The Aeolian harp. This poetic image entered the Russian literary language from the end of 1814-the time of publication of the ballad of V. A. Zhukovsky with this name. Let us recall a fragment of this poem in the part concerning the "musical" theme. Arminius, the bard, who was in love with Princess Minwana, hung his harp on an oak tree as a pledge of their pure love. According to the singer's prediction, after his death, the harp sounded by itself: "something staggered / Leaves without wind; / And something snuggled up / To the strings, invisibly flying down from a height... / And suddenly ... out of the silence / Rose a long, pensive chime." Having thus learned of the death of her lover, Minwana also died of grief soon after. Her soul merged in heaven with that of Arminius, but since then "the oak tree stirs and the strings [of the harp] resound."

The idea of a lyre hanging (on a cypress tree), which was supposed to leap up after the death of the hero (fortunately, he was still alive, and the lyre hung silently "in the dust", i.e. in the dust), is also played out in I. I. Dmitriev's poem "To the Lyre" (1791). Despite the fact that Zhukovsky mentioned Aeolus in the title of the ballad, the harp in his work does not sound at all from the wind, although usually such harps "played" precisely at the will of the winds. What was the Aeolian harp?

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The Encyclopedia of Music explains that it was a box-resonator with several metal strings that sounded from the wind. The first mention of such an instrument dates back to the X century.

The appearance of the image of the Aeolian harp in European poetry and the disclosure of its mystical purpose is shown in the detailed work of A. E. Mokhov "The Aeolian Harp: the Thing and the Poetic World" (Russkaya rech. 1993. N 4), to which we refer interested readers. In turn, we will use some information from Mokhov's article concerning the history of the instrument.

The Aeolian harp, as understood by Zhukovsky's contemporaries, was invented (or rather improved) by the German A. Kircher in the middle of the 17th century. A century later, this" toy " suddenly became fashionable in England. In the same place, it was also given the name: The harp of Aeolus. Soon this fun game under the name Aeolharfe returned to its homeland in Germany, where it also found many fans. It was also known in Russia at the very beginning of the XIX century as a lordly entertainment. According to D. S. Merezhkovsky, Count A. A. Arakcheev also had this instrument in his Gruzino estate. In the novel "Alexander the First, the all-powerful temporary worker" dozed off: the music of the wind was heard in an Aeolian harp on one of the Georgian towers, and in this music - Nastenka's lulling voice... " And further: in Georgia there was an Aeolian harp "with taut strings, which made a plaintive sound under the wind. The villagers, passing by in the late afternoon, whispered in fear: "The power of the cross is with us!"". According to the number of mentions (five times) of this tool, Merezhkovsky is the "record holder" among Russian writers.

At the beginning of the XIX century, a similar expression - Aeolian psaltery-is found in the poet-philologist A. Kh. Vostokov. But he is not talking about Aeolus-the wind, but about the Aeolians-the Greeks.

The Aeolian music box was usually inserted in the windows, mounted on roofs, sometimes placed in garden gazebos, and it hummed monotonously from the wind, from the draft. The strength and duration of the sound depended only on the strength of the wind. It is possible to speak of such a "harp" as a musical instrument only conditionally, in a figurative sense, since music is still an organized sound, the main components of which are rhythm, timbre, harmony, melody, etc. According to the apt remark of M. A. Dmitriev, the sound of this "harp" is "unworthy to be called / A musical game!" (i.e. it doesn't deserve the name of the music).

The Aeolian harp is one of the monotonous instruments, since each string is capable of reproducing only one sound of the chromatic scale, one pitch. This was especially true for the first versions of the instrument, when the strings were all the same. Later,

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when the" harp " had strings of different lengths and thicknesses, they began to tune them to several tones in unison, thereby giving a certain "musicality". In this respect, the Aeolian harp is somewhat akin to a horn (in the orchestra of Russian horn music of the XVIII century), a bell (Who listens to one bell, hears only one tone-French proverb) or an ordinary whistle (siren). Apparently, this is why the pseudo-harp soon went out of fashion.

Let us return, however, to Zhukovsky's ballad and its poetic image. It has long been rightly noted that the poet wrote his work based on songs (poems) Ossian. Indeed, in Ossian, the harps sometimes sound of their own accord, announcing the death of a worthy person.

