Disputes about the composition of the work are still ongoing, but most scientists have come to the conclusion that it should be like this: “Prologue. Part One”, “Peasant Woman”, “Last One”, “Feast for the Whole World”. The arguments in favor of this particular arrangement of material are as follows. The first part and chapter “Peasant Woman” depicts an old, moribund world. “The Last One” shows the death of this world. In the final part, “A Feast for the Whole World,” signs of new life are especially noticeable, the overall tone of the narrative is lighter, more joyful, and one feels a focus on the future, associated primarily with the image of Grisha Dobrosklonov. In addition, the ending of this part plays the role of a kind of denouement, since it is here that the answer to the question posed at the beginning of the work sounds: “Who lives cheerfully, freely in Russia?” Turns out to be a happy person people's defender Grisha Dobrosklonov, who in his songs predicted “the embodiment of people’s happiness.” At the same time, this is a special kind of denouement. She does not return the wanderers to their homes, does not put an end to their search, because the wanderers do not know about Grisha’s happiness. That is why it was possible to write a continuation of the poem, where the wanderers had to look for happy person and further, following the wrong trail - right up to the king himself. The peculiarity of the composition of the poem is its construction, based on the laws of the classical epic: it consists of separate relatively autonomous parts and chapters, its hero is not an individual person, but the entire Russian people, and therefore by genre it is an epic folk life.
The external connection of the parts of the poem is determined by the motive of the road and the search for happiness, which also corresponds to the genre of the folk-epic tale. The plot and compositional method of organizing the narrative - the journey of the peasant heroes - is complemented by the inclusion of author's digressions and extra-plot elements. The epic nature of the work is also determined by the majestically calm pace of the narrative, based on folklore elements. The life of post-reform Russia is shown in all its complexity and versatility, and the breadth of coverage general view on the world as a kind of wholeness is combined with the author’s lyrical emotion and detail external descriptions. The genre of the epic poem allowed Nekrasov to reflect the life of the entire country, the entire nation, and at one of its most difficult, turning points.
Essay on literature on the topic: Genre and composition of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”
Other writings:
- All his life he nurtured the idea of a work that would become a people's book, a book “useful, understandable to the people and truthful,” reflecting the most important aspects of his life. For 20 years he accumulated “word by word” material for this book, and then worked for 14 years on Read More......
- Deserves special attention question about the first “Prologue”. The poem has several prologues: before the chapter “Pop”, before the parts “Peasant Woman” and “Feast for the Whole World”. The first “Prologue” is sharply different from the others. It poses a problem common to the entire poem “To whom Read More ......
- Nekrasov devoted the odes of his life to working on a poem, which he called his “favorite brainchild.” “I decided,” said Nekrasov, “to present in a coherent story everything that I know about the people, everything that I happened to hear from their lips, and I started” Read More ......
- This issue still remains the subject of heated debate. Nekrasov, changing the way the theme was realized, strictly subordinated the architectonics of the poem to a single ideological plan. Compositional structure The work is intended to emphasize the main idea: the inevitability of the peasant revolution, which will become possible on the basis of the growth of the revolutionary consciousness of the people, Read More ......
- Essay topic: Artistic originality poems. “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a broad epic canvas, imbued with ardent love for the homeland and people, which gives it that lyrical warmth that warms and enlivens the entire poetic structure of the work. The lyricism of the poem is manifested in Read More......
- Nekrasov’s entire poem is a flaring up, gradually gaining strength, worldly gathering. For Nekrasov, it is important that the peasantry not only thought about the meaning of life, but also went into difficult and long haul truth-seeking. The “Prologue” begins the action. Seven peasants argue about “who lives Read More ......
- The meaning of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is not clear. After all, the question is: who is happy? – raises others: what is happiness? Who deserves happiness? Where should you look for it? And “The Peasant Woman” does not so much close these questions as open them and lead to them. Read More......
- The compositional design of the parts of the poem is extremely diverse; they are all built in their own way, one part is not like the other. The most widely represented form of plot development in the poem is the story of the “lucky man” encountered by the wanderers, who answers their question. This is how the chapters “Pop”, “Happy”, “Landowner”, Read More ......
The name of Nekrasov is forever fixed in the consciousness of the Russian people as the name of a great poet who came to literature with his new word and was able to express the high patriotic ideals of his time in unique images and sounds.
