The novel “The Golden Pattern” (1926) is structured in the form of a confessional narrative by the narrator about her fate, absorbing the spirit of a turning point in Russian life and the existence of the Russian intelligentsia - from the turn of the century to the first emigrant impressions of the early 1920s. (All links to the text of the novel are given according to the edition: Zaitsev B.K. A Strange Journey / Compiled and prefaced by I. Kuramzhina; Art. D. Shotkin. - M.: Panorama, 1996.) In a story that is multifaceted in composition and style The author conveyed to the daughter of the manager of the Moscow plant, Natalya, the deep connection between the individual and the historically characteristic. Through the eyes of the heroine, pictures of the metropolitan and provincial reality of the period of pre-revolutionary expectations and the revolution itself are revealed, and a symbolically capacious image of the natural cosmos is given. The subject of intense artistic reflection of the author and heroine were various types of human relations with historical time, which are designated at different stages life path Natalia herself and in the character system.
The psychological make-up of the narrator is evident from the very beginning of her narrative. What dominates here is a youthfully enthusiastic perception of the world, which “seemed so far and spacious,” aesthetic talent associated with singing, a joyful acceptance of a carefree existence, illuminated by the “delicious smells” of his native Moscow, and love for his future husband Markel, with whom, as she saw it, they were “left to themselves, to their youth, to their thirst for life and love.” Psychologically motivated at this time is the heroine’s superficial attitude towards faith and church sacraments, in to a greater extent soulful, aestheticized rather than deeply spiritual perception of both Lenten services and the joyful atmosphere of Easter Moscow.
The deepening of the heroine’s individual and historical reflection about herself as a “lover of life”, who, as it became more and more obvious, happened to live during the impending storms, is connected in the novel with the vicissitudes in her personal, family life. This and an increasingly dramatic feeling of inner dissatisfaction in family relationships, and a hysterical fascination with the colorful life of the artistic Moscow bohemia, in which the external bustle gradually concealed a hidden omen of an inevitable explosion. Already at this stage of the narrative, the novel’s time acquires a synthesized character, due to the superimposition on the reflections of the young heroine of her later retrospective perception of everything she experienced, about the epoch-making significance of which she, as she admits, “didn’t think much about in those years”...
This “double” narrative perspective gives the heroine’s confession special psychological persuasiveness. Natalya’s naively enthusiastic perception of the splendor of Moscow bohemian existence, neglect of family concerns, the serious illness of her son, prodigal rapprochement with Alexander Andreevich - all this is “corrected” here by the bitter irony of the then historical short-sightedness of the “dressed up Moscow tribe”, repentant self-awareness, permeated with heightened moral reflection (“I am an artist, a lady, a singer”), in the light of which the later death of her son will be seen as a heavy retribution for that small cross in the form of his illness, which at one time was not accepted and borne by the heroine. The narrator’s penetrating feeling for the hidden meaning of the external events of her life gives the narrative a lyrical character, which is manifested in the rhythm and syntax of the phrase, sometimes close to the poetic style: “Everything flashed and is carried away from my memory, like that time - a foggy and poignant time for me... ".
The heroine’s insight into the individual and historical meaningfulness of the path of both her own and that of her generation of creative intelligentsia is conveyed in the work by various means of substantive representation. The dynamics of the portrait characterization are also important in this regard, when, reveling in disastrous freedom, the narrator catches in her face the expression of “wandering, fluidity,” and spatial leitmotif images. Thus, the oblivion of the family forces Natalya to admit that “the house... was becoming a hotel,” and later the voluntary departure from the family hearth for the sake of an idle and carefree life in Paris and Rome will symbolically “rhyme” with the future retribution of fate - with the already forced sad emigrant separation from home , Moscow, Russia.
The period of the heroine's wanderings across Europe, projected onto the Gospel parable about prodigal son, becomes at the same time the time when in her inner world a visionary perception of one’s life and the fate of Russia awakens. On the basis of nostalgic memories, an awareness of the main value guidelines grows: “Russia, Markusha, father, Galkino.” Gradually overcoming the thorns of new sensual hobbies (the story of Gildo), the narrator more and more definitely strives to understand the mysterious pattern of her path, that Higher Will that “spins the pattern of life.” In the process of development of the novel's action, such knowledge is due to the deep aspiration of the individual towards Communion with God, expressed in an intense search for genuine faith, which in the subsequent hard times will become a powerful strengthening for the heroine: “I sing “I Believe,” but do I believe myself?”
Difficult reflection on being lost own life(“And who am I?.. Why am I sitting here?”), which paved the way for the rediscovery of our native land, is not coincidentally correlated in the novel with the beginning of the First World War, which for the first time brings into the novel a feeling of the irrational abyss of history. The emotional and at the same time extremely concentrated perception of the approaching “times of events” by Natalya, who is returning to her homeland, becomes in Zaitsev’s portrayal a significant crossroads of the personal and the general historical. A shout heard from a military carriage, a meeting with a son, observation of the “severe running of clouds” - these and other small and symbolically significant episodes and scenes of the novel convey the conflicting severity of the relationship between personal, family principles and the challenges of the era: “They broke into our quiet circle news of battles and marches." And at the same time, genuine awareness of this “other zone, war and grief” introduces the individual to the understanding of the people’s tragedy, returns it to that spiritual and moral space, which is often lost in everyday, “unfaithful and foggy” existence: “I will flutter... a rather empty, easy life..."
As she deepens into the feeling of the destructive reality of the wartime hard times, both the content and style of the heroine’s narrative changes, the ethics of spiritual self-restraint comes to the fore in front of the formidable face of historical time. In Natalya’s speech, lyrical appeals to the Motherland sound more and more poignantly, in the fate of which the narrator discerns an indirect reflection of her own wanderings and experienced sorrows: “Oh, Russia! Bitter and sweet, darkness and tenderness, as if abandonment and loneliness...”. Working in the infirmary, Natalya discovers for herself the world of people’s characters disfigured by the war, and in the tragedy that takes place in history, she feels connected as with her own inner life, with “my own Apocalypse”, and with eternity: “... from the chorales of eternity... it’s as if I have moved on to the everyday...”.
It is through dialogue with the challenges of history that the paradoxes of both the heroine’s personal self-awareness and that part of the novel are more acutely revealed in the logic of the novel’s action. thinking intelligentsia, whose mentality she embodies. Here is a share of Natalya’s frivolity and indomitable emotionality that has not been completely eliminated, which manifested itself, in particular, in her “escapade” with the Soul, and a significant measure of naivety in the hope of a quick return to the harmonious order of national and individual existence - that “everything will happen soon.” will end." On the other hand, this is the acuteness of historical, ethically oriented reflection “about life, peace, war, tragedy.” At this stage of fate, the heroine’s thinking becomes more and more painfully focused on the insoluble and inaccessible to ordinary consciousness contrasts generated by the era itself: “We were warming ourselves. Someone was dying... Rushing in a speculator’s car into the night terrible war and miserable pleasures...” Subsequently, looking at her own past short-sightedness from another era (“That was a different century, and we were children”), the heroine is still far from self-denial. Profound insight of the measure national suffering awakens a conciliar principle in her worldview and sets a special scale of critical self-esteem: “She was stupid, impudent with Markel and unfair... in that autumn, under the blood of the hostages being shot...”. Drawing these psychological processes in the inner world of the narrator, Zaitsev artistically gropes for the possible limit of the internal stability of an individual undergoing the test of history. Natalya’s spiritual world, sensitive to this test, captures the moments of a particularly aggressive attack of the era on human individuality. She feels this both in connection with her husband’s conscription into the army (“an invisible, terrible line separated us”), and in a heightened perception of how the village harmony in Galkino, the highest embodiment of which she sees as the Easter Procession of the Cross, is increasingly being destroyed irreversibly by the “hustle and bustle of the revolution.” , the inertia of a “senseless and merciless” rebellion.
The gradual narrowing of Natalya’s living space, associated with the loss of her father, the loss of her native Moscow walls (“In Moscow, our apartment was seized”), strengthens in her soul the understanding of secret “rapprochements” in fate and her predicament to the incomprehensible laws of Providence, by whose wise will “who- then, for the time being, he stubbornly diverted us from the events." Everyday objects receive symbolic significance here, absorbing the scale of life lived, such as, for example, “that white cross, what remains from my youth, my father...”
