My first friend, my priceless friend. Alexander Pushkin - Pushchin: Verse
My first friend, my priceless friend!
And I blessed fate
When my yard is secluded,
Covered in sad snow,
Your bell rang.
Analysis of the poem “I.I. Pushchina" by Pushkin
Pushkin often turned to friends in his work. Among them, the closest was I. I. Pushchin, whom the poet met while studying at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. The young people had similar interests and views on the future of Russia. Pushchin turned out to be one of those who did not lose affection for Pushkin during his exile. In 1825 he visited the great poet in the village. Mikhailovskoe. The poem “I.” is dedicated to the memory of these happy days. I. Pushchin."
It is known that the Decembrists hid plans for an armed uprising from Pushkin, since they did not want to bring suspicion on the poet. They understood the significance of his talent and wanted to preserve it for the future. During his visit to Mikhailovskoye, Pushchin also did not say anything to Pushkin about the upcoming speech. The poet learned about him while still in exile. Pushchin was convicted and sent to settle in Siberia. Pushkin wrote several times to the Tsar asking for a mitigation of his punishment, but was invariably refused. In 1826 he wrote the poem “I. I. Pushchin” and sent him to distant Siberia. The unfortunate convict was very grateful to Pushkin for this literary news.
From the first lines, Pushkin addresses his comrade with very touching words (“first friend”, “priceless friend”). Pushkin was bored and lonely in the village. His only joy was his nanny, Arina Rodionovna. He is eternally grateful to his friend for his visit, which is associated with the ringing of a bell. Russian poets and writers often note the magical sound of a bell, awakening a godforsaken village from hibernation and symbolizing the unexpected arrival of a guest.
Pushkin compares his rural exile with Pushchin’s Siberian imprisonment. He, of course, understands that the size of the punishment is not comparable. But both friends suffered for their sincere convictions, which they formed at the same time during the Lyceum. By reminding Pushchin of the “clear days of the lyceum,” Pushkin emphasizes his unshakable commitment to youthful ideals.
The poet guessed that even close friends were keeping something back. Subsequently, he realized that he could well have shared the fate of the Decembrists. Exile to Mikhailovskoye became an unexpected salvation for the poet, as it made it impossible for him to stay in the capital. The poem "I. I. Pushchin" is also a kind of apology from Pushkin to his friend.
The narrator remembers his friend, whom he lost forty years ago. The narration is told in the first person.
All the children from the old Moscow courtyard studied at two nearby schools, but Yura was unlucky. The year he started studying, there was a large influx of students, and some of the children were sent to a school far from home. This was “foreign territory”. To avoid fights with locals, the children went to and from school in a large group. Only on “their territory” did they relax and start playing in the snow.
During one of the snow battles, Yura saw an unfamiliar boy - he stood on the sidelines and smiled timidly. It turned out that the boy lives in Yura’s entrance; his parents simply “walked” him throughout his childhood in the church kindergarten, away from bad company.
The next day, Yura involved the boy in the game, and soon he and Pavlik became friends.
What a reserve of individuality this boy, then the young man ‹…›, had, if he managed to enter so firmly into the soul of another person.
Before meeting Pavlik, Yura “was already experienced in friendship” - he had a childhood bosom friend, handsome, with a girl’s haircut, Mitya - “weak-hearted, sensitive, tearful, capable of hysterical outbursts of rage.” From his father, a lawyer, “Mitya inherited the gift of eloquence” and used it when Yura noticed that his friend was jealous of him or was telling lies.
Mitya’s quarrel and constant readiness to quarrel seemed to Yura “an indispensable part of friendship,” but Pavlik showed him that there is a different, real friendship. At first, Yura patronized the timid boy, “introduced him into society,” and gradually everyone began to consider him the main one in this couple.
In fact, friends did not depend on each other. Communicating with Mitya, Yura got used to “moral compromise,” and therefore Pavlik’s moral code was stricter and purer.
