Introduction ………………………………………………………………………3
Definition of the concept…………………………………………………………….5
Thing as an artistic detail……………………………………..8
Landscape details……………………………………………………...………..11
Portrait detail…………………………………………………….15
2.1. Features of the writer’s realism…………………………………….18
2.2. Goncharov – master of artistic detail…………………………..20
Portraits of the heroes of “An Ordinary Story”……………………….22
An artistic detail as an exponent of the state of mind…..26
Non-verbal detail in the work………………………..30
Gaze and its function……………………………………………..33
Concomitant and dissonant detail……………………………35
Landscape art of Goncharov…………………………………...39
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………43
…………………………………...45
Introduction
Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov is one of the greatest masters of Russian realistic prose. Belinsky called his talent “strong, wonderful” and pointed to Goncharov’s “extraordinary skill” in depicting characters. One of the means of creating such unique and realistic characters was the use of artistic detail. An artistic detail is one of the means of creating an artistic image, which helps to present the picture, object or character depicted by the author in a unique individuality.
Turning to one of the three novels by I.A. Goncharov’s “Ordinary History”, it should be determined relevance of this study. The novel “An Ordinary Story” is the writer’s first serious work, but it already fully reflected his spiritual maturity. By focusing on his first work, we dive deeper into the author’s artistic world, understand the intent of the work, and try to identify the origins that became the starting point for subsequent novels.
Target This work is to identify the features and determine the role of artistic detail in the novel by I.A. Goncharov "Ordinary History". To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve a number of tasks:
Define artistic detail and determine its role in literature;
Characterize Goncharov’s method and prove that detail plays an important place in his work;
Consider portrait, landscape and subject details in the novel, determine their specificity.
Subject This study was based on the functioning of the artistic detail in the work “An Ordinary Story”, which is object of study.
In accordance with the objectives set in Chapter I
the concept of artistic detail is considered and more detailed analysis details-things, landscape and portrait details. Chapter II is devoted to consideration of the main characteristic features creative method I.A. Goncharova. In Chapter III we turn to a specific work “An Ordinary Story” and analyze the artistic detail, based on the contrast of two life positions main characters of the novel.
When researching the topic of this work, we relied on the works of: A.G. Tseytlina “I.A. Goncharov", N.I. Prutskova “The Skill of Goncharov – a Novelist”, Galanova B. “Painting with Words: Portrait. Scenery. Thing".
The main results of this study are presented in the conclusion.
Chapter I. Artistic detail
Definition of the concept
The picture of the depicted world, the image of the hero of a work of literature in a unique individuality, consists of individual artistic details. The composition of the components and details of subject figurativeness is important in all literary genres. But in epic works its possibilities are especially great.
Being an element of an artistic whole, a detail in itself is the smallest image, a micro-image. At the same time, the detail is almost always part of a larger image.
“Detailing the objective world in literature is not just interesting, important, desirable, it inevitable; in other words, this is not decoration, but the essence of the image." After all, a writer is not able to recreate an object in all its features (and not just mention it), and it is a detail, a set of details that “replaces” the whole in the text, evoking in the reader the associations the author needs. The author relies on the imagination and experience of the reader, who mentally adds the missing elements. R. Ingarden calls this elimination of incomplete places specification works by the reader, it is individual for each one. The use of artistic detail not only replaces spatial, detailed descriptions, but also allows us to trace the dynamics of changes occurring in a person. For example, Tolstoy is very attentive to the eyes of Natasha Rostova. Often it is enough for him to point out Natasha’s look or the expression in her eyes for the reader to get an idea of her inner state.
TO artistic detail(from the French Detail - detail, trifle) refer mainly to subject details in a broad sense: details of everyday life, landscape, portrait, interior, as well as gesture, subjective reaction, action and speech (the so-called speech characteristic). Initially, artistic detail was perceived as a means of depicting (describing) the volumetricity and concreteness of the objective world and served as a guarantee of life authenticity and artistic truth.
Subsequently, the aesthetic functions of the detail became more complex, although “fidelity to detail” remained one of the hallmarks of classical realism of the 19th century.
Classification details repeats the structure of the objective world, composed of “components of different quality” - events, actions of characters, their portraits, psychological and speech characteristics, landscape, interior, etc. And B. Esin identifies three large groups: detailsplot, descriptive,psychological.The predominance of one type or another gives rise to a corresponding property, or dominant, style:“plot content” (“Taras Bulba” by Gogol), “descriptiveness” (“Dead Souls”), “psychologism” (“Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky); the named properties “may not exclude each other within the same work” .
Depending on the specific implementation of the aesthetic range, a detail can be clarifying, clarifying and revealing the writer’s intention, but it can also be a semantic focus, a condenser of the author’s idea, the leitmotif of the work (in Chekhov A.P.).
Artistic details are highlighted, demonstrating their own significance in the artistic unity of the whole - in N.V. Gogol, C. Dickens, L.N. Tolstoy and structurally neutral, inconspicuous, disappearing and leading into subtext - in E. Hemingway, Chekhov. From the point of view of stylistic coloring and in terms of their subject content, details can be spectacular, exotic (V.P. Kataev, Yu.K. Olesha) and restrained, “modest”, even trivial, without, however, losing their character (I.A. Goncharov).
It should be said about the functions of the artistic detail. Detail focuses attention on what seems most important or characteristic to the writer in nature, in a person or in his environment objective world. For example, the substantive details in the depiction of Onegin’s office express the author’s ironic attitude towards the hero.
In the case when the author enhances some details, they turn into artistic details in which the author’s attitude towards life and characters is manifested. The episode with Katerina Ivanovna’s “draded damask scarf” in “Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky testifies to the writer’s sympathetic attitude towards this unfortunate woman.
Some artistic details become multi-valued symbols that have psychological, social and philosophical meaning (“the case” in Chekhov’s story “The Man in the Case”).
Exist different types compositions of object-visual details. In the works of some writers (Turgenev and Goncharov, Balzac and Zola), portraits, landscapes, actual psychological characteristics, and statements of characters are clearly separated from each other: one or another fact, object, or phenomenon is consistently and leisurely characterized. When reading the works of other writers, on the contrary, one often gets the impression that we are talking about everything at once: everyday, psychological, portrait, landscape characteristics are so compact and so “merged” in the text of the work that it is not easy to single out one thing (example - Chekhov's stories).
Thing as an artistic detail
The world of things constitutes an essential facet of human reality, both primary and artistically realized. This is the sphere of human activity and habitat. A thing is directly related to their behavior, consciousness and constitutes a necessary component of culture: “a thing outgrows its “thingness” and begins to live, act, “substance” in spiritual space" . Things are made by someone, belong to someone, evoke a certain attitude towards themselves, become a source of impressions, experiences, thoughts. They were placed by someone in exactly this place and are faithful to their purpose, or, on the contrary, for some reason they are in a purely random place and, having no owner, lose their meaning and turn into trash. In all these facets, things that are either values or “anti-values” are able to appear in art (in particular, in literary works), constituting their essential link.
One of the leitmotifs of literature of the 19th-20th centuries. - a thing akin to a person, as if fused with his life, home, everyday life. Carefully depicted by N.V. Gogol depicts things in the house of Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna (“Old World Landowners”): bundles of dried pears and apples on a palisade, a neatly maintained clay floor, chests, drawers in the rooms, a singing door.
In the literature of the 19th-20th centuries. a degrading prosaic illumination of the material world predominates rather than an elevating poetic one. In Gogol and in the “post-Gogol” period, life with its material surroundings is often presented as dull, monotonous, burdensome to a person, repulsive, insulting aesthetic feeling. Let us remember Raskolnikov’s room, one corner of which was “terribly sharp”, the other “too ugly blunt”, or the clock in “Notes from the Underground”, which “wheezes as if they are being strangled”, after which a “thin, disgusting ringing” is heard. At the same time, man is depicted as alienated from the world of things, which thereby bears the stamp of desolation and deadness.
Literature of the 20th century was marked by an unprecedentedly wide use of images of the material world, not only as attributes of everyday life, people’s habitat, but also (above all!) as objects organically fused with the inner life of a person and at the same time having a symbolic meaning: both psychological and “existential”, ontological (so-called related parts).
In addition, there are dissonant details, i.e. they are presented as contrasting and contradictory to the inner world of the heroes. Such a detail invites the reader to take a closer look at the subject, without skimming the surface of the phenomena. Falling out of line, she attracts attention.
Conventionally, we can distinguish the most important functions of things in literature, such as cultural (especially significant in travel novels, historical novels and everyday life works), characterological (shows the intimate connection of things with their owners), plot-compositional (characteristic of detective literature, so called evidence details).
So, material specificity constitutes an integral and very significant facet of verbal and artistic imagery. An object in a literary work (both within interiors and outside them) has a wide range of meaningful functions. In this case, things “enter” literary texts differently. Most often they are episodic, present in very few episodes of the text, and are often mentioned in passing, as if in passing.
Things can be “presented” by writers either in the form of some kind of “objective” reality, dispassionately depicted (remember Oblomov’s room in the first chapters of I. A. Goncharov’s novel; descriptions of shops in E. Zola’s romance “Ladies’ Happiness”), or as someone’s impression from what he saw, which is not so much painted as drawn with single strokes, subjectively colored. The first style is perceived as more traditional, the second - as akin to modern art.
Landscape details
The forms of the presence of nature in literature are varied. These are mythological embodiments of her forces, and poetic personifications, and emotionally charged judgments about her (whether individual exclamations or entire monologues), and descriptions of animals, plants, their, so to speak, portraits, and, finally, landscapes themselves - descriptions of broad natural spaces.
In addition, there are landscape details - these are individual significant elements in an urban or natural landscape that carry the function of a deeper analysis of the situation or the inner world of the hero at that moment. Extensive pictures of nature are always noticeable, often creating a background; landscape details sometimes play a more significant role, but they may remain unnoticed by readers, because sometimes the author skillfully hides them behind everyday details.
In folklore and in the early stages of the existence of literature, non-landscape images of nature prevailed: its forces were mythologized, personified, personified, and at the same time often participated in people’s lives. A striking example is “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.”
The time of birth of landscape as an essential link in verbal and artistic imagery is the 18th century . The so-called descriptive poetry (J. Thomson, A. Pope) widely recreated pictures of nature, which at that time (and later!) was presented mainly elegiacally - in tones of regret about the past. This is the famous “Elegy Written in a Country Cemetery” by T. Gray.
The nature of the landscape changed noticeably in the first decades of the 19th century, in Russia - starting with A.S. Pushkin. Every major writer of the 19th-20th centuries. - a special, specific natural world, presented primarily in the form of landscapes. In the works of I.S. Turgenev and L.N. Tolstoy. F.M. Dostoevsky and N.A. Nekrasov, F.I. Tyutchev and A.A. Fet, I. L. Bunin and A.L. Blok, M.M. Prishvina and BL. Pasternak masters nature in its personal significance for the authors and their heroes.
In the literature of the 20th century. (especially in lyrical poetry) the subjective vision of nature often takes precedence over its objectivity, so that specific landscapes and the definition of space are leveled out, or even disappear altogether. These are many of Blok’s poems, where landscape specifics seem to dissolve in fog and twilight.
Another feature of the works of the 19th – 20th centuries are city (urban) landscapes. The city becomes not just a background, a place where events unfold, but also important factor, influencing the inner world and philosophical self-knowledge of the heroes.
Images of nature (both landscape and all others) have a deep and completely unique meaningful significance. The centuries-old culture of mankind has rooted the idea of the goodness and urgency of the unity of man with nature, of their deep and indissoluble connection. This idea was artistically embodied in different ways.