The tragic culmination of the break in the connection between times, which was experienced by both the individual and the whole of Russia at the time of the revolutionary breakdown, becomes for Natalya the execution of her son, which is plotally associated in the novel with the death of her father and marks the collapse of the family chain. In connection with this, an event that has autobiographical associations for Zaitsev himself, the episode of the narrator’s visit to the unmarked grave of her son, seen with her sophisticated spiritual vision as “Our Calvary,” the cathartic overcoming of which is possible through the restoration of repentant prayerful communication with God, is especially symbolic: “Only in singing, in “In the words of prayers and the harmonious, lightened rhythm of the service, we felt freer, here we breathed, here there was air, light.” In this confession of the heroine there is a connecting thread between the various milestones of her fate, a kind of spiritual program, projected both on the stoic, personal overcoming of revolutionary modernity, and on the emigrant future, the restless outlines of which appear in final scenes novel following the farewell to his native land: “Everything was on my mind - the homeland was moving farther and farther, under the smooth, Russian sound of wheels...”.
Thus, in the individual fate of the narrator, who forms the compositional center of the novel’s narrative, the depth of the historical and moral meaning. In the turns and zigzags of this path, the author discerns the spiritual ideal of a person’s search for internal resources to resist private temptations and open dialogue with historical time.
The problem of the relationship between the personal and the historical, the preservation of individuality “during events” turns out to be significant in relation to the destinies minor characters, the system of which is largely built precisely in connection with the spiritual position occupied by each of them during a period of upheaval.
The older generation, who fundamentally did not want to adapt to the conditions of revolutionary turmoil, is depicted in the image of their father main character, in which it is no coincidence that there are autobiographical associations with the father of the author himself, K.N. Zaitsev, who managed a Moscow metal plant. The attitude and patriarchal way of life of the father, convinced, according to Natalya’s observation, that “the world moves according to the Russian Gazette”, become in the work a sad reminder of the “familiar” and spiritually close to the author and narrator of “ancient Russia” that is forever leaving. At the same time, acute insight is noticeable in his skeptical assessment of the speculativeness and passivity of representatives of the intelligentsia as “unfounded,” “unreal” people who, like Georgievsky, are capable of “rolling up to the village in white trousers.”
The theme of the intelligentsia and revolution, deeply understood in the articles of A. Blok and other thinkers of the beginning of the century, receives deep development in Zaitsev’s novel. Strengths and vulnerabilities of the aristocratic worldview, brought up on examples of high European culture the intellectual elite are revealed in the images of Georgievsky, Markel, Alexander Andreich.
The consciousness of Georgy Alexandrovich Georgievsky, “a gentleman and a nobleman,” “whose family came from Byzantium,” is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, there is a sense of groundlessness here, conditioned by the distance from both the primordial traditions of the folk faith (“It’s hard for me to consider myself a Christian”) and from the social aspects of Russian life, which is eloquently indicated by his visit to Galkino “in whites”, which is repeatedly recalled in the novel. trousers" - "just like going to a resort." At the same time, distanced from the specific social realities of our time, Georgievsky’s inner world is filled with a tragic foreboding of future catastrophes, which to a large extent reflected the mindset of the refined intelligentsia Silver Age: "We have dark things ahead of us... and strange things, and terrible things...". Parallels with Blok’s articles on the scale of the revolutionary element can be seen in Georgievsky’s comparisons of everything that happened with the destruction of the Roman Empire by the barbarian masses: “The plebs and the soldiers, the dictators, flooded this Rome with blood...”. It is no coincidence that the references to the fate of Seneca that arise in this context will subsequently be perceived by Natalya as Georgievsky’s prescient anticipation of both his own death and the fate of the intelligentsia during the triumph of the deafening “music of the revolution”: “I had long foreseen the war, the revolution, and my death...”. In his tragic understanding of modernity, there is also a strong ethical component, which is associated with the motive of moral and historical guilt, dating back to populism, tied to the benefits of “civilization” (in Blok’s sense of this concept), to the well-fed life of the intelligentsia for the impending historical explosion. The corresponding detailed statements of the hero are designed in an almost oratorical style - the more obvious is their programmatic significance for both the narrator and the author himself: “For a long time now I have felt that the world is not in order. We have lived peacefully, well-fed and sinfully for too long and have accumulated too many explosive forces . Look, humanity is bored. There is a new day in blood and battle...”
The narrator's husband, Markel, who is engaged in science under the "green lamp" of his Moscow office, who stubbornly continues to lecture even in frozen classrooms, embodies with his position the desire of the thinking part of the intelligentsia to avoid total depersonalization even in the barracks conditions of average existence imposed by the era - the intelligentsia, which was subsequently doomed to emigrant exile. In his final letter to Natalya, containing a deep spiritual assessment of everything that happened in Russia, a direct correlation arises between the scales of private and national existence, a remarkable parallel emerges with the tragic intuitions of Georgievsky and at the same time outlines the path for the Russian emigration to preserve their national identity: “What happened to Russia, with us - it is no coincidence. Truly, we and everyone have reaped only what we have sown. Russia bears the punishment of redemption just like you and I... We are in a foreign land, and for a long time (and I believe in Russia!)... We have to live and fight, affirming ours. Perhaps we are stronger just when we are underground...”
The novel also shows the disastrous consequences of the characters losing their personal core under the onslaught of historical upheavals. A fundamentally different choice, in comparison with Georgievsky and Markel, is made for himself by the representative of the pre-revolutionary creative elite, the artist Alexander Andreich, who is trying, at the cost of complete renunciation of individuality, to mimic the style of “new life”, to establish himself in the eyes of the authorities as an artist “working for the republic” . However, even this mimicry, as becomes obvious in the episode with the firewood, is unable to prolong the full existence of the previous culture in post-revolutionary conditions.
The narrator's son Andrei becomes a victim of the revolution - not only physically, but also spiritually. His involuntary involvement in the whirlpool of revolutionary confrontation turns into a family disaster for Natalya and occurs to the detriment of family and personal relationships. He, as the narrator notes, “moved even further”: “as if it was not a son who stood in front of me, but a young general...”.
The bearer of militantly anti-personal force in the novel is Kukhov - in the past an unscrupulous journalist, and in times of hard times who became one of the faceless links in the punitive system of revolutionary terror. “The ineradicable taste of plebeianism,” its hidden and then overt aggression, recognized in Kukhov by Natalya and Georgievsky, are perceived in the logic of the work as the main driving force of the destructive elements of the barbaric revolution.
It is important that in the system of the most significant characters in the novel, the comparison of various destinies is associated precisely with the personal choice of each of them in a given historical era, with the polarization of mutually exclusive positions in terms of maintaining or, on the contrary, to one degree or another consciously trampling on one’s own individuality in favor of the depersonalizing trends of modernity .
Rich in artistic embodiment pictures of surrounding life presented in the novel mainly through the eyes of the narrator. In this image, three main components can be distinguished: the world of Moscow and Moscow life, familiar to the heroine from a young age; no less dear to her is the aura of provincial Rus' and the endless expanses of Russia as a whole; this is also the scale of the natural cosmos, the presence of which is associated both with the revelation of the psychological background of her experiences and with the supra-historical level of the author’s philosophical generalizations.
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Personality and historical time in B. Zaitsev’s novel “The Golden Pattern”
(To the 125th anniversary of the birth of B.K. Zaitsev)
Nichiporov I. B.
The novel “The Golden Pattern” (1926) is structured in the form of a confessional narrative by the narrator about her fate, absorbing the spirit of a turning point in Russian life and the existence of the Russian intelligentsia - from the turn of the century to the first emigrant impressions of the early 1920s. (All links to the text of the novel are given according to the edition: Zaitsev B.K. A Strange Journey / Compiled and prefaced by I. Kuramzhina; Art. D. Shotkin. - M.: Panorama, 1996.) In a story that is multifaceted in composition and style The author conveyed to the daughter of the manager of the Moscow plant, Natalya, the deep connection between the individual and the historically characteristic. Through the eyes of the heroine, pictures of the metropolitan and provincial reality of the period of pre-revolutionary expectations and the revolution itself are revealed, and a symbolically capacious image of the natural cosmos is given. The subject of intense artistic reflection by the author and heroine were various types of human relationships with historical time, which are indicated at different stages of Natalya’s life path and in the system of characters.
The psychological make-up of the narrator is evident from the very beginning of her story. What dominates here is a youthfully enthusiastic perception of the world, which “seemed so far and spacious,” aesthetic talent associated with singing, a joyful acceptance of a carefree existence, illuminated by the “delicious smells” of his native Moscow, and love for his future husband Markel, with whom, as she saw it, they were “left to themselves, to their youth, to their thirst for life and love.” Psychologically motivated at this time is the heroine’s superficial attitude towards faith and church sacraments, which is more spiritual and aestheticized than the in-depth spiritual perception of both Lenten services and the joyful atmosphere of Easter Moscow.
The deepening of the heroine’s individual and historical reflection about herself as a “lover of life”, who, as it became more and more obvious, happened to live during the impending storms, is connected in the novel with the ups and downs in her personal and family life. This is an increasingly dramatic feeling of internal dissatisfaction in family relationships, and a hysterical fascination with the colorful life of the artistic Moscow bohemia, in which the external bustle gradually concealed a hidden omen of an inevitable explosion. Already at this stage of the narrative, the novel’s time acquires a synthesized character, due to the superimposition on the reflections of the young heroine of her later retrospective perception of everything she experienced, about the epoch-making significance of which she, as she admits, “didn’t think much about in those years”...
