Let's start with the properties of the depicted world. The depicted world in a work of art means that conditionally similar real world the picture of reality that the writer paints: people, things, nature, actions, experiences, etc.
In a work of art, a model of the real world is created. This model is unique in the works of each writer; The depicted worlds in different works of art are extremely diverse and can be more or less similar to the real world.
But in any case, we should remember that before us is an artistic reality created by the writer, which is not identical to the primary reality.
The picture of the depicted world is made up of individual artistic details. By artistic detail we will understand the smallest pictorial or expressive artistic detail: an element of a landscape or portrait, a separate thing, an act, a psychological movement, etc.
Being an element of an artistic whole, a detail in itself is the smallest image, a micro-image. At the same time, the detail almost always forms part of a larger image; it is formed by details, forming “blocks”: thus, the habit of not swinging your arms when walking, dark eyebrows and mustaches with blond hair, eyes that did not laugh - all these micro-images form a “block” of a larger image - the portrait of Pechorin, who , in turn, merges into an even larger image - a holistic image of a person.
For ease of analysis, artistic details can be divided into several groups. First of all, external and psychological details are highlighted. External details, as you can easily guess from their name, depict to us the external, objective existence of people, their appearance and habitat.
External details, in turn, are divided into portrait, landscape and material. Psychological details depict to us the inner world of a person; these are individual mental movements: thoughts, feelings, experiences, desires, etc.
External and psychological details are not separated by an impassable boundary. Thus, an external detail becomes psychological if it conveys, expresses certain mental movements (in this case we are talking about a psychological portrait) or is included in the course of the hero’s thoughts and experiences (for example, a real ax and the image of this ax in Raskolnikov’s mental life).
According to the nature of the artistic influence, details-details and details-symbols are distinguished. Details act en masse, describing an object or phenomenon from all conceivable sides; a symbolic detail is singular, trying to capture the essence of the phenomenon at once, highlighting the main thing in it.
In this regard, modern literary critic E. Dobin suggests separating details from details, believing that detail is artistically superior to detail. However, this is unlikely to be the case. Both principles of using artistic details are equivalent, each of them is good in its place.
Here, for example, is the use of detail in the description of the interior in Plyushkin’s house: “On the bureau... there was a lot of all sorts of things: a bunch of finely written pieces of paper, covered with a green marble press with an egg on top, some kind of old book bound in leather with a red edge , a lemon, all dried up, no bigger than a hazelnut, a broken armchair, a glass with some liquid and three flies, covered with a letter, a piece of sealing wax, a piece of a rag picked up somewhere, two feathers, stained with ink, dried out, as if in consumption , a toothpick, completely yellowed.”
Here Gogol needs exactly a lot of details in order to strengthen the impression of the meaningless stinginess, pettiness and wretchedness of the hero’s life.
Detail-detail also creates special persuasiveness in descriptions of the objective world. Complex psychological states are also conveyed with the help of details; here this principle of using details is indispensable.
A symbolic detail has its advantages; it is convenient to express the general impression of an object or phenomenon, and with its help the general psychological tone is well captured. A symbolic detail often conveys with great clarity the author’s attitude towards what is depicted - such, for example, is Oblomov’s robe in Goncharov’s novel.
Let us now move on to a specific consideration of the varieties of artistic details.
Esin A.B. Principles and techniques of analyzing a literary work. - M., 1998
When analyzing speech matter, not only words and sentences are relevant, but also building units of language(phonemes, morphemes, etc.). Images are born only in text. The most important stylistic trend in art. lit-re – muting general concepts and the emergence in the reader's mind representation.
The smallest unit of the objective world is called artistic detail. The part belongs to metaverbal world of the work: “The figurative form of a lit work contains 3 sides: a system of details of subject representation, a system of compositional techniques and speech structure.” Usually details include details of everyday life, landscape, portrait, etc. detailing the objective world in literature is inevitable, this is not decoration, but the essence of the image. The writer is not able to recreate the subject in all its features, and it is the detail and their totality that “replaces” the whole in the text, evoking in the reader the associations the author needs. This “elimination of places of incomplete certainty” Ingarden calls specification. When selecting certain details, the writer turns objects with a certain side towards the reader. The degree of detail in the MB image is motivated in the text by the spatial and/or temporal point of view of the narrator/storyteller/character, etc. detail, like the “close-up” in cinema, needs a “long shot”. In literary criticism, a brief report of events, a summary designation of objects is often called generalization. Alternation of detailing and generalization is involved in creating rhythm Images. Their contrast is one of the style dominants.
The classification of details repeats the structure of the objective world, composed of events, actions, portraits, psychological and speech characteristics, landscape, interior, etc. A.B. Yesin proposed to distinguish 3 types: details plot, descriptive And psychological. The predominance of one type or another gives rise to a corresponding property of the style: “ storyliness"("Taras Bulba"), " descriptiveness" ("Dead Souls"), " psychologism" ("Crime and Punishment"). In epic works, the narrator’s commentary on the characters’ words often exceeds the volume of their remarks and leads to the depiction of the 2nd, nonverbal dialogue. Such dialogue has its own sign system. It is made up kinesics(gestures, elements of facial expressions and pantomime) and paralinguistic elements(laughter, crying, rate of speech, pauses, etc.). MB details are given in opposition, or can form an ensemble.
E. S. Dobin proposed his typology based on the criterion singularity/many, and used different terms for this: “ Detail affects in many ways. Detail tends toward singularity." The difference between them is not absolute; there are also transitional forms. " Stranger"(according to Shklovsky) detail, i.e. introducing dissonance into the image, has enormous cognitive significance. The visibility of a detail that contrasts with the general background is facilitated by compositional techniques: repetitions, “close-up”, retardations, etc. By repeating and acquiring additional meanings, a detail becomes motive (leitmotif), often grows into symbol. At first it may surprise, but then it explains the character. The symbolic detail of the MB is included in the title of the work (“Gooseberry”, “ Easy breathing"). The detail (in Dobin’s understanding) is closer to sign, its appearance in the text evokes the joy of recognition, exciting a stable chain of associations. Details - the signs are designed for a certain horizon of the reader’s expectations, for his ability to decipher this or that cultural code. More than a classic, details – signs are supplied fiction.
QUESTION 47. LANDSCAPE, ITS VIEWS. SEMIOTICS OF LANDSCAPE.
Landscape is one of the components of the world of a literary work, an image of any closed space in the outside world.
With the exception of the so-called wild landscape, descriptions of nature usually include images of things created by man. When performing a literary analysis of a specific landscape, all elements of the description are considered together, otherwise the integrity of the object and its aesthetic perception will be violated.
Landscape has its own characteristics in various types of literature. He is presented most sparingly in the drama. Because of this “economy”, the symbolic load of the landscape increases. There are much more opportunities for introducing a landscape that performs a variety of functions (designating the place and time of action, plot motivation, a form of psychologism, landscape as a form of the author’s presence) in epic works.
In the lyrics, the landscape is emphatically expressive, often symbolic: psychological parallelism, personification, metaphors and other tropes are widely used.
Depending on the subject or texture of the description, landscapes are distinguished between rural and urban, or urban ("Notre Dame Cathedral" by V. Hugo), steppe ("Taras Bulba" by N.V. Gogol, "The Steppe" by A.P. Chekhov), forest (“Notes of a Hunter”, “Trip to Polesie” by I.S. Turgenev), sea (“Mirror of the Seas” by J. Conrad, “Moby Dick” by J. Meckville), mountain (its discovery is associated with the names of Dante and especially J .-J. Rousseau), northern and southern, exotic, the contrasting background for which is the flora and fauna of the author’s native land (this is typical for the genre of ancient Russian “walkings”, in general “travel” literature: “The Frigate “Pallada”” by I.A. Goncharova), etc.
Depending on the literary direction, there are 3 types of landscape: ideal, dull, stormy landscape.
Of all the varieties of landscape, the first place in terms of its aesthetic significance should be given to the ideal landscape, which developed in ancient literature - in Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, and then developed over many centuries in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
The elements of an ideal landscape, as it was formed in ancient and medieval European literature, can be considered the following: 1) a soft breeze, blowing, tender, carrying pleasant smells; 2) an eternal source, a cool stream that quenches thirst; 3) flowers covering the ground with a wide carpet; 4) trees spread out in a wide tent, providing shade; 5) birds singing on the branches.
Perhaps the most concise list of idyllic landscape motifs in their parodic refraction is given by Pushkin in his letter “To Delvig”. The very writing of “poems” already presupposes the presence in them of an “ideal nature”, as if inseparable from the essence of the poetic:
“Admit it,” we were told, “
You write poems;
Is it possible to see them?
You portrayed them
Of course, streams
Of course, cornflower,
Little forest, little breeze,
Lambs and flowers..."
Characteristic are diminutive suffixes attached to each word of the ideal landscape - “idyllem”. Pushkin lists all the main elements of the landscape in an extremely laconic manner: flowers, streams, breeze, forest, herd - only birds are missing, but instead there are lambs.
The most important and stable element of an ideal landscape is its reflection in the water. If all other features of the landscape are consistent with the needs of human feelings, then through reflection in water nature agrees with itself and acquires full value and self-sufficiency.
In the ideal landscapes of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Baratynsky we find this self-doubling as a sign of mature beauty:
And in the bosom of the waters, as if through glass,
(V. Zhukovsky. “There is heaven
and the waters are clear!..")
My Zakharovo; it
With fences in the wavy river,
With a bridge and a shady grove
The mirror of water is reflected.
(A. Pushkin. "Message to Yudin")
What a fresh oak tree
Looks from the shore of Drugova
Into her merry glass!
(E. Baratynsky. "Excerpt")
In the 18th century, the ideal landscape was significant in itself, as a poetic representation of nature, which had previously not been included in the system of aesthetic values of Russian literature. Therefore, for Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, this landscape had artistic intrinsic value, as a poeticization of that part of reality that earlier, in medieval literature, was not considered poetic: as a sign of mastery of the ancient, pan-European art of landscape. By the beginning of the 19th century, this general artistic task had already been completed, therefore, in Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Baratynsky, Tyutchev, Nekrasov, the ideal landscape comes into conflict with the real state of the world as something imaginary, ethereal, distant or even offensive in relation to the grave, ugly, suffering human life.
The bleak landscape came into poetry with the era of sentimentalism. Otherwise, this landscape can be called elegiac - it is closely related to the complex of those sad and dreamy motifs that make up the genre feature of the elegy. A dull landscape occupies an intermediate place between an ideal (light, peaceful) and stormy landscape. There is no clear daylight, green carpets full of flowers, on the contrary, everything is immersed in silence, resting in sleep. It is no coincidence that a cemetery theme runs through many dull landscapes: “Rural Cemetery” by Zhukovsky, “On the Ruins of a Castle in Sweden” by Batyushkov, “Despondency” by Milonov, “Osgar” by Pushkin. The sadness in the soul of the lyrical hero is transformed into a system of landscape details:
A special hour of the day: evening, night or a special time of year - autumn, which is determined by distance from the sun, the source of life.
Impermeability to sight and hearing, a kind of veil obscuring perception: fog and silence.
Moonlight, bizarre, mysterious, eerie, the pale luminary of the kingdom of the dead: “The moon looks thoughtfully through the thin vapor,” “only a month will show a crimson face through the fog,” “the sad moon quietly ran through the pale clouds,” “the moon makes its way through the wavy fogs.” - the reflected light, moreover, scattered by the fog, pours sadness on the soul.
A picture of dilapidation, decay, decay, ruins - be it the ruins of a castle at Batyushkov, a rural cemetery at Zhukovsky, “an overgrown row of graves” at Milonov, the decrepit skeleton of a bridge or a decayed gazebo at Baratynsky (“Desolation”).
Images of northern nature, where the Ossian tradition led Russian poets. The north is a part of the world, corresponding to night as part of the day or autumn, winter as the seasons, which is why the gloomy, dull landscape includes details of northern nature, primarily such characteristic, easily recognizable ones as moss and rocks (“mossy strongholds with granite teeth,” on a rock overgrown with wet moss", "where there is only moss, gray on the grave stones", "over a hard, mossy rock").
In contrast to the ideal landscape, the components of a formidable, or stormy, poetic landscape are shifted from their usual place. Rivers, clouds, trees - everything is rushing beyond its limit with an obsessively violent, destructive force.
We find the brightest examples of stormy landscapes in Zhukovsky ("Twelve Sleeping Maidens", "Swimmer"), Batyushkov ("The Dream of Warriors", "Dream"), Pushkin ("Collapse", "Demons").
Signs of a rugged landscape:
Sound sign: noise, roar, roar, whistle, thunder, howl, so different from the silence and soft rustling of an ideal landscape (“huges are groaning”, “it died with a whistle, howl, roar”, “huge waves rushed with a roar”, “Wind makes noise and whistles in the grove,” “the storm roared, the rain made noise,” “eagles scream above me and the forest murmurs,” “the forest roars,” “and the sound of water and the whirlwind howl,” “where the wind rustles, the thunder roars”).
Black darkness, twilight - “everything was dressed in black darkness,” “abyss in the darkness before me.”
The wind is raging, gusty, sweeping away everything in its path: “and the winds raged in the wilds.”
Waves, abysses - boiling, roaring - "whirl, foam and howl among the wilds of snow and hills."
A dense forest or piles of rocks. At the same time, the waves beat against the rocks (“crushing against the gloomy rocks, the shafts make noise and foam”), the wind breaks the trees (“the cedars fell upside down,” “like a whirlwind, digging fields, breaking forests”).
Trembling, trembling of the universe, instability, collapse of all supports: “the earth, like Pontus (the sea), shakes,” “oak groves and fields tremble,” “Lebanon cracked with flint.” The motif of the “abyss” and failure is stable: “here the abyss was boiling furiously,” “and in the abyss of the storm there were piles of rocks.”