In many works, writers focus not on the background itself, but on a specific detail of nature. For example, a lonely pine and a palm tree (“In the wild north it stands alone...”), a lonely old cliff (Utes”), an oak leaf (“An oak leaf tore off from a branch of my birth...”) - all these are details that already turn into Lermontov’s poetry. symbols of loneliness, alienation. In L.N. Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”, at key moments in the heroes’ spiritual quest, the author creates images-symbols that help to understand their self-knowledge or insight (Prince Andrei, wounded in battle, sees a “bottomless blue sky” in front of him).
The motif of the garden - nature cultivated and decorated by man - is present in the literature of almost all countries and eras. The garden often symbolizes the world as a whole. “The garden,” notes D.S. Likhachev, “always expresses a certain philosophy, an idea of the world, man’s relationship to nature, this is a microcosm in its ideal expression” . The novels of I.S. are unimaginable without gardens and parks. Turgenev, works by A.P. Chekhov (in “The Cherry Orchard” the words are heard: “... all of Russia is our garden”), poetry and prose of I.A. Bunin, poems by A.A. Akhmatova with their Tsarskoye Selo theme.
The principle of figurative parallelism is widespread in literature, based on a contrasting comparison or likening the internal state of a person to the life of nature. The “discovery” of nature is associated with the awareness of man as a particle of the Universe included in its life. The description of the landscape in this case creates an idea of state of mind heroes. The psychological landscape correlates natural phenomena with inner world person.
The landscape can be given through the perception of the character as he moves. Let's turn to Chekhov's story “The Steppe”. This story is a vivid example of a psychological landscape that excludes description for the sake of description; it is an example of the writer’s knowledge of the secrets of a child’s soul.
Description of the landscape can do even more complex function. It can explain a lot about the character of the hero.
Goncharov’s description of Oblomovka, for example, seems to be deliberately deprived by the author of any poetry; he directly says about this: “The poet and the dreamer would not be satisfied even general view this modest and unpretentious area.” But the line of words, the warm feeling that permeates every picture, landscape sketch, refute this assertion.
The key words of this episode are the following: calm, peace, silence, quiet, sleepy, sleep, death. “Silence and undisturbed calm reign in the morals of the people in that region,” “life, like a calm river, flowed past them,” “everything promises a calm, long-term life there... and an unnoticed, dream-like death...” Characters of those who are not in a hurry , the gentle inhabitants of Oblomovka, the character of the main character of the novel and the essence of such a phenomenon as
“Oblomovism” are revealed, along with other figurative and expressive means, through the details of the description of the landscape. The principle of psychological parallelism in the episode “Oblomov’s Dream” is manifested in the likening of nature’s life to human life.
The peculiarity of the functioning of landscape details is that they can serve as plot motivation, i.e. to direct the course of events in one direction or another (“Blizzard” by A.S., Pushkin).
1.4. Portrait detail
A portrait of a character is a description of his appearance: physical, natural and, in particular, age-related properties (facial features and figures, hair color), as well as everything in a person’s appearance that is formed by the social environment, cultural tradition, individual initiative (clothing and jewelry , hair and cosmetics). A portrait can capture body movements and postures characteristic of a character, gestures and facial expressions, facial and eye expressions. With all this, he creates a stable, stable complex of external human traits.
Turning to literature, it must be said that until the era of romanticism, idealizing portraits dominated in it. They are replete with metaphors, comparisons, epithets. In works of a humorous and farcical nature, a grotesque manner is used (remember F. Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”).
For all their opposition, idealizing and grotesque portraits have a common property: they hyperbolically capture one human quality: in the first case, physical-spiritual perfection, in the second, the material-physical principle.
There are two types of psychological portrait:
IN portrait description the correspondence between the hero’s appearance and his inner world can be emphasized.
The hero's appearance and his inner world are correlated according to the principle of contrast (another side of the dissonant detail).
The first type of portrait is used by all authors throughout the history of literature. But the second one requires special skill from the author (using the example of “An Ordinary Story” we will see this later when we turn to the dissonant detail).
Over time (especially clearly in the 19th century), portraits prevailed in literature, revealing the complexity and diversity of the appearance through the writer’s penetration into the soul of the hero and with psychological analysis (About Pechorin: “The eyes did not laugh when he laughed... This is a sign of either an evil disposition or deep constant sadness").
The portrait of the hero, as a rule, is localized in one place in the work. More often it is given at the time of the character's first appearance, i.e. expositionally. But literature also knows another way of introducing portrait characteristics into the text. It can be called leitmotif. A striking example of this is the repeated references throughout Tolstoy’s novel to radiant eyes Princess Marya.
IN literary portraits The attention of authors often focuses more on what figures or faces express, what impression they leave, what thoughts and feelings they evoke, rather than on themselves as a depicted reality (Pulcheria Alexandrovna in F.M. Dostoevsky).
Portraits capture not only the static in the “outer” person, but also gestures and facial expressions, which are dynamic in nature and undergo endless changes depending on the situations of a given moment. At the same time, these fluid forms are based on a stable, stable reality, which can be called a behavioral attitude or orientation. “By the manner of speaking,” wrote A.F. Losev, “by the look of the eyes... by the holding of hands and feet... by the voice... not to mention the whole actions, I can always find out what kind of person is in front of me... Observing... the expression of a person’s face... you definitely see something internal here.” .
Forms of behavior are recreated, comprehended and evaluated by writers very actively, constituting no less important facet of the world of a literary work than the portraits themselves. At the same time, portrait and “behavioral” characteristics find different embodiments in the works. The first ones, as a rule, are one-time and exhaustive. Behavioral ones are usually dispersed in the text, repeated and variable.
Not a single hero is created without a description of the portrait, and these two sides of the artistic appearance of the character - portrait and “behavioral” - steadily interacting, present him to us in all its completeness, and sometimes even inconsistency.
Chapter II. Artistic method I.A. Goncharova
2.1. Features of the writer's realism
“When drawing, I rarely know at that moment what my image means,
portrait, character; I only see him alive in front of me..."
A.I. Goncharov
What are the distinctive features of Goncharov’s realism and his style? How were his views on the nature of art reflected in his works? How did Goncharov combine image and detail and how, with the help of things and objects, did he present us with the intended image in its entirety?
These are the issues that are planned to be addressed. Let's try to decide on the method used by I.A. Goncharov, based on his views on the nature of art.
Based on the realistic achievements of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, Goncharov considers realism to be the only reliable method of art, its main law: “Artistic fidelity to the depicted reality, i.e. “truth” is the fundamental law of art – and no one can change this aesthetics.”
Criticism has long established his alienation from the so-called “eternal questions” of existence. He was not characterized by pessimistic moods at any stage of development. It is characteristic that in Goncharov’s work the fantastic motifs that were so frequent in the stories of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and even Leo Tolstoy found almost no development. Goncharov’s extremely sober, almost rationalistic mind is free from admiration for the “terrible,” “otherworldly,” and mystical. There is also no religious pathos, without which it is impossible to imagine Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy last period his life. Alexander Aduev is indifferent to religion (the scene of his visit to church); in “The Precipice” the chapel with the image of Christ is repeatedly depicted in connection with the spiritual doubts of the Faith; but this symbol of the Christian faith does not awaken anything truly religious in the heroine. Also, the heroes Oblomov, Stolz, Raisky - all of them are devoid of religious feeling.
The author of Oblomov has no fear of death. Death for him is only the end of life; he speaks about her briefly and almost indifferently. In “An Ordinary Story,” the novelist talks about the predicament of Alexander Aduev, who did not know how to inform his mother about his decision to return to the capital. “But,” notes Goncharov, “his mother soon saved him from this work. She died". And there are plenty of such examples. Goncharov loves life, which he paints in all its phases, from the cradle to the unattractive, but inevitable and therefore not scary grave.
Reality, whatever it may be, needs an epically calm depiction. Goncharov implements it throughout his work. The basis of his talent is enormous observation, the fruits of which immediately receive aesthetic design. Goncharov's contemplation of reality is not passive: it is only full of calm and balanced cheerfulness. This is where Goncharov’s objectivity comes from. Its characteristic features are the evenness of the image, sobriety of assessments, balance of parts, harmoniously merging into one holistic image.
Goncharov – master of artistic detail
Having characterized the general outlines of Goncharov’s artistic method, let us turn to his style, to his characteristic use of details when creating images of works.
One of the most significant places in Goncharov’s style belongs to the poetic image. Working on the images took a lot of energy from Goncharov. While drawing their inner world, the author did not forget about their external form. human image. The attention that the novelist paid to creating a portrait, character and type was extremely great. His portraits invariably carry a characteristic function. Familiarizing the reader with the image of the character begins with a portrait: “The wind at times blew a curl from her face, as if on purpose to show Alexander a beautiful profile and white neck, then lifted the silk mantilla and showed off her slender waist, then flirted with the dress and revealed a small leg " This is how the image of Lisa is depicted in “Ordinary History”. In “The Precipice” the appearance of the old men Molochkovs, Tychkov, Marfinka, Vera, Raisky, Tushin and others is also described in detail from the very first words. One of Goncharov’s “was combed and dressed impeccably, dazzling with the freshness of his face”; the other was “in a dark green tailcoat with coat of arms buttons, clean-shaven, with dark sideburns evenly bordering his face.” These descriptions of appearance cannot be mentioned in one work, but we do not strive for this. It should be noted that not only the main characters of his works had clear characteristics by which we distinguish Oblomov from Stolz, Aduev the elder from the younger. Even an uncharacteristic appearance is noted by Goncharov: a man of “uncertain years, with an uncertain physiognomy, at a time when it is difficult to guess the summer; neither handsome nor ugly, neither tall nor short, neither blond nor dark-haired. Nature did not give him any sharp, noticeable feature, neither bad nor good.”
With great care, Goncharov reproduces facial features and clothing that differ from the usual norm. We will see especially many portraits in the novel “The Precipice”, where the technique of expressive household details has largely reached perfection.
A portrait of a character opens the way for us to understand his character. Goncharov does not invent new methods of depicting the inner world of the human personality, but he improves them.
Believing, as a true realist, that a portrait of a person has physical expressiveness, Goncharov is especially attentive to the person’s eyes and his gaze. When Olga fell in love with Oblomov, this was first of all reflected in her eyes: “The cloud of impenetrability flew away from her. Her gaze was telling and understandable. It was as if she deliberately opened a well-known page of the book and allowed the treasured passage to be read.” The novelist also sets off the views of other characters - “young, fresh, almost childish” in Raisky, “sharp and piercing” in his director’s wife, “hot and dry” in Natasha, sympathetically shy in Tushin, etc.
Although in general Goncharov’s letter is characterized by restrained and modest details, the manner of “molestation”, so close to Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, is also present in the author of “An Ordinary History”. This is the manner of the clerk Mukhoyarov to raise his “trembling” hands up or hide them in his sleeves, or the manner of the aristocratic old man Pakhotin to chew with his lips. Mentions of Vera’s trembling chin - from the smile she suppresses - run through the entire text of “The Precipice”.
Chapter III. Features of the use of artistic detail in the novel “An Ordinary Story”
3.1. Portraits of the heroes of “An Ordinary Story”
Goncharov always gave great importance and importance to the portrait and everyday characteristics of the characters. They are usually given immediately in expositions and “back stories,” although they are then repeated partly during the course of the narrative. Goncharov’s portraits, of course, reveal the psychology of the heroes, their inner world. But at the same time, they usually include an image of the hero’s manners and everyday habits, and hence the everyday things around him and the entire environment of his life.
So Anton Ivanovich “before he wore trousers and a Cossack coat, now he wears a frock coat and trousers on weekdays, and on holidays he wears a tailcoat of God knows what cut. There is not a person he knows who would have lunch, dinner or a cup of tea with him, but there is also no person with whom he would not do this fifty times a year.” The subsequent clarification of his lifestyle - “there is no grief, no worries, no worries” - clarifies for us the whole essence of this person.