This “double” narrative perspective gives the heroine’s confession special psychological persuasiveness. Natalya’s naively enthusiastic perception of the splendor of Moscow bohemian existence, neglect of family concerns, the serious illness of her son, prodigal rapprochement with Alexander Andreevich - all this is “corrected” here by the bitter irony of the then historical short-sightedness of the “dressed up Moscow tribe”, repentant self-awareness, permeated with heightened moral reflection (“I am an artist, a lady, a singer”), in the light of which the later death of her son will be seen as a heavy retribution for that small cross in the form of his illness, which at one time was not accepted and borne by the heroine. The narrator’s penetrating feeling for the hidden meaning of the external events of her life gives the narrative a lyrical character, which is manifested in the rhythm and syntax of the phrase, sometimes close to the poetic style: “Everything flashed and is carried away from my memory, like that time - a foggy and poignant time for me... ".
The heroine’s insight into the individual and historical meaningfulness of the path of both her own and that of her generation of creative intelligentsia is conveyed in the work by various means of substantive representation. The dynamics of the portrait characterization are also important in this regard, when, reveling in disastrous freedom, the narrator catches in her face the expression of “wandering, fluidity,” and spatial leitmotif images. Thus, the oblivion of the family forces Natalya to admit that “the house... was becoming a hotel,” and later the voluntary departure from the family hearth for the sake of an idle and carefree life in Paris and Rome will symbolically “rhyme” with the future retribution of fate - with the already forced sad emigrant separation from home , Moscow, Russia.
The period of the heroine’s wanderings across Europe, projected on the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son, simultaneously becomes the time when a prophetic perception of her life and the fate of Russia awakens in her inner world. On the basis of nostalgic memories, an awareness of the main value guidelines grows: “Russia, Markusha, father, Galkino.” Gradually overcoming the thorns of new sensual hobbies (the story of Gildo), the narrator more and more definitely strives to understand the mysterious pattern of her path, that Higher Will that “spins the pattern of life.” In the process of development of the novel's action, such knowledge is due to the deep aspiration of the individual towards Communion with God, expressed in an intense search for genuine faith, which in the subsequent hard times will become a powerful strengthening for the heroine: “I sing “I Believe,” but do I believe myself?”
It is no coincidence that the difficult reflection on the loss of one’s own life (“And who am I?.. Why am I sitting here?”), which paved the way for the new acquisition of one’s native land, is correlated in the novel with the beginning of the First World War, which for the first time brings into the novel a feeling of the irrational abyss of history . The emotional and at the same time extremely concentrated perception of the approaching “times of events” by Natalya, who is returning to her homeland, becomes in Zaitsev’s portrayal a significant crossroads of the personal and the general historical. A shout heard from a military carriage, a meeting with a son, observation of the “severe running of clouds” - these and other small and symbolically significant episodes and scenes of the novel convey the conflicting severity of the relationship between personal, family principles and the challenges of the era: “They broke into our quiet circle news of battles and marches." And at the same time, genuine awareness of this “other zone, war and grief” introduces the individual to the understanding of the people’s tragedy, returns it to that spiritual and moral space, which is often lost in everyday, “unfaithful and foggy” existence: “I will flutter... a rather empty, easy life..."
As she deepens into the feeling of the destructive reality of the wartime hard times, both the content and style of the heroine’s narrative changes, the ethics of spiritual self-restraint comes to the fore in front of the formidable face of historical time. In Natalya’s speech, lyrical appeals to the Motherland sound more and more poignantly, in the fate of which the narrator discerns an indirect reflection of her own wanderings and experienced sorrows: “Oh, Russia! Bitter and sweet, darkness and tenderness, as if abandonment and loneliness...”. Working in the infirmary, Natalya discovers the world of people’s characters disfigured by the war, and in the tragedy that takes place in history, she feels connected both with her own inner life, with “her Apocalypse,” and with eternity: “... from the chorales of eternity... I as if I had switched to the ordinary...”
It is through dialogue with the challenges of history that the paradoxes of both the heroine’s personal self-awareness and that part of the thinking intelligentsia, whose mentality she embodies, are more acutely revealed in the logic of the novel’s action. Here is a share of Natalya’s frivolity and indomitable emotionality that has not been completely eliminated, which manifested itself, in particular, in her “escapade” with the Soul, and a significant measure of naivety in the hope of a quick return to the harmonious order of national and individual existence - that “everything will happen soon.” will end." On the other hand, this is the acuteness of historical, ethically oriented reflection “about life, peace, war, tragedy.” At this stage of fate, the heroine’s thinking becomes more and more painfully focused on the insoluble and inaccessible to ordinary consciousness contrasts generated by the era itself: “We were warming ourselves. Someone was dying... Rushing in a speculator’s car on the night of a terrible war and miserable pleasures...”. Subsequently, looking at her own past short-sightedness from another era (“That was a different century, and we were children”), the heroine is still far from self-denial. A deep insight into the extent of the people's suffering awakens a conciliar principle in her worldview and sets a special scale of critical self-esteem: “She was stupid, impudent with Markel and unfair... in that autumn, under the blood of the hostages being shot...”. Drawing these psychological processes in the inner world of the narrator, Zaitsev artistically gropes for the possible limit of the internal stability of an individual undergoing the test of history. Natalya’s spiritual world, sensitive to this test, captures the moments of a particularly aggressive attack of the era on human individuality. She feels this both in connection with her husband’s conscription into the army (“an invisible, terrible line separated us”), and in a heightened perception of how the village harmony in Galkino, the highest embodiment of which she sees as the Easter Procession of the Cross, is increasingly being destroyed irreversibly by the “hustle and bustle of the revolution.” , the inertia of a “senseless and merciless” rebellion.
The gradual narrowing of Natalya’s living space, associated with the loss of her father, the loss of her native Moscow walls (“In Moscow, our apartment was seized”), strengthens in her soul the understanding of secret “rapprochements” in fate and her predicament to the incomprehensible laws of Providence, by whose wise will “who- then, for the time being, he stubbornly diverted us from the events." Everyday details receive symbolic significance here, absorbing the scale of the life lived, such as, for example, “that white cross that remains from my youth, my father...”.
The tragic culmination of the break in the connection between times, which was experienced by both the individual and the whole of Russia at the time of the revolutionary breakdown, becomes for Natalya the execution of her son, which is plotally associated in the novel with the death of her father and marks the collapse of the family chain. In connection with this, an event that has autobiographical associations for Zaitsev himself, the episode of the narrator’s visit to the unmarked grave of her son, seen with her sophisticated spiritual vision as “Our Calvary,” the cathartic overcoming of which is possible through the restoration of repentant prayerful communication with God, is especially symbolic: “Only in singing, in “In the words of prayers and the harmonious, lightened rhythm of the service, we felt freer, here we breathed, here there was air, light.” In this confession of the heroine there is a connecting thread between the various milestones of her fate, a kind of spiritual program, projected both on the stoic, personal overcoming of revolutionary modernity, and on the emigrant future, the restless outlines of which appear in the final scenes of the novel, following the farewell to her native land: “Everything I thought - the homeland was moving further and further, to the smooth, Russian sound of wheels...”
Thus, in the individual fate of the narrator, who forms the compositional center of the novel’s narrative, the depth of historical and moral meaning is revealed. In the turns and zigzags of this path, the author discerns the spiritual ideal of a person’s search for internal resources to resist private temptations and open dialogue with historical time.
The problem of the relationship between the personal and the historical, the preservation of individuality “in times of events” turns out to be significant in relation to the destinies of minor characters, whose system is largely built precisely in connection with the spiritual position occupied by each of them during a period of upheaval.
The older generation, who fundamentally did not want to adapt to the conditions of revolutionary turmoil, is depicted in the image of the father of the main character, in whom it is no coincidence that there are autobiographical associations with the father of the author himself - K.N. Zaitsev, who managed a Moscow metal plant. The attitude and patriarchal way of life of the father, convinced, according to Natalya’s observation, that “the world moves according to the Russian Gazette”, become in the work a sad reminder of the “familiar” and spiritually close to the author and narrator of “ancient Russia” that is forever leaving. At the same time, acute insight is noticeable in his skeptical assessment of the speculativeness and passivity of representatives of the intelligentsia as “unfounded,” “unreal” people who, like Georgievsky, are capable of “rolling up to the village in white trousers.”
The theme of the intelligentsia and revolution, deeply understood in the articles of A. Blok and other thinkers of the beginning of the century, receives deep development in Zaitsev’s novel. The strengths and vulnerable sides of the worldview of the aristocratic intellectual elite, brought up on the examples of high European culture, are revealed in the images of Georgievsky, Markel, Alexander Andreich.