It is in a turbulent landscape that the sound palette of poetry reaches its greatest diversity:
Storm of darkness the sky covers,
Whirling snow whirlwinds;
Then, like a beast, she will howl,
Then she will cry like a child...
(A. Pushkin. "Winter Evening")
Moreover, if through an ideal landscape the image of God is revealed to the lyrical subject (N. Karamzin, M. Lermontov), then the stormy one personifies the demonic forces that cloud the air and explode the snow into a whirlwind. We also find a stormy landscape combined with a demonic theme in Pushkin’s “Demons.”
Semiotics of landscape. Different kinds landscapes are semiotized in the literary process. There is an accumulation of landscape codes, entire iconic “funds” of descriptions of nature are created - the subject of study of historical poetics. While they constitute the wealth of literature, they at the same time pose a danger to the writer who is looking for his own path, his own images and words.
When analyzing a landscape in a literary work, it is very important to be able to see traces of a particular tradition, which the author follows consciously or unwittingly, in unconscious imitation of styles that were in use.
Detail - from fr. detail - detail, particularity, trifle.
An artistic detail is one of the means of creating an image, which helps to present the embodied character, picture, object, action, experience in their originality and uniqueness.
The detail fixes the reader's attention on what seems to the writer the most important, characteristic in nature, in a person or in the objective world around him. The detail is important and significant as part of the artistic whole. In other words, the meaning and power of detail is that the infinitesimal reveals the whole.
There are the following types of artistic detail, each of which carries a certain semantic and emotional load:
a) verbal detail. For example, by the expression “no matter what happens” we recognize Belikov, by the address “falcon” - Platon Karataev, by one word “fact” - Semyon Davydov;
b) portrait detail. The hero can be identified by a short upper lip with a mustache (Liza Bolkonskaya) or a small white beautiful hand(Napoleon);
c) object detail: Bazarov’s robe with tassels, Nastya’s book about love in the play “At the Lower Depths”, Polovtsev’s saber - a symbol of a Cossack officer;
d) a psychological detail that expresses an essential feature in the character, behavior, and actions of the hero. Pechorin did not swing his arms when walking, which indicated the secrecy of his nature; the sound of billiard balls changes Gaev’s mood;
e) a landscape detail, with the help of which the color of the situation is created; the gray, leaden sky above Golovlev, the “requiem” landscape in “ Quiet Don", intensifying the inconsolable grief of Grigory Melekhov, who buried Aksinya;
f) detail as a form of artistic generalization (“the case-like” existence of the philistines in the works of Chekhov, the “murlo of the philistine” in the poetry of Mayakovsky).
Special mention should be made of this type of artistic detail, such as the household detail, which, in essence, is used by all writers. A striking example is “Dead Souls”. It is impossible to tear Gogol's heroes away from their everyday life and surrounding things.
A household detail indicates the furnishings, home, things, furniture, clothing, gastronomic preferences, customs, habits, tastes, and inclinations of the character. It is noteworthy that in Gogol, an everyday detail never acts as an end in itself; it is given not as a background or decoration, but as an integral part of the image.
And this is understandable, because the interests of the heroes of the satirical writer do not go beyond the limits of vulgar materiality; the spiritual world of such heroes is so poor and insignificant that the thing may well express their inner essence; things seem to grow together with their owners.
A household detail primarily performs a characterological function, that is, it allows one to get an idea of the moral and psychological properties of the characters in the poem. Thus, in Manilov’s estate we see a manor house standing “alone on the south side, that is, on a hill open to all the winds,” a gazebo with the typically sentimental name “Temple of Solitary Reflection,” “a pond covered with greenery”...
These details indicate the impracticality of the landowner, the fact that mismanagement and disorder reign on his estate, and the owner himself is only capable of meaningless project-making.
Manilov’s character can also be judged by the furnishings of the rooms. “There was always something missing in his house”: there was not enough silk material to upholster all the furniture, and two armchairs “stood covered with just matting”; next to a smart, richly decorated bronze candlestick stood “some kind of simple copper invalid, lame, curled to one side.”
This combination of objects of the material world on the manor’s estate is bizarre, absurd, and illogical. In all objects and things one feels some kind of disorder, inconsistency, fragmentation. And the owner himself matches his things: Manilov’s soul is as flawed as the decoration of his home, and the claim to “education,” sophistication, grace, and refinement of taste further enhances the hero’s inner emptiness.
Among other things, the author especially emphasizes one thing and highlights it. This thing carries an increased semantic load, developing into a symbol. In other words, a detail can acquire the meaning of a multi-valued symbol that has psychological, social and philosophical meaning.
In Manilov’s office, one can see such an expressive detail as piles of ash, “arranged, not without effort, in very beautiful rows” - a symbol of an idle pastime, covered with a smile, cloying politeness, the embodiment of idleness, the idleness of a hero surrendering to fruitless dreams...
For the most part, Gogol's everyday detail is expressed in action. Thus, in the image of things that belonged to Manilov, a certain movement is captured, during which the essential properties of his character are revealed. For example, in response to Chichikov’s strange request to sell dead souls, “Manilov immediately dropped his pipe and pipe on the floor and, as he opened his mouth, remained with his mouth open for several minutes...
Finally, Manilov picked up his pipe with his chibouk and looked into his face from below... but he couldn’t think of anything else but to release the remaining smoke from his mouth in a very thin stream.” These comic poses of the landowner perfectly demonstrate his narrow-mindedness and mental limitations.
Artistic detail is a way of expressing the author's assessment. The district dreamer Manilov is not capable of any business; idleness became part of his nature; the habit of living at the expense of serfs developed traits of apathy and laziness in his character. The landowner's estate is ruined, decline and desolation are felt everywhere.
The artistic detail complements the internal appearance of the character and the integrity of the revealed picture. It gives the depicted extreme concreteness and at the same time generality, expressing the idea, the main meaning of the hero, the essence of his nature.
Introduction to literary criticism (N.L. Vershinina, E.V. Volkova, A.A. Ilyushin, etc.) / Ed. L.M. Krupchanov. - M, 2005
ARTISTIC DETAIL - a microelement of an image (landscape, interior, portrait, depicted things, action, behavior, deed, etc.), which is of greater importance for the expression of content than other microelements. The figurative world of the work (see: Content and form) can be detailed to varying degrees. Thus, Pushkin’s prose is extremely sparsely detailed, the main focus is on the action. “At that moment the rebels ran at us and broke into the fortress. The drum fell silent; the garrison abandoned their guns; I was knocked off my feet, but I got up and, together with the rebels, entered the fortress” - that’s practically the entire description of the assault in “The Captain’s Daughter.” Lermontov's prose is much more fully detailed. In it, even material details reveal mainly the characters and psychology of the characters (for example, Grushnitsky’s thick soldier’s overcoat, the Persian carpet bought by Pechorin to spite Princess Mary). Gogol's details are more focused on everyday life. Food means a lot: the menu of “Dead Souls” is much more plentiful than the menu of “A Hero of Our Time” - in proportion to the attention that the characters pay to it here and there. Gogol is also more attentive to the interiors, portraits, and clothing of his heroes. Very thorough in detailing I.A. Goncharov, I.S. Turgenev.
F.M. Dostoevsky, even more than Lermontov, focused on the psychological experiences of the characters, prefers relatively few, but catchy, expressive details. Such, for example, are Raskolnikov’s too noticeable old round hat or Raskolnikov’s bloody sock. L.N. Tolstoy, in such a voluminous work as “War and Peace,” uses leitmotifs - repeating and varying in different places text details that “fasten” the images, interrupted by other figurative plans. Thus, in the appearance of Natasha and Princess Marya, the eyes stand out many times, and in the appearance of Helen, bare shoulders and a constant smile. Dolokhov often behaves impudently. In Kutuzov, weakness is emphasized more than once, even in the first volume, i.e. in 1805, when he was not too old (a rare hyperbole in Tolstoy, however, implicit), in Alexander I there was a love of all kinds of effects, in Napoleon there was self-confidence and posturing.
It is logical to contrast with details (in the plural) - drawn-out static descriptions. A.P. Chekhov is a master of detail (Khryukin’s dog-bitten finger, Ochumelov’s overcoat in “Chameleon”, Belikov’s “cases”, Dmitry Ionych Startsev’s changing build and manner of speaking, the natural adaptability of the “darling” to the interests of those to whom she gives all her attention), but he an enemy of details, he seems to paint, like impressionist artists, with short strokes, which, however, add up to a single expressive picture. At the same time, Chekhov does not load every detail with a direct meaningful function, which creates the impression of complete freedom of his manner: Chervyakov’s surname in “Death of an Official” is significant, “speaking,” but his first and patronymic are ordinary, random - Ivan Dmitrich; in the finale of “Student”, Ivan Velikopolsky thought about the episode with the Apostle Peter at the fire, about the truth and beauty that guided human life then and in general at all times, - I thought, “when he was crossing the river on a ferry and then, climbing the mountain, looking at his native village...” - the place where important thoughts and feelings come to him does not have a decisive influence on them impact.
But basically, an artistic detail is directly significant, there is something “standing” behind it. Hero of “Clean Monday” I.A. Bunina, not knowing that his beloved will disappear in a day, will leave the world, immediately notices that she is dressed all in black. They wander around the Novodevichy cemetery, the hero looks with emotion at the footprints “that new black boots left in the snow,” she suddenly turned around, feeling it:
It's true how you love me! - she said with quiet bewilderment, shaking her head.” Everything is important here: both the repeated reference to the color black, and the definition, which becomes an epithet, “new” (it was customary to bury the dead in everything new, and the heroine is preparing to bury herself as if alive and finally walks through the cemetery); the feelings and premonitions of both are heightened, but he simply loves, and she is gripped by a complex of complex emotions, among which love is not the main thing, hence the bewilderment at his feelings and shaking her head, meaning, in particular, disagreement with him, the impossibility for her to be like him .
The role of details in “Vasily Terkin” AT is very important. Tvardovsky, stories by A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “Matrenin’s Dvor”, “military” and “village” prose: at the front, in the camp, in a poor village there are few things, each is valued. In “Farewell to Matera” V.G. Rasputin, everything that the inhabitants of the island to be flooded were accustomed to during their long, almost permanent life on it, was seen as if for the last time.
In the story by V.M. Shukshin “Cut” to the old woman Agafya Zhuravleva, his son and his wife, both candidates of sciences, came to visit by taxi. “Agafya was brought an electric samovar, a colorful robe and wooden spoons" The nature of the gifts, completely unnecessary for the village old woman, indicates that the candidate of philological sciences is now very far from the world of his childhood and youth, has ceased to understand and feel it. He and his wife are by no means bad people, however, the malicious Gleb Kapustin “cut” the candidate, albeit demagogically, but, according to the men, thoroughly. The men, out of ignorance, admire the “mean” Gleb and yet do not love him, since he is cruel. Gleb is rather a negative hero, Konstantin Zhuravlev is rather a positive one, an innocent victim in the general opinion, but the details in the exposition of the story indicate that this is partly not accidental.
Municipal educational institution secondary school No. 168
with UIP HEC
The role of artistic detail in works of Russian literature of the 19th century
Completed by: 11th grade student “A” Tomashevskaya V.D.
Checked by: literature teacher, teacher highest category
Gryaznova M. A.
Novosibirsk, 2008
Introduction
1. Artistic detail in Russian literature of the 19th century
2. Nekrasov
2.1 Techniques for revealing the image of Matryona Timofeevna
2.2 “Carrier” by Nekrasov
2.3 Lyrics by Nekrasov. Poetry and prose
4. The role of artistic detail in the work of I.S. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons"
5. The objective world in the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment"
6. L.N. Tolstoy
6.1. Irony and satire in the epic novel “War and Peace”
6.2 About the artistic skill of L. N. Tolstoy
7. A.P. Chekhov
7.1 Dialogues of A. P. Chekhov
7.2 Color detail in Chekhov
Bibliography
Introduction
The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the works of Russian writers are interesting not only in the lexical features and style of the text, but also in certain details that give the work a special character and carry a certain meaning. Details in the work indicate some feature of the hero or his behavior, since writers teach us not only to analyze life, but also to understand the human psyche through detail. Therefore, I decided to take a closer look at the details in the works of Russian writers of the 19th century and determine what feature they express and what role they play in the work.
Also, in one of the chapters of my work, I plan to consider the lexical means with the help of which individual characteristics characters and the author's attitude towards the characters is distributed.
The object of the study is the texts of Russian writers of the 19th century.
In my work I do not pretend to be a global discovery and deep study, but for me it is important to understand and reveal the role of detail in works.
It is also interesting for me to determine the relationship between the description of the furnishings and interior of the hero’s room or home and his personal qualities and fate.
1. Artistic detail
An artistic detail is a pictorial and expressive detail that carries a certain emotional and meaningful load, one of the means by which the author creates a picture of nature, an object, character, interior, portrait, etc.
There is nothing accidental in the work of a great artist. Every word, every detail, detail is necessary for the most complete and accurate expression of thoughts and feelings.
Everyone knows how one small artistic detail can transform a literary (and not only literary) work and give it a special charm.
Such details as Bulgakov’s “sturgeon of the second freshness”, Goncharov’s Oblomov’s sofa and robe, Chekhov’s bottleneck under the moon are part of the reality of our time.
2. N. A. Nekrasov
Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” in the chapter “Peasant Woman”, from depicting mass scenes and episodic figures of individual peasants, takes the next step: he talks about the fate and development as a personality of a peasant working woman throughout her life. Moreover: the chapter reveals the life of a Russian peasant for a hundred years. This is evidenced by the details. Summer is ending (obviously the summer of 1863, if you go by the chapter “The Landowner”). The truth-seekers meet Matryona Timofeevna, a peasant woman “about thirty years old.” That means she was born around the mid-twenties. We don’t know how old she was when she got married, but again, without much error, we can say: 17-18 years old. Her first-born - Demushka - died due to the oversight of old Savely somewhere in the mid-40s of the 19th century. “And old man Savely is a hundred years old” - that was when the misfortune happened to Demushka. This means that Savely was born somewhere in the mid-40s of the 18th century, and everything that happened to him, with the Korezh peasants and with the landowner Shalashnikov, with the German manager, dates back to the 60-70s of the 18th century, that is to the time of the Pugachevism, the echoes of which were undoubtedly reflected in the actions of Savely and his comrades.