Speaking about Nekrasov’s poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” it must be said that the poem is not finished. The poet began work on a grandiose plan " folk book" in 1863, and ended up terminally ill in 1877. As he said: “One thing I deeply regret is that I did not finish the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” However, Belinsky believed that incompleteness is a sign of the true. The question of the “incompleteness” of the poem is highly controversial. After all, “Who Lives Well in Rus'” was conceived as an epic, that is, piece of art, depicting with the maximum degree of completeness an entire era in the life of the people. Since folk life is limitless and inexhaustible in its countless manifestations, epics in any variety are characterized by incompleteness. The epic can be continued indefinitely, but you can put an end to almost any part of its path. That is, the individual parts of the poem are connected by some common phenomenon. For example, in “Who Lives Well in Rus'” all parts are united only by wandering peasants (excluding the parts “Last One” and “Feast for the Whole World”). This allows you to freely rearrange the parts. That is, there is a loose order of parts. If the order had been fixed, the part “The Last One” would have followed not the first part, but the second, and “The Peasant Woman” would have been located after the third part, “A Feast for the Whole World.” The composition of the work is built according to the laws of classical epic: it consists of separate, relatively autonomous parts and chapters. Outwardly, these topics are connected by the theme of the road: seven truth-seekers wander around Rus', trying to resolve the question that haunts them: who can live well in Rus'? And therefore, rearranging the parts does not eliminate the meaning and charm of the poem.
The genre originality of the poem is its mixing of fairy-tale motifs and real facts stories. For example, the number seven in folklore is magical. The Seven Wanderers are an image of a large epic cast. The fabulous flavor of the Prologue raises the narrative above everyday life, above peasant life and gives the action an epic universality. At the same time, the events are attributed to the post-reform era. The specific sign of the peasants - “temporarily obliged” - indicates the real situation of the peasants at that time. But not only magic number wanderers creates a fabulous atmosphere. In the Prologue, the meeting of seven men is narrated as a great epic event:
In what year - calculate
In what land - guess
On the sidewalk
Seven men came together...
So the epics and fairy-tale heroes for battle or for an honorable feast. But here, along with fairy-tale motifs, the general sign of post-reform ruin is captured, expressed in the names of the villages: Zaplatovo, Razutovo, Zlobishino, Neurozhaika. Terpigoreva County, Empty Volost, Smart Province - all this also tells us about the plight of the provinces, districts, and volosts after the reforms of 1861.
And yet the men live and act as in a fairy tale: “Go there, I don’t know where, bring that, I don’t know what.” The poem makes a comic comparison of a men's argument with a bullfight in a peasant herd. According to the laws of the epic, it unfolds, as in Gogol’s “ Dead souls”, but also acquires an independent meaning. A cow with a bell, straying from the herd, came to the fire, fixed her eyes on the men,
I listened to crazy speeches
And I began, my dear,
Moo, moo, moo!
Nature and animals also participate in the peasant dispute:
And the raven, a smart bird,
Arrived, sitting on a tree
Right by the fire,
Sits and prays to the devil,
To be slapped to death
Which one!
The commotion grows, spreads, covers the entire forest:
A booming echo woke up,
Let's go for a walk,
Let's go scream and shout
As if to tease
Stubborn men.
The poet approaches the very essence of the dispute with irony. The men do not yet understand that the question of who is happier - the priest, the landowner, the merchant, the official or the tsar - reveals the limitations of their ideas about happiness, which come down to material security. But for the peasants of that time, the issue of security was the most important. And not only in Russia this question worried people, which is why the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” has a prominent place not only in Russian, but also in world poetry.
Genre originality poem by N. A.-Nekrasov is amazing ability the author to combine a fairy-tale atmosphere with political problems 60s of the XIX century. And also in writing a wonderful epic poem, accessible to all people at any age.
