2004 marks the 70th anniversary of Novella Nikolaevna Matveeva ,a poet, bard, and translator.

It stands at the origins of the bard song along with B. Okudzhava, Y. Vizbor, M. Ancharov. In the 60s, this genre became a popular form of spiritual communication between people of different professions, bright "singing poets" appeared: V. Vysotsky, A. Galich, A. Gorodnitsky, A. Yakusheva, Yu. Kukin, E. Klyachkin, O. Mityaev, Yu. Kim. Their lyrical voice was distinguished by sincerity, confession, and a romantic attitude.

Thanks to the help of K. Chukovsky and M. Atabekyan, in 1966 the company "Melody" Matveeva released the first CD of the author's song in our country. Giant discs with 15-20 songs each, as well as floppy disks, continued to appear in the following years. The voice of the performer, soft but brave, high, almost childlike, does not change over the years, evokes a piercing feeling of inner purity, naturalness and at the same time dramatic fullness.

S. Marshak, V. Chivilikhin, N. Starshinov, D. Kugultinov took part in the creative fate of the poetess. Since 1963, her husband Ivan Semenovich Kiuru, also endowed with the gift of poetry, a friend and co-author, who died in 1992, was next to her. Matveeva composed

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music and his poems: "Vardane", "Koni", "Roscha zaalela", "Tabor", "Melody for guitar", "Moi Voronenok", etc.

As you know, the bard's song is a synthetic genre: in it, the talent of a poet and a composer, a performer and a singer are inseparable. If in a pop song the musical side is primarily important, then in a bard song, according to B. Okudzhava, it is the text, its quality that determines both the music and the manner of performance. However, Matveeva has a different approach to her work: "I have a song because it has its own melody from the very beginning, which, as a rule, appears to me before the words... In general, the words of my songs are unthinkable without a melody. Song lyrics for me are only conclusions from music" (see: Bardovskaya pesnya, Moscow, 1993, p. 27). Nevertheless, in any case, the author's song is characterized by the harmony of the word and melody, greater accessibility and ease of perception.

The essence of Matveeva's poetic worldview can be defined by the word "romance". "If high romanticism, along with high ideals, is characterized by the inner dramatic duality of the characters, a deeply tragic view of the world, then romance, with all the sense of drama, is characterized by dreams and hopes, emotional lightness and mobility, an inspired fantasy" (Russian writers. XX century. Bibliographic dictionary: In 2 ch. Ch. 2. Moscow, 1998, p. 35).

In her songs, the poet, with her characteristic active temperament and courage, turns to romantic images and themes - the sea, the sky, distant countries, exotic islands, fairy-tale cities, white ships, clouds, sails, lighthouses. Her favorite characters are mysterious captains, travelers, horsemen, pioneers, people seeking, obsessed with the discovery of the unknown and beautiful ("In the pre-dawn fog", "Brothers Captains", "The Flying Dutchman", "Blue Sea", "Songs of the distant distance", "Captain without a mustache", "Horizon", "The Lighthouse", "There's a Traveler", "Jimmy's Ancestors", "Missouri", "America", "Italy", "Spanish Song"). The magical world of the poet-bard is fed by adventures and fairy tales from the books of Stevenson, London, J. Verne, Cooper, Twain, Swift, Gauff, Hoffmann, Stanyukovich.

Matveeva's romantic aspirations are closest to A. Green, whom she considers her teacher and whose creativity is constantly echoed in her poetry, which is expressed in reminiscences, both hidden and explicit. The writer's books are populated by a tribe of strong, proud, selfless, unselfish and kind people, and the mysterious and unusual sounding names of the heroes and the cities where they live support the feeling of beauty, joy, and light emanating from these books.

This mood permeates the play " Aigle's Prediction "(based on Green's prose), which includes thirty-three author's songs.,

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they gave a romantic tone to the whole performance. The final lines of one of them (under the same name) are addressed to the one that is waiting for an extraordinary ship:

Believe the wave of the seas,
Believe your fate
- Your Hour will come!
You'll see the glitter
Scarlet Sails:
It's up to you.
For Matveeva, as for Green, scarlet sails are a symbol of beautiful justice, a dream come true.

