Characteristics of Plyushkin: the hero of the poem Dead Souls.
Gallery of landowners presented in the poem by N.V. Gogol " Dead souls”, ends with the image of Plyushkin. In the scene of meeting Chichikov, the character of the hero is revealed in all its artistic fullness.
The poem reveals such traits of the hero as grumpiness, stinginess, lack of spirituality, suspicion and distrust. He calls the dead peasants “parasites” and grumbles at Mavra, confident that she is deceiving the master. Plyushkin suspects Mavra that she “tampered” his paper. When it turns out that his suspicions are in vain, he begins to grumble, dissatisfied with the rebuff that Mavra gave him. Gogol also emphasizes Plyushkin’s stinginess here. Having found the paper, in order to save money, he asks for a “splinter” instead of a tallow candle. And, having started to write, he scribbles “sparingly line upon line,” regretting that “there will still be a lot of blank space left.” The hero's stinginess acquired hypertrophied features and led his entire house into desolation and chaos. In Plyushkin’s house everything is covered with dust, in his inkwell there is “mouldy liquid and a lot of flies at the bottom.”
Using portrait details, the author reveals to the reader the lack of spirituality of his hero. In passing, Gogol gives us a brief portrait sketch of Plyushkin. We see how suddenly “some kind of warm ray”, “a pale reflection of feeling” flashed on his wooden face. Using an extensive comparison, the author here compares this phenomenon with the appearance of a drowning person on the surface of the waters. But the impression remains immediate. Following this, Plyushkin’s face becomes “even more insensitive and even more vulgar.” Here the hero’s lack of spirituality and lack of living life are emphasized. And at the same time, the “pale reflection of feeling” on his face is probably a potential opportunity for spiritual rebirth. It is known that Plyushkin is the only landowner who, together with Chichikov, was supposed to become a character in the third volume of the poem, according to Gogol’s plan. And it’s not for nothing that the author gives us a biography of this hero, and in this passage he notes that Plyushkin had friends at school.
The hero's speech is typical. It is dominated by abusive expressions (“thief”, “fraudster”, “robber”). Plyushkin's intonations contain threats; he is grumpy, irritated, and emotional. His speech contains exclamatory sentences.
Thus, in the poem the character of the hero appears multifaceted, potentially interesting for readers and the author. Gogol's Plyushkin completes the gallery of Russian landowners opened by Manilov. And this order also, according to critics, has a certain meaning. Some researchers believe that the hero represents the last degree of moral decline, while others, analyzing Gogol’s plan (a poem in three volumes), say that the most soulless, “dead” character in the work is Manilov. Plyushkin is a man* capable of moral rebirth. And in this regard we can talk about great importance this scene in the development of the entire author's plan.
Plyushkin Stepan
- the fifth and last of the “series” of landowners to whom Chichikov turns with an offer to sell him dead souls. In the peculiar negative hierarchy of landowner types derived in the poem, this stingy old man (he is in his seventh decade) occupies both the lowest and the highest level at the same time. His image personifies the complete death of the human soul, the almost complete death of a strong and bright personality, completely consumed by the passion of stinginess - but precisely for this reason, capable of resurrection and transformation. (Below P., of the characters in the poem, only Chichikov himself “fell”, but for him the author’s plan preserved the possibility of an even more grandiose “correction.”)
This dual, “negative-positive” nature of P.’s image is indicated in advance by the ending of the 5th chapter; Having learned from Sobakevich that a stingy landowner lives next door, whose peasants are “dying like flies,” Chichikov tries to find out the way to him from a passing peasant; he doesn’t know any P., but guesses who he’s talking about: “Ah, the patched one!” This nickname is humiliating, but the author (in accordance with the end-to-end technique “ Dead souls") from satire instantly moves to lyrical pathos; admiring the accuracy folk word, gives praise to the Russian mind and, as it were, moves from the space of a morally descriptive novel into the space of an epic poem “like the Iliad.”