The consciousness of Georgy Alexandrovich Georgievsky, “a gentleman and a nobleman,” “whose family came from Byzantium,” is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, there is a sense of groundlessness here, conditioned by the distance from both the primordial traditions of the folk faith (“It’s hard for me to consider myself a Christian”) and from the social aspects of Russian life, which is eloquently indicated by his visit to Galkino “in whites”, which is repeatedly recalled in the novel. trousers" - "just like going to a resort." At the same time, distanced from the specific social realities of our time, Georgievsky’s inner world is filled with a tragic foreboding of future catastrophes, which to a large extent reflected the mindset of the refined intelligentsia of the Silver Age: “We have dark things ahead of us... and strange, and terrible...”. Parallels with Blok’s articles on the scale of the revolutionary element can be seen in Georgievsky’s comparisons of everything that happened with the destruction of the Roman Empire by the barbarian masses: “The plebs and the soldiers, the dictators, flooded this Rome with blood...”. It is no coincidence that the references to the fate of Seneca that arise in this context will subsequently be perceived by Natalya as Georgievsky’s prescient anticipation of both his own death and the fate of the intelligentsia during the triumph of the deafening “music of the revolution”: “I had long foreseen the war, the revolution, and my death...”. In his tragic understanding of modernity, there is also a strong ethical component, which is associated with the motive of moral and historical guilt, dating back to populism, tied to the benefits of “civilization” (in Blok’s sense of this concept), to the well-fed life of the intelligentsia for the impending historical explosion. The corresponding detailed statements of the hero are designed in an almost oratorical style - the more obvious is their programmatic significance for both the narrator and the author himself: “For a long time now I have felt that the world is not in order. We have lived peacefully, well-fed and sinfully for too long and have accumulated too many explosive forces . Look, humanity is bored. There is a new day in blood and battle...”
The narrator's husband, Markel, who is engaged in science under the "green lamp" of his Moscow office, who stubbornly continues to lecture even in frozen classrooms, embodies with his position the desire of the thinking part of the intelligentsia to avoid total depersonalization even in the barracks conditions of average existence imposed by the era - the intelligentsia, which was subsequently doomed to emigrant exile. In his final letter to Natalya, containing a deep spiritual assessment of everything that happened in Russia, a direct correlation arises between the scales of private and national existence, a remarkable parallel emerges with the tragic intuitions of Georgievsky and at the same time outlines the path for the Russian emigration to preserve their national identity: “What happened to Russia, with us - it is no coincidence. Truly, we and everyone have reaped only what we have sown. Russia bears the punishment of redemption just like you and I... We are in a foreign land, and for a long time (and I believe in Russia!)... We have to live and fight, affirming ours. Perhaps we are stronger just when we are underground...”
The novel also shows the disastrous consequences of the characters losing their personal core under the onslaught of historical upheavals. A fundamentally different choice, in comparison with Georgievsky and Markel, is made for himself by the representative of the pre-revolutionary creative elite, the artist Alexander Andreich, who is trying, at the cost of complete renunciation of individuality, to mimic the style of “new life”, to establish himself in the eyes of the authorities as an artist “working for the republic” . However, even this mimicry, as becomes obvious in the episode with the firewood, is unable to prolong the full existence of the previous culture in post-revolutionary conditions.
The narrator's son Andrei becomes a victim of the revolution - not only physically, but also spiritually. His involuntary involvement in the whirlpool of revolutionary confrontation turns into a family disaster for Natalya and occurs to the detriment of family and personal relationships. He, as the narrator notes, “moved even further”: “as if it was not a son who stood in front of me, but a young general...”.
The bearer of militantly anti-personal force in the novel is Kukhov - in the past an unscrupulous journalist, and in times of hard times who became one of the faceless links in the punitive system of revolutionary terror. “The ineradicable taste of plebeianism,” its hidden and then overt aggression, recognized in Kukhov by Natalya and Georgievsky, are perceived in the logic of the work as the main driving force of the destructive elements of the barbaric revolution.
It is important that in the system of the most significant characters in the novel, the comparison of various destinies is associated precisely with the personal choice of each of them in a given historical era, with the polarization of mutually exclusive positions in terms of maintaining or, on the contrary, to one degree or another consciously trampling on one’s own individuality in favor of the depersonalizing trends of modernity .
A significant area of interaction between the subjective-personal and the epochal-historical are the pictures of surrounding life, rich in artistic expression, presented in the novel mainly through the eyes of the narrator. In this image, three main components can be distinguished: the world of Moscow and Moscow life, familiar to the heroine from a young age; no less dear to her is the aura of provincial Rus' and the endless expanses of Russia as a whole; this is also the scale of the natural cosmos, the presence of which is associated both with the revelation of the psychological background of her experiences and with the supra-historical level of the author’s philosophical generalizations.
Bibliography
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Nichiporov I. B.
The novel “The Golden Pattern” (1926) is structured in the form of a confessional narrative by the narrator about her fate, absorbing the spirit of a turning point in Russian life and the existence of the Russian intelligentsia - from the turn of the century to the first emigrant impressions of the early 1920s. (All links to the text of the novel are given according to the edition: Zaitsev B.K. Strange Journey / Compiled and prefaced by I. Kuramzhina; Art. D. Shotkin. - M.: Panorama, 1996. (Library "Russian Literature. 20th Century ". Hereinafter, italics in quotations belong to the author of the novel.) In the multifaceted story in composition and style of the daughter of the manager of a Moscow plant, Natalya, the author conveyed the deep connection of the individual, personal and historically characteristic. Through the eyes of the heroine, pictures of the metropolitan and provincial reality of the period of pre-revolutionary expectations and directly revolution, a symbolically capacious image of the natural cosmos is given. The subject of intense artistic reflection of the author and heroine is the various types of human relationships with historical time, which are indicated at different stages of Natalia’s life path and in the system of characters.
The psychological make-up of the narrator is evident from the very beginning of her story. What dominates here is a youthfully enthusiastic perception of the world, which “seemed so far and spacious,” aesthetic talent associated with singing, a joyful acceptance of a carefree existence, illuminated by the “delicious smells” of his native Moscow, and love for his future husband Markel, with whom, as she saw it, they were “left to themselves, to their youth, to their thirst for life and love.” Psychologically motivated at this time is the heroine’s superficial attitude towards faith and church sacraments, which is more spiritual and aestheticized than the in-depth spiritual perception of both Lenten services and the joyful atmosphere of Easter Moscow.
The deepening of the heroine’s individual and historical reflection about herself as a “lover of life”, who, as it became more and more obvious, happened to live during the impending storms, is connected in the novel with the ups and downs in her personal and family life. This is an increasingly dramatic feeling of internal dissatisfaction in family relationships, and a hysterical fascination with the colorful life of the artistic Moscow bohemia, in which the external bustle gradually concealed a hidden omen of an inevitable explosion. Already at this stage of the narrative, the novel’s time acquires a synthesized character, due to the superimposition on the reflections of the young heroine of her later retrospective perception of everything she experienced, about the epoch-making significance of which she, as she admits, “didn’t think much about in those years”...
This “double” narrative perspective gives the heroine’s confession special psychological persuasiveness. Natalya’s naively enthusiastic perception of the splendor of Moscow bohemian existence, neglect of family concerns, the serious illness of her son, prodigal rapprochement with Alexander Andreevich - all this is “corrected” here by the bitter irony of the then historical short-sightedness of the “dressed up Moscow tribe”, repentant self-awareness, permeated with heightened moral reflection (“I am an artist, a lady, a singer”), in the light of which the later death of her son will be seen as a heavy retribution for that small cross in the form of his illness, which at one time was not accepted and borne by the heroine. The narrator’s penetrating feeling for the hidden meaning of the external events of her life gives the narrative a lyrical character, which is manifested in the rhythm and syntax of the phrase, sometimes close to the poetic style: “Everything flashed and is carried away from my memory, like that time - a foggy and poignant time for me... ".
The heroine’s insight into the individual and historical meaningfulness of the path of both her own and that of her generation of creative intelligentsia is conveyed in the work by various means of substantive representation. The dynamics of the portrait characterization are also important in this regard, when, reveling in disastrous freedom, the narrator catches in her face the expression of “wandering, fluidity,” and spatial leitmotif images. Thus, the oblivion of the family forces Natalya to admit that “the house... was becoming a hotel,” and later the voluntary departure from the family hearth for the sake of an idle and carefree life in Paris and Rome will symbolically “rhyme” with the future retribution of fate - with the already forced sad emigrant separation from home , Moscow, Russia.