The world invented by Green is quite real for the poetess - when reading, a complete illusion of its authenticity is created. As a poet of the Grinov direction, Matveeva is distinguished by a combination of romantic fantasy with a subtle poetization of the ordinary. The poet's world is realistic and psychological. An energetic invasion of reality in order to change it for the realization of a high dream fills the artist's creations with vitality, a sense of responsibility for what is happening on earth.

For Matveeva, the fictional, fairy-tale "Land of Delphinium" with the main city of Kangaroo, which does not exist without the author, is as natural as Zurbagan for Green: "Palm trees will wither without me, Roses will wither without me, Birds will fall silent without me..." who sends her letters of greetings and claims that even without her, palm trees grow, roses bloom, birds sing, that is, the fairy-tale world becomes real. It's unsettling: "What will happen without me?" The poetess resorts to psychological parallelism:

The waves are blue.
Green ones? No, the blue ones.
Bitter tears run down...
I'll brush them away, shake them off, erase them.
The song "Land of Delphinium" also uses other techniques common in the lyrics of bards: figurative emotional comparisons (in the fairytale land, "White envelopes from the mail Burst like magnolia buds, Smell like jasmine"), syntactic, verbal and sound repetitions expressing the author's mood ("And yesterday it came, it came, it came to Me I need a letter, a letter, a letter"), alliteration-a combination of mostly smooth sonorous sounds ("The waves are blue... Like millions of chameleons... Wisteria blooms gently - It is more delicate than frost"). Striking rhythmic and intonation-

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the great variety of the song, its amazing colorfulness, picturesque picturesqueness.

Matveyeva's famous "Ship" also sails to the land of dreams and romance (under this name, her second collection of poems was published in 1963). The poet's propensity for metaphor, fruitful adherence to the traditions of M. Tsvetaeva were clearly manifested in this poem. Her ship built itself ("it soaked itself with pitch, dressed itself in oak and metal", its own pilot, boatswain, captain. He sees everything, notices everything, encourages everyone.

The poem is a simple and natural combination of two intonations, two lexical layers-the sublime and the ordinary. If in the first two lines there are romantic notes ("I soared like a falcon over the waves"), then in the next two lines there is a colloquial, everyday style ("They say I made myself").

On the one hand, the ship "made a noise with its sails", "dreamed of something", on the other - "made faces at the last tsars", "wrote everything down, checked everything", "gossiped" with other ships, "everything that I saw was on the masts" - let's recall the saying " to wind up on a mustache"). The diminutive form of the word korablik allows us to perceive it as a living being striving for a happy and free life. In the light of this image, the meaning of the author's own words is understood: "Apparently, in the depths of my soul I am an active person, and from here in the verses - a traveling beginning. I prefer a wide geography to a narrow one in verse, just as I would prefer a stream to stagnant water, colorful vegetation to dull vegetation, linen cloth to synthetics, and a live apple to dried fruit. I guess I'm just a normal person... I long to welcome not cramped space, but space and strive for something bright" (Matveeva N. Luxury available to everyone / / Voprosy literatury. 1988. N 7. P. 260).

In Matveeva's songs, the action can take place not only in "forever wonderful" and unknown countries, in the mountains or on the seashore, but also on the outskirts of your hometown. In the song "Outskirts, or Houses without roofs", the author conveys his sense of the quirkiness of a new building immersed in a night's sleep, subtly using metaphor and association: "on the magic wind "dances" paper litter", "houses without roofs" float somewhere, like "ships"," a tub with some paint "turns into a "shuttle", "a stirring stick" - into an "oar", "a tub-boat" is carried by " cement waves"from the " brick ships"; in the "white night distance" you can see some "cut-out towers", cranes seem to be "lace".

She finds beauty in the most seemingly mundane things, prosaic objects. The images are real and close to the fairy-tale ones. Matveeva's romance is both earthy and sublime. From the side of her imaginary boat, she sees the real picture of the Moscow suburbs and at the same time perceives it in a different, magical way.

