According to popular belief, love and marriage are synonymous, spring from the same source, and respond to the same human needs. But, like most common beliefs, this is based not on actual facts, but on prejudices.

Marriage and love have nothing in common, they are as opposite as poles, in fact they are antagonistic towards each other. Without a doubt, some marriages grew out of love. But this is not because love can only assert itself through marriage. On the contrary, it is rather explained by the fact that only a few people were able to outgrow the custom. There are today a huge number of men and women for whom marriage is nothing more than a farce, but who submit to this institution solely due to the influence of public opinion. In any case, although some marriages are indeed based on love, although sometimes love continues into marriage, I believe that this happens independently of the marriage, and not at all because of it.

On the other hand, the idea that love can be the result of marriage is completely false. Sometimes we hear about miraculous cases when married people fall in love with each other, but a close examination of these cases will show that this is just getting used to the inevitable. Of course, gradually getting used to each other has nothing to do with the spontaneity, intensity and beauty of love, without which the intimate side of marriage will most likely turn out to be humiliating for both men and women.

Therefore, the lines that Dante placed above the entrance to hell - “Abandon hope, all who enter here” - can equally be applied to marriage.

Marriage is a failure that only the stupidest people will deny. You only need to take a look at the divorce statistics to understand what a failure the institution of marriage truly is. To understand these statistics, typical philistine arguments about the laxity of divorce laws and the growing promiscuity of women are not suitable. Firstly, every twelfth marriage ends in divorce; secondly, the number of divorces per thousand people has increased since 1870 from 28 to 73; third, adultery as a reason for divorce has increased by 270.8% since 1867; fourthly, the number of leaving the family increased by 369.8%.

In addition to the statistics, there are a large number of works, dramatic and literary, that shed further light on this topic. (...) many writers reveal the sterility, monotony, squalor and inadequacy of marriage as a factor in achieving harmony and understanding between people.

The serious social scientist should not be satisfied with the common superficial explanation of this phenomenon. He must dig deeper into the very lives of the two sexes to find out why marriage turns out to be such a disaster.

Edward Carpenter notes that behind every marriage there is a union of two worlds, male and female, so different from each other that the man and woman must remain strangers. Fenced by an insurmountable wall of prejudices, customs, habits, marriage hardly involves improving knowledge about each other, respect for each other, without which any union is doomed to failure.

Henrik Ibsen, who hated all social pretense, was perhaps the first to recognize this great truth. Nora leaves her husband not because (as a narrow-minded critic would note) she is tired of her responsibilities or feels the need to fight for women's rights, but because she has come to the conclusion: she lived for eight years with a stranger and bore him children. Can there be anything more humiliating than a lifelong union of two alien beings? A woman has no need to know anything about a man, she should only worry about his income. What should a man know about a woman besides the fact that she has a good appearance? We have not yet outgrown the biblical myth that a woman has no soul, that she is just an appendage of a man, created from his rib, for the convenience of a gentleman who was so strong that he was afraid of his own shadow.

Or maybe the low quality of the material from which the woman was created was the reason for her inferiority? One way or another, a woman has no soul - so why know anything about her? Moreover, the less soul she has, the better her qualities as a wife, the more readily she will dissolve in her husband. This slavish submission to male superiority has kept the institution of marriage comparatively intact for so long. Nowadays, when a woman begins to realize her importance, to realize herself as a being over whom the master has no power, the sacred institution of marriage is gradually losing its role, and no sentimental mourning will help this.

Almost from infancy, the girl is told about marriage as the ultimate goal; therefore, her upbringing and education are subordinated to this. Like dumb creature fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for marriage. However, oddly enough, she is allowed to know much less about her purpose as a wife and mother than an ordinary artisan knows about her craft. It is indecent and indecent for a girl from a respectable family to know anything about intimate life. In the name of an obscure respectability, marriage passes off dirt and filth as the purest and most sacred agreement that no one dares question or criticize. This is precisely the attitude towards marriage of the average supporter. The future wife and mother is kept completely in the dark about her only competitive advantage - sex. Thus, she enters into a lifelong relationship with a man only to feel shocked, disliked, insulted beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct that is sex. Without hesitation we can say that large share misfortune, poverty, want and physical suffering in marriage are the consequences of criminal ignorance in matters of sex, ignorance which is passed off as the greatest of virtues. It would not be an exaggeration to say that more than one family has broken up due to this unfortunate fact.

If, however, a woman is free enough, if she is mature enough to penetrate the secrets of sex without the sanction of the state or church, she will be branded with shame, declared unworthy to become the wife of a “decent” man, whose entire decency lies only in an empty head and a lot of money . Could there be anything more offensive than the idea that healthy adult woman full of life and passion, must resist the needs of nature, must tame her most passionate desire, thereby undermining her health and crushing her spirit, must limit herself in dreams and visions, abstain from deep and magnificent sexual desire until a “decent” person appears and won't take her as his wife? This is what marriage means. How can such a union end in any other way than collapse? Here is one, and not the last, factor of marriage that distinguishes it from love.

Our age is the age of practicality. The times when Romeo and Juliet risked the wrath of their fathers in the name of love, when Gretchen was not ashamed of the gossip of gossips for the sake of love, are long gone. If, on rare occasions, young people allow themselves the luxury of romance, their elders immediately intervene, hammering wisdom into them until they “get their wits.”

The moral lesson that is taught to a girl is not whether a man aroused love in her, it comes down to one question: “How much?” The only deity of practical Americans is money; The main question of life: “Can a man earn a living? Will he be able to support his wife? This is the only thing that justifies marriage. Gradually these ideas permeate the girl’s every thought; she doesn't dream about moonlight and kisses, about laughter and tears; she dreams of cheap stores and bargains. This poverty of soul and stinginess are generated by the institution of marriage. The state and church do not recognize another ideal, since it is the only one that allows the state and church to completely control people.

Without a doubt, there are people who continue to look at love without paying attention to dollars and cents. This truth is especially obvious in relation to the class that is forced to take care of itself through its own labor. The colossal changes in the position of women brought about by this powerful factor are truly phenomenal, especially if we remember that women entered the industrial arena only recently. Six million working women; six million women, equal with men in the right to be exploited, robbed, participate in strikes and even die of hunger. Continue, my lord? Yes, six million, employed in a variety of industries: from the highest mental work to mines and railroads; Why, there are even detectives and policemen among them. Truly, complete emancipation!

The woman views her position as a worker as transitional, expecting to be thrown out at the first opportunity. This is why it is much more difficult to organize women than men. “Why should I join a union? I’m going to get married, I’ll have my own house.” Wasn't this what she had been told from infancy as her ultimate calling? Pretty soon she learns that although the house is not as huge as the prison called the factory, it has much more powerful doors and bars. And its keeper is so devoted to his work that nothing escapes him. The most tragic thing, however, is that the house no longer frees a woman from hard labor, but only increases the number of her responsibilities.

According to the latest statistics presented to the Committee on Labor, Wages and Overpopulation, ten percent of women workers in New York City alone are married, but they are forced to continue to work in the lowest paid jobs in the world. Add to this horror the exhausting work around the house - what then remains of the “security” of the house and its glory? In fact, even a married woman from the “middle class” cannot talk about her home, since her husband is the complete owner of it. It doesn't matter if your husband is rude or loving. I want to say that marriage provides a woman with a home only thanks to her husband. She moves into his house and stays there for years until her personal life becomes as dull, limited, and boring as her surroundings. It is not surprising that a woman becomes quarrelsome, petty, irritable, unbearable, and becomes a gossip, thereby driving her husband out of the house. She has nowhere to go, even if she wanted to. In addition, the short period of marriage and complete subjugation of a woman makes her completely unsuitable for life. She becomes indifferent to her own appearance, loses ease of movement, hesitates to make decisions, is afraid to express judgment - that is, she turns into a boring creature that most men hate and despise. It’s an amazingly inspiring atmosphere to give birth to a new life, isn’t it?

But how can a child be protected if not through marriage? After all, isn't that the most important consideration? But what emptiness and hypocrisy lies behind it! Marriage protects children, but at the same time thousands of children find themselves without guardianship and a roof over their heads. Marriage protects children, but at the same time, orphanages and correctional facilities are overcrowded, and the Society for the Protection of Children from Abuse is busy rescuing young victims from their “loving” parents and placing them in the even more caring hands of foster care organizations. This is just a joke!

Marriage may perhaps bring a horse to water, but does it ever let it drink? The law may place a child's father under arrest and provide him with a prison uniform, but will it save the child from hunger? And if a parent is unemployed or in hiding, how will marriage help in this case? They talk about the law only when a person needs to be brought to the court of “justice”, when he needs to be placed behind prison bars, but even in this case, the state, not the child, will benefit from the fruits of his labor. The child gets memories of his father’s dirty striped robe.

This is similar to another paternalistic contract - capitalism. It robs a person of the rights given to him from birth, retards his development and growth, poisons his body, keeps him in ignorance, poverty and dependence in order to then establish charitable societies that grow magnificently on the last vestiges of human self-respect.

If motherhood is the highest destiny of female nature, what other protection is needed than love and freedom? Marriage only defiles, insults and corrupts this purpose. One of his provisions is “only by following me will you give continuation of life.” These institutions condemn a woman to the chopping block, humiliate and shame her if she refuses to buy the right to motherhood by selling herself. Only marriage sanctions motherhood, even if conceived in hatred under duress. If motherhood were the result of free choice, love, passion, courageous feeling, would society place a crown of thorns on an innocent head and carve in bloody letters that disgusting epithet “illegitimate”? If marriage absorbed all the virtues with which it is adorned, then crimes against motherhood would forever erase it from the sphere of love.

Love, the strongest and deepest thing in life, the harbinger of hope, joy, passion; love that denies any laws and any regulations; love, the freest and most powerful creator of human destiny, how can this indomitable force equate itself with that pitiful creation of the state and church - with marriage?

Free love? As if love could be anything else! A man buys intelligence, but all the millions in the world cannot buy love. A man subjugates his body, but all the power of the earth is unable to subjugate love. A man has conquered entire nations, but any army is powerless before love. The man has chained and entangled the spirit, but he is completely helpless before love. High on the throne, with all the luxury and splendor that his gold can provide him, a man remains unhappy and lonely if love bypasses him. But if she comes to him, the shack of the last poor man begins to glow with warmth, life, light. Only love has the magical power to make a beggar a king. Yes, love is free and cannot exist in any other atmosphere. In freedom, she gives herself selflessly, completely, without reserve. All the laws, all the courts of the universe cannot erase love from the face of the earth, once it has taken root on it. If the soil is barren, can marriage fertilize it? This is just the last desperate battle between life and death.

Love does not need protection; She is her own defense. And as long as love remains the creator of life, not a single child will be abandoned, hungry or tortured. I know it's true. I know women who chose motherhood outside of marriage, although they loved the fathers of their children. Not many “legitimate” children enjoy the care, protection, and attention that free motherhood provides.

Defenders of power fear the emergence of free motherhood, since it will deprive them of their prey. Who will fight? Who will create wealth? Who will produce policemen and jailers if women refuse to raise children unquestioningly? Nation, nation! - shout kings, presidents, capitalists, priests. It is necessary to preserve the nation, even if a woman turns into a simple machine. At the same time, the institution of the family is the only valve for releasing steam, which allows one to avoid the harmful sexual emancipation of a woman. But these crazy attempts to maintain the state of enslavement are futile. The edicts of the church, the insane attacks of those in power, and even the hand of the law are in vain. Woman no longer desires to be part of the production of a race of sick, weak, decrepit and miserable human beings who have neither the strength nor the moral courage to throw off the yoke of poverty and slavery. Instead, she wants to have fewer children, whom she raises lovingly and better, and so that this is the result of her free choice, and not the coercion that comes with marriage. Our pseudo-moralists will still have to grow into a deep sense of responsibility towards the child, which has already awakened in a woman’s chest thanks to the love of freedom. She would rather give up the joy of motherhood than bring new life into a world that breathes destruction and death. And if she becomes a mother, then in order to give the child the deepest and best that is in herself. Her motto is to grow with the child, and she knows that only in this way can she cultivate true masculinity or femininity in him.

Ibsen must have imagined a free mother when he painted the portrait of Mrs. Alving with masterful strokes. She was the perfect mother because she outgrew the confines of marriage and all its horrors, because she broke the chains and allowed her spirit to soar freely until it gave her back her identity, reborn and strong. Alas, this came too late to save the joy of her life, Oswald, but not too late to realize that love, subject to freedom, is the only condition for a truly wonderful life. Those who, like Mrs. Alving, paid with blood and tears for their spiritual transformation condemn marriage as a deception, an empty and petty mockery. They know that the only creative, inspiring, uplifting basis for the emergence of new race people, the new world is love, whether it lasts only a short time or lasts forever.

In our current truly pygmy state, love is truly alien to most people. Misunderstood and expelled from everywhere, it rarely takes root anywhere; and if this happens, it soon dries up and dies. Its delicate fabric cannot withstand the stress and strain of daily backbreaking work. Her soul is too complex to adapt to the vile barking of our social structure. She cries and suffers along with those who need her so much, but at the same time are not able to rise to her heights.

Someday men and women will rise and climb to the mountain peak, they will meet, strong and free, ready to experience love and bask in its golden rays. What imagination, what poetic genius can, even approximately, predict the possibilities of such a force in people's lives? If the world is ever going to know true togetherness and intimacy, it will be love, not marriage, that will be the parent.

Modern statistics on divorces in Russia also speak volumes - approx. ed.

The heroine of the play of the same name

The heroine of the play "Ghosts"

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• Introduction
• Conclusion

Introduction

The theme of feelings is eternal in art, music, and literature. In all eras and times, many different creative works were dedicated to this feeling, which became inimitable masterpieces. This topic remains very relevant today. The theme of love is especially relevant in literary works. After all, love is the purest and most beautiful feeling, which has been sung by writers since ancient times.