But the closer Chichikov is to P.’s house, the more alarming the author’s intonation; suddenly - and as if out of the blue - the author compares himself as a child with his present self, his then enthusiasm with the current “coolness” of his gaze. “Oh my youth! oh my freshness! It is clear that this passage applies equally to the author - and to the “dead” hero, whom the reader will meet. And this involuntary rapprochement of the “unpleasant” character with the author in advance removes the image of P. from that series of “literary and theatrical” misers, with an eye on whom he was written, distinguishes him from the stingy characters of picaresque novels, and from the greedy landowners of moral descriptive epics, and from Harpagon from Molière’s comedy “The Miser” (Harpagon has the same hole as P., below his back), bringing, on the contrary, closer to the Baron from “ The Stingy Knight"Pushkin and Balzac's Gobsek.
The description of Plyushkin's estate allegorically depicts desolation - and at the same time the "cluttering" of his soul, which "does not grow rich in God." The entrance is dilapidated - the logs are pressed in like piano keys; Everywhere there is a special disrepair, the roofs are like a sieve; the windows are covered with rags. At Sobakevich’s they were boarded up at least for the sake of economy, but here they were boarded up solely because of “devastation.” From behind the huts one can see huge piles of stale bread, the color of which is similar to scorched brick. As in a dark, “through the looking glass” world, everything here is lifeless - even the two churches that should form the semantic center of the landscape. One of them, wooden, was empty; the other, stone, was all cracked. A little later image the empty temple will be metaphorically echoed in the words of P., who regrets that the priest will not say a “word” against the universal love of money: “You cannot resist the word of God!” (Traditional for Gogol is the motif of a “dead” attitude towards the Word of Life.) The master’s house, “this strange castle,” is located in the middle of a cabbage garden. The “Plyushkinsky” space cannot be captured with a single glance, it seems to fall apart into details and fragments - first one part will be revealed to Chichikov’s gaze, then another; even the house is in some places one floor, in others two. Symmetry, integrity, balance began to disappear already in the description of Sobakevich’s estate; here this “process” goes in breadth and depth. All this reflects the “segmented” consciousness of the owner, who forgot about the main thing and focused on the tertiary. For a long time he no longer knows how much, where and what is produced on his vast and ruined farm, but he keeps an eye on the level of the old liqueur in the decanter to see if anyone has drunk.
The desolation “benefited” only the Plyushkino garden, which, starting near the manor’s house, disappears into the field. Everything else perished, became dead, as in a Gothic novel, which is reminiscent of the comparison of Plyushkin’s house with a castle. It’s like Noah’s Ark, inside of which there was a flood (it’s no coincidence that almost all the details of the description, like in the Ark, have their own “pair” - there are two churches, two gazebos, two windows, one of which, however, is covered with a triangle of blue sugar paper ; P. had two blond daughters, etc.). The dilapidation of his world is akin to the dilapidation of the “antediluvian” world, which perished from passions. And P. himself is the failed “forefather” Noah, who from a zealous owner degenerated into a hoarder and lost any certainty of appearance and position.
Having met P. on the way to the house, Chichikov cannot understand who is in front of him - a woman or a man, a housekeeper or a housekeeper, “rarely shaving beard"? Having learned that this “housekeeper” is a rich landowner, the owner of 1000 souls (“Ehva! And I’m the owner!”), Chichikov cannot get out of his stupor for twenty minutes. Portrait of P. (long chin, which has to be covered with a handkerchief so as not to spit; small, not yet extinguished eyes run from under high eyebrows like mice; a greasy robe has turned into yuft; a rag on the neck instead of a handkerchief) also indicates a complete “loss of "A hero from the image of a rich landowner. But all this is not for the sake of “exposure”, but only for the sake of reminding of the norm of “wise stinginess”, from which P. was tragically separated and to which he can still return.
Previously, before the “fall,” P.’s gaze, like a hardworking spider, “ran busily, but efficiently, along all ends of its economic web”; Now the spider entwines the pendulum of the stopped clock. Even the silver pocket watch that P. is going to give - but never gives - to Chichikov in gratitude for “getting rid of” dead souls, and they are “spoiled.” A toothpick, which the owner may have used to pick his teeth even before the French invasion, also reminds us of a bygone time (and not just stinginess).
