Characteristics of the hero
OLGA MESHCHERSKAYA is the heroine of I. A. Bunin’s story “Easy Breathing” (1916). The story is based on a newspaper chronicle: an officer shot a high school student. In this rather unusual incident, Bunin captured the image of an absolutely natural and uninhibited young woman who entered the adult world early and easily. O.M. - a sixteen-year-old girl about whom the author writes that “she did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown school dresses.” The point is not at all about beauty, but about inner freedom, unusual and unusual for a person of her age and gender. The charm of the image lies precisely in the fact that O.M. doesn't think about his own life. She lives to the fullest, without fear or caution. Bunin himself once said: “We call it the womb, but I called it light breathing. Such naivety and ease in everything, both in audacity and in death, is “easy breathing,” “not thinking.” O.M. she has neither the lazy charm of an adult woman nor human talents, she only has this freedom and lightness of being, not constrained by decency, and also a rare human dignity for her age, with which she brushes aside all the reproaches of the headmistress and all the rumors around her name. O.M. - personality is precisely a fact of his life. Psychologist L. S. Vygotsky especially highlighted the heroine’s love conflicts in the story, emphasizing that it was this frivolity that “led her astray.” K. G. Paustovsky argued that “this is not a story, but an insight, life itself with its awe and love, the writer’s sad and calm reflection - an epitaph to girlish beauty.” Kucherovsky believed that this was not just an “epitaph for girlish beauty,” but an epitaph for the spiritual “aristocratism” of existence, which is opposed by the brute force of “plebeianism.”
This story allows us to conclude that it belongs to the short story genre. The author managed to convey in a short form the life story of high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, but not only her. According to the definition of the genre, a short story in a unique, small, specific event must recreate the entire life of the hero, and through it, the life of society. Ivan Alekseevich, through modernism, creates a unique image of a girl who is still only dreaming of true love.
Not only Bunin wrote about this feeling (“Easy Breathing”). The analysis of love was carried out, perhaps, by all the great poets and writers, very different in character and worldview, therefore, many shades of this feeling are presented in Russian literature. When we open a work by another author, we always find something new. Bunin also has his own. In his works there are often tragic endings, ending with the death of one of the heroes, but it is more light than deeply tragic. We encounter a similar ending after finishing reading “Easy Breathing.”
First impression
At first glance, the events seem messy. The girl plays at love with an ugly officer, far from the circle to which the heroine belonged. In the story, the author uses the so-called “proof by return” technique, since even with such vulgar external events, love remains something untouched and bright, does not touch everyday dirt. Arriving at Olya’s grave, the class teacher asks herself how to combine all this with a pure look at “that terrible thing” that is now associated with the name of the schoolgirl. This question does not require an answer, which is present in the entire text of the work. They permeate Bunin's story "Easy Breathing".
The character of the main character
Olya Meshcherskaya seems to be the embodiment of youth, thirsty for love, a lively and dreamy heroine. Her image, contrary to the laws of public morality, captivates almost everyone, even the lower grades. And even the guardian of morals, teacher Olya, who condemned her for growing up early, after the death of the heroine, comes to the cemetery to her grave every week, constantly thinks about her and at the same time even feels, “like all people devoted to a dream,” happy.
The peculiarity of the character of the main character of the story is that she longs for happiness and can find it even in such an ugly reality in which she had to find herself. Bunin uses “light breathing” as a metaphor for naturalness and vital energy. the so-called “ease of breathing” is invariably present in Olya, surrounding her with a special halo. People feel this and therefore are drawn to the girl, without even being able to explain why. She infects everyone with her joy.
Contrasts
Bunin's work "Easy Breathing" is built on contrasts. From the very first lines, a double feeling arises: a deserted, sad cemetery, a cold wind, a gray April day. And against this background - a portrait of a high school student with lively, joyful eyes - a photograph on the cross. Olya's whole life is also built on contrast. A cloudless childhood is contrasted with the tragic events that occurred in the last year of the life of the heroine of the story “Easy Breathing.” Ivan Bunin often emphasizes the contrast, the gap between the real and the apparent, the internal state and the external world.
Story plot
The plot of the work is quite simple. The happy young schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya first becomes the prey of her father's friend, an elderly sensualist, and then a living target for the aforementioned officer. Her death prompts a cool lady - a lonely woman - to “serve” her memory. However, the apparent simplicity of this plot is violated by a bright contrast: a heavy cross and lively, joyful eyes, which involuntarily makes the reader’s heart clench. The simplicity of the plot turned out to be deceptive, since the story “Easy Breathing” (Ivan Bunin) is not only about the fate of a girl, but also about the unfortunate lot of a classy lady who is used to living someone else’s life. Olya’s relationship with the officer is also interesting.
Relationship with the officer
In the plot of the story, the already mentioned officer kills Olya Meshcherskaya, involuntarily misled by her game. He did this because he was close to her, believed that she loved him, and could not survive the destruction of this illusion. Not every person can arouse such strong passion in another. This speaks of Olya’s bright personality, says Bunin (“Easy Breathing”). The act of the main character was cruel, but she, as you might guess, having a special character, stupefied the officer unintentionally. Olya Meshcherskaya was looking for a dream in her relationship with him, but she failed to find it.
Is Olya to blame?
Ivan Alekseevich believed that birth is not the beginning, and therefore death is not the end of the existence of the soul, the symbol of which is the definition used by Bunin - “light breathing.” Analysis of it in the text of the work allows us to conclude that this concept is souls. It does not disappear without a trace after death, but returns to its source. The work “Easy Breathing” is about this, and not just about Olya’s fate.
It is no coincidence that Ivan Bunin delays explaining the reasons for the heroine’s death. The question arises: “Maybe she is to blame for what happened?” After all, she is frivolous, flirts either with the high school student Shenshin, or, albeit unconsciously, with her father’s friend Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin, who seduced her, then for some reason promises the officer to marry him. Why did she need all this? Bunin (“Easy Breathing”) analyzes the motives of the heroine’s actions. It gradually becomes clear that Olya is as beautiful as the elements. And just as immoral. She strives in everything to reach the depth, to the limit, to the innermost essence, and the opinion of others does not interest the heroine of the work “Easy Breathing”. Ivan Bunin wanted to tell us that in the actions of the schoolgirl there is no feeling of revenge, no meaningful vice, no firmness of decision, no pain of repentance. It turns out that the feeling of fullness of life can be destructive. Even the unconscious longing for her is tragic (like that of a classy lady). Therefore, every step, every detail of Olya’s life threatens with disaster: pranks and curiosity can lead to serious consequences, to violence, and frivolous play with the feelings of other people can lead to murder. Bunin leads us to such a philosophical thought.
"Easy breath" of life
The essence of the heroine is that she lives, and not just plays a role in a play. This is also her fault. To be alive without following the rules of the game means to be doomed. The environment in which Meshcherskaya exists is completely devoid of a holistic, organic sense of beauty. Life here is subject to strict rules, violation of which leads to inevitable retribution. Therefore, Olya’s fate turns out to be tragic. Her death is natural, Bunin believes. “Light Breath,” however, did not die with the heroine, but dissolved in the air, filling it with itself. In the finale, the idea of the immortality of the soul sounds like this.
A person's life is short, often not lasting more than one century, but it is even more offensive when they die young. The image and characterization of Olya Meshcherskaya in Bunin’s story “Easy Breathing” with quotes is an example of the tragic fate of a young beauty from a rich noble family.
Olya's appearance was striking. At first she is an ordinary high school student. The happy schoolgirl from a wealthy noble family was simply pretty. Carefree, playful girl
“...began to blossom and develop by leaps and bounds.”
Fourteen-year-old Olya is already a girl with a thin waist and clearly visible breasts. The body shape could be called in one word - charm. At fifteen years old:
“I was already reputed to be a beauty.”
Olya had special properties: she was not spoiled:
“ink stains on the fingers, disheveled hair, stranded when a knee fell while running.”
The girl captivated with her sincerity and cuteness, attractiveness and uniqueness. She had good hair that allowed her to create colorful hairstyles. A beautifully decorated head caused envy.
The author reveals this feeling not among women of the same age, but among older women. It becomes clear how offensive it was for the headmistress of the gymnasium to see in front of her something that does not exist and never did exist for her. The noblewoman Meshcherskaya knows how to behave:
“...sat down as easily and gracefully as only she could.”
Her movements make her stand out from the crowd; the schoolgirl is always visible, liked and becomes an ideal to follow.
The girl is keen on reading. She found in her father's books what a real woman should be like. From the descriptions, Olya created her ideal, which she strove for:
“eyes boiling with resin...eyelashes black as night...small legs...moderately large breasts...sloping shoulders...”.
But the girl caught the main quality of beauties - easy breathing. Olya asked her friend to determine if her breathing was like that.
A carefree attitude towards life and the world around us can be compared to the wind sweeping over the earth and human passions. Young woman
“... playful and very careless to those instructions that she ...”
They do. For her childlike spontaneity, sincerity and openness, Olya is loved by her peers and junior high school students, especially first-graders.
Fans surround the beauty, she likes it, she begins to play with the destinies of men: high school student Shenshin, a Cossack officer. Shenshin tried to commit suicide, an enraged officer kills Olya in front of the crowd.
“... the officer told the judicial investigator that Meshcherskaya lured him, was close to him, vowed to be his wife...”.
Olya simply mocks men. Why does Meshcherskaya have such an attitude towards the opposite sex? The reason is probably that she became a woman early, not because of her desire, but due to the will of circumstances and excessive emancipation. 56-year-old Malyutin used his power and captured the beauty. All that remains from the first intimacy is a feeling of disgust:
“Now I have only one way out... I feel such disgust for him that I can’t get over it!”
The girl writes down everything she experiences. The diary proves that outward recklessness is just a shell. In fact, Olya is a thoughtful and holistic person. She evaluates what happened, realizes that her life is over and begins to behave as if every moment is her last:
“...Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun during her last winter...”
He leaves life happy, releasing his “light breath” in order to refresh the life around him, to take away tragedy and resentment. The last breath of the schoolgirl stands before the reader’s eyes for a long time. It feels like a cloud enveloping the soul, carrying it far away from earthly problems. You need to live with an open soul, clean breathing and faith in a happy ending.
A. Childhood.
V. Youth.
S. Episode with Shenshin.
D. Talk about breathing easy.
E. Arrival of Malyutin.
F. Connection with Malyutin.
G. Diary entry.
N. Last winter.
I. Episode with the officer.
K. Conversation with the boss.
L. Murder.
M. Funeral.
N. Interview with the investigator.
O. Grave.
II. COOL LADY
A. Cool lady
b. Dream about brother
With. The dream of an ideological worker.
d. Talk about breathing easy.
e. Dream of Ola Meshcherskaya.
f. Walks in the cemetery.
g. At the grave.
Let us now try to schematically outline what the author did with this material, giving it an artistic form, that is, we will ask ourselves, how then will the composition of this story be indicated in our drawing? To do this, let us connect, in the order of a compositional scheme, the individual points of these lines in the sequence in which the events are actually given in the story. All this is depicted in graphic diagrams (see p. 192). At the same time, we will conventionally designate with a curve from below any transition to an event chronologically earlier, that is, any return of the author back, and by a curve from above any transition to a subsequent event, chronologically more distant, that is, any leap of the story forward. We will receive two graphical diagrams: what does this complex and confusing curve, which is drawn in the figure at first glance, represent? It means, of course, only one thing: the events in the story do not develop in a straight line {51} 59 , as would be the case in everyday life, but unfold in leaps and bounds. The story jumps back and forth, connecting and contrasting the most distant points of the narrative, often moving from one point to another, completely unexpectedly. In other words, our curves clearly express the analysis of the plot and plot of a given story, and if we follow the order of individual elements according to the composition scheme, we will understand our curve from beginning to end as a symbol of the movement of the story. This is the melody of our short story. So, for example, instead of telling the above content in chronological order - how Olya Meshcherskaya was a high school student, how she grew up, how she turned into a beauty, how her fall took place, how her relationship with the officer began and proceeded, how it gradually grew and suddenly her murder broke out, how she was buried, what her grave was like, etc. - instead, the author begins immediately with a description of her grave, then moves on to her early childhood, then suddenly talks about her last winter, after which she tells us during a conversation with the boss about her fall, which happened last summer, after this we learn about her murder, almost at the very end of the story we learn about one seemingly insignificant episode of her high school life dating back to the distant past. These deviations are depicted by our curve. Thus, graphically our diagrams depict what we above called the static structure of a story or its anatomy. It remains to move on to revealing its dynamic composition or its physiology, that is, to find out why the author designed this material in exactly this way, for what purpose he starts from the end and at the end speaks as if about the beginning, for the sake of which all these events are rearranged.
