Soul of the Poem

"The soul of the poem"

So often it happens: after reading a poem, the soul suddenly stops at some phrase, a line that touched the very depth of your being in the heart! This poetic lines pulsed and flowed through the veins already in your blood, carrying the vital energy of the word to the whole organism. And, indeed, these special lines are already permanently imprinted in every cell of your body, and you repeat them again and again, admiring this beauty and profound transcendence.

And you know what it is -
The verse line?
Thats not something with something in the word,
This is the vein of the verse.

And, pulsing, flowing
Every time the lines of life,
If someone suddenly decided
Whisper it and take it -

Vzdybit verse, letting through the veins,
Rook's eloquence ...
Behind the poet, through the walls -
To try and ... to pass.

The great Russian composer Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857), the founder of Russian classical music, emphasizes: "To create beauty, one must be a pure soul yourself." As can not flow from a clean source of dirty water, and from dirty - clean. This truth is given to us from God. Where does the soul recognize this truth? "Soul by nature Christian" - this deep thought, truly a symbol of the faith of Orthodoxy belongs to the teacher of the Church Tertullian, who lived at the turn of the II-III centuries of our era. That is, a person, originally created by the Creator in the image and likeness of God, has an inner need for communication with Him. Without this communication, like a branch cut off from a tree, it withers and dies spiritually, and even bodily. His life turns into nonsense, into an empty burning of time in pursuit of satisfying earthly needs, which can not be completely satisfied. It is Christianity that has its own special concept of life and peace, organic and systematic, different from all other philosophies of mankind.
"Christianity is the heavenly revelation of truth, the Good News to the human race, proceeding not from a man or an angel, but from the Lord God and the Creator Himself." The essence of Christianity is love. But not that natural, inherent not only to man, but to all living things on earth, and the true is divine. It is the divine love that is real, genuine. Such love is a peak, a set of perfections in a person, which is acquired gradually throughout the life of a human being. The best accomplishments in life are made with the help of such love, every living cell in the world breathes this love. Orthodoxy teaches that natural love is romantic, dreamy, emotionally sensual, which awakens apart from us and also disappears beyond us and it can also turn "in a flash of instant into frenzied hatred." Such love is selfish, it exists only as long as all the needs of the ego are satisfied-my desires. "Dressed in selfishness," Pavel Florensky calls such love . In fact, we are all infected with the desire for pleasure, money, glory of the earth, and the impossibility of achieving these aspirations leads us to suffering. There is such a spiritual law - true love is impossible where there is no knowledge of oneself, and the resulting humility. Selfishness kills true love, and until we begin to struggle with the passions within us, our selfish desires that bring suffering to us, we will not achieve the truth of love and God. No wonder Christianity is called a hospital, a hospital in which there is all the means to cure egoism. T. Travnik with his poetic lines calls on all of us to find, to know and live precisely true love:

To know love - and to live loving.
Not in the fidgety passion of feelings,
Skillful jealousy, whose taste
Until disgust is a sign.

And in that love where there is no more
No women, no men, only light,
Single color, single tone
LOVE will be called ...

And from now on I will not share myself
Love for friends, love for enemies,
Love for loved ones, unloved -
Everything will become whole and one.

The concluding stanza of this poem eloquently characterizes T. Travnik as an Orthodox Christian poet in which the poet expresses his understanding of love for man. Whichever side of life the poet reveals in his poetic creations, the Christian Orthodox world view is a red thread throughout the poetic work of Terentia Travnik. This is especially evident in the spiritual philosophical and religious poems that bring the reader to the reader's heart the theme of God in human life, revealing its significance in the organization of life on earth, the meaning of life and death, and the special patriotism of the Russian people. Reasoning about himself in the context of poetry, the author frankly acknowledges the influence of poetry itself on the formation of his personality as a poet, his growth in understanding vital questions of the meaning of life and the sense of the presence of God at every moment of his life. Turning to the Creator, the poet with humility asks to accept "poems bow":

You woke me in love
To search for words in the breath of life,
Words that transform the flesh
Just a thought.

Accept, Lord, the bow-poems -
Poet gift and rebel,
But be at least a point in unison
In them with the fact that we call the universe,
That means life was not in vain
Becoming the paramount!