A lover of “all sorts of ceremonies, both funny and sad; He also loved to be present at various extraordinary events.” Kostyakov is depicted in portraiture “in a lacquered cap, in a robe, belted with a handkerchief.”
Let us dwell on the female images of the work. “The fullness and freshness of her cheeks and the splendor of her breasts confirmed the promise about the children (to feed, nurse, dress and dress)” - this is the only portrait characteristic of Sophia in the novel, but, apparently, it is the most significant for I.A. Goncharova in this image.
In Lyubetskaya, Goncharov focuses on her character, showing it through facial expressions: “Her physiognomy rarely remained calm for two minutes. Everything about her showed an ardent mind, a capricious and fickle heart.”
Let's see how the images of two opposing heroes are given - uncle and nephew. Their first meeting begins with a description of Pyotr Ivanovich’s appearance - “tall, proportionally built, with large, regular features of a dark-matte face. The hands were full and white, the nails were long and transparent.” A similar characteristic, by the way, can be seen when describing Count Novinsky - “tall, slender, blond, with large expressive eyes, with a pleasant smile. There is simplicity, grace, and some kind of gentleness in manners.” Before us are two people of the highest society of St. Petersburg, and this social niche is reflected in its representatives in their appearance and manners. “Any artistic image appears before us in the guise of an individual... In this sense, any character in a work, manifesting itself as a person, having an individual appearance, will also carry in itself the general features inherent in people in general.” .
It is interesting to note that the image of Alexander with all the details of the portrait is not drawn at the time when he was in the village. Goncharov depicts him most clearly only in the middle of his work, comparing him with the image of his uncle: “What is the difference between them: one is a whole head taller, slender, plump, a man of strong and healthy nature, with self-confidence in his eyes and manners. But not in a single glance, nor in a movement, nor in a word could one guess the thoughts or character of Pyotr Ivanovich - so everything was covered up in him by secularism and the art of self-control. In Alexander, on the contrary, everything showed a weak and delicate build, a changeable facial expression, and some kind of laziness or slowness and unevenness of movements. He was of average height, but thin and pale.” The difference in the portraits of heroes, both external and verbal, is undeniable.
Pyotr Aduev’s eyebrows should be addressed separately; Goncharov’s frequent focus on them gives them significance in the character’s appearance. Almost all situations affecting him are expressed on the face, namely, with the help of eyebrows - he will either be surprised and raise them up, or move them or frown.
Dialogues play a large role in the composition of the novel. Often the plot moves through dialogue. The dialogues also provide information about the characters.The storyline of “An Ordinary Story” is built on brilliant and witty dialogues between uncle Pyotr Ivanovich and nephew Alexander. The strength of the dialogues and their lively interest are based on the collision of contrasting natures, characters, and worldviews. The novel often uses stylistic contrast, generated by the collision of different stylistic layers of language, taken from spheres of life that are distant from each other. In Alexander’s thoughts and speeches in “Ordinary History” there are words, expressions and even long quotes from the poetry of Pushkin and other poets, bearing the stamp of a romantic approach to life, sublime pathos, and a stormy play of passions. Taken out of context, these expressions lose their original meaning. They contrast with the reality in which Alexander finds himself, and, in particular, with the reality presented in the cold and businesslike speeches of his uncle. As a result, the stylistic contrast creates a comic effect.
Speaking about Alexander, it should be noted that his external appearance bears the imprint of his internal state, and, taking into account that throughout the entire work the hero changed internally, it is quite logical that his outfits changed. Let's remember Alexander's fishing meetings with Lisa. He usually walked around casually dressed, “and then he put on a new coat, coquettishly tied a blue scarf around his neck, straightened his hair, even, it seems, curled it a little and began to look like an idyllic fisherman.” Going to the theater, he “pulled out last year’s tailcoat, which had not been worn for a long time, and pulled on white gloves.” While he is still uncomfortable: “it was crowded there, something was missing here; the neck was too hot in the satin scarf.” But by the end of the novel, Alexander completely turns into a business man, and with “dignity wears his bulging belly and an order around his neck.”
The writer writes out all the portraits very carefully. Takes into account all the characteristics of a person’s character and takes into account the appearance of a person that has developed in a particular society. As a result, we can say that the appearance of Goncharov’s hero turns out to be not so much a reflection of his ideological and moral positions, but rather the embodiment of a certain social structure in which his character was formed.
3.2. An artistic detail as an expression of the state of mind
It is common for literature to establish an internal connection between the sounds, colors, lines, shapes, smells perceived by literary characters and the state of the character himself during this perception. Correspondence is associated with the primary meaning of the symbol, like a tablet broken into two parts: when these parts are folded, the coincidence of the contours along the break line, their “correspondence” to each other serves as a visible sign of trust, their internal connection.
Such a connection is present in all works, be they poetic or prosaic. This proximity of seemingly different elements at first glance seems significant and necessary only with a deeper and more detailed analysis of the characters’ characters. A symbol, a detail - these different and at the same time similar methods of concretization appear in the context of the work as strong and dominant elements, since the author, relying on them, creates the artistic plan of the work in its entirety. Through detail, the author has another opportunity to reveal everything that has not been said before, everything that cannot be said directly to readers.
In previous chapters it was already said about the peculiarities of Goncharov’s method of using parts, but any theory should be emphasized in practice. Therefore, we will try, based on the above characteristics of artistic detail, to show how this technique was used by I.A. Goncharov in the novel “An Ordinary Story”.
Let's go back to the beginning of the work. In front of us is the village of Grachi, summer, landowner Anna Pavlovna. We learn that the house has been in turmoil since the very morning and the reason for this is the departure of the landowner’s only son, Alexander Fedorich Aduev, to St. Petersburg. Riding with him is the valet Yevsey, who is currently saying goodbye to his dear housekeeper Agrafena. “That day she spilled the tea with bitterness. Her coffee boiled over, the cream was burnt, and the cups fell out of her hands. She will not put the tray on the table, but will blurt out; He won’t open the closet or the door, but slam it.” We see that Goncharov deliberately uses everyday objects, seemingly inconspicuous, but in all actions associated with them, the internal state of the housekeeper is expressed. The attitude towards Yevsey's departure is emphasized by every sound that is not heard by us, but vividly imagined in the imagination, with a knock, blow, or clap of this or that object.
Let's move on further in the story. Alexander Fedorych has been in St. Petersburg for more than two years, living with his uncle Pyotr Aduev, whose figure we will dwell on later. All the romance and strength of Alexander’s soul, which was raised in the village, results in love for Nadenka Lyubetskaya. Let us remember the first conversation between the nephew and his uncle about this relationship. Alexander rushes forward to hug his uncle and in one second “did two stupid things: he messed up his hair and dropped the letter.” But it doesn’t end there, because the hero’s feelings overwhelm him, after which he began to wipe off the place of the letter where the ink had dropped, wiping the “hole”; the table begins to wobble from friction, and now the bust, made of Italian alabaster, standing on the shelf, flies down.
Let us dwell on one more point that seems significant when analyzing an artistic detail as an expression of the hero’s internal state. Alexander, being in Nadenka’s house, worries that he did not have time to talk with her alone, and is forced to entertain her mother while his beloved sits outside in the gazebo. Goncharov again does not resort to directly presenting the character’s internal state to the reader; he only casually says that he feels restless - his feelings are reflected in his actions, and his actions are directly related to the objects in the room: he will go to the window, look into the yard, then goes to the piano, takes a few notes from the music stand, smells two flowers, goes up to the parrot, wakes it up and, finally, being at the door, slips out.
But, like everything in this world, love also sees its end. Lyubetskaya is alone with Alexander, she decides their fate, how difficult it is for her to say the fatal word “no” for Alexander, and this internal struggle is expressed by the very piano that several episodes ago represented Alexander’s anxiety. As the emotional mood of the conversation increases, Nadenka changes notes, and at the climax, begins to play out a difficult passage. Again, the author plays on the ability of human consciousness to connect together the internal state of the hero with the material and sound environment.
Goncharov uses the same ability of the reader when describing the playing of the orchestra in the theater, where Alexander was at that time with Aunt Lizaveta Alexandrovna. It was as if Alexander had lived his life again. The sounds were “frisky, playful, as if the games of childhood”, smooth and courageous (like youthful carelessness, courage), they thundered like reproaches of jealousy, then “boiled with the fury of passion”, and finally, “sang about deceived love and hopeless longing.”
Let's turn to Alexander during his relationship with Yulia Tafaeva. We should, in our opinion, pay attention to their last meeting. Such moments are the most capacious, and it is farewell and parting, as culminating plot units, that attract the attention of both readers and writers. Again, the sound environment gives significance to the conversation, correlates with the internal mood of the characters, and, based on their emotional mood, expresses itself in certain keys. Alexander, clearly not in a pleasant position for himself, begins to tap his fingers on the glass. But Goncharov does not limit himself to the sounds in the room, the spatial framework expands, and we hear the mixed noise of voices from the street and the driving of carriages. “Lights were shining in the windows everywhere, shadows were flickering. It seemed to him that where there was more light, a cheerful crowd had gathered; there, perhaps, there was a lively exchange of thoughts, fiery, volatile sensations: they live noisily and joyfully there.” So, the plane of vision echoes the sound plane. An artistic detail, reflected by the light seen by Aduev from the window, changes its function, moves into another, new dimension for itself - it becomes a “catalyst” for the outburst of all Alnksandr’s feelings, a minute ago formed into a dense clot of energy, and felt by readers only by tapping fingers on glass.
So, we can observe that artistic detail is reflected not only in the world of things and objects. The sounds embodied by the author in the form of words move along with everyday objects, being their constant companion. Goncharov’s skill in the episodes of the novel analyzed above lies in the ability to combine word, action, detail and sound, to provide the reader with a plot element truthfully, completely, dwelling on each component that seems at first glance insignificant. The part protrudes into in this case as auxiliary, specifying. When choosing one or another, the author relies on the imagination and experience of the reader, who mentally adds the missing elements.
3.3. Non-verbal detail in the work
In communication situations, nonverbal forms of behavior: gestures, facial expressions, gaze, gait, laughter, tears, etc. – can convey information and go deep into the subtext. The information conveyed by nonverbal “languages” often diverges from the meaning of words; in addition, it itself can be contradictory (for example, gestures can mean greeting and joy, but the gaze can be hostile). In a literary work, the significance of such specification is unlikely to be disputed. We will not dwell only on communication situations, we will also analyze the gestures and movements characteristic of each character, reflecting his position in relation to any situation, we will look at individual gestures, and these will reveal the hero to us even more.
Let's start with Alexander Aduev. Remembering him before leaving and in the first few days of his stay in St. Petersburg, one cannot help but recall his characteristic outburst of feelings, which was expressed in his desire to hug his interlocutor, whether the interlocutor was an uncle or a friend. And, of course, we understand that this gesture, made by Goncharov for a reason, speaks of the openness and spiritual simplicity of the young man, of the good qualities brought up in the village. And what a surprise this nephew’s impulse to hug him was for Aduev Sr. He continued to shave, as if not noticing the visitor. And apparently, Goncharov deliberately says that after starting work, Alexander does not have such a desire. The city even changes Aduev Jr.’s gait: “The light and shaky gait became smooth and firm.”
It is worth paying attention to the final scene in the epilogue. Both uncle and nephew contradict their inner being: “And they hugged. - For the first time, by force! - proclaimed Pyotr Ivanovich. - And lastly, uncle: this is an extraordinary case! - said Alexander." The heroes of the novel, hugging, seem to change places at this moment; everyone commits an “extraordinary” act. However, both of these actions speak of a completely “ordinary” process of reconciliation between recent opponents on their common path to “career and fortune.” Even if the uncle cannot go further, the nephew will henceforth take his place.