Forgiving betrayal is not much different from betrayal itself.
Parents took care of Pavlik only in early childhood. Having matured, he became completely independent. Pavlik loved his parents, but did not allow them to control his life, and they switched to his younger brother.
Pavlik never entered into a deal with his conscience, which is why his friendship with Yura once almost ended. Thanks to the tutor, Yura knew German perfectly since childhood. The teacher loved him for his “true Berlin pronunciation” and never asked for his homework, especially since Yura considered teaching it beneath his dignity. But one day the teacher called Yura to the blackboard. Yura did not memorize the poem he was assigned - he was absent for several days and did not know what was asked. Justifying himself, he said that Pavlik did not inform him about his homework. In fact, Yura himself did not ask what was asked.
Pavlik took this as a betrayal and did not speak to Yura for a whole year. He tried many times to make peace with him without clarifying the relationship, but Pavlik did not want this - he despised workarounds, and he did not need the Yura that he revealed himself to be in the German lesson. Reconciliation occurred when Pavlik realized that his friend had changed.
The nature of friendship is different from that of love. It is easy to love for nothing and very difficult to love for anything.
Pavlik was a “mental” boy, but his parents did not provide him with a “nutritive environment.” Pavlik's father was a watchmaker and was exclusively interested in watches. His mother seemed to be a woman who “did not know that printing had been invented,” although her brothers, a chemist and a biologist, were major scientists. A cult of books reigned in Yura’s family, and Pavlik needed this like air.
Every year the friends became closer to each other. The question “Who should I be?” stood up to them much earlier than to their peers. The guys had no obvious preferences, and they began to look for themselves. Pavlik decided to follow in the footsteps of one of his famous uncles. Friends made shoe polish, which did not give shoes shine, and red ink, which stained everything except paper.
Realizing that they would not make chemists, the guys switched to physics, and after that - to geography, botany, and electrical engineering. During breaks, they learned how to balance by holding various objects on their noses or chins, which horrified Yuri’s mother.
Meanwhile, Yura began writing stories, and Pavlik became an amateur stage actor. Finally, the friends realized that this was their calling. Yura entered the screenwriting department of the Institute of Film Arts. Pavlik “failed in the director’s degree,” but the next year he brilliantly passed exams not only at VGIK, but also at two other institutes.
On the first day of the war, Pavlik went to the front, and Yura was “rejected.” Soon Pavlik died. The Germans surrounded his detachment, holed up in the village council building, and offered to surrender. Pavlik had only to raise his hands, and his life would have been saved, but he ended up and was burned alive along with the soldiers.
Forty years have passed, and Yura still dreams of Pavlik. In the dream, he returns from the front alive, but does not want to approach his friend or talk to him. Waking up, Yura goes through his life, trying to find guilt in it that deserves such an execution. It begins to seem to him that he is to blame for all the evil that is happening on earth.
We are all guilty before each other and a hundred times more guilty - before the dead. And we must always remember this guilt of ours - perhaps then our most sacred dream will come true: “to bring the departed back to life...
One day, a friend invited Yura to a dacha he had recently bought to go mushroom picking. Walking through the forest, Yura came across traces of ancient battles and suddenly realized that Pavlik died somewhere here. For the first time he thought that in the village council surrounded by enemies, “it was not death that was happening, but Pavlik’s last life.”
Our responsibility to each other is great. At any moment, we can be called upon by a dying person, a hero, a tired person, or a child. This will be “a call for help, but at the same time for judgment.”
Poem "I.I. Pushchinu" ("My first friend, my priceless friend") Pushkin wrote in December 1826. It is dedicated to two events: Pushchin’s arrival in January 1825 in Mikhailovskoye, where the poet was in exile, and Pushchin’s deportation to hard labor in Siberia for participating in the Decembrist uprising.
In 1828 in Chita A.G. Muravyova gave Pushchin the poem “My First Friend.” It was not published during Pushkin's lifetime.
