Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov, who took literary pseudonym Maxim Gorky created more than one remarkable work. Many people of our time are ready to plunge into fabulous and mysterious world the story “Old Woman Izergil”, while others prefer his revolutionary works, imbued with patriotism and fortitude. For example, one can recall Gorky’s novel “Mother”; everyone followed the development of events in this work with bated breath and wanted to quickly find out how this story would end. interesting story about the heroine mother!? As they say: “There are no comrades according to taste!”, that’s why we like various works.
And now I would like to touch on the following topic: “People of the “bottom”: characters and destinies (based on Gorky’s drama “At the Bottom”).”
This topic is interesting because it is dramatic works of this writer and many others, of course, reveals many problems that are relevant to this day. Among them we can recall laziness, greed, greed, hypocrisy, selfishness, and excessive pride. We also encounter all these human vices, modern people. We encounter many people every day, and it is very difficult to say who is he to you, friend or enemy!? After all, as they say now: “People tend to wear masks,” and indeed! We will never be able to say whether a person is good or bad, only in some way life situation his whole “essence will come out.” Gorky wrote about this more than once. He repeatedly pointed out that a kind and decent person at first glance, suddenly, unexpectedly, turned out to be “not the first fresh person.”
Now I propose to consider in more detail the topic that is at the head of this essay, and give a number of illustrative examples.
So, let’s look at the current situation in society using the example of the play “At the Bottom.” The dialogue in this work is a speech embodiment of the plot as a consistent development of action: the effectiveness of the word, characteristic of drama, means a system of actions and reactions, where there is no and cannot be a word, regardless of the developing event, where the word is an action.
From the very beginning of the work, the author plunges us into a disgusting environment from which it would seem impossible to escape: “A basement like a cave. The ceiling is heavy, stone vaults, smoked, with crumbling plaster. Light - from the viewer and, from top to bottom, - from a square window with right side. The right corner is occupied by Ash’s room, fenced off by thin partitions; near the door to this room is Bubnov’s bunk. In the left corner there is a large Russian stove; in the left, stone wall there is a door to the kitchen where Kvashnya, Baron, and Nastya live. Between the stove and the door against the wall is a wide bed covered with a dirty chintz curtain. Everywhere along the walls there are bunks. In the foreground, near the left wall, is a piece of wood with a vice and a small anvil attached to it, and another, lower than the first. On the last one - in front of the anvil - Tick sits, trying on the keys to the old locks. At his feet are two large bunches of different keys, put on wire rings, a damaged table, two benches, a stool, everything is unpainted and dirty. At the table, by the samovar, Kvashnya is in charge, the Baron is chewing black bread and Nastya, on a stool, is reading, leaning on the table, a tattered book. On the bed, covered with a canopy, Anna is coughing, Bubnov, sitting on the bunk, tries on old ripped trousers on a hat blank, clamped in his knees, figuring out how to cut them. Near him is a tattered cardboard from under a hat - for visors, pieces of oilcloth, rags.
It was written in 1902. The characters in this play are people who, as a result of social processes that took place at the turn of the century, found themselves thrown to the very bottom of life.
Social conflict is present in the play primarily in the form of a confrontation between the owners of the shelter, the Kostylevs, and its inhabitants. Kostylev appears in the eyes of the night shelters as a rich man who thinks only about money and strives to ask for as much as possible for a place. At the same time, Kostylev pretends to be a pious person and firmly believes that he will use the extra money received from the inhabitants of the shelter for a good cause. “I’ll throw fifty dollars on you, pour oil into the lamp... and my sacrifice will burn in front of the holy icon...” he insinuatingly says to Kleshch. However, the night shelters themselves are kinder and more sympathetic than Kostylev: The actor helps the dying Anna, Vaska Ash sincerely loves Natalya. And Kostylev is sure that “kindness of heart” cannot be equated with money under any circumstances, which he explains to the Actor: “Kindness is above all good things. And your debt to me is indeed a debt! So, you have to compensate me for it...”
Vasilisa, Kostylev’s wife and owner of the shelter, loves to show her superiority over the shelter. Allegedly keeping order in the rooms, she threatens to call the orderlies, who will “come and impose a fine,” and after that she will kick out all the inhabitants of the shelter. But her superiority and power are imaginary, which, after her angry tirade, Bubnov reminds her of: “How will you live?”