As you can see, attention to detail allows us to draw serious conclusions that in terms of the breadth of its depiction of life, the chapter “The Peasant Woman” has no equal in Russian literature of the 19th century.
2.1 Techniques for revealing the image of Matryona Timofeevna
The fate of a simple Russian woman is well shown in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” using the example of the peasant woman Matryona Timofeevna. This:
dignified woman,
Wide and tight
About thirty years old.
Beautiful: gray hair,
The eyes are large, strict,
The richest eyelashes,
Severe and dark.
Thanks to the songs, the image turned out to be truly Russian. We notice the song language of Matryona Timofeevna when she remembers her deceased parents:
I called loudly to my mother,
The violent winds responded,
The distant mountains responded,
But my dear one didn’t come!
The Russian peasant woman is characterized by lamentations, because she cannot otherwise express her grief:
I thrashed and screamed:
Villains! executioners!
Fall, my tears,
Not on land, not on water,
Fall right on your heart
My villain!
(Negative parallelism, typical of folk songs and laments).
This is what she says, seeing the desecration of the body of her dead son. The lyricism of lamentations is also enhanced by parallelisms and epithets expressing the power of maternal love.
Matryona Timofeevna's speech is rich in apt constant and unstable epithets. She figuratively describes the appearance of her first son Demushka:
Beauty taken from the sun,
The snow is white,
Maku's lips are red,
The sable has a black eyebrow,
The hawk has eyes!..
Her speech is also rich when she calls in vain for her parent. But the priest, her “great defense”, will not come to her; he died early from backbreaking labor and peasant grief. In her expressions about the sorrows of life, folk motives are clearly felt:
If only you knew and knew,
To whom did you leave your daughter,
What can I bear without you?
Then comes the following equation:
I shed tears at night,
Day - I lay down like grass.
This extraordinary woman grieves especially, not openly, but secretly:
I went to the fast river,
I chose a quiet place
At the broom bush.
I sat down on a gray pebble,
She propped her head up with her hand,
The orphan started crying!
In Matryonushka’s catches there are also common vernaculars:
I was lucky in the girls,
So I got used to the matter, -
she says. Synonyms are often found (“there is no one to love and dove”; “path-path”, etc.).
Before Nekrasov, no one had portrayed a simple Russian peasant woman so deeply and truthfully.
2.2 "Carrier" by Nekrasov
Orienting poetry towards prose, introducing Russian everyday material into verse, Nekrasov is faced with the question of plot; he needs a new plot - and he is looking for it not from previous poets, but from prose writers.
From this point of view, his poem “Carrier” (1848) is interesting. The first chapter shows how much Nekrasov departs from the old ballad verse - here we have a parody (rather obvious) of Zhukovsky’s “Knight of Togenburg” (the parody was precisely Nekrasov’s means of introducing Russian everyday material into poetry). It serves as a plot point in the plot. The second chapter is a story about a cab driver who hanged himself. In 1864, B. Edelson called this poem “an awkward translation into verse of an old joke about a hanged cab driver,” but did not give any real reference to this anecdote.
Meanwhile, Nekrasov used very specific material in this poem. In the almanac "Dennitsa" for 1830 there is an essay by Pogodin "Psychological Phenomenon", where the "anecdote about a hanged cab driver" is developed in the same lines as in Nekrasov. The merchant leaves thirty thousand rubles in the sleigh, tied in old boots, then finds a cab driver, asks him to show the sleigh and finds his money untouched. He counts them in front of the cab driver and gives him a hundred rubles as a tip. “And the cabman was rich in profits: he received a hundred rubles for nothing.
Surely he was very happy about such an unexpected find?
The next morning he - hanged himself "
Pogodin’s essay is close to Dahl’s stories and already predicts the “physiological essays” of the natural school. It contains many everyday details, some of them preserved by Nekrasov. His style is much simpler than the deliberately vulgarized style of Nekrasov’s play. One detail is curious. The Nekrasov merchant forgets silver in his sleigh, and this detail is emphasized by the author:
Silver is not paper
No signs, Brother.
Here Nekrasov corrects one detail from Pogodin that is not entirely justified in everyday life. The Pogodinsky merchant forgets banknotes in his sleigh, “brand new, brand new,” but the banknotes could have been found “by signs.” This detail is characteristic of the difference between Pogodin’s early, timid “naturalism” and Nekrasov’s keen interest in everyday details.
2.3 Lyrics by Nekrasov . Poetry and prose
In his autobiographical notes, Nekrasov characterizes the turning point that took place in his poetic work as a “turn to the truth.” However, it would be wrong to interpret this too narrowly - only as an appeal to new unusual “material” of reality ( new topic, new plots, new heroes). This is the approval of a new position, the development of a new method, the establishment of new relationships with the reader.
Turning to the world of workers, to the world of the poor and oppressed, with their urgent needs and interests, confronted the author with a disordered, disharmonious, and diverse reality. It was the boundless element of everyday life, everyday prose. Naturally, its development began in a genre adjacent to artistic prose - in the essay. But the experience of the “physiological sketch” was adopted and reworked by the natural school, which gave high artistic examples. An endless variety of individual cases, facts and observations, a wealth of ordinary, mass, everyday manifestations real life received artistic significance thanks to close socio-psychological analysis, “classification” and “systematization” of types, revealing cause-and-effect relationships between human behavior and the circumstances affecting it.
Nekrasov's early poems appear in the atmosphere of the “natural school” and next to his prose experiments. Nekrasov’s prose of the 40s, of which only very little was later recognized by the author as worthy of attention and reprinting, demonstrates the multiplicity and “fragmentation” of impressions, episodes, and scenes.
Mastering the lessons of realistic observation accuracy and social insight of assessments, Nekrasov first makes attempts to transfer the principle of “physiology” into poetry, with its thoroughness, analyticalness, and often satire. This is a study of certain socio-psychological types, picturesque and revealing at the same time.
As a man of the reasonable middle,
He didn’t want much in this life:
Before lunch I drank rowan tincture
And he washed down his lunch with a sneeze.
I ordered clothes from Kincherf
And for a long time (forgivable passion)
I had a distant hope in my soul
To become a collegiate assessor...
("Official")
The driving pathos of such a narrative lies in the very close examination of a hitherto unknown subject. This is the pathos of learning.
I “Before dinner, I drank rowan tincture” - there is nothing intrinsically poetic in either the vocabulary or the rhythmic organization of this line. What stops here is the very unexpectedness of the appearance in the poetic text of “chikhir” or, say, “Kincherf” - such documented details of bourgeois everyday life.
Nekrasov continued to have poems that fit well within the framework of the “natural school” - for example, “Wedding” (1855), “Wretched and Smart” (1857), “Daddy” (1859) and some others. Their distinctive features are the study of social fate, immersion in circumstances, causes and consequences, a consistently deployed chain of motivations and, finally, an unambiguous conclusion - a “verdict”. But in works of this type the lyrical principle itself is clearly weakened. There is no doubt, for example, that Gogol’s narrative about Akaki Akakievich is more saturated with lyricism than Nekrasov’s “The Official.”
To meet the all-conquering “prose” it was necessary to put forward new principles of poetic generalization. Nekrasov had to master the diverse, multi-faceted and multi-voiced life material that poured in in accordance with a certain system of assessments, so important in lyrics. But be that as it may, poetry had to defeat prose from within.
Let us recall one of Nekrasov’s relatively early (1850) poems:
Yesterday, at about six o'clock,
I went to Sennaya;
There they beat a woman with a whip,
A young peasant woman.
Not a sound from her chest
Only the whip whistled as it played...
And I said to the Muse:
“Look! Your dear sister!
(“Yesterday, at about six o’clock...”)
V. Turbin wrote about this poem: “This is newspaper poetry; these are poems, so to speak, for the issue: an ever-hurrying, preoccupied reporter of a certain newspaper visited Sennaya and within an hour, perched on the edge of a table in a smoky secretariat room, sketched out poems on scraps of proofs.”
This judgment could be considered quite fair if Nekrasov did not have the last two lines. Indeed, the time and place are indicated in a reporter’s manner precisely and vaguely at the same time (“yesterday” is definitely only in relation to “today”; “Sennaya” with its function and meaning is known only to those who know Petersburg well of a certain period). This is a report from the scene, an exact reproduction of a “low” scene, domestic and cruel at once. But Nekrasov is not limited to reporting, a “physiological sketch” here. The reader is struck by the unusual juxtaposition: the tortured peasant woman is the Muse. This very transition was accomplished according to the laws of poetry. Only here could sketch and symbol collide, and in this collision both were transformed.
The symbolic image of the tortured Muse, the suffering Muse, will run through all of Nekrasov’s work.
But early on I was burdened with bonds
Another, unkind and unloved Muse,
The sad companion of the sad poor,
Born for labor, suffering and fetters...
("Muse", 1851)
No! received her crown of thorns,
Without flinching, the dishonored Muse
And under the whip she died without a sound.
(“I’m unknown. I didn’t get you...”, 1855)
And finally, in "Last Songs":
Not Russian - he will look without love
To this pale one, covered in blood,
The Muse cut with a whip...
(“Oh Muse! I’m at the door of the coffin!”)
The origins of this image are in that very “newspaper” poem of 1850, where it appears for the first time, as if in the presence of the reader. Without this reliance on the “prose” of the documented episode on Sennaya, the image of the Muse could perhaps be perceived as too rhetorical and conventional. Nekrasov’s work is not just a “tormented,” “exhausted,” “grieving” Muse, not even a Muse under torture, but a “cut with a whip” Muse (an extremely specific and Russian version of torture).
Such an image could be created with very meager means only in an extremely intense “field” of the author’s subjectivity.
Poems could, perhaps, indeed be written “to order” and on scraps of magazine galleys, but they still obeyed their own special, poetic logic. Just as, on the basis of life’s polyphony of voices, Nekrasov developed new principles of poetic “voice management,” so in the unprecedented subject-matter scope of his world, new possibilities for artistic organization opened up.
If the definition given to Nekrasov by B. Eikhenbaum - “poet-journalist” - helped at one time to find the key to understanding his creative originality, then today the idea of Nekrasov writing poetry in the intervals between reading proofs needs significant clarification. For Nekrasov himself, poetry is the most organic and fruitful way of creative action. This is also the most intimate area of his literary work. I Nekrasov’s poetry, having experienced the significant influence of prose and journalism, acting in a certain sense as “anti-poetry,” opened up new poetic resources. It has not ceased to be an exposition of ideals and human values. Speaking about some of Nekrasov’s poems - “report”, “feuilleton” or, as was customary by the poet’s contemporaries, “article”, one must take into account the well-known metaphorical nature of these definitions. Between reporting in the exact sense of the word and Nekrasov’s poetic reporting lies that qualitative line, which turns out to be so difficult to define. And yet it is unmistakably palpable.
Indeed, the poetic word acquires a special authenticity; Before us is the testimony of an eyewitness, and sometimes a participant in the event. Many of Nekrasov’s poems are constructed as a story about what was seen or heard, rather even as a “report” from the scene of an incident, as a transfer of live dialogue. At the same time, the author does not claim the exclusivity of his position or his point of view. Not a poet - a chosen one, standing above reality, but an ordinary observer, just like the rest, experiencing the pressure of life.
A captivating illusion of a genuine, unorganized flow of events is created, an atmosphere of trust in the ordinary and random, in the independent, disordered course of life, “as it is,” is born. However, in order for life to freely and naturally reveal its inner meaning, considerable energy of the author is required. A reporter is constantly on the move; he is not only ready to observe and listen, to absorb impressions, but also to participate.
On the other hand, the possibility of such an approach to reality was due to some of its characteristic properties, which acquired special expressiveness and poignancy. The extreme interest of what was observed and heard was caused by the fact that various manifestations of life were increasingly becoming public, open to view. Massive, dramatic action was transferred to streets and squares, to “public places” and hospitals, to theater and club halls. That is why the role of “street impressions” is so great in Nekrasov’s poetry; sometimes the author only needs to look out the window for the life around him to begin to open up to his greedy and keen attention in the most characteristic scenes and episodes (for example, “Reflections at the Front Entrance,” “Morning,” etc.).
And it's not just a matter of changing the scene. The main thing is that human life reveals itself in communication and interaction, often in the most everyday, everyday ways. And Nekrasov’s “reporter” participates in this communication as an equal “actor”.
Nekrasov's work is characterized by complex poetic structures that appear, as it were, on the border between epic and lyric poetry. The interaction of these two elements, their inseparability, determine artistic originality. These are the most “Nekrasov” poems: “About the Weather” (part one - 1859, part two - 4865), “Newspaper” (1865), “Ballet” (1867). Coming from a “report” and a “feuilleton” and talking about something that had not yet been discussed in lyric poetry before Nekrasov, they achieve a high degree of poetic tension.
Outwardly moving in line with the St. Petersburg “feuilleton” - casual chatter about “weather” and city “news”, Nekrasov creates a holistic picture of the world.
An ugly day begins -
Muddy, windy, dark and dirty.
Oh, if only we could look at the world with a smile!
We look at him through a dim network,
What flows like tears down the windows of houses
From damp fogs, from rain and snow!
Quite real rain, snow, fog are stubbornly associated with “the blues”, despondency and directly with “tears”:
Anger takes over, spleen crushes,
It just begs tears from your eyes.
And now it’s not just tears that are asking from the eyes, -
sobs are heard. They are escorting the recruit.
And the women will share their tears!
A bucket of tears per sister will go,
The young woman will get half a bucket...