We must determine the function of this rearrangement, that is, we must find the expediency and direction of that seemingly meaningless and confused curve, which for us symbolizes the composition of the story. To do this, it is necessary to move from analysis to synthesis and try to unravel the physiology of the story from the meaning and from the life of its entire organism.
What is the content of the story or its material, taken in itself - as it is? What does the system of actions and events that stands out from this story as its obvious plot tell us? It is hardly possible to define the nature of all this more clearly and simply than with the words “everyday dregs.” In the very plot of this story there is absolutely not a single bright feature, and if we take these events in their life and everyday meaning, we have before us simply an unremarkable, insignificant and meaningless life of a provincial schoolgirl, a life that clearly springs up on rotten roots and , from the point of view of assessing life, gives a rotten color and remains completely sterile. Maybe this life, this everyday dregs is at least somewhat idealized, embellished in the story, maybe its dark sides are shaded, maybe it is elevated to the “pearl of creation,” and maybe the author simply portrays it in a rosy light , as they usually say? Maybe he even, having grown up in the same life, finds a special charm and charm in these events, and maybe our assessment simply differs from the one that the author gives to his events and his heroes?
We must say plainly that none of these assumptions hold up when examining the story. On the contrary, the author not only does not try to hide this everyday dregs - it is naked everywhere in him, he depicts it with tactile clarity, as if he allows our feelings to touch it, feel it, feel it, see it with our own eyes, put our fingers into the sores of this life. The emptiness, meaninglessness, and insignificance of this life are emphasized by the author, as is easy to show, with tactile force. This is how the author speaks about his heroine: “... her high school fame was imperceptibly strengthened, and there were already rumors that she was flighty, that she could not live without fans, that the high school student Shenshin was madly in love with her, that it was as if she loved him too, but so changeable in her treatment of him that he attempted suicide..." Or in these rude and harsh expressions, revealing the undisguised truth of life, the author speaks about her connection with the officer: "... Meshcherskaya lured him, was in touch with him, vowed to be his wife, and at the station, on the day of the murder, seeing him off to Novocherkassk, she suddenly said that she had never thought of loving him, that all this talk about marriage was just her mockery of him...” Or this is how mercilessly the same thing is shown again the very truth is in the entry in the diary, depicting the scene of rapprochement with Malyutin: “He is fifty-six years old, but he is still very handsome and always very well dressed - I just didn’t like that he arrived in a lionfish - he smells all of English cologne, and his eyes very young, black, and the beard is gracefully divided into two long parts and completely silver.”
In this entire scene, as it is recorded in the diary, there is not a single feature that could hint to us about the movement of living feeling and could in any way illuminate the heavy and hopeless picture that develops in the reader when reading it. The word love is not even mentioned, and it seems that there is no word more alien and inappropriate for these pages. And so, without the slightest clarity, in one muddy tone, all the material about life, everyday conditions, views, concepts, experiences, events of this life is given. Consequently, the author not only does not hide, but, on the contrary, reveals and allows us to feel in all its reality the truth that lies at the heart of the story. We repeat once again: its essence, taken from this side, can be defined as everyday dregs, like the muddy water of life. However, this is not the impression of the story as a whole.
It’s not for nothing that the story is called “Easy Breathing,” and you don’t have to look at it very carefully for a long time to discover that as a result of reading we get an impression that cannot be characterized otherwise than to say that it is the complete opposite of the impression that give the events that are narrated, taken by themselves. The author achieves exactly the opposite effect, and the true theme of his story, of course, is light breathing, and not the story of the confused life of a provincial schoolgirl. This is a story not about Olya Meshcherskaya, but about light breathing; its main feature is that feeling of liberation, lightness, detachment and complete transparency of life, which cannot in any way be deduced from the very events that lie at its basis. Nowhere is this duality of the story presented as clearly as in the story of the classy lady Olya Meshcherskaya, which frames the entire story. This cool lady, who is amazed, bordering on stupidity, by the grave of Olya Meshcherskaya, who would give half her life if only this dead wreath would not be in front of her eyes, and who, deep down in her soul, is still happy, like all people in love and devoted to a passionate dream , - suddenly gives a completely new meaning and tone to the whole story. This classy lady has long been living with some kind of fiction that replaces her real life, and Bunin, with the merciless ruthlessness of a true poet, tells us quite clearly that this impression of light breathing coming from his story is a fiction that replaces his real life. And in fact, what is striking here is the bold comparison that the author allows. He names three fictions in a row that replaced this classy lady’s real life: at first, such a fiction was her brother, a poor and unremarkable ensign - this is reality, and the fiction was that she lived in a strange expectation that her fate would somehow will change fabulously thanks to him. Then she lived the dream that she was an ideological worker, and again it was a fiction that replaced reality. “The death of Olya Meshcherskaya captivated her with a new dream,” says the author, bringing this new invention very closely to the two previous ones. With this technique, he again completely doubles our impression, and, forcing the entire story to be refracted and reflected as in a mirror in the perception of the new heroine, he decomposes, as in a spectrum, its rays into their component parts. We quite clearly feel and experience the split life of this story, what is in it from reality and what is from dreams. And from here our thought easily moves on its own to the analysis of the structure that we made above. The straight line is the reality contained in this story, and the complex curve of the construction of this reality, which we used to indicate the composition of the short story, is its light breathing. We guess: events are connected and linked in such a way that they lose their everyday burden and opaque darkness; they are melodically linked to each other, and in their build-ups, resolutions and transitions they seem to unravel the threads that bind them; they are released from those ordinary connections in which they are given to us in life and in the impression of life; they detach themselves from reality, they unite one with the other, just as words are united in a verse. We dare to formulate our guess and say that the author drew a complex curve in his story in order to destroy its everyday dregs, to transform its transparency, to detach it from reality, to transform water into wine, as a work of art always does. The words of a story or a poem carry its simple meaning, its water, and the composition, creating a new meaning above these words, on top of them, places it all on a completely different plane and transforms it into wine. Thus, the everyday story of a dissolute schoolgirl is transformed here into the light breath of Bunin’s story.
This is not difficult to confirm with completely visual, objective and indisputable indications and references to the story itself. Let's take the basic technique of this composition and we will immediately see what purpose is served by the first leap that the author allows himself when he begins with a description of the grave. This can be explained by somewhat simplifying the matter and reducing complex feelings to elementary and simple ones, approximately like this: if we were told the life story of Olya Meshcherskaya in chronological order, from beginning to end, what extraordinary tension would accompany our learning of her unexpected murder! The poet would create that special tension, that dam of our interest, which German psychologists, like Lipps, called the law of psychological dam, and literary theorists call “Spannung.” This law and this term only mean that if any psychological movement encounters an obstacle, then our tension begins to increase precisely in the place where we encountered the obstacle, and this is the tension of our interest, which every episode of the story pulls and directs towards the subsequent resolution would, of course, overwhelm our story. He would be filled with inexpressible tension. We would find out approximately in this order: how Olya Meshcherskaya lured the officer, how she entered into a relationship with him, how the vicissitudes of this relationship replaced one another, how she swore her love and talked about marriage, how she then began to mock him; we would have experienced, together with the heroes, the entire scene at the station and its final resolution, and we, of course, would have remained watching her with tension and anxiety in those short minutes when the officer, with her diary in his hands, having read the entry about Malyutin, went out onto the platform and unexpectedly shot her. This is the impression this event would make in the disposition of the story; it juxtaposes the true climax of the entire story, and around it the rest of the action is located. But if from the very beginning the author puts us in front of the grave and if we constantly learn the history of an already dead life, if further we already know that she was killed, and only after that we learn how this happened - it becomes clear to us that this the composition carries within itself the resolution of the tension that is inherent in these events taken by themselves; and that we read the murder scene and the diary entry scene with a completely different feeling than we would have done if events had unfolded before us in a straight line. And so, step by step, moving from one episode to another, from one phrase to another, it would be possible to show that they are selected and linked in such a way that all the tension contained in them, all the heavy and cloudy feeling is resolved, released, communicated then and in such a connection that it produces a completely different impression than it would have produced if taken in the natural course of events.
It is possible, by following the structure of the form indicated in our diagram, to show step by step that all the skillful leaps of the story ultimately have one goal - to extinguish, destroy the immediate impression that comes to us from these events, and turn, transform it into something else, completely opposite and opposite to the first.
This law of destruction by the form of content can be very easily illustrated even by the construction of individual scenes, individual episodes, individual situations. For example, in what amazing context we learn about the murder of Olya Meshcherskaya. We were already with the author at her grave, we had just learned from a conversation with the boss about her fall, Malyutin’s surname had just been mentioned for the first time, “and a month after this conversation, a Cossack officer, ugly and plebeian in appearance, did not have exactly nothing to do with the circle to which Olya Meshcherskaya belonged, he shot her on the station platform, among a large crowd of people who had just arrived by train.” It is worth taking a closer look at the structure of this phrase alone in order to discover the entire teleology of the style of this story. Pay attention to how the most important word is lost in the heap of descriptions surrounding it from all sides, as if extraneous, secondary and unimportant; how the word “shot” is lost, the most terrible and terrible word of the entire story, and not just this phrase, how it is lost somewhere on the slope between the long, calm, even description of the Cossack officer and the description of the platform, a large crowd of people and the just arrived train . We will not be mistaken if we say that the very structure of this phrase muffles this terrible shot, deprives it of its power and turns it into some kind of almost mimic sign, into some kind of barely noticeable movement of thoughts, when all the emotional coloring of this event is extinguished, pushed aside, destroyed . Or pay attention to how we learn for the first time about the fall of Olya Meshcherskaya: in the boss’s cozy office, where there is the smell of fresh lilies of the valley and the warmth of a shiny Dutch woman, amidst reprimands about expensive shoes and hairstyle. And again the terrible or, as the author himself says, “incredible confession that stunned the boss” is described as follows: “And then Meshcherskaya, without losing her simplicity and calmness, suddenly politely interrupted her:
Sorry, madame, you are mistaken: I am a woman. And you know who is to blame for this? Dad's friend and neighbor, and your brother, Alexey Mikhailovich Malyutin. It happened last summer, in the village..."
The shot is told as a small detail of a description of a train that has just arrived, here a stunning confession is reported as a small detail of a conversation about shoes and hair; and this very circumstance - “Papa’s friend and neighbor, and your brother, Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin” - of course, has no other meaning than to extinguish, destroy the stupefaction and improbability of this confession. And at the same time, the author now emphasizes the other, real side of both the shot and the confession. And in the scene at the cemetery itself, the author again calls in real words the vital meaning of events and talks about the amazement of a classy lady who cannot understand “how to combine with this pure look that terrible, what is now connected with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya?" This terrible, which is connected with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya, is given in the story all the time, step by step, its horror is not understated at all, but the story itself does not produce a terrible impression on us, this terrible thing is experienced by us in some completely different feeling, and this story itself For some reason, the terrible thing has the strange name of “light breathing,” and for some reason everything is permeated with the breath of a cold and subtle spring.
Let's dwell on the title: the title is given to the story, of course, not in vain; it reveals the most important theme, it outlines the dominant feature that determines the entire structure of the story. This concept, introduced into aesthetics by Christiansen, turns out to be deeply fruitful, and it is absolutely impossible to do without it when analyzing any thing. In fact, every story, picture, poem is, of course, a complex whole, composed of completely different elements, organized to varying degrees, in different hierarchies of subordination and connection; and in this complex whole there is always some dominant and dominant moment, which determines the construction of the rest of the story, the meaning and name of each of its parts. And this dominant feature of our story is, of course, “light breathing” {52} 60 . It appears, however, at the very end of the story in the form of a cool lady’s recollection of the past, of a conversation she once overheard between Olya Meshcherskaya and her friend. This conversation about female beauty, told in the semi-comic style of “old funny books,” serves as the pointe of the entire novel, the catastrophe in which its true meaning is revealed. In all this beauty, the “old funny book” assigns the most important place to “easy breathing.” “Easy breathing! But I have it,” listen to how I sigh, “I really do?” We seem to hear the very sigh, and in this comic-sounding story written in a funny style, we suddenly discover a completely different meaning, reading the final catastrophic words of the author: “Now this light breath has again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind...” These words seem to close the circle, bringing the end to the beginning. How much can sometimes mean and how much meaning a small word can breathe in an artistically constructed phrase. Such a word in this phrase, which carries within itself the entire catastrophe of the story, is the word "This" easy breathing. This: we are talking about that air that was just named, about that light breathing that Olya Meshcherskaya asked her friend to listen to; and then again the catastrophic words: “... in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind...” These three words completely concretize and unite the whole idea of the story, which begins with a description of the cloudy sky and the cold spring wind. The author seems to say in final words, summarizing the whole story, that everything that happened, everything that constituted the life, love, murder, death of Olya Meshcherskaya - all this, in essence, is only one event - This light breathing again dissipated in the world, in this cloudy sky in this cold spring wind. And all the descriptions of the grave, and the April weather, and gray days, and the cold wind, previously given by the author - all of this is suddenly united, as if gathered at one point, included and introduced into the story: the story suddenly receives a new meaning and a new expressive meaning - this not just a Russian county landscape, it’s not just a spacious county cemetery, it’s not just the sound of the wind in a porcelain wreath, it’s all the light breath scattered in the world, which in its everyday meaning is still the same shot, the same Malyutin, all that terrible , which is connected with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya. It is not for nothing that pointe is characterized by theorists as an ending on an unstable moment or an ending in music on a dominant. This story at the very end, when we have already learned about everything, when the whole story of Olya Meshcherskaya’s life and death has passed before us, when we already know everything that might interest us about the classy lady, suddenly throws an unexpected poignancy at everything we have heard a completely new light, and this leap that the short story makes, jumping from the grave to this story about easy breathing, is a decisive leap for the composition of the whole, which suddenly illuminates this whole whole from a completely new side for us.
