THE STUDY OF M.Y. LERMONTOV’ LYRICS IN A SECONDARY SCHOOL (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE POEMS "I AM NOT FOR ANGELS AND PARADISE..." AND "PRAYER")

Abstract. The given article offers a way of studying the poems by M.Y. Lermontov "I am not for angels and paradise ..." and "Prayer" ("In a difficult moment of life") in a secondary school. Special attention is paid to the study of God-fighting motives in the poet's lyrics, the illogicality of the lyrical world of M.Y. Lermontov. The leading methodological technique in the work is comparative analysis as a method of interpretation of a poetic text and a method of verbal drawing, with the help of which students comprehend the plot-compositional features of poems. The purpose of the analysis is to use it to help students realize the author's position and rise to the philosophical problems that worried M.Y. Lermontov at the beginning of his career and in the last years of his work.

The article is intended for students and teachers of philological faculties, teachers of Russian language and literature, as well as methodologists.

Keywords: M.Y. Lermontov, analysis, lyrics, God-fighting, lyrical hero.

The contradictions of Russian life were comprehended by M.Y. Lermontov in the spirit of philosophical searches of his time. Shagalov states: "From this point of view, Lermontov's lyrics are fundamentally philosophical. No vital phenomenon displayed by the poet can be understood outside of the central philosophical ideas of the epoch. The specificity of Lermontov's lyrics lies in the antonymy, in the unresolved ideological and spiritual conflicts between heaven and earth in the soul of the personality itself, where opposite and absolutely irreconcilable forces operate: faith contradicts experience, feeling contradicts reflection, ideal contradicts reality," A.A. [Shagalov, 2001: 10].

"The world is imperfect, but if God created it, then he is primarily to blame for the imperfection," V.D. Skvoznikov [Skvoznikov, 1998: 203]. Thus, M.Y. Lermontov's idea of God-fighting reaches completeness and uncompromising in his early lyrics. God-fighting is inherently at a great distance from the scientific definition of anti-religion. Its main content is despair and merciless irony, but the very idea of God is not in essence denied. It is not the existence of God as the organizer of the world that is in doubt, but faith in his enlightened mind. God-fighting moods can rise to complete disbelief, but they always represent a brief moment of decisive despair, because others get along and argue with him.

Such scientists as S.N. Durylin, A.A. Shagalov, V.D. Skvoznikov, V.I. Korovin, G.L. Orekhanov and others have been studying the philosophical lyrics of M.Y. Lermontov at various times.

The complex and ambiguous attitude of M.Y. Lermontov in his poems to God has led to the fact that few poems on the God-fighting theme are studied at school, besides, they are studied separately from each other and rarely compared. Therefore, when studying such lyrical works of Lermontov, we propose to compare several different poems in which the illogicality of the poet's world of lyrics is traced, which is incompatible with sincere faith, to identify the tragic conflict of poems in which the personality itself acts as a carrier of higher spiritual values, throws merciless accusations at God and at the same time considers him the highest heavenly power.

We propose at the literature lesson to conduct a comparative analysis of the poem by M.Y. Lermontov of the early period of creativity "I am not for angels and paradise ..." (1831) and the later "Prayer" (1839) to show how different moods the poet wrote in his orientation.

Thus, in the poem "I am not for angels and paradise ..." the features of the poet's "great dispute" with God are most openly and clearly revealed. At the beginning of the poem, it may seem that the author recognizes the omnipotence and power of the creator, his omniscience: "I am not for angels and paradise / created by an Omnipotent God; / But why I live suffering, / He knows more about it." However, this omniscience confuses the lyrical hero, since he himself does not know what to do with his life, hence the feeling of alienation and loneliness of the poet. He compares himself to a demon, darkness and hopelessness reign in his soul: "As my demon, I am the chosen one of evil, / As a demon, with a proud soul, / I am a careless wanderer among people, / A stranger to the world and heaven." The lyrical hero believes that he is alone with his demon in the whole world "we are alone with him in the world."  At the end of his monologue, he asks to compare himself with his "companion" in order to prove his case to everyone and show that the demon is next to him throughout his life.

In order for students to be able to conduct such an analysis themselves, we suggest asking students leading questions that will help them in determining the whole meaning of the work:

How does the author see God? Who is he to him? Who does the lyrical hero associate himself with and why?

It is also important to draw the attention of students to the fact that the poem is divided into 3 parts, and, using the technique of verbal drawing, each part can be illustrated as "steps" from which the author gradually "descends" to show exactly where the lyrical hero is. In the first quatrain we see the presence of angels, paradise, the all-powerful God. And if you draw an associative series, then usually these words are equated to something heavenly, located far above the earth. Then the author takes readers down a step below, where the lyrical hero and his "demon" are located. He cannot reach that height, because he has too much pride and anger at the injustice of his position in the world. And at the very bottom, the author has a reader or someone who is invited to "observe" the fate of the demon and the lyrical hero, compare them and come to the disappointing conclusion that they are the same in essence and are alone on earth.

Next, we propose to compare this poem with the poem "Prayer" ("In a difficult moment of life") and offer the following questions to the students after reading:

What feelings do you feel after reading this poem? Do these feelings differ from those that were after studying the previous one? How do you imagine the lyrical hero in this poem? Is he somehow connected with the demon here?

This poem was written at a more mature age, when the principles and life positions of M.Y. Lermontov were already finally formed.

Here the lyrical hero does not feel separated from God, he does not have a sense of loneliness, he himself turns to God and feels a connection with him, from which it becomes easy for him. The image of a demon in this poem is completely absent.

Compositionally, we can also offer to break the poem into its components. The first stanza describes a difficult state of mind, familiar to every person: despondency, longing, sorrow, anxiety, despair: "In a difficult moment of life, sadness is crowding in my heart, / I repeat one wonderful prayer by heart." You can compare it with the composition of the previous poem and say that here it is the opposite. In the first stanza, we are, as it were, at the lower "stage", the lyrical hero is just beginning to turn to the Almighty with the help of prayer. In the second stanza, he already feels the power in these "consonances of the words of the living." We rise a step higher, where the lyrical hero feels this miraculous power of words addressed to God. And finally, in the third stanza, we ascend to the highest stage, at which the hero feels a state of peace, purity, spirituality that comes after prayer. It's easy for him because he understands: God will not leave him in a difficult moment and will always be by his side.

So, after analyzing two poems, we can clearly show students how ambiguous M.Y. Lermontov's attitude to God was, how long he was in philosophical search and in different periods interpreted the meaning of the Almighty for man in different ways. On this basis, we can conclude that it is necessary to conduct comparative analyses of different poems at school so that students do not make mistakes when characterizing the philosophical lyrics of M.Y. Lermontov.

The God-fighting motives are not something accidental by M.Y. Lermontov. They organically permeate the entire fabric of his work, variously embodied in the most suffering, deep and sincere creations of the poet.