It seems that, having described the circle, the narrative returned to the point from which it began - the first of the “Chichikovsky” landowners, Manilov, lives just as outside of time as the last of them, P. But there is no time in Manilov’s world and never has was; he has lost nothing - he has nothing to return. P. had everything. This is the only hero of the poem, besides Chichikov himself, who has a biography, has a past; The present can do without the past, but without the past there is no path to the future. Before the death of his wife, P. was a zealous, experienced landowner; my daughters and son had a French teacher and madame; however, after this, P. developed a widower “complex”; he became more suspicious and stingier. He took the next step away from the path of life determined for him by God after the secret flight of his eldest daughter, Alexandra Stepanovna, with the captain and the unauthorized assignment of his son to military service. (Even before the “flight” he considered the military to be gamblers and wasteful people, but now he is completely hostile to military service.) The youngest daughter died; son lost at cards; P.'s soul became completely hardened; “a wolfish hunger of stinginess” took possession of him. Even the buyers refused to deal with him - because he is a “demon”, not a person.
The return of the “prodigal daughter,” whose life with the captain’s captain turned out to be not particularly satisfying (an obvious plot parody of the ending of Pushkin’s “ Stationmaster"), reconciles P. with her, but does not save her from destructive greed. After playing with his grandson, P. didn’t give Alexandra Stepanovna anything, but he dried the Easter cake she gave her on his second visit and is now trying to treat Chichikov to this cracker. (The detail is also not accidental; Easter cake is an Easter “meal”; Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection; by drying the cake, P. symbolically confirmed that his soul had become dead; but in itself the fact that a piece of cake, albeit moldy, is always kept by him , is associatively connected with the theme of the possible “Easter” revival of his soul.)
Clever Chichikov, having guessed the substitution that occurred in P., “retools” his usual opening speech accordingly; just as in P. “virtue” is replaced by “economy”, and “rare qualities of the soul” by “order”, so they are replaced in Chichikov’s “attack” to theme of the dead shower. But the fact of the matter is that greed was not able to take possession of P.’s heart to the last limit. Having completed the deed of sale (Chichikov convinces the owner that he is ready to take on the tax costs of the dead “for your pleasure”; the economic P.’s list of the dead is already ready, unknown to what need), P. ponders who could reassure her in the city on his behalf, and remembers that the Chairman was his school friend. And this memory (the course of the author’s thoughts at the beginning of the chapter is completely repeated here) suddenly revives the hero: “... on this wooden face<...>expressed<...>a pale reflection of feeling." Naturally, this is a random and momentary glimpse of life.
Therefore, when Chichikov, not only having acquired 120 dead souls, but also having bought runaways for 27 kopecks. for the soul, leaves from P., the author describes a twilight landscape in which the shadow and light are “completely mixed” - as in the unfortunate soul of P.
The hero's surname has become a household name for centuries. Even someone who has not read the poem represents a stingy person.
The image and characterization of Plyushkin in the poem “Dead Souls” is a character deprived of human traits, who has lost the meaning of the appearance of his light.
Character appearance
The landowner is over 60 years old. He is old, but he cannot be called weak and sick. How does the author describe Plyushkina? Stingily, like himself:
- An incomprehensible floor hidden under strange rags. Chichikov takes a long time to figure out who is in front of him: a man or a woman.
- Hard gray hair, sticking out like a brush.
- An insensitive and vulgar face.
- The hero’s clothing evokes disgust, one is ashamed to look at it, ashamed of a person dressed in something like a robe.
Relationships with people
Stepan Plyushkin reproaches his peasants for theft. There is no reason for this. They know their owner and understand that there is nothing left to take from the estate. Everything has been tidied up at Plyushkin's, rotting and deteriorating. Reserves are accumulating, but no one is going to use them. A lot of things: wood, dishes, rags. Gradually, the reserves turn into a pile of dirt and scrap. The heap can be compared to the trash heap collected by the owner of the manor's house. There is no truth in the landowner's words. People don't have time to steal and become a swindler. Due to unbearable living conditions, stinginess and hunger, men run away or die.In relationships with people, Plyushkin is angry and grumpy:
Likes to argue. He quarrels with men, argues, and never immediately accepts the words spoken to him. He scolds for a long time, talks about the absurd behavior of his interlocutor, although he is silent in response.