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the light. The poetess herself admits: "... that "paper trash" is written from nature. If the whole night was self-deception, then the whole world is self-deception, because I have never seen anything more beautiful and wonderful than that evening turning into night. I don't think I was able to capture all its beauty, and even that flying trash didn't give the impression of dirt. It's just the way I see the world, and sometimes it makes me very angry, sometimes it leaves me without a language to describe it... not beauty, no... Beauty is some kind of slightly sweet word, to describe its remarkable, let's say so... "(Istomin S, Denisenko D. The most famous bards of Russia, Moscow, 2002, p. 268).

This can only be said by an artist in whose poems and songs the fabulousness and fantasticism come from the love of life. Among the best songs of the poetess are "Conjurer", "Fireman", "Gypsy Moldavanka", "Heather", "Drainpipes", "Old Tramp", "Homeless Brownie", " What a big wind!".

The love theme in Matveeva's lyrics does not appear in poems, but only in songs: "A letter to your beloved", " Oh, how long we're going!", "The Girl from the tavern". In the latter, the author uses a cross-cutting metonymy. The theme of secret and unrequited love is revealed through everyday details: when a loved one "went to another", he was reminded of a raincoat hanging on a nail, when he left forever - a nail in the wall, then-a trace from a nail that was torn out of the wall... However, memory and loyalty resist what happened, love does not die.

The book of poems "The Soul of Things" (1966) deserves special attention. The poetess reflects on the poet and poetry, on creativity and its connection with life, on the purpose of art, on the nature of poetic craft, on how the images of her poems and songs are born. The book consists of works that differ in orientation and intonation-lyrical, sharply publicistic, song, sarcastically ironic, and sometimes satirical. The author expressed her poetic credo in the poem of the same name:

I will be told: give up your dreams, draw reality;
Write as it is: a boot, a horseshoe, a pear ...
But reality also has an appearance,
And I'm looking for the soul under the guise.
"The soul of things "(concepts, categories, relations) - "this is their essence hidden from the eye, concentrated reality, transformed by creative fantasy, this is the romantic core of the artistic image, its holy of holies" (Pustovoit P. G. Figurative word of the Novella Matveeva // Vech. cf.school. 1996. N 3. P. 36). The poetess tends towards allegorical art, in which the conventional, often fantastic, helps to understand the essence of things more deeply.

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It proclaims a departure not from reality, but from the ordinary, from the "frenzied regularities" lying on the surface, from which, having rebelled, you want to run away "for mischief On the island of mixed colors, Where night is not night, And day is not day, Where the abyss of the unusual is not lilac lilac, Cinnamon is not brown" ("Paints"). This is the fantastic island of Gel-Gyu-Green's fictional world.

In the "Song", the poetess speaks about the arbitrariness, unintentional nature of her creativity, which cannot be controlled and rationalized:

How did the song turn out for me?
I don't know what to say!
I try myself
By the fire
Take apart the snowflake piece by piece!
The author seems to justify himself: I sing as it is sung, I write as it is written, and if you start to delve into the logic of images, shine them with the dead light of analysis, nothing will remain of them. Matveeva's poetry, according to the observations of the critic SI. Chuprin (see his introductory article "The Republic of Dreams of Matveeva's Novella" to the collection "Favorites", Moscow, 1986), is distinguished by such qualities as absolute freedom of self-expression, emotional looseness, variety and whimsical flexibility of rhythms and intonation, ease of any internal "gesture".

The poetess asserts personal independence, uniqueness and uniqueness of each spiritual and life experience, while expressing her dislike for erased words, worn-out expressions, rhythmic and intonation monotony. Sonnet "Stamp" ends with energetic lines:

I'm afraid of the stamp! I'm afraid of the stencil:
It's stupid, it's funny, but it's the end of the world.
A satirical portrait of producers and consumers of philistine-bourgeois " stamps "is created in the poem" Props of one poet "("Everything is fresh, everything is ripe, languid, Everything is soft, floated to the edge"). Knowing the value of the word, applying it honestly and chastely, Matveeva is merciless to pretentiousness and trickery, flirtatiousness and pretentiousness, as indicated in the sonnet "Rhyme":

And where the rhyme is too shocking
The entire line is destroyed by shock.
If the poet thinks not about the meaning, but about the form, in order to "show off", to play with words, then the consonances in his verse will be artificial.