The period of the heroine’s wanderings across Europe, projected on the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son, simultaneously becomes the time when a prophetic perception of her life and the fate of Russia awakens in her inner world. On the basis of nostalgic memories, an awareness of the main value guidelines grows: “Russia, Markusha, father, Galkino.” Gradually overcoming the thorns of new sensual hobbies (the story of Gildo), the narrator more and more definitely strives to understand the mysterious pattern of her path, that Higher Will that “spins the pattern of life.” In the process of development of the novel's action, such knowledge is due to the deep aspiration of the individual towards Communion with God, expressed in an intense search for genuine faith, which in the subsequent hard times will become a powerful strengthening for the heroine: “I sing “I Believe,” but do I believe myself?”
It is no coincidence that the difficult reflection on the loss of one’s own life (“And who am I?.. Why am I sitting here?”), which paved the way for the new acquisition of one’s native land, is correlated in the novel with the beginning of the First World War, which for the first time brings into the novel a feeling of the irrational abyss of history . The emotional and at the same time extremely concentrated perception of the approaching “times of events” by Natalya, who is returning to her homeland, becomes in Zaitsev’s portrayal a significant crossroads of the personal and the general historical. A shout heard from a military carriage, a meeting with a son, observation of the “severe running of clouds” - these and other small and symbolically significant episodes and scenes of the novel convey the conflicting severity of the relationship between personal, family principles and the challenges of the era: “They broke into our quiet circle news of battles and marches." And at the same time, genuine awareness of this “other zone, war and grief” introduces the individual to the understanding of the people’s tragedy, returns it to that spiritual and moral space, which is often lost in everyday, “unfaithful and foggy” existence: “I will flutter... a rather empty, easy life..."
As she deepens into the feeling of the destructive reality of the wartime hard times, both the content and style of the heroine’s narrative changes, the ethics of spiritual self-restraint comes to the fore in front of the formidable face of historical time. In Natalya’s speech, lyrical appeals to the Motherland sound more and more poignantly, in the fate of which the narrator discerns an indirect reflection of her own wanderings and experienced sorrows: “Oh, Russia! Bitter and sweet, darkness and tenderness, as if abandonment and loneliness...”. Working in the infirmary, Natalya discovers the world of people’s characters disfigured by the war, and in the tragedy that takes place in history, she feels connected both with her own inner life, with “her Apocalypse,” and with eternity: “... from the chorales of eternity... I as if I had switched to the ordinary...”
It is through dialogue with the challenges of history that the paradoxes of both the heroine’s personal self-awareness and that part of the thinking intelligentsia, whose mentality she embodies, are more acutely revealed in the logic of the novel’s action. Here is a share of Natalya’s frivolity and indomitable emotionality that has not been completely eliminated, which manifested itself, in particular, in her “escapade” with the Soul, and a significant measure of naivety in the hope of a quick return to the harmonious order of national and individual existence - that “everything will happen soon.” will end." On the other hand, this is the acuteness of historical, ethically oriented reflection “about life, peace, war, tragedy.” At this stage of fate, the heroine’s thinking becomes more and more painfully focused on the insoluble and inaccessible to ordinary consciousness contrasts generated by the era itself: “We were warming ourselves. Someone was dying... Rushing in a speculator’s car on the night of a terrible war and pathetic pleasures...”. Subsequently, looking at her own past short-sightedness from another era (“That was a different century, and we were children”), the heroine is still far from self-denial. A deep insight into the extent of the people's suffering awakens a conciliar principle in her worldview and sets a special scale of critical self-esteem: “She was stupid, impudent with Markel and unfair... in that autumn, under the blood of the hostages being shot...”. Drawing these psychological processes in the inner world of the narrator, Zaitsev artistically gropes for the possible limit of the internal stability of an individual undergoing the test of history. Natalya’s spiritual world, sensitive to this test, captures the moments of a particularly aggressive attack of the era on human individuality. She feels this both in connection with her husband’s conscription into the army (“an invisible, terrible line separated us”), and in a heightened perception of how the village harmony in Galkino, the highest embodiment of which she sees as the Easter Procession of the Cross, is increasingly being destroyed irreversibly by the “hustle and bustle of the revolution.” , the inertia of a “senseless and merciless” rebellion.
The gradual narrowing of Natalya’s living space, associated with the loss of her father, the loss of her native Moscow walls (“In Moscow, our apartment was seized”), strengthens in her soul the understanding of secret “rapprochements” in fate and her predicament to the incomprehensible laws of Providence, by whose wise will “who- then, for the time being, he stubbornly diverted us from the events." Everyday details receive symbolic significance here, absorbing the scale of the life lived, such as, for example, “that white cross that remains from my youth, my father...”.
The tragic culmination of the break in the connection between times, which was experienced by both the individual and the whole of Russia at the time of the revolutionary breakdown, becomes for Natalya the execution of her son, which is plotally associated in the novel with the death of her father and marks the collapse of the family chain. In connection with this, an event that has autobiographical associations for Zaitsev himself, the episode of the narrator’s visit to the unmarked grave of her son, seen with her sophisticated spiritual vision as “Our Calvary,” the cathartic overcoming of which is possible through the restoration of repentant prayerful communication with God, is especially symbolic: “Only in singing, in “In the words of prayers and the harmonious, lightened rhythm of the service, we felt freer, here we breathed, here there was air, light.” In this confession of the heroine there is a connecting thread between the various milestones of her fate, a kind of spiritual program, projected both on the stoic, personal overcoming of revolutionary modernity, and on the emigrant future, the restless outlines of which appear in the final scenes of the novel, following the farewell to her native land: “Everything I thought - the homeland was moving further and further, to the smooth, Russian sound of wheels...”
Thus, in the individual fate of the narrator, who forms the compositional center of the novel’s narrative, the depth of historical and moral meaning is revealed. In the turns and zigzags of this path, the author discerns the spiritual ideal of a person’s search for internal resources to resist private temptations and open dialogue with historical time.
The problem of the relationship between the personal and the historical, the preservation of individuality “in times of events” turns out to be significant in relation to the destinies of minor characters, whose system is largely built precisely in connection with the spiritual position occupied by each of them during a period of upheaval.
The older generation, who fundamentally did not want to adapt to the conditions of revolutionary turmoil, is depicted in the image of the father of the main character, in whom it is no coincidence that there are autobiographical associations with the father of the author himself - K.N. Zaitsev, who managed a Moscow metal plant. The attitude and patriarchal way of life of the father, convinced, according to Natalya’s observation, that “the world moves according to the Russian Gazette”, become in the work a sad reminder of the “familiar” and spiritually close to the author and narrator of “ancient Russia” that is forever leaving. At the same time, acute insight is noticeable in his skeptical assessment of the speculativeness and passivity of representatives of the intelligentsia as “unfounded,” “unreal” people who, like Georgievsky, are capable of “rolling up to the village in white trousers.”
The theme of the intelligentsia and revolution, deeply understood in the articles of A. Blok and other thinkers of the beginning of the century, receives deep development in Zaitsev’s novel. The strengths and vulnerable sides of the worldview of the aristocratic intellectual elite, brought up on the examples of high European culture, are revealed in the images of Georgievsky, Markel, Alexander Andreich.
The consciousness of Georgy Alexandrovich Georgievsky, “a gentleman and a nobleman,” “whose family came from Byzantium,” is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, there is a sense of groundlessness here, conditioned by the distance from both the primordial traditions of the folk faith (“It’s hard for me to consider myself a Christian”) and from the social aspects of Russian life, which is eloquently indicated by his visit to Galkino “in whites”, which is repeatedly recalled in the novel. trousers" - "just like going to a resort." At the same time, distanced from the specific social realities of our time, Georgievsky’s inner world is filled with a tragic foreboding of future catastrophes, which to a large extent reflected the mindset of the refined intelligentsia of the Silver Age: “We have dark things ahead of us... and strange, and terrible...”. Parallels with Blok’s articles on the scale of the revolutionary element can be seen in Georgievsky’s comparisons of everything that happened with the destruction of the Roman Empire by the barbarian masses: “The plebs and the soldiers, the dictators, flooded this Rome with blood...”. It is no coincidence that the references to the fate of Seneca that arise in this context will subsequently be perceived by Natalya as Georgievsky’s prescient anticipation of both his own death and the fate of the intelligentsia during the triumph of the deafening “music of the revolution”: “I had long foreseen the war, the revolution, and my death...”. In his tragic understanding of modernity, there is also a strong ethical component, which is associated with the motive of moral and historical guilt, dating back to populism, tied to the benefits of “civilization” (in Blok’s sense of this concept), to the well-fed life of the intelligentsia for the impending historical explosion. The corresponding detailed statements of the hero are designed in an almost oratorical style - the more obvious is their programmatic significance for both the narrator and the author himself: “For a long time now I have felt that the world is not in order. We have lived peacefully, well-fed and sinfully for too long and have accumulated too many explosive forces . Look, humanity is bored. There is a new day in blood and battle...”