Listen to the poem "I.I. Pushchinu" :
My first friend, my priceless friend
Message from I.I. Pushchin – early edition
The first stanza of the poem "To I.I. Pushchin" is taken from the unfinished "Message to I.I. Pushchin", written in January-August 1825:
My first friend, my priceless friend, And I blessed fate When my yard is secluded, Covered in sad snow, Your bell rang. Forgotten shelter, disgraced hut Tell me where the years went |
Fate, fate with an iron hand She destroyed our peaceful lyceum, But you are happy, oh dear brother, Happy are you, useful citizen, In his chosen turn. You have conquered prejudice |
190 years ago the most famous poem about friendship was born
I.I. Pushchina
My first friend
my priceless friend!
And I blessed fate
When my yard is secluded,
Covered in sad snow,
Your bell rang.
I pray to Holy Providence:
Yes my voice to your soul
Gives the same consolation
May he illuminate the imprisonment
A ray of lyceum clear days!
Alexander Pushkin 1826
The friends met in Mikhailovskoye at eight o'clock in the morning on January 11 (23rd New Style) 1825 and spent the whole day, evening and part of the night talking.
Pushchin's arrival was a huge event for the disgraced poet. After all, even relatives did not dare to visit the exile; they and Pushchin dissuaded him from the trip.
The unexpected joy of meeting illuminated not only that short January day, but also much that awaited the friends ahead. When, thirty years later, Ivan Ivanovich Pushchin takes up his pen to describe his meeting with Pushkin in Mikhailovsky, every letter in his manuscript will shine with happiness. “Notes about Pushkin” is one of the brightest works created in the memoir genre in Russian.
Shortly before parting, the friends remembered how they talked through a thin wooden partition at the Lyceum. Pushchin had the thirteenth room, Pushkin the fourteenth. It's right in the middle of the long corridor. From a boy’s point of view, the location is advantageous ─ while the tutor is walking from one end or the other, the neighbors will warn you about the danger. But Pushkin and Pushchin had a common window; a partition divided it strictly in half.
Reviews about the lyceum students of the warden Martyn Piletsky have been preserved; this is what he wrote about the 13-year-old Pushchin:
"...Nobility, good nature with courage and subtle ambition, especially prudence ─ are his excellent qualities."
Who could have known then how useful both this courage and this prudence would be to Ivan...
In Mikhailovskoye, number thirteen brought number fourteen three bottles of Clicquot champagne, the manuscript of “Woe from Wit,” a letter from Ryleev, gifts from Uncle Vasily Lvovich, a lot of news, and took away the beginning of the poem “Gypsies,” letters... He left after midnight, at three o’clock January 12.
"...The coachman had already harnessed the horses, the bell rang at the porch, the clock struck three. We still clinked glasses, but we drank sadly: as if it felt like we were drinking together for the last time, and that we were drinking into eternal separation! Silently, I threw my fur coat over my shoulders and ran away in the sleigh. Pushkin said something else after me; hearing nothing, I looked at him: he stopped on the porch with a candle in his hand. I heard: “Farewell, friend!” .."
When Pushkin begins to finish writing his message to Pushchin, he will have been in prison for almost a year - first in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and then in the Shlisselburg Fortress. After the verdict, Ivan Pushchin and Wilhelm Kuchelbecker were erased from the “Memorable Book of the Lyceum”, as if they did not exist at all.
In October 1827, Pushchin, shackled in hand and leg shackles, was sent along a convoy to the Chita prison. The journey took three months.
“On the very day of my arrival in Chita, Alexandra Grigorievna Muravyova calls me to the stockade and gives me a piece of paper on which was written in an unknown hand: “My first friend, my priceless friend!”
This was at the beginning of 1828. But Pushchin saw the original poem only in 1842.
Dmitry Shevarov "Motherland", No. 5, 2016
Illustration ─ Nikolay Ge. "Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin in the village of Mikhailovskoye" (1875): Pushkin and Pushchin reading "Woe from Wit."