Thus, there is practically no difference between the owners of the shelter and their guests. Kostylev buys a stolen watch from the thief Vaska Pepel; his wife Vasilisa had an affair with the same Vaska. Therefore, the conflict between the Kostylevs and the night shelters has not so much a social basis as moral basis: after all, Kostylev and his wife are people without heart and conscience. Vasilisa persuades Vaska Pepel to kill Kostylev, who, according to her, is torturing her and her sister. Ash condemns her: “... you have no soul, woman.”
Policeman Medvedev, uncle of Vasilisa and Natalya, also does not at all look like a stern representative of the law. He complains about his hectic service, regrets that he has to constantly separate fighters: “If only we would let them beat each other freely, as much as each one wants... they would fight less, because they would remember the beatings longer.” He comes to play checkers with his roommate Bubnov, and proposes to the dumpling seller Kvashnya to marry him. In the play “At the Bottom,” social differences between all the characters are erased. The concept of the bottom is expanding and capturing everyone characters, and not just the inhabitants of the shelter.
Each of the heroes who found themselves at the bottom experienced their own conflict with society in the past. Drunkenness brings the actor to the shelter; he admits that he “drank away his soul.” Because of this, the Actor loses faith in himself and his talent. Only with the arrival of Luka, a wonderful old man at the shelter, who manages to restore faith in the future to many of the shelter’s residents, does the Actor remember his name “from the stage”: Sverchkov-Zavolzhsky. However, in the shelter he has no name, just as he has no past or future. Although the Actor constantly quotes lines from immortal plays, he distorts their words, adapts them to the life of the night: “I’ll get drunk like... forty thousand drunkards...” (modified line from Hamlet), the Actor commits suicide, unable to resist the oppressive and the sucking, depersonalizing reality of the bottom of life.
Occasionally, the sharpie Bubnov recalls his past life. Previously, he was a furrier, “he had his own establishment.” His wife “contacted” the master, a “dodgeman,” as Bubnov himself admitted, and a big fighter. Bubnov planned to kill his wife, but left in time, escaping from hard labor. But for the fact that now he has to lead such a lifestyle, Bubnov blames not his insidious wife, but himself: his binges and laziness. He looks in surprise at his hands, which he thought would never wash off. yellow paint, and sees that now they are just dirty. If earlier his hands were the hallmark of his profession, now he belongs entirely to the faceless brotherhood of the night shelters, as he himself says: “It turns out that on the outside, no matter how you paint yourself, everything will be erased... everything will be erased, yes!”
Satin, when he was a boy, worked at the telegraph office. The baron was a real aristocrat, he studied, “wore the uniform of a noble institute,” and then went to prison for embezzlement. The whole life of the baron appears before the readers as a change of several suits, several masks: from a noble uniform, robe, cap with a cockade to a prisoner's robe and the clothes of a rooming house.
Together with these heroes, under the same roof live the sharper Satin, the thief Ash, the walking girl Nastya, the market cook Kvashnya, Tatar. However, in the shelter, the social differences between them are erased, they all become just people. As Bubnov notes: “... everything faded away, only one naked man remained...”. Social conflicts The events that determined their fate remain in the past and are excluded from the main action of the play. We see only the result of social unrest that has had such a tragic impact on people’s lives.
However, the very title of the play “At the Bottom” suggests the presence of social tension. After all, if there is a bottom to life, there must be something above this bottom; there must also be a rapid flow of light, bright, joyful life. The night shelters do not hope to ever find such a life. All of them, with the exception of the Tick, are turned to the past or immersed in worries about the present. But the Tick is also filled not so much with hope as with impotent anger. It seems to him that he lives in a dirty shelter only for the sake of Anna, his dying wife, but after her death nothing changes. The faith of the inhabitants of the shelter in the possibility of a new life is restored by Luka, the “crafty old man,” but it turns out to be fragile and quickly fades away.
“At the Bottom” is not just a social, but a socio-philosophical drama. What makes a person human, what helps and hinders him to live, to gain human dignity - the author of the play “At the Bottom” seeks answers to these questions. Thus, the main subject of depiction in the play is the thoughts and feelings of the night shelters in all their contradictions. shows that for those who, by the will of fate, have found themselves at the very bottom of life, their situation does not seem tragic, unbearable, hopeless. The fact that their environment, the oppressive atmosphere of the shelter, pushes people to theft, drunkenness, and murder, seems to its inhabitants to be a normal course of life. But the author's point of view differs from the position of his heroes. It shows that the inhuman conditions of the bottom lead to impoverishment spiritual world person, even that sublime feeling, like love, leads to hatred, fight, murder, hard labor. Among the inhabitants of the shelter, only Satin “awakens” to life and pronounces a furious monologue about the greatness of man. However, the speech of this hero is only the first step towards changing the consciousness of people who have fallen to the bottom of life, the first attempt to overcome the social conditions that put pressure on a free person.