And the final phrase, which we called catastrophic above, resolves this unstable ending on the dominant - this is an unexpected funny confession about easy breathing and brings together both plans of the story. And here the author does not at all obscure reality and does not merge it with fiction. What Olya Meshcherskaya tells her friend is funny in the most precise sense of the word, and when she retells the book: “...well, of course, black eyes, boiling with resin, by God, that’s what it’s written: boiling with resin! - eyelashes as black as night...” etc., all this is simple and definitely funny. And this real real air - “listen to how I sigh” - also, insofar as it belongs to reality, is simply a funny detail of this strange conversation. But it, taken in a different context, now helps the author to unite all the disparate parts of his story, and in catastrophic lines the whole story suddenly runs before us with extraordinary conciseness from this light sigh and this cold spring wind on the grave, and we are really convinced that this is a story about easy breathing.
It could be shown in detail that the author uses a number of auxiliary means that serve the same purpose. We have pointed out only one most noticeable and clear method of artistic design, namely the plot composition; but, of course, in the processing of the impression coming on us from events, in which, we think, lies the very essence of the effect of art on us, not only the plot composition plays a role, but also a whole series of other moments. In the way the author tells these events, in what language, in what tone, how he chooses words, how he constructs phrases, whether he describes the scenes or gives a brief summary of their results, whether he directly quotes the diaries or dialogues of his heroes or simply introduces us to the event that took place , - all this is also reflected in the artistic development of the theme, which has the same meaning as the indicated technique we have discussed.
In particular, the choice of facts itself is of greatest importance. For the sake of convenience, we proceeded from the fact that we contrasted the disposition of the composition as a natural moment with the artificial moment, forgetting that the disposition itself, that is, the choice of facts to be formalized, is already a creative act. In the life of Olya Meshcherskaya there were a thousand events, a thousand conversations, the connection with the officer contained dozens of twists and turns, Shenshin was not the only one in her gymnasium hobbies, she did not let slip about Malyutin to the boss for the only time, but for some reason the author chose these episodes, discarding thousands of others , and already in this act of choice, selection, sifting out the unnecessary, of course, a creative act was reflected. Just as an artist, when drawing a tree, does not, and cannot, write out each leaf individually, but gives either a general, summary impression of a spot, or several separate sheets - in the same way, a writer, selecting only those necessary for him features of events, powerfully processes and rearranges life material. And, in essence, we begin to go beyond this selection when we begin to extend our life assessments to this material.
Blok perfectly expressed this rule of creativity in his poem when he contrasted, on the one hand,
Life is without beginning and end.
A case awaits us all...
and on the other:
Erase random features -
And you will see: the world is beautiful.
In particular, the organization of the writer’s speech itself, his language, structure, rhythm, and melody of the story usually deserve special attention. That unusually calm, full-fledged classical phrase in which Bunin unfolds his short story, of course, contains all the elements and forces necessary for the artistic implementation of the theme. We will subsequently have to talk about the paramount importance that the writer’s structure of speech has on our breathing. We made a number of experimental recordings of our breathing while reading passages of prose and poetry, having different rhythmic structures, in particular, we completely recorded our breathing while reading this story; Blonsky is absolutely right when he says that, essentially speaking, we feel the way we breathe, and that breathing system is extremely indicative of the emotional effect of each work. {53} 61 , which corresponds to it. By forcing us to spend our breath sparingly, in small portions, to hold it, the author easily creates a general emotional background for our reaction, a background of a sadly hidden mood. On the contrary, forcing us to throw out all the air in our lungs at once and energetically replenish this supply, the poet creates a completely different emotional background for our aesthetic reaction.
We will separately have occasion to talk about the significance that we attach to these recordings of the respiratory curve, and what these recordings teach. But it seems to us appropriate and significant that our very breath while reading this story, as the pneumographic recording shows, is lung breathing, that we read about murder, about death, about turbidity, about everything terrible that is connected with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya, but at this time we breathe as if we are not perceiving something terrible, but as if each new phrase carries within itself illumination and resolution from this terrible thing. And instead of painful tension, we experience almost painful lightness. This outlines, in any case, an affective contradiction, a clash of two opposing feelings, which, apparently, constitutes an amazing psychological law of an artistic short story. I say amazing, because with all traditional aesthetics we are prepared for the exact opposite understanding of art: for centuries, aestheticians have been talking about the harmony of form and content, that form illustrates, complements, accompanies the content, and suddenly we discover that this is the greatest the delusion that form is at war with content, struggles with it, overcomes it, and that the true psychological meaning of our aesthetic reaction seems to lie in this dialectical contradiction of content and form. In fact, it seemed to us that, wanting to depict light breathing, Bunin had to choose the most lyrical, the most serene, the most transparent that can only be found in everyday events, incidents and characters. Why didn’t he tell us about some first love, transparent as air, pure and unobscured? Why did he choose the most terrible, rough, heavy and muddy thing when he wanted to develop the theme of easy breathing?
We seem to come to the conclusion that in a work of art there is always some contradiction, some internal discrepancy between the material and the form, that the author selects, as it were, deliberately difficult, resistant material, one that resists with its properties all the author’s efforts to say what he wants to say. And the more irresistible, stubborn and hostile the material itself, the more suitable it seems to be for the author. And the formality that the author gives to this material is not aimed at revealing the properties inherent in the material itself, revealing the life of a Russian schoolgirl to the end in all its typicality and depth, analyzing and overlooking events in their real essence, but precisely in the reverse side: to overcome these properties, to make the terrible speak in the language of “light breathing”, and to make the dregs of everyday life ring and ring like a cold spring wind.
ChapterVIII
The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Hamlet's riddle. “Subjective” and “objective” decisions. Hamlet's character problem. The structure of the tragedy: plot and plot. Hero identification. Catastrophe.
The tragedy of Hamlet is unanimously considered mysterious. It seems to everyone that it differs from other tragedies by Shakespeare himself and other authors primarily in that in it the course of action is unfolded in such a way that it certainly causes some misunderstanding and surprise in the viewer. Therefore, research and critical works about this play are almost always interpretive in nature, and they are all built on the same model - they try to solve the riddle posed by Shakespeare. This riddle can be formulated as follows: why is Hamlet, who must kill the king immediately after talking with the shadow, unable to do this and the whole tragedy is filled with the story of his inaction? To resolve this riddle, which really confronts the mind of every reader, because Shakespeare in the play did not give a direct and clear explanation of Hamlet’s slowness, critics look for the reasons for this slowness in two things: in the character and experiences of Hamlet himself or in objective conditions. The first group of critics reduces the problem to the problem of Hamlet's character and tries to show that Hamlet does not take revenge immediately either because his moral feelings are opposed to the act of revenge, or because he is indecisive and weak-willed by his very nature, or because, as Goethe pointed out, too much work has been placed on too weak shoulders. And since none of these interpretations fully explain the tragedy, we can say with confidence that all these interpretations do not have any scientific significance, since the completely opposite of each of them can be defended with equal right. Researchers of the opposite kind are trusting and naive towards a work of art and try to understand Hamlet’s slowness from the structure of his mental life, as if he were a living and real person, and in general their arguments are almost always arguments from life and from the meaning of human nature, but not from artistic construction plays. These critics go so far as to claim that Shakespeare’s goal was to show a weak-willed person and to unfold the tragedy that arises in the soul of a person who is called to accomplish a great deed, but who does not have the necessary strength for this. They understood “Hamlet” for the most part as a tragedy of powerlessness and lack of will, completely disregarding a number of scenes that depict in Hamlet features of a completely opposite character and show that Hamlet is a man of exceptional determination, courage, courage, that he does not hesitate at all for moral reasons etc.
Another group of critics looked for the reasons for Hamlet’s slowness in those objective obstacles that lie in the way of achieving his goal. They pointed out that the king and the courtiers have very strong opposition to Hamlet, that Hamlet does not kill the king right away because he cannot kill him. This group of critics, following in the footsteps of Werder, argues that Hamlet’s task was not to kill the king at all, but to expose him, prove his guilt to everyone, and only then punish him. Many arguments can be found to defend this opinion, but an equally large number of arguments taken from the tragedy can easily refute this opinion. These critics do not notice two main things that make them cruelly mistaken: their first mistake boils down to the fact that we do not find such a formulation of the task facing Hamlet anywhere in the tragedy, either directly or indirectly. These critics invent new problems for Shakespeare that complicate matters and, again, use arguments from common sense and everyday plausibility more than the aesthetics of the tragic. Their second mistake is that they overlook a huge number of scenes and monologues, from which it becomes completely clear to us that Hamlet himself is aware of the subjective nature of his slowness, that he does not understand what makes him hesitate, that he cites several completely different reasons for this, and that none of them can bear the burden of serving as a support for the explanation of the whole action.
Both groups of critics agree that this tragedy is highly mysterious, and this admission alone completely destroys the power of persuasiveness of all their arguments.
After all, if their considerations are correct, then one would expect that there would be no mystery in the tragedy. What a mystery if Shakespeare deliberately wants to portray a hesitant and indecisive person. After all, we would then see and understand from the very beginning that we have slowness due to hesitation. A play on the theme of lack of will would be bad if this very lack of will was hidden in it under a riddle and if critics of the second school were right that the difficulty lies in external obstacles; Then it would be necessary to say that Hamlet is some kind of dramatic mistake of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare failed to present this struggle with external obstacles, which constitutes the true meaning of the tragedy, clearly and clearly, and it is also hidden under a riddle. Critics try to solve the riddle of Hamlet by bringing in something from the outside, some considerations and thoughts that are not given in the tragedy itself, and approach this tragedy as an incidental case of life, which must certainly be interpreted in terms of common sense. According to Berne’s beautiful expression, a veil is thrown over the picture, we are trying to lift this veil in order to see the picture; It turns out that the flair is drawn on the picture itself. And this is absolutely true. It is very easy to show that the riddle is drawn in the tragedy itself, that the tragedy is deliberately constructed as a riddle, that it must be comprehended and understood as a riddle that defies logical interpretation, and if critics want to remove the riddle from the tragedy, then they deprive the tragedy itself of its essential part.
Let's dwell on the mystery of the play itself. Criticism, almost unanimously, despite all the differences of opinion, notes this darkness and incomprehensibility, the incomprehensibility of the play. Gessner says that Hamlet is a tragedy of masks. We stand before Hamlet and his tragedy, as Kuno Fischer puts it, as if before a veil. We all think that there is some kind of image behind it, but in the end we are convinced that this image is nothing other than the veil itself. According to Berne, Hamlet is something incongruous, worse than death, not yet born. Goethe spoke of a grim problem regarding this tragedy. Schlegel equated it to an irrational equation; Baumgardt speaks of the complexity of the plot, which contains a long series of diverse and unexpected events. “The tragedy of Hamlet is really like a labyrinth,” agrees Kuno Fischer. “In Hamlet,” says G. Brandes, “there is no “general meaning” or idea of the whole hovering over the play. Certainty was not the ideal that floated before Shakespeare’s eyes... There are many mysteries and contradictions here, but the attractive power of the play is largely due to its very darkness” (21, p. 38). Speaking about “dark” books, Brandes finds that such a book is “Hamlet”: “In places in the drama, a gap opens, as it were, between the shell of the action and its core” (21, p. 31). “Hamlet remains a mystery,” says Ten-Brink, “but a mystery that is irresistibly attractive due to our consciousness that this is not an artificially invented mystery, but one that has its source in the nature of things” (102, p. 142). “But Shakespeare created a mystery,” says Dowden, “which remained for thought an element that forever excites it and is never fully explained by it. It cannot therefore be assumed that any idea or a magical phrase could solve the difficulties presented by the drama, or suddenly illuminate everything that is dark in it. Ambiguity is inherent in a work of art, which does not have in mind some task, but life; and in this life, in this history of the soul, which passed along the gloomy border between the darkness of the night and daylight, there is ... a lot that eludes any study and confuses it "(45, p. 131). Extracts could be continue ad infinitum, since all critics, with the exception of a few, stop at this. Shakespeare’s detractors, like Tolstoy, Voltaire and others, say the same thing in the preface to the tragedy “Semiramis”. “Hamlet is the greatest confusion,” Rümelin says that “the play as a whole is incomprehensible” (see 158, pp. 74 - 97).