The lyrical side of the works is the first thing that attracts the attention of most readers. It is the theme of love that inspires, inspires and evokes a number of emotions, which are sometimes very contradictory. All great poets and writers, regardless of writing style, theme, or time of life, dedicated many of their works to the ladies of their hearts. They contributed their emotions and experiences, their observations and past experiences. Lyrical works are always full of tenderness and beauty, bright epithets and fantastic metaphors. The heroes of the works perform feats for the sake of their loved ones, take risks, fight, and dream. And sometimes, watching such characters, you become imbued with the same experiences and feelings of literary heroes.

1. The theme of love in the works of foreign writers

In the Middle Ages, the chivalric romance was popular in foreign literature. The chivalric novel, as one of the main genres of medieval literature, originates in the feudal environment during the era of the emergence and development of chivalry, for the first time in France in the mid-12th century. Works of this genre are filled with elements heroic epic, the boundless courage, nobility and courage of the main characters. Often, knights went to great lengths not for the sake of their family or vassal duty, but in the name of their own glory and the glorification of the lady of their heart. Fantastic adventure motifs and an abundance of exotic descriptions make the knightly romance partly similar to a fairy tale, the literature of the East and the pre-Christian mythology of Northern and Central Europe. The emergence and development of the chivalric romance was greatly influenced by the work of ancient writers, in particular Ovid, as well as the reinterpreted tales of the ancient Celts and Germans.

Let us consider the features of this genre using the example of the work of the French philologist-medievalist, writer Joseph Bedier, “The Novel of Tristan and Isolde.” Let us note that in this work there are many elements alien to traditional chivalric romances. For example, the mutual feelings of Tristan and Isolde are devoid of courtliness. In the chivalric novels of that era, the knight went to great lengths for the sake of love for the Beautiful Lady, who for him was the living physical embodiment of the Madonna. Therefore, the knight and that same Lady had to love each other platonically, and her husband (usually the king) was aware of this love. Tristan and Isolde, his beloved, are sinners in the light of Christian morality, not only medieval ones. They only care about one thing - to keep their relationship secret from others and to prolong their criminal passion by any means. This is the role of Tristan’s heroic leap, his constant “pretense,” Isolde’s ambiguous oath at “God’s court,” her cruelty towards Brangien, whom Isolde wants to destroy because she knows too much, etc. Tristan and Isolde are overcome by a strong desire to be together, they deny both earthly and divine laws, moreover, they condemn not only their own honor, but also the honor of King Mark to desecration. But Tristan’s uncle is one of the noblest heroes, who humanly forgives what he must punish as a king. He loves his wife and nephew, he knows about their deception, but this does not reveal his weakness at all, but the greatness of his image. One of the most poetic scenes of the novel is the episode in the forest of Morois, where King Mark found Tristan and Isolde sleeping, and, seeing a naked sword between them, readily forgives them (in the Celtic sagas, a naked sword separated the bodies of the heroes before they became lovers , in the novel this is a deception).

To some extent, it is possible to justify the heroes, to prove that they are not at all to blame for their suddenly flared passion, they fell in love not because, say, he was attracted by Isolde’s “blond hair”, and she was attracted by Tristan’s “valor”, but because the heroes drank a love drink by mistake, intended for a completely different occasion. Thus, love passion is depicted in the novel as the result of an action. dark force, which penetrates into the bright world of the social world order and threatens to destroy it to the ground. This clash of two irreconcilable principles already contains the possibility of a tragic conflict, making “The Romance of Tristan and Isolde” a fundamentally pre-courtly work in the sense that courtly love can be as dramatic as desired, but it is always joy. The love of Tristan and Isolde, on the contrary, brings them nothing but suffering.

“They languished apart, but suffered even more” when they were together. “Isolde became a queen and lives in grief,” writes the French scholar Bedier, who retold the novel in prose in the nineteenth century. “Isolde has passionate, tender love, and Tristan is with her whenever he wants, day and night.” Even while wandering in the forest of Morois, where the lovers were happier than in the luxurious castle of Tintagel, their happiness was poisoned by heavy thoughts.

Many other writers have been able to capture their thoughts about love in their works. For example, William Shakespeare gave the world a number of his works that inspire heroism and risk in the name of love. His "Sonnets" are filled with tenderness, luxurious epithets and metaphors. The common thread artistic methods Shakespeare's poetry is rightly called harmony. The impression of harmony comes from all of Shakespeare's poetic works.

The expressive means of Shakespeare's poetry are incredibly diverse. They inherited a lot from the entire European and English poetic tradition, but introduced a lot of absolutely new things. Shakespeare also shows his originality in the variety of new images he introduced into poetry, and in the novelty of his interpretation of traditional plots. He used poetic symbols common to Renaissance poetry in his works. Already by that time there was a significant number of familiar poetic devices. Shakespeare compares youth to spring or sunny dawn, beauty - with the charm of flowers, withering of a person - with autumn, old age - with winter. The description of the beauty of women deserves special attention. “Marble whiteness”, “lily tenderness”, etc. These words contain boundless admiration for female beauty, they are filled with endless love and passion.

Undoubtedly best embodiment love in the work can be called the play "Romeo and Juliet". Love triumphs in the play. The meeting of Romeo and Juliet transforms them both. They live for each other: "Romeo: My heaven is where Juliet is." It is not languid sadness, but living passion that inspires Romeo: “All day long some spirit carries me high above the earth in joyful dreams.” Love transformed them inner world, affected their relationships with people. The feelings of Romeo and Juliet are severely tested. Despite the hatred between their families, they choose boundless love, merging in a single impulse, but individuality is preserved in each of them. The tragic death only adds to the special mood of the play. This work is an example of great feeling, despite the early age of the main characters.

2. The theme of love in the works of Russian poets and writers

This topic is reflected in the literature of Russian writers and poets of all times. For more than 100 years, people have been turning to the poetry of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, finding in it a reflection of their feelings, emotions and experiences. The name of this great poet is associated with tirades of poems about love and friendship, with the concept of honor and Motherland, images of Onegin and Tatyana, Masha and Grinev appear. Even the most strict reader will be able to discover something close to him in his works, because they are very multifaceted. Pushkin was a man who passionately responded to all living things, a great poet, creator of the Russian word, a man of high and noble qualities. In the variety of lyrical themes that permeate Pushkin’s poems, the theme of love is given so much significant place that the poet could be called a glorifier of this great noble feeling. In all of world literature you cannot find a more striking example of a special passion for this particular aspect of human relations. Obviously, the origins of this feeling lie in the very nature of the poet, responsive, able to reveal in each person the best properties of his soul. In 1818, at one of the dinner parties, the poet met 19-year-old Anna Petrovna Kern. Pushkin admired her radiant beauty and youth. Years later, Pushkin again met with Kern, as charming as before. Pushkin gave her a newly printed chapter of Eugene Onegin, and between the pages he inserted poems written especially for her, in honor of her beauty and youth. Poems dedicated to Anna Petrovna “I remember a wonderful moment” is a famous hymn to a high and bright feeling. This is one of the peaks of Pushkin's lyrics. The poems captivate not only with the purity and passion of the feelings embodied in them, but also with their harmony. Love for a poet is a source of life and joy, the poem “I loved you” is a masterpiece of Russian poetry. More than twenty romances have been written based on his poems. And let time pass, the name of Pushkin will always live in our memory and awaken the best feelings in us.

Opens with Lermontov's name new era Russian literature. Lermontov's ideals are limitless; he desires not a simple improvement in life, but the acquisition of complete bliss, a change in the imperfections of human nature, an absolute resolution of all the contradictions of life. Eternal life- the poet does not agree to anything less. However, love in Lermontov's works bears a tragic imprint. This was influenced by his only, unrequited love for his friend from his youth, Varenka Lopukhina. He considers love impossible and surrounds himself with a martyr's aura, placing himself outside the world and life. Lermontov is sad about his lost happiness “My soul must live in earthly captivity, Not for long. Maybe I will never see Your gaze, your sweet gaze, so tender for others.”

Lermontov emphasizes his distance from everything worldly: “No matter what is earthly, but I will not become a slave.” Lermontov understands love as something eternal, the poet does not find solace in routine, fleeting passions, and if he sometimes gets carried away and steps aside, then his lines are not the fruit of a sick fantasy, but just a momentary weakness. “At the feet of others I did not forget the gaze of your eyes. Loving others, I only suffered from the Love of former days.”

Human, earthly love seems to be an obstacle for the poet on his path to higher ideals. In the poem “I will not humiliate myself before you,” he writes that inspiration is more valuable to him than unnecessary quick passions that can throw the human soul into the abyss. Love in Lermontov's lyrics is fatal. He writes, “Inspiration saved me from petty vanities, but there is no salvation from my soul in happiness itself.” In Lermontov's poems, love is a high, poetic, bright feeling, but always unrequited or lost. In the poem "Valerik" the love part, which later became a romance, conveys the bitter feeling of losing contact with the beloved. “Is it crazy to wait for love in absentia? In our age, all feelings are only temporary, but I remember you,” the poet writes. The theme of betrayal of a beloved who is unworthy of great feelings or has not stood the test of time becomes traditional in Lermontov’s literary works related to his personal experience.

The discord between dream and reality penetrates this wonderful feeling; love does not bring joy to Lermontov, he receives only suffering and sadness: “I’m sad because I love you.” The poet is troubled by thoughts about the meaning of life. He is sad about the transience of life and wants to do as much as possible in the short time allotted to him on earth. In his poetic reflections, life is hateful to him, but death is also terrible.

Considering the theme of love in the works of Russian writers, one cannot help but appreciate Bunin’s contribution to the poetry of this topic. The theme of love occupies perhaps the main place in Bunin’s work. In this topic, the writer has the opportunity to correlate what is happening in a person’s soul with the phenomena of external life, with the requirements of a society that is based on the relationship of purchase and sale and in which wild and dark instincts sometimes reign. Bunin was one of the first in Russian literature to devote his works not only to the spiritual, but also to the physical side of love, touching with extraordinary tact the most intimate, hidden aspects of human relationships. Bunin was the first to dare to say that physical passion does not necessarily follow a spiritual impulse, that in life it happens the other way around (as happened with the heroes of the story " Sunstroke"). And no matter what plot moves the writer chooses, love in his works is always a great joy and a great disappointment, a deep and insoluble mystery, it is both spring and autumn in a person’s life.

At different periods of his work, Bunin speaks about love with varying degrees of frankness. In his early works the characters are open, young and natural. In such works as “In August”, “In Autumn”, “Dawn All Night”, all events are extremely simple, brief and significant. The characters' feelings are ambivalent, colored in halftones. And although Bunin talks about people who are alien to us in appearance, way of life, relationships, we immediately recognize and realize in a new way our own feelings of happiness, expectations of deep spiritual changes. The rapprochement of Bunin's heroes rarely achieves harmony; as soon as it appears, it most often disappears. But the thirst for love burns in their souls. The sad parting with my beloved is completed by dreamy dreams (“In August”): “Through tears I looked into the distance, and somewhere I dreamed of sultry southern cities, a blue steppe evening and the image of some woman who merged with the girl I loved... ". The date is memorable because it testifies to a touch of genuine feeling: “Whether she was better than others whom I loved, I don’t know, but that night she was incomparable” (“In Autumn”). And in the story “Dawn All Night,” Bunin talks about the premonition of love, about the tenderness that a young girl is ready to give to her future lover. At the same time, it is common for youth not only to get carried away, but also to quickly become disappointed. Bunin's works show us this painful gap between dreams and reality for many. “After a night in the garden, full of nightingale whistles and spring trepidation, young Tata suddenly, through her sleep, hears her fiancé shooting jackdaws, and realizes that she does not at all love this rude and ordinary-down-to-earth man.”

Most of Bunin's early stories tell about the desire for beauty and purity - this remains the main spiritual impulse of his characters. In the 20s, Bunin wrote about love, as if through the prism of past memories, peering into a bygone Russia and those people who no longer exist. This is exactly how we perceive the story “Mitya’s Love” (1924). In this story, the writer consistently shows the spiritual formation of the hero, leading him from love to collapse. In the story, feelings and life are closely intertwined. Mitya's love for Katya, his hopes, jealousy, vague forebodings seem to be shrouded in special sadness. Katya, dreaming of an artistic career, got caught up in the false life of the capital and cheated on Mitya. His torment, from which his connection with another woman, the beautiful but down-to-earth Alenka, could not save him, led Mitya to suicide. Mitya’s insecurity, openness, unpreparedness to confront harsh reality, and inability to suffer make us feel more acutely the inevitability and unacceptability of what happened.

A number of Bunin's stories about love describe a love triangle: husband - wife - lover ("Ida", "Caucasus", "The Fairest of the Sun"). An atmosphere of the inviolability of the established order reigns in these stories. Marriage turns out to be an insurmountable obstacle to achieving happiness. And often what is given to one is mercilessly taken away from another. In the story “Caucasus,” a woman leaves with her lover, knowing for sure that from the moment the train departs, hours of despair begin for her husband, that he will not be able to stand it and will rush after her. He is really looking for her, and not finding her, he guesses about the betrayal and shoots himself. Already here the motif of love as a “sunstroke” appears, which has become a special, ringing note of the “Dark Alleys” cycle.