“A bucket”, “half a bucket” of tears... And finally, from restrained irony - to the intonation of inescapable despair:
And the old woman will take her mother without measure -
And he will take without measure - what is left!
Inconsolable sobbing - in the very rhythm, in the very sound of the lines.
At the beginning of the cycle “On the Weather” there are words reminiscent of Pushkin’s “St. Petersburg poem” with its menacing picture of a flood:
And the big trouble passed - The water gradually receded.
The Bronze Horseman is also present here - for Nekrasov it is simply a “copper statue of Peter”, not far from which the reporter saw the dramatic scene of seeing off the soldiers. But Peter here is not a formidable ruler, but rather just an indifferent, inanimate sign of St. Petersburg, a city so different from Pushkin’s, plagued by completely different, much more ordinary worries and troubles. But the motif “water” - “trouble,” as we see, turns out to be significant and stable here too. It seems to unite in one mood the different episodes that the reporter witnesses.
There is hardly anything dry on the soldiers,
Streams of rain are running from our faces,
Artillery is heavy and dull
Moves his guns.
Everything is silent. In this foggy frame
The warriors' faces are pitiful to look at."
And the dampened sound of the drum
It's like it's rattling liquidly from afar...
Water aggravates to the limit the hopelessly gloomy impression of the funeral of a poor official, which the narrator “accidentally” came across:
Finally, here comes the fresh hole,
And there is knee-deep water in it!
We lowered the coffin into this water,
They covered him with liquid mud,
And the end!..
The “funny pun” heard in the cemetery is also connected with this:
“Yes, Lord, how he wants to offend,
It will offend so much: yesterday I burned,
And today, if you please, see
I went straight from the fire into the water!”
This is how the usual “out of the frying pan and into the fire” is rephrased. But Nekrasov’s fire and water are not symbolic, but natural, genuine.
At the same time, Nekrasov’s “weather” is the state of the world; It's about he talks about everything that affects the fundamental basis of a person’s well-being - dampness, fog, frost, illness - that grips him “to the bones”, and sometimes even threatens him mortally.
St. Petersburg is a city where “everyone is sick.”
The wind is somewhat suffocating,
There is an ominous note in it,
All cholera - cholera - cholera -
Typhus promises all sorts of help!
Death is here- mass phenomenon, a funeral is a common sight, the first thing a reporter encounters when he goes out into the street.
All kinds of typhus, fevers,
Inflammations go on and on,
Cab drivers, washerwomen are dying like flies,
The children are freezing on their beds.
The weather here almost personifies fate itself. The St. Petersburg climate killed Bosio, the famous Italian singer.
Her epitaph is naturally, organically included in Nekrasov’s cycle “On the Weather”:
Daughter of Italy! With Russian frost
It's hard for midday roses to get along.
Before his fatal force
You dropped your perfect brow,
And you lie in a stranger’s homeland
The cemetery is empty and sad.
The alien people have forgotten you
On the same day you were handed over to the earth,
And for a long time there was another one singing,
Where they showered you with flowers.
It's light there, the double bass is humming there,
The timpani are still loud there.
Yes! in our sad north
Money is difficult and laurels are expensive!
A forgotten grave in a deserted cemetery... This is also the grave of a brilliant singer with a melodious foreign name, lost in the cold expanses of a foreign country. And the grave of the poor, lonely official is a pit, full of water and liquid mud. Let's remember:
Neither relatives nor priest walked in front of the coffin,
There was no gold brocade on it...
And finally, the grave “where great powers fell asleep,” a grave that the narrator was never able to find - this is especially emphasized, although it is not in a foreign cemetery, not in a foreign country:
And where there is neither a slab nor a cross,
There must be a writer there.
All these three moments seem to “rhyme” with each other, forming the cross-cutting theme of Nekrasov’s “Petersburg poem”. A Nekrasov-like complex image of St. Petersburg grows, which, in turn, becomes a symbol of the Russian north.
Petersburg is presented here not as a harmonious, complete whole, a sovereign capital, as it was in Pushkin, but in the vein of a different poetics. “Physiological” descriptions allow us to see St. Petersburg as ugly. In fact:
The streets, shops, bridges are dirty,
Every house suffers from scrofula;
The plaster falls and hits
People walking along the sidewalk...
In addition, since May,
Not very clean and always
Not wanting to be left behind by nature,
Water blooms in the canals...
But we haven’t forgotten that yet,
That in July you are completely soaked
A mixture of vodka, stables and dust -
A typical Russian mixture.
Even the traditional epithet “slender” finds Nekrasov in the most unexpected context: “stuffy, slender, gloomy, rotten.”
It is interesting that in “Crime and Punishment” - perhaps Dostoevsky’s most “St. Petersburg” novel, dating back to the same period - there are the following lines about Raskolnikov’s “street impressions”: “The heat on the street was terrible, and also stuffy, crowded, everywhere there is lime, forests, brick, dust and that special summer stench, so familiar to every St. Petersburger who does not have the opportunity to rent a dacha...” It was in this stinking stuffiness of St. Petersburg that Raskolnikov hatched his monstrous idea. “Physiological” details are too closely related to rather abstract things, to the general atmosphere of the city, its spiritual life.
The same can be said about Nekrasov’s St. Petersburg.
With each new episode, the poet’s words sound more and more sarcastically:
We're not pushing.
Near the Russian capital,
Except gloomy
Neva and dungeons,
There are quite a few bright paintings.
Nekrasov's “street scenes” are almost invariably “cruel scenes.”
Everywhere you will find a cruel scene, -
The policeman is too angry,
With a cleaver, as if into a granite wall,
There’s a knock on poor Vanka’s back.”
Chu! shrill moans of a dog!
Now it’s stronger, it’s clear they cracked again...
They started to warm up - they warmed up for a fight
Two Kalashnikov... laughter - and blood!
These poems continue the motifs of previous work (let us recall, for example, the cycle “On the Street” with its concluding words: “I see drama everywhere”) and anticipate the themes and moods of the subsequent one. In this regard, it is worth mentioning at least one of Nekrasov’s later poems, “Morning” (1874), with its concentration of “cruel scenes” and its “alienated” intonation:
The janitor beats the thief - got caught!
They drive a flock of geese to slaughter;
Somewhere on the top floor there was a sound
Shot - someone committed suicide...
In the cycle “About the Weather,” the scene of beating a horse becomes symbolic, as if “quoted” later by Dostoevsky in Raskolnikov’s famous dream.
Pictures seen by chance are not so accidental - they act in one direction, creating a single image. Also, Nekrasov’s everyday facts are by no means everyday - they are too dramatic for that. He concentrates the drama of surrounding events to the highest degree. “Terrible”, “cruel”, “tormenting” are intensified to the point where it already exceeds the human measure of perception. The pictures of St. Petersburg are not able to caress the eye, its smells are irritating, its sounds are full of dissonance...
In our street, working life:
They begin before dawn,
Your terrible concert, chorusing,
Turners, carvers, mechanics,
And in response, the pavement thunders!
The wild cry of a man-seller,
And a barrel organ with a piercing howl,
And the conductor with the pipe, and the troops,
Walking with drums,
The urging of exhausted nags,
Barely alive, bloodied, dirty,
And the children are torn apart by crying
In the arms of ugly old women...
But all these “tearing”, prosaic “noises” of the St. Petersburg street, which deafen a person, shock him - they really are “terrible for the nerves” - rise in Nekrasov to an ominous, almost apocalyptic symphony.
Everything merges, groans, hums,
It rumbles somehow dully and menacingly,
Like chains are forged on the unfortunate people,
As if the city wants to collapse.
And at the same time, there is something painfully attractive in the “music” of this “fatal” city:
It's light there, the double bass is humming, the timpani are still loud there...
This is Nekrasov’s complex perception of the city, harsh and cold, where success is difficult, the struggle is cruel (“money and the roads of laurels are difficult”), where disharmony and darkness reign, only more sharply shaded at times by external splendor. As N. Ya. Bekovsky rightly writes, “Petersburg” is the theme, the style, and the flavor of the special fantasticality that Russian writers have given to all, both brilliant and dull, prose of modern life, its mechanism and its everyday work, grinding people’s destinies.”
The capital appears in Nekrasov as an integral organism, alien to harmonious harmony, but living its own life, saturated with energy and internal contradictions. It consists, as it were, of many different contrasting worlds (for example, the world of Nekrasov’s Sovremennik and the world of dandies from Nevsky or the world of a lonely old woman seeing off the coffin of an official), which are in active interaction. They can suddenly meet here, on the streets of St. Petersburg, where everything and everyone is mixed up. After all, everyone participates in the life of the capital in one way or another, “everyone is involved in droves.” No wonder this word is repeated every now and then:
Everyone is sick, the pharmacy is triumphant -
And he brews his potions in droves...
And the dead man was carried into the church.
A lot of them had a funeral service there in droves...;
The news of what happened somewhere and with someone immediately becomes known to everyone:
We'll read everything if the paper can bear it,
Tomorrow morning in the newspaper sheets...
This gives Nekrasov’s poems about St. Petersburg a special flavor. In the poet himself lives that high degree of vitality and vital sensitivity that is characteristic of the capital and constitutes its poetry. The intense rhythm of this life excites, disperses the blues, despite the abundance of cruel, ugly, gloomy things. This is the rhythm of labor and the rhythm of growing strength, awakening possibilities. Here, in St. Petersburg, not only are “chains being forged for the unfortunate people,” but somewhere in the invisible depths difficult, unstoppable spiritual work is going on. And the sacrifices made here are not in vain.
Indeed: St. Petersburg “raised forces superior to it, raised Russian democracy and the Russian revolution.”
Complex and indirect, in “coupling” artistic motives and images, Nekrasov realizes the generalization that he expressed with journalistic directness about the role of St. Petersburg earlier, in the poem “The Unhappy” (1856):
Within your walls
And there are and were in the old days
Friends of the people and freedom,
And among the graves of the dumb
There will be loud graves.
You are dear to us, you have always been
The arena of active force,
Inquisitive thought and work!
However, a task of such magnitude would, of course, be beyond the power of the most efficient St. Petersburg “reporter.” The author either gets closer to this hero generated by himself, or pushes this figure aside and comes to the fore himself. It is him, “Nikolai Alekseich,” that we see first of all when the “reporter” asks the delivery boy Minai about magazines and writers. We also hear the voice of Nekrasov himself in the “feuilleton” “Gazetnaya” (1865), when, amid a relaxed, ironic story, genuine pathos suddenly breaks through:
Make peace with my Muse!
I don't know any other tune.
Who lives without beginning and anger,
He doesn't love his homeland...
The evolution of the “image of the narrator” also occurs in “Ballet” (1866). The reporter decided to attend a benefit performance at the ballet - it would seem that it was a “picture of the capital’s morals,” that’s all. But here is the corps de ballet, and Petipa in the attire of a Russian peasant, as K.I. Chukovsky writes, “as if falling through the ground along with the orchestra and the stage, - and in front of the same “flower garden of the mezzanine,” in front of the same golden epaulettes and stars of the stalls, gloomy, like a funeral, village recruitment:
Snowy - cold - haze and fog...”
The same recruitment set is invariably depicted by Nekrasov both in the cycle “On the Street” and in the cycle “About the Weather”. In “Ballet” this is a whole picture, unfolding in the vast Russian expanses and inexorably displacing all previous impressions, just as reality displaces a dream - although the picture here was created by the author’s imagination:
But in vain the man snaps.
The nag barely walks - he resists;
The neighborhood is full of creaking and squealing.
Like a sad train to the heart
Through the white funeral shroud
It cuts the earth and it groans,
The white snowy sea is moaning...
It’s hard, you’re a peasant’s grief!
The whole structure of speech changes decisively. B. Eikhenbaum at one time drew attention to how Nekrasov here transforms “the three-foot anapaest from the feuilleton form into the form of a viscous, hysterical song:
Know people good manners,
That I myself adore ballet.
Oh, you baggage, unnoticeable baggage!
Where will we have to unload you?..”
The disappearance of feuilleton intonation marks the disappearance of the “feuilletonist” himself, in whose place the poet openly spoke.
Now we are fully aware that the appearance of the final picture is prepared by the details and associations that break through from the very beginning, permeating the entire work, by the unity of the worldview, despite the sharp transitions of style: this and the caustic and sad remark about the general and senatorial stars - “noticeable immediately, //That they were not snatched from the sky - //The stars of the sky are not bright for us”; this is also a significant recognition in connection with the enthusiastic reception by the public of Petipa’s peasant dance - “No! where it’s about the people, // There I’m the first to get carried away. It’s a pity: in our meager nature // There aren’t enough flowers for wreaths!” This motif is again echoed in the image of the “scarce north”, the land dressed in the “white shroud of death”:
Do you see how sometimes under a bush
This little bird will flutter
What doesn’t fly anywhere from us -
Loves our meager north, poor thing!
The St. Petersburg “mysteries” thus find their true place - this is not the whole world at all, but only some part of it, not at all the most significant, although it was recreated by Nekrasov in true complexity and color. Whatever Nekrasov writes about, the initial thing for him is pictures of folk life, the thought of the people's fate - this is given explicitly or hidden, but is always guessed.
Just as the blood connection with the people's worldview, always vividly felt by Nekrasov, preserved and strengthened by him, did not allow any contradictions and doubts to destroy the internal unity and strength of his nature, so the people's life as a whole, with its dramatic content, its spiritual origins and aspirations , determined the basis of the unity of his poetic world.
This is the center from which all impulses emanate and to which all threads converge.
Russian poetry, as N. Ya, Berkovsky rightly noted, was distinguished by the special nature of its exploration of the surrounding world, and first of all, of national nature and national life. This is not even a search for correspondences; rather, this is where poets first found and recognized their emotions. Hence the widest inclusion in lyrical poetry of images of the external world as images of experience.
“The rook on the arable land, the “club of the crow family”, the rotten December of St. Petersburg with its blurred street, the tear-stained, damp huge door in the wooden church - all these are images of Nekrasov’s lyrical states.”