The narrator's husband, Markel, who is engaged in science under the "green lamp" of his Moscow office, who stubbornly continues to lecture even in frozen classrooms, embodies with his position the desire of the thinking part of the intelligentsia to avoid total depersonalization even in the barracks conditions of average existence imposed by the era - the intelligentsia, which was subsequently doomed to emigrant exile. In his final letter to Natalya, containing a deep spiritual assessment of everything that happened in Russia, a direct correlation arises between the scales of private and national existence, a remarkable parallel emerges with the tragic intuitions of Georgievsky and at the same time outlines the path for the Russian emigration to preserve their national identity: “What happened to Russia, with us - it is no coincidence. Truly, we and everyone have reaped only what we have sown. Russia bears the punishment of redemption just like you and I... We are in a foreign land, and for a long time (and I believe in Russia!)... We have to live and fight, affirming ours. Perhaps we are stronger just when we are underground...”
The novel also shows the disastrous consequences of the characters losing their personal core under the onslaught of historical upheavals. A fundamentally different choice, in comparison with Georgievsky and Markel, is made for himself by the representative of the pre-revolutionary creative elite, the artist Alexander Andreich, who is trying, at the cost of complete renunciation of individuality, to mimic the style of “new life”, to establish himself in the eyes of the authorities as an artist “working for the republic” . However, even this mimicry, as becomes obvious in the episode with the firewood, is unable to prolong the full existence of the previous culture in post-revolutionary conditions.
The narrator's son Andrei becomes a victim of the revolution - not only physically, but also spiritually. His involuntary involvement in the whirlpool of revolutionary confrontation turns into a family disaster for Natalya and occurs to the detriment of family and personal relationships. He, as the narrator notes, “moved even further”: “as if it was not a son who stood in front of me, but a young general...”.
The bearer of militantly anti-personal force in the novel is Kukhov - in the past an unscrupulous journalist, and in times of hard times who became one of the faceless links in the punitive system of revolutionary terror. “The ineradicable taste of plebeianism,” its hidden and then overt aggression, recognized in Kukhov by Natalya and Georgievsky, are perceived in the logic of the work as the main driving force of the destructive elements of the barbaric revolution.
It is important that in the system of the most significant characters in the novel, the comparison of various destinies is associated precisely with the personal choice of each of them in a given historical era, with the polarization of mutually exclusive positions in terms of maintaining or, on the contrary, to one degree or another consciously trampling on one’s own individuality in favor of the depersonalizing trends of modernity .
A significant area of interaction between the subjective-personal and the epochal-historical are the pictures of surrounding life, rich in artistic expression, presented in the novel mainly through the eyes of the narrator. In this image, three main components can be distinguished: the world of Moscow and Moscow life, familiar to the heroine from a young age; no less dear to her is the aura of provincial Rus' and the endless expanses of Russia as a whole; this is also the scale of the natural cosmos, the presence of which is associated both with the revelation of the psychological background of her experiences and with the supra-historical level of the author’s philosophical generalizations.
The “Moscow text” of the novel is very multi-layered and becomes a mirror of the inexorable change historical eras, turning points in the destinies of the main characters.
In the first part, the “ancient image of Mother Moscow”, spiritually related to the author and heroine, as an Orthodox city, with its Kremlin cathedrals and churches, with a “vaguely joyful, Easter” mood, consonant with the enlightened worldview of the young characters, comes to the center. In building lyrical image In the city, an important role belongs to landscape sketches of both spring and autumn Moscow, which has a unique “delicious smell”. The details of color painting are also significant here, as if inscribing the “golden expanses” of the city space, the “delicate greenery” of its gardens into the frame of a harmonious natural existence. At the time of Natalya’s hectic Moscow life, the novel especially emphasizes her lack of sensitivity to this hidden world of her native Zamoskvorechye and Strastnoy Monastery (“she fell apart, crossing her legs”) - something that later, during the destruction of this world, will turn into moral suffering for her. The world of home comfort, which gives the individual the right to an individual existence protected from external shocks, is also associated with the city, which has not yet experienced revolutionary destruction. This atmosphere of pre-revolutionary comfort of both Moscow and Galkin life is captured in consonant everyday details: a “green lamp” in Markel’s Moscow office and a lamp with a “green lampshade” in Galkin.
A different tone appears in the image of a city entering a period of pre-revolutionary timelessness. Here, subjectively dear to the heroine, the signs of the former life still remain - both “the delicate gold of church crosses” and “smoke, janitors and bakers” - however, the irreconcilable collision of the personal and the historical declares itself with the utmost poignancy. The narrator’s attempt to internally rely on the associative emotional background of the details of the Moscow space (the bench, “where they once kissed”) turns into a clear awareness of the beginning triumph of the spirit of revolutionary entropy, the “kingdom” of the crowd, “spreading seeds along the boulevards.” The perception of how “chaotic and fun things are in Moscow” leads Natalya to an insight into irreversible shifts in national life and consciousness: “Everything is wavering, Rus' has moved…”.
The tragic consequence of such epoch-making changes in the final chapters of the novel is the complete death of old Moscow, now dismantled for firewood, Moscow, where behind the once-monastery walls prisoners of concentration camps “paid for their former life, from time to time descending into the sad, blood-soaked dungeons of the Lubyanka...” . In a certain sense, the city, like the narrator herself, bears the cross of retribution for her former carefree existence. Behind the grotesque image of a space losing its individuality, “full of malice and madness,” a Moscow of “leather jackets” and “jackets of well-fed officials” - in the distant background, from the depths of the suffering spirit of the author and heroine, the image of the former Moscow emerges, with its desecration, but not destroyed until end with the soul, “the unique appearance of our Kremlin in the world”: “After all, my Moscow, homeland and love - brilliant or destroyed. It doesn’t matter.” In the culminating moments of her post-revolutionary life, including her arrest, a mournful standing at the grave of her son, the heroine peers into the ruins of her former living space, recognizes the familiar pipes of her father’s factory, familiar streets: “Those streets along which I rushed in my youth... In the distance are the pipes of the factory, where once then I lived, blossomed and laughed..." This spiritual and moral “archeology” largely restores the unique “golden pattern” of personal existence, disrupted by historical cataclysms, and transfers the final image of “our Moscow that floated away” to the scale of eternity.
The image of rural Rus' that appears when depicting Galkin’s pictures of family life is drawn in less detail, but no less meaningful in the novel. This is an image that was initially presented in sublimely lyrical tones, which brings it closer to the depiction of old Moscow: here “the golden sun streamed from behind light clouds,” the life of Natalya’s father flowed rhythmically, in harmony with the peasants. However, the trials of war and revolution force the narrator to experience the gradual loss of home - in its not only everyday, but also spiritual sense. The destruction of the patriarchal Galkino way of life by the peasants themselves, obsessed with the thirst for rebellion and expecting, like Lenka, who burst into the house, “resistance, war and exploits”, is depicted in a historical perspective, prompting the narrator to correlate her anxiety for the fate of the “cozy house in Galkino Great Russian” with the premonition of that "fate" of history, to which all of Russia was subject. Therefore, a single rural landscape sketch here develops into three-dimensional picture, where lyrical spontaneity and epic scope, enriched with folklore motifs, were combined: “How dark it is in the village on a gloomy August night, how heavily the wind sings in the old linden and birch trees. Motherland! Darkness and fields, and trains to the west, to that fatal land where it hums the earth is in trouble..."
The interpenetration of the individual and the universal also occurs in the depiction of the mysterious elements of the natural universe throughout the novel.
Throughout the entire work there is a symbolically significant reference to Natalya’s natural companions and patrons - the wind and the “blossoming apple tree” - which reveal the core of the heroine’s inner world, its beauty, the play of young forces and at the same time that impetuous, spontaneous beginning that is associated with raging " winds" of history. Already from the initial landscape descriptions, their cosmic, “stellar” perspective is set. In the first part, the images of “young stars” and “gilded patterns of clouds” are consonant with Natalya’s joyful, harmonious experience of the world, and the image of the “pattern” will then pass through many landscape sketches, embodying the mysterious intricacies of private and historical destinies. Thus, the drama of the heroine’s internal torment about her abandoned family finds a symbolic “correspondence” in the image of “a black sky with a pattern of gold.”
Natalia's story about climaxes her destiny is often accompanied by images of stars, which each time from a new perspective highlight the essence of her emotional experiences. At the time of the heroine’s reckless passion for bohemian Moscow life, the images of “big stars, hot with frost” become an indirect expression of the hidden longing of the soul for heavenly purity. IN painful thoughts Natalya about the “complexities and abysses” of her and the people’s fate at the time of the impending revolution, “wonderful luminaries in the heavens” become a soul-healing reminder of the unchanging simplicity and greatness of the heavenly world, independent of human arbitrariness. Close spiritual meaning finds her communication with starry sky during his imprisonment: “The pattern of their gold over our abyss is so piercing...”.