But all this criticism sees in the darkness a shell behind which the core is hidden, a curtain behind which the image is hidden, a veil that hides the picture from our eyes. It is completely incomprehensible why, if Shakespeare's Hamlet really is what critics say about it, it is surrounded by such mystery and incomprehensibility. And it must be said that this mystery is often endlessly exaggerated and even more often based simply on misunderstandings. This kind of misunderstanding should include the opinion of Merezhkovsky, who says: “Hamlet’s father’s shadow appears in a solemn, romantic atmosphere, during thunderclaps and earthquakes... The father’s shadow tells Hamlet about afterlife secrets, about God, about revenge and blood” (73, p. 141). Where, other than the opera libretto, this can be read remains completely unclear. There is no need to add that nothing like this exists in the real Hamlet.
So, we can discard all the criticism that tries to separate the mystery from the tragedy itself, to remove the veil from the picture. However, it is interesting to see how such criticism responds to the mysterious character and behavior of Hamlet. Berne says: “Shakespeare is a king without rule. If he were like anyone else, one could say: Hamlet is a lyrical character, contrary to any dramatic treatment” (16, p. 404). Brandeis notes the same discrepancy. He says: “We must not forget that this dramatic phenomenon, the hero who does not act, was to a certain extent required by the very technique of this drama. If Hamlet had killed the king immediately upon receiving the revelation of the spirit, the play would have to be limited to just one act. Therefore, it was positively necessary to allow slowdowns to arise” (21, p. 37). But if this were so, it would simply mean that the plot is not suitable for tragedy, and that Shakespeare is artificially slowing down such an action, which could be completed immediately, and that he is introducing an extra four acts into such a play, which could perfectly fit into just one. The same is noted by Montague, who gives an excellent formula: “Inaction represents the action of the first three acts.” Beck comes very close to the same understanding. He explains everything from the contradiction between the plot of the play and the character of the hero. The plot, the course of action, belongs to the chronicle, into which Shakespeare poured the plot, and the character of Hamlet - from Shakespeare. There is an irreconcilable contradiction between both. “Shakespeare was not the complete master of his play and did not dispose of its individual parts quite freely,” the chronicle does. But that’s the whole point, and it’s so simple and true that you don’t need to look around for any other explanations. Thus, we move on to a new group of critics who are looking for clues to Hamlet either in terms of dramatic technique, as Brandes roughly expressed it, or in the historical and literary roots on which this tragedy grew up. But it is quite obvious that in this case this would mean that the rules of technique defeated the abilities of the writer or the historical nature of the plot outweighed the possibilities of its artistic treatment. In both cases, “Hamlet” would mean a mistake by Shakespeare, who failed to choose a suitable plot for his tragedy, and from this point of view Zhukovsky is absolutely right when he says that “Shakespeare’s masterpiece “Hamlet” seems to me a monster. I don’t understand it Those who find so much in Hamlet prove more their own richness of thought and imagination than the superiority of Hamlet. I cannot believe that Shakespeare, when writing his tragedy, thought everything that Tieck and Schlegel thought when reading it: they see in it and in its striking oddities the whole of human life with its incomprehensible mysteries... I asked him to read it to me "Hamlet" and after reading it, tell me in detail your thoughts about it monstrous freak."
Goncharov was of the same opinion, who argued that Hamlet cannot be played: “Hamlet is not a typical role - no one will play it, and there has never been an actor who would play it... He must exhaust himself in it like the eternal Jew... The properties of Hamlet are phenomena that are elusive in the ordinary, normal state of the soul.” However, it would be a mistake to assume that historical-literary and formal explanations that seek the reasons for Hamlet’s slowness in technical or historical circumstances necessarily tend to the conclusion that Shakespeare wrote a bad play. A number of researchers also point to the positive aesthetic meaning that lies in the use of this necessary slowness. Thus, Wolkenstein defends an opinion opposite to the opinion of Heine, Berne, Turgenev and others, who believe that Hamlet himself is a weak-willed creature. The opinion of these latter is perfectly expressed by the words of Hebbel, who says: “Hamlet is carrion even before the tragedy begins. What we see are roses and thorns that grow from this carrion.” Wolkenstein believes that the true nature of a dramatic work, and, in particular, tragedy, lies in the extraordinary tension of passions and that it is always based on the inner strength of the hero. Therefore, he believes that the view of Hamlet as a weak-willed person “rests... on that blind trust in verbal material, which sometimes characterized the most thoughtful literary criticism... A dramatic hero cannot be taken at his word, one must check how he acts. And Hamlet acts more than energetically; he alone wages a long and bloody struggle with the king, with the entire Danish court. In his tragic desire to restore justice, he decisively attacks the king three times: the first time he kills Polonius, the second time the king is saved by his prayer, the third time - at the end of the tragedy - Hamlet kills the king. Hamlet, with magnificent ingenuity, stages a “mousetrap” - a performance, checking the readings of the shadow; Hamlet cleverly eliminates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from his path. Truly he is waging a titanic struggle... Hamlet’s flexible and strong character corresponds to his physical nature: Laertes is the best swordsman in France, and Hamlet defeats him and turns out to be a more dexterous fighter (how this is contradicted by Turgenev’s indication of his physical weakness!). The hero of a tragedy has a maximum will... and we would not feel the tragic effect of “Hamlet” if the hero were indecisive and weak” (28, pp. 137, 138). What is curious about this opinion is not that it identifies the features that distinguish Hamlet’s strength and courage. This has been done many times, just as the obstacles that Hamlet faces are emphasized many times. The remarkable thing about this opinion is that it reinterprets all the material of the tragedy that speaks of Hamlet’s lack of will. Wolkenstein considers all those monologues in which Hamlet reproaches himself for lack of determination as self-stimulating will, and says that least of all they indicate his weakness, if you like, on the contrary.
Thus, according to this view, it turns out that all of Hamlet’s self-accusations of lack of will serve as further evidence of his extraordinary willpower. Waging a titanic struggle, showing maximum strength and energy, he is still dissatisfied with himself, demands even more from himself, and thus this interpretation saves the situation, showing that the contradiction was not introduced into the drama in vain and that this contradiction is only apparent. Words about lack of will must be understood as the strongest proof of will. However, this attempt does not solve the matter. In fact, it gives only an apparent solution to the question and repeats, in essence, the old point of view on the character of Hamlet, but, in essence, it does not find out why Hamlet hesitates, why he does not kill, as Brandeis demands, the king in the first act , now after the message of the shadow, and why the tragedy does not end with the end of the first act. With such a view, one must, willy-nilly, join the direction that comes from Werder and which points to external obstacles as the true reason for Hamlet’s slowness. But this means clearly contradicting the direct meaning of the play. Hamlet is waging a titanic struggle - one can still agree with this, based on the character of Hamlet himself. Let us assume that it really contains great forces. But with whom is he waging this struggle, against whom is it directed, how is it expressed? And as soon as you pose this question, you will immediately discover the insignificance of Hamlet’s opponents, the insignificance of the reasons holding him back from murder, his blind compliance with the intrigues directed against him. In fact, the critic himself notes that prayer saves the king, but is there any indication in the tragedy that Hamlet is a deeply religious person and that this reason belongs to spiritual movements of great strength? On the contrary, it emerges completely by accident and seems as if incomprehensible to us. If, instead of the king, he kills Polonius, thanks to a simple accident, it means that his determination has matured immediately after the performance. The question arises: why does his sword fall on the king only at the very end of the tragedy? Finally, no matter how planned, random, episodic, the fight he wages is always limited by local meaning - for the most part it is parrying blows directed at him, but not an attack. And the murder of Guildenstern and everything else is only self-defense, and, of course, we cannot call such human self-defense a titanic struggle. We will still have the opportunity to point out that all three times when Hamlet tries to kill the king, to which Wolkenstein always refers, that they indicate exactly the opposite of what the critic sees in them. The production of Hamlet at the 2nd Moscow Art Theater, which is close in meaning to this interpretation, provides just as little explanation. Here we tried to implement in practice what we just learned in theory. The directors proceeded from the collision of two types of human nature and the development of their struggle with each other. “One of them is a protester, a heroic one, fighting for the affirmation of what constitutes his life. This is our Hamlet. In order to more clearly identify and emphasize its overwhelming significance, we had to greatly shorten the text of the tragedy, throw out from it everything that could completely delay the whirlwind... Already from the middle of the second act, he takes the sword in his hands and does not let go of it until the end of the tragedy; We also emphasized Hamlet’s activity by condensing the obstacles that are encountered on Hamlet’s path. Hence the interpretation of the king and his associates. Claudia’s king personifies everything that hinders the heroic Hamlet... And our Hamlet will constantly be in a spontaneous and passionate struggle against everything that personifies the king... In order to thicken the colors, it seemed necessary to us to transfer the action of Hamlet to the Middle Ages.”
This is what the directors of this play say in the artistic manifesto that they released regarding this production. And with all frankness they point out that in order to translate it on stage, to understand the tragedy, they had to perform three operations on the play: first, to throw out from it everything that interferes with this understanding; the second is to thicken the obstacles that oppose Hamlet, and the third is to thicken the colors and transfer the action of Hamlet to the Middle Ages, while everyone sees in this play the personification of the Renaissance. It is quite clear that after such three operations any interpretation can be possible, but it is equally clear that these three operations turn the tragedy into something completely opposite to how it is written. And the fact that such radical operations on the play were required to carry out such an understanding is the best proof of the colossal discrepancy that exists between the true meaning of the story and between the meaning interpreted in this way. To illustrate the colossal contradiction of the play into which the theater falls, it is enough to refer to the fact that the king, who actually plays a very modest role in the play, in this situation turns into the heroic opposite of Hamlet himself {54} 62 . If Hamlet is the maximum of heroic, light will - its one pole, then the king is the maximum of anti-heroic, dark will - its other pole. To reduce the role of the king to the personification of the entire dark beginning of life - for this it would be necessary, in essence, to write a new tragedy with completely opposite tasks than those that faced Shakespeare.
Much closer to the truth come those interpretations of Hamlet's slowness, which also proceed from formal considerations and really shed a lot of light on the solution to this riddle, but which are made without any operations on the text of the tragedy. Such attempts include, for example, an attempt to understand some of the features of the construction of Hamlet, based on the technique and design of the Shakespearean stage {55} 63 , the dependence on which in no case can be denied and the study of which is deeply necessary for the correct understanding and analysis of the tragedy. This is the significance, for example, of the law of temporal continuity established by Prels in Shakespearean drama, which required from the viewer and from the author a completely different stage convention than the technique of our modern stage. Our play is divided into acts: each act conventionally designates only the short period of time that the events depicted in it occupy. Long-term events and their changes occur between acts, the viewer learns about them later. An act may be separated from another act by an interval of several years. All this requires some writing techniques. The situation was completely different in Shakespeare's time, when the action lasted continuously, when the play, apparently, did not break up into acts and its performance was not interrupted by intermissions, and everything happened before the eyes of the viewer. It is absolutely clear that such an important aesthetic convention had colossal compositional significance for any structure of the play, and we can understand a lot if we become acquainted with the technique and aesthetics of the contemporary stage of Shakespeare. However, when we go beyond the boundaries and begin to think that by establishing the technical necessity of some technique we have thereby already solved the problem, we fall into a deep mistake. It is necessary to show to what extent each technique was determined by the technology of the stage at that time. Necessary - but far from sufficient. It is also necessary to show the psychological significance of this technique, why out of many similar techniques Shakespeare chose this particular one, because it cannot be assumed that any techniques were explained entirely by their technical necessity, because this would mean admitting the power of bare technology in art. In fact, technology, of course, unconditionally determines the structure of the play, but within the limits of technical capabilities, every technical device and fact is, as it were, elevated to the dignity of an aesthetic fact. Here's a simple example. Silverswan says: “The poet was pressed by a certain structure of the stage. In addition, the category of examples emphasizing the inevitability of the removal of characters from the stage, resp. the impossibility of ending a play or stage with any troupe, includes cases when, during the course of the play, corpses appear on the stage: it is impossible was to force them to get up and leave, and so, for example, in “Hamlet” the useless Fortinbras appears with various people, in the end only to exclaim:
Remove the corpses.
In the midst of the battlefield they are conceivable,
And it’s out of place here, like traces of a massacre,
And everyone leaves and takes the bodies with them.
