Secular society in the novel by A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin"

Truthfulness is one of the main qualities of the novel “Eugene Onegin”. In it A.S. Pushkin reflected the reality of the 19th century: people’s habits, their actions, secular society itself. That is why “Eugene Onegin” is an invaluable work in historical and literary terms.

The great critic Belinsky called this novel “an encyclopedia of Russian life.” And indeed it is. It is in this work by A.S. Pushkin was one of the first poets to decide to depict society to readers as it was in the 19th century. Secular society in “Eugene Onegin” is not shown from the very the best side. In this society, it was enough to dress smartly and do your hair. And then everyone began to consider you a secular person. This happened with the main character of the novel, Onegin. He was bored with social life, and the society that surrounded him oppressed the hero. This life killed all feelings in the main character, and it was impossible for him to escape anywhere from the mood that was in his soul. Onegin is opposed to the majority of people of this era, and secular society does not accept him. Evgeniy is forced to leave. He arrives in the village. From this moment we are transported to a completely different environment, where everything was much calmer than in the city. The main character was not accepted here either, since he was sharply different from the majority of the village population. But here, too, Onegin managed to find people who understood him. Here he found a devoted friend Lensky, true love Tatiana Larina. Tatyana grew up as a reserved girl, but with a huge imagination, her soul was constantly full of many different feelings:

One wanders with a dangerous book,

She searches and finds in her

Your secret heat, your dreams...

Having given her heart to Onegin, Tatyana could no longer trust her secret to anyone, not even her closest relatives. And not only because she was a secretive girl, but also because the society around her would never be able to understand her. This situation occurs quite often nowadays. The surrounding society does not allow a person to develop individually: it either adjusts it in its own way or rejects it. The person becomes withdrawn and is afraid to trust anyone.

This work has great historical significance. Studying “Eugene Onegin”, the reader learns what the life of people was like, their activities, habits, holidays; Pushkin describes in detail the festive atmosphere of Tatyana Larina’s name day, guests who seemed to her completely boring people, dances:

Monotonous and crazy

Like a young whirlwind of life,

A noisy whirlwind swirls around the waltz;

Couple flashes after couple.

Probably the most a shining example The insensitivity of people, their disrespect for others was the death of Lensky. Lensky was unusual, sincere person, but which, unfortunately, was not really noticed during life, and after death they forgot about him:

But now... the monument is sad

Forgotten. There's a familiar trail to him

I stalled. There is no wreath on the branch;

One under him, gray-haired and frail,

The shepherd is still singing...

Apparently, Lensky was born too early, because society would never have been able to rise to his level.

Moscow!.. Tatyana turned from a provincial girl into a noble lady by marrying a general. And in appearance she was no different from other women. She was able to achieve this without much effort. Her life changed dramatically... But was she happy?..

The novel “Eugene Onegin” is of great importance for Russian people. And as Belinsky said: “To evaluate such a work is to evaluate the poet himself in all the volume of his creative activity" And although two centuries have passed, the themes raised in “Eugene Onegin” remain relevant today.

Duality Images secular society. Human consciousness and the system of life values, as is known, are largely shaped by moral laws adopted in society. Pushkin writes in the novel about both the capital and the Moscow and provincial nobility.

The author of the novel pays special attention to the St. Petersburg nobility, a typical representative of which is Eugene Onegin. The poet describes in every detail the day of his hero, and Onegin’s day is a typical day of a metropolitan nobleman. Thus, Pushkin recreates a picture of the life of the entire St. Petersburg secular society. Fashionable daytime stroll along a specific route (“Wearing wide bolivar, Onegin goes to the boulevard..."), lunch in a restaurant, visit to the theater. Moreover, for Onegin the theater is not an artistic spectacle or even a kind of club, but rather a place of love affairs and behind-the-scenes hobbies. Pushkin gives his hero the following characteristics:

The theater is an evil legislator,

Fickle admirer of Charming Actresses,

Honorary citizen of the backstage...

Pushkin describes Onegin's office and his outfit in great detail. The author seems to want to once again emphasize the isolation of young people of that time from the national soil, because they early childhood were in an atmosphere of a foreign language, people (governesses and tutors were foreigners) and things. (“But trousers, tailcoat, vest - all these words are not in Russian...”). The day of the young dandy ends with a ball, a favorite pastime of the capital's nobles.

Pushkin speaks about St. Petersburg high society with a fair amount of irony and without special sympathy, because life in the capital is “monotonous and colorful,” and “the noise of the world gets boring very quickly.”