Memories of youth and the Motherland bring the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” closer to the prose of the 20-30s. These stories are narrated in the past tense. The author seems to be trying to penetrate into the depths of the subconscious world of his characters. In most of the stories, the author describes bodily pleasures, beautiful and poetic, born of true passion. Even if the first sensual impulse seems frivolous, as in the story “Sunstroke,” it still leads to tenderness and self-forgetfulness, and then to true love. This is exactly what happens with the heroes of the stories “Business Cards”, “Dark Alleys”, “Late Hour”, “Tanya”, “Rusya”, “In a Familiar Street”. The writer writes about ordinary lonely people and their lives. That is why the past, filled with early, strong feelings, seems to be truly golden times, merges with the sounds, smells, colors of nature. As if nature itself leads to mental-physical rapprochement loving friend people's friend. And nature itself leads them to inevitable separation, and sometimes to death.

The skill of describing everyday details, as well as a sensual description of love is inherent in all the stories in the cycle, but the story “Clean Monday”, written in 1944, appears not just as a story about the great mystery of love and the mysterious female soul, but as a kind of cryptogram. Too much in the psychological line of the story and in its landscape and everyday details seems like an encrypted revelation. The accuracy and abundance of details are not just signs of the times, not just nostalgia for Moscow lost forever, but a contrast between East and West in the soul and appearance of the heroine, leaving love and life for a monastery.

3. The theme of love in literary works of the 20th century

The theme of love continues to be relevant in the 20th century, in the era of global catastrophes, political crisis, when humanity is making attempts to re-shape its attitude towards universal human values. Writers of the 20th century often portray love as the last remaining moral category of a then destroyed world. In the novels of the writers of the “lost generation” (including Remarque and Hemingway), these feelings are the necessary incentive for the sake of which the hero tries to survive and live on. "Lost Generation" - the generation of people who survived the first world war and left spiritually devastated.

These people abandon any ideological dogma and search for the meaning of life in simple human relationships. The feeling of a comrade's shoulder, which almost merged with the instinct of self-preservation, guides the mentally lonely heroes of Remarque's novel "On western front no change." It also defines the relationships that arise between the heroes of the novel "Three Comrades".

Hemingway’s hero in the novel “A Farewell to Arms” renounced military service, what is usually called a person’s moral obligation, renounced for the sake of a relationship with his beloved, and his position seems very convincing to the reader. A person of the 20th century is constantly faced with the possibility of the end of the world, with the expectation of his own death or the death of a loved one. Catherine, the heroine of the novel A Farewell to Arms, dies, just like Pat in Remarque's novel Three Comrades. The hero loses his sense of necessity, his sense of the meaning of life. At the end of both works, the hero looks at the dead body, which has already ceased to be the body of the woman he loves. The novel is filled with the author's subconscious thoughts about the mystery of the origin of love, about its spiritual basis. One of the main features of literature of the 20th century is its inextricable connection with the phenomena of social life. The author's reflections on the existence of such concepts as love and friendship appear against the background of socio-political problems of that time and, in essence, are inseparable from thoughts about the fate of humanity in the 20th century.

In the works of Françoise Sagan, the theme of friendship and love usually remains within the framework of a person’s private life. The writer often depicts the life of Parisian bohemians; Most of her heroes belong to her.F. Sagan wrote her first novel in 1953, and it was then perceived as a complete moral failure. IN art world Sagan there is no place for strong and truly strong human attraction: this feeling must die as soon as it is born. It is replaced by something else - a feeling of disappointment and sadness.

love theme literature writer

Conclusion

Love is a high, pure, beautiful feeling that people have sung since ancient times, in all languages ​​of the world. They have written about love before, they are writing now and will continue to write in the future. No matter how different love is, this feeling is still wonderful. That’s why they write so much about love, write poems, and sing about love in songs. The creators of wonderful works can be listed endlessly, since each of us, whether he is a writer or an ordinary person, has experienced this feeling at least once in his life. Without love there will be no life on earth. And while reading works, we come across something sublime that helps us consider the world from the spiritual side. After all, with every hero we experience his love together.

Sometimes it seems that everything has been said about love in world literature. But love has thousands of shades, and each of its manifestations has its own holiness, its own sadness, its own fracture and its own fragrance.

List of sources used

1. Anikst A.A. Shakespeare's works. M.: Allegory, 2009 - 350 p.

2. Bunin, I.A. Collected works in 4 volumes. T.4/ I.A. Bunin. - M.: Pravda, 1988. - 558 p.

3. Volkov, A.V. Prose of Ivan Bunin / A.V. Volkov. - M.: Moscow. worker, 2008. - 548 p.

4. Civil Z.T. "From Shakespeare to Shaw"; English writers of the 16th-20th centuries. Moscow, Education, 2011

5. Nikulin L.V. Kuprin // Nikulin L.V. Chekhov. Bunin. Kuprin: Literary portraits. - M.: 1999 - P.265 - 325.

6. Petrovsky M. Dictionary of literary terms. In 2 volumes. M.: Allegory, 2010

7. Smirnov A.A. "Shakespeare". Leningrad, Art, 2006

8. Teff N.A. Nostalgia: Stories; Memories. - L.: Fiction, 2011. - P.267 - 446.

9. Shugaev V.M. Experiences of a reading person / V.M. Shugaev. - M.: Sovremennik, 2010. - 319 p.

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is devoted to the study of how their idealistic ideas about female beauty, love, and marriage are expressed in the concepts of Russian writers of the 19th century. This chapter (this is due to the logic of the work) is entirely devoted to the analysis of works of Russian literature of the 19th century, i.e. pre-Chekhov tradition. Such a review is necessary in order to show what Chekhov started from when rethinking and reevaluating the existing ideas about the ideal of female beauty. The dissertation examines the most representative, from our point of view, works that reflect these trends. Of course, this review does not pretend to be comprehensive.

Despite the fact that the idea of ​​female beauty changes from era to era, the writer’s desire for the ideal remains constant. Beauty in Russian XIX literature century - an ethical category, it is inextricably linked with good. The vector for two directions in the perception and depiction of female beauty was set by Pushkin and Gogol. On the one hand, there is the ideal, supermundane image created by the poet, on the other, the tragic antinomy of the ideal and the real, the spiritual - the carnal, the Divine - the devilish. Oleg Kling rightly says that the antinomy “high - low” in the depiction of love runs through all Russian literature - Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. The researcher shows how this antinomy was refracted differently in the works of symbolists and post-symbolists 31 . We consider how these two trends were embodied in the works of Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century century. We also show the influence of George Sand and her novels on the formation of a new type of women and marital relationships, which were reflected in the works of Russian writers of the 19th century.

Poem by A.S. Pushkin’s “I Remember a Wonderful Moment” is an example of how creative fiction and fantasy embellish reality. The poet creates a legend, exalting love, the inspiration of which is not even a woman, but some unearthly, angel-like substance - “the genius of pure beauty” - an ethereal creature, ephemeral, like a “vision”, a spirit hovering in the empyrean. This deity with a real female name rises above reality, setting the reader up for sublime ideal love. Despite the fact that the real prototype and Pushkin’s attitude towards a specific woman - A.P. Kern - disagreed with the glorified poetic image 32; what is important for us is that the poet created the cult of the sublime woman in accordance with the ethical and aesthetic ideas of his era.

In his early essay “Woman” (1829), Gogol refers to Plato’s dialogue with his student Telecles about the essence of female beauty and asserts the superiority of the feminine principle - physical beauty, art and love, which spiritualize a man. Together, masculine and feminine create a perfect harmonious unity. This is close to Schiller's concept. However, in more later works For the writer, material beauty evokes the passions of sodom and is destructive to the soul. Beauty and holiness in Gogol, as a rule, are incompatible. According to Gogol, female earthly beauty is evil. Wanting to establish the harmony of relationships in marriage as a spiritual unity of masculine and feminine principles, Gogol paradoxically destroys the idyll. His Philemon and Baucis - old-world landowners - live in complete harmony and agreement with each other, but their relationship is absolutely devoid of any eroticism.

In the 1840s - 1860s of the 19th century, the “women’s issue” became clearly and acutely evident in Russian society. The works of George Sand were a kind of cultural detonator. The views of George Sand, who affirmed carnal love, conflicted with the religious-patriarchal idea of ​​the position and role of women in the family and society. With her works, the writer established a new morality in relation to women.

Chernyshevsky was directly influenced by the works and personality of George Sand. The novel “Jacques,” in which “the problem of a love triangle was solved in accordance with the principle of a “free heart,” inspired Chernyshevsky to practically apply the literary model both in his own marriage and in the novel “What is to be done?” Chernyshevsky was not only an ardent supporter and follower of the ideas of George Sand in the liberation of women and the new ethics of relations in marriage, he also developed the main thoughts of the writer and gave them a more global meaning, transforming them into a theory about the reorganization of society on the basis of universal equality (I. Paperno ). Destroying the public and Christian code of morality, Chernyshevsky in his works rationalized and “legalized” a woman’s right to adultery. Despite all the utopianism and vulnerability, especially from an artistic point of view, Chernyshevsky’s novel, his position in relation to the emancipation of women was not ignored by Russian writers and philosophers.

Dostoevsky reacted sharply to how the ideas of George Sand were transformed by Chernyshevsky. The way the author of a social utopia solved the complex problems of love triangles, directly linking the project of reorganizing society with the transformation of relationships in family and marriage, evokes a rebuke full of sarcasm in the story “The Eternal Husband.” Dostoevsky showed how, on the one hand, love relationships fit into those familiar to us literary diagrams and how, on the other hand, the motives of human behavior can be unexpected and unpredictable in real life. Directing us along the path of well-known patterns of love triangles described in literature (“Provincial Woman” by Turgenev), or by referring to images noble robbers and the avengers of Hugo and Schiller, Dostoevsky unexpectedly explodes the situation with a farcical scene in which it turns out that the deceived husband was in love with his rival. Dostoevsky opens the underground of the human psyche, which cannot be calculated, as the architects of heaven on earth, a new society in which everyone will coexist in harmony, want to do. Dostoevsky is interested in such cases of behavior that do not fit into the usual patterns, but which cannot be ignored when it comes to love and marriage.

Goncharov had an ambivalent attitude towards George Sand and argued with Belinsky. The ideas of women's emancipation undoubtedly did not leave Goncharov indifferent. However, he believed that the issue was more complex than simple declarations of equality between women and men.

Love is the basis of all three of Goncharov's novels. In disputes about what is artistic truth and how to depict reality, as well as on the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic components in a work of art, Goncharov consistently continued to defend the positions of idealism even in those years when attacks on idealism from naturalism began. Soberly aware of the abyss that separates reality from the ideal, the writer believed that it was necessary for a work of art to lead the reader to the ideal, unity truth, goodness and beauty. For Goncharov, these are the truisms of aesthetics, the foundations of Schiller’s concept. In his novels, Goncharov strives to present to the reader an image of a harmonious personality, in which a sober, enlightened mind, active energy, morality, spirituality, a sense of beauty and physical beauty are combined. And this, as the German scientist P. Tiergen convincingly proves using the example of the novel “Oblomov,” coincides with Schiller’s ideas about the connection between spirit and matter, more specifically, about the inseparable connection between the physical and moral-aesthetic state of a person. The Russian writer believed in the high, transformative power of love, which gives impetus to the mind and heart, awakens from sleep, inspires creativity and art. Goncharov's novels are built on the opposition sleep - awakening, life - death, fossilization. In the novel “Oblomov,” Olga Ilyinskaya, taking on the role of Pygmalion, tries to breathe life into the inactive soul of Ilya Ilyich. However, having failed like Pygmalion in her relationship with Oblomov, Olga becomes Galatea in her love and marital relationship with Stolz and successfully plays this role. Goncharov did not stop at the ideal married couple he created in the novel “Oblomov” as the standard of love and the image of Olga Ilyinskaya as the ideal of female beauty. IN last novel“Breakage” the writer shows the endless process of searching for the female ideal that embodies the harmony of the trinity truth, goodness and beauty. Boris Raisky is an artist obsessed with the idea of ​​finding such artistic image, which would connect the ideal and reality as an indivisible whole. In the novel "The Precipice" he takes on the role of Pygmalion, only he cannot find his only Galatea. Pygmalion-Paradise dreams of combining physical beauty with spiritual beauty. Undoubtedly, for Goncharov, as well as for his hero, the artist Raisky, highest type beauty is embodied in the image of the Sistine Madonna. It was precisely the Renaissance, earthly beginning, combined with spirituality in the image of Raphael’s Madonna, that attracted Goncharov.

Turgenev presented the contradiction between the ideal and the real in two types of women: a bacchante woman who awakens irrational feelings in a man, and a woman who embodies the harmonious rational principle of the ideal world of antiquity. Love captures Turgenev's heroes, depriving them of individuality. In the prose poem “Love,” Turgenev briefly and succinctly formulates the state of a person in love, who feels the invasion of someone else’s “I” as the death of his own “I” . Therefore, love is perceived by Turgenev as a feeling that is tragic for an earthly creature whose flesh is finite. Turgenev's female bacchantes enslave men (“Correspondence”, “Smoke”, “Spring Waters”). Love-slavery, depicted by Turgenev, evokes associations with the works of Sacher-Masoch. The similarity was already noted by Turgenev’s contemporaries, and the Austrian writer himself considered himself a successor to his Russian colleague. Nostalgia for the lost Greek world, its integrity and beauty is undoubtedly present in Turgenev’s discourse. Let us recall that even in an early poem dedicated to Venus, Turgenev says that for modern man Venus is a myth, and he worships not Venus the goddess, but her copy, the beauty of a man-made image created by an artist from marble. Meeting the perfection of ancient beauty in real life (“Three Meetings”) is a dream, a poetic illusion. The narrator loves a dream, a myth, a statue, an ideal, the image that his imagination, art constructs, and not a real woman - a creation of nature. Turgenev's philosophical reflections are close to Schiller's, his idea that art is a game, and also that a return to natural principles, the “golden age” is enriched with knowledge, moral responsibility, and freedom of choice. According to Schiller, a cultured person can return to his integrity through an ideal.