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In the poem "Consonances", the author states: "I just don't like it when the consonants are like birch branches on a pine tree." The paronymy technique used here is also found in the "Old Word": "Poet and glory-there is no more dangerous alloy".

A poisonous irony permeates the poem, in which Matveeva refers to a certain poet, mired in naturalistic mud:

Don't write, don't write, don't type
Raucous books that glorify the flesh.
Using a metaphorical style, the author contrasts the" flesh "with" stars of the mind, flashes of the spirit", everything sublime in a person. The path of spiritual rebirth is hard and difficult, but it is easy to slip into the primitiveness, ordinariness, lack of spirituality of mineral existence, and then the world of carnal needs, naked sensuality and womb will lead humanity to "the path from Plato to plankton And from Phidias to mussel... "(here the poetess again subtly and elegantly uses the possibilities of paronymy).

Spiritual strength, moral purity and beauty in Matveeva herself are supported by her great predecessors in world literature and art, to whom she constantly turns and dedicates her poems: "Vasily Andreevich", "Lermontov", "In Memory of Prishvin", "Robert Bernet", "Shakespeare", "Heinrich Heine", "Rembrandt", "Rubens", "Pieter Brueghel the Elder".

In subsequent years, a number of poetry and song collections by Matveeva were published: "Swallow's School" (1973), "River" (1978), "Law of Songs" (1983)," Surf Country "(1983), "Praise for Work" (1987), "Indissoluble Circle" (1991), "Minuet" (1994), " Sonnets "(1998), "Melody for Guitar" (1998)," Shepherd's Diary "(1998)," Caravan "(2000)," Jasmine " (2001). Over time, her lyrics become more philosophical and analytical, her interest in contemporary social issues increases, her vision becomes dialectical, wise and sharp-sighted, and her poetic palette becomes more complex. This is especially evident in the understanding of the universe and nature. Understanding the truth of things, the need to get to the bottom of everything-these are the reasons that guide the artist.

The poem "Traces" ends with invocational lines:

Let's go!
Between different links
I'm eager to reconnect.
Matveeva likes an aphoristic ending that expresses a direct attitude to the topic.

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The single combat of the elements and the mind in the human soul is the basis of the poem "Sleepers". If the elements lead to nowhere, to a dead end, then "Only there it is good and not scary, Where the sleepers are laid high", that is, where an organized, strong-willed beginning is present in a person. The poetess claims:

The path on the sleepers can not fail to come true.
You can't get lost on it.
Sleepers, as it were, take on the role of a vital reference point on land, approaching in this sense with the reliable light of a lighthouse in the sea-also a symbol of good. These same motives - above all, the discipline of poetic thought-are also reflected in the sonnet " I envy the distant times...":

We need a bridle for hot horses,
a cover for books, a frame for all portraits,
Dam - to the dispersed waves,
Sonnet to poets who have started talking.
The poem "Truisms", in which the theme of morality is interpreted, is based on the antithesis - a clash of contrasting concepts: flame - glacier, violence - virtue, intelligence - stupidity, wolf - dove. The author angrily protests against the philosophy of "lawlessness" ("everything is one, So "everything is allowed"), and suggests that it is unacceptable to forget the immutable moral values that have been tested for centuries in the minds and behavior of contemporaries.