With God in his heart and relying on the main Christian truths of Orthodoxy, the poet successfully solves the most important task of man: he consciously creates himself as a person, sacrificing for this, sometimes even a successful self-manifestation outside. The Orthodox Christian worldview gives T. Travnik an inner freedom and a deep understanding that the maximum development and manifestation by the artist in the external world of all his abilities, abilities and talents, but without God in his soul leads to an inevitable death.
The union of two centuries of the 20th and the 21st for Russia is a unique time - this is the time of the revival of the Spirit. The "spiritual hunger" accumulated over seventy years of atheism in the country resulted in the need to find answers to questions related to such concepts as Truth, God, the meaning of human life, the destiny of man. The human soul was drawn to books of a psychological, religious, philosophical focus on the Spirit and the spiritual. The logotherapy of Victor Frankl (1905-1997), an Austrian psychiatrist, psychologist and neurologist, prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp, which reminds a person that "he has a Spirit and he is a Spiritual being" becomes more and more relevant to modern society. The main principle of logotherapy is the statement that a person does not live to receive pleasure and avoid pain, but in order to understand and realize the meaning of his life - this is the first way. Second - the meaning can be found by searching and implementing spiritually directed actions, by experiencing the deep essence of another person, his value in love for him. And the third way is the most difficult. This understanding, finding the meaning of your own suffering in a situation that you can not change. What kind of poetry can help a man in his life? This is spiritual poetry, the poetry of spiritual experience, the same "high poetry" that Marina Tsvetaeva wrote (1892-1941) - a Russian poet, prose writer, translator, one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, in her classification of poets. Certainly, the poetry of T. Travnik is the strongest means of awakening spirituality in a person. As he passes through spiritual trials throughout his life, "then - a hero, then ... an outcast to the lost", the poet himself gained an invaluable spiritual experience, describing it in his work "taking everything with my heart burning, for gifts - with life, thank", "in I became real -thus: I breathe, I live, I love. " A conscious attitude to the events of his own life - his faith and love, a meeting with death, the so-called existential pain associated with the loss of the most expensive, finding the meaning of his existence and active attitude to life, gave a colossal spiritual growth of his personality. Turning to his reader, T. Travnik says:


... I'm not a poet, but a spiritual man.
I burn poems to move thoughts,
Separate the fastenings of the lines in them,
Fill them with a heartfelt meaning ...

You should be surprised -
And the joy in this, it does not matter,
What modesty yours is changing the look of
A substitute for false shame.

And you, reading what I
All these years, rhymed,
You will open in yourself - yourself,
The beginning for the beginnings.

In the two final lines of this poem, the goal of all the poetic creativity of T. Travnik is concealed. This noble goal - to help his reader discover "in himself, his beginning for beginnings" the poet and sees his ministry. And the beginning of the poem - too, unusual and at the same time symbolic and characteristic for the author: the pronoun "I" - T. Travnik writes with a small letter. With this conscious move, the poet emphasizes that he is only an intermediary, communicating and transmitting, through a poetic word, a completely different, sacred, great and eternal Word, divine truths and revelations. "The Lord revealed to me the power of the Word and turned the blood into ink" - so begins one of the poet's early poems. Maybe that is why the author calls himself a "spiritual leader", someone who explores and opens for our soul our other sounding of what has been said, read, by a spiritual narrator, and not just a poet who knows how to rhythmically and skillfully rhyme. By this deliberate move: the small capital letter "I", especially at the beginning of the line or the stanza, is used by the poet often, so that, God forbid, "be proud of the words of a pouring gift." Thus, the author hones his work not only in content, but also in visual-graphic execution. It is here that his pictorial gift of the artist of the word appears, and Travnik is an artist. For many years the poet does not part with the palette and easel.
And, indeed, the poetry of T. Travnik, as if woven not only from the depths, but also from many amazing coloristic facets of reality. Each line, phrase - have their subplanes and branches. Repeatedly I read his lines and stanzas. I am fascinated by this multifacetedness and extends my understanding of life and death, or rather, the transition from life to death. Over the years, working seriously psychology of creativity, namely literary creativity, I have not often met such poems, few people touch in poetry these depths, which so often says the poet Travnik. I think not everyone who takes on the creative word, is given the right to reveal these depths to us, the readers. It seems that Travnik really hears the whispers of this transcendence and transmits these messages to us, through his poetic word, through his amazing gift.
"Soul of a poem" from the book "Poetry of one line"