The evolution of Tolstoy’s views from the affirmation of the ideal of harmonious relations between a man and a woman to the complete denial of marriage is examined using the example of two, in our opinion, iconic works of the writer. This work is the first time a complete comparative analysis showing the evolution of Tolstoy's views on marital relations. “Family Happiness” (1859) and “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) are two milestones on the path of Tolstoy’s comprehension of the dialectics of love, the entire complexity of the relationship between a man and a woman united in marriage. The story “Family Happiness” is a prelude to “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, “The Kreutzer Sonata” is an afterword. “Family Happiness” was written by Tolstoy before his marriage in 1862 and before he became acquainted with the ideas of Schopenhauer, which he accepted with great sympathy. “The Kreutzer Sonata” reflected the ideas and moods of not only Tolstoy the man who experienced a crisis in family relationships, but also of the writer-philosopher who revised his previous ideals, ideas about love and marriage at the turn of the era. Both works are confessions: in the early story - a woman’s reflection on marital relations, in the later - the confession of a man who became the murderer of his wife. Beethoven's sonata Quasi una fantasia (Moonlight Sonata) sounds twice in “Family Happiness”: at the beginning, at the moment of the birth of love between the characters, and at the end of the story after the trials of “family happiness”; Sonata No. 9 for violin and piano in A major, opus 47, by the same composer defines dramatic conflict story "The Kreutzer Sonata". Both verbal works under consideration are a kind of parallel to musical ones. Musical inclusions in the structure of Tolstoy's narrative explicate the subconscious of the human psyche, opening up the subtle world of the characters' intuition in those moments of emotional tension when, according to Schopenhauer, a person's desires and sensations do not lend themselves to logical, rational awareness. In “Family Happiness,” Tolstoy presents his concept of the family, which is close to J. J. Rousseau’s idea that love passions are destructive to family happiness. Tolstoy's understanding of femininity and marital relations is opposed to the ideas about gender equality, free love, and new ideas about marriage inspired by George Sand that were gaining strength in Russia in the mid-19th century. The ideal of motherhood and family, which received its highest positive embodiment in War and Peace, and then put to the test by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, has not lost its significance for the writer. By creating the image of a woman caught in a whirlwind of passions, who has lost her integrity, faced with a choice between feelings and marital duty, between love and motherhood, the writer showed the crisis of the patriarchal family and defended female virtue in marriage. According to Tolstoy, beauty without virtue is evil. “The Kreutzer Sonata” was written by Tolstoy at a time when society was discussing questions about marriage and the right to divorce, about a woman’s ability to choose a spouse for love, when the crisis that arose in his own family relationships coincided with a deeper spiritual conflict, with a feeling of the meaninglessness of earthly things. existence, the result of which is death. Earthly existence is deprived of harmony, where there is a constant struggle between living beings. Man, Tolstoy shows in articles of this period, is by nature a carnivorous creature, capable of destroying his own kind. A man and a woman, who differ from each other both in physiological structure and in upbringing, cannot come to mutual understanding. The war between the sexes, according to Tolstoy, is a war at the biological level. Naturalistic features in the depiction of carnal love, biological determinism, as well as the undermining of the foundations of the patriarchal family corresponded to new trends in European literature. Therefore, it is not surprising that Tolstoy, along with Zola, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Wagner and other representatives of modernism, was classified by Max Nordau as degenerates. The main thing that distinguished Tolstoy from naturalist writers, whom he himself criticized, was that the Russian writer gave the reader a positive, ideal. Deconstructing and subverting carnal beauty female body, and also destroying the very idea of ​​marital relations, Tolstoy, together with his hero, protests against nature - the division of people into two warring sexes. Tolstoy leads his hero (and himself identifies with him in the “Afterword” to the “Kreutzer Sonata”) to the idea of ​​sexless marriages, to brotherhood. This was an extreme expression of the writer’s awareness of the crisis of previous ideas about the ideal of femininity. Exposing marriage, which, according to Tolstoy, is based on pleasure, the writer says that love between the sexes alienates a person from the love of God. After the turning point of the 1880s, the ideal for Tolstoy became sexless love for all people and for God. On the ashes of their former ideals - the patriarchal family, motherhood - consecrated by the trinity truth, goodness and beauty, Tolstoy affirms the Christian ideal of God, in whose perfect image this triad was embodied. The story "The Kreutzer Sonata" caused controversy. In this regard, the story of N.S. deserves attention. Leskova “About the Kretzer Sonata” (1890), which affirms the ideal of motherhood.

IN IVChapter “Demythologizing the female ideal and marital relations in an era of skepticism” examines how Nietzsche's ideas, social and cultural modernization of society, women's emancipation aggravated the problem of gender relations and how this is reflected in the works of Western European writers who influenced the new idea of ​​women. In Chekhov's work, the idealistic tendencies of Russian writers of the 19th century are subject to revision.

Chekhov's emergence as a writer occurred during the period when in post-reform Russia there was a rapid development of capitalism and a change in the sociocultural paradigm of life. Formed new culture, which meets the bourgeois tastes and demands of the “marginal” people who have poured into big cities. With the destruction of the supremacy of elite classical culture, the boundaries of “high” and “low” are blurred, a situation of cultural polycentrism is emerging, and culture is developing “broadly” and horizontally. With the development of new genres of mass literature, the communication space is expanding. Russia is entering into closer cooperation with Western culture. Moreover, the dialogue of cultures took place not only at the level of high art. Chekhov began his journey in literature by collaborating in mass publications in the 1880s. Work in humorous magazines, as well as other factors, in particular, natural science education, influenced the formation of a different worldview, different from the “classics” who assigned a high educational mission to literature.

Men reacted differently to the change in the social role of women at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: from destructive irony (Nietzsche) to serious polemics in the works of philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. This most important theme has found expression in both works of high and popular literature. The “women's question” polarized society. We consider how the works of two major writers of the turn of the century, Ibsen and Strindberg, expressed opposing points of view on the problem of women's emancipation and the role of women in the family. Ibsen, in whose works there are images of strong independent women who help a man find his “I”, find love and fulfillment in creativity (Hilda, Irena), women for whom freedom of choice is necessary (Nora, Elida, Hedda), received a reputation as a feminist. The drama A Doll's House, which questioned the patriarchal traditions of the family, shocked Victorian society and gave impetus to controversy: Max Nordau responded by writing the play The Right to Love, which defended the interests of a “healthy” family, and Strindberg wrote the novella A Doll's House. In contrast to Nordau's moralizing, Strindberg shows the confrontation between man and woman as an eternal conflict, a “fatal duel” - this theme runs like a red thread through the entire work of the Swedish writer. Strindberg, a supporter of the patriarchal family, in his book “Marriages” (1884-1885) defends the need for proper education of women with early age. Many of the ideas of Strindberg, a consistent Darwinist, are also close to Chekhov, although he did not take such a radical position on the women's issue. The depiction of family breakdown is something new that is included in the drama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the change in the balance of roles in society and the emancipation of women.

Using the examples of plays by Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, the dissertation shows how the change in the social role of women affected dramatic techniques -

the relationship between roles in the character system. The idea of ​​a strong woman displacing a man from the stage of life is embodied in the dramaturgy of Ibsen (Ghosts, Hedda Gabler), Strindberg (Mistress Julie, The Father, Pelican). The father in these plays is presented as an off-stage character or, as in Strindberg’s “The Father,” a man defeated by a woman who has lost his masculine properties. In Chekhov's plays, the significantly absent image of the father is a plot-forming element (The Seagull), a semantic marker indicating the collapse of the patriarchal family in "Three Sisters", where adult children turn out to be unviable, in "The Cherry Orchard", where the role of "patriarch" is taken on by the old servant Firs.

The frustration of men towards a strong woman, femme fatale, is reflected in the works of many decadent mystics, such as Octave Mirbeau, Ganz Gaines Evers, and others. The dominance of a woman causes mystical horror. Sadism in a woman is presented as a physiological exaltation of love - “The Garden of Torment” by O. Mirbeau. In Evers's mystical story, the image of a spider woman, luring men into her web and killing them as a female spider, acquires symbolic significance. The Swedish writer Ola Hansson, one of whose stories “The Split Self” was published in Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya, tries to understand the psychophysiological basis of split personality, the cause of instinctive fear, sexual nightmare, and what love becomes for his male characters. His stories show the types of broken men defeated by women, often driven to suicide. Sexual relations cause fear in the souls of sophisticated, nervous men of a new type of Amazon woman. Chekhov's works, like Hansson's, show the dual psychophysiological nature of men with feminine traits and women with masculine ones. The French researcher J. de Prouillard well demonstrated this apparent paradox using the example of “Drama on the Hunt” 33. Dominant women and weak men are present both in Chekhov’s early and late works (“Champagne”, “The Witch”, “Tina”, “The Jumper”, “The Wife”, “Anna on the Neck”, “Ariadne”, “The Seagull”, "Three Sisters") A woman’s sexual dominance drives a high school student (“Volodya”) to suicide. Zoological comparisons illustrating the essence of men and women are often found in the writer’s works. But unlike the decadent mystics, Chekhov’s zoomorphism in the characteristics of the characters testifies to the writer’s connection with Darwinism. For example, in Chekhov we find a metaphor characterizing gender relations: a female fly drinks blood from a spider (“Neighbors”), but this metaphor does not grow to the scale of a sexual nightmare, as in Evers, and the image is not the basis of the plot.

We do not have direct evidence that Chekhov was familiar with Hansson’s works, so we cannot say with complete confidence that Chekhov’s “Fear” is a response to Ola Hansson’s story “The Split Self,” although this possibility cannot be ruled out either, because Chekhov was undoubtedly familiar with the publications of the newspaper “Novoe Vremya”. Most likely, Chekhov’s “Fear” is a response to the topical problem of interaction between the sexes, which has been widely discussed in literature. Silin's fear is due to the fact that he does not understand his relationship with his wife and he develops neurosis, a fear of life. Fear, as follows from the content of the story, is a consequence of the Fall. However, despite the fact that both men, led into sin by a woman, begin to experience fear of life, in Chekhov’s story, unlike Hansson, Evers, Mirbeau, there is no demonization of women. On the contrary, we know that Silin’s wife, who entered into a loveless marriage, is unhappy. The story has an almost vaudeville ending: the husband, who forgot his cap in a friend’s room, incriminates his lovers and leaves home, “as if afraid of being chased.” The fear is transmitted to the friend. The irony of guilty exiles from paradise permeates the narrative.

Skalkovsky’s book “About Women. Thoughts old and new" is interesting as an alternative view of gender relations. In contrast to the decadent tendency, in Skalkovsky’s book - a product of mass literature - current problem time is presented in a light ironic form. Skalkovsky’s compilation book “On Women” went through six editions in a year and was very popular. From the standpoint of male chauvinism, the author discredits women. His book judges women for infidelity in marriage, examines the problems of divorce, prostitution, assesses the economic dependence of women on men in marriage as a manifestation of legalized prostitution, affirms the harm of women's education and emancipation, criticizes the inability of women to art and their inability to manage money, as well as engage in economic issues in the family. The book caused a resonance, both serious and mass publications responded to it. Grassroots culture picked up the themes and tone of irony towards women. Chekhov's story "About Women" is an irony over Skalkovsky's male chauvinism. Quotes and allusions to Skalkovsky’s treatise are also found in other works of Chekhov. Although the book went against the progressive ideas of the time and was not an original conceptual work, it is nevertheless a valuable evidence of the understanding and popularization of pressing issues of the time.

In the story “The Joke” (in its first edition) there are not only references to Skalkovsky’s book, but also the very type of behavior of the hero, which expresses the clear gender superiority of a man, reminiscent of the position of an expert on women’s hearts, the author of the treatise “On Women”. Subsequently, having reworked the story, Chekhov gave it an elegiac ending in the spirit of Turgenev’s and his own works, such as “Vera”, “House with a Mezzanine”, etc.

The story “Verochka” is usually interpreted as a variation on the theme “Russian man on rendez-vous”. However, Chekhov showed the situation as an outdated cliché, where both heroes - he and she- are ridiculous. Verochka is literary type a girl who has internalized bookish ideals, which she tries to realize on a date, but the hero does not understand her. A similar situation often occurs in Chekhov, both in his early works (“Fatherlessness”) and in his later ones (“Ionych”, “With Friends”), etc. The hero of the story “On the Way” was associated both with Chekhov’s contemporaries and subsequent interpreters, with Rudinsky type. There is undoubtedly a connection with Turgenev, but with another work - with the story “ Strange story" The plot, in which a girl from a good family with fanatical self-denial followed her holy fool teacher for the sake of faith, was transformed by Chekhov. It is with the story of his own faith that Likharev captivates his random interlocutor. Changing ideals, Likharev every time makes them his religion. He sees himself as an ideological mentor to the women who become his victims (wife, mother, daughter). Chekhov showed very important feature for such people is the inconsistency of ideological passions. This is due to the fact that ideals cannot be eternal; over time they become outdated, and then the need for a new faith arises. Ilovaiskaya did not take the path of self-denial in the name of ideals; she woke up in time from the sleep into which Likharev plunged her with the magic of his speeches. The fact that the writer gives the heroine the opportunity to sober up and escape the spell of sublime ideas was Chekhov’s dispute with the popular Tolstoyan and populist concepts of the relationship between a man and a woman, built on a common ideal. Chekhov leads this debate both in the ironic feuilleton “In Moscow” and in the story “The Wife.” Chekhov showed that not only the ideal of a woman who completely dissolves in the thoughts and deeds of a man, a “noble slave”, an associate of her ideological mentor, is outdated, but also that any ideals are not eternal. The influence of a man's ideas on a woman, and then liberation from his influence, is also shown in the earlier story “Good People” (1886). The author is ironic both towards the heroes of the story and towards the ideals in which they fanatically believe and turn them into dogmas. He gives the heroine the opportunity to personal experience realize that ideals eventually turn into “old trash.” In these stories, as in his last work, “The Bride” (1903), Chekhov shows the liberation of a woman from the influence of an ideological mentor. The influence of the hero on women in the story “My Life” is not so clearly shown. Misail Poloznev does not seek to play the role of a mentor who re-educates women. In general, Misail Poloznev, who in polemics with Dr. Blagovo defends moral laws, which he places above all else and himself strictly follows, is fairly interpreted by A.P. Skaftymov as a character close not only to the ideas of Tolstoy, but also of Chekhov. It is often perceived by researchers as goodie(I.N. Sukhikh). However, in our opinion, the ending of the story does not allow us to conclude that Chekhov views the path of his hero as a positive experience that must be followed. Misail himself says about himself that he “has become like Radish and, like him, causes boredom with his useless instructions” (P. 9, 279). Although the author sympathizes with his hero, women who are initially inspired by his ideas are not on the same path with him. Masha Dolzhikova leaves her husband, citing biblical wisdom that “everything passes”; sister Cleopatra dies, unable to bear the role of an ideological worker and a free woman without prejudice; Anyuta Blagovo, in love with Misail, meets him at Cleopatra’s grave and caresses their common niece, however, entering the city, she walks alone “respectable, stern.” One cannot but agree with the witty observation of Canadian researcher Douglas Clayton, who showed that Likharev failed in the role of Pygmalion. Let us add on our own that Chekhov and all other heroes like him failed in this role. However, Chekhov shows that the emancipation of women is a complex process that leads not only to the frustration of men, but also of women in new role do not feel happy (“A Boring Story”, “The Indian Kingdom”, “On the Cart”, “The Story of an Unknown Man”, “In My Own Corner”, “Case in Practice”, “Three Years”, “The Seagull”, “Three Sisters” ").