The friendship of Alexander and Pospelov on the pages of the novel appears as real. At the beginning of the novel, he “galloped sixty miles to say goodbye to Alexander,” then Alexander writes him a letter, wanting to express everything that was happening in his soul at that moment. But time and the city change him, and his best friend is already yawning, sitting down next to Aduev, and then, unable to stand it, laughs at the outpourings of his soul, at the fact that Alexander still lives with dreams and memories of the past.
Just as money is a constant component of the uncle’s conversation, so tears throughout the entire work are an expression of real, sincere feelings. Tears are presented especially vividly in the first part of the novel. The mother sees off her son - the most sincere feelings were in these tears. Moreover, Goncharov uses the gradation method: tears, sobs and, finally, sobs. After his first broken love, Alexander sobs in his uncle’s office.
Let's turn to Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev. Comparing the gait that his nephew took shape after two years in St. Petersburg and his own gait, one can find something in common: “With an even, beautiful gait, with restrained but pleasant manners,” - in Peter Aduev, and “an even and firm gait” - at Alexander's. The deliberate use of the repeated word “even” gives a certain symbolism to the similarity that arises between them, the merging of the way of life of both into a single concept - “getting things done.”
Techniques of non-verbal detailing are found in “Ordinary History” in a wide variety of variations - these are facial expressions, gait, tears, and laughter. Their importance is on par with other functions of the part. It is worth dwelling on the role of the gaze in the work in more detail, since it most succinctly reflects the inner essence of the hero.
3.4. The gaze and its function in the work
For Goncharov, using a character’s eyes to show his soul, to reveal all its hidden corners, which sometimes cannot be described in words, is a frequent and effective technique. A look can sometimes say much more than a word can.
Here we will first of all turn to female images, because it is in the female gaze, according to Goncharov, that one can see all the ardor and strength of feelings.
Let us turn once again to the scene of Agrafena’s farewell to Yevsey. “Agrafena Ivanovna looked at him sideways. And in this look all her melancholy and all her jealousy were expressed.”
The descriptions of Lyubetskaya’s eyes cannot fail to attract attention; it seems that Goncharov sought to clearly depict the whole nature of this girl: “when she raises her eyes, you will now see what an ardent and tender heart they serve as a guide. Suddenly they will throw you like lightning, burn you and instantly hide under your long eyelashes; you will be illuminated by the gentle radiance of the eyes as if the moon was slowly emerging from behind the clouds.” Her same look when talking with Alexander about the engagement: “With a hint of slight thoughtfulness in her eyes and without a smile, but somehow absent-mindedly.” And if Aduev could analyze his gaze more deeply, see the soul through them, perhaps there would be no hope of their endless happiness in family life in the future, the impossibility of which was indicated by Nadenka’s gaze at that moment.
The image of Tafaeva is very different from Lyubetskaya, there is no need to go deeper, because already from the description of the eyes, although not so detailed, we see the difference between them, which is then so clearly reflected in their attitude towards Alexander - “the look is meek and always thoughtful, partly sad " Could a girl with such eyes do to Alexander the way Nadenka did? “Her eyes burned with a feverish brilliance” when she quarreled with the man she loved so much. Note that when Nadenka told Alexander that she had fallen in love with someone else, her look was described only at the moment when she raised her eyes from the piano - there was fear in them. And it is unlikely that this feeling was in any way connected with love for Alexander; she was afraid of his anger, but did not regret that it was all over.
Let's say a little about Alexander's eyes. After two years of being in St. Petersburg, he himself changed, which means that the former naivety is replaced by self-confidence and courage shining in his eyes, “the former enthusiasm on his face was tempered by a slight shade of thoughtfulness...”.
So, the function of the gaze in a work is extremely important. A detailed description of each character is replaced by an image of a view that changes depending on the situation and the hero’s internal experience. Similar situations will never be perceived in the same way, and the hero’s view of the situation, both literally and figuratively, will acquire a characteristic, distinctive feature that is characteristic of him. By focusing on the look when describing his characters, Goncharov rebuilds his work, psychologizes it, and thereby raises it to a high artistic level.
3.5. Concomitant and dissonant detail
Each hero of a work of fiction is associated with certain things that, throughout the entire novel, are indirectly or directly connected with him, either by their constant presence or by the constant use of them by the hero in his activities.
In this regard, let us remember Alexander Aduev. Goncharov did not invent any special things that would accompany the main romantic of the work. Knowing the mentality with which Alexander came to St. Petersburg and with which he spent the first two years in it, one can, without going far, see him writing poems or a novel, which will reflect all his internal torments and experiences. This is exactly how Peter Aduev’s nephew is depicted. When the publisher of the magazine, to which Aduev Sr. refers one of those very novels of his nephew, speaks about the worthlessness of these works, calls their author (Alexander) immature, too subjective, he is forced to do everything that has been accumulated for many years: notebooks, sheets of paper, scraps with the verses begun - throw it away, burn it. Things that represent part of his inner world must be destroyed. Destroying them, he lost part of himself, leaving himself to be torn apart by fire: “... the edges of it (the leaf) bent, it turned black, then warped and suddenly flared up; quickly followed by another, a third, and then suddenly several rose and caught fire in a heap, but the next page underneath them still turned white and two seconds later also began to turn black at the edges.”
One of the interesting moments in the work is Alexander’s explanation to his uncle and aunt of the meaning of the concepts of love and friendship. He “takes out two octams of scribbled paper from his wallet.” These small and worn-out pieces of paper immediately rise in our consciousness to the level of the heights of those concepts that are indicated in them, and immediately descend to worthlessness. How powerful is the influence of detail!
Let us remember how Pyotr Aduev and Lizaveta Alexandrovna live - on a big street, they occupy a good apartment, in constant prosperity. Having analyzed the entire novel, it is impossible to remember a moment where Aduev Sr. was mentioned outside of connection with such things as money, wine, cigars, food. Alexander tells that Nadenka betrayed him and now loves the count - his uncle eats turkey; the nephew talks about heartache - either an offer of money follows from a close relative, or he remembers that he has not had lunch today.
Let us pay attention to the conversations about money that run through the entire text of “Ordinary History.” Already during his first conversation with his nephew, Aduev Sr. tells him: “Mother asked to supply you with money... You know what I’ll tell you: don’t ask me for it, it always violates good agreement between decent people. However, don’t think that I refused you: no, if it happens that there is no other way, then you, there’s nothing to do, turn to me...” Alexander not only remembered this cold sentence well, but also gave it an almost allegorical interpretation. For him, borrowing money from his uncle is tantamount to agreeing to some extent with his philosophy of life, to compromise with him. “I don’t think I bothered you often,” Alexander coldly replies to his uncle when, during an affair with Nadenka, he warns his nephew not to ask him for “despicable metal.” But Alexander renounced his youthful romanticism and embarked on a new practical path. “Well, don’t you really need despicable metal even now? Contact me at least once. - Oh, you need it, uncle: there are a lot of costs. If you can give ten, fifteen thousand...” This agreement marks the touching union of uncle and nephew, who have forever renounced their former romantic illusions.
In contrast to this, the image of Pyotr Ivanovich’s wife was created. “Lizaveta Alexandrovna looked at the luxurious furniture and at all the toys and expensive trinkets of her boudoir - and all this comfort, which others have a caring hand loving person surrounds the beloved woman, seemed to her a cold mockery of true happiness.” How her inner world contrasts with the objects that constantly surround her, but represent absolutely nothing to her.
Speaking about a detail that introduces some discord and comes into conflict with the general outline of the episode, or the hero himself (i.e., a dissonant detail), let’s also turn to the image of Nadenka Lyubetskaya.
While walking with Alexander, she was occupied by a bug: “... am I going to fall on the insect that is crawling along the path?.. Oh, I got it! poor thing! she will die! Nadenka began to breathe on her, trying to save her, but as soon as the bug started to move, “Nadenka shuddered, quickly threw it to the ground and crushed it with her foot.” In this case, the deliberate inclusion in the conversation of such a small, insignificant element as a bug has a very important function. The attitude towards a bug is absolutely the same as towards Alexander: make you fall in love with yourself, help you realize what love is (carry it in your palm, breathe, trying to save it in this way), and then fall out of love and abandon the person who loves you (crush the bug with your foot).
Similar to the previous dissonant detail, there is another one, also associated with Lyubetskaya. “- Alexander Fedorych! - it was heard again from the porch, - the yogurt has been on the table for a long time. - After a moment of inexpressible bliss - suddenly sour milk!! - he said to Nadenka. – Is everything really like that in life? “As long as it doesn’t get worse,” she answered cheerfully, “but curdled milk is very good, especially for someone who hasn’t had dinner.” We notice a clear dissonance between Alexander’s feelings and Nadenka’s words about yogurt. The detail presents us with Nadya’s thoughts that were in reality at that moment: “Our love is not yet so blissful, that’s what makes it good. But I’m sure that soon I’ll truly love you, and it’s unlikely that you’ll fall in love, Alexander.”
Another point that should be noted is that Alexander was brought a German manuscript for translation: “What is this - prose? - he said, “about what?” Alexander’s hands trembled with joy when he opened the package. And I read what was written in pencil at the top: “About the land, an article for the department on agriculture.”
So, Goncharov uses a dissonant detail in the novel - we see this in the example of the image of Lizaveta Alexandrovna, Nadenka Lyubetskaya and Alexander. The function of an accompanying detail is not new for literature, but each writer loses the general meaning that was originally invested in this term, and acquires that specificity and individuality, which, together with the character traits of the hero, makes up a holistic and unique image, as happens with Alexander Aduev and his uncle in the novel.
3.6. Landscape art of Goncharov
Landscape is one of the most powerful means for creating an imaginary, “virtual” world of a work, an essential component of artistic space and time.
Pictures of nature in “Ordinary History” are given an important place. “The room smelled fresh from the balcony. From the house, a garden of old linden trees, thick rose hips, bird cherry trees and lilac bushes spread out into a distant space. Flowers dazzled between the trees and paths ran in different directions; further on, the lake quietly splashed into the shores, bathed on one side by the golden rays of the morning sun and smooth as a mirror; on the other, dark blue, like the sky that was reflected in it, and barely covered with swell. And there the fields with waving, multi-colored grains ran like an amphitheater and adjoined the dark forest,” it was Anna Pavlovna who opened the balcony door.
The balcony as a decorative detail, while possessing signs of plausibility, is nevertheless for the most part an artificially created element in the house. It is intermediate, transitional in nature between nature and home. So, Anna Pavlovna opens not the window, but the balcony doors, i.e. she herself pushes Alexander towards the artificial life that will be in St. Petersburg.
The nature seen by Alexander becomes not just a picture, so material and concrete, full of shades and colors, but it should have forced Alexander to abandon the trip. But Alexander did not even look there: “between the fields, a road wound like a snake and ran away beyond the forest, the road to the promised land, to St. Petersburg.”
Let's turn to the episodes where Goncharov uses landscape details, such as a snake road, a river, a thunderstorm, and urban ones - the Bronze Horseman, buildings and houses.
The use of the comparison of a road with a snake is intentional by the author. If we look at the meaning of the snake symbol, then living underground, she is in contact with the underground world and has access to otherworldly forces.It also symbolizes the original instinctive nature, the surge of vitality, uncontrolled and undifferentiated, potential energy, the inspiring spirit. It is a mediator between Heaven and Earth, between the earth and the underworld. The writer depicts such a polar difference between the two worlds - village and city. In addition, the snake is a tempter (it became the reason for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden). In this case, she tempts him to go to St. Petersburg and “lose” himself there.
Let us remember how St. Petersburg was described when Alexander arrived there: “He saw only pipes, roofs, and black, dirty brick sides of houses.” And further: “The city of fake hair, false teeth, cotton imitations of nature, round hats, the city of polite arrogance, artificial feelings, lifeless bustle.”