Landscape images in the novel also acquire a menacing apocalyptic meaning, being associated with the irrational abyss of the whirlpool of history. Already in the first part, a harbinger of tragedy breaks through the image of Galkin’s peaceful life. The image of the glow from the first arson of estates is associated with Blok’s famous thoughts about “the distant crimson glow of events that we all passionately await, that we fear, that we hope for” (“On the Theater,” 19083) and acquires an epochal-historical meaning (“there was a drama in the distance” ), and the “reddish reflections” of this glow that fell on the face of the sleeping son become an ominous prophecy about his fate: “Purple reflections fell on Andryusha, and the fact that the echoes of anger and vengeance touched his face was unpleasant to me...” story, which is perceived by the already internally mature Natalya as high tragedy, palpable in the cemetery landscape she contemplated shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. History is coupled here with eternity, images of darkness and the abyss foreshadow the coming Apocalypse: “I felt... everyone on the edge of a bottomless abyss in the blackness of nights and the darkness of storms...”. The heroine will extract the tragic universal meaning from the penetration into the “writings” of the starry sky later, already on the very eve of the revolutionary explosion, when the image of the earth will absorb the scale of not only a national, but also a planetary fratricidal catastrophe: “Yes, the stars speak of the boundless, in Death walks in the desert, and who is dying at this moment, whose blood is watering my land?
So, the relationship between the personal and the historical, the universal at a time of tremendous social upheaval is revealed in B. Zaitsev’s novel “The Golden Pattern” at various artistic levels - from the depiction of the main character’s life path to the system of characters and landscape images - and has a spiritual and axiological meaning. The will to preserve individuality and moral standing in the face of global challenges of history becomes the main criterion for the author’s assessment of heroes and events.
BORIS ZAITSEV
GOLDEN PATTERN
Part oneMy youth was pleasant and easy. Back in Riga, where I studied at the gymnasium, the girls called me lucky. Not out of anger, no. I had a good relationship with them. I was distinguished by my laughter, fun, and unmistakably prompted. But she also succeeded - without effort.
I remember Riga with pleasure. I lived there with my aunt. I was little embarrassed. In the mornings I ran to the Lomonosov gymnasium, in thin shoes, a brown dress with a black apron, met with students from the Polytechnic, winked at them. I wasn't beautiful. After all, God did not offend. I remember myself like this: gray-green eyes, fluffy hair, not very neat, light: lukewarm skin - with a golden tint - and I myself am quite tall, slenderly built, and have good legs: that’s probably it.
I had a lot of friends. In addition to the gymnasium, we went to theaters, and to each other, and to parties with students. I remember how we skated - my legs carried me easily then - how in the spring, during exams, we wandered through old Riga, and along the Dvina embankment, where ships of distant journeys sway at the piers, the smell of tar, ropes are coiled, traders at the nearest market They are fiddling with vegetables, and the fortress looks heavy with its towers. The world seemed so far away and spacious! And in the sunset sky, smoky pink and tender green, the distant and the impossible were intertwined. With our eighteen-year-old legs, we could fly anywhere.
Once a student looked at my palm in such twilight.
You were born under the sign of the wind. The wind is your patron. And the apple tree is blooming.
He was slightly in love with me, which I approved of. But I didn’t understand much about the wind and the apple tree. And she burst into tears. He kissed my hand and looked at me seriously.
Then you will believe it.
I felt some tenderness for him, and I must admit that at the seaside, on a May morning, sitting on the stern of a fishing boat (we sometimes rode around the bay) - I even kissed him.
I, perhaps, cheated somewhat with this on another friend of mine, almost from childhood, Markush, who was then studying in Moscow. But, I confess, I had no remorse. Well, she kissed and kissed. So, it was a minute. The sun has warmed up. She was young.
I graduated from high school, cried, said goodbye to my friends, said goodbye to my aunt, with whom I spent my years studying, and went to Moscow to see my father.
My father used to serve in the wilderness, and now he managed a huge factory on the outskirts of Moscow. The man is not yet old, vigorous, a great lover of life - from a landowner family. And I missed sitting at my factory. He loved the countryside and hunting, horses, farming, but the factory, in fact, was the saddest thing.
“Work is the curse of man,” he said. At dinner, he drank glass after glass, unnoticed.
We lived in a one-story mansion, right next to the plant, and this damned plant - where nails were made, rails were patched - was always rattling and gathering dust and smoking nearby. You were sitting on the terrace - it overlooked a small garden - suddenly, next to the fence, a train would whistle, drag some carriages, backing up, send smoke over the young poplars in the garden, and our whole house would tremble. And the father, stocky, dense, sits on the balcony, drinks his beer.
Labor is the curse of man.
I settled into my two rooms perfectly: everything was clean, everything was in order, I always got up in a good spirit, drank sweet coffee and played various things on the piano. Back in Riga, at my aunt’s, I tried to sing, and they found that I had a decent voice, not strong, but pleasant. I sing to myself in the morning, my father is on the Board, and the plant knocks and rumbles, at twelve the whistle blows, the workers disperse, at two they go back to work, day after day, day after day. And my Tchaikovsky, or Schumann, Glinka!
On Sundays, Markusha came from Petrovsky-Razumovsky. We grew up with this Markusha as children, in the village - he was, as it were, my father’s pupil, the son of his old friend. Now my Markusha turned out to be a gangly young man, large, with a beard coming out of his chin, and with a bright blush - the green band of his student cap matched his tanned face. His hands are huge, but kind: agricultural. He was a peasant's son.
The first time he saw me, he was embarrassed. Blushed. And I don't at all. I kissed him in a friendly, but also pleasant way. He smelled like a strong, fresh young man.
I felt something simple, honest in him.
You have become so prettier... and so elegant.
I hugged him again.
Markushka, listen, I seriously want to learn to sing.
He looked at me joyfully, with shining eyes.
You, Natasha, so... you can do everything... I'm sure... you can do everything.
I remember I started spinning on one leg - not because I had such a thirst to become a singer - it was just that life and joy sounded inside me.
My father approved of me. He himself loved singing, and we even sang a duet with him “Do not tempt me unnecessarily.”
And I started taking singing lessons, and then I entered the conservatory. My Markel, Markusha, remained my cavaliere servente.
Soon I moved to Gazetny, where the conservatory apartments were then. The establishment is quite strange! Singers and musicians lived there - all students at the conservatory. Like a boarding school or boarding school. Right away, in the corridor, it was felt that something was wrong: on the right in the room they were singing, on the left they were playing the scale, and further away there were violin exercises. My God, home of musical madmen! In the living room, the boss, or head waiter, asked the visitor who he wanted to call. And in this reception room, with the musty air, the worn Cretonne furniture, with canaries, white curtains, Markusha often waited for me, not knowing where to put his hands, how to look and what to say. Our girls scurried along the corridor, snorting, but without fail someone behind the wall was playing something.
I had two main visitors here: Markusha - he came on Wednesdays, he always confused everything. “You, Natasha, well, of course... I, you know, brought you a book...” and looked at me as if I were a higher being. I was kind to him and laughed too. It doesn't seem like she was teasing.
Father also appeared often, washed, smoothed, in a well-tailored suit, with sweets. He kissed me, kissed the hands of my young ladies, told jokes, and from Saturday to Sunday invited me to his factory for an overnight stay.
“You are happy,” my friend Nilova, small, thin, with a huge mouth, unbrushed teeth and a sharp soprano, told me: “You have a father... well, you know, I could just fall in love with such a father.”
Nilova, let’s say, always fell in love, but, of course, she could like her father - and many did.
And on Saturdays, having called what we needed from our classes, we went to me, to the factory. What were we doing?
In the dining room of our mansion, in the hum of the factory, under the white light of electricity, my father fed us dinner and gave us wine. Besides Nilova, there were: Kostomarova, Anna Ilyinichna, a serious girl, rather plump, with dark eyes and a velvety mezzo-soprano voice, and Zhenya Andreevskaya. We laughed a lot, my father looked after us. Nilova squealed that her head was spinning - he kept adding more.
If you feel dizzy, you need to drink so that you start spinning in the other direction.
Zhenya Andreevskaya clung to him like a cat, her green, sly eyes sparkled like chartreuse. Anna Ilyinichna was always calm and thorough.
We sat two to a room and fell asleep with a light, young sleep. Sometimes only Nilova gnashed her teeth and muttered something about an oriental man with whom she had a history. In the morning Markusha came, we sang again, had dinner, ate endless candies, and as before, our house shook from the train passing by the office.
Zhenya Andreevskaya raised her lorgnette and looked through the window at the roofs of dusty workshops, smoking chimneys, networks of wire, stacks of blanks.
Oh, how interesting everything is here!
The father nodded, smoked, and blew out smoke rings.
