The extraordinary, surprisingly natural language of Gogol. Gogol's language, the principles of his style, his satirical manner had an undeniable influence on the development of the Russian literary and artistic language from the mid-30s. Thanks to Gogol’s genius, the style of everyday speech was freed from “conventional constraints and literary cliches,” Vinogradov emphasizes. Absolutely appeared in Rus' new language, distinguished by its simplicity and accuracy, strength and closeness to nature; figures of speech invented by Gogol quickly came into general use, Vinogradov continues. Great writer enriched the Russian language with new phraseological units and words that originated from the names of Gogol’s heroes.
Vinogradov claims that Gogol saw his main purpose in “bringing the language closer together fiction with the lively and accurate colloquial speech of the people."
One of characteristic features style of Gogol, which A. Bely points out, was Gogol’s ability to skillfully mix Russian and Ukrainian speech, high style and jargon, clerical, landowner, hunting, lackey, gambling, bourgeois, the language of kitchen workers and artisans, interspersing archaisms and neologisms in his speech as characters, and in the author's speech.
The writer connected the authenticity of the reality he conveyed with the degree of proficiency in the class, estate, and professional style of the language and dialect of the latter. As a result, Gogol's narrative language acquires several stylistic and linguistic planes and becomes very heterogeneous.
Russian reality is conveyed through the corresponding language environment. At the same time, all existing semantic and expressive shades of official business language are revealed, which, when ironically describing the discrepancy between the conventional semantics of social clerical language and the actual essence of phenomena, appear quite sharply.
Gogol used colloquial speech more widely and deeply than all his predecessors. Gogol masterfully combined various, sometimes almost opposite, “stylistic elements of the Russian language.” His use of the jargon of petty officials, nobility, landowners and army officers not only enriched the literary language, but also became a means of satire in the style of Gogol himself and his followers.
When describing spiritual world, the actions of the heroes, and everyday life are invariably highlighted by the characteristic features of speech, complementing and clarifying the various aspects of what is depicted. Speech is the hero’s self-disclosure.
This is how the author describes the director, Sophie’s father, a man full of penny-pinching ambition: “... very strange man. He is more silent. Speaks very rarely; but a week ago I was constantly talking to myself: “Will I get it or not?” He will take a piece of paper in one hand, fold the other empty and say: “Will I receive it or not?” .
One of the characteristic features of Gogol’s poetics is that the writer likes to talk about serious things casually, jokingly, with humor and irony, as if wanting to reduce the importance of the subject. Many stories from the St. Petersburg cycle, in particular “Notes of a Madman,” are based on this technique.
Already in his first stories, Gogol depicts the people through the realistic atmosphere of folk language, beliefs, fairy tales, proverbs and songs.
So in “Notes of a Madman” there are elements of Russian folk art: “Does my house turn blue in the distance? Is my mother sitting in front of the window? Mother, save your poor son! Drop a tear on his sore little head! Look how they torture him! Hold the poor orphan to your chest! He has no place in the world! They're chasing him! Mother! Have pity on your sick child!..”
Gogol wanted to find new methods and means of “figurative expressiveness” and strove for “concrete, expressive, saturated with life colors and details, figuratively expressive oral narration.”
In Vinogradov’s opinion, the principle of metaphorical animation played an important role for Gogol. In addition, Gogol increasingly uses characteristics of oral folk speech words and images, brings the “verbal fabric” of the narrative into line with the image of the narrator, describes the course of actions sequentially and gives the language a subjective character, writes Vinogradov.
In “Notes of a Madman” the narrator is more personified, Gukovsky emphasizes. He is not just a storyteller, but an author, a writer speaking about himself and addressing his reader, and this writer is not just a writer, he is Gogol. The narrator shares with the reader detailed description habits and individual moments in the lives of heroes and their relatives, thus acting as omniscient.
Gogol's language most naturally combines simplicity, capacity and diversity of living colloquial speech and the language of fiction, Russian and Ukrainian. Gogol masterfully uses the language of various social strata and classes, professional language, jargon and high style.