The reader will be able to increase the number of such examples without any difficulty by carefully reading at least one Shakespeare" (101, p. 30). Here is an example of a completely false interpretation of the final scene in Hamlet using technical considerations alone. It is absolutely indisputable that, without having curtain and unfolding the action on a stage open all the time in front of the listener, the playwright had to end the play every time so that someone would carry away the corpses. In this sense, the technique of the drama undoubtedly put pressure on Shakespeare. He certainly had to force the dead bodies to be carried away in the final one. stage of Hamlet, but he could have done it in different ways: they could have been carried away by the courtiers on stage or simply by the Danish guard. From this technical necessity, we can never conclude that Fortinbras appears. only then, to carry away the corpses, and that this Fortinbras is of no use to anyone. One has only to turn to this, for example, interpretation of the play, which is given by Kuno Fischer: he sees one theme of revenge, embodied in three different images - Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are all avengers for their fathers - and we will now see a deep artistic meaning in that with the final appearance of Fortinbras this theme receives its fullest completion and that the procession of the victorious Fortinbras is deeply meaningful where the corpses of the other two avengers lie, whose image was always opposed to this third image. This is how we easily find the aesthetic meaning of a technical law. We will have to turn to the help of such research more than once, and, in particular, the law established by Prels helps us a lot in clarifying Hamlet’s slowness. However, this is always only the beginning of the study, and not the entire study. The task will be each time to establish the technical necessity of a technique, and at the same time understand its aesthetic expediency. Otherwise, together with Brandes, we will have to conclude that the technique is entirely in the possession of the poet, and not the poet in the technique, and that Hamlet delays four acts because the plays were written in five, and not in one act, and we will never be able to understand why one and the same the technique, which put absolutely equal pressure on Shakespeare and on other writers, created one aesthetic in the tragedy of Shakespeare and another in the tragedies of his contemporaries; and even more, why the same technique forced Shakespeare to compose Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet in completely different ways. Obviously, even within the limits allotted to the poet by his technique, he still retains creative freedom of composition. We find the same lack of discoveries that explain nothing in those prerequisites for explaining Hamlet, based on the requirements of the artistic form, which also establish absolutely correct laws necessary for understanding the tragedy, but completely insufficient for its explanation. This is how Eikhenbaum says in passing about Hamlet: “In fact, the tragedy is delayed not because Schiller needs to develop a psychology of slowness, but just the opposite - That’s why Wallenstein hesitates because the tragedy must be delayed, and the detention must be hidden. It's the same in Hamlet. It is not for nothing that there are directly opposite interpretations of Hamlet as a person - and everyone is right in their own way, because everyone is equally wrong. Both Hamlet and Wallenstein are presented in two aspects necessary for the development of the tragic form - as a driving force and as a retarding force. Instead of simply moving forward according to the plot scheme, it is something like a dance with complex movements. From a psychological point of view, this is almost a contradiction... Absolutely true - because psychology only serves as motivation: the hero seems to be a person, but in reality he is a mask.
Shakespeare introduced the ghost of his father into the tragedy and made Hamlet a philosopher - the motivation for movement and detention. Schiller makes Wallenstein a traitor almost against his will in order to create the movement of tragedy, and introduces an astrological element that motivates the detention" (138, p. 81). Here a number of perplexities arise. We agree with Eikhenbaum that for the development of an artistic form it is really necessary that the hero simultaneously developed and delayed the action. What will explain this to us in Hamlet no more than the need to remove the corpses at the end of the action will explain to us the appearance of Fortinbras, because both the technique of the stage and the technique of form, of course, put pressure on us; poet. But they put pressure on Shakespeare, as well as on Schiller. The question arises: why did one write Wallenstein and the other Hamlet? Why did the same technique and the same requirements for the development of artistic form once lead to the creation of “Macbeth”, and another time “Hamlet”? , although these plays are directly opposite in their composition? Let us assume that the psychology of the hero is only an illusion of the viewer and is introduced by the author as motivation. But the question is, is the motivation chosen by the author completely indifferent to the tragedy? Is it random? Does it say anything by itself, or does the action of tragic laws remain exactly the same, no matter what motivation, no matter what concrete form they appear, just as the correctness of an algebraic formula remains completely constant, no matter what arithmetic values we substitute into it?
Thus, formalism, which began with extraordinary attention to the concrete form, degenerates into the purest formalism, which reduces individual individual forms to known algebraic schemes. No one will argue with Schiller when he says that the tragic poet “must prolong the torture of the senses,” but even knowing this law, we will never understand why this torture of the senses is prolonged in Macbeth at the frantic pace of development of the play, and in "Hamlet" is completely opposite. Eikhenbaum believes that with the help of this law we have completely explained Hamlet. We know that Shakespeare introduced the ghost of his father into the tragedy - this is the motivation for the movement. He made Hamlet a philosopher - this is the motivation for the detention. Schiller resorted to other motivations - instead of philosophy he has an astrological element, and instead of a ghost - treason. The question is why, for the same reason, we have two completely different consequences. Or we must admit that the reason indicated here is not real, or, more correctly, insufficient, not explaining everything and not completely, or more correctly, not even explaining the most important thing. Here is a simple example: “We really love,” says Eikhenbaum, “for some reason, ‘psychology’ and ‘characteristics’. We naively think that an artist writes in order to “depict” psychology or character. We are puzzling over the question about Hamlet - did Shakespeare “want” to portray slowness in him or something else? In fact, the artist does not depict anything like this, because he is not at all concerned with issues of psychology, and we do not watch Hamlet at all to study psychology” (138, p. 78).
All this is absolutely true, but does it follow from this that the choice of character and psychology of the hero is completely indifferent to the author? It is true that we do not watch Hamlet in order to study the psychology of slowness, but it is also absolutely true that if we give Hamlet a different character, the play will lose all its effect. The artist, of course, did not want to give psychology or characterization in his tragedy. But the psychology and characterization of the hero is not an indifferent, random and arbitrary moment, but something aesthetically very significant, and to interpret Hamlet the way Eikhenbaum does in the same phrase simply means to interpret him very poorly. To say that the action in Hamlet is delayed because Hamlet is a philosopher is simply to take on faith and repeat the opinion of those very boring books and articles that Eikhenbaum refutes. It is the traditional view of psychology and characterization that states that Hamlet does not kill the king because he is a philosopher. The same flat view believes that in order to compel Hamlet to action, it is necessary to introduce a ghost. But Hamlet could have learned the same thing in another way, and one only has to turn to the tragedy to see that the action in it is not Hamlet’s philosophy, but something completely different.
Anyone who wants to study Hamlet as a psychological problem must abandon criticism altogether. We tried above to show in summary how little it gives the right direction to the researcher and how it often leads completely astray. Therefore, the starting point for psychological research should be the desire to rid Hamlet of those N000 volumes of commentaries that crushed him with their weight and about which Tolstoy speaks with horror. We must take the tragedy as it is, look at what it says not to the philosophizing interpreter, but to the ingenuous researcher; we must take it in its uninterpreted form {56} 64 and look at it as it is. Otherwise, we would risk turning instead of studying the dream itself to its interpretation. We know of only one such attempt to look at Hamlet. It was made with brilliant courage by Tolstoy in his most beautiful article on Shakespeare, which for some reason continues to be considered stupid and uninteresting. This is what Tolstoy says: “But not one of Shakespeare’s faces is so strikingly noticeable, I won’t say inability, but complete indifference to giving character to his faces, as in Hamlet, and not one of Shakespeare’s plays is so strikingly noticeable that blind worship Shakespeare, that unreasoning hypnosis, as a result of which it is not even possible to think that any of Shakespeare’s works might not be brilliant and that any main character in his drama might not be the image of a new and deeply understood character.
Shakespeare takes a very good ancient story... or a drama written on this topic 15 years before him, and writes his own drama on this plot, putting completely inappropriately (as he always does) into the mouth of the main character all his thoughts that seemed to him thoughts worthy of attention. Putting these thoughts into the mouth of his hero... he does not care at all about the conditions under which these speeches are spoken, and, naturally, it turns out that the person expressing all these thoughts becomes a Shakespearean phonograph, deprived of all character, and actions and speeches it is not consistent.
In the legend, Hamlet’s personality is quite clear: he is outraged by the deed of his uncle and mother, wants to take revenge on them, but is afraid that his uncle will kill him just like his father, and for this he pretends to be crazy...
All this is understandable and follows from the character and position of Hamlet. But Shakespeare, putting into Hamlet’s mouth those speeches that he wants to express, and forcing him to perform the actions that the author needs to prepare spectacular scenes, destroys everything that makes up the character of the Hamlet of the legend. Throughout the entire duration of the drama, Hamlet does not what he might want, but what the author needs: he is horrified by his father’s shadow, then he begins to tease her, calling him a mole, he loves Ophelia, he teases her, etc. No. there is no possibility of finding any explanation for Hamlet’s actions and speeches and therefore no possibility of attributing any character to him.
But since it is recognized that the brilliant Shakespeare cannot write anything bad, then learned people direct all the powers of their minds to finding extraordinary beauties in what constitutes an obvious, annoying flaw, especially expressed sharply in Hamlet, consisting in that the main person has no character. And so thoughtful critics declare that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, a completely new and deep character is expressed in an unusually strong way, which consists precisely in the fact that this person has no character and that this lack of character is the genius of creating a profound character. And, having decided this, learned critics write volumes upon volumes, so that the praises and explanations of the greatness and importance of depicting the character of a person who has no character form enormous libraries. True, some of the critics sometimes timidly express the idea that there is something strange in this face, that Hamlet is an inexplicable mystery, but no one dares to say that the king is naked, which is clear as day, that Shakespeare failed, yes and did not want to give any character to Hamlet and did not even understand that this was necessary. And learned critics continue to explore and praise this mysterious work...” (107, pp. 247-249).
We rely on this opinion of Tolstoy not because his final conclusions seem correct and exclusively reliable to us. It is clear to any reader that Tolstoy ultimately judges Shakespeare based on extra-artistic aspects, and the decisive factor in his assessment is the moral verdict that he pronounces on Shakespeare, whose morality he considers incompatible with his moral ideals. Let us not forget that this moral point of view led Tolstoy to reject not only Shakespeare, but almost all fiction in general, and that at the end of his life Tolstoy considered his own artistic works to be harmful and unworthy works, so this moral point of view lies completely outside the plane art, it is too broad and all-encompassing to notice particulars, and there can be no talk about it in a psychological consideration of art. But the whole point is that, in order to draw these moral conclusions, Tolstoy gives purely artistic arguments, and these arguments seem so convincing to us that they really destroy the unreasoning hypnosis that has been established in relation to Shakespeare. Tolstoy looked at Hamlet with the eyes of Andersen’s child and was the first to dare to say that the king is naked, that is, that all those virtues - profundity, accuracy of character, insight into human psychology, etc. - exist only in the reader’s imagination. In this statement that the Tsar is naked lies the greatest merit of Tolstoy, who exposed not so much Shakespeare as a completely absurd and false idea about him, by opposing him with his own opinion, which he not without reason calls completely opposite to that which has been established in everything European world. Thus, on the way to his moral goal, Tolstoy destroyed one of the most severe prejudices in the history of literature and was the first to boldly express what has now been confirmed in a number of studies and works; namely, that in Shakespeare not all the intrigue and not the entire course of action are sufficiently convincingly motivated from the psychological side, that his characters simply do not stand up to criticism and that there are often glaring and, for common sense, absurd inconsistencies between the character of the hero and his actions. So, for example, So directly states that Shakespeare in “Hamlet” was more interested in the situation than in the character, and that “Hamlet” should be considered as a tragedy of intrigue, in which the decisive role is played by the connection and concatenation of events, and not by the revelation of the character of the hero. Rügg shares the same opinion. He believes that Shakespeare does not confuse the action in order to complicate the character of Hamlet, but complicates this character in order for it to better fit the dramaturgical concept of the plot he received according to tradition. {57} 65 . And these researchers are far from alone in their opinion. As for other plays, researchers there name an infinite number of facts that irrefutably indicate that Tolstoy’s statement is fundamentally correct. We will still have the opportunity to show how valid Tolstoy’s opinion is when applied to such tragedies as “Othello”, “King Lear”, etc., how convincingly he showed the absence and insignificance of character in Shakespeare and how completely correctly and accurately he understood the aesthetic meaning and the meaning of Shakespearean language.