Petersburg is presented in the novel through the “stone fences of identical houses”; they seem to protect a person from everything natural, do not allow feelings to escape, which is why here everyone “is pushed away from the road with a glance, as if everyone were enemies among themselves.” By the way, the Bronze Horseman is one of these giants, in front of which Alexander stood for an hour “with an enthusiastic thought”; it has a mesmerizing effect on him - “... and his eyes sparkled... He felt cheerful and at ease.”
Let's turn to landscape details.
How naturally the picture of a thunderstorm in the village is described. We consider it important to note that the rain began just before Alexander’s arrival. The thunderstorm seems to foreshadow something, as if it wants to alert everyone in the Aduevs’ house - Alexander is coming, but he is no longer the same as he was, the city has made him different.
Pictures of nature more often than in all other episodes arise in connection with Lisa. They meet Alexander while he and his friend are fishing, and then meet only in the lap of nature.
One day Kostyakov says to Lisa: “But you don’t know how, madam: you didn’t let him (the perch) bite well.” When Lisa's fish fell off her fishing rod. We can interpret these words as their relationship with Alexander - perhaps he would have been with her, but she did not give him a good bite.
Let us remember the description of the river that Aduev went to after Lisa’s father spoke to him: “It was black. Some long, fantastic, ugly shadows ran across the waves. The shore where Alexander stood was shallow.” The river seems to reflect the internal state that the hero was experiencing at that moment. Moreover, the shallow shore is metaphorically represented by us as the inner world of Alexander. The soul is as devastated as the chalk of the river bank.
Alexander decides to leave, and Lisa is waiting for him on a bench under a tree, “thinner, with sunken eyes.” Moreover, the state of nature helps us to understand even more deeply the tragedy of the heroine’s feelings at this time - “autumn has come. Yellow leaves were falling from the trees; the sky was gray; A cold wind was blowing with light rain. The banks and rivers are empty.”
The landscape art of Ordinary History is varied. Goncharov is not limited to only describing the village - the summer heat in St. Petersburg, the night on the Neva, winter evening on Liteiny Prospekt, the outskirts of the city, where Aduev wanders along with Kostyakov.
So, analyzing the above, we can draw a conclusion about the mostly psychological function of the landscape - pictures of nature help in revealing the inner world of the hero, creating a major or minor emotional atmosphere (sometimes contrasting with the emotional state of the character). Landscape details also play a role in clarifying the inner world of the characters. Moreover, they are often presented as metaphorical; you need to look deep into the details to really feel the author’s thoughts. Urban descriptions of St. Petersburg places appear in the novel as a contrast, a complete opposite. Shading each other, they acquire expressive precision.
Conclusion
The purpose of this study was to identify features and determine the role of artistic detail in the novel by I.A. Goncharov "Ordinary History". Based on the conducted research, a number of conclusions can be drawn.
An artistic detail, being an element of an artistic whole, is itself the smallest image. At the same time, the detail is almost always part of a larger image. An individual detail, when assigned to a character, can become his permanent attribute, a sign by which this character is identified.
Considering Goncharov’s work, we noticed the following features of his method: the poetic image is drawn from its internal content, but the author does not forget at the same time about the external form of the human image. The attention that the novelist paid to creating a portrait, character and type was extremely great. Goncharov turns to such aspects of the hero as facial features, facial expressions, clothing, and pays special attention to his gaze. So, detail in Goncharov’s novels occupies one of the most important places. Goncharov’s skill in the episodes of the novel we analyze lies in his ability to combine word, action, detail and sound. Using non-verbal detail, he takes the work to a new, psychological level, characteristic of all his works.
Thus, having analyzed the essence of artistic detail, Goncharov’s method of using detailing and looking at the concept of artistic detail in a specific work, we can conclude: Goncharov already in his first work uses various types and functions of detail: in portrait characteristics he turns to descriptive details, but each of such details has a psychological basis (images of Alexander and his uncle, Anton Ivanovich’s clothes). Moreover, the psychology of the heroes is reflected not only by portrait characteristics, but also
speech (a striking example is the speech of the Aduevs senior and junior). The appearance of Goncharov's hero to a certain extent reflects the social structure in which the character was formed.
We noticed the psychological nature of the details when the characters used some things - Agrafena’s farewell to Yevsey, the episode with Alexander’s “three nonsense”, Nadenka’s playing the piano and some other plot elements make us understand that any interior item, any insignificant object detail can serve Goncharov has elements of characterizing the internal state of the heroes.
Non-verbal forms of behavior (gestures, facial expressions, laughter, tears) form a psychological subtext in the novel “An Ordinary Story” (the gait of Pyotr Ivanovich, the tears of Alexander’s mother, Pospelov’s laughter). The function of the gaze in the novel plays the same significant role as in subsequent works - it reveals the inner world of the characters and changes in accordance with internal movements.
Goncharov often uses the method of opposition, i.e. a dissonant detail that conflicts with the general outline of the episode and, thereby, attracts attention to itself, it becomes either psychological in nature or warning (this happens in the episode with the bug).
And finally, landscape details. Having analyzed them, we can say that their role in the novel is ambiguous. Most often, they metaphorically reflect the essence of phenomena and events occurring at a given moment (an open balcony door, a snake road, a thunderstorm). Sometimes they help to better understand the character, and in the case of the Bronze Horseman, the detail rises above the character and guides him.
Thus, the role of detail in the novel “An Ordinary Story” is significant. With the help of artistic detail I.A. Goncharov deepens the problems of the novel and introduces new, exceptional features into its poetics.
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“An Ordinary Story,” published in 1847 in Sovremennik, was the first work of fiction by I. A. Goncharov to appear in print. The writer worked on “An Ordinary Story” for three years. In an autobiographical article “An Extraordinary History” (1875-1878), he wrote: “it was conceived in 1844, written in 1845, and in 1846 I had a few chapters left to write.”
Goncharov read his “Extraordinary History” to Belinsky for several evenings in a row. Belinsky was delighted with the new talent, who performed so brilliantly. Before giving his work “to Belinsky for judgment,” Goncharov read it several times in the Maykovs’ friendly literary circle. Before appearing in print, the novel underwent many corrections and alterations.
Recalling the late 40s, the dark time of Nicholas’s reign, when advanced Russian literature played a huge role in the fight against feudal-serf reaction, Goncharov wrote: “ Serfdom, corporal punishment, the oppression of the authorities, the lies of the prejudices of social and family life, rudeness, savage morals among the masses - this is what stood in line in the struggle and what the main forces of the Russian intelligentsia of the thirties and forties were directed towards.”
“Ordinary History” showed that Goncharov was a writer sensitive to the interests of his time. The work reflects the changes and shifts that took place in the life of feudal Russia in 1830-1840. Calling for the fight against “all-Russian stagnation”, for work for the good of the fatherland, Goncharov passionately searched around him for those forces, those people who could carry out the tasks facing Russian life.
The essence of the pseudo-romantic worldview inherent in a significant part of the idealistic intelligentsia of the 1930s, divorced from reality, is revealed by Goncharov in the image of the main character of the novel, Alexander Aduev. I saw the soil on which this phenomenon grew in the noble-manorial serf system of life, in the lordly landowner upbringing.
Romantic perception of life, sublime abstract dreams of glory and exploits, of the extraordinary, poetic impulses - who did not, to some extent, go through all this in their youth, in the “era of youthful unrest.” But Goncharov’s merit as an artist is that he showed how these youthful dreams and illusions are distorted and disfigured by lordly-serf education.
Young Aduev knows about grief and troubles only “by ear” - “life is smiling at him from the very beginning.” Idleness and ignorance of life “prematurely” developed “heartfelt inclinations” and excessive daydreaming in Aduev. Before us is one of those “romantic sloths,” barchuks who are accustomed to blithely living off the labor of others. Young Aduev sees the purpose of life not in work and creativity (work seemed strange to him), but in an “exalted existence.” “Silence... stillness... blessed stagnation” reigns on the Aduev estate. But in the estate he does not find a field for himself. And Aduev leaves “to seek happiness”, “to make a career and look for fortune - to St. Petersburg.” All the falsity of Aduev’s everyday concepts begins to be revealed in the novel already in the first clashes between his dreamer nephew, spoiled by laziness and lordship, and his practical and intelligent uncle, Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev. The struggle between uncle and nephew also reflected the then, just beginning, breakdown of old concepts and mores - sentimentality, caricatured exaggeration of feelings of friendship and love, poetry of idleness, family and home lies of feigned, essentially unprecedented feelings, waste of time on visits, on unnecessary hospitality etc. In a word, all the idle, dreamy and affective side of old morals with the usual impulses of youth towards the high, great, graceful, towards effects, with a thirst to express this in crackling prose, especially in verse.
Aduev Sr. at every step mercilessly ridicules the feigned, groundless dreaminess of Aduev Jr. “Your stupid enthusiasm is no good”, “with your ideals it’s good to sit in the village”, “forget these sacred and heavenly feelings, and take a closer look at the matter.” But the young hero does not give in to moral teaching. “Isn’t love a thing?” - he answers his uncle. It is characteristic that after the first failure in love, Aduev Jr. complains “about the boredom of life, the emptiness of the soul.” The pages of the novel devoted to the description of the hero’s love affairs are an exposure of the egoistic, possessive attitude towards a woman, despite all the romantic poses that the hero takes in front of the chosen ones of his heart.
For eight years, my uncle worked with Alexander. In the end, his nephew becomes a business man, a brilliant career and a profitable marriage of convenience await him. Not a trace remained of the former “heavenly” and “sublime” feelings and dreams. The evolution of the character of Alexander Aduev, shown in “Ordinary History,” was “ordinary” for some of the noble youth of that time. Having condemned the romantic Alexander Aduev, Goncharov contrasted him in the novel with another, undoubtedly more positive in a number of traits, but by no means ideal person - Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev. The writer, who was not a supporter of the revolutionary transformation of feudal-serf Russia, believed in progress based on the activities of enlightened, energetic and humane people. However, the work reflected not so much these views of the writer, but only the contradictions that existed in reality, which were carried with them by the bourgeois-capitalist relations that replaced the “all-Russian stagnation”. Rejecting the Aduev-type romanticism, the writer at the same time felt the inferiority of the philosophy and practice of bourgeois “common sense”, the selfishness and inhumanity of the bourgeois morality of the elder Aduevs. Pyotr Ivanovich is smart, businesslike and in his own way a “decent person.” But he is extremely “indifferent to man, to his needs and interests.” “They look at what a person has in his pocket and in the buttonhole of his coat, but they don’t care about the rest,” his wife Lizaveta Aleksandrovna says about Pyotr Ivanovich and others like him about her husband: “What was the main goal of his work? Did he work for a common human goal, fulfilling the lesson given to him by fate, or only for petty reasons, in order to acquire official and monetary importance among people, or, finally, so that he would not be bent into an arc by need and circumstances? God knows. He didn’t like to talk about lofty goals, he called it nonsense, but he said dryly and simply that things had to be done.”
Alexander and Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev are contrasted not only as a provincial romantic nobleman and a bourgeois businessman, but also as two psychologically opposite types. “One is enthusiastic to the point of extravagance, the other is icy to the point of bitterness,” says Lizaveta Aleksandrovna about her nephew and husband.
Goncharov sought to find an ideal, that is, a normal type of person, not in Aduev Sr. and not in Aduev Jr., but in something else, a third, in the harmony of “mind” and “heart.” A clear hint of this is already contained in the image of Lizaveta Aleksandrovna Adueva, despite the fact that the “age” has “eaten” her, as Belinsky rightly noted, Pyotr Ivanovich.