Ossian is a legendary storytelling bard, a sort of Celtic Homer who supposedly lived in the third century. His songs-poems "found" and for the first time (in 1762) were published by the Scotsman J. MacPherson (1736-1796). When you delve deeper into the essence of the problem, it turns out that the bard Ossian did not exist. His poems are a hoax by MacPherson, who may have used some sort of oral Celtic lore. The fake publisher was discovered by the beginning of the XIX century, but the romantic poets were in no hurry to renounce Ossian's name. A modern researcher writes: "Ossian's songs were written down by an erudite folklorist, an inspired and talented poet, but they were and remain largely literary forgeries" (Early Romantic Trends, L., 1972).

It is noteworthy that MacPherson composed his poems just when the original Aeolian harp was in fashion in England. It is characteristic that the musical instrument played by the ancient Celts, the author called the harp. The word itself is relatively young. The ancient Greeks did not know it, they had lyres and cithars. The harp goes back to the Latin harpa (hook, hook; from the same family and harpoon). It entered European languages through Old German sometime in the XI-XII centuries - in any case, much later than the time of the mythical Ossian.

The stringed musical instrument that MacPherson called the harp was called the cruit(t) by the ancient Irish; the croude was an analogue of the Scots - a certain prototype of the violin, i.e. the instrument is not plucked, but bowed. Etymologists of Gaelic (ancient Gauls, ancestors of the French) The language traces emit to the Celtic * krutta, which is a kind of Roman lyre like the" barbarian harp " with a round, curved body (Lexique etymologique de l'irlandais ancien de j. Vendryes, lettre "C", 1987). The word harp (harpa) in the Irish language is a late borrowing.

Thanks to MacPherson's light hand, Celtic "harps" were included in all translations of his poems into other languages. Moreover, the harp has become a permanent attribute of singer-bards in pre-romantic and romantic poetry.-

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time periods. However, Russian poets in their works on Ossian themes sometimes used the usual "synonym" - lyre instead of the harp.

On the pine tree that golden lyre hangs;
A steep cliff is opened by ramparts,
The desert is silent, and lyra is silent.
When will the thundercloud arrive,
And the lightning will flash like a bright snake,
And the storm will groan, and the sea will rise,
That lyre makes a sad chord.
Trilunny. Ossian's Lyre, 1830

The Gaelic word bard is an ancient one: the Old Celtic *bardos dates back to the Latin bardus (1st century). It has long meant a wandering singer who celebrated leaders and heroes in his songs (A Dictionary of the Old Scottish, v. 1, London, 1931; The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Principles, v. 1, 1934).

In French, barde has been known since the beginning of the XVI century, i.e. long before MacPherson; in Russian, at least since 1740. Bards were usually called ancient Gallic singers, and among the ancient Celts and Scandinavians, songmakers were more often called skalds. By the way, in the poems of Ossian/MacPherson's storyteller is often figuratively (probably folklore!) called by the phrase "mouth of chants, mouth of songs," i.e. something like the Russian Chrysostom.

What the emit instrument looked like, to the accompaniment of which the skalds sang their fairy tales, is unknown. There are many legends about it, but no descriptions. Obviously, it was something similar to the Finnish kantele and Russian psaltery (horizontal "harps"). It is characteristic that the illustrators of Ossian's poems/MacPherson (2nd half of the XVIII-1st third of the XIX centuries) depicted Celtic "harps" of a wide variety of fantastic types.

Excerpts from Ossian/MacPherson's Russian translations have been known in Russia since 1788. Ossian became fully available to Russians in a prose translation from the French by E. I. Kostrov in 1792. Kostrov's work was used as a "subscript" by many of his contemporaries (Maslov V. I. Ossian in Russia [bibliography], L., 1928; Levin Yu. D. Ossian in Russian Literature, L., 1980).

On harps in Ossian/McPherson is said repeatedly. But there are only a few references to the fact that they are hung on trees and the wind plays on them. Thus, the aged bard Ossian sings: "My harp hangs on a withered branch. Its strings make a dull sound. Wind, O my sweet harp! or does a shadow touch you as it passes by?" (E. Kostrov Ossian, son of Fingal, bard of the third century. St. Petersburg, 1818. Part 1); " When

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already the bards have departed, and their harps hang on the heights of Selma. - A. S.], then I hear a voice in my ears, and my soul is awakened. This is the voice of times past... " (Ibid., Part 2). In Ossian/The souls of the dead, carried by the wind (they themselves "control" the winds and storms), touched the strings of harps, making them sound sad. As MacPherson explained in the footnotes to the poems of his Ossian, the ancient Irish believed that before the death of a famous person, harps spontaneously emit prophetic sad sounds. It is this motif that Zhukovsky reflected in his ballad, with which our article begins.