Now we take as the starting point of our further reasoning the opinion, which is completely consistent with the evidence, that it is impossible to attribute any character to Hamlet, that this character is composed of the most opposite traits and that it is impossible to come up with any plausible explanation for his speeches and actions. However, we will argue with the conclusions of Tolstoy, who sees in this a complete flaw and pure inability of Shakespeare to depict the artistic development of action. Tolstoy did not understand or, rather, did not accept Shakespeare’s aesthetics and, having told his artistic techniques in a simple retelling, translated them from the language of poetry into the language of prose, took them outside of the aesthetic functions that they perform in drama - and the result, of course, was , complete nonsense. But the same kind of nonsense would result if we carried out such an operation with any definitive poet and made his text meaningless by a complete retelling. Tolstoy retells scene after scene of King Lear and shows how absurd their connection and mutual connection is. But if the same exact retelling were carried out on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s novel could easily be reduced to the same absurdity, and if we remember what Tolstoy himself said about this novel, we will be able to apply the same words and to "King Lear". It is completely impossible to express the thought of both a novel and a tragedy in a retelling, because the whole essence of the matter lies in the connection of thoughts, and this connection itself, as Tolstoy says, is composed not of thought, but of something else, and this something else cannot be conveyed directly in words, but can only be conveyed by a direct description of images, scenes, positions. It is just as impossible to retell King Lear as it is impossible to retell the music in your own words, and therefore the method of retelling is the least convincing method of artistic criticism. But we repeat once again: this basic mistake did not prevent Tolstoy from making a number of brilliant discoveries, which for many years will form the most fruitful problems of Shakespearean studies, but which, of course, will be illuminated completely differently than Tolstoy did. In particular, in relation to Hamlet, we must completely agree with Tolstoy when he claims that Hamlet has no character, but we have the right to ask further: is there any artistic task contained in this lack of character, does this have any meaning? and whether this is simply a mistake. Tolstoy is right when he points out the absurdity of the argument of those who believe that the depth of character lies in the fact that a characterless person is depicted. But perhaps the goal of tragedy is not at all to reveal character in itself, and perhaps it is generally indifferent to the depiction of character, and sometimes, perhaps, it even deliberately uses a character completely unsuited to events in order to extract from Is this some special artistic effect?
In what follows we will have to show how false is, in essence, the opinion that Shakespeare's tragedy is a tragedy of character. Now we will accept as an assumption that the absence of character can not only stem from the author’s explicit intention, but that he may need it for some very specific artistic purposes, and we will try to reveal this using the example of Hamlet. To do this, let us turn to an analysis of the structure of this tragedy.
We immediately notice three elements from which we can base our analysis. Firstly, the sources that Shakespeare used, the original design that was given to the same material, secondly, we have before us the plot and plot of the tragedy itself, and, finally, a new and more complex artistic formation - the characters. Let us consider in what relation these elements stand to each other in our tragedy.
Tolstoy is right when he begins his discussion by comparing the saga of Hamlet with the tragedy of Shakespeare {58} 66 . In the saga everything is clear and clear. The motives for the prince’s actions are revealed quite clearly. Everything is consistent with each other, and every step is justified both psychologically and logically. We will not dwell on this, since this has already been sufficiently revealed by a number of studies and the problem of the riddle of Hamlet could hardly arise if we were dealing only with these ancient sources or with the old drama about Hamlet, which existed before Shakespeare. There is absolutely nothing mysterious in all these things. Already from this one fact we have the right to draw a conclusion completely opposite to that made by Tolstoy. Tolstoy argues this way: in the legend everything is clear, in Hamlet everything is unreasonable - therefore, Shakespeare ruined the legend. The reverse course of thought would be much more correct. Everything in the legend is logical and understandable; Shakespeare, therefore, had in his hands the ready-made possibilities of logical and psychological motivation, and if he processed this material in his tragedy in such a way that he omitted all these obvious bonds that support the legend, then, probably, he had a special intention in this. And we are much more willing to assume that Shakespeare created the mystery of Hamlet based on some stylistic tasks than that this was caused simply by his inability. This comparison already forces us to pose the problem of Hamlet’s riddle in a completely different way; for us it is no longer a riddle that needs to be solved, not a difficulty that must be avoided, but a well-known artistic device that needs to be comprehended. It would be more correct to ask, not why Hamlet hesitates, but why does Shakespeare make Hamlet hesitate? Because any artistic technique is learned much more from its teleological orientation, from the psychological function that it performs, than from causal motivation, which in itself can explain to the historian a literary, but not an aesthetic fact. In order to answer this question, why does Shakespeare make Hamlet hesitate, we must move on to the second comparison and compare the plot and the plot of Hamlet. Here it must be said that the plot design is based on the above-mentioned mandatory law of dramatic composition of that era, the so-called law of temporal continuity. It boils down to the fact that the action on stage flowed continuously and that, therefore, the play proceeded from a completely different concept of time than our modern plays. The stage did not remain empty for a single minute, and while some conversation was taking place on the stage, behind the stage at this time long events were often taking place, sometimes requiring several days for their execution, and we learned about them several scenes later. Thus, real time was not perceived by the viewer at all, and the playwright always used conventional stage time, in which all scales and proportions were completely different than in reality. Consequently, Shakespearean tragedy is always a colossal deformation of all time scales; usually the duration of events, the necessary everyday periods, the temporal dimensions of each act and action - all this was completely distorted and brought to some common denominator of stage time. From here it is already completely clear how absurd it is to pose the question of Hamlet’s slowness from the point of view of real time. How long does Hamlet slow and in what units of real time will we measure his slowness? We can say that the real timing of the tragedy is in the greatest contradiction, that there is no way to establish the duration of all the events of the tragedy in real time units, and we absolutely cannot say how much time passes from the minute the shadow appears to the minute the king is killed - a day, a month , year. From this it is clear that it turns out to be completely impossible to solve the problem of Hamlet’s slowness psychologically. If he kills after a few days, there is no question of any slowness at all from an everyday point of view. If time drags on much longer, we must look for completely different psychological explanations for different periods - some for a month and others for a year. Hamlet in the tragedy is completely independent of these units of real time, and all the events of the tragedy are measured and correlated with each other in conventional time {59} 67 , scenic. Does this mean, however, that the question of Hamlet’s slowness disappears altogether? Maybe in this conventional stage time there is no slowness at all, as some critics think, and the author has allocated exactly as much time for the play as it needs, and everything is done on time? However, we can easily see that this is not so if we recall Hamlet’s famous monologues, in which he blames himself for the delay. The tragedy clearly emphasizes the hero's slowness and, what is most remarkable, gives completely different explanations for it. Let us follow this main line of the tragedy. Now, after the revelation of the secret, when Hamlet learns that he is entrusted with the duty of vengeance, he says that he will fly to vengeance on wings as swift as the thoughts of love, from the pages of his memories he erases all thoughts, feelings, all dreams, his whole life and remains with only one secret covenant. Already at the end of the same action, he exclaims, under the unbearable weight of the discovery that has fallen upon him, that time has run out of time and that he was born for a fatal feat. Now, after talking with the actors, Hamlet reproaches himself for the first time for inaction. He is surprised that the actor ignited in the shadow of passion, in an empty fantasy, but he remains silent when he knows that a crime has ruined the life and kingdom of the great ruler - his father. What is remarkable about this famous monologue is that Hamlet himself cannot understand the reasons for his slowness, he reproaches himself for shame and disgrace, but only he knows that he is not a coward. Here is the first motivation for delaying the murder. The motivation is that perhaps the words of the shadow are not trustworthy, that perhaps it was a ghost and that the ghost’s testimony needs to be verified. Hamlet sets his famous “mousetrap”, and he no longer has any doubts. The king betrayed himself, and Hamlet no longer doubts that the shadow told the truth. He is called to his mother, and he conjures himself that he should not raise a sword against her.
Now it's time for night magic.
The graves are creaking, and hell is breathing with infection.
Now I could drink living blood
And capable of doing things that
I would recoil during the day. Mother called us.
Without brutality, heart! Whatever happens
Don't put Nero's soul in my chest.
I will tell her the whole truth without pity
And maybe I’ll kill you in words.
But this is my dear mother - and my hands
I won’t give in even when I’m furious... (III, 2) 68
The murder is ripe, and Hamlet is afraid that he will raise the sword against his mother, and, what is most remarkable, this is immediately followed by another scene - the king’s prayer. Hamlet enters, takes out his sword, stands behind him - he can kill him now; you remember what you just left Hamlet with, how he begged himself to spare his mother, you are ready for him to kill the king, but instead you hear:
He is praying. What a lucky moment!
A blow with a sword - and it will rise to the sky... (III, 3)
But Hamlet, after a few verses, sheathes his sword and gives a completely new motivation for his slowness. He does not want to destroy the king when he is praying, in a moment of repentance.
Back, my sword, to the most terrible meeting!
When he is angry or drunk,
In the arms of sleep or unclean bliss,
In the heat of passion, with abuse on his lips
Or in thoughts of new evil, on a grand scale
Cut him down so he goes to hell
Feet up, all black with vices.
...Reign some more.
Delay is only, not a cure.
In the very next scene, Hamlet kills Polonius, who is eavesdropping behind the carpet, completely unexpectedly hitting the carpet with his sword and exclaiming: “Mouse!” And from this exclamation and from his words to the corpse of Polonius further it is absolutely clear that he meant to kill the king, because it is the king who is the mouse that has just fallen into the mousetrap, and it is the king who is the other, “more important” one, behind whom Hamlet received from Polonius. There is no talk of the motive that removed Hamlet’s hand with the sword, which had just been raised over the king. The previous scene seems logically completely unrelated to this one, and one of them must contain some kind of visible contradiction, if only the other is true. This scene of the murder of Polonius, as Kuno Fischer explains, is considered by almost all critics to be evidence of Hamlet’s aimless, thoughtless, unplanned course of action, and it is not without reason that almost all theaters and many critics completely ignore the scene with the king’s prayer, skip it completely, because they They refuse to understand how it is possible for someone so obviously unprepared to introduce a motive for detention. Nowhere in the tragedy, neither before nor after, is there more of that new condition for murder that Hamlet sets for himself: to kill without fail in sin, so as to destroy the king beyond the grave. In the scene with his mother, a shadow again appears to Hamlet, but he thinks that the shadow has come to shower his son with reproaches for his slowness in taking revenge; and, however, he does not show any resistance when he is sent to England, and in a monologue after the scene with Fortinbras he compares himself with this brave leader and again reproaches himself for lack of will. He again considers his slowness a shame and ends the monologue decisively:
Oh my thought, from now on be in blood.
Live in a thunderstorm or don’t live at all! (IV, 4)
We find Hamlet further in the cemetery, then during a conversation with Horatio, finally during the duel, and until the very end of the play there is not a single mention of the place, and the promise that Hamlet just made that his only thought will be blood is not is justified in any verse of the subsequent text. Before the fight, he is full of sad forebodings:
“We must be above superstitions. Everything is God's will. Even in the life and death of a sparrow. If something is destined to happen now, then you don’t have to wait for it... The most important thing is to always be ready” (V, 2).
He anticipates his death, and the viewer along with him. And until the very end of the fight he has no thoughts of revenge, and, what is most remarkable, the catastrophe itself occurs in such a way that it seems to us to be spurred on by a completely different line of intrigue; Hamlet does not kill the king in fulfillment of the main covenant of the shadow; the viewer learns earlier that Hamlet is dead, that there is poison in his blood, that there is no life in him even for half an hour; and only after this, already standing in the grave, already lifeless, already in the power of death, he kills the king.
The scene itself is constructed in such a way that it leaves no doubt that Hamlet is killing the king for his latest atrocities, for poisoning the queen, for killing Laertes and him - Hamlet. There is not a word about the father; the viewer seems to have forgotten about him completely. This denouement of Hamlet is considered by everyone to be completely surprising and incomprehensible, and almost all critics agree that even this murder still leaves the impression of an unfulfilled duty or a duty performed completely by accident. It would seem that the play was mysterious all along because Hamlet did not kill the king; finally the murder was committed, and it would seem that the mystery should end, but no, it is just beginning. Mézières says quite accurately: “Indeed, in the last scene everything excites our surprise, everything is unexpected from beginning to end.” It would seem that we have been waiting the whole play just for Hamlet to kill the king, finally he kills him, where does our surprise and misunderstanding come from again? “The last scene of the drama,” says Sokolovsky, “is based on a collision of coincidences that came together so suddenly and unexpectedly that commentators with previous views even seriously blamed Shakespeare for the unsuccessful ending of the drama... It was necessary to come up with the intervention of some outside force... This blow was purely random and resembled, in Hamlet’s hands, a sharp weapon that is sometimes given into the hands of children, while at the same time controlling the handle...” (127, pp. 42-43).