Among these wonderful images, one should include not only Lizaveta Alexandrovna, but also Nadenka.
The daughter is a few steps ahead of her mother. She fell in love with Aduev without asking and almost does not hide this from her mother or remains silent only for the sake of decency, considering for herself the right to dispose in her own way of her inner world and Aduev himself, which, having studied him well, she has mastered and commands. This is her obedient slave, gentle, spinelessly kind, promising something, but pettyly proud, a simple, ordinary young man, of which there are many everywhere. And she would have accepted him, gotten married - and everything would have gone as usual.
But the figure of the count appeared, consciously intelligent, dexterous, and brilliant. Nadenka saw that Aduev could not stand comparison with him either in mind, or in character, or in upbringing. In her everyday life, Nadenka did not acquire consciousness of any ideals of male dignity, strength, and what kind of strength? All she had to do was see what she had seen a thousand times in all the other young men with whom she danced and flirted a little. She listened to his poetry for a minute. She expected that strength and talent lay there. But it turned out that he only writes passable poetry, but no one knows about them, and he is also sulking to himself at the count because he is simple, smart and behaves with dignity. She went over to the side of the latter: this was the conscious step of the Russian girl so far - silent emancipation, a protest against the authority of her mother, which was helpless for her.
: “An Ordinary Story” is a short work, consisting of two parts with an epilogue. The reader, opening the first page, finds himself in the century before last, “in the village of Grachi<…>poor landowner<…>Adueva." From the opening lines, in addition to “Anna Petrovna and Alexander Fedoritch” of the Aduevs, their friends and servants, another person introduces himself - the author.
- Characteristics of Alexander Aduev: V.G. Belinsky, in his article about the novel, called Alexander “a thrice romantic - by nature, upbringing and life circumstances.” In Goncharov’s understanding, the last two theses (upbringing and circumstances) are inextricably linked. Alexander can be called the darling of fate. But a person with claims to his own exclusivity does not give birth to high power, are not formed by bitter collisions with life (as romantic literature interpreted). His personality is created by the entire atmosphere of the noble estate, in which he is the king and god, and dozens of people are ready to fulfill his every desire.
- Contrasts in the novel: a provincial town and St. Petersburg, a dreamer-nephew and a practical uncle: Village and St. Petersburg. Two worlds, two worldviews. The development of action is built on the principles of contrast. The contrast extends to the characters. Not only by age, but as individuals with different views on life, the two main characters are contrasted - Alexander and his St. Petersburg uncle Pyotr Ivanovich.
- Analysis of disputes between Alexander and Peter Aduev: The meaning of the polemical scenes of the novel was first understood by L.N. Tolstoy. Not the same Tolstoy as we are accustomed to imagine him - a venerable old man-writer with a gray beard. Then there lived an unknown young man of nineteen years old, and there was a girl whom he really liked, Valeria Arsenyeva. He advised her in a letter: “Read this beauty ( "An ordinary story"). This is where to learn to live. You see different views on life, on love, with which you cannot agree with any of them, but your own becomes smarter, clearer.”
- Pyotr Aduev's wife: Lizaveta Alexandrovna: By the beginning of the second part, the arrangement of characters and our attitude towards them gradually changes. The reason is the appearance of a new heroine - the young wife of Pyotr Aduev, Lizaveta Alexandrovna. Combining worldly experience and spiritual subtlety in her nature, she becomes the personification of a kind of “golden mean”. The heroine softens the contradictions between her nephew and uncle. “She witnessed two terrible extremes - in her nephew and her husband. One is enthusiastic to the point of extravagance, the other is icy to the point of bitterness.”
- Heroines of Goncharov. Nadenka: Belinsky also noted that “one of the features of his (Goncharov’s) talent is his extraordinary skill in drawing female characters. He never repeats himself, not one of his women resembles another, and all, like portraits, are excellent.” Russian writers did not value external beauty in their heroines. In the epilogue of the novel, the writer exclaims: “No, it is not plastic beauty that we should look for in northern beauties: they are not statues.
- Psychological content of the novel: The richness of the psychological content of the novel also manifests itself in the everyday conversation of the characters in love. At the same time, explanatory remarks are almost completely absent; the author limits himself to the short “said”, “said”, “spoke”, “spoke”. Meanwhile, he talks in detail about external actions - not excluding who knows how the insect got onto these pages. Let's try to do it on our own psychological analysis and imagine what feelings and motivations are behind each of the phrases spoken and movements made.
- Alexander's second love. Yulia Tafaeva: Alexander owes his entire meeting with his second lover to his uncle. After his wife despaired of getting the young man out of his gloomy state of mind (as they would say now - depression), Pyotr Ivanovich gets down to business. In the interests of the “factory,” it is necessary to distract the overly amorous companion from spending common capital on Yulia. Therefore, the elder Aduev introduces his nephew to a young beautiful widow.
- Alexander and Julia: For Alexander, the meeting with Tafaeva gives him a unique chance to confirm in practice everything that is written about love in the romantic books both love. “They live inseparably in one thought, in one feeling: they have one spiritual eye, one hearing, one mind, one soul...” Reality makes adjustments to what are, at first glance, beautiful words. “Living for each other” in fact turns out to be a manifestation of selfishness, a type of domestic despotism.
- Alexander and Lisa: By chance, the companions meet a charming summer resident and her father. The circumstances of the acquaintance and walks resurrect the dacha hobby of Alexander Nadenka. With her romantic exaltation, the stranger reminds us of Yulia Tafaeva. Her name - Lisa - makes us remember not only Lizaveta Alexandrovna. This name goes back to the heroine of the sentimental story by N.M. Karamzin, fellow countryman of Goncharov.
- Alexander and his aunt at a concert. Music influence: Auntie asks Alexander to accompany her to a concert of a famous musician, a “European celebrity.” His current comrade, the narrow-minded vulgar Kostyakov, is outraged by the price of the ticket and, as an alternative, offers a visit to the bathhouse, “we’ll have a nice evening.” However, Alexander cannot resist his aunt’s request, which ultimately brings him benefits that are incomparable to visiting a bathhouse.
- Analysis of Alexander's return to the village: The ring composition leads to the moment from which the story began. Once again the action unfolds on a “beautiful morning”, again before us is “a lake familiar to the reader in the village of Grachakh.” Again we see Anna Pavlovna, who has been “sitting on the balcony since five o’clock,” waiting for her son with the same excitement with which she let go eight years ago. : The literary and creative theme plays such an important role in the plot of the novel. It requires separate independent consideration. First of all, you need to pay attention to the names of writers directly mentioned in the text, quotes, their place, meaning. We have already talked about one thing. The list of favorite French authors helps to understand the upbringing of Julia, who “probably still reads” Eugene Sue, Gustave Drouino, Jules Janin. And yet, the central creative names heard on the pages of the novel are the names of two great Russian writers - the fabulist I.A. Krylov and A.S. Pushkin.
- Belinsky about the novel: In the review article “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847,” summing up the literary results, Belinsky noted with satisfaction: “The last year of 1847 was especially rich in wonderful novels, stories and short stories.” First of all, the insightful critic noted the works of novice writers - in addition to “An Ordinary History,” the first story of the famous “Notes of a Hunter” (“Khor and Kalinich”) and the novel “Who is to Blame?” Iskander.
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(1812-1891)
IA Goncharov came from an ancient noble family. He was born in the city of Simbirsk, the writer spent his childhood in a rich landowner's estate. From 1822 to 1830, Goncharov studied at the Moscow Commercial School, and in 1831 he took an exam at Moscow University for the philological or, as it was then called, the verbal faculty. The university left a memory of itself as the best time in the writer’s life: here he learned the wonderful spirit of freedom of Moscow University, a temple of science that educated “not only the mind, but the entire young soul.” In the memoirs about the university (they have the subtitle “How we were taught 50 years ago”) the names of Lermontov and Herzen, Belinsky and K. Aksakov, historian M. Kachenovsky and professor of theory of fine arts and archeology N. Nadezhdin appear.
One of vivid impressions those years, there was a visit to the university by A. Pushkin in September 1832. Goncharov recalls the atmosphere of the dispute that arose after a lecture between Pushkin and Kachenovsky about the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” Goncharov creates an image of “literary antagonism” that arose between the participants in the dispute back in 1818, when Pushkin wrote the first, but not the last, epigram on Kachenovsky. During his student years, he showed interest in professional literary pursuits: in 1832, the magazine “Telescope” published an excerpt from E. Xu’s novel “Atar-Gul” translated by Goncharov.
Having graduated from the university in 1834, Goncharov went home, where he was “swept by the same “Oblomovism” that he observed in childhood.” In order to “not fall asleep looking at this calm,” in the fall Goncharov moved to St. Petersburg and began serving in the Ministry of Finance.
The role of the literary and artistic circle of academician of painting N. Maikov, whose sons, Valerian and Apollo, the future writer taught literature, was also significant in the development of Goncharov’s literary talent. The appearance in print of the novel “An Ordinary Story” (1846) meant recognition of Goncharov’s literary talent.
In 1853, Goncharov set off on a circumnavigation of the world on the military frigate Pallada, which lasted two years. The result of the trip was the essays “Frigate “Pallada” - a unique phenomenon of Russian literature mid-19th century V.
In 1859, Goncharov published the novel “Oblomov”, and ten years later - “The Precipice” (1869). IN last years life, Goncharov appears as a brilliant publicist in “Notes on the Personality of Belinsky”, a literary critic in the sketch “A Million Torments”, a memoirist (“Servants of the Old Century”), an art historian who has collected extensive material for articles on the work of A.N. Ostrovsky. A special place in Goncharov’s journalism belongs to the articles “Better late than never”, “Intentions, objectives and ideas of the novel “The Precipice””, in which the writer provides a rationale for the principles of realism.
Artistic method
In 1879, an article by I.A. appeared in the magazine “Russian Speech”. Goncharov “Better late than never.” 33 years after the publication of his first novel, “Ordinary History,” Goncharov answered to readers, trying in the article “to explain once and for all his own view of the author’s tasks.” This critical analysis of his own work was a revision of the preface to a separate edition of The Precipice in 1870, which was never published. Goncharov returned to him in 1875, but only now, says Goncharov, this material can serve as a preface to the collection of all his works.
Goncharov’s article is of fundamental importance for characterizing the uniqueness of the writer’s creative method. Goncharov begins the formulation of his own aesthetic principles with the definition of being artistic creativity, which is “thinking in images.” According to Goncharov, there are two types of creativity - “unconscious” and “conscious”. The “unconscious” artist creates, obeying the requirement to outline the impression, to give space to the work of the heart, the flow of fantasy. For such artists, the ability to convey the power of impression prevails over the analysis of life. In other writers, Goncharov believes, “the mind is subtle, observant and overcomes imagination and heart,” and then the idea is expressed in addition to the image and often obscures it, revealing a tendency. Goncharov defines his type of creativity as “unconscious”.
Belinsky was one of the first to draw attention to this feature of Goncharov’s work, defining it as an excellent “ability to draw.” The basis of his artistic images was always the impression of a person, event, phenomenon, and he hurried to remember it, putting a verbal image on scraps of paper: “... I move forward, as if by groping, at first I write sluggishly, awkwardly, boringly (like the beginning in Oblomov and Raisky), and I myself find it boring to write, until light suddenly pours in and illuminates the path where I should go... I always have one main image and at the same time the main motive: it is this that leads me forward - and On the way, I accidentally grab whatever comes to hand, that is, whatever is close to it...” From the episode, the sketch, the big picture. This happened with Oblomov’s Dream, which, being published in 1849 as separate work, served as a sketch for the epic painting “Oblomov”.