In the stories “Darling”, “Ariadne”, “Lady” with a Dog”, in our opinion, Chekhov’s break with the idealistic idea of ​​the relationship between a man and a woman is most clearly expressed. All three stories are an argument with Tolstoy's concepts of femininity, family and marriage.

The story “Darling” is Chekhov’s hidden polemic with Tolstoy’s ideal

femininity and motherhood. Regardless of whether or not readers of the story “Darling” share Tolstoy’s well-known point of view that Chekhov wanted to curse, but instead blessed his heroine, her image is perceived as an archetype. Modern literary scholars correlate “darling” with the mythological images of Psyche, Echo, the heroine of Flaubert’s story “A Simple Soul,” and Olenka’s happy marriage with an old-world idyll. The correlation of the heroine with mythological and literary prototypes convinces that the Chekhov heroine condenses in herself not individual, unique traits, but universal, eternal ones. In the typology of the complex maternal complex developed by Jung, the darling coincides with the type of “daughter,” a woman who is completely dependent on a man. The deepest archetypal patriarchal idea of ​​the lack of form in a woman, as the essence of her nature, receives theoretical understanding in Jung's concept. According to Jung, female formlessness, emptiness is the key to understanding the mystery of the union of the masculine and feminine principles by analogy with how opposites - Yin and Yang - are united. In Chekhov's story, the heroine is the embodiment of femininity, the expression of gender in its pure form. Olenka is a hollow vessel, which, Tolstoy is right, can be filled with any content - a spirit that carries the masculine principle. She feels her integrity, fullness only when she is a member of a couple, in unity with the male spirit that fertilizes her. Left with an “empty nest,” Olenka suffers from depression; her inner unfulfillment changes her outer form - she loses weight, becomes dull, and ages. With each new loss of a member of a couple, the environment around her also changes. outside world- house and yard. The word "emptiness", which appears very often on the pages of this a short story, is the key. It coexists in tandem with completeness, fullness. In the story “Darling,” Chekhov expressed what he was unable to accomplish in his plans. student years dissertation “The History of Sexual Authority.” As in the outline of a dissertation written under the influence of Darwin's works, in the story Chekhov indirectly draws analogies between the processes occurring during evolution in the animal world and in human society. It is impossible not to see the physiological dominant in the description of Olenka Plemyannikova, as well as in the perception of the heroine by others. It is characteristic that Tolstoy, in his edition of Chekhov's story, removed the erotic details in the portrait of Olenka and softened the irony. Chekhov's view of the physiological basis of the nature of relations between a man and a woman is objective and devoid of Tolstoy's revealing pathos. The physiological component of a person, like all living things, cannot be assessed. In “Darling,” Olenka’s maternal feelings for high school student Sashenka are a natural continuation of her organic need to love, forgetting about her own “I,” the need to dissolve in the “Other.” Chekhov showed that the maternal instinct in a woman is the strongest instinct. But Chekhov presents motherhood not as an ideal, but as a natural part of female nature, and therefore does not raise motherhood to the height to which Tolstoy raises it. Chekhov's story is polemical in relation to Tolstoy's concept of femininity. However, the writer’s irony is also addressed to modern people who have lost touch with nature, that naive and natural perception of the world that was characteristic of ancient man and which is so fully embodied in Olenka. This “complexity of simplicity” (V.B. Kataev) gives rise to a striking effect of volume and multidimensionality of the image, despite all its seeming primitiveness and deliberate schematism.

The story “Ariadne”, the substantive essence of which, at first glance, is a love triangle and the misogynistic reasoning of the hero, to which he comes after a collapse in love, receives very important overtones in the cultural context. The context of the story helps to show how Chekhov undermines the idealistic ideas of the hero, debunks the dogmas formed by upbringing and cultural tradition. "Ariadne" is good example depictions of the process of demythologization of exhausted ideals, taken for granted, which lead into an illusory world. Chekhov's text is replete with cultural associations and allusions. And if the connection with ancient Greek mythology is not so obvious, then the position that “Ariadne” is Chekhov’s polemical response to the “Kreutzer Sonata” has almost become a commonplace in literary criticism. If we compare Chekhov's story with the myth of Ariadne, then, in our opinion, Chekhov is not so much interested in the plot and characters of the heroes of the myth as in the image and idea of ​​the labyrinth. Chekhov distanced himself from the moralizing of Tolstoy, from whose authority he had finally freed himself by the time of the creation of Ariadne. Unlike Tolstoy's work, at the end of the story the hero-narrator dreams not of how to punish the temptress Ariadne, who, as it seems to him, led him into the labyrinth of vice, idleness, vulgarity, and not of how to take revenge on his rival, but of , how to free yourself from the web you are caught in by throwing away the thread holder. But the hero of the story, Shamokhin, got entangled not only in love networks. He also found himself in a labyrinth of his own ideas, illusions and dogmas. He, like many men in his circle, had an idealistic vision of women and love. Like his literary predecessors, who fell in love with the image of an ancient statue, Shamokhin, who associated the name of a mythological heroine who embodies perfection with a real girl, creates a sexual fetish. However, as Shamokhin recognizes the object of his adoration, the gap with the mythological image increases and deepens. Seeing the grin of a beast in the revived marble figurine, he becomes a misogynist and now preaches a different morality, close to the hero of the “Kreutzer Sonata,” and repeats Strindberg’s ideas outlined in “Marriages” almost verbatim. Ariadne in a new guise, as Shamokhin talks about her, reminds us of Turgenev’s women - priestesses of sensual love who enslave weak men. By mythologizing his chosen one, Shamokhin becomes a participant in the myth he himself created, moving further and further away from reality. Thus, Chekhov uses myth not so much to show the universality of human characters and situations, but rather to expose the type of consciousness of the hero, who thinks in mythologems, stereotypes, and clichés. Chekhov debunks the idol of his time, created by men - the vamp woman, femme fatale. The dominant woman is not dramatized by the writer, but is portrayed ironically. Chekhov's goal is not to expose female vices that are revealed to a man, not to moralize on the “women's issue,” but to debunk the scholastic dogmas by which the hero lives. Unlike the author of The Kreutzer Sonata, Chekhov talks with operetta-like ease about the relationships between lovers and destroys melodrama.

Turning to the story “The Lady with the Dog,” we consider how Chekhov uses the chronotope of the holiday romance, compromised by mass literature, to reduce the melodrama of high love relationships.

Article by N.K. Mikhailovsky “Darwinism and Offenbach’s operettas”, which paradoxically united two phenomena that seemed to have nothing in common: scientific and cultural life, reflects the essence of the mentality of the era of the collapse of the idealistic worldview. Mikhailovsky proves in his article that Offenbach is not only the author of frivolous music on frivolous subjects reflecting the spirit of his time, but also an exposer, an innovator, equal in the strength of the revolutionary spirit to Voltaire, a satirist-educator who destroyed old social and moral dogmas. What is the similarity between Offenbach and Darwin? Darwin is a subverter of old ideas in science, Offenbach in art. Lawrence Senelick is right that Chekhov was close to Offenbach's anti-idealism 34 . The story “The Lady with the Dog” is associated not with a specific operetta, but with bourgeois boulevard culture in the broad sense, its ideology aimed at entertainment, looseness, festivity, pleasure, and disregard for moral taboos. Resorts, which in late XIX centuries begin to develop in Russia according to the European model. Chekhov conceived the story “The Lady with the Dog” when he lived in Paris and the resorts of France. In "The Lady with the Dog" the action takes place at a resort in Yalta. The resort chronotope as a plot-forming element of the narrative, actualized for the first time in Russian literature by Lermontov, 35 partly resembles that characterized by M.M. Bakhtin's provincial chronotope with its stagnation and cyclical everyday time 36. However, unlike a provincial chronotope, where monotonous routine reigns, in a resort, time for vacationers is compressed and compressed. Although the events that take place are predictable in advance and, from the point of view of an outside observer, have a monotonous, repetitive nature, for the characters involved in the events, time moves rapidly. The resort topos is a foreign space for vacationers, so all events that occur are perceived by them as simultaneous. The atmosphere of the resort chronotope has features of festivity, carnival, and adventurousness. Resort guests, finding themselves in an unusual environment, live in anticipation of adventure, new thrills, and passions. Chekhov's story is examined in comparison with the story by V. Mikulich (L.I. Veselitskaya) “Mimochka on the Waters,” in which the “resort romance” is presented in all its cynicism as a very ordinary phenomenon. Mikulic is ironic about the exhausted model romantic relationships, which fit into the formula “treachery and love” and devalues ​​the tragedy. The resort relationship in “The Lady with the Dog” is also depicted by Chekhov without any romantic flair, its essence is naked. The behavioral model of Chekhov's resort guests, like that of V. Mikulich, destroys the archetype of romantic passions of heroes that have developed in Russian literature, involved in love conflicts, which rapidly develop in accordance with the regulations of the resort chronotope in an exotic setting. In “The Lady with the Dog,” the program of resort love relationships is known in advance to all vacationers and is cynically passed on by word of mouth. The behavior of the characters fits into the clichés, only these are different cultural and behavioral clichés. Gurov is an integral part of bourgeois culture. Anna Sergeevna represents an idealistic model of ideas about a woman and her behavior, which by the end of the 19th century had turned into a cliché that became the property of mass culture. Chekhov equalizes the heroes, without endowing one with a high way of thinking and the other with vulgarity. The narrator's remark that “love changed them both” shows that both equally had something to change in themselves. The writer abandons the plot stereotype about a hero awakening to a new life, about a life that is better and purer than the previous one. Unlike Mimochka on the Waters, where the ending is closed to the development of high relationships between the characters, in The Lady with the Dog it sprouts from the low boulevard genre new type stories without ending. With his ending, Chekhov removes the idealistic idea of ​​love, which promises a wonderful life. Destroying illusory ideas about love, Chekhov confronts his heroes with problems and shows that they are soberly aware of this. Chekhov's innovation lies in this anti-idealistic ending. By showing adultery in the story, Chekhov happily avoided extremes. He is far from viewing adultery as a woman’s protest against the “dark kingdom.” He also avoided, like Tolstoy, demonizing women who cheat on their husbands. He does not openly condemn adultery as such, starting with the story “Agafya”, right up to his last works. In “The Lady with the Dog,” “tabloid” culture is the context that performs a destructive function in relation to the idealistic worldview, which had exhausted itself by the end of the 19th century. Chekhov, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, does not collide, but balances the high and low, and therefore the conflict in his works is smoothed out and does not reach the tension of tragedy. The reaction to Tolstoy’s story, who saw the influence of Nietzsche’s ideas in the work, is indicative.

So, Chekhov’s heroes live as idealistic chimeras, building projects for the education of women, floating in the illusory world of dreams, thinking in stereotypes. The writer distances himself from his characters and deconstructs ideologemes that had become obsolete by the end of the 19th century, turning them into schemes and clichés. It can be said that Chekhov, like Offenbach, whose role Mikhailovsky not by chance compared with the role of Voltaire, turning to lofty images, mercilessly lowered them and killed them with irony, debunked the exhausted ideals existing in society, which had turned into dogmas.

Having examined Chekhov in the context of the idealistic paradigm of the 19th century, we tried to show that he destroyed the previous canon of relations between the writer and the reader. The idea that goes back to Schiller’s concept that a work of art should elevate the reader above reality and lead him to the ideal experienced a crisis at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, and Chekhov was precisely the writer in whose work this intention of art revealed its inconsistency. Rejection of the previous system of values ​​and, moreover, the debunking of exhausted ideals is precisely what is new in Chekhov’s work that separated him from his predecessors and contemporaries. That is why, in our opinion, Chekhov should not be considered a writer who completed realism. In the axiological system of modernism, disbelief, disappointment and denial are assessed not so much as negative manifestations spirit, as much as necessary stages on the path to ascension. In his last, unfinished work, “The Will to Power,” Nietzsche writes about nihilism and decadence as phenomena that are “necessary and inherent” to every people, every era for ascension and movement. Chekhov's work formed a new ethical and aesthetic paradigm, dialogical in relation to the previous, idealistic one. The paradox of the reception of Chekhov’s work is that both his contemporaries and the subsequent generation of readers tried to squeeze the works of the innovator into idealistic formulas, which over time turned into dogmas, and with them to measure his artistic potential, in the very dogmas that the reformer of prose and drama categorically rejected. The figure of Chekhov, standing at the intersection of eras, is lonely. This disposition once again confirms the idea that literary process- this is not an evolutionary forward movement and Chekhov approaches us when consciousness is freed from ready-made truths taken on faith.
IN Conclusion The main results of the study are formulated.