Berne correctly says that Hamlet kills the king not only in revenge for his father, but also for his mother and himself. Johnson reproaches Shakespeare for the fact that the murder of the king does not occur according to a deliberate plan, but as an unexpected accident. Alfonso says: “The king is killed not as a result of Hamlet’s well-thought-out intention (thanks to him, perhaps, he would never have been killed), but due to events independent of Hamlet’s will.” What does consideration of this main line of intrigue in Hamlet establish? We see that in his stage conventional time, Shakespeare emphasizes Hamlet’s slowness, then obscures it, leaving entire scenes without mention of the task facing him, then suddenly exposes and reveals it in Hamlet’s monologues in such a way that one can say with complete accuracy that the viewer perceives Hamlet's slowness not constantly, evenly, but in explosions. This slowness is shaded - and suddenly there is an explosion of monologue; the viewer, when looking back, especially keenly notices this slowness, and then the action again drags on, obscured, until a new explosion. Thus, in the minds of the viewer, two incompatible ideas are constantly connected: on the one hand, he sees that Hamlet must take revenge, he sees that no internal or external reasons prevent Hamlet from doing this; Moreover, the author plays with his impatience, he makes him see with his own eyes when Hamlet’s sword is raised above the king and then suddenly, completely unexpectedly, lowered; and on the other hand, he sees that Hamlet is slow, but he does not understand the reasons for this slowness and he always sees that the drama is developing in some kind of internal contradiction, when the goal is clearly outlined in front of it, and the viewer is clearly aware of those deviations from the paths that tragedy takes in its development.
In such a construction of the plot, we have the right to immediately see our curved plot form. Our plot unfolds in a straight line, and if Hamlet had killed the king immediately after the revelations of the shadow, he would have passed these two points along the shortest distance. But the author acts differently: he constantly makes us aware with perfect clarity of the straight line along which the action should go, so that we can more acutely sense the slopes and loops that it actually describes.
Thus, here too we see that the task of the plot is, as it were, to deviate the plot from the straight path, to force it to take crooked paths, and perhaps here, in this very curvature of the development of the action, we will find those necessary for the tragedy the concatenation of facts for the sake of which the play describes its crooked orbit.
In order to understand this, we must again turn to synthesis, to the physiology of tragedy, we must, from the meaning of the whole, try to unravel what function this crooked line has and why the author, with such exceptional and unique courage, forces the tragedy to deviate from the straight path.
Let's start from the end, from the disaster. Two things here easily catch the researcher’s eye: firstly, the fact that the main line of the tragedy, as noted above, is obscured and shaded here. The murder of the king takes place amidst the general chaos, it is only one of four deaths, all of them breaking out suddenly, like a tornado; a minute before, the viewer does not expect these events, and the immediate motives that determined the murder of the king are so obviously laid down in the last scene that the viewer forgets that he has finally reached the point to which the tragedy was leading him all the time and could not bring. As soon as Hamlet learns of the queen's death, he now cries out:
Treason is among us! - Who is the culprit?
Find him!
Laertes reveals to Hamlet that all this is the king’s tricks. Hamlet exclaims:
How about a rapier with poison? So go
Poisoned steel, for its intended purpose!
So come on, impostor murderer!
Swallow your pearl in solution!
Follow your mother!
There is not a single mention of the father anywhere, everywhere all the reasons rest on the incident of the last scene. This is how the tragedy approaches its final point, but it is hidden from the viewer that this is the point to which we have been striving all along. However, next to this direct obfuscation, it is very easy to reveal another, directly opposite one, and we can easily show that the scene of the king’s murder is interpreted in precisely two opposite psychological planes: on the one hand, this death is obscured by a number of immediate causes and other accompanying deaths, on the one hand, on the other hand, it is isolated from this series of general murders in a way that, it seems, has not been done anywhere in another tragedy. It is very easy to show that all other deaths occur as if unnoticed; the queen dies, and now no one mentions this anymore, Hamlet only says goodbye to her: “Farewell, unfortunate queen.” In the same way, Hamlet’s death is somehow obscured, extinguished. Again, now after the mention of Hamlet’s death, nothing more is directly said about it. Laertes also dies unnoticed, and, most importantly, before his death he exchanges forgiveness with Hamlet. He forgives Hamlet for his and his father’s death and himself asks for forgiveness for the murder. This sudden, completely unnatural change in the character of Laertes, who was always burning with revenge, is completely unmotivated in the tragedy and most clearly shows us that it is needed only to extinguish the impression of these deaths and against this background again highlight the death of the king. This death is highlighted, as I have already said, using a completely exceptional technique, which is difficult to find an equal in any tragedy. What is extraordinary about this scene (see Appendix II) is that Hamlet, for no apparent reason, kills the king twice - first with a poisoned sword tip, then forces him to drink poison. What is this for? Of course, in the course of the action this is not caused by anything, because here before our eyes both Laertes and Hamlet die only from the action of one poison - the sword. Here, a single act - the murder of the king - is, as it were, split in two, as if doubled, emphasized and highlighted in order to especially vividly and acutely give the viewer the feeling that the tragedy has come to its final point. But perhaps this double murder of the king, so methodologically incongruous and psychologically unnecessary, has some other plot meaning?
And it's very easy to find. Let us remember the significance of the whole catastrophe: we come to the end point of the tragedy - the murder of the king, which we expected all the time, starting from the first act, but we come to this point in a completely different way: it arises as a consequence of a completely new plot line, and When we get to this point, we do not immediately realize that this is precisely the point towards which the tragedy has been rushing all the time.
Thus, it becomes completely clear to us that at this point two series, two lines of action, which have always diverged before our eyes, converge and, of course, these two different lines correspond to a bifurcated murder, which, as it were, ends one and the other line. And now again the poet begins to mask this short circuit of two currents in a catastrophe, and in the short afterword of the tragedy, when Horatio, according to the custom of Shakespearean heroes, briefly retells the entire content of the play, he again glosses over this murder of the king and says:
I'll tell everyone about everything
What happened. I'll tell you about the scary ones
Bloody and merciless deeds,
Vicissitudes, murders by mistake,
Punished by duplicity and by the end -
About the intrigues before the denouement that destroyed
The culprits.
And in this general heap of deaths and bloody deeds, the catastrophic point of the tragedy again blurs and drowns. In the same scene of the disaster we see quite clearly what enormous power the artistic shaping of the plot achieves and what effects Shakespeare extracts from it. If we look closely at the order of these deaths, we will see how much Shakespeare changes their natural order solely in order to turn them into an artistic series. Deaths are composed into a melody, like sounds; in fact, the king dies before Hamlet, and in the plot we have not yet heard anything about the death of the king, but we already know that Hamlet has died and that there is no life in him for half an hour, Hamlet outlives everyone, although we know that he died, and although he was wounded before everyone else. All these rearrangements of main events are caused by only one requirement - the requirement of the desired psychological effect. When we learn of Hamlet's death, we completely lose all hope that the tragedy will ever reach the point where it aims. It seems to us that the end of the tragedy took exactly the opposite direction, and just at the moment when we least expect it, when it seems impossible to us, then exactly this happens. And Hamlet, in his last words, directly points out some kind of secret meaning in all these events, when he concludes with a request to Horatio to retell how it all happened, what caused it all, asks him to convey an external outline of the events, which the viewer retains, and ends: “The rest is silence.” And for the viewer, the rest really happens in silence, in that unsaid remnant of the tragedy that arises from this amazingly constructed play. New researchers willingly emphasize the purely external complexity of this play, which eluded previous authors. “Here we see several parallel plot chains: the story of the murder of Hamlet’s father and Hamlet’s revenge, the story of the death of Polonius and Laertes’ revenge, the story of Ophelia, the story of Fortinbras, the development of episodes with the actors, with Hamlet’s trip to England. Throughout the tragedy, the scene of action changes twenty times. Within each scene we see rapid changes in themes and characters. The game element abounds... We have a lot of conversations not on the topic of intrigue... in general, the development of episodes that interrupt the action..." (110, p. 182).
However, it is easy to see that the point here is not at all a matter of thematic diversity, as the author believes, that the interrupting episodes are very closely related to the main intrigue - the episode with the actors, and the conversations of the gravediggers, who in a humorous way again talk about the death of Ophelia, and the murder of Polonius, and everything else. The plot of the tragedy is revealed to us in its final form as follows: from the very beginning, the entire plot underlying the legend is preserved, and the viewer always has before him a clear skeleton of the action, the norms and paths along which the action developed. But all the time the action deviates from these paths outlined by the plot, strays onto other paths, draws a complex curve, and at some high points, in Hamlet’s monologues, the reader suddenly learns, as if by explosions, that the tragedy has deviated from the path. And these monologues with self-reproaches for slowness have the main purpose that they should make us clearly feel how much something is not being done that should be done, and should once again clearly present to our consciousness the final point where the action should still be sent. Every time after such a monologue, we again begin to think that the action will straighten out, and so on until a new monologue, which again reveals to us that the action has again become distorted. In essence, the structure of this tragedy can be expressed using one extremely simple formula. Plot formula: Hamlet kills the king to avenge the death of his father. Plot formula - Hamlet does not kill the king. If the content of the tragedy, its material tells how Hamlet kills the king to avenge the death of his father, then the plot of the tragedy shows us how he does not kill the king, and when he kills, it is not at all out of revenge. Thus, the duality of the plot-plot - the obvious flow of action on two levels, all the time a firm consciousness of the path and deviations from it - internal contradiction - are embedded in the very foundations of this play. Shakespeare seems to choose the most suitable events in order to express what he needs, he chooses material that finally rushes towards the denouement and makes him painfully shy away from it. He uses here the psychological method that Petrazycki beautifully called the method of teasing the senses and which he wanted to introduce as an experimental method of research. In fact, tragedy constantly teases our feelings, it promises us the fulfillment of a goal that stands before our eyes from the very beginning, and all the time it deviates and takes us away from this goal, straining our desire for this goal and making us painfully feel every step in side. When the goal is finally achieved, it turns out that we are led to it by a completely different path, and two different paths, which seemed to us to go in opposite directions and were at enmity throughout the development of the tragedy, suddenly converge at one common point, in a bifurcated scene murder of the king. What ultimately leads to murder is that which all along led away from murder, and the catastrophe thus reaches again the highest point of contradiction, a short circuit of the opposite direction of two currents. If we add to this that throughout the development of the action it is interrupted by completely irrational material, it will become clear to us how much the effect of incomprehensibility lay in the very tasks of the author. Let’s remember Ophelia’s madness, let’s remember Hamlet’s repeated madness, let’s remember how he fools Polonius and the courtiers, let’s remember the actor’s pompously senseless declamation, let’s remember the cynicism of Hamlet’s conversation with Ophelia, which is still untranslatable into Russian, let’s remember the clownery of the gravediggers - and we will see everywhere, everywhere, that all this material, as in a dream, processes the same events that were just given in the drama, but condenses, intensifies and emphasizes their nonsense, and then we will understand the true purpose and meaning of all these things. These are, as it were, lightning rods of nonsense, which with brilliant prudence are placed by the author in the most dangerous places of his tragedy in order to somehow bring the matter to an end and make the incredible possible, because the tragedy of Hamlet is incredible in itself as it is constructed by Shakespeare; but the whole task of tragedy, like art, is to force us to experience the incredible, in order to perform some extraordinary operation on our feelings. And for this, poets use two interesting techniques: firstly, they are lightning rods of nonsense, as we call all these irrational parts of Hamlet. The action develops with complete improbability, it threatens to seem absurd to us, internal contradictions thicken to the extreme, the divergence of two lines reaches its apogee, it seems that they are about to break apart, leave one another, and the action of the tragedy will crack and the whole of it will split - and in these the most dangerous moments, suddenly the action thickens and quite openly turns into insane delirium, into repeated madness, into pompous declamation, into cynicism, into open buffoonery. Next to this outright madness, the improbability of the play, contrasted with it, begins to seem plausible and real. Madness is introduced in such abundant quantities into this play in order to save its meaning. Nonsense is discharged like a lightning rod {60} 69 , whenever it threatens to break the action, and resolves the catastrophe that must arise every minute. Another technique that Shakespeare uses in order to make us invest our feelings in an incredible tragedy boils down to the following: Shakespeare allows a kind of convention in a square, introduces a scene on stage, makes his heroes contrast themselves with the actors, gives the same event twice , first as real, then as acted out by actors, bifurcates its action and its fictitious, fictional part, the second convention, obscures and hides the improbability of the first plan.