Explaining to the reader how the “mechanism” of the unconscious works in an artist, Goncharov resorts to the metaphorical image of a “mirror,” comparing their ability to reflect life. “It is difficult to draw from life,” writes Goncharov, “and in my opinion, it is simply impossible to create types that have not yet been formed, where its forms have not been established, the faces have not been layered into types.” The mirror of creative consciousness can repeat as many images as it likes, but it cannot convey something that does not yet have a definite form, especially when it comes to the laws of social development.
Goncharov calls the process of creating his artistic image typification, which he understands as a “mirror” reflection of life, environment, era in the phenomenon that interests him: “All this, in addition to my consciousness, was naturally reflected in my imagination by the power of reflection, as a landscape from windows, as sometimes a huge environment is reflected in a small pond: the sky overturned over the pond, with a pattern of clouds, and trees, and a mountain with some buildings, and people, and animals, and vanity, and stillness - all in miniature likenesses. So this simple physical law is carried out on me and my novels - in a way almost imperceptible to me.”
Goncharov is the author of three great epic works. The time interval between the appearance of each of them in print is about ten years: “An Ordinary History” was published in 1846, “Oblomov” was completed in 1857, and published in 1859, “The Break” dates back to 1869 G.
In this temporary space, the implementation of plans is an important feature of Goncharov’s creative method. He needed time to process the impressions of existence, to put them into the artistic system of one, as Goncharov himself insisted on this, and not three novels: the reader had to “catch one common thread, one consistent idea - the transition from one era of Russian life to another” . Thus, according to Goncharov’s plan, each part of this novel cycle was an artistic picture of a certain era of Russian reality, and together they represented its biography, told by an intelligent, thoughtful writer. These principles noted by Goncharov were implemented in artistic structure novels, in their plot organization, compositional scheme, system of images and characters.
"An Ordinary Story"
The appearance of Goncharov's first novel in print was preceded by several small experiments in poetry and prose. On the pages of the handwritten almanac “Moonlit Nights”, published by the Maykov circle, 4 of his poems are published (later these are the poems of Sashenka Aduev from “Ordinary History”), the stories “Dashing Illness” (1838) and “Happy Mistake” (1839).
In these early works one can feel the influence of Pushkin's prose. Thus, in “The Happy Mistake,” which is reminiscent of a secular story in genre, the ardent passions of the romantic characters already have a psychological motivation.
The essay “Ivan Savvich Podzhabrin” is the only early work young writer, published during Goncharov’s lifetime in Sovremennik in 1848. This is a typical physiological essay exploring morals, in which the features of Gogol’s style are noticeable: the narrative in it is focused on fabulous manner, enough great place occupy lyrical digressions, and Ivan Savvich and his servant Avdey were created, undoubtedly, under the influence of “The Inspector General”.
Already by the beginning of the 40s, Goncharov’s creative positions were determined: his unconditional interest in Russian reality: in what “stood” but did not become a thing of the past, and in what was new, which was making its way into life.
The novel “An Ordinary History” was the first Russian work to explore the forms of social progress in Russia. Goncharov's innovation lay in the fact that he tried to see the manifestation of social patterns in the fate of an individual. In the novel we have the ordinary story of the transformation of the young romantic Alexander Aduev into a representative of the new bourgeois formation. Already in the first attempt of the novel, certain plot and compositional principles for the structure of the conflict are developed, which will subsequently be used by Goncharov in his other works.
Externally, the plot of “An Ordinary Story” has a pronounced chronological character. Goncharov carefully and leisurely tells the story of the life of the Aduevs in Rrach, creating in the reader’s imagination an image of a noble province dear to the author’s heart. At the beginning of the novel, Sashenka Aduev is passionate about Pushkin, he writes poetry himself, listening to what is happening in his heart and soul. He is exalted, intelligent, confident that he is an exceptional being, who should not have the last place in life. Throughout the course of the novel, Goncharov debunks the romantic ideals of Aduev. As for the social revelations of romanticism, they are not directly declared anywhere in the novel. Goncharov leads the reader to the conviction that the historical time of romanticism has passed through the entire course of the novel’s events.
The narrative in the novel begins with a presentation of the story of Yevsey and Agrafena - the Aduev serfs, an ordinary story of landowner tyranny, told in an everyday, calm tone. Sending her son to St. Petersburg, Anna Pavlovna is focused only on her experiences, and she does not care about the feelings of Yevsey and Agrafena, whom she separates for a long time. However, the author says, addressing the reader, she “did not prepare her son for the fight against what awaited him and awaits everyone ahead.”
Goncharov reveals the world of the provincial nobility, living in a completely different dimension, in three letters brought by his nephew to his uncle.
Each of them is associated with one of the plot motives that will be implemented in the novel. Thus, in Zaezzhalov’s letter Kostyakov is mentioned - “a wonderful person - his soul is wide open and such a joker,” communication with whom will constitute one of the “epochs” of the development of the younger Aduev. The aunt's letter also represents a kind of anticipation of one of the plot twists in the novel. The ardent enthusiasm of Marya Gorbatova's memories of a yellow flower and a ribbon as a symbol of the will of tender feelings for Pyotr Ivanovich is replaced by a completely reasonable request for English wool for embroidery. This letter is a kind of “summary” of the image of Sashenka’s future, to which the hero will come in the finale. The mother’s letter ends with the phrase “Do not leave him, dear brother-in-law, with your advice and take him into your care; I pass it on to you from hand to hand” the most important principle of constructing a system of images of a work has been “programmed”. The role of Sashenka’s mentor passes to his uncle, but his philosophy of life is just as little taken into account by the young Aduev as his mother’s words. One of the functions of the uncle’s image in the novel is to debunk the romantic ideals of the nephew.
The fate of Pyotr Ivanovich is a clear example of the benefits of abandoning romantic illusions. This hero does not deny reality and does not oppose himself to it; he recognizes the need for active inclusion in life, familiarization with the harsh everyday work. The hero of the novel, which appeared in print in 1846, became an artistic generalization of a phenomenon that was just “erupting” in Russian reality, but did not escape the attentive Goncharov. Many of the writer’s contemporaries went through the harsh school of everyday work: Gogol, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, and Saltykov, who overcame social romanticism, but did not lose faith in ideas. As for the image of the elder Aduev, Goncharov shows what a terrible moral disaster the desire to evaluate everything around him from the standpoint of practical benefit can turn into for a person.
The assessment of the romantic as the most important personality quality is far from unambiguous. Goncharov shows that the “liberation” of a person from the ideals of youth and the associated memories of love, friendship, and family affections destroys the personality, occurs unnoticed and is irreversible. Gradually, the reader begins to understand that an ordinary story of familiarization with the prose of life has already happened to Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev, when, under the influence of circumstances, a person is freed from romantic ideals of goodness and becomes like everyone else. It is this path that Alexander Aduev takes, gradually becoming disillusioned with friendship, love, service, and family feelings. But the end of the novel - his profitable marriage and borrowing money from his uncle - is not the end of the novel. The ending is a sad reflection on the fate of Pyotr Ivanovich, who succeeded on the basis of real practicality. The depth of the moral catastrophe that has already befallen society with the loss of faith in romanticism is revealed precisely in this life story. The novel ends happily for the younger one, but tragically for the older one: he is sick with boredom and the monotony of the monotonous life that has filled him - the pursuit of a place in the sun, fortune, rank. These are all quite practical things, they bring in income, give a position in society - but for what? And only a terrible guess that Elizaveta Alexandrovna’s illness is the result of her devoted service to him, service that killed her living soul, makes Pyotr Ivanovich think about the meaning of his life.
In studies of Goncharov’s work, it was noted that the originality of the novel’s conflict lies in the collision of two forms of life presented in the dialogues between uncle and nephew, and that dialogue is the constructive basis of the novel. But this is not entirely true, since the character of Ayauev Jr. changes not at all under the influence of his uncle’s beliefs, but under the influence of circumstances embodied in the twists and turns of the novel (writing poetry, infatuation with Nadenka, disappointment in friendship, meeting with Kostikov, leaving for the village, etc. .). The circumstances “alien” to the hero are concretized by the image of St. Petersburg given in the second chapter of the novel against the backdrop of the memories of the “provincial egoist” Aduev about the peace of rural life. The turning point in the hero occurs during his meeting with the Bronze Horseman. Aduev turns to this symbol of power “not with a bitter reproach in his soul, like poor Evgeny, but with an enthusiastic thought.” This episode has a pronounced polemical character:
Goncharov’s hero “argues” with Pushkin’s hero, being confident that he can overcome circumstances and not submit to them.
The dialogue plays an essential function in clarifying the author's point of view, which is not identical to either the position of the uncle or the position of the nephew. It manifests itself in a dialogue-dispute that continues without stopping almost until the end of the novel. This is a debate about creativity as a special state of mind. The theme of creativity first appears in a letter from young Aduev to Pospelov, in which the hero characterizes his uncle as a man of the “crowd,” always and equally calm in everything, and completes his analysis of the moral qualities of Pyotr Ivanovich with the conclusion: “... I think he didn’t even read Pushkin." The serious conclusion that vegetating “without inspiration, without tears, without life, without love” can destroy a person will turn out to be prophetic: having added prose to Pushkin’s lines (“And without hair”), the uncle, without suspecting it, pronounces a sentence on himself. Sashenka’s romantic poems, which he destroyed with his criticism, from the position of Pyotr Ivanovich are an expression of reluctance to “pull the burden” of daily work, and his remark “writers are like others” can be seen as the hero’s conviction that unprofessional pursuit of literature is self-indulgence and a manifestation of lordly laziness . Confronting the positions of his heroes, Goncharov himself is arguing with an invisible enemy, because the poems of Dtsuev Jr. are the poems of the young Goncharov, which he never published, apparently feeling that this is not his kind of creativity. However, the fact of their inclusion in the text of the novel is very significant. Of course, they are weak artistically and may seem like a parody of romantic reverie. But the lyrical pathos of the poems is caused not only by Goncharov’s desire to expose idealism: Sashenka’s romanticism is aimed at criticizing the depersonalization of man by the bureaucratic reality of St. Petersburg and at criticizing the moral slavery of women.
The theme of the poet and the crowd - one of the cross-cutting themes of the novel - manifests itself in a unique way. Its detailed interpretation by the young Aduevs is given in Chapter IV, revealing the state of the hero who has reached the apogee of happiness in love. Dreams about Nadenka and dreams of poetic glory merge together, but the author accompanies this enthusiastic monologue with his own commentary. From it, the reader learns about a comedy, two stories, an essay, and a “journey somewhere” created by Sashenka, but not accepted into the magazine, and gets acquainted with the plot of a story from American life, which Nadenka listened to with delight, but was not accepted for publication. . Failures are perceived by Aduev in the spirit of the romantic conflict between the poet and the crowd; he recognizes himself as a person capable of “creating a special world” without difficulty, easily and freely. And only at the end of the monologue the position of the author-narrator, who doubts the success of this kind of creativity, is indicated.
Dialogue, as the most important substantive element of the genre form of Goncharov’s novel, turns out to be a form of expression of the author’s point of view in other novels: its dialectical character will increase. The writer’s task was to strive to indicate his position without insisting on it as the only reliable one. This, apparently, can explain the “absurdities” of the artistic structure, the contradictory characters of the heroes of “Oblomov” and “Cliff”, for which Druzhinin, Dobrolyubov, and many others reproached the author. Goncharov, due to his character, temperament, and worldview, could not and did not want to write out recipes for correcting damaged morals that were not thought through and had not been gained through personal experience. Like his young hero Aduev, he took on elegant prose when “the heart beats more evenly, the thoughts come into order.”