The main content of the dissertation is reflected in the following publications:
Monographic research

1. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and the problem of the ideal / M.M. Odessa. – M.: RSUH, 2010.

23 p.l.

Compilation and editing

1. 
   Russia and the USA: forms of literary dialogue / Ed. MM. Odessa and Irene Masing-Delitzsch. – M.: RSUH, 2000. 205 p.
2. 
   At the turn of the century. Russian-Scandinavian literary dialogue / Comp. MM. Odessa. Ed. MM. Odesskaya, T.A. Chesnokova. – M.: RSUH, 2001. 336 p.
3. 
   Among the greats. Literary meetings / Comp., intro. article and comment. MM. Odessa. – M.: RSUH, 2001. 445 p.

Review: Galina Rylkova. Sredi velikihk: Literatuurnye vstrechi. Edited, Introduction and Commentaries by Margarita Odesskaya. Moscow: RGGU, 2001. 445 pp. // North American Chekhov Society Bulletin. Winter, 2001 – 02. Vol. X, NO. 1.PP. 6 – 7.

1. 
   Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov. Collection of articles / Compiled, ed., intro. note by M.M. Odessa. – M.: RSUH, 2007. 402 p.

Reviews: M. Goryacheva. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov // Chekhov Bulletin. M.: Max Press, 2007. No. 21. P. 31 – 38.

Yu. Fridshtein. Three in one century, not counting the theater // Modern dramaturgy. 2009. No. 1, January – March. pp. 257 – 258.

Articles published in publications recommended by the Higher Attestation Commission

1. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Nikolai Uspensky and his “seditious” book / M. Odesskaya // Questions of literature. 1994. No. 5. P. 304 – 317.
2. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Gun and lyre (Hunting story in Russian literature of the 19th century) / M. Odesskaya // Questions of literature. 1998. No. 3. P.239 – 252.
3. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Did Mr. Chekhov have ideals? / MM. Odessa // Bulletin of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Series “Journalism. Literary criticism". 2008. No. 11. P.219 – 227.
4. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Tolstoy's treatise “What is art?” in the context of the collapse of idealistic aesthetics / M. M. Odesskaya // Philological Sciences. 2009. No. 2. P. 20 – 29.
5. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Where does Ariadne's thread lead? /MM. Odessa // Bulletin of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Series “Philological Sciences. Literary studies and folklore." 2010. No. 2. P. 118 – 126.

11. Odesskaya M.M. S. N. Bulgakov - literary critic. Article about Chekhov and polemics about ideals / M.M. Odessa // Bulletin of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Series “Journalism. Literary criticism". 2010. No. 8. P.33 – 46.

12. Odesskaya M.M. The ideal of beauty and love in the works of I.A. Goncharova / M.M. Odessa // Philological sciences. 2010. No. 2. pp. 49 – 60.

1. 
   Odesskaya M.M.“Everything should be beautiful in a person”: Chekhov and Marxist

journalism / M.M. Odessa // Bulletin of the Russian State University for the Humanities. Series “Journalism. Literary criticism". 2011. No. 6. P. 189 – 204.

1. 
   Odesskaya M. Chekhov’s Tatyana Repina: From Melodrama to Mystery Play /

Margarita Odesskaya // Modern Drama. Winter 1999. Volume XLII. Number 4. P. 475 –
15. Odesskaya M. Leo Tolstoy's Treatise What Is Art? In the Context of the Disintegration

of Idealistic Aesthetics / M. Odesskaya // Social Sciences. 2009. #4. P. 47 – 55.

Articles in other publications

16. Odesskaya M.M. Immodest guesses about “Immodest guesses” by I.L. Leontieva-

Shcheglova / M.M. Odessa // Chekhoviana: Chekhov and his entourage. – M.: Nauka, 1996. WITH.

17. Odesskaya M.M. N. Hawthorne, A. Chekhov, F. Sologub. Archetype of the garden / M. Odessa //

Young researchers of Chekhov: Materials of the III international. conf. 1998. M.: MSU,

1998. pp. 260 -- 266

18. Odesskaya M.M.“Fly the ship, carry me to the distant limits”: The sea in poetics

A.S. Pushkin and A.P. Chekhov / M.M. Odessa // Chekhoviana: Chekhov and Pushkin. – M.:

Science, 1998. pp. 102 – 106

19. Odesskaya M.M. Mythologization of reality by the heroes of A. Chekhov and N. Sadur

/M. Odessa // Russian language, literature and culture at the turn of the century. IX

International Congress MAPRYAL. Abstracts of reports and messages. Bratislava,

1999. T. 1. P. 237.

20. Odesskaya M.M. E.N. Opochinin/ M.M. Odessa // Russian writers 1880 – 1917.

Bibliographic Dictionary. – M.: Russian Encyclopedia, 1999. T. 4. P. 441 –

1. 
   Odesskaya M.M.., Bokova V.M.. N.A. Osnovsky. / Odesskaya M.M., Bokova V.M.//

Russian writers 1880 – 1917. Bibliographical dictionary. – M.: Russian Encyclopedia, 1999. T. 4. P. 455 – 456.

1. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Tatyana Repina A.P. Chekhov: the problem of genre / M. Odesskaya

//VIICCEES WORLD CONGRESS. Abstracts. – Tampere. Finland, 2000. P. 38.

1. 
   Odesskaya M.M.“Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev: the problem of genre / M. Odesskaya //Literaria Humanitas VII. Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin v evropskych kulturnich souvislostech. – Brno: Mosarikova univerzita, 2000. pp. 195 – 205.
2. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Henry Thoreau and Anton Chekhov: forest and steppe / M. Odesskaya // Russia and the USA: forms of literary dialogue. – M.: RSUH, 2000. P. 122 – 131.
3. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Introductory article. Classics and “ordinary talents”. Comments/ M. Odesskaya // Among the greats. Literary meetings. – M.: RSUH. 2001. P. 5 – 16. 401 -- 417
4. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Anton Chekhov and Ulla Hansson: fear and love / M. Odesskaya // At the turn of the century. Russian-Scandinavian literary dialogue. – M.: RSUH, 2001. P.214 – 227
5. 
   Odesskaya M. A. P. Chekhov’s Three Sisters: Symbolic Numerals /M. Odesskaya // AATSEEL. 2001. P. 148 – 149.
6. 
   Odesskaya M.M.“Three Sisters”: symbolic and mythological subtext / M.M. Odessa // Chekhoviana. "Three Sisters" - 100 years. – M.: Nauka, 2002. P. 150–158.
7. 
   Odesskaya M.M.“Tatyana Repina” by Chekhov: from melodrama to mystery / M.M. Odessa // Drama and theater. – Tver: Tver. state univ., 2002. pp. 81 – 93
8. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Fools and jesters in the works of A.P. Chekhov / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov: Baikal meetings. Sat. scientific tr. – Irkutsk: RIO Irkut. Univ., 2003. P.56 – 63.
9. 
   Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and modern Russian theatrical remakes / M.M. Odessa // Century after Chekhov. 1904 – 2004. International scientific. conf. Abstracts of reports. – M.: MSU, 2004. P. 140–141.
10. 
    Odesskaya M.M. Ibsen and Chekhov: myth, fairy tale, reality / M. Odesskaya //Drittes Internationales Čechov –Symposium in Badenweiler. – Badenweiler, 14-18. Abstracts. October 2004. P. 44–45.
11. 
    Odesskaya M.M. Shakespearean images in “The Cherry Orchard” / M.M. Odessa // Chekhovina. “The Sound of a Broken String”: to the 100th anniversary of the play “The Cherry Orchard.” – M.: Nauka, 2005. P. 494 – 505.
12. 
    Odesskaya M. Hedda Gabler: Life in Time / M/ Odesskaya //Acta Ibseniana. Ibsen and Russian Culture. Ibsen Conference in St. Petersburg 2003. 1–4 October / Edited by Knut Brynhildsvoll. – Oslo: Center for Ibsen Studies. University of Oslo, 2005. pp. 85 – 96.
13. 
    Odesskaya M.M. A book about Sakhalin - Chekhov’s tribute to medicine / M.M. Odesskaya // A.P. Chekhov in the historical and cultural space of the Asia-Pacific region. Mat. International scientific-practical conf. 21 – 30 Sep. 2005. – Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Publishing house. "Lukomorye", 2006. P.59-64.
14. 
    Odesskaya M.M. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov in the light of Max Nordau’s concept of degeneration / M. Odesskaya // Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov. Sat. articles dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Chekhov’s death. - M.: Russian State University for the Humanities, 2007. pp. 211-226.
15. 
    Odesskaya M. Let Them Go Crazy: Madness in the Works of Chekhov / Margarita Odesskaya // Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture /Edited by A. Brintlinger and I. Vinitsky. – Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2007. pp. 192-207.
16. 
    Odesskaya M.M. Father as an off-stage character in the dramaturgy of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov / M. Odesskaya // The work of Henrik Ibsen in the world cultural context. Mat. Intl. conf. – St. Petersburg: Pushkin House, 2007. pp. 144-156.
17. 
    Odesskaya M. Ibsen and Chekhov: Myth, Fairytale and Plot Structure / Margarita Odesskaya //Studi Nordici. 2007. X1V. - Pisa-Roma, 2007. P.11-17.
18. 
    Odesskaya M.M. Walden hermit and steppe wanderer: philosophy of nature / M.M. Odessa // Taganrog Bulletin. “Steppe” A.P. Chekhov: 120 years. Mat. Intl. scientific-practical conf. – Taganrog: Taganrog State. lit. and Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve, 2008. pp. 78-86

41. Odesskaya M.M. The role of sound and color in the architectonics of the plot of Chekhov's works

/ MM. Odessa // Chekhov readings in Yalta. Chekhov's world: sound, smell, color. Sat. scientific tr./ House-museum of A.P. Chekhov in Yalta. – Simferopol: Share, 2008. Vol. 12. pp. 155-164.

42. Odesskaya M.M. Chekhov and Edgar Allan Poe: themes, motifs, images / M. Odesskaya //

Canadian American Slavic Studies. Current Issues in Chekhov Scholarship. -California

2008. Vol. 42.Nos. 1-2. P.119 – 146.

43 .Odesskaya M.M. Jesters, holy fools and madmen in the works of Chekhov / M.M. Odesskaya // A.M. Panchenko and Russian culture. – St. Petersburg: Pushkin House, 2008. P. 266–277.

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Reviews and messages
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To maintain love and grow in it, correct priorities are important, i.e. the ability to highlight and manifest what love is based on and what is the most essential link in it, the formula of love.
The word “love” is one of the most extraordinary words in our language. Some dictionaries give at least 25 definitions of this word. This word denotes love for food, love for flowers, love for man, and love for God. The French writer F. La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) rightly noted that “there is one love, but there are thousands of counterfeits,” and K. Paustovsky (1892-1968) said: “Love has thousands of aspects, and each of them has its own light, its own sadness, its own happiness and its own fragrance.”
Love and marriage. There are different classifications of the aspects of love and unity in marriage given by various Christian authors.
J. McDowell gives three types of love

1. Love if.
2. Love, because.
3. Love, period.

Calling for mature love, he compares the role of each type of love:

"The first kind of love

This is the only kind of love that many people have ever known. I call it “love if.” We give or receive such love when fulfilled certain conditions. Our motives are essentially selfish and our goal is to get something in exchange for our love. "If you will good child, Daddy will love you." “If you, as a lover, live up to my expectations... If you satisfy my desires... If you sleep with me, I will love you.”
Many marriages fail because they were built on this type of love. A husband or wife finds himself in love with some imaginary romantic image. When disappointment sets in or when expectations are no longer met, “love if” often turns into bitterness.

The second type of love

(and I think most people marry based on this type) is “love because.” A person is loved because he is something, or has something, or does something. This love comes from some quality or condition in a person's life. “Love because” often sounds like this: “I love you because you are beautiful”, “I love you because you make me feel confident”, “I love you because you are so popular”, etc. d.
You might think that “love because” is a very good thing. We all want to be loved for certain qualities in our lives. The fact that someone loves us for who we are can initially reassure us because we know that there is something worthy of love about us. But this type of love soon becomes no better than “if” love, i.e. truly unsteady ground for marriage.
Love and relationships. Think, for example, about the problem of competition. What will a family relationship based on “love because” be like when someone comes along who is more likely to possess the qualities for which you are loved? Suppose you are a woman whose beauty is one of the criteria for your husband's love. What happens when a more beautiful woman appears on the scene? Or suppose you are a man whose wife's love is based on your salary and the things that come with it. What happens when someone comes along with more money? Will the competition worry you? Will she be a threat to your marriage? If yes, then your love is of the “love because” type. Realize that in “love because” relationships, we are afraid to let our partner know who we really are deep down. We fear that we will be less accepted, loved less, or even rejected if our partner discovers our true self.

There is a third type of love.

This is love without conditions, or unconditional love. This love says, “I love you, no matter what you may be like deep down. I love you, no matter what changes in you. I love you, PERIOD!”
Don't make mistakes and take your time. This love is not blind. She can know all the flaws and imperfections of another person and, nevertheless, completely accept that person without demanding anything in return. This love cannot be earned, it cannot be stopped. She is not bound by anything. It differs from “love because” in that it is not based on any one attractive feature of the loved one.