In Gorky's play "At the Lower Depths" the system of images is extremely interesting. But, before addressing them directly, we should take a closer look at the meaning of the title of the work. What is this “bottom”? According to Gorky, this is not only housing - “a basement like a cave, the ceiling is heavy, stone vaults, smoke-stained, with crumbling plaster,” not only social status, but also a state of mind.
And in Gorky’s play, each hero is unhappy in his own way, so each has his own path of striving for the light of life.
Now let’s turn to the gallery of images “At the Bottom”. Vaska Pepel, a thief and rebel, Kleshch, is apparently a talented mechanic, but a tough, even cruel person, calmly watching his wife Anna die in agony. Next on the list of characters is Nastya, a girl of twenty-four years old, whose only joy in life is love story"Fatal love" Kvashnya is a dumpling seller, a sympathetic woman, also with her mental tragedy. Bubnov is a cap-holder and a drunkard. Satin, a rather interesting person, with his own philosophy of life, openly drinks away all his abilities and capabilities. The actor, a former servant of Melpomene, is now an alcoholic. Baron, who was once the owner and lost everything. Alyoshka, a young shoemaker of twenty, is a man without a future, like the rest. A Tatar, a believing Muslim and, perhaps, therefore still somehow escaping from complete mental degradation. And, finally, Luka, a wanderer who suddenly appeared in the lives of the night shelters and in a short time left a mark on the souls of every inhabitant of the basement. Each of these images is interesting in its own way, the life of each of them is bitter in its own way.
Vaska Pepel is a thief. And at the beginning of the play we don’t really think about why he is a thief, how did he become one? But at one fine moment Vasily himself talks about himself: “I have been a thief since childhood... everyone always told me: Vaska is a thief, Vaska’s son is a thief! Yeah? So? Well - here you go! Look, I’m a thief!.. You understand: maybe I’m a thief out of evil... because I’m a thief, because no one ever thought of calling me by another name...” Maybe this really is true. A person has been branded, and he is already forced to live the way others see his life. And, apparently, Luka said right to Natasha when Ash invited her to leave with him: “He’s a good guy, a good guy! Just remind him more often that he is a good guy, so that he doesn’t forget about it! He will believe you..."
Vaska was the lover of Natasha's older sister, Vasilisa. This is a powerful woman, even scary, cruel, who loves only money. She encouraged Ash to steal. Moreover, she began to persuade him to kill her husband, the owner of the shelter. As a result, she achieves her goal: Vaska, in a fight, miscalculating her strength, kills Kostylev. Further fate Ash is clear - hard labor or prison.
The girl Nastya also evokes controversial feelings. She dreams of big and bright love, while selling herself. Having read romance novels, she imagines her lover: either Raoul or Gaston. And she cries and cries... You can’t help but wonder: is it possible to condemn her empty dreams, the lies that she is trying to pass off as the truth?..
The actor, a drunken servant of Melpomene, tells everyone that his “body is poisoned by alcohol,” as if even proud of it. In fact, he remembers the scene with such pain!.. But due to the weakness of his nature, having fallen to the bottom of life, it is easier for him to continue to destroy himself than to fight life’s difficulties. When Luka gives him hope by talking about a free clinic for alcoholics, the actor stops drinking: “Today I worked, swept the street... but I didn’t drink vodka! What's it like? Here they are - two five-altyn, and I’m sober! Having learned of the futility of his hopes, the Actor hangs himself, not realizing that he did not need the clinic, he just needed to believe in himself.
Satin is very interesting, a man with his own philosophy of life. From the very beginning of the play, words such as “macrobiotics”, “Sardanapalus”, etc. are heard from his lips. This hero is different from the rest of the inhabitants of the “bottom”. He says about himself: “I’m tired, brother, of human words... all our words are tired! I heard each of them... probably a thousand times...", "I was an educated person...", "I read a lot of books...".
So what happened to him? How did he become an inhabitant of the shelter? Here are his own words: “I served four years and seven months in prison... but after prison there was no progress!” And he was imprisoned for the murder of his offender sister, who, shortly after her brother’s conviction, died. This is a human tragedy! We feel sorry for this hero. It is about him that the wanderer Luke says the following words: “How did you go astray from your path, huh?.. You are so brave... not stupid... and suddenly...”. By the way, it was Luka who helps reveal the character of each of the inhabitants of the shelter, but he had a particularly strong influence on Satin: “Old man? He is smart!.. The old man is not a charlatan! What is truth? Man - that's the truth! He understood this... you don’t!.. He... acted on me like acid on an old and dirty coin...” It is this hero who, after Luke’s departure, takes the first step towards taking a more active position in life.