Diversity language styles and dialects we observe both in Gogol’s characters and in the speech of the narrators. The difference is that the language of the characters depends on their class affiliation.
The originality of Gogol’s language lies in the fact that he deliberately uses tautology, syntactic synonymy, unusual words and phrases, metaphorical and metonymic displacements and allogism. The writer piles up verbs and nouns, lists completely incompatible things and objects in one row, and even resorts to grammatical inaccuracy of expressions.
Gogol widely uses the technique of tautology in his work: “His entire office is lined with cabinets with books. I read the names of some: all learning, such learning that our brother doesn’t even have an attack”; “Your Excellency,” I wanted to say, “do not order execution, but if you already want to execute, then execute with your general’s hand.”
Culinary and everyday vocabulary is also included in the structure of literary and artistic presentation (the author’s speech, revealing the evaluative orientation of the character’s remarks; Medzhi’s speech), which reveals characteristic feature Meji’s prudently greedy nature: “I drink tea and coffee with cream. Oh, I have to tell you that I don’t see any pleasure in the big gnawed bones that our Polkan eats in the kitchen. Bones are good only from game, and that too when no one has yet sucked the brains out of them. It is very good to mix several sauces together, but only without capers and without herbs; but I don’t know anything worse than the habit of giving dogs balls rolled out of bread. Some gentleman sitting at the table, who held all sorts of rubbish in his hands, will begin to knead the bread with these hands, call you and put a ball in your teeth. It’s somehow rude to refuse, so eat; with disgust, but eat..." “If they hadn’t given me hazel grouse sauce or roast chicken legs, then... I don’t know what would have happened to me. The sauce with porridge is also good. But carrots, or turnips, or artichokes will never be good...”
In Gogol's style, it is easy to distinguish two streams that run through all of his work. On the one hand, the speech is measured, rounded, and solemn. It seems that in no other Russian writer can you find such regularity and solemnity as in him. Something songlike can be heard in the rhythm and turns of this speech. On the other hand, Gogol does not narrate, but recites. The tone of his stories is not calm and measured, but impetuous and stormy. His speech flows in wide lyrical streams, is interrupted by exclamations, sprinkles with jokes, falls into buffoonery and even rises again to lush lyricism.
Gogol often uses such a turn of epic poetry, which is not found in other Russian writers - an epic comparison. The essence of the phrase is that, having compared the thing being described, the artist is so carried away by the object taken for comparison, describes it in such detail that he no longer explains, but obscures the thing being compared with it: “I pressed myself against the wall. The footman opened the doors, and she flew out of the carriage like a bird. How she looked to the right and to the left, how she flashed her eyebrows and eyes...” “Holy saints, how she was dressed! Her dress was white, like a swan: wow, so lush! And how I looked: the sun, by God the sun!” “What a car! What people don’t live there: how many cooks, how many visitors! And our brotherhood of officials is like dogs, one sits on top of the other. I also have a friend there who plays the trumpet well.” “Damn it, his face looks like an apothecary bottle, and there’s a tuft of hair on his head, curled with a tuft, and he holds it up, and smears it with some kind of rosette, so he already thinks that he alone can do anything.” “The hair on his head is like hay.” “Ay, ah, ah! What a voice! Canary, right canary."
Words with diminutive suffixes: “frachishka”, “feather”, “rain”, “droshki”, “quiet”, “umbrella”.
French phrases and individual words are quite rare: “Sophie”, “ma chire”, “papa”, “Fidel”, “equivoques”, “dana” acquire a satirical connotation.
But in Gogol’s language there are many provincial, sometimes rude, but bright and characteristic words and expressions, like no one else. There are also specific words here, like: “kike”, “mug”, “rags”, “little dog”, “damn”, “collapsed”, “stupid serf”, “drag”, “pigs”, “trashy”, “vile” ", "scandalism", "rude", "blockhead", "insolent", "liars", "donkey", "scoundrels", "you can't fool me!"
