"Stranger" is perhaps the most famous lyric poem by one of the greatest poets of the Russian Silver Age - Alexander Blok. This work is included in the school literature curriculum.
The period of work on the poem
"The Stranger" was written in a difficult period for the poet - when he himself was going through a difficult personal drama. His beloved, Lyubov Mendeleeva, left him for his friend and fellow poet Andrei Bely. Blok took this betrayal and parting hard, perhaps partly for this reason the poem is imbued with such lyrical sadness.
According to many researchers, the poet conveys the atmosphere of the Petersburg outskirts, in addition, here you can find his impressions of trips to the dacha, where the poet visited more than once during this period, dull rural entertainment and local inhabitants.
Plot
So, the scene of action is a kind of restaurant, in which all the dirt and vulgarity of the big city is deliberately concentrated. Here the air itself is heavy, it is difficult to breathe, the eyes of those around them are empty, there are not people around, but grotesque creatures "with the eyes of rabbits." This world is disharmonious, viscous and dreary, and being in it is devoid of any meaning.
And every evening in this terrifying place with its ordinary vulgarity, she appears - no longer the Beautiful Lady of the early Blok's lyrics, but a woman in whose heart there is obviously a secret, a kind of bitterness that makes her come here. This woman, wrapped in silk and exuding a scent of perfume, obviously does not belong to this gray world, she is a stranger in it.
The stranger walks through the mud without getting dirty with it, and remains a kind of lofty ideal.
It is significant that the lyrical hero does not at all seek to dispel the mystery surrounding her, to approach her and ask her name, to find out what brought her here. Indeed, in this case, the romantic halo surrounding the mysterious stranger will also disappear, from a stranger she will turn into just an earthly woman, in whose life something may have happened. It is important for him precisely as a symbol, as an image showing that even in the most hopeless darkness there is light and beauty, as a sign of a mystical miracle that brings meaning and fills life with content.
Literary analysis
The poem is written in iambic pentameter with a classic cross alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes.
The whole work can be roughly divided into two parts: in the first there is an atmosphere of hopelessness, the second is illuminated by the presence of the mysterious Stranger. At the same time, the antithesis of images is constantly emphasized by vocabulary and phonetics: at the beginning of the poem, all images are extremely gloomy and dull, "low" vocabulary prevails ("lackeys", "drunkards", "stick out", etc.), in the second part - exclusively "High", emphasizing the "magic" and inaccessibility of the image.