The local, provincial nobility is represented very widely in the novel. This is Onegin’s uncle, the Larin family, guests at Tatyana’s name day, Zaretsky.

Onegin’s uncle was a “village old-timer”, he was busy quarreling with the housekeeper, looking out the window, squashing flies and reading the “eighth year calendar”.

Prominent representatives of the provincial nobility gather at Tatiana’s name day: Gvozdin, “an excellent owner, the owner of poor men”; Petushkov, “county dandy”; Flyanov, “heavy gossip, old rogue.” If Pushkin introduces real historical figures, for example Kaverin, into the story about the capital’s nobility, then in in this case the author uses the names of famous literary characters: The Skotinins are the heroes of Fonvizin’s “The Minor,” Buyanov is the hero of V.L. Pushkin’s “Dangerous Neighbor.” The author also uses speaking names. For example, Triquet means “beaten with a stick” - a hint that he cannot be accepted in high society, but in the provinces he is a welcome guest.

Not far from Lensky lives Zaretsky, “once a brawler”, “the head of a rake”, now “a single father of a family”, “a peaceful landowner”. But he cannot be called a decent person, because he loves “to quarrel young friends and put them on the fence.” This is what happens in the case of Lensky and Onegin. In general, Zaretsky is responsible for the death of Lensky; although he, as a second, could have prevented the duel, he did everything possible to ensure that it took place.

And Vladimir Lensky can be classified as a local nobleman. He is “a romantic and nothing more,” according to Belinsky’s definition. As a romantic, he does not know life at all, he sees everyone either in a rosy or black light (“He was an ignoramus at heart…”). He is alienated from national culture, maybe more Onegin (the neighbors call Lensky half-Russian). When discussing the future of Vladimir Lensky, Pushkin sees two possible paths. Following the first of them, he could have become Kutuzov, Nelson or Napoleon, or even ended his life like Ryleev, because Lensky is a passionate man, capable of reckless things, but heroic deed(in this he is close to Pushkin). But his trouble is that the environment in which he finds himself is hostile to him, in it he is considered an eccentric. Lensky would rather take the second path:

Or maybe even that: a poet

The ordinary one was waiting for his destiny.

He would have become an ordinary landowner, like Onegin’s uncle or Dmitry Larin.

Larin, about whom Belinsky says that he is “something like a polyp, belonging at the same time to two kingdoms of nature - plant and animal,” was a “kind fellow,” but in general an ordinary person (evidence of this is the Ochakov medal , which was not an individual award, unlike the order). His wife was fond of books in her youth, but this hobby was rather age-related. She got married against her will, was taken to the village, where she “was torn and cried at first,” but then she took up housekeeping and “got used to it and became happy.”

World landed nobility is far from perfect, because in it spiritual interests and needs are not decisive, just like intellectual interests (“Their conversation is prudent about haymaking, about wine; about the kennel, about their relatives”). However, Pushkin writes about him with more sympathy than about St. Petersburg. In the provincial nobility, naturalness and spontaneity are preserved as properties human nature("Neighbors good family, unceremonious friends"). The local nobles were quite close to the people in terms of their attitude and way of life. This is manifested in the attitude towards nature and religion, in the observance of traditions (“They kept in life the peaceful habits of dear old times...”).

Pushkin pays less attention to the Moscow nobility than to the St. Petersburg nobility. Several years have passed since Pushkin wrote the first chapter of his novel, and A. S. Griboyedov finished the comedy “Woe from Wit,” but Pushkin adds Griboyedov’s lines to the epigraph of the seventh chapter, thereby emphasizing that since then there has been little in Moscow has changed. The ancient capital has always been patriarchal. So, for example, Tatyana is met at her aunt’s by a gray-haired Kalmyk, and the fashion for Kalmyks was at the end of the 18th century. The Moscow nobility is a collective image, in contrast to the St. Petersburg nobility, where Eugene Onegin is the main character. Pushkin, speaking about Moscow, seems to populate it with the heroes of Griboyedov’s comedy, whom time has not changed (“But no change is visible in them, everything in them is like the old model...”). A real historical figure also appears in Moscow society: “Vyazemsky somehow got hooked on her (Tatyana) ...” But in Moscow there is still the same bustle, “noise, laughter, running around, bowing,” which leave both Tatyana and the author indifferent.

Influence high society The author himself evaluates it ambiguously. The first chapter gives a sharp satirical image Sveta. The tragic sixth chapter ends lyrical digression- the author’s thoughts about the age limit that he is preparing to cross: “Am I going to be thirty years old soon?” And he calls on “young inspiration” to save the “soul of the poet” from death, to prevent

…get stoned

In the deadening ecstasy of light,

In this pool where I Swim with you, dear friends!