In the 40s personality conflict and society he saw as developing in several directions at once, two of which he evaluates in Ordinary History, and the other two he outlines as possible: the hero’s involvement in the life of the St. Petersburg petty bureaucracy and philistinism (Kostyakov) - this conflict has already been partially revealed in Medny horseman" in the fate of Evgeniy) - and immersion in the physical and moral dream, from which Aduev sobered up. Philistinism and sleep are intermediate stages of the hero’s evolution, which in the artistic structure of “Oblomov” are fully realized and develop into independent storylines.
The theme, ideas and images of “Oblomov” and “Cliff” already existed hidden in art world“Ordinary history”, the measured life of Goncharov the official went on as usual. By the will of fate and his own will, he was destined to experience what he dreamed about as a teenager.
Already in the first novel, “An Ordinary Story” (1847), the idea of the entire trilogy received an original embodiment. The conflict between uncle and nephew was intended to reflect very characteristic phenomena of Russian social life of the 1840s, the customs and life of that era. Goncharov himself explained his plan as follows in the critical article “Better late than never” (1879): “The struggle between uncle and nephew also reflected the then, just beginning, breakdown of old concepts and mores - sentimentality, caricatured exaggeration of feelings of friendship and love, poetry idleness, family and home lies of feigned, essentially unprecedented feelings<…>, a waste of time on visits, on unnecessary hospitality,” etc.
All the idle, dreamy and affective side of old morals with the usual impulses of youth - towards the high, great, graceful, towards effects, with a thirst to express this in crackling prose, most of all in verse.
All this “was obsolete, gone away; there were faint glimpses of a new dawn, something sober, businesslike, necessary.” This assessment of the conflict is quite understandable if we take it from a general historical perspective. According to Goncharov, the landowner way of life that raised Alexander Aduev, the idle environment of the landowner’s estate without intense labor of soul and body - these are the social reasons that determined the complete unpreparedness of the “romantic” Aduev to understand the real needs of modern social life.
These needs, to a certain extent, are embodied in the figure of Uncle Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev. Healthy careerism coexists quite well in his character with education and an understanding of the “secrets” of the human heart. Consequently, according to Goncharov, the advent of the “industrial age” itself does not at all threaten the spiritual development of the individual, does not turn it into a soulless machine, callous to the suffering of other people. However, the writer, of course, is by no means inclined to idealize the moral character of the representative of the new, victorious “philosophy of business.” In the epilogue of the novel, the uncle appears as a victim of this “philosophy”, having lost the love and trust of his wife and himself found himself on the verge of complete spiritual emptiness.
Here we come to understand the essence of the conflict in Goncharov’s first novel. The types of “romantic” and “man of action” for a writer are not only and not so much signs of the hero’s belonging to a certain class, profession, or even cultural and everyday microenvironment (“province” or “capital”). These are, first of all, understood and interpreted very widely as “eternal types” and even (in allegorical terms) “eternal” poles human spirit: sublime and base, divine and devilish, etc. It is not without reason that the fate of the heroes is surrounded by many literary reminiscences. For example, Alexander’s speeches and actions constantly “rhyme” (in the form of direct quotes, allusions) with the destinies of many heroes European literature, the same “disappointed idealists” as himself. Here are Goethe’s Werther, and Schiller’s Karl Moor, and the heroes of Zhukovsky-Schiller’s ballads. and Evgeniy from Pushkin's " Bronze Horseman”, and Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempre from “Lost Illusions”…. It turns out that the “romantic biography” of Alexander Aduev is as much a biography of a Russian provincial romantic of the 1840s as it is an “international” biography, “a barely noticeable ring in the endless chain of humanity.” Goncharov himself pushes the hero to this conclusion in the episode where Alexander’s condition is described after the inspired playing of a visiting violinist struck his imagination. It’s no wonder that sometimes Alexander perceives his dispute with his uncle through the prism of the plot of Pushkin’s famous poem “The Demon”, and then Pyotr Ivanovich appears to him in the image of an “evil genius” tempting an inexperienced soul...
The meaning of Pyotr Ivanovich’s “demonic” position is that the human personality for him is just a mechanical cast of his “Century”. He declares love to be “madness”; “illness” on the grounds that it only interferes with one’s career. Therefore, he does not recognize the power of the heart’s passions, considering human passions “mistakes, ugly deviations from reality.” It also refers to “friendship”, “duty”, “loyalty”. All this is allowed to a modern person, but within the boundaries of “decency” accepted in society. He, therefore, wrongfully reduces the very essence of the “Century” only to a bureaucratic bureaucratic career, narrowing the scope of the “case.” It is not without reason that proportionality, correctness, and measure in everything become the dominant characteristics of both his behavior and his appearance (cf., for example, the description of a face: “not wooden, but calm”). Goncharov does not accept in his hero an apology for “the cause” as such, but extreme forms of denial of dreams and romance, their beneficial role in the formation of the human personality in general. And in this case, the rightness in the dispute already goes to the side of the nephew: “Finally, isn’t this common law nature, that youth should be anxious, ebullient, sometimes extravagant, stupid, and that everyone’s dreams will subside over time, as they did for me?” This is how Alexander, wise in life, reflects in his final letter to his uncle.
Closer to the finale, the genre structure of Goncharov’s first novel, oriented towards the plot canons of the “novel of education,” becomes clearer. Education by life is understood in the novel primarily as the education of the hero’s feelings. “Lessons of Love” become a true school of life for Alexander. It is not for nothing that in the novel it is the personal, spiritual experience of the hero that becomes the main subject of artistic research, and love conflicts are closely intertwined with the main conflict of the novel - a dispute between two worldviews: “idealistic” and “sober-practical”. One of the lessons of life wisdom for Alexander was the discovery of the beneficial, uplifting power of suffering and delusion: they “purify the soul” and make a person “participant in the fullness of life.” Anyone who at one time was not an “incurable romantic”, was not “eccentric” and was not “crazy” will never become a good “realist”. Pushkin’s wisdom - “the old man is funny and flighty, the sedate young man is funny” - seems to hover over the final pages of Goncharov’s work. This wisdom helps to understand the enduring essence of the dispute between uncle and nephew.
Is it because in the finale Pyotr Ivanovich pays so cruelly for his efficiency that he too quickly hastened to accept the “truth” of the “Century” and so easily and indifferently parted with “ yellow flowers”, and with the “ribbon” stolen from his beloved’s chest of drawers, and with other “romantic nonsense” that was still present in his life? And Alexander? The transformation of Alexander, a “romanticist” into a “realist,” differs from a similar transformation of his uncle in that he takes a “sober view” of life, having previously gone through all the steps of the romantic school of life, “with full consciousness of its true pleasures and bitterness.” Therefore, for Alexander, the hard-won “realistic” worldview is not at all a “necessary evil” of the “Century”, for the sake of which it is imperative to suppress everything poetic in oneself. No, Alexander, quite like Pushkin, begins, as the author notes, “to comprehend the poetry of the gray sky, a broken fence, a gate, a dirty pond and a trepak,” that is, the poetry of “the prose of life.” That is why the hero again rushes from Rooks to the “business”, “non-romantic” Petersburg, because he is gradually imbued with the peculiar “romance of business”. It is not without reason that in his letter to his aunt he now considers “activity” to be the “powerful ally” of his romantic love for life. His “soul and body asked for activity,” the author notes. And on this path, the vector of spiritual evolution of Aduev Jr. foreshadowed the appearance of the future hero Goncharov, equally passionate about the “romance of the matter” - Andrei Stolts...
One can only complain that all these spiritual insights of the hero remained insights. He didn't make a Stolz. In the epilogue, instead of Stolz, we see a somewhat softened copy of Aduev Sr. instead of the “hero of the cause” - the “hero-businessman”. Neither in the field of “dreams” nor in the field of “deeds” did Alexander succeed in spiritually transforming and defeating the heavy tread of the “industrial age”.
But the reader still remembers that such a possibility was not at all excluded by Goncharov for his hero. Goncharov’s first novel definitely found itself within the artistic boundaries of the “natural school.” The author of “An Ordinary History” disagreed with the staff of the collection “Physiology of St. Petersburg” on the decision main problem realism - problems of the typical. In Goncharov’s characters one can always feel a certain “residue” that cannot be directly derived from historical time or “environment”. Like the author of “Eugene Onegin,” it is important for Goncharov to emphasize both the realized and unrealized capabilities of the heroes, not only the extent of their compliance, but also the degree of their inconsistency with their “Century.” Projecting the conflict of “An Ordinary Story” onto the plot collisions of Goncharov’s next novel “Oblomov,” we can say that the idealism of Alexander Aduev concealed two equal, although opposite, development possibilities. As in the fate of Vladimir Lensky, in the fate of his younger “literary brother” there was, relatively speaking, both the “Oblomov option” and the “Stolz option.” The development of this dialectic of character will be traced by Goncharov in the system of images of the novel “Oblomov”
I. A. Goncharov with M. Yu. Lermontov, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. I. Herzen in the 1840s laid the foundation for the Russian classical novel.
Goncharov’s first creation of this kind was “Ordinary History,” on which he worked in 1845-1846. Its publication in the magazine “Sovremennik” (1847) brought the author not just fame, but noisy fame, and aroused enthusiastic assessments from the most demanding critics - V. G. Belinsky, Ap. Grigorieva, V.P. Botkina. Grigoriev considered it the best work since the appearance of Dead Souls. Belinsky stated that Goncharov now occupies one of the most prominent places in Russian literature.
In the novel “An Ordinary History,” the analysis of which interests us, Goncharov brought onto the stage and forced two heroes to speak out to the end, who personified two sides of Russian reality, previously separated and distant from each other, and now brought together by life itself.
Aduev Sr. is a type well known to the novelist and characteristic of his St. Petersburg circle. He is a sign of the times, a product of the “St. Petersburg period of Russian history.” This is not only a successful metropolitan official, but also a new businessman, an entrepreneur, who derives considerable benefit from his work for the benefit of industry and general progress. He is a practitioner and at the same time a philosopher in his field, who has developed an irrefutable system of principles and rules that guarantee him success, well-being, and spiritual comfort. Pyotr Ivanovich has no doubt that he fully understood the nature of man and the laws of his existence, that he measured all his needs and capabilities; he is convinced that everything that goes beyond the limits of the measured is groundless dreams, idle and harmful fantasies, resulting from inactivity, stupidity and ignorance of reality. Filled with such confidence, armed with experience, common sense, and caustic irony, he mercilessly debunks and executes his nephew’s naive belief in the “lofty and beautiful,” in “eternal love,” in the “sacredness of friendly ties.”
Aduev Jr. was also well known to Goncharov. These Aduevs are the offspring of old lordly estates, most of them enthusiastic idealists, who brought from their home, from books, from the walls of the university both sublime and abstract ideas about human feelings, about virtues, about creativity and public service. Petersburg becomes a difficult test for Alexander. And it turns out that the young hero has nothing to oppose to the logic and prose of St. Petersburg reality. His resources are insignificant, his inspiration is formless, his enthusiasm is short-lived, his arguments are unconvincing in a dispute with modernity - and with his uncle. The further Goncharov develops and completes the character of Alexander (repeatedly emphasizing his kinship with Pushkin’s Lensky), the clearer it becomes that this romantic appropriated romanticism to himself, but failed to embody it in action, in fate, in creativity, which is what distinguishes him from the true romantics. At the end of the novel, he decides to put his mental and spiritual wealth into profitable circulation - into that circulation of abilities and capital that creates the St. Petersburg civilization - and succeeds in this no less than his uncle.
Goncharov does not administer justice and reprisal to the heroes, he only carefully collects all the details of their lives and composes a simple, harmonious picture - without sharp contours, without too thick shadows, without too bright spots of light. The meaning of the picture emerges by itself, although it is not as simple as some critics thought. It is impossible to make a mistake in it: all the data is reliable, tangible, everything lives and moves here freely and naturally. This is the irresistible power of Goncharov’s realism, which manifested itself already in his first novel, “An Ordinary Story.”