Nekrasov’s lyrical feeling recognizes itself primarily where people’s pain, melancholy, oppression and suffering are heard. Nekrasov's plots are, as a rule, unfortunate stories, their heroes are “coachmen, old village women... people from the St. Petersburg pavement, writers on hospitals, abandoned women...”. Of course, Dostoevsky was largely one-sided when he argued that “Nekrasov’s love for the people was only the outcome of his own grief in itself...”. However, he rightly spoke not just about sympathy, but about Nekrasov’s “passionate to the point of tormenting love” for everything that suffers from violence, from the cruelty of unbridled will that oppresses our Russian woman, our child in a Russian family, our commoner in a bitter... ... his share." Actually, this is conveyed in the famous description of Nekrasov - “the sadman of the people’s grief.” Here, both sides are equally important and inseparable: the world of people’s passions, interests, aspirations is reflected in Nekrasov as a world living according to its own complex laws, an independent and sovereign world, shaping and transforming the poet’s personality, but this world is not left to the poet by himself - in the worldview the poet is closely united with him.
Already in the first lyric poem with a “peasant” plot at its core - “On the Road” - Nekrasov achieves a very complex unity. He looks at the life of the people not only through an “analytical prism,” as Apollo Grigoriev believed, but also through the prism of his own mental state: “Boring! boring!..” The suffering here is not only “from the grief of the man who was crushed by the “villainous wife,” and from the grief of the unfortunate Grusha, and from the general grief of the people’s life,” as N. N. Skatov rightly says in the book. It exists, lives in the poet as if from the beginning - with the coachman’s story it is only confirmed, substantiated and strengthened. A certain vicious circle has been outlined: it seems that one can “dispel melancholy” only by turning to this same melancholy again - for example, in the song “about recruitment and separation.” “Provoked” by the interlocutor, the coachman, however, amazes him: he “comforts” him with a story about his own grief, which he himself, as it turns out, is not able to fully comprehend:
And, listen, I almost never hit you,
Unless under the influence of a drunken...
It is here that the listener's anxiety reaches its extreme point - he interrupts the story. This is very typical for Nekrasov: you expect that the melancholy, the pain will somehow be quenched, that it will somehow be resolved, but it turns out the opposite, there is no outcome and there may be. The cruelty is hopelessly intensified in the famous scene of the driver with the horse:
And he beat her, beat her, beat her!
He again: on the back, on the sides,
And running forward, over the shoulder blades
And by the crying, meek eyes!
But the last scene was
More outrageous than the first one:
The horse suddenly tensed up and walked
Somehow sideways, nervously soon,
And the driver at every jump,
In gratitude for these efforts,
He gave her wings with blows
And he himself ran lightly next to him.
("About the weather")
The poem “Morning” (1874) paints a gloomy picture of the village, seeing which “it’s hard not to suffer.” The parts are woven into one chain, reinforcing each other:
Infinitely sad and pathetic
These pastures, fields, meadows,
These wet, sleepy jackdaws...
This nag with a drunk peasant...
This is a cloudy sky -
It would be natural to expect some kind of opposition here, but, just as in the case of the coachman’s complaint, it can even more deafen and depress the perceiver:
But the rich city is no more beautiful...
And then a kind of “dance of death” unfolds, as N. N. Skatov writes. This, apparently, is the reason for the apparent indifference of the author's tone, which the researcher drew attention to. But this is not indifference, of course, but, on the contrary, an extreme degree of shock. Nowhere, in the entire surrounding world, it seems that nothing can be found that could resist what he saw, outweigh it and refute it. And such intonation has a much stronger effect than direct exclamations of sympathy and compassion.
The author's lyrical activity is looking for new, increasingly complex ways of expression. The event turns out to be the center of intersection of emotional and ethical assessments. So, if we return to the poem “On the Road”, it is not difficult to see that the emphasized features of the speech of the driver-narrator - “on the jew’s harp”, “tois”, “crashed”, “rubbed”, etc. - not only create a social characteristic, and are intended to highlight (against the background of correct general literary speech) the dramatic meaning of the story, thereby enhancing its perception. The point of view of the narrator-hero and the point of view of the listener-author, although not coinciding, intersect and interact.
The energy of an interested observer, listener, interlocutor reveals the hidden depths of people's life and character. He peers, listens, questions, analyzes - without his efforts, our meeting with this world in all its authenticity would not have taken place. At the same time, he seems to be afraid to obscure it with himself, trying to withdraw, disappear, leaving us alone with the phenomenon. He even sometimes strives to emphasize his special position as an outside observer, with his interests, activities, moods, and way of life:
It's been dull and rainy since the morning
Today turned out to be an unlucky day:
For nothing in the swamp I got wet to the bones,
I decided to work, but work doesn’t work,
Lo and behold, it’s already evening - the crows are flying...
Two old women met at the well,
Let me hear what they say...
Hello, dear. -
“How can this be, gossip?
Still crying?
Walks, knowing from the heart a bitter thought,
Like a big-city owner?” --
How can you not cry? I'm lost, sinner!
Darling aches and hurts...
He died, Kasyanovna, he died, my dear,
He died and was buried in the ground!
The wind shakes the wretched hut,
The whole barn fell apart...
Like a crazy person I went along the road:
Will my son get caught?
I would take a hatchet - the problem is fixable, -
Mother would console her...
Died, Kasyanovna, died, darling -
Is it necessary? I'm selling the axe.
Who will take care of a rootless old woman?
Everything has become completely impoverished!
In the rainy autumn, in the cold winter
Who will stock up on firewood for me?
Who, as you hear a warm fur coat.
Will he get some new bunnies?
He died, Kasyanovna, he died, my dear -
The gun will go to waste!
But here the narrator again hastens to separate himself from what is happening:
The old woman is crying. What do I care?
Why regret it if there is nothing to help?..
This motive is always clearly discernible in Nekrasov. In the poem “About the Weather,” he interrupts himself with annoyance while describing the terrible scene of a driver with a horse:
I was angry and thought sadly:
“Should I stand up for her?
Nowadays it is fashion to sympathize,
We wouldn't mind helping you,
The unrequited sacrifice of the people, -
We don’t know how to help ourselves!”
Here is the bitterness of powerlessness, hopelessness, and a challenge to those who are inclined to become complacent, to abdicate responsibility only by “sympathizing” with the unfortunate. For the poet, thinking about their suffering is also thinking about his own suffering (“But we don’t know how to help ourselves”).
The author’s “sideways” view is thus forced, and it is not given to him. As much as the narrator, the observer, strives to defend his position, he is irrevocably destroyed by those impressions that are born of the surrounding reality and to which his soul is open.
My weary body is weak,
Time for bed.
My night is not long:
Tomorrow I'll go hunting early,
I need to sleep better before the light...
So the crows are ready to fly away,
The party is over...
Well, get going!
So they stood up and croaked at once. -
Listen, be equal! -
The whole flock flies:
It seems as if between the sky and the eye
The scoop net is hanging.
Instead of direct outpourings, which the narrator is clearly struggling with, trying to suppress and avoid, an image appears, accidentally snatched from the surrounding “empirics” - a crow. As if it was all about them, as if they were the ones who “caused the trouble.” This is where emotional tension is concentrated. This is how the poem begins:
Really, isn’t this a crow club?
Near our parish today?
And today... well, it’s just a disaster!
Stupid croaking, wild moans... -
and this, as we have seen, ends with this. The author can no longer get rid of this: something black, gloomy clouds the eyes, interferes with looking, something ugly, disharmonious rings in the ears...
But the conversation of the old women at the well itself is not at all a genre picture, not a sketch from life - the author’s lyrical feeling is connected here very noticeably. It lives primarily in that heightened perception of death, loss, in the awareness and poetic expression of it, which marks a high stage of personal development. The son here is both the breadwinner and the protector, but not only that. It contains the only justification for life, the only source of light and warmth. Material, everyday details, excitedly sorted out by the poor old woman, are important for her not in themselves, but as things involved in the life of her son, and now idle, unnecessary, mercilessly testifying to his irrevocable departure - therefore, their mention is fanned with special tenderness.
With the death of one person, the whole world collapses, and the words here take on special significance: “He died and was buried in the ground!” This is not at all similar to the depiction of the death of a man, which is given, for example, by Tolstoy in the story “Three Deaths.” Nekrasov’s death of a peasant will later become the theme of an entire poem, and the poem “In the Village” can be considered as one of the preliminary sketches.
Here it comes down to literal and very significant in meaning and style coincidences:
You died, you didn’t live to live,
Died and buried in the ground! -
we read in the poem “Frost, Red Nose” (1863).
Her hero Proclus is also “the breadwinner, the hope of the family.” But what they are mourning here is not just the loss of a breadwinner, but a terrible, irreparable loss - a grief that cannot be survived:
The old woman will die from the cliff, Your father will not live either, A birch tree in the forest without a top - A housewife without a husband in the house.
It is significant that the tragedy of the peasant family is freely and naturally correlated with the fate of the poet himself. The dedication to “Sister” for the poem “Frost, Red Village,” written later, is perceived as internally necessary; it seems to be talking about something completely different, but it is connected with the poem itself by the unity of feeling and tone. At the same time, it retains the independence of the lyrical appeal and becomes a powerful lyrical refrain:
For everyday calculations and charms
I would not part with my muse,
But God knows if that gift has not gone out,
What happened to me being friends with her?
But the poet is not yet a brother to people,
And his path is thorny and fragile...
. . . . . . . . . . .
And time has passed, I'm tired...
I may not have been a fighter without reproach,
But I recognized the strength in myself,
I believed in a lot of things deeply,
And now it's time for me to die...
I'm singing the last song
For you - and I dedicate it to you.
But it won't be any more fun
It will be much sadder than before,
Because the heart is darker
And the future will be even more hopeless...
The feeling of despair and hopelessness - in connection with the constant Nekrasov motives of the poet's thorny path, his own flawedness, threatening death - seems to lead precisely to this plot, determines his choice. Interwoven here are the pain of one’s own losses, and even the general anxious state of nature, engulfed in a storm.
And the window trembles and dapples...
Chu! how large hailstones jump!
Dear friend, you realized long ago -
Here only the stones do not cry...
The blizzard howled harshly
And she threw snow at the window...
The sad hut of an orphaned family, and the whole earth, “like a shroud, dressed in snow” (later the same thing will be heard in the poem “Ballet”: after seeing off the recruits they return, as if from a funeral, “the earth is in a white shroud of death”).
With the motif of death, funeral, shroud, the motif of sobs reappears and intensifies.
In dedication:
I know whose prayers and tears
Stitching with a nimble needle
On the shroud is a piece of linen,
Like rain that charges for a long time,
She sobs softly.
For her tears, Nekrasov will find another, perhaps unexpected, image:
Tear after tear falls
On fast hands yours.
So the ear silently drops
Their ripened grains...
This image does not appear suddenly; it organically grows out of the entire peasant worldview and worldview into which the poet immersed himself here. Also in the poem " Uncompressed strip"(1854) a mature ear of grain prays for a plowman:
“...It’s boring to bend down to the ground,
Fat grains bathing in dust!
No! we are no worse than others - and for a long time
The grain has filled and ripened within us.
It was not for this reason that he plowed and sowed,
So that the autumn wind will scatter us?..”
But the plowman is no longer destined to return to his field:
The hands that made these furrows,
They dried up into slivers, hung like whips,
What a mournful song he sang...
The grains falling onto the ground are like the tears of an orphaned “strip” over a dying plowman. In this sense, “The Uncompressed Strip” also sounds like a harbinger, an anticipation of the later poem. In “Frost...” in an address to the deceased Proclus we will again hear:
From your reserved strip
You'll reap the harvest this summer!
Daria has a terrible dream:
I see that I'm falling
Strength is a countless army, -
He waves his arms menacingly, his eyes sparkle menacingly:..
But the “Busurman army” turns out to be swaying, rustling ears of corn in a rye field:
These are ears of rye,
Filled with ripe grains,
Come out to fight with me!
I began to reap quickly,
I reap, and on my neck
Large grains are falling -
It’s like I’m standing under hail!
It will leak, it will leak overnight
All our mother rye...
Where are you, Prokl Savastyanich?
Why aren’t you going to help?..
Ripe grains fall, crumble, flow, leak out, do not give rest, require extreme stress and remind of irrevocable loss:
I will begin to reap without my dear one,
Knit the sheaves tightly,
Drop tears into sheaves!
What determines the foundations of peasant life is its meaning and joy:
The little cattle began to go into the forest,
Mother rye began to rush into the ear,
God sent us a harvest! -
now, with the death of Proclus, it is irreparably, completely destroyed. In a happy dying vision, Daria still imagines her son’s wedding, which she and Proclus were looking forward to “like a holiday,” and in which the role of the ear of grain is again bright, life-affirming:
Sprinkle grains of grain on them,
Shower the young with hops!..
But she, like Proclus, is also no longer destined to participate in this measured, wise, close to the natural flow of renewed life. Everything that was full of living meaning for her faded.
Researchers have already noted that the lyrical intensity in the poem “Frost, Red Nose” happily combines with its epic beginning. This reveals a more general pattern for Nekrasov. The poet's lyrical feeling truly finds itself only when it comes into contact with the epic foundations of the folk world. His inner “I” only here receives its most complete and free embodiment. The unfolding of the poem actually overcomes the poet's despair and loneliness, although its plot does not contain anything literally comforting. What is precious here is the very possibility of internal merging with the high order of life. “Until the very end of Daria’s life, until her last minutes,” writes J. Bilinkis, “the poet will not disagree with his heroine anywhere or in anything, he will be able to convey her dying visions and feelings.”
Not a sound! The soul dies
For sorrow, for passion.
And you feel how you conquer
Its this dead silence.