Here there are such expressions as: “Damned heron!”, “Oh my God, hurry up.” doomsday will come”, “ask, even crack, even if you’re in need, the gray-haired devil won’t give it away”, “the face is such that you want to spit”, “caught your eye”, “so that I don’t receive a salary!”, “damn it “,” “I didn’t let my nose stick out,” “after all, you’re zero, nothing more,” “not a penny to my name,” “I spit on him,” “having my nose plugged, I ran at full speed,” “not completely bad-looking,” “loves without memory”, “what a vulgar tone”, “he will start as expected, and end with a dog’s tongue”, “disgusting tongue”, “after all, his nose is not made of gold”, “make a mess”, “this insidious creature is a woman”, “went incognito”, “got into a scam”, etc.
And finally, the original proverbs: “Sometimes you get things so mixed up that Satan himself can’t figure it out,” “Sometimes you rush around like crazy,” “love is a second life,” “you won’t get a third eye on your forehead,” “When England takes snuff, then France is sneezing."
Gogol's verbal painting promotes artistic clairvoyance, revealing the inner appearance of a person and transforming him. Of course, the word has “incomplete clarity” (according to A.F. Losev), but it reveals what is hidden in the representation. Everything worthless and petty was displayed by N.V. Gogol “outwardly” and “felt” in completeness and unity. Let us note that only contemplative and creative reading reveals the significance of “little things” and “collectivity” in the works of N.V. Gogol. A.S. Pushkin keenly noticed the innovative features of N.V.’s style. Gogol - humor, poetry, lyricism and imagery. N.V. Gogol was “captured by the power of words”; he showed special skill in what is called “accuracy.” The figurativeness of Gogol’s style is the most important aesthetic principle, based not on a simple synthesis of the arts (poetry and painting); it is also a special style, a unique language that contains within itself a grain of picturesqueness. The roots of Gogol's language are in “contemplation,” or more precisely, in two opposing features of “vision.” Andrei Bely noticed that N.V. Gogol does not have “normal” vision: his eye is either wide open, dilated, or squinted, narrowed.”
“Gogol’s images, the names of Gogol’s types, Gogol’s expressions have entered the common language. From them new words were produced, for example, Manilovism, Nozdrevism, rags, dog-whistle style etc. [...]
None of the other classical writers created such a number of types as Gogol that would enter literary and everyday use as common nouns.
During his lifetime, Belinsky called Gogol “a brilliant poet and the first writer modern Russia" Gogol laid the foundation for the use of folk language in Russian literature and the reflection of the feelings of the entire people. Thanks to Gogol’s genius, the style of everyday speech was freed from “conventional constraints and literary cliches. A completely new language appeared in Rus', distinguished by its simplicity and accuracy, strength and closeness to nature; figures of speech invented by Gogol quickly entered into general use. The great writer enriched the Russian language with new phraseological units and words. Gogol saw his main purpose in “bringing the language of fiction closer to the living and apt colloquial speech of the people”
One of the characteristic features of Gogol’s style, which A. Bely points out, was Gogol’s ability to skillfully mix Russian and Ukrainian speech, high style and jargon, clerical, landowner, hunting, lackey, gambler, bourgeois, the language of kitchen workers and artisans, interspersing archaisms and neologisms in the speech of both characters and the author’s speech. Vinogradov notes that the genre of Gogol’s earliest prose is in the style of the Karamzin school and is distinguished by a high, serious, pathetic narrative style. Gogol, understanding the value of Ukrainian folklore, really wanted to become “genuinely national writer"and tried to involve a variety of oral folk speech in the Russian literary and artistic narrative system. The writer connected the authenticity of the reality he conveyed with the degree of proficiency in the class, estate, and professional style of the language and dialect of the latter. As a result, the language of Gogol’s narrative acquires several stylistic and linguistic planes and becomes very heterogeneous. Vinogradov notes that in the early editions of Dead Souls, Gogol’s use of clerical vocabulary and phraseology was wider, freer and more natural. With a touch of irony, Gogol uses clerical and bureaucratic-official expressions when describing “non-official”, everyday situations and the life of officials. Gogol's vernacular style is intertwined with clerical and business style. Gogol sought to introduce into the literary language the vernacular of different strata of society (small and middle nobility, urban intelligentsia and bureaucrats) and, by mixing them with the literary and book language, to find a new Russian literary language. In “Notes of a Madman” and in “The Nose,” Gogol uses clerical business style and colloquial official speech much more than other styles of vernacular. At times Gogol resorted to an ironic description of the content that society puts into one word or another. For example: “In a word, they were what is called happy”; “There was nothing else on this secluded or, as we say, beautiful square.”