Plyushkin believes in God. He blesses those who leave him on their journey, he is afraid of God’s judgment.
Hypocritical. Plyushkin tries to pretend to care. In fact, it all ends in hypocritical actions. The gentleman enters the kitchen, he wants to check if the courtiers are eating him, but instead he eats most of what he has cooked. Whether people have enough cabbage soup and porridge is of little interest to him, the main thing is that he is full.
Plyushkin does not like communication. He avoids guests. Having calculated how much his household loses when receiving them, he begins to stay away and abandons the custom of visiting guests and hosting them. He himself explains that his acquaintances fell out of touch or died, but what is more likely is that no one simply wanted to visit such a greedy person.
Character of the hero
Plyushkin is a character who is difficult to find positive traits. He is completely permeated with lies, stinginess and sloppiness.What traits can be identified in the character’s character:
Incorrect self-esteem. Behind the external good nature lies greed and a constant desire for profit.
The desire to hide your condition from others. Plyushkin becomes poor. He says he has no food when barns full of grain rot for years. He complains to the guest that he has little land and no patch of hay for the horses, but this is all a lie.
Cruelty and indifference. Nothing changes the mood of the stingy landowner. He does not experience joy, despair. Only cruelty and an empty, callous look are all that the character is capable of.
Suspicion and anxiety. These feelings develop in him at breakneck speed. He begins to suspect everyone of stealing and loses his sense of self-control. Stinginess occupies his entire essence.
Main distinguishing feature- this is stinginess. The curmudgeon Stepan Plyushkin is such that it is difficult to imagine unless you meet him in reality. Stinginess manifests itself in everything: clothes, food, feelings, emotions. Nothing in Plyushkin is fully manifested. Everything is hidden and hidden. The landowner saves money, but for what? Just to collect them. He does not spend either for himself, or for his relatives, or on the household. The author says that the money was buried in boxes. This attitude towards a means of enrichment is amazing. Only the miser from the poem can live from hand to mouth on sacks of grain, having thousands of serf souls and vast areas of land. The scary thing is that there are many such Plyushkins in Russia.
Attitude towards relatives
The landowner does not change in relation to his relatives. He has a son and a daughter. The author says that in the future his son-in-law and daughter will happily bury him. The hero's indifference is frightening. The son asks his father to give him money to buy uniforms, but, as the author says, he gives him “shish.” Even the poorest parents do not abandon their children.The son lost at cards and again turned to him for help. Instead, he received a curse. The father never, even mentally, remembered his son. He is not interested in his life, fate. Plyushkin does not think whether his offspring are alive.
A rich landowner lives like a beggar. The daughter, who came to her father for help, takes pity on him and gives him a new robe. The 800 souls of the estate surprise the author. Existence is comparable to the life of a poor shepherd.
Stepan lacks deep human feelings. As the author says, feelings, even if they had the beginnings, “diminished every minute.”
A landowner living among garbage and rubbish is no exception, a fictional character. It reflects the reality of Russian reality. Greedy misers starved their peasants, turned into semi-animals, lost their human features, and aroused pity and fear for the future.
Plan
1. The history of writing the poem “Dead Souls”.
2. The main task that N.V. set for himself. Gogol when writing a poem.
3. Stepan Plyushkin as one of the representatives of the landowner class.
4. Appearance, life and morals of Stepan Plyushkin.
5. The reasons for the moral decay of the hero.
6. Conclusion.
The famous poem by N.V. Gogol's "" was written in 1835. It was during this period that such a direction as realism gained particular popularity in literature, the main goal of which was a truthful and reliable depiction of reality through generalization typical features person, society and life in general.
Throughout creative path was interested in the inner world of man, his development and formation. The writer set his main task when writing the poem “Dead Souls” to be able to comprehensively show the negative features of the landowner class. A striking example of such a generalization is the image of Stepan Plyushkin.