So the whirlpool that deadens the soul. But here is the eighth chapter:

and now for the first time I bring a muse to a social event.

She likes the harmonious order of oligarchic conversations,

And the coldness of calm pride,

And this mixture of ranks and years.

Y. Lotman very correctly explains this contradiction: “The image of light received a double illumination: on the one hand, the world is soulless and mechanistic, it remained an object of condemnation, on the other hand, as the sphere in which Russian culture develops, life is inspired by the play of intellectual and spiritual forces, Poetry, pride, like the world of Karamzin and the Decembrists, Zhukovsky and the author of “Eugene Onegin” himself - it retains unconditional value. Society is heterogeneous. It depends on the person himself whether he will accept the moral laws of the cowardly majority or the best representatives of the world.”

With all the breadth of its themes, the novel “Eugene Onegin” is, first of all, a novel about the mental life and quests of the Russian noble intelligentsia of the 20s of the 19th century, before the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Main
its theme is an advanced personality in its relation to noble society and the people. Pushkin reveals this theme in the images of representatives of the progressive noble intelligentsia - Onegin, Lensky and Tatyana.
By naming his novel after one of the characters, Pushkin thereby emphasized the central position among them (and in the entire novel) of Eugene Onegin.
Onegin is a “secular St. Petersburg young man”, a metropolitan aristocrat.
Drawing the image of his hero, Pushkin speaks in detail about his upbringing and education, about life in the St. Petersburg “society”. “A child of fun and luxury,” Onegin received home education and upbringing under the guidance of a French tutor, typical of aristocratic youth of that time. He was brought up in the spirit of aristocratic culture, divorced from national and popular soil.
The corrupting influence of the “light” further removed Onegin from the people. Onegin leads a life typical of the “golden youth” of that time: balls, restaurants, walks along Nevsky Prospect, visiting theaters. It took him eight years.
But Onegin, by his nature, stands out from the general mass of aristocratic youth. Pushkin notes his “involuntary devotion to dreams, inimitable strangeness and a sharp, cooled mind,” a sense of honor, and nobility of soul. This could not but lead Onegin to disappointment in the life and interests of secular society, to dissatisfaction with the political and social situation that developed in Russia after Patriotic War 1812, during the years of intensifying reaction, during the years of the dominance of Arakcheevism. Blues and boredom took possession of Onegin. Having left secular society, he tries to engage in some kind of useful activity. Nothing came of his attempt to write: he did not have a vocation (“yawning, he took up the pen”) and no habit of work, his lordly upbringing took its toll (“he was sick of persistent work”). An attempt to combat “spiritual emptiness” through reading also proved unsuccessful. The books he read either did not satisfy him or turned out to be in tune with his thoughts and feelings and only strengthened them.
Onegin is trying to organize the life of the peasants on the estate, which he inherited from his uncle:
He is the yoke of the ancient corvée
I replaced it with a light quitrent...
But all his activities as a landowner-owner were limited to this reform. The old moods, although somewhat softened by life in the lap of nature, continue to possess him.
Onegin's extraordinary mind, his freedom-loving sentiments and critical attitude to reality placed him high above the crowd of nobles, especially among the local lords, and doomed him, in the absence social activities, to complete loneliness.
Having broken with secular society, in which he found neither high morals nor real feelings, but only a parody of them, and being cut off from the life of the people, Onegin loses his connection with people.
Onegin could not be saved from “spiritual emptiness” by the strongest feelings that unite man with man: love and friendship. He rejected Tatyana’s love, since he valued “freedom and peace” above all else, and failed to unravel the depth of her nature and her feelings for him. He killed his friend Lensky because he could not rise above public opinion of that local nobility, which he inwardly despised. Class prejudices prevailed in the hesitations that he experienced after receiving a challenge to a duel. He was afraid of “the whispers, the laughter of fools,” the gossip of the Zaretskys.
In a depressed state of mind, Onegin left the village. He “began to wander,” but this did not dispel him.
Returning to St. Petersburg, he met Tatyana married woman, the wife of his relative and friend. Love for her flared up in him, but Tatyana unraveled the selfishness that underlay his feelings for her: he again did not understand the depth of her requests. The novel ends with the scene of Onegin's meeting with Tatyana. ABOUT future fate Onegin says nothing. However, Pushkin thought about continuing the novel. In the fall of 1830, he wrote the tenth chapter, in which he was going to talk about the emergence of the first secret societies of the Decembrists. But due to censorship conditions, he could not publish it; Moreover, it was dangerous to keep it. And Pushkin burned what he had written that same fall. Only a few, scattered pieces of the initial stanzas of the chapter have been preserved in the poet’s papers.
How did Pushkin think about unfolding the action in Chapter X? Would he have brought Onegin into the Decembrist society? There is evidence from one of Pushkin’s acquaintances that, according to the poet, “Onegin should have either died in the Caucasus or become one of the Decembrists.” But how accurate this evidence is is unknown. In the person of Onegin, Pushkin was the first writer to portray the type of enlightened nobleman that emerged in Russia in the 20s of the 19th century and was widely known in the years following the defeat of the Decembrists. Onegin is a typical representative of this enlightened part of the noble intelligentsia, who was critical of the way of life of noble society and government policy. It was the noble intelligentsia who avoided serving tsarism, not wanting to join the ranks of the silent ones, but they also stood aloof from socio-political activities. And such a path, although it was a kind of protest against the socio-political system, inevitably doomed to inaction, to withdrawal from the people, to isolation.
into a narrow circle of selfish interests. This naturally led such people to “spiritual emptiness” and deprived their life of a high goal, a positive program. Belinsky said beautifully about Onegin and thereby about people of this type: “The inactivity and vulgarity of life choke him, he doesn’t even know what he needs, what he wants, but he... knows very well what he doesn’t need, what he I don’t want what self-loving mediocrity is so happy with, so happy.”
The absence of a positive program dooms Onegin to inaction. Herzen rightly said about him:
“...The young man does not meet any lively interest in this world of servility and petty ambition. And yet he is condemned to live in this society, since the people are even more distant from him... but there is nothing in common between him and the people...”
The image of Onegin has enormous generalizing power. “The fact is that we are all more or less Onegin, since we do not prefer to be officials or landowners,” said Herzen. Onegin’s typicality was so strong that from that time on, according to Herzen, “every novel, every poem had its own Onegin, that is, a man condemned to idleness, useless, led astray, a stranger in his family, a stranger in to his country, unwilling to do evil and powerless to do good, ultimately doing nothing, although he takes on everything, except, however, for two things: firstly, he never takes the side of the government, and. secondly, he never knows how to take the side of the people.”
In the image of Onegin, Pushkin showed the path that part of the noble intelligentsia of his time followed - a quest in isolation from society and the people. Pushkin condemned this path of the individualist hero, which makes him socially useless, a “superfluous” person.