The idea of the dialectic of life and death is subtly drawn in "Snowflake". Driven by the wind, she leaned against the windowpane and immediately melted away:

And only from death did snowflake learn,
That life can be warm.
In other poems about nature ("Summer", "Oak Grove", "Winter", "Steppe", "Acacia", "Forest", "The river flowed like rain", "Moonlit night", "Frost", "Aloe", "Smoke", "Waterfall", " Under the author tries to understand the life of trees, flowers, inhabitants of fields and groves, full of riddles and secret, hidden meaning. Matveyeva's nature is spiritualized, she lives, breathes, excites, and we seem to see, hear, and feel her desires and plans. Touching it, the poetess experiences a kind of enlightenment and purification of the soul, more fully realizes the charm of life, her existence on earth. This state is perfectly conveyed in the "Ballad of the Circle" by diminutive affectionate suffixes and the corresponding rhythm of the refrain:

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If only I could see the leaves and the rays...
if only I could have fellow travelers more often:
Shadow on the path,
Flying Cobwebs
And the groves are not a gloomy sight.
Poems about nature amaze with the author's amazing observation. With the help of sixteen emotional-evaluative and color epithets that differ in accuracy and imagery, she defines different states of ice ("Faces of Ice")- The associative series in the "Hymn to Pepper" is long: "Order of the kitchen, coat of arms of storerooms... joyful gnome"; and here is "plantain-a proven orderly" ("Summer"). Unexpected comparisons stop:" Like river shells, night violets suddenly opened up "("Night violets"), "Rings on a stump - like circles on water" ("Wood"), "Waves rufflingly wave yarn Like spinners-rebels" ("Waves and Rocks"); visual and auditory images: "Red-red and black taiga" ("Siberia"); "A dry sunset burns like a copper mirror" ("Steppe"); a stream - "a sonorous harp under the ice" ("Winter Orgies"); "on a rope... frozen laundry clangs" ("Winter"); tautological combinations: "But the light of a special winter night is gentle" ("Smoke"); "You can fall, so as not to fall, And fall, so as not to fall" ("Waterfall"); sound recording: "In the hollows snow, layered like mica..."; "Eggplant sides lay down..."; "Sheet steel of fierce cold" ("Winter").

The poetess admires what she sees outside the window: a rosehip bush, sweet peas on the hedge, evening rain, a simple water lily, a cabbage head, a May beetle, and each time creates picturesque "landscape" sketches, revealing to the reader the earthly beauty.

Over the years, the lyrical and romantic beginning in Matveeva's poetry has not weakened, although critics have repeatedly accused her of adhering to the exotic, of escaping from reality, of being disconnected from life, and said that fantasy leads her into the illusory realm of dreams. In fact, the poet's exoticism is an inevitable companion of romantic wanderings, it helps to connect the distant with the immediate environment. In addition, poetry itself has the right to fiction, to fantasy, which makes it possible to understand real life, to assert what does not yet exist in it; and the craving for miracles helps to overcome the monotony of everyday life, the disharmony of life's prose.

Her "freethinking and independence" led to the fact that she "turned out to be misunderstood (however, like any great poet), untimely and, on a large scale, not in demand" (Krasnikov G. N. Fatal clue for life, or In search of the lost sky. Moscow, 2002. pp. 213, 216).

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Nevertheless, Matveeva continues to occupy a special and prominent place in modern Russian poetry. Her best works still retain an active civic intonation, a sharpened poetic vision of the world in detail, romantic pathos, they teach an unmistakable distinction between good and evil, honor and dishonor, introduce a person to genuine spirituality; they are characterized by a refined artistic form.

Today, the poetess continues to translate poetry from European and CIS languages; writes poems for children - witty, kind, capable of bringing joy to the reader of any age; works on the autobiographical book "The Ball Left in the Sky", parts of which were already published in the Znamya magazine in 1996-1997, about her own works. children's impressions, parents, about the artistic atmosphere in the family (partly the author told about this earlier in the poems "Keys to the Club", "Things in the House" in the collection "Surf Country"); speaks with articles on topical issues of art, poetry, song genre. In 1998, she was awarded the Pushkin Prize in Poetry.

Her need to express her soul remains the same as during the "thaw". Restlessness is the main character trait of the lyrical hero Matveeva. And in spite of everything, it does not change itself, fights for its ideal, for the human in man. Her lines sound optimistic:

When
words and objects lose their meaning,
Poets come to Earth to renew them

("Poets").

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