The title page of the first London edition (1762) was decorated with an engraving: the singing elder Ossian sitting under an oak tree, on the branches of which his harp hangs. Tree-hanging harps are also not MacPherson's original discovery. He borrowed this custom from ancient authors who hung their tools on the branches of trees or bushes in memory of themselves, of their stay in this or that place (or in general in the world). Let us recall Virgil: "Let my sonorous flute hang on the sacred pine tree "(Bucoliki). In the draft of Onegin's Travels, Pushkin used this traditional image: on the banks of the Soroti River, he is standing on the riverbank.

he left his mark,
There, in the wind as a gift, on the dark spruce
He hung up a ringing pipe.

A century later, A. Akhmatova wrote similarly: in Tsarskoye Selo Park

so many lire hung on the branches,
But mine also seems to have a place.

"All the sweet souls on high stars..." 1921

Many Russian writers of the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries were deeply imbued with Ossian's poetry/McPherson's. But Russian Ossianism was derived in terms of " rejecting [the authors]". from the source, reinterpretation of his ideas and techniques in a different, more relevant for this time, artist and current in the genre environment "(Kostin V. M. A. S. Pushkin and "Poems of Ossian" by D. MacPherson / / Problems of method and genre. Tomsk, 1983. Issue 10). The harps hung on the branches did not serve for sound, but were considered as a kind of tombstone "tablets" in memory of the storytelling singers who lived earlier. This is how Russian sentimentalist and pre-Romantic writers perceived this idea: "In unbearable grief, nothing would have comforted me, nothing would have prevented me from leaving the harp and hanging it on the branches of a tree, if Homer's lyre had not sounded to me about eternal laurels" (Quoted in: Vvedensky D. N. Etudes on Eternal Laurels).

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the influence of Ossian poetry in Russian literature. Nezhin, 1916). Similarly, in N. I. Gnedich: when

You will come to my tomb in the moonlight
Talk to my shadow,
My forgotten handguard
Remember, bring it with you;
To distinguish the singer's tomb,
Hang it under the oak tree above me.

The Transience of Youth, 1806.

But more, in the spirit of the time, Russian poets were attracted by the romantic theme of harp sound under the influence of the wind. The formal non-musical nature of the instrument did not bother the authors. This theme was later used by Merezhkovsky in his novel about Alexander I (1911-12). In his pages, the Aeolian harp is found not so much as a reality of the era, but as an artistic comparison, a complex definition. So, the hero of the novel says about Byron: "... here is a true romantic! His poetry is like an Aeolian harp played by a storm... " And further - the words of A. Bestuzhev: "My nervous constitution is an Aeolian harp played by a storm..." S. Gorodetsky used this image just as abstractly: "Nerves, like the strings of an Aeolian harp, tremble at the smallest touch" (Adam, 1915)...

Let's go back to the beginning of the XIX century. Who knew Ossian's poems well/A. Vostokov told about how the image of his late friend appeared to the poet:

He opened his mouth, as with a gurgling current
A hum whispers in the wilds, or the wind Touches the
, so it curled in my ear
The voice is ethereal.

A Vision on a May night, 1802 (Emphasis added). - A. Sh.)

N. Gnedich in The Last Song of Ossian (1804) wrote: after the death of the bard, the " stranger "(traveler) will visit his deserted dwelling,

He will enter the open door.
And, with astonished eyes
Looking around the deserted canopy,
On a dilapidated wall
He will see Ossian's harp,
Where is visya, orphaned,
There will be a message of quiet conversations
Only with desert winds.

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Not in the forest, not on the branches, but on the wall of the room hangs this harp, talking to the winds. By the way, Ossian himself has/MacPherson's account of this is different: "He will no longer hear the sound of my harp." Short, and ... ugly!

In V. N. Grigoriev's Ossian poem, an elderly bard pines at his father's grave, singing a funeral hymn. At the same time, he names the signs that informed him about the death:

No wonder the harp on a rainy day
She shuddered of her own accord,
As if someone's plaintive shadow
I touched her with my ethereal fingers.

Tosca Ossiana, 1822

This motif is already familiar not only from Zhukovsky's "Aeolian harp", but also in his earlier ballad the harp sounds for the same reason:

And suddenly ... like a breeze
A whiff from the east,
He touched the dormant leaf a little,
Slightly touched the swell of the stream...
And a voice passed with it...
as if it were above the stars
Seraphim touched the harp
With ethereal fingers.