The character of Onegin was not invented by Pushkin. In this image, he generalized the features typical of many young people of that time. These are people supported by the labor of serfs, who received the most disorderly upbringing. But unlike the vast majority of representatives of the ruling class of landowners, who were calm and serene about their idle life and the situation of the oppressed people, these young people, more intelligent, more sensitive, more conscientious and noble, experienced dissatisfaction with their environment, with everything social order and at the same time dissatisfaction with oneself. Not accustomed either by upbringing or by their social status to work, to work, to active actions, they did not even think of fighting against the unjust social system, against the representatives of the noble class corrupted by this system. They contemptuously withdrawn into themselves, felt disappointed in life, embittered at everything and everyone.

They stood out sharply among the secular crowd and seemed somehow strange people, but they themselves continued to lead the same meaningless, empty secular (in the city) or landowner (in the countryside) life, well understanding all its meaninglessness and experiencing nothing from it except boredom and mental suffering. Pushkin perfectly characterizes the feelings of boredom and hopelessness characteristic of these people in the following verses of the eleventh stanza of the eighth chapter:

* It’s unbearable to see in front of you
* There is a long row of dinners alone,
* Look at life as a ritual,
* And following the decorous crowd
* Go without sharing with her
* No common opinions, no passions.

Pushkin portrays Onegin, of course, as an egoist, but this is not a smug egoist in love with himself, but, as he correctly called Onegin great critic Belinsky, “a suffering egoist.” Onegin, apparently, understands that one of the main sources of his melancholy, “the blues,” is the lack of work, of any activity of a social nature. But he is so smart that he cannot follow the beaten paths available at that time to a young nobleman who wants to find a “useful” occupation for himself. He will not serve as an officer or official, because he understands (or feels) that this would mean actively supporting that system, the injustices of which are the ultimate cause of his melancholy and disappointment.

He would not be able to make the goal of his life certain minor improvements in the work or life of his peasants, feeling that these would be separate patches, insignificant, private measures that do not solve the main and main problem abolition of peasant slavery, serfdom...