Plyushkin does not appear in the poem right away, this last landowner, whom Chichikov visits during his travels. However, for the first time, Chichikov learns brief reviews about his way of life and character in passing while communicating with Nozdryov and Sobakevich. As it turned out, Stepan Plyushkin is a landowner who is already over sixty, the owner of a large estate and more than a thousand serfs. The hero is distinguished by his particular stinginess, greed and mania for accumulation, but even such an unpleasant characteristic did not stop Chichikov and he decided to get to know him.
Meets the hero on his estate, which was in decline and devastation. Was no exception main house: all the rooms in it were locked, except for two, in one of them the hero lived. It seemed that in this room Plyushkin put away everything that caught his eye, any little thing that he later did not use anyway: these were broken things, broken dishes, small pieces of paper, in a word - junk that no one needed.
Plyushkin's appearance was as unkempt as his house. It was clear that the clothes had long since fallen into disrepair, and the hero himself looked clearly older than his years. But it wasn’t always like this... Until recently, Stepan Plyushkin lived a measured, calm life, surrounded by his wife and children on his native estate. Everything changed overnight... Suddenly the wife dies, the daughter marries an officer and runs away from her home, the son goes to serve in the regiment. Loneliness, melancholy and despair took possession of this man. Everything that seemed to support his world collapsed. The hero lost heart, but the last straw was the death of his outlet - his youngest daughter. Life was divided into “before” and “after”. If quite recently Plyushkin lived only for the well-being of his family, now he sees his main goal only in the senseless filling of warehouses, barns, rooms of the house, in the moral annihilation of himself... he is going crazy. The stinginess and greed that developed every day finally broke the thin and previously strained thread of relations with the children, who were ultimately deprived of his blessing and financial support. This reveals the hero’s special cruelty towards loved ones. Plyushkin loses human face. It is no coincidence that in the first minutes of meeting the hero, Chichikov sees in front of him a sexless creature, which he mistakes for an elderly woman - the housekeeper. And only after several minutes of reflection, he realizes that in front of him is still a man.
But why exactly is this so: moral exhaustion, a ruined estate, a mania for hoarding? Perhaps, by doing so, the hero was only trying to fill his inner world, his emotional devastation, but this initial passion over time grew into a destructive addiction, which at the root, from the inside, eliminated the hero. But he just lacked love, friendship, compassion and simple human happiness...
Now it is impossible to say with complete confidence what the hero would be like if he had a beloved family, the opportunity to communicate with children and loved ones, because Stepana Plyushkina N.V. Gogol portrayed exactly this: a hero who “lives an aimless life, vegetates,” being, in the words of the author of the poem, “a hole in humanity.” However, in spite of everything, those human feelings still remained in the hero’s soul that were unknown to the other landowners whom Chichikov visited. Firstly, there is a feeling of gratitude. Plyushkin is the only one of the heroes who considered it correct to express gratitude to Chichikov for the purchase of “dead souls”. Secondly, he is no stranger to a reverent attitude towards the past and towards the life that he now so lacked: what inner inspiration ran across his face at the mere mention of his old friend! All this suggests that the flame of life has not yet gone out in the hero’s soul, it is there and it is glowing!
Stepan Plyushkin certainly evokes pity. It is this image that makes you think about how important it is to have loved ones in your life who will always be there: both in moments of joy and in moments of sadness, who will support, lend a hand and stay close. But at the same time, it is important to remember that in any situation you must remain human and not lose your moral character! You need to live, since life is given to everyone, in order to leave behind a memorable mark!
One of the most bright characters Gogol, literary hero, whose name has long become a household name, a character who is remembered by everyone who read “Dead Souls” - landowner Stepan Plyushkin. His memorable figure closes the gallery of images of landowners presented by Gogol in the poem. Plyushkin, who even gave his name to the official disease (Plyushkin syndrome, or pathological hoarding), is essentially a very rich man who has led his vast economy to complete decline, and huge amount serfs - to poverty and a miserable existence.