Let's take a simple example. The actor recites his pathetic monologue about Pyrrha, the actor cries, but Hamlet immediately emphasizes in the monologue that these are only the actor’s tears, that he is crying because of Hecuba, about whom he has nothing to do, that these tears and passions are only fictitious. And when he contrasts his own passion with this fictitious passion of the actor, it no longer seems fictitious to us, but real, and we are transported into it with extraordinary force. Or the same technique of doubling the action and introducing the fictitious into it in the famous scene with the “mousetrap” was just as accurately applied. The king and queen on stage depict a fictitious picture of the murder of their husband, and the king and queen - the audience are horrified by this fictitious picture. And this bifurcation of two plans, the opposition of actors and spectators makes us, with extraordinary seriousness and strength, feel the king’s embarrassment as real. The improbability underlying the tragedy is saved because it is surrounded on two sides by reliable guards: on the one hand, a lightning rod of outright nonsense, next to which the tragedy receives visible meaning; on the other hand, a lightning rod of outright fictitiousness, hypocrisy, a second convention, next to which the first plan seems real. It is as if there was an image of another painting in the painting. But not only this contradiction lies at the heart of our tragedy; it also contains another, no less important for its artistic effect. This second contradiction lies in the fact that the characters chosen by Shakespeare somehow do not correspond to the course of action that he outlined, and Shakespeare with his play provides a clear refutation of the general prejudice that the characters of the characters should determine the actions and actions of the heroes. But it would seem that if Shakespeare wants to depict a murder that cannot take place, he must act either according to Werder’s recipe, that is, surround the execution of the task with the most complex external obstacles in order to block the path of his hero, or he must would have followed Goethe's recipe and shown that the task entrusted to the hero exceeds his strength, that they demand of him the impossible, incompatible with his nature, titanic. Finally, the author had a third option - he could follow Berne’s recipe and portray Hamlet himself as a powerless, cowardly and whiny person. But the author not only did not do one, nor the other, nor the third, but in all three respects he went in the exact opposite direction: he removed all objective obstacles from the path of his hero; in the tragedy it is absolutely not shown what prevents Hamlet from killing the king immediately after the words of the shadow; further, he demanded from Hamlet the task of murder that was most feasible for him, because throughout the play Hamlet becomes a murderer three times in completely episodic and random scenes. Finally, he portrayed Hamlet as a man of exceptional energy and enormous strength and chose a hero directly opposite to the one who would answer his plot.
That is why the critics had to, in order to save the situation, make the indicated adjustments and either adapt the plot to the hero, or adapt the hero to the plot, because they all the time proceeded from the false belief that there should be a direct relationship between the hero and the plot, that the plot is derived from the character of the heroes, how the characters of the heroes are understood from the plot.
But all this is clearly refuted by Shakespeare. It proceeds from precisely the opposite, namely from the complete discrepancy between the heroes and the plot, from the fundamental contradiction of character and events. And for us, already familiar with the fact that plot design also comes from a contradiction with the plot, it is not difficult to find and understand the meaning of this contradiction that arises in the tragedy. The fact is that by the very structure of the drama, in addition to the natural sequence of events, another unity arises in it, this is the unity of the character or hero. Below we will have the opportunity to show how the concept of the character of the hero develops, but now we can assume that a poet who constantly plays on the internal contradiction between plot and plot can very easily use this second contradiction - between the character of his hero and between development of action. Psychoanalysts are absolutely right when they argue that the essence of the psychological impact of tragedy lies in the fact that we identify ourselves with the hero. It is absolutely true that the hero is the point in the tragedy, based on which the author forces us to consider all the other characters and all the events that take place. It is this point that brings together our attention, it serves as a fulcrum for our feelings, which would otherwise be lost, endlessly deviating in their assessments, in their worries for each character. If we were to equally evaluate the king’s excitement, and Hamlet’s excitement, and Polonius’s hopes, and Hamlet’s hopes, our feelings would get lost in these constant fluctuations, and one and the same event would appear to us in completely opposite meanings. But tragedy acts differently: it gives our feeling unity, makes it accompany the hero all the time and through the hero perceive everything else. It is enough to look only at any tragedy, in particular at Hamlet, in order to see that all the faces in this tragedy are depicted as Hamlet sees them. All events are refracted through the prism of his soul, and thus the author contemplates the tragedy in two planes: on the one hand, he sees everything through the eyes of Hamlet, and on the other hand, he sees Hamlet himself with his own eyes, so that every spectator of the tragedy immediately Hamlet and his contemplator. From this it becomes completely clear the enormous role that falls on the character in general and on the hero in particular in the tragedy. We have here a completely new psychological plan, and if in a fable we discover two directions within the same action, in a short story - one plan of plot and another plan of plot, then in tragedy we notice another new plan: we perceive the events of the tragedy, its material, then we perceive the plot design of this material and, finally, thirdly, we perceive another plane - the psyche and experiences of the hero. And since all these three plans ultimately relate to the same facts, but only taken in three different respects, it is natural that there should be an internal contradiction between these plans, if only in order to outline the divergence of these plans. To understand how a tragic character is built, we can use an analogy, and we see this analogy in the psychological theory of the portrait that Christiansen put forward: for him, the problem of a portrait lies primarily in the question of how the portraitist conveys life in the picture, how he makes the face live in a portrait and how it achieves the effect that is inherent only in a portrait, namely that it depicts a living person. In fact, if we begin to look for the difference between a portrait and a painting, we will never find it in any external formal and material signs. We know that a painting can depict one face and a portrait can depict several faces, a portrait can include both landscapes and still life, and we will never find the difference between a painting and a portrait unless we take that life as a basis. , which distinguishes every portrait. Christiansen takes as the starting point of his research the fact that “inanimateness stands in mutual connection with spatial dimensions. With the size of the portrait, not only the fullness of his life increases, but also the decisiveness of its manifestations, and above all the calmness of her gait. Portrait painters know from experience that a larger head speaks more easily” (124, p. 283).
This leads to the fact that our eye is detached from one specific point from which it examines the portrait, that the portrait is deprived of its compositional fixed center, that the eye wanders across the portrait back and forth, “from the eye to the mouth, from one eye to the other and to all moments containing a facial expression” (124, p. 284).
From the various points of the picture at which the eye stops, it absorbs different facial expressions, different moods, and from here arises that life, that movement, that consistent change of unequal states, which, in contrast to the numbness of immobility, constitutes the distinctive feature of the portrait. The painting always remains in the form in which it was created, the portrait is constantly changing, and hence its life. Christiansen formulated the psychological life of a portrait in the following formula: “This is a physiognomic discrepancy between different factors of facial expression.
It is possible, of course, and, it seems, thinking abstractly, it is even much more natural to make the same mental mood reflected in the corners of the mouth, in the eyes and in other parts of the face... Then the portrait would sound in one single tone... But it would be like a thing sounding, devoid of life. That is why the artist differentiates mental expression and gives one eye a slightly different expression than the other, and in turn a different expression for the folds of the mouth, and so on everywhere. But simple differences are not enough, they must harmoniously relate to each other... The main melodic motive of the face is given by the relationship of the mouth and eye to each other: the mouth speaks, the eye responds, excitement and tension of will are concentrated in the folds of the mouth, the resolving calm of the intellect dominates in the eyes... The mouth gives out instincts and everything a person wants to achieve; the eye opens what it became in a real victory or in a tired resignation...” (124, pp. 284-285).
In this theory, Christiansen interprets the portrait as a drama. A portrait conveys to us not just a face and the emotional expression frozen in it, but something much more: it conveys to us a change in mental moods, the whole history of the soul, its life. We think that the viewer approaches the problem of the nature of the tragedy in a completely similar way. Character in the precise sense of the word can only be depicted in an epic, like spiritual life in a portrait. As for the character of tragedy, in order for it to live, it must be composed of contradictory features, it must transport us from one mental movement to another. Just as in a portrait the physiognomic discrepancy between different factors of facial expression is the basis of our experience, in tragedy the psychological discrepancy between different factors of character expression is the basis of tragic feeling. Tragedy can have incredible effects on our feelings precisely because it forces them to constantly turn into the opposite, to be deceived in their expectations, to encounter contradictions, to split into two; and when we experience Hamlet, it seems to us that we have experienced thousands of human lives in one evening, and for sure - we have managed to experience more than in entire years of our ordinary life. And when we, together with the hero, begin to feel that he no longer belongs to himself, that he is not doing what he should be doing, then tragedy comes into its own. Hamlet expresses this wonderfully when, in a letter to Ophelia, he swears his eternal love for her as long as “this car” belongs to him. Russian translators usually render the word “machine” with the word “body”, not realizing that this word contains the very essence of the tragedy 70 . Goncharov was deeply right when he said that Hamlet’s tragedy is that he is not a machine, but a man.
In fact, together with the tragic hero, we begin to feel ourselves in the tragedy as a machine of feelings, which is directed by the tragedy itself, which therefore acquires a very special and exclusive power over us.
We are coming to some conclusions. We can now formulate what we have found as a triple contradiction underlying the tragedy: contradictory plot and plot and characters. Each of these elements is directed, as it were, in completely different directions, and for us it is completely clear that the new moment that the tragedy introduces is the following: already in the short story we were dealing with a split in plans, we were simultaneously experiencing events in two opposite directions: in one, which the plot gave him, and the other, which they acquired in the plot. These same two opposite plans are preserved in the tragedy, and we pointed out all the time that, reading Hamlet, we move our feelings on two levels: on the one hand, we are more and more clearly aware of the goal towards which the tragedy is moving, on the other hand, we see just as clearly how much she deviates from this goal. What new does the tragic hero bring? It is quite obvious that it unites both of these planes at every given moment and that it is the highest and constantly given unity of the contradiction that is inherent in the tragedy. We have already pointed out that the entire tragedy is constructed all the time from the point of view of the hero, and this means that he is the force that unites two opposite currents, which all the time collects both opposing feelings into one experience, attributing it to the hero. Thus, two opposing planes of tragedy are always felt by us as a unity, since they are united in the tragic hero with whom we identify ourselves. And that simple duality that we already found in the story is replaced in the tragedy by an immeasurably more acute and higher order duality that arises from the fact that, on the one hand, we see the whole tragedy through the eyes of the hero, and on the other, we see the hero with our own eyes . That this is really so and that, in particular, Hamlet should be understood this way is convinced by the synthesis of the disaster scene, the analysis of which we presented earlier. We have shown that at this point two planes of the tragedy converge, two lines of its development, which, as it seemed to us, led in completely opposite directions, and this unexpected coincidence of them suddenly refracts the entire tragedy in a completely special way and presents all the events that have taken place in a completely different form . The viewer is deceived. All that he considered to be a deviation from the path led him exactly to where he had been striving all along, and when he got to the final destination, he did not recognize it as the goal of his journey. The contradictions not only converged, but also changed their roles - and this catastrophic exposure of contradictions is united for the viewer in the hero’s experience, because in the end only these experiences are accepted by him as his own. And the viewer does not experience satisfaction and relief from the murder of the king; his feelings, strained in the tragedy, do not suddenly receive a simple and flat resolution. The king is killed, and now the viewer’s attention, like lightning, is transferred to what follows, to the death of the hero himself, and in this new death the viewer feels and experiences all those difficult contradictions that tore his consciousness and unconsciousness apart during the entire time he was contemplating the tragedy.
And when the tragedy - both in Hamlet’s last words and in Horatio’s speech - seems to describe its circle again, the viewer quite clearly senses the dichotomy on which it is built. Horatio's story returns his thought to the external plane of the tragedy, to its “words, words, words.” The rest, as Hamlet says, is silence.
OLGA MESHCHERSKAYA
OLGA MESHCHERSKAYA is the heroine of I.A. Bunin’s story “Easy Breathing” (1916). The story is based on a newspaper chronicle: an officer shot a high school student. In this rather unusual incident, Bunin captured the image of an absolutely natural and uninhibited young woman who entered the adult world early and easily. O.M. - a sixteen-year-old girl about whom the author writes that “she did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown school dresses.” The point is not at all about beauty, but about inner freedom, unusual and unusual for a person of her age and gender. The charm of the image lies precisely in the fact that O.M. doesn't think about his own life. She lives to the fullest, without fear or caution. Bunin himself once said: “We call it the womb, but I called it light breathing. Such naivety and lightness in everything, both in audacity and in death, is “light breathing”, “non-thinking”. O.M. she has neither the lazy charm of an adult woman nor human talents, she only has this freedom and lightness of being, not constrained by decency, and also a rare human dignity for her age, with which she brushes aside all the reproaches of the headmistress and all the rumors around her name. O.M. - personality is precisely a fact of his life.
Psychologist L.S. Vygotsky especially highlighted the heroine’s love conflicts in the story, emphasizing that it was this frivolity that “led her astray.” K.G. Paustovsky argued that “this is not a story, but an insight, life itself with its awe and love, the writer’s sad and calm reflection - an epitaph to girlish beauty.” Kucherovsky believed that this was not just an “epitaph for girlish beauty,” but an epitaph for the spiritual “aristocratism” of existence, which is opposed by the brute force of “plebeianism.”
M.Yu.Sorvina
Literary heroes. - Academician. 2009 .
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Books
- Apple and apple tree. Or a guide to a happy pregnancy and the accompanying moods, Olga Meshcherskaya. The pregnancy diary of a girl with an enthusiastic soul, filled in against the backdrop of Italian landscapes and realities, full of original tips and recommendations for a happy pregnancy, will be yours... e-book
- A calendar guide for strengthening and renewing feelings. For new lovers and experienced couples, Olga Meshcherskaya. This perpetual calendar is created for those who are crazy about their other half. He will tell you how to please the object of your feelings throughout the year. Will bring bright colors to the picture of your love...