Moscow, and Nicholas II, who was shot in Ekaterinburg after the October Revolution) have been buried in the church. A few years ago, the remains of Nicholas II were also moved to the church, and a solemn burial ceremony was held for that purpose.
After more than 20 years of construction, St. Petersburg finally rose above the swampy, scrubby, rabbit-infested bayous and bayous. Despite frequent flooding, wet weather and long winters, it was a "paradise" in Peter I's eyes, a place where he could see the world, face it and interact with it. Peter I knew how hard it would be to build the new capital and gave the new city the meaningful name of St. Petersburg. St." is derived from Latin, meaning holy; "Peter" is derived from Greek, meaning stone; and "Fort" is derived from German and Dutch, meaning castle. Therefore, the original meaning of "St. Petersburg", which consists of several words, is "the sacred city of stone". To stone instead of wood to build houses at that time is a sign of progress, but also a sign of the liberation and development of productive forces, Peter obviously expects this "sacred stone city" can make the closed, backward Russia "push the door to the five lakes, open an account of the four seas".
Just as the new Winter Palace became the Royal Court, Russian history also entered a new heyday, Ekaterina II on July 6, 1762 began to rule. The Empress learned from Europe and emulated it more than her forefathers, so that the art of architecture in the French and Italian styles and all kinds of stone sculptures were spread all over St. Petersburg. The statue of Peter the Great, designed by the famous French sculptor Falcon and others, was erected on August 7, 1782 on the Senate Square on the banks of the Neva River. Thanks to Pushkin's poem, the statue of the "Bronze Horseman" became an eternal symbol of the immortal St. Petersburg.
Second, the geographical reasons and the organism itself functional advantages
1. geographical reasons
Birch tribe may occur in the Cretaceous period, the Tertiary widely distributed in the northern hemisphere temperate zone and frigid zone. Fossils have been found in Shanwang, Shandong Province and Fushun, Liaoning Province, China. Fossilized pollen was first seen in the Late Cretaceous. Later, they were also found in large numbers in Eurasia.
2. Biological reasons
Birch scientific name: Betula platyphylla Suk, belongs to the birch birch genus, distributed in the northeast of the big, small Xing'anling, Changbai Mountain and North China alpine areas; vertical distribution in the northeast of the elevation of 1000m below, North China for 1300-2700m. the Soviet Union, the eastern part of Siberia, North Korea and the northern part of Japan also have distribution.
Ornamental characteristics and garden use: birch branches and leaves, beautiful posture, especially the trunk is straight, white and elegant, very striking. Lone planting, clump planting in the garden, park lawn, poolside, lakeside, or in a row planted on the roadside are quite beautiful. If in the mountains or hilly slopes planted in pieces, can form a beautiful landscape forest.
Based on the above reasons, so I think the birch tree often appear in literature.