Gogol believed that the literary and book language of the upper classes was painfully affected by borrowings from foreign, “foreign” languages, impossible to find foreign words, which could describe Russian life with the same accuracy as Russian words; as a result, some foreign words were used in a distorted sense, some were assigned a different meaning, while some original Russian words disappeared irrevocably from use.
Gogol closely connecting the secular narrative language with the Europeanized Russian-French salon language, not only denied and parodied it, but also openly contrasted his own style of storytelling language standards, corresponding to the salon-lady language. In addition, Gogol also struggled with the mixed half-French, half-popular Russian language of romanticism. Gogol contrasts the romantic style with a realistic style, reflecting reality more fully and believably.
As for the national scientific language, Gogol saw the peculiarity of the Russian scientific language in its adequacy, accuracy, brevity and objectivity, in the absence of the need to embellish it. Gogol saw the sources of the Russian scientific language in Church Slavonic, peasant and the language of folk poetry.
Gogol sought to include in his language the professional speech of not only the nobility, but also the bourgeois class. Attaching great importance to the peasant language, Gogol replenishes his vocabulary, recording the names, terminology and phraseology of accessories and parts of peasant costume, equipment and household utensils peasant hut, arable farming, laundry, beekeeping, forestry and gardening, weaving, fishing, traditional medicine, that is, everything related to the peasant language and its dialects. The language of crafts and technical specialties was also interesting to the writer, as was the language of noble life, hobbies and entertainment. Hunting, gambling, military dialects and jargon attracted close attention Gogol.
Gogol sought to find ways to reform the relationship between the literary language of his day and the professional language of the church. He introduced church symbols and phraseology into literary speech,
Already in his first stories, Gogol, using the Ukrainian literary tradition, depicts the people through the realistic atmosphere of folk language, Ukrainian rituals, beliefs, fairy tales, proverbs and songs,
Gogol contrasts not only the complex, artificially embellished language of Panich, far from living oral folk speech, with the simple, intelligible, everyday language of Foma Grigorievich, but also their images are contrasted with each other.
when comparing the two editions of “Evenings”, there is a rapid change in Gogol’s style towards the use of the expressive variety of lively colloquial speech. In the second edition, Gogol eliminates standard, uniform book and literary vocabulary and phraseological units or replaces it with synonymous, more expressive, dynamic expressions from living oral speech.
The principle of metaphorical animation played an important role for Gogol.
The author of “The Overcoat” is close to the environment in which his hero lives, writes Gukovsky, he understands the worries and problems, dreams and reality of Akakiy Akakievich’s life, he talks about everything not from hearsay, but as an acquaintance who knew both Akakiy Akakievich’s relatives and the official. the narrator shares with the reader a detailed description of the habits and individual moments in the lives of the heroes and their relatives, thus acting as omniscient.
The author combines “a pure comic tale built on a language game, puns and deliberate tongue-tiedness” with a description in sublime, emphatically pathetic from the point of view of rhetoric tones when we are not talking about really lofty concepts and phenomena, but, on the contrary, about something everyday and small .
“I have never created anything in my imagination and did not have this property. The only thing that worked out well for me was what I took from reality, from what was known to me. I have never painted portraits in the sense of a simple copy. I created a portrait, but I created it out of consideration, not imagination.”