The idea for the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” arose in the early 1860s. Nekrasov continued to work on the poem until the end of his life, but never managed to complete it. Therefore, when publishing the poem, serious difficulties arose - the sequence of chapters remained unclear, the author's intention could only be approximately guessed. Researchers of Nekrasov’s work settled on three main options for the arrangement of chapters in the poem. The first was based on the sequence of seasons in the poem and the author’s notes and proposed the following order: “Prologue and first part” - “Last child” - “Feast for the whole world” - “Peasant woman”. The second swapped the chapters “A Feast for the Whole World” and “The Peasant Woman.” With this arrangement, the concept of the poem looked more optimistic - from serfdom to funerals “on the support”, from satirical pathos to pathetic. The third and most common version - most likely, it was the one you came across when reading the poem (“Prologue and first part” - “Peasant Woman” - “Lastly” - “Feast for the whole world”) - also had its own logic. The feast organized on the occasion of the death of the Last One smoothly turns into a “feast for the whole world”: according to the content of the chapters “The Last One” and “Feast for the whole world” are very closely related. In the chapter “A Feast for the Whole World,” there is finally a truly happy person.
We will rely on the third option, simply because it was the one that became generally accepted when the poem was published, but at the same time we will remember that the poem remained unfinished and we are dealing with a reconstruction, and not the actual author’s intention.
Nekrasov himself called his work “an epic of modern peasant life.” Epic is one of the most ancient literary genres. The first and most famous epic, which all authors turning to this genre were guided by, is Homer's Iliad. Homer gives an extremely broad cross-section of the life of the Greeks at a decisive moment for the nation, the period of the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans - at a turning point, the people, like the individual, reveal themselves more clearly. With the simplicity of a Greek commoner, Homer does not miss even the smallest details of the life and military way of life of his heroes. The listed features have become genre-forming; we can easily find them in any epic, including in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” including.
Nekrasov tries to touch all facets of people's life, pays attention to the most insignificant details of people's life; The action of the poem is timed to coincide with the culminating moment for the Russian peasantry - the period that came after the abolition of serfdom in 1861.
The compositional core of the epic was the journey of seven men, which made it possible to expand the boundaries to the utmost artistic space poems. The seven wanderers seem to be one whole; they are poorly distinguishable from each other; whether they speak in turn or in chorus, their lines flow together. They are only eyes and ears. Unlike the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” in “Who Lives Well in Rus',” Nekrasov tries to be completely invisible, hide behind the canopy and show the people’s point of view on what is happening. Sometimes, for example, in the famous passage about Belinsky and Gogol, which the man has not yet carried from the market, the author’s voice still breaks through, but this is one of the few exceptions.
Nekrasov called “Who Lives Well in Rus'” a poem. However, in terms of genre, it was not similar to any of the famous Russian poems. “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a folk heroic poem. Nekrasov combined the features of three genres: a “peasant” poem depicting the life of a peasant, a satirical review depicting the enemies of the people, and a heroic revolutionary poem revealing the images of fighters for people's happiness. Nekrasov strives to merge these three lines of his artistic creativity in the poem.
The first line is most fully represented in the poem. The depiction of folk.life is encyclopedic. The most complete reflection of this trait is given precisely in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” The second and third lines, due to the incompleteness of the poem, are not superior to his other works.
Nekrasov managed to show himself more clearly in other works both as a satirist and as a poet heroic epic. In the poem “Contemporaries,” he masterfully “brands and castigates the people’s enemy” - the capitalists and the pack of those who served the owners of money and those in power. The images of revolutionary fighters are more developed and more emotionally depicted in his poem “Russian Women”. The revolutionary solution to the pressing issues of our time in the conditions of censorship terror could not receive a more complete artistic expression even under the pen of Nekrasov.
Ideological and on this basis emotional attitude Nekrasov’s approach to reality determined, within the framework of the new genre, the use of various techniques and means inherent not only in epic, but also in lyrical and dramatic genres. Here both a calm epic story and various songs (historical, social, everyday, propaganda, satirical, intimate lyrical) are organically merged; here, in a synthetic unity, legends, lamentations, fantasy of fairy tales, beliefs, metaphorical ideas characteristic of a person of religious perception, and a lively, realistic dialogue, proverbs, sayings inherent in a materialistic worldview appeared in synthetic unity; here is caustic satire, disguised in allegory, in omissions, in allegorical form. The wide scope of reality required introduction into the framework of the main event large number independently developed episodes necessary as links in a single artistic chain.
In terms of genre, “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is in many ways closer to a prose narrative than to the lyric-epic poems characteristic of Russian literature of the first half of the 20th century.
N.A. Nekrasov wrote a wonderful poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” Its writing began in 1863, two years after the abolition of serfdom in Russia. It is this event that is at the center of the poem. The main question of the work can be understood from...