"Love, period"

can only be tested whole and a complete person- someone who doesn't need to take anything away from life's relationships to fill the voids in his own life.
A classification that examines the four aspects of love in marriage, feelings of love
Some authors identify four aspects of love in marriage and believe that the Greeks had four words for what we call love:
1. Eros - physical, sexual attraction, sexual unity.
2. Storge - affection, devotion, belonging, close ties.
3. Philea - friendship.
4. Agape - unconditional, sacrificial love, love that gives and does not set conditions.
The authors compare these four aspects of love with each other:
Eros says: “I am attracted to you.”
Storge says: “I am your relative.”
Philea says, “I like you.”
Agape says, “I love you.”
Eros comes from physiology. Storge comes from genes. Philea comes from emotions. Agape is based on a decision, on an effort of will.
Eros says: “I love you because I am attracted to you.”
Storge says: “I love you because we are related.”
Philea says, “I love you because I enjoy being with you.”
Agape says: “I love you” - not “I love you if ...” and not “I love you because ...”, but simply: “I love you.”
Abilene Christian University Professor W. Broome, for greater simplicity and better understanding gives figurative and understandable definitions of these four types of love:
Eros is the love of strawberry layer cake.
Storge is love for a relative, not because she is attractive or smart or rich, but because she is your relative.
Philea is the love of a team playing the same game and in which there is a spirit of teamwork and mutual support, and if this is absent, then the whole team suffers.
Agape is the love that gives “rain to the unjust.”
For us, it is not so much important to exercise knowledge of the Greek language as to have a correct understanding and practical explanation of which aspects of love in marriage must be present in order for love to manifest itself in completeness and harmony on all sides. All these sides of love are not only levels of love or stages of perfection, but different, interconnected sides of the same love in marriage. It should be noted that if you single out only physical love from other types of love, then it can become a mockery of love and a gross perversion of what love is. We are not talking about the fact that some aspect of love is not needed, but we can talk about the aspects without which a full-fledged marriage and family cannot be built.

UDC 82.0:801.6; 82-1/9

S. V. Burmistrova

LOVE AND FAMILY ISSUES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 19TH CENTURY

Russian literature of the 1840-60s is studied. in the context of ideological and philosophical discourse about love and marriage, the poetics of the love plot in the works of first-line writers and fiction writers is examined.

Keywords: gender studies, feminism, patriarchal mentality, philosophy of gender, fiction, comparative literary studies, dialogue of cultures.

In the 1840-60s. V Russian society The crisis of the institution of family and marriage has clearly emerged. At the same time, the possibility of transforming society as a whole was associated with the reform of the family union, the emancipation of women, and a change in ideas about her purpose. M. L. Mikhailov in his journalistic article “Paris Letters” (1859) wrote: “The question of the situation and organization of the family is one of the most pressing issues of our time. The solid and correct successes of civilization depend only on its resolution.”

Originated in the 1840s. the discussion about the nature of love and the moral side of the marital union divided the Russian public into two opposing camps; representatives of one of them defended the patriarchal model of marriage and family relations, and the second included apologists for the new ethics of love and marriage.

The patriarchal model of marriage and family, as a rule, combines two traditions that are incompatible in their essence: Christian and the patriarchal one. This overlap is explained by the fact that Christian dogma served as the basis for the formation of a patriarchal form of marriage and family relations. At the same time, patriarchal logic, using only the external attributes of the Christian teaching on marriage, distorted it exactly to the extent that it was required to approve the “model of one sex,” i.e., the androcentric concept of being.

In Christian teaching, marriage is considered as a “sacrament of love” and is compared with the image of the union of Christ and the Church. Theologically, Christian marriage is focused not so much on procreation and satisfying temporary natural needs - all this is secondary - but on nurturing perfect love in spouses, about which the Apostle Paul said: “Love is patient, kind, love does not envy, love does not boast, He is not proud, does not act outrageously, does not seek his own, is not irritated, does not think evil... He covers everything, believes everything, hopes everything, endures everything. Love never fails." Therefore, marriage is not the result of love, but it is an opportunity to grow in perfect love, which is necessary for a person to be reunited with God. According to Christian ethics, in

In marriage there is an ontological and mystical combination of spouses into one flesh. In this regard, the idea of ​​the indissolubility of marriage seems organic, since divorce in this case means the cutting of one flesh.

However, in the 1840s. The Christian concept of gender relations was not widespread for the reason that hopes for overcoming the crisis in the intimate sphere of human life were pinned primarily on non-traditional approaches to its explanation (although certain elements of the Christian concept were included in the content of new models of love and marriage). In addition, the Christian tradition of marriage and family relations practically did not function in Russian society in its pure form, but, as a rule, in the version that arose as a result of its interpretation by the patriarchal mentality.

The patriarchal form of organizing a marital union has developed in Russian culture over several centuries. A qualitative change in attitude towards marriage was clearly evident in the 17th century, when marriage began to be perceived not as a “sacrament of love”, but simply as a private transaction. Since marital relations were no longer perceived as a spiritual-mental-physical unity, but only as a “corporal unity”, in best case scenario as mental and physical, they were accordingly deprived of their mystical meaning. If a necessary condition and at the same time the goal of a Christian marriage was love (for man and God), then in the patriarchal model it loses its primary importance, and more often it is leveled out completely.

The patriarchal family is a rigid hierarchical system in which the functions of men and women are strictly differentiated. The man is declared the unconditional authority, and the woman is only a sounding board, an “appendage” of her husband. The father's power in the family is absolute. The totality of paternal power (in general, men) determines the asymmetry of the family version created in the logic of patriarchy. In this regard, M. Petrashevsky, who linked the main reason for the disharmony of love and family relationships with the dominance of men, insisted on the need to “exit the country of the fathers.”

Since the 1840s. in Russia, along with the already existing Christian and patriarchal traditions, a new ethics of love and marital union is being formed. Under the influence of the philosophy of French utopian and Christian socialism, as well as the artistic creativity of George Sand, which expressed protest against stereotypical ideas about women and the flawed role that she played in the family and society, part of the Russian intelligentsia (primarily those who were called “Westerners” ") tried to form new models of behavior of men and women in love and marriage.

The general humanistic pathos of the attitude towards family and marriage, characteristic of the theories of A. Saint-Simon, P. Leroux, C. Fourier, V. Considerant, E. Cabet and others, could not but find a response among Russian thinkers. Thus, in the doctrine of P. Leroux, he was attracted by the idea of ​​equality of the sexes and the rehabilitation of the flesh. According to Leroux, God, being absolute love and goodness, could not create anything imperfect or flawed. The physical plane of existence, just like the spiritual one, has a divine origin and, because of this, cannot be evil or sin. Equal creations of God - man and woman - have no reason to regulate relations among themselves on the principle of dominance and subordination, the philosopher believed.

E. Cabet’s book “Journey to Ikaria,” published in 1840, aroused keen interest in Russia. In this book great attention devoted to issues of marriage and family relationships. In the utopian state of Ikaria, a man and woman enter into a marital relationship voluntarily, subject to mutual psychophysiological attraction and spiritual community. Dowry and inheritance do not play any role there; only the personal merits of the future spouses are important. The basis of family happiness is not only spiritual kinship, but also work, and a woman works equally with a man. Social harmony arises as a result of the well-being of everyone separate family. The education system, combining physical and moral aspects, is divided into home education, carried out by parents, and public education, under the control of the school. Nevertheless, in Ikaria, the female psychocosm still did not represent an independent value, since the main goal of a woman’s upbringing and education was so that she would be close and understandable to her husband’s mental interests and could really become his full-fledged companion.

C. Fourier, who became a cult author for the majority of “Petrashevites,” in his teaching sharply criticized bourgeois marriage and family, based on calculation and falsehood, and insisted on the abolition of these social institutions. In Fourier's "theory of passions" passion is considered as a defining property human nature. In the new world, the French utopian believed, marriage will represent

a union freely entered into and dissolved, which will ensure the best combination of individuals, as well as the liberation of the woman. At the same time, the family will lose all meaning.

Even earlier, Belinsky, in a letter to Botkin dated September 8, 1841, expressed an idea similar to the ideas of Fourier, that in order to liberate the human personality it is necessary to abandon the family union: “And the time will come - I fervently believe this. when there will be no meaningless forms and rituals, there will be no contracts and conditions for feelings, there will be no debt and obligations, and the will will yield not to will, but to love alone; when there are no husbands and wives, and there are lovers and mistresses, and when the mistress comes to her lover and says: “I love another,” the lover will answer: “I cannot be happy without you, I will suffer all my life; but go to the one you love,” and will not accept her sacrifice if, out of generosity, she wants to stay with him, but, like God, he will tell her: “I want mercy, not sacrifice.” A woman will not be a slave to society, but, like a man, she will freely indulge in her inclination, without losing her good name, this monster - a conventional concept.

And yet in the 1840s. There were more calls not for the destruction of family and marital unions, but for their transformation. George Sand, her personality and artistic creativity gave a powerful impetus to rethinking traditional models of marriage and family relations. At the same time, the French novelist “became a symbol of women’s liberation, a slogan of the struggle against centuries-old oppression.” It should be noted that for Russian readers, most of whom did not have the opportunity to directly study philosophical literature, the novels of George Sand were almost the only source of acquaintance with the latest ideas about love and marriage. Moreover, George Sand, who knew well the works of Locke, Rousseau, Mabley, Leibniz, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Leroux, Lamennais, “very keenly felt the moral aspect of philosophical and ideological teachings and knew how to talentedly popularize it.” Despite the eclecticism of the French writer’s worldview, the ideas of utopian and Christian socialism played an important role in it. The philosophy of love of George Sand included the theories of A. Saint-Simon (rehabilitation of the flesh), P. Leroux (equality of the sexes in love), C. Fourier (harmony of passions), etc. A marriage union based on calculation or only on sensual attraction, according to thought George Sand is hostile to the very nature of marital love, understood as the absolute unity of body and soul, man and woman.

In the 1860s. the main contradictions of the process of women's emancipation in Russian reality, due both to the psychological unpreparedness of the woman herself for

independence, and the lack of the necessary legislative and moral-ethical framework in society. Thus, S.S. Shashkov wrote at the end of the 19th century: “But our gross ignorance and Asian lordship of social life. were the reason that pure idea free feeling during the first experiments of its acclimatization on Russian soil, it yielded bad results. Seducing a girl, captivating, for the sake of a moment’s whim, a married woman, striking up a relationship with some milliner or maid and, when tired of it, leaving her - this was often passed off as a practical application of the principles of Georgesandism.”

In the second half of the 19th century. The progressive concept of love and marriage, developed in the 1840s, continues to develop. based on the philosophy of utopian and Christian socialism. At the same time, a radical point of view persistently asserts itself, expressed in the denial of the family union and the mutual obligations of a man and a woman in marriage. T. A. Bogdanovich in her book “The Love of People of the Sixties” very accurately described the approach of representatives of this generation to the problems of the intimate sphere of human life. People of the 60s They believed that family and love “need to be cleansed of the debris of outdated concepts and rebuilt on new, reasonable principles.<.>They were not satisfied with their quest new form for old feelings. They considered it possible to change their very feelings." The people of the sixties, who completely rejected the existing reality as undesirable, simultaneously sought to compensate for their denial by restructuring this reality. Therefore, the axiological space of the era is determined not only by such concepts as “nihilism”, “atheism”, “materialism”, but also by theories of the creation of a new world (building the kingdom of God on earth) and the education of a new man. The readiness of the sixties to act by any means in the name of “universal harmony” explains the emergence of such phenomena as fictitious marriage and commune.

N. G. Chernyshevsky, one of the most prominent representatives of the generation of the sixties, affirmed the idea of ​​self-sacrifice in love, which goes back to Georgesand ethics. Dreaming all his life of “loving only one woman,” of being faithful to her “not only after marriage, but also before marriage,” he was ready to step over his own feelings for the sake of his beloved’s happiness. On the eve of the wedding, he outlined to his future wife his ideas about love and marriage, which, we note, reveal a clear similarity with the plot-like features of George Sand’s novel “Jacques.” From Chernyshevsky’s point of view, a husband should not oppress his wife in anything; only equality can be the basis of happiness; he gives her freedom of feelings and promises not to reproach her if his wife falls in love with another or even leaves her husband for the sake of new love. Developing the idea of ​​a country

According to Fourier, Chernyshevsky also believed that the path to harmonization of relations between people lies through following the inclination of one’s nature and through the denial of duty, which changes in every century and in every area.

The obvious inconsistency of the sixties in solving the problem of reforming love and family unions was due to the discrepancy characteristic of their philosophy between the principles of respect for freedom, natural rights of the individual, love for humanity and the intention towards eudaimonism, nihilism, and the reduction of human spiritual life. This inconsistency already in the 1860s. noted many of those who were not involved “in the cycle of the democratic environment.” And yet, in the public consciousness, the leaders of the sixties were perceived as role models. A. M. Skabichevsky recalls that every word of Chernyshevsky “was considered law at that time,” and according to the novel “What is to be done?” arranged private and family life.

But if the leaders made every effort to create and implement programs for the formation of a perfect person and a perfect world, then most of the followers of the new ideology were focused only on “consuming ready-made truths,” as a result of which both the ideology itself and its adherents suffered.

Modern researchers tend to assess the ethical concept of the sixties as ambivalent, having both negative and positive manifestations. I. B. Pavlova, for example, points out the contrast between the ideal of the sixties and their life-building. Their views, in her opinion, “turned out to be inconsistent with the foundations of a family and marriage union, even hostile to them.<.. >Attempts to translate into reality the ideas of the novel “What is to be done?” caused much more negative manifestations than positive ones, and were accompanied by broken destinies.”