The only thing to which a young enlightened nobleman like Onegin could worthily devote all his strength, his entire life, would be a direct fight against the main evil of Russian life of that time - against serfdom and tsarist autocracy. But we have already seen that this is precisely what he was not capable of due to his upbringing and living conditions, which killed all social activity in him. “Longing laziness” - here characteristic Onegin, “he was sick of persistent work...”.

Among this group of advanced, enlightened nobles there were also those who managed to overcome their class egoism, for whom the bleak impressions of the difficult situation of the peasants, of the cruel torment of soldiers, of the rudeness and reactionary nature of the autocracy prevailed over the harmful consequences of their upbringing and social status. They resolutely embarked on the path of revolutionary struggle against the tsarist government, the struggle for the overthrow of the autocracy and the abolition of serfdom. Such were the Decembrists, who, precisely in those years when the action of Pushkin’s novel takes place (1819-1825), secretly prepared a revolutionary uprising; such was Pushkin himself, who, with his revolutionary poems, instilled in his readers hatred of the oppressors, a passionate love for freedom and the homeland, and a thirst for revolutionary feat.

People like Onegin did not belong to this category of noble revolutionaries. But the very fact that they felt uncomfortable in the social situation of that time, were sad, and mopey, suggests that they still stood significantly above the general level of noble youth. And if the circumstances of Onegin’s life had helped him to recover from selfishness, from proud inattention to others, then it would have been quite natural and logical for him to draw closer to people who shared his basic views, his sharply negative attitude towards the existing system - with the Decembrist revolutionaries.

The main character of A.S. Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin” is a nobleman, an aristocrat. It is directly connected with modernity, with the real circumstances of Russian reality and with the people of the 1820s. Onegin is familiar with the Author and some of his friends....

One of the main characters of the novel in the verses of A.S. Pushkin is Onegin. It is no coincidence that the work is named after him. The image of Onegin is complex and contradictory, containing positive signs of progressiveness and sharply negative traits pronounced individualism...

The letters of Tatiana and Onegin stand out sharply from the general text of Pushkin’s novel in verse “Eugene Onegin”. Even the author himself gradually highlights them: an attentive reader will immediately notice that there is no longer a strictly organized “Onegin stanza”, but a noticeable...

The novel "Eugene Onegin" - favorite child Pushkin. The novel was written over eight years. P. began writing his novel during his heyday social movement, during the heyday of freedom-loving ideas, and finished writing it during the years of the terrible reaction after...

(373 words) “Nature creates man, but society develops and forms him” - this is what the great critic Belinsky said about the relationship between society and its members. It is difficult to disagree with the publicist, because the formation of even the most independent personality is possible only in a team, where she comprehends all the laws of the social system, and only then denies them. The surrounding world would give a person the skills to survive in the natural environment, but it is the human race that gives us morality, science, art, culture, and faith in all the diversity of internal interactions of individual people. Who are we without these fundamental phenomena? Just animals unadapted to nature.

I can explain my point of view with the help of examples from the literature. In Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin" main character imagines himself as an individual, far from the empty world and its petty ideals. However, when he flees the village after committing murder, his would-be lover Tatiana comes across Eugene's library and reads the books that shaped his personality. After this she discovers inner world Onegin, which turned out to be a copy of Byron's "Childe Harold". This work gave rise to a fashionable trend among spoiled youth - to depict languid boredom and gravitate towards proud loneliness. Evgeniy succumbed to this trend. His false image was fueled in society, because there are all the conditions for such a game to the public. All the hero’s actions are a tribute to conventions. Even the murder of Lensky was done for the sake of the day, since in the eyes of the world a duel looks better than a timely admission of a mistake.

Same result social influence Lensky himself appears. He writes mediocre poetry, imitating the romantic poets, loves sublime phrases and beautiful gestures. His ardent imagination desperately searches for the image of a Beautiful Lady whom he can worship, but in the village he finds only the coquette Olga, and makes an ideal out of her. Vladimir became this way for a reason: he studied abroad and adopted the latest habits of foreigners, his student community. It is not nature that makes Lensky a “slave of honor,” but the social prejudices that he shares. Nowadays no one would even think of shooting themselves over a woman: society has changed, but nature has remained the same. Now it becomes clear what forms a personality from them.

Thus, we have found out that it is society that shapes the personality of a person born by nature. Although people are flattered by the realization that they are not subject to social stereotypes, they are still (to one degree or another) a miniature of their own social group. All of them reflect the cultural, scientific, political and other realities of their time; they are not unique and cannot be formed in isolation from society.

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