Nekrasov in his poems sometimes appears as a greater lyricist than in lyric poems themselves, especially when it comes to folk life. A strict genre distinction is not helpful here at all - the overall picture emerges only from comparison and tracing of cross-cutting themes, motifs, and figurative connections.
Nekrasov needs the integrity of a world that is internally very contradictory - and here the epic and the lyrics interpenetrate and reinforce each other.
It is not without reason that some passages from Nekrasov’s poems are often considered in studies of poetry. So, for example, Andrei Bely (followed by many literary critics) dwelled on the following stanzas of the poem “Frost, Red Nose”, feeling in them the integrity of the lyrical feeling:
I fell asleep after working hard in sweat!
Fell asleep after working the soil!
Lies, uninvolved in care,
On a white pine table,
Lies motionless, stern,
With a burning candle in our heads,
In a wide canvas shirt
And in fake new bast shoes.
Large, calloused hands,
Those who put up a lot of work,
Beautiful, alien to torment
Face - and beard down to the arms...
Indeed, this passage can be read as a complete poem, affirming the world of peasant life as the highest reality. This is a direct expression of human values. There are no prosaic details here. “Sweat” and “calluses”, “labor” and “earth” in this context are lofty, poetic words.
The image of the “asleep” is inherent in true greatness. It is no coincidence that his name is not mentioned here. Before the nalgi, it’s as if he is no longer the concrete, so vividly and individually perceived by loved ones, “Prokl Savastyanich”, “Proklushka”, as he is in everyday scenes. But let’s not forget that these scenes themselves emerge only in Daria’s imagination; in reality, we do not see Proclus alive. A considerable distance separates him from the world of the living.
The appearance of the plowman in “The Uncompressed Strip,” as we remember, is distorted by illness and overwork; he is rather an object of the author’s compassion (“it’s bad for the poor fellow”), and “non-poetic” descriptions only enhance the impression (“his hands... dried to a sliver, hung like whips,” “the eyes dimmed,” etc.). The hero of “Frost...” is free from this; he is treated not by sympathy, but by admiration. Silence, lack of vanity (“lying there, uninvolved in care”), closeness to the “other” world (“with a burning candle in their heads,” “a face alien to torment”) create a special solemnity and ideality of appearance.
Proclus, the “living”, “everyday” one, who, if necessary, could hide himself in a cart, leisurely drink leaven from a jug, or casually affectionately “pinch” his Grie-gauha, and the one who silently lies “on the white pine table” merge into a single image only in the vast space of the entire poem. But it is interesting that most of Nekrasov’s poems gravitate precisely toward “poemness,” so to speak.
The internal correlation of all elements is of decisive importance for Nekrasov.
In his “peasant” lyrics, as well as in the poems closely related to this lyrics, the image of suffering and asceticism dominates. No matter what different works we turn to here - “On the Road”, “Troika”, “In the Village”, “Uncompressed Lane”, “Orina, the Soldier’s Mother”, “Reflections at the Main Entrance”, “Railroad”, “Peddlers” “,” “Frost, Red Nose,” - everywhere with amazing consistency it is said about strength undermined, destroyed, about broken hopes, about orphanhood and homelessness, and finally, about death, which has already occurred or is inevitably approaching. However, behind all this extreme degree of human misfortune, a bright, ideal, heroic beginning opens up.
Just as in Nekrasov’s “repentant” poems the true feat of the poet could appear and be expressed only through his internal contradictions, mental struggle, confusion and despair, so here the lofty and immortal foundations of people’s life are revealed in the abysses of misfortune and ugliness, darkness and squalor. It is in this arena of unbearably difficult struggle that the heroic powers of the heroes manifest themselves.
If in "Peddlers" (1861) this non-patriarchal, cruel world, where the “detours” are three miles, “but directly six,” where bargaining and love are so strangely intertwined, the moan-song of the “wretched wanderer” and the treacherous shots of the forester - if this world does not completely collapse, it is only because there is somewhere else it is peasant, earnest, strong, perhaps artless, like Katerinushka’s thoughts, like her dreams of a family idyll with her beloved:
Neither you nor your father-in-law
I won’t be rude to Nikola,
From your mother-in-law, your mother,
I will endure any word.
...........................
Don't bore yourself with work,
I don't need the strength,
I am willingly for my dear one
I will plow the arable land.
You live for yourself walking,
For a working wife,
Driving around the bazaars,
Have fun, sing songs!
And you come back from the bargaining drunk -
I'll feed you and put you to bed!
“Sleep, handsome one, sleep, rosy one!”
I won't say another word.
These words sound all the more piercing the clearer it becomes that they are not destined to come true. Likewise in “Troika” the dazzlingness of the first part contrasts with the gloomy coloring of the finale:
And they will bury you in a damp grave,
How will you go through your difficult path?
Uselessly extinguished strength
And an unwarmed chest.
If Nekrasov enters the realm of the idyll, then this is, as N. Ya. Berkovsky aptly put it, “an idyll dressed in mourning clothes.”
In the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” the beauty and happiness of peasant life really exist, but they are seen through tears, when there is no return to this joyful harmony. And the more closely Nekrasov looks at these ordinary pictures, with all their everyday, unobtrusive details, the more meaning they now acquire for Daria - she does not have the strength to tear herself away from them.
He’s running!.. uh!.. he’s running, little shooter,
The grass is burning under your feet! -
Grishukha is as black as a little pebble,
Only one head is white.
Screaming, he runs up into a squat
(A pea collar around the neck).
Treated my grandmother, my womb,
Little sister - she's spinning like a loach!
Kindness from the mother to the young man,
The boy's father pinched him;
Meanwhile, Savraska was not dozing either:
He pulled and pulled his neck,
I got there, baring my teeth,
Chews peas appetizingly,
And into soft kind lips
Grishukhino's ear is taken...
In Daria's happy dreams highest degree not only “sheaves of gold” are artistically significant,
“beautiful Masha, playful”, “rudy faces of children”, etc., but also this very “peas like a collar”, so lovingly described by Nekrasov. N. Ya. Berkovsky calls the poem a wonderful monument to the “struggle for the “holy prose” of peasant life, for the lyrics of labor and economy, family and home economics”...
They always have a warm house,
The bread is baked, the kvass is delicious,
Healthy and well-fed guys,
There is an extra piece for the holiday.
The same struggle for the “holy prose” of the peasant way of life also passes through the lyrics - hidden possibilities and the people's aspirations declare themselves in spite of meager reality. The cycle “Songs” (1866) opens with the following remarkable poem:
People's houses are clean, bright,
But in our house it’s cramped and stuffy.
People have a vat of cabbage soup with corned beef,
And in our cabbage soup there is a cockroach, a cockroach!
People have godfathers - they give children,
And we have godfathers - they’ll eat our bread!
What people have on their minds is to have a chat with their godfather,
What's on our minds is, shouldn't we go with the bag?
If only we could live like this to surprise the world:
So that the harness with bells, the painted duta,
So that the cloth is on your shoulders, not just sackcloth;
So that we receive honor from people no worse than others,
The priest is visiting the big ones, the children are literate;
The people's dream of a happy life is expressed in the “song” extremely close to the forms in which it actually lives in the people’s consciousness. The world of what is desired and desired is personified here by a house in which contentment, warmth, “cleanliness, beauty” reign.
What is conveyed by the word “blindness” is difficult to define or call anything else. “Lepota” is not just a “key word”, it is main image poems, and perhaps the entire cycle. It contains order and comfort, material wealth and moral dignity. Bread, of which there is plenty for everyone, and “cabbage soup with corned beef” are not just signs of well-being and contentment, but almost symbols of happiness.
It is here, in the sphere of popular thinking, that the “prosaic” details of everyday life are justified. Remaining concrete in everyday life, they suddenly suddenly become significant and lofty in their own way. In the poem “Duma” (1860), for example, we read:
At the merchant's at Semipalov's
People live without food,
Pour vegetable oil onto porridge
Like water, without regret.
On holiday - fatty lamb,
Steam floats over the cabbage soup like a cloud,
At half lunch they will loosen their belts -
The soul asks to leave the body!
Ordinary satiety (bread, cabbage soup, “lean butter” and “fat lamb”) receives moral justification also because the ideal of a hero from the people is not idleness, but work. He considers “work” and “rest”, “everyday life” and “holidays” to be natural and reasonable, constituting a certain internal order of life. One is impossible without the other.
They snore through the night, having eaten until they sweat,
The day will come - they amuse themselves with work...
Hey! take me as a worker
My hands are itching to get some work done!
Signs of contentment become especially alluring and desirable in contrast to hunger, despair, poverty, and everything that is destined for the hero in reality:
Our side is poor,
There is nowhere to throw the cow out...
And what’s on our minds is that we shouldn’t go with the bag.
("Songs")
The people's dream does not know “poetry” and “prose” in their metaphysical separation. Therefore, the following combination is completely natural:
So that money is in the purse, so that rye is on the threshing floor;
So that the harness with bells, a painted arc,
So that the cloth is on your shoulders, not just sackcloth...
Any detail of material life ultimately turns out to be aesthetically experienced and meaningful.
So that children in the house are like bees in honey,
And the mistress of the house is like a raspberry in the garden!
The people's ideal appears in Nekrasov both in “close” concreteness and in harmonious versatility. People's life is revealed in its most diverse features, on the most different levels. Nekrasov either seems to remain entirely within the circle of popular consciousness and folk poetic expression, then openly and decisively goes beyond these limits.
Truly, from some hidden, “artesian” depths, Nekrasov draws his conviction in the inexhaustible power of the people’s spirit:
Don’t be shy for your dear fatherland...
The Russian people have endured enough
He also took out this railway -
He will endure whatever God sends!
Will bear everything - and a wide, clear
He will pave the way for himself with his chest.
It’s just a pity to live in this wonderful time
You won't have to - neither me nor you.
(“Railroad”, 1864)
The last lines contain the same Nekrasov note of sadness, complicating the picture of happy possibilities. But the paths here are not blocked, but opened. It is not idealization, but a fearlessly sober look at the real state of the world, a deep creative penetration into it that allows Nekrasov’s poetry to strengthen itself in a life-affirming outcome. Nekrasov’s achievement as an artist consisted in the ability to cover with a single glance the area of the idyll, the area of tragedy, and the area of the comic.
Nekrasov significantly transformed the sphere of the poetically sublime, introducing there the concepts of “low” prose, rethought by new social experience. First of all, this concerns the signs of peasant labor and life, which received special meaning for democratic public consciousness. A number of interesting observations on this matter are contained in the book by B. O. Corman. Such words as, for example, “laborer” and “blacksmith”, “day laborer”, “digger” acquired a poetic meaning, expanded their content, and began to be used by Nekrasov in a figurative meaning - in relation to phenomena of spiritual life. The word of the everyday dictionary “bast shoes” in the new context received the role of a high symbol: “So that the wide bast shoes of the people pave the way to it” 1.
But there were other possibilities in mastering different aspects of reality. L. Ya. Ginzburg draws attention to the tragically low principle inherent in Nekrasov’s poetry. “The word remains low, emphatically low,” she writes, “but it takes on a tragic and terrible meaning, reflecting the social tragedy of the oppressed.”
From its bark
It's unraveled
Melancholy-trouble
Exhausted.
I'll eat Kovriga
I'll eat cheesecake
With a big table!
I'll eat it all alone
I can handle it myself.
Be it mother or son
Ask - I won’t give!
True, these lines were not taken by L. Ya. Ginzburg from the lyrics - this is “Hungry” from the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.”
The deeper Nekrasov goes into peasant theme The more multifaceted and polyphonic it seems to him, the stronger the artistic need for synthesis becomes in him, the further he moves away from lyricism in the narrow sense of the word. N. N. Skatov believes: “The broad front of the study of folk peasant life in Nekrasov’s poetry has clearly narrowed since the late 60s, it almost stops in the lyrics, and is locked, in fact, on one truly grandiose creation - on the poem “To Whom in Rus'” to live well” and, in general, brings little that is fundamentally new, although it gives birth to truly artistic masterpieces such as the barge hauler song in “Contemporaries”.
This song - “Up the Mountain” - can really be perceived as an independent work, as if it had absorbed all the most perfect from the great variety of Nekrasov’s “songs”.
No bread
The house is falling down
How old have you been?
Kame noem
My grief,
Life is bad!
Brothers, rise!
Let's whoop, let's go!
Whoa, guys!
the mountain is high...
Kama is gloomy! Kama is deep!
Give me some bread!
What sand!
What a mountain!
What a day!
It's so hot!
Pebble! how many tears we shed for you!
Didn't we, dear, bother you?
Give me some money!
Abandoned the house
Little guys...
Let's whoop!..
The bones are shaking!
I would like to lie down on the stove
Sleep through the winter
Leak in summer
Walk with grandma!
What sand!
What a mountain!
What a day!
It's so hot!
Not without good souls in the world -
Someone will take you to Moscow,
Will you be at the university -
The dream will come true!
There is a wide field there:
Know, work and don't be afraid...
That's why you're deeply
I love, native Rus'!
(“Schoolboy”, 1856)
At the rift of the patriarchal world, new values arose that nourished Nekrasov’s poetry, allowing it to remain precisely poetry.
This is, first of all, the ideal of freedom, the impulse towards it, the struggle for it. This is people's liberation, people's happiness.
At the same time, new social and spiritual communities emerge - their oppressed supporters, their “intercessors”. Nekrasov plays a huge role in ideological unanimity and cooperation in the struggle. This is the strongest union. The new spiritual unity, its necessity, its poetry in Nekrasov’s ideological and artistic system are extremely active.
The “high” in Nekrasov’s poetry is connected, on the one hand, with “book culture”, with educational ideas, with the “ray of consciousness” that the advanced intelligentsia is called upon to throw on the people’s path.
Here symbolic images of a “book”, “portrait” appear - signs of ideological influence, continuity, spiritual elevation.
On the other hand, the sources of poetry for Nekrasov are in the very foundations of people's life and national character.