Ideological and philosophical discourse of the 1840-60s. had a direct impact on fiction this period. “In the 40s,” notes V. Kuleshov, “many stories about emancipation with love plots were created.” However, it should be clarified that such works began to appear back in the 1830s. Thus, Pushkin in “Roslavlev” and “Novel in Letters” (1830) was one of the first to raise the question of a woman’s education and her position in the family. At the same time, Pushkin’s champions of women’s rights were both men and women themselves, such as Polina, an extraordinary girl protesting against the limitation of women’s activities within the framework of family responsibilities; or the hero of “The Novel in Letters”, who advocates the breadth of a woman’s mental horizons.

V. F. Odoevsky in the stories “Princess Mimi” (1834), “Princess Zizi” (1839) also touched upon the issue

sa about the position of women in modern life. Odoevsky made the main character of the story “Princess Mimi” an “old maid”, a “gossip”, i.e. female character, which has never occupied a central position in the romantic society story. However, Mimi was not always like this: in her youth she was “pretty good-looking,” but “didn’t have any specific character.” The development of the storyline of Princess Mimi reflects the main milestones in the process of transforming an ordinary society girl into one of the members of that “terrible society”, “controlling public opinion”, which “judges life and death and never changes its sentences.” The main reason The writer sees the moral change of the heroine in the conditions of her life, where the only goal and meaning of female existence is marriage. A secular girl “is taught to dance, draw, and music so that she can get married; they dress her, take her out into the world and force her to pray to the Lord God so that she can get married as soon as possible. This is the limit and the beginning of her life. This is her very life." But Mimi could not become either a “good wife” or a “good mother of the family,” that is, her existence lost all meaning, became almost phantom, and she herself almost found herself outside the living space established for a woman. “Often at the ball she didn’t know where to stick - to the girls or to the married people - no wonder: Mimi was unmarried! The hostess greeted her with cold courtesy, looked at her as if she were unnecessary furniture and did not know what to say to her, because Mimi was not getting married.”

Society, thus, provoked the “damage” of the young girl: “Every day her pride

was insulted......Every day there is annoyance, anger,

envy and vindictiveness little by little spoiled her heart,” until it became so perverted that it arrogated to itself the right to judge people, to be hypocritical, and to slander. It was from this moment that Princess Mimi gained “real power in the living rooms, many were afraid of her and tried not to quarrel with her.”

In the literature of the 1830s. One can single out a whole corpus of texts in which one way or another the idea of ​​the superficiality, emptiness and uselessness of the existing system of female upbringing and education was developed, as well as the idea that in a secular environment sincere, faithful love between a man and a woman is impossible. First of all, we should name such works as “The Bedroom of a Socialite Woman” (1834) by I. Panaev, “Katenka Pylaeva, My Future Wife” (1836) and “Antonina” (1836) by P. Kudryavtsev, “Mamzel Katish, or Catching Suitors” (1838) P. Efebovsky, “ Big light"(1840) and "The Pharmacist" (1841) by V. Solloguba and others. However, the position of the authors of these works was based on traditional ideas about the roles of men and women in family and marriage, which determined the modeling of monotonous and schematic plots about love.

Since the 1840s. In Russian literature, works with love plots appear that reveal innovative collisions and situations. Thus, one of the plot lines of I. Panaev’s story “Ak-teon” (1842) is based on a love story married woman to a person close to her in spiritual interests. The heroine of P. Kudryavtsev’s story “The Last Visit” (1844), Anna Mikhailovna, just like the heroine Panaeva, is forced to live in a marriage with a rude person who is alien to her in spirit. The author explains the love feeling that arose in her heart for Roman Petrovich, the owner of a nearby estate, by the young woman’s need to communicate with a man related to her in intellectual and spiritual aspirations. However, the generally accepted moral code, as well as the life circumstances in which the love relationships of Kudryavtsev’s heroes developed, did not allow them to even hope for happiness. The situation of inevitable hopelessness and misfortune is strengthened by the description of the night landscape against which the meeting between Anna Mikhailovna and Roman Petrovich took place: “The centuries-old giants rose sullenly in front of them, obscuring more than half of the horizon.<.>The darkness of the approaching night thickened their thicket even more and did not allow their gaze to penetrate far into the depths of the garden.<.. >Isn’t it true that this thicket is as dark and opaque as your vague hopes?” .

In the novel "Who's to Blame?" (1847) A. I. Herzen presented the theme of friendship between a man and a woman, which has not been developed in Russian literature.

At the same time, in most works of the 1840s, the plots of which include innovative love motives and conflicts, traditional (patriarchal) representations of femininity are preserved. In a patriarchal culture, the feminine principle is perceived as passive, dependent, requiring the active influence of the masculine principle. One of the permanent ideas of the androcentric world order is the idea of ​​“creation of woman” by man. In this regard, the story of Lyubonka Krutsiferskaya appears as the story of the awakening of a “simple, weak woman” under the influence of the personality of a strong man.

Thus, the motif of Pygmalion and Galatea is realized in the story of Ap. Grigoriev “One of Many”, which includes three “episodes”, the last of which has an unambiguous title - “The Creation of a Woman”. For Grigoriev’s poetics, according to researchers, the key is “the idea of ​​another person as a mirror.” Moreover, if Grigoriev’s hero is “recognized as an other being of the author’s spirit,” then the heroine is precisely a projection of the demiurgic energy of a man (hero/author). Mutual understanding and love in the relationship between a hero and a heroine can only arise if a man sees in a woman his “equal,” that is, a continuation of himself, his ideas, and ideals. Thus, Zvanintsev, the hero of the story “One of Many,” confessing his love to the young

to the girl, said: “I can only love my equal.<.. .>I love you because I created you."

The idea of ​​creating a woman is also consistently embodied in those works that present a negative version of the plot about female emancipation. Thus, in the lives of the pseudo-emancipated heroines of Pobedonostsev, Pleshcheev, Turgenev, one of the most common scenarios for the existence of a woman in a patriarchal world is realized, which can be conventionally described as mimicry. A woman’s orientation towards androcentrism, conscious exclusion from the norms of female existence, preference for the values ​​of male culture, although it contributes to leaving the circle of roles assigned to the female sex, nevertheless only gives rise to the appearance of freedom and independence. In reality, this path does not lead to the affirmation of the intrinsic value of the female personality, but, on the contrary, contributes to the loss of her individual beginning.

The heroine Pleshcheyeva from the story “The Cigarette” believed, for example, that a woman can achieve liberation from subordination only by following men’s, the most successful models of behavior, and therefore, as a “truly emancipated woman,” she “loved to ride horseback, eat paquitos and drink a glass of champagne at a country party.” picnic".

Even Turgenev, who spoke and wrote a lot about the “spiritual greatness and beauty of the Russian woman”, depicted a “gallery of female characters”, for which he was called by his contemporaries the “Russian Georges Zand”, nevertheless, he was also a hostage of “patriarchal ghosts”, including the myth of the creation of woman by man. In the stories written in the 1840s and 50s, his heroines play a traditionally passive role, dependent on a man. In front of her chosen one, a girl (for example, Lisa from the Diary extra person“, Maria Pavlovna from “The Calm”) is “in awe,” and disappointment in him means for her at the same time disappointment in herself and ultimately leads to “withering” and “fading away.”

In contrast to the early stories, where female characters are shown as if from the outside, that is, without revealing their inner appearance, in the works of the late 1850-60s. Turgenev carefully describes the moment of spiritual awakening, the moral search of his heroines. Thus, Natalya Lasunskaya’s meeting with Rudin prompted her to do inner work, to understand her destiny, which she begins to see not only as a future wife and mother, but also as her husband’s assistant “in the great work of his life.” Inspired by the era of the 1860s. female images (for example, the image of Elena Stakhova, the heroine of the novel “On the Eve”) already expressed a woman’s other aspirations: for independence, material independence, for something outside the framework of family happiness.

Despite the fact that Turgenev’s heroine is morally higher and purer than the hero, the writer emphasized that only thanks to the impulse emanating from a man, she begins to think about her own self-determination, about the meaning of her life.

The idea of ​​“lunar dependence”, dominant in the patriarchal paradigm, according to which a woman is seen as an object in need of influence from a man, received a unique expression in the plot construction of Turgenev’s texts. The writer uses a two-part principle in organizing the plot, which is also found in Panaev, Pisemsky, Druzhinin and others. The first part usually depicts the joyless existence of a girl in an environment alien to her in spirit; the second tells about the heroine’s meeting with an “active person”, under whose influence she learns to analyze herself, her relationships with people around her and, in general, revises those values, which guided me before.

Chernyshevsky was among the first male writers to express a critical attitude towards concepts that reinforced the opinion of the weakness and inferiority of women compared to men. Organizing the plot of the novel “What is to be done?” (1863) also according to a two-part scheme, the writer rethought the underlying ideological mechanisms, the function of which was to support and preserve stereotypes about the inferiority of the female personality. First of all, he tried to destroy the stable artistic principle the interdependence of the female and love themes (“the content of the story is love, the main character is a woman”). Modern foreign researchers, for example Joe Andrew, write that in Russian literature of the 19th century. a woman is always depicted in the world of feelings and love, and as two main events that create movement women's life, stands for marriage and love. The functioning of this principle in Russian literature was a consequence of the essentialist perception of the nature of a woman as exclusively sensual and inextricably linked with family life. The features of biodeterminism can be traced not only in the position of those writers who expressed disagreement with the ideas of women's emancipation, but also those who were active defenders of the women's liberation movement. A. I. Herzen, for example, was indignant at the fact that “a woman’s world is limited to the bedroom and kitchen,” but at the same time connected the possibility of a woman’s self-realization with the range of her natural callings: “A woman has great family responsibilities in relation to her husband - the same ones that which her husband has for her, and the title of mother raises her above her husband, and here is the woman in all her triumph: the woman is more a mother than the man is a father; the matter of primary education is a social matter, a matter of the greatest importance, and it belongs to mathematics

ri. The world of religion, art, the universal is revealed to a woman in exactly the same way as to us, with the difference that she brings grace to everything, the irresistible charm of meekness and love.”

Chernyshevsky expands the sphere of the “universal” for women. This is no longer only “religion”, “art”, “great family responsibilities regarding the husband” and motherhood, but also social activity. Thus, Vera Pavlovna, in whose image Chernyshevsky embodied his ideas about a new, i.e., emancipated female personality, is distinguished by “independence” and “independence”, which she achieved through participation in socially significant work: she gives lessons, works in sewing workshops , preparing for medical practice.

At the same time, however, the emancipated women themselves, for example A. Kollontai, pointed out the “schematic nature” of Verochka’s image, which did not allow “to see in him a literary, much less a life type.”

More or less consistently, Chernyshevsky managed to destructure the sociocultural myth about the creation of a woman by a man. The writer shows that his heroine, even before meeting Lopukhov, “a man of high intelligence,” was aware of the discrepancy between her worldview and the ideas about life that were characteristic of her immediate environment. Moreover, Vera Pavlovna actively defended her views, rebelled, and fought against her parental authority. In her first husband, Lopukhov, the heroine found not so much a patron or leader, but a friend who helped her “break out of the basement” and take her first steps in life. free life. New character Vera Pavlovna felt the relationship between a man and a woman already when she met Lopukhov, admitting to him that he looked at her completely differently than other men: “You look straight, simply. No, your look doesn’t offend me.” The fictitious marriage proposed by Lopukhov as a means of liberating Verochka from family oppression is at first really

was like that. But it was trust and respect for each other that made them marital relations truly complete.

Chernyshevsky organizes the models of marriage and family relations of the main characters of the novel in accordance with the principles of love ethics proposed by utopian socialists. Vera Pavlovna, for example, on the advice of Lopukhov, carefully studied the work of V. Considerant “Destine’e Sociale”. From the point of view of “new people,” love helps them “elevate” and “improve mentally and morally.” In addition, love, purified from passions and subordinated to reason, has the property of “expanding from the loved one to all people.” Therefore, when a triangle arises in the love relationship of “new people” (Lopukhov - Vera Pavlovna - Kirsanov), Lopukhov selflessly goes towards the happiness of his wife with another person. In his farewell message, he wrote: “I embarrassed your calm. I'm leaving the stage. Don't be sorry, I love you both so much that I am very happy with my determination. Goodbye."

At the same time, the plot of the novel reveals that the love ethics of the “new people” cannot claim absolute harmony. In these relationships there is potentially an element of betrayal, due to the principle of freedom to satisfy the desires of one's own nature. Freedom in love implies that at any moment a man or woman can break off an intimate relationship, following the call of their heart. The love unions of “new people” depicted in the novel “What is to be done?” exist, as it were, outside the family-clan space, separately, outside the integrity of time (the past has been discarded, the future is still a dream, a dream). In the works of Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin and other contemporaries of Chernyshevsky, the theme of love, family is necessarily correlated with the theme of clan, soil. Dostoevsky believed that “socialism (and especially in the Russian version) requires cutting off all ties.”

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Burmistrova S.V., Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor.

Tomsk State Pedagogical University.

St. Kyiv, 60, Tomsk, Tomsk region, Russia, 634050.

Email: [email protected]

The material was received by the editor on May 19. 2010

S. V. Burmistrova

LOVE AND FAMILY PROBLEMS IN THE RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE OF XIX CENTURY

The article presents an analysis of the Russian literature 1840-60 in the context of philosophical ideas about the love and marriage. The author's views on the construction of plot in the general and marginal texts of the literary process of the 19th century.

Key words: gender research, feminism, patriarchal mentality, philosophy of gender, dialogue of culture, comparative analysis, belles-lettres.

Tomsk State Pedagogical University.

Ul. Kievskaya, 60, Tomsk, Tomskaya oblast, Russia, 634061.