Terribly interesting. Deputy - wonderful! And damn them, all these interesting factories. Labor, if you like, is the curse of man.
On Mondays, my father did not let us go.
Eh, why go there? Give it up. There's no point.
Sometimes we really were delayed. He took us to the factory. We walked past employees' houses, with smaller gardens than my father's, past a three-story red office building, and through the gate into the factory yard. Here, along small rails, a horse was pulling a trolley, there were heaps of rusty iron lying around, and there was a smell of something sharply metallic and acrid.
The dust stood gloomily. It seemed that the sun would never rise, the azure sky would never rise above the gloomy buildings, and above the chimneys, from which the smoke never tired of flowing.
Father, in a cap, in his gray suit, stocky, strong, short in stature, led through the workshops. In the steelworks, a white-violet stream blinded us, and golden stars hovered above it. Chief master I looked at the release of steel through the purple glass, like looking at the sun during an eclipse. A giant crane was used to lift a bowl of boiling gold and tip it into special grooves, where the metal cooled and turned red and crepe. We saw - then half-naked workers dragged these same blanks with tongs, shoved them into the rollers, and with a wild screech a fiery streak flew by - ever longer, ever longer, finally carried out with a whistle, and the distributor caught it.
Personality and historical time in B. Zaitsev’s novel “The Golden Pattern” (To the 125th anniversary of the birth of B. K. Zaitsev)
Nichiporov I. B. "Golden Pattern" 1926 is built in the form of a confessional narrative of the narrator about her fate, absorbing the spirit of a turning point in Russian life and the existence of the Russian intelligentsia - from the turn of the century to the first emigrant impressions of the early 1920s. All links to the text of the novel are given according to the edition: Zaitsev B.K. A Strange Journey / Comp. and preface I. Kuramzhina; Artist D. Shotkin. – M.: Panorama, 1996. In a multifaceted story in composition and style, the daughter of a Moscow plant manager, Natalya, the author conveyed the deep connection between the individual, personal and historically characteristic. Through the eyes of the heroine, pictures of the metropolitan and provincial reality of the period of pre-revolutionary expectations and the revolution itself are revealed, and a symbolically capacious image of the natural cosmos is given. The subject of intense artistic reflection by the author and heroine were various types of human relationships with historical time, which are indicated at different stages of Natalya’s life path and in the system of characters.
The psychological make-up of the narrator is evident from the very beginning of her story. What dominates here is a youthfully enthusiastic perception of the world, which “seemed so far and spacious,” aesthetic talent associated with singing, a joyful acceptance of a carefree existence, illuminated by the “delicious smells” of his native Moscow, and love for Kel’s future husband, with whom, as she saw it, they were “left to themselves, to their youth, to their thirst for life and love.” Psychologically motivated at this time is the heroine’s superficial attitude towards faith and church sacraments, which is more spiritual and aestheticized than the in-depth spiritual perception of both Lenten services and the joyful atmosphere of Easter Moscow.
The deepening of the heroine’s individual and historical reflection about herself as a “lover of life”, who, as it became more and more obvious, happened to live during the impending storms, is connected in the novel with the ups and downs in her personal and family life. This is an increasingly dramatic feeling of internal dissatisfaction in family relationships, and a hysterical fascination with the colorful life of the artistic Moscow bohemia, in which the external bustle gradually concealed a hidden omen of an inevitable explosion. Already at this stage of the narrative, the novel’s time becomes synthesized, due to the superimposition on the reflections of the young heroine of her later retrospective perception of everything she experienced, about the epoch-making significance of which she, as she admits, “didn’t think much about in those years”...
This “double” narrative perspective gives the heroine’s confession special psychological persuasiveness. Natalya’s naively enthusiastic perception of the splendor of Moscow bohemian existence, neglect of family concerns, the serious illness of her son, prodigal rapprochement with Alexander Andreevich - all this is “corrected” here by the bitter irony of the then historical short-sightedness of the “dressed up Moscow tribe”, repentant self-awareness, permeated with heightened moral reflection “I am an artist, a lady, a singer,” in the light of which the later death of her son will be seen as a heavy retribution for that small cross in the form of his illness, which at one time was not accepted and borne by the heroine. The narrator’s penetrating feeling for the hidden meaning of the external events of her life gives the narrative a lyrical character, which is manifested in the rhythm and syntax of the phrase, sometimes close to the poetic style: “Everything flashed and is carried away from my memory, like that time - a foggy and poignant time for me... ".
The heroine’s insight into the individual and historical meaningfulness of the path of both her own and that of her generation of creative intelligentsia is conveyed in the work by various means of substantive representation. The dynamics of the portrait characterization are also important in this regard, when, reveling in disastrous freedom, the narrator catches in her face the expression of “wandering, fluidity,” and spatial leitmotif images. Thus, the oblivion of the family forces Natalya to admit that “the house... was becoming a hotel,” but later the voluntary departure from the family hearth for the sake of an idle and carefree life in Paris and Rome will symbolically “rhyme” with the future retribution of fate - with the already forced
The sad emigrant separation from home, Moscow, Russia.
The period of the heroine’s wanderings across Europe, projected on the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son, simultaneously becomes the time when a prophetic perception of her life and the fate of Russia awakens in her inner world. On the basis of nostalgic memories, an awareness of the main value guidelines grows: “Russia, jackpot, father, Galkino.” Gradually overcoming the thorns of new sensual hobbies in the story of Gildo, the narrator more and more definitely strives to understand the mysterious pattern of her path, that Higher Will that “spuns the pattern of life.” In the process of development of the novel's action, such knowledge is due to the deep aspiration of the individual towards Communion with God, expressed in an intense search for genuine faith, which in the subsequent hard times will become a powerful strengthening for the heroine: “I sing “I Believe,” but do I believe myself?”
It is no coincidence that the difficult reflection on the loss of one’s own life, “And who am I?.. Why am I sitting here?”, which paved the way for the rediscovery of one’s native land, is correlated in the novel with the beginning of the First World War, which for the first time brings into the novel a feeling of the irrational abyss of history. The emotional and at the same time extremely concentrated perception of the approaching “times of events” by Natalya, who is returning to her homeland, becomes in Zaitsev’s portrayal a significant crossroads of the personal and the general historical. A shout heard from a military carriage, a meeting with a son, observation of the “severe running of clouds” - these and other small and symbolically significant episodes and scenes of the novel convey the conflicting severity of the relationship between personal, family principles and the challenges of the era: “They broke into our quiet circle news of battles and the Shah." And at the same time, a genuine awareness of this “other zone, war and grief” introduces the individual to the understanding of the people’s tragedy, returns it to that spiritual and moral space, which is often lost in everyday, “incorrect and foggy” existence: “There will be I need to flit around... a rather empty, easy life...".
As she deepens into the feeling of the destructive reality of the wartime hard times, both the content and style of the heroine’s narrative changes, the ethics of spiritual self-restraint comes to the fore in front of the formidable face of historical time. In Natalya’s speech, lyrical appeals to the Motherland sound more and more poignantly, in the fate of which the narrator discerns an indirect reflection of her own wanderings and experienced sorrows: “Oh, Russia! Bitter and sweet, darkness and tenderness, as if abandonment and loneliness...”. Working in the infirmary, Natalya discovers the world of people’s characters disfigured by the war, and in the tragedy that takes place in history, she feels connected both with her own inner life, with “her Apocalypse,” and with eternity: “... from the chorales of eternity... I as if I had switched to the ordinary...”
It is through dialogue with the challenges of history that the paradoxes of both the heroine’s personal self-awareness and that part of the thinking intelligentsia, whose mentality she embodies, are more acutely revealed in the logic of the novel’s action. Here is a share of Natalya’s frivolity and indomitable emotionality that has not been completely eliminated, which manifested itself, in particular, in her “escapade” with the Soul, and a significant measure of naivety in the hope of a quick return to the harmonious order of national and individual existence - that “everything will happen soon.” will end." On the other hand, this is the acuteness of historical, ethically oriented reflection “about life, peace, war, tragedy.” At this stage of fate, the heroine’s thinking becomes more and more painfully focused on the insoluble and inaccessible to ordinary consciousness contrasts generated by the era itself: “We were warming ourselves. Someone was dying... Rushing in a speculator’s car on the night of a terrible war and miserable pleasures...”. Subsequently, looking at her own past short-sightedness from another era, “That was a different century, and we were children,” the heroine is still far from self-denial. A deep insight into the extent of the people's suffering awakens a conciliar principle in her worldview and sets a special scale of critical self-esteem: “She was stupid, impudent with her cell and unfair... in that autumn, under the blood of the hostages being shot...”. Drawing these psychological processes in the inner world of the narrator, Zaitsev artistically gropes for the possible limit of the internal stability of an individual undergoing the test of history. Natalya’s spiritual world, sensitive to this test, captures the moments of the era’s particularly aggressive offensive on human individuality.