Russia, the homeland - perceived and presented as the homeland of the people - is the top of Nekrasov’s hierarchy of values.
Nekrasov's lyrics mark a very difficult stage in the development of poetry. It expressed a new rise in the sense of personality, associated precisely with the breaking of old foundations, an active social movement, and, in general, with the era of preparation for the Russian revolution.
On this basis, a new rise in lyric poetry was possible. At the same time, Nekrasov’s poetry differed from the poetry of the previous stage in a qualitatively different structure of its lyrical “I”.
“I” here is open to the outside world, accepting its diversity and polyphony.
It is not closed, not individualistic, it is capable of feeling and speaking “for another.” It seems to multiply, remaining at the same time united and itself, taking on different “guises”, the “voice” unites it, correlates within itself different “voices”, different intonations.
“Nekrasov’s lyrics opened up enormous opportunities for establishing the principles of artistic polyphony, behind which stood new ethical forms and a democratic social position.
Actually, with Nekrasov, polyphonism and polyphony became the artistic, structural expression of such democracy.”
Nekrasov’s lyrical “I” is not fundamentally individualistic.
Nekrasov's poetry grew, as it were, from the negation of poetry. She undoubtedly absorbed the experience of prose and drama. It is characterized to a large extent by both “narrative” and “analyticity”.
In turn, the poetry of Nekrasov and his contemporaries - Tyutchev, Fet - had a significant influence on prose and the novel.
“Nekrasov justified the very necessity of poetry...” However, writing poetry after Nekrasov became immeasurably more difficult.
It is not for nothing that he had, in essence, no direct successors, although the “Nekrasov school,” the school of his like-minded people and followers, existed.
In order for the development of Nekrasov’s traditions to become possible on the same scale and with the same degree of talent, new social changes were necessary, new level social life and culture.
4. The role of artistic detail in the work of I.S. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons"
In his work, the great Russian writer Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev used a wide range of literary techniques: landscapes, compositional structure, a system of secondary images, speech characteristics, etc... But the most impressive multifaceted means of the author’s embodiment of ideas and images on the pages of works is the artistic detail. Let's consider how this literary device participates in revealing the semantic content of Fathers and Sons, obviously the most controversial novel by I.S. Turgenev.
First of all, it should be noted that the portraits and descriptions of costumes in this work, as in any other, actually consist entirely of artistic details. So, for example, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov has “...a face as if carved with a thin and light chisel” and “an appearance.., graceful and thoroughbred...”. And so, the reader can immediately determine by appearance that “Uncle Arkady” belongs to the noble class. Sophistication, refined manners, the habit of a luxurious life, secularism, unshakable self-esteem, inherent in the “charming melancholic” and characterizing him as one of the typical representatives of the nobility, are constantly emphasized by the author with artistic details that represent Pavel Petrovich’s household items: “a single large opal "on the sleeves", "tight shirt collars", "patent ankle boots", etc.
Using the description of beautiful and elegant things of the “archaic phenomenon” I.S. Turgenev shows the atmosphere in which the elder Kirsanov lives, betraying his worldview. Deliberately focusing attention on the inanimate objects surrounding Uncle Arkady, the author leads the reader to the idea of a certain lifelessness of the “district aristocrat,” calling him a “dead man.”
The irrelevance of Pavel Petrovich’s life principles determines his “deadness,” the very fact of existence, which reveals in the work the idea of the decay and failure of the noble class of that time. Thus, we see that the artistic detail, participating in the portrait characteristics and description of the costume, performs an important function, reflecting the images and intent of the novel.
It must also be said that the image of the psychological portraits of the characters plays a large role in identifying the main ideas of the work. To convey the feelings, experiences, and thoughts of the characters in “Fathers and Sons,” the author often uses artistic details. A clear example This may serve as a reflection of Bazarov’s internal state on the eve of the duel. I.S. Turgenev with amazing skill shows the anxiety and excitement of Evgeny Vasilyevich. The writer notes that the night before the fight with Pavel Petrovich, Evgeniy “... was tormented by random dreams...”, and while waiting in the grove, “... the morning chill made him shudder twice...”. That is, Bazarov is obviously afraid for his life, although he carefully hides this even from himself. “Dreams” and “chill” are those artistic details that help the reader understand Bazarov’s thoughts and feelings that gripped him in this difficult situation, and understand that Evgeniy Vasilyevich is able not only to deny and argue, but also to experience, to love life.
The background against which the action unfolds takes an active part in revealing the psychological state of the novel's heroes. So, for example, in the eleventh chapter, the romantic, sublime mood of Nikolai Petrovich is the response of his soul to the fragrance and beauty of nature. In this episode, the author depicted the landscape using artistic details that recreate the atmosphere of a beautiful rural evening. The relationship between nature and the inner world of the “ladybug” and the “stars” that “swarmed and winked” are especially insightful. In addition, this artistic detail is almost the only one indicating the change from the evening landscape to the night one. I.S. Turgenev indicated the change in state with just one stroke, delighting in its simplicity and expressiveness. Thus, artistic details play important role not only in the author’s depiction of portraits, characters, and moods of the heroes, but also in creating a general background in various episodes of the novel.
To more clearly identify the functions of the analyzed means of literary embodiment in “Fathers and Sons,” we will analyze the methods of its use in this work. The most used method in the novel is to complement each other with artistic details. This technique not only gives the reader a broader and more vivid idea of any image, interior, psychological state, but also draws our attention to those features that the author considered necessary to emphasize. In particular, the situation in Kukshina’s house is depicted on the pages of the work precisely by listing artistic details: magazines, “mostly uncut,” “dusty tables,” “scattered cigarette butts.” I.S. Turgenev already through description interior decoration Evdokia’s room exposes the falsity of the nihilism of a “wonderful nature.” Further characteristics given to her by the author finally reveal Kukshina’s inconsistency both as a denier, and as a woman, and as a person, but the first thing that indicates the error of her views, the incorrect understanding of emancipation, is the interior of Avdotya Nikitishna’s house. Another method of using artistic detail in Fathers and Sons is antithesis. For example, Kukshina arrived at the governor’s ball “in dirty gloves, but with a bird of paradise in her hair,” which once again highlights her negligence and promiscuity, which she passes off as the life principles of an emancipated woman. In addition, artistic detail in a novel is often complemented by any other literary medium. In particular, the writer mentions that Bazarov’s “speeches” are “somewhat complex and fragmentary.” This visual detail is revealed and enhanced by Evgeniy Vasilyevich’s remarks, which are characterized by speed, sharpness, impetuosity and some aphorism. And so, in “Fathers and Sons” I.S. Turgenev uses the literary device in question in all possible variants, which allows him to significantly increase and expand its ideological purpose.
Thus, we see that artistic details are used by the author throughout the entire work to express the concept of the novel, when describing the appearance of the characters, their thoughts and feelings, and the background in certain parts of “Fathers and Sons.” I.S. Turgenev uses this means of pictorial embodiment in various variations, which makes it possible to endow it with greater semantic load. The amazing diversity, remarkable versatility and amazing selection of artistic details of the work lead the reader to the thought expressed by Pisarev in the critical article “Bazarov”: “...through the fabric of the novel the fierce, deeply felt attitude of the author towards the deduced phenomena of life shines through...”
Turgenev’s characters in the novel “Fathers and Sons” appeared before us as already established personalities with unique, individual, living characters. For Turgenev, of course, the laws of morality and conscience are very important - the foundations of human behavior. The writer tries to reveal the fate of his heroes, taking into account the fate historical development society. Like any great artist, the artist’s detail, Turgenev’s detail: a look, a gesture, a word, an object - everything is extremely important.
In his works, subject details and colors are interesting. Describing Pavel Petrovich, the writer shows that he constantly takes care of appearance, emphasizes the aristocratic nature of his manners and behavior; beautiful polished nails on the fingers of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov really proves that he is a sybarite, a white-handed woman and a slacker.
Gesture. “He turned away, cast a devouring glance at her and, grabbing both her hands, suddenly pulled her to his chest.” He does not mean that he fell in love, but these gestures are details that reveal the entire inner world of the hero.
Let us remember the duel, when it was not noble knighthood, but that duel between Pavel Petrovich and Bazarov, which shows the nobility comically.
Bazarov’s aphorisms are very interesting, which reveal the essence of the hero’s character: “Every person must educate himself”, “Correct society - there will be no diseases”, “As for time, on what I will depend on it - let it depend on me”, “Nature is a workshop, and man is a worker in it” Thus, Bazarov’s aphorisms, written out in detail in the text, allow Turgenev to reveal the hero’s ideological position.
Another interesting detail in the disclosure of images is the technique of verbal irony, when people either say offensive things to each other or speak without hearing the other. (Disputes between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich)
On the pages of the novel, many words sharpen their symbolic meaning: Bazarov stood with his back turned when he declared his love to Anna Sergeevna, as if trying to isolate himself. To reproduce the lively conversational speech of the characters, Turgenev widely uses incomplete sentences, which introduce into their speech a shade of speed of action and the state of excitement of the hero.
Another interesting detail is that in the 19th century the title of the work became the key reference words (L.N. Tolstoy - “War and Peace”, A.S. Griboyedov “Woe from Wit”). Dostoevsky used a different method keyword– italics (trial, case, murder, robbery, then, after that...
5. The objective world in the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment"
When F.M. Dostoevsky focuses all his attention on things in rooms and apartments, diligently and accurately reflecting their appearance; one must pay attention to the slightest detail in the descriptions, which are so rare and meager in his work. Dostoevsky describes Sonya’s home in detail because it is not only a snapshot of her sinfulness, her distorted existence and mental suffering, but also a part of Raskolnikov’s soul, whose fate is in Sonya’s hands. Women in Dostoevsky’s works do not have their own destiny, but they determine the destiny of men and seem to dissolve in it.
Dostoevsky describes Sonya's room. What sadness, what an abomination of desolation... And this chest of drawers, standing as if on the verge of oblivion, close to a terrible sharp corner running somewhere deeper. It seems that one more step and you will find yourself in a world of otherworldly shadows. Sonya was brought to this gray dwelling by her sinful sacrifice. Such sacrifice inevitably gives rise to Sonya's meeting with criminal pride, with the bearer of dark arrogance - Raskolnikov.
Plunging into the depths of all things, situations and states, you begin to comprehend something completely amazing, inaccessible to the Cartesian mind: the fact that Sonya lives in her gray corner is her metaphysical meeting with Raskolnikov, which had already taken place long before the reality. Having settled here, Sonya thereby penetrated the soul of the ideological killer and remained in it forever. Sonya’s room is a part of Raskolnikov’s soul reflected outside. Living in her room, Sonya lived in Raskolnikov’s soul long before she personally met him.
That’s why Raskolnikov’s very difficult promise to tell Sonya who killed Lizaveta sounds so simple. According to Raskolnikov, he then chose Sonya to tell her this, when he had not yet killed Lizaveta, and did not know Sonya herself, but only heard Marmeladov’s drunken story about her. Dostoevsky discovered new worlds and new laws of existence unknown to anyone. Introducing us to these worlds and laws, he shows that everything that needs to happen in reality has already happened in our spiritual depths with the assistance of our own inner will, and that our aspirations, dreams and desires, unknown to our consciousness, accepting various shapes and species materialize in the world of phenomena. Thus, both directly and indirectly, Dostoevsky affirms the thought of the great Origen: “matter is spirituality compacted by human sin.
If Sonya’s room really is the materialized part of Raskolnikov’s soul that has emerged, then it becomes understandable why, listening to Marmeladov, he already “unconsciously knows” who he will kill and to whom he will come to confess to the murder. If the empty room in the Resslich brothel is a symbol of metaphysical emptiness that has long taken possession of the soul of an ideological killer, then one can spiritually feel why at the very first meeting of Svidrigailov with Raskolnikov, both of them instantly and essentially recognize each other.
6. Tolstoy
6.1 Irony and satire in the epic novel “War and Peace”
In the epic novel War and Peace, L.N. Tolstoy’s attitude towards the “big world” is not just negative. He often resorts to irony, and sometimes acts as an accuser, as a satirist.
The human type that is embodied in Ippolit Kuragin is so alien and hateful to Tolstoy that he simply cannot restrain himself in his anger. Obviously, this is why the author’s description of this character is given as grotesque:
“And Prince Hippolyte began to speak Russian with the accent that the French speak when they have spent a year in Russia. Everyone paused, so animatedly, Prince Ippolit urgently demanded attention to his story. - “In Moscow there is one lady une dame for the carriage. And very tall. It was to her taste... She said..." Then Prince Hippolyte began to think, apparently having difficulty thinking..."
The mixed Russian-French language and the obvious stupidity of Prince Hippolyte evoke not so much cheerful as unkind ridicule from the author and his reader. Tolstoy's denunciation is accepted by the reader as natural, as it should be.
Tolstoy hates not only the people of the “big world”, but also the world itself - its atmosphere, abnormal way of life. Here, for example, is how an evening at Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s is described:
“Just as the owner of a spinning workshop, having seated the workers in their places, walks around the establishment, noticing the immobility or the unusual, creaking, too loud knock of the spindle, hurriedly walks, restrains it or puts it into proper motion, so Anna Pavlovna, walking around her living room, approached to a mug that had fallen silent or was talking too much, and with one word or movement she again started a decent conversational machine.”
The world of secular society is presented as a mechanical, machine-like world. And not only is it presented - it is what it is for Tolstoy: here both people and feelings are mechanical.
Tolstoy sometimes expresses his negative attitude towards the character with one single word.
Napoleon, so unloved by Tolstoy, looks at the portrait of his son in his office... This is how the author writes: “He approached the portrait and pretended to be thoughtfully tender...” “Pretended!” A direct assessment of Napoleon's feelings.
4.Comparison
In Anna Pavlovna's salon the guest is a viscount. Tolstoy notes: “Anna Pavlovna obviously treated her guests to it...”.