This fifth and final companion of Chichikov is a shining example how dead it can become human soul. Therefore, the title of the poem is very symbolic: it not only directly indicates that we are talking about “dead souls” - as the dead serfs were called, but also about the pitiful, deprived human qualities, the devastated souls of landowners and officials.
Characteristics of the hero
("Plyushkin", artist Alexander Agin, 1846-47)
Gogol begins the reader’s acquaintance with the landowner Plyushkin with a description of the surroundings of the estate. Everything indicates desolation, insufficient funding and the absence of a strong hand of the owner: dilapidated houses with leaky roofs and windows without glass. The sad landscape is enlivened by the owner's garden, although neglected, but described in much more positive colors: clean, tidy, filled with air, with a “regular sparkling marble column.” However, Plyushkin’s home again evokes melancholy, around there is desolation, despondency and mountains of useless, but extremely necessary for the old man, rubbish.
Being the richest landowner in the province (the number of serfs reached 1000), Plyushkin lived in extreme poverty, eating scraps and dried crackers, which did not cause him the slightest discomfort. He was extremely suspicious; everyone around him seemed treacherous and unreliable, even his own children. Only the passion for hoarding was important for Plyushkin; he collected everything he could get his hands on on the street and dragged it into the house.
("Chichikov at Plyushkin's", artist Alexander Agin, 1846-47)
Unlike other characters, Plyushkin's life story is given in full. The author introduces the reader to a young landowner, talking about a good family, his beloved wife and three children. Neighbors even came to the zealous owner to learn from him. But my wife died eldest daughter she ran away with a military man, her son joined the army, which his father did not approve of, and the youngest daughter also died. And gradually the respected landowner turned into a man whose whole life was subordinated to accumulation for the sake of the accumulation process itself. All other human feelings, which had not previously been bright, faded away in him completely.
It is interesting that some professors of psychiatry mentioned that Gogol very clearly and at the same time artistically described a typical case of senile dementia. Others, for example, psychiatrist Ya.F. Kaplan, deny this possibility, saying that psychopathological traits do not appear sufficiently in Plyushkin, and Gogol simply illuminated the state of old age, which he encountered everywhere.
The image of the hero in the work
Stepan Plyushkin himself is described as a creature dressed in unkempt rags, looking like a woman from afar, but the stubble on his face still made it clear that the main character was a representative of the stronger sex. Given the general amorphousness of this figure, the writer focuses attention on individual facial features: a protruding chin, a hooked nose, lack of teeth, eyes expressing suspicion.
Gogol - great master words - with bright strokes shows us a gradual but irreversible change human personality. A person, in whose eyes intelligence shone in previous years, gradually turns into a pitiful miser who has lost all his best feelings and emotions. The main goal of the writer is to show how terrible the coming old age can be, how small human weaknesses can turn into pathological traits under certain life circumstances.
If the writer simply wanted to portray a pathological miser, he would not go into details of his youth, a description of the circumstances that led to his current state. The author himself tells us that Stepan Plyushkin is the future of the fiery young man in old age, that unsightly portrait, upon seeing which the young man would recoil in horror.
("Peasants at Plyushkin", artist Alexander Agin, 1846-47)
However, Gogol leaves a small chance for this hero: when the writer conceived the third volume of the work, he planned to leave Plyushkin - the only landowner Chichikov met - in an updated, morally revived form. Describing the landowner’s appearance, Nikolai Vasilyevich separately singles out the old man’s eyes: “the little eyes had not yet gone out and ran from under his high eyebrows, like mice...”. And the eyes, as we know, are the mirror of the human soul. In addition, Plyushkin, seemingly having lost all human feelings, suddenly decides to give Chichikov a gold watch. True, this impulse immediately fades away, and the old man decides to include the watch in the deed of gift, so that after death at least someone will remember him with a kind word.
Thus, if Stepan Plyushkin had not lost his wife, his life could have turned out quite well, and his old age would not have turned into such a deplorable existence. The image of Plyushkin completes the gallery of portraits of degraded landowners and very accurately describes the lowest level to which a person can slide in his lonely old age.