Important point in the destruction of the forms of book syntax in Gogol was associated with the methods of including into the author’s speech inappropriately direct, “alien speech”, with their constantly fluctuating ratio. The writer included “other people’s speech” into the author’s narrative, often contradicting the author’s point of view, without any warnings or reservations. This led to a comic displacement of different semantic planes, sharp “jumps” of expression, changes in narrative tone, while at the same time this relationship serves Gogol as a means of creating comic repetitions.
Gogol’s text is characterized by an atmosphere of little things, as an example the description of Bashmachkin’s reaction to Petrovich’s barbarously calm statement about the cost of making a new overcoat: “One hundred and fifty rubles for an overcoat!” “exclaimed poor Akaki Akakievich, clasping his hands and screaming, perhaps for the first time in his life, for he was always distinguished by his quiet voice.”
Gogol often describes the details of the narrative in great detail, while the writer shows the redundancy of any quality by the redundancy of the means of grammatical expression of this very quality, for example, the doctor’s voice is neither loud nor quiet, but extremely moving and magnetic (Nose).
in “The Overcoat” there are more detailed, specific, substantive descriptions of objects, things, people, etc. than in Gogol’s other works. The writer gives a detailed portrait of the hero, his clothes and even food.
Gogol mixed the Ukrainian language with various dialects and styles of the Russian language. Moreover, the style Ukrainian language directly depended on character actor works. Gogol combined the Ukrainian vernacular with Russian through the vernacular “pea panic” from “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.”
You need to know that Akaki Akakievich spoke mostly in prepositions, adverbs and, finally, particles that absolutely have no meaning.” (Overcoat); “still... there’s something like that... something like that there...” (Dead Souls).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the fact that he deliberately uses tautology, syntactic synonymy, unusual words and phrases, metaphorical and metonymic displacements and alogisms. The writer piles up verbs and nouns, lists completely incompatible things and objects in one row, and even resorts to grammatical inaccuracy of expressions.
Numerous features of Gogol's language explain the fact that the writer's language simply and naturally entered both the literary and everyday Russian languages.
Related information.
Composition
Gogol began his creative activity like a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism, opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
Gogol's social orientation is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of public importance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
For bright purposes satirical image Gogol's heroes are served by a careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, homes of the heroes. If in romantic stories Gogol are given underlined picturesque landscapes, giving the work a certain elevation of tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “ Dead souls", landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes. Themes, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings...", in "Taras Bulba ", V lyrical digressions“Dead Souls”), then becomes close to live conversational (in everyday paintings and scenes of “Evenings...” or in stories about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Gogol loved and had a keen sense of popular colloquial speech, skillfully using all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life.
The character of a person social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol's characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposition of the ideal of life with the reality of life.” He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
IN great literature Gogol was introduced (“Evenings on a farm near Dikanka 1831-1832”), which amazed contemporaries with the extraordinary originality of the poetic material: “... everyone was delighted with this living description of the singing and dancing tribe, these fresh pictures of Little Russian nature, this gaiety, simple-minded and at the same time crafty. How amazed we were at a Russian book that made us laugh, we who had not laughed since the time of Fonvizin!” wrote Pushkin.
The cycle of “Evenings”, written over two and a half years, included the stories “Sorochinskaya Fair”, “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “May Night or the Drowned Woman”, which made up the first part of the collection (1831).
Gogol’s appeal to Ukrainian themes was natural: the writer spent his childhood and youth in Ukraine, he was always interested in Ukrainian culture and literature, and he was especially fascinated by oral folk art talented people. It is known with what persistence Gogol collected information about Ukrainian folk customs, rituals, legends, beliefs.
The main object of the image in the “evenings” becomes folk life, and the main character is the Ukrainian people - wise, crafty, freedom-loving, noble, daring and generous.