The image is completely ambiguous" strange man» Luke. He appears in the play and begins to excite the emotions and deeply hidden feelings of the inhabitants of the shelter. Long accustomed to cruelty and inhumanity, they look with surprise and distrust at Luka, who has something for everyone kind word. Here a well-known dispute arises about whether to tell a person the cruel truth or to calm him down with a saving lie. The author opposes saving lie. But what's wrong with Luke comforting the dying Anna, telling her that she will finally rest? But the Actor cannot withstand the collision of fiction and reality and commits suicide. Luke tells everyone what they deep down wanted to hear, something that can awaken some bright feelings in their sick souls. But not every soul is able to endure such a shock. Therefore, we cannot say unambiguously whether he is a positive hero or a negative one.
So, Gorky’s play “At the Lower Depths” is very interesting for its characters, their ambiguity, and complexity. Disputes about this work continue to this day, and this fully speaks of Gorky’s genius as a playwright.
In Gorky's play "At the Lower Depths" the system of images is extremely interesting. But, before addressing them directly, we should take a closer look at the meaning of the title of the work. What is this “bottom”? According to Gorky, this is not only housing - “a basement like a cave, the ceiling is heavy, stone vaults, smoked, with crumbling plaster,” not only social status, but also a state of mind.
And in Gorky’s play, each hero is unhappy in his own way, so each has his own path of striving for the light of life.
Now let’s turn to the gallery of images “At the Bottom”. Vaska Pepel, thief and rebel; Kleshch, apparently, is a talented mechanic, but he is a tough, even cruel man, calmly watching his wife Anna die in agony. Next on the list of characters is Nastya, a twenty-four-year-old girl, whose only joy in her life is the romance novel “Fatal Love.” Kvashnya is a dumpling seller, a sympathetic woman, also with her own spiritual tragedy. Bubnov is a cap-holder and a drunkard. Satin, a rather interesting person, with his own philosophy of life, openly drinks away all his abilities and possibilities. The actor, a former servant of Melpomene, is now an alcoholic. Baron, who was once the owner and lost everything. Alyoshka, a young shoemaker of twenty, is a man without a future, like the rest. A Tatar, a believing Muslim and, perhaps, therefore still somehow escaping from complete mental degradation. And finally, Luka, a wanderer who suddenly appeared in the lives of the night shelters and in a short time left a mark on the souls of every inhabitant of the basement.
Each of these images is interesting in its own way, the life of each of them is bitter in its own way.
Vaska Pepel is a thief. And at the beginning of the play we don’t really think about why he is a thief, how did he become one? But at one fine moment Vasily himself talks about himself: “I have been a thief since childhood... everyone always told me: Vaska is a thief, Vaska’s son is a thief! Yeah? So? Well, here you go! Look, I’m a thief!.. You understand: maybe I’m a thief out of evil... because I’m a thief because no one ever thought of calling me by another name...” Maybe this really is true. A person has been branded, and he is already forced to live the way others see his life. And, apparently, Luka said correctly to Natasha when Ash invited her to leave with him: “He’s a good guy, a good guy! Just remind him more often that he is a good guy, so that he doesn’t forget about it! He will believe you..."
Vaska was the lover of Natasha's older sister, Vasilisa. This is a powerful woman, even scary, cruel, who loves only money. She encouraged Ash to steal. Moreover, she began to persuade him to kill her husband, the owner of the shelter. As a result, she achieves her goal: Vaska, in a fight, miscalculating her strength, kills Kostylev. The further fate of Ash is clear - hard labor or prison.
The girl Nastya also evokes controversial feelings. She dreams of big and bright love, while selling herself. Having read romance novels, she imagines her lover either Raoul or Gaston. And he cries and cries. You can’t help but wonder: is it possible to condemn her empty dreams, the lies that she is trying to pass off as the truth?..
The actor, a drunken servant of Melpomene, tells everyone that his “body is poisoned by alcohol,” as if even proud of it. In fact, he remembers the scene with such pain!.. But due to the weakness of his nature, having fallen to the bottom of life, it is easier for him to continue to destroy himself than to fight life’s difficulties. When Luka gives him hope by talking about a free clinic for alcoholics, the actor stops drinking: “Today I was working, sweeping the street... but there was no vodka.”