Gromoboy, 1810

The poetic image of the Aeolian harp fell out of active use in the first quarter of the XIX century, during the period of the decline of romanticism, simultaneously with the loss of interest in the gloomy and monotonous poetry of Ossian/McPherson's. Later examples are quite rare.

Something mystically elusive is connected with this image in Fyodor Tyutchev:

Oh, the skald's harp! how long did you sleep
In the shadow, in the dust of a forgotten corner;
But only the moon that enchanted the mist,
An azure light flashed in your corner,
Suddenly a wonderful tinkle began to flutter in the string,
Like the delirium of a soul disturbed in its sleep.

Skald's Harp, 1838

But more often this phrase does not carry a special semantic load: "This is a review of the slender harp / Under the Aeolian hand... "(M. Dmitriev about

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poems by K. Pavlova, 1843). Similarly, other authors, for example, V. Benediktov about the death of Zhukovsky:

He, in the distance, is like a light-bearing ghost,
More and more lost
In the depths of a cloudless sky,
And like the sound of an Aeolian harp
Worn out, fading sweetly,
It subsided...

Memoirs, 1852;

A. Maikov:

And the Aeolian harps are silent sad row
Aeolian Harps, 1856.

In 1905, I. A. Bunin published the poem "Ghosts", in which he recalled and revived the "old Scottish tradition":

No, the dead are not dead to us!
There is an old Scottish tradition,
What are their shadows, invisible to the eyes,
People come to see us at midnight,

What about the dusty harps hanging on the walls,
They touch their hands mysteriously
And awaken in the slumbering strings
Sad and sweet sounds.

N. Gumilyov used this image somewhat unexpectedly in his address to the sea: "From Suez to Babel-Mandeb, your surface rings like an Aeolian harp" (Red Sea, 1921).

The real Aeolian harp, a wind toy for the adult rich, did not attract the attention of Russian poets; as far as we know, none of them mentioned this primitive box with strings.

The monotonous sound of wind in strings (wires) is well known in our purely technical time. Let us recall the most recently heard lines from poems and songs of Soviet poets: M. Isakovsky - "Invisible violins / Strings rang in the distance" ("Radiomost", about the wind humming in radio wires); "Hurried poles began to walk; / Wires hummed and played, / We have never seen such a thing" ("Along the village", the same goes for electric wires); B. Kornilov - " Running out of the woods to the highways, / Telegraph poles howl ("Great-grandfather"); V. Agatov - " Dark night, only the wind buzzing in the wires..." ("Dark Night"), etc.

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Apparently, it is no coincidence that the Frenchman Kastner in the middle of the XIX century believed that such music is associated with space. Monotonously humming, howling from the wind wires - this is the modern Aeolian harp. Poets sometimes call this howling singing. With a certain amount of imagination, these sounds can be found mysterious and even... softness. In fact, the monument to the composer J. Sibelius in Helsinki is also a kind of Aeolian flute. It is welded from several hundred steel pipes that "play" in gusts of wind.

In the Paris newspaper " Days "(1927), the Aeolian harp was figuratively called a fundamentally new instrument (theremin), when the performer's hands play" in the air", i.e. the electromagnetic field of the musician creates" heavenly music".

The name of Zhukovsky's ballad, due to its extraordinary popularity, gave rise to the fact that one of the members of the Arzamas literary society, A. I. Turgenev, received the nickname Aeolian Harp. The same name was later given to the gazebo-rotunda in the resort park of Pyatigorsk. Over time, this phrase has taken root in the poetic language, regardless of the actual subject. True, now it is perceived more with an ironic than with a romantic connotation.

The real object, which even in its "life" was little known to anyone, has been completely forgotten for two and a half centuries, but its poetic name, loudly "pronounced" by Zhukovsky, has been preserved in the language. And the ability of this "harp" to respond to air currents in our days has suddenly acquired a new figurative (metaphorical) meaning. In an essay about Fyodor Tyutchev, the author writes:: "Tyutchev was the thinnest, most delicate instrument, swayed by the wind of time, and he felt this wind physically, with exceptional acuteness. And in response, he made unique sounds: he broadcast, he performed sacred rites" (E. Kurganov). Tyutchev-thinker / / Zvezda. 1999. N 6). What's not an Aeolian harp? A familiar metaphor "shines through" in the romance to the words of M. Matusovsky from the movie "True Friends "(1954): "What is the heart, what is the heart so disturbed, / As if the wind touched a string..."

Saint-Petersburg.

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