The real hero of the book is the people, their character, manifested in fairy tales and legends. Ukrainian fairy tales are scary and bewitching at the same time; in them, good is not always clearly rewarded, but, in the end, reward comes for all actions - good and bad. "May Night, or the Drowned Woman" is based on many legends about "restless souls" who died innocently. A beautiful, kind lady suffers the bullying of her witch-stepmother. Unable to bear it, she throws herself into the pond and becomes a mermaid. Together with other mermaids, she tries to punish her stepmother, drags her into the water, but she is insidious and cunning. The stepmother turned into a mermaid. And the poor lady “cannot swim freely, like a fish, she drowns and falls to the bottom like a key.” The mermaid turns for help to Levk, the son of the head, who is not happy. Levko loves the beautiful Galya, but the boy’s cunning father himself has designs on the girl and “does not hear” when his son asks permission to marry. Levko and the mermaid meet in a dream. Pannochka tells the guy about her stepmother and asks: “Help me, find her!” The request turns out to be easily fulfilled: after watching the mermaids play “the kite,” Levko immediately sees one who likes to be an evil and predatory kite, who is not so transparent and pure, “something turns black inside her.” The grateful lady helps Levk to unite his life with his beloved girl. The story told by Gogol is permeated with lyricism, Ukrainian songs, and shrouded in poetic sadness. There is a lot of kindness in her and there is no Christian intolerance towards suicides. They are not cursed, they are unhappy. N.V. Gogol grew up in the atmosphere of Ukrainian songs and fairy tales, perfectly conveyed it in his books, and managed to captivate readers with the poetry of Little Russian folk legends.
The peculiarity of stories about Ukrainian life is a masterful combination of the real and the fantastic. Gogol’s fantasy is based on the fantasy of folklore, so witches, mermaids and sorcerers living and acting next to people are not so much scary as funny, and the main motive of “Evenings” is the victory of the earthly, human over the mysterious, otherworldly.
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he soon turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under beneficial influence Pushkin. But he was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and “ little man", a resident of St. Petersburg corners.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
This social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, Gogol’s plot serves only as a pretext for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep insight into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol to genius artist words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The names of Khlestakov, Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich and others became household names. Even the minor characters depicted by Gogol on the pages of his works (for example, in “Dead Souls”): Pelageya, the serf girl Korobochka, or Ivan Antonovich, the “jug snout”, have great power of generalization and typicality. Gogol emphasizes one or two of his most significant features in the character of the hero. Often he exaggerates them, which makes the image even more vivid and prominent.
The purposes of a vivid, satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, the hero’s home.
If in Gogol’s romantic stories there are emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes.
The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech.
The two worlds depicted by Gogol - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings", in "Taras Bulba", in lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to a live conversational one (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings” or when the story is told about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of folk speech and skillfully used all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena. public life.
1) periodic structure phrases when many sentences are connected into one whole (“Taras saw how vague the Cossack ranks had become and how despondency, indecent for the brave, began to quietly embrace the Cossack heads, but was silent: he wanted to give time to everything so that they would get used to the despondency brought on by farewell with his comrades, and meanwhile in the silence he was preparing at once and suddenly to wake them all up, whooping like a Cossack, so that again and with greater strength than before, cheerfulness would return to everyone’s soul, which only the Slavic breed is capable of, a broad, powerful breed before others , that the sea is in front of shallow rivers");
2) the introduction of lyrical dialogues and monologues (for example, the conversation between Levko and Ganna in the first chapter of “May Night”, monologues - appeals to the Cossacks of Koshevoy, Taras Bulba, Bovdyug in “Taras Bulba”);
3) an abundance of exclamatory and interrogative sentences (for example, in the description of the Ukrainian night in “May Night”);
4) emotional epithets that convey the power of the author’s inspiration, born of love for native nature(description of the day at the Sorochinskaya Fair) or to the folk group (Taras Bulba).
Gogol uses everyday speech in different ways. IN early works(in “Evenings”) its bearer is the narrator. The author puts into his mouth both vernacular words (everyday words and phrases), and such appeals to listeners that are of a familiar, good-natured nature, characteristic of this environment: “By God, I’m already tired of telling! What are you thinking?
The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. Gogol's humor - “laughter through tears” - was determined by the contradictions of the Russian reality of his time, mainly by the contradictions between the people and the anti-people essence of the noble state. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposite of the ideal
life with the reality of life." He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”