The poem “Who Lives Well in Russia” is the central and largest work in the work of Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov. The work, begun in 1863, was written over several years. Then the poet got distracted by other topics and finished the poem with death...
The reader recognizes one of the main characters of Nekrasov’s poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” - Savely - when he is already an old man who has lived a long and difficult life. The poet paints a colorful portrait of this amazing old man: With a huge gray...
In many of his works, Nekrasov reflects on the fate of the Russian peasant woman: in the poem “Frost, Red Nose”, the poems “Troika”, “In full swing of the village suffering ...”, “Orina, the soldier’s mother” and many others. In the gallery of wonderful women...
The poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” became one of the central ones in the work of N. A. Nekrasov. The time when he worked on the poem was the time big changes. The passions of representatives of revolutionary democratic movements were in full swing in society. The best part intelligentsia...
"My favorite child“- this is what Nekrasov wrote in his manuscript about the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” Later, in one of his letters to the journalist P. Bezobrazov, the poet himself defined the genre of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”: “This will be an epic of modern peasant life.”
And here the modern reader will immediately have many questions, because when we hear the word epic, we are reminded of large-scale works, for example, the epics of Homer or the multi-volume works of Tolstoy. But does even an unfinished work have the right to be called an epic?
First, let’s figure out what is meant by the concept of “epic”. The problematic of the epic genre involves consideration of the life not of an individual hero, but of an entire people. Any significant events in the history of this people are selected to depict. Most often, such a moment is war. However, at the time Nekrasov created the poem, there is no war going on in Russia, and the poem itself does not mention military actions. And yet, in 1861, another event, no less significant for people’s life, took place in Russia: the abolition of serfdom. It causes a wave of controversy in high circles, as well as confusion and a complete restructuring of life among the peasants. It is to this turning point that Nekrasov devotes his epic poem.
The genre of the work “Who Lives Well in Rus'” required the author to comply with certain criteria, first of all, scale. The task of showing the life of an entire people is not at all easy, and it was this that influenced Nekrasov’s choice of a plot with travel as the main plot-forming element. Travel is a common motif in Russian literature. Both Gogol addressed him in “Dead Souls”, and Radishchev (“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”), even in the Middle Ages it was popular genre“Walking” – “Walking beyond the three seas.” This technique allows the work to depict a full-fledged picture of folk life, with all its customs, joys and sorrows. In this case, the main plot fades into the background, and the narrative breaks up into many separate kaleidoscopic parts, from which at the same time gradually emerges three-dimensional picture life. The peasants' stories about their destinies give way to lingering lyrical songs, the reader gets acquainted with country fair, sees folk festivals, elections, learns about attitudes towards women, grieves with the beggar and has fun with the drunk.
It is characteristic that parts sometimes deviate so strongly from each other in the plot that they can be swapped without harm to the composition of the work. This at one time caused long disputes over the correct arrangement of the chapters of the poem (Nekrasov did not leave clear instructions on this).
At the same time, such a “patchwork” of the work is compensated by the internal continuous development of the plot - one of mandatory conditions for the epic genre. The people's soul, sometimes very contradictory, sometimes despairing under the weight of troubles and yet not completely broken, moreover, constantly dreaming of happiness - this is what the poet shows the reader.
Among the features of the genre “Who Lives Well in Rus'” one can also mention the huge layer included in the text of the poem folklore elements, from directly introduced songs, proverbs, sayings to implicit references to this or that epic, the use of phrases like “Savely, the Russian hero.” Nekrasov’s love for to the common people, his sincere interest in the topic - it’s not for nothing that it took so many years (more than 10) to collect material for the poem! Note that the inclusion of folklore elements in the text is also considered a sign of an epic - this allows you to more fully depict the features folk character and way of life.
The genre peculiarity of the poem is also considered to be the bizarre combination of historical facts with fairy tale motifs. In the beginning, written according to all the laws of fairy tales, seven (magic number) peasants set off on their journey. The beginning of their journey is accompanied by miracles - a warbler speaks to them, and they find a self-assembled tablecloth in the forest. But their further path will not follow a fairy tale.
The skillful combination of a fairy-tale, unburdensome plot with serious political problems of post-reform Rus' favorably distinguished Nekrasov’s work immediately after the publication of parts of the poem: it looked interesting against the backdrop of monotonous pamphlets and at the same time made one think. This also allowed the epic poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” not to lose its interest for the reader today.
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