The word “treated” could be taken as a common metaphor. But the immediately following comparison reveals its direct and negative meaning:
“Just as a good head waiter serves as something supernaturally beautiful that piece of beef that you don’t want to eat if you see it in a dirty kitchen, so this evening Anna Pavlovna served her guests first the Viscount, then the Abbot, as something supernaturally refined "
Tolstoy resorts to comparisons of this kind quite often.
The fourth volume opens with a description of a St. Petersburg evening with the same Anna Pavlovna Scherer. Prince Vasily Kuragin reads a letter, which, as Tolstoy noted, “was revered as an example of patriotic spiritual eloquence.” Prince Vasily was famous in the world for “his art of reading.” This art, comments Tolstoy, “It was believed that words flowed loudly, melodiously, between desperate howls and gentle murmurs, completely regardless of their meaning, so that completely by chance a howl fell on one, and a murmur on the others.”
6.Portrait detail
Often it is done unexpectedly and is specific.
The reader's first meeting with Anatoly Kuragin. About his appearance, Tolstoy says: “Anatole stood straight, eyes open.” We are accustomed to combining the verb “gape” with the word “mouth” (“Gaping your mouth” in a portrait description is perceived as a mockery of the “quickness”, “resourcefulness” of the hero). “Open your eyes” is an unexpected, unusual expression, and therefore especially expressively emphasizes the dullness and lack of intelligence in Anatole’s eyes.
7. Speech detail
The same Anatol Kuragin often repeats the word “a” without need or meaning. For example, in the scene of explanation with Pierre after trying to seduce Natasha: “I don’t know this. A? - said Anatole, cheering up as Pierre overcame his anger. “I don’t know this and don’t want to know... at least you can take back your words.” A? If you want me to fulfill your wish. A?"
This meaningless questioning “a” creates the impression that in front of you is a person who is constantly surprised: he will say a word, and then look around, and don’t really understand himself, and as if he’s asking those around him what, they say, what did I say...
8. External gesture
In Tolstoy it is often incompatible with the words, appearance or actions of the character.
Let us recall once again the scene of reading the letter from the Right Reverend: “Most Gracious Emperor!” - Prince Vasily said sternly and looked around the audience, as if asking whether literature has anyone to say against this. But no one said anything.
6.2 About the artistic skill of L. N. Tolstoy
The first part of the second volume begins with a description of Nikolai Rostov's arrival home. It is worth noting how Tolstoy “overheard” the feelings of a person returning to his native place after a long separation, so close and understandable to all of us. Impatience: quickly, quickly home, to where Nikolai had been striving for all the last months and days. “Is it soon? Soon? Oh, these unbearable streets, shops, rolls, lanterns, cab drivers!” AND joy of recognition: here: “cornice with chipped plaster”; “the same door handle of the castle, for the cleanliness of which the countess was angry, opened just as weakly,” “the same chandelier in a case”... And happiness of love all to you alone, and joy.
After returning, Nikolai Rostov got “his own trotter and the most fashionable leggings, special ones that no one else in Moscow had, and boots, the most fashionable, with the sharpest toes” and turned into a “well done hussar.” Rostov (i.e. responsiveness, sensitivity) and hussar (i.e. recklessness, dashing, rudeness of an unreasoning warrior) - these are two warring parties character of Nikolai Rostov.
Rostov promises to pay his big loss to Dolokhov tomorrow, gives his word of honor and realizes with horror that it is impossible to keep it. He returns home, and in his condition, it is strange for him to see the usual peaceful comfort of the family: “They have everything the same. They don't know anything! Where should I go? Natasha is going to sing. This is incomprehensible and irritates him: why can she be happy, “a bullet in the forehead, and not singing”...
Vasily, according to Tolstoy, a person is alive with a wide variety of feelings, aspirations, and desires. Therefore, the writer sees his hero “now as a villain, now as an angel, now as a sage, now as an idiot, now as a strong man, now as a powerless creature.”
Events Everyday life for the characters in the novel are always significant. Nikolai listens to his sister’s singing, and the unexpected happens to him: “suddenly the whole world focused for him in anticipation of the next note, the next phrase, and everything in the world became divided into three tempos... Eh, our stupid life!” thought Nikolai. “All this, and misfortune, and money, and Dolokhov, and anger, and honor - all nonsense... but here it is - real.”
The requirements of “honor” are everything for Rostov. They determine his behavior. The importance and obligation of noble and hussar rules disappears in the flow of genuine human, present feelings evoked by music . The present Most often it is revealed to a person through a shock, through a crisis.
The dynamics of character development and its inconsistency are reflected in the portrait details of the characters.
For example, Dolokhov. He is poor, ignorant, and his friends (Kuragin, Bezukhov, Rostov) - counts, princes - are wealthy and successful. Rostov and Kuragin have beautiful sisters, Dolokhov has a hunchback. He fell in love with a girl of “heavenly purity”, and Sonya is in love with Nikolai Rostov.
Let us pay attention to the details of the portrait: “his mouth... always had the semblance of a smile”; “light, cold” look. During card game Nikolai Rostov is irresistibly attracted to “broad-boned, reddish arms with hair visible from under his shirt.” “The semblance of a smile”, “cold gaze”, predatory, greedy hands - details that depict the cruel, inexorable appearance of one of the masked people.
A dynamic detail: a look, a gesture, a smile (usually in the form of a common definition or a participial, adverbial phrase) - indicates to the reader the mental state or instantaneous internal movement of the hero:
“Meeting Sonya in the living room, Rostov blushed. He didn't know how to deal with her. Yesterday they kissed in the first minute of the joy of their date, but today they felt that it was impossible to do this; he felt that everyone, both his mother and his sisters, looked at him questioningly and expected him to see how he would behave with her. He kissed her hand and called her you - Sonya. But their eyes, having met, said “you” to each other and kissed tenderly. She asked with her gaze for forgiveness for the fact that at Natasha’s embassy she dared to remind him of his promise and thanked him for his love. With his gaze he thanked her for the offer of freedom and said that, one way or another, he would never stop loving her, because it was impossible not to love her.”
The method of penetrating into the psychology of the character of a work of art is internal monologue– reflections, thoughts (“to oneself”), speech, reasoning of the character. For example, the thoughts of Pierre Bezukhov after a duel with Dolokhov:
“He lay down on the sofa and wanted to fall asleep in order to forget everything that happened to him, but he could not do it. Such a storm of feelings, thoughts, memories arose in his soul that he not only could not sleep, but could not sit still and had to jump up from the sofa and with quick steps walk around the room. Then he imagined her in the first time after her marriage, with open shoulders and a tired, passionate look, and immediately next to her he imagined the beautiful, insolent and firmly mocking face of Dolokhov, as it had been at dinner, and the same face of Dolokhov, pale, trembling as it was when he turned and fell into the snow.
What happened? – he asked himself. - I killed lover, yes, his wife's lover. Yes, it was. From what? How did I get to this point? “Because you married her,” answered the inner voice.”
One thought causes another; each in turn generates a chain reaction of considerations, conclusions, new questions...
The attractiveness of searching, thinking, doubting heroes lies precisely in the fact that they passionately want to understand what life is, what is its highest justice? Hence - the continuous movement of thoughts and feelings, movement as a collision, struggle (“dialectics”) of various decisions. The “discoveries” that the heroes make are steps in the process of their spiritual development.
The dialectic of mental movements is reflected in dialogues: interlocutors interrupt each other, the speech of one wedges itself into the speech of another - and this creates not only a natural intermittency in the conversation, but also a lively confusion of thoughts.
The dialogues reveal either complete mutual understanding (Pierre - Andrei; Pierre - Natasha, Natasha - her mother), or a confrontation of thoughts and feelings (Pierre - Helen; Pierre - Anatole; Prince Andrei - Bilibin).
And in dialogues, the artist often uses inappropriately direct speech so that the author’s attitude is completely clear to the reader.
“dialectics of the soul...” - that’s what N.G. called it. Chernyshevsky features the artistic style of L. Tolstoy in revealing the inner world of the characters. “Dialectics of the soul” determines the complex syntactic structure of a sentence. The artist is not embarrassed by either the bulkiness of a word or sentence, or the spaciousness of expression. The main thing for him is to fully, reasonably, exhaustively express everything that he considers necessary.
7. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
7.1 Dialogues of A.P. Chekhov
This feature of Chekhov’s mastery, by the way, was not immediately understood by critics - for many years they insisted that the detail in Chekhov’s works was accidental and insignificant. Of course, the writer himself did not emphasize the significance of his details, strokes, and artistic details. He generally did not like emphasis in anything; he did not write, as they say, in italics or discharge. He spoke about many things as if in passing, but it was “as if” - the whole point is that the artist, in his own words, counts on the attention and sensitivity of the reader.
At the beginning of the story “The Bride,” the author conveys the difficult, depressed state of Nadya Shumina on the eve of the wedding. And he reports: “From the basement floor, where there was a kitchen, to open window you could hear people rushing there, knocking knives, slamming the door on the block, the smell of fried turkey and pickled cherries...” It would seem that these were purely everyday details. However, immediately further we read: “And for some reason it seemed that now it would be like this all my life, without change, without end!” Before our eyes, “turkey” ceases to be just an everyday detail - it also becomes a symbol of a well-fed, idle life “without change, without end”
Then a dinner is described with mannered and vulgar conversations. And when Chekhov mentions: “They served a big, very fat turkey,” this detail is no longer perceived as neutral or random, it is important for understanding the well-being and mood of the main character.
A similar touch in the story “The Lady with the Dog” looks even more expressive. Gurov in Moscow languishes with memories of Anna Sergeevna.
One day, leaving the doctor's club, he begins a conversation with his card partner about a “charming woman” whom he met in Yalta. And in response he hears: “And just now you were right: the sturgeon is smelly!” These words, so ordinary, seem to hit Gurov and make him suddenly feel the vulgarity and meaninglessness of the life in which he participates.
Chekhov’s detail is deeply not accidental; it is surrounded by the atmosphere of life, way of life, way of life - like this “fat turkey” or “smelly sturgeon”. Chekhov the artist amazes with the variety of tonality of the narrative, the richness of transitions from a harsh recreation of reality to subtle, restrained lyricism, from light, subtle irony to striking mockery.
The words of the writer became a popular saying: “Brevity is the sister of talent.” In a letter to M. Gorky, he wrote: “When a person spends the least number of movements on any specific action, then this is grace.”
Brevity and the ability to say a lot in a few words define everything that comes from Chekhov’s pen (with the exception of a few early stories and the first play). Chekhov's works are poetically elegant, internally proportionate and harmonious; it is not for nothing that Leo Tolstoy called him “Pushkin in prose.”
A.P. Chekhov is the heir to the best traditions of Russian classical literature. The son of Russia, connected with his native land, with Russian history, culture, life with the whole spirit and structure of his works, Chekhov has long been recognized by the whole world.
The modest writer, completely free from vain vanity, predicted a short-lived life for himself as the author of stories, novels and plays. However, he is still modern, and there is not a single wrinkle in his creative portrait.
He lived in the twentieth century for only a few years, but became one of the most beloved and read writers of our time. Together with the names of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the name of Chekhov received recognition from all mankind.
Chekhov is one of the most repertoire playwrights in the world. He is called the Shakespeare of our time. There is not a single continent where his plays and vaudevilles are not performed. And perhaps his most precious feature is that, recognized by millions, he enters every home not as a fashionable celebrity, but as an irreplaceable friend.
7.2 Color detail in Chekhov
Belikov's dark glasses (“Man in a Case”) are an accurate, concrete image: dark glasses separate a person from all living things, extinguish all the colors of life. The “dark glasses” are accompanied by other external details: a raincoat, an umbrella, a warm coat with cotton wool, a gray suede case for a penknife; “his face, it seemed, was also in a cover, since he kept hiding it in his raised collar.”
Vasily's portrait description of Belikov highlights the relative adjective gray - a dull lifeless color, which is combined with Belikov's two constant color definitions - pale and dark: dark glasses on a pale face.
The color background (or rather, its colorlessness) further enhances the meaning of the definitions: small, crooked, weak smile, small pale face...
However, Belikov is not a frozen symbol, but a living face. And Belikov’s lively reaction to events is again given in colors that replace the usual pallor of his face. Thus, having received a caricature about the “anthropos in love,” he becomes angry. He becomes green, “darker than a cloud,” when he meets Varenka and her brother, racing on bicycles. The indignant Belikov “turned from green to white”...
The story “Ionych” is interesting because of its lack of color. For example, Startsev reached out to the Turkins and fell in love with their daughter. But everything remains colorless or dark: dark leaves in the garden, “it was dark”, “in the dark”, “ dark house»…
Vasily, in this dark row there are other colors. For example, “Ekaterina Ivanovna, pink from tension, plays the piano,” - pink only from physical tension. The blue envelope was in which Kotik’s mother sent a letter to Startsev asking him to come to them, the Turkinim. Yellow cemetery sand, yellow and green money with which Doctor Startsev stuffs his pockets. And in the finale, the plump, handsome Ionych and his coachman, also fat, red with a fleshy nape...
These are the “talking” colors of Chekhov’s text, which help the reader to more deeply feel the meaning and meaning of the literary text.
Thus, in conclusion of my work, I can say that the role of detail in Russian literature has great value, and when studying works of art of Russian literature of the 19th century, the reader should pay as much attention as possible to the various elements of the description of the interior, clothing, gesture, and facial expressions of the hero.
I believe that artistic details in works sometimes tell us about something that the author does not write directly about, but wants to convey to the reader, thus a detail can say more than what is said openly.
Bibliography
1. I.S. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons"
2. F.M. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment"
3. A.P. Chekhov “The Bride”, “The Cherry Orchard”, “Man in a Case”, “Lady with a Dog”
4. Literary reference book
5. Yu.N. Tynyanov “Poetics”, “History of Literature”.
6. M. N. Boyko “Lyrics of Nekrasov”.
7. L. N